‘We have to learn,’ I would insist to Babalwa. ‘How are we going to survive if we never learn to produce our own food?’
She agreed on the imperative but differed fundamentally on the rest. Babalwa saw clearly how bad we were at food production, and how much help we needed. Soil. Conditions. ‘You know, Roy, you know…’ She would stare and hold it until I walked away.
And really, I did know. Our few attempts to secure meat had failed badly. We had one or two surprisingly wild chickens cooped, providing eggs and, supposedly, meat. But we were as terrible at butchery – even something as simple as a chicken – as we were at farming. We never even thought of trying to find a roaming sheep or cow, the subject avoided by mutual silent agreement.
We survived, but in no comfort. Eventually, as the daily grind took proper hold, we fell back into a reliable rhythm of rice and canned beans. Rice and canned stew. Rice and spinach.
Perhaps most indicative of our state of decline was our inability to watch movies. After weeks and weeks of fiddling with panels and batteries and portable solars, we set up enough power to fire up genuinely warm water, as well as the entertainment system in Babalwa’s lounge. That first night she scattered the small room with cushions and prepared popcorn. I made coffee. We stacked the table with chocolate and argued over the first movie, eventually settling on Spanglish. Something soft and old to start, please, she begged. Just to get going. Something American and stupid.
I conceded, then ruined the evening by crying.
Adam Sandler reaches into Téa Leoni’s bathrobe and cups her breast to calm her. It’s a mock funny scene, nothing really, but I was judderingly reminded of Angie and myself. It was exactly the kind of thing she would have done to me, had I had breasts. It was our kind of fight, comedy or not. Their weepy hysteria felt so much like home I crashed under the memory. We tried again, but the weight of the films was too much. Their ideas, their people, their references, their beauty all spoke of subjects too rich. So we walked through and around and over our home entertainment system, playing music on it occasionally but generally leaving it fallow.
‘If it’s people, what d’you think they’re burning?’ Babalwa asked as we slid past Gold Reef City. The column of smoke had drifted further back as we approached. Now it looked like it could be over Midrand, possibly even Pretoria. It thinned while we drove, threatening to disappear totally into the late afternoon clouds.
‘Who the fuck knows?’ I grunted, irritable now with the idea that coming back to Joburg would somehow alter our circumstances. ‘Probably just an accident of nature. Leaves burning through broken glass or something.’
Babalwa pulled her knees up to her chin and stuck her tongue out at me. ‘Poes! It better be fucking people. I’m not sure I can spend the rest of my life with a sulky pants like you.’
I laughed, then clamped my lips back over my half tooth. I managed to forget about it most of the time, but every now and again it came back to me how ridiculous I must have looked with this massive angular chunk missing from my face. Despite the fact that I was the only man on the planet, I still wanted to impress and please Babalwa in the way that men impress and please women. But I found myself keeping my mouth shut and looking away as much as possible. Dentistry was now my constant ironic companion.
‘You should just laugh. Let go, man,’ Babalwa said, eyes twinkling. ‘I think it’s cute, anyway. Broken teeth are sexy in lotsa places.’
I grunted and made a pretence of refocusing on the road.
‘Don’t be grumpy, Roy. It’s my first time in Jozi. I’m excited.’ She reached a bony little hand over and patted my knee. ‘Tell me what it was like,’ she said, gripping my kneecap in encouragement.
‘Full. A lot of fokken traffic. Angry people.’
‘Liar.’ She tried to lift my patella, pushing it painfully around its socket. ‘You were probably the angry one. I’m sure there was lots that was great here. I wish I could have seen it…’ She trailed away and focused on the industrial landscape as we looped into the spaghetti junction.
I allowed myself a couple of flashbacks. Images of shiny cars and the glinting Highveld sun, traffic jams and metro roadblocks. Fat cops hustling for lunch. Maybe she was right, I conceded to myself. Quite possibly she was right…
Initially Jozi seemed little changed. The dry brown walls were still slumped and decaying and hopelessly wrong, but now the transmission paint was peeling, doubling up the ghetto atmosphere. Inside the easy lines of the skyline, the city had faded, was fading.
As we crested the hill to Zoo Lake we entered a teeming jungle. The birds had taken over. The hadedas perched in throngs on treetops, rooftops and garden walls, the packs on high supporting ground troops drilling the earth with prehistoric beaks. The hadada shrieks bounced against the softer calls of the loeries, also obscenely abundant over the forest tops. Then the weavers, the shrikes, the robins and all the smallers, crying and yelling and calling and hunting.
I stopped the van as we passed the zoo.
The houses and converted office-houses facing Jan Smuts Avenue had fallen so far back into the shrubbery they were barely recognisable. An old-school billboard had fallen completely off its wall mounting, the vines and creepers pulling it easily and slowly down. Windows were covered in vines. Where once the tops of the oak trees had merely brushed fingers to create a light canopy, now they had threaded together to form a complete roof, filled in by shrubs and tendrils and leaves.
And birds.
The forest stood tall, as in a fairy tale. Grass poked up through General Smuts’s tarmac, challenging the dominance of hundreds of years. Soon it would be the tar that was repressed, and rare and alien. I knew the forest would end in less than a kilometre and we would emerge in the glassy shine of Rosebank. Still, I searched for breath.
‘Jesus’ was all I said to Babalwa. ‘A complete fucken forest.’ I felt like a twelve-year explorer, previously bulletproof, suddenly lost, realising the true worth of my meagre experience and supplies. ‘It can’t have closed off completely,’ I added, ostensibly to comfort her, but really speaking to myself, the one with the memories. I pressured the accelerator, urgent in my need to get us through the few hundred metres to Rosebank. Babalwa gawked happily at the hadedas and loeries, shrieking properly when she spotted a zebra grazing next to the road. ‘Must be from the zoo,’ I said.
She commanded me to stop so she could look at it properly. ‘Never seen one before,’ she muttered, her chin resting on the half-raised window. ‘Check how fat its ass is. That’s wonderful. Really wonderful.’ She laughed and her little paw came out again and patted me on the knee. ‘Thanks for bringing us, Roy. This is fun. Much better than PE.’
We burst through into Rosebank, which had all the hallmarks of a conventional concrete jungle.
We entered Eileen’s apartment like we were returning from some kind of prolonged holiday. Me, the father, carrying our baggage and supplies up the staircase from the basement. Babalwa running up the stairs to see if she could find a view of the smoke column, then running back down past me again, yelling about not being able to find it. I dragged the bags and the boxes of food, grumbling to myself. We had become an odd pair. A husband and a wife. A father and daughter. A mother and her lost, toothless son. My tongue slipped through the gap again, seeking out the sharpest edge, playing with the idea of blood.
‘Absolutely fuck all!’ Babalwa thumped up the last steps to land next to me as I left Eileen’s flat for the last load. ‘Can’t see a damn thing. Maybe it was just a natural fire. Like on Survivor, before they get given flint.’