I grunted and turned for the basement, soothed in a strange but significant way by her chatter.
‘Can I go in?’ Babalwa half stepped over Eileen’s threshold.
I dumped the last box (canned beans, long-life milk, canned tuna, canned tomatoes) on the kitchen counter and heaved. As strong as I had become, the carrying had still taken it out of me.
‘Who was this chick, anyway?’ Babalwa bounced into the kitchen. ‘Girlfriend?’
‘Office associate.’
‘Not very creative though.’ Babalwa hoisted her narrow ass onto the counter. ‘Check out this flat. It’s like she was still sixteen and her mom did it for her.’
‘In many ways she was,’ I replied. ‘Look, it’s pretty dark now. We need to decide what we’re gonna eat, how we’re gonna heat it. We’ve got shit to do.’
Babalwa grabbed me by my hair, pulled me into her and locked her legs behind me. ‘You need to chill the fuck out, baba. There are no deadlines here.’ She kissed me carefully, like a wife, probing my mouth with her tongue, reassuring me with her hands and her legs and her grip. Just as I began leaning in, she slipped her tongue through the hole in my front tooth and burst out laughing, pushing me back, the heels of her palms against my chest. ‘Sexy!’ She laughed, looking me in the eye. ‘Sexy like a meth addict. Sexy like a crack pipe.’
I pushed her back, harder than I intended, almost slamming her head against the corner of Eileen’s smoke extractor. ‘Fuck you. You’re in Roy country now. Show respect.’
‘Pretty hard to respect a man with a gap like that in his teeth, mister!’ Babalwa slid off the counter, hugged me quickly and trotted into the lounge. ‘Seriously?’ she called out. ‘You woke up here, in this flat? Must have been freaky. Seriously freaky. I mean, just being in a space like this, it’s like going…’ Her voice disappeared as she entered the bedroom.
We slept that night in Eileen’s bed, our stomachs grinding away at the beans and the tuna, Babalwa farting gently as she slumbered. I let my arm curl over her, like we were lovers and not lost, lonely refugees.
CHAPTER 17
Genuinely enamoured
‘Do you even know how to shoot one of these things?’ Babalwa laughed at me as she picked up the weapons, then laid them carefully back down again, one by one.
‘Blasted a few rounds. Landed on my ass.’
‘We should probably give ourselves lessons…’
We carted a shotgun, an AK and an R1 out the front entrance of Tyrwhitt Mansions. Guns, it turns out, aren’t that complicated. You open them up, shove in the bullets where it looks like they’re supposed to go, find the safety and fire.
If you’re a scrawny girl, you avoid the shotguns.
We blasted the stop sign at the bottom of Tyrwhitt Avenue to pieces, moving closer and closer as the reality of our talents became obvious, Babalwa burying her elbows in the tarmac with every shotgun effort.
The birds scattered with each shot, then came back down again. They were clustered in the trees, on the street signs, on the balconies. Egrets, eagles, loeries, hadedas. They made me think of the free pigs, and I wondered if they were still around.
‘Be a bit careful,’ I said as we packed the guns back into the basement armoury and selected a personal pistol each. Babalwa chose a Vektor SP4, a Russian thing, far too big in her baby hand. I took the Vektor CPZ, all rounded edges and Star Wars. ‘There was a pack of free pigs and dogs around when I was here. Big enough to tear up a young girl from PE.’
‘Thanks,’ she said caustically. ‘I’ll keep that in mind. Oh, we should look for solar or a generator while we’re out, nè? This water thing could screw us up. I know you don’t want to move from your cherry’s flat, but we might have to.’
‘We need to plan a route?’
Babalwa flicked her safety off, then on again, and shoved the Vektor into the rear waistband of her gym shorts, where it sat, enormous and devoid of context. ‘Let’s just drive.’ She winked at me. ‘I can feel there’s something out there.’
She loaded the CDs into the van’s player as we searched the edges of Gauteng. Randfontein, Roodepoort, Krugersdorp, Daveyton, Vosloo, Magaliesberg, Midrand, Centurion, Tembisa, Pretoria, Benoni, Brakpan, Katlehong, Springs, Soweto. We pounded the speakers, not stopping, not talking, our heads bumping along, teenagers absorbing a new, morphing landscape.
The plants were pushing the houses back, each millimetre of growth adding to each tendril a new triumph of organic force. In the townships progress was slower but still real, clusters reaching up and over the roofs, sporadic grass patches spiralling upwards and sideways simultaneously.
‘We’re just starting summer rains, right?’ Babalwa asked rhetorically. ‘It’s October, right? And it rains hard up here?’ We were driving through the matchbox houses of Katlehong.
‘Very.’
‘What you reckon – two years? Three? Before everything is gone?’
‘Depends. At the zoo it’ll be less. Soon we’ll have to cut a path out, if we want to go back the way we came.’
‘Show me where you grew up,’ she said. ‘There’s no smoke.’
I pointed the van to Greymont Hills.
Babalwa took great interest in my childhood house, firing off a string of probing questions about my father as she shot away the locks to the front door and the security gate.
‘Did he beat you? You ever remember him sober? What about your mother?’
She roved through the house, picking up things – coffee mugs, pots, bowls, couch cushions – as if they represented me and my family rather than my tenants, then sitting on the front step contemplatively when I told her how many hours I had spent there myself. She cut an incongruous figure, there on my childhood front step. A scrawny girl in filthy white gym shorts and a vest, shotgun hooked over her arm and a pistol jutting from her hip.
I was becoming genuinely enamoured.
We started having sex regularly after the PE movie debacle – after I had cried through Spanglish. She would hug. Rub my head. Hold my hand. At night – only ever at night – she would pull me towards her and take me in, guiding with authority, climaxing with a fierce grip and complete silence. I, in turn, made a habit of collapsing into her, of passing out in her arms, of harvesting the small doses she offered, as fully as possible, as often as possible.
Around that time, she began raising the idea of children.
If we are really the only ones, she would say, then our children are going to have to sleep with each other to breed. We’ll be inbreeders.
I would shrug. Grunt.
‘Seriously, Roy! D’you think about it? I mean, at some stage we’re going to have to breed, nè? We have to try, don’t we?’
Once she had forced the idea into my head I did begin to think about it. But inevitably my thoughts would end with the idea of Babalwa as wife – as partner. As family.
I stayed as quiet as she would let me, offering titbits, basic ideas, technical prods along the line of genetics, cross-pollination, and so on. I would research occasionally, presenting her with whatever facts I thought would add to the debate playing out in her head. Personally, though, breeding was an abstract notion. I knew that once she had decided, I would follow in the wake.
Still, my resignation wasn’t entirely passive. As the days passed I allowed myself to consider the idea of her in relation to me, in relation to family. I considered her form more deeply. Her child hips. Her adult eyes. Her details began to etch themselves on my brain, and my heart. Soon there would be no wiping them away.