Dub Steps by Miller, Andrew

casually, while my heart leapt, fists in the air. ‘Could be anywhere, I suppose – can’t tell from this far.’
    ‘Where there’s smoke …’ Babalwa wriggled excitedly.
    ‘There’s something burning,’ I finished coldly. ‘Could mean anything.’
    ‘Could mean everything.’ Babalwa laughed at my caution.
    I ran my tongue through the guillotine gap in my front tooth and grimaced behind closed lips.
     
    The smoke toyed with us over seventy kilometres, shifting the source of its dance as we threaded our way through the splatter of empty cars blocking the highway. Babalwa squirmed ceaselessly, thrilled at the idea of Jozi. My tongue matched her vigour, probing relentlessly, excitedly, for the missing half of my front tooth.
    ‘There’ll be nothing to see,’ I kept saying to her in the build-up to the trip. ‘It’s not a big city any more. It’s an abandoned pile of glass and brick.’
    ‘Still,’ she said, refusing to concede, ‘it’ll be fun. Better than pretending to be farmers. We can go shopping. Looting. Whatever. Sandton City.’
    As much as I tried to deny it, I was with her. Jozi, as always, held the lure of change.
     
    Once we had the player working, once we had watched that first movie, our PE lives slid into a shambolic routine. We mowed thelawn and trimmed the edges of the reserve. We erected a greenhouse. We decided what to plant. We watched our seeds sprout, and rot.
    Theoretically, hydroponics had seemed like the answer. In practice, however, we couldn’t get even the simplest elements of the process right, and after three months we had grown sick, thin and very tired of farming. We roamed further and further, seeking out homesteads and nurseries and smallholdings and farms with vegetable patches. We didn’t score often, but when we did we scored big. One farm in the Gamtoos Valley yielded a truckload. Spinach, carrots, green beans, potatoes – all waiting neatly in a lush garden, right next to the farmhouse.
    But that was the exception. Generally we reached far and worked hard for little – the drooping, dying greenhouse mocking us each day when we returned.
    ‘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, eventuallysettling 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