Dub Steps by Miller, Andrew Page A

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, eyestwinkling. ‘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, nowthey 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