Dub Steps Read online

  Dub Steps

  Dub Steps

  by

  Andrew Miller

  First published by Jacana Media (Pty) Ltd in 2015

  10 Orange Street

  Sunnyside

  Auckland Park 2092

  South Africa

  +2711 628 3200

  www.jacana.co.za

  © Andrew Miller, 2015

  All rights reserved.

  ISBN 978-1-4314-2220-3

  Also available as an e-book:

  d-PDF ISBN 978-1-4314-2249-4

  ePUB ISBN 978-1-4314-2250-0

  mobi file ISBN 978-1-4314-2251-7

  Cover design by publicide

  Set in Sabon 11/15pt

  See a complete list of Jacana titles at www.jacana.co.za

  Contents

  You

  I

  CHAPTER 1: Failure and I considered each other

  CHAPTER 2: Drunk

  CHAPTER 3: The ultimate farce

  CHAPTER 4: Genital nappies

  CHAPTER 5: I leaned back casually

  CHAPTER 6: I lit a cigarette and thought about my father

  CHAPTER 7: The occasional bark of what must have been a dog

  CHAPTER 8: Just one

  CHAPTER 9: Shotguns falling from my arms

  CHAPTER 10: Five

  CHAPTER 11: The only reliable thing in the circumstances

  CHAPTER 12: Tears of ass pain

  CHAPTER 13: Suddenly claustrophobic

  CHAPTER 14: I hopped around on my other leg

  CHAPTER 15: Just look at this grass

  II

  CHAPTER 16: Refugees

  CHAPTER 17: Genuinely enamoured

  CHAPTER 18: Six

  CHAPTER 19: The pain did numb, eventually

  CHAPTER 20: My entire life on that fucking cloud

  CHAPTER 21: Cow experience

  CHAPTER 22: It could be good once it’s done

  CHAPTER 23: Shangaan in many ways

  CHAPTER 24: By the time we had meat in the freezer we hated each other

  CHAPTER 25: Fats took increasingly to his room

  CHAPTER 26: Cloudy with a hint of yellow

  CHAPTER 27: I also imagined her in his arms

  CHAPTER 28: Allowing myself to dream

  III

  CHAPTER 29: We did our chores

  CHAPTER 30: Just spectators

  CHAPTER 31: None brave enough to stop

  CHAPTER 32: German Valium

  CHAPTER 33: My school name

  CHAPTER 34: Hungover, shamed troops

  CHAPTER 35: Guinea pig in the air

  CHAPTER 36: Kids and grannies scrambled

  CHAPTER 37: Picking and biting

  CHAPTER 38: A month

  CHAPTER 39: No emergency vehicles

  CHAPTER 40: Weeping into the basil

  CHAPTER 41: You had it and you didn’t want it

  CHAPTER 42: Blacks, browns, beiges and a few whites

  CHAPTER 43: We carried on

  IV

  CHAPTER 44: I wish I had written it down at the time

  CHAPTER 45: Getting your shit together technically

  CHAPTER 46: Indecipherable intellectual potential

  CHAPTER 47: A story and a lie

  CHAPTER 48: Fuck fuck fuck

  CHAPTER 49: Rumpelstiltskin

  CHAPTER 50: Straight entertainment

  CHAPTER 51: Looking so hard to the sky

  CHAPTER 52: Later

  CHAPTER 53: The natural error margin

  CHAPTER 54: Keep on going

  V

  CHAPTER 55: Very, very busy

  CHAPTER 56: I am her child

  CHAPTER 57: I am not used to such journeys

  CHAPTER 58: Who do you love?

  CHAPTER 59: Of course they follow

  CHAPTER 60: Seeds need to spread

  CHAPTER 61: Heavy

  CHAPTER 62: Bundles of complex energy

  CHAPTER 63: I drop it

  You

  I am an old man on a hill, and my regrets are generic. To the extent that death can surprise, this has been it. It shouldn’t be a shock, but there you go.

  I regret, most of all, my shrivelled heart. So focused on the numbers. On the maths of my personal equation. Can a man change his heart? Are there ways to improve the spirit of who you are? Of why you choose? It would be nice to think so. But me, now, I am simply ambient. I must be. Into this air I shall shortly slip. The solvent is this running, jagged brain, all angles and contusions, breaks and falls. The surface shines. Teflon. I slip back, and back, into my stories, ideas of her. Whoever she is now, her, the love I refused. Me, angry little peanut.

  I should have loved harder. Generic.

  I refused to let go. Generic.

  I think I will miss the birds, the weavers most of all, but all of them really. (The worker birds more than the exotic. The mynas and the barbets and the robins. The boys on the rush, building and moving, private and fast and swooping.) Generic.

  Blue sky. It starts to taste like something as you get really old. Something powerful. You open your sagging mouth and let the blue pour in. It’s fresh and light and it bubbles like an advert. Generic.

  I remember a time on the beach. Well, not really a memory. Just the brushstroke of us, down the shoreline. She took my hand. Gave me hers. It was some kind of gift. A human transmission. I flickered with a deeper recognition I couldn’t place.

  It all feels like that now. Transmission. Flickers.

  It’s all on the record, in the archive, on display at the expo. You know what I looked like. What I did. You have the details, the story and all of its bastard children. Still, I must bleat just once.

  Look, I was a cunt. Maybe that’s it. Maybe that’s all I really want to say. I know it now. It’s not a regret. You can’t apportion blame – even to yourself. It’s an observation. Age makes it easier to actually see. (Generic.)

  A cunt on the move. A cunt with intentions. A cunt who cried at his own pain, paper cuts and marriage, it never mattered. I lived filled with tears.

  So, there it is. That you are reading this, whoever you are, wherever you are, is enough. I have spoken. You have heard.

  The rest is up to you.

  I

  CHAPTER 1

  Failure and I considered each other

  I looked into the bathroom mirror and ground my knuckles into the sink.

  A face too pockmarked.

  Skin: puffy. Eye sockets: grey, pushed in too far. I shoved a thumb into the half-moon beneath the left eye and the white indentation stayed.

  Failure and I considered each other, Angie’s cackle rising and falling and rising again from the dining room. I ratcheted my knuckles further. Then I punched the mirror, smashed it.

  I marched through the dining room as hostess Clarissa, followed by Angie, was clicking in my direction to assess exactly what the fuck.

  I mumbled a thank you at Clarissa, then at the rest of the now standing guests, lastly at the seething form of my wife, whose keys I grabbed from the foyer table.

  No one moved to follow.

  I took Angie’s retro Mini Cooper, a vile black-and-cream thing, and aimed it right at the complex boom, as they did in those old movies. We came to an auto American halt inches from the red-and-white pole. The guard hit the button from his booth. I slammed the heel of my palm against the steering wheel and let the blood splatter across the cream leather.

  I drove to Eileen’s Rosebank apartment, parked the Mini deep under and went to sleep for two days.

  CHAPTER 2

  Drunk

  The dinner party had been Angie’s attempt to get me straight with the Mlungu’s ownership. There were rumblings and rumours, talk, mutterings about Roy. The usual. As the business grew I was receding, and I
was receding because I had been drinking for the greater part of twenty years.

  There were pauses, but they were brief and inconsequential.

  Once, I booked into rehab for two weeks.

  Otherwise I was drunk.

  The dinner had rolled along. We were all wit and astute, analytical asides. The boss boys, Rick and Mongezi, were calculatingly casual, keeping the talk light, shop. The VR legislation, the new drugs on the underground, and so on.

  Mongezi, bless his humble little black ass, did his best to stay parallel to me. We had started together, and no matter how far away he grew, he was always loyal.

  Which was no easy thing. The bottle tipped and I tipped the bottle and it was too fast, of course it was too fast, the anxiety simmering already, less than an hour in. I was talking too much – I should never talk – and I was messing.

  Red wine in all the wrong places.

  CHAPTER 3

  The ultimate farce

  I only met my mother a few times and my father – despite his many talents and attempts to be something else – was ultimately a useless fucker.

  We lived in Greymont, on the cusp of Triomf, a shattered, angry suburb still trying to become Sophiatown again after all these years. She lived on the Westcliff hills, locked into the glimmering heights by her father. Punished.

  Their story was the ultimate farce, and I the farcical result.

  My father was at the height of a failed international cricket career, and my mother was in London on one of those white South African working trips. She was beautiful. Trim and fit and a dancer, part-time, but good enough at waggling around to be asked to appear on the boundary at one of the night games, where her form caught his eye and … it’s obvious and predictable. They came together full of pills in a club somewhere on the fringes of the West End, he a minor celebrity, she very star-struck. They fell into each other, fingers and blushes, sweaty palms and neck massages, and nine months later I came carelessly into existence.

  My most vivid maternal memory is her arriving one evening when I was around five years old. I remember her hand and its foreign dimensions. The length of her fingers. Their restlessness. She had mousy brown hair and nervous eyes. Oh, and she was wearing brown slip-ons. I remember that.

  She thrust a present at me. I opened the rectangular gift, pulling red ribbon off patterned brown-and-gold paper. I peeled the expensive sticky tape easily off either side and unfolded the paper to reveal a royal blue box. Inside the box was an overwhelmingly classy pen. Silver, very understated, thin, heavy.

  An adult’s pen.

  She crouched next to me and brushed my cheek with long, anxious fingers. ‘It’s in case you need to think out loud,’ she said. I was busy assessing the gift, clicking the push button in and out, captured by the smoothness of the internal latch, still searching for the right reply, when he kicked her out.

  ‘We gotta go.’ Russle Fotheringham stomped into the lounge, bakkie keys in hand. ‘I’m late. Next time, yes?’ She left the lounge quickly, half looking back. Russle and I drove to the bottle store, then back home again.

  CHAPTER 4

  Genital nappies

  Even in Jozi – thousands of miles from the celebrity moon shots, from Silicon Valley and the baked bean teleportation parties – there was a belief that we were shifting it.

  Life.

  Change was the thrill as I left university and entered advertising school. Mankind was, so the story went, finally crossing the threshold into a truly functional existence. If we chose the right combinations we could augment and magnify and enhance forever. The pavement, the sky, the air pushing quietly in and out of our snouts.

  Our first copywriting module of the year was delivered by a thirty-something man in wire frames, stubble and a Steve Jobs buzz cut.

  The class was twenty deep, all Model C kids with family backing (such as myself – my mother was absent, but her father funded any educational desire) or corporate sponsorship. Mr Jobs peered down on us.

  ‘I believe in change,’ he said, deathly career-serious. ‘Not that it is often very likely, in a deep, fundamental sense, but rather that it is our true hope as a species. The desire to change is all we have.’

  I waded through the hype with as little focus as I had applied to everything else. I drank. I went to clubs. I tried to date girls, and failed, because I drank.

  Still, I put my glasses on and marched out to the street with the rest of class as the wise Jobs added colour to the walls. As he raised the elevation of a passing pair of middle-aged breasts. Copywriting, he told us as we walked, was dead. Yes, there would be a requirement for a certain volume of text, but our professional lives would be defined less by our words than by our ability to manipulate the paradigm of experience.

  Which sounded fine to me. To all of us, thumbs hovering, eyes rushing. We were the pioneers. Eventually, we would pass the gifts on. To our parents. To schoolkids in Uganda. To the mamas in the rurals.

  The year passed, a thin layer of communication verbiage fell over my equally thin arts degree and I stepped into ‘the agency’. HHN – Huber Huber & Ndimande – a sixty-person set-up with offices in Hyde Park and an array of young, fiery-eyed executives leading the charge.

  Looking back on my first days at the agency, I perceive Mongezi as a friend. He now possesses, via the warmth of an old man’s imagination and despite everything to come, a benign and accommodating place in my idea of my story. I see him clearly: a tall, thoughtful young man, prone to empathy.

  Before we got into serious business, we were chat partners on the agency balcony. During work hours the rotation of smokers and gossipers and chatterers was ceaseless. But after hours I would inhale tobacco, he would drag on his blunt and together we’d pick the world apart.

  In my hood, Mongezi said, there is nothing. At home people fetch water in buckets and walk kilometres carrying it. No one is networked or connected or app-enabled. If we had the net, or credit cards, the goods would still never arrive. There are no deliveries.

  I admired him. He had all the southern African tongues, including media and technology. He travelled regularly north, and east, into the landscape that for most of us was just backdrop. Mongezi was aware of the distance between his chosen profession and his philosophical heart. He was not out to save the world, but he knew it needed saving.

  In our business that was no small thing.

  I remember a time. An episode. On the balcony, leaning on the rail, watching over the unfurling minutiae of the post-rush-hour parking lot.

  ‘I was thinking last night,’ he said, releasing a long dribble of spit down onto a Mercedes. ‘Labour will not be required. It’s redundant. Human muscle has peaked.’

  ‘We rocket past the sun in technicolour glory.’

  ‘Sho. Of course. But I’ve always thought of it in terms of labour. Elites up in space. Chunks of meat down here, harvesting food. Screwing the lids on Coke bottles.’

  ‘Which are sent up daily, in fleets, unpacked at the Virgin docking station.’

  ‘Sho. But maybe not. Maybe they won’t need us. My mother, in Limpopo. Not required. My gogo. Aunts. They’ll grow their shit in space. Automagically generating food. Livers. Feet. Rice Krispies.’

  ‘Who? The rich?’

  ‘They won’t need us. We won’t need them. My grandmother can grow her sweet potatoes in peace.’

  ‘We say fuck off!’ I shouted to the dusk.

  Mongezi flicked his roach over. We watched it fall, hoping to see it stick in the spit on the Merc’s window.

  The door to the balcony swung open. A middle-aged traffic lady from Venda scolded Mongezi in vernac, then slammed it shut.

  Most of our time together was on that balcony, and it was usually much less philosophical. We smoked and developed, in spiralling increments, our current obsession: our premise for a truly South African slasher flick.

  Housewife in car, somewhere in Bryanston. Sandwiched behind the driver’s seat is her hedge cutter, which she is driving bac
k from the repair man. She’s rich, but sensible too. She fixes the hedge cutter instead of replacing it, even though the rewards are negligible.

  ‘Three hundred bucks is three hundred bucks. It all matters.’

  ‘Even if a new hedge cutter would ultimately last longer than the broken one.’

  ‘Even if.’

  A street thug passes her at the traffic light, can’t spot a device worth anything, decides to drift by, but at the last second spots the cutter and smashes the back-seat window with the spark plug gripped between his knuckles, the glass spraying all over the baby in the booster seat. He grabs the cutter, which, conveniently enough, is petrol powered, and rips it to life.

  The thug has issues. He feels a need to express them. He runs the cutter through a newspaper seller, then lops off the head of a young biker guy on a 50cc. In the midst of the ensuing ruckus he slips away, marches casually to the Bryanston Spar, cutter in hand, looking like a reasonable enough man on his way to do reasonable things.

  ‘He blazes into the Spar at ankle height.’

  ‘Optimum height for chaos.’

  ‘Ankles and baby heads.’

  ‘The chocolate shelves.’

  ‘Mixed nuts everywhere.’

  ‘Screams. Blood. Mixed nuts.’

  Before it was serious, before business fell accidentally onto us, it was that kind of thing. Our movie. Our lives. Wild ideas about all the things we were lucky enough to know very little about.

  All the while, the media philosophy fell like steady coastal rain. The creative directors and division heads looked over us as they spoke, their eyes locked into the mythical middle distance, where they saw community. Always community. Placing the brand at the centre of a community. Facilitating community interactions. Creating genuine, tangible community value. Bringing the virtual to life within the community. Developing brand equity within the new paradigm of real-world augmentation and the limitless virtual possibilities for community interaction.