Free Dub Steps by Miller, Andrew

The idea was to build something akin to a home grid, a power source able to do more than boil the kettle or light a bulb.
    The bean incident was a reminder that our raider-gatherer lifestyle had a limited time frame, and would have to morph into food production. A life of chickens (presuming we could catch the wild ones) and crops – plucking and hoeing and growing. Soil and harvest.
    ‘That means,’ said Babalwa, ‘there’s no way we can stay here. It’s all sand. We’ll never grow anything.’
     
    Day to day, I foraged and raided. I drove ceaselessly, peering into the cracks and corners of Port Elizabeth from my obscene, crushed and dented armoured van, flipping ceaselessly through an always evolving stack of raided CDs and sticks and players. Even with all the musical foraging, I spent most of the time in my father’s dance space – not Schulz, but the old boys. The ones who had got him started.
    Digweed, Tenaglia, Fatboy Slim, Africanism , Fresh House Flava et al.
    Babalwa developed her own orbit. We inched into a mutual ritual that accommodated our disparate paths, our innate need for human contact and our permanent state of metaphysical terror. Seldom, if ever, did we join forces. The raiding was private – each person’s way of communicating internally, of addressing the context and the place and the situation.
    I dissolved, for the second time and through calculated effort, my pissing habit, displacing it with an expanding collection of teenage girls’ photo albums, iPods and mobiles. I picked them carefully, cultivating an archetype to which I attached my lusts and dreams.
    The girl – my girl – was between fifteen and eighteen years old. She wasn’t a rebel, but she wasn’t a nerd either. She was that quiet girl, still to be properly unveiled, especially to herself. She sat in the middle of the class and her mind drifted as much as it paid attention to geometry, biology and equations. She felt stirrings in her heart and her loins when she thought of him, but she was only just becoming aware of how to deal with them practically, firstly, and with him, secondly. Her underwear was, of course, crisp white. She listened to alternative indie-style sounds. The Canadian scene, but with old-fashioned hip hop and newer broken beats thrown in. She was conversant in local music – she knew her deep house from her kwaito from her trashy Eurobeats.
    She read a lot of books. Any book really. Pulp fiction. Poetry. History. She was open. She was waiting. Every now and again shewrote poetry.
    She had friends.
    Boys.
    Girls.
    They gathered in groups. Hugged. Held hands. Smoked illicitly, around corners.
    Took photos.
    And I collected them. I snuck them, presuming Babalwa was ever looking, into my flat. Pored over them gently, some days. Pawed them on others. Pulled the printed pictures out, examined them, put them back. Thumbed my grubby way across screen after screen after screen.
     
    ‘Roy,’ she said. We were sitting on the pyramid bench, looking out over the skatepark and the memorials at the sea, our toes tickling in the knee-high grass. ‘Just look at this grass. And think about it. We are going to run out of cans. The roads are already growing over. It’s going to get harder and harder to move. The animals will keep coming. It will get more dangerous. Harder to find food and, if we don’t make a serious plan, harder to grow it, to hunt it. If we just stay here, if we don’t build, we’ll be swallowed up.’
    She leaned forward on her arms, lifting her backside slightly off the bench, and rocked. I considered her profile and realised how well I now knew her features. Her always shaved head. The clouds that hovered in her eyes. Her boyish body. Her ridiculously conservative clothes. Shorts, T-shirt, sandals. The incongruity of her. Of the two of us. I looked back out to the sea, all flat and benign.
    ‘Where do we live? Why? How do we live? Why? What do we do about power?’ she asked in a rush. ‘I