Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [13]
Ash is wearing that humouring-me smirk.
'Okay, okay, fine. You're right. Conjecture hurts the cause. Enough with the conspiracy talk. But you know it's true.'
The taxi rockets around Hospital Bend, which used to feature an actual hospital, home to the world's first heart transplant, before it got turned into luxury apartments, past the nice middle-class burbs, Obs and Rosebank and Pinelands and Langa, and into the loxion sprawl proper. Don't be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it's all Potemkin for the tourists. You just need to go a couple of blocks in to find the real deal, the tin shacks and the old miners' hostels and the converted containers now that the shipping industry has died together with the economy. All the same shit they've been promising to fix since the 1955 Freedom Charter or whatever it was. And despite the border patrols, the sprawl just keeps on spreading. You can't keep all of the Rurals out all of the time.
The taxi pulls over to let us out at the circle at the entrance to Berlin, named like so many of the districts, Kosovo and Barcelona and Joe Slovo and Mandela Tribute Park, for the headline news. We get out by the massive and so very conspicuous SAPS station, and walk the rest of the way back to the club, past the tourist zone, where the rubbernecks come to get their taste of poverty and their photographs with the kiddies, maybe some love muti from the sangoma, or a taste of mqombothi beer shared around in a can between men who are only there to lend the scene authenticity, to earn a little cash to buy a Zamalek, real beer in a real bottle, because no one cares about tradition anymore. The tourists don't venture too deep into the heart of it, which means they're missing out on the drop toilets and spiderwebs of illegal electricity connections in the newest parts of the sprawl, where council hasn't got to yet.
Ash would point out the good stuff they're missing too, the stuff he tried to show our hombre friends, the barbershop strip in Chinatown and jazz at the shebeen and the soccer club and the boxing society and the entrepreneurs hawking minutes on their cell phones (illegally with the new SIM ID laws in place) and the sense of community and how transformation has been real and important. Like it's not a total wank, where people are just as economically fucked as they were before, only now they're sick as well, or, worse, trying to escape being sick and bringing it in with them from the Rural. And that leads to spates of outbreaks all over and crackdowns, just as bad as those bad old days when the police came storming in to quarantine and deport whole neighbourhoods.
Ash takes my hand as we reach the soccer pitch next to the club, really just a scrap of dirt that the community housing committee cleared for development, so uneven that the ball catches on clods and goes wide or random. It's good practice for the kids, Ash says; when they get to play on a real field, they'll have the advantage. We're trying to get it permanently instated, which requires more funding, more waiting, more neo-colonial cocks, no doubt.
He fiddles with the ring on my finger. 'Do you really have to wear that?'
'Don't start with that now, please,' I say.
'But all the time?'
'And what am I gonna do when Home Affairs comes knocking? And interrogates me on why I'm not wearing my wedding ring?'
Ash snorts. 'In light of all the other transgressions? The heady whirlwind of the entire week-long romance before you got married? Or that she lives in a totally different part of the city? Or, you know, that minor detail about you not being female-inclined? I'm just saying.'
'Then you don't need to be uptight about it. Jesus, Ash. She's a fucking refugee. Have some compassion.'
The club smells decidedly funky, like too many sweaty kids have simply dumped their gear post-game in a pile, which turns out to be exactly the case. Ash starts plucking