Dub Steps by Miller, Andrew Page A

outside.
    Back to dad’s rack, another Zonneblom, back again, stumbling. Suddenly I was reaching for destruction or damnation or something similar and opening the third was impossible. I couldn’t get the screw into the cork.
    And then out the front door and to the car and over a rock and smashing my face into the ground and the black wet darkness of being out cold in the rain on some stranger’s driveway. Then the waking and the pain needles all through my face and my torn lip and my ripped cheek and the sight, the awful, pathetic sight of my shard of tooth on the driveway, pointing like a compass in the direction of home.
     
    I laughed when I saw Babalwa the next day but she didn’t return it. Her face fell, her eyes hooded and careful and a little bit scared.
    ‘What the fuck?’ She shouted like a mother. ‘What the bloody fuck Roy?’
    ‘I got lost.’
    ‘Your face.’ She shook her head and then snuck another look at me. ‘Your lips. Jesus, Roy, your tooth!’
    ‘I won’t do it again, promise.’
    ‘What?’
    ‘Drink.’
    ‘That’s what this is? You went drinking?’
    She closed the space between us down to a millimetre and slapped me, through the cuts and scabs, through the broken lip and tortured gums. As the pain shot through my mouth I groaned and fell back a step or two. ‘You stupid fuck,’ she said, crying now, tears running down both cheeks. ‘Please, please, I’m begging you, Roy. You’re all I’ve got. You’re the only hope there is. If you turn into this …’ Her head twisted away from the horror. ‘If you turn into this, you’re pushing me out, totally alone, into the world. You can’t do that. Jesus Christ, you can’t do that, Roy.’
    ‘I said I won’t.’
    ‘I don’t believe you.’ Babalwa walked away.
     
    I saw her again two days later.
    By then my mouth had started the healing journey, healthy parts reaching for each other over the volcanoes. The remaining half of my tooth throbbed constantly. Babalwa insisted I extract it, but I refused. The pain would fade, or the nerve would numb, or something like that. She shook her head and walked away again.
    The pain did numb, eventually, ratcheting down from a scream to a throb, from a throb to a pulse, from a pulse to an annoying dull ache. I sliced constantly on the guillotine that now hung from my gum, tiny, almost invisible trickles of blood forming repeatedly in the curl of my tongue.
    It was weeks before Babalwa could look at me directly without her own countenance crumpling completely.
    I stopped smiling.
    I eliminated the smile from my life.
    The very idea of smiling, gone.
     
    Losing a back tooth is unfortunate. Losing a front tooth is life-changing. I would catch glimpses of myself in shop windows and stray mirrors and every time I was shocked; the combination of hair and tooth had created a reflection I didn’t recognise. I turned the van’s rear-view mirror far left, cutting myself out entirely. I withdrew from Babalwa, and from myself. I lay awake at night, fizzing in sobriety, frogmarching myself into dreams of magnitude. I whipped and whipped and whipped. But while the scars slowly grew closed, the damage remained.
     
    ‘Boss.’ Fats sipped his tea and blinked rapidly. ‘That’s about the most fucking tragic thing I’ve ever heard.’ He wiped back a tear. ‘Serious. Since all this shit happened, this is the most pathetic, disturbing thing …’
    I shrugged, picked a tea mug off its stand, reached to turn on the kettle and then put the mug back. ‘Imagine how I feel.’
    ‘That’s the point, nè?’ Fats locked me in for a while, eyeball to eyeball. ‘That’s exactly the fucking point.’
     
    ‘What’s the point?’ Babalwa slurred, having appeared at the corner of the kitchen door. She was wiping her eyes.
    ‘Hai.’ Fats shook his head. ‘We were just discussing your mlungu here and his dental problems.’
    ‘You drinking tea?’ Babalwa asked Fats hopefully.
    ‘Ice-cold. Straight out the