bios

"For the first time in human history, a simple program has proven effective in the lives of many addicts." –NA Preamble, "What is the NA Program"

The first mission is in motion before dawn, in the cold damp hours steaming from blankets and pallets, they head out into the mines, down in the trash of last night, cans, bottles, cardboard, treasure, separating into black plastics for the scrapyard scales. They range slow burdened and sure, investigating and scrutinising, every find is a fragment closer to a piece, a cap, a packet of two rand biscuits.

She winds down her window.

He leaves the rehab fat and full of confidence. He is afraid of disappointing his mother. Glowing complexion, new clothes from the outside, and a shrug, happy to be clean, out the rusty gate, under the wide sky. Three months later he returns unrecognisable. Thin, more teeth gone, and a homeless tan, dark burnt by the sun.

He escapes from the clinic. Weeks of complaining about his feet, aching, sore to walk on, walking around the rehab wincing. There were discussions, in the three years he's been in rehab he has tried to run twice before - but now his feet are so sore. He walks barefoot around the rehab, wincing when anyone looks at him.

Quartz Street is cut in half by Highpoint. A husk of an apartment building atop a husk of a shopping centre, with a supermarket that is incredibly easy to shoplift from -if, like me, you are white. On the street above – Highpoint is in Hillbrow, just before the brow of the hill, on one side Quartz is a walkway, with stalls down the middle and hastily occupied and abandoned shops down the sides.

From the crisp cavern of the last of the stars I am woken with half a mug of semi warm sweet black tea. I can feel the warmth of the security hut lingering in this incursion of hands into my nest. There is a message for me on his phone - charging in the hut, I must come, he leaves shift in ten.

He arrived back beaten. It was obvious the beating was fake. We had pooled our money and he had gone to buy from the dealer who sells stone. He was gone for four hours. I had already hustled more and smoked and was merely simmeringly pissed off. Tell me you smoked it all and it's fine. He clung on to the story and I had no choice but to act like I believed him. For whatever reason he needed that freedom. Here, in the clutch of this transient community, you get aligned with acting like you believe and working with the remnants.

By the swimming pool park, at the far crossroads, looking at the street names, today's using buddy says, “Who was Percy Osborne anyway?”

She dies amongst the lush tall green grass and the trash of an unclaimed urban pathway winding cramped between two buildings, her last breath choking out bloody through split lips and sobs of, ”I didn't take it, please, het nie gevang, he' nie.” A theory had surfaced that she was there when the phone went missing and it gained life, became a surety. Her whole life for a phone theft theoretical.