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.

His job is to scrape the pap off the bottom of the pot, the giant pot for forty five people, every morning and night, and he complains that he can no longer do it. No one else will scrape the pot. And so they took Sbuda to the clinic. Just before he leaves he asks that they get his sneakers from the clothes he has locked up in the office.

It takes them five days to find him. They look for him by waiting. He returns shoeless, in an openbacked hospital gown and a medicated daze. He had tried to walk to home and gotten half way, to the city centre, where after three days of walking, he had smoked. Passed out from hunger, exhaustion and nyaope he was found and taken to a hospital. Identified. They phoned his people, who had the rehab pick him up. Another six months they said. Three years six months in the rehab. They have never once visited him, they do not want him home, they do not want to deal with him. They pay for him to stay here. Scraping the pap from the pot, sleeping in the drone of the stepwork, frustrated by endless repeated viewings of the John Wicks, the Transporters, Despicable Mes.

“Wrestling,” he says, “why can't we ever watch the wrestling.” Whenever he asks, someone says, “Hey Sbuda, where are your shoes?”

The TV is cracked. There is one USB stick. No wifi. No way to download new things to watch. No staff in the office to do it if there was.

Sbuda has spent most of his life living under a bridge near the airport, hustling for money at the entrances, stealing scrap, smoking. He does not imagine any other life.

Someone else escapes during a football match against another rehab. He scores a goal and then vanishes. He told everyone he was going to do it in the afternoon meeting the day before, after he had led us in the third step prayer. His girlfriend is pregnant he has heard, he needs to know if he is the father. Soccer is banned from then on.

Scofield is so named because he has broken out of this rehab eight times, once by setting it on fire. One section of the dorms was rendered uninhabitable and so many sleep on the floor of the common area -the squatters, the rest packed into bunks three high, welded by inmates, the admitted, whoever. Badly welded. Often breaking under the movement of a skommel. Scofield was bought here in chains by the green beans. He has been in thirty two rehabs in his life. He is twenty six years old. Willingness.

Another arrives on a pole, strung up as if to slaughter, hashtagged by his own people, ranting that if he closes his eyes the world will end. He cuts his foot open on the broken tiles in the shower while dancing and trying to keep his eyes open. There are no bandages, he waits bleeding into toilet paper for a day until one of the staff can take him to the clinic. This is his third time here.

The dorm and clinic visits are managed by two former attendees of the rehab. No homes that will take them back, they have been absorbed into ebb and return. No way to navigate any discernible future. At least they are not using. One clean for two years, one going on eight.

He's 20 maybe and comes in willing and then soon confesses he is doing this not for himself but for his people. He will smoke as soon as he leaves. He spends large portions of his time talking to the ancestors, or the wall. After two weeks he tries to escape through the roof, is pulled back in by his feet, and chained to his bed for three days. After that is two weeks of short steps and dishes duty. It makes for so much happiness when people are punished with dishes, then everyone else gets to take a break.

“It's not so bad, two weeks,” he says. His previous rehab, somewhere in the forest, everyone was on short steps, the whole six months, and chained to your bed every night. “Only church, no stepwork, prayer and garden work, and ntwala. Not like these small ones here, big ones, you could never sleep, so we slept away from the beds, standing up.”

He is enthusiastic in step class, always vocal about finding recovery, after three months he leaves and is in hospital after three days — caught smoking, his brother has beaten him into intensive care.

A youngster, maybe 16 comes in for meth, hashtagged in reported fervour by the dorm managers, in his own bathroom, at his father's place, he thought his father loved him, but here? He still wants to party, he is after all, young. His people want him to stop cigarettes as well, they are not allowed to give him smokes from his tuckshop, he trades duties for two gwaai, will sweep, mop, do dishes, anything for gwaai. There is an established informal economy around these situations. Trading crips, goslows, stoksweets, eleven rand mylife, anything from the ten rand a day tuckshop to get out of duties. A system of privilege has formed around those who get sugar, coffee, tea smuggled in by the dorm managers. The two dorm managers are barely paid -their lodging and food and a small stipend of R2500 a month for the most senior, who has maintenance and debt, nothing for the junior – they extract a percentage of these smokkels for themselves, for control. Three months in a meal can be sent to you by your people, KFC and shoprite cakes mostly. Building up to a three month mark is a plague of begging, “what duties can I do for you?”

A handyman is bought in to start repairing the fire damaged dorm. He is outside working on a door when the kid spots his chance to escape. Over the back wall. He makes for the freeway. The family next door shriek, “Faithy go tell the Uncle one of his people is getting out!”. There is a scramble for the chains and the car, as they head out. They find him three blocks away, lost, he does not know the area and everyone he passes is running back to the rehab, whatsapping, telling him to go back, for his own good. They pull up and he gets in, they hashtag him anyway, he'll be in short steps for two weeks.

There are no medical professionals here. It is handled by the dorm managers, sometimes they forget. Methadone is for five days maximum and the withdrawals kicking convulsively in the night are surrounded by threats, to shut the fuck up and stop crying. Those who snore are woken up, those who dream loudly are told to stop dreaming. Everyone sleeps on their own particular precipice.

Three months in being kept awake by the shadows of these kicks, still inhabiting my bones, unwilling to let me sleep, when I hear a bird in the night, I look up at the crumbling chipboard of the bunk above me, and try to trace its flight across the unimaginable sky. Closing my eyes its cries are bright pin pricks in a line against the darkness.

In the spasms of the night the shadow of a cat, the rustling of a crips packet under a bed somewhere.

“It's the ancestors!”

“Cat's are evil, get it out, get it out!”

“It's the mouse, you guys must clean up your snacks man.”

In the bathroom sometime in the hushed rhythm of other people's breathing, re-reading again The Eagle Has Landed – the only book on the fucked shelves that has it's ending intact, most are ripped out to use as dustpans for morning duties – addicts, man. Here is where I escape the no-sleep of three months in, the bathroom door has a hole in it, the stalls no doors at all, the toilets no seats or broken seats, the shower handles no handles, the mirror is scraps of reflection after an ancient tantrum, my legs kick unbidden while balancing on a three legged plastic chair trying to quiet a mind awake with regret and the opportunities I must grasp when I get out, for I have a life to rebuild, occasionally punctuated by the shitting of someone, half asleep, trying not to catch my eye.

Signalling it could be time to try get some actual sleep, around three thirty am the seekers of hot water start whispering in to the bathroom – where there is no bath – lining up and otherwising. There are shouts of shutthefuckup walking back through the common area, a double volume cold space, maybe fifteen by fifteen and ten high, where we eat, watch TV, have meetings, step classes, and where some sleep. This was once a mortuary, then a church, then a gym, apparently the guy who ran the gym needed to get clean, so he started a rehab. Passing the just waking dorm guy, who is up to start the porridge, three hours of stirring a pot that is three times too big for the only plate that is working on the stove that strains under the weight of the stirring. Between stirs he sleeps on a thin sponge in a former coldroom and scrolls through chattering upbeat tiktok motivationals, how to get that money yo, how to get that bitch yo.

Sleep comes just in time for Sekunjalo, the six am call and the bashing of feet for the slow to get up, Se! Kun! Jaloooo! Often self appointed kings of the rehab will try to do this five minutes earlier than the dorm guy, he lets them – mostly they are tolerated, ignored.

Morning meeting, readings from the NA Daily Reflections, identifications, airing of issues, then din pap, two sugars, no milk, no butter, fights break out daily over who gets the few extra bowls. Standing in the three by fifteen concrete yard, crowding around those who might let go of a sip coffee, eating pap before it gets cold, sitting on upended old paint buckets, the chipboard comes out and good natured arguments break out over who gets to play with the single set of dominoes. Milling, milling.

A scuttled together kennel of sorts houses Bullet, black dog, grey in years, the longest inmate here, shuffles, wobbles out to the pap pot scrapings Sbuda dutifully shovels into an icecream bak. The bored tease Bullet until he lashes out, too old to actually bite. Step class is at eight thirty. It's enough to just stand in the dust and feel the sun, until it's time to peel off to mop, to move the room around, bring in the desk and chairs.

Step class is given by someone who was here, is now years clean, about eight pay attention, the rest sleep on the side benches. The diligent copy out the questions, third time round, fourth time around they'll also be sleeping. The person giving class is often too beset with all the admin of the place, organising gwaai, toiletries, visits, intake, etc, that step class is given by other people, sometimes those who've been longest in this place, sometimes people who've passed through, live in the area, have free time. There are lots of those, there is a cycle of months clean, years clean, success stories, with free time. Sometimes one of them simply no longer appears..

Tea is a quarter loaf of powder bread, margarine and thin juice. After step class lunch is a quarter loaf of bread and gravy, sometimes three tins of fish divided, sometimes dahl, sometimes salted carrots but always the packet gravy. After lunch the rush to rearrange the room to set up the TV to be in front to re-watch John Wick or Power Book: Ghost, all of it. A mishmash of din sponges and threadbare blankets and sleep and bravado.

By two pm in the dusty yard we are circling the tuckshop door, it is just punctuation. Something that happens in the midst of all this nothing that happens. There is step work but there is no sense of the outside. Of what to do when you get out, and it translates into a sort of listlessness, a tired impatience with everything. “Tuckshop must open now. These guys are fucking around.” The dorm guy arrives back with packet crips that must be repackaged and someone gets that privilege. Bullet digs in the 30cm square attempt at a vegetable patch, from seeds hustled from kitchen duties preparing the supper, stywe pap with gravy, some boiled down vegetables, maybe a russian, sometimes chicken pieces, cut in two, half per person.

There is space out back to grow a proper vegetable garden and it's a common thing to want, but it will never happen, if allowed out there someone might try to escape.

Faith appears on the roof of the house next to the rehab, punctually as tuck shop is open, whatever time it is open, and she always calls out, “Het iemand seep?”

She is maybe ten, and her parents smoke – at night we smell the indanda seeping into the dorm window, the smell of plastic burning, copper being mined from the broken appliances mined from other people's discards – but fresh from school she is on the roof asking for soap, for rollons, for crips, for stoksweets. She only takes toiletries that are still sealed. She will take anything from the tuckshop, even the smallest leftovers of a goslows. She will talk for hours with anyone, any conversation always abbreviated into wants, needs, but also long enjambements about her friends and her brother, and what shit they caught on at school. She disappears when other opportunities present. “Okay, bye, but tomorrow as jy he' seep.”

Just before supper is the afternoon meeting, on hot days out in the yard, and never is there anyone willing to share, there is a list and generally when it's time there is an excuse and a battle to get someone anyone but not the same perpetually willing who share the same story over and over. On lucky days someone from outside who has free time, clean time and free time, and will fire everyone up with hope.

After dinner, the seeds saved from the whatever vegetables are taken outside in darkness, and we plant them in the dust of Bullet's diggings. The sky is sodium orange light from the nearby factories and security zones, barely a star is visible. I point to the evening star.

“That's a satellite”, I am told, “they're all satellites.”

“How can there be so many satellites?”

“I only see two.”

I cup my hands into a sort of shield against the orange miasma and ask him to do the same and look directly up.

“Oh no, yassis, those can't all be satellites”.

There is thumping music from just, it feels just next door, friday, saturday, sundays. Sundays is slow jams, nineties RnB. I start to anticipate my Janet Jackson moment as soon as the thumping starts on Fridays nine pm, just before weekend lights out. On the first night I hear it I imagine a two story building, a nightclub above some sort of shopping centre, a dancefloor, booths. I imagine wrong.

Dreaming of being out one slow jam sunday in the dark, there is the occasional “Jirre daai nommer!” from the bed above me. I say something about wanting to go dancing there, at that place. It is not a place for dancing. What I am hearing is a car wash. An open area where on weekends one guy parks his car and pumps tunes, other people pull up in their cars to listen, and to smoke, and assumingly buy, meth. Sure there is dancing, but it is not a club.

In a two kilometre square radius from the rehab there are nine other rehabs. In this area, a grid of streets, of falling down smartly kept houses, a merchant is in walking distance on any road. The local economy is spazas and meth – two giant supermarket chains suck money out of the community, employing few. There is little here to do with time.

The rehab prepares for bed in the same settling way night after night, everyone slowly peeling off to bed, small conversations. Just before this, lights not quite out, an argument. Muffled shouts and suddenly someone is on the floor and everyone is piling in on the beating. It takes the junior dorm manager to stop it, he separates the other dorm manager from the relapse patient. An old disagreement, an insult. The patient is punished, chained to his bed, given duties. The dorm manager is verbally disciplined the next day, but who else will wake up at three to make the din pap, and manage the tuckshop and cook all the meals and keep the peace.

The food is shit because this rehab costs R2800 a month, the services are limited, the counselling is limited, there is no preparedness for finding work, or even getting your ID or going back to school because this rehab costs R2800 a month.

R2800 a month is more than a third of the average monthly salary in this area. It is an entire pension. But it is cheaper than having an addict in the house.

This place is an organic response to a need. It is not registered, filling in a gap, cannot apply for funding, must stay under the radar. Kunjalo, nje.

Woken by mumbling underneath the symphony of uneasy breathing, Sbuda at the window, clutching at the bars, mumbling and crying. Touching him on the arm starts him awake. Dazed, he says, “I thought I was at my grandmom's house.” Behind him, beyond the shadow of Faith's roof, a night bird cries it's path beyond the sodium haze, against an invisible sky. .

He makes his way back to his bed, lying down in a crackling of forgotten crips packets.

“Is that the cat,” shouts from the other room.

“Ek sal dit vrek maak, oor de muur gooi!”

“Skommel jy Sbuda?”

“Hey, Sbuda, where are your shoes?”

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.

This pedestrian mall littered with unshaped scraps, people who will buy anything you have to sell after the long walk up, for much less than needed, goes down toward, more Hillbrow, hotels abandoned even by the merchants, and then up past the public hospital and then down, the long walk down to Killarney Mall, fertile ground for the two finger boys when the streets around Quartz are too aware. To the other side, where I nurse my downs, underneath the airconditioners, behind a security fence, next to the Hollywood Bets, opposite Highpoint, on the city side of the brow. This is my day job, nyaope is a hungry child.

Plastic plates with tomatoes placed to trip up the thronging flow through and past the purple betting franchise. The two finger boys weave through the press of people going to drink, to work, from work, to beg, to ask, to bet, to collect their pension grants, passing to get to the taxi home, tata ma chance, it is a thick river of opportunity and it is five meters away from the shanty town two meters wide behind the security fence, under the aircons, and about twenty meters away from the dealers. I am stuffed up in this shanty strip, making my daily smack from placing bets for the dealers. Once, weeks ago, I bet a ten rond and got back a hundred and the word is out, the mlungu is lucky. So they bring bags of heroin or pieces of crack to predict numbers for them on the UK 49s. Occasionally someone wins something and my reputation holds, but it has been long since someone has won and the calls for “mlungu bet” are diminishing. It is on one such diminished day that I fall in with the two finger boys.

Here in the tunnel stream of perhaps valuable things mined from bins it is dim in the day and alight with the flash of indanda and meth pipes at night- against hatred of the sun, light. It is here they find me. A white person occupied with desperate need to avoid the bone splitting pain of the opiate withdrawal that comes every eight hours, who will face less scrutiny when the tapping of a card fails. Their principle targets, those without their wits about them, are found leaving or entering taverns, the most lucrative are pensioners on SASSA payout days.

We can judge a society by how it treats its most vulnerable.

Sleeping in a circle around a nightly makeshift fire, out in the open, another twenty or so meters away, further down the hill. The morning cold awakes us, and spurs us to the early foot traffic. We share proceeds. Everyone does what they can when they can.

There is a central person, the divider of spoils, the decider of what I tap for, and – I cannot quite remember his name. To designate his position he literally retains a position above us. Next to where we sleep is a pile of old building rubble, stones mostly, and when we sleep, he sleeps on this pile, his bed of stones.

There are many names I hardly remember.

Thulani, perhaps Thando, when I first got to the streets of Hillbrow, welcomed me into his hokkie, reconstructed often in a small park next to a parking lot, next to the dealers on, the name of the road escapes me, Bertha maybe – near Nugget, anyway – reconstructed often in cardboard after the Metro cops raid and burn everything down. At some point he contracted TB and was near death, so we saved up what we could and sent him home to maybe Eldorado Park, to see his people, by minibus taxi. He returned a few days later, his family had refused him entrance to the home, they did not believe he had TB, and anyway he is still using. It takes a few days, he dies in the night, a slow wheezing fading away gurgle. In the cardboard home we had just that day remade on the bed of ashes left to us. Thulani, perhaps.

One night we are returning with our spoils to the fire circle at the corner of Esselen street and the pile of stones is empty. The divider of spoils never returns. Due to my power of tapping without scrutiny the bed of stones becomes mine, soon it is the most comfortable night’s sleep.

A wallet is lifted with two finger feathers from a pocket of a sleeping passed out man near a tavern near sunrise, the blueness in the sky an unending tone merging with the concrete around us, and inside this wallet is not only a card but a scrap of paper with a scrawled pin code.

At the ATM to take what is there is, a spitting child is blocking, as best he can, anyone from using the machine, he is twelve or fourteen, the age of the average member of the two finger gang. He is spitting warnings.

“Don’t trust this machine. It will steal you.”

Asking him to move, “Do not talk to him, he is mad,” from the queue behind me.

A security guard nearby, “He is just another of you paras, another thief, trying to take people’s money.”

Someone mutters, “fokken tikkop”.

His clothes are a broken nest, he is a compilation of tears and holes, one of the boys ask him if he has eaten and he says, “Don’t trust the machine.” And so we take him back to the street corner where we live and we feed him. Perhaps he can work with us. He is another thief.

He cannot work with us. He does not know how to steal. He spends his days at the ATM trying to warn people and, when we can, we get him to come with us for food.

We have spent the day hustling down at Killarney Mall, the long walk up, through the Quartz traders open air arcade, trading, swapping, tapping. We pass Highpoint, shoplift at the supermarket, it is perhaps midweek, perhaps midnight, we have plastic bags bursting with things for the corner nightly redistribute. There are three of us, as we are about to cross the stream of cars and human traffic, we pause, the least vulnerable, the most brave of us, sprints across, through the melee. A white SUV barrels down toward him and he dodges it adeptly. A car backfires. It is too loud. People are ducking, screaming. From the SUV disappearing we hear, “Fucking paras, fuck you.” On the road, shot, dead, is… whoever.

The vans arrive fast, his body is blocking traffic, the mpusa ask where we live, and we point to our corner. No, they need a registered, a proper address. Without an address or a family they will not investigate. Not even with those.

ATM boy will only eat certain foods, specific, no reason to it. This is the unique pressing burden of him, I take him to Hillbrow clinic -stocked with nyaope to fend off the withdrawals, ATM boy does not nyaope, not even meth. The security guards wave their beeping wands over us, an iron fence, a walkway bordered by a dusty garden, late afternoon golden sun dancing off the dead palm pot plants, thin enamel white painted poles hold up a sort of cover above, provincial. A queue passes a faded green felt notice board, out of date HIV warnings, announcements of long gone opportunities. The queue stretches down a long corridor toward night, an unhurried fuss.

Further into the night, a woman dozes, a child on her lap, wailing sporadically with hurt arm, a trickle of blood on his temple. She passes out, the child falls. From somewhere, in hushed tones, a nurse picks up the child, takes him away. The woman looks around, “I don’t know what is going on.” ATM boy gives her the sandwich he didn’t want. She bites down on it absently. A name is called. “That’s me.” She drops the remains of the bread onto the floor and moves down the corridor towards a beckoning shadow. Bodies move to fill the empty seat.

From the depths of his pockets he hands the intake nurse a square of blue cardboard, she reads the name. “Oh you, yes.”

She points down a side corridor, “You know where the sister is, she was asking about you a few weeks ago.”

ATM boy leads me a complex route to a door and knocks. The sister greets him by name, enthusiastically. She has his meds, he should have picked them up weeks ago. No word from his mother, she tells him. She hands me the meds, tells me that they should make handling him easier. What are they for? Schizophrenia. And his mother? When she brought him here, she left to go fetch some money, for food, from the ATM. Never came back.

The medication made him useless. He would sleep directly after taking it, often pissing in his pants, unable to get out of the stupor in time. When the medication ran out he returned to the ATM. Disappearing one day, the security guard nearby says he has been arrested for being a public nuisance.

Behind the supermarket, behind Highpoint, there was a metal air expulsion kind of funnel, a heating vent perhaps, and a hole in the fence, and me and Dain, Dane, would sleep there on cold nights, or any night really when we needed the safety of the space behind the warm horizontal tube of the extractor. A third person joined us at some point, I cannot even guess at his name. And we would move together in the day all three of us. We would take turns, draw lots really, fight mostly, over who would sleep closest to the warmth of the metal, tucked as close to the tube as possible, snuggling under. Often the other guy would claim to be more vulnerable to the cold. We were sleeping in an opiate daze when the power went out, the whole of Hillbrow plunged into a deep cold darkness. In the morning he would not wake, cold to the touch, the power still not returned, but our, Daine and myself, our downs were pulling on us, and so we left him cold, tucked under the extractor. Dead in our minds.

Eventually, downhill in Durban, this occupation has exhausted me, because I have the luxury of the life I destroyed, can be rebuilt.

People with undestroyed lives, that provide me with daily help, need to relieve themselves of the burden of me. The suggestion is made that I lie to get into the psych ward at Addington to get methadone.

A tunnel of security guards waving their beeping paddles, the particular shadows of public health, peeling posters, faded instructions, a tone of cream paint scuffed and grimed., muffled sobs, the shuffle of gowns. Out into tall windows letting in the summer light, a dying palm pot plant, a white concrete amputated crescent moon bench, upon which sits a yellowed paper man, in a robe and stained vest and maybe underwear, pinching an unlit cigarette between his thumb and forefinger, squinting as he drags on it. His head lifts slightly, as if he has the desire to eye me suspiciously, but not the energy.

Orange metal walls, the cancer section, more stairs, “psychiatric” printed on A4s, in plastic sleeves, peel off walls, point in opposite directions as part of some test or experiment or other cruelty. One more cream flight of steps, round a corner, an alcove opposite the toilets. Wooden, wooden top, a cavalcade of files in green sleeves, nurses briskly harassed, two uncalm doctors in white and worn stethoscopes, residents festooned with bright new stethoscopes, all packed into maybe three by five hushed meters. A nurse is trying to explain the medication times to a howling woman. A man hugs, pleading and admonishing in quiet tones, the toilet wall abutment. There is no queue. The only movements in the ward dazed, uncomfortable in their beds.

She grabs a moment, makes sure to tell me she is only grabbing a moment, that she has to leave now and what can she do for me. Crisp, her sleek black hair, her rings, her teeth, even her name badge shines through the murk. I tell her that I am suicidal and I am going to hurt myself, and I need to book in now.

“Nyaope,” she states.

“Yes.”

“Don’t do it,” she leans forward whispering. I am left with no response.

“There’s no methadone.” She looks from side to side, “Just go.”

“But I need help.”

“If you must, come tomorrow in the morning. It’s too late to admit you now.” She reels off a long list of various tests and other clinics I must get referrals from before I can be admitted to Psych Ward. Queues I need to pass through.

Doc is a high functioning addict, with inherited wealth. Doc either studied at med school or was an actual Doctor. Doc will know where to go, what to do. His car is at the back entrance to the drug house at 24, which means he’s at 26. I walk up the road in the fading light, and outside 26, recognisable from his shoes, is Chilli Bite, slumped against a tree, under a black plastic bag, obviously smoking. The residents in the flats opposite often complain about Chilli Bite, smoking outside, as do the people inside the drug house, Chilli Bite says it’s his right. Often misquotes Mandela. I greet him, he doesn’t reply. The black plastic breathes in and out in the wind.

Inside Doc, surrounded by people indulging his meth rantings – Doc is prone to, if he senses the attention of the crowd waning, handing out free drugs – and try to get his attention.

There was rain recently and the floors still have a half inch of water, mud, little drug baggies. Jenny the pitbull jumps up at me, and I take her through to Ncosy, who is fighting with Nicole over a missing something, as usual, and I say, “Has Jenny been fed.” Nicole says Doc will feed her later. I ask for a loan of forty so I can get a cap, and they say Boyo just came right, and I go to Boyo and he makes me a hit, I laugh about Chilli Bite passed out outside. “Oh, he passed, got hit by a car, I covered him”.

King George Hospital, Doc says, they have a good programme, but lie, he says, lie, lie, lie until you get into the psych ward, INSIDE, lie to get inside, only once you are in a bed, only then tell the truth. And go early in the morning.

First light, on the way up the first hill I contemplate making the lie real and stand on the edge of one of those steep downhills and watch the trucks barrelling down towards me. I attempt to step out into the path of one of them, but my body refuses.

Ten am I arrive. The corridors are wider at King Dinzinzulu? King George, whatever, but still those particular shadows. I pass broken vending machines, tables of cheap snacks, empty hand sanitiser dispensers, to emergency intake.

It takes two hours to be called to register that I am even there. Twelve noon. And I join the queue to wait to see a resident, to be assigned to whoever I must see.

Before the resident I must see a nurse. It is six pm when I get to nurse and the fever has begun, a thousand cold sweats and hot deliriums, my bones are pushing into my skin, and my hands have begun cramping.

“Nyaope,” says the nurse.

“No,” I say.

“Okay,” she says smiling, “so no medication then.”

And points me to another queue. People sit next to me for hours, disappear into the corridors, do not return.

Time has lost all meaning. I cannot control my limbs. A thin stream of waxy shit is making its way down my leg, but I cannot walk to the toilet, only around and around in circles. Sitting down, sitting up, standing up, slumping, I have begun trying to talk my way through the pain. My elbows feel as if they are outside the skin, screeching on passing chalkboards.

“Suicide, I just tried to kill myself, “ biting, sucking in breath through the pain.

The young resident contemplates me. “Did you try, or did you just think about it?”

I describe standing on the edge of the road and trying to.

“It might be enough.” Hands me back my folder.

“Doctor will see you when he does his rounds in the morning. Take a seat.”

I am doubled over in gut pain when they finally find me a bed to wait on. It is a gurney in bright corridor. No bedding, not that I need bedding, my legs would kick it off. I need shielding from the light that is in itself pain embodied, my eyeballs are on fire and I keep drifting in and out of consciousness. There will be no sleep. My sides are aching and my heart is breaking out of my chest.

The last time I was like this was when my meds vanished at my sister’s place and I was rushed to a private clinic and told had I waited any longer I would have died. And yet I am here, climbing under the thin blue rubber covered foam, thin like prison sponges, to hide from fluorescent as searing as the midday sun.

Around seven am my resolve crumbles. Hoist myself up and start walking toward the exit. Reaching the double doors, tackled to the ground by two security guards and dragged by my feet screaming back to my gurney, I fight and I fight, I need to go, I need relief, give me relief or let me go find relief, I refuse to get on the gurney, a resident picks me up from behind, my arm around his neck. They are holding me down and contemplating handcuffing me to the gurney when a doctor intervenes.

“Nyaope,” he says.

“I’ll discharge him, fucking paras, lying to get a comfortable bed.”

Outside the hospital, from the brow of a hill, I spot some paras under a tree in an abandoned lot.

I take the stethoscope from out of my pants, clean off the waxy shit, and trade it for a cap of nyaope, cover myself with the garbage bag, slump against the tree – the black plastic breathing in and out with the wind.

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.

I had arranged for someone to send me money for transport, and waited all night. The whatsapp now apologizes, they have only just put through the instant clearance which will take roughly forty minutes. And I am going to be late for my appointment if I wait.

Down at the Denis Hurley Center there is a social worker who can get people into a free rehab. And there are people who will believe in me again if I just get myself to a rehab. There are people who believe that I can get myself to rehab.

I did not want to walk.

I can not tell you if I would have used the uber money for smack and walked anyway...

Before rehab every user wants one last hurrah.

But the money will come in less than forty and the appointment is in fifty and if I wait for the money I might buy smack and not make the appointment, and it is maybe a half hour’s brisk walk...

I set out to set out from the small sanctioned space that I sleep in, tucked away in the church garden, where I have returned to eek the last warmth out of my carving of cardboard and plant life in the last blueness of morning, and gather my things, my bank card, my hoodie, my tin foils and lighters...

All I want is a room to sleep in, regulated medication for the withdrawal and to be free from the ability to assuage my pain endlessly with heroin. I want to slowly un-numb. I want to be endlessly numb. Both at the same time. But the returning thing from which I am trying to escape is invading the numbness, and the endless small junkie tasks of every para day are no longer numbing and money is less but the tasks are relentless and I take no joy in them and then the smack is less and the wheedling and the shame is more and so now, it is impossible to be impossibly numb anymore and the only way, is to unnumb slowly, to return to the waking world.

I set out to walk to the Denis Hurley Center.

Determined. Withdrawing. Shivering. The bone splintering pain is in the post. The shit streaming down my legs is later. But later I will be in rehab and have methadone.

The park I sometimes sleep in, smoke at, in small groups in the lazy afternoon haze. It’s not afternoon, it’s empty, no groups to try get a hit off.

As they bask in the balcony shade of their nymandawos, out of reach of the rising day’s heat, the dealers lazily refuse to give me credit.

The other park, empty except for some still sleeping, glazed with the restless sweat of nearing need. Scattered sandwich wrappers from the call to prayer meal drop.

Just around the corner is the rotting cat carcass, it’s on my route to the scrap for crack place and I have been noting it’s decay daily, and today it’s eyes are full of maggots, and it’s stomach has exploded with flies.

The corner of the intersection, under the protection of the overhanging roof of the abandoned butchery, where I sometimes sleep after a day of digging tins from bins. No-one but detritus, foils romantic in wind eddies -depleted. The trickle of shit is starting to eek. I’m going to rehab. I can make it. They’ll have methadone.

The crack house where I sometimes hustle for change, crack, a roof, and the smoking room is abandoned, three para’s outside trying to make a plan in the hot sun.

The rank of broken taxis where we smoke, under the canopy of old trees and plastic sheeting breathing in the morning heat the users are huddled around a burning tyre for a warmth not possible, and no one will spare me a hit, no one has – they say and they retreat into the old minibus rusting black plastics, someone offers me a blackening banana, the smell of it makes me retch, I am offered a hit if I come back in a little bit or wait but I am late for my appointment to get into a rehab and my stomach is bubbling and my hands are chicken hands cramp, searing tendons hot and steel pulling in parts of my body I never had before and fuck I really wanted to uber.

The abandoned methadone clinic with the nyaope dealers selling what I need right now – christ just one hit before I book into rehab...

Indanda smell soaking like a spoeg bucket through a warren of weeds and bushes where the dealers live in the abandoned lot next to the abandoned boat builders yard, where the paras live in the hulls of abandoned boats.

The boys who smoke on the steps of the abandoned HIV clinic opposite the taxi rank where the dealers hide among the sellers of cell phone accessories, smileys grilling on open fires,

The users smoking on the steps of the abandoned public toilets, trying on freshly shoplifted hoodies.

Through the alleys and finally through a levelled building, just one or two bricks high the smokers and the spikers leaning against the wind in plastics trying to get their hits and I look for someone to ask for just one fucking hit... the money must be in my account by now. An ATM mocks me from across the road. And there, one block away, is the Denis Hurley centre.

Fuck it, I'm going to rehab, they'll have methadone.

I wasn’t going to rehab. There was no methadone.

In order to get into Newlands Rehab, to get off street drugs, you have to be off street drugs. They do not accept anyone who tests positive for any substances. If you want to get clean, they advise you self manage your own detox by reducing the amount of nyaope you smoke over five weeks. Over that five weeks you have to attend two sessions a week, one private with the social worker, and one group session with all those trying to reduce to get into rehab. I agree to this and ask them if they can maybe get me an Uber, I know the money has hit my account and I don’t want to walk back, because then I will spend it badly, sharing and paying back all the little hits I had on the way, and then have nothing for myself to get through the night. They are unable to call me an Uber.

I miss my next session.

I try to attend the group session but at the same time, at the Denis Hurley Centre there is a free meal, and the queue is an hour and a half long. I can queue and eat or I can go and listen to how I need to reduce my usage in order to get clean, to get into a rehab to get clean.

I choose to eat.

I phone the Newlands Rehab to see if they offer a twelve step program and a way to reintegrate into larger society. They tell me they will help me get closer to God.

I get myself Suboxone, via an addiction psychiatrist, to help get through the withdrawals. This is an exercise unto itself, it is days and hours and so much time trying to explain to people my limitations and how I need help and how just giving me money will not help and the help I need is not to be trusted. To be not trusted. Not to be.

On my way to my second one on one session at the Denis Hurley Center the cat is starting to dry out, caved mummy skin. A lack of flies.

I am there to tell the social workers that I have Suboxone, can start it immediately, and it’s a six month process but I will be free of all street drugs within three weeks and I can I get into Newlands, I’ll come to all sessions from now on. And I am told that to get into Newlands you cannot be on any medication at all.

All I want is a room, medication and for it to be impossible to take any heroin for roughly six weeks, I want a rehab to formalise this, because it is impossible for anyone to know that I am trying to claw my way back unless there is the official stamp of a rehab, however unsuited to rehabilitation it might be.

Now it seems that even being clean is not a good enough to get into Newlands, the only free rehab I can find, it seems that I must be off all medication, even the medication that is keeping me clean. And I start the walk back from the social worker at the Denis Hurley Center, with no money for caps, and slightly close to withdrawal. I could start my Suboxone now, but I only have two weeks worth and have been told that only if I get into rehab will the full six months be paid for. Reduction therapy is a joke when some days you have nothing at all and some days you have too much. Addicts cannot self manage, its in the name. Coming off Suboxone without titrating down is a different kind of withdrawal, easier on the mind, hard on the body, which is hard on the mind.

I just want a room and time to think without the pressure of withdrawal every eight hours, twelve hours on methadone, twenty four hours on Suboxone.

I pass Matshikiza, squatting in an alley, beating like porridge the insides of a fan. She’s getting the copper out. She thinks it might be just less than a kilogram. That’s about R150, if we make the daytime scrapyard, but they’re far and it’s after three. Her hair is flotsam, long with strips of fabric, strips of coloured plastic, ribbons, discarded hair extensions, bits of bright wig, braided, melted into her own impeciably matted, feral elegant. She flings it over her shoulder occasionally as we work, stripping the plastic casing, always talking Matshikiza, “Iris is back,” she tells me.

“And fat,” I say as we break off the metal transformer bit, “I saw her last week.”

“Returned from the farm, yes, she was clean but there was no work, now her weight is already going” and then we have to unstrand the copper wire, but there’s more copper in the cables and we need every bit we can get, and we take to trying to burn off the plastic and someone comes out a door and shouts, “FUCK OFF PARAS” and so we amble away and find a parking lot to mine our copper.

While we burn and strip and break, her hair occasionally catches a flame and singes or flames and she brushes these forest fires off like mosquitoes. “Iris was raped by a customer the other night, but she is so not wys, you know. She went to the cops. They asked her if he paid, and then told her it wasn’t rape.”

In the fading light Matshikiza shakes her hair shampoo commercial, away from the flames, “ I am not sure if the client or the cop beat her, but her eye is fucked.”

Some boys they come past us and we find out the late night scrap yard opens in half an hour and they only pay R90 a kilogram. One of the boys wants Matshikiza to go with him to the bush, so they do and I carry on stripping the wires, burning the plastic until I am sick with acrid.

The other boy stays with me, the tiknitian, out of worn holes his backpack streams wires and broken cellphone bits and random scraps of previous technology and he paces and talks to himself anxiously, starts as if being interrupted, the familiar crys-style comforting me as I choke on plastic smoke.

Matshikiza returns with R25. We walk to the scrap merchant. He weighs us in at 400 grams, we get R40. We have R65, enough for a cap and a small piece to share.

We make it back to the open air broken building para city, a field of people huddled under black rubbish bags trying to smoke and we get a cap and a piece and we get inside the black plastic and it smells of plastic and we smell of burnt plastic and the sweat of the day and I can tell the withdrawal is coming because I am getting my sense of smell back, and a half cap isn’t going to do it but that’s what there is and I get my foil and Matshikiza loads on a dot, and I pull in, and then we dot through it, levering in the secondary smoke, dots to prevent waste, the sickness must be diminished, feeling a small bit of relief, saving the crack for just before we have to walk back up the hill from town to Percy Osbourne, where she works and I can ask people for help, and I lean back -as much as is possible inside a black garbage bag – and say, “things are bad today.”

Exhaling, we are close under the plastic, in a very tiny room, the light is gone outside and we can only see each other when the lighter sparks on. I tell her I’ve been trying to get into Newlands rehab, because I need a free rehab, but they want me to get clean first.

Matshikiza laughs. “I went to Newlands, the orderlies there, they trade nyaope for clothes or toiletries or whatever you can give. Everyone smokes there. But they charge more, so I came back.”

We hit the crack and take off the black plastic and the street lights and the people and the rustling of so many people under black plastic whispering and exhaling and we start to walk up the hill, the taxis and the rankness, the scattered pavement cookeries, the hustling shouts dying out, behind me somewhere is the Denis Hurley Centre.

Unsure now how to make our next plan and it must be made soon we stumble past the mosque where the last few styrofoams of Ramadan briyani are being handed out, and Matshikiza flirts one away from the packing up staff and we sit on the pavement scooping with broken stryofoam scoops hot rice and chicken scraps into our not hungry mouths in service of out hungry stomachs, swapping with compatriots the street gossip of the day, trying to figure out a plan.

Limping now towards Percy Street, we meet up with Grant, he’s heard I have Suboxone and so we go with him to the strip-club he dances at, and sell the Suboxone half price to the owner’s son who has a son who is trying to get clean, in order to return to school.

And we walk up to the nymandawo, to the dealers who chase us with stones, and we buy caps and pieces and steel ourselves for the walk up to the church garden to smoke

The hill ahead of us, but we will not smoke until we are safe in the garden, away from sharing, we drag ourselves up hill wreathed in eddies of mynah call.

On the corner by Venice road, Iris and her detached retina, a wary lollipop ready with okapi.

Another corner, a blankness on the pavement, an absence of mummifying cat.

We collapse into the church garden, sweating and sticky with hints of burning plastic, coal smoke, lingering briyani, various detritus, breathing in the vinegar fumes of heroin running down the foil, we have enough not to dot. Soon we fade into the intimacy of opiate oblivion. Before she sleeps she says, “Iris is lucky, she has a farm to go back to.”

In the crisp cavern of the night, a warm incursion of hand shakes Matshikiza awake, he has business for her. As she stands some of the sticks and leaves have joined into the jetsam of her hair, the glow of the street light outlines the church vaguely. She has finished sharing for the day, and will not return.

Soon it is only my own warmth left in the nest.

The withdrawal will wake me in about three hours.

Reality is that, which when you stop believing in it, does not go away

I don’t need to read Melinda Ferguson’s latest pity porn memoir “Swift” to know it’s shit. The promo interview headline in last week’s Business Day says it all. Look it up, I’m not going to give them the fucking clicks. And no, I didn’t bother to read the interview either.

Ferguson’s reason for existence seems, from a literary point of view, to be to triumph over adversity. There was Smacked, then Hooked, then (I think, maybe?) Bamboozled. Now there is “Swift”, the amazing story of how she fled to her holiday cabin in the wood and saved a bird while, unbeknownst to her, the love of her life died alone at home. I know this from an FB post from late last year. We were treated to this life tragedy live on social media, and then now three-ish months later she’s swiftly processed and written a fucking book?

Yassis.

The thing about life is that it is absolutely chockablock full of random tragedies and traumas and minor triumphs. My mother, estranged, has fucking dementia and I’ll probably never get to talk to her again to tell her I love her, and also I saved a bee with a saucer of sugar today but I’m not going to shit out a memoir about it same day delivery.

Maybe there’s more to this book that I know. I have not read it. I will not read it. I give two fucks about an old white lady who saved a bird in her holiday cottage.

The astonishing speed in which Ferguson shits out pity porn with redemptive endings, by her own pen or through her imprint, whatever the fuck it’s called, is what, well, astonishes.

People go through shit every day. They deal with shit ALL THE FUCKING TIME. Some of them might save small avian creatures along the way, some of them might run over their neighbour’s dogs. Have you taken a moment to look around at any major intersection lately? Been in line at any public health service ever? There is a tone deafness in having the time and the platform to carve meaning out of what happened exclusively to you, and taking it on a publicity tour.

I’m not saying that Ferguson didn’t go through this shit, I’m not suggesting that there is anything suspicious about the speed of her process of tragedy – I might be suggesting that the speed of her processing of this tragedy might be the actual tragedy, but I need some time to process this.

What the fuck is so special about Melinda Ferguson? Why does she get her picture in the paper? She has had to deal with loss? Big fucking whoop.

There’s always another tragedy and triumph around the corner. The triumph is not the end point, there is no great epiphany in any of it, it’s fucking relentless. We make the changes we can, we do the next right thing or not, and so on. The point of loss is not to triumph over it for fucking clicks. And no, I can’t make any sense out of any of it myself. Most people do not get a moment to stop and give themselves a pat on the back for processing even the most basic daily traumas. So can we stop fucking triumphing over adversity already, please.

Maybe Ferguson’s next book can be about how she triumphs over the adversity of being a very average writer, and learns to interpret whale song.

PS: Melinda, I am sorry for your very personal loss, I wish you strength and long life.

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.

I needed him because he provided me a place to stay, he needed me because I was better at spinning, and in that burnt out third floor roofless room, I began to see the lies in his truths and the truths in his lies and had no choice but to accept that he had his reasons, he made no explanations.

“If you have relapsed I will no longer help you,” and so you cannot say that you have relapsed. You want to be able to tell the truth. But you will tell small lies to survive the withdrawal, the hunger, the elements.

And the shame of this will slowly demand more oblivion. It is the dishonesty's shame that leads to the justifications. It is the asking and not achieving what you honestly wanted to do that leads to the over-explaining. Of trying to explain to yourself the lack of ability to explain the lack of ability.

The help was just enough to maintain where I was, not enough to get out of it. It was hard enough for people to survive through the day, how could I expect any sort of total solution from any one individual. They had the distractions of their everyday traumas. Sometimes I knew the help would set me back. But the prospect of being foodless, drugless, unnumbed was not something to embrace for the sake of the greater good. It was hard enough to survive through the day. Constantly crawling toward evaporating levers of change, there is always some form of oblivion to embrace. Without the privilege of distraction, the only choice is between oblivions.

The sorry story that accosts you huddled in pity me pose on Long Street is just another performance. Another strategy for survival. The insistence of woe reaps more reward than mere hunger. And then woe becomes who you are. You cannot let people see the small moments of joy.

In days spent performing sadness there is little room for the distraction of joy. Even the spending is a grim reminder of the soon lack.

You distance yourself from yourself by talking in third person, the royal we, instead of I, you say you.

Waiting for the lights to change, putting loose coins into the hands of the man holding up the black plastic bag at the traffic lights. At least he's trying. At least you've helped in some small way.

You distance yourself from the problem by helping in some small way.

In the drug houses there is a community of Smalls, Sdudlas, Ntombis, BoyBoys, MaLevens, the people change, the names are always the same. It is impossible to have anything of your own. To stick to oneself is to invite suspicion, or theft. To have nothing openly for long enough, is to invite sharing. The meagre spoils of the day made less in sharing is a kind of insurance against lack, when without maybe someone here will help, and so everyone shares, in a balance between fears.

There is no linear path to get here. Some people are born here. There is no time in the day to even get to home affairs to get a new ID. Some people here were born without being entered on the record. Survival is time consuming. There is no space for breathing. There is a basic scrabbling for the end of each day that is hard to translate. There are people with genuine kindness that will help in case of emergency, and they do not understand that every day is an emergency and emergencies are invented that they will understand. Lies containing truth. The choice so often is between honesty or survival.

The old man has two beds in his room. One for him, one for newspapers and cats. He lives on the second floor of a milked with rot perhaps old boarding house, a faded five stars on the gate. To get to his place you pass through a dishevelled drinking place , climb steps above the brothel, it has that particular smell that these places have: husks of cockroach eggs, cracked windowsill paint strata, wood decayed in bodily fluids, electrical shorting, forgotten fires, paper damp with age – a smell no amount of hope can mask. His neighbours talk to him only to mission cigarettes, boiling water from his, the only kettle, and advice.

He wakes at 4:30am amongst the mewling of kittens and cats waiting to be fed, and he irons his suit, as threadbare as the financial district he will walk to in order to ply his trade. He needs to look respectable, it's for his own sake. He mends his suits in the late morning, after returning from, he calls it, pan-handling, after doing his modest dose of heroin, and then reads the morning papers and returns to work around two in the afternoon. He needs the heroin and the repaired suits in order to endure getting the money for the heroin and the suit repair. The cats are his survival.

Huddling in the lee of the stench at the scrap for crack recyclers, I clutch the pipe against the clawing hands, then into a garbage bag to try grab windless space to inhale some small dots of smack. There is no time to breathe. I must get more cans. I must dig in more bins to stave off reality. This is not a party.

Someone buys me a hoodie. It's summer in Durban. They will not give me money for food, or drugs or medication but they buy me a hoodie. Give it to me with the price tag still on. One thousand two hundred rand. We both know that I will sell the hoodie for drugs, not even getting cash so I can get food, the merchants only pay in drugs for clothes. I cannot exchange it, without a recipient I will be arrested for shoplifting. I get two hundred rands worth of drugs.

Chop Wood. Carry Water.

There is a methadone program here. At seven in the morning they line up to receive their daily dose. Methadone has a twelve hour half life, by seven tonight everyone here will be in withdrawal. There is no nightly dose. There is no methadone on weekends. And so the attempt to get clean results in higher tolerance. The dose never reduces, it is not tracked, this is not a reduction program. This is not a pathway away from daily addiction, this is another way to maintain. The nurse and admin person upfront have no time for my questions, “we are trying to help you, do you want or not?”.

I follow him straight line from the traffic lights at the mall where I have spent the afternoon withdrawing, watching him work the passing cars, trying to not shit in my pants. Before when I have had money I have shared resources with him and now he is helping me. We are passing time here while he waits for his end of day daily peace job,of which he often boasts. There is an older man up the road just before the old zoo who pays him to feed the monkeys in the fading light. This old man sits on his balcony and throws down bags of fruit and an envelope containing a hundred rand. We fight for the fruit with the monkeys while feeding them, he has pulled in maybe another hundred or two at the lights. I do not ask. We in the now darkness head down the alley, to the side gate that leads into the stolen apartment complex where he pays rent in kind.

The gate is blocked by the sleeping figure of an old man. We have to move him, “Don't wake him.” I interpret this as kindness. An old brown sherry bottle rolls off, tinkling decorously toward the gutter, the old man grunts, “don't fucking wake him.” Why not? “He's my father and he will want to come inside. Never trust a wetbrain”. Slipping inside the gate, up the filth littered stairs. Tripping over recalcitrant rats unabated. He has lived, alongside his family in various forms for his whole life. From here by the tracks, past the factories, the mall, up to the old zoo, these few square kilometres have been his whole life. He almost finished school just over there. He almost got a job in another town once and would have left from the train station over there. He has no electricity, no television, no phone, can hardly read, no size-able ambition other than this daily avoiding of withdrawal. The nightly comfort in the distractions and rituals of oblivion, is his only allotted purpose.

He always makes sure he has one cap of heroin to wake up to, so that he can get to work calmly, “you cannot hurry the money,” he smiles as he takes small joy in his morning ritual.

At the traffic lights he fights over his place with a woman on crutches, “the bitch can walk.”

And besides, he has been here his whole life. He has pride in this work, knows all the people in the cars. He has an impatient conversation with a man through the car window. The light goes green. A shrug, “says he'll be back later,” shouting now, “I could have asked three other cars, these larnies, always over-explaining, always a story with them, they can't just say no.”

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

And I say, “Yeah and Matthews Meyiwa?”

“But,” shrugs Mickey Mouse, “Adrian must have been the most badass, no last name, like Tupac.”

He liked to be called Mickey Mouse because he visited Disneyland as child, part of a school thing, his mother saved up for months. And he discovered Mickey Mouse, hustling fantasy hard for tips. He struck up a conversation with this real life fake Mickey Mouse, and somehow ended up in the change room and saw all those ten dollar bills tumbling out of the costume and he thought to himself, this is what I want. It became his ambition to become a hustler like Mickey Mouse. So he left school, called himself Mickey Mouse and now not so much later, it seems to him, he hustles for change outside the public swimming pool, parking cars -he has made a hard shell of life in order to protect his self.

Mickey Mouse spent his nights on the steps of an abandoned house, on the corner of Adrian where Meyiwa becomes Percy, watching over the sex workers who work from the house at opposite corner. One night after a client refuses to pay one of them, and is trying to shove her out of his car, Mickey Mouse shows up, pulls the guy into the street, takes his car keys, marches him to the nearest ATM and makes him pay her.

There are other stories, that he walks the old ladies home after water aerobics, that there is a sex worker – clean now, with kids, off the street – who comes to swim at the pool but because of her past she is afraid to walk alone to South Beach where she now stays alone. He always gives her a walk, Mickey Mouse.

Not popular with the residents of the drug houses – who harass the sex workers, steal from them, worse – he is not allowed in some of the drug houses, maybe because he has stood up to the Nigerians he bravado shrugs.

On the last night of Mickey Mouse, he had gone into the drug house a block further up Percy to ask if anyone had food for him, maybe a piece, or a bag, anything. One of the magosha's boyfriends claims that Mickey Mouse has been harassing his bitch. Another accuses him of stealing some food. Without perceptible warning they are swiftly stabbing pummelling parries into his body...

...and he drops.

He is thrown onto the pavement. Waiting for the ambulance to arrive too late, his burbling blood sucking where they have stabbed him in the lungs.

Down on the corner at Adrian the magosha are bemoaning his fate, here at Percy less than fifty meters away they are talking – whatapestwhatapain, what a poes he was.

Other versions of history.

Mandela was replaced by an actor. Jan Van Riebeck was fat. Jesus was black. How quickly these discussions gain speed. Passed down theories as an attempt to make sense, to comfort, a sense of peace in acknowledging lack of control. In a vacuum rumour stands for truth. Truth is relegated to rumour. History is bigger.

Tupac Eminem. It's the only music around here, no one has a phone, data, the time to find new music, the access to people who know new music, the music played is what's known, what has been passed down, the older deader addicts liked Tupac, the old USBs still work in the new, always a new speakerbox visiting before it's sold. The old legends survive. Watch out for the illuminati.

A phone is not to look for new music or find information. A phone is not a communication device. Everything is currency. Airtime, data bundles, they pass through – sold for drugs food comfort. It's comfort to think there is a larger conspiracy, every disapproved act is resistance. Access is expensive. Cheap flip flops, they're shit, fall apart fast, new shoes that would last can be traded down by the ranks, for food.

On the corner of Meyiwa and Thusi, this twelve year old, he helps me sometimes, he's lived here his whole life. Not long, just his whole life. I help him when I have spare caps, nyope, crack. He helps me when he has spare caps. It is more often he helps me. He knows how to protect himself. He has learnt survival to a degree I will never comprehend. When I get clean I must come back and get him a job. He's never been to school, can't read, can count in multiples of the price of crack. He tells me that he knows I will be getting clean because I have an education, I must have people. To watch the way he survives out here, to see the him pull from nothing, from trash, a baleful look, an alchemist of need. An education to envy, if educated to value it.

It is far more complex than this. Every conception of self is untranslatable to a language outside of the self. Everyone's awakenings are their own. All forms of languages learnt from different sources.

This guy, early forties, he grew up, somewhere West Coast, inland, sand dunes, past the tourist influence, has just been off the street now a year, rebuilding. Twenty years ago he started on the street, has done prison time, is a twenty-eight. When he was fifteen or so he stabbed one of his teachers, but still didn't try meth for six years, and it started even before the teacher.

Somehow earlier he has made himself hard, and then somewhere around twelve he took to stabbing trees.

He would get angry and take out the stolen okapi and find a tree. At school, he would escape the day early, over the back wall, down in the veld in burbling distance to the river, there was this one tree that lent in toward the slope, and he could put one arm around it and his forehead against the trunk, and he could make like it was a brother he was greeting, “Otherwise?”, and he could stab that tree in the stomach, in hard parries, holding on fast and just imagining the life in flurries escaping, the gurgling in his ears.

So for him, in getting clean his biggest fear was that going home his old mense would invoke the number credo, “you leave us, you die”, but after six months die goede het begin balance, so he has to go find them, to get it over with. They've heard he's clean. They appreciate the visit, but he must not spend time with them. He, to them now, is hope. It is impossible to know the truth of this.

The youngest person in the rehab is fifteen, he has booked in with an older using buddy. Court conditionally there, they have been caught breaking into a pre-primary school – they were trying to steal the school's media technology to sell for meth. If they complete the six months they will get a suspended sentence. They spend the hour after the thin meal, before lockdown, out in the twenty by ten metre courtyard, spitting rhymes at each other. The older writing his own, the younger reciting Tupac, Eminem.

He spends his sixteenth birthday in the rehab and the gift given to him by his dorm mates is half an hour alone in the room -so he can skommel in peace.

When he gets home, he plans to stab someone, to get arrested. “In prison I will learn how to protect myself, to...”

He brandishes his fist as if holding an okapi. This is his best option as he conceives it.

It is a week after they book out, that we hear the news, the sixteen year old has escaped to the streets.

One of the older guys from his dorm chuckles at this news. “Fucking seun,” shaking his head, “te steek...”, he grimaces and clutches his fist, swooping quick tight parries, “...human flesh is not butter you know.”

Someone else sighs, “yassis, you know that sound...when you pull out the knife,” sucks air wetly between his teeth, grabs his crotch, “makes me so hard.”

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.

They whooped and celebrated, the mob one organism as they bought her here to beat her to death in the thirst for justice. There was no point in calling the police. She limps to her death, gurgling finality. Unsure.

What to make of it. I am watching a man die in the dust surrounded by a ring of people, a ring of fire around his body, arms shoved down with a tire, melting.

“Impimpi,” they chant. We are watching a man die. It is just before what we now refer to as liberation. Young and new to this kind of death, I am unsure how to think of it. A journalist, a South African who has been living in exile, recently returned, explains it to me in the back of an SABC shuttle to the suburbs. Or perhaps this is an amalgamation of conversations over that period, my mind trying to find some kind of pattern in all this.

Bourne from a desperate mistrust of authority, under the umbrella of a new dispensation being crafted by the former oppressor and the designated liberator, it was hard to know who had collaborated with who. Who was collaborating with who. Who would punish those who enriched themselves by collaborating with the boers, the police, the oppressors. We must trust the boers says the designated liberator. As the iron hand of oppression they could not be trusted. This person worked with the boer, or perhaps some other growing power, and must face justice. They cannot turn to the police, who he might have been working with. Justice crafted in uncertainty, made concrete in fire, by death.

These explanations gave no certainty. It was hard to see the sense in any of it; a young life burnt away, discarded in the side scrub of an open patch of dust, to satisfy a yearning for justice, any justice.

Stealing solar panels from the roofs of bundled homes while the residents sleep lulled by hot baths, long hard days, trudging home to this dry, dried out extension of a township on the outskirts of this always a little windy city, the dust sifting in through the cracks in the badly built two room not even houses.

Here beyond the slow shifting slag of the golden mine dumps he is finally caught by the predictability of his modus operandi. There simply isn't enough out here to continue to steal, not indefinitely, not even for a few months. Not enough people, income, opportunity.

He exhausts the houses, the blocks of flats, street by street, row by row, block by block until he returns to the places that have been refitted. The police are called by those up and waiting for his return. The police do not arrive. They can't trust the police to take action. He will only bribe them anyway. An outpouring of frustration, for the injustice of daily existence. The police cannot be trusted. Those who want more than everyone else must be punished.

And he is chained on a long rope to the back of a car and dragged until his clothes and skin are shreds and he has gone beyond sorry, sorry will not save him, he has gone beyond pain, when he is dragged down a street one street away from his mother's shack and she comes running screaming for them to stop and they stop and they tell her to make sure he does not do it again. Mob justiced.

And he spends many hours waiting in the long queue at the hospital for some attention, with the dust drifting in through the ceiling, time and him of no consequence in the underfunded machine of care running over capacity.

The streets here seem to go on forever, wide and generous with big wasted dust choked dry grass mangy dog yards, endless houses small and dwarfed by the sky and time and waiting for work, or for someone to get home from work, or waiting to escape the no lessons of school, or waiting for someone to maybe bring some money for bread or something to break the long silences.

Children, old people, middle aged, the broken wander the streets aimlessly calling out “Otherwise?” to each other. A contraction of, “How are you otherwise?” here it simply means, tell me anything but bad news. There is a merchant on every block, a lolly lounge is never more than five minutes away. The thin opportunity of school is left early for the brotherhood of the number. A place to swap bravados and hope. The comfort of escape. A lolly lounge is never more than five minutes away.

She just needs a little more out of this life, and is walking up the wide street, otherwising as she goes, focusing on her phone, whatsapping for any thin opportunity to earn a living. She needs to pay off this phone. She can't afford data to check her emails. Social data plan only. Endless streams of motivational tiktoks. She is walking towards asking a friend if maybe they can help her with maize meal for tonight's dinner.

Her phone is snatched out of her hand running a young boy maybe he's fourteen and he wants a little more meth, distance, life, and he's shirtless, tattoos muscling in the dry hot sun, dust from his feet.

“Vimba!” she cries..

“Vimba!” echoes behind him as he runs. “My whole life is on that phone,” she screams as the mob forms, “Vimba” they chant. Those tattoos, the number on the base of his neck. They will not save him now.

Vimba!

He is cornered in an open field, surrounded by the husks of old phones and tornados of plastic bags and dust. The mob is an octopus of fury. Not that he has ever seen an octopus, or even been to the ocean, or a swimming pool. His dry open empty life, his lack, beaten out of him.

Her recovered phone is broken irreparable in the struggle and a young boy's penis is cut off and while he bleeds to death, they carry the slow emptying out of his body, and dump it half hidden, the slow sifting of the mine dump dusting over the husk of this life.

Hands locked behind our heads we are sitting on the cold concrete floor in front of each others laps, our elbows on the knees of the person behind us, stale invective spits from the cops searching the curtains, the mattresses, every broken item in the room is broken, they search the door frame cracks for crack, cracks in everything – they tear the newspaper coverings on the broken windows letting the light in.

They will find nothing, or something, or plant something or pretend to plant or whatever, it's daily this shit. They're here for money, they're here to get something if there's no money, the magosha are already undressing in the room next door, they are here to steal our time, because they have time to waste, we only have to wait, they'll move on, so we can remove our drugs from the various places we've hidden them, the cracks in the door frames, the mattress, the curtains.

It's daily this shit, we all have holes to fill, some fall on you like a stone and sometimes you dig your own. Sometimes you get poesed in the face with the back of a gun for upsetting the balance of power. For control.

The scrawled phones numbers of various policemen, a particular policeman, on a decaying scrap of the back of a flyer for a penis enlargement sangoma service, and a side of the road pay by the second phone, whenever all else failed we can always pimp our dealers. The guys who give us squalid and dash us Sundays, who we wheedled and bothered and whimpered at, begging and scraping and then finally selling out, because they were careless under which rock or in which fucked switch can they hid their stash.

You sleep on the pavement next to where they ply their trade and you watch them pay off the cops daily and you call the cops and they pay you off with the drugs you can't afford to buy and the dealers pay off the cops with money they need to buy the drugs the cops are paying you off with to get money that they need to buy food at home and the dealers trade drugs for food from the shoplifters and the fraudsters, and for phones from the phezula boys and two finger kids and sometimes someone goes to prison but it's all just time.

The Quantum appears on the security cameras twice a day. Before even they are banging at the gate Mike or Prince or Dave or whatever name interchangeable is already counting out, looking at the screen, “How many are there? Six. Okay.” He counts out three hundred in the smallest dirtiest notes possible. If he's been shat on by the boss today he'll sometimes rub the notes up his ass crack. For control.

In the drug houses, where we sometimes crash, on the floors of the magosha's rooms, between clients -the larnies have the mapusa's phone numbers and sometimes if a client is out of hand, too much meth, too much no sleep, beating the dogs is fine but beating the magosha, damaging the merchandise for resale, they will call the cops and they will come quickly. Fights on the street reported by the neighbourhood embattled whatsapp group have no such swift luck. This is an informal relationship that is often a solution for the woman trapped by a raging ego high on crack raining blows down on her, because she is merchandise.

Unless the raging ego high on crack is mapusa himself. These are the exceptions. This is not daily and treated with force and phone calls and conferences and the redrawing of lines. The money that is paid daily to the Quantum or the Manchester Boys or the Polo comes from the money the magosha bring in. Cops on drugs are slowly edged out of circulation. For control.

Trapped by economics, living above a Tanzanian restaurant, in a tiny room, with all my things I can't afford a lock, so I can't leave my things in my room because I'm one flight up from a busy restaurant in a street where I buy my drugs. Out of one window I can call to the Somalian shopkeeper for supplies, out of another window I can wave my late night food order to the Bangladeshi take away, out of the sliding door that opens, an abandoned idea of a deck, dizzying to the street I can throw down my bank card to my dealer who throws up my supplies for the day. I sit online earning, asking, failing. I am always in my room.

I don't know how they get in. It's past midnight, my drugs have run out and I am passing out while trying to subtitle a you tube video at $0.25c an hour. Three of them in full body armour and more crashing through the kitchen below. I am the only one here at night and they want me to call the restaurant owner, the obviously suspected Tanzanian drug lord.

They find not even drug evidence and then they resort to violence, one of them has me against the wall. I don't bother to ask if they have probable cause or a warrant. I am not Dick Wolf. The mapusa in charge is going through my belongings on the floor, my technology, my clothes and he pulls out a hoodie and says, “This looks too small for you but it will fit my son.” They are shopping now. I tell them, sure, and take them through a tour of what I no longer need.

One of them shifts a piece of rhinoboard and finds a makeshift cupboard, gleefilled they assume they have found the drug stash. They fully empty out the only furniture, these recessed makeshift shelves, jumper cables, hello kitty hot water bottles, a assortment of those tiny tool sets that come in either red or blue plastic, boxes nondescript, half used bags of pollyfilla, three different parts of three different vacuum cleaners, a less shiny but more valuable guitar, reams of now rat shredded blue plastic, a small child's car seat, a now broken set of plates with Olde English recipes glazed on to them... these are less the contents of some feared drug dealers apartment, and more that of a struggling suburban dad. Which of course is what the proprietor is. The policemen's glee is palpable. They are also suburban dads. I donate some pots and pans to the officer who had just poesklapped me. For control.

Its a golden hot afternoon I am selling dog food samples gleaned from a pet store to the dealer who is looking after the dog I am trying to rescue from him. In the yard of the sprawling three property nymandawo we are unconcerned by the circling sirens, we are after all doing nothing illegal, we are merely in proximity to illegality, we don't anticipate heat. But I am white and in this particular yard and the quantum boys are hungry and I am dragged through the golden dusk to the police van.

I am well dressed, clean, without any drugs on me and they do not give a fuck. Someone must cry. They make me wait in the cells with everyone else waiting in the cells, people squeezing the last battery life out of their should have been confiscated phones, begging their people to send ewallets. There is a another cell, behind the main cell, where we are encouraged by a junior officer to go, to make calls, so no one can see. Call your people she says with care, these guys, they will take money.

There is an ATM around the corner from the police station. I am driven by this young officer. I have negotiated a spot fine of R800. For feeding a dog. In the wrong place. This is not something I wish to defend in court. I have a record. A first offence admission of guilt for possession and assaulting a police officer. It's easier to pay the spot fine. To buy the cool drink. To drink the Kool aid.

The ATM is out of order and I have to go into a shop to do a cashback. The officer asks me politely if I can also get her some things. But to please not tell the other police. She needs some maize, some salt, some maybe a few vegetables please. Its mid month and there is no food at home.

An age ago, drunk on the way home from a bar the two of us stopped to swing in the park, and were arrested, me for solicitation, her for soliciting. She chose an admission of guilt fine, paid to the policemen directly. Admitting guilt for fear of going to prison, which is where the guilty go, ergo not being guilty. I opted to go to the holding cells for the weekend, and ended up in Westville Prison, where I begged, because I was afraid of Gen Pop, and was sent to the Psychiatric Section, three days cowering under a sheet while faeces was flung about. At no point did either of us campaign for prison reform.

The power goes off in the beach house I am renting. The landlord is unreachable. I try to figure it out phoning Eskom. It is a maze of an unfathomable tangle of departments before I find out that my landlord owes a size-able amount, even if he pays today, the power will only, because of the backlog, because of load shedding and cable theft, be put back on the week after I leave. And I can't reach the landlord.

Driving home I pass an Eskom truck at a sub-station. It seems to me so much easier to make them an offer, to pay the workers directly, to side step this behemoth of a failing system, to not contribute to it's obviously corrupt ways, and so two men, working for the the crippling civil service minimum wage (I am helping them, I tell myself) come to the box in the street outside the beach house where I am on holiday and reconnect the power for R500. There might be a fine to the landlord later. I won't be there.

Often I am caught driving without my driver's licence, because I simply have not had the time and it is simply easier to pay a spot fine. So I slip a clippa to the officer. For control.

Phezula! and he's running with the genius of bravado, snatched out of her hand as she sat in the minibus hurtling down through Hillbrow – decaying concrete, decaying daylight, toward Bree street rank. The taxi pauses for a minute and he lightening grabs through the window the cellphone she's paying off, her whole life is on that phone, and he vanishes through the cars and alleys and filth. There isn't even the time for anyone to scream Vimba.

Vimba comes later.

For my children to eat, someone must cry.

It started in earnest when he found himself in a shitty separated room in a broken building looking down on the street, the taxis endlessly hurtling past, seeing people in the windows on phones with lives, him here wanting. He began to analyse the patterns, look for gaps. From his window he saw the swift snatching of phones and he saw mistakes and he saw them being taken by mob justice and he began to analyse the escape routes on foot, run them, time them, look for ways different.

When he took his first phone he learnt through his mistakes the people who wouldn't help, the people who would buy phones and the people who were faster and cheaper and then he found someone like him, self taught, without formal education, without even a computer, who could crack any phone – a phone genius, who could fix or rebuild any piece of technology using only trial and error, using only time, who got good prices and demanded nothing upfront. He discovered the risks and then he began to be able to feed his children, and his baby mama started to look at him with respect again.

A respect, he tells me, found lacking for every attempt he had ever made to do things, the right way, the way his mother had insisted he...

His mother had her own short cuts to necessity. He had to leave school early to help feed the nest of siblings left in the wake of his father's final vanishing. The father ever present but gone, sitting there two blocks away broken by defeat, who now holds his hands out to passing cars. He will not be his father. He will put his hands in the passing cars. For his children to eat, somebody must cry. This is his work.

The phone genius sits in the musty nymandawo waiting for the phezula boys and two finger gangs to bring him the materials of his trade: locked phones, chargers, bluetooth speakerboxes, any detritus of technology for him to weave his skills. He has learnt, with the leaking extension cable slipping over the wall from the makeshift tavern, and the spotty internet gleaned from the franchises on the through road, he has learnt how to make something broken worth money. There are witches upstairs who confer midnight rituals for his protection and he pays them a fee for this. He has learned how to flash a NAND chip with a piece of used nyope tinfoil. He can reset an iPhone 8 with a sliced open charging cable and a depleted car battery. He can charge any phone without it having a charging block. He has phones wired to electricity, on permanently, strung out in hiding places in roof cracks, gleaning the wifi on the long route through the makeshift tavern from the franchises on the through road. A mind finding work to do. Among the chancers and the tiknicians his genius is set apart, from the outside it is indistinguishable.

There is skill inherent in the undetected slipping a wallet or a phone two fingers out of someone’s pocket while walking through busy Hillbrow streets, syncing up, syncopated and then running. There is a path to developing these skills. Everyone is educated wherever they are. A street education is a freedom and an exclusion. The necessity to survive, the action itself, the pleasure of displaying your skills by hiding them, the fear of being nothing, of having nothing, outweighing the fear of vimba.

In house breaking there is a sheered genius to the method, intelligent in it's necessity. A leanness of action in the warm winter night, the singing of insects, the rain washed whoosh of the cars as we slunk down the alley next to the abandoned car wash, in through the fence, feeding the emaciated guard dog seduced over many weeks of passing to the merchant – a place to oroborus feed and hide the ever present pain – the slipping past and over the fence into the suburban property, the knowledge that the security guard out front on the street had a nyope problem, that the residents were out to dinner, and we had a traffic light child with us. I will not detail the methods of entry, of disabling the alarms, for some corporate security firm to take advantage of. For the street criminal to eat, someone else must cry. We ate.

There is no path towards using these gifts within polite society. Advantage could be taken of the street criminal's experience. After a life of having to find a way to eat outside of systems, there is nothing to trust. Nothing but his own intelligence, an education owned, an awareness passed beyond caring about any society, other than the sure knowledge that in order for his children to eat, somebody must cry.

For the street criminal, there is no need for an awareness of supposed choices, of what preparedness to becoming a productive member of society might entail, or even of the thin level of education that one might have had, an education here is deeper. Any chance of being included in a formal society has been, by that society, snatched away.

In a burning building many stories up, do you submit to the flames or do you jump?

Make no mistake, the building is on fire.

A life snatched away.

Phezula!