Dub Steps Read Online Free

it. At him. You can’t just. Please. Roy. Please. Please.
    But I didn’t look. I would like to say it wasn’t possible. That there was a mess inside that was simply too much. But really I could have.
    Still, I chose not to. I turned away. Fuck Russle. Fuck parents. Family. There was never anything for me in that place. I was different. Others might need to look back, down, into the past. Me, I was headed in one direction.
    Forward.
     
    And then they let go. Mongezi drifted away. Angie too. Rick. The rest.
    Me? I remained in rotation, swirling in tight, personal little circles.
     
    Eileen, and the others like her, were the final evidence of my decade of decline. After I had pissed on my friends, after the wife and I had spat at each other, green and angry, I was adopted by a succession of thin, anxiety-ridden young girls. Girls who liked cats and struggled with men and worked far too well. Organisers. Anxious little beings. Filers of documents. Placers of calls.
    And really, it was right. For what was I other than feral? Wild. Hungry. Hunting for affection I would instantly reject.

    Eileen’s flat eased my aches and awakened a sense of shame at my own shabby, juvenile existence. The place reeked of adherence to a life regime. From the well-used exercise bike to the bookshelf and its contents (Cormac McCarthy, Josie Blues, Mtutuzeli Matshoba, JG Ballard, Lesego Rampolokeng, Gabriel García Márquez, Vince Khumalo, Gore Vidal, Kagiso Nkuna, Zadie Smith, Zapiro, Calvin and Hobbes), the markers of structure and adult activity were everywhere.
    Most attractive was sleeping in her bed, which I did shamelessly, making sure to ruffle the linen in the spare bedroom, where I was supposed to be. Her bed, full of the olfactory pleasures of the female nest, was my sanctuary. I wallowed in it.
     
    I turned off my mobile and dropped naked into her soft, dark-pinkbedding. I drained the red wine in my glass, poured another, drank that and went to sleep.
     
    I dreamed of my father. He was chasing me. As usual.
    With knives. Belt buckles. Broken bottles. He chased and I ran and it lasted for days, weeks, until eventually he stopped. Hands on knees. Panting. Staring at me. Exhausted. Tears in his eyes.
     
    I woke up.
     
    I sat in the lounge. I’d been out for a long time. I lit a cigarette and thought about my father.
    He died when I was twenty, crashing into his coffin with a brain haemorrhage. He warranted a few column inches here and there, a mention on the news scroller, that kind of thing.
    Russle Fotheringham, who played a single season for the Proteas and three seasons for the Gauteng Lions, and who started a second career as a DJ in the greater Gauteng area, died on Saturday of a brain haemorrhage. Fotheringham’s symptoms were consistent with what has become known colloquially as Cell Brain. He is survived by his only son, Roy.
    Towards the end, just before the haemorrhage, my father had fallen into fluffy trance. The last time I had visited him he was spinning Markus Schulz obsessively in the lounge, finger in the air, eyes half closed.
    ‘This,’ he said, pulling the cans behind his ears and looking at me seriously, ‘is actually very good stuff. People say it’s too simple and too happy, but I’m telling you, this is good music.’
    I took the Senheissers from him and plonked them on. It was standard four-to-the-floor trance, a simple, never-ending bass underneath a litany of equally simple, rising candy synths. Beats for children, sports back-tracks and junkies. I put my finger in the air. ‘Someone pass me my lollipop.’
    Russle Fotheringham took his headphones back.
     
    He was all spindly legs and arms. A cigarette burned in the ashtray next to him. There was always one waiting, smoke curling. It was one of the marvels of my father, his ability to keep a smoke alive without ever really smoking it. He would grab it with long, accomplished fingers, toss the butt into his lips, give it the smallest nip possible and