D6 / 08.02
FROM one end to the other it takes 15 minutes. Or, at least, it used to. The district drowns in its psychosis now: solar panels glint like scales, organic gardens rise from the mist, and electric cars swim the streets.
The transformation began soon after the returnees, the first batch of D6 residents, went on to better things, and their homes were sold off one by one for ever-increasing amounts to those who arrived with DIY hydroponic roof gardens and the tell-tale glow of semipermanent sun-block.
I had turned down the offers, had chosen to hold on to my parents’ home, and so here I am, gridlocked between wholefood bakeries and apartments that darken as the sun bends across the village; its inhabitants in perpetual shadow.
We had agreed to meet outside Old Parliament. There would be some sort of festival to mark the day: music, perhaps some stalls selling food, general revelry if we were in luck.
After the Golden Revolution and the tumultuous decade that followed the nationalisation of the mines, parliament had been relocated to another city. Now, it is a complex with a museum, coffee houses and eateries that open onto the gardens.
I make my way down the endless road which, in one way or another, I have known my whole life. There was the photo of girls skipping which had hung in the lounge, taken perhaps 80 years earlier. I have vague, unreliable memories of eggs being sold from under live chickens when I was a child over there. And when we first moved back, teenagers on their skateboards ruled these streets. Now it is the urban gentry in their customised 3D printed threads and biotic smoothies, and it is no longer music but a silent parade of cars that floats in the morning air.
It is a stirring far in the opposite direction to which my attention slips. When I am up early enough, I can see from my stoep a pink miasma of morning fires and effluence rising above The Wall. Township. Now there is
The revolutionaries, it had turned out, were no better than the capitalists, just more intent on iron rule
something that hasn’t changed.
The Wall obscures a flood of GR homes that moves with the highway, its residents arriving in a phalanx to the city each morning, only to be mass-transited out before the sun sets.
The revolutionaries, it had turned out, were no better than the capitalists, just more intent on iron rule. No matter, because since then the Party had fought its way back to power and things have all but returned to normal. Us and them. Normal.
I pass the high school that became a training centre during one of the regime changes, across from offices that a century ago held monthly public hangings — or that’s what the old girl always said — and on in the direction of the book store which has somehow managed to survive everything.
I stop to catch my breath and chortle.
But, of course, I am the old girl now. My laugh turns into a wheeze, which spreads to a cough until I realise how ridiculous I must look: out of place and time.
When I reach Old Parliament they are already there, signs held aloft.
It creeps closer, could happen any day now, that’s what everyone says. Soon, The Wall will be taken down one brick at a time and perhaps then they will remember that, like so little else, human nature never changes.