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taking taxis, putting up with shoving in among twenty-four people packed into a space officially licensed for sixteen, or dealing with the strikes or the gun fights when the taxi wars get too heated. And some of the gamchees are willing to look the other way for a small fee, purely administrative. The trick is to do it out in the open, as if it's a normal transaction. My wallet is locked out along with all the other functions on my phone, so Ashraf transfers five times the going rate to the gamchee manning the taxi at the head of the Khayelitsha line.
       We cram in next to a mama with a week's worth of groceries and a two year-old spilling out of her lap and a guy who is too beat down to be gangster – probably just some poor asshole riding the job-hunt bus to nowhere. Not likely he's going to get anything with what's clearly a knife scar striped through his hair above his ear, which pegs him as loxion. Could be worse though, he could be disconnect. He could be living Rural or in Zim, that other suburb of China.
       'Y ey! Diskonneksie. Geen moeilikheid nie, ne? ' The gamchee waggles a finger at me. At five times the fare, he knows full well I'm not gonna be any trouble at all.
       I feel like shit. I'm still not breathing 100% and the muscle in my eyelid keeps spasming. It's driving me crazy, although Ash says he can't see it.
       'That's one of the things I'm talking about. The shit we can't see. The tech was only approved, what, eighteen months ago? How do they know what the long-term effects are going to be? And here they are dishing out defusings like it's a party game. It's like shock therapy, you know, dampening down excitable behaviour, frying our brains, flattening us out, so we're all unquestioning, unresisting obedient model fucking zombie puppydog citizens.'
       The mama rearranges the child on her lap uncomfortably, and Ash beckons for me to lower it a decibel. He always gets embarrassed when I talk too loud in public. It's not like anyone can hear me above the driver's bhangra rock blaring from the speakers or our greedy gamchee friend hoping to pick up a couple more fares, screeching 'Kaaaaai-ee-leetsha!' out the window in case there's any uncertainty about our route.
       'Ten. If it was about brainwashing, they'd just dose the water supply. Don't you think? Chill out, baby.'
       I lower my voice slightly.
       'I'm not talking brainwashing. I'm saying it's electroshock lobotomy. Government endorsed. And the whole water supply thing? Please. Too easy to test for. The international enviro agencies would pick that up in a second. Unless they paid them off. I mean, anything's possible. They're all corrupt, all of them.'
       Ash is wearing that humouring-me smirk.
       'Okay, okay, fine. You're right. Conjecture hurts the cause. Enough with the conspiracy talk. But you know it's true.'
       The taxi rockets around Hospital Bend, which used to feature an actual hospital, home to the world's first heart transplant, before it got turned into luxury apartments, past the nice middle-class burbs, Obs and Rosebank and Pinelands and Langa, and into the loxion sprawl proper. Don't be fooled by the cosy apartment blocks lining the highway, it's all Potemkin for the tourists. You just need to go a couple of blocks in to find the real deal, the tin shacks and the old miners' hostels and the converted containers now that the shipping industry has died together with the economy. All the same shit they've been promising to fix since the 1955 Freedom Charter or whatever it was. And despite the border patrols, the sprawl just keeps on spreading. You can't keep all of the Rurals out all of the time.
       The taxi pulls over to let us out at the circle at the entrance to Berlin, named like so many of the districts, Kosovo and Barcelona and Joe Slovo and Mandela Tribute Park, for the headline news. We get out by the massive and so very conspicuous SAPS station, and walk the rest of the way back to the