by Ilze Hugo
Two heads in front of Sans, a mother was consoling her crying kid, who was begging her to let him skip his check.
“I’m sorry, little bear,” she said. “But we have to. You know we do.”
“But what if the siren goes off and they come and cart me off to that place where they took Uncle Alfred and I never see you again?” His mother bent down and hugged him to her breast as the boy’s sobs grew louder, his whole body shaking with the force of his fear.
“It’s going to be okay,” cooed his mother. “I promise. Look, do you have your thermometer with you? It’s in your pocket, right? Take it out.”
The boy did as he was told. “Let’s take your temp, quick. If it’s all fine, we’ll know it’s safe to stick your pass in the slot.”
Sans waited for the trembling kid to take his turn. When his own turn came, he slid his medpass into the slot.
There was a low hum and a thin ray of light washed over his body. “Body temperature scan slightly elevated. Please continue to level two.”
Shit. That wasn’t good.
Trying to stay calm, he stuck his thumb into the oval hole at the top of the postbox, and waited for the familiar sting. A high-pitched ping followed. Sans pulled out his thumb and stuck it into his mouth to suck away the blood. “DNA scan complete. Congratulations. White blood count acceptable. Please proceed,” whined the uptight voice from inside the yellow box. He rolled up his sleeve and stuck his arm into the slot. Pressed a button and waited for the needle to do its thing.
“Injection complete. Thank you. A healthy city is a happy city,” sang the voice inside the machine before spitting out his pass.
* * *
When he got back to his flat, his unicorn was still there.
“What about you?” he asked her.
“What about me?”
“Aren’t you going to get checked?”
The girl didn’t say anything, just stared out the window and down into the street where Johannes, the car guard, was perched on a crate in front of that Asian girly den (the one where those pretty Cape Flats “geisha” girls were always sitting in rows in the fluorescent-lit foyer, hoping for walk-ins). Johannes was belting out his usual brand of mashup Manenberg opera while jingling a tin can with loose change.
“Hayi, wena, do you want to play with fire? You know what will happen if you get caught without an updated medpass. You get thrown on the Island.”
“The Island?” she said lazily, as if they were talking about palm trees and sandy beaches. Outside the window, Johannes had stopped singing and was chatting to some girl with crazy curls.
“Forget about it,” he said, dipping his fingers into her hair. The strands seemed to writhe, like something alive, moving and coiling around his fingertips. Like a Klimt mermaid she seemed to him, all hair and foreboding.
“I want you to wash my feet with it,” he murmured, kissing her roots.
“What?”
“Never mind. Forget about it.”
He walked her to the gate, where a kid in gumboots, her long purple braids tied up in a knot, was laying into the buttons on the intercom like she was giving them CPR. “Hey, Sans,” said the kid.
“Hey, Kholeka. Here for me?”
“Nah, delivering some lip porn to the guy at number eleven. That new game is still on the Mouse’s download list. Will drop it off in next week’s package, ’kay?”
The Mouse, aka Mickey Mouse, was the city’s biggest data dealer, slinging hard drives filled with the latest international movies, series, music, even phone apps and educational material, all sorts of digital shit. Technically illegal, the system worked better if you didn’t know the source, and the guy was a hermit, a ghost. Only his runners knew where he lived and they were paid a mint to keep their traps shut.
“You haven’t told me your name,” he told his unicorn as they pushed past the little button-whacker into the street.
“Whatever you want it to be,” she said, all coy and syrup sweet.
“Ha. Cute. But no, really.”
“That which we call a rose . . .” she teased. “But really. You would only forget it, wouldn’t you?”
“What about some digits, then?”
She gave him a quick, quizzical look.
“Your phone number.”
Her finger pointed down. “Your shoe. It’s untied.”
He stooped down to make the knot.
A few steps in front of him on the pavement, a mother with a boxy fringe was hunched over, chiding her two twin boys, her hands gripping the necks of their T-shirts. “Akin, you stop that right this minute. No laughing outside the house. How many times have I told you? Do you want the Veeps to pick you up and lock you away? You, too, Shafiek. Wipe that smirk off your face right now—don’t think I can’t see it behind your mask.”
“But, Mom. He tickled me.”
His eyes trailed the trio stomping off towards the mountain. When he turned his head back, his unicorn was gone. He’d fallen for the oldest trick in the book. She might as well have said, “It’s not me, it’s you.” In a way, he wished she had.
- 10 - LUCKY
Lucky was on his way to make the drop when it started raining. He was running a few hours early, in any case, so he ducked into the new therapy bar on the corner to escape the downpour. He’d heard the doormen were lax, and to be fair, he was dying to see what all the fuss was about.
The place was crowded with rowdy peeps pressed together like Pringles. On a stage lined with thick rope, a man in a suit was beating up the Easter Bunny, sweat pouring off fake fur.
Sick City’s newest chain of therapy bars was proving to be beyond popular, with three new venues expected to open soon. The concept was simple: this was a fight club for the frustrated, a strange new cure for the dangerous levels of anger and violence that had been building in the city. The Days getting you down? Come beat someone up in a nice, safe, legal way.
For a rand or two, you got three minutes in the ring with someone dressed as the president, the taxman, Jesus, Santa, your boss, your wife, your boyfriend, neighbor, the Pope. A live punching bag on which to take out your rage. Pay extra and the game could be rigged in your favor.
Of course, there were precautions that needed to be taken. Civilian fighters had to be kitted out in scrubs and gloves and goggles. The bar’s own fighters could bare their skin, but had to undergo rigorous daily med tests before getting into the ring.
Before the therapy bars, mob violence was getting intense. Lucky once watched his neighbor, a kid of about fourteen, being necklaced by an angry mob because the senile old bag at the end of the street had accused him of stealing a butternut. A butternut.
The crowd had doused him with petrol and lit the match. Then a local preacher used his one good Sunday jacket to put out the fire. No one helped him. Not even Lucky.
Afterwards, Lucky read an interview with the kid’s mother in the Daily Truth—where she kept repeating over and over how it was all some huge, sick misunderstanding. How he was a good kid, her boy, no skollie, would never steal anything—the boy didn’t even have a nickname.
Lucky still had nightmares about it. Not because of the necklacing—he’d seen guys being necklaced more times than he cared to remember—but because he’d known the kid. Had played soccer with him to pass the time more than once. And still, he’d stood there. Rooted to the spot like some stupid statue dripping in pigeon shit. While the flames leapt higher. Didn’t even blink.
Things were better now, thanks to the therapy bars. Don’t have money for a ticket into the ring? No problem. If you went to your local clinic, chatted to the nurses there, they’d give you a government-sponsored coupon equal to one free session. There was a limit to how many coupons you could pick up in a month. If you were extra pissed about something, you had to fork out. But it was pricey, so you had to be pretty loaded. Lucky had heard there was this guy called the Mouse who lived underground somewhere in some kind of secret apartheid bomb shelter or something who could hook you u
p with fake coupons cheap-cheap or in exchange for all sorts of shady favors.
He was standing in a corner of the bar, hustling for cigarettes, when the redhead came up to him and offered him a drag. Van Hunks, his favorite brand. He hadn’t been able to get hold of a single entjie, let alone a Van Hunks, in months. He inhaled the smoke slowly, savoring the smooth warm sensation as it slid down into his lungs. The redhead started chatting to him about the match. She looked familiar, but he couldn’t place her face. With one thing leading to another, the talk soon shifted to sharing a pipe: “If you’re into that sort of thing?”
Lucky sure was, but it was getting late and Major was waiting. He thought of Sans and how pissed he’d be if he found out that Lucky had missed the drop. His boss usually made the drops himself, but today something had come up. The way Sans had acted when Lucky came to pick up the cash around noon—the way he stood outside the door and didn’t want Lucky to come into his flat—made Lucky figure that there was a girl involved. There always was, wasn’t there?
Lucky squeezed the strap of his backpack with his fist. Thirty ponies at 3,000 rands a pony. That was an unholy amount of money to be carrying around—he’d better stop screwing around and get to the sisters quick.
“Go straight there and back. Don’t mess around. Don’t even stop to tie your shoelaces,” Sans had said before giving him the cash.
But the woman kept sing-saying in her syrupy voice, “Just one hit,” until Lucky finally said, “Let’s make it quick,” and followed her into the back seat of her car, where she locked the door and took the thing out of her handbag.
“What kind of a pipe is that?” he asked.
“A magic pipe,” her honey voice cooed. That was about all Lucky remembered before things turned black.
- 11 - TOMORROW
When Tomorrow arrived back at the house, the fingers holding the key were dancing their own crazy dance and couldn’t find the keyhole. After she finally got the door open, she dropped her bag and headed into the kitchen, where yesterday’s dishes were stacked like skyscrapers. Somehow her body found a chair. But her mind wasn’t there. She didn’t even register the speck of brown mouse scuttling past her toes and the gray cat scrambling after it. Just sat there. Sat there. Thinking about everything and nothing.
Someone had left a copy of the Daily Truth on the kitchen table. Tomorrow didn’t care for the Truth. Her mother had called it a conspiracy rag, full of grand schemes and cheap shots. But now she leafed through it to forget. Thumbed the pages. Tried to read. But the sentences were swimming. For a moment, she considered paging straight to the classifieds—she had to find a new job fast before rent day came around—but she was too worried and stressed to even think about that now, so she stuck to reading the articles instead. Most of page two was an ad for a traditional healer. “Mama Lily: Want to change your miserable life? Through my strong ancestors all is possible. Laughter charms and cures, cheating lover, love binding, bad luck with relationships, tokoloshe, enemies, witches, curses, banishing evil, dream interpretations, business and family affairs, strange happenings and many more. I also work on penis size. All guaranteed results.” Below that there was an ad for a doomsday cult, and squeezed in next to that was an article on how the Laughter was first designed to be some kind of Malthusian population-control experiment. Tomorrow didn’t know what a Malthusian was, but it sounded like a supervillain in a comic book. What a load of crap, she thought, and switched to the back page to read the cartoons instead. But she couldn’t concentrate. Her thoughts kept reversing back to the market; her brain kept trying to find Elliot’s face in the crowd.
There was a noise coming from the sink. The tap was dripping. She hadn’t noticed it before. Water was p-p-plopping into the basin like a heartbeat. Like a pulse. What a waste. She really needed to stand up and close the thing. She was willing her limbs to work when she noticed the Truth again. At the back of her mind something tickled. A memory, a thought, an idea . . .
She turned a page.
Then another.
And another.
Until she found what she was looking for.
There, next to the ad for the sangoma, another ad, smaller, so small that only her subconscious had seemed to register it the first time around. “Need help? From lost kittens to life crises, contact F. September. Truthologist. Patternologist. Private Detective. Pro Bono.” Just that. And a number.
She pulled her phone out of her pocket. Four bars. A miracle. A sign.
She had to dial the number three times before she got it right. Her brain felt muddled and wired at the same time, out of step. Third time was the charm. It was ringing.
Ringing.
Ringing . . .
“Hi, this is Faith September.”
Finally. “Hi. I’m calling about your ad in—”
“I can’t come to the phone right now, but leave a message straight after the beep.”
- 12 - PIPER
Tamatie stacked the bottles of Jik into a pyramid. “Showmanship is the secret to great salesmanship,” his dad had always preached. That, and an eye for the details. Tamatie’s eyes were locked in on a detail right now: the slim, flaming redhead getting out of the van across the street. Something about the woman wasn’t quite right. Not her bra size or the mess of her half-dyed, wet red hair. Something else. That felt off. He had a sense for these things. And that fox was trouble. He was sure of it.
It was getting dark, the rain was pouring down the sides of the stall’s plastic tarp ceiling, and the cold made his phantom arm ache.
Tamatie adjusted one pillar in his pyramid and looked up towards the van again. The woman was still standing there, in the rain, in front of the bar. It had been twenty minutes now. Her eyes darted up and down the street while she scratched her neck and hands like they itched. Was she waiting for someone?
The woman fiddled with her mask and Tamatie wondered what her mouth looked like. It had been so long since he’d seen a real, live, female mouth. Was it small and sleek and prim, with the lips turned up a smidge at the tips? Or full and thick with a prominent cupid’s bow and a nice plump and curvy bottom? And the color? Plain Jane nude or nice and rosy? Soft and smooth to the touch or slightly chapped? Did she have dimples when she smiled? There was a lot of lip porn doing the rounds, what with everyone all covered up in masks now, but Tamatie wasn’t the type to trawl the web for cheap chops. Every now and again he did stop to wonder, though, ’cause who didn’t appreciate a good lip . . .
The street was at a slope, and Tamatie’s stall was uphill from where the redhead was standing, giving him a good view of the stain of black roots that flowered from her crown.
With his attention diverted, his eyes and mind not on the job, the pyramid started teetering dangerously. One palm shot out to quell the impending cave-in, but he was too late. Plastic collided with pavement. Tamatie picked up the tumbled bottles, placed them on the table, and began to stack from scratch, focusing again on the task at hand.
* * *
Piper pulled the sleeve of her shirt down over her tattoo. She hated it now, reminding her of another time, when she was another person with a different life, a profession that might have been honorable. She scanned the street for what felt like the hundredth time. In the distance, she could hear multiple sirens wailing in stereo, the soundtrack to the city. A dead taxi growled past with the windows rolled down. The mullet-headed guardjie had his hand on the roof, his palm tapping to the beat of some kasi tune she didn’t recognize. Her own soundtrack was playing the Velvet Underground. She could hear Lou Reed’s voice at the back of her mind as she stood on the corner, scratching at her neck. “I’m waiting for my man.”
Tonight her man was late. And it was getting to her. Piper walked to the back of the van. It was a “company car,” and Major only let it out of his sight on Mondays—the old caretaker would be wondering where she’d gotten to with it by now. She rested her hand against the back window and peeked in through the gap in the curtain. She could just a
bout make out the two little lumps lying there in the dark. They seemed to be sleeping again, which was a relief. Earplugs. She couldn’t believe she’d forgotten the earplugs. The one from this morning had been a real earache. All that screaming and shouting and banging was enough to make anyone go mad.
Piper swiveled around, straightened her back, and tried to wipe the rain out of her eyes—“A good posture in life is half the battle won,” her mother was always harping on—and started pulling at her sleeves again. Across the street a Jik vendor was giving her the stink eye. Such a bad place for a meet, she thought to herself again, annoyed from scratch, but her man had insisted.
Her nails were raking the tattoo, her skin was itching something fierce, and it triggered the same old memories of the day she got the infernal thing, how her mother had cried, the future looking so bright. Perfect little Piper. That was her. Always climbing higher. Burning brighter. Prefect in high school. Captain of the hockey team. Straight A’s in high school. Then med school just because she could, not because she had any real interest in medicine, but because she was smart enough to get in, because it was what was expected of her. The plan was to become a surgeon. She had the hands, the drive, and the brain for it. During her second year as an undergrad, she’d read a book by Oliver Sacks, whose words were poetry to her. He made medicine sound like art. It made her think about the brain. Really think. About how much people still don’t understand about how it functions. This was terra incognita. With so much still uncharted, unmapped.
For the first time since starting med school, Piper saw being a doctor as more than an achievement, another gold star to add to the list. Was that what having a vocation meant? If so, she had one. She decided to specialize in neurology. The future seemed sure, everything falling into place.
Then the Down Days descended and all her friends from med school were either hopping on planes to leave the country or signing up to help. Perfect little Piper felt like she needed to lend a hand, too. That it was expected of her. If she had to be totally honest, a part of her was also fascinated by the drama of it all. What was that expression about watching car crashes? How you knew you had to turn away, that you shouldn’t look, but you just couldn’t help yourself. This was something like that. But instead of just one crash, it was a tsunami-style freeway pileup stretching all the way from here to . . . everywhere.
