Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

  "Would you say she's happy?"

  "Sometimes it feels like Songweza is angry at the whole world. But she doesn't really mean it. She just has her ups and downs."

  "Which is why she's on medication?" She seems confused. "No, I don't think so."

  "Nothing? Not even homeopathic? Muti?"

  "Oh yes. Yes, she sees a sangoma once a month. They both do. He gives them treatment to help with the stress. All this stress of being famous."

  "I'm slightly – concerned – that you might not know as much about the kids as you think you do."

  "We talk all the time. I cook dinner for them every night. Make their lunch for school. We go to church on Sundays."

  "You know they're drinking beer? Smoking weed?"

  She twitches and then looks at me with frank appeal. "They're just letting off steam. They're good kids. Don't tell Mr Huron. Please. They're good kids."

  12.

  I get the taxi to drop me off in Rosebank and find the nearest payphone. It's an anachronism that the mall even has a working payphone, but I guess it caters to the traders at the African market and teens who have run out of airtime. Or the dubiously agenda'd, like me. I don't want to use my cellphone, don't want my number showing up on caller ID, in case I still decide to hang up. As if he'd still have it saved on his phone.

  Because the truth is that I don't know if I can do it. Unless Prim Luthuli can dig up a useful lost thing, I am going to need a back-up plan. And the back-up plan involves summoning up the demons of my Former Life. Sloth does not approve of this plan.

  "Ninth Floor Publishing & Print," the receptionist says, in a tone shot through with contempt. 'Hello?"

  I find my voice. "Can I speak to Gio – Giovanni Conti, please. Features editor on Mach."

  "Deputy editor. Putting you through."

  There is a brief snatch of radio playing a housey number with a marimba riff, and then there's that signature drawl. "'Lo?" Giovanni has bed-voice the way other guys have bed-hair, apparently careless, but in reality, as meticulously styled as his irony t-shirts and cultishly obscure Russian designer jeans.

  "Hey, Gio."

  There is a long pause for processing time. Maybe even response-modifying time. And then he says, "Zinzi? Holy crapola. Where are you?"

  "Downstairs. Can I come up?"

  "No. Wait. I'll come down. Meet me at Reputation. It's the hotel bar across the road."

  "I think they have a policy," I say, leaving it hanging.

  "Oh. Oh right," he says.

  Which is how we end up meeting under the fluorescent lights of the local Kauai, attracting the rapt attention of a cluster of well-pierced teens sitting around a plastic table loaded down with bile-green smoothies. While other passersby, the black-diamond hipsters and mall rats and suits, spare me only the sliding glances reserved for people in wheelchairs and burn victims, the Goth kids have no shame. They're practically staking me out. I raise one hand, busted-celebrity-mode, acknowledging, yes, it really is me, now please leave me alone, for fuck's sake. It doesn't put them off in the slightest. It must be something about dressing all in black that gives you a sense of social invulnerability. I'd be tempted to try it, but they're only playing at being outcasts.

  Gio puts his hand on my shoulder. "Zinz?" He hastily removes it as Sloth snaps at his fingers.

  "You were expecting someone else?"

  He leans in awkwardly to give me a hug, thinks better of it and slips into the chair opposite.

  "I like the beard," I say. "And the new cut. You're looking good."

  "Thanks." He scrubs absently at the fine stubble over his skull with his palm.

  But what I mean is, he's looking different. He's filled out, his face especially, and there's a hint of paunch under his button-up shirt. I wonder if he's quit the irony tees or it's just a button-up shirt kinda day. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing the tattoo that loops up his right arm, a neat line of dashes tracing the trajectory of a paper jet set to fly away up his sleeve; a tribute to idealism, to the absurd frailty of flight. I used to walk my fingertips up that line of dashes. It used to suit him.

  I'm aware that he's evaluating me in the same way, comparing this Zinzi with the images in his database. Like a spot-the-difference game. Circle the lines around the eyes. Circle the torn left ear, where the bullet caught me. Circle the Sloth with his weirdly disproportionate arms draped over my shoulders like a furry backpack.

  "So. Jeez. It's good to see you. What, how – I mean, the newspapers said ten years…"

  "I got parole. Good behaviour. Didn't you hear?"

  "No, I–"

  "It's okay. I haven't been following your life either."

  "Well, it's not like you've been posting status updates. Look, do you want something? A smoothie? A drink? A… what does that thing drink anyway?"

  "Water, Gio. We're both fine. Don't sweat it. It's good to see you."

  "Yeah. Yeah, it is." He ducks his head boyishly, but the effect is diluted in the absence of tousled fringe. The tectonic plates of whatever we were have shifted out from under us – call it contextual drift. Mind the gap.

  We're saved from risking being the first to breach the divide, by the approach of Goth girl and her posse.

  "Excuse me," she says, with the kind of boldness that means she doesn't give a damn that her blonde roots are showing under the black dye (although she's still tried to obliterate her freckles under a thick coat of base).

  "Nothing to see here. Run along, kiddies." Gio makes a shooing gesture.

  "I'm not talking to you. Asshat." The girl scrunches her face in adolescent scorn and then touches my sleeve as lightly as a butterfly sneeze, like I'm a saint, or possibly a blood relation of Dita Von Teese. "I just wanted you to know, it doesn't matter what you did."

  "Well, it does, actually," I say. But my retort bounces off her like a ping-pong ball off an armoured car.

  "We still think you're cool."

  "Okay. Thank you." One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. The others watch reverentially, and when it's clear I'm not going to say anything else, or give her a blessing or something, she nods, and leads her posse off in the general direction of the movies.

  "That was odd," I say, watching the black pack ascend the escalator.

  "It's that Hyena rapper guy, Slinger. He's made zoos cool. You're counter-culture aspirational, baby."

  "My life's ambition." But the encounter has cracked the awkwardness between us.

  "You still eat sushi?" he says, and we relocate to a conveyor-belt place round the corner.

  "So, what's up, Zinz?" he says, shovelling a salmon California roll into his mouth with plastic chopsticks, errant grains of rice plopping into the soya sauce. I once saw MRI scans of sushi in a magazine. In the stuff prepared by a master sushi chef, the rice runs laterally, so it's less likely to come apart. Not a bad life philosophy. Stick close, keep your head down, and you won't fall to pieces.

  "What brings you to this part of town?" Gio persists, spearing a maki roll with one chopstick and cramming it into his mouth. He always had a rough edge.

  "Research," I say, skirting the clamour of questions I don't particularly feel like dancing with right now. "I'm working on something, and I thought you might be able to give me some pointers."

  "Autobiographical?" He's fishing.

  "Ah, no. It's an article, a book actually," I ad-lib. "It's pretty early stages. It's on that kwaito band? IJusi?"

  "Aren't they more Afropop?"

  "Same thing."

  "Not quite. And isn't it a little early to be immortalising the one-hit-wonder kids anyway? They won't last six months."

  "Okay, look, it's for a feature I'm hoping to sell to Credo, so I can maybe spin it into a book on music and Jozi youth culture, part coffee-table book, part trend bible. Something that might actually make money." Even I'm beginning to buy this.

  "So this is it," he says, clacking his chopsticks at me for emphasis.

  "What?"

  "Zinzi'
s Big Comeback." I learned to speak in capital letters from Giovanni. Learned to use a crack pipe, too.

  "Hope so. Of course, I'm handicapped," I tilt my head at Sloth, who has gone to sleep on my shoulder. "I suspect this guy's going to make it a little harder to get interviews."

  "You'd be surprised," Gio says, breaking out his lopsided smile. I find it's grown on me.

  13.

  People who would happily speed through Zoo City during the day won't detour here at night, not even to avoid police roadblocks. They're too scared, but that's precisely when Zoo City is at its most sociable. From 6 pm, when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they've been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. Kids chase each other down the corridors. People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other's bums. The smell of cooking – mostly food, but also meth – temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. The crack whores emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape, and catcall the commuters heading to the taxi rank on the street below.

  I arrive home with a copy of every music magazine on the planet, or at least those available at CNA. I haven't seen Benoît all day. He was planning to fill in for Elias again, although when I left this morning, he was still passed out, reeking of beer.

  Elias has called in the favour four times already this week. He's been sick, coughing his lungs up in the squalid room he shares with six other Zimbabweans. It looks like TB. D'Nice has been bugging Elias for sputum to sell on the black market to people who can use it to claim temporary government grants. But the sickness in Elias's lungs could just as well be asbestos or a reaction to the black mould. Proper diagnoses are as rare as real doctors round here.

  There are plenty of the other kind. Nyangas and sangomas and faith healers with varying degrees of skill or talent, broadcasting their services on posters stuck up on telephone poles and walls. Some of them are charlatans and shysters, advertising cures for anything from money woes to love-sickness and Aids with muti made from crushed lizard balls and aspirin. Guess which ingredient does all the hard work?

  Object muti is easy, particularly when it's based on a simple binary. Locked or unlocked. Lost or found. Objects want to have a purpose. They're happy to be told what to do. People less so. A hack spell to scramble SMSs on your business rival's phone – easy. An affection charm to make someone feel more tenderly towards you, whether it's a teen crush or an abusive husband – a little trickier. Lab studies have shown that some spells work through manipulating hormone levels, boosting seratonin or oxytocin or testosterone. Simple on/off equations. Most magic is more abstract. Capricious. It has a tendency to backfire. And the big stuff they promise, the Aids cures, bigger penises or death spells, are all placebo and nocebo, blessings and curses conjured up in your head. Not unlike glossy magazines, which also promise a better sex life, a better job, a better you. Trust me, I used to write those articles. And just look at me now.

  Some folk have a real mashavi for healing, some can make genuine muti. But these are rare, and they tend to be out of the price range of someone like Elias. Which means another day of standing in line at the clinic from 5 am onwards, hoping to get to front of the queue before the cut-off time at noon, so as to procure seven and a half minutes of time with the burned-out nurses who have seen it all before. None of which is conducive to keeping up with your shifts.

  Which is why it's even more of a surprise when I realise that one of the cooking smells mingling through the building is emanating from my apartment. I push open the door to find Benoît, still in Elias's too-small uniform, standing at the hotplate, cooking hot-dogs and pap and beans. The whole apartment has been swept and wiped down, and even the bed has been made. The generator is purring happily, a canister of petrol standing beside it.

  "You're looking very chipper for someone who should still be suffering the mother of all hangovers. And what's this?" It will turn out that I have good cause to be suspicious.

  "I can't do something nice for you?"

  "Oh, I can think of several things nice you could do for me, with me, to me."

  "You see how it could be if you just gave me a key."

  "This was a one-time deal, mister, and only because you were still sleeping it off when I left. Don't get used to it."

  "You don't like it?" he asks.

  I relent, sling my arms over his shoulders and lean against his back. "S'all right. I guess."

  "Get off, woman, I'm cooking," he laughs, shrugging me off. But he tilts his head all the way back to kiss me.

  "Cooking? Or burning?" I tease.

  "Merde!"

  He insists that we take our faintly charred hot-dogs up to the roof, leaving the critters behind. He's even bought paper plates and napkins, and two bottles of beer. He also brings out his camera, a battered and hopelessly outdated Korean generic, barely a megapixel, and held together with duct tape. It's seen a lot, that camera. Whole documentaries' worth. But the only photos Benoît has shown me are the ones he takes of himself.

  He's obsessive about it. He's recorded every step of his journey from Kinshasa to Joburg, photographed every major landmark, every significant crossroad or place he stayed for the night, every person who showed him kindness. But it's not enough to photograph the people or the places. He has to be included in the frame. Like it's not only evidence that he was really there, but that he exists at all.

  By the time we reach the rooftop, I'm out of breath. People don't come up here a whole lot, especially since the elevators died, except to hang laundry out on a sunny day. Sometimes there'll be a party on the roof, to celebrate a wedding or a birth or when one of the local gangs feels like buying some community goodwill with a spitbraaied sheep and grilled offal. It can get ugly if people are drunk, at New Year especially. It's practically tradition for people to send appliances crashing to the street, storeys below. There are reasons the cops and ambulances are slow to respond to "incidents" in Zoo City – if they respond at all.

  Benoît ducks under a laundry line, sheets and dresses and shirts flapping like tethered kites. Everything takes on a muted quality fifteen floors up. The traffic is reduced to a flow and stutter, the car horns like the calls of mechanical ducks. The skyline is in crisp focus, the city graded in rusts and coppers by the sinking sun that has streaked the wispy clouds the colour of blood. It's the dust in the air that makes the Highveld sunsets so spectacular, the fine yellow mineral deposits kicked up from the mine dumps, the carbon-dioxide choke of the traffic. Who says bad things can't be beautiful?

  "Why don't we come up here more often?" Benoît says, uncharacteristically wistful.

  "Too many stairs."

  He gives me a reproving look, and I feel bad for spoiling the mood.

  "Here. Sit down." He plucks a quilt off the line, impervious to the sharp nettle-sting of the protection spell handwoven into the fabric by the specialty tailoring team downstairs, and spreads it on the cement under the water tower. I oblige. The quilt is still damp and covered in a patchwork of wannabe Disney characters, poor cousins to rip-offs and barely recognisable. But it's not like Benoît to be so unconscientious. "Aren't you worried it'll get dirty?" I say.

  He shrugs. "Dirt isn't a permanent state. It'll recover." It occurs to me that he is not talking about the quilt. "C'mere." I scoot over to him and he tucks me under his arm and raises the camera high, pointing towards us. "Say Jozi," he says. And I understand that he is leaving.

  When he turns the camera around to check out the photograph, it reveals him beaming broadly straight into the lens, but I am a blur of profile jerking towards him.

  "No good," Benoît declares, but he doesn't delete the picture. He extends his arm to take another photo. "Hold still this time. Try looking at the camera." He touches my chin with his thumb, gently adjusting the angle of my jaw so that I am staring into our tiny and faraway reflection in the lens.

  "Can't you wait?"

  "I don't think so,
Zinzi," he says quietly.

  "Two weeks," I say. In desperation, "One."

  "I can't say."

  "But you still need to get your stuff together. Organise transport." There are people smugglers who will get you across borders, sneak you under barbed-wire fences, ferry you across crocodile-infested waters, pay off border guards with cases of beer or bullets. Although usually it's the other way round. Not much demand for sneaking out of South Africa. Of course, he could just fly, but then there will be stamps in his passport that will have to be explained to the people at Home Affairs, who believe being a refugee means you can never go home again.

  He sighs and lowers the camera to look at me. "I'm working on it. D'Nice says he knows some people."