Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

"Am I paying extra for this as well?"

"Open the paper."

I unfold the note. There is an eleven-digit sharecall number. Underneath it is a handwritten scrawl that takes me a moment to decipher. It reads: "Hani Luxury Estates Format" and "Play along".

"What the-" I start to say, but Vuyo is already standing to greet the sweaty Japanese salaryman with a briefcase handcuffed to his wrist who has been directed to our table by the waitress.

"Ah, Mr Tagawa," Vuyo says, turning the charm all the way up to eleven, "I hope you're not too jet-lagged. This is my investment partner, Lebo Hani, daughter of the great communist leader. But don't worry, she's hundred per cent capitalist. Don't mind the animal."

"You really are something." Gio's voice on the other end of the line is a combo of admiring and pissed off.

"Hello yourself."

"So, I just had this call."

"Uh-huh."

"Dr Veronique Auerbach. About Mach's journalist? Confirming that she's lined up some interviews for you. If you're actually doing a story, that is. She seemed sceptical. Suspicious even."

"Yeah, I'm in the middle of typing up my pitch. Sex, drugs, jet-set travel."

"I wouldn't have minded. Much. I mean, why would I expect anything less of you?" Gio says. The malice in his voice is justified. After all, I am the girl who stole his ATM card and eight grand out of his bank account, and blamed it on the cleaner.

"Only she didn't speak to me, she spoke to Montle, my editor. And I had to do a shitload of explaining. So, congratulations."

"I got the job?"

"Almost at the cost of mine. Helluva way to pitch an assignment, Zee. I need 1600 words in my inbox by April 23rd. Get some dirt, please. Something sexy."

"I'm all about the sexy dirt."

"And the reverse, if memory serves. So, what happens with the Sloth when you have sex?"

"You want a matching bite somewhere else?"

"Kinky," he says, but I can tell he's still simmering. "Maybe you can show me sometime. Laters, sweets. I gotta go."

"Yeah, me too," I say, turning the Capri in a lazy arc under the highway and into Anderson Street and the parking lot of Mai Mai.

The healer's market is less popular than Faraday, which is conveniently close to a major taxi rank. It looks like a cheap tourist attraction from the outside, with its mudcoloured walls and the spread of herbs drying in the sunshine on the pavement outside the main entrance. Under a thatched deck, a man crouches on his haunches in front of a little urn on top of an open fire, wafting pungent smoke across the parking lot. A German tourist emerges from the toilets, forgetting to zip up his fly, and stops to talk to the guy carving up pieces of old tyre to make sandals.

The sky has taken on that bright translucent quality that pre-empts a thunderstorm. The air pressure has changed. There are clouds rolling in on the horizon, cumulonimbuses that weigh down on the city. My mom used to insist we covered up the mirrors during storms to avoid drawing the lightning, scrambling round the house with towels and sheets at the first sign of a puffy cloud. It drove my dad crazy. "Superstitious rubbish," he always said, sticking his nose back in his cinematography books. "This is what's holding the continent back." He was always way too narrow about his definitions of what modern Africa meant.

We never were hit by lightning. But all my mom's precautions – slaughtering a goat for the ancestors in thanksgiving for the birth of Thando's kid, the ceremony when I got my matric results, the stupid sheets over the mirrors – none of it helped a damn against bullets.

As I get out of the car, a skinny boy, somewhere between twelve and nineteen, gets up from the shade of a scraggly eucalyptus tree at the edge of the parking lot and darts over, already hard-selling: "Lady, hey lady, look after your car, nice, lady. You want a car wash, lady?" He has buggy yellow eyes and an old knife scar in his hairline, like a side-parting. Sloth shrinks away from his breath.

"Not today, thanks."

"Cheap for you, sister! Special price!"

"Next time, my friend." He starts to slink back to his tree, where he's obviously sleeping rough. There is a tarpaulin precariously strung over the lower branches and a pile of rubble backing up against one of the highway support pillars. I can see the shadows of others huddled inside. "Wait, kid. Do you know where I can find Baba Ndebele?"

Yellow Eyes perks up immediately and prances towards the entrance. "This way, my sister. Come with me. I show you."

The square arch opens onto rows of red brick houses with ivy climbing the walls and a mix of equal parts flowers and weeds growing in planters. A black chicken scavenges between the bricks for crumbs. A woman in a white and red sarong with Zulu shields and beads crisscrossing her chest like bandoliers glares from a doorway, although I'm not sure whether it's at me or at the sickly boy.

There is a grisly wunderkammer in every window, hanging in every doorway. Tortoise shells, a wildebeest skull with a broken horn, shrivelled twists of dead animal or plant matter, it's hard to say, and drifts of magic, like a static hum in the air, a harmony to the drone of traffic on the highway above. Sloth hides his head against the back of my neck.

"Here, my lady, in here," the boy says. I tip him with a five-rand coin and Yellow Eyes claps his hands together in a horribly servile gesture, waits to see me in, and then lopes down the alleyway, swiping at the black chicken with his foot as he goes past.

I step into a doorway of a tiny waiting-room-cumapothecary. A woman sits sewing on a narrow bench. She gives me an incurious once-over and returns to her needlework without comment. The room is lined with shelves crammed with cloudy glass jars of unidentified substances. There are dried herbs hanging from the ceiling, twisting slightly in the breeze from a fan in the corner of the ceiling, cable-tied to the burglar bars of the window to keep it upright. The blades witter and creak like an asthma attack. There is a curtain drawn across an inner doorway.

"Sawubona, Mama, I've come to see Baba Ndebele," I say to the needlework woman. She puts her finger to her lips and looks at me out the sides of her eyes, then returns to sewing. She is embroidering beads onto an orange and white skirt. I sit down beside her and wait. A fly buzzes in an invisible rhomboid flight path, continually readjusting the pattern, an insect mathematician calculating geometries. Outside, a few doors down, a woman laughs brightly and then returns to a conversational murmur. The traffic takes on the rhythmic shush of a low tide, occasionally interrupted by the brut-brut-brut of a motorcycle or the roar of an exhaust with a hole in it. The fan judders abruptly, as if about to rattle itself right out of its jimmied mounting, then settles back into its asthma. And the woman sews, threading beads onto the skirt one at a time. I pull Sloth into my lap and lean my head against the cool wall. 281 alligator. 342 alligator. 719 alligator. 953 alligator.

I startle awake as a young woman emerges from behind the curtain. She is wearing a headband with a beaded fringe in front and a dried goat's gallbladder hanging behind. Red and white beads are wrapped across her chest and round her ankles and wrists. She is pretty, with dark blonde hair that curls up at her shoulders, but her face is carefully blank. She kneels in the doorway, stands again, bows and holds the curtain aside for me to enter. The sewing woman is gone. I nudge Sloth. He murmurs grumpily and tries to nuzzle into my lap to go back to sleep. "Come on, buddy," I say, poking him in his ribs. "We're up." My head feels hangover-muzzy, and as I stand up, the world reels away from me for a moment. It's either the incoming storm or the goddamn magic.

I swing Sloth onto my back and press a two-rand coin into the young woman's hand, because thwasa are not allowed to speak to you until you give them something silver. It could be tinfoil, but it's generally accepted that money is better for appeasing the ancestors, even when dealing with an initiate.

"Take off your shoes, please," she says and I slip out of my sandals and step into the consulting room. There is a sharp smell of imphepho – burning herbs.

"This is Baba Dumisani Ndebele, sangoma," the young woman says, indicating the huge man built like a pro rugby-player kneeling on a reed mat in the centre of the cement floor. He is wearing a white vest and a red apron, with a leopard skin tied over it and a matching leopard band across his forehead. His head is shaved and shiny with sweat. It is much hotter in here without the fan. I notice there's a D amp;G logo on his vest, so subtle as to be the real makhoya. Fong Kong goods tend to shout their fake logos as loud as they can. So much for the simple life of serving the spirits of the ancestors.

"Thokoza khehla," I say in greeting to the spirits, more out of some residual deference to my mother than anything I might feel myself.

"Thokoza," Dumisani replies and sneezes several times. "My dlozi has told me about you." He waggles his cellphone, a brand new iPhone, significantly. "He tells me you do not want to be here."

"I didn't know the ancestors were SMSing now."

"No, he calls me. The spirits find it easier with technology. It's not so clogged as human minds." He taps his head for emphasis. "They still like rivers and oceans most of all, but data is like water – the spirits can move through it. That's why you get a prickly feeling around cellphone towers."

"And here I thought it was the radiation." I know I'm being disrespectful, but I can't resist. "So is there a spiritworld MTN? What are the tariffs like? I bet you get a lot of 'please call me's'."

"Hayibo, sisi. So cynical and you with a shavi. What would your mother say?"

I flinch. Lucky guess.

"My dlozi says you will need a reading. The amathambo will help guide you."

The initiate says quietly, "Please put the money down on the mat. It's R500." I comply and the thwasa quietly withdraws from the room, letting the curtain fall closed behind her.

"Shame, sisi," Dumisani says. "It's because you carry your spirits with you. It's the state of the world, my sister. Seven billion people have a lot of ghosts. Sometimes they get lost. But spirits are heavy, nè? They weigh you down. You should cut your shavi loose."

"Very funny."

"No joke. There are ways it can be done. It's like soccer – you just need a substitute."

"Sloth has got me through okay so far, thanks. Can we do this?"

"I see you are a woman of action and forthrightness. Yes, we can do this. Please take these." He loads up my cupped palms with cowrie shells and stones, a chipped nautilus fossil, dominoes (one broken), a twist of white beads around a piece of wood, a bullet, an MTN pay-asyou-go sim card – I guess it is the preferred network – and a tiny plastic figurine of an ugly purple monster with a shock of matted orange hair that might once have come in a Happy Meal.

"Now blow on your hands and throw them."

I just open my hands and let the contents fall. Dumisani looks irritated.

"You didn't do sports at school, hey?" He examines the constellation of objects, seriously. Sloth sneezes abruptly, once, twice, three times. The sangoma announces triumphantly, "You see, they are with us!"

I smile, but I'm thinking Sloth's propensity for discharging his nose is not so much a sign from the other side as a sign that the incense is getting up his snout. It must be obvious in my expression.

"You know, in my previous life I was an actuary," Dumisani says. "Audi S4. Four-bedroom house in Morningside, renovated. All the gadgets. Three different ladies I took care of, and they took care of me. Two children by different mothers. Private schools. Apartments. Cars. Then I got the call. In my heart, I mean, not on my phone. The amadlozi wouldn't leave me alone. Hakking, hakking, all the time. Like your neighbour's dog at three o'clock in the morning. These terrible dreams. The same one, over and over: my grandmother carrying a snake that climbed off her shoulders and walked up to me and entered my chest like a vagina. I got sick. So sick, my girlfriends thought it was Aids. They left me, all of them. They were scared. I don't blame them. I lost forty kilos in two weeks. The skin was hanging off me like when you have bad liposuction. Trust me, one of my girlfriends had bad liposuction. It looks very ugly."

"What happened?" There is damp sweat pooling between my shoulder blades and Sloth's belly fur. I want to shrug him off onto the floor, but I can tell by the way he's gripping my arms that he's not going anywhere.

"I stopped fighting it," Dumisani shrugs. "It's not so different, the statistical analysis, the number-crunching. It's just the same with the bones. It's knowing how to read them. Like here, you see." He turns over a white shell that has landed on one of the dominoes. It's the chipped tile, a blank and a three, with one dot dissected by the break.

"Now, this, this is bad luck. And here as well," he says, indicating the triangulation of the troll, the bullet and the broken domino. "Very bad. There is a shadow on you."

"Trust me, I noticed." Sloth huffs, his breath hot against my ear. But really, I mean the Undertow. The inevitability of it is crushing. Sometimes I wake up in the night struggling to breathe, and my chest feels as crumpled as a car wreck. Maybe that's all your talent is for, a distraction to keep you preoccupied until the blackness comes rushing in.

"And here?" The sangoma nudges a fan-shaped shell with red striations with his finger. He seems impressed. "Whoo! Girl, either you have been messing with a very bad umthakathi or you're just a magnet for imoya emibi. I don't know if a chicken's going to do any good here. We might need a bull for this."

"I'm not really interested in sacrificing chickens or cows or witches or evil spirits or shadows. It's very simple. I'm looking for something. Vuyo said you could help me."

"Something? Or someone?" he asks slyly. "Because this little stone over here", he rocks the bit of quartz backwards and forwards with his thumb, "says you're not being open with me."

"Someone," I agree, grudgingly.

"Two someones," he says, his finger darting between two practically identical smoothed bits of amber. "Is it twins? Twins are very powerful. In Zulu culture we used to kill one of the pair to kill the bad luck."

"Can I add humans to the no-sacrifice list?" But I'm impressed and a little bit shaken, and he knows it. I concede, "I'm sorry baba, I meant no disrespect to you or the amadlozi."