Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

There is a long pause. Then Carmen says, "Excuse me," in a strangled voice. Her cheeks are bright pink. She picks up her Bunny and clip-clops into the house.

"You've gone and upset her," Huron says, not looking particularly bothered.

"It's upsetting stuff."

"This notion of yours," he says, pinching his thick bottom lip. "What should we call it – the Polanski-Sopranos Theory? It's original. Not bright. Not true. But original. Aren't you worried I'm going to put out a hit on you?"

"Believe me when I say I haven't got anything left to lose."

"So, what's next? You go to the police?"

"With what evidence? One half-baked Polanski-Sopranos Theory? No, I'm just letting you know that if anything happens to Songweza Radebe – anything else I should say – then I will go to the police. Inspector Lindiwe Tshabalala is an old friend. She'll listen to what I have to say." By "friend" I mean "one-time interrogator" of course, but I figure I can afford to be a little liberal with the truth.

"These are wild accusations. I might have to take this to my lawyer."

"Do what you have to."

"Do you have a physical address I can have the restraining order sent to?"

"Your people know where to find me. But so long as Songweza stays singing fit and healthy, I won't trouble you with the slightest, littlest thing, Mr Huron."

"You assume I don't have my own insurance policy on you."

"Like the 1.5 million you've taken out on each twin?"

"You've been doing some research, little girl."

"I'd like my money now, please."

28.

I hand over the cash to Vuyo in the lobby of the Michelangelo. It's the most upmarket hotel I can think of that's still vaguely accessible. I've dressed accordingly in a sundress and dark sunglasses with a red faux snakeskin briefcase I purchased from the Sandton City luggage shop for the occasion, together with a brand-new phone. I can afford it. And for some moments in your life, it's worth making a scene. Especially the kiss-off.

I sit beside Vuyo on one of the couches in the sumptuous flash of the lobby and flick open the briefcase on my lap, not caring who sees. I'm feeling reckless.

"All here plus the fee for the recent extras. Do you want to count it?"

"I trust you," says Vuyo, calmly flipping the briefcase shut. "We're rehearsing for a movie," he says smoothly to an overweight man in a Cape Town t-shirt goggling at us.

"You shouldn't," I reply.

"Can I say that I am sad?"

"You could. It won't make a difference."

"I am sad. We worked well together."

"I worked. You ambushed."

"Ah. But I knew you would rise to the occasion. You are a hard-headed woman, Zinzi December. Sometimes you need a push." He still hasn't reached for the briefcase. "This isn't a sting, I hope. No cops about to swoop down?"

"I thought about it," I confess. "But I'm too busy trying to dig myself out of the plague pit that's my life right now."

He leans in close to me. "This money? I will give it back to you doubled. Another R500,000 a year from now. Come work with us. You're an asset to the Company."

"There's more chance of Sloth sprouting wings and starting his own airline. Not that I don't appreciate the offer. I'm trying to get clean."

"Zinzi. What are you going to do? Keep digging up trinkets for old people for spare change?"

"Something better. Or worse. Depends on how you feel about the media. I'm hoping for better."

"Well, if you ever need a dentist…"

"I have Ms Pillay's email address."

He stands up to shake my hand and, just like that, I am cut free.

Or not quite.

There are 3,986 new emails in my inbox, unread. I set up an auto-reply to all of them.

This is a scam.

No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing.

Save your money.

Spend it on ice-cream.

Go out to dinner.

Take your loved ones away for the weekend.

Pay off your credit cards.

Have an adventure.

Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or

gambling.

But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.

And next time, don't be so fucking naive.

Vuyo is going to be pissed. But not pissed enough to have me killed. Not when he doesn't have an animal yet. And hey, there will be others. Moegoes are easier to come by than e.coli in a fast-food kitchen.

I add a final line, even though it's a petty revenge, far less than he deserves, even though it might implicate me, or at least my anonymous pseudonym, Kahlo999.

Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte [email protected] machmagazine.co.za

It takes a long time to send 3,986 emails, watching the status bar count them off. There is a deep satisfaction in this. A satisfaction that is dented when one of the addresses bounces. It takes a techno-naif to fall for a 419, but they're usually not so unsophisticated that they can't even get their return address right.

This is the mail system at host smtpauth01.mweb. co.za.

I'm sorry to have to inform you that your message could not be delivered to one or more recipients. It's attached below.

For further assistance, please send mail to postmaster.

If you do so, please include this problem report. You can delete your own text from the attached returned message.

The mail system ‹no-one›: Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=inventedzoocity.com type=A: Host not found

Reporting-MTA: dns; smtpauth01.mweb.co.za X-Postfix-Queue-ID: D4AF5A024B

X-Postfix-Sender: rfc822; [email protected] Arrival-Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200 (SAST)

Final-Recipient: rfc822; ‹no-one›

Original-Recipient: rfc822;[email protected]

Action: failed

Status: 5.4.4

Diagnostic-Code: X-Postfix; Host or domain name not found. Name service error for name=‹no-one› type=A: Host not found

– -----

From: Kahlo999

Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200

To: ‹no-one›

Subject: RE:

This is a scam.

No one is going to give you millions of dollars for nothing. Save your money. Spend it on ice-cream. Go out to dinner. Take your loved ones away for the weekend. Pay off your credit cards. Have an adventure.

Blow it on skydiving lessons or drink or hookers or gambling.

But please, don't send it to me or anyone else involved in this ugly little fiction.

And next time, don't be so fucking naive.

Questions? Please contact Giovanni Conte [email protected] machmagazine.co.za

– --- From: ‹no-one›

Date: Sun, 27 March 2011 21:51:59 +0200

To: ‹no-one›

Subject: ‹no subject›

I danced until my feet broke off. Until my shoes turned red with blood. I always wanted to be a girl in a storybook.

– -----

It's too strange, too poetical to be spam. I open up the Word doc and add it to my collection.

It bothers me, like a pubic hair between your teeth. Or a ghost in the machine.

Hey, it's not like I have anything else to do with my life right now. I take my laptop downstairs and four blocks over to the Nice Times Internet Café to print them out. The guy at the shop wraps the hard copies in a brown-paper bag for me, so it's only when I get home and spread them out over the floor that Sloth freaks the fuck out.

He's been resting on my back, half dozing, but when the pages are arranged on the linoleum, he starts hissing, tugging at my arms to pull me away.

"What's your problem? Is it this?" I pick up a page, and he hunches his shoulders and bats the page out of my hand. He scrambles off my back and backs into the far corner, behind the bed, bristling like the pages are possessed. Maybe Vuyo was right and this is bad muti, a hack spell from a rival syndicate. Maybe this is the cause of everything, the dark shadows over my life. I dig in my bag to see if I still have that bottle of muti the sangoma gave me. How hard can it be?

Sloth is not convinced this is a good idea. I'm kneeling in the middle of my apartment, burning imphepho in an incense holder, a spindle of fragrant smoke rising in the air. I've crumpled up the emails in a large empty pot. "Unless you have a better suggestion?"

He opens his mouth.

"A better suggestion that doesn't involve going back to Mai Mai," I add quickly.

His jaw snaps shut. And then he sneezes twice, abruptly.

"See? It's a sign."

Resigned, Sloth holds out his lanky arm and I take a pinprick of blood with a vintage brooch from my jewellery box and wipe it off on the most recent email.

I pour a liberal dose of paraffin over the crumple of papers in the pot, add a splash of the sangoma's cleansing muti from the cough-medicine bottle, and take a swig for good luck. Then I light the email streaked with Sloth's blood and drop it into the pot. Séance flambé!

What happens instead is that a two-foot-high flame shoots up from the pot, singeing my eyebrows. I fling myself away in surprise and my foot catches the pot. Flaming paraffin splashes over the floor. Sloth screams in alarm and starts crawling for his climbing post, moving amazingly speedily. He clambers up his pole, reaches out and hooks onto one of the loops of rope hanging from the ceiling and swings towards the front door, which is probably the smart option. If I had any sense, I'd be doing the same. Instead, I grab the first thing at hand, which just happens to be my yellow leather jacket, and start beating out the flames.

The fire resists valiantly, but I finally manage to whack the life out of the flames – and my jacket. The fire dies reluctantly, almost resentfully. Greasy, evil-smelling black smoke pours out of the pot and boils off the floor. Choking and gagging on the smell, I fumble to open the window. And then it hits me.

Dunes of powdery yellow sand. They swell and fall like ocean waves. Something you could drown in. Mounds erupt from the waves, spill termites onto the sand. They are swallowed up again. The waves roll on.

A king without his head. He holds it in his lap. The head rolls its eyes and grins with blood-stained teeth beneath its crown. Take me, take me, take me to your spider den. He is wearing a faded Oppikoppi t-shirt.

Birds circling in the sky, an aviary's worth, all different kinds, cranes, pigeons, hawks, vultures, sunbirds, sparrows.

A flash of an old movie. Soylent Green is people.

A barbed-wire fence. A bright yellow sign. Private property. Trespassers will be mutilated.

An artificial fingernail, half an inch long, ruby red with silver stars painted on it, lying in a gutter. A private galaxy in the dirt. There are faded letters stencilled on the kerb. Kotch. Kozy. Kotze.

A supermarket trolley brimming with white plastic forks. It catches on fire. The forks twist and melt.

A snowfall of feathers. Some of the tips are clotted with red gobs of flesh. It turns into a rain of frogs.

Snap! Snap out of it. Snap out-

I open my eyes to find Sloth shaking me by my shoulders and whining.

"Okay, it's okay. I'm fine." I sit up gingerly, rubbing the back of my head, where I seemed to have smashed it against the floor, possibly repeatedly. My heels ache, as if I have been drumming them in a seizure. I'm lucky I didn't bite off my tongue.

Or break a nail.

29.

"David Laslow," the voice on the phone drawls.

"Photographer Dave? This is Zinzi December. We met at the Biko?"

"I wondered if you'd call me," he sounds resigned. "You want to kak me out, I understand. It was a job. Gio was paying me. He didn't tell me what was involved."

"Forget it. That's not why I'm calling. I want to do a story, a real one. I want you to take the photographs."

"Whoo boy, did you pick the wrong week. I've got the Mbuli court case, the premier's portrait, the Springbok press conference, some new clinic opening – and that's not counting whatever comes up during the course of the day."

"This just came up. And besides, you owe me."

"I thought that wasn't why you were calling?"

"It isn't. But that doesn't mean you don't. Come on, I'll be your fixer on the zoo stories. Isn't that what you wanted? An all-access pass to Zoo City. You want drugs, sex, vice, dog fights? I can get you in. But you have to do this for me."

"You don't let up, do you?"

"No."

Dave is waiting by the One-Stop shop when I pull into the petrol station under Ponte. Once a glitzy apartment block famed for its round design, it's turned from housing project with gangsters, squatters, drugs and prostitution, garbage and suicides piling up in the central well, back to reclaimed glitzy apartment block. I suspect it will go through its own revolving door soon enough.

"Get in." I pop the door lock for him. I still haven't got the window fixed. "My car is less likely to get us hijacked." He obliges with a dubious look.

"Where are we going?" he asks

"Did you pull the clips on the homeless guy killing I asked for?"

"Yep," he digs into his pocket and hauls out a slim bundle of photocopies. "Poor guy didn't get much in the way of column space. Here's The Star."

The Star 23 March 2011

Homeless Man Burned Alive

[Ellis Park] The badly burned body of Patrick Serfontein, 53, was found under a bridge in Troyeville on Tuesday, Gauteng Police said. Captain Louis du Plessis said the homeless man was apparently beaten before his attackers set him alight. The man was identified by his South African ID, found on the scene. The police have opened a murder investigation and appealed for witnesses to come forward. – Sapa.

"And here's my paper."

The copy features a grotesque photograph of a man's face, the skin black and bubbled, lips peeled back from the teeth, like he just got back from holiday in Pompeii.

The Daily Truth

POLICE FILE

Homefried Homeless.

I'm telling you straight. Some human scum burned a homeless ou to death on Tuesday. Patrick Serfontein lived under a Troyeville bridge in a cardboard box until he was beaten up and necklaced with a tyre over his head by one or more tsotsis who are still unidentified and walking around free and easy because no one saw anything.