Zoo City (14 page)

   "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."

   "D'Nice would. How are you going to pay for it?"

   "I'm working on that too."

   "How?"

   "Always with the questions, cherie. Can you stop being such a journalist for one minute?" He kisses me, as if that's an answer and, raising the camera again, teases. "Now hold still, will you?"

   And I think: No, you.

The call comes later. At 2 am – that hour of sleepless brooding.

   "She's dwying to sabodage him," the voice says urgently into the phone, without so much as a hola or unjani. The only reason I recognise it is because of the nasal honk.

   "Arno?"

   "She's going to fug evewyding up. Song and da boyfwienb. Dey're supposed to be in sdudio. And she's jusd gone. She's so selfidg. She jusd wants to ruin evewyding for him." He is choking back tears, and I realise I was wrong about his crush. It's not on Songweza. It's S'bu.

I spend the morning making phone calls to a list of Songweza's friends culled from Mrs Luthuli and, more usefully, Des. Most of them are a bust, even though her friends open up to me like an oyster come shucking time at that magic introduction "I'm a journalist". Even vague proximity to celebrity turns people into attention whores, especially teenagers. They spill their guts on her first crush, how she cheated on a Maths paper in grade seven and got bust so the whole class had to write the test again, how much she loves music, how talented she is, how much she talks in class, and on her phone, on MXit, how much she loves to party. How sometimes she gets really down on the world, "like seriously dark, hey, but not, like suicidal" the girl called Priya tells me.

   My notes give me an outline only. The details are lacking, like a Polaroid that is still developing. I get the idea that there are names missing on Mrs Luthuli's list, names she might not approve of, like this boyfriend she doesn't even know about.

   I look up the people written up on Des's action whiteboard. The designer and the publicity chick are dead-ends, straight business, slightly perplexed as to why I'd be calling. The only person of interest is Heather Yalo, who just so happens to be the manager for mega names like Leah and Noluthando Meje. When I introduce myself, she says, "It wouldn't be appropriate to talk to the media yet," and hangs up on me. I wonder if Huron knows that Des is planning a coup.

   I set something up for tonight, with help from Gio, who "knows people". I also put in a message to Vuyo.

Kahlo999: I need a favour.

Vuyo: I heard about ur mkwerekwere. I can help. U write the letter. Ill get an official letterhead.

   I'm too busy wrestling the spiteful flip of hope in my chest to care about where Vuyo got his intel from. The Company has more eyes than the inner-city CCTV surveillance system when it comes to protecting its interests. And I have my suspicions about who has been informing on me. I wouldn't be at all surprised if his name is D'Nice Languza.

Kahlo999: What are you talking about?

Vuyo: "Tragically, the International Red Cross DRC were misinformed. Benoit Bocangas wife and children are dead."

Kahlo999: You are a twisted SHIT of a human being. 

Vuyo: Could even provide photos of the bodies. U need to get me references for Photoshopping tho. 

Kahlo999: Shut the fuck up, Vuyo. It's not an option. 

Vuyo: Touchy.

Kahlo999: You're not listening to me. I need three things: I need to find out if a cellphone number has been used in the last four days. I need to access a MXit account. And I need to find out if a life insurance policy has been registered on a particular party. 

Vuyo: Itll cost u. 

Kahlo999: R5000. Add it to my tab.

Vuyo: 12. With interest. Send me details.

 >>Kahlo999: Out of curiosity. Does the Company do trafficking?

Vuyo: Are u sure u don't have police sitting next to u?

Kahlo999: Pretty sure.

Vuyo: U havent installed the firewall.

Kahlo999: I think you're up in my business enough already. C'mon, Vuyo. Trafficking? Sex slavery? 

Vuyo: Company has wide interests.

Kahlo999: If I wanted to find out if someone had been kidnapped? By a dealer? Forced into prostitution? 

Vuyo: Not kidnapping if they come of own accord. 

Kahlo999: I think our definitions of "own accord" may differ. Can I give you a name?

Vuyo: This is an expensive favour girl. There is a price for what happens next.

Kahlo999: I think I know someone who can pay that price.

It turns out that slipping back into Former Life is as easy as pulling on a dress. Fashion is only different skins for different flavours of you. Tonight, I am peach schnapps. Nervous as a fourteen year-old trying to sneak into a club for the first time. Did I say "a" dress? I meant nine. Which is the total extent of what I own.

   Sloth huffs grumpily, sprawled out on the floor with a bunch of cassava leaves I got at the market downstairs to placate him (along with a tub of wood lice for the Mongoose). If I could leave Sloth behind, I would. But the feedback loop of the separation anxiety is crippling. Crack cravings have nothing on being away from your animal.

   After trying on all nine dresses, twice, with an intermission period spent trying to recapture the wood lice that escaped when Sloth grumpily up-ended the tub, I settle on skinny jeans and a surprisingly tasteful black strappy top I borrow from one of the prostitutes on the third floor, after giving up in disgust on my wardrobe. When I say borrow, I mean rent. She assures me it's clean. For thirty bucks, I'm dubious, but it passes the sniff test, so fuck it.

   I catch a taxi into Auckland Park with the late-night cleaners, the nurses and the restaurant dish-washers: the invisible tribe of behind-the-scenes. I get off after Media Park and walk up to 7th Street with its scramble of restaurants, bars and Internet cafés. Outside the Mozambican deli-cum-Internet café, a hawker tries to sell me a star lantern made of wire and paper and, when I decline, offers me marijuana instead.

   I used to stomp here. Got bust smoking dope in my readily identifiable school uniform on the koppie and was suspended for two weeks. Did my first line of coke in the bathrooms of Buzz 9. Had snatched sex in a driveway on 8th before the homeowner called armed response. This should not be so intimidating. But when I see Gio fiddling intently with his phone on the kerb outside the Biko Bar, it's a relief.

   "Hey, you."

   He looks up guiltily and stashes his phone in his jacket pocket. "Hey, baby, you made it! C'mon, the guys are already inside." He ushers me towards the velvet ropes that have seen better days, and a short, wiry bouncer who is wearing a t-shirt that reads TRY IT MOTHERFUCKER.

   "She's with me," Gio says and, although the bouncer is not happy to see Sloth, he gives us the tiniest of head tilts to indicate, yeah, sure, whatever.

   The Biko Bar is to Steve Biko as crappy t-shirt design is to Che Guevara. His portrait stares down from various cheeky interpretations. A hand-painted barber-shop sign with a line-up of Bikos in profile modelling different hairstyles and headgear; a chiskop, a mullet, a makarapa mining helmet. Steve stares out with that trademark mix of determination and wistful heroism from the centre of a PAC-style Africa made of bold rays of sunlight. Steve, with a lion's mane, is the focal point of a crest of struggle symbols, power fists, soccer balls and a cursive "The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". My academic dad would have hated it. Reduced by irony and iconography to a brand.

   "I see they sell t-shirts," I say. "Do the kids' sizes come pre-soaked with acid?"

   "Very funny, Zinzi," Gio says, steering me through to the back. "Don't worry, they're nervous about meeting you too."

   Apprehension clenches in my gut like the moment before you go over the lip of the rollercoaster. I never liked rollercoasters. Gio swings me towards a table occupied by a small cluster of painfully hip people with expensive haircuts. There is a very pierced and inked woman with violently red hair and Bettie Page eyes, and two men, one in a hideous paisley print shirt and gelled spikes, the other in his early forties, a war photographer's waistcoat and a crafted coating of cynicism. They're all clustered around a big camera with a serious lens, examining the display on the back.

   "Oh, ick," says the woman, pushing the camera away just as we reach the table. "Why would you show me that?" She hits the photographer on the shoulder, but it's a playful punch, the kind that says, I really like you, even though you show me gruesome photographs, maybe even because you show me gruesome photographs. "What's Dave got you looking at this time?" Gio says.

   "Photos of the homeless guy who was killed," says Laconic Photographer Guy, the Dave in question.

   "Ooooh, cool," Gio says. "I'd dig to check those out. You know, we have this new gross-out feature in Mach. Gangrenous feet. Puffadder bites. Ideally tied in to some kind of extreme adventure that's gone horribly wrong."

   "Not much adventure in getting beaten up and set on fire. Cut him up pretty bad. Especially his face. Cut off his fingers too."

   "Are you really going to publish these in Mach?" asks Ugly Paisley Shirt, clearly thrilled at the prospect.

   "We're a men's magazine," Gio shrugs. "Men are brutal." And then adds hastily, "I'm not saying women aren't."

   "They just hide it better," I say. Everyone looks at me, and then they all simultaneously switch their focus to Sloth. Paisley Shirt smirks. I put up my hand, like a kid at school volunteering the answer everyone's waiting for. "Hi, I'm Zinzi."

   "Sorry, yeah, guys, this is my friend I told you about?" Gio's tone is loaded with things left unsaid. "Zinzi December. We used to work together." Sleep together. Take drugs together. Sleep together while taking drugs together at work together. It was a simple relationship, really.