Lauren Beukes - Zoo City
Sloth opens his mouth to sigh in an I-told-you-so way. "Don't even think about it," I say, popping a breath mint to cover the gin.
22.
"We can't keep doing this," Benoît says, lifting my arm from the sweaty rumple of sheets. He turns over my hand and touches his mouth to my fingertips each in turn, the lightest of kisses.
"What, stating the obvious? What difference does one more time make to your wife? She'll have you for the rest of your life. Or until you get divorced over something incidental, like squeezing the toothpaste from the top of the tube. Or, you know, being total strangers to each other after five years."
"It makes a difference to me."
"Well, you'll have you for the rest of your life, too." I roll over to straddle him. "So, can you live with it?"
"Get off, wench."
"You don't mean that." I dip down to kiss him, leaning on his chest and the smooth dead scar tissue that doesn't feel anything.
"Don't I deserve some recovery time?" he says, pulling at my wrists as if he's going to wrestle me off. But he doesn't have any such intention.
"I'll show you what you deserve," I say, dipping lower.
I sit on the edge of the bed afterwards, my foot folded under me and fight with the cheap plastic lighter I stole from Ronaldo, which clicks like the luckiest game of Russian roulette ever. "Do you know where you're going?"
"Burundi. They're in a camp called Bwagiriza in the east, in Ruyigi. Safe from the fighting, they say. They're consolidating, moving all the people to one place. It's better."
"But still not exactly a holiday resort."
"They had to close the supertubes, it's true." He smiles, but it's as fake as the designer labels at Bruma Lake.
"Candyfloss machine broke down. The balloons have drifted away. The rebels took all the stuffed fluffy toys when they left. Have you spoken to her?"
"There's only one satellite phone."
"So you don't actually know it's them." I get a spark, but it doesn't last long enough for the cigarette to catch. Dammit. Flick-flick.
"The UN aid worker scanned a copy of her carte d'identité."
"Could be stolen. Assumed identity. They do genetic testing in the UK refugee centres now to make sure you're actually from wherever you say you are. Have you asked for a DNA match to your actual wife? Do they have her dental records?" Flick. Flick.
"This isn't easy for me either," he says.
"Oh piss off, Benoît," I say, flick-flick-flicking the
lighter.
"I'm glad you've found someone else."
"That spying pigdog D'Nice can piss off too." Flick. Flick. Flick.
"It's good, Zinzi, it's what you need."
I toss the goddamn fucking useless piece of fucking shit lighter against the fucking wall. And instantly regret it. Now I'll have to go down the fucking stairs and buy another fucking lighter at the fucking spaza, which will probably be fucking closed at this time of the fucking night. I prowl over to the wall and pick up the lighter. The little plastic nib has broken off. It's well and truly fucked.
"Whatever is or isn't between me and Giovanni – you don't have a say in my life anymore, Benoît."
"I didn't know I ever did." He looks at me like I'm the bad guy. "Do you want to see photographs of them?"
"Why would I want to see photographs of the people you're leaving me for?"
"Because I'd like to show you."
"Oh for god's sake. Fine."
It takes him a couple of minutes to retrieve the photographs from his room upstairs. In the meantime, I manage to score a box of matches off a woman carrying a bucket of water up the stairs on her head.
Back in my room, Benoît takes the cigarette from my mouth and drags on it. I've never seen him smoke before. Then he sits down beside me on the bed with a bundle wrapped in plastic and bound with elastic bands in his lap. He starts slipping off the elastic bands and putting them neatly beside him. Some of them are practically rotted through. I'm curious in spite of the poison flower in my chest.
"When was the last time you looked at these?"
"Yesterday. Before that, I don't know. A year? Two years? I used to look at them every day."
He unfurls one Checkers packet. It's wrapped around another, which is wrapped around another, which is wrapped around a tight sheaf of papers bound in a piece of military green raincoat and tied with string.
It's a mix of photos and computer print-outs of photographs, already faded, the paper worn soft with handling and the rigours of cross-continental travel. Benoît, a woman and three children aged two to seven at a guess, posing formally, unsmiling in front of a low wall. Their features are indistinct. Washed out. They already look like ghosts.
The same woman, looking exhausted, wrapped in bright yellow sheets and holding a pinch-faced newborn, his eyes clenched against the light, a little girl poking her head into the bottom of the frame like she can't bear to be left out.
The same little girl holding the baby under his arms, carting him around.
The little boy sitting in a cardboard box, grinning to reveal one tooth.
The family posing formally again in front of a fountain in a city setting.
The same background, but this time Benoît is holding the little boy upside-down as if he's about to drop him into the fountain, while the rest of the family collapses in laughter.
But the one that yanks my heart into my stomach is the picture of the woman hiding her face behind her apron with a coy smile, playing a game with the camera.
Or rather, the man behind it.
"Celvie," Benoît says. "Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. He's the smallest. Two and a half years old. He has so much energy. You need a leash to hold him."
I do the maths. "So six or seven now."
"Seven. His birthday is in April. Next week. Seven years old. Practically grown-up. I'll have to start saving for his university fees." The corner of his mouth twitches grimly, not even a Fong Kong smile. We're both considering the impossibilities of university fees, of universities in general, of where a university degree might get you. My BA. Benoît's third-year mechanical engineering.
He starts to put the photographs away, re-bagging them in plastic, slipping the elastic bands back into place.
"What are you going to tell them?"
"That papa got lost for a while."
"And the Mongoose?"
"Ah," Benoît waves his hand. 'He'll get used to them. They might pull his tail, but it will be okay. He's only mean to nasty Sloth girls," Benoît says, shoving me for emphasis.
"Oof. Well, I'm not going to miss you at all."
"I won't think about you for a second."
"I won't even remember you, I'll be so busy shagging other guys. I'll be, like, Benoît who?"
"You'll remember the Mongoose when the fleas hatch."
"I won't. I won't remember you. I won't miss you. I never loved you. I never even liked you. And you smell funny. And your feet, your calloused nasty-ass feet? They're disgusting. I'll be glad to have them gone from my bed."
"You smell funny too," he says and kisses me on my cheekbone near my ruined ear. I tilt my head onto his shoulder. We sit quietly for a long time.
I'm swimming lengths at the gym pool at Old Ed's sports club. Back and forth, perfect tumble-turns – which I have never been able to do properly – at either end, back and forth.
I am the only person in the pool. The only person in the club, it feels like. I am churning up the water into choppy little waves. There is a whistle blowing out a rhythm I have to keep to, but I am falling behind. I can't keep up.
And far below me, so deep it's like this pool is suspended over a continental shelf, something is rising, swimming up towards me. Something with teeth.
23.
I wake with a start, my heart thudding. Benoît is fast asleep, lying behind me so we're curled together like a pair of quotation marks. His hard-on pokes into my back with innocent insistence, not privy to our decision to forgo the delights of each other. It wasn't the dream. There was a noise.
I sit up, listening carefully. There is the sound of running feet. A shout drifting up from the street. A door slams. More shouts. Gunshots. Unreasonably, I immediately think of Songweza. The way the sound is dulled, it seems like it's coming from the Twist Street side, and I glance out the window to check. The street is quiet, not even a plastic bag stirring in the trees.
The Mongoose's face appears at the end of the bed, nose snuffling as he stands up on his back paws to peer at me.
"Looks like it's just you and me." I slip out of bed, pulling on some clothes and a pair of slops. "The unholy alliance." Benoît doesn't stir.
The lights are on at 608. I rap lightly on the door and Mr Khan, the little tailor whose wife has a talent for weaving anti-theft charms into his work, opens the door a moment later. He used to have a small shop in Plein Street, but now he does what business he can out of Elysium Heights. His wife, Mrs Khan, supplements her charm-making by advising residents on government grant applications. It helps that her Black Scorpion is easily hidden in her handbag when she goes down to social welfare, with applications and ID books in hand.
Mr Khan beckons with little grabbing gestures for me to come in quickly before scurrying back to the window and the unfolding drama. I step over bolts of cloth and squeeze in round the sewing machine on the desk to the window, where Mrs Khan, their twelve year-old daughter, the sex-worker from across the passage and a man I can only assume is her patron for the hour have taken up viewing positions, all looking down over the street. We're not the only tenants enjoying a little 4 am drama. On either side of us people are leaning out of the windows to look, smoking and chatting.
"It's these gangs," Mrs Khan tuts, shifting her weight to balance the sleeping baby on her hip. "And that damn private security." The police are a joke with a punchline you've heard before. Armed response runs Zoo City and the downtown area the same way dogs piss on their territory. They're only interested in protecting their buildings. If a crime happens across the road, it's as if it doesn't happen at all. They lose interest as soon as it's out of their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, Elysium and Aurum fall out of the borders of privatised law. Our landlord is
too snoep to pony up for protection.
There is another crackle of gunfire. A muzzle flash is reflected in the broken windows of the building on the corner. Then a man scrambles out from the cover of the trees lining the avenue, firing back over his shoulder. His trainers make a tennis-court squeal as he skids on the wet tarmac. A Bear lumbers out behind him and looks both ways, as if checking for oncoming traffic.
This is not the strangest thing I have seen in our street. There was the attempted rape that was interrupted – Mrs Khan roused some of the larger men on our floor, and they beat the would-be rapist into a coma. There was the night D'Nice got stabbed, unfortunately not fatally. There was the murder in the stairwell a few weeks ago. But the weirdest was the night the owner of a local brothel paraded her girls and their menagerie naked down the street hoping to drum up new business.
"Dogfight turned bad," says one of the guys leaning out of the window of 610, with great authority.
"Not too late to place your bets," his goateed friend says. But their laughter is hollow.
"No, man," Mrs Khan says, annoyed, "shows what you know. It's a gang war, definitely. The 207s were moving in on the Cameroonians two weeks ago now. This is revenge, you'll see."
Mr Khan tries to shoo his daughter back to her bed. "Come on, my baby, you need to rest for school tomorrow." But the girl doesn't move. This is better than TV. And probably better than school too, as far as her life education is concerned.
On the street below, there is another shot. The Bear's shoulder collapses with a jerk. It roars in pain, rises to its full height, and then seems to think better of it. The man tugs at the Bear's arm, trying to get it to move. It roars again and then drops back on all fours. The man starts to run, gesturing urgently for the Bear to follow him. It starts after him. But it's too late.
More bullets, AK-47 rounds this time, rip through the animal, knocking it sideways. The man screams and starts running back towards the Bear, then hesitates. The Bear shambles another step and then collapses on its backside with a surprised whuff. It tries to get up, confused. The AK-47 stutters again. The Bear's forepaws slide out from under it. Its jaw strikes the kerb with an audible crack. The people at the window wince. Very slowly, the Bear's head lolls to one side. The man turns and runs like hell is at his heels.
It will be.
We hold our collective breath. A tsotsi holding that favourite weapon of revolutionaries, criminals and revolutionaries-turned-criminals walks cautiously out from beneath the scaffolding of the trees, the AK-47 at his hip ready to be swung up. There is a blur of wings hovering above his shoulder. A Sunbird. He walks up to the Bear and prods it with his foot. It doesn't move. He empties another clip into it anyway. The Bird darts forward to see, darts back again.
There are sirens in the distance. Private security, not police. You can tell by the pitch of the wail. The tsotsi looks up and sees half the building standing at their windows, watching. He gives us a cheerful wave and steps back into the trees, his Bird darting about his head.
We know what's coming. None of us say anything. The Mongoose paces the window ledge, whiskers quivering. The sirens get louder. The Bear lies motionless on the pavement beside the metal frame of a licensed vendor's stall.
The air pressure dips, like before a storm. A keening sound wells up soft and low, as if it's always been there, just outside the range of human hearing. It swells to howling. And then the shadows start to drop from trees, like raindrops after a storm. The darkness pools and gathers and then seethes.
The Japanese believe it's hungry ghosts. The Scientologists claim it's the physical manifestation of suppressive engrams. Some eyewitness reports describe teeth grinding and ripping in the shadows. Video recordings have shown only impenetrable darkness. I prefer to think of it as a black hole, cold and impersonal as space. Maybe we become stars on the other side.
I turn away as it rushes down the road in the direction of the running man. Mr Khan covers his daughter's eyes, even though it's her ears he should be protecting. The screaming only lasts a few awful seconds before it is abruptly cut off.
"Tsk," Mrs Khan says, to break the silence that's weighing down on us, like someone has turned up the gravity. "This city."
But I've thought of something else. "Where are your parents?" I murmur, remembering the poison hallucination, the shop assistant with the name badge – Murderer! Murderer! Murderer! – bending over my five year-old dream self.
