"Zoo City" - читать интересную книгу автора (Beukes Lauren)18.Vuyo insists on meeting me at Kaldi's coffee shop in Newtown, the funkified art, theatre, design and fashion capital of the inner city. They burned this neighbourhood down in the early 1900s to prevent the spread of bubonic plague, and it occurs to me that they should consider doing it again, to purge the blight of well-meaning hipsters desperately trying to paint it rainbow. I should really try to be less cynical. I squeeze between the tables packed with actors, dancers, trendy new media folk, BEE venture capitalists in suits with no ties, and capitalist wannabes (also in suits, but Vuyo is late. I check my emails on my phone and eavesdrop on the actorly bunch at the next table who are having a very heated and apparently hilarious debate about a proposed smackdown between David Mamet and Athol Fugard. Then again, they could be rehearsing lines from a play about the same. There are another 312 responses to Eloria, including one from a French journalist who wants to do a story, is desperate to fly to DRC right away to meet. Vuyo would milk him for visa application fees, maybe even try to convince him to set up an emergency fund to help evacuate Eloria. I quietly delete it. There is also another strangely anomalous message. Again, no return address. Maybe it is time to put up that firewall. You said you would love me warts and all. I forward the message to my personal address to add to the other one and nearly get bust by Vuyo, who has slipped into the chair opposite me. "Anything interesting?" he asks. He does not apologise for being late. "Admin," I say. He orders a black americano and waits for the waitress to leave before launching straight in. "If someone has "Bad things can happen even to famous people." "Ah, but then someone would have to care. There is an insurance policy on that name, paid for by Moja Records. One point five. "As in million?" "And on the matching item. They come as a pair?" "Twins tend to. Okay, what about the MXit account?" "Sorry. Couldn't get in." "What kind of slacker hackers are you using?" "Hackers are Eastern Bloc scammers. The Company relies on good old-fashioned African business as taught to us by our colonial masters." "Bribery and corruption?" "So much more efficient." "And the phone?" "Yes, my friend at Vodacom looked it up for me for a small fee. That phone number hasn't made or received a call since Sunday 20th 02h36." "Do you have a record of what number was dialled?" "That will cost you extra. Luckily, I anticipated that you would want this." He slides over a piece of paper folded in half. "One more thing," he says, before releasing the piece of paper. "You should see a friend of mine. At Mai Mai. Dumisani Ndebele. A "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 "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 "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. " 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 "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 " " "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'." " I flinch. Lucky guess. "My The initiate says quietly, "Please put the money down on the mat. It's R500." I comply and the "Shame, "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 "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 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 "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 "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 some "Some "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 He waves the apology away. "It doesn't matter to me what you mean or don't mean. Do you have anything belonging to these someones?" "That's exactly my problem." He holds up one finger with a quick little jerk. "One moment." He picks up his phone as if it's been ringing and pretends to answer it. "Yes, I know. Bloody cheeky. In her bag? "Is it perhaps my wallet?" " "All right." I shake out the entrails of my bag, my own constellation of meaningful objects. Car keys. My notebook, stuffed with clippings on iJusi cut from music magazines and a Greyhound bus brochure on fares to Zimbabwe and Botswana, both destinations en route to Kinshasa. Four cheap pens, only one of which is functional. My wallet, containing R1800, which is about R1300 more than it's seen in a long time. A lipstick (rose madder, matt, half-melted), Tic-Tac mints, S'bu's songbook, a crisp white business card (belonging to Maltese amp; Marabou), a pack of dented business cards held together by a hairband (belonging to me), a battered cigarette spilling crumbs of tobacco, crumpled sachets of artificial sweetener, spare change. "Let's see," the "What are you doing?" I grab for the songbook, but he yanks it away, holding it above his head as the corner of the pages starts to brown and curl in the licking flames. "Helping you." The fire in his right hand has reached its height, flaring hot and bright and yellow, shedding burned pieces, like snowflakes, crisp around the edges. "You young people. No respect for your culture." A fragment drifts down: "Let's party, let's get together, Dumisani yelps and flicks his fingers where the flame has caught them. The scraps of paper fall to the reed mat among the strewn rubble and the contents of my bag, still burning. He whacks out the flames, then scrapes together the scraps and pieces, cupped in his hands. His initiate enters, carrying a wooden pestle and mortar, already full of ground and reeking herbs, a tin cup, a syringe sealed in plastic and a two-litre plastic Coke bottle full of a viscous yellow liquid. She bows and retreats, and the "I will need some blood, please. Don't worry, it's perfectly sterile. Just a drop will do." But as I unwrap it and move to prick my finger, he motions for me to stop. "Not you. The animal." Sloth retreats behind my back with a whimper. "I can do it if you're scared," he offers, with a hint of impatience. "No, it's all right. Come on, buddy, just a little prick." Sloth extends his arm and turns his head away as I punch the needle into the thick skin of his forearm. It takes a second and then a bright bead of red wells up through his fur. The " "Not for treatment. It's part of your diagnosis. Drink it." I've drunk my share of dubious concoctions in my time, but I'm thinking more along the lines of nasty shooters. And there was the time I took a swig from a bottle of methylated spirits stolen from the art supplies storeroom when I was fifteen, but we won't get into that or the vomiting that followed. "If you think I'm drinking "You need to stop fighting," he says, and bashes the tin cup against my mouth so hard I cut my lip against my teeth. As I gasp in shock, some of the foulness washes down my throat. It is warm and slimy and bitter and sweet, like crushed maggots that have been feeding on rotten sewer rat. Like shit and death and decay. Sloth slides from my back, suddenly limp as a sack of drowned kittens. I drop forward onto all fours, heaving and gagging, but coughing up only long strings of spit. And then the convulsions start. " |
||
|