Zoo City (34 page)

   Benoît is still in hospital. Critical condition, the doctors say. They speak in medical terms, but what I understand is broken ribs, a bruised heart, a punctured lung, nerve damage to his dislocated arm. He will need months of physiotherapy. He may never recover the full use of it. But the worst is the bite. It's the magic. Animal wounds take longer to heal, come with stranger side-effects. He sways between fevered moments of wakefulness and unconsciousness that's borderline coma, but with more erratic brain activity, like he's still fighting monsters in there. The Mongoose paces the corridors, looking thin and miserable.

   There was nothing I could do there.

   Eight days to Kigali if I keep to the tar, and don't hit any potholes or roadblocks I can't bribe my way out of.

   Day one: Johannesburg to Harare

   Day two: Harare to Lusaka

   Day three: Lusaka to Mbeya

   Day four: Mbeya to Dar es Saalam

   Day five: Dar es to Nairobi

   Day six: Nairobi to Jinja

   Day seven: Cross into southern Uganda

   Day eight: Mbasa to Kigali.

   The place names sound like new worlds. I have only ever travelled to Europe. On a skiing holiday with my parents when I was eleven, when Thando broke his leg, not on the slopes but slipping on an icy pavement. On a working holiday to London when I was eighteen, which lasted a month before I decided to hell with living in a shitty apartment and working a bar and returned to the creature comforts of my parent's Craighall house with the pool and the gardener and the char lady who made my bed. Before I met Gio, before I killed my brother, before Sloth.

   I have an amaShangaan bag full of fake cash. I have a bundle of photographs. I have print-outs of emails from a UN aid worker. I have Benoît's family's names and ID numbers and application papers for asylum in South Africa.

   What I do not have is permission to leave the country in the wake of a multiple homicide/serial killer investigation.

   Celvie. Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. It's going to be awkward. It's going to be the best thing I've done with my miserable life.

   And after that? Maybe I'll get lost for a while.

Making the fantastic seem credible is hard work. I was lucky to have co-conspirators.

   Special thanks to Johnson Sithole of JBS Security, who was my fixer in Hillbrow and Berea (special thanks for not bringing your gun), and to photographer Marc Shoul for recommending him.

   Thanks to Lindiwe Nkutha for taking me to Mai Mai and Faraday healers' markets and for getting bounced from the Rand Club with me when we weren't appropriately dressed. I'm grateful to the management of High Point and their passionate young security team, who gave me a complete tour of the building and really did catch a rapist.

   Nechama Brodie's fine pop-culture history of the city, The Jo'burg Book, became my bible, and Nechama sent me additional personal recommendations, annotated maps and provided general fact-checking. Thanks also to my great friends Georgi Guedes and Ter Hollman for playing host.

   My music industry insiders/informers were Esther Moloi, Jason Curtis, Gabi le Roux, Shamiel Adams and music journalist Evan Milton, who insisted on being allowed to interview Odi Huron, albeit for a fictional magazine. Thanks to you all, and to travel writer Justin Fox for helping me plot Zinzi's travel arrangements.

   Thanks also to Charlie Human and Sam Wilson who were roped in to write additional materials for this book, the psychological paper on the Undertow and the prison interviews respectively. Both pieces added a depth to my story and provided perspectives I wouldn't have thought of on my own.

   Dr Meg Jones and Cape Medical Response paramedic Chris de Meyer were invaluable in providing expert medical opinions on fictional conditions and injuries.

   I'm very grateful to Jamala Safari, who shared his journey from the DRC to South Africa (hopefully soon to be a novel), unravelled acronyms and the tangle of conflicts over resources that has resulted in an estimated 5.4 million deaths in the Congo since 1998. James Bocanga, another DRC émigré who runs his own security firm in my neighbourhood, patiently explained slang and daily life, and provided translations for me.

   Bishop Paul Verryn invited me to visit the Central Methodist Church, where, at the time, over three thousand refugees were living in terrible, dehumanising conditions – that were nevertheless better than sleeping on the street. It was a shocking and humbling experience that has stayed with me, even though I couldn't find a way to fictionalise it. The church offered shelter during the xenophobic attacks of 2008, and continues to offer support and assistance even as many try to ignore the dire situation of refugees in South Africa. There's been ongoing controversy about it, especially recently, but the people I met there were courageous and empathetic, and doing the best they could in the worst possible circumstances.

   Tim Butcher's Blood River: A Journey to Africa's Broken Heart provided a great perspective on the DRC, while Jane Bussman's book The Worst Date Ever: War Crimes, Hollywood Heart-Throbs and Other Abominations was a brilliant, awful and very funny resource on the LRA, specifically their actions in Uganda.

   Other books that proved invaluable include Bongani Madondo's Hot Type; Kgebetli Moele's sad, funny, gorgeous Hillbrow novel Room 207; Melinda Ferguson's harrowing autobiographical account of addiction, Smacked; Kevin Bloom's devastating Ways of Staying; and especially Penny Miller's riveting and sadly out-of-print Myths and Legends of Southern Africa – which haunted my childhood with its wonderful stories and distinctly disturbing illustrations.

   Matt Weems's fantastic website warlordsofafghanistan.com was such an intriguing and wonderful reference, I was tempted to abandon this book and write about that instead.

   Friends on Twitter leapt to help me with research questions on anything from storm drains to good places to dump a body (only a little creepy, guys). Thanks especially to @6000 and @ghostfinder for medicinal advice, @mattduplessis, @brodiegal, @gussilber and @louisgreenberg for general Joburg advice. And to everyone else who tweeted back about different species of gun or how easy it would be to lever a gate off its hinges.

   Various 419 scammers were very helpful in sending reference material direct to my inbox (you're welcome to contact me to claim a percentage of my royalties, although there may be a small administrative cost involved), but I owe greater thanks to the good people of 419eater.com and ScamWarners.com, the South African 419 Unit of the SAPS, and the victims I interviewed for Marie Claire and Cosmopolitan stories for their insight into scams and scamming syndicates.

   Thanks to my meticulous and highly critical readers: Sarah Lotz, Sam Wilson, Zukiswa Wanner, Lindiwe Nkutha, Verashni Pillay, Nechama Brodie, Charlie Human, Louis Greenberg and my husband, Matthew Brown – you all helped make this book what it is.

   Genius illustrators John Picacio and Joey Hifi created the two most beautiful covers in the world for the international and South African editions of the book respectively. They're both incredible in different ways, and both artists took time out of their insane schedules to do the work. I'm grateful.

   Marc "Marco" Gascoigne and Lee Harris at Angry Robot, and Pete van der Woude and Maggie Davey at Jacana have been exceptional and brilliant people to work with, as has been my editor, Helen Moffett.

   Finally, thanks to my family and friends – especially to Matthew and Keitu – for making everything worth it.

Lauren Beukes is a writer, TV scriptwriter and recovering journalist (although she occasionally falls off the wagon). She has an MA in Creative Writing from the University of Cape Town under André Brink, but she got her real education in ten years of freelance journalism, learning really useful skills like how to pole-dance and make traditional sorghum beer. For the sake of a story, she's jumped out of planes and into shark-infested waters, and got to hang out with teen vampires, township vigilantes, AIDS activists and homeless sex workers among other interesting folk.

She lives in Cape Town with her husband and daughter.

www.moxyland.com

EXTRA.

MOXYLAND WINNERS.

Last summer Angry Robot ran a competition in association with Authonomy.com to write a short story based around Lauren Beuke's debut novel, Moxyland. The winning three entries – as judged by Lauren, herself – are presented here. These stories may be read without having enjoyed Moxyland, but we think you'll get the most out of them if you've read the novel. So go read it. We'll wait.

INATEC BIOLOGICA INC.

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Minutes created by FACILIT4TOR PRO version 4.01 (licensed copy 10876-12).

Copyright © FACILIT4TOR INC. 2019. You may not distribute, copy, print, scan, etc. these minutes or parts thereof without written permission from FACILIT4TOR INC. For detailed legal information, visit facilit4tor.law.

MINUTES OF MEETING #4586 Ref. 32

Dated 27-09-2019

ATTENDING: (5)

List By Corporate Status.

Nwabisa Mthini, Vice president of marketing, Ghost Inc. (subsidiary of Praetorian Global)

Harold Brown, Legal Division: Corporate relations, Inatec Biologica

Jacques du Plessis, Corporate alignment official, Actisponse Private Security (Police Affiliated)

Busisiwe Zono, Liaison, Vukani Media

Jules Dyonashe, Bioinformatics Applications Div, Inatec Biologica

ABSENT: (None)

START TIME: 21.45

— Automatic reading of minutes of previous meeting by FACILIT4TOR PRO is cancelled at 0:07.

— Brown (Inatec) thanks all present for attending.

— Mthini (Ghost Inc) tells Brown (Inatec) to cut the bullshit.

— Mthini (Ghost Inc) reminds all present of the details of the enhanced branding campaign for the soft drink Ghost. Salient points are:

1) Vukani Media, in association with Inatec Biologica, was contracted to enhance the branding of the soft drink Ghost.

2) The enhancement was to include cellular-level biological modification of Ghost Inc.'s brand ambassadors.

3) The modification was to bring the brand ambassadors in line with the Ghost brand, as laid out in the Ghost Inc. Brand Bible Version 5.5 (Doc 564. Not found in archive).

4) The key phrases of the Ghost brand are: Youth, Aspiration, Peergroup Bonding, and Safe (pro-consumption) Creativity. — Mthini (Ghost Inc.) tells Du Plessis (Actisponse) to play Media File #13-586 [not found in archive].

[ SUMMARY OF MEDIA FILE #13-586

OPENING TITLE TEXT: "Broadcasting From A Little Pink Spaceship Orbiting Your Anus, It's The Toby Show!"

Footage cuts to a young man wearing a pair of sunglasses. His head is half-shaved. He is wearing an open BabyStrange jacket with no shirt beneath, leather chaps, and a pair of boxer shorts printed with a black-and-white image of female pudenda.

   The man, who appears intoxicated, narrates a clearly fictitious experience he had escaping from a police holding cell. The narration is punctuated as the man swigs from a family-sized bottle of Ghost.

   This story is interspersed throughout by video clips of sex scenes recorded on a BabyStrange jacket, in which the young man has coitus with a variety of women of different nationalities, in a variety of positions. Although these clips are not directly related the narration, they are tangentially connected to the action described. For instance, a description of the young man cutting through some prison bars with a metal file is illustrated by close-up footage of a penis being thrust repeatedly between a pair of breasts.

   Each shot in some way includes the soft drink Ghost, or Ghostthemed memorabilia, often in an inserted capacity.

   At least three participants in the video clips are recognisable social figures, media rated B+ and above. They include 17 year old pop starlet
, Luxury Travel Presenter
, and
, the socialite daughter of
.

   The fictional account of the escape cumulates in the man skewering his captors through their hearts with his own engorged penis, and carrying them around "like a kebab." ]

— Du Plessis (Actisponse) calls up a still frame from Media File #13-586

(Frame 2:41:15) revealing a bioluminescent marker on Toby
's arm. The marker is the corporate logo of Ghost Inc.

— Mthini (Ghost Inc.) suggests that everyone involved in the branding exercise should be subject to immediate dismissal and disconnect.

— Du Plessis (Actisponse) reports that Media File #13-586 has been downloaded 3,566,143 times in the last 6 months, giving it a pop culture profile of B (Underground – High Popularity).

— Mthini (Ghost Inc.) states that, together with other video files from the same source, this media file has irrevocably damaged the brand of the soft drink Ghost.

— Zono (Vukani Media) claims that the man in the footage, Toby
, is not, and never was, an officially selected brand ambassador for Ghost, and his actions are not the responsibility of Vukani Media or any of its affiliates.

— Mthini (Ghost Inc.) says that he doesn't give three shades of shit if Toby
is an official brand ambassador or not. He is clearly a by-product of the branding program.

— Brown (Inatec) asks Dyonashe (Inatec) if it is possible that a nonbrand ambassador could have been subject to cellular level branding.

— SILENCE (17 secs) during which Dyonashe (Inatec) flips through the print-outs in front of him.

— Dyonashe (Inatec) says that he cannot answer fully, as the branding brief contained elements that were classified at level A++. However, the therapies involved did have a contagious component, as specifically requested by Ghost Inc.