Zoo City Part 21

"Ninth Floor Publishing & Print," the receptionist says, in a tone shot through with contempt. 'h.e.l.lo?"

I find my voice. "Can I speak to Gio Giovanni Conti, please. Features editor on Mach Mach."

"Deputy editor. Putting you through."

There is a brief s.n.a.t.c.h of radio playing a houseynumber with a marimba riff, and then there's that signature drawl. "'Lo?" Giovanni has bed-voice the way other guys have bed-hair, apparently careless, but in reality, as meticulously styled as his irony t-shirts and cultishly obscure Russian designer jeans.

"Hey, Gio."

There is a long pause for processing time. Maybe even response-modifying time. And then he says, "Zinzi? Holy c.r.a.pola. Where are you?"

"Downstairs. Can I come up?"

"No. Wait. I'll come down. Meet me at Reputation. It's the hotel bar across the road."

"I think they have a policy," I say, leaving it hanging.

"Oh. Oh right," he says.

Which is how we end up meeting under the fluorescent lights of the local Kauai, attracting the rapt attention of a cl.u.s.ter of well-pierced teens sitting around a plastic table loaded down with bile-green smoothies. While other pa.s.sersby, the black-diamond hipsters and mall rats and suits, spare me only the sliding glances reserved for people in wheelchairs and burn victims, the Goth kids have no shame. They're practically staking me out. I raise one hand, busted-celebrity-mode, acknowledging, yes, it really is me, now please leave me alone, for f.u.c.k's sake. It doesn't put them off in the slightest. It must be something about dressing all in black that gives you a sense of social invulnerability. I'd be tempted to try it, but they're only They're practically staking me out. I raise one hand, busted-celebrity-mode, acknowledging, yes, it really is me, now please leave me alone, for f.u.c.k's sake. It doesn't put them off in the slightest. It must be something about dressing all in black that gives you a sense of social invulnerability. I'd be tempted to try it, but they're only playing playing at being outcasts. at being outcasts.

Gio puts his hand on my shoulder. "Zinz?" He hastily removes it as Sloth snaps at his fingers.

"You were expecting someone else?"

He leans in awkwardly to give me a hug, thinks better of it and slips into the chair opposite.

"I like the beard," I say. "And the new cut. You're looking good."

"Thanks." He scrubs absently at the fine stubble over his skull with his palm.

But what I mean is, he's looking different. He's filled out, his face especially, and there's a hint of paunch under his b.u.t.ton-up shirt. I wonder if he's quit the irony tees or it's just a b.u.t.ton-up shirt kinda day. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing the tattoo that loops up his right arm, a neat line of dashes tracing the trajectory of a paper jet set to fly away up his sleeve; a tribute to idealism, to the absurd frailty of flight. I used to walk my fingertips up that line of dashes. It used to suit him.

I'm aware that he's evaluating me in the same way, comparing this Zinzi with the images in his database. Like a spot-the-difference game. Circle the lines around the eyes. Circle the torn left ear, where the bullet caught me. Circle the Sloth with his weirdly disproportionate arms draped over my shoulders like a furry backpack.

"So. Jeez. It's good to see you. What, how I mean, the newspapers said ten years..."

"I got parole. Good behaviour. Didn't you hear?"

"No, I"

"It's okay. I haven't been following your life either."

"Well, it's not like you've been posting status updates. Look, do you want something? A smoothie? A drink? A... what does that thing drink anyway?"

"Water, Gio. We're both fine. Don't sweat it. It's good to see you."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is." He ducks his head boyishly, but the effect is diluted in the absence of tousled fringe. The tectonic plates of whatever we were have shifted out from under us call it contextual drift. Mind the gap.

We're saved from risking being the first to breach the divide, by the approach of Goth girl and her posse.

"Excuse me," she says, with the kind of boldness that means she doesn't give a d.a.m.n that her blonde roots are showing under the black dye (although she's still tried to obliterate her freckles under a thick coat of base).

"Nothing to see here. Run along, kiddies." Gio makes a shooing gesture.

"I'm not talking to you. a.s.shat." The girl scrunches her face in adolescent scorn and then touches my sleeve as lightly as a b.u.t.terfly sneeze, like I'm a saint, or possibly a blood relation of Dita Von Teese. "I just wanted you to know, it doesn't matter what you did."

"Well, it does, actually," I say. But my retort bounces off her like a ping-pong ball off an armoured car.

"We still think you're cool."

"Okay. Thank you." One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. The others watch reverentially, and when it's clear I'm not going to say anything else, or give her a blessing or something, she nods, and leads her posse off in the general direction of the movies.

"That was odd," I say, watching the black pack ascend the escalator.

"It's that Hyena rapper guy, Slinger. He's made zoos cool. You're counter-culture aspirational, baby."

"My life's ambition." But the encounter has cracked the awkwardness between us.

"You still eat sushi?" he says, and we relocate to a conveyor-belt place round the corner.

"So, what's up, Zinz?" he says, shovelling a salmon California roll into his mouth with plastic chopsticks, errant grains of rice plopping into the soya sauce. I once saw MRI scans of sushi in a magazine. In the stuff prepared by a master sushi chef, the rice runs laterally, so it's less likely to come apart. Not a bad life philosophy. Stick close, keep your head down, and you won't fall to pieces.

"What brings you to this part of town?" Gio persists, spearing a maki roll with one chopstick and cramming it into his mouth. He always had a rough edge.

"Research," I say, skirting the clamour of questions I don't particularly feel like dancing with right now. "I'm working on something, and I thought you might be able to give me some pointers."

"Autobiographical?" He's fishing.

"Ah, no. It's an article, a book actually," I ad-lib. "It's pretty early stages. It's on that kwaito band? IJusi?"

"Aren't they more Afropop?"

"Same thing."

"Not quite. And isn't it a little early to be immortalising the one-hit-wonder kids anyway? They won't last six months."

"Okay, look, it's for a feature I'm hoping to sell to Credo, Credo, so I can maybe spin it into a book on music and Jozi youth culture, part coffee-table book, part trend bible. Something that might actually make money." Even I'm beginning to buy this. so I can maybe spin it into a book on music and Jozi youth culture, part coffee-table book, part trend bible. Something that might actually make money." Even I'm beginning to buy this.

"So this is it," he says, clacking his chopsticks at me for emphasis.

"What?"

"Zinzi's Big Comeback." I learned to speak in capital letters from Giovanni. Learned to use a crack pipe, too.

"Hope so. Of course, I'm handicapped," I tilt my head at Sloth, who has gone to sleep on my shoulder. "I suspect this guy's going to make it a little harder to get interviews."

"You'd be surprised," Gio says, breaking out his lopsided smile. I find it's grown on me.

People who would happily speed through Zoo City during the day won't detour here at night, not even to avoid police roadblocks. They're too scared, but that's precisely when Zoo City is at its most sociable. From 6 pm, when the day-jobbers start getting back from whatever work they've been able to pick up, apartment doors are flung open. Kids chase each other down the corridors. People take their animals out for fresh air or a friendly sniff of each other's b.u.ms. The smell of cooking mostly food, but also meth temporarily drowns out the stench of rot, the urine in the stairwells. The crack wh.o.r.es emerge from their dingy apartments to chat and smoke cigarettes on the fire-escape, and catcall the commuters heading to the taxi rank on the street below.

I arrive home with a copy of every music magazine on the planet, or at least those available at CNA. I haven't seen Benoit all day. He was planning to fill in for Elias again, although when I left this morning, he was still pa.s.sed out, reeking of beer.