Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,103

on that bus swarms like a cloud of spaghetti.

And even here, there's that Zoo City hustle going on. Maybe it's not peculiar to Hillbrow. Maybe it's South Africa. You do what it takes, you take the opportunities. Vendors walk up and down the line of cars selling warm cold-drinks and chips, single skyfs or packs of Remington Gold. Two girls in short skirts and dusty high heels lean in the window of a 4x4 flirtatiously. It's a 24-hour border post. People have 24-hour needs.

Sloth is hidden in a rattan bag full of clothes with a hole slashed in the side for him to breathe. The bag is stacked on the roof amid a jumble of other bags, loaded with the kinds of things returning Zimbabweans bring home for their families. Clothes and canned food, blankets, appliances, toilet paper, sanitary pads. I will dump these on the other side. They're only a cover while I'm still in South African territory. Still in Inspector Tshabalala's jurisdiction. Never mind Vuyo's.

The Capri has had a paint job. It's now black. The window has been fixed. It has new plates to go with my new Zimbabwean passport in the name of Tatenda Murapata, twenty-nine, full-time nanny going home for a holiday. D'Nice sourced the papers for me, to make up for pointing the cops in the direction of my apartment. But only after I threatened to frame him for Mrs Luditsky's murder. He doesn't need to know I already handed over the knife after I retrieved it from the drain along with the china kitten. He even got me a good exchange rate on my counterfeit notes. Just because they're fake doesn't mean they don't have value, particularly when dealing with border officials who don't look too closely.

Beno卯t 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 Beno卯t'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.

Acknowledgments

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