be told what to do. People less so. A hack spell to scramble SMSs on your business rival's phone – easy. An affection charm to make someone feel more tenderly towards you, whether it's a teen crush or an abusive husband – a little trickier. Lab studies have shown that some spells work through manipulating hormone levels, boosting seratonin or oxytocin or testosterone. Simple on/off equations. Most magic is more abstract. Capricious. It has a tendency to backfire. And the big stuff they promise, the Aids cures, bigger penises or death spells, are all placebo and nocebo, blessings and curses conjured up in your head. Not unlike glossy magazines, which also promise a better sex life, a better job, a better you. Trust me, I used to write those articles. And just look at me now.
Some folk have a real mashavi for healing, some can make genuine muti. But these are rare, and they tend to be out of the price range of someone like Elias. Which means another day of standing in line at the clinic from 5 am onwards, hoping to get to front of the queue before the cut-off time at noon, so as to procure seven and a half minutes of time with the burned-out nurses who have seen it all before. None of which is conducive to keeping up with your shifts.
Which is why it's even more of a surprise when I realise that one of the cooking smells mingling through the building is emanating from my apartment. I push open the door to find Benoît, still in Elias's too-small uniform, standing at the hotplate, cooking hot-dogs and pap and beans. The whole apartment has been swept and wiped down, and even the bed has been made. The generator is purring happily, a canister of petrol standing beside it.
"You're looking very chipper for someone who should still be suffering the mother of all hangovers. And what's this?" It will turn out that I have good cause to be suspicious.
"I can't do something nice for you?"
"Oh, I can think of several things nice you could do for me, with me, to me."
"You see how it could be if you just gave me a key."
"This was a one-time deal, mister, and only because you were still sleeping it off when I left. Don't get used to it."
"You don't like it?" he asks.
I relent, sling my arms over his shoulders and lean against his back. "S'all right. I guess."
"Get off, woman, I'm cooking," he laughs, shrugging me off. But he tilts his head all the way back to kiss me.
"Cooking? Or burning?" I tease.
"Merde!"
He insists that we take our faintly charred hot-dogs up to the roof, leaving the critters behind. He's even bought paper plates and napkins, and two bottles of beer. He also brings out his camera, a battered and hopelessly outdated Korean generic, barely a megapixel, and held together with duct tape. It's seen a lot, that camera. Whole documentaries' worth. But the only photos Benoît has shown me are the ones he takes of himself.
He's obsessive about it. He's recorded every step of his journey from Kinshasa to Joburg, photographed every major landmark, every significant crossroad or place he stayed for the night, every person who showed him kindness. But it's not enough to photograph the people or the places. He has to be included in the frame. Like it's not only evidence that he was really there, but that he exists at all.
By the time we reach the rooftop, I'm out of breath. People don't come up here a whole lot, especially since the elevators died, except to hang laundry out on a sunny day. Sometimes there'll be a party on the roof, to celebrate a wedding or a birth or when one of the local gangs feels like buying some community goodwill with a spitbraaied sheep and grilled offal. It can get ugly if people are drunk, at New Year especially. It's practically tradition for people to send appliances crashing to the street, storeys below. There are reasons the cops and ambulances are slow to respond to "incidents" in Zoo City – if they respond at all.
Benoît ducks under a laundry line, sheets and dresses and shirts flapping like tethered kites. Everything takes on a muted quality fifteen floors up. The traffic is reduced to a flow and stutter, the car horns like the calls of mechanical ducks. The skyline is in crisp focus, the city graded in rusts and coppers by the