and pissed off.
"Hello yourself."
"So, I just had this call."
"Uh-huh."
"Dr Veronique Auerbach. About Mach's journalist? Confirming that she's lined up some interviews for you. If you're actually doing a story, that is. She seemed sceptical. Suspicious even."
"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 wunderkammer in every window, hanging in every doorway. Tortoise shells, a wildebeest skull with a broken horn, shrivelled twists of dead animal or plant matter, it's hard to say, and drifts of magic, like a static hum in the air, a