fan-shaped shell with red striations with his finger. He seems impressed. "Whoo! Girl, either you have been messing with a very bad umthakathi or you're just a magnet for imoya emibi. I don't know if a chicken's going to do any good here. We might need a bull for this."
"I'm not really interested in sacrificing chickens or cows or witches or evil spirits or shadows. It's very simple. I'm looking for something. Vuyo said you could help me."
"Something? Or someone?" he asks slyly. "Because this little stone over here", he rocks the bit of quartz backwards and forwards with his thumb, "says you're not being open with me."
"Someone," I agree, grudgingly.
"Two someones," he says, his finger darting between two practically identical smoothed bits of amber. "Is it twins? Twins are very powerful. In Zulu culture we used to kill one of the pair to kill the bad luck."
"Can I add humans to the no-sacrifice list?" But I'm impressed and a little bit shaken, and he knows it. I concede, "I'm sorry baba, I meant no disrespect to you or the amadlozi."
He waves the apology away. "It doesn't matter to me what you mean or don't mean. Do you have anything belonging to these someones?"
"That's exactly my problem."
He holds up one finger with a quick little jerk. "One moment." He picks up his phone as if it's been ringing and pretends to answer it. "Yes, I know. Bloody cheeky. In her bag? Ngiyabonga." He sandwiches the phone between his shoulder and his ear, as if he's still listening and taps his finger in the direction of my bag. "You have something in your bag that will help us."
"Is it perhaps my wallet?"
"Hei. If you don't want my help, vaya. Go."
"All right." I shake out the entrails of my bag, my own constellation of meaningful objects. Car keys. My notebook, stuffed with clippings on iJusi cut from music magazines and a Greyhound bus brochure on fares to Zimbabwe and Botswana, both destinations en route to Kinshasa. Four cheap pens, only one of which is functional. My wallet, containing R1800, which is about R1300 more than it's seen in a long time. A lipstick (rose madder, matt, half-melted), Tic-Tac mints, S'bu's songbook, a crisp white business card (belonging to Maltese & Marabou), a pack of dented business cards held together by a hairband (belonging to me), a battered cigarette spilling crumbs of tobacco, crumpled sachets of artificial sweetener, spare change.
"Let's see," the sangoma's shiny forehead accordions in furrows of concentration as, following whatever directions he's getting via his phone, he picks out the songbook and my notebook. "Good," he says. He shakes out the clippings and chucks the notebook aside. He shoves the phone in his pocket and then, holding the clippings and the songbook in one hand, he pulls out a zippo lighter and flicks it open.
"What are you doing?" I grab for the songbook, but he yanks it away, holding it above his head as the corner of the pages starts to brown and curl in the licking flames.
"Helping you." The fire in his right hand has reached its height, flaring hot and bright and yellow, shedding burned pieces, like snowflakes, crisp around the edges. "You young people. No respect for your culture." A fragment drifts down: "Let's party, let's get together, siyagruva, baby, let's be free", a scorched society-page pic of Song and S'bu at the SAMA awards, posing in his'n'hers versions of a pinstriped suit with '80s-style braces and matching trilbies.
Dumisani yelps and flicks his fingers where the flame has caught them. The scraps of paper fall to the reed mat among the strewn rubble and the contents of my bag, still burning. He whacks out the flames, then scrapes together the scraps and pieces, cupped in his hands.
His initiate enters, carrying a wooden pestle and mortar, already full of ground and reeking herbs, a tin cup, a syringe sealed in plastic and a two-litre plastic Coke bottle full of a viscous yellow liquid. She bows and retreats, and the sangoma funnels the burnt scraps through the V of his hands into the bowl of the mortar. He makes a big show of grinding them up. Then he passes me the syringe in its plastic pack.
"I will need some blood, please. Don't worry, it's perfectly sterile. Just a drop will do." But as I unwrap it and move to prick my finger, he motions for me to stop. "Not you. The animal."
Sloth retreats behind my back with a whimper.
"I