Zoo City - By Lauren Beukes Page 0,59

can do it if you're scared," he offers, with a hint of impatience.

"No, it's all right. Come on, buddy, just a little prick."

Sloth extends his arm and turns his head away as I punch the needle into the thick skin of his forearm. It takes a second and then a bright bead of red wells up through his fur. The sangoma passes me a dried leaf, and I swipe up the blood and pass it back to him to be ground up in the mortar. Finally, he adds a thick glop of the milky yellow liquid, which is pus, mucus or unpasteurised sour milk – I can't decide which is the worst possibility. I suppose it depends on the source. He pours it out into the tin mug.

"Muti?"

"Not for treatment. It's part of your diagnosis. Drink it."

I've drunk my share of dubious concoctions in my time, but I'm thinking more along the lines of nasty shooters. And there was the time I took a swig from a bottle of methylated spirits stolen from the art supplies storeroom when I was fifteen, but we won't get into that or the vomiting that followed. "If you think I'm drinking that, you're insane."

"You need to stop fighting," he says, and bashes the tin cup against my mouth so hard I cut my lip against my teeth. As I gasp in shock, some of the foulness washes down my throat. It is warm and slimy and bitter and sweet, like crushed maggots that have been feeding on rotten sewer rat. Like shit and death and decay. Sloth slides from my back, suddenly limp as a sack of drowned kittens. I drop forward onto all fours, heaving and gagging, but coughing up only long strings of spit. And then the convulsions start.

I am three years old, sitting in the park eating those small pink flowers that grow in the clover. They are unbearably sour and I shudder every time I mash one up between my teeth. And pluck another one to do it again. Thando falls off the slide. I am only peripherally aware of this, I am so intent on chewing up the sour little flowers. He runs up to show me his skinned knee with pride. Blood runs down his leg, sticky like honey.

There is a man with plastic gloves and a facemask picking out globs of brain and pieces of Thando's skull from the daisy bush.

The absence of my parents at the trial. When I try to call them from the prison payphone, the electronic blips monitoring how many seconds I have left before my money runs out also count down the silence stretching between us.

Pacing outside the ambulance entrance to Charlotte Maxeke's ER, smoking ferociously, practically chewing up the cigarettes. So absorbed in the loop of please-don't-be-dead-please-don't-be-dead and still high, I don't notice the shadows starting to drop from trees and axles and other dark places and coagulating. Slime mould does the same thing in the right conditions: it masses together to form one giant community with a single-minded intent. Only slime mould isn't accompanied by a howling sucking smacking sound like the sky tearing at an airplane. Slime mould doesn't come for you, to drag you down into the dark.

I am laughing and swearing as Thando – always the fucking white knight – drags me down the stairs of Belham Luxury Apartments, which were never luxury and barely apartments. Some of the other junkies watch blearily from their doorways, but can't be arsed to intervene. The others can't be arsed to even look. Like my parents can't be arsed to get involved, not after all my prior offences.

"Leave me the fuck alone!" I laugh and then scream and rail and kick and flail as my brother shoves me into the shiny new VW Polo that came with his shiny new promotion. "Why can't you just leave me–"

Songweza painting her nails purple in her anonymous bedroom. When she is finished, she spreads her legs and paints narrow stripes, like cuts, down the inside of her thigh.

The World Trade Center. Only the planes wheeling round the twin towers have dark feathers streaked with white, and long sharp beaks.

Afterwards, the daisy bush retains the impression of the impact of Thando's body. I am expecting a cartoon, a perfect Wile E. Coyote silhouette with arms thrown up in surprise. But it is just a crushed bush. Broken branches. Bruised and torn leaves. Stains on white petals as if from a rusty rain.

Where are your