says and kisses me on my cheekbone near my ruined ear. I tilt my head onto his shoulder. We sit quietly for a long time.
I'm swimming lengths at the gym pool at Old Ed's sports club. Back and forth, perfect tumble-turns – which I have never been able to do properly – at either end, back and forth.
I am the only person in the pool. The only person in the club, it feels like. I am churning up the water into choppy little waves. There is a whistle blowing out a rhythm I have to keep to, but I am falling behind. I can't keep up.
And far below me, so deep it's like this pool is suspended over a continental shelf, something is rising, swimming up towards me. Something with teeth.
23.
I wake with a start, my heart thudding. Benoît is fast asleep, lying behind me so we're curled together like a pair of quotation marks. His hard-on pokes into my back with innocent insistence, not privy to our decision to forgo the delights of each other. It wasn't the dream. There was a noise.
I sit up, listening carefully. There is the sound of running feet. A shout drifting up from the street. A door slams. More shouts. Gunshots. Unreasonably, I immediately think of Songweza. The way the sound is dulled, it seems like it's coming from the Twist Street side, and I glance out the window to check. The street is quiet, not even a plastic bag stirring in the trees.
The Mongoose's face appears at the end of the bed, nose snuffling as he stands up on his back paws to peer at me.
"Looks like it's just you and me." I slip out of bed, pulling on some clothes and a pair of slops. "The unholy alliance." Benoît doesn't stir.
The lights are on at 608. I rap lightly on the door and Mr Khan, the little tailor whose wife has a talent for weaving anti-theft charms into his work, opens the door a moment later. He used to have a small shop in Plein Street, but now he does what business he can out of Elysium Heights. His wife, Mrs Khan, supplements her charm-making by advising residents on government grant applications. It helps that her Black Scorpion is easily hidden in her handbag when she goes down to social welfare, with applications and ID books in hand.
Mr Khan beckons with little grabbing gestures for me to come in quickly before scurrying back to the window and the unfolding drama. I step over bolts of cloth and squeeze in round the sewing machine on the desk to the window, where Mrs Khan, their twelve year-old daughter, the sex-worker from across the passage and a man I can only assume is her patron for the hour have taken up viewing positions, all looking down over the street. We're not the only tenants enjoying a little 4 am drama. On either side of us people are leaning out of the windows to look, smoking and chatting.
"It's these gangs," Mrs Khan tuts, shifting her weight to balance the sleeping baby on her hip. "And that damn private security." The police are a joke with a punchline you've heard before. Armed response runs Zoo City and the downtown area the same way dogs piss on their territory. They're only interested in protecting their buildings. If a crime happens across the road, it's as if it doesn't happen at all. They lose interest as soon as it's out of their jurisdiction. Unfortunately, Elysium and Aurum fall out of the borders of privatised law. Our landlord is
too snoep to pony up for protection.
There is another crackle of gunfire. A muzzle flash is reflected in the broken windows of the building on the corner. Then a man scrambles out from the cover of the trees lining the avenue, firing back over his shoulder. His trainers make a tennis-court squeal as he skids on the wet tarmac. A Bear lumbers out behind him and looks both ways, as if checking for oncoming traffic.
This is not the strangest thing I have seen in our street. There was the attempted rape that was interrupted – Mrs Khan roused some of the larger men on our floor, and they beat the would-be rapist into a coma. There was the night D'Nice got stabbed, unfortunately not fatally. There was the murder in the stairwell a few weeks ago. But the weirdest was the night the owner of a local brothel paraded her girls