Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

"Helluva inheritance."

"It's hard. I get stressed. All the Starmakerz nonsense. The city, all the parties, warra-warra. It's a bad influence,

Joburg. But they're good kids."

"I get the idea that the boys don't know about Song. I told them I was a journalist, don't worry."

"Des knows. My son. Did he mention…" She looks to me for acknowledgment that I'm up on the family ties. "He said I shouldn't tell them. They're young. They're emotional. Especially S'busiso. He takes everything to heart."

"I noticed."

"I think he gets bullied at school. He doesn't tell me, but sometimes he comes home with bruises. And what if something has happened to her? How would they deal with it? It's better that they don't know. They shouldn't have to carry the worry. I told them she's visiting a friend."

"What is she like, Songweza?"

"She's smart, very smart. A's at school. But she's not like S'bu. She's popular with the girls. And the boys too," she says, with a little grimace of concern.

I'll bet, if that voice is any reflection of the rest of the package.

"Does she have a boyfriend?"

"Oh no." She looks shocked. 'Song would tell me. We have an agreement. No boyfriends until she finishes high school."

"Would you say she's happy?"

"Sometimes it feels like Songweza is angry at the whole world. But she doesn't really mean it. She just has her ups and downs."

"Which is why she's on medication?" She seems confused. "No, I don't think so."

"Nothing? Not even homeopathic? Muti ?"

"Oh yes. Yes, she sees a sangoma once a month. They both do. He gives them treatment to help with the stress. All this stress of being famous."

"I'm slightly – concerned – that you might not know as much about the kids as you think you do."

"We talk all the time. I cook dinner for them every night. Make their lunch for school. We go to church on Sundays."

"You know they're drinking beer? Smoking weed?"

She twitches and then looks at me with frank appeal. "They're just letting off steam. They're good kids. Don't tell Mr Huron. Please. They're good kids."

I get the taxi to drop me off in Rosebank and find the nearest payphone. It's an anachronism that the mall even has a working payphone, but I guess it caters to the traders at the African market and teens who have run out of airtime. Or the dubiously agenda'd, like me. I don't want to use my cellphone, don't want my number showing up on caller ID, in case I still decide to hang up. As if he'd still have it saved on his phone.

Because the truth is that I don't know if I can do it. Unless Prim Luthuli can dig up a useful lost thing, I am going to need a back-up plan. And the back-up plan involves summoning up the demons of my Former Life. Sloth does not approve of this plan.

"Ninth Floor Publishing amp; Print," the receptionist says, in a tone shot through with contempt. 'Hel lo ?"

I find my voice. "Can I speak to Gio – Giovanni Conti, please. Features editor on Mach ."

"Deputy editor. Putting you through."

There is a brief snatch of radio playing a housey number with a marimba riff, and then there's that signature drawl. "'Lo?" Giovanni has bed-voice the way other guys have bed-hair, apparently careless, but in reality, as meticulously styled as his irony t-shirts and cultishly obscure Russian designer jeans.

"Hey, Gio."

There is a long pause for processing time. Maybe even response-modifying time. And then he says, "Zinzi? Holy crapola. Where are you?"

"Downstairs. Can I come up?"

"No. Wait. I'll come down. Meet me at Reputation. It's the hotel bar across the road."

"I think they have a policy," I say, leaving it hanging.

"Oh. Oh right," he says.

Which is how we end up meeting under the fluorescent lights of the local Kauai, attracting the rapt attention of a cluster of well-pierced teens sitting around a plastic table loaded down with bile-green smoothies. While other passersby, the black-diamond hipsters and mall rats and suits, spare me only the sliding glances reserved for people in wheelchairs and burn victims, the Goth kids have no shame . They're practically staking me out. I raise one hand, busted-celebrity-mode, acknowledging, yes, it really is me, now please leave me alone, for fuck's sake. It doesn't put them off in the slightest. It must be something about dressing all in black that gives you a sense of social invulnerability. I'd be tempted to try it, but they're only playing at being outcasts.

Gio puts his hand on my shoulder. "Zinz?" He hastily removes it as Sloth snaps at his fingers.

"You were expecting someone else?"

He leans in awkwardly to give me a hug, thinks better of it and slips into the chair opposite.

"I like the beard," I say. "And the new cut. You're looking good."

"Thanks." He scrubs absently at the fine stubble over his skull with his palm.

But what I mean is, he's looking different. He's filled out, his face especially, and there's a hint of paunch under his button-up shirt. I wonder if he's quit the irony tees or it's just a button-up shirt kinda day. His sleeves are rolled up, revealing the tattoo that loops up his right arm, a neat line of dashes tracing the trajectory of a paper jet set to fly away up his sleeve; a tribute to idealism, to the absurd frailty of flight. I used to walk my fingertips up that line of dashes. It used to suit him.

I'm aware that he's evaluating me in the same way, comparing this Zinzi with the images in his database. Like a spot-the-difference game. Circle the lines around the eyes. Circle the torn left ear, where the bullet caught me. Circle the Sloth with his weirdly disproportionate arms draped over my shoulders like a furry backpack.

"So. Jeez. It's good to see you. What, how – I mean, the newspapers said ten years…"

"I got parole. Good behaviour. Didn't you hear?"

"No, I-"

"It's okay. I haven't been following your life either."

"Well, it's not like you've been posting status updates. Look, do you want something? A smoothie? A drink? A… what does that thing drink anyway?"

"Water, Gio. We're both fine. Don't sweat it. It's good to see you."

"Yeah. Yeah, it is." He ducks his head boyishly, but the effect is diluted in the absence of tousled fringe. The tectonic plates of whatever we were have shifted out from under us – call it contextual drift. Mind the gap.

We're saved from risking being the first to breach the divide, by the approach of Goth girl and her posse.

"Excuse me," she says, with the kind of boldness that means she doesn't give a damn that her blonde roots are showing under the black dye (although she's still tried to obliterate her freckles under a thick coat of base).

"Nothing to see here. Run along, kiddies." Gio makes a shooing gesture.

"I'm not talking to you. Asshat." The girl scrunches her face in adolescent scorn and then touches my sleeve as lightly as a butterfly sneeze, like I'm a saint, or possibly a blood relation of Dita Von Teese. "I just wanted you to know, it doesn't matter what you did."

"Well, it does, actually," I say. But my retort bounces off her like a ping-pong ball off an armoured car.

"We still think you're cool."

"Okay. Thank you." One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. The others watch reverentially, and when it's clear I'm not going to say anything else, or give her a blessing or something, she nods, and leads her posse off in the general direction of the movies.

"That was odd," I say, watching the black pack ascend the escalator.

"It's that Hyena rapper guy, Slinger. He's made zoos cool. You're counter-culture aspirational, baby."

"My life's ambition." But the encounter has cracked the awkwardness between us.