Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

After trying on all nine dresses, twice, with an intermission period spent trying to recapture the wood lice that escaped when Sloth grumpily up-ended the tub, I settle on skinny jeans and a surprisingly tasteful black strappy top I borrow from one of the prostitutes on the third floor, after giving up in disgust on my wardrobe. When I say borrow, I mean rent. She assures me it's clean. For thirty bucks, I'm dubious, but it passes the sniff test, so fuck it.

I catch a taxi into Auckland Park with the late-night cleaners, the nurses and the restaurant dish-washers: the invisible tribe of behind-the-scenes. I get off after Media Park and walk up to 7th Street with its scramble of restaurants, bars and Internet cafés. Outside the Mozambican deli-cum-Internet café, a hawker tries to sell me a star lantern made of wire and paper and, when I decline, offers me marijuana instead.

I used to stomp here. Got bust smoking dope in my readily identifiable school uniform on the koppie and was suspended for two weeks. Did my first line of coke in the bathrooms of Buzz 9. Had snatched sex in a driveway on 8th before the homeowner called armed response. This should not be so intimidating. But when I see Gio fiddling intently with his phone on the kerb outside the Biko Bar, it's a relief.

"Hey, you."

He looks up guiltily and stashes his phone in his jacket pocket. "Hey, baby, you made it! C'mon, the guys are already inside." He ushers me towards the velvet ropes that have seen better days, and a short, wiry bouncer who is wearing a t-shirt that reads TRY IT MOTHERFUCKER.

"She's with me," Gio says and, although the bouncer is not happy to see Sloth, he gives us the tiniest of head tilts to indicate, yeah, sure, whatever.

The Biko Bar is to Steve Biko as crappy t-shirt design is to Che Guevara. His portrait stares down from various cheeky interpretations. A hand-painted barber-shop sign with a line-up of Bikos in profile modelling different hairstyles and headgear; a chiskop , a mullet, a makarapa mining helmet. Steve stares out with that trademark mix of determination and wistful heroism from the centre of a PAC-style Africa made of bold rays of sunlight. Steve, with a lion's mane, is the focal point of a crest of struggle symbols, power fists, soccer balls and a cursive "The most potent weapon of the oppressor is the mind of the oppressed". My academic dad would have hated it. Reduced by irony and iconography to a brand.

"I see they sell t-shirts," I say. "Do the kids' sizes come pre-soaked with acid?"

"Very funny, Zinzi," Gio says, steering me through to the back. "Don't worry, they're nervous about meeting you too."

Apprehension clenches in my gut like the moment before you go over the lip of the rollercoaster. I never liked rollercoasters. Gio swings me towards a table occupied by a small cluster of painfully hip people with expensive haircuts. There is a very pierced and inked woman with violently red hair and Bettie Page eyes, and two men, one in a hideous paisley print shirt and gelled spikes, the other in his early forties, a war photographer's waistcoat and a crafted coating of cynicism. They're all clustered around a big camera with a serious lens, examining the display on the back.

"Oh, ick," says the woman, pushing the camera away just as we reach the table. "Why would you show me that?" She hits the photographer on the shoulder, but it's a playful punch, the kind that says, I really like you, even though you show me gruesome photographs, maybe even because you show me gruesome photographs. "What's Dave got you looking at this time?" Gio says.

"Photos of the homeless guy who was killed," says Laconic Photographer Guy, the Dave in question.

"Ooooh, cool," Gio says. "I'd dig to check those out. You know, we have this new gross-out feature in Mach. Gangrenous feet. Puffadder bites. Ideally tied in to some kind of extreme adventure that's gone horribly wrong."

"Not much adventure in getting beaten up and set on fire. Cut him up pretty bad. Especially his face. Cut off his fingers too."

"Are you really going to publish these in Mach? " asks Ugly Paisley Shirt, clearly thrilled at the prospect.

"We're a men's magazine," Gio shrugs. "Men are brutal." And then adds hastily, "I'm not saying women aren't."

"They just hide it better," I say. Everyone looks at me, and then they all simultaneously switch their focus to Sloth. Paisley Shirt smirks. I put up my hand, like a kid at school volunteering the answer everyone's waiting for. "Hi, I'm Zinzi."

"Sorry, yeah, guys, this is my friend I told you about?" Gio's tone is loaded with things left unsaid. "Zinzi December. We used to work together." Sleep together. Take drugs together. Sleep together while taking drugs together at work together. It was a simple relationship, really.

Piercing Girl scootches round to make space for us to sit on the plush velvet bank while Gio does the introductions – the crème de la crème of musos in his immediate social circle, plus Paisley Shirt, better known as Henry. Dave is, as surmised, a news photographer for The Daily Truth , although he photographs gigs as well – mainly jazz, but he's done Oppikoppi four years in a row, plus the occasional feature for lifestyle magazines on the side. Henry does social media at a below-the-line agency, and a big part of his mandate is the music scene. Gio invited him specially. "He's the fag to Songweza's hag," he told me on the phone beforehand. "If anyone's going to have the dirt on your girl, it's Henry."

Piercing Girl is a hardcore music journalist when she's not being mom to a two year-old she calls Toddlersaurus. "Juliette writes for every one," Gio says. "All the local mags, as well as Billboard , Spin , Juke and Clash ."

Piercing Girl/Juliette rolls her eyes in pleased fake modesty, which I take to mean it's all true. "And what do you do now, Zinzi?" she asks sympathetically, leaning forward, giving me the benefit of her full attention. It's only three-quarters patronising.

"I find lost things."

"Like stolen goods?" Henry pipes up. "Because my parents' place was broken into last week and they got my grandfather's watch. It was a fob watch, you know, the one with the chain, like 102 years old-"

"No, like lost things. As I said. Car keys. Missing wills."

"For money?" He raises his eyebrows, as if this is more ludicrous than toasters with built-in MP3 players.

"I charge a reasonable rate for my time."

He warms to the idea. "Hey, you know, you could totally work at an old-age home where they have, like, senile dementia or what's that forgetty disease?"

"Alzheimer's," Piercing Girl provides.

"Yeah, I bet they lose stuff all the time, and you could take it back to them and charge them, and they'd forget they paid you already and you could charge them again."

"I don't think it works like that," Piercing Girl says, clearly having decided to adopt me as her pet cause. "Does it, Zinzi?"

"Who knows how it works?" I know I'm being antagonistic.

"But aren't there tests? I thought they did a full analysis?"

"Human lab-rats!" says Henry enthusiastically. "Only I guess sometimes there are actual rats, right? That must be confusing."

"In the US, Australia, Iran, places like that, they do a full head-to-toe, CAT scans, brain scans, endochrine system analysis, the works. In South Africa, we're protected by the Constitution." And the prohibitive costs of all that invasive testing. There are better things to spend government funds on, like nuclear submarines or official pocket-lining. They do a few basic measurements to try and quantify your shavi , but mainly they rely on reports from the social workers and cops, along with basic demonstrations of what you can do.