Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

"Take off your shoes, please," she says and I slip out of my sandals and step into the consulting room. There is a sharp smell of imphepho – burning herbs.

" This is Baba Dumisani Ndebele, sangoma ," the young woman says, indicating the huge man built like a pro rugby-player kneeling on a reed mat in the centre of the cement floor. He is wearing a white vest and a red apron, with a leopard skin tied over it and a matching leopard band across his forehead. His head is shaved and shiny with sweat. It is much hotter in here without the fan. I notice there's a D amp;G logo on his vest, so subtle as to be the real makhoya. Fong Kong goods tend to shout their fake logos as loud as they can. So much for the simple life of serving the spirits of the ancestors.

" Thokoza khehla ," I say in greeting to the spirits, more out of some residual deference to my mother than anything I might feel myself.

" Thokoza ," Dumisani replies and sneezes several times. "My dlozi has told me about you." He waggles his cellphone, a brand new iPhone, significantly. "He tells me you do not want to be here."

"I didn't know the ancestors were SMSing now."

"No, he calls me. The spirits find it easier with technology. It's not so clogged as human minds." He taps his head for emphasis. "They still like rivers and oceans most of all, but data is like water – the spirits can move through it. That's why you get a prickly feeling around cellphone towers."

"And here I thought it was the radiation." I know I'm being disrespectful, but I can't resist. "So is there a spiritworld MTN? What are the tariffs like? I bet you get a lot of 'please call me's'."

" Hayibo, sisi . So cynical and you with a shavi . What would your mother say?"

I flinch. Lucky guess.

"My dlozi says you will need a reading. The amathambo will help guide you."

The initiate says quietly, "Please put the money down on the mat. It's R500." I comply and the thwasa quietly withdraws from the room, letting the curtain fall closed behind her.

"Shame, sisi ," Dumisani says. "It's because you carry your spirits with you. It's the state of the world, my sister. Seven billion people have a lot of ghosts. Sometimes they get lost. But spirits are heavy, nè ? They weigh you down. You should cut your shavi loose."

"Very funny."

"No joke. There are ways it can be done. It's like soccer – you just need a substitute."

"Sloth has got me through okay so far, thanks. Can we do this?"

"I see you are a woman of action and forthrightness. Yes, we can do this. Please take these." He loads up my cupped palms with cowrie shells and stones, a chipped nautilus fossil, dominoes (one broken), a twist of white beads around a piece of wood, a bullet, an MTN pay-asyou-go sim card – I guess it is the preferred network – and a tiny plastic figurine of an ugly purple monster with a shock of matted orange hair that might once have come in a Happy Meal.

"Now blow on your hands and throw them."

I just open my hands and let the contents fall. Dumisani looks irritated.

"You didn't do sports at school, hey?" He examines the constellation of objects, seriously. Sloth sneezes abruptly, once, twice, three times. The sangoma announces triumphantly, "You see, they are with us!"

I smile, but I'm thinking Sloth's propensity for discharging his nose is not so much a sign from the other side as a sign that the incense is getting up his snout. It must be obvious in my expression.

"You know, in my previous life I was an actuary," Dumisani says. "Audi S4. Four-bedroom house in Morningside, renovated. All the gadgets. Three different ladies I took care of, and they took care of me. Two children by different mothers. Private schools. Apartments. Cars. Then I got the call. In my heart, I mean, not on my phone. The amadlozi wouldn't leave me alone. Hakking , hakking , all the time. Like your neighbour's dog at three o'clock in the morning. These terrible dreams. The same one, over and over: my grandmother carrying a snake that climbed off her shoulders and walked up to me and entered my chest like a vagina. I got sick. So sick, my girlfriends thought it was Aids. They left me, all of them. They were scared. I don't blame them. I lost forty kilos in two weeks. The skin was hanging off me like when you have bad liposuction. Trust me, one of my girlfriends had bad liposuction. It looks very ugly."

"What happened?" There is damp sweat pooling between my shoulder blades and Sloth's belly fur. I want to shrug him off onto the floor, but I can tell by the way he's gripping my arms that he's not going anywhere.

"I stopped fighting it," Dumisani shrugs. "It's not so different, the statistical analysis, the number-crunching. It's just the same with the bones. It's knowing how to read them. Like here, you see." He turns over a white shell that has landed on one of the dominoes. It's the chipped tile, a blank and a three, with one dot dissected by the break.

"Now, this, this is bad luck. And here as well," he says, indicating the triangulation of the troll, the bullet and the broken domino. "Very bad. There is a shadow on you."

"Trust me, I noticed." Sloth huffs, his breath hot against my ear. But really, I mean the Undertow. The inevitability of it is crushing. Sometimes I wake up in the night struggling to breathe, and my chest feels as crumpled as a car wreck. Maybe that's all your talent is for, a distraction to keep you preoccupied until the blackness comes rushing in.

"And here?" The sangoma nudges a 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 some one ?" 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."

"Some one ," 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 amp; 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 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.