Lauren Beukes - Zoo City

" There you are." Gio collapses onto the barstool next to me. He still sounds pissy, although he's made some effort. He's wearing a very subtle, very expensive cologne. "Why don't you answer your phone? I've been trying to call you all night."

"My phone and I parted ways. Call it a tactical withdrawal." But he's not really listening.

"Was that guy bugging you? This place can be such a meat market."

"I need a favour."

"Whoa there, lady. I think you're already in the red on the Official Favours account."

"Have an argument with me. Outside."

"We're heading that way, let me tell you. Why would we be doing this?"

"We used to have great arguments, remember?"

"The neighbours three blocks over remember, Zee. As well as the Aftermath."

"Don't remember you complaining about make-up sex."

"I was too afraid," he grins. But he's getting off on this. We used to play games in bed, and our screaming arguments were always power plays.

"Come on. Outside. You may have to rough me up a little."

"That's a new one. You learn that kink in the big house?" He trails after me as I head towards the entrance. I just hope Ro won't completely destroy him.

Just before we reach the doors, I shove him hard in the chest, yell, "I said , just leave me the fuck alone," and storm out onto the street, exaggerating my limp.

He grabs my arm, bewildered. "Hey?"

"Get it through your head, Giovanni. It's over!" I may be overdoing it. The gin sings in my head. "There was never anything between us! And I'm sick of you following me!"

"Oh yeah?" Gio says, getting into it. "Well… what about the baby?"

"It wasn't yours," I spit, improvising.

"Bitch!" He raises his hand to pretend-slap me, but his arm gets stuck before it can begin its descent, clamped firmly in a fist the size of Gio's head.

"Your evening's festivities have come to a premature end, my friend," the man attached to the fist says. "Why don't you run along?" Ronaldo twists Gio's wrist down, forcing him to buckle to follow the trajectory of his arm.

"Ow. It's not what you think," Gio squeaks. "Ow."

"That's what I keep telling you, you stalker freak!" I say, my voice hitching. "It's over. Leave me alone!"

"You heard her. You have everything from inside?" Ronaldo keeps twisting until Gio is on his knees. Gio nods.

"Then have a lovely evening, sir," says Ronaldo, releasing his wrist. Gio scrambles to his feet. "Don't let me see you back here for a while."

"Jesus." Gio gives me a look so filthy it would make a sewer blush. "I hope you're fucking happy." He stalks away down the block, flexing his wrist and swearing under his breath.

"Thank you. You won't believe-"

"And you." He takes my arm firmly and speaks low: "I don't want to see you back here for a while either. I don't know what kind of game you're playing, but I'm not into it."

"Okay, I'm sorry…" I fumble, decide to come clean. "I was trying to get your attention. I know you helped Song Radebe and-"

"And look where it got me," he interrupts, taking off his shades, leaning close so I can get the full picture. Someone beat him ugly. His face is bruised, his right eye is a watering slit in a purple sack. There are cigarette burns on the inside of his wrist where he is gripping my arm. Perhaps the splinted fingers aren"t boxing damage after all.

"I need to know where she is."

"I didn't tell them," he says, frogmarching me to the corner. "Why would I tell you?"

"Because I'm trying to help her."

"I don't know that. Maybe you don't know that."

"At least tell me who they are."

"I'm so sick of you fucking zoos."

"Wait, does that mean it was the Marabou? The Maltese?"

"It means, don't come back." He shoves me towards the corner so hard that my ankle twists and my heel snaps off. He turns and heads back towards the doors with the light and bass spilling from inside, leaving me standing under the streetlight with less shoe than I arrived with. Dignity, too.

Sloth opens his mouth to sigh in an I-told-you-so way. "Don't even think about it," I say, popping a breath mint to cover the gin.

"We can't keep doing this," Benoît says, lifting my arm from the sweaty rumple of sheets. He turns over my hand and touches his mouth to my fingertips each in turn, the lightest of kisses.

"What, stating the obvious? What difference does one more time make to your wife? She'll have you for the rest of your life. Or until you get divorced over something incidental, like squeezing the toothpaste from the top of the tube. Or, you know, being total strangers to each other after five years."

"It makes a difference to me."

"Well, you'll have you for the rest of your life, too." I roll over to straddle him. "So, can you live with it?"

"Get off, wench."

"You don't mean that." I dip down to kiss him, leaning on his chest and the smooth dead scar tissue that doesn't feel anything.

"Don't I deserve some recovery time?" he says, pulling at my wrists as if he's going to wrestle me off. But he doesn't have any such intention.

"I'll show you what you deserve," I say, dipping lower.

I sit on the edge of the bed afterwards, my foot folded under me and fight with the cheap plastic lighter I stole from Ronaldo, which clicks like the luckiest game of Russian roulette ever. "Do you know where you're going?"

"Burundi. They're in a camp called Bwagiriza in the east, in Ruyigi. Safe from the fighting, they say. They're consolidating, moving all the people to one place. It's better."

"But still not exactly a holiday resort."

"They had to close the supertubes, it's true." He smiles, but it's as fake as the designer labels at Bruma Lake.

"Candyfloss machine broke down. The balloons have drifted away. The rebels took all the stuffed fluffy toys when they left. Have you spoken to her?"

"There's only one satellite phone."

"So you don't actually know it's them." I get a spark, but it doesn't last long enough for the cigarette to catch. Dammit. Flick-flick.

"The UN aid worker scanned a copy of her carte d'identité ."

"Could be stolen. Assumed identity. They do genetic testing in the UK refugee centres now to make sure you're actually from wherever you say you are. Have you asked for a DNA match to your actual wife? Do they have her dental records?" Flick. Flick.

"This isn't easy for me either," he says.

"Oh piss off, Benoît," I say, flick-flick-flicking the

lighter.

"I'm glad you've found someone else."

"That spying pigdog D'Nice can piss off too." Flick. Flick. Flick.

"It's good, Zinzi, it's what you need."

I toss the goddamn fucking useless piece of fucking shit lighter against the fucking wall. And instantly regret it. Now I'll have to go down the fucking stairs and buy another fucking lighter at the fucking spaza, which will probably be fucking closed at this time of the fucking night. I prowl over to the wall and pick up the lighter. The little plastic nib has broken off. It's well and truly fucked.

"Whatever is or isn't between me and Giovanni – you don't have a say in my life anymore, Benoît."

"I didn't know I ever did." He looks at me like I'm the bad guy. "Do you want to see photographs of them?"

"Why would I want to see photographs of the people you're leaving me for?"

"Because I'd like to show you."

"Oh for god's sake. Fine."

It takes him a couple of minutes to retrieve the photographs from his room upstairs. In the meantime, I manage to score a box of matches off a woman carrying a bucket of water up the stairs on her head.

Back in my room, Benoît takes the cigarette from my mouth and drags on it. I've never seen him smoke before. Then he sits down beside me on the bed with a bundle wrapped in plastic and bound with elastic bands in his lap. He starts slipping off the elastic bands and putting them neatly beside him. Some of them are practically rotted through. I'm curious in spite of the poison flower in my chest.

"When was the last time you looked at these?"

"Yesterday. Before that, I don't know. A year? Two years? I used to look at them every day."

He unfurls one Checkers packet. It's wrapped around another, which is wrapped around another, which is wrapped around a tight sheaf of papers bound in a piece of military green raincoat and tied with string.

It's a mix of photos and computer print-outs of photographs, already faded, the paper worn soft with handling and the rigours of cross-continental travel. Benoît, a woman and three children aged two to seven at a guess, posing formally, unsmiling in front of a low wall. Their features are indistinct. Washed out. They already look like ghosts.

The same woman, looking exhausted, wrapped in bright yellow sheets and holding a pinch-faced newborn, his eyes clenched against the light, a little girl poking her head into the bottom of the frame like she can't bear to be left out.

The same little girl holding the baby under his arms, carting him around.

The little boy sitting in a cardboard box, grinning to reveal one tooth.

The family posing formally again in front of a fountain in a city setting.

The same background, but this time Benoît is holding the little boy upside-down as if he's about to drop him into the fountain, while the rest of the family collapses in laughter.

But the one that yanks my heart into my stomach is the picture of the woman hiding her face behind her apron with a coy smile, playing a game with the camera.

Or rather, the man behind it.

"Celvie," Benoît says. "Armand. Ginelle. Celestin. He's the smallest. Two and a half years old. He has so much energy. You need a leash to hold him."

I do the maths. "So six or seven now."

"Seven. His birthday is in April. Next week. Seven years old. Practically grown-up. I'll have to start saving for his university fees." The corner of his mouth twitches grimly, not even a Fong Kong smile. We're both considering the impossibilities of university fees, of universities in general, of where a university degree might get you. My BA. Benoît's third-year mechanical engineering.

He starts to put the photographs away, re-bagging them in plastic, slipping the elastic bands back into place.

"What are you going to tell them?"

"That papa got lost for a while."

"And the Mongoose?"

"Ah," Benoît waves his hand. 'He'll get used to them. They might pull his tail, but it will be okay. He's only mean to nasty Sloth girls," Benoît says, shoving me for emphasis.

"Oof. Well, I'm not going to miss you at all ."

"I won't think about you for a second."

"I won't even remember you, I'll be so busy shagging other guys. I'll be, like, Benoît who ?"

"You'll remember the Mongoose when the fleas hatch."

"I won't. I won't remember you. I won't miss you. I never loved you. I never even liked you. And you smell funny. And your feet, your calloused nasty-ass feet? They're disgusting. I'll be glad to have them gone from my bed."

"You smell funny too," he 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.