The Down Days

by Ilze Hugo

  After walking for what felt like forever, he turned right, towards the Bo-Kaap, where rows and rows of candy-colored cottages lined up like dominoes on the slopes of Lion’s Head. The cottages, built as rentals for freed slaves and artisans back when the city was still just a speck, stood tightly packed together like rows of rainbow-hued Lego blocks against the cobbled streets.

  He climbed the white steps to the shocking pink cottage where most of his street kids lived. The ones whose parents had caught the Joke. Empty houses weren’t too hard to come by now, provided you had the right connections, and it was easy enough for a guy like him, with means and ways (who didn’t mind getting his hands dirty), to procure this one when the owner, a friend of a friend of a friend, kicked the bucket a year ago. The place needed some TLC, but it was nice enough, and better than living in an underpass.

  He knocked on the door.

  A young guttersnipe with a thick mop of blond curls opened it. “Elliot? Are you here about Elliot?” she asked, all swirls and spunk.

  “Who’s Elliot?”

  “Never mind,” said the guttersnipe, her face falling.

  “And who are you, for that matter?”

  “Seeing as you are at my door . . . after you,” the guttersnipe shot back. She raised her brows, and the curls coiled across her eyes in metronomic clumps.

  “Sans,” said Sans. “You’re new?”

  “Oh,” said the girl. “Sorry. I didn’t know.” Her suicidal locks coiled from twelve to six again. “It’s Tomorrow.”

  She brushed the hair from her eyes. Sans noticed they were red and swollen. The kid must be high as a kite.

  “What’s tomorrow?”

  “It’s my name. Like in the day after today.”

  Sans just stared at her crazy hair as it did its thing.

  “I moved in last week. With Elliot. He’s my brother . . .” The sentence trailed off, the word brother petering out in a kind of croak. Then she steadied herself and her pointy chin came back up. “Lucky said it was okay, that you wouldn’t mind. That a lot of space had opened up recently.”

  Another lock clocked in at six. Sans studied its arc . . .

  “Hey?” the hair’s girl said.

  “I heard you. Yes. Where was I? Lucky. I’m looking for Lucky. Is he here?”

  “No. I haven’t seen him since this morning.”

  “Any ideas where he might be holing up?”

  “No.”

  “You sure you’re not fucking with me, kid?” said Sans, resting one hand on the wooden doorframe. “I won’t find the little bastard hiding in there if I step in to have a look?” He took a step towards her, pushed his body over the threshold. Her breath stunk of sleep. But she didn’t flinch.

  “Whatever,” was all she said. “Do what you need to do.”

  He was about to push past her into the house, when he stopped. Her eyes. Her fucking eyes. Those big manga peepers. And the way they seemed to glaze over. They were spooking him. Making him think of earlier. Those gleaming black hole eyes he saw on the street. Why was he feeling so paranoid? What the hell was in Major’s hooch? Fuck this. He needed to get the hell out of here. Needed to think. “Just tell Lucky to call me when he turns up, okay? He has something of mine and I’d like to get it back.”

  The girl nodded. Sans started down the steps.

  “Hey,” she called. “Your leg?”

  “Yeah, it’s fine. Old injury. Shark attack. Real big one, too. Great white. Just get Lucky to call me, okay?”

  He turned around to go again. Then swiveled back. “I can cut it for you, you know.”

  “What?”

  “Your hair. It keeps falling over your eyes. Doesn’t it drive you mad?”

  The kid didn’t say anything. Just stared at him.

  “Just think about it, okay?”

  The girl nodded, but her black-hole eyes didn’t even blink. Sans suppressed a shiver. Looking into those dark, dead eyes, he suddenly came face-to-face with the realization that if he couldn’t find the kid soon—and more important—the money, he was going to end up with his own black hole of a bullet hole in his cold, dead forehead. Dammit, Lucky.Where the hell are you?

  - 17 - LUCKY

  When Lucky woke up, he was lying in a black metal box. His wrists were tucked behind his back, tied together with something cold and plastic. Cable ties? The box was moving; he could hear cars, and honking. What the hell?

  Then it clicked. A van. The woman he’d been talking to outside the therapy bar had thrown him in the back of a van. But why? It didn’t make any sense.

  His head felt heavy and muddled—like an old forgotten storeroom, packed to the rafters, in need of a good scrub. His left temple throbbed.

  A soft groan at the back of his neck made him jerk. He inched his body around and there she was. A girl. Tied up like he was. Older than Lucky, by maybe a year. With braided hair snaking across her forehead, eyes, and lips.

  “What the . . . You okay?”

  The girl nodded. “My name’s Lerato,” she whispered, her voice barely audible. “Yours?”

  “Lucky.”

  “Ha. Think we could use some right about now.”

  He looked at her, his face a question mark.

  The corners of her mouth crept into the beginnings of a lopsided smile. “Some luck.”

  Lucky’s wrists ached. “How long have you been in here?”

  “Hours, I don’t know. Since before you came. I could hear you and her talking up in the front earlier. Saw when she chucked you back here, too.”

  “My head. It doesn’t feel right.”

  “She drugged us with something. That pipe thing she was carrying around with her—did she show it to you, too? At least it takes the edge off. I’m not half as freaked out about this as I should be. Which is one small blessing, I guess.”

  TUESDAY

  - 18 - THE DAILY TRUTH

  OPINION

  IT’S RAINING CASH

  You don’t have to win the lotto to get rich quick. Just stand outside without an umbrella, writes Lawyer Tshabalala

  Something strange happened in Bree Street yesterday. I mean, even stranger than usual, people. “Just after 5:00 p.m. and Sick City was shutting shop when, fluttering down from heaven to touch our brows, Madiba’s face rained down on us,” tells street vendor Tamatie Johnson.

  But this wasn’t the Second Coming, folks. Notes. Hundreds of notes. Cold hard cash falling from the sky. And not small change, either. Not greens, reds, or blues, my broe, but bright, flaming orange ones.

  The bizarre incident brought the city to a standstill, as everyone and their mother ran in front of trucks, bicycles, skateboards, goats, cows, and carts to catch Madiba’s smiling face.

  “The wind was howling, and I was on my way to work when all these notes started pouring from the sky. Like magic. Or a reality TV show or something,” said Sick City resident Terrence Baadjies.

  “It’s God’s work. It has to be,” a local pastor on the scene named Oupa Ndlovu proclaimed. Another bystander, who didn’t want to be named, said if it was indeed the Almighty who was responsible for this, why didn’t He make it rain food rather than money as she was tired of the constant grocery shortages and block-long supermarket queues? To this, Oupa responded, quite rightly, that money was the lightest resource, wasn’t it, and nobody wanted potatoes falling on them now, did they?

  Now, readers, I’m not religious much, but I did go to Sunday School once. Anyone remember that parable about the bree weg and the smal weg (the wide road and the narrow road)? Wasn’t the wide road supposed to be lined with all the money and the girls? With a nice and toasty bonfire waiting for us at the end? Matthew 7:13–14, “For wide is the gate, and broad is the way, that leadeth to destruction, and many there be which go in thereat: Because strait is the gate, and narrow is the way, which leadeth unto life, and few there be that find it.” So, if this was indeed the Big Guy’s work, He sure has a bang-up sense of humor, right?

  That made me wonder w
hat the end-timers were saying about all this cash raining down, on Bree Street, nogal. So, I left a message with a spokesperson for the Church of the Four Horsemen in Adderley Street, but so far, no comments. But I’ll keep you posted, brothers and sisters, I sure will.

  Someone else did have something to say, though. When the Truth contacted her for a soundbite, well-known Sick City sangoma Mama Lily had another angle. She said the notes were a sign that the ancestors were finally favoring the city again—that they’d finally forgiven us and that the falling rands were a taste of better things to come.

  Well, we can only hope, my dear readers. We can only hope.

  - 19 - SANS

  He left the street rat with the crazy hair and made his way down into the belly of the city. A halo of red dawn fire was circling the sky. In Long Street, sleeping shapes, mummified in blankets from head to toe, lined the pavement. A volunteer health worker in a plastic suit was doing the rounds, checking for pulses. The blue-haired, dreadlocked dead collector, whom Sans played cards with in Greenmarket Square, was waiting in her van across the street. Her guardjie, a mouthy kid with a mullet, was resting his head on the dashboard with his eyes closed, snatches of sound escaping from his headphones through the open window and into the cold morning air. Sans nodded to the dead collector and she lifted a finger to her brow in recognition.

  A young boy was herding cows across the tar, funneling the brown beasts in a solemn procession through the rows of abandoned cars to greener pastures (the rugby fields of a nearby abandoned high school, he guessed). Sans could barely remember the time when these streets didn’t know cows or dead collectors. He thought about those American apocalyptic films he saw as a kid. Vicious viruses sweeping nations and the world coming to an end with a bang and a crash. One day you’re going about your business, greasing the hamster wheel as a midlevel salesman in a pencil factory, and the next day everything is at a standstill. In a blink you’ve turned into some kind of gun-packing Rambo who trawls the countryside fending off cannibals and living off fried rats. But that’s not how things tended to turn out in the real world. No bangs here. Things just kind of fizzled out slowly until the past felt like a hazy fairy tale that had happened to somebody else.

  The big brown beasts trundled past. He couldn’t quite figure how everything could feel so wrong and yet so right at the same time, ever since he’d met that damned cherry. And worse, now he couldn’t get her out of his damn head.

  What he should be worrying about was Lucky and the missing bag of cash, but all he could think about was the feel of the cold green linoleum on his palms as she dropped her shiny black anchors right into his cold beating heart. The way the strands seemed to change their hue as her body moved under the lamplight. Just the thought of it was enough to drive a man to drink. Not that he needed an excuse anyway—he hadn’t exactly had a sober night now, had he? Why hadn’t he just gotten her damn number, he asked himself for the hundredth time. Hell, even her name would have been a start.

  As he watched the red dawn spread, it reminded him of a song his mother used to listen to. For some reason that Sans could never quite figure, his mother seemed to own only one record, which she played over and over, while cooking or puttering around the house, until the lyrics of the songs and the singer’s deep, terrifying voice engraved itself onto his young, pliable brain.

  He could hear it now, as he walked. The voice. Singing about love being this burning, fiery thing. “And it burns, burns, burns. The ring of fire . . .”

  - 20 - FAITH

  Six a.m. Dawn patrol and the streetlights still glowing in the smog like mutant fireflies. This was the hour when the city’s health workers swept the streets for corpses. The council preferred it this way, bright and early before the rest of the world woke up. Leaving the dead to lie in the street after sunrise was bad for morale, and a PR nightmare to boot.

  Faith was sipping at the hot coffee from her flask, one hand scrubbing the fog-glazed windows with the sleeve of her shirt, when she saw him through the windshield, walking down the road with his hands in his pockets. The ponyjacker with the limp. Pony Boy gave her a nod as he strode past and she lifted an index finger to her brow in return. The guy was a weird one. Faith had a boyfriend once, a sportscaster who became a total stuck record when he’d had too much to drink, always finding a way to bring the subject back to his one true love—Arsenal Football Club. That’s what Pony Boy was like. A complete one-track road. Married to the job. He had this look he gave girls. Even some guys. Like they were all nothing more than hair on legs to him.

  Ash was resting his head on the dashboard, headphones around his neck, groaning to himself. She could only catch a word here and there, his usual early morning skit about “unethical working conditions,” “corporate slavery, man,” and “the big fat effing zombie machine.”

  “Oh, hush, what do you know?” Faith piped in. “You wouldn’t know a tie if it bit you on the ass. Here.” She leaned over, one hand groping underneath the seat, and pulled out a can of Coke. “This will make it all better. Promise.”

  “I see. Qu’ils mangent de la brioche. Let them eat cake.”

  Faith rolled her eyes.

  “Sugar, I mean. It’s morphine for the masses, you know.”

  “Shut up and drink the hexed thing.”

  He half-smiled, popped the ring, took a few sips. Then his head jerked upright like a jack-in-the-box.

  “Better?”

  “Much. Much, much. Thank God for sugar. Bring on the cake!” He rolled down his window, took a deep breath. “Ahh, beautiful morning . . .”

  “The living is easy,” purred Faith, like a diva. Ash had a thing for old-school tunes like these. Ella, Eartha, Nina, Frank, the works. He was full of contradictions like that. Always walking around dressed like that guy, Ninja, from Die Antwoord, or the ghost of Tupac himself. With this moer-me face one second and grinning like a mad fool the next. Anyway, the vintage tunes had rubbed off on her over the years. Their roots were entwining like an old married couple. It was something they shared now. Hazards of the job and all that.

  “Fish are jumping,” crooned Ash. “But seriously now . . .” He cleared his throat and spat a thick blob of phlegm out the window. “Back to the sugar thing. I miss Reese’s Pieces, man. Don’t you miss Reese’s Pieces? It won’t be long now until this whole Laughter thing gets sorted out and the borders are open again. First thing I’m doing when they open the borders is going online and ordering me some.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “Reese’s Pieces. You used to get them here when I was a kid. Like Smarties, but with a tummy full of peanut butter.”

  “No. I mean about the borders opening up.”

  “I’m sure you’ve read about it. The Sick City Gazette says the US have developed a vaccine. They’re getting ready to ship it in as we speak. The French are also close to a cure, so either way we’ll be rid of this quarantine nonsense soon.”

  “Ag . . .”

  “Ag what, Miss Paranoia? You don’t believe it? You’re going to give me another conspiracy lecture, aren’t you? Okay, spit it out.”

  “Fine. You’re right. I don’t believe it. The bullshit about the vaccines. It’s all a front. There’s no such thing as a free lunch. Never has been. They’re just trying to gather intel. The Daily Truth says the head of the Young Militants is hiding out somewhere in Grassy Park. And they’re just up to the same crafty shit again, that’s what.”

  “What do you mean, again?”

  “Don’t you know? Have you been living under a rock? Vaccines were how they got to Osama bin Laden back in the day, that’s what.”

  “Before my time. Way before my time. I was just a kid then.”

  “Well, let me fill you in. It was seriously dodgy stuff. The CIA organized a fake vaccine drive and got a bunch of health workers to put on their best Mother Teresa faces and smoke the motherfucker out. They put up posters advertising free hepatitis B vaccinations to the masses, but actually they were
collecting DNA in a scheme to find bin Laden through his family. Crafty fuckers.”

  “No ways, man. That sounds like some serious conspiracy-nut stuff right there. You should really stop reading that rag of yours. The Truth is warping your brain. Besides, even if you’re right, don’t you ever think about the consequences of spreading these kinds of stories? Of feeding anti-vax paranoia like this? People could die. Real people. Someone’s mother, father . . . someone’s kid.”

  “But it happened! Was all over the news back then. In all the papers, on TV, too! The government didn’t even deny it. Just kept mum. That’s as good as confessing, IMHO.”

  “Yes. Right. Let’s say I believe you and leave it at that. Agree to disagree and all that. Truce?”

  Faith pulled a face. Sighed. She thought back to a conversation she’d had with Lawyer a while back. About how there was no point in trying to convince people of something if they’d made their minds up. “Truth is,” he’d said, lying there on her bed with his arms folded under his head, “it doesn’t help if you show people the truth. They’re only going to ignore it and believe whatever they want to anyway. Even reasonable-seeming people are completely irrational when it comes to this—it’s like we can’t help ourselves. I read this article once saying that researchers have found that people get a dopamine rush when their beliefs are confirmed. That feeling validated makes us happy. Crazy, right? No wonder people don’t want to change what they believe. My biggest wish for the world is that people could stop pontificating. Dogmatize, sermonize, moralize. These are all swear words in my book.”

  “Truce,” she told Ash, and looked out the window, one finger absentmindedly stroking the bruise above her eye.

  It was quiet in the car for a while. The boy sipped the black sugary liquid in silence and Faith watched the world wake up outside the car window. The mummified sidewalk sleepers hatching from their cocoons, one by one, like moths. The bleary-eyed vendors pushing their trolleys laden with goods towards Greenmarket Square. In her side mirror, she watched the ponyjacker with the limp ducking into an all-night coffee bar down the street.