Slipping

by Lauren Beukes

  Four days go by before he sees her again. She is sitting outside the restaurant on the corner. She is with two people, a man and a woman, and although his first instinct is to duck away, to leave it, he turns towards her instead. He walks up to the table and stands in front of her, waiting until she notices him. It only takes a second, but it might as well be forever, and later he will wish that she hadn’t.

  “Oh god! This is the blackmailing freak I was telling you about.” She turns back to him. “What? Like I’d go out with a, what are you, what, a bloody traffic cop?” She leans back, her arms spread across the back of her chair and says it again for the benefit of her friends, “Like I’d go out with a fucking traffic cop.” She draws on her cigarette, the flare of orange at the tip is nearing her fingers, and exhales the smoke at him. She leans forward, towards him, her lips slightly open as if for a kiss, “You’re lucky I don’t report you for sexual harassment, you psycho.”

  He could clamp every wheel of her car, wallpaper every inch of glass with pink tickets. Instead he sinks down next to it. It is parked up the street, above Loop, on Dorp, where he normally would have no reason to go. He had to search up and down the streets to find it. He sits on the pavement beside it, his feet in the road, and rests his hand on the bumper. She still has not had the paint fixed. He picks off another flake and thinks to put it in his mouth again, to peel off all the paint, to sit here and eat her bumper. Instead, he just holds it in his hand, closes his fist on it and squeezes it, tensing every muscle in his arm, in his shoulders, in what feels like his whole body, until it feels like he is shaking with the effort. But it feels like nothing, like he is holding air, and when he opens his hand, uncurling his fingers, spreading them wide, there is indeed nothing there at all.

  I’ve thought about it myself, you know. Who hasn’t? But you need a catch, a hook, a way of delaying the restless trigger finger on the remote just long enough to grab the audience before the next commercial break. Because it’s not just static entertainment for zombie voyeurs anymore. You have to engage with your viewers. And Jude does that better than anyone else. But you have to be consistent. You have to stay fresh. It’s not easy.

  But Jude’s doing okay, if the queue snaking out from the Biko Bar is anything to go by. Special Appearance. She seems to be doing a lot of these lately. But then she has a lot of adoring fans. Much more than when she was just Koketla.

  Adil and I are fashionably late, which would not normally be a problem, except that it means we don’t have Jude’s security guys to protect us from the plebs, and someone in the line recognizes me. It starts a Mexican wave of excitement, and suddenly, everyone is screaming for Jude and surging forward, grabbing at my jacket as if she has left her mark on me and I can somehow convey it to them, like a saint’s relic. It takes two bouncers to fight them off, while the door girl quickly ushers us in.

  We push through into a crush of beautiful people and Adil whistles, or at least I assume he does by the way he’s pursing his lips. It’s hard to hear over the music.

  “How we gonna find her?” he yells.

  “Easy. Just look for the densest concentration of people.” And it’s true, for all that these posers are pretending to be about their own shit, they are drawn into a haphazard orbit swirling around the glittering magnet that is Jude. Whether they admit it or not. That and the cameras, of course.

  Craig, the camera guy, picks us up before she does, swinging the glassy eye towards us as we shove our way towards her. This always makes me uncomfortable, no matter how many times she ropes me in as supporting cast. It’s knowing that they’re there, watching, all the time. Live. I don’t know how she deals.

  “Hey Craig,” I say, raising my hand, only to have Jude’s manager Dirk, who is always lurking, but always just out of frame, grab me by the elbow.

  “Babes, please. How many times I gotta tell you? Don’t talk to the cameraman.”

  “Sorry,” I mumble, but Craig has already turned the camera back on Jude, radiant, like all the world loves her. I suppose much of it does. Or at least those parts of it with satellite access or broadband Internet.

  She changed her name three months back, just after she started. It was Dirk’s idea. He persuaded her that she was going to lose out on the very lucrative overseas market with a name like Koketla. Americans wouldn’t be able to wrap their tongues around it. “Think of your audience, babes!” And “Hey, Jude!” does make a catchy name for a TV show, I have to admit.

  “Did the mic pick that up?” Dirk mouths at the PA standing near the sound guy, still on about my talking-to-the-cameraguy-faux-pas-deluxe. But she shakes her head and shrugs. No big deal. Dirk still huffs at me: “How many times you been guesting now?” as if he intends to drop me like last season’s Italian shoes. As if he could.

  “Well, I am the best friend,” I hiss back.

  “For now, babes. For now.”

  I think she should have used her name, owned it, made it a running joke that no one outside of South Africa could pronounce it. Heck, most of the whiteys inside South Africa couldn’t manage it, but hey, whatever works for you, right? Anything to appease the ratings gods.

  It’s a very competitive market now that everyone and their domestic worker has public access broadcast rights and a private channel to call their own. Not to mention big-time sponsor deals. Even that grunty plumber Faisal who was voted celebrity most likely to choke on his own boringness is now the official spokesman for Drano.

  Koketla—sorry, Jude—could have gone the sex tape route, like that chick Magda: devouring men like they were going out of fashion. She worked her way through most of Cape Town’s eligible straight population—and that was just in the first season. Of course, some of Magda’s once-off studlings asked to have their faces or um, other body parts, blanked out, but I was surprised at how many men were totally happy to appear live on camera, naked, in front of half the world. No skaam whatsoever. Or maybe we’re all publicity whores when it comes down to it.

  Dirk has been much smarter with Jude. No cheap-and-nasty booty shows or lip-smacking tell-all YOU magazine exposés for Mrs. Mugudamani’s little girl. Although there’s been an FHM shoot and at least one Marie Claire cover. And sure, there have been lovers—she’s South Africa’s official Most Desirable after all—but it’s all tastefully shot, soft focus, low light. Dirk has stylists and everything. So much for reality TV.

  In front of us, Jude winds up her sparkling conversation with that old vulture of a gossip columnist, who must nevertheless be courted, be allowed to bask in her glow. And the PA, who has been waiting for this moment, makes urgent hand motions to us. I know my cue after three months of this. The crowd parts like the Red Sea, Jude turns her full radiance on us, frothy signature Smirnoff cocktail in hand, and purrs in real delight: “Hola, guys!”

  And this is part of Jude’s hook. Her authenticity despite all the artifice surrounding her. She is so genuinely warm and nice that you cannot help liking her. Even the Mail & Guardian arts critic is head over heels with her, despite himself, he says. And being so wonderful and cool and smart and gorgeous, Jude attracts other wonderful, cool, smart, gorgeous people who are interesting to watch.

  Her friends are all artists and DJs and rappers and poets—the creative elite. And occasionally, some reasonably attractive academics as wildcards, folk who can throw in a twist of gender theory or Marshall McLuhan-isms, to even the most arb conversations, about rock versus kwaito, say. That’s where I come in.

  Of course, you get the occasional product placement, like the Smirnoff cocktails or Adil, for example, who is apparently a shit-hot up-and-coming filmmaker who needs the exposure. And for a very reasonable fee, Dirk will place him center stage.

  If you ask me, Dirk should be the one with the show, with his pedicures and hair plugs and deliberately awful shirts in floral print or bold stripes, not forgetting his manipulative Sun Tzu stratagems. (That would be the ancient Chinese general guy who killed the king’s favorite wife to make a point about ar
my discipline—I might say in an aside, during my highbrow guest slot.)

  Oh, Dirk comes off as sweetie-darling charming, but trust me, he’s the coldest, savviest, most flamboyantly evil bastard of a marketing pimp you ever could meet. Although when I pointed this out to Jude once, in a rare off-camera moment, she just smiled in that devilishly cute way she’s cultivated, tipping her jaw slightly down and raising an eyebrow, half-sly, half-sweet, like it was obvious. “Ja-a. Lucky for me!”

  Right now, Jude kisses me warmly on the cheek and links her arm with Adil’s. Hmm. Is he to be a love interest, then? And I wonder, cynically, if that costs extra. While Koketla was genuinely that nice, that friendly, that generous, I’m realizing more and more that Jude only seems that way. And some bitter part of me hopes that she’ll mess up.

  “Shall we check out the VIP room?” Jude beams, taking my hand in hers. “I heard a little rumor that Lucas Radebe is here!” As her adoring sidekicks for the evening, we traipse obediently after her, Dirk’s security guards parting the crowd, off-camera of course, to let her through.

  It turns out that the famous soccer player is not in the building. Is not even in the country right now, and with the party starting to fizzle, we are ushered off stage left as fast as possible, because Jude absolutely cannot be associated with a dud night out, not if her sponsors are to be kept happy.

  I notice that Adil has been left behind somewhere along the way, which makes me feel a bit ashamed of my earlier suspicions, but then Dirk sidles up to me, while Jude is flirting with a star-struck fan, asking her to sign his arm: “And then I’m gonna go straight to a tattoo shop and get it inked over,” he says, a little too enthusiastically, which has the security guys edging closer.

  “So, we’re leaving now,” Dirk says.

  “Ja. I know. I’m catching a ride.”

  Dirk smiles, all teeth. “Well, I thought that it might be past your bedtime.”

  “No,” I say, “I’m good,” steadily meeting his look. A knot of irritation creases above one eyebrow, but then he grins again and slaps me on the back. “Okay, babes, have it your way. But don’t say I didn’t warn you. It’s going to be one helluva night!”

  There is still a line snaking outside the bar as Jude’s little entourage—cameras and minders and manager and me—spills out onto the street. Her signature limo, covered in graffiti by her brand-name boyfriends, is waiting at the curb, vapor billowing from the exhaust in the cold. “Brrr!” Jude says, with a giggle, rubbing her arms—she is seriously underdressed for the Jozi winter—and clambers into the limo.

  Dirk slips in the front with the driver, which is weird, I think. He normally follows in a car with security and the rest of the crew. But I don’t think anything of it until I climb in after Craig the camera guy, not even managing to close the door before the limo pulls away, tires screaming.

  “Hey!” I yell, realizing only now that I am fairly drunk. But then I see that there is someone else in the back of the limo with us, drinking a bottle of extra-dry Savanna (because he also has sponsorship deals) and wearing a black ski mask.

  He points two fingers at us, his thumb cocked like a gun, and jerks his hand up. “Bang!” he whispers in that signature husky Chris Isaak voice. “You’ve been jacked.” His cameraman, wedged into the far corner to try and take in the whole scene, zooms in on our startled faces.

  I am too shocked to say anything, but Jude, who is more outspoken than Koketla ever was, lets rip. “Excuse me, what the fuck do you think you’re doing?”

  “Hey now! Hey! Do you know who you’re talking to?” he says, patting the dull black weight of a Glock 9mm resting in his lap, still talking soft and low, cowboy-style. But of course she knows who she’s talking to. Half the world does.

  Joshua-X. Joburg’s number one white-boy hijacker, whose daring criminal exploits go out 24-7 on 136 channels around the world, not including subscriber Internet. He’s even started his own station, Tsotsi-TV, with a spin-off that has him mentoring aspiring juvenile offenders. Of course, a lot of it’s faked these days, but then so is Jude’s show.

  “You asshole! You can’t hijack my ratings!” Jude is effervescent with anger. I’ve never seen her more beautiful.

  “Just did, baby.” He looks directly into her camera, mugging, and says another one of his trademark lines, “So, let’s say we go for a little ride.” Weirdly, this reassures me, reminds me that it’s just a show and that Dirk is sitting up front. Jude realizes this at the same time and lunges forward, leaning over Joshua-X to beat on the glass separating us from the driver.

  “Dirk! Dirk! Goddammit!” She is almost sobbing with rage. Squashed next to Craig, I hear Dirk’s voice crackling in his headphones: “Okay, let’s cut to commercial break.” Craig lowers the camera and makes a slicing motion across his throat to Joshua-X’s camera guy, who looks disgusted, but nevertheless switches his camera to standby. Joshua-X looks amused and raises his cider to me, tilting his head past Jude’s armpit as she continues to beat on the glass. The limo pulls over.

  “Okay,” Craig says into his headset microphone and the dividing window glides down.

  “Dirk! What the fuck!”

  “Easy, babes. I thought we discussed this.”

  “You didn’t discuss him!”

  “But I said we needed a little drama. A way to spice things up a bit.”

  “We’ve been over this! Why can’t you trust me? The show works! Everyone loves it! Everyone loves me!”

  “Babes,” Dirk says, “I didn’t want to tell you. But MTV Europe is threatening to drop us.”

  “What?” Jude rocks back into her seat.

  “Serious.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Audiences are fickle, babes. Why do you think we been doing so many parties, so many openings? But this will make you, trust me. I spoke to Nike and they like it a lot. They’re very interested.”

  “You’ve already discussed this? With sponsors?”

  “Yeah, listen, it’s perfect. The country’s hottest criminal hijacks the most adored superstar. The ratings will go through the roof, I’m talking inter-stellar.”

  “Oh,” Jude says. “Oh. God. Well. Couldn’t you have told me, Dirk? Instead of springing this . . . this—whatever this is?”

  “Aw c’mon, babes, we know your acting needs a little work. It had to be a surprise.” Joshua-X snickers at this, and Jude scowls at him.

  “So, whaddaya say?” Dirk grins and throws a little fake onetwo punch. “We on, champ?”

  “Okay, okay,” she wafts her hand in resignation. “Whatever you say, Dirk,”

  “Love ya, babes. Now, Craig, we’re still on a five-minute time delay, right?” This is something all the live TV producers cottoned onto after that whole thing with Janet Jackson’s boob. It’s already come in handy for Jude—there was that time when a street kid threw a bunch of carrot tops at her during her Durban tour. Just blipped out of the broadcast, no worries.

  Dirk checks his watch. “Right, we’ve got enough time, let’s take it from the top, from when you climbed into the limo.”

  But I can’t keep quiet anymore. “Don’t you think this is a little disingenuous? What happened to reality, Jude? People trust you.”

  “Okay, that’s it,” Dirk snaps. “I’ve had it. You! Out!”

  “Oh no, Dirk, please . . .” Jude whines. “She’s my best friend. I need her here for moral support.”

  “For the love of . . . fine. But she’s not in the scene.”

  “Hey, mind if I take a smoke break?” Joshua-X asks, bored by the proceedings.

  “Just make it snappy,” Dirk says, turning back to Jude. “Now, babes, let’s talk about how we’re gonna handle this . . .”

  I stand on the pavement with Joshua-X, shivering in the cold night air, while Dirk goes over an ad-lib script with Jude. Joshua-X looks me up and down and purses his lips. I smile back, uneasily. “So. How’s it going?” I ask.

  “Yeah, all right, you know. Got all these wannabes, tho
ugh. Would you believe I got cats cruising around looking for me, actually trying to get hijacked?”

  “That’s pretty messed up.”

  “Yeah, they use cell phones to track my whereabouts, there’s like this whole SMS network or something.”

  “Hectic.”

  “And then I got guys muscling in on my act and I don’t just mean other cats with cameras, you know what I’m saying, I mean real criminals out there, real tsotsis, you know, pretending to be me, using my schtick to rob people. Now that’s messed up! Like, not cool at all.”

  Dirk emerges from the limo, a reassuring arm around Jude’s shoulders. “Good to go? Everyone?” We take our positions, Joshua-X climbing back into the limo, draping himself back into the seat with a fresh beer and the Glock in his lap. His camera guy susses it out through the viewfinder and gives him a thumbs-up.

  “Okay, now just like she was leaving the club,” Dirk says. He pulls me aside. “But not you. You can ride up-front with me.” Jude smoothes down her dress and shakes out her braids, drawing herself up and turning on her kilowatt smile, like she’s totally oblivious to what’s waiting for her in the limo.

  I climb in next to Dirk, but just as the cameras are about to start rolling, he slides down the glass divider. “And babes? One more thing. You gotta take a bullet. Just in the leg. Don’t worry, it’ll be great. It’ll make CNN.”

  “What?” Jude says, dazed, but then Craig shoves her forward and she trips into the limo.

  “What!” I shout, but Dirk rolls up the divider as the limo screeches away, the momentum throwing me back. He leans over and clicks on the intercom so we can hear what’s happening in the back without transmitting anything on our side. I twist round, shaking with adrenaline, frantically trying to find the button that will lower the divider, with some idea of clubbing Joshua-X on the back of the head.

  “Hey there, lady, you’ve been jacked.”

  “Please! Omigod! Please! No!”