Zoo City

by Lauren Beukes

  The pair come into the house dripping, and Mrs Luthuli goes scuttling off in search of towels.

  "Heita," Songweza bubbles, "I'm Song and we're iJusi and we're going to be massive!"

  S'bu punches her arm, embarrassed. "Song! Be more modest."

  Song frowns. "Why? It's true."

  It probably is.

  But while the twins may be the stars, this is undoubtedly the Odi Huron show. He indicates that we'll take a stroll across the garden to the newly refurbished studio to get a "sneak peek for your ears" of the new iJusi single, "Drive by Love".

  "IJusi is more than a band for me," he says, "it's a sign of the future. Song and S'bu are exactly what the new Moja Records is about. It's not about using the new beats in our deal with Babyface; it's not about getting every sub-Saharan Android phone pre-loaded with iJusi FutureSong credits. It's about this. People say the twins shine when they sing. I say that we should all shine; that we can all shine if we just focus, if we just get past what's holding us down."

  To emphasise the point, he sips from his bottle of vitamin water, part of his detox routine. It's a far cry from the triple shots of tequila that were the order of the day during the Detective Wolf era. The evidently healthy and clearly still razor-sharp Odi exudes the air of being a remade man, and iJusi represent a new sound that may well see his Moja stable eclipse the already impressive achievements of JumpFish, whose brilliant rekindling of bubblegum Afropop swept both urban and pop-rock charts, and Keleketla, the devilishly clever electro-pop-meets-kwaito street-jam that seemed to pulse along every street corner in 2004, before the band split with Moja over "artistic differences".

  And hey, maybe Odi deserves a break after everything he's been through. "Do I regret any of it? Of fucking course I do," he says, adding, "I also regret James not making it fucking clear enough that I didn't want to talk about it."

  I press. People want to hear his side of the story. The Bass Station deaths. Lily. He relents, pinching his lip, unhappily.

  "You have to understand. It was the fucking noughties, not the easy-swing 1990s. We were worried about people getting in – not someone trying to get out." His brassiness fails him. "Look, there isn't a day I don't think about that padlocked gate, don't wish it had never happened."

  What did happen was that armed robbers broke into the Bass Station in November 2001, half an hour after closing. It was still doing good numbers back then, even if it was attracting a seedier, druggier clientele than when it first opened as town's hottest nightspot two years earlier. When the robbers couldn't get into the time-delay safe, they took it out on the manager, Odi's business partner, Jayan Kurian, and a bartender, Precious Ncobo, who was helping him lock up. They tried to escape through the emergency exit, but in violation of fire-safety regs, the gate was locked. They were shot in cold blood.

  "It was a terrible shock. That these men could just break in and do this to me? To me! I didn't feel safe. I couldn't cope. I just quit. Walked away. Right out of the business. I was finished with it." He looks over the mixing-desk at the recording rooms beyond, his face reflected on the sound proofed glass. "The doctors diagnosed PTSD."

  Practically overnight, Odi disappeared from the music scene and removed himself from society. He locked himself in the house, spiralling into depression and illness. There were rumours of cancer, even Aids. Certainly, the photographs of him back then, in his studio with a fresh-faced Lily Nobomvu, show a man wasting away.

  "Lily was my angel, my saving grace," Huron says. It's no secret that the music side of Odi's business had been faltering since the mid-'90s. "The club was too distracting. The Hillbrow scene was rough. Gangsters and drugs and gun-running – and the gay scene and the sex that was going on, everyone sleeping with everyone else. I lost focus. The music suffered."

  Lily was the turning-point for Odi. After two years of "rattling around in here, feeling sorry for myself", he reinvented himself and adopted a new "life mantra" – his life philosophy. "I decided no interference. No drugs. No alcohol. Clean living," Odi says. "Good music that would reach out to people, touch them here, in their souls," he puts a hand on the back of his head. "People want things that stick. They're looking for something spiritual. They're hungry for that."

  He discovered someone who could sate that hunger through one of his talent scouts: a single-mother church chorister from Alexandra township. Lily Nobomvu made her debut in February 2003, with "Kingdom Heart", a solidly built, catchy single that didn't pick up much airplay, but sold lots of CDs out of car boots. Odi persisted, pushing the gospel angle at a time when kwaito was ruling the charts.

  In the wake of Brenda Fassie's fatal overdose in 2004, he positioned Lily as the pure alternative to the fast life of sex and drugs and disco soul that had claimed the "Madonna of the Townships". She went platinum within the month.

  But on 18 June 2006, two years and two albums later, Lily drove her car off a bridge. She was only thirty. The rumours of depression emerged only afterwards. "What can I tell you?" Huron says. "It was a shock. It's not that we didn't know, it's that we didn't know how bad it was. This industry eats boys and girls in different ways."

  Lily's nineteen year-old daughter, Asonele Nobomvu, recently hired as the fresh design talent for the hip hop-inspired fashion label Lady-B, feels differently. "[Huron] pushed her too hard," she said in a recent interview with the Sunday Times. "He was desperate for her to be the next Brenda, but how could she live up to that?"

  The bereaved daughter is not Odi's only detractor. Moro, who defected to Sony BMG in 2007, pulled no punches when asked about the man he once described as his mentor. "The man's got expectations a mile high. He doesn't let up, you're in that recording studio night and day, and he's just sucking it up. He's obsessive is what it is. All that time in that big old house on his own, the dying and shit? He needs to catch a wake-up, live a little, is what I'm saying."

  Odi scoffs at the advice. "What do you think I'm doing?" And it's true that things are happening for the once and future hit-maker. Whatever illness was dragging him down seems to be in remission, and he's got big things planned for the twins. "They're going to be bigger than Michael Jackson!"

  And as part of his comeback, he's just opened a new club, Counter Revolutionary. It's all been done site unseen, but he's quick to point out that he approved the architectural drawings and signed off on every decision, down to "what kind of flusher to put on the shitters".

  True to form, the new venue is already drawing a lot of press for the controversial decision to feature animalled dancers. Odi grins as he talks about three separate concerned citizens' groups that have protested outside the club, drummed up Facebook petitions and inundated the newspapers with complaints. It's a provocative move, but then, as Odi says cheekily, "Everyone deserves a second chance."

  He's also started getting counselling from a psychiatrist who comes by twice a week to help him deal with the crippling fear that has kept him a recluse these long years.

  "Give us a few months to figure out the right medication, and maybe I'll even see you on the dancefloor.

  "You ready to hear this?" he says, turning towards the mixing-desk. He cranks the volume and hits "play" on the file called "Driveby". It's an irresistibly catchy head-bopper of a song, sweet and fizzy with dips into a dirty, grungy hip-hop beat on the chorus. Songweza is right. It's going to be massive. And so is Odi, once again.

  Like Noxx raps in the remix of Moro's classic "Cul-de sac": Eye on the ball, ma'gents, eye on the ball…

  IJusi headline the Mzansi Unite stage on Saturday, featuring HHP, Joz'II (featuring Da Les, Ishmael and Tasha Baxter), Lira, PondoLectro and R&B/pop sensation JonJon (guest slots by Mandoza and Danny K), with DJs Chillibite, Tzozo, Jullian Gomes, and MP6-60. The World in Union stage features Mix n Blend, Krushed n' Sorted, Animal Chin, Spoek Mathambo, Dank and HoneyB.

  (Grand Parade Fan Park, gates @ 4 pm for big-screen game; concert 7 pm; tickets WebTickets.co.za)

  16.

  My new ride is
a '78 Ford Capri in burnt orange and good nick, apart from a few rust spots and a nasty scratch on the passenger door. It's not the only one that's a little rusty. I haven't driven in three years and the car handles like a shopping trolley on Rohypnol.

  Huron's heavy, James, handed over the keys without a word. Didn't bother to reply when I asked for the spare key. Wasn't there to help when it took me five tries to get the engine to turn over with a strangled choke, followed by a bout of spluttering and finally a sickly roar.

  With 22 years experience in treating addictive behaviours and other compulsive disorders, Haven provides a multi-disciplinary approach, including counselling, the 12-step programme and cognitive-behavioural therapy.

  A residential facility set on a tranquil and secluded country estate near the Cradle of Humankind, Haven provides a safe and supportive environment in which to reclaim your sense of self.

  I take a drive out to Hartbeespoort Dam, that favourite watery weekend getaway for landlocked city-dwellers. The urban sprawl thins out as the road deteriorates; kitmodel cluster homes, malls and the fake Italian maestro-work that is the casino give way to B&Bs, stables, ironwork furniture factories and country restaurants. The hawkers selling giant plastic mallets and naïve Tanzanian banana-leaf paintings and the guys handing out flyers advertising new townhouse complexes get increasingly pushy as the spaces between traffic lights grow longer. A grizzled bush mechanic sits under a corrugated-iron leanto, rolling a cigarette and looking out for customers attracted by the badly hand-painted sign propped up outside advertising exhaust fittings. A tea garden proclaims itself HOME OF THE ORIGINAL CHICKEN PIE! And then civilisation falls away. The road narrows to one lane and opens out into dusty yellow grasslands and farms cordoned off with electric fences under a ferociously blue sky, with puffy white cumulus clouds already threatening a late-afternoon thunderstorm.

  I nearly miss the turn-off to Haven, despite the very specific directions I was supplied with when I phoned to lie about setting up interviews for a non-existent story on the rise of rehab safaris for Mach magazine.

  "After the sign to the lion park, turn right onto a dirt road. You'll see the sign," the warmly professional male receptionist had said. It would help if the name Haven was not one of nine small, precisely lettered arrows on a discreet sign-pole, including the Shongolo Hunting Lodge, Moyo Spa, Vulindlela Country Hotel and the Grassy Park Country Living Estate.

  After doubling back (twice), I finally spot the sign and pull up at an intimidating black gate framed by electric fencing. I buzz the intercom and give my name. The gate slides open – Sim Sala Bim. I drive up the dirt road, if "drive" is the right word for what I'm doing with the Capri, which is behaving like a rhinoceros on rollerskates spoiling for a fight. I compensate by accelerating, kicking up billows of dust behind the car as it skids through the corners, past a copse of trees and a blue satiny wedge of dam with cormorants in the reeds.

  I barrel round the bend and a sprawling farmhouse comes into view. It's repurposed rustic chic: stables and warehouses converted to dormitories, judging by the neat rows of windows hemmed by sunny yellow curtains. There is an aloe garden in front, being tended by a twentysomething in denim overalls, her hair in cocky little twists. She looks up, shielding her eyes from the morning sun, and waves me towards an acacia tree and a row of white lines in the gravel that mark out the visitors' parking. I pull in between a Bentley in racing green and a white minivan with tinted windows and HAVEN stencilled on the side.

  As I crunch up the drive, the girl gravitates towards Sloth, holding out a piece of succulent.

  "Hi, Munchkin," she says in a baby voice. "Oh, he's so cute." Sloth leans forward to sniff the aloe leaf. He takes a tentative bite, leaving a smear of milky sap on his chin fur, and scrunches his nose at the bitter taste. "Aloe's really good for the skin," the girl says. "We also grow indigenous herbs and organic veggies in the fields out back."

  "No cheeseburger stand?"

  The girl restrains a smirk. Her lost things are like a halo of dandelion fluff. "So are you inmate or rubbernecker?" she asks.

  "Rubbernecker," I answer without hesitation. "You?"

  "I'm a screw. Or on staff, anyway. Used to be an inmate. Repeat offender. Crimes against my body. Puking sickness followed by heroin, which led to more puking sickness." I'd be surprised at her forthrightness, but that's addicts for you. The twelve steps crack 'em open and then they can't shut up.

  "You should grow hoodia," I suggest. "Isn't that a healthier way to suppress your appetite?"

  "More natural definitely," Overshare Girl agrees, "although I've never really got that argument. I mean, puffadder venom is natural. Dying of gum disease at thirty is natural. You know why the Khoi used hoodia in the first place? So they could pretend they weren't starving to death. How's that for messed up?"

  "Pretty messed up." I push her a little to see what comes out. "This a good place?"

  "S'okay. High on the spoilt little rich kids and schleb factor, but you only really catch the brunt of it when you're on the other side. But the food is good. Organic. You got a cigarette on you?"

  "Sorry, I tend to bum off other people. Anyone interesting?"

  "Schleb-wise? That British Big Brother star – the Pakistani girl? Melanie whassisface? She's really sweet. Not what you'd expect at all. She says they just made her look like a major-league bitch in the edit. Um. Some big-shot politician's son. Minister of Parking, or whatever. Some people just do their time, you know?"

  "You just doing your time?"

  "Sure. It's in the coding, right? It's funny, 'cos I used to be really big-time into astrology. Had a woman I used to see like once a month, sometimes twice. She was cool, even though I think she was making it up half the time. But I really wanted to believe that there were these magic celestial bodies that would direct my life, tell me what to do, and it turns out it's not stars, it's some bits of screwy DNA. I'm just meat with faulty programming."

  "That's why you've chosen to stick around?"

  "That gate you came through? It's like a revolving door. You go out, you come back in. Might take years, might take hours. It's inevitable. They tell you this stuff about cognitive behaviour and about breaking the pattern and being mindful. All I'm hearing is that there's no such thing as free will."

  "They give you a rough time?"

  She shrugs. "Some rougher than others."

  "I have a friend who was here, S'bu? He doesn't even like to talk about it."

  "S'bu Radebe? He was a sweetie. But really shy. He had a really hard time. Kid from the sticks. I mean, he shouldn't have been in here in the first place, even Veronique said, and he was having to listen to all these hardcore addicts talk about the bad shit they'd done, prostituting themselves, abandoning their kids–"

  Killing their brothers, I add to the list, but only in my head. What comes out of my mouth is: "He shouldn't have been in here?"

  "Ag, you know. Issues are like weeds. Everyone's got them. You can pull them up, you can poison them, even tually they'll just grow back. S'bu's too sensitive for the world. He just needs to toughen up a little and he'll be fine. His sister, though? She was nuts."

  "Aren't we all?"

  "Her and the boyfriends. Hei wena."

  "You mean like Jabu?"

  "Excuse me? Hi there! Can I help you?" I recognise the warmly professional voice I spoke to on the phone.

  "I'd like to carry on talking to you," I say to the girl, as the husky man in a checked shirt and an earnest smile starts walking over. "Chat later?"

  "Doubt it. The inmates are going on a daytrip and I'm driving." She blows Sloth a kiss. "Bye, cutie!"

  The receptionist leads me into the cool interior of the farmhouse. Whoever decorated has decent taste in art or, quite possibly, psychedelics. The reception area has wooden floors half-covered by a cheerful orange, red and blue woven rug. There is a print of Technicolor lunatic smiley flowers hanging above the hotel-style reception desk.

  In front of the desk two cream
and gold suitcases monogrammed all over with distinctive LVs are parked beside an oversized couch half-occupied by a boy who sighs dramatically and reposes himself, jiggling his foot impatiently.

  "I'll be right with you," says my guide, over his shoulder to the boy, ushering me down the corridor and through to an office marked DR VERONIQUE AUERBACH –EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR on the door, together with the admonition PLEASE KNOCK.

  He ignores this, flinging the door open to reveal the lady in question sitting tucked into the bay window that overlooks the garden, reading a magazine.