town's golden days. I pull myself out of the stream and take cover, pressing my back to the recessed wall and crouching down among the rubble, making myself as small as possible, but also ready to bolt. Sloth is curled against my chest, still in his sling. He's shivering violently. Scuttly things tickle my back. I resolve not to think about them. I'm
'Here, chick-chick-chicken!' Nasty calls from somewhere down the tunnel. He sounds pissed. He's answered by a girl's nervous giggle. Which means either Yellow Eyes is keeping mum, or they know the tunnels better than I do and he's split off, lying in wait somewhere up ahead. I've got to get back to that ladder.
Splashing sounds resolve into Yellow Eyes with his torch, followed at a cautious distance by Nasty wading down the centre of the canal, carrying his screwdriver above the water. There is a two-stroke gash across his face. I hope it gets infected. Wounds inflicted by Animals sometimes fester in strange and horrible ways.
I shrink back against the wall, Sloth hunches his shoulders to make himself smaller, tucking his head under mine, and we both hold our breath. They pass right by, Yellow Eyes humming tunelessly. If they move far enough ahead, I can double back.
Somewhere in their wake, the girl squeals in surprise.
'Stop messing around!' Nasty shouts over his shoulder, not bothering to look back. Busi emerges a moment later, edging along the embankment, using my phone for light. She is shaking her foot like a kitten and holding up a soggy sneaker, its dangling laces black with grime.
'Tumiiiii,' she whines, trying to wring out the shoe. 'It's slippy.'
'Then walk in the middle,' Nasty snipes back from down the tunnel.
She bends down to pull her wet shoe onto her bare foot. Then she looks up, straight at us. I put my finger to my lips, pleading. She stares. One alligator. Two alligator. Three alligator. Four alligator. Five alligator. Six alligator. And then she yelps, 'Here! Tumi! She's here, she's here, she's here!'
Shit. So much for victim solidarity. I shove her into the canal. She screams, a thin sound that cuts off abruptly as she goes under. She emerges a second later, thrashing wildly and spluttering, without her shoe
'Stand up!' I yell at the idiot girl, who doesn't realise the water is only waist-deep, maybe chest-deep on her. Nasty Tumi is wading back towards me, grinning, Yellow Eyes splashing up after him.
'You might want to help your girlfriend.' I stay where I am, back against the wall, searching out the rubble at my feet with one hand. 'The water's rising.'
'She can take care of herself,' he says, but Yellow Eyes stops to pull her up. She falls against him, sobbing, nearly pulling him under.
'What about you?' I ask Tumi. But it's just a play for time. I've found what I've been looking for. I close my hand over a broken brick, stand up and hurl it with full force, not at his head, but his hand. Tumi howls and drops the screwdriver. It plinks into the water and disappears, the current sweeping it away with the other detritus. Busi shrieks in dismay.
Tumi scrambles out of the water and lunges for me. But it's Sloth's arm he grabs, tearing him out of the sling and swinging him out over the canal. Sloth drops into the water, too surprised to make a sound.
'Now what?' Tumi leers. He doesn't see Sloth resurface or start paddling for the bank, his long arms stroking elegantly through the water. But he's losing against the current, the angle of his trajectory towards the shore getting sharper as it tugs him away.
'Fuck you,' I say and stab him in the side of his neck with the broken porcupine quill. I clutch onto my bag and plunge into the canal after Sloth without sticking around to see the results.
We wash up kilometres away, clinging to each other, battered from being hurled against the cement walls all the way down, with various additional minor wounds, including scratched arms and legs from a surprise collision with a broken branch wedged under the water.
It takes a long time to find the strength to stand up and carry on, and when I shrug Sloth onto my shoulders, he is so waterlogged, it feels like he's put on ten kilos. Sloth is ominously quiet. It's an indication of how much shit we're in because normally he's the first to complain, bleating rebukes in my ear.
The worst is that I don't know where we are. It's not like I'm the world authority on Joburg's storm drains, but I've been down here enough times looking for lost things to know the basic lie of the land. This is all unfamiliar. The tunnels are a scramble of pitch-black termite holes, some of them narrowing away to nothing, like whoever was digging them got bored and wandered off. The original gold diggings maybe, when Johannesburg was still just a bunch of hairy prospectors scrabbling in the dirt. Maybe we'll bring home a nugget the size of Sloth's head.
Sloth guides me through the dark, squeezing my shoulders like handlebars. If we could just find a lost thing, I could follow the connection back home, like a trail of breadcrumbs.
But hours later, we have not stumbled on anything, not a lost thing, not an exit, not even a passage that leads anywhere, just one dead end after another in the humid dark. Sloth squeaks once, a bleak little noise as I slump down against the wall. My feet are aching, my stomach is clenched, like hunger is a sweet it could suck on.
'Don't sweat it, buddy. We'll get out of here,' I say. 'No worries.'
But he can tell I don't believe myself. It's so black down here, my eyes invent ghosts to make up for the sensory deprivation, ripples of black on black. It's as quiet as purgatory.
And then Sloth chirrups and looks up with a sharp jerk of his head. Swimming is not the only thing he does better than me. I strain to listen. My heart drops into my gut. 'Is it them?'
There is a low rumbling sound, almost indiscernible, but it's building, like house music rising to a dancefloor crescendo. I stand up in a hurry. 'Water?' There are reports every year of kids who have drowned in the drains, caught out by flash floods that come out of practically nowhere while they're messing around in the tunnels smoking dope or looking for ninja turtles.
But Sloth clucks in irritation, shutting me up so he can listen. It's something else. He bats at my face with urgent pawings, the way he does when I've overslept. 'All right, all right,' I say, staggering to my feet and in the direction he guides me, towards the epicentre of the noise. It better not be a wall of water.
The sound reverberates through the tunnels, ramping up to a teeth-rattling earthquake. There is a glow up ahead, as if of civilisation. Hope sparks in my gut. I stumble forward, round a corner, into blinding artificial light. I make out huge metal ribs lining the tunnel like the belly of a robot whale. And then a whip of glass and metal thunders past inches from my face.
The blur of one shocked pink face staring out the window, mouth open in a perfect O of surprise, is the only witness to the near-death of Zinzi December by Gautrain.
21.
Brixton is not quite the new Melville, but since House of Nsako and now Counter Rev the area is definitely on the up, complete with irate residents complaining about noise levels and cars blocking their driveways. I walk up to the entrance, limping only slightly. It took hours to wash the smell of drains out of Sloth's fur, and I'm wearing a longsleeved top under my '60s pinafore dress to hide the worst of the scratches. Otherwise, we're pretty good, considering the traumas of the day: having to talk my way past Gautrain security, finding a taxi in Sandton willing to take a filthy, wet and stinking zoo girl downtown so I could rescue my car.
The sharecall phone number Vuyo gave me was for a taxi company, Quick-Quick. The operator was able to check the log for Sunday morning, 02h46. 'Yes, we received a call,' she said, gruffly. 'Pick up was for 14 Highbury Road, Brixton. Some kind of club. Counter Revolutionary? Heading to Morningside. So you gonna pay for it?'
'Pay for what?'
'Customer never showed. Our driver waited for twenty minutes. Could have got two more fares in. That's lost income. That's-' But I'd already hung up on her.
The doors of Counter Rev are dramatically oversized, glossy black with huge silvered handles in the shape of a reversed C and R facing off against each other. Hip hop booms from within, breezy lyrics over a richly malevolent melody. The bouncer is wearing dark sunglasses and a red and black jacket with a gold helmet insignia pinned to his lapel, accessorised with massively bunched shoulders and a hefty dose of aggro. But when I hesitate
