Moxyland - Lauren Beukes [5]
'So what's the problem?' I say, taking one anyway, igniting it with a light tap on the table.
'Oh my darling.'
'No, seriously.' I take a drag and the micronutrients kick up the sugar by 100 degrees. I am intensely interested, blisteringly smart, devastatingly witty.
'Your habit.'
'Which one?'
'Toby, please. You make me terribly tired. It's unconscionable. We've decided.'
'And that's it?'
'Well, of course you have a choice. If you'd bothered to phone Sunshine… It's just that we won't be enabling you anymore. We've already advised the trustees.'
I take another drag of the nutradiet. I think it's the zinc that does it, that complements the sugar, I mean. You have to watch it though, because vitamin C will kill a buzz dead.
'Oh for god's sake. You're on something now, aren't you?'
I lean back, put my feet on the table to a jangle of cutlery and crockery, cos there's not really space for it. If I can get her to cry, points go to me and everything else is annulled.
'So, how is father? Still fucking his boss? What's her name again?'
But she just looks at me.
'Really, darling.' Even the squashy-faced marsupial is the image of bored contempt, digging under its armpit with its perfect little teeth. Chalk this one to her.
By the time I get to Stones, my mood has not improved. The pool bar is not, shockingly, exactly jamming at eleven a.m. on a Sunday, even though it's one of the few places in Long Street that's still general access. No corporati pass or proof of income required, and the cams don't work too well. Which goes a way to explaining the general dinginess and a clientele that leans towards the undesirable side of the LSM spectrum – and also qualifies it as the ideal venue to plot Tendeka's next outrageous, which he's being generous enough to allow me to guest on.
It's a mutual beneficial. I score some quality vid that'll push up my streamcast's rankings, and he gets his exploits recorded for posterity, faces blanked out, of course. Not like those fucking idiot thug-lifers in Baltimore who were IDed and arrested by their uploads, in high-def. Tendeka and Ash are in the middle of a game, but when he sees me, he sets down the cue and crams me into a back-slapping hug of camaraderie, or maybe that should be comrade-ery for the Struggle revivalist over here. He's such a wannabe, so born fifty years too late. His dreads shoved up against my cheek smell of too much ZamBuk wax.
'Toby! We thought you weren't coming.'
'What, and miss all this?' I gesture at the near-empty pool hall, inhabited only by Tendeka and his go-everywhere accessory, Ashraf, a couple of oldtimers wedged in the corner, sinking their fifth beers already and not even lunch time, and the bartender, of course, who is tuned out to the soccer. The irony is lost on Tendeka.
'Can you tone down the coat? We don't want to draw too much attention,' he says, conspiracy quiet, as if he's telling me I have bad breath. Can I tell you how crazy it is that the visuals are freaking him out when they didn't make the motherbitch so much as flinch?
My BabyStrange is set to screensaver mode, so it clicks into a new image every two minutes. Here's a random sampling to give you an idea of what's displaying on the smartfabric that is so bothering Ten: close-ups of especially revolting fungal skin infections, Eighteenth Century dissection diagrams and, for a taste of local flavour, a row of smileys – that's sheep's heads for the uninitiated – lips peeled back to reveal grins bared in anticipation of the pot.
'No, see, Ten, that's where you're wrong,' I explain. 'It's camouflage, hiding in clear sight. By drawing loads of attention, I actually avert it.'
'You're not going to turn it off?'
'That's right.'
'Uh-huh,' he says, flat. And just in time, Ashraf swoops into the rescue, reprising once again his role as long-suffering BF and keeper of the peace. Mister fucking UN.