"Cape Town runs on koesisters, the Noon Gun, and four seasons in a single day"
Naledi Khumalo, 28, from Orlando West in Soweto, has spent two years on reception at Lion's Head Lodge, a screaming-lime former tailor's shop at the top of Wale Street with eleven thousand four hundred buttons under its glass counter. She is a professional background. She writes jokes for a late-night TV show at R150 a joke, she's afraid of heights and hates hiking, and her comedy pilot, FRONT DESK, has thirty-two good pages and no ending, with eleven days left before the deadline. Nobody who walks through the door is the main character, she has decided. Then the app starts moving guests around by itself.
Sophie Carrington is the face of a candle company called SOFT LAUNCH Co., with a yellow raincoat, four hundred people watching her livestream at one in the morning and a big secret in an envelope. Emma Whitlock, her best friend since Year 7, is the one who runs everything and laminates the itinerary. They are in Cape Town for Emma's thirtieth, and the new Plus One feature keeps finding them things to do together. Around them are Thiago, the Brazilian drummer from the Rio stampede video, who dives under the counter when the Noon Gun fires; couples influencers Brayden and Kaylee, who are building up to a sunrise proposal; landlord Uncle Ebi, his racing pigeons and his sister's koesisters; and a Partner Hub on the ceiling that sits in the corner, watches everything, judges everything and tells you nothing.
The near-misses pile up. Sophie's e-scooter loses its brakes halfway down Wale Street, and she becomes Turmeric Girl, a viral video with a sprained wrist. A door screen shows a bar marked Exposure, then flickers it away. Tannie turns amber whenever something goes wrong, and on the Lion's Head sunrise hike, in the dark, on the chains, Sophie's headtorch dies. Naledi keeps a note on her phone called THINGS THAT ARE PROBABLY NOTHING, and it keeps getting longer. Monday is the birthday: the cake, the envelope, the cable car and a sunset over the Atlantic. The forecast says cloud, and the wind is rising.
Age: 28
Type: Hostel receptionist and part-time TV comedy writer
Fatal Flaw: Has a joke for everything except the ending of her own pilot
Role: Protagonist
Age: 29
Type: Candle-brand founder and livestreamer
Fatal Flaw: Always means it, and always taps the fun button
Role: Victim
Age: 29
Type: Best friend since Year 7 and co-founder
Fatal Flaw: Laminates everything. It's a sickness, she says
Role: Plus One
Age: 25
Type: Brazilian drummer in town for the jazz festival
Fatal Flaw: Can read your heart rate from your footsteps, but not the Noon Gun
Role: Ally
Age: —
Type: Landlord, racing-pigeon man and tailor's grandson
Fatal Flaw: Owns the building, doesn't run it, and wants that on the record
Role: Keeper of the building
Age: ???
Type: Mysterious presence
Fatal Flaw: None documented
Role: Observer
From the Prologue, "Party of Two"
The thing nobody tells you about flying from London to Cape Town, Sophie Carrington told her followers, is that there's no jet lag.
"Like, none." She was lying on her back on the roof of the Lion's Head Lodge at a quarter to one in the morning, with her phone held above her face at arm's length and the clip-on ring light pinned to the collar of her yellow raincoat, so that she glowed like a saint in a very small, very bright chapel. "Eleven and a half hours on a plane. One hour time difference. So I've got literally no excuse for being awake. I'm just awake. Because I'm happy. Which is disgusting. Sorry."
The comments scrolled up the side of the screen, white on black.
\@jadeyboo_x: SOPH UR GLOWING
\@candlegirlclaire: is that the mountain behind u 😭😭
\@softlaunchfan_22: WHERE IS EMMA
\@m.ahmed.ldn: omg the lights of the city
Four hundred and twelve people were watching. At one in the morning in Guildford, which was also one in the morning here, apart from the extra hour that didn't count. Four hundred and twelve people who had nothing better to do on a Sunday night than watch a twenty-nine-year-old woman who sold candles lie on a roof in Africa and talk about her feelings. Sophie loved every single one of them. She did. That was the embarrassing part.
"Okay. Okay, look." She rolled onto her front, propped herself on her elbows on the warm tar of the roof, and turned the phone round. "Look at this."
She had been looking at it for twenty minutes and she still didn't believe it.
The roof of the Lodge was flat and crowded with things: a rusted oil drum cut in half lengthways and welded onto legs, which the girl at reception had told her was "the braai, and please don't call it a barbecue in front of anyone Afrikaans"; a washing line with three pairs of someone's board shorts pegged on it; two plastic chairs; a potted aloe the size of a toddler; and a tall wire cage against the back wall, draped with a tarpaulin, from inside which something occasionally made a soft, contented croo. The walls around the edge were waist-high and painted the same colour as the rest of the building, which in daylight was a green so bright it was nearly a noise. Sophie had called it "lime" when they arrived that afternoon. The receptionist had said, very politely, "Screaming lime. That's the official name. The owner chose it. We don't ask."
Fictional reviews of the fictional Lion's Head Lodge, quoted from the book.
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Loved the buttons!!" — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "The cooking class changed my life, I've put sultanas in everything since." — FreeToWander guest
⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ "Obsessed with this place, the Bo-Kaap is SO pretty, the scooters are so fun to ride down the hill to the Waterfront!!" — kaylee_t_oc
☠ "the hill is steep. brakes are a variable. risk accepted. ☠" — @HostelReaper