by T. C. Farren
Susan’s brown suede boots take up the pedals like little leather men. We swing past the live man on stilts advertising Eddie’s Gas.
‘Here we go. Lesotho. The arse end of the world.’ Susan glances sideways at me.
I save my laugh. One day, when I have my tongue, I will laugh out loud about driving through the arse end in a bulletproof suppository.
Susan tears open a Bar One and takes two huge bites, like it’s a burger. She offers a chocolate to me, opens another one without apology.
‘My next assignment is in China.’ She taps the screen of her car media system. A man speaks gently, entreating us to speak Mandarin. Susan asks, ‘Did you learn Mandarin at school?’
I press the air with my fingers and thumb.
‘You’re lucky. In those days they didn’t bother with it in the US.’
I don’t know about lucky, I’d like to say. In elementary school, they taught us the words you might need at a conveyor belt. Lift. Twist. Alternative item. Red light. Green. Later, our Mandarin teacher, Mr Li, began to groom the chosen few. We learned to say, ‘Tell section seven to accelerate.’ Or, ‘You no longer have a job.’
* * *
After two hours in Susan’s car, I could smoothly recite corporate management Mandarin. How will we benefit from this arrangement? What guarantee can you give us? Do you have a digital privacy armour package? I have seen the sights, thank you.
Susan leaves a fingernail space between the front of her vehicle and the bumpers before us.
‘What’s this?’ she mutters. ‘A Sunday drive?’
A slight shift causes a hard drift of the car to the right, a hurtle towards an oncoming car. A mere twitch slaps us back in front of three flatbed trucks, just missing a string of car comets.
Once, Susan glances at my cheek and starts to ask, ‘That scar, was it from . . .?’
She ramps a blind rise, freefalls into a double-lane speed belt. Her question is a passing curiosity, dust from the recent past, part of the unremembered distance streaming behind us.
* * *
Susan doesn’t look at the view, even when we get near Egoli with its repopulated mine dumps, their terraces glinting black, their fountains so high you can see the water evaporating. ‘Shit heaps’ they call them, the workers like me. The shit heaps glimmer with rim-flow pools. I learned the term in the surplus Good Living magazines that came to the refugee camp still in their wrapping. We flicked through pictures of solar-charged chandeliers, garden statues of Mr Mandela in his suit among the ‘poor man’s orchids’ of the rich. There were wall-length sofas with floor connections for massage and warmth, photographed with huge house-cats fed on chicken intestines. Positively Feline, said the heading. One sofa had a young, live lion arranged across the back rest. Its golden eyes looked drugged, its body well fleshed like the lions Templeton Industries bred for the trophy hunters to prey on. The rogue lions, on the other hand, were skinny and wild, refusing a clumsy death at the hands of the panting, flaccid men who came all the way from America on jet planes to kill cats bigger than the ones that kneaded their pillows and meowed for tinned chicken.
No.
I shut my eyes. Why Bhajo? Why now?
* * *
Three hours from the city, the BMW slides past slow white figures on a golf course. A small white ball climbs the sky. A pale airport runway unrolls past the pressed green fields. Susan stops before a tall, gaunt guard. He meets my eyes once, sneaks a hostile shot. I know what it means. It means, Refugee.
‘How are things, Matla?’ Susan asks him.
‘Problems with kids on motorbikes. Racing.’
‘Brats,’ Susan says.
The guard flicks the boom up like it’s a toothpick. In the distance, three white helicrafts dip their noses at a white building.
* * *
Susan fetches her copper urn from the back seat, clamps a hand into my shoulder muscle.
‘Don’t let me down.’
As if, now that I’ve endured her chocolate farts and listened to her labouring through corporate Mandarin, now that I’ve sweated before impact perhaps five hundred times, we are friends.
I get out, embarrassed for Susan.
A pale hand waves from the door of the nearest helicraft.
I follow Susan’s shoes, crushing loose pebbles like little sadomasochists; keep my eyes off the white beast looming before us. I was airlifted on a stretcher to a field hospital, they said, but I was deeply descending then, clawing towards death.
I am about to fly for the first conscious time in my life.
Susan climbs the five stairs. Dragonfly, 554 FP, it says on the underbelly.
‘Malachi. This is Mr Rawlins.’ Susan turns to the captain, ‘Malachi’s mute.’ She drops her voice, murmurs, ‘Not deaf and dumb.’
‘Ah, good,’ the pilot smiles like he is genuinely pleased for me.
He has sliding silver hair in a side parting, white chinos, a collared white shirt. His teeth glow white. He has a white film on his tongue too, perhaps from the coffee in his polystyrene cup. Susan gives Mr Rawlins the copper urn with the red ribbon, holds out her hand to me. ‘Godspeed.’
She pounds down the stairs, swings her broad rear towards her too-thin BMW.
I drop into a seat, buckle up before the pilot tells me to.
Mr Rawlins leans across, taps the window. ‘Watch out for golf balls.’
Is he joking? The pilot smells of tobacco smoke. The hairs in his nose are coated in nicotine. I need him to be perfect, but I am dismayed to see two small spots of sweat at his underarm seams. A second bad sign, apart from the fungus on his tongue. Mr Rawlins opens a tiny Perspex fridge filled with stumpy Coca Colas and nine pie packets with pictures of little pigs.
‘All yours,’ he says. ‘It’s a nine-hour flight. We cross a time zone, so we arrive the same day.’
One piggy pie for every hour of flying.
The pilot folds into his cockpit and lights up a cigarette. The alarm screams indignantly.
Is he crazy?
‘Don’t worry, the petrol tank is at the back.’
I cough loudly, twice. He touches a button. Some kind of vacuum sucks his smoke straight up. Mr Rawlins starts the engines and coasts gently out of the range of bad golfers and their hard, white balls abducted by the wind.
There is the sound of air escaping under terrible pressure. As we lift up, my body dives for the earth, yearning. The pilot takes off with a stream of smoke pulling from his head. Nine little pigs smile through the Perspex.
This must be what they call adventure.
As we rise I let my eyes drop through the glass, see the crowns of houses and upended skirts of trees. The Dragonfly erupts through the clouds with barely a sound, more like a hum, as if the thin vacuum that removes the man’s smoke is keeping this craft in the sky.
* * *
After two hours, I am part of the Dragonfly. The machine breathes its mechanical breath through the soles of my sneakers as it takes me up to rub shoulders with the sun, fly within earshot of heaven, get the first whisper in. My fear is gone. The Dragonfly is taking me gracefully to a miracle of science. I will soon become a Raizier quality product.
Joy is fecund, but it rots easily. A dusting of old yellow appears on the rims of the pilot’s white sleeves. Fluff forms, a gathering audience to our exhaustion. Several times I check my GPS on my timepiece but it says, Aircraft Tracker Block On. Mr Rawlins doesn’t bother to speak to me, as if his words would be wasted on a mute.
The earth turns to heaving, sucking blue, but I would not call it a colour. It is a state, a plane, almost astronomical. I have seen the sea three times at Ladebi beach but this sea is as wilful as a seizure, as crushing as the unconscious mind. I would not call it blue.
* * *
After five more hours, the Dragonfly starts to slide from the sky. From a distance, the oil rig is a greedy creature crouched over its prey, covering it for consumption or mating. Closer, it’s a piece of industry broken off, a floating bloc
k of factory, with cement beams and steel cylinders sinking into the water, rooting it, I can only hope, in the earth’s core. Towers of criss-cross struts climb towards the sky as if someone was trying to build scaffolding to heaven. On the highest deck, a tall, round tower glitters near a landing ring. At the edge of the deck, an orange torpedo tilts down at forty-five degrees. A hi-tech lifeboat, ready to freefall into the sea.
As we fly closer, the sea smashes at the rig’s metal legs, turns them into twigs to be snapped off with a careless slap before the water demolishes the rig, devours it without tasting. The Dragonfly descends.
I can swim. I can swim, I tell myself desperately.
The pilot does something astonishing. He works the controls with one hand and pulls his shirt over his head with the other. Mr Rawlins has unexpectedly big breasts. He covers them up with a perfectly pressed shirt, identical to the one in which he’s spent nine hours sloughing skin. He clips down his mirror, combs his silver hair so it shines like the rotor blades through the window. He starts to brush his teeth, switching hands on the levers. He spits foam into his cup, speaks into the stiff wire on his cheek.
‘Nadras tower, Dragonfly 554FP, seventy feet and descending. Landing estimated at thirty-five seconds.’
I grip my seat as the rig heaves to meet me. As the deep sea separates into green, grey, black, I see black fins like plastic, pricking curiously in the water beneath the rig.
Am I dreaming?
A pillow of wind tries to stop us from touching down. We find a second of surrender, dive the last ten metres.
We land more heavily than one would expect from a man with excellent hygiene and a silver side flick, a man who is too important to communicate with a mute.
* * *
A Chinese woman stands like a sculpture cut from pearly white rock. After hours of flying, all the pilot gets is a slight bow. Her eyes are so black the midday sun tints them magenta.
‘Malachi Dakwaa.’ She smiles out of custom rather than kindness. ‘I am Meirong. The logistics controller on this project.’ She is wearing a black dress, square at her neck. There are black radio devices clipped to her waist, which is impossibly slim. Nipped. Her shoes are low and black.
I brace against the faint rocking of the rig, keep my eyes off the pale, polished bump rising above her ankle strap. The hair on her head is simply black water. She nods. ‘Come with me.’
Her flesh is shinier, more solid than I have ever seen. She is made of the same stuff as the life-size Buddha I saw in a garden shop once, but this woman is not the offspring of a gurgling teacher of joy without cause. She is the marble tree under which the fat man sat.
A black man steps from a huge old lifeboat with a torn-off roof. I want to duck away from his AK97, but I’ve taught myself to plant my feet, breathe before security personnel. The man’s muscles are laid in thin, strong strips, I can tell by his easy flex on the slightly shifting surface. Metal jangles with each tread, as if his pockets are heavy with loose change. His eyes are as bleak as the surface of this rig.
Oh, God. His epaulettes.
My fists form into bone.
They bear the same sign as the ANIM. I suck air through my teeth, force my eyes to the devil-thorn insignia on his chest. Nadras Oil, it says. A barbed star with a right angle hooked to each tip. A drilling emblem with a clockwise momentum, not the insignia of the devil who took my tongue.
‘Malachi, this is Romano, our security officer.’
‘Hello.’ His voice is full-bodied, his only fat. ‘Please give me your timepiece.’
I snap it off my wrist. He slides off the back, presses out the microchip.
‘Turn around, please.’ He pats every centimetre of my clothing. He pulls on rubber gloves. ‘Open your legs.’
I refuse to move.
‘Mr Rawlins gets it, too,’ Meirong says.
The pilot sighs, presents himself for inspection. The machine-gun man slides his rubber hand into the pilot’s trousers.
Meirong tries a personal touch. ‘Romano’s here to earn a heart for his little girl.’ The man winces as if she has just sunk a thorn into his heart. I must remember – the logistics controller is manipulative.
I spread my legs. The tickle beneath my testicles sets off a knot of nerves, expecting electricity. I want to turn and hit him.
‘Come, Malachi,’ Meirong says. ‘We must work right away. The prisoners are waiting.’
The murderers.
My heart dips, but I follow obediently. The Buddha in the garden shop was too focused on the pliancy of his toes, the expansion of his self as he bound a million universes into one locust swarm of love. He didn’t feel the bony coldness of the tree.
Meirong marches past the tall, round tower towards a windowless steel edifice. She stops at a metal door halfway along the building. Lifts a key card from her breasts. Unlocks it.
* * *
It is not so comfortable, this factory ship. From the top I see narrow passages, sharp corners intended for servicemen, not polished pearls with supple skin. But Meirong pours herself down the steep stairs, suddenly a Chinese gymnast trained in sullen concentration, reserving her smiles for an outright win. I follow easily. I am a runner by night, luckily, my stomach is like steel. We are dropping down some kind of thoroughfare between the two wings of the rig, down narrow flights with skinny railings, our descent marked by bright, reliable rows of silver rivets punched against the sea. We move silently, two agile apes through the man-made trees.
Meirong pauses at a door to the right that says, Private. Keep out.
‘Strictly out of bounds for maintenance crew.’ Her eyes shoot black bolts. ‘That’s you.’ She launches down again, stops at a door in the left wing. She speaks without even catching her breath. ‘Here we are. Maintenance.’
The door emits a rusted screech. We walk along a corridor painted with thick yellow paint like congealed egg yolk. We pass some closed doors, then a room with benches and a table bolted to the metal floor. I glimpse two thin streams of sunlight filtering in near the roof, the only openings to the sky I have yet seen.
Further down the corridor, Meirong taps at a door. ‘Your living quarters.’
She walks straight past any chance of leisure, leads me deeper into the building until I hear a low hum that might be the pressure of the sea. The sound gets louder, begins to ring like a soft, suppressed joining of voices. Just before the door at the dead end of the long corridor, Meirong swings up a set of spiral stairs.
At the top, computer screens cover two walls. The third wall is a window into falling space, the glass as thick as the crocodile tanks at the Tantwa River. Far, far below the yellow ceiling is a craving and a pulse; I sense it with the hairs at the back of my neck. I look away, try to focus on the screens, but my eyes refuse to understand the images I see – fluorescent light flung onto metal mesh, a sheen of human skin. That is all. I am not ready yet.
A young black man sits at a desk bristling with keypads and switches. His dreadlocks swing as he spins in his chair, jumps up to meet us. He has thick, wild eyebrows and an untidy patch of hair on his chin. His one eye is light brown, the other holds a splinter of green. His genes must be uneven. He grins.
‘Ah, Malachi, how are you, man?’
I offer him a careful smile, lock my teeth behind my lips. ‘I’m Tamboaga.’ He glances at Meirong. ‘From Zim.’
‘Tamba’s here for a kidney.’
His face becomes sombre. ‘My brother’s very sick.’
I nod in sympathy. Only then does the movement in the computer frames draw me in.
I gasp inwardly, try to understand the high-res pixels.
They are naked, all of them. An array of bent necks with long, dishevelled hair. They are all colours. A deep cocoa, here the ebony of the equatorial regions, here clay, here pink. Beards sprout on the men. A glimpse of black bush between their legs, tired and thick. A penis lolling, a breast swung to the side. Humans in cages.
Meirong says, ‘Forty of them, sourced
from prisons all around Africa. After three cycles, they go back to their justice systems. We grow the organs inside them for six weeks, give them two weeks to heal. We’ve done one harvest with this lot. We start again on Thursday.’
I trace the patterns on their skin from pressing on bare metal, the deeper, longer gashes with puncture marks where a needle has passed through and pulled tight. Stitches.
With horror I count the wounds on a huge black man. Two cuts per cycle. One to go in. One to come out. Will there be blood?
‘Tamba runs the wiring and piping from up here.’ Meirong points through the thick glass. ‘Do you see how it works?’
Massive chains run inside steel tracks in the ceiling. Two rows of metal hooks dangle near the roof. Abbatoir hooks, but bigger.
I step towards the window, let my eyes plunge downwards.
Two rows of cages on curved cradles, bolted to the floor. Beneath each row, a twisted umbilicus of wires and pipes emerges from the floor, threads through the u-shaped cradles, drops away again.
I see no blood from this glass station. Beyond the thick mesh, all I see is the hair on their heads. I see shoulders, elbows. Here and there I see toes.
There are only a few women, but they are barely living. They will not waken my strange, sick libido.
‘This is a very sophisticated system.’ Meirong spins slowly, takes on a computer glow. She speaks with sincere pride. ‘A Chinese engineer set it all up for us.’
Tamba rolls his eyes at me.
And me, Malachi? Naturally I am speechless.
* * *
At the bottom of the spiral stairs, the murmuring returns. I recognise the sound now: it is the muted pulse of a foreign crowd. At the refugee centre in Zeerust, the people sheltered beneath the hum, sipped their sugary orange drinks, unwrapped their bread with their fingertips as if it might take fright and fly.
It is only now I realise that the people on the screens were completely silent. The subjects were suffering in mime.
Meirong stops before the door at the dead end. Through the steel, the wind of their breathing scrapes at the fine hairs in my ears.
‘The last maintenance man was a failure.’ Fury strikes her marble eyes. ‘The recruitment agent fucked up. Listen carefully, Malachi. The first rule for you is no communication. If you communicate, you’re out. And that agent,’ contempt curls her top lip, ‘will be fired.’