by T. C. Farren
Now I see why Susan Bellavista was so excited by my inability to speak.
Meirong raises a key card, turns a tiny light green.
* * *
The inmates go quiet. I hear some whispers, a long, melancholic laugh. We are standing near the left-hand corner of the hall. The two rows of cages run towards Tamba’s glass kiosk, high above, on the left.
Beyond the mesh I see skin and hair, shifting. Animal madness, broken, still slightly stinking from the mêlée. The huge hall mimics the pull and heave of the sea. The room is breathing. I hear the swish of natural electricity.
No. They are not real people. The cages are too cramped for them to even stand up. They have no t-shirts, no sun-tan lines, nothing to show they were once a banker, a bin collector, a mother, a physician. They have no bags, no phones, no buttons to brand them. Only nipples, sunken parts, the pathos of ribs. I glimpse soft vaginal lips, the sudden drop of a skinny buttock. A sad reminder of fat pouched on a man with loose stomach skin. Meirong shuts the door behind us.
‘We keep them naked to avoid the logistics of clothes. And it’s easier for hygiene.’
She walks a few steps, stops at a metal trolley. She picks up a long tool with twin blades, and next to it some kind of leather sheath reinforced with metal strips. A giant dog’s muzzle or falconer’s glove, with steel locks attached to it. Meirong digs a fingernail into the fabric beneath her breast, presses a switch on a device on her hip.
‘Tamba, when did you last douse for lice?’
‘It’s been a while,’ Tamba replies through her speaker. He presses a key. ‘Yeah. Five days.’
Meirong nods grimly at him.
Tamba touches a switch. There is the hiss of nozzles unclogging. A soft mist drifts down from the roof. The sudden stink of pesticide as forty bodies cower and clench, try to escape it. There are some gasps, some words for God. Meirong leads me towards the cages, which, raised on their cradles, stand from my thighs to half a metre above my head. She waves her silver blades.
‘It is your job to clip and clean their hands and feet. Also report signs of parasites, bleeding, things the cameras could miss.’
She points to a transparent tube leading into a cage at mouth level. ‘Don’t worry about nutrition. We record their intake.’ She stops. ‘Are you understanding all this?’
I nod twice to convince her.
‘It’s a twenty-four hour cycle. Their supplements speed up nail growth abnormally. And you won’t believe what they get up to if you miss a clipping. They pick their wounds incessantly.’
She stops at the top of the two-metre wide aisle. Only now do I let my eyes sink behind the criss-cross wires. I was wrong about my libido.
The knees of these women will be my failing, with their smooth triangular caps, skin stretching over bone as they sit with bent legs. In row two, a huge, ruined beauty sits with her knee dropped to the side so her private parts open like a dutiful flower. I look away so as not to be mistaken for a man with normal, lurid tastes. I swing my eyes from a white woman’s finely hung collar bone, the way it dips, almost invisible, a mere shadow in the skin before it sinks into the roundness of her shoulder joint. I dream of my new radio beneath my tube of toothpaste, my aqueous cream, my Vaseline.
Meirong sighs. ‘Masturbation is okay.’
I almost choke.
‘We give them hormones to slow down their sex drive, but we can’t go too far. Too much suppression slows cell growth. No penetration though, it’s dangerous. Get Tamba to stop them.’
Does she mean a shock? My ears amplify the breathing, the shatter of a cough to my right.
Meirong turns to the sound, speaks into her device. ‘Tamba, number one, what temp?’
‘Umm . . . normal,’ Tamba replies.
‘Tell Olivia to check vitamins.’
The man’s eyes tilt upwards, chestnut with golden flecks. His face is so gaunt his cheekbones are like steel pins placed under his skin. He has a long penis. It lies lethargic, untrimmed against the mesh. There is a single burn mark on the inside of the man’s ankle.
Meirong points to the floor of the cage next to his. ‘Those are the waste plates. They look like nothing, but they’re very sensitive tools for measuring blood pressure, temperature, heart rate.’
An old woman sits with a full bum on the metal square, her legs, I am sorry to say, splayed. Her hair twists over her shoulder and drapes her groin in a long grey rope.
‘The subjects slide them to the side and excrete into a tray.’ Meirong’s face assembles into sweet, pretty smugness. ‘The waste is diluted with sea water and flushed away.’
I am relieved to see tiny numbers at the base of each cage. Meirong unlocks a rectangular hatch near the floor of cage three.
‘Watch carefully, Malachi.’ She clips the leather brace to the edges of the opening. Two pretty hands slide through the gap into the falconer’s glove. Meirong pulls on the leather strap so it traps and separates the hands in one drag. The metal buckle bites the leather, squeezes the knuckles together. Meirong sinks her cutter beneath the nail of a little finger. ‘This one’s a husband killer.’
There is a snigger inside the cage. ‘Only one, Miss China. You make it sound like there were a whole lot.’ The woman has glossy black hair tangled in knots. Her skin is as white as the polystyrene trays we slapped the chickens onto. Her breasts are perfect, curiously tilting, their eyes innocent. She has a mouth like a fig, plush with a dip in the middle. Inside her mouth there is sweet wet flesh, seeds of salivary glands, soft pink papillae. I can’t see them, but I know. The fig never disappoints.
We had a fig tree outside our hut. We watched every fruit grow, picked it at the first sign of pigeons.
I force my attention back to Meirong, sending a curve of nail flying against the mesh. The woman’s arms and legs are notched with healed cuts, a peculiar scaling; a strange mutation of a mermaid. And she sits like a mermaid, her knees bent to the side, her feet tucked under her bum. The soles of her feet are pink from the pressure, her only colour besides her thick, fig lips and her nipples like a rabbit’s nose. If you touched them they would retract. The fig splits, shows a dream of pink.
‘In case you’re wondering how I did it, I used a knife.’
Meirong smacks the buckle on the leather strap, loosens it. ‘You’re wasting your time, Vicki. This one can’t speak.’
Vicki withdraws her hands. ‘Can’t or won’t?’
Meirong steps back, delivers her high, triumphant line. ‘Malachi has no tongue.’
Forty pairs of eyes slide down my jaw, find the place where my tongue should be rooted. I lift my chin, try to blur my eyes, but the black-haired woman starts a giggle that staggers and trots along the cage walls. Behind me, a mad guffaw blasts from a large man with curling black sideburns trying to creep into his mouth.
‘Ah, Malachi.’ The refrain starts with the rope-haired crone, who, up close, looks like Granny Elizabeth. She, too, looks like she could do with an alcoholic drink.
‘Malachi-i-i . . .’ More voices coalesce, broken by higher notes.
‘Walk.’ Meirong marches me between the cages like I am mounted on a trolley. She warns the prisoners, ‘If anyone spits, you’ll get ninety volts.’
A woman’s imploring nipples press against the mesh, her hands against the cage making plump squares of skin. ‘Malachi . . . Help me . . .’
They whisper, they wail with open palms. Men, most of them, their voices deep with a raw catch. Oh God, beseeching. Meirong turns at the end of the aisle, leads me back the way we came. She bangs on number forty, the last cage on our right.
‘Josiah has killed over three hundred people.’
It is the man with coarse hair curling towards his teeth. He smiles at me. ‘Malachi.’ He savours my name like it is tender meat.
I want to run away as fast as my legs will carry me but I turn my back on him, swallow my spit. I walk after Meirong, suddenly foolish in white, a ball boy at Wimbledon, my shirt too thin across my spine.
>
* * *
Meirong shuts the door, stares at me in the sudden, sucking quiet. ‘Will you remember?’
The flames across my face, the agony that sent me into weeks of bloodless sleep.
‘Will you remember, when they get like this?’
A cocktail of shame and rage in the guerrilla’s eyes. Blood flowing like a river in the Tantwa watercourse, bodies arrested in the air then landing, weeping on the yellow linoleum.
‘We deliberately left the sedative out of their morning feed.’ There is not a nuance of remorse in her voice. She bows without a hint of respect. ‘I think you’ve passed the test.’
She leads me up the spiral stairs to Tamba’s observation station.
* * *
I ignore the flickering portraits on the wall, force my mind to register the piping diagram on Tamba’s computer screen.
‘We unclip the feed pipe when we winch the cages up,’ Meirong says. ‘As you can see, the irrigation is all done from above.’
Tamba notices my desperate composure. ‘Hey brother, you need a rest.’ He presses the switch on a printer, catches the sudden tongue of printed plastic.
‘Keep it.’ He hands me the picture.
But Meirong is not finished. She fixes on my useless mouth. ‘The two of you must work out a system of signals. The agent said you had first aid?’
I nod. A requirement for supervisors, but I learned more from watching doctors fighting to save flesh, not rubber mannequins.
‘Good. It’s too bad you don’t sign, but you’ll have to try. For instance, Tamba, how would he say, “Administer shock”?’
‘Umm . . .’ Tamba thinks. He presses his wrists together, mimes handcuffs.
‘Right. That’s punishment. Got it?’
I nod. Meirong watches my hand hanging uncooperatively against my thigh.
‘How would you say, “Check temp”?’
‘It’s okay.’ Tamba tries to spare me. ‘We’ll work on it later.’
Meirong slings a red lanyard around my neck, anoints me. ‘Your key card to the cultivation hall. Look after it.’ She flicks her liquid hair. A black wave breaks. She melts down the spiral.
* * *
It is a short passage and three unexpected stairs to the canteen. I stumble down them, suddenly weak. A woman gets up from a table with long benches fixed to it, all of it bolted to the minutely swaying rig. Her two big teeth make me believe her wide smile.
‘Hey, Malachi.’ She is thin and planed like a corner of a wall, with a prominent nose and protruding throat. In the deep, unpractised silence, she shrugs. ‘I’m here for my child.’
I glance at her arms, limp and hanging.
Meirong says, ‘Olivia’s baby boy needs lungs.’
‘They’re coming with this second cycle.’ Olivia exhales, her breath catching on the deadline. Her eyes are filmed with salt. She locks her fingers, twists her empty arms inside out. ‘I can’t wait.’
Meirong waves at a trolley piled with white crockery. ‘Come, let’s eat. Janeé is going to be late.’
The food is alien-seeming on this planet of sea. The carrots are a deathly grey, but I am not surprised. The memory of roots and plants and transpiration already seems incredible this far out to sea. My lamb chop looks like it was carved and cooked a year ago. My potato took the heat then crumpled into its plastic skin.
‘The food’s good tonight,’ Tamba says softly next to me. He laughs at my surprised twitch. ‘Yeah, brother . . .’
Across from me, Olivia shines the arm of her fork for nearly a whole minute. She is jittery about the days to harvest, shallow-panting to the date. I puncture my potato tentatively. This is my warning. She is falling to pieces after only thirteen weeks. I chew doggedly, tell my queasy body that the subtle shifting of the rig is a mere fantasy. Next to me Tamba checks the growth on my chin, assessing, perhaps, how thick my beard could be. He stares at my cling-wrap hands, sniffs discreetly for an odour off me, but I am sanitised by salt air and Solo deodorant. I don’t know what his story is, but Tamba is afraid of my black skin.
A woman sticks inside the door frame, forces her huge hips through the space. Her head is a plump pumpkin, her bum a plush double sofa on which two people could sit comfortably. She eyes me like she’s trying to guess if my species bites. ‘Malachi.’
I raise a hand to her, spoon some carrots in. As she sits, the joints of the bench surrender, then weakly fix.
‘Janeé used to cook for hundreds in the Craymar fish factory,’ Olivia says ingratiatingly.
Janeé’s face comes gently alive. ‘It was easy. After a few years, feeding a hundred people is the same as feeding ten.’ Janeé mulches her food like a waste-disposal machine, drains a glass of juice the colour of blood. The bench almost levitates as she gets up.
‘Thanks, Janeé,’ Olivia and Tamba sing as she crashes our plates onto the trolley and rattles it over the threshold. Her bum bulges and slides. I almost hear the pop as she arrives on the other side.
* * *
Tamba clangs with me down the passage, shoves on the door to my living quarters. ‘Here we go.’
It is a four-by-four yellow cell, painted lava thick. There are two beds against the walls.
‘You’re sharing with me.’ Tamba grins. ‘Sorry.’
My suitcase is already on one little bed, unzipped. Inside, everything is rumpled and rearranged. Tamba apologises on behalf of the bosses.
‘They’re serious about staying secret, dude. They trash our microchips. And their satellite shield is fifteen miles wide.’
They must have checked the lining of my case, my toothpaste, for what? I see it has been squeezed. I lift the jumble of my clothes. My radio is still there. The wires and the plastic plug. I think of the pretty bridge on the husband killer’s foot. I check the wall socket. Two-pronged. Good. I sigh. My very first sound since I arrived. I push my suitcase off the bed and lie down.
‘God, it’s like a gift Janeé’s got,’ Tamba laughs. ‘One thing’s for sure, they didn’t choose her for her cooking.’ I feel him prying at my shut eyelids. ‘She’s here to earn arteries for her son. They say it’s diabetes, but the truth is he’s a smack addict.’
My eyes sneak open.
Tamba smiles, teasing me with the mystery. ‘He doesn’t qualify for a transplant but the thing with a cook is, you need extra insurance. Think about it, Malachi, if the cook gets pissed off . . .’ He sprinkles air. ‘She can poison you.’
I stare at him without intelligence.
‘Do you wanna come and watch a movie?’
I shake my head.
Tamba backs out, dismayed by my meagre potential as a friend.
But I don’t rest easily.
The old woman in the cage brings me the scent of yeast from Granny Elizabeth’s palm beer. It brings me the shine of the crèche children’s skin, the sweat on their palms as they clutched on to my mother – with me, her little prince, always closest to her heart.
I roll over, face the wall, try to stifle the memories.
* * *
I fastened my lips to her nipple until I felt brave enough to wrestle and yelp with the children my age, while she helped feed the newborns with rubber teats.
The memories push up from the bottom of my spine, pass through the barbed wire around my heart. I roll into a ball, try to refuse them room at the inn. But they will not dissipate.
* * *
Cecilia worked night shift so she could be with me. She arrived home from the corn sheds and put me to her breast just as the sun was starting to sting her eyelids. There’s no point in having a child if you didn’t have time to love it, she said, and even then I knew she meant she would never leave me in a box to cry until my tears slowly dried in a factory crèche where I might as well be drip-fed. Where I would be lucky to get a turn to suck on hastily thrust rubber, thirty seconds to suck while my mother takes her slim place in the factory line, her elbows ticking, take, twist drop, hardly time to shift her weight to the other foot.
She opened her eyes. ‘Thank you! Ooh, it was the sun.’ She shook her finger at the sun. ‘Stop shutting my eyes!’
* * *
I press my face into my pillow, let my open eyes scratch against the pillowcase. I don’t want to feel my mother’s arms. The white pillow burns my eyeballs like the white, white sun on the corn fields of Krokosoe.
I jerk into a sitting position. I study the piping diagrams on Tamba’s printed sheets, force the patterns into my short-term memory. I throw myself onto my back, dig my heels into my mattress. Tomorrow I must be stronger.
I flail towards sleep. Lying on this tiny bed, I can’t deny the rocking of the sea. It sickens me, soothes me as I dive away from memories of love, tormented by my dread of the new day.
FRIDAY
Short sharp trumpet blasts shock me awake, a brass band gone mad. Tamba sleeps through it, his dreadlocks splayed on his white pillow. The burping sounds get louder. Tamba sits up and slaps at his wrist, silences the cacophony. He smiles at me.
‘Frogs. Funny, right?’ He falls back on the pillow. ‘Agh,’ he sighs, like he’s just remembered I’m not going to be a huge amount of fun. He swings his feet to the floor. ‘Let’s go and get some breakfast. Meirong will be waiting. She’s fucking never late.’
Tamba pees like a mule. He comes out of the bathroom with a wet face. Toothpaste fumes gather in the small room. I am seized by sudden panic. There is something I did not consider. How on earth will I get enough privacy to electrocute my genitals?
Tamba glances at his timepiece. ‘Move it, Malachi. Seriously.’