by T. C. Farren
There is a clack of plastic coat hangers as he throws on an orange t-shirt and jeans. Who cleans them, I wonder? It’s been two days but it feels like two weeks since I washed myself. I slide open the concertina door, squeeze into the bathroom cubicle. I slip a new white shirt over my head, pull on a pair of black trousers. I look like some kind of steward.
‘Must I wait for you?’
I slide the door open an inch, wave Tamba away. The first communication the poor man receives is me telling him to leave.
In the bedroom, I hook my radio to my belt. Sling Meirong’s lanyard around my neck, add a touch of red.
* * *
Meirong sits in an office dress the colour of sour cream, irritated by my close shave with the clock. I take the place next to Tamba, lean back while Janeé slaps down my plate. My eggs are so greasy I can see my face in them. Romano the security guard takes the right-hand bench, his eyes strung with fine red capillaries. His fingernails are dirty, but I’m not the one to judge. I am like a dirty nail, all of me unclean.
Olivia asks, ‘How did you sleep, Malachi?’
Tamba shows her mildly incredulous eyes. He answers for me, ‘He died for twelve hours, right Malachi? You were history.’
I coax my oily egg onto my toast.
Meirong says, ‘Malachi, Tamba says you two are set up with signs. Is everything agreed?’
I glance at Tamba, who’s grinning obsequiously. I get away with a ghost nod, too imperceptible to qualify as a lie. I capture my egg, press it into a sandwich. In Bhajo we liked to eat with our hands, taste the food first with our fingertips.
‘Is Mr Rawlins coming today?’ Olivia asks.
‘Eleven a.m.,’ Meirong says. ‘You’ll know by lunchtime.’
Olivia sighs.
Tamba reassures her, ‘Timmy’s fine, Olivia. He’s giving his granny a hard time.’
She shakes her head. ‘He went into intensive care yesterday.’
‘Ah, no.’
‘Meirong only told me after supper last night.’
‘I let you do your work first and eat a good meal,’ Meirong snaps defensively.
Olivia sits with her hands in her lap, her tomato too red on her empty plate.
‘Look, it’s difficult, Olivia,’ Meirong says. She waves the suffering away. ‘All we can do is keep working.’ She sweeps aside her black tea. ‘Are the towels ready?’
Olivia nods her head.
‘Malachi. Go with her, please.’
My tea is strong and sweet. I gulp some of it.
Tamba says quickly, ‘Come to the surveillance room, Malachi. We’ll run through what we practised.’ His lie is as glib as the egg white still quivering on his plate.
Meirong nods. ‘Call me if you need me. I’ve got to do security while Romano sleeps, then I’ve got lunchtime meetings.’ Meirong checks her watch, a busy executive in the city. She slips off the end of the bench, leaving a drift of dismissive air.
I follow Olivia down the corridor, hover in the doorway of a room filled with large plastic tanks and rows of silver instruments. A pale pink fluid drips from glass tubes propped in rings that might hold toothbrushes. A pink infusion in a bulbous bottle says, Sedative. Saturday.
Olivia watches me studying her laboratory. ‘It’s got more equipment than Greyfield’s radiation monitoring lab,’ she says sadly. ‘They didn’t bother too much with safety. Do you know nuclear poisoning?’
I nod my assent.
‘I left Timmy with an old lady so I could breast-feed him on my lunch break.’ She picks up a metal bucket. ‘She lived one road from the Greyfield gate.’
The chemical fumes from the bucket sting my eyes.
You were a good mother, Olivia. Really.
Olivia chokes, ‘Timmy’s lungs got blisters on them. Blisters.’
I don’t know what to do with her guilt. A shrug would seem insensitive. I take the metal bucket, stand like a hotel steward in white shirt and black trousers. I wait until Olivia turns her grief-stricken back on me. I walk away from her pain, bearing towels for the hands and feet of the special guests.
* * *
I’m halfway up the spiral stairs when Tamba launches down them. I stagger back, hang on to the railing.
‘Okay, quick. Temperature is like this . . .’ He flicks mock sweat off his brow with his forefinger. ‘Show me.’
I do it slowly, feeling foolish. I am unused to communicating. ‘Shock, we know –’ Tamba smacks his wrists together. ‘Use fingers for cage numbers.’
I nod.
‘For urgent, do this –’ Tamba whips his forefinger against his middle finger, makes a smacking sound. It’s the warning between children, Ooh, you’re in trouble now.
‘Do it, Malachi.’
I flick my fingers. They make a weak snap, but I feel like I’ve barked out loud.
‘What else?’ Tamba asks. ‘Diarrhoea.’ He waves from his waist towards the floor, signifying some internal flood.
I sweep my hands downwards. Here he is, the diarrhoea.
Tamba starts to laugh. ‘That’s a curtsey, not a shit.’ He guffaws loudly.
My eyes squeeze to slits, but habit keeps my lips from separating. Do not laugh, Malachi. For God’s sake, do not laugh.
Tamba stamps up the metal spiral, chuckling.
If I laugh I might tear open, release lava from the dark, broiling depths of me. I might kill people, cry a tsunami of tears. I raise the red lanyard from my chest, unlock the door to the prisoners.
* * *
Their heads turn my way like weeds to the sun. The husband killer murmurs something to the long-haired crone, who narrows her eyes thoughtfully. The man in cage one is watching me hungrily, his mind probing, rolling, landing on its feet. The beast in him is feline, an emaciated lion like the one Kontar tried to save. Across from him, the mass murderer spills sticky black ash.
I pick up the leather sheath and the long silver clipper, walk towards them. I lift the latch of the first cage, clip the sheath to the opening. I jab my hands at number one. A thrust, nothing dainty.
He gives me his fingers. I tighten the leather strap, sink the clipper beneath the nail of his little finger. Squeeze. The curve of nail falls like a frozen teardrop.
‘I see they chose an angry man.’
His next nail snaps like a fragment of grief.
‘My name is Samuel. I was a journalist, filming suicide bombers in Algiers. They blew up a market. It had nothing to do with me.’
There were children at that market, surely. I see the shattered fruit, the falling cigarettes.
He takes back his hands, lifts his feet into the leather sheath. I stare at the burn mark on his ankle. Was it a flying ember from a burning burka?
‘Scooter burn,’ he says. He watches me clip his feet. ‘Don’t believe Meirong. We’re not all killers. Some of us here don’t even deserve prison, never mind this.’
A big talker, the journalist, trying to cover up his cowardice. But I see the shadows in his loquaciousness.
* * *
‘Loquacious?’ my father asked me.
‘Talkative.’
He was testing my vocabulary in the hut.
‘Ah, so this is what you are, Hamri,’ my mother teased him.
To the Kapwa, it is not a noble trait; it is a wasted, worrying proclivity to prod at a subject like a cat playing with something dead.
‘Loquacious,’ she said. ‘And there is no vaccination?’
‘Cecilia,’ my father answered sweetly, ‘there are worse diseases.’
No. Not Hamri. Please.
* * *
I lift a white towel from the antiseptic, rub the day-old coating off the journalist’s toes. I try not to stare. The supplements must speed up replication everywhere. It’s not like he’s been dancing barefoot on the deck. I loosen the strap, lock his wire prison. Start on the old woman who looks like Granny Elizabeth, who secretly milked the palms to make beer. Despite her withered flesh, the old woman’s fingers are extraordinarily silky. I g
room her hands, smooth like mine, fight the panic rising in me. I drop the towel in the stinking liquid, move on to the husband killer.
Her vagina is an oyster shut against the fluorescent sun. I press the clipper beneath her thumbnail, mother-of-pearl pink.
‘It’s true what Samuel says. Some of us are innocent.’ She shrugs. ‘Not me.’ Something catches in her voice, a sliver of a sob wresting free.
My elbows suddenly become watery and weak. We have something in common, this hateful mermaid and I. We harbour in our minds the same terrible red. The white towel lifts brown off even the blindingly white Vicki. She sighs raggedly.
‘I suppose I’m not as bad as Shikorina in number twenty. She killed her own children.’
Oh, please. Save me.
* * *
I work through eight prisoners, endure their whispers, their exclamations, their pleas for mercy. Ten years of New Nation keeps my hands steady as I wash away their impurities, trim their claws, ensure that their nourishment reaches their tongues. The ninth prisoner is dark and skinny, of Indian origin, I think. He is jabbering in a language that is foreign to me, his one front tooth missing. His one fingernail is black, like it has been hit with a hammer. Perhaps his victim bit him before they died, left a sign that he should go straight to hell, with no McDonald’s stops.
I cut his crooked nails, refuse to look at him.
Dream creatures, all of them, in a sordid dream city. Let them babble, let them plead, I will not listen.
* * *
After twelve subjects, this job might as well be chicken maintenance. I remember the New Nation advertising pamphlets.
It is social in the cages. The chickens are kept warm and clean. Their comfortable quarters ensure they do no harm to themselves or other fowls.
I have, after all, not broken free of factory slavery, as my father so fervently wished for me.
* * *
‘It is a waste, Malachi, of beautiful thinking. Factory work makes a desert of your mind.’
I mocked my father, with his poetry, ‘But isn’t there an infinity of yellows in the desert?’
‘Crap!’
‘Hamri!’ my mother warned.
‘It’s crap. Words bring rain, lightning. Inspiration.’ He implored, ‘Never be content with the desert, please.’
‘Hamri, stop pressuring him.’
My father was unusually assertive. ‘Malachi. Words are water.’
* * *
I screw up my eyes.
Be gone, Hamri. Please.
An enormous black man inclines his head, as big as a mule’s. ‘Are you saving a loved one?’
If I had a tongue, I would bite it in surprise.
This man is so huge he could be Gadu Yignae, the first man who emerged from the bowels of the earth. The leather strap has to slide to the end of its length. I stare at his hands, the size of young chickens on growth hormones. I would not like to see the size of his fist.
I compress his huge knuckles, let the buckle teeth bite. Do a careless cut.
‘Ouchie!’
A laugh ripples between my ribs. Where did he find that childish exclamation?
I blur my eyes, try to turn the giant into mist, but the huge man has cracked the dream horizon with his stupid expletive.
He sighs. ‘I killed the ones I love.’
The dark side of love blasts through me.
‘I shot my brother and my wife. He died inside her.’
His own blood. For love.
I sink to my haunches.
The giant is astonished. ‘Malachi?’
Some prisoners start to jeer, ‘Malachi-i-i . . .’
‘Quiet!’ the giant thunders.
The chanting fades into a sheepish twittering.
I grip the giant’s thumb, shoot to my feet. I look up but Tamba is dipping his head to some music playing in his ears.
‘Sorry if I shocked you. I can be very crude with the facts. I was a High Court judge for thirteen years.’
I whip away the brace, abandon the judge’s gargantuan feet. Slam the hatch against his crimes of passion.
* * *
The cage next to the giant flushes. The prisoner shuts his waste plate.
‘Taking strain, mate?’
It is a butter-coloured man, once fat. His old skin flares from his waist, rolls from his neck like a drooping Dilophosaurus. A jet of water rinses the remnants of his flabby bum. I attach the glove to his cage, fight the tremors still coursing through my system.
He stares balefully at the glove.
‘I feel like a sheep or a pig, you know, having its trotters cut.’
Interesting that he used the word ‘pig’. He shoves his hands into the glove. Even his fingers wear extra skin. His accent is rounded, warped like a boomerang. Australian, must be.
The man in the next cage is white and skinny, a tax consultant, perhaps, with allergies. He has faint red spots across his chest. I touch my button cautiously.
Tamba replies, ‘Yes?’
I sign cage seventeen. Flick my fingers across my upper body.
‘What, a rash?’
I nod.
‘Olivia will mix some cortisone into his vitamins –’
I cut Tamba off. The white man has a nose like a beak and sharp blue eyes that could embed in your skin. He tugs on his skinny penis, a rude nervous tic.
I glare at his compulsive comforting.
He lets go of his penis and submits his hands to me. I am careful not to touch his skin. I clip through balloons of breath, hold and expel, use my last nerves to get to the end of the aisle.
* * *
In the last cage, the woman’s eyes are wide, straining to see.
‘Do you have my baby?’ She smiles at some apparition. ‘Will you play soccer with him? He loves the ball and he is not even three.’
Cage number twenty. This must be Shikorina, the one the mermaid spoke of. The woman who killed her children.
She has a pretty mouth, a pronounced M where the two halves of her top lip meet. M for mother. Her shoulders are broad, a crow’s outstretched wings, her shoulder joints sharp and pricking. She has round bluish scars on her chest and her arms.
I lock the brace to her cage.
Her hands will not come through. Damn her.
She strokes a phantom head. ‘Are you hungry, my love?’
My skin prickles at the back of my neck. The warmth of my mother’s breath passes over me.
Someone says softly down the aisle, ‘She drowned them. Three of them.’
No, please.
I hit the switch of my communication device. Tamba’s forehead touches the glass. ‘Number twenty being stubborn?’
Shikorina’s long, sodden fingers drift into the brace.
‘Watch that one’s skin,’ Tamba says into his microphone. ‘She used to have lupus. They had to do a blood transfusion.’
I nod at Tamba, cut her sharp nails, this black bird of prey. I stare at the fingers that must have tangled in their hair, shoved their heads down while they thrust their little bums up. My empty stomach heaves. I rub the murderer’s hands with detergent.
‘Lunchtime, Malachi,’ Tamba says through my speaker.
I squeeze out the soiled towels, throw them on the trolley. Leave the rolled virgin ones for after lunch. I try not to run towards the door.
One voice snaps free of the murmurings, flies high above them, ‘I am innocent. Help me.’
I fumble for my key card, shut the door on the cry.
I slide my spine down the metal door. Twenty subjects’ talons cut. Twenty to go. My fingertips are burnt white. My torso aches in places that might contain my heart, my lungs, my liver. I am a tumult of longing, of terror, after less than one day.
This is the Raizier price for being the chosen one.
* * *
Olivia’s voice rings with a panic-stricken peal as Janeé bangs down our meatballs and spaghetti.
‘My granny says our neighbours went to see Timmy in hospital. They
’re these gay guys next door.’ She laughs desperately. ‘They’re like his uncles.’
Janeé has poured tomato sauce over the top, the colour of the paint bags they pop in cheap Nigerian movies. Too orange to be realistic.
I forsake Janeé’s synthetic raspberry juice, pour myself a glass of water. Janeé’s spaghetti rolls onto her fork and flies into her mouth at rhythmic intervals. I can almost hear the cymbals crash like in Zeke’s Circus in Zeerust, who every year gave surplus tickets to us refugee children. The Nollywood blood bursts on her lips.
Come on, Malachi, it’s fake ketchup, you stupid ass.
I can say ass, Father. If I mean a donkey.
Olivia is saying, ‘I went clubbing with them once. Sjoe, I couldn’t believe my eyes. All these guys in G-strings. Half a cap of MDMA in every drink. It was long before I was pregnant. I wouldn’t have done it if . . .’ Her voice fades away, her eyes drift to her little boy’s ribs caving in, sucking for oxygen. She takes a mouthful, but it is a mistake. Olivia is too miserable to chew.
Tamba tries some flattery. ‘You know, Malachi, Olivia was headhunted by Greyfield Nuclear when she was still in college. She got top marks, didn’t you, Olivia?’
Olivia swings her legs off the bench and hurries out with a meatball still in her mouth.
‘Shit.’ Tamba hits his head. ‘It was the bloody job that did it.’
Janeé nods her big head sagely.
Tactless, I believe, is the right word for it.
Meirong prods her fork towards the doorway. ‘Patch it up, please.’
Tamba sighs. He leaves a pile of spaghetti, trails out to go and say sorry to his friend.
Meirong smears her meatball in the sauce. ‘You people really have to toughen up on this rig.’ She races it around the track. ‘I’ve had to look out for myself all my life. I was the second born. You know what that means.’
Janeé and I both stare at her blankly.
‘In those days the one-child policy was very strict.’ When the meatball has reached a good speed she tosses it between her lips. ‘I grew up in an orphanage.’
Ah, I see. I have read about that policy. Poor Meirong was probably well schooled in politics and Chinese etiquette, but every day she waited for her parents to pay the fine and pitch up at the gate.
Poor, poor child. I study her surreptitiously. Where is that little kid?