by T. C. Farren
Meirong catches the pity stealing over me. She gets to her feet, picks up a mountain of spaghetti from the tray. ‘I’ve got to get this to Romano.’ She turns to me, punishes me for guessing right. ‘You’ve got seven minutes left, Malachi. Don’t dally.’
I flick a piece of spaghetti hanging its head off my plate. I will neither dilly nor dally. I hesitate for a second, try a polite goodbye. I wave at Janeé, but I don’t get it right.
I leave the scene of the Nollywood shoot-out.
My bravado dissipates with every step I take down the passage. At the door to the hall my heart kicks against my ribcage, tries to break free. I take a deep breath, raise the red lanyard. Open up.
* * *
I take up where I left off, cage number twenty-one, tune my ears to the roiling, rumbling sea. Very soon my ankles, my backbone protest against the relentless, repetitive bowing and straightening. Even my fingers hurt from sinking the metal semi-circle beneath each nail, and press, release, press, release. A human cutting-cleaning machine.
I groom four more prisoners, reach a man who is quoting from the Qur’an, I think.
‘Al-Araf, verse number twenty-seven says we have made the evil ones friends to those without faith . . .’ He taps his head. ‘I had every verse here. But I am losing it.’ The hands he offers me are misshapen, the flesh melted like wax. He sees me staring. ‘Must I tell you what happened?’
It’s the first time any of them have asked my permission. I can’t help but listen.
‘I was burning twelve hundred Bibles in a fire. I was making a . . .’ he waves, but the English word eludes him. ‘I am from Morocco, in the North. There we are Muslims.’
A glimmer of orange tongues leaps in his black eyes.
‘This Catholic priest tried to stop me, but his robe caught the flames. I tried to roll him on the ground but he was big, he was . . .’ His fiery eyes search the air for the English word. ‘An accident, Malachi.’
I stare at the death branded into his skin. A dead priest, a man of the burning cloth.
He is lying, like the others. Of course he killed in cold blood. The only ones who have told the truth are the mermaid with the knife notches and the giant who killed his loved ones while they were making love. As I pull the brace away, the Moroccan’s eyes are pools of sorrow. The ash of twelve hundred Bibles has doused the last sparks.
As I start on the next prisoner, I feel dark eyes driving into my crown. High above me, Meirong is standing in Tamba’s glass kiosk, her pale arms folded like a communist boss. I compose myself to be precisely what she ordered. A mute man with no moods, no soft spots, as resilient as the little girl who grew up in an orphanage.
I clip the nails of a bald man of about fifty. He has a German accent. ‘I was driving too fast, it was very misty . . .’
I squeeze my eyes shut, press on the clipper. Please.
My shelter comes from Bayira, singer of Kapwa songs. ‘Mokaa, Mokaa . . .’
Don’t cry, don’t cry . . .
I deflect Meirong’s sharp gaze with my springy hair, suck in my spit to hear Bayira more clearly. ‘Mokaa ne komoka na danga . . .’
Don’t cry, and let clouds rain in your mouth.
* * *
Bayira’s chili stew was a rite of passage among the boys in our factory village. If you could eat a whole bowl you were ready to kiss a girl on the lips.
‘Kafi fopaka nadyi . . .’
Bayira’s voice vibrates within my eardrums, trembles in my chest. There is a cry in his voice, a grieving loss that says he would die right now for the love he sings of.
Bayira had fat, soft lips but when he sang they became acrobatic, fitted around the Kapwa vowels, retreated from his teeth when the consonants came.
* * *
Meirong is still at the glass, watching for weakness. Does this mean there is no camera to spy on the aisle?
I do a perfect job of the German hit-and-run, start on a woman’s fingers.
When I turned fourteen I ate a whole bowl of Bayira’s chili stew without weeping.
The men teased me, ‘Whoo, Malachi. You are ready.’
I laughed and looked down at the fire, but I raised my eyes once to Araba’s father. I wanted him to see I was nothing like my father, Hamri, who could not eat Bayira’s chili without grabbing for a water glass and wheezing comically.
* * *
My blades slip from their position. The huge woman in the cage cries out in pain, ‘Aaiee!’
Sorry, I would say, only because my parents taught me to never harm a woman.
The woman sounds grief-stricken. ‘I miss Dominic.’
Dominic? Is this the name of the man before me?
The woman is dusky skinned, voluptuous. A dark-haired Amazon. She looks exactly like the huge painting on the bus in Nelspruit, an advertisement for a Tropika granadilla drink. The girl on the bus sucks on a plastic straw, throws dust on tiny men as the bus blunders past them. This one has a hungry mouth, a slight overbite.
‘Dominic never ever hurt me,’ she says petulantly.
Her hair is more suited to an asylum than a tropical island. One half is plaited in a straitjacket, the other half bursts free. She sits like an untrained child, her knees wide open.
Thank God I am not aroused by soft places. My only weakness now is soft, singing skin stretched over sculpted bone, the pretty architecture of a woman’s skeleton. Women’s bones are not so much a construction, no. They are a composition. A symphony of strength and vulnerability.
I clip the beauty’s toes, tear my eyes from the skin on her ankles, as thin as the pages burnt by the Moroccan.
‘Komoka na dango . . .’
Bayira saves me.
* * *
Near the end of the row, I glance up to see that Meirong has disappeared. The relief is like a slow tranquiliser through my elbows. I let my cutting glove hang.
The woman in the second-to-last cage has white teeth, white eyes as if she’s on a diet of real cow’s milk. Even her nails shine. Their half-moons are impossibly neat for someone with a ragged scar from ribs to pubis. Her toenails have received the same careful scraping.
Josiah the mass murderer reads my mind. ‘Madame Sophie killed five girls with heroin. But she likes to keep her nails nice for the gentlemen.’
A hyena laughs behind me. I don’t need to turn to know it is Vicki, the husband killer.
‘Isn’t Madame Sophie lovely, Malachi? Or Charmayne in number twelve. She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?’
‘Vicki,’ Samuel warns from cage number one.
‘Charmayne was Dominic’s favourite.’
‘Vicki!’ Samuel hisses.
I swing away from Madame Sophie, face the last cage.
* * *
Josiah slides his hairy hands into the leather glove.
‘It’s true what they say. I killed three hundred Seleka.’
In his eyes I see graves, hands begging for mercy.
‘I was fighting for my people.’ He pulls a hand free, wields a ghost machete. ‘War is war.’
I swallow. Taste the metal of a blade. Never.
I pull the brace away, shaking. Let him pick holes in his greasy covering. Let the fungus bite and breed. I spin on my heel, walk towards the trolley.
‘War is war!’ Josiah bellows after me.
I lunge towards his cage, whip like a striking snake. I spit.
The prisoners gasp. I grab the morning’s towels from the trolley, march towards the door. A growth coils in my belly like a cancer. I have failed in my mission to be inviolable, silent. An excellent employee.
I have failed to be a mute man with no history.
* * *
I tear off my clothing, swing on the hot tap. I stand still in the shower, take the punishment. I need the heat to erase the bullets, scald my weakness.
‘Geez, Malachi! You cooking in there?’
I spin the tap shut. The stillness grates against my raw skin.
‘There’s steam everywhere.’ Tamba slides t
he concertina door open, sticks his head through.
I swing towards the wall, shield my private parts.
‘You trying to kill yourself?’ The door slides shut.
My skin starts to burn now. My scalp, my shoulders, my penis seared by acid rain. I open the cold tap and let it slap at my fiery skin. Take that, and be happy. Blanched, they would say in recipes.
* * *
The pain gives me a focus in the canteen. My hair sits uneasily on my head. It feels loose, like I’ve been scalped and left for dead.
‘How was your first day, Malachi?’ Olivia asks me. She is wearing a shining yellow tracksuit, as if the wall has swelled into a three-dimensional form. Tamba puts an arm around me, squeezes my shoulders.
Inwardly I scream.
‘I’m sure he’s fine now. He went and skinned himself.’ Tamba laughs. ‘It’s like, bejesus, did you grow up at the hot springs or something?’
A light frown lands between Romano’s eyes. Perhaps he has not seen the fake epoxy rock pools in the Destination magazine, with the busloads of tourists up to their chins, sloughing off the epithelial cells of their skin.
‘Are the subjects freaking you out?’ Olivia asks me.
I shake my afro, lie outright. Bald-faced, they call it. I pick up my knife and fork, tip them at forty-five degrees to what might be spinach. My curved wrists lie about two things. I am culturally white. I am mentally all right. I must find a way to cauterise my mind, become as lifeless inside as the pentagon of hake on the plate before me.
Meirong arrives to eat dessert with us, her cream dress crumpled from all her meetings. She stares at me appraisingly.
‘Everything all right?’
I nod and scoop at my yellow pudding. It detaches from my bowl like a loose cornea. I spoon some into my mouth, refuse to show the weakness of my predecessor.
Was his name Dominic?
Meirong devours her pudding within seconds. She strokes her empty bowl with the back of her spoon, makes it sing. Is this some Eastern custom, I wonder?
‘Is there any more caramel?’
Janeé shakes her head. ‘Sorry.’
Meirong drops her spoon sulkily. ‘Olivia, I’ll meet you in the tank room before breakfast. We need to run through the special needs report before I give it to Doctor Mujuru.’
As she leaves, Romano rises to his feet.
Olivia says, ‘Say hello to the stars for me, Romano.’
‘And me,’ Tamba adds mournfully.
‘The security lights are too bright. I can hardly see them.’
When Romano has gone, Tamba nudges me. ‘There’s a games room upstairs. Do you wanna check it out?’
I offer him a horizontal movement of my head. Negative.
‘Oh, come and play ping-pong.’
Another no for Tamba.
He hides his hurt with racism. ‘Ping-pong, haww saww. Must be a Chinese thing.’
‘I’ll come,’ Olivia says listlessly.
I watch Janeé jab her spoon into her caramel. I sense a yearning in her. Ask Janeé, I want to say. She might not be the one you would normally pick for sport but you never know, she might mop the floor with you in a ping-pong tournament.
The canteen empties, except for Janeé who packs the plates, one might say, indelicately. I nod gingerly at the cook. Walk my chafing, raw limbs towards my living quarters.
* * *
I need to read.
I am thirsty for words to escape into.
When I reach my room I hear the tap, tap of airtight plastic. Rifle shots in the distance, approximately twenty kilometres away – this is the volume of ping-pong through an acre of stainless steel. I sit painfully on Tamba’s bed.
Ouchie, as the giant said.
Tamba’s storage hatch is unlocked, a rusted Volkswagen sign dangling off an ancient key. I slide the door open, scratch through his things. I find a thin, red Kindle with Little Red Riding Hood on the cover. I open her cloak. Tamba’s first favourite is a poetry book. Riding White Clouds. I click his second best. Sun Prophet, Memoirs of a Psytrance DJ. The cover is a naked torso of a man with wire tattoos coiling across his skin. His smile is transient, thin, his eyes unnaturally bright, even in black and white. It says he used to DJ in the Arizona desert, led ten thousand people into spiritual ecstasy.
I creep to the bathroom, shut myself in.
I sit on the toilet seat, my neck muscles tight against the sound of protracted gunfire pinging above me. I swipe the book to the middle, fall into the words like an addict.
When I cut molly with amphetamine it was like someone telling me I won the Lotto while I was getting head. But when I snorted MDMA straight, pure empathy and love built tiny houses inside me and sent waves of love children into the atmosphere . . .
My bum stings against the porcelain but I wallow in the words, grateful for the luxury.
I could feel my separate skin but my compressed kick drums fused us all into one, synchronised us . . .
The talk of chemical ecstasy calms me.
Tap tap. Tap tap tap. Olivia and Tamba are perfectly matched, two martyrs playing ping-pong, both of them missing the stars to bring back a pulsing, live gift to their loved ones.
Yet there is something about Tamba that does not quite fit. He is like the DJ in this book, a man without a long-term plan, tickle me, let’s dance, play ping-pong, haww saww. I can’t imagine him suffering this rig for a soulmate. I stare at the picture of the desert DJ, the barbed-wire art gouging his skin. Just like Kontar’s scars, after he saved the lion cubs.
* * *
A rogue lioness dragged her cubs through the barbed wire at the factory wall. Kontar and I watched her cubs suck her dry until she was staggering. Kontar couldn’t stand their mewling.
* * *
I shut down the Sun Prophet. But the razor thorns have already hooked into my memory.
* * *
My uncle burst through the dark doorway while I was sleeping.
‘Kontar stole hippo meat from my storage drum. Where is he, Malachi? Tell me.’
I shook my head stupidly.
‘Tell me!’
My father stepped between us. ‘Malachi doesn’t lie. Let’s go and find him.’
I waited for their footsteps to fade beneath the distant night engines.
I ran out before my mother could catch my fluttering sleeve.
* * *
‘Kontar!’
‘Help me!’
The barbed wire lay tossed like tumbleweeds. Kontar’s satchel was open in the long grass, chunks of hippo fat gleaming in the fluorescent light from the fibre-optic factory. I crouched down and peered into the wire tunnel. A skinny lion cub was licking Kontar’s face, taking his ear softly between its teeth. The other cubs were balancing on the wire behind it, their paws bleeding. I flung a piece of hippo fat towards the dead lioness. The cubs scrambled back to the factory wall, whimpering. There was a terrible snarling as they tore into it. They must have been starving.
I ripped off my clothes, leopard-crawled into the tunnel.
‘Aaaghh!’ I cried as the pain arrived in stinging, hot rips. I backtracked, rubbed a chunk of hippo fat down my arms, my legs, my belly. The barbed wire still tore my skin, but let me slither through.
* * *
I groan softly now, remembering. I force my attention back to Tamba’s Kindle, scroll to the end of his list. Basic Anatomy. I click on the medical textbook, stare at the black diagrams of human skeletons. Clavicle, scapula, sternum. The scientific name for fingers is phalanges. A carpal is a wrist bone. Metatarsals are the bones in the centre of the foot.
* * *
The serrated steel tore my elbows as I pulled his trousers down his thighs, hooked them off his feet. I smeared the hippo fat on Kontar’s legs as he hollowed his chest and slid his shirt over his head.
* * *
I shut the basic anatomy book.
I drop Tamba’s Kindle on my pillow, take off my socks and shoes. I slouch on my bed, stare at my bare phala
nges.
* * *
One lion cub caught the scent of our greasy skin and crept purposefully towards us. The others dipped after it, wincing with each step. I scrambled backwards, crying out as the wire clawed into me.
‘Hurry!’ Kontar begged me.
The barbs sank their teeth into my hips. They tore my underarms before I folded myself up and slithered past.
As Kontar and I stood up, the lion cubs burst from the tunnel. I grabbed the last chunk of fat and flung it to them. The cubs pounced on it, growling. We turned and sprinted.
When we reached the first rise, Kontar and I stopped to watch the cubs prowl and lick, circle and slink into the yellow corn as if they were made of it.
* * *
I stand up, undo my buckle. I slide my black trousers past my stinging thighs.
* * *
Kontar hugged me. ‘Thank you, Malachi.’
He started towards their hut.
‘No. Come to us!’
He stopped, shook his head. ‘He will hurt my mother.’
My own mother cried out at the sight of me naked and torn up by razor blades.
‘Father, you must help Kontar. Uncle’s going to beat him.’
‘Where is he?’
‘Hurry, Father, run!’
‘Go, Hamri.’
My mother used hot salty water to strip the hippo grease and clean the cuts. I kept my scream down to a whimper.
‘Will Father save him, Mama?’
My mother said nothing.
* * *
I sink onto my back, balance on my raw shoulder blades. Above me is the sound of faint rifle fire. Tap, tap tap. A ping-pong marathon.
* * *
Hamri arrived home smaller, more yellow than I had ever seen him. His eyes slid past me to the shadows on the wall.
‘If I fought him, he would have killed them.’
‘No.’
His voice cracked. ‘I don’t know what he did to that child afterwards.’
‘Stop him!’ I jumped up and raced into the night. It was my mother who streaked after me and held me tight. My cuts began to leak through my clean shirt.
‘Why doesn’t someone stop him?’ I cried. ‘All the men can go together . . .’
‘They won’t. He’s the only one with a hippo licence. He feeds everyone.’
I broke away, shouting, ‘I’ll stop him, I will!’