The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  My mother whipped me close, pressed my kicking knees, my elbows deep into her belly. ‘He’ll kill you.’

  My mother made me hold my tongue. But she could not stop the rotting malaise that grew within her son.

  From the night of the lions, I was ashamed of Hamri. My father was too small, too yellow. Too weak for the monster that blocked out the light.

  Kontar came to school squinting. He wore his long school shirt and trousers, even though it was sweltering. He rested his swollen head on his desk. He turned slowly from the waist for several weeks. His skull gradually returned to its usual shape, but Kontar stumbled all the time. My heart cried each time I saw him stop and consider a short jump from rock to rock.

  * * *

  The tap of the ping-pong stops. Or does it?

  An echo haunts the air for nearly half a minute.

  The Kindle. I pat the duvet. Where is it?

  I drag the bed from the wall. I can’t see it. I run my fingers against the floor. They hit something solid – ah! I tap the red X, shut the anatomy book. Shut the cloak of Little Red Riding Hood. I slip the Kindle back into Tamba’s hatch, throw myself beneath my feather duvet. I face the wall just as Tamba’s shoes stall at the door. He lets himself in and switches on his bedside light. He removes his shoes, then pees as if he’s been drinking jugs of beer. Tamba tears his blankets back like the lid of a tin. He slides the door of his hatch, scratches for something. I feel the weight of his Kindle in his hands.

  Will he smell me on the screen?

  I control my breathing like a yogi.

  Tamba begins to snore with the light on. I ease onto my back, cover my groin, an involuntary habit. My bed clothes feel as if they are woven from barbed steel.

  Damn them.

  Damn the prisoners for bringing my loved ones back to me. They called up my father, my cousin Kontar, the singer in our village, for goodness’ sake. They hooked their toenails beneath my skin, dug their fingers in.

  Somewhere between the moon and the sea a helicraft thrashes like an overhead fan.

  Tomorrow I must be an unremembered dream; too ethereal for them to bite into, use my silent blood for sustenance.

  Yes. Tomorrow I will be the ghost.

  SATURDAY

  My skin is still sore but, by some miracle, not torturous. An eerie whistling rises and falls miles above me. Is it the wind? I get dressed in a black shirt and pleated black trousers. Tamba breathes heavily in his sleep. He has an erection. I should wake him, but it would be a definite intrusion – enter stage left into a pornographic dream.

  I slide the concertina door back with a deliberate bang, splash water on my face, still tingling from last night’s scalding. I check the mirror. No redness. My hair growth is quite prolific, stubble like a burnt field after two days. I slap my chin with shaving foam, strip the new growth with a brand-new blade. I brush my teeth loudly. Check my timepiece. Ten to seven. I peep through the bathroom door. Tamba’s white dome is still growing.

  * * *

  I remember those dreams from when I was fifteen, my narrow bed shielded by the red Chinese horse hanging between the beds, my skin still unmolested by voltage clips. Like Tamba, now so luxuriously, happily on his back, dreaming of a woman’s hips fitting over him.

  It makes me sick.

  I retreat into the bathroom. I did not cross the sea to witness a stranger’s wet dream.

  I must be untouchable, remember. A ghost among the killers. I must float like a membrane across their retinas.

  I catch my eyes in the bathroom mirror. They are too bright, too fraught. I draw a veil across them. Good. My eyes appear blind.

  With these eyes I locate Tamba’s big toe beneath the sheet. I give it a squeeze.

  Tamba opens his eyes slowly. ‘Shit.’ He leaps to his feet like Meirong is after him with a gun. ‘I need a piss.’

  He groans as he tries to aim his heaven-thrust penis into the toilet. I have had more than enough of this gruesome intimacy. I dive through the door, hurry to the canteen.

  * * *

  Meirong is sitting in a bright red dress watching the doorway like a cash-in-transit guard. She has a briefcase at her feet and some emails printed on plastic sheets.

  Olivia waves one at me, grinning. ‘Look, Malachi. A message from my granny.’

  ‘Malachi can’t read,’ Meirong says dourly. She eyes Olivia’s precious email, her small hand itching to take it. ‘Have you finished? I need to shred it.’

  Olivia gives it to her reluctantly. ‘My little boy’s out of hospital,’ she tells me. ‘He’s on a ventilator on the couch.’ She laughs. ‘Guess what happened, Malachi?’ She reaches again for the sheet, but Meirong is already zipping it into her briefcase.

  ‘Where is your roommate?’ Meirong asks me.

  This woman is emotionally stunted, she must be. I am hardly a normal citizen, but even I can read simple feelings. Olivia’s fingers flutter to the table top. The doorway remains empty.

  If I had a tongue I would say, Tamba is waiting for his hard on to soften. Last time I saw him, he was trying to pee through a tree.

  Tamba sweeps in just then, his eyes innocently wide. ‘Sorry,’ he breathes. He lifts the top slice of toast, sets the pile teetering, like the atmosphere in this breakfast room. Tamba butters his toast lavishly.

  ‘It’s eleven minutes past, Tamba. Do you not care?’

  Tamba floats his fried liver between them, drops it on his butter substitute.

  ‘This is the third time,’ Meirong says.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Don’t think there will be no consequence.’

  ‘For God’s sake, Meirong. Eleven minutes.’

  Meirong leaves a Chinese-sized bite in her white toast, arrives on her feet. ‘Olivia, I’ll inspect your growth markers at ten.’ She turns to Tamba and me. ‘I want both of you on your jobs by half past.’ Meirong strides through the door, choppy with indignation. Janeé almost crushes her on the other side. ‘Janeé, please report to me if they stay late.’

  When Meirong is gone, Tamba says under his breath, ‘Stupid bitch.’

  Janeé pours caramel-coloured tea from a silver teapot. The sound of a delinquent wind reaches my ears now. A shadow floats across the portholes above our heads. Yes. The clouds are racing. Romano steals in, grunts some Portuguese greeting. Eases his tired body onto the bench.

  Olivia tells him, ‘Timmy’s hooked up to a ventilator day and night, but he’s getting better. Guess how we know?’

  Romano scoops half of the marmalade jar onto his toast. ‘How?’

  ‘He got off the couch and crawled to the glass cabinet. He turned the key. I mean, he’s only twenty months. He opened the blimming thing and he broke Little Bo Peep.’

  There is a bewildered silence. Is this good news?

  ‘It was my granny’s best piece. It was, like, old china. Do you know what he did? He said, “Ahh, sha-a-ame.”’

  We wait.

  ‘His first words, I mean except “Mama” and “Nana”. “Ahh, sha-a-me.”’

  Romano’s tired eyes reflect Olivia’s pleasure. He talks with a huge piece of toast in his cheek. ‘My little girl, she talked at one and a half years. My wife said, “Say Mae, say Mae.”’ Romano utters a laugh that has been soaked in pure love. ‘She said, “Papai.”’

  Olivia chuckles. ‘My granny stuck the Bo Peep together with superglue. I just wish . . . I just wish . . .’

  I know what Olivia wishes. She wishes time would rush like a tidal wave, crush the pipettes, the poached eggs, the thousands of rivets and bring the day they carve out a pair of new lungs for Timmy.

  Which prisoner is cultivating them, I wonder?

  Janeé spoons three sugars into her tea, stirs vigorously. ‘It’s twenty-nine past,’ she says meaningfully.

  Tamba slashes at his liver with his butter knife. ‘I take it your son is stable, Janeé? His veins?’

  Janeé spills hot tea on her chin. She grabs for a serviette.

  ‘They say if you�
�re diabetic, sugar’s like heroin,’ he says spitefully.

  ‘Time to go,’ Janeé says grimly. She collects the plates with a surprising quietness. It’s amazing how guilt can make clumsy people delicate, turn noisy plate-crashers into nimble plate-stackers.

  Olivia floats from the room, still delighted about Timmy. I bow slightly to Janeé, I suppose in pity. Follow Olivia out of the seething atmosphere.

  * * *

  In her laboratory, Olivia hands me my bucket of clean white towels. ‘All strength,’ she says, powerful now that her child is strong enough to break Little Bo Peep into pieces.

  As I walk down the corridor, the sea lets loose a warning wave against the metal legs of the rig. Or am I imagining it?

  Disappear, Malachi. Be a shadow in the wings.

  * * *

  My father used to make us enact our English pieces on the factory simulation mezzanine. Instead of our role-plays like, ‘I am worried about the productivity over Christmas’ or ‘Section ten’s figures are corrupted. Who is responsible?’ Hamri nudged us onto the tiny, high stage to replace dry factory language with floral Shakespearian.

  * * *

  Be gone, Father.

  * * *

  I raise my key card from my heart, turn the red light green.

  * * *

  When I reach Samuel’s cage, I can’t help but stare at his nails. They are the same length as yesterday before I cut them. Those nutrients could grow a human in the same few days as a GM chicken. I put my bucket down, latch the leather glove to his prison.

  Samuel doesn’t even let me reach his little finger. ‘Do you believe me, Malachi?’

  He must be talking to himself. I do not exist.

  ‘Do you understand my English?’

  Second in the English Olympiad two thousand and twenty. Selected to work in America, Mister Journalist.

  ‘Forget about me.’ He inclines his head towards the old crone with the crocodile skin. ‘Think about Eulalie. She’s psychic, Malachi.’

  The old woman smiles a wry, old smile.

  ‘That means she can see things with her mind.’

  I wipe the sweat from the skin between his fingers.

  ‘She saw corpses buried in a swimming pool in Eritrea. Children.’

  Oh, no. Help me.

  A gust of wind beats the metal casing of this ship. I dig my thumb beneath the buckle, release Samuel’s fingers.

  ‘She told the prime minister’s wife. The woman spoke out, so they poisoned her. They said it was Eulalie.’

  Fuck off, monsters, this has nothing to do with me.

  Sorry for swearing, Hamri.

  I finish Samuel’s feet, start on the old witch’s astonishingly young fingers.

  ‘Just look at him, Samuel,’ the husband killer croons next to me. ‘Such lovely smooth skin. He is better than us. A real victim.’

  I groom the old crone’s knobbly toes, set them free. I pick up my bucket, turn to the sarcastic mermaid.

  * * *

  Vicki hesitates for a second, surrenders her feet to me. ‘Have you ever seen an angelfish, Malachi?’

  I slice through a nail that has replaced itself overnight.

  ‘My husband hooked one that day. It had these long, pretty wings, all the colours of the rainbow.’ Her fingers touch the colours in the air. ‘He chopped them off like they were just fins.’ Her eyes have turned from black to a brooding violet. ‘I got revenge for the angelfish.’

  I release her feet, avert my eyes from the edge of her sternum, pressing through her skin like the beginnings of a fin. Vicki tucks her feet beneath her bum, her knees to one side. The Mermaid and the Angelfish. Charming.

  What about the serrated scaling knife she stuck into her husband? I force myself to trim Vicki’s pink fingertips. What about the red on the linoleum?

  I wipe her slender hands with my white towel. As I pull the brace away, I catch a glimpse of the bone in her wrist, the tilt on the outer edge, the sweet, surprising rise. ‘Carpal’ is an ugly word. Vicki’s wrist is the velvet inside of a bird’s wing. A tremor passes through me, a tiny flight of my nervous system.

  I lock Vicki’s cage quickly, turn my back on her.

  * * *

  I work through six more prisoners, tune my ears to the crash of waves in the abyss below us.

  ‘Al-Masihhh . . .’ A quavery cry sinks into my senses. The voice is high, as cracked as the tar on a Kattra pavement.

  The man’s skin was once black, perhaps, but the years, perhaps decades without sunlight seem to be bleaching him yellow. Liverish, my father would have said, even though his own skin wore a Samwati tint.

  The prisoner next to him laughs. ‘Yassir says you are Jesus coming to heal him.’

  This man is blacker than my viscose trousers. The two men are different-coloured twins with their hollow chests and long arms, but close up the dark man looks like an Ethiopian runner on the sports channel, his tendons laid on top of his skin like a topographic map showing crawling water courses, mountain contours.

  ‘Actually, Malachi must be Jesus.’ He chuckles affectionately. ‘Remember, he cleaned the disciples’ feet.’

  Despite the rising fury of the sea, they calm me, these two. Their opposites express the conflict in me.

  * * *

  I work swiftly through two more subjects, tend to the toenails of a mad, happy man. It is the excitable Indian with one front tooth missing and one black thumb. What the heck is he so happy about? He thrusts one hand out as if he is asking for money, points to the gap in his teeth.

  The Ethiopian laughs, interprets for me, ‘Vihaan is asking for your tooth, Malachi.’

  The Indian pinches his fingers, gives me a devilish grin. I clamp my teeth shut instinctively.

  This is too ridiculous, the situation, for me to stay ghostly.

  As I check his wiring and his pipes, he tugs hard at his mouth. A red trail of spit hangs from his fingers. A real tooth has come free.

  ‘Hee heeee!’

  I jam my thumb on my intercom.

  ‘What?’ Tamba’s tone is as thick and bitter as vulture soup.

  I bare my teeth, pinch at the air.

  ‘Abscess? It can’t be. There’s a mouthwash in their vitamins.’

  I shake my head, tug at my own teeth.

  The Indian thrusts his tooth up proudly for Tamba to see, but the mesh must be blurring it.

  I draw a computer screen, stab at my eyes to say, Check your computer, stupid.

  Tamba swivels on his chair, his dreads floating like reeds of water-borne algae. ‘He’s pulling his teeth out. Wow!’ Tamba grins through the window. ‘Tell him to do another one.’

  Very funny.

  By now the hall is laughing as if the Indian and I are mime artists hired to entertain them for the afternoon.

  Vicki shouts out mockingly, ‘Call the tooth fairy, Malachi! Do you know her? I hear she’s very sexy.’

  Madame Sophie laughs across from her.

  I pick up my bucket, feel the needle of Vicki’s perspicacity driving into me. This woman senses something about me and sex.

  * * *

  When I reach the gigantic Gadu Yignae, he apologises like he is their caretaker, not me. ‘Sorry, Malachi. They’re just desperate to laugh. You must know the feeling.’ He nods like we are some kind of compatriots.

  I groom his huge hands, not plucked animals but the hands of a plaster god. His pubic hair curls in thick welts, like it is carved from rock.

  They say Gadu Yignae led the people from the earth’s core into the sunlight and built them a shelter beneath the trees, but a flash flood killed him prematurely.

  The giant takes back his hands, pulls on a jagged scar across his chest. A bead of white fluid drips. ‘You might as well tell Tamba. This sore has flared up again.’

  How the heck does he know Tamba’s name?

  ‘Cage fifteen,’ the giant advises me.

  I press my intercom, panic for an instant. What was the signal for infection?

&n
bsp; I touch my heart, make an imaginary incision. Let the stripe of my mouth turn down.

  Tamba’s mouth twitches. ‘Wound not happy?’

  I glare at him through the glass. Tamba pulls his head from the window before he succumbs to my extraordinary charm.

  The giant gives me his hands, smiles at me kindly. ‘That tongue of yours must have caused you a lot of suffering.’

  For a moment, we are brothers sharing a similar hardship. I too was on an anaesthetic drip. I too died to human society, except for Lizet who resurrected me as a zombie very quick at detecting errors in the plastic wrapping machine.

  I trim his huge, captive hands. An ancient memory lands as softly as a parachute.

  * * *

  My grandfather’s huge hands clasped the sides of my head. ‘A beautiful boy.’

  Hamri spoke up bravely, ‘He looks just like his mother.’

  My grandmother stood up from her washing work, her hands dripping. ‘Yes,’ she said bitterly. ‘Half Kapwa.’

  Hamri spun around, pointed at his mother’s hands, their pigment stolen by the chlorine bleach from rich people’s white sheets. ‘Look at you, Mother. Half white.’

  My grandfather’s hands were big enough to twist my head off my neck, but he sank back into his chair, scraping for raw breath.

  We had to leave.

  * * *

  On the bus home, my father hugged me, his Kapwa baby. ‘It’s not the tribe that they hate, Malachi. It’s the opportunity. They think we live in luxury. Do you see how the bosses divide us?’

  Beneath my father’s sigh ran a thick, ruined river. He fantasised about Utopia all the way home, but even at six years old I could sense the shadow of his guilt. Would a poet have left his parents suffering in a rotten shack on a swamp? Would he have left his mother to peel her black skin; his father to bite for oxygen?

  * * *

  The giant with my grandfather’s hands is asking me now, ‘Conscious Clause, Malachi. Have you heard of them? They’re the closest we’ve got to human rights.’

  Actually, yes. An errant son of the head of the IMF started it. They assassinated him, but the movement has billions of mula behind it.

  He nods at the rows of scarred human flesh. ‘None of us signed for any of this.’ He tries to capture my eyes. ‘And I don’t think you signed up to torture us.’