The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  And how do I forget a child’s mouth filled with sand?

  I must think of these people as slaughter animals. They are chickens, all of them. If Raizier is to murder them, this is their destiny. I work through two prisoners, cling desperately to my analogy. The fussing Indian in cage number thirteen is miming fire now, explosions. I throw open his metal hatch. He thrusts his feet through, but he waves wildly at the ceiling. A deranged chicken, that’s what he is. He holds a wet finger to his nose, sniffs. He waves it towards me, entreats me to smell it. I capture his hands, hurry through the cutting as the Indian shouts a mad monologue to the roof.

  What did he do? Drop bombs somewhere, and now expects revenge?

  I wish I was deaf as well as dumb. Earplugs would be lovely. I want to hit my button and beg Tamba for some. The madman yowls with frustration as I set his hands free. I latch his cage, check my timepiece. I spent four hundred and eighty-three seconds on him. I have begun to rise again. In a few days, this will be as easy as plastic-wrapping chicken.

  * * *

  I groom another prisoner without even blinking. Drop my bucket at the giant Gadu Yignae’s feet. Judge James, Vicki calls him.

  ‘Samuel’s right,’ he says in his rumbling baritone. He shakes his massive head. ‘Raizier can’t send us home in this condition.’ A crease spreads like slow lightning across his brow. ‘My guess is they’ll say we died in jail of something like cholera or TB. They’ll say it’s too infectious to return our bodies.’ He nods thoughtfully. ‘They might keep our teeth.’ He smiles for the first time, his teeth shining like a sculptor carved each one out of marble. ‘Our first tool, our last proof. Built in.’ The judge is beginning to sound like an impassioned dentist. But a deep anger rises to his reasonable eyes. ‘I don’t want to die like this.’

  I wait for yesterday’s tirade to come but he watches me with an expression of pity.

  ‘It will ruin you, Malachi.’

  The giant pulls his hands free. ‘If you want to go to Conscious Clause, do you know what the crux of your argument should be?’ He waves at the rows of chicken mesh. ‘You had no idea you would be aiding and abetting the death of forty people.’

  I rub his thick heels with shaking fingers.

  ‘Bring me something, Malachi. I’ll write it for you.’

  I bang his wire hatch, lock it.

  Aiding and abetting the death . . .

  Antiseptic sloshes onto my white sneakers as if I am squirting urine.

  I stumble away from the giant, flee to the fat Australian.

  Confusion racks me like a fever as I groom his loose skin. A rushing sound inside my eardrums surges like the sea as I fumble through the skinny rapist, check his wires and his pipes.

  But as I work through the next prisoner, I hear someone singing, ‘Cula, Cula, Kuya kudi kunyi.’

  Next door, the girl with kohl eyes is chanting a child’s song under her breath. A mournful sound, somehow calming. The prettiest trace of guitar strings plays on each side of her spine as she hunches over her knees, wipes her face compulsively.

  Andride, the social worker, asks softly behind me, ‘She’s singing in Luba. She’s from the DRC.’

  I tear my attention from the girl’s architecture.

  ‘They tortured Lolie to make her pull the trigger.’

  I stare at the young woman brushing the sack off her face. Or was it a sheet of plastic?

  ‘She was an excellent shot. The M23’s best sniper.’

  Together we watch the girl fighting for breath, over and over.

  ‘She was ten.’

  I bite on my breath.

  He nods towards the giant. ‘Judge James said she should never have been sentenced.’

  There is a long, swollen oval protruding from the girl’s abdomen. I hit the switch on my device.

  ‘Yes?’

  I touch my own stomach, spread my fingers to indicate a swelling.

  Tamba assumes the worst. ‘What? Burst appendix?’

  I shake my head.

  He shrinks with relief. ‘Ah. Spleens. They’re growing two in number seventeen because the cells graft so easily.’ He chuckles unexpectedly. ‘You know how they say, I nearly split my spleen?’

  I wait in the presence of a crack killer with two spleens inside her belly.

  ‘Never mind,’ Tamba says mournfully. He clicks his microphone off, once again disappointed in me.

  Lolie gives me her fingers, stares unblinkingly down the barrel at me.

  How many hearts have those kohl eyes found through her rifle sights? How many spleens has she split with exploding copper sheaths? The girl is a brutal killer.

  I cut Lolie’s nails with steady, strong fingers. With each slotting of the blade in the interstice between skin and nail, with each slim half-moon that falls to the floor, I prove to Lolie that, crack shot or not, she is not the only one who can be accurate.

  * * *

  The skinny Indian is screeching now but I ignore the ruckus, move on to Shikorina.

  Unlike the sniper, the child killer greets me with her arms open wide. ‘My brother. Did you come on an aeroplane?’

  Her smile is as warm and cherishing as a deep silky bath on a dusty afternoon. Her nails are soft and clear, they give way easily.

  ‘Hear me, Kenneth,’ she implores me. ‘I said to my children, Don’t love me. Don’t.’

  ‘GAS!’ someone shouts.

  ‘They loved me too much. Don’t you see?’

  ‘Paraffin!’

  The big beauty Charmayne is stabbing her finger at the roof above the Indian’s cage. I smell a petroleum stink. I run back to the tooth-puller, now squeezed into the corner of his cage, his feet tucked under him. Liquid pours from a short pipe high above him, pools on the floor beneath my sneakers. I shove on my intercom, bounce like a boxer, join the others in their frantic mimicry.

  ‘Leaking pipe! Paraffin!’ the prisoners shout for me.

  ‘SHIT.’ Tamba springs to his feet. He yells into a microphone on his desktop, ‘Meirong! Kerosene leak! It’s pouring all over number thirteen . . . Yes! . . . Yes!’ Tamba turns in wild circles. He mutters to himself, ‘Shut. Shut. Shut. Recovery.’ His arm swings and falls. ‘Ahh.’

  The fluid fades to a trickle. The whole hall stares up, watches it drip.

  Meirong’s voice sounds faintly through the speaker.

  Tamba says, ‘Okay, I’ll rinse him.’ He slams a button on his DJ desk. A shower pours down on the tooth puller from his irrigation pipe. He screams and arches, the rungs of his chest a chicken carcass picked clean.

  Tamba snaps, ‘It’s only water, for God’s sake. Tell him to relax.’ Tamba remembers my disability. He switches his sound off for a second, hammers his forehead with the heel of his hand. He clicks his microphone on again, says more delicately, ‘Fuck, Malachi. I think it’s time for lunch.’

  Shikorina is quiet now, bewildered by the emergency.

  The giant speaks to me over the heads of five prisoners. ‘Perhaps this is their modus operandi.’

  ‘Malachi?’ Tamba urges over my radio, ‘Drop what you are doing and come.’

  Barry, the fat Australian, asks, ‘Do you mean, this is how they will finish us?’

  The giant nods. ‘It looks like it.’

  Someone exclaims, ‘Whoaaah.’

  Barry points upwards, breathing heavily. ‘Each cage has got one. Look.’

  The prisoners peer at the transparent tubing running along the roof. Between each shower nozzle is a tiny pipe aiming towards the cages.

  Tamba barks, ‘Malachi. Get out.’ He is pressed hard against his surveillance glass, his nose as bulbous as a gnome’s. Is this place about to blow, as they say in those old movies with Leonardo DiCaprio?

  ‘Ohh!’ Charmayne gasps. ‘Liquid gas for . . .’

  ‘Fire.’ Josiah says the word for her.

  The word flares, catches alight on the metal wires.

  ‘Fire!’

  ‘Fire!’

  Through the glass, Tamba is
on his feet, a tall featureless figure, his earpiece pressed to his temple. He is a vulture suddenly, one of the monstrous ones that savaged newborn lions in Krokosoe.

  ‘Malachi!’

  I pick up my bucket, my radio still crackling. As I pass Samuel in cage number one, he thrusts his eyebrows high.

  ‘Do you see what I mean?’

  I keep my guilty scowl wired to my brow, but my sneakers peel off the floor with soft, sucking clicks, the sound of sycophantic cowardice.

  * * *

  Janeé dumps our plates piled high with something white. Next to each pale heap is a row of bright orange sticks. She squeezes through the door, disappears.

  Tamba turns to me.

  ‘It wasn’t your fault, Malachi. That pipe is too high to see a split from the ground.’ He evades the question in my eyes, tries to quip, ‘Thank God no one smokes in there. One flick and . . .’ He flings his hands to the roof like the poor tooth puller who mimed fire for nearly two hours.

  Olivia’s eyes are huge with fright. ‘Why do they need that gas?’

  Tamba looks down, shuffles his fish sticks. ‘Meirong should tell you. It’s not my job.’

  ‘Come on, Tamba.’ Olivia won’t let go. ‘It sounds scary.’

  Tamba squirms in his seat. ‘Meirong says it’s to burn evidence. In, say, a crisis.’

  ‘What evidence?’

  ‘The cages, the cultivation systems . . .’ Tamba gestures vaguely.

  Olivia chews as if flames are licking the walls of the corridor. ‘Meirong said the little lifeboat is for us. What about the prisoners?’

  Tamba stabs a fish stick into his white mound, stodgy enough to stifle a small fire. He shrugs uneasily. ‘Maybe the big boat Romano sleeps in.’ He bites off what might be the head of his fish stick, flips it and does the same with the tail. ‘Ask Meirong.’

  Olivia succumbs to the potato that now seems designed to induce stupidity. But Samuel’s angry eyes still burn into me.

  Do you see what I mean?

  A figure in a white moon-suit walks past the canteen. It has a padded chest and padded legs, a metal canister on its back. There is a synthetic swish of fattened limbs, the rattle of an ordinary toolbox. The man turns his head, but the reflection from his visor conceals his eyes from us.

  Olivia turns too late. ‘What was that?’

  Meirong bounds into the room as if she might fly into a triple somersault.

  ‘Engineer’s oversight,’ she declares triumphantly. ‘Quenton –’ She corrects herself: ‘Mr Carreira says it’s not Maintenance.’ She nods at me. ‘You can go in there now, Malachi.’ She swings to Olivia, ‘Tell Janeé I’ll take Romano’s lunch up at two.’ Meirong vaults after the swishing white figure.

  ‘She’s pretty,’ Olivia says, as if this is relevant.

  I rise just as Janeé lands on the opposite bench. Her side seems to sink. I leave Olivia in suspension, go after the fireproof engineer and the green Chinese nymph, in pursuit of one thing: this day’s ending.

  * * *

  I open the door cautiously. The hall still stinks of flammable gas. As I reach the trolley, a cranking sound starts above me. The man in the white moon-suit is sliding on a harness along the roof. Behind him, a square hatch has opened in the wall next to Tamba’s glass station. Meirong crouches in the opening, a trapeze artist about to leap into the voluminous space. But the caged audience are not watching her with bated breath; they are watching the cranking astronaut like their life depends on it. His suit must be fireproof. I glance back, eye the slim opening I have just come through. How many seconds would I take to reach the door? I gather my courage, collect my grooming tools. I ignore Samuel carefully, refuse to look at Vicki. I turn my back on Shikorina, whose children loved her too much, start on the toes of cage number twenty-one. I am relieved to have the prisoners’ attention off me, but Meirong is taking this chance to monitor my activities. I clip and clean, meticulous yet nimble. The prisoners give me their extremities absent-mindedly, stare up at their only entertainment since Malachi the tongueless first walked among them. As I work, the engineer tugs a tube from the roof and snips it with his own cutting tool. He fiddles with a wrench, smears on something that may be glue.

  After five prisoners, he shuts his toolbox. Every single member of the audience exhales. I even catch a smile from Charmayne, the island beauty.

  ‘Thank God.’ The social worker with the silver wings breathes. ‘We get a second chance.’

  The giant smiles wryly. ‘A few more weeks to live.’

  I glance up at Meirong’s perch, but the trapeze artist has moved to a different stage, perhaps an afternoon matinée in the forbidden wing.

  I wash Andride’s feet, rub roughly at a beauty spot as the man in the moonsuit cranks back into the tunnel next to Tamba’s kiosk. The panel in the wall grinds shut. Tamba’s dreadlocks create the silhouette of a rain-spider’s hairy legs as he gives me a lazy thumbs-up, smiles a smile as slow as mashed potato.

  Did he smoke weed through his raspberry juice? I let the brace drop from Andride’s beauty spot.

  * * *

  Is this my second chance? Is God, fireproof and cool in heaven, amusing himself with some cruel symmetry?

  The only God I know is the one who cut out my tongue and said, Look, Malachi. You’re the only one who lived to tell the tale.

  The only God I know is the God of irony.

  It feels like someone has poured liquid lead into me.

  If this job is a second chance from some pyromaniac in the sky, I am not interested. Keep your dirty deal! I want to shout at the roof, where the yellow paint has hardened in sloppy creases like the skin of a mammoth, thick and stupid.

  * * *

  I groom a tall man with conjunctivitis, report his infection to Tamba. There is nothing I can do to fix his pigeon chest. I trace the plastic tubes below his cage, winding in, winding out. There will be no leaks because of me. I have come this far without the help of heaven. I will shut up for six months, take my tongue and run, run, run. Escape the bad grace of Jesus or Allah or any of God’s favourite sons.

  * * *

  When I reach Charmayne, she whispers to me, ‘Just me, Malachi. Leave the others if you have to.’ Her angry scar splits her solar plexus, steals beneath one creamy breast. ‘Save me, please.’ Her pubic bush looks straight at me. Her palm-frond lashes sweep towards the floor, carpet it with luscious grief.

  The desert strangler asks, ‘Why are you whispering?’

  All eyes swing to Charmayne’s hunger, her knees spread wide.

  She says the words I have heard too many times today: ‘I don’t want to die like this.’

  What’s the difference? I want to scream. What does it matter how you shitting expire? I throw her towel in the bucket, shut Charmayne’s cage. These killers have no right to choose their cause of death. Did their victims get a chance? Did they give them a menu?

  Did my classmates raise their hands and ask, Please can you rather do it another way?

  I slam my bucket down, start on the next subject. My blood is hot and dark, my skin threatening to split. I work through eight deserving killers, bite on my breath to contain the lava that might escape if I dare to breathe out.

  * * *

  Madame Sophie, on the contrary, is as serene as if she is relaxing at the beautician’s. She has no idea she might be buried in position any moment like the people of Pompeii. She doesn’t seem to notice that the wrath of Satan is busy trimming her nails. She watches me, says wistfully, ‘I did my girls like this. Nails, blusher, lipstick. They loved it . . .’

  Josiah throws his head to the enamel heaven, laughs hard enough to let loose all the demons the angels have tied up for centuries.

  ‘Shut up, Josiah!’ Madame Sophie kicks at his cage. She turns to me, as spiteful as a child.

  ‘Ask him about the children.’

  A snake of fear writhes in Josiah’s eyes.

  ‘Not children. Worms.’ He rises to his feet. His venom flies from his lips
. ‘They were worms, those Seleka, crawling into us!’ He squats in his cage, pulls imaginary strings from between his buttocks.

  I hit my switch. Bring an axe. Light the gas. Chop off the monster’s head.

  ‘What’s it?’ Tamba says.

  I bang my wrists together, mime handcuffs.

  Tamba stares down at Josiah. He scoots to the left, lifts his elbow high. A fine spray showers onto Josiah’s skin. A strike of electricity cleaves through him. It ricochets in me, finds leftover traces from last night’s radio. The monster crashes to his cage floor, his nose slamming onto his excretion plate. The last digits of his fingers hook into the mesh, fuse with the metal. He rises up and slams his face again. He pisses involuntarily. Tamba gives one last jolt so Josiah’s fingertips do a double-jointed hook. This time he rips a nail. A bright red drip shocks the yellow floor.

  I back away from it.

  I will not tend to him, even if his blood is bright red, not black as I imagined. Still vibrating with the electric spillage from the devil’s cage, I snatch up my bucket, reel past Eulalie.

  The old witch croons softly, ‘I hear children, Malachi.’

  Her words fire through my crown, detonate in my belly. I stand motionless.

  ‘Are they friends?’ She turns a withered ear to me. ‘Is it a crèche?’

  Panic floods my organs, this time freezing.

  ‘A classroom?’

  Streams of ice shaft into my heart, pierce my soft tissue.

  ‘Children?’ Vicki’s lips part with morbid curiosity. ‘Whose children?’

  I whirl on the mermaid, pelt her with icy hail.

  Vicki shrinks from my silent storm. ‘Sorry,’ she murmurs.

  Eulalie cradles me with gentle sympathy. I tear my eyes from hers, cough up icy pellets, tears ripped from the Arctic of my being. I drop my equipment on the trolley, force my frozen limbs from this ghastly mortuary.

  * * *

  I tear off my whispering grey outfit, adjust the shower taps to the temperature of blood in a calm, resting state.

  How dare she?

  I stand in the warm rain, begin to shiver. How dare Eulalie? She was taking a clever, cruel guess, surely.

  Who did she see?