The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  The ghost of Araba, disgust ruining her flawless face?

  Was it Erniel, more furious than when I nearly won the English Olympiad?

  Or was it my cousin Kontar, shaking his battered head, disowning me?

  What did they want to say to me?

  I sink to my knees, raise my face to the shower rose – not a pretty flower, but an ugly plumbing fitting. Josiah and I both on our knees, both made mad by the ghosts of children.

  No.

  I climb to my feet. The prisoners are the enemy. I am the victim.

  I rub my skin hard with a coarse towel. The heat slowly calms my convulsive shaking. I leave enough water for Tamba, should the mood take him to wash his skin. I dress in a pale yellow shirt with khaki trousers. Smart casual, they would say in the fashion magazines. Smart, I suppose, because of the pleats.

  * * *

  Janeé’s food tonight is smart casual too. A piece of sirloin steak escorted by a troop of green, rolling peas. They chuckle as they escape the prongs of my fork. Tamba arrives in stiff denim and aftershave as strong as a chemical weapon. He, too, has managed to shower, thanks to me knocking thirty minutes off my clipping time.

  ‘Did you handle the shock treatment?’

  I nod, nonchalant.

  ‘They say the Indonesian project had microphones inside the cages. The surveillance man couldn’t take it. He had a total nervous breakdown.’ Tamba shudders. ‘I don’t know how you do it, Malachi. You must be a special kind of man.’

  Something tells me this is not a compliment.

  I jerk my fork from my steak, chase some chuckling peas. After six attempts I manage to catch three.

  ‘Malachi, you’re not eating,’ Olivia says. ‘Are you nauseous or something?’

  No, my dear, just in the midst of a total nervous breakdown. Thank you, Tamba, for putting words to it.

  ‘I’ll have to tell Meirong you’ve lost your appetite. We can’t have you sick among the prisoners now.’

  I shake my head, try to smile.

  Yes. Olivia would drop me in the shark pit, wherever it is.

  I dive at my sirloin and saw off a piece. Olivia watches as I scoop some mushroom sauce onto it. These mushrooms are no Enid Blyton stalks like the pixies cavorted on in the paper books we got from the Waste to Wonder agency. I part my teeth minimally, force steak into the chasm that Raizier has promised to fill by Christmas.

  I see Josiah’s blood drip from his torn finger.

  I begin to shiver. I should have stayed to cut his claws. I should have reported the injury.

  ‘Malachi, are you okay?’ Olivia stands up and puts a hand to my forehead.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ Janeé asks.

  ‘He seems weak.’

  Tamba hands me a serviette. I spit my steak into it. The tremors leave me immediately.

  I take up a spoon meant for the jelly and custard on the trolley, shovel five hundred peas into my mouth. I munch as if to say, See? I’m fine. Really.

  But when Janeé starts to hand out the pudding, I scoop my last peas into my cheeks, force myself not to launch off the bench and run. I stand up carefully, rub my stomach in a gesture I have seen among satiated people. I bow slightly to Janeé, a bad actor in a bad sitcom. A flicker of forgiveness softens the cook’s surliness.

  I weave through the doorway of the canteen.

  Outside, I slump in the corridor.

  ‘Dammit, he’s cracking up!’ Olivia says through the wall. ‘He didn’t eat his lunch either.’

  ‘He’s fine,’ Tamba says. ‘Leave him for a night. Malachi’s not the same as you or me.’

  I stare at the yellow paint. Tonight, I see the problem with the interior decorating. The school linoleum was the same yellow, wasn’t it?

  I rock along the corridor.

  I need to speak or I will break down completely.

  My peas try to bounce up my throat, but I slam them back with my epiglottis. The ones I hid in my cheeks ping from them like ping-pong balls. I leave a trail of green peas to my room with no sky above and no birds to peck them, like in Hansel and Gretel, had they legumes.

  * * *

  I perch on the end of my bed.

  I need to draw a line or I will turn into a drooling idiot. I slide my hand into the shadow of the bedside cabinet. Tamba’s cell phone is still where he tossed it yesterday. My fingers close on the plastic. If he catches me, I will say I was playing Fruits against Ghouls, the game the packers loved to play at lunch break.

  I sit down on my pillow. The door seems to shiver in anticipation of Tamba flinging it open. I creep past it to the bathroom, slide the concertina door shut.

  * * *

  The bathroom air is still pale with steam. I crouch in the shower, take refuge in the white tiles. The damp wall sticks to my shirt. My spine ticks against the porcelain. My white sneakers grip the slippery floor, still stained with yellow drops of antiseptic fluid. I switch on Tamba’s phone, listen to the cheerful Samsung tune. I key in his three stars, press the Glossia icon. A text box opens up, clean and white.

  Oh, God. Words. I love them.

  I choose cursive to smooth my shocking story. Take a terrible breath.

  My fingers are white-tipped and scuffed from their mild detergent burn, but they learn the keyboard arrangement easily.

  I had just turned fifteen. We had finished our geometry with Mr Zakari. My father was reading us Elizabethan sonnets, urging us to notice the chauvinism beneath the music of the words. He said it was like a violin playing to a rugby scrum.

  The letters take my pain and roll it into mystical shapes. Full bellies and slashing swords, rolling waves peaking, sometimes with pinpricks.

  Hamri strained his wiry body towards us. His sheer intensity, as usual, had us listening:

  ‘See how these rhyming couplets hide the fear of women in the sixteenth century.’

  A quavering question came from Paulus, the tall one. ‘What were they afraid of?’

  Hamri smiled mysteriously. ‘The richness of their wombs. Perhaps of their love?’

  Some of us giggled uncomfortably.

  ‘Look how Wyatt compares the woman he desires to a stag in a hunt . . .’

  A face appeared at the door. Noble bones. Not ugly. His eyes were a deep red, a trick of the sun reflecting off the red brick. A man as thin as fish gut stood behind him.

  ‘Shut up!’ he growled at us, but our hearts had already flung themselves onto our breathing pipes.

  The guerrillas entered gracefully, their movements composed like a brutal sonnet, their rifles like devil birds perched on their shoulders.

  For an instant, the men seemed relieved to find shelter in our sunny classroom. They knelt among us, stabbed their AK47s into our ribs. I will never forget the smell of their breath. Fermented pig and death. They had been living on hippo bones from the rubbish dumps.

  The thin man crouched in the front, spoke softly in Kapwa, ‘Yinawa kani unmiyu.’ Eyes front. He put his rifle to my father’s knee.

  ‘Carry on teaching.’

  Hamri read mellifluously, as he always did, but we heard the terror pushing against it.

  ‘The vain travail hath wearied me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind. Yet may I by no means my wearied mind draw from the deer, but as she flees before, fainting I follow . . .’

  Even with the rifle in my ribs, my father’s words brought the scent of jasmine that wove between the grass stalks alongside the river.

  ‘There is written her fair neck round about: “Noli me tangere . . .”’

  Touch me not.

  Templeton Security clattered to the door. Men recruited from the village, many of them fathers of the silent hostages in the classroom.

  ‘Someone saw men on the hill.’ Erniel’s father inside his bulletproof vest, a tortoise too small for its shell. His voice was high with fright. ‘Any sign of trouble?’

  Hamri gazed through the mouth of his cave, the terrified air singeing us still, silent children. The cop
per eyes of his tribe, the golden sleekness of his shaved cheek as my loquacious father, for once in his life, spoke a single syllable.

  ‘No.’

  They rattled away with their machine guns, their illfitting vests squeaking like mice.

  The guerrillas rose up and opened fire through the window. The Templeton fathers did not fire a single bullet. Their fingers stayed frozen on their triggers, refusing to risk killing their own daughters and sons.

  The guerrillas shot the men to mathematically irregular pieces.

  They filled the children with lead, pinned them to the walls as if with the steel pins my father used to stick up his favourite quotations. The demons laughed with the lurid pleasure of killing, the screams of the children feeding their monstrous lust to shatter, annihilate. Our blood was their simplest triumph.

  I sink to my bum. The water soaks my khaki trousers as the violence, the horror take their place in the sentences, pose as calm fact, as if gently blotting the blood where it pooled on the linoleum and began to grow a skin.

  The guerrilla next to me pulled out a machete, shoved the toe of his boot be tween my teeth. The stink of detritus, the clawing for breath, then the razor tip of his blade across my tongue. He turned me into a fountain of blood.

  The scab in my throat tears free and chokes me. I cough and cough.

  I stop, touch with my finger where my tongue should be. I see no blood.

  I return to my screen, hunt among the memories, find some air to breathe.

  The children’s teeth flew like corn chopped off the cob. Their stomachs were like soft animals, cowering, bleeding out. The children clasped their bellies as if each were harbouring a vulnerable creature, perhaps a puppy.

  Kontar did not even duck. Mouth open, he watched the bullets come. Like Kontar drank his tea, he took the heat. They tore open his chest.

  His chest was not metal.

  Erniel crouched beneath his desk, his eyes burning above his knees. He was too frightened to move his head but I heard what he said.

  ‘My sisters.’

  Their love passed before their eyes. Not their entire life, as some people say. No. Their greatest love, clarified. They died loving the thing they cherished more than anything.

  Araba stared past me.

  ‘Mama,’ she whispered.

  The tears run from my eyes, turn the keys blurry. I open them wide.

  A growling cry escapes me, the sound of the dying lioness.

  My father fell heavily across my knees. His spine was bare, like the defrosted rats we dissected in Natural Science. This is the effect of the AK47.

  My father died reaching up for my mouth.

  I drop the phone on my lap, let my hands hang. I am grateful for the lingering steam in the bathroom. The light is nothing like the crispness of a Krokosoe afternoon when the wind blows the factory smoke over the fields towards the hydroelectric plant in Anchi.

  I let my head roll from side to side, the neutral white tiles like the blank paper we used before my father arranged second-hand tablets from Kattra. I wipe my eyes, pick up my writing instrument.

  I am in two thousand and thirty-five, writing the moments I have hidden from since I was fifteen.

  The guerrillas left me to bleed. When my classmates lay drained, I was still a tributary running between them.

  Tamba bangs into the bedroom.

  ‘Malachi?’

  I jump to my feet, turn on a tap in the basin.

  ‘Malachi, are you all right? You looked shaky at supper.’

  I grab my toothbrush and scrub.

  ‘Olivia and I are watching Apocalypse Three if you want to come up?’

  I spit nothing into the drain. Suck water noisily from the stream.

  Tamba slams out again. He has no time for a slow, silent victim of apocalypse.

  The chlorine water washes away the fiery crust in my throat. I wait a full seven minutes for the echo of the movie player to start up.

  I write easier, breathe easier with a dark, destructive soundtrack somewhere above me.

  Templeton called in the army, but they arrived too late. The ANIM burnt the workers on the factory floor and in the packing sheds. They burnt the cornfields with Bayira in his tractor, and then the rest of the labour force. They razed the village, picked off the tottering old women, the angry dogs, the toddlers.

  I spent three months in a Kattra hospital waiting to die, trying to sink beneath the lip of consciousness. I tried holding my breath. Be still, I told my lungs. But it was my heart that would not stop beating. It tapped its foot, ticked in time, jerked once every second out of habit.

  Sometimes I would wake with a shock that left me wondering if I was dead before the pain brought me to blinding, bellowing wakefulness, whimpering disbelief. Blood spitting, the pain so high and so hot, so utterly embracing it must be that I was being slowroasted, kept alive; or repeatedly murdered, of course with knives.

  I do not re-read what I have written. I tap, Save to audio chip.

  I press on the seam of the built-in ear clip. It snaps off eagerly. I poke the cone into the vee between my first two fingers, flex my hand into a fist.

  I snap the furtive little piece back onto its mother ship. I will give it to Samuel, the recorder of facts.

  * * *

  I slide Tamba’s phone into the shadow where I found it. I crawl into bed naked, too tired to find my sleeping shorts. Dim waves of devastation break from the recreation room, miles above me.

  The movies at the refugee centre cured me of diving to the ground at the sound of bullets, and pissing, just pissing. Some children had to be packed into their metal beds with blankets to muffle the sound while the movies played for two hours. It didn’t occur to the welfare workers to simply not play films about war and devastation, for goodness’ sake.

  I expect to lie awake, trying not to wet my bed, but I sleep right through the third act of Apocalypse Three. I sleep like a man who did not leave his supper, but ate his fill of sirloin steak. A man who has brokered peace, and will forever live on the seeded side of the unexploded landmines.

  MONDAY

  I wake to the sound of a bomb counting down. I pull my face off a landmine planted beneath mouthfuls of grass. Tamba has set his timepiece to tick like an old clock. There is a damp patch on my pillow, not from tears but escaped spit, the infantile sign of a deep, innocent sleep. I roll into a sitting position. Tamba’s skin has the sheen of someone who has been drinking and dancing until two in the morning. He sleeps with his mouth open, his tongue paralysed.

  I pull on my trousers in full view of Tamba’s dead eyelids. I wear brown trousers today. Fawn, they call it, but this day is not a day for sweet forest creatures. This brown may as well be military issue. I slip my own rudimentary phone into the cabinet, pick out Tamba’s like a practised thief. I drop it in my pocket. Tamba breathes as evenly as if he is on a heart-lung machine. I sling on an olive-green shirt, fasten the cuffs. Tie the laces of my brown suede shoes.

  In the bathroom, my hair looks like pigeons have been mating in it. I discourage the fuzz with palmfuls of water. My eyes, I notice, have borrowed a gleam of army green. Camouflage. I am going in.

  In the bedroom, Tamba’s alarm rips up the quiet. He jerks from the coma induced by too much ping-pong. I hook my intercom to my belt, tramp towards breakfast. In the corridor I tread on three of last night’s peas, crushing them.

  I burst the skin of my pork sausage without even wincing. I eat it with exaggerated confidence, but there is only Janeé to witness my miraculous healing. Her pumpkin face glows orange in the sun filtering from the two glass eyes above us. If I could make small talk, I would ask her something frivolous like, How did your parents decide on your name, Janeé?

  Janeé nods.

  ‘It’s good that you eat,’ she says sincerely. ‘You must be strong for Meirong.’ She bends her sausage and bites the middle like a papaya. ‘The way I stay strong is, I sleep.’ She chuckles. ‘They can dance on me, I don’t wake up. Olivia
says she plays music, she keeps the lights on, I only snore louder.’

  I don’t want to think of Olivia in her panties and bra dancing on Janeé’s belly, pummelling it. I smile at the cook. In the quiet before the others come, Janeé and I develop our first friendship.

  Meirong arrives, wearing black-and-white checks. What, must she lie flat before Quenton for him to play chess today?

  She perches uneasily on the bench. ‘Feeling better, Malachi? I hear you aren’t eating.’

  I nod emphatically, fix my gaze on Meirong’s dress, but the chess squares take turns to jut in and out of focus.

  ‘He ate all his sausage,’ Janeé tells Meirong proudly. She sends me a secret message over Meirong’s head, Be strong for the lady boss. I sense it in the careful way she steadies herself to pass me tea.

  ‘Hi guys.’ Tamba bounces a sausage onto his plate. ‘What’s happening?’ He seems to have recovered some of the good humour he showed before his sleeping pills were ripped from him. ‘Whoa, Meirong, you look stunning today.’ But his eyes jitter like mine, trying to still the optical effect of the squares.

  Romano enters stealthily. Olivia trails in behind him, still sleepy. ‘Mor-ning,’ she sings.

  I forgive Olivia for her selfish worry last night. This woman has buttery sun stored somewhere in her marrow. When she is happy, Olivia shines like a place that has never seen rain, like the thirty-third clear day at the equator. Araba and I counted during our last summer in Bhajo.

  Olivia’s two front teeth tease the skin off a sausage like a mother cat with her newborn young.

  ‘I had this lovely dream. We were floating on the sea, me and Timmy. We were on this plastic thing with a little see-through window. You know those old blow-up things? But instead of reefs there were these beautiful flowers growing in the sea.’ She giggles. ‘Lilies.’ Now that the sausage is free of its skin, Olivia nibbles it awake lovingly. ‘And the sun!’ She stares up at the golden light above us, hushed with reverence for the fire in the sky.

  Meirong ignores her completely. ‘Romano, still no sign?’