The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  ‘No.’

  ‘What, the Spanish Armada?’ Tamba teases.

  Meirong bans all jokes with her tone. ‘The tanker convoy passed safely. But we got a report at eleven p.m. of a solo sailor lost at sea.’

  ‘All alone?’ Olivia says.

  ‘She was in a yacht race with her father.’

  ‘A girl?’ Tamba says.

  Meirong nods, nips merciless pieces off her sausage.

  ‘How old is she?’ Romano asks.

  ‘Nineteen.’

  We all stop chewing, all feel the vulnerability of a young girl alone on the hostile sea.

  ‘It’s an Éternité Insurance boat. It’s absolutely critical we stay out of this. Imagine the search parties.’ For a moment Meirong looks utterly desperate. ‘Imagine the press. Let’s pray she doesn’t drift towards us.’

  But she would rather kick Buddha’s fat arse than ask for help, wouldn’t she?

  I push my plate away, stand up briskly. I am, after all, the only one in military colours. The only one fighting on the front line. Yes, I took a hit. Last night I stood wavering, choking on a piece of sirloin steak. But I did not fall, did I?

  ‘Already?’ Olivia squeaks.

  I nod in a manly manner. I have devised a weapon that can defeat forty enemies with a single stroke. I have it primed in my pocket. If it were a time bomb, it would be ticking.

  ‘Um, the bucket’s done but it’s inside, on the counter . . .’

  I put up my hand, invite Olivia to stay and complete her sausage midwifery. I nod politely at the others, cleave briskly from these people weakened by lilo dreams and the petty fears of civilians.

  ‘I’ll be there in a minute, Malachi,’ Tamba says.

  ‘Now, please,’ Meirong orders him.

  Tamba gets to his feet. As I reach the corridor, I hear him slur through his baked beans, ‘What did I say? I said he’d be okay.’

  * * *

  I open the door to Olivia’s laboratory. My bucket of white towels waits on the desk next to a row of transparent sacs draped over the edge. Testosterone inhibitor, says a white sticker.

  As I pass the canteen, Tamba falls in behind me, my appointed landmine-clearance deputy. But Tamba is not my comrade today. I have stolen from him.

  He climbs the spiral stairs to his perch, choking on his toast.

  I hesitate at the door, suddenly watery in the area between my shoulder blades. Scapulas, according to Basic Anatomy. I pop the ear clip from the body of the Samsung. A mute-speaker sign comes up immediately. I put the clip to my ear, swipe the screen. Who will help me?

  Joey. Geraint. Eric. I tap on William.

  I type, Will you speak for me? Touch the Talk icon. William repeats the question into my ear in smooth, sincere American. I hide the audio chip as I practised last night. Make a digital knuckle-duster. I shove open the door like this is a bust.

  * * *

  My trousers hiss with friction as I collect my cutting tools, walk swiftly towards Samuel, the journalist. I pray to the God of technology, please, please let him recognise what on earth this thing is. I procrastinate, check his piping painstakingly.

  Samuel is compassionate on this auspicious day.

  ‘Hey, Malachi. Are you okay?’

  Stop with the kindness. This is no way to meet your damned nemesis.

  I feel sweat springing between the fingers of my locked fist. Will the moisture wreck the ear clip?

  ‘Yesterday was scary. That fire thing.’

  Now I sweat like a hostage with thirty seconds to disarm the explosives sewn into my clothes. I glance up at the surveillance glass. Tamba takes a swig from a plastic bottle, picks his teeth. He rotates his roller chair towards his camera images.

  Can he see me on his screens?

  I lop off the frighteningly fast growth of Samuel’s thumbnail. Relax. The cameras are mounted directly above each subject. They can’t see me.

  The stump of my tongue begins to weep with fear. I swallow with horrible difficulty.

  Do it, Malachi.

  I loosen the clip with the tip of my thumb. Samuel’s alert eyes catch the movement. I guide the clip between his fore and middle finger, crush them together.

  Keep it secret. Please.

  Upstairs, Tamba’s nostrils are positioned towards me. Fear wells up in me. I have just jumped off this metal planet into the sea. I trim Samuel’s hand, neglect his little finger. I stroke the white towel ever so gently across his skin so as not to dislodge the memory chip. Set his hands free like the wings of a carrier pigeon. His eyes dart towards Tamba.

  ‘Check security,’ Samuel says softly.

  Tamba is lounging back now, gazing into space. His fake cheer at breakfast seems to have turned quickly to melancholy. Good. Let him be self-obsessed.

  I nod at Samuel.

  The journalist transfers the audio chip to his ear in one smooth movement, buries it in the clever cauliflower of his outer ear. How wonderful is the physiology of the human being.

  Focus, Malachi.

  I point at Samuel’s feet. His smooth testicles swing as he lifts his knees and thrusts his feet through the opening. I slide my free hand in my pocket. Press the Go key.

  Samuel smiles once, perhaps at the unexpected accent. His lips part to expand his fine Homo sapiens listening ability. He gives himself over to my American ventriloquist. I watch as his eyes glow with interest, darken with dread, widen to show a secret rim of white. He hunches forwards as if to hide his heart from the guerrillas’ bullets. Or is it from his own awful memories?

  Samuel shuts his eyes, slams his spine against the mesh. Clear water slides down his cheeks. For a second a dumb compassion visits me. But when Samuel opens his eyes, they are flashing emergency lights. Bright yellow. Angry.

  ‘You think I am like them? You do, don’t you?’

  I glare back at him.

  ‘It takes courage to do my work. You try and stand by and watch people being blown up.’

  My hands are growing hair, sprouting dirty fingernails like the robot in the Werewolf movies.

  ‘Do you think I’m not haunted?’ Samuel plucks the audio chip from his ear and tosses it at my feet.

  He pulls his own feet back in. I sweep up the memory chip, slam the metal hatch. But some part of me is kicking for dry ground.

  My words were meant to shut the journalist up, not rouse him to fury.

  The old witch is squinting at the floor, searching for the plastic chip. ‘What is it, Samuel? I can’t see.’

  ‘Malachi has written his story for us. And because I am honourable, because it’s my job, I will tell you, Eulalie.’ Samuel begins as if he is making a speech at a wedding. ‘Eulalie . . . Everyone . . . Malachi wants us to know how he lost his tongue. Listen!’

  The whole hall falls silent, ready to hear my first words since two thousand and twenty.

  ‘Malachi was fifteen. He and his class had just finished their maths lesson!’

  Samuel roars out sentences he has only heard once. The prisoners gasp as if the guerrillas are trotting down the aisle now, their rifles bristling in the fluorescent light. They fall quiet as Samuel shouts how the guerrillas crouched behind us while our teacher read Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet about the king’s mistress.

  ‘“Any trouble here?” His friend’s father asked. The children held their breath. “No,” his father said.’

  Samuel’s words beat like hooves on my heart.

  ‘The ANIM opened fire on the children . . .’

  ‘Terrible,’ someone croaks behind me.

  ‘Children!’

  ‘They burnt the factory and the fields surrounding it. They shot the old people, the animals, the toddlers.’

  There is a horrified silence.

  Eulalie jerks at her hands, but they are tightly trapped in their leather stocks.

  ‘Good enough, Malachi?’ Samuel’s fiery eyes burn a hole on each side of my spine.

  High above me, Tamba props his chin on his hands; gazes at the greasy paint on t
he ceiling.

  Eulalie searches my face, her eyes a steel scourer. I keep my eyes down, flick a cursory towel across her skin in case Tamba should pull his head out of his blinding self-pity. I lock the witch’s cage, hurry to the husband killer.

  Vicki is glaring at me as if it was I who crept over the copse and sunk my rifle between rows of small, undeveloped ribs.

  She jabs her fingers into the leather sheath. ‘You know nothing, Malachi.’

  I glimpse the bone between her breasts, more of a secret slope. A fin nudging through a meniscus, too ephemeral to break the surface with a splash.

  Vicki leans close, whispers with a muted violence, ‘He . . . he . . .’

  I feel my cheeks go slack with horror.

  Rock. Scissors. Fire. Rape. The tools so beloved of Homo sapiens.

  Vicki tears her hands free. She huddles over her knees, shows the curved ribs of some marine creature at the museum. I feel a terrible urge to walk my fingers up the rungs, count them. Sorry Vicki.

  I am so, so sorry.

  * * *

  I groom the Indian with the benzene leak and one more prisoner after him. Lock the leather glove to the cage of the Gadu Yignae.

  He shoves his gigantic hands into my taming glove. One hand flutters free from my strap, forms a massive fist. He sinks it between the pectoral muscles on his chest.

  ‘I was a volcano. This thing inside me.’ He returns his hand, watches me pit my strength against the hoof-like growths on his fingertips. ‘And now, after all this time, do you know what I miss?’

  I glance up at him.

  ‘The smell of her hair. She said her conditioner had real geraniums in it. I teased her, I said, Do you really think there are fields of geraniums somewhere?’ The giant inhales deeply as if his wife has just shaken her hair free and filled the air with the scent of a thousand tiny flowers. ‘And do you know what haunts me more than anything?’

  I let his towel drip, wait expectantly.

  ‘Their baby.’

  ‘What baby, Judge James?’ asks the Australian.

  A sob tears free of the giant’s lung cavity. ‘They found a foetus during the autopsy.’

  ‘Ah, your brother’s child?’

  The giant nods his enormous head.

  Eulalie’s voice arrives like a gentle wind across the plains. ‘It was your child, Judge James.’

  The giant shakes his head, ‘No.’

  A murmuring takes flight among the cages. ‘His child . . .’

  His roar rips through the rig, ‘NO-O!’

  The words flare out of reach, float near the roof, ‘It was the judge’s son . . .’

  The giant pulls them down like a kite. ‘My son . . .’ His sobs are shuddering blasts.

  ‘Poor James,’ the Australian murmurs. ‘Poor James.’

  But the giant is wind through a bombed building, blowing in hollow gusts. Exploding with an emptiness that nothing, not even his thick law books, can ever fill again.

  * * *

  When I reach Lolie the crack killer, she shoots staccato words at me, one after the other in a thudding monologue. I have no idea what language she is firing at me. I tighten my leather strap, stare into her high-tensile eyes. Her skin is the temperature of metal in the middle of a cold, cold night as she waits for her target to leave his warm mistress.

  Too many double-o–seven movies, Malachi. My last count was nineteen.

  I push the button on my intercom.

  Tamba hauls himself out of his gloomy reverie. ‘Yes?’

  I swipe my forehead, turn my hands up to say, Check temp.

  Tamba swivels his roller chair, manipulates something that might be a mouse. ‘Whoa. It’s low. I’ll turn up her heat.’

  As I clip Lolie’s fingers, I feel the quick warmth entering them. Sweat breaks out on her eyebrows. When I unlatch her hands, she wipes her face feverishly, nose, mouth, cheeks, nose, mouth, cheeks, freeing them from whatever they smothered her with. Was it plastic?

  By the time I reach Shikorina, Lolie is sweating on her arms and her scarred, swollen belly where they are growing not one but two extra spleens.

  * * *

  Shikorina’s lap appears empty today. Today she is silent, desolate, like a mother who lost her children in an accident. Her brother would have taken them. What was his name? Kenneth. He was a good man, I could tell by the way she spoke to me yesterday. Why on earth didn’t she ask him to take her children?

  The giant lets out one last eerie gust behind me.

  But it is too late for speaking or shutting up.

  Or is it?

  My vision fades to a watery whiteness. My eye sockets feel empty. I rub my eyelids, squint behind me. The giant’s spine emerges slowly like a rutted road after a flood. He sits utterly still now, a rocky monument to a man who might have lived an honourable life.

  Is it too late?

  ‘Let’s go for lunch,’ Tamba says listlessly.

  I leave Shikorina’s toenails to flourish one more day. I breathe leftover scraps of breath, force my feeble fingers to fasten the latch.

  I have not told the whole truth. I still have a secret in me. It lurches up my throat like undigested meat as I drop my tools on the trolley, stumble from the hall.

  I hurry along the corridor, plunge down the three sudden steps, choking on my half a story.

  * * *

  Janeé drops a plate down in front of me.

  ‘Beef bourguignon,’ she says with a French accent.

  It seems to be me who gets the gristle. Everything Janeé cooks needs a certain trick, like how to nip off the meat strings and swallow them before they form a sinewy rope that reaches down your oesophagus to hook something up.

  Like the whole truth.

  Tamba swallows with difficulty. He mutters, ‘You’re doing better than me.’

  Janeé, I see, is very clever. She puts the thick, single strands aside like they might be viable arteries to lie inside her son. Romano stalks in and sits. Meirong whisks in after him.

  ‘I just need a quick bite, Janeé. I’m taking Romano’s afternoon shift.’

  Optimistic, I think. She will be chewing at this bench for at least two days and two nights.

  ‘I don’t need to sleep,’ Romano says sullenly.

  But Meirong’s voice rises to a worried pitch. ‘Sorry, Romano, I’m not having you dead on your feet, and this girl sails into us with a whole rescue operation after her.’ She sits lightly on the bench, chews her food manically with her tiny, sharp teeth. She rolls a yellow bulb lurking in the gravy. ‘Are these onions?’

  ‘French,’ Janeé says smugly.

  Shallots, I would like to say, the name for baby onions in the country where the onions are very small and the men, some people say, a bit creepy. Speaking of creepy, Meirong’s dress is lower in the front than I have yet seen. Above her black-and-white checks a delicate crease hints at the squeeze of her bra against her breasts. I spy like a creepy Frenchman, but don’t get me wrong, those silky spheres might as well be flying fish, or giant moths that came to rest on the salt in the centre of the table. Meirong’s cleavage turns into a frown line, deeper, more disapproving with every masticating minute. She swallows too early. Her white china face turns the transparent pink of a baby lizard. She dives for the red juice. I watch the obstruction travel down her flawless throat. Is it the bourguignon, or is it the lost girl she is choking on?

  Meirong stands unsteadily, hurries out like a black-and-white hologram of a worried woman.

  ‘I can stay awake for five days,’ Romano says bitterly.

  Tamba yawns, just thinking about the struggle of holding up his eyelids.

  ‘Why not make him a coffee bomb, Janeé? Have you got any?’

  Romano shakes his head. ‘No need.’

  ‘Can you make one for me?’ Tamba asks.

  ‘You’re not on night shift.’

  ‘For this afternoon, I mean.’

  ‘Can you not do your job?’

  ‘Janeé. You’re startin
g to sound like a tattle tale.’ Tamba pleads, ‘I’m just bored. I don’t know. Miff.’ He drags me into it. ‘Malachi’s doing such a good job spotting trouble, there’s nothing happening.’

  Olivia glows at me approvingly.

  ‘I’m like . . .’ Tamba’s fists clench on the table top, ‘battling a bit, Janeé.’

  ‘Okay, Tamba. But I’ve only got the liquid.’

  Tamba’s hands go limp. ‘Lovely.’

  The muscles in Romano’s jaw bunch like a chainsaw as he finishes his lunch way before me.

  ‘Bao tarde,’ he says dolefully. His canvas clothes seem to sigh as he leaves.

  Tamba and I sit and watch Janeé dine like a French princess with Amazon arms and ten-pound teeth.

  ‘Cold milk or hot?’ she asks Tamba.

  ‘Hot.’

  ‘Wait here.’

  Tamba and I wait in silence for a full five minutes. It is not me who wants the coffee bomb, but I would sit here all day and all night rather than return to the wreckage my half a story has wreaked.

  Janeé squeezes through the door again. Tamba jumps up to receive his foaming polystyrene cup. He takes a big swig, gets a bumper of foam on his top lip. He coughs so hard, coffee streams from his nostrils. Cocaine surrogate. Tamba wipes his nose with the back of his hand.

  ‘I love you, Janeé.’

  Janeé smiles for the first time, it seems, in her whole pumpkin life. I touch my palms together once, thank her for the difficult beef. Follow Tamba, the coffee charmer, to the place where I least in the world want to be.

  Tamba floats up the spiral stairs with his precious liquid. Ebullient, one might say, after a single sip. Heaven help us. He must be sensitive.

  I rest my forehead against the metal door. Swallow solid air.

  Be strong, Malachi.

  The bones in my forehead pick up the ongoing tremors of the tidal wave inside. The prisoners are still stirred up, I can feel it.

  I raise my red lanyard, turn the light green.

  * * *

  The prisoner’s beard is prematurely grey, his legs long and skinny. He starts to tell me about something he didn’t do, but his words are broken by his chipped teeth. One thing is for sure, Janeé’s beef would have killed him. He says the word ‘Harare’ somewhere in his stream of slurred English.

  Ah, a white Zimbabwean, his beard and his teeth ruined by GM corn. I was lucky. My mother grew wild spinach at our doorstep.