The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  I flick my switch.

  Tamba is head-banging in his chair, chewing his dreadlocks with his front teeth. He rocks towards the glass. ‘What, so quick?’

  I mime a shot in the bum.

  Tamba squints at my finger squeezing an imaginary syringe. ‘Of what?’

  I form a vee with my hands, take a chance with the literacy thing.

  ‘Vee . . . vee . . . um. Vitamins?’

  Spare me. The two of us are now playing afternoon charades.

  ‘Oh, really? What symptoms, Malachi?’

  I swirl my fingers at my chin, knead an invisible beard. I tap my teeth.

  ‘Ah, I see,’ Tamba says. ‘Good! I’ll tell Olivia.’ He speaks into a nearby microphone, rolls his chair back to me. ‘You’re brilliant, Malachi.’

  The caffeine has made Tamba horribly hearty. Still, his overzealous compliment gets me through the next two subjects.

  I stall before the social worker and his accusing, grey gaze.

  ‘I thought you were ex-ANIM.’

  Your mistake, stupid.

  He watches me square off his overgrown fingernails. ‘Do you hate me for helping them?’

  I can’t stop my head from nodding.

  ‘Does that mean you believe I am innocent?’

  I falter, bewildered.

  He sings joyously to the hall, ‘Malachi believes me!’

  In the movies they would say, ‘Shut up, you fuck.’

  Sorry for swearing, Hamri.

  My anger burns all the way to Charmayne, the big beauty. I can almost see sparks fly as I slash at her nails. She must know she is a fraction of a millimetre from sudden agony, but still she tries to clear her name with me:

  ‘It was their greed that killed them, Malachi. They both had solar Volvos. Mansions.’ She shakes her head. ‘If you knew what they spent on their suits.’

  Splat, Charmayne. Splat splat. I would love to shut her up with some childish onomatopoeia. Those suits must have split their seams on the concrete. She sees the cynicism in my eyes.

  ‘I grew up wearing other people’s clothes from lost property.’ Charmayne has dark, soft hairs on her belly, the down on a female doe. ‘No children of staff were allowed in our block so I hid all day in the fire escape.’ She raises her stair-climbing thighs, gives me her feet. ‘I used to sneak into the pool at night and swim up and down the dark side where no one could see me.’

  I imagine her broad shoulders rolling through quiet lengths, her breasts swinging up, swinging down the painted line. I clip and clean the long, strong feet that must have kicked underwater so as not to make a splash. I must admit that Charmayne’s eccentric hair, her full-cream skin, her eyes gleaming with some mystical mercury must have created a magical sight, even in the dark lane of a locked-up pool.

  If I was a normal man I would fall in love, surely, but the only thing that tempts me is Charmayne’s beautiful knees. The bones are flat on top like a mesa or a butte, I can’t remember which. I drag my eyes from them.

  Don’t be stupid, Malachi. This woman is an instrument of earth-moving greed with no regard for human life or the flimsiness of suits.

  A growl begins to brum at the base of my throat.

  * * *

  ‘All right, all righ-h-t,’ near the end of the row, Madame Sophie soothes sarcastically.

  I didn’t realise my growl had risen to loud.

  Madame Sophie’s blonde hair is a blown-out white today, her skin as pale as an albino’s. Even her eyes have turned platinum.

  Is my mood affecting my eyesight? I see white spots on her nails. Were they there yesterday? I press my switch. How the heck do I mime calcium? The only way to do it is to mime milk.

  ‘And now?’ Tamba says.

  I pull on imaginary udders. It must be from a cow, though, Tamba. Corn milk only causes further deficiencies. I pinch the teats between thumb and finger, use long strokes. I think those milking machines use grease.

  ‘Milk?’ Tamba guesses.

  I nod, skim the air in an arc above Madame Sophie’s fingertips.

  ‘Ah, calcium.’ Tamba is becoming world-class at word association.

  I nod at him, bend my tired back over Madame Sophie’s fingers.

  ‘Have you heard of euthanasia?’ she asks me. ‘Do you know that word?’

  No, Madame Sophie, I was only the son of an English teacher who believed that words were life-giving entities.

  I loosen her fingers. She hooks them through the mesh.

  I straighten up, stare at their half-moons. Are there white spots?

  ‘It was euthanasia,’ she says. ‘Not murder.’

  You are too white, Madame Sophie. Overexposed. I drop her towel in the detergent. What of the dark half of the photo negative?

  * * *

  Josiah has had thirty-nine clippings to prepare for my visit. I lock the glove to his cage, but he waves his black talons towards the tiny camera facing it.

  ‘What will happen if Tamba sees these?’

  His nails are more than an inch long and knotted like the wood of an ugly tree. I stare up at the surveillance box, but Tamba is still head banging up there, listening to God-knows-what on his speakers. Josiah sighs.

  ‘Useless, that one.’

  Josiah’s toenails have also gone into their first twist. The trick is to get the clippers beneath the devilish bend.

  ‘A sad story, Malachi. Your cousin was the only one who died with dignity.’

  I freeze. Kontar’s body on the school-room floor, his shirt hanging in torn strips as if to keep the flies away.

  I crunch my blade through Josiah’s coiling toenail. It cracks length-wise, rips through the cuticle. Yes.

  A sheer accident but painful, surely. Josiah’s toe is bleeding. He touches it with interest. I fill my lungs with rumbling breath.

  ‘Are you growling, Malachi?’

  I let the roar out of my sternum, ‘Haaaghhh!’ I don’t care who hears it.

  ‘What did you do, Malachi?’ The dirty flecks in his eyes pull like radioactive magnets. ‘What did you do to make them cut off your tongue?’

  I crash into his cage. Josiah laughs as if he has ripped out my raw heart. I shove away, rock towards Vicki.

  She stares into my open mouth as I gasp for oxygen. ‘Malachi?’

  I steady myself on her cage, get my bearings.

  Upstairs, Tamba chomps down on the split end of a dreadlock.

  Floor. Wall. Red hand over red hand I make it to the end of the aisle.

  ‘Your bucket, Malachi,’ Vicki hisses.

  I force my attention to the floor. One shoe before the other shoe, I retrace my steps. I don’t look, but I sense Josiah’s pockmarked eyes drawing every last iron filing of courage from me. His laugh is rich with amusement and something more deadly. A terrible satisfaction.

  Josiah has given his guilt to me.

  It is several kilometres to the door. My legs seem to have lengthened, like the man on stilts outside Eddie’s Gas in Nelspruit. The only thing that saves me is the sight of my brown shoes as I follow my stilted course along the floor.

  ‘Josiah, you’re such a cunt,’ Vicki says behind me.

  Josiah’s laugh for the first time sounds human. He is finally free. He gave it all to me.

  I slam the door shut. I meant for it to be more of a composed click. Another loud thud as I throw my back against it. I crash my bucket to the floor, drop my head between my knees.

  What did you do, Malachi?

  Is Josiah forever part of me? I watch a string of saliva hanging from my mouth. It is clean, at least. Silver.

  What did you do?

  ‘Aaaagh!’ I shout to drown out Josiah’s chant.

  Tamba comes clanging down the spiral stairs. ‘Malachi?’ He trips the last part, nearly falls onto me. ‘What’s happening?’

  ‘Aaagh,’ I moan.

  ‘Are you sick?’ His warm hand touches my back, so gentle I want to rise into it and let Tamba hold me.

  Help me.

 
I want to press my face into his chest, hear his heart beat too fast from his coffee bomb.

  I climb slowly to my feet. I lay my back against the door, a metal slab in a parlour for the dead. The floor and the wall have swapped places, that’s all.

  Tamba steps back. ‘What do you need, Malachi?’

  Does he expect me to mime some kind of vitamin?

  I press my palms against the door behind me. Door. Floor. I push off with my hands, walk along the floor. One brown shoe. Two.

  ‘Okay, just trying to help. I mean, it could have been a heart attack or something.’ Tamba touches his heart, the precise place I want to lay my head. ‘Jesus.’

  He follows me in silence down the corridor.

  Walk faster, Malachi. Don’t be insipid.

  Tamba starts to sing under his breath, his concentration impaired from his caffeine shot. ‘Strange day,’ his lyrics go. ‘Strange day for a break-up. Can we wait till next week?’

  I know that song. It’s from the Hedonistic Hell Crew, big on the radio before I left, hundreds of years ago. The bastard clicks his fingers. I drop the bucket at the door, turn into our living quarters. Tamba passes by the opening, sings his way to find some sweeter company. He reverses a few steps, pauses in the doorway.

  ‘I won’t tell them that you, like, collapsed. But you’d better pull yourself together, dude. I’m not into lying for you. I want to finish this job and get off this ship. Please.’ Tamba hangs off the door frame, swings away. I think I hear his fingers clicking further down the passage.

  Emotionally strange, the two of us. A strange day for a break-up.

  But it can’t wait till next week.

  * * *

  I can’t see myself properly in the bathroom mirror. My outline is indistinct. The details of my face have run like watercolours. I point my penis to the toilet. I feel its ditches and its star-shaped scars, the raw welt from my corrective treatment on Sunday. It is ugly, this organ, not accidentally pretty like Vicki with her good, strong ridges. Keloid, not skin. I spit into the toilet, check my sputum. It is still clear and silvery.

  This is a sign I can go and have supper with the crew. My fluids are see-through.

  No one witnessed my breakdown, other than a self-centred ex-junkie.

  I do up my zip, nod to my vague image in the mirror.

  Go and eat, Malachi.

  * * *

  Janeé is slopping white sauce onto rice.

  ‘Chicken à la king,’ she tells us.

  Meirong is the first to break the surface with her fork. For some reason, the afternoon has turned her the precise colour of the creamed chicken.

  ‘That sailing girl is drifting straight towards us. Unless the wind or the current swings . . .’ Meirong tips the first mouthful in, drops a grain of rice on the table. Everyone stares at it.

  My eyesight, I am grateful to realise, is once again crisp.

  ‘Shit,’ Olivia swears. Her blue eyes show a rim of cerise. ‘We just need three days!’

  Meirong turns on her. ‘We need two months, actually. We’ve got to finish three cycles to make it pay. We’ve got to . . .’ She loses two more grains of rice to her terror of failure. She pushes her plate away. ‘I’m not hungry, Janeé. I’m going up to tell Romano to switch off the deck lights tonight. We need a total blackout.’

  Janeé tries to jump up but her thighs get stuck beneath the table top.

  Meirong seizes a covered plate. ‘Is this it?’

  Her black-and-white squares pull and push through the opening.

  ‘Good luck!’ Olivia calls after her.

  Near the roof, the two fingers of sun turn pinkish, fade away.

  ‘Christ,’ Tamba says morosely. The chicken à la king has pulled him off his caffeine too quickly. ‘What if the search party finds us?’

  ‘Meirong won’t let them,’ Janeé says.

  ‘She’s not as perfect as you think, you know, Janeé.’ Tamba sips his raspberry juice, stains the chute between his nose and his lips. The green streak in his eye has almost been reabsorbed.

  How is Tamba party to secret truths about the bosses?

  Your half a story, Tamba. It’s a silent scream every time you open your mouth.

  He sighs. ‘Come, Olivia. Let’s go and watch old movies. Let’s watch Tree of Life. I watched it once when I was h-’ He stops.

  Only I know he was about to say, ‘high’.

  ‘Okay. But there’s a good chance I’ll fall asleep. Coming Janeé?’

  ‘Yes please,’ Janeé says too eagerly. She glances at me. ‘What about you, Malachi? Have you seen it?’

  I shake my head. I put my hands together, rest my cheek on them. Mime sleepy.

  What did you do, Malachi?

  My knees have no wish to support me but I scrape through the doorway. My stomach is refusing the food for a noble king. I stagger along the corridor, take the three random steps on my hands and knees. I slam my shoulder against the wall, hurtle through the door of my living quarters. I dive into the bathroom. Bend over the toilet bowl.

  Nothing wants to come up.

  Nothing.

  * * *

  I shut the toilet seat, sit on it. No. This feels too scatological, like my trousers should be around my ankles. One shoe skids in the shower. I sit in a pool of Tamba’s morning water. It wets my buttocks through.

  Good. This is appropriate.

  For seven months afterwards, I was incontinent.

  Truth only.

  I pull Tamba’s phone from my pocket. The Samsung sign wanes, becomes watery. But I don’t need to see.

  I feel the truth with my fingertips, let them say what will surely blind me if I look straight at it.

  * * *

  The guerrilla stabbed his rifle barrel into my father’s knee.

  ‘Yinawa kani unmiyu.’

  My father took a ragged breath. He kept his reading speed measured, but his creamy sonnet was thickened by terror.

  ‘For Caesar’s I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’

  The guerrilla’s lips were too soft for a killer. They separated with some vile desire as he hitched Araba’s skirt up with his bayonet. He made a shallow cut on her thigh. Nothing more than a thin, red stripe, but the blood, or perhaps the sonnet, inspired in him a hunger for her sweet, young beauty. I heard his whispered promise,

  ‘Later, I will love you.’

  Araba’s brown eyes scorched into mine, begging me to save her. Or were they saying goodbye?

  ‘Any sign of trouble?’ Erniel’s father asked.

  Erniel was sitting two desks to my right, imploring his father behind his thick glasses.

  ‘No.’

  Hamri’s no was a shield that could wrap the earth and pull it tight, protect it from meteors and stray fire from the sun. Templeton Security clattered away with their machine guns. My words burst from my mouth.

  ‘Yes! They are here!’

  A suicide bomber’s pin.

  Erniel’s father stormed through the doorway. Glittering ions spun in orbit around his silhouette as he aimed his rifle at the devil crouched behind his child. But all he could see were his son’s desperate eyes. The guerrilla shot him six times in the breast, ripping up his Kevlar vest.

  When the fathers were all dead, Araba’s guerrilla shot the clothes off her body. In my river of blood, in my halfawake state, I caught a glimpse of one young breast. A taut, tender swelling. Dead. Her scalp had lifted so her braids hung over her face.

  * * *

  I drop the phone on my lap, crash my head from side to side, silent, but the truth burgeons in my heart, incinerates my scar tissue. A soft groan tears from my throat.

  I bow my head before the lord of shame in his long, dirty coat.

  I killed Araba with my lust.

  I thought she belonged to me.

  I clasp the phone, write my final line.

  I killed them all with my loquaciousness.

  * * *

  It has all come unstuck. The strings, the gri
stle, the fifteen years of silence that have smothered me. I try to cry, but a strange barking sound comes out. Dry.

  I balance the Samsung on the basin, turn on the cold shower tap. I drench my khaki uniform, fight my wet shirt off my skin. I pull off my trousers. Sit naked in my sneakers. This is not a noble image. I hook them off with my big toes, rub my bare feet, rub between the toes like I do with the prisoners. I rub between my fingertips, tear at my nails with my teeth. I bite them to the quick, turn myself into one of them.

  A sleepiness comes over me.

  I watch the cold rain on the battleground of my flesh, the fires long out. Water runs into the sinkholes where the bomb blasts have changed my landscape. I raise my hand lethargically, turn off the water. I crawl out of the bathroom, onto my mattress. I slip Tamba’s phone beneath my pillow, let my body weep gently into my duvet.

  * * *

  I sleep. I sleep even with my shame charged beneath my head, ready to blast through my pillow and kindly shatter my brains.

  I sleep until God knows what hour, when Tamba shouts, ‘Bloody fuck!’

  I bolt into a sitting position.

  Tamba crawls out of the bathroom on his hands and knees. I stare stupidly. Is he me?

  Am I reliving my last minute of consciousness before I went to bed?

  ‘You wet the floor, you stupid git. I nearly knocked myself out.’

  Sorry. A single bird croak comes out.

  ‘Did you say something?’ Tamba’s eyes jangle with excitement. ‘Did you say sorry?’

  I sink back on the pillow.

  He grins. ‘Maybe we’re making progress.’ Tamba pulls on his pyjama shorts, striped pale blue. His skin is smooth for a man so full of prickles. He has funny hairs on his nipples, spring-coiled things from a joke shop. He gets into bed, switches off the light.

  ‘What do you think, buddy?’ he asks in the dark.

  If you really want to know, Tamba, I think you should pluck your nipples.

  I feel for his Samsung, dig my head into the pillow. The last words I hear are Tamba’s whisper.

  ‘Christ-mas. I hope I can get to sleep.’

  Then Tamba’s stolen phone and the whole, untruncated truth chop off my head. I die again to this day, unconscious.

  TUESDAY

  As I wake, the first thing I feel for is my full story. Smooth plastic with curved edges, strangely warm as if it has been receiving signals from my dream brain. This yellow phone is my friend, my executioner. Today I will be the boy I truly am. Not the baby boy my mother cried over after three miscarriages. Not the one my father stroked in disbelief until the midwife, Granny Beatrice, said, ‘Let him sleep.’