by T. C. Farren
I was a little jaundiced, they said. My colour matched my father’s in my first few weeks, but soon his hand showed Samwati yellow against my black skin.
Not this boy.
Today I will be the boy who killed his village with a perilous word: Yes.
The one who loved Araba like the giant loved his wife.
I lift my head from the pillow. Tamba is nowhere to be seen. It looks like someone has abducted him: there is a tangle of sheets on the floor, a shrunken puddle from my last night’s pilgrimage to bed on all fours.
I check my timepiece. 6.57. Late for breakfast! I fly out of bed, kneel at my suitcase. All I have left is a long-sleeved purple shirt. Party purple, for goodness’ sake. I throw it on. What trousers? Pale yellow. Even worse.
I drag them on, slip the Samsung into my pocket. I have no time to brush my teeth. I dart into the bathroom and suck on my toothpaste tube, coat my mouth with artificial peppermint. I hope my American ventriloquist has gone to the same lengths.
I am three steps into the corridor when I feel the slap of the cold rig against my bare feet. I scramble back to fetch my sneakers with the yellow detergent drips. Today I will be the boy who went to school with no socks, my bare ankles protruding.
* * *
I thud along the corridor with my boy’s ankles, man’s sneakers, blast into the breakfast room. I glance at the clock. Ten seconds to seven.
‘No need to worry,’ Olivia says. ‘We all slept a little late.’
‘What do you mean?’ Meirong says sullenly. ‘I haven’t even been to bed.’ She has a delicate smudge beneath each eye. Purple seems to be the theme for this day.
Tamba’s spoon stops halfway to his mouth, yellow sweetcorn purée sticking to it.
‘Whoa, Malachi. Feeling festive today? I tried everything to wake you up. I tickled your face, but you slapped me away.’ He waits, like he expects another crow’s croak.
I sit down next to him. No apology from me.
Meirong blurts, ‘The sailing girl found us. Just past midnight. She motored right under the rig. Can you believe it?’
The schoolboy in me wants to say, Wow.
The buckles on Meirong’s shoulders look like epaulettes. She’s in a maroon lycra suit tossed with tiny coloured shards like broken windscreen glass. I eat a whole boiled egg. I can’t stand egg white, but there is no way I’m going to separate it from the yolk. I will go in today with the whole truth, the white so polished I can see myself in it.
The others gobble their sweetened corn like a group of GM addicts. I leave mine to grow a petulant skin, eat another whole egg. Tamba pours salt onto his plate and rolls his egg round and round, pondering our destiny. He is dressed in dark green jeans and a pink t-shirt. Clubbing colours, if you ask me. That pink would surely glow under strobe lights.
‘What’s her name?’ Tamba asks eventually.
Meirong pulls a perfectly round yolk from its white plastic mould. ‘Frances.’ A cowlick seems to have lifted from her glossy helmet. She watches me bite into a third whole egg. ‘Romano’s given her breakfast, but I need you to take her lunch up, Malachi.’
My heart shoots a silly flare. I will see the sun.
Meirong says quickly, ‘I’m choosing Malachi because he can’t speak.’
‘Geez, Meirong. Why don’t you rub it in?’ Tamba gets up from the table, singles me out with a sympathetic glance. ‘See you now, buddy.’
Is this what a strange crow’s croak can win? Loyalty?
I swallow a final egg like it is the rubber front of my sneaker. One more yolk for the road.
* * *
By the time I reach the hall I am panting with terror. I stick my fingernail into the seam of the ear clip.
I will never again be the boy I was yesterday. But I would rather be Josiah, scratching my arse.
I pin the memory chip between my fore and middle finger, lock it in the crease. Tiny, this explosive, about to blow up the silence I have cowered inside my whole adult life. No blank façade, no turning the other cheek, no clever plastic-wrapping ten thousand units per second can save me from this. I raise the key card from my heart. Shove the door open.
* * *
Their eyes torch the air like they’re wolves at night, waiting to savage my soft underbelly. I want to drop to my knees, crawl towards their eighty eyes, say, Please take my truth from me.
Take my father, trying to shut me up.
Take Erniel with no sisters. None. They were gunned down within an hour of him bleeding out.
Take Araba’s breasts. Her remaining nipple was like pinched, soft lips. A kiss.
I try to stop my legs from quavering but the ligaments, the tendons around my knees have all turned to weak tea.
God in heaven, hold me up. Please.
The prayer works.
God has not heard my whole story yet. In a few minutes, he will leave me in a dilapidated heap, cross me off his list of holy children, but for now some unseen force lets me collect my cutting tools and walk straight towards Josiah’s eyes, driving their greasy drill-bits into me. I swing from him at the last instant, face Samuel, the journalist.
‘We were wondering if you were going to come. After yesterday.’
What the heck has happened to his fury?
This time, Samuel is watching my hands, his eyes hunting for the audio chip. I glance up. Tamba is peering through his window straight at me. Another wolf in the night, ready to sink his teeth into the back of my neck. He looks away, suddenly self-conscious about his authority. He rolls his chair sideways, swipes at something on a screen. Good. Let him sneak his surveillance. Hide and seek is the game we will play.
Samuel is actually wriggling his fingers in the leather glove. ‘Malachi?’
I make a smooth pickpocketing switch. Samuel draws his hands back carefully, my whole truth hidden in the web between his fingers. He steers my bomb towards his ear. I shove my hand into my pocket, press the manual switch.
It’s party time. Let’s play.
My heart begins to buck like a panic-stricken beast. A sob rises in me. I clip Samuel’s toes through fat, frightened tears. The journalist sits very still, listens in utter silence to William, my American ventriloquist. The subtle lines on the edges of his eyes sweep up, make him seem feminine. He bites on his lips. I wait for Samuel’s eyes to catch alight with a raging abhorrence. But his face only softens.
I wipe my tears on the sleeve of my purple shirt, glance up at the glass. Eighty eyes turn upwards, track the predator. Tamba’s face is still turned away.
Samuel takes the clip from his ear. His eyes hold one thing. A lion’s compassion.
‘What do you want me to do with it?’ He withdraws his feet, presses them together, toe bone to toe bone. ‘Do you want me to tell it?’
My chin falls to my chest. My spinal cord pulls a groan up from my throat.
Samuel frowns. ‘Yes?’
I nod three times. My father would have said thrice.
Samuel pulls his lion gaze from me. Every one of my muscles is now the strength of Five Roses tea. My bladder twangs like a guitar string, not from the sounds of guns and war, but from the quantum truth that is about to blast me to pieces.
This is not a party. This is my second death.
Samuel presses the audio chip between his palms. He speaks like Jesus on the mount, without an amplifier:
‘While Malachi’s father read the poem about the king’s mistress, a guerrilla lifted Araba’s skirt with his bayonet . . .’
His words, my words keep me moving.
‘His blade made a shallow cut . . .’
Eulalie’s ancient face threatens to come loose from its skeleton. Her breasts reach down her wrinkled belly. There is something shame-faced about her downward-looking nipples. I get to work clipping, but my heavy, heavy heart is too lightly hooked behind my ribs. If it falls to the floor, this is good, for I will be truly dead and not have to listen to Samuel.
‘The words burst from his mouth. Yes! They are h
ere!’ Samuel chokes. ‘They were a suicide bomber’s trigger.’
I wait for Samuel’s hatred, but I hear only one emotion soaking his words, my words. Samuel is sad.
‘They shot the clothes off Araba’s body . . .’ He stops, rasps through the smoke fumes in his memory. ‘Her braids hung over her face.’
‘Shame, Malachi,’ Vicki whispers.
Shame in South African, which means I pity you? Or shame on you, you murderer in party purple, you demon on two legs?
Samuel chokes, ‘He killed them all with his loquaciousness.’ He bows his head, keeps his hands pressed together as though asking for consideration from God.
As if he is me.
I no longer exist. I have no hatred, no love. Nothing.
‘You had no time to think. It happened too quickly.’ Samuel pulls his knees to his chest, hugs them tightly. ‘I had three weeks.’ He shakes his head, stares at his history. ‘My camera gave them courage. I should never have filmed those people.’ He cradles his head between his elbows. ‘But my father always said, “When will I see your work on AAC?”’ Samuel rocks like a baby. ‘The film made it to live streaming on Hardnews.com. Over forty million hits –’ Samuel begins to cry like a child.
Tamba’s face is oriented our way. I can’t comfort the lion in cage number one.
Vicki tries to stuff sweet, soft words between Samuel’s sobs. ‘Samuel, don’t cry, please.’
All I want to do is whip out my Samsung and say, Stop crying, Samuel, stop. You just made a terrible, terrible mistake.
I bend over my bucket, hang upside down, make like I am scratching for a clean towel. Before I can imagine how funny I must look, I press my fingers to my lips, kiss them. Show them to Samuel.
It works. His crying quietens down.
Vicki, unbelievably, doesn’t even snigger.
‘See, Samuel,’ she says gently. ‘Even Malachi forgives you.’
As I snap the witch’s tough, old-age nails, she breathes like she is climbing up through rubble.
‘I should have said nothing,’ she mumbles.
She coughs up small stones as I wash her gnarled feet. A tear falls to her shrivelled thigh, the most enormous tear I have ever seen.
Is she crying for the prime minister’s wife?
I stare in amazement as more tears fall. How can one old, dry woman create all that water?
Eulalie’s tears flood the cracks of her cheeks, run between her empty breasts. I have no choice but to wash her feet, cover up the natural disaster happening on the factory floor.
Please don’t cry, Eulalie. My eyes sting as if I have stuck my face into the antiseptic. I extricate the witch’s feet, stumble to Vicki.
* * *
I secure the leather sheath, but all I see through my tears is a blur of white fingers. I clutch on to them, try to hold them still. I squeeze my clipper blades, feel a shard of something soft fly from the metal. I stare anxiously. Did I hurt her? But Vicki is watching me with the utmost pity. I tear my eyes back to her hands. It looks like all her blood has rushed from her ventricles into her fingertips. Tears stream down the back of my throat. I sniff.
‘You were just a kid, really.’
I shake my head. Fifteen.
Vicki frowns. ‘Fifteen is the dumbest time.’
I growl a refusal. No, Vicki. Youth is not an alibi.
But the mermaid is adamant. ‘When you’re fifteen you can’t think of . . .’ she searches her mind for the right word in her thesaurus. ‘Consequences.’ She gives me her feet. ‘I mean, that’s when I started cutting. Fifteen.’
My eyes climb the keloid ladder running up her shins.
‘How old are you, Malachi?’ Vicki asks. ‘Thirty?’
I nod, surprised.
‘So you lived for fifteen years. Died for fifteen. Am I right?’
Save me. I stare into the sweet, glistening mercy of the mermaid’s eyes. The crow’s croak, I don’t know where it comes from. It nearly sounds like, ‘Yes.’
Vicki shrugs. ‘I know how it feels. How many times have I thought – I’m not joking, a hundred times a day, a hundred times a night – why didn’t I just tell someone?’ She stares at her bubble toes. ‘Why didn’t I just . . . I don’t know, speak?’
I am very, very careful not to look up, but I feel Tamba’s stare hacking into my cheek. What happened to his head-banging to surround-sound music?
I rub the soles of Vicki’s feet. Stop staring, Tamba, please.
Madame Sophie gasps, ‘What’s wrong with Eulalie?’
I whirl towards the witch. She is slouched against the mesh, no longer weeping. Her damp-granite eyes have turned to soft rabbit fur, like the one that died of fright when a dump dog chased it into our hut. Eulalie’s bony shoulders slump as if her ancestors are whipping her from the roof. Her breathing becomes lighter and lighter until she has no need of it.
Is she still alive?
Her grey eyes are wide open, just like the rabbit after its heart attack.
I hit my button.
‘What?’
I bang my heart three times.
‘Heart attack?’ Tamba jumps up, darts from switch to switch. ‘No! We can’t afford this. I’m calling the doctor’s wing.’ He uses an emergency-room tone he might have heard on TV. ‘Suspected heart attack. BP eighty over sixty. Pulse fifty-seven.’ He loses his professional tone. ‘What? Umm . . . She looks kind of sleepy . . . A small one? . . . How much?’ Tamba adjusts a setting on his keyboard, touches a switch.
Eulalie’s entire body jerks like in a mild car collision. Her head whips forwards, hits the metal. Her chest rises and falls. She is breathing.
I give Tamba the thumbs-up, a crude overstatement of how I am feeling.
‘We must investigate this subject. That was really not funny.’
Not funny, no, to live with a regret so deep it can strike you dead just by surfacing.
It might be a muscle spasm, or some aftereffect of the ECG. It might be the electric shock. But Eulalie smiles at me.
* * *
The next three prisoners talk in troubled tongues about their deed or mine, I cannot guess. But the yellow man gives me his hands eagerly, grins like I just won a ribbon for his team. He says something earnest in his Sudanese dialect. The desert strangler, it seems, is not in the mood to interpret. He sits with his chin sunken into his chest, his hands turned up on his runner’s legs. Has he also had some kind of cardiac trouble?
But as I fasten the glove to his cage, he says quietly, ‘Life’s a swine.’ He watches me lop the nails off his sinewy fingers. He shakes his head gravely. ‘I will never forget her.’
Oh, no, please. Not more skeletons.
‘Sometimes the soldiers took prostitutes on their trips. Then they drank beer and had sex while they stole our food aid and drove it to Adigral.’
I cut into the hard nail on his wedding finger.
‘One time, I killed the driver and took the truck. I left the girl in the desert. The way she died, ahhhh.’ His voice is parched, like the poor girl in the desert, half dressed, calling for water. He shoves his broad feet into the sheath. ‘What must I do with her, Malachi?’ He begs, ‘Tell me.’
I stare into his desert-sand eyes.
‘Give her water, Gibril.’
Did those words come from me?
‘It will make her happy.’
They come from the witch. Eulalie’s shock treatment seems to have got her in touch with a thirsty prostitute.
‘Water?’ The desert strangler scans my face for a more convincing commandment.
Yes, give her water, I urge him silently. Don’t make her wait.
Slow hope flares in his eyes.
I turn my whole body towards Eulalie. What about me? I plead silently. What must I give? Please, tell me.
By some alchemy, the old witch hears me. She pulls on her rope of hair like she is ringing a church bell from the twelfth century. ‘Give them your love, Malachi. They are not free while you are guilty.’
&n
bsp; A wave of ice-cold sea breaks over me.
My father. My school friends. I do love them. I do.
‘Malachi,’ Tamba speaks sternly. ‘Are you feeling faint again?’
I shake my head, somehow pull off a tight-lipped grin.
I love you, Hamri.
It’s all I can think through the next few prisoners.
I will love them, like Eulalie says. It is easy.
I love Hamri’s eyes, their unnatural shine whenever he looked at me. I love Araba’s neck, the bones delicate but inseparable as she bent over her maths, digging too hard with her pen. I love Kontar’s wild laugh as he tore from my grip, clay covered, his bare heels sprinting through the green grass. I even love Erniel, his timorous smile, his long school socks pulled up too high. Cherishing tears leak from my heart, drip down the seam of my yellow trousers. They leave a trail behind me.
Am I imagining it? I stare at the floor. Yes. I see a damp tread from my sneaker. It is not my penis, surely – it is my heart, overflowing with the love I have not let myself feel since then.
* * *
The tooth-extracting Indian is digging at his bellybutton with a fingernail that must have shot out overnight. His poor umbilicus is red and raw already. It tears me back to the present.
Bullshit, Malachi, those drips are not an overflow of lost love. Your valves are just weak, worn out by too much pressure.
The Indian man gouges at his stomach like he is trying to unbutton it to release the truth. I press my switch, point at the Indian’s frenzied fingers.
‘Stomach cramps?’
No, he’s crazy. A small electric shock would do the trick. Instead, I nod at Tamba.
‘Any sign of a loose stool?’
I stare at him, incredulous. How the heck would I know?
Tamba gets my message.
‘Okay, okay, it’s not like you can ask him. I’ll get Olivia to check his outflow for pathogens. Let’s give him a painkiller.’