The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  Good, Tamba, please. Take his pain from him.

  I hear the crackle as Tamba connects with Olivia.

  ‘A painkiller antispasmodic to cage number thirteen. Fast-acting, please. It’s that mad Indian dude. Malachi says he’s got stomach trouble.’

  Well, actually it’s his secrets.

  ‘Thanks.’ Tamba tips his head to my microphone. ‘Tell him to drink from his pipe.’

  I point at the Indian’s feeding tube. He shakes his head, pokes at his bellybutton.

  Tamba touches his torture switch. A fine mist falls over the Indian. Before Tamba can even add violence to it, the Indian sucks frantically on his food pipe.

  Almost immediately, he goes loose. A silly smile creeps across his fevered face. I hold out a hand, invite him to give me his feet. He lifts them into the glove, strokes the inflamed skin around his bellybutton as if to say, One more day, then I will undo the knot.

  I will have to watch him carefully. It is not an antispasmodic this man needs, but an antipsychotic. But a drug such as this might stop him from remembering.

  Let him remember everything, this mad, navel-excavating Indian. Let him remember and die free.

  * * *

  The giant seems to overhear what I am thinking.

  ‘One freedom, please.’ He slurs a little, barely moving his lips. ‘Just this once, pass me by.’

  He is sitting on his hands like a child under rebuke. Has he had a stroke? I stare at his mouth. No. It is not hanging slack. I check his musculature. He still looks like Hercules. I glance up at Tamba.

  ‘Please,’ the giant begs. ‘I just want some peace.’

  It is not like him to plead. And he is in a far better state than he was yesterday. I pretend to fiddle with the latch on his cage.

  ‘Tamba’s not watching.’

  I glance up. The giant is right. Tamba, thank God, has been lulled by my last few groomings to pull out some chewing gum and play a computer game. I can tell by the rapid action of his thumbs. Yes, he is shooting something.

  I skip the mournful giant, move to the fat Australian.

  Barry looks strangely stunned, as if suffering some aftershock. Did my confession do this to him?

  His voice shakes as he speaks. ‘I know how it feels to love a girl like you did. This one girl, Zauna. She really knew me.’

  He sounds like he is reciting lyrics from a vintage love song by Justin Bieber. Has he heard of him? Yes, without a doubt Barry had Justin Bieber on his sound system. I trim the Australian’s flabby hands, feel his sadness pulsing through his soft fingertips.

  But I know what he means. Araba was the only one who understood my twisted humour. She knew of my struggle with my father’s poetry, the way it kept surfacing in me. She knew of my yearning for her, so vast I could scoop out the insides of the earth leaving only its porcelain skin, take her hand among the dust and start a new universe.

  I cannot bring myself to laugh at the fat Australian.

  I work my way to Lolie, the young assassin who could find the nought-point-three-millimetre passage through my brain and stop my heart with a high-pressure hiss. But today, she looks like she has drunk from the Indian’s painkiller. She lies back with her black hair tickling her shoulders, pretty. I have not had sex with a woman so I can’t say, but rather like a film star in a postcoital scene. Today she is almost making music with her mellifluous Congolese language. I drop her wire hatch, let it hang. A strange admiration shines from her pinpoint pupils as she speaks. She got the wrong message about me, surely. Whoever interpreted for Lolie did a very bad job.

  I turn to the social worker. Put Lolie straight. Quickly.

  Andride misunderstands, translates for me.

  ‘Lolie says she doesn’t blame you.’ He listens to her lilting speech. ‘She says she also killed when she was fifteen.’

  I shake my head. No. Sorry. Forgiveness is not that easy.

  The movement of my head has a shocking effect on Lolie. She buries her face in her hands and makes a high, hissing cry, the sound of a tree through an acoustic sensor as it’s being chopped down. She clamps her nose and mouth, smothers herself deliberately.

  The prisoners click their tongues. ‘Lolie. Lolie.’

  ‘Honey . . .’ Madame Sophie calls sweetly.

  What if she suffocates herself before my eyes? Above us, Tamba shoves against his back rest, stretches his arms in the air.

  Do something, I command the social worker with my eyes.

  Andride tries the tone of a terrorist. ‘Fight, Lolie. Fight.’

  Still she will not breathe.

  ‘Shoot, Lolie! Or they will shoot you.’

  Lolie whines like a tree amplified thirty thousand times.

  ‘Lolie?’ I try to say. I am surprised by the deepness of the sound that comes out. It is gentle, yet masculine. Lolie drops her hands from her mouth, stares at me. I shine my compassion into her kohl eyes.

  Andride is right. They broke you, Lolie.

  Lolie’s strange chuckle sounds more like a hiccup.

  Upstairs, Tamba walks his roller chair to the window, exhausted by the violent coup he has just accomplished with his thumbs. I rap on Lolie’s cage, make a soft clang. She catches her erupting laugh, swallows it. I pull on the leather strap, gently tighten it.

  Tamba turns a slow, bored circle on his roller wheels. I clip Lolie’s nails with the utmost gentleness. She bows her head, hides her smile from Tamba’s screen. Her smile is exhausting for her, I think, for it keeps falling to the floor. She picks it up and slings it back on, even sweeter.

  What is this? Lolie, the child soldier finding happiness?

  Lolie’s smile is like a disease. It sets off a whole lot of unpractised smiles among us.

  ‘I’ve never seen her smile before,’ someone murmurs.

  ‘First time.’

  ‘First time.’

  Tamba must have caught the contagion of happiness on his screens. He skids back to the glass. ‘What’s happening, Malachi?’

  I glare back at him, fake deep outrage. These pigs, I shout silently.

  ‘Are they laughing at you?’

  I nod, a ridiculous, huffy figure.

  Tamba lynches me with a grin, joins in what he imagines to be crowd mockery. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters insincerely.

  I scowl until he ducks his head and finds something to do on the far side of his DJ desk. I shut Lolie’s cage, get away from the lethal weapon of her new, childish smile. I stomp to Shikorina, keep up my façade of fury in case Tamba should come back to double-check on my unhappiness.

  * * *

  Shikorina gives me her long fingers with their circular blue scars.

  ‘We are born from Satan. You and me.’

  After the sweet assassin, Shikorina’s words are a cruel ambush.

  ‘We come from the place the devil eats bones. The place of graves.’

  Maybe, Shikorina, you are right. Or maybe, just maybe, we made a terrible mistake.

  Terrible. The intensity catches on my heart like the sharp end of a bone. I try to breathe through it, but it stabs my lungs like pleurisy. Which bone is it?

  The blessing bone that says mistakes can be forgiven? Or the curse bone that says sin remains sin; I am spawn of Satan?

  Shikorina takes back her hands, lifts her feet like they are waterlogged. As I bend over them, Eulalie’s words travel slowly down a broken-down telephone of prisoners, ‘The children . . . The children . . .’

  The words come in wisps, until Lolie speaks in jagged English: ‘The children forgive you.’

  I jerk up straight. Is the message for me?

  But Lolie practises her crazy, crooked smile, holds up three fingers. ‘Three.’

  The pleurisy pierces my ribs. No. Not for me. I killed more than three.

  Shikorina turns her ear to the mesh, like the truth is caught in the wires. ‘Is it true, Malachi?’

  I shrug. Maybe.

  But maybe is not enough. Shikorina waits, still watching me. She is asking the wro
ng person, she should be asking God.

  But I have seen Shikorina’s gentleness when she touches her ghost children. She took them into the sunshine and stroked them, I know. She held them close at night when the white wolves chased them in their dreams. But her mind cracked down the middle. Broke in half, like Lolie’s.

  I can’t say, but one thing is for sure. Shikorina’s children still love the mother she half was.

  I hold up two hands, exaggerate. Shove her children towards her, wholeheartedly, not half. They still love you, Shikorina.

  Shikorina crashes back against the mesh, wraps her octopus arms around the three of them. She is careful not to crush them with a love so powerful it could accelerate the wash-spin cycle of the earth, make plants grow at the rate of three centimetres a second. I free her feet quickly. She murmurs to her children in soft decibels of love as she rolls from side to side, unconscious of the wire cutting into her bony shoulders. I see she has torn a strip of skin from her spine. I will have to keep an eye on the raw spot.

  I lock Shikorina’s cage with a hope that makes me dizzy. I pick up my bucket, nearly skip a few steps. I stop, compose myself, walk more demurely to the trolley.

  * * *

  What if the witch is more sane than any High Court judge? What if Shikorina’s children still love her, all three?

  Maybe I just got the lucky bone in my throw. In Bhajo they call it summudiye. Maybe there is a perfect reason to party.

  I lift my key card to the door, unlock it.

  Manners, Malachi. Hamri had a way of saying it so sweetly.

  I turn to face the prisoners. I nod like a manservant, smile my unpractised smile for the second time since I told the whole truth.

  Thank you.

  * * *

  I drink water from the bathroom tap, point my penis gently at the porcelain. I have finally found some friends.

  The thought jolts my body. Malachi, are you mad?

  I flick my penis roughly back inside my zip. I must be shell-shocked, my limbic brain veering between love and desperation. As moody as a bus driver, my mother used to say. I pull my belt too tight. The prisoners will be back in their old jails in six months. In six months I will have a tongue, dress up in the lie that I never lost it. I will wear it like a cool, classic shirt and tie, buy a matric certificate, get a briefcase like Hamri’s, but with new, smooth straps. I will change my name in case my grandfather from Kattra hears I am still living.

  I rinse my face. Smother myself briefly with my hand towel. No. I will carry my history like children buried in cement.

  Right now, I’d rather die.

  This is a sentiment I go to lunch with.

  * * *

  I sit on the bench with Shikorina’s children pulling on my ears. This is how audacious my imagination has become. Janeé is slapping down beige soup with shattered bits floating in it. They slip like tiny fish down my throat. I try to catch and chew, but they are too slimy.

  ‘Leek soup,’ Janeé explains.

  Ah, leeks. Those long pale fingers with hairy ends.

  Tamba picks up his spoon, sighs. ‘We’re lucky to get vegetables this far out.’

  I have never knowingly eaten a leek. I have seen them in the mega market, trying to climb off the shelf and scuttle away on legs that look a lot like nasal hairs. As I scoop the swimming pieces into my mouth, Janeé slams down another plate. The first half of lunch is innocent. But this? A chicken’s breast with a sprig of parsley tucked like a flower behind a dead woman’s ear. The breast is dusted with light brown spice, but is a victim of murder nonetheless.

  Olivia notices my consternation. ‘Good protein,’ she warns me.

  There is something of the murderess in Olivia under pressure. I can’t suppress a sigh. Smothering child soldiers. Poisoning prime ministers’ wives. Torturing chickens for eating pleasure. These are some of the things broken humans get up to.

  Stop joking, Malachi. It’s really not funny. I am like Shakespeare’s Earl of Gloucester, living in a ditch with his eyes plucked out, still making dark jokes. Where will it get me?

  I swallow. Some damned relief.

  I cut into my breast. Oh, no. I swing my eyes from my plate, fix them on some static lifting Olivia’s fringe.

  Olivia turns to check the wall behind her head. She hits her fringe like there might be a beetle crawling in it. ‘What is it?’ she demands.

  Tamba saves me from the awkward situation. ‘Urgh. I can’t eat this. It’s still pink.’ He pushes his plate away.

  I can’t help smiling. Yes! My comrade.

  My approval lends grist to Tamba’s whining. ‘I need a microwave.’

  Janeé frowns, insulted. ‘You’re not allowed in that wing.’ ‘You take it, then.’

  Meirong drops her spoon so her leek soup spatters. ‘Tamba, there are more important things to worry about right now.’ She stands up. ‘Malachi. Come with me.’ She lifts the solo sailor’s lunch from the trolley.

  I stand up, sidle away from my plate. Meirong plants the tray in my hands. ‘Can you do this without spilling?’

  I stare down at it. The solo sailor has survived a storm at sea to eat leek soup. I reach for a clean plate, cover her chicken.

  ‘Wait,’ Janeé says. She pours red raspberry juice into a polystyrene cup and fixes on a lid.

  * * *

  I balance the solo sailor’s lunch, follow Meirong through the noisy door to the centre of the rig. I pant up the stairs after her. Eight days without working out, and now I must carry leeks to a stow-away up fifty flights of stairs. It’s time to start running on the spot. Meirong’s bum is beautiful, I know this from the fleshy things that normal men appreciate. Two papayas rubbing together, joined by a bridge of skin. Two halves of the brain, it might as well be, joined by the corpus callosum.

  Meirong pulls ahead. ‘Malachi, don’t tell me you’re not fit.’

  I give her a disdainful look, skip up the next flight of stairs. Even with her hands free, I breathe against her back, force her to go faster as we climb the steel jungle gym towards the sun. At the door to the deck, I stand casually, as if the sweat is not making dark patches on my purple shirt. Meirong shines delicately, refuses to pant in front of me. She lifts a pink lanyard from her neck. Unlocks the aperture to the sky.

  * * *

  The sun pours through my crown, shines into my eyes like I am its long-lost son. The sea air is lightly salted, cool. Beautiful. It floods my blood vessels, makes them rich, rich, rich as I follow Meirong along the deck. I breathe in, almost dizzy. But as I walk past the helicraft landing pad, the sun starts to beat my head with a stick. I walk after Meirong’s papayas swinging one-two, one-two towards a storeroom with three old-fashioned padlocks and a manual key slot.

  Meirong unhooks a bunch of metal keys from her waist. ‘Lock the door behind you when you go in. Lock every one of these padlocks on the way out.’ She points at the old orange lifeboat held by a steel A-frame. ‘Hang these keys on the first engine. Do you see it?’

  I nod at Meirong, set the tray down at my feet.

  She points back at the door to the jungle gym. ‘I’ve left the main entrance open. I’ll lock up after you. We can’t afford to be sloppy with security.’

  Yes, Mrs Hitleress.

  I knock on the metal door. Meirong ducks away, darts past the tower towards the management wing. I unlock the padlocks, turn the copper key. I pick up my tray, nudge the door open with the toe of my sneaker.

  * * *

  The girl lies uncovered on a metal bed, her body as thin as a torn sheet of canvas. Her eyes are open, the luminous green of underwater algae. She tries to spy past my body.

  ‘Why does she run from me?’ Her voice is cracked by sea salt.

  The small room is bare, except for her bed and a plastic crate, upended to create a table. On the floor, a scattering of rusted nails and a trampled Texan cigarette packet lie like ghostly remains of the oil-drilling days. I step over a torn weightlifter’s magazine. Go closer with my tray. The girl
’s hair is as white as Madame Sophie’s, but it is frayed by deluges of rain and blistering winds. The sun has peeled her nose and cheeks to a deep raw pink; burnt bands of blisters on her forearms and shins. She wears loose boxer shorts that must have belonged to her father. A dirty white shirt hangs open at her neck. The girl has no sign of breasts, as if her fight for survival might have frightened them away. A huge white tooth hangs on a leather strip against her blistered chest.

  I put the tray on the crate, kneel next to the bed.

  Frances sits up slowly. ‘Thanks.’ She sounds American. A relative of William, my digital voicebox. ‘Are you going to talk to me?’

  I stare at her sheepishly.

  ‘Oh no. Not you, too. Romano’s very kind, but everything I ask him he says, “I’m sorry I can’t say.”’

  Romano said sorry to this little girl who looks like driftwood? I point at my mouth, shake my head stupidly. There is no point in trying to mime, Tongue. Cut.

  ‘That Chinese woman, what is she going to do with me?’

  I sigh, get to my feet. She grabs my thumb, pulls at it feebly. ‘Do you have a satellite phone?’

  Oh no. Not another plea for rescue.

  ‘My black box is under the navigation table.’ The sun has polished her eyes to the thickness of a magnifying glass. ‘Can you get it from my yacht?’

  I point towards the door. The lady who ran away? I wag my finger to and fro, mime to Frances: She’s the boss. Sorry.

  ‘Do you have a cell phone, maybe?’ she persists desperately.

  I shake my head, deny the thousands of luxurious words hanging in my pocket.

  ‘What about a pen?’ She pulls on my hand with her measly strength. ‘Please.’

  I have no choice but to sink to my knees. Frances drags her leather string through her knotted hair. She writes on the skin of my forearm. 0845691233. The numbers come up pale from the huge incisor.

  ‘This is my mother’s number. Please call her for me.’ Frances squeezes my wrist with the little strength she has left. ‘Will you?’

  I can’t bring myself to pull away from her feeble grip. I make a rolling action with my free hand. Tomorrow, they will call her. Surely.

  Frances tries to smile. ‘Tomorrow might not come.’

  What does she mean?