by T. C. Farren
She holds out her palm, shows me the serrated tooth. ‘It was my father’s,’ she croaks. ‘He got it from a great white.’
I’m afraid I can’t share her love for the evil-looking thing.
‘I took it off him.’ She loops the necklace clumsily over her head. ‘I had to roll him into the sea. He was so heavy.’ Her arms fall limply, as if remembering the weight of her dead father.
I force myself to my feet, allow myself a small, sorry grunt. My own arms hang from the weight of her mother’s phone number. The poor woman must be frantic, her prayers fluttering from her lips like torn strips of spinnaker over thousands of sea miles.
A hoarse, hollow sound issues from the girl’s mouth.
‘I need my mother, please.’
I don’t think the sailor girl can cry. It looks like her tear ducts are too dry. I hunt around, find an empty glass beneath the bed. This child needs water so she can at least weep for her own mother! This is thoroughly inhumane. This ancient rig is not exactly a five-class hotel, but the least they can do is see to her basic needs.
Damn you, Meirong.
I sign for the girl to lift up her torn shirt.
Fear radiates from her glassy eyes. ‘Take it off?’
I shake my head, mortified. Show me your bellybutton, is all I want to say. I lift my purple shirt and pinch the skin on my stomach, show her how it snaps back.
Frances gets my meaning. She lifts up her shirt, pulls at the skin near her bellybutton. It sinks back very, very slowly. Definite dehydration. The girl needs a drip.
I utter a worried, ‘Aah,’ like there’s going to be trouble unless we fix this. But right now, my only remedy is fake raspberry juice. I put the polystyrene cup in her hands, close her fingers around it. She takes a tiny sip of the syrup. Then she sucks it greedily, leaves a stain of red around her raw lips. Good.
Leek soup? I gesture like an insensitive butler.
Frances turns her face away.
Just try.
I press the soup bowl into her hands, insistent. Frances takes a little sip, then slugs back the glutinous liquid. She closes her eyes with the ecstasy of eating slimy white scraps of a far-fetched vegetable in the middle of the sea. Suddenly she doubles over, convulsing. I grab for a red bucket someone has left for her to do her ablutions in. She retches into it, a pinkish fluid. I shut my eyes, fight the sea-sickness kicking at my oesophagus.
I search the room. The child doesn’t even have toilet paper, for goodness’ sake. I tear a strip of cloth from the edge of her sheet and wipe her mouth with it. The girl steals a corner of the cloth, wipes her shark tooth clean. I snatch up the lunch tray. A growl starts deep within me, propels me to the door. Whatever happens, Meirong is going to hear about this.
I balance the tray on one hand, turn the copper key, but Frances is clambering to her feet, coming after me. I lock the door again quickly, sweep to the other end of the room, try to draw her from the door. Where the heck is Romano? I am not trained for this. The girl sways against the door, eyes my bunch of keys. Is she going to attack me?
I mime pouring water into the glass, lift it to my lips. I point outside like I was actually just going to look for a garden tap, with a row of impatiens perhaps, those pink-and-white flowers that bloom without thinking twice.
Frances shuffles slowly back to her bed. She lies back, exhausted from her flash of resistance.
‘Where’s Romano?’ she says accusingly. ‘At least he speaks to me.’ She rolls towards the wall, shows me a raw, emaciated shoulder. Her sigh, I can hear, has not a molecule of moisture in it.
I unlock the door, swing it wide enough to let the sun hunt her down one more time. I want so badly to say sorry. The rattle of the spoon on the soup plate surely won’t communicate my apology, but my deep, sorry sigh might.
I shut the heavy door, shut the nineteen-year-old child behind three barbarous steel locks.
* * *
I scurry across the deck and cross the little bridge to Romano’s lifeboat. I hang the keychain on the first engine, just as Meirong told me to. Romano’s snore is loud enough to be considered a serious security threat. He lies fast asleep on a thin mattress, still fully dressed in his Nadras Oil outfit. I stretch into the boat, touch Romano’s boot. He is on his knees in a split second, his Kalashnikov pointing straight at my heaving heart. I crash back against a metal mount with my butler’s tray, face the deadly glare of the AK97. My lungs have locked shut.
Romano lowers the barrel, flings the rifle beneath a bench.
Finally I wheeze out.
‘How is she?’ he asks.
I open my mouth, sweep a shaking hand up and out.
‘She sicked it up?’
I nod. I stab at a vein on the inside of my arm.
‘I know. She needs a drip! I told Meirong, but she’s done nothing.’ He shakes his head angrily, speaks my mind for me. ‘It’s not right!’
Romano climbs deeper into the lifeboat and throws out socks, a jersey, two tins of sweetcorn. He releases a long string of Kool-Aid sachets. Then he jerks on a massive drum and carries it to the back of the boat, grunting. He whips the keys off the propeller, shoves them into his pocket. This is Romano’s midnight, but he is sacrificing his sleep to help the girl prisoner. I nod at him approvingly. A mutual conspiracy leaps up between the security man and me. Even the sun softens its megalomania, gives us the privacy to agree, without words, that Romano and I must somehow try to save the poor child.
* * *
I let myself into the rig, shut the door behind me. The sun was too brutal on the surface, but I miss it, I miss it as soon as I turn my back on it. My heart sinks towards my shoes as I descend the metal stairs, my journey marked by the thousands of rivets I climb past. I pause at the door to the management wing. Private. Keep Out.
The door is digitally sealed but I want to shove on it, barge in and shout with my Samsung, ‘Look, that girl up there is very sick! She needs fluids. And she needs to go home, she is extremely upset. Can someone see to it?’
Don’t blow it, Malachi.
The door to the maintenance wing yowls as I open it.
I pass Olivia in her laboratory, squeezing a drop from a pipette. One fat tear that the solo sailor could not manage. I pass the empty canteen, still jangling with irritation from our lunch, reach the spiral stairs leading up to Tamba’s surveillance station. He has put the sound of his overland attack up high. I shut my eyes, steady myself against the stertorous blasts.
Romano nearly shot me up there in the sunshine.
I fumble for my key card, fall through the door, escape the fresh ammo, the flying grit, the stream of machine-gun bullets zinging past my ears.
* * *
They are waiting. The second row of prisoners are clicking their long nails, licking their teeth, loosening their tongues, getting ready to tell me what they think of my truth. But the first row were strangely kind to me. Will these ones hate me?
Number twenty-one is the white Zimbabwean with the vitamin deficiency.
‘Junk,’ he says with his chipped teeth. He gives me his hands. ‘You were junk on love.’ The funny thing is he sounds drunk with those teeth. ‘I was junk like you . . .’ He tries to say something about his felony, but I wish he would shut up. He sounds too absurd for the subject of either murder or love.
I nod politely, check his wires and his pipes.
Was I drunk on teenage love?
As I finish the next prisoner, Tamba must have lost his virtual life up there because he jumps to his feet and roams restlessly around his room. He throws himself in his chair, shows the underside of his shoes as he hitches them onto his control desk. Risky, I think. What if he accidentally kicks a switch and kills off a few precious assets?
* * *
As I work down the aisle, the priest killer crouches like he wants to head-butt me to the floor. His teeth are tightly gritted, his demeanour, one might say, nowhere near what one might expect of a lift attendant. The Moroccan looks like he could p
ounce on his Japanese tourists and rip their McDonald’s lunches straight from their stomachs. I put my bucket down a little distance from him.
He shoves his melted hands into the glove. I see they are shaking.
‘I am the one who hung on.’ Cinders crack inside him. The heat bursts his teardrops before they can fall. ‘Now he won’t let me go,’ he rasps. ‘I hung on to him. Now he hangs on to me.’
I hold his trembling hands still, clip his melted fingers. I cover his hands with my white cloth, squeeze them as if to starve them of oxygen.
He pulls his fingers from the glove, begs me, ‘How can I stop him from coming to me?’
I turn towards the top of the aisle, point towards the old witch. Ask Eulalie.
It is Gibril, the desert strangler, who picks up my meaning. He tells the yellow man who tells the prisoner next to him. The priest killer’s question lands in Vicki’s lap.
She says clearly, ‘What do you think, Eulalie? Mohammed, the Muslim oke, he still wants to kill the priest.’
Eulalie gazes down the aisle, finds Mohammed with her smoky eyes. She covers her ears, pulls her senses away from her rowdy friends. The prisoners quieten down.
Her words float down the aisle from the prisoners’ mouths.
It is the desert strangler who carries them to us. ‘She says you are brothers. You and Father Rayan.’
The priest killer gasps. ‘How does she know his name?’
Eulalie taps her fists together. Her words make their way down to us. ‘The Christian and the Muslim, they both worshipped the wrong God.’
Did those words come from the tooth-pulling Indian? Surely not. He can’t speak English, can he?
Eulalie speaks again, faintly. Charmayne, the big beauty, picks up the phrase from the desert-strangling Ethiopian, ‘God is who we are?’ Charmayne snorts loudly. ‘Did you say that, Eulalie?’ She smacks the cage with her huge hands. ‘That’s rubbish!’
The priest killer slowly unravels his fighting stance. He hangs his head so his shining fringe falls across his face like a curtain. I clip his toes with a lump in my throat the size of a Bible. With each cut it feels like I am ripping out an angry page.
Rubbish. Charmayne is right.
Does he believe that shit?
I clip crudely, shove the priest killer’s feet back to him. But my fury is wasted on him. Mohammed wraps his arms around some unseen figure, welds his heart against some imaginary chest. He is busy making friends with a plump Catholic priest. This is way too eerie, even for this cursed, blessed place. The priest has become his invisible friend. The entire hall makes soft sounds of amazement. My hands are shaking. My throat feels ragged, cut by my soundless shout, God is who we are?
Never. It can’t be.
* * *
I am grateful to reach the big beauty, who is as scornful as me. She hugs her muscular thighs, shakes her head bitterly. ‘There’s no God in me, Malachi.’
I lock the glove to her cage.
Charmayne leans closer, hisses, ‘Do you want to know the truth?’
Oh, no. Rather keep it. Please.
‘They were standing near the parapet. I heard them whispering.’ Her hair sticks up like two woollen horns on her head. ‘Pete said, “Let’s cut Charmayne out.” Bongi said, “Yes.”’ Her lips seem to swell as if the truth is poisoning them. It flies out like a swarm of marauding bees, ‘I pushed them.’
Oh God. Here is the God she is not.
‘I pushed them. I did!’
Oh, Charmayne. I am so, so sorry. My clippers hang feebly in my fingers. I feel their Versace suits against her skin, the echo of their living breath, the warmth of their living blood as she shoved.
Tamba interrupts, ‘Malachi? Is everything okay?’
I nod casually, resume my duties.
‘Watch out for that one.’
I glance sharply at him. Is this about Dominic?
‘From here, she’s a man-eater. I mean, on my monitor.’
I refuse to smile at him, sink to a buddy-buddy kind of sexism. As I start on Charmayne’s feet, a strange refrain flutters down the aisle. It starts softly with Eulalie, flits across to Madame Sophie.
‘They were gay . . .’
‘They were gay . . .’
‘The architects, they loved each other,’ the desert strangler says clearly.
‘Gay, like lovers?’ Charmayne shakes her magnificent, horned head. ‘Never. Bongi was married.’
I free her feet. Charmayne clambers to her mighty knees.
‘Eulalie,’ she demands, ‘what do you see?’
Eulalie stares at the space above Charmayne’s head like she is watching a movie.
‘Eulalie?’ Madame Sophie prompts.
‘They are wearing gold suits. They are very, very happy.’
‘Ooh.’ Vicki embellishes, ‘Glittery, golden suits.’
Charmayne covers her breasts like there are cameras clicking, catching her in a naked act of forgiveness.
Her voice catches with grief, ‘You’re teasing me.’ She turns her smooth, beautiful back on me. But I don’t see her expanse of dusky smooth skin. I don’t see her vertebrae.
I see Araba’s lovely breasts as she bares them to me. Plush they are, perfect cocoa-infused fruits, their silken skin topped by a chocolate ripple, the place to put one’s thumb to open it. But these nipples are not torn open by machine guns, they are soft like the ribbon they use to wrap gifts. I blink my eyes, try to refuse Araba’s gift of her glorious young breasts. I am thirty years old, please.
But it is the boy before the massacre she is smiling at.
Araba is alive, still flowering. Nothing can touch her, only me, if I want to.
I want to. I want to, but not in the way an ordinary man might. I want to stroke her nipple as soft as a butterfly’s wing, press my thumb on it as if I created it. I want to cup her perfect breasts and imagine it was I who healed the blown-apart flesh.
Let me make it better, Araba, please.
Charmayne is digging her thumbs into her eyes, trying to rub out the ghosts in their glittering suits. I leave her to battle with her spirits, float through several groomings in the company of Araba’s heavenly breasts.
* * *
As I work closer to Madame Sophie, I feel her staring intently, an unflattering platinum strip exposed in her eyes. Can she see Araba’s breasts?
By the time I reach her, Madame Sophie’s eyes are bulging. I am no doctor, but I have read this could be a sign of a thyroid deficiency. How the heck do I mime popping eyes to Tamba?
I set my bucket on the floor before her. Stop staring, Madame Sophie.
Upstairs, Tamba is glancing down at us, starting to pack up. I have no choice but to bow my head, lop off a long white arc she must have cleaned with her teeth.
‘Do you see?’ Her blue eyes are polar lights from the place where the sun shines all day and all night. She whispers, ‘Do you see, Malachi?’
I see what she sees, a row of heroin-fed prostitutes lying on white beds, their transparent drip sacs gleaming above them. A moody golden light caresses the scene, warms my aching elbows, my knees as I rub my white towel across Madame Sophie’s photosensitive skin.
She lies back against the mesh, so still it’s as if her central nervous system has stopped functioning.
Across the aisle, Eulalie’s voice holds a pure, cracked sweetness, ‘They are clear, Madame Sophie. As clear as diamonds.’
Madame Sophie moves only her eyes. Is she paralysed?
‘Your dead girls are free.’
Seriously? Gold suits and sparkling nymphs?
But a blush suffuses Madame Sophie’s pale skin. A feathery smile touches her lips.
Josiah laughs as if choking on his own clotted grease. Some of the prisoners cough in strange sympathy.
Josiah snorts, ‘You’re lying, Eulalie.’ But his scarred eyes smoulder with some strange fear.
I squeeze his furry fingers into my glove, punish him gently.
He stares at me, says sl
yly, ‘What of your mother, Malachi?’
I clutch my chest, wheeze through the bullet wound.
He hits me while I am still reeling, ‘Is she free?’
I sink to my knees, rock like a brain-damaged patient in an asylum. Josiah’s words have been hiding in the lining of my brain, malignant as a cancer, corrupting the cells of my interstitial membranes. He found them, the devil, he stitched them together. I rock on the bones of my bum, my only memento of the man who stood here a moment ago.
Eulalie’s shout is like a sorcerer’s whip. ‘Josiah!’
Josiah’s laughter crashes to the metal floor.
Eulalie points her crooked finger at him. ‘Your mother was Seleka. From the village of Bambari.’
‘Oh. Oh. Oh,’ Vicki gasps behind me. ‘Josiah.’
Josiah’s black moustache seems to tear off his lip. His hairy hands fly up to catch it.
The hips of a thin donkey, I rock on them.
Eulalie’s tone is calmer now, matter-of-fact as if she is reporting the weather on the day that he did it, ‘You sent your soldiers in.’
Josiah rams his forehead into the cruel mesh. Harder and harder, over and over as if he is painting the walls of his cave with red. I shut my eyes. That might be me screaming. Eulalie speaks as if she is describing the strength of the wind, the chances of rain, the size of the hole in the ozone over Antarctica.
‘You were a sweet baby, she knows this. He taught you to hate.’
Josiah smashes his face into the floor of the cage, simulating the shock treatment he received on Monday. Eulalie shouts like a thunderclap, ‘Josiah!’
Josiah stops.
‘Your mother forgives you.’
Josiah breaks his nose on his excretion plate. He smashes his head against the left side, the right side of the cage, like Hellboy the Seventh before he tore free and demolished New Orleans. The five-inch bolts on the floor shiver.
‘Malachi, stop him!’ Vicki shrieks.
I scramble to my feet, hit the button of my intercom. Tamba appears after a few long moments. Half the prisoner portraits behind him are already black screens. He sounds irritated, like a shopkeeper locking up. ‘What?’ He watches Josiah batter his head against the mesh. ‘Oh-h-h,’ he breathes.