The Book of Malachi

by T. C. Farren

  Well. I could you know, Tamba. I roll onto my back, relieve the pain of his Samsung digging into me. I smile in the dark. I have a man-made voicebox growing against my skin.

  If I didn’t get my tongue, Mother, would I die of it?

  I am too frightened to consider exactly what I mean by this.

  I shut my eyes, hurry towards the cheap refuge of sleep.

  WEDNESDAY

  I wake to the sound of water showering down. I listen for the cawing of five thousand waking chickens. The rig gives me the near silence of five thousand rivets. I check my timepiece. Fifteen minutes. I hang my legs off the bed in a leisurely manner, but as my feet touch the cold floor I remember last night’s embarrassment. Apparently I was singing.

  I tug off my party clothes, rub at the indent from my belt buckle. Somehow I slept without disturbing the neat pile of laundry Tamba left for me. I lift the white trousers off the pile, pull them on. They are beautifully smooth, astonishingly white, like the clean-dry machine personally went and swapped them for a brand-new pair. I slip my plastic voicebox into the pocket. Next, my white ball-boy shirt. The sound of falling water stops. I wriggle my feet into my sneakers with the yellow stains, tug my trousers down so the hem covers them. I need to get out before Tamba teases me about my tongueless lullaby. I cup my hand, blow into it. Ooh. Not as pure as my white outfit. Still. I hurry from the room to escape Tamba’s dripping smirk and the eyes of my grandfather, his legs bending gently with the to and fro of his ferry.

  * * *

  Breakfast is melted cheese you could cross a river on. Janeé puts my own rubber mat in front of me. Meirong and Romano are already sitting with their plates, but they have not yet tackled their cheese. There is not a single sign of Meirong’s laughter from last night. She is in bright orangey red, like she just fell into a furious sunset.

  ‘You sure you can destroy it?’ she asks Romano cryptically.

  Romano nods. ‘Bring me the right explosive. Trobancubane.’

  ‘We must wait until they’re far enough so they don’t hear the blast.’

  ‘Wait. Wait,’ Romano mutters darkly. ‘That’s all you ever say.’

  ‘Yes. Wait!’ Meirong seizes her knife, saws into her ferry.

  There is no water on the table today. Today I will have to be brave. I snatch at the red juice in the jug, pour myself half a glass. I toss it between my lips before I have time to think about the colour of blood. It strips the mucous membranes of my mouth immediately, deodorises my mouth with fake raspberry. I feel an itchy feeling deep in my brain, but there is something exhilarating about the syrupy drink. For a second, my mind is a simple fake fruit, not a tangle of trepidation, a constant jousting between pride and shame.

  I take another sip, careful not to drip it on my white angel’s outfit.

  A happy zing. Mmm. Interesting.

  Tamba wafts in, smelling of something that clashes horribly with raspberry. He sits down in a midnight-blue shirt, looks from face to face, confused by the current of anger crisscrossing the room. ‘Any news?’

  Meirong shakes her head, ‘So far, so good.’

  Tamba lifts his cheese with his fingers, stares curiously at what lies beneath it. I scoop out some cubes of what might be potato, chew enthusiastically.

  Meirong blazes right through the middle of hers in her orange sunset. She points her fork at Romano. ‘Either eat or get some rest.’

  Romano jumps up, as if he might grab Meirong’s knife and cut her throat with it.

  Luckily for him, Olivia drifts between them. ‘Mor-ning,’ she chants, like she has decided to beat up her terror with pure optimism. She sits down in her white coat. ‘Mm mm, I’m starving. I’ve been up since five.’

  Romano slinks out of the room before he murders his lady boss.

  Meirong frowns. ‘Take your coat off, Olivia. You smell like a pharmacy.’

  Meirong is right. Even the raspberry can’t shoot through the stink. Olivia hangs up her white coat on a hook. Beneath it, she wears the crumpled green of a plant that has been trodden on. Next to me, Tamba rolls his rubber ferry and bites into it. Simple, except for the oil drip on his blue shirt.

  ‘Oh shit.’ Tamba tries to wipe the oil off with a serviette. ‘This shirt is bloody expensive.’

  No one finds it in their heart to care about his shirt, but Tamba’s first sip of raspberry juice cheers him up. He tucks a serviette into his neck and launches at his roll like he is chewing for charity.

  The raspberry juice also gives Olivia extra zing. ‘Everything is going well, don’t you think? I mean, we’re praying the search party misses us, and they will. But the subjects are all healthy. Even number two, her heart is fine now.’ Olivia’s eyes suck like a tornado in a clear blue sky. ‘Please, Meirong, can I ask you something? Please can they start with number twenty and get that lung tissue to Timmy? He’s so small, they say he only needs a piece. I’m just so scared something happens and we miss it by a day.’

  ‘Uhh.’ Meirong chews. ‘Maybe.’

  Olivia’s green clothes uncrease before my eyes, as if she has had two days of watering and photosynthesis. ‘Thank you. Oh, thank you!’

  ‘Maybe. I can’t say for definite. I’ll have to ask Mr Carreira.’

  Meirong drops her fork as if the bell has rung for the end of the chewing marathon. She gets to her feet. Olivia grabs Meirong’s hand floating near her ear. Meirong pulls free, slips away from Olivia’s supplicating spine, her fluttering fingers, her frail green hope that a single day of drought could annihilate.

  I finish my red drink, smile at Janeé as if to say, Thanks for this lovely drink. It brings a scritchy scratchy sensation but goodness me . . .

  Janeé stares at my cheese. ‘Malachi?’

  I pat my stomach, keep the crazy red smile up, bestow her with fake raspberry happiness.

  Tamba tugs the serviette from his neck. ‘Me too. My stomach has shrunk.’

  Janeé stares suspiciously at the two of us.

  ‘Any chance of a coffee bomb?’ Tamba asks.

  ‘No,’ Olivia interrupts. ‘You’re already twitchy, Tamba.’

  Tamba shakes his head, lies brazenly. ‘Coffee actually calms me.’

  ‘Please, Tamba. Everything’s going so nicely.’

  But Olivia didn’t hear me roar like a lion last night. She didn’t see three grown people giggling like they were drunk on Granny Elizabeth’s acetati.

  ‘What do you say, Janeé?’ Tamba begs shamelessly.

  ‘Sorry. All gone.’

  Tamba drops his forehead to the table. ‘Arghh.’

  He drags his feet from the canteen. Twitchy. Definitely.

  Not me. I seem to be on a high induced by the raspberry drink. I have the sudden weird strength to touch Olivia’s shoulder, give it a squeeze with my smooth, plastic-wrapped hand. Three more days, Olivia, I would dearly love to say. I follow after Tamba’s midnight-blue mood.

  * * *

  I swing into our room, scrub my teeth. Rub at the red stain that looks like a damp-lipped woman just kissed me. It won’t come off. I smile helplessly in the mirror. My grandfather’s eyes smile back at me.

  I shrink away from them, hurry down the corridor.

  Yesterday was Araba’s rubbery breasts. Today my grandfather’s eyes are teasing me.

  Whatever is haunting me has a gravely stupid sense of humour.

  * * *

  I hesitate at the steel door. I have no words prepared on my plastic voicebox, but I feel light on my feet today. Partly sunny, they might say on one of those vague forecasts. Partly haunted. I make one more attempt to rub my red-stained lips. I raise my key card, turn the red light green. Open the door wide to yesterday’s consequences.

  * * *

  The silence hums like a swarm of bees caught in my cranium. I hear not a cough, not a croak, not a single malicious word spoken about me. I study the air above the mesh. Have they all been accidentally gassed?

  No.

  Samuel rests his chin on his knees. Charmayn
e rocks backwards on her buttocks, flicks her thick hair like she is suffering beneath the tropical sun. Even from this distance, Vicki’s eyes send me some kind of message as she taps staccato on the ladder climbing her thigh. Is she counting the rungs to reach her vagina?

  I pull my gaze from Vicki, drop Samuel’s wire hatch almost cheerily. He might get lucky this week. If Olivia gets her way, the surgeons will start at the far end of the aisle and operate on Shikorina instead of him.

  ‘Sad thing, Malachi,’ Samuel says to me.

  Lighten up, I want to say. How many years has it been raining? Samuel really ought to try Janeé’s red syrup.

  ‘It’s the judge,’ Vicki says softly.

  Thirty-nine heads turn towards the giant’s cage.

  There is something horribly wrong. I crush my leather glove against my chest. I’m afraid there will be blood.

  Vicki, tell me.

  ‘It took thirty seconds,’ Vicki says.

  No. Not dead. Please.

  But Vicki nods her head. ‘Sorry, Malachi.’

  Next to her, Eulalie sighs with a deep, soothing pity.

  Run. Save him!

  I shunt my feet down the aisle, my heart shrinking from the ghastly sight I am about to see.

  * * *

  The giant has grown even more colossal. He is buckled over one knee, his head bowed to the floor of his prison. One huge arm is trapped beneath him, the other flung against the mesh. One leg is bent at a shocking angle, as if the weight of his torso has popped the rivets in his hip and pulled it right out of its socket. Dislocated, this beautiful man. A gigantic statue the crowd has toppled in a coup.

  I sink to my haunches, try to say, ‘Judge James?’

  There are red raspberry juice drips on the floor beneath him. Three.

  I bang on his cage. ‘Hey-y.’

  I beg him to lift his head, cite some kind of legislation, anything. I duck down to search his eyes. They are wide open, startled. A length of wire loops through his mesh and threads between his big, broken teeth. He has blood on his lips. A cold tremor seizes me. My own stained lips quiver uncontrollably. The giant chewed through two hundred volts to blow himself up. The memory of electric shock rips through my ganglions, but there are no sparks flying from this gigantic body. The blood-drips near my sneakers are already half dry. He has been lying here for hours.

  I swing towards Eulalie, beg her with my eyes. Is he dead?

  Her ancient smile is sorrowful and sweet. ‘We must wait three days. Only then can he come to me.’

  No. Maybe, just maybe they can resuscitate him. I hit my switch.

  Even from up there, Tamba senses me vibrating. ‘Oh, Jesus, what’s wrong?’

  There is no other way. I whip my finger across my throat.

  ‘Dead?’

  Maybe they can find breath inside him. I stamp my foot.

  A miracle from the doctors. Quickly!

  ‘He can’t be! How?’

  I jam a finger between my teeth. Bite too hard on it. I flash my fingers, mime a convulsive shock.

  ‘Electric shock? Shit!’ Now he touches keys, works his switches. ‘I can’t get a reading. Fuck, Malachi. He’s our best specimen!’ Tamba doesn’t bother to cut off my intercom. ‘Meirong. Suicide!’

  ‘How?’

  ‘Number fifteen. He bit the wires.’

  ‘Pull him up. Pull him up! Your father must save his heart!’

  What about his life? And why Tamba’s father?

  ‘It’s too late,’ the Australian says sadly. ‘He stopped breathing at about three a.m.’

  I challenge him wordlessly, Where is your timepiece, Barry?

  He shrugs woefully. ‘Three is the time we started drilling. Less oil leakage then. Less gas flares.’ Barry looks ashamed, as if it was he who chilled the giant’s blood at three a.m.

  I see the giant’s little finger is smeared with red. He must have used it to hook the wire through the mesh.

  The prisoners were all complicit, they must have been. He must have been working on the wire for how long?

  They are all silent now. Yes. They let the giant die.

  Steel cables begin to snake inside the tracks in the roof. A huge metal hook winds down towards me.

  ‘Malachi. Quickly. Unclip the feed pipe,’ Tamba says.

  I tug the feed pipe clear. The huge hook finds its eye on the top of the giant’s cage. The cage begins to quake. There is a catching stutter of metal cogs on metal thread as a motor in the roof begins to winch the toppled statue up, up. I drag my eyes from the giant’s thick, clear retinas. Why the surprise? Why?

  Did he see his unborn son?

  Tamba is operating the motorised winch like he is flying a Boeing. ‘I’m doing it. I’m doing it,’ he mutters through my intercom as the giant sways above me.

  I stare at the giant’s penis crushed against the crosswires beneath him. His testicles are imprinted with the gridiron pattern of latitude and longitude, the rational rules the giant loved so much. North and South, left and right – and now so terribly wrong.

  I swing towards Barry, the Australian. Why did you let him die?

  Charmayne feels my accusation across the aisle. ‘It was all he wanted, Malachi.’ She grips her big toes, her knees pointing out as if her symmetry might save her from culpability. ‘When he heard he killed his baby.’

  The giant’s cage shunts past the glass kiosk where Tamba is concentrating on his flying, not watching me. I run a few steps, thrust at Charmayne’s cage.

  She recoils, lets go of her big toes. She bangs her knees together, shuts her womb to me. ‘We let him, because we loved him.’

  Some prisoners nod their heads, murmur words for love.

  I smack on Charmayne’s cage, refuse her reasoning.

  ‘I’m sorry to say this,’ the social worker says gently, ‘but you also let him die.’

  I wrench my whole body this way and that. No. Never!

  But Samuel is nodding in cage number one. Vicki’s black eyebrows are silent, sorry arcs. My outrage falls off its hinges. I let my arms hang.

  They are right. I let the judge sit on his bleeding hands. I ignored his drunken slur and his grisly, gritted teeth. How can I blame them? I loved the giant after knowing him for a few days. These people have lived naked with his grandeur for fourteen weeks. He was a man of honour, Judge James, he deserved to take his own life.

  The panel in the wall grinds open next to Tamba’s surveillance box. The giant’s cage cranks into it. I catch a glimpse of Meirong’s orange sunset before it shuts and leaves a façade of melted cheese.

  ‘Malachi?’ Tamba says. ‘Emergency meeting in the recreation room. Now.’

  I shut Samuel’s cage. Before I even reach the door, I am rehearsing my alibi for Raizier management. The judge was fine, really. Check the record of his vitals. He showed no sign of injury to his fingers or his teeth.

  I don’t care that I can’t speak one coherent word. I will find a way to protect the giant’s beautiful, decisive wish to die.

  * * *

  I pass the women’s living quarters, drag myself up the stairs to the recreation centre.

  I take the brown chair with the broken armrest, like someone threw it across the room and didn’t bother to reset its limbs. Janeé perches on a puckered beige seat that to me looks a lot like a huge cashew. She glances longingly at the War Console controls at the TV. I know the feeling. I yearn for my own precious keys, sitting so heavily in my pocket. I adjust my leg so it does not show a lump. It’s like having an erection in front of people who think I am a eunuch. Tamba sits in the same blue that the dark night of the soul must be. Next to him, Olivia smooths her rumpled green skirt, twitches it. She lifts her bum, plants it again on a green cushion they call a pouffe in the Good Living magazine.

  ‘Man, relax,’ Tamba murmurs to her.

  Olivia sits up as straight as a stick, but her knee jiggles like she swallowed some of the stuff she used to kick-start Eulalie. Meirong pulls up a metal chair and despise
s it. She balances her tiny bum bones on it, refuses to lean into the back rest.

  A tall man comes to a halt before Janeé’s Sleeping with the Enemy sofa. He has shrieking colour across his cheeks. From here, he has the teeth of a plankton eater, grey and interleaving. His nose is too white, too thin to let in enough oxygen. He waits in silence, creating a gallows by simply not speaking.

  A sigh escapes my lips. Is this the only funeral Judge James is going to get?

  I let my spine soften into my broken brown chair. A tiny sob escapes me.

  I didn’t know electricity could tear your ligaments.

  I turn my sob into a cough. The giant must have drunk his own blood to hide his wounds from me. The taste of haemoglobin teases the back of my throat. I place my hands on my knees, stare at my little fingers. No blood, see?

  Get a grip, Malachi.

  Mr Carreira adjusts his feet like he is about to sing. ‘I would prefer not to have met any of you.’

  Olivia’s lips fall away from her bunny teeth. Her knee stops jiggling.

  ‘That way you are less of a threat to our privacy. But this is a special circumstance . . .’ Mr Carreira sieves our wriggling fear between his blue-grey teeth.

  In the age of clean-dry machines and one-hour veneers, why on earth are this man’s teeth so unbecoming?

  ‘Number fifteen was worth over twenty million to us. Hearts are the most difficult of the organs to get right. They need a naturally high supply of iron.’

  ‘The doctor is optimistic he can save the stem-cell heart,’ Meirong says.

  ‘That’s one out of the six. He had five more cycles.’

  Meirong’s head hangs like Mr Carreira just broke her neck. A little rash has appeared between her eyebrows which, I notice now, are as finely shaped as a character in Chinese writing. I fix my eyes on the patch of inflamed skin.

  ‘There was a memo from Asia about a suicide.’ Mr Carreira asks Tamba: ‘Did Meirong not share it?’