by T. C. Farren
‘Yes?’ Olivia nearly whispers.
‘They are heading straight for us.’
Olivia drops her spoon in her food.
‘We’ll know by tonight. Just, all of you . . .’ Meirong glares at each one of us. ‘No trouble. Please.’ She gives up on her oxtail. ‘Olivia, Doctor says to add a sedative to their evening feed. We can’t take any chances right now.’ She drops a bunch of keys on the table, makes me jump. ‘The girl. Give her lunch then hang the keys on the engine.’ She slings a pink lanyard around my neck, anoints me. ‘Now, please.’
Meirong passes me a bowl from the trolley. It looks like we will all be eating waggy tails today.
‘She’s very weak,’ Meirong says grimly. ‘You might have to feed her.’
The silence in the canteen simmers with guilt. Meirong claps her hands as if to make the shame of five people fly up and away. ‘Come, come. Back to your stations, everyone.’
* * *
I hurry on to my horrible afternoon task.
Up, up I climb towards the sun, balancing bits of skeleton. By the time I reach the last flight of stairs, my chest is burning. Surely I could not have lost my fitness this quickly. No, the tightness of my breath must have something to do with a dead judge and a shipwrecked sailor who might be too sick to eat.
I unlock the door to outer space, step through the opening.
* * *
The psychopathic sun fires its rays onto the landing pad, strikes at my irises. It turns the sea to a cruel, blue light that houses no life on its skin.
I knock on the door of the storeroom. Knock harder. No answer. I unlock the padlocks, let myself in. Frances is on her back, her arms flung wide. The burn wounds on her shins leak a yellow fluid. She rasps for breath like she is draining the dregs of an oxygen bottle, her face a feverish red. I put her tray on the upturned crate, lay my hand on her cheek. She has a raging temperature. Her eyes prise open. She smiles, delirious.
‘Daddy?’
Don’t be silly. I am as black as the basalt sands of Bhajo.
‘Sit up. Sit up,’ I try to say, but all that comes out are dumb-sounding vowels. I dare not use my phone in case she exposes me. I try and lift her against the pillows, but even forty kilos takes some leverage. Frances slides to the side, her forehead banging against the wall. I need to get to her mouth. The marrow will fix her. I drag her straight, grab hold of her chin. I chase a string of marrow, tip it between the girl’s blistered lips. She swallows like she has to move a cabinet to let it through.
‘Good girl,’ I slur in my tongueless language. Still, the sound has love in it. I try again. This time the food hits the cabinet and shoots back up her throat. Frances coughs it out. Fluid trickles from her nostrils. I stretch the neckline of her tattered shirt, wipe her face with it. Why do they not bathe and dress this poor kid? She is dirty and dying.
I haul her up higher. ‘Come. Let’s try,’ I try to say. This time I scoop a tiny sip of gravy. This time it goes in. But Frances’s burning head falls back as soon as I release it.
Damn it!
I grab her glass of water, sprinkle some on her forehead. I splash a few drops on her neck, watch it gather in the hollow of her shallow, sucking throat.
She is dying, you bastards.
Romano’s shadow stretches through the door. I swing towards him.
‘She’s dying,’ I try to sound.
‘I haven’t slept. I’ve been watching her. Cooling her like so.’ He picks up the weightlifting magazine and flaps it over her face. ‘I’ve just seen Meirong. They’re taking her tonight.’ He strokes the girl’s temples where her hair has saved her white skin. ‘Not long, girlie . . .’
I bend over Frances, try to trickle more gravy between her lips. She swallows convulsively.
‘Here,’ Romano says. ‘Let me.’ He takes the spoon and dips it into the stew. Feeds her tiny morsels like he is saving a baby bird.
I drop the storeroom keys on the solo sailor’s crumpled sheet, walk out of the room with lead in my sneakers. She doesn’t have long, I know this in my marrow.
‘Drink, girlie,’ Romano sings in a high, woman’s voice. He hasn’t slept since yesterday, but I know he is the best nurse Frances could ever get. I leave the girl to his ministrations, walk into the pounding sun.
Bastards. Profit-driven pigs. I should have known from Susan Bellavista’s boots that Raizier would stamp on our faces. Let a young girl bleed pus.
* * *
I am halfway down the first maze of stairs when I feel Meirong’s key card knocking against my chest. I was supposed to hang it on the lifeboat. Romano was supposed to be asleep.
I stop. Consider it.
I will give it to her later. The Meirong bitch can wait.
* * *
I stride into the cultivation hall incensed by the cruelty I have just seen. It makes me prickly with the prisoners. I walk straight past Vicki with her ripe-fig lips. They should harvest those, give them to some old lady in Hollywood.
But the angry thought only hurts my already labouring heart.
If they so much as touch the mermaid, I will kill them.
Janeé’s oxtail stew has given me the fierceness of a Maasai warrior, but with no spear and no tongue to take on Raizier. I lock the brace to cage number twenty-one, start on the man’s fingers. If the solo sailor dies, Romano and I will be on the war path.
I snort through my nostrils like the ox whose marrow I have just eaten. A mute refugee and a sleepless veteran? I doubt it. The only thing I am sure of is that I could get a mention in the Guinness Book of World Records as the fastest nail-clipper ever seen on earth. I half shut my eyes, cut even quicker. The prisoners find it necessary to hold their breaths and keep very, very still as I chop off their new moons.
* * *
The social worker is not impressed with my clippers chattering like demented teeth.
‘Malachi? Why are you speeding?’
I glance at the glass. Tamba is bowed over his lap, his elbow lifted. I don’t believe it, he is clipping his own fingers.
I slip the phone beneath my leather glove, type to Andride. ‘What are you, a traffic cop?’
The social worker smiles at my stupid quip. I slip my phone back into my white trousers.
Everything, everything is standing on its head. And I have no idea how to save the dead and dying.
Andride tries to interrupt my metal-flashing frenzy, ‘What if Eulalie’s right?’
I hesitate for a second.
He shrugs. ‘What if dying’s just like . . .’ Andride thinks hard, ‘climbing on the roof to watch Foe fetara?’
I know what he means. He means the blinding beauty of gunpowder on New Year’s Eve.
A sound clatters down from above. A metal pulley cranks the giant’s empty cage towards us. Tamba has abandoned his manicure and is biting on his bottom lip, steering carefully. The cage swings above the empty gap, drops into its cradle. It stinks of disinfectant. Andride and I stare into its emptiness, strain our eyes and our ears for some trace of the giant’s spirit.
Satisfied with his pilot skills, Tamba drops down, disappears.
I slip the phone beneath my glove.
Tamba props a bare foot on his DJ desk. He begins to clip his toes.
I type with trembling fingers. ‘What if the judge is on the roof drinking a pink drink?’
I wring out a dripping white towel, wipe Andride’s hands, smother my crazy smile.
What if the girl with the fever can never burn up, even if the sun takes her right now as firewood?
I drop the towel in my bucket, meet the unearthly light in Andride’s eyes.
‘Does that man have a fever?’ Tamba’s feet have disappeared from his desk.
Andride lowers his eyes, hides the lasers of hope I seem to have lit with my African accent.
I jab at my eyes, tell Tamba to see for himself.
Tamba peers at a monitor. ‘Temp normal.’
I show him the O for okay, slide the cutting brace
from the social worker’s feet. I lock his cage, walk away from Andride as if we have not just experienced some kind of earth-defying, light-firing revelation.
* * *
The prisoners near us laugh and gabble like they’re at a cocktail party. I don’t know where that stuff came from, but the prisoners love it. After all, if there is no death then how the heck can there be murder in the first, the second, or the third degree?
I settle down to a less record-breaking clipping speed, curiously exhilarated, but when I reach the priest killer he throws cold water on me.
‘It’s the people who love them.’ He shakes his head. ‘I am very sorry for the priest’s mother. Very, very sorry. Can you tell her for me? She is Sara Alaoui, from Assilah. Can you write her address?’
Oh no. They’re asking favours of my digital tongue.
‘She lives at Ali Ibnou Abi Taleb. Please. Tell her I love him now, Father Rayan.’ The priest killer’s eyes glow like olive oil in the fluorescent light. Healthy he is, even with an extra kidney ripening in him. He shows two fingers glued together like Siamese twins. ‘We are together.’
I smile at him. It’s going to be the party of the century.
I clip his healthy outgrowths, set his feet free. The priest burner, it turns out, is quite a sweet guy.
* * *
The next few prisoners smile dreamily, talk in foreign tongues about eternal life, perhaps.
But when I reach Charmayne, she spits, ‘Mohammed’s gone mad. It’s rubbish, Malachi.’
Her hair is madder, more split than it has ever been. One side of her parting looks like she has stuck her finger in a plug, the other half is the good twin, clinging and meek.
‘If it’s true, why did I bother to kill Bongi and Pete?’
Deep down I want to smile. A murderer’s worst dilemma.
‘Why?’
I spare a thought for the poor sucker before me who found himself on a sexy, sucking island inside Charmayne’s eyes. Tamba is watching us with an unnerving interest, I dare not reply. I turn away from her angry, shaking breasts as fine as midnight sand, work all the way to Madame Sophie.
* * *
She smiles at me like Olivia has given her intravenous heroin. Static lifts her hair, creates a blonde halo. Her fingernails are perfectly white-tipped as if she has spent the whole day getting ready for some awards ceremony. She smiles dreamily.
‘It makes me want to hurry up and die.’
Me too, Madame Sophie. I would take Janeé’s steak knife and sink it between my ribs right now if I knew I would see Cecilia. I would spill my own blood, create a red carpet leading to my mother.
Over the microphone I hear the shuffling of Tamba’s fingers. ‘Hurry up, Malachi.’ He is crumpled up, pressing his penis. ‘I need a piss. Number forty is nice and quiet. Is it safe for me to leave?’
I nod at him.
‘You sure?’ he squeaks.
I roll my eyes. Go and piss, Tamba.
He swipes some things from his desk. I give Madame Sophie’s nails an extra-tight trim to make sure she can’t use them to get to the big, beautiful occasion of death. As I shut her cage, I feel the careless caress of Vicki’s eyes behind me.
‘If my husband’s up there, I’ll have to tell him.’
I turn around slowly. Her eyes are the silken inside of an African violet. My body moves closer involuntarily.
Vicki whispers so softly I have to read her lips. ‘I love you much more than I hate you, Malachi.’
I stare at her mouth. I want to run my tongue in circles, feel its slippery creases. I drop my eyes, aching with longing. Vicki lifts her knees to protect her heart. She doesn’t realise she is showing me the flesh of her sexual parts. She doesn’t know how much I want to touch her. But I dare not talk to Vicki. I must save my survival instinct for the worst among us. The one with the biggest, darkest propensity to forget.
* * *
Josiah’s hairy hands are on his lap, his legs stretched out like he is retired on a beach, simply watching the sea. I switch my phone to Peremptory.
‘Hands please.’
I swallow my disgust for the knobbed, furry fingers he offers me. His own mother forgives him. Who am I to judge?
Josiah has blue-black bruises on his cheeks and dried blood on his top lip, but the usual cramp of hatred on his forehead has receded. His eyes, I notice, still show their scarring from a lifetime of violent psychosis.
Why are you so calm, you bastard?
A soft metallic music starts up behind me.
Eulalie is running the back of her hands against the mesh, strumming her knuckles like she is playing a strange guitar. She smiles tenderly.
‘She stroked your head like this. She kissed you, she said . . .’ Eulalie cocks her head to one side, listens. ‘These are not poison moths. They are butterflies.’
I suck sharp splinters into my larynx.
‘Butterflies?’ Vicki breathes.
Some prisoners try the word out. ‘Butterflies.’
I shut my eyes. Painted paper wings fly behind my eyelids. When I open them Vicki is smiling like she too saw the picture books from the Waste to Wonder agency. I lift my fingers to the steel squares of Eulalie’s prison. She meets them with the pads of her smooth skin.
‘Cecilia,’ she says.
My mother’s name.
I stagger with drunken happiness all the way to the trolley. The prisoners stare like there are extinct butterflies in the air around me. As I float from the hall, the last thing I hear is a giggle from the sweet mermaid, Vicki. The soft, indulgent sound of a woman in love. I shut the door, sorry, so sorry to imprison them.
* * *
I glide past the spiral stairs, a smiling idiot.
I don’t care what anyone thinks. Cecilia, my mother, has spoken to me.
I forgot to lock the door behind me. I backtrack to the hall, raise the key card, let it click. The peace in me is the exquisite art on a butterfly’s wings.
My mother. I think she still loves me.
* * *
I leave my bucket at the door to Olivia’s laboratory, whirring and clinking with glass instruments. The canteen is already empty. Only one plate of food waits on the trolley. I lift the cover. Golden, crisped fish. I sniff it. Mmm. There is the delicate scent of silver beneath the greasy batter, nothing like the stink of the fish farms in Zeerust, a thousand miles from the sea. The silver skin is serrated from where Janeé must have torn off the fin. I try a bit of the white flesh underneath. Oh. Succulent. Nothing like the bruised chunks they beat with mechanical mallets in the factories. This is how it should be – fish should be speared from the sea, not bred in gelatinous tanks filled with corn mulch and fish semen.
The fresh fish feeds every cell of my being.
Mother, this is what I have always missed. If only you could taste it.
I stab at the plump, straw-coloured potato. It is soft right through. I cut a deep cross, squeeze both ends so the cross opens up. Stick a block of butter substitute into it. We made the same cross on our mosquito bites, dug our fingernails into it. The absurdity only strikes me now. We made the sign of the Christ.
I take a big buttery bite of my potato. Delicious.
Does Christ see the funny side of our potatoes and our itchy-bites? Or does he only think of the nails and whips and the throbbing blue feet he must have got from hanging so long? I take a big swig of red raspberry juice. I don’t know the active evil ingredient, but the juice infuses me with even more joie de vivre than the lovely food. I allow myself a long, happy sigh. I still have Meirong’s key card to the deck. I meant to give it to her at supper time. How will I find her?
Janeé fills the doorway. I feel a vacuum in my eardrums before her hips pop through. ‘Ah, Malachi. How was your fish?’ She frowns at my rumpled batter. ‘You don’t like your batter?’
I pick on the crust, compose an apology. It is tinted to perfection. Only a magic wand could give it its incandescence. Instead I pick the batter up, take a huge cr
ackling bite.
Janeé takes this as an invitation to warp the bench with her buttocks. ‘I made up the recipe. Me. Craymar has been using it for six years already.’
Mother, help me.
Janeé pours herself a glass of raspberry juice. She nods victoriously. ‘Have you heard the news? The search party has passed us.’ She beams, makes a sawing motion with the back of her hand. ‘They’re opening them up tomorrow. Meirong says they might take a few arteries from the first ones.’
I try to smile, take another swig of red blood substitute. Immediately my brain itches.
‘They will make a little hole in his leg and his neck. Keyhole surgery,’ she says proudly. ‘They pull the arteries through with a needle.’
Pins and needles attack my scalp. I rub my head frantically.
Janeé checks the canteen clock. ‘The surgeons will be here in three hours.’
I bury my fingernails in my hair and scrub, scrub, scrub like I am a victim of head lice.
‘Sjoe, what’s wrong?’ Janeé leans back, stares at me. ‘It must be the fish.’
Not the fish. Not the fish. But I nod and cough and scratch – like how many hints do I have to give that I am suffering?
‘Shame.’ Janeé utters the South African word for sweet pity. But she is not built for emergencies. She heaves to her feet, pours me some water. She stamps around to my side and ruffles the droplets through my roots, rubs it on my temples. ‘There. Better?’
The water stings my hot, histamine skin.
Janeé compresses my bench, sticks the glass of water in my clenched paw. ‘The funny thing is, my boy doesn’t even want to live. He says, “Leave me, Mammie. Heroin is the only thing I want.” I say, “Kanya, I will miss you.” He says, “Don’t worry, Ma, I will see you afterwards.”’ Her big shoulders shake like an unsound building. Her stomach begins to heave like a bulldozer is ramming it. Janeé lays her huge head on the table next to the raspberry juice and laughs with the mirth of several elephants.
I scratch my scalp frantically.
When she lifts her head, Janeé’s face is saturated with tears. She sniffs violently, almost vacuuming the sachets of salt on the table. I offer her my paper serviette. She takes it from me, uses the tiny triangular scrap to blow her nose like a trumpet. Her smile is a child’s plump-faced illustration of the sun.