by T. C. Farren
The red ablution bucket stands next to the bed. I look inside. Dry. The solo sailor was too dehydrated to even produce urine. Tonight the weightlifting magazine is not a courtier’s fan, it is a grotesque anomaly. It curls on the crate, the tanned mammoth on the cover pumping his muscles for no one. It is too dark for me to see but I know his arteries are writhing just beneath his skin, which is that weird chestnut-red that white people go when they roast on a sun machine.
Move it, Malachi.
Stop slipping sideways, like Hamri.
I run back to the Dragonfly, stand on the circle of white paint that demarcates the landing pad. I wave at Romano’s silhouette. He paces a few steps, seems to look right through me. I catch a glimpse of a tiny spark on each shoulder. His Nadras Oil epaulettes. I shuffle along the white line towards the Dragonfly’s landing struts. I jump up and down, wave like I am trying to hail a taxi from the night sky. Romano gazes past the rotor blades. Am I invisible? I glance down at myself. No, my white Valentino outfit glows in the moonlight reflecting off the Dragonfly. Romano moves out of sight. I run to the base of the surveillance tower, duck through the small door. I climb a flight of stairs as long and steep as the escalator at Home Affairs in Joburg. I push up with my thighs, up, up the dark lighthouse.
* * *
Near the top I double over to catch my breath. The barrel of a gun straightens me up. I throw up my hands, feel my eyelids peel with terror. The AK97 expands, fills my vision.
‘Malachi!’ Romano drops his rifle, lets it swing like an umbrella he might need in inclement weather.
I jab frantically at my screen. ‘They killed Frances.’
‘What?’
‘She’s gone.’
Romano shakes his head, ‘They took her to the doctor’s rooms. Meirong said they were getting her ready to fly out.’
I falter. What if he is right? Who do I trust, the logistics controller or a ninety-year-old witch?
I think of Cecilia’s three moth-kisses above my ear.
Flutterbies.
‘They killed her with anaesthetic,’ I write. ‘They’re going to throw her in the shark pit.’
Romano raises his barrel again. ‘You’re lying.’
I stare into the twin steel chutes. A tiny bit of urine leaks down my leg. I type with jittery fingers, ‘Why would I lie?’
‘When?’
‘Some time before midnight.’
‘Where’s your proof?’
‘When do the sharks feed?’ I type hastily.
Romano glares at me fiercely. He thinks I am taunting him with a riddle.
I type ferociously, ‘When do they drop dead bodies? That suicide.’
Comprehension grows in Romano’s eyes. ‘Sunrise. The sharks come at sunrise.’
I glance through the door of his glass station. The moon, only slightly handicapped, sinks lower in the sky.
Romano snatches at his face, makes a funny, explosive squeal. ‘Motherfuckers. Frances!’ He turns ugly. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Come!’ I beg him. ‘Let’s go and see.’
We climb down Romano’s dark, dark tower in silence and the sweat of two confused men who want more than anything to see Frances alive. For me she is another schoolgirl I have let die. For Romano she is a daughter who clung to him for the simple chance to see the sky, breathe oxygen.
I follow Romano across the deck, glance up once at the splendid white Dragonfly that also let the young girl die.
* * *
Inside the rig, Romano locks the door behind us and takes off down the man-made cliff, lithe on the narrow landings and the steep stairs. He stops halfway down a flight. His eye-line, when he turns, is my sweating bellybutton.
‘If they see us, I’ll say you broke security. I’ll say I was bringing you in.’
He melts down the staircase, his epaulettes glinting like tiny wings in the surreal white light. I pour myself after him, pride myself on my near-silent rubber landings. Romano’s boots are huge yet shockingly stealthy. One longer lace clicks as it touches five thousand metal rungs. The tiny sound amplifies as we near the door to the management wing. I seize Romano’s shoulder, stop him. He flings me so hard I slam into a railing.
‘Aghh!’
The knob on my head swells beneath my fingertips. I jab at Romano’s boot, which in this light looks like it is made of crocodile skin. I kneel at his feet, shove the tardy lace into the tongue of his boot. Romano puts a heavy hand on my crown, blesses me with an apology.
I hate this man. I love him.
We tiptoe like midnight children past the door to the right that says, Private. Keep Out. Romano stops so my knee bangs into his back. He cocks his head, listens. There is no sound of the Raizier bosses sacrificing their beauty sleep. We steal past the entrance to the maintenance wing on the left. Again, Romano pauses. There is a muffled gushing sound. Is it a toilet flushing?
Romano hurries down a diagonal flight. I pinch the thick cotton of his shirt, hustle after him.
Slowly the vampire light fades until we are suspended in oily blackness. The lights have been snuffed out in this lower chamber. Is it near their graveyard?
There is the jangle of metal keys as Romano fumbles for something. An infrared ray cuts the dark into black chunks, counts the rivets for us as we descend the next ten metres. The roar of a restless liquid beast rises up through our shoes, louder and louder until it echoes through the steel of a heavily reinforced door. Romano lays his head against this final barrier to the sea. I put my ear to the door, listen with him. Millions of tons of sea batter against our dark castle, warning us to not put a single toe out of it. Romano selects a key card from an entire flush. The click is inaudible against the din of the ocean. A tiny red light turns to green.
Romano shoves his shoulder against the door.
The moonlight leaks beneath the metal edifice into a heaving, hungry pit among the shins of the rig. Romano shines his infrared ray into it. Fifeen metres below us, a black wave rolls back, growls a warning, then smashes against the metal stanchions holding us up. It is relentless, this sea, confident that it is only a matter of centuries before the steel gives. The sea air is foetid with salt and some other, organic matter. Romano crosses the platform outside the door, takes off along a narrow ledge above the stormy pit. He turns, beckons to me. My bulging eyes in his torchlight must express my feelings. You must be crazy.
Romano shoots the infrared ray at my feet. ‘Come.’
I lift up my feet, one by clumsy one, as if learning to walk. My blood swells inside my ears, slaps against my tympanic membranes. I cling tightly to a slim metal railing I pray was welded to last forever, walk the plank above the barbarous sea.
Ahead of me, Romano is digging his fingers into a rectangular seam in the skirt of the rig. ‘Help me.’
I see no possibility of it opening, but I stick my smooth fingertips into the seam. The metal sheet shudders and scrapes along its salt-encrusted tracks in the wall of the rig. The moon sweeps into the opening, caresses an intricate-looking engine. On either side is a lateral brace, not meant for men to rest their bums but to hold the huge engine in its storage place.
‘Sit,’ Romano commands me.
I climb onto the right ledge, he takes the space on the other side.
‘Sewage pump,’ he says.
I sniff. I smell no odour of excrement. This moon has a definite fondness for machines. She sidles lower in the sky, hesitates on the horizon as if hypnotised by the object of her love. She seems not to be particular about the purpose of the pump. She strokes it with golden light for what might be hours.
* * *
After a long, long soiree, the moon turns silver, makes a strange artwork of Romano and the gigantic sewage system. She paints me silver too, irons out my tired creases, then slowly the light turns a soft charcoal pink. It must be close to sunrise. I bend down, peer towards the horizon. The moon turns transparent, exits discreetly, on her way to commit infidelity in another hemisphere.
* * *
Now the sky slowly becomes more frivolous. It turns the sea pink, paints the metal pinions with a hue of watermelon. Below us, triangular pink fins appear as if cued by stage lights.
Sharks. I slam my back against the wall. The triangles thrust higher, show a glistening, glutinous coating on their shark-leather skins. The beasts are two metres, three metres long, some of them. Some of them are babies. I see the colossal dorsal fin of an old warrior, pitted and torn in grey and pink. He rolls below us, his jaw crammed with stalagmites thrusting up in razor-sharp disarray. His tiny eyes hook us in our hiding place. I pull my feet up, bang the back of my head on the steel behind me. Romano laughs softly. The rogue shark dives down deep, leaves the seething pit to the juveniles. Just then, the sound of voices falls into the shark pit, bounces back out.
To the left, past the narrow ledge, the door to the rig is open. Two men stand on the platform, dressed in black as if they hoped to cloak themselves in the darkness of the night. They did not expect pink. One is a black man of about fifty, if his grey sideburns are not lying. His face wears an expression of habitual scepticism. Could this be Tamba’s father? Yes. He has the same straight shoulders, the same anarchic eyebrows as his rebel son. The other man is plump, as soft as the hake he would become if he fell in. But he says something to Tamba’s father, points at the sharks like this is an aquarium. The men disappear through the doorway.
They re-emerge carrying a stretcher. On it is a skeleton, painted pink. Its hipbones are like soup plates, the valley between them grotesquely steep. They must have torn off her shirt after her last breath, dishonoured her by stripping off her father’s boxer shorts. The girl was skin and bone beneath her ragged clothing. Her pubic hair is blonde and sparse. Her pale nipples look lifelessly to the side – no flesh to point them heavenward. It is only her eyes that stare towards us. From here I catch a sheen of their arc-eye brilliance.
Oh, Frances.
The plump man loosens the strap around her ankles. Tamba’s father loosens the strap around her sunken solar plexus. Below us, the sharks spin and thrash in grey and black, roll over to get a better view of the skinny offering. Frances’ white hair falls back, less frayed in this party light. Tamba’s father tips the front end of the stretcher up. The sun arrives above the horizon, turns her sunburnt eyes a turquoise blue.
Is she alive?
But Frances is as stiff as a board as she shoots off the stretcher and slips feet first into the sea. The huge, scarred monster blasts up from the deep. It opens its jaws, engulfs Frances up to her abdomen. Her arms do not flail or fly, she is a rigor-mortis mannequin as the beast lifts her so high she gazes up at us.
Daddy, I hear her say.
The shark plunges into the sea, drags Frances down into its black-and-blue violence. Romano’s feet are on the ledge beneath his bum, his head crushed between his knees. A funny sound issues from him, a high-pitched whining. I shove my hand behind a ridged metal pipe, clamp it over Romano’s mouth. Shut up.
I close my eyes, feel a small desperate relief for the little prick Frances must have felt as they put her to sleep. But my comfort is short-lived. When I open my eyes there is red spilling – bright scarlet in the light, blacker in the shadows. Frances was thirsty but her thin body was filled with blood. My stomach hurls me over my knees. I vomit into the shark pit. A trail of bile sails into the churning sea.
‘Stop it,’ Romano whispers.
But Tamba’s father misses it. He pats his plump colleague on the back. I see his lips, full like Tamba’s, form the words, ‘Thank you.’
Shitting bastards. Frances wanted to live!
I stare at the red water fading to a less terrible shade. I lock my eyes onto the horizon, where the sun has become a bare, blunt orange.
I am not afraid.
I heard her say, Daddy.
Even though they murdered her, I don’t care what anyone says. There is no such thing as death.
* * *
The doctors pick up their empty stretcher, disappear into the rig. The steel door shuts behind them. Romano is crying openly now.
I set my volume to loud. ‘They kill the prisoners. Don’t they?’
Romano is rubbing his eyes like he wants to pluck them out. ‘I hate them. I hate them.’
‘Some of them are innocent.’
‘Frances,’ he groans. ‘She begged me, Malachi.’
‘I know. I know. She trusted you.’
‘She begged me to get her black box off her boat.’
‘Where is the yacht?’
Romano points at the huge metal leg to the right of the shark pit. I make out a dark hatch in the cylinder shafting into the sea. ‘I winched it up. Meirong’s orders.’ Romano snarls, ‘I hate her!’
I bend over and vomit again into the pit. Wipe my mouth. I sit with my phone loose on my lap and watch the sun rise in its yellow battle-dress. My heart is emptied out. My mind is very clear as to what I must do next.
‘Let’s get the black box. Let’s call for help.’
Romano shakes his head wildly. ‘No. Tomorrow I bomb the boat.’ He grabs something from an inside pocket. ‘Look.’ He thrusts it through the convoluted piping of the pump. It is a glossy photo of a child, her pink dress too loose for her stick figure. ‘My baby, Milja.’ An ocean of love glows from the eyes in the photograph. ‘She calls me Chefe Sol. Sun Chief. She trusts I will save her life.’ Romano stares at me through the tangled machinery. ‘Meirong says they will send a heart from this harvest.’
‘Do you believe her?’
Romano taps the space between his eyes. ‘Meirong knows I will put a bullet here if she lies to me. For then I have nothing to live for. Nothing.’ He climbs out and grabs my hand, jerks me back onto the narrow ledge. My phone flies from my grip. I snatch it from the air, drop it into my pocket. Romano shuts the sliding panel with astonishing strength. He walks the plank above the shark pit, still streaked with hungry fins. I clutch the railing, follow him to the door.
As Romano lifts the key card, the sewage pump starts up. Brownish fluid pours from a round opening below where we were sitting, flies into the shark pit. The anus of the rig. Three sharks rise to receive the prisoners’ overnight excrement. The others slash at them with vicious envy.
I hope they shoot me. The thought drills through my head like keyhole surgery.
Let them shoot me rather, if they catch me.
I raise my hand to Romano’s neck, as hard as iron. He flinches at my touch. I pull out my Samsung.
‘I am sorry about Frances. You tried your best.’
Romano buckles, drops his heavy head to my shoulder. I sling an arm around his back, hold him tight, like a father. Romano begins his terrible, strange keening again. I take the key card from his fingers, turn the light green. I kick the door open and nudge Romano inside the rig. I follow him in, shut the metal door behind us. This time I raise the key card to just below the contact zone. The green light stays on but I sling the lanyard around Romano’s neck, usher him into the pitch dark. Romano shrugs me off violently, bounces on the balls of his feet. He snatches for his torch, slices at me with his stream of red light.
‘You are not my friend, Malachi!’ He stabs two fingers towards his eyes. ‘From now on I am watching you.’ He bounds up the stairs, powerful, ready to do anything, anything to save his daughter’s life.
THURSDAY
This time the feline hinges shriek loudly. Twice. I hustle into the maintenance wing, pass the women’s quarters, my ears reassured by the engine sound of a snore. Could it be Olivia?
I crash into our bedroom, snap on the light. I haul out my suitcase, try three zips before I find my paper notepad and my old roller-gel plastic pen. I poke Tamba’s naked chest with it.
He smacks at the pen, misses. ‘Hey!’
I write in large, extravagant letters: They killed the solo sailor.
Tamba stares at my dishevelled white outfit. ‘Where have you been?’
They threw her in the shark pit.
I tear off the page, write in gigantic letters: THE GIRL SAILOR IS DEAD.
Tamba jerks to a sitting position, gasping. I wait mercilessly. He rubs his knees compulsively, as if this might ease the agony of the truth.
‘These people are not human,’ he says.
I slay him with my roller-gel weapon: It was your father.
‘Oh God.’ Tamba clutches his head. ‘Basta-a-a-rd . . .!’ He leaps up and charges at the metal wall, smashes his forehead against it. A red rivulet trickles towards his eyebrows, so very, very much like Doctor Mujuru’s.
I tear my eyes from the blood.
It’s slaughter. This whole thing.
Tamba shakes his head, paces the tiny room. ‘It’s not the same, Malachi. That girl was innocent.’
I hold up my white pad, torch him silently. You are guilty of murder.
He tears at his dreadlocks like a mad, naked beggar. I stare at his skinny legs, strangely adolescent for his broad chest.
SIT, I command him.
Tamba sits. I perch on the corner of his bed, write quickly, Some of the prisoners are also innocent.
Tamba stares at my white pad, distressed.
Help me to free some.
He leaps up. ‘Are you fucking crazy?’ His torn hair sails from his fingers to the floor. Some kind of vacuum sucks it into the corridor. ‘I told you, if I screw up, I go straight back to prison.’
I write desperately: I will NEVER say you helped me! I underline NEVER three times.
Tamba prowls around my notepad, re-reads my plea. I catch his hand, pull him to sit again. I keep my eyes off the red trickle, for if I look at it I will be sick all over my only writing instruments.
The journalist, Samuel. Sentenced in Algeria. They blamed him for a bomb but all he did was film it.
Tamba leaps up, turns in a circle.
The girl, Lolie. Kidnapped when she was ten. They smothered her with a plastic bag to make her shoot the enemy.