CONTENTS
Cover
Title Page
Leave us a review
Copyright
Dedication
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Saturday
Sunday
Monday
Tuesday
Wednesday
Thursday
Friday
Acknowledgements
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The Book of Malachi
Print edition ISBN: 9781789095197
E-book edition ISBN: 9781789095203
Published by Titan Books
A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd
144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP
www.titanbooks.com
First Titan edition: October 2020
10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 T.C. Farren. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.
A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.
For David
MONDAY
My job is to check the plastic, see that it seals off the body parts, splays the flesh flat like faces against a windscreen. The vulnerability of a chicken is in the angle of their wings. If you pull them, the skin stretches, eases back. A newborn’s legs have the same elastic, I have seen this at the refugee centre in Zeerust. Their skinny legs stay up against their stomachs, the skin on their thighs rumpled and loose. Now it is my job to see that the skin on the chicken’s limbs is stretched and tucked to hide the hack marks. The machine must seal their pimpled skin, hide the tatters.
I know what they say about me at New Nation. One of my assistants, Beauty, is eighteen. She chews gum while she tears the plastic off the corrections, a perfect black grape, her chewing gum the pip.
‘My granny’s getting old, she asks me the same questions, she forgets. “How was your day, Nono?” Later, “How was your day?” I told her about you, Malachi. I said not a sound comes from your mouth.’ Beauty smiles, her chewing gum stopped between her teeth. ‘Do you know how we say we will keep a secret? We say, “Don’t worry. I will make like Malachi.”’
The phrase echoes in my head.
I am a successful mute. Malachi, well done.
* * *
My boss and I meet on the packing-office steps. We almost kiss, we both fall back.
‘A woman was on the phone checking your psychometrics. A labour agent from Raizier Pharmaceuticals.’ Lizet’s face stays in the shadow, the sun colours her long neck yellow. ‘I said you’re always on time. You’re . . . appropriate. I said you understand instructions. Nothing wrong with his brain, I said. But, you know, he doesn’t communicate.’ Her mouth wilts. ‘The woman seemed pleased!’ Lizet steps outside. ‘Did you apply for something?’
I shake my head.
She checks my eyes for truth. Sighs, satisfied with the confusion she finds.
‘About two hundred corrections. It’s going to be a helluva day.’
* * *
All day I stroke the plastic back onto its track. I anticipate trouble, see it coming. My job is menial, but it doesn’t show. The plastic leaves no calluses. It erases my fingerprints, smoothes my hand into a black silk glove.
I rinse off the static in my basin. Above it, the mirror has the skin disease mirrors get in gloomy rooms, dark spots that spread. In it, my hair is soft and knotted. My eyes are shallow sand at the edge of the Tantwa River. I have a cat’s head, wide across the eyes, tapering to the chin. The mirror is so high, I can only see the slight lift of my top lip. I cannot see my teeth, miraculously unblasted, unchipped by molten blade or machine-gun butt. I cannot see my fine scar, smoothed by a volunteer plastic surgeon.
* * *
I rest on the bed I bought from a man who went to jail for stealing chickens. The mattress has two dents, hollowed for a man and a wife, a virgin ridge in the middle.
I can say that word now. Before, it would have meant a bolt through my body that ripped off my fingertips.
Virgin. Virgin. I would say, over and over in my mind as I pressed the wires to my testicles.
Virgin ridge.
* * *
Every twenty-four hours, I slip into the dent on the right. I take only the space I need, the air that I must breathe. At night, when the air is abundant, I run on the spot. I travel ten kilometres in the same place. In the morning, I go to the toilet in my shorts, drip two drops on the seat. Clean it. For breakfast I cook Jungle Oats in a small pan with no handle. I eat it with Huletts sugar and real butter. I am rich enough to buy butter.
I inhabit number twenty-nine in the long line of the men’s hostel. They are stables, really, with a flush toilet in the corner. We peer over the top of the doors like dark horses at the scrappy grass. Beyond is a road pitted from rumbling trucks, bullies arriving with military frequency, carrying not men with weapons but live chickens with broken legs from being shoved into crates piled six storeys high. Now and then, a truck filled only with heads. I turn away.
I have seen decapitation. The head disengages as
