I do it slowly, feeling foolish. I am unused to communicating. ‘Shock, we know –’ Tamba smacks his wrists together. ‘Use fingers for cage numbers.’
I nod.
‘For urgent, do this –’ Tamba whips his forefinger against his middle finger, makes a smacking sound. It’s the warning between children, Ooh, you’re in trouble now.
‘Do it, Malachi.’
I flick my fingers. They make a weak snap, but I feel like I’ve barked out loud.
‘What else?’ Tamba asks. ‘Diarrhoea.’ He waves from his waist towards the floor, signifying some internal flood.
I sweep my hands downwards. Here he is, the diarrhoea.
Tamba starts to laugh. ‘That’s a curtsey, not a shit.’ He guffaws loudly.
My eyes squeeze to slits, but habit keeps my lips from separating. Do not laugh, Malachi. For God’s sake, do not laugh.
Tamba stamps up the metal spiral, chuckling.
If I laugh I might tear open, release lava from the dark, broiling depths of me. I might kill people, cry a tsunami of tears. I raise the red lanyard from my chest, unlock the door to the prisoners.
* * *
Their heads turn my way like weeds to the sun. The husband killer murmurs something to the long-haired crone, who narrows her eyes thoughtfully. The man in cage one is watching me hungrily, his mind probing, rolling, landing on its feet. The beast in him is feline, an emaciated lion like the one Kontar tried to save. Across from him, the mass murderer spills sticky black ash.
I pick up the leather sheath and the long silver clipper, walk towards them. I lift the latch of the first cage, clip the sheath to the opening. I jab my hands at number one. A thrust, nothing dainty.
He gives me his fingers. I tighten the leather strap, sink the clipper beneath the nail of his little finger. Squeeze. The curve of nail falls like a frozen teardrop.
‘I see they chose an angry man.’
His next nail snaps like a fragment of grief.
‘My name is Samuel. I was a journalist, filming suicide bombers in Algiers. They blew up a market. It had nothing to do with me.’
There were children at that market, surely. I see the shattered fruit, the falling cigarettes.
He takes back his hands, lifts his feet into the leather sheath. I stare at the burn mark on his ankle. Was it a flying ember from a burning burka?
‘Scooter burn,’ he says. He watches me clip his feet. ‘Don’t believe Meirong. We’re not all killers. Some of us here don’t even deserve prison, never mind this.’
A big talker, the journalist, trying to cover up his cowardice. But I see the shadows in his loquaciousness.
* * *
‘Loquacious?’ my father asked me.
‘Talkative.’
He was testing my vocabulary in the hut.
‘Ah, so this is what you are, Hamri,’ my mother teased him.
To the Kapwa, it is not a noble trait; it is a wasted, worrying proclivity to prod at a subject like a cat playing with something dead.
‘Loquacious,’ she said. ‘And there is no vaccination?’
‘Cecilia,’ my father answered sweetly, ‘there are worse diseases.’
No. Not Hamri. Please.
* * *
I lift a white towel from the antiseptic, rub the day-old coating off the journalist’s toes. I try not to stare. The supplements must speed up replication everywhere. It’s not like he’s been dancing barefoot on the deck. I loosen the strap, lock his wire prison. Start on the old woman who looks like Granny Elizabeth, who secretly milked the palms to make beer. Despite her withered flesh, the old woman’s fingers are extraordinarily silky. I groom her hands, smooth like mine, fight the panic rising in me. I drop the towel in the stinking liquid, move on to the husband killer.
Her vagina is an oyster shut against the fluorescent sun. I press the clipper beneath her thumbnail, mother-of-pearl pink.
‘It’s true what Samuel says. Some of us are innocent.’ She shrugs. ‘Not me.’ Something catches in her voice, a sliver of a sob wresting free.
My elbows suddenly become watery and weak. We have something in common, this hateful mermaid and I. We harbour in our minds the same terrible red. The white towel lifts brown off even the blindingly white Vicki. She sighs raggedly.
‘I suppose I’m not as bad as Shikorina in number twenty. She killed her own children.’
Oh, please. Save me.
* * *
I work through eight prisoners, endure their whispers, their exclamations, their pleas for mercy. Ten years of New Nation keeps my hands steady as I wash away their impurities, trim their claws, ensure that their nourishment reaches their tongues. The ninth prisoner is dark and skinny, of Indian origin, I think. He is jabbering in a language that is foreign to me, his one front tooth missing. His one fingernail is black, like it has been hit with a hammer. Perhaps his victim bit him before they died, left a sign that he should go straight to hell, with no McDonald’s stops.
I cut his crooked nails, refuse to look at him.
Dream creatures, all of them, in a sordid dream city. Let them babble, let them plead, I will not listen.
* * *
After twelve subjects, this job might as well be chicken maintenance. I remember the New Nation advertising pamphlets.
It is social in the cages. The chickens are kept warm and clean. Their comfortable quarters ensure they do no harm to themselves or other fowls.
I have, after all, not broken free of factory slavery, as my father so fervently wished for me.
* * *
‘It is a waste, Malachi, of beautiful thinking. Factory work makes a desert of your mind.’
I mocked my father, with his poetry, ‘But isn’t there an infinity of yellows in the desert?’
‘Crap!’
‘Hamri!’ my mother warned.
‘It’s crap. Words bring rain, lightning. Inspiration.’ He implored, ‘Never be content with the desert, please.’
‘Hamri, stop pressuring him.’
My father was unusually assertive. ‘Malachi. Words are water.’
* * *
I screw up my eyes.
Be gone, Hamri. Please.
An enormous black man inclines his head, as big as a mule’s. ‘Are you saving a loved one?’
If I had a tongue, I would bite it in surprise.
This man is so huge he could
