I compress his huge knuckles, let the buckle teeth bite. Do a careless cut.
‘Ouchie!’
A laugh ripples between my ribs. Where did he find that childish exclamation?
I blur my eyes, try to turn the giant into mist, but the huge man has cracked the dream horizon with his stupid expletive.
He sighs. ‘I killed the ones I love.’
The dark side of love blasts through me.
‘I shot my brother and my wife. He died inside her.’
His own blood. For love.
I sink to my haunches.
The giant is astonished. ‘Malachi?’
Some prisoners start to jeer, ‘Malachi-i-i . . .’
‘Quiet!’ the giant thunders.
The chanting fades into a sheepish twittering.
I grip the giant’s thumb, shoot to my feet. I look up but Tamba is dipping his head to some music playing in his ears.
‘Sorry if I shocked you. I can be very crude with the facts. I was a High Court judge for thirteen years.’
I whip away the brace, abandon the judge’s gargantuan feet. Slam the hatch against his crimes of passion.
* * *
The cage next to the giant flushes. The prisoner shuts his waste plate.
‘Taking strain, mate?’
It is a butter-coloured man, once fat. His old skin flares from his waist, rolls from his neck like a drooping Dilophosaurus. A jet of water rinses the remnants of his flabby bum. I attach the glove to his cage, fight the tremors still coursing through my system.
He stares balefully at the glove.
‘I feel like a sheep or a pig, you know, having its trotters cut.’
Interesting that he used the word ‘pig’. He shoves his hands into the glove. Even his fingers wear extra skin. His accent is rounded, warped like a boomerang. Australian, must be.
The man in the next cage is white and skinny, a tax consultant, perhaps, with allergies. He has faint red spots across his chest. I touch my button cautiously.
Tamba replies, ‘Yes?’
I sign cage seventeen. Flick my fingers across my upper body.
‘What, a rash?’
I nod.
‘Olivia will mix some cortisone into his vitamins –’
I cut Tamba off. The white man has a nose like a beak and sharp blue eyes that could embed in your skin. He tugs on his skinny penis, a rude nervous tic.
I glare at his compulsive comforting.
He lets go of his penis and submits his hands to me. I am careful not to touch his skin. I clip through balloons of breath, hold and expel, use my last nerves to get to the end of the aisle.
* * *
In the last cage, the woman’s eyes are wide, straining to see.
‘Do you have my baby?’ She smiles at some apparition. ‘Will you play soccer with him? He loves the ball and he is not even three.’
Cage number twenty. This must be Shikorina, the one the mermaid spoke of. The woman who killed her children.
She has a pretty mouth, a pronounced M where the two halves of her top lip meet. M for mother. Her shoulders are broad, a crow’s outstretched wings, her shoulder joints sharp and pricking. She has round bluish scars on her chest and her arms.
I lock the brace to her cage.
Her hands will not come through. Damn her.
She strokes a phantom head. ‘Are you hungry, my love?’
My skin prickles at the back of my neck. The warmth of my mother’s breath passes over me.
Someone says softly down the aisle, ‘She drowned them. Three of them.’
No, please.
I hit the switch of my communication device. Tamba’s forehead touches the glass. ‘Number twenty being stubborn?’
Shikorina’s long, sodden fingers drift into the brace.
‘Watch that one’s skin,’ Tamba says into his microphone. ‘She used to have lupus. They had to do a blood transfusion.’
I nod at Tamba, cut her sharp nails, this black bird of prey. I stare at the fingers that must have tangled in their hair, shoved their heads down while they thrust their little bums up. My empty stomach heaves. I rub the murderer’s hands with detergent.
‘Lunchtime, Malachi,’ Tamba says through my speaker.
I squeeze out the soiled towels, throw them on the trolley. Leave the rolled virgin ones for after lunch. I try not to run towards the door.
One voice snaps free of the murmurings, flies high above them, ‘I am innocent. Help me.’
I fumble for my key card, shut the door on the cry.
I slide my spine down the metal door. Twenty subjects’ talons cut. Twenty to go. My fingertips are burnt white. My torso aches in places that might contain my heart, my lungs, my liver. I am a tumult of longing, of terror, after less than one day.
This is the Raizier price for being the chosen one.
* * *
Olivia’s voice rings with a panic-stricken peal as Janeé bangs down our meatballs and spaghetti.
‘My granny says our neighbours went to see Timmy in hospital. They’re these gay guys next door.’ She laughs desperately. ‘They’re like his uncles.’
Janeé has poured tomato sauce over the top, the colour of the paint bags they pop in cheap Nigerian movies. Too orange to be realistic.
I forsake Janeé’s synthetic raspberry juice, pour myself a glass of water. Janeé’s spaghetti rolls onto her fork and flies into her mouth at rhythmic intervals. I can almost hear the cymbals crash like in Zeke’s Circus in Zeerust, who every year gave surplus tickets to us refugee children. The Nollywood blood bursts on her lips.
Come on, Malachi, it’s fake ketchup, you stupid ass.
I can say ass, Father. If I mean a donkey.
Olivia is saying, ‘I went clubbing with them once. Sjoe, I couldn’t believe my eyes. All these guys in G-strings. Half a cap of MDMA in every drink. It was long before I was pregnant. I wouldn’t have done it if . . .’ Her voice fades away, her eyes drift to her little boy’s ribs caving in, sucking for oxygen.
