* * *
My blades slip from their position. The huge woman in the cage cries out in pain, ‘Aaiee!’
Sorry, I would say, only because my parents taught me to never harm a woman.
The woman sounds grief-stricken. ‘I miss Dominic.’
Dominic? Is this the name of the man before me?
The woman is dusky skinned, voluptuous. A dark-haired Amazon. She looks exactly like the huge painting on the bus in Nelspruit, an advertisement for a Tropika granadilla drink. The girl on the bus sucks on a plastic straw, throws dust on tiny men as the bus blunders past them. This one has a hungry mouth, a slight overbite.
‘Dominic never ever hurt me,’ she says petulantly.
Her hair is more suited to an asylum than a tropical island. One half is plaited in a straitjacket, the other half bursts free. She sits like an untrained child, her knees wide open.
Thank God I am not aroused by soft places. My only weakness now is soft, singing skin stretched over sculpted bone, the pretty architecture of a woman’s skeleton. Women’s bones are not so much a construction, no. They are a composition. A symphony of strength and vulnerability.
I clip the beauty’s toes, tear my eyes from the skin on her ankles, as thin as the pages burnt by the Moroccan.
‘Komoka na dango . . .’
Bayira saves me.
* * *
Near the end of the row, I glance up to see that Meirong has disappeared. The relief is like a slow tranquiliser through my elbows. I let my cutting glove hang.
The woman in the second-to-last cage has white teeth, white eyes as if she’s on a diet of real cow’s milk. Even her nails shine. Their half-moons are impossibly neat for someone with a ragged scar from ribs to pubis. Her toenails have received the same careful scraping.
Josiah the mass murderer reads my mind. ‘Madame Sophie killed five girls with heroin. But she likes to keep her nails nice for the gentlemen.’
A hyena laughs behind me. I don’t need to turn to know it is Vicki, the husband killer.
‘Isn’t Madame Sophie lovely, Malachi? Or Charmayne in number twelve. She’s gorgeous, isn’t she?’
‘Vicki,’ Samuel warns from cage number one.
‘Charmayne was Dominic’s favourite.’
‘Vicki!’ Samuel hisses.
I swing away from Madame Sophie, face the last cage.
* * *
Josiah slides his hairy hands into the leather glove.
‘It’s true what they say. I killed three hundred Seleka.’
In his eyes I see graves, hands begging for mercy.
‘I was fighting for my people.’ He pulls a hand free, wields a ghost machete. ‘War is war.’
I swallow. Taste the metal of a blade. Never.
I pull the brace away, shaking. Let him pick holes in his greasy covering. Let the fungus bite and breed. I spin on my heel, walk towards the trolley.
‘War is war!’ Josiah bellows after me.
I lunge towards his cage, whip like a striking snake. I spit.
The prisoners gasp. I grab the morning’s towels from the trolley, march towards the door. A growth coils in my belly like a cancer. I have failed in my mission to be inviolable, silent. An excellent employee.
I have failed to be a mute man with no history.
* * *
I tear off my clothing, swing on the hot tap. I stand still in the shower, take the punishment. I need the heat to erase the bullets, scald my weakness.
‘Geez, Malachi! You cooking in there?’
I spin the tap shut. The stillness grates against my raw skin.
‘There’s steam everywhere.’ Tamba slides the concertina door open, sticks his head through.
I swing towards the wall, shield my private parts.
‘You trying to kill yourself?’ The door slides shut.
My skin starts to burn now. My scalp, my shoulders, my penis seared by acid rain. I open the cold tap and let it slap at my fiery skin. Take that, and be happy. Blanched, they would say in recipes.
* * *
The pain gives me a focus in the canteen. My hair sits uneasily on my head. It feels loose, like I’ve been scalped and left for dead.
‘How was your first day, Malachi?’ Olivia asks me. She is wearing a shining yellow tracksuit, as if the wall has swelled into a three-dimensional form. Tamba puts an arm around me, squeezes my shoulders.
Inwardly I scream.
‘I’m sure he’s fine now. He went and skinned himself.’ Tamba laughs. ‘It’s like, bejesus, did you grow up at the hot springs or something?’
A light frown lands between Romano’s eyes. Perhaps he has not seen the fake epoxy rock pools in the Destination magazine, with the busloads of tourists up to their chins, sloughing off the epithelial cells of their skin.
‘Are the subjects freaking you out?’ Olivia asks me.
I shake my afro, lie outright. Bald-faced, they call it. I pick up my knife and fork, tip them at forty-five degrees to what might be spinach. My curved wrists lie about two things. I am culturally white. I am mentally all right. I must find a way to cauterise my mind, become as lifeless inside as the pentagon of hake on the plate before me.
Meirong arrives to eat dessert with us, her cream dress crumpled from all her meetings. She stares at me appraisingly.
‘Everything all right?’
I nod and scoop at my yellow pudding. It detaches from my bowl like a loose cornea. I spoon some into my mouth, refuse to show the weakness of my predecessor.
Was his name Dominic?
Meirong devours her pudding within seconds. She strokes her empty bowl with the back of her spoon, makes it sing. Is this some Eastern custom, I wonder?
‘Is there any more caramel?’
Janeé shakes her head. ‘Sorry.’
Meirong drops her spoon sulkily. ‘Olivia, I’ll meet you in the tank room before breakfast. We need to run through the special needs report before I give it to Doctor Mujuru.’
As she leaves, Romano rises to his feet.
Olivia says, ‘Say hello to the stars for me, Romano.’
‘And me,’ Tamba adds mournfully.
‘The security lights are too bright. I can hardly see them.’
When Romano has gone, Tamba nudges me. ‘There’s a games room upstairs. Do you wanna check it out?’
I offer him
