Tamba bangs in and throws himself next to me. ‘Geez, what’s this? Monster of the deep? Did you wrestle this yourself, Janeé?’ He laughs loudly.
Janeé chews her tentacles like she is feeding on Tamba’s own chopped bits tossed with rice. Tamba pitches the pink pieces into a sighing heap. Somewhere the wind screams through thick sea salt while I glaze my eyes, pick out my rice, flick the grains into my mouth.
Janeé frowns. ‘Don’t you like octopus? Romano’s got a net down at the shark pit.’ She condemns me to a caste that has no taste for gourmet snakes, ‘The bosses love octopus.’
Where the heck is the shark pit?
‘We have the right to refuse, Janeé,’ Tamba says. ‘Not many other rights going around on this rig.’
Janeé glares at him. ‘We are lucky to be here.’
‘You’re right, Janeé. We’re fucking lucky.’
I get that feeling of tectonic plates shifting beneath my feet, continents splitting off and drifting out of sight. I try to find my footing, spoon in some oily rice. A coat of grease forms on the roof of my mouth. Sadly, I have no tongue to remove it.
Perhaps I should become slippery, slither away when the prisoners try to catch me, like Kontar and me when we wrestled near the river. We covered ourselves in red clay that made us so slick our hands slid off each other in useless, laughing swipes. The only way to win the wrestle was to pin the other boy to the ground, chest to chest until he surrendered.
* * *
Yes. This afternoon I will be nimble, fleet of foot. If they try to sink a tooth or diseased claw into me I will smear myself with clay, slide from their grip.
I swallow my last mouthful of rice. I slip off the bench, thank Janeé with a lubricated nod, leave with footsteps so slick I could be barefoot. Not even Olivia’s false smile finds a place to stick.
‘Cheers, Malachi,’ she calls after me.
I drift through the wind screaming in a fit of fury. I raise the red lanyard, let the key card do its trick.
* * *
I slip through the door, pad past Shikorina, who is curled in a foetal position, staring. Her eyes try to cling to my shining clay, but they slide off the bank into her own dark bathwater.
I groom three more prisoners on the toes of my sneakers, ready to duck a flying punch, a spoken flame, a tilt of the floor in the metal hall. I release the feet of a red-haired man with orangutan arms and a contagion of freckles, pad to the next prisoner.
‘Are you Bhajoan?’
I lock my head to my spine to stop it from snapping. The man looks my age; premature white hair at his temples.
‘Were you perhaps a member of ANIM?’
The mud dries on me. Anger whips away my spit so my mouth feels like it is coated with bitter cocoa.
The prisoner nods. ‘I am Andride. I was working with the ANIM soldiers from the Nachimale forest.’
My breath rasps through the powdery dryness.
‘I was a trained social worker, but I taught them wood art.’
A roar rumbles in my chest. I jam the brace onto his cage, try to veil my hatred, but a machine-gun glint escapes my eyelids.
‘The military shot down my whole woodwork class. Thirteen of them.’ There is a hollow in his eyes, a vacancy left by his guerrilla friends. ‘They blamed me.’
I pinch a half moon of flesh between the clipper blades. He talks like I am about to sever his fingers one by one. ‘I was helping them, Malachi.’ This is what the English call barking up the wrong tree.
I could pick neat, semi-circular holes in him for teaching murdering pigs to carve African figures for curio stalls in airports. I snatch away the clipper, unravel a white towel to its full length. I scrub the man’s feet, half blind with fury.
Of course I have kept abreast of Bhajoan politics. The ANIM lost their war six years after I lost my whole universe. Of course I heard how the guerrillas tried to creep out and live among the factory communities, but the people lynched them for burning Kapwa workers as if they were imperialist assets, factors in production, not human beings who take their places on the factory floor for the sake of their children. Showing up every day in caps and overalls for the sake of love, LOVE! I want to scream.
If someone lit a match we would both burst into flames, Andride with his wooden carvings, me with the dry, caked mud on my skin.
But surely this man is lying. Surely he is guilty?
If so, this is one stupid irony, like a monkey’s wedding, shining through the soaking rain. Irony like a monkey’s bum, an unexpected bright blue.
* * *
I muse furiously about metaphors such as these, cut a trail of flying nails to the priest burner’s disfigured fingers.
‘Whosoever kills a soul, it shall be as if he had killed all mankind . . .’
The man is quoting from his disappearing Qur’an but he can’t catch me, I am sealed in wet clay, as slimy and slick as the mud bream at the bottom of the Tantwa River.
‘Allah forbids murder and I am his son. But do you know who the judge believed?’
In his eyes I see Bibles burning, their skin-thin pages melting faster than my own bargain books.
‘The tourists in a big hotel looking through a window.’ He shakes his head. ‘Stupid, those tourists, you know those fat ones from the United States and Japan?’
His talk of fat tourists seems to relax him.
‘Sometimes my elevator could only carry three.’ His fingers cramp again, perhaps on the Catholic priest’s vestments. ‘He hung on to me. Please believe me.’ His pleas gather speed
