Oh, no.
Tamba’s shower is softly dripping. I hear the friction of his towel rubbing to and fro.
‘Hey, Malachi, I just thought of something!’ Tamba comes in, drips water from the loose eye of his foreskin. He pulls a yellow Samsung from the cabinet between our beds. ‘They took my sim, I just use it to play games. But I was thinking in the shower, why the hell don’t you talk like the deaf and dumb?’
I stare at him blankly.
He keys in three stars, unlocks the Samsung. He touches an icon, shows me the screen. A shimmering microphone flares and recedes.
‘Have you tried this app where you type and it talks for you?’
A scary possibility throbs in my larynx.
‘This one’s called Glossia. I make it read books to me when I’m feeling lazy. I just load the text.’ He taps the screen. ‘Look. You can choose deep and sexy.’ He types something, taps the top of a list. A suave American says huskily, ‘Hey babe, you wanna dance with me?’ Tamba grins mischievously.
I sit up, a hot fissure spreading across my chest.
Tamba tries another setting. An audacious chipmunk invites me to dance with it. Tamba laughs, shows me a row of sliding dials.
‘Talking speed. Volume. Look, it goes from Whisper all the way to Megaphone.’ He sticks his nail into a seam at the bottom of the phone. ‘I’ve never appreciated this stuff, but look . . .’ A tiny plastic disc comes free in his fingers. ‘Have you seen this ear clip? You put it here like this . . .’ It is cone-shaped on the other side, a bit like a golf tee. It is halfway to Tamba’s ear when he realises his oversight. He hits his forehead with blunt force. ‘Ah, shit! Sorry. I forgot. You can’t read and write.’
My vocal chords tick as they cool inside my cartilage.
Tamba drops his eyes. Black guilt for certain, he suffers from the malady.
‘I was just lucky. Education is something the Zim government kept up.’
I shrug as if I know nothing of such things. Tamba tosses his phone into the cabinet. He quickly forgets about the sorry illiterate staring at the space that just swallowed his Samsung. With the selfishness of a drug addict, he scratches for his Kindle, presses the on switch. I can tell by the backlit barbed wire that tonight he will be reading the Sun Prophet’s desert memoirs.
Thunder splits the nearby sky.
* * *
One hit is all I need.
One hard knock to stop the sex from filtering into my veins, climbing scar by scar up Vicki’s subtle wrist.
* * *
Like Araba’s, as she sat so languid and still, her eyes loyal to my father’s whiteboard. She wanted me too; the deep downstrokes of her writing told me so. She had the gift of composure, her skin like windless water, but she loved the Valentino books the girls read at school, each with the same purple strip but with a different black beauty, a different man in a suit with his collar loosened, kissing. I trailed my eyes across the classroom, cut Araba out of the backdrop with her one wrist hanging loose, her breasts pressed against the desk as she leaned into her untidy cursive. I returned to my Macbeth questions, hungry.
* * *
Tamba flings down his Kindle so it bounces on the bed. ‘Man, this book just makes me feel worse!’ He jumps to his feet, his face dark, washed thunder. ‘This is a pharmaceutical ship, for God’s sake.’ He storms to the door. ‘I’m going to try Janeé.’
Good. Go.
Watch out she doesn’t feed you arsenic.
I listen to Tamba’s feet stomping towards the cook. Then I roll off my bed, drag out my suitcase. I dig out my radio, try to pry off the back. Damn. I smash a corner against the metal floor. A triangle of black plastic flies against the wall. I hook my fingers into the crack. The plastic plate snaps off, baring its coloured wires. Brown, blue, yellow, running from positive to negative. I take a moment to admire the beautiful predictability of its nervous system.
I rip the brown from its copper pin. Jerk the blue loose. I stick my plug into the wall. A hundred and twenty volts. I unbuckle my belt roughly, shove the raw wires into my trousers.
I see Vicki’s mermaid knees, lucent in the sunlight sifting through a green ocean.
I hit the switch. The rig catches fire in split delicious seconds, crashes me to the floor. There is a searing sensation between my legs; my spine becomes a tunnel of terrible flames. The pain rips me inside out as I sprawl, make no sound, clutch at my genitals.
I am nerves blown out. Black carbon flesh.
* * *
Slow footsteps pad along the corridor. I jerk the copper wires from my trousers, snort from the agony. I clamp the broken plate over the innards of the radio. Shut my suitcase with fingers that feel like prostheses. I roll onto my bed just as Tamba shuffles in with an overflowing teacup.
‘Fucking chamomile.’
A few minutes ago Tamba’s desperate, doleful look might have been funny, but I am fighting the aftershocks jittering in me. Tamba perches on the edge of his bed, sips his tea like a nephew of the long-deceased queen.
A drumming starts up, the syncopation of raindrops against the steel rig.
Tamba sighs. ‘How the hell am I gonna get through the night?’
If I could, I would say, Tamba, I know of something that would help you. It has to do with leaping into an agonising blue fire then resting in the music of the cooling, the plucking of the electric current through your bloodstream.
Of course I do not offer Tamba my radio.
* * *
I slip into a sleep so lifeless I might as well be a fibre-optic cable burnt by a vicious power surge, then
