His chest was not metal.
Erniel crouched beneath his desk, his eyes burning above his knees. He was too frightened to move his head but I heard what he said.
‘My sisters.’
Their love passed before their eyes. Not their entire life, as some people say. No. Their greatest love, clarified. They died loving the thing they cherished more than anything.
Araba stared past me.
‘Mama,’ she whispered.
The tears run from my eyes, turn the keys blurry. I open them wide.
A growling cry escapes me, the sound of the dying lioness.
My father fell heavily across my knees. His spine was bare, like the defrosted rats we dissected in Natural Science. This is the effect of the AK47.
My father died reaching up for my mouth.
I drop the phone on my lap, let my hands hang. I am grateful for the lingering steam in the bathroom. The light is nothing like the crispness of a Krokosoe afternoon when the wind blows the factory smoke over the fields towards the hydroelectric plant in Anchi.
I let my head roll from side to side, the neutral white tiles like the blank paper we used before my father arranged second-hand tablets from Kattra. I wipe my eyes, pick up my writing instrument.
I am in two thousand and thirty-five, writing the moments I have hidden from since I was fifteen.
The guerrillas left me to bleed. When my classmates lay drained, I was still a tributary running between them.
Tamba bangs into the bedroom.
‘Malachi?’
I jump to my feet, turn on a tap in the basin.
‘Malachi, are you all right? You looked shaky at supper.’
I grab my toothbrush and scrub.
‘Olivia and I are watching Apocalypse Three if you want to come up?’
I spit nothing into the drain. Suck water noisily from the stream.
Tamba slams out again. He has no time for a slow, silent victim of apocalypse.
The chlorine water washes away the fiery crust in my throat. I wait a full seven minutes for the echo of the movie player to start up.
I write easier, breathe easier with a dark, destructive soundtrack somewhere above me.
Templeton called in the army, but they arrived too late. The ANIM burnt the workers on the factory floor and in the packing sheds. They burnt the cornfields with Bayira in his tractor, and then the rest of the labour force. They razed the village, picked off the tottering old women, the angry dogs, the toddlers.
I spent three months in a Kattra hospital waiting to die, trying to sink beneath the lip of consciousness. I tried holding my breath. Be still, I told my lungs. But it was my heart that would not stop beating. It tapped its foot, ticked in time, jerked once every second out of habit.
Sometimes I would wake with a shock that left me wondering if I was dead before the pain brought me to blinding, bellowing wakefulness, whimpering disbelief. Blood spitting, the pain so high and so hot, so utterly embracing it must be that I was being slowroasted, kept alive; or repeatedly murdered, of course with knives.
I do not re-read what I have written. I tap, Save to audio chip.
I press on the seam of the built-in ear clip. It snaps off eagerly. I poke the cone into the vee between my first two fingers, flex my hand into a fist.
I snap the furtive little piece back onto its mother ship. I will give it to Samuel, the recorder of facts.
* * *
I slide Tamba’s phone into the shadow where I found it. I crawl into bed naked, too tired to find my sleeping shorts. Dim waves of devastation break from the recreation room, miles above me.
The movies at the refugee centre cured me of diving to the ground at the sound of bullets, and pissing, just pissing. Some children had to be packed into their metal beds with blankets to muffle the sound while the movies played for two hours. It didn’t occur to the welfare workers to simply not play films about war and devastation, for goodness’ sake.
I expect to lie awake, trying not to wet my bed, but I sleep right through the third act of Apocalypse Three. I sleep like a man who did not leave his supper, but ate his fill of sirloin steak. A man who has brokered peace, and will forever live on the seeded side of the unexploded landmines.
MONDAY
I wake to the sound of a bomb counting down. I pull my face off a landmine planted beneath mouthfuls of grass. Tamba has set his timepiece to tick like an old clock. There is a damp patch on my pillow, not from tears but escaped spit, the infantile sign of a deep, innocent sleep. I roll into a sitting position. Tamba’s skin has the sheen of someone who has been drinking and dancing until two in the morning. He sleeps with his mouth open, his tongue paralysed.
I pull on my trousers in full view of Tamba’s dead eyelids. I wear brown trousers today. Fawn, they call it, but this day is not a day for sweet forest creatures. This brown may as well be military issue. I slip my own rudimentary phone into the cabinet, pick out Tamba’s like a practised thief. I drop it in my pocket. Tamba breathes as evenly as if he is on a heart-lung machine. I sling on an olive-green shirt, fasten the cuffs. Tie the laces of my brown suede shoes.
In the bathroom, my hair looks like pigeons have been mating in it. I discourage the fuzz with palmfuls of water. My eyes, I notice, have borrowed a gleam of army green. Camouflage. I am going in.
In the bedroom, Tamba’s alarm rips up the quiet. He jerks from the coma induced by too much ping-pong. I hook my intercom to my belt, tramp towards breakfast. In the corridor I tread on three of last night’s peas, crushing
