‘Yesterday was scary. That fire thing.’
Now I sweat like a hostage with thirty seconds to disarm the explosives sewn into my clothes. I glance up at the surveillance glass. Tamba takes a swig from a plastic bottle, picks his teeth. He rotates his roller chair towards his camera images.
Can he see me on his screens?
I lop off the frighteningly fast growth of Samuel’s thumbnail. Relax. The cameras are mounted directly above each subject. They can’t see me.
The stump of my tongue begins to weep with fear. I swallow with horrible difficulty.
Do it, Malachi.
I loosen the clip with the tip of my thumb. Samuel’s alert eyes catch the movement. I guide the clip between his fore and middle finger, crush them together.
Keep it secret. Please.
Upstairs, Tamba’s nostrils are positioned towards me. Fear wells up in me. I have just jumped off this metal planet into the sea. I trim Samuel’s hand, neglect his little finger. I stroke the white towel ever so gently across his skin so as not to dislodge the memory chip. Set his hands free like the wings of a carrier pigeon. His eyes dart towards Tamba.
‘Check security,’ Samuel says softly.
Tamba is lounging back now, gazing into space. His fake cheer at breakfast seems to have turned quickly to melancholy. Good. Let him be self-obsessed.
I nod at Samuel.
The journalist transfers the audio chip to his ear in one smooth movement, buries it in the clever cauliflower of his outer ear. How wonderful is the physiology of the human being.
Focus, Malachi.
I point at Samuel’s feet. His smooth testicles swing as he lifts his knees and thrusts his feet through the opening. I slide my free hand in my pocket. Press the Go key.
Samuel smiles once, perhaps at the unexpected accent. His lips part to expand his fine Homo sapiens listening ability. He gives himself over to my American ventriloquist. I watch as his eyes glow with interest, darken with dread, widen to show a secret rim of white. He hunches forwards as if to hide his heart from the guerrillas’ bullets. Or is it from his own awful memories?
Samuel shuts his eyes, slams his spine against the mesh. Clear water slides down his cheeks. For a second a dumb compassion visits me. But when Samuel opens his eyes, they are flashing emergency lights. Bright yellow. Angry.
‘You think I am like them? You do, don’t you?’
I glare back at him.
‘It takes courage to do my work. You try and stand by and watch people being blown up.’
My hands are growing hair, sprouting dirty fingernails like the robot in the Werewolf movies.
‘Do you think I’m not haunted?’ Samuel plucks the audio chip from his ear and tosses it at my feet.
He pulls his own feet back in. I sweep up the memory chip, slam the metal hatch. But some part of me is kicking for dry ground.
My words were meant to shut the journalist up, not rouse him to fury.
The old witch is squinting at the floor, searching for the plastic chip. ‘What is it, Samuel? I can’t see.’
‘Malachi has written his story for us. And because I am honourable, because it’s my job, I will tell you, Eulalie.’ Samuel begins as if he is making a speech at a wedding. ‘Eulalie . . . Everyone . . . Malachi wants us to know how he lost his tongue. Listen!’
The whole hall falls silent, ready to hear my first words since two thousand and twenty.
‘Malachi was fifteen. He and his class had just finished their maths lesson!’
Samuel roars out sentences he has only heard once. The prisoners gasp as if the guerrillas are trotting down the aisle now, their rifles bristling in the fluorescent light. They fall quiet as Samuel shouts how the guerrillas crouched behind us while our teacher read Thomas Wyatt’s sonnet about the king’s mistress.
‘“Any trouble here?” His friend’s father asked. The children held their breath. “No,” his father said.’
Samuel’s words beat like hooves on my heart.
‘The ANIM opened fire on the children . . .’
‘Terrible,’ someone croaks behind me.
‘Children!’
‘They burnt the factory and the fields surrounding it. They shot the old people, the animals, the toddlers.’
There is a horrified silence.
Eulalie jerks at her hands, but they are tightly trapped in their leather stocks.
‘Good enough, Malachi?’ Samuel’s fiery eyes burn a hole on each side of my spine.
High above me, Tamba props his chin on his hands; gazes at the greasy paint on the ceiling.
Eulalie searches my face, her eyes a steel scourer. I keep my eyes down, flick a cursory towel across her skin in case Tamba should pull his head out of his blinding self-pity. I lock the witch’s cage, hurry to the husband killer.
Vicki is glaring at me as if it was I who crept over the copse and sunk my rifle between rows of small, undeveloped ribs.
She jabs her fingers into the leather sheath. ‘You know nothing, Malachi.’
I glimpse the bone between her breasts, more of a secret slope. A fin nudging through a meniscus, too ephemeral to break the surface with a splash.
Vicki leans close, whispers with a muted violence, ‘He . . . he . . .’
I feel my cheeks go slack with horror.
Rock. Scissors. Fire. Rape. The tools so beloved of Homo sapiens.
Vicki tears her hands free. She huddles over her knees, shows the curved ribs of some marine creature at the museum. I feel a terrible urge to walk my fingers up the rungs, count them. Sorry Vicki.
I am so, so sorry.
* * *
I groom the Indian with the benzene leak and one more prisoner after him. Lock the leather glove to the cage of the Gadu Yignae.
He shoves his gigantic hands into my taming glove. One hand flutters free from my strap, forms a massive fist. He sinks it between the pectoral muscles on his chest.
‘I was a volcano. This thing inside me.’ He returns his hand, watches me pit my strength against the hoof-like growths on his fingertips. ‘And now, after all this
