I glance up at him.
‘The smell of her hair. She said her conditioner had real geraniums in it. I teased her, I said, Do you really think there are fields of geraniums somewhere?’ The giant inhales deeply as if his wife has just shaken her hair free and filled the air with the scent of a thousand tiny flowers. ‘And do you know what haunts me more than anything?’
I let his towel drip, wait expectantly.
‘Their baby.’
‘What baby, Judge James?’ asks the Australian.
A sob tears free of the giant’s lung cavity. ‘They found a foetus during the autopsy.’
‘Ah, your brother’s child?’
The giant nods his enormous head.
Eulalie’s voice arrives like a gentle wind across the plains. ‘It was your child, Judge James.’
The giant shakes his head, ‘No.’
A murmuring takes flight among the cages. ‘His child . . .’
His roar rips through the rig, ‘NO-O!’
The words flare out of reach, float near the roof, ‘It was the judge’s son . . .’
The giant pulls them down like a kite. ‘My son . . .’ His sobs are shuddering blasts.
‘Poor James,’ the Australian murmurs. ‘Poor James.’
But the giant is wind through a bombed building, blowing in hollow gusts. Exploding with an emptiness that nothing, not even his thick law books, can ever fill again.
* * *
When I reach Lolie the crack killer, she shoots staccato words at me, one after the other in a thudding monologue. I have no idea what language she is firing at me. I tighten my leather strap, stare into her high-tensile eyes. Her skin is the temperature of metal in the middle of a cold, cold night as she waits for her target to leave his warm mistress.
Too many double-o–seven movies, Malachi. My last count was nineteen.
I push the button on my intercom.
Tamba hauls himself out of his gloomy reverie. ‘Yes?’
I swipe my forehead, turn my hands up to say, Check temp.
Tamba swivels his roller chair, manipulates something that might be a mouse. ‘Whoa. It’s low. I’ll turn up her heat.’
As I clip Lolie’s fingers, I feel the quick warmth entering them. Sweat breaks out on her eyebrows. When I unlatch her hands, she wipes her face feverishly, nose, mouth, cheeks, nose, mouth, cheeks, freeing them from whatever they smothered her with. Was it plastic?
By the time I reach Shikorina, Lolie is sweating on her arms and her scarred, swollen belly where they are growing not one but two extra spleens.
* * *
Shikorina’s lap appears empty today. Today she is silent, desolate, like a mother who lost her children in an accident. Her brother would have taken them. What was his name? Kenneth. He was a good man, I could tell by the way she spoke to me yesterday. Why on earth didn’t she ask him to take her children?
The giant lets out one last eerie gust behind me.
But it is too late for speaking or shutting up.
Or is it?
My vision fades to a watery whiteness. My eye sockets feel empty. I rub my eyelids, squint behind me. The giant’s spine emerges slowly like a rutted road after a flood. He sits utterly still now, a rocky monument to a man who might have lived an honourable life.
Is it too late?
‘Let’s go for lunch,’ Tamba says listlessly.
I leave Shikorina’s toenails to flourish one more day. I breathe leftover scraps of breath, force my feeble fingers to fasten the latch.
I have not told the whole truth. I still have a secret in me. It lurches up my throat like undigested meat as I drop my tools on the trolley, stumble from the hall.
I hurry along the corridor, plunge down the three sudden steps, choking on my half a story.
* * *
Janeé drops a plate down in front of me.
‘Beef bourguignon,’ she says with a French accent.
It seems to be me who gets the gristle. Everything Janeé cooks needs a certain trick, like how to nip off the meat strings and swallow them before they form a sinewy rope that reaches down your oesophagus to hook something up.
Like the whole truth.
Tamba swallows with difficulty. He mutters, ‘You’re doing better than me.’
Janeé, I see, is very clever. She puts the thick, single strands aside like they might be viable arteries to lie inside her son. Romano stalks in and sits. Meirong whisks in after him.
‘I just need a quick bite, Janeé. I’m taking Romano’s afternoon shift.’
Optimistic, I think. She will be chewing at this bench for at least two days and two nights.
‘I don’t need to sleep,’ Romano says sullenly.
But Meirong’s voice rises to a worried pitch. ‘Sorry, Romano, I’m not having you dead on your feet, and this girl sails into us with a whole rescue operation after her.’ She sits lightly on the bench, chews her food manically with her tiny, sharp teeth. She rolls a yellow bulb lurking in the gravy. ‘Are these onions?’
‘French,’ Janeé says smugly.
Shallots, I would like to say, the name for baby onions in the country where the onions are very small and the men, some people say, a bit creepy. Speaking of creepy, Meirong’s dress is lower in the front than I have yet seen. Above her black-and-white checks a delicate crease hints at the squeeze of her bra against her breasts. I spy like a creepy Frenchman, but don’t get me wrong, those silky spheres might as well be flying fish, or giant moths that came to rest on the salt in the centre of the table. Meirong’s cleavage turns into a frown line, deeper, more disapproving with every masticating minute. She swallows too early. Her white china face turns the transparent pink of a baby lizard. She dives for the red juice. I watch the obstruction travel down her flawless throat. Is it the bourguignon, or is it the lost girl she is choking on?
Meirong stands unsteadily, hurries out like a black-and-white hologram of a worried woman.
‘I can stay awake for five days,’ Romano says bitterly.
Tamba yawns, just thinking about the struggle of holding up his
