This is a sign I can go and have supper with the crew. My fluids are see-through.
No one witnessed my breakdown, other than a self-centred ex-junkie.
I do up my zip, nod to my vague image in the mirror.
Go and eat, Malachi.
* * *
Janeé is slopping white sauce onto rice.
‘Chicken à la king,’ she tells us.
Meirong is the first to break the surface with her fork. For some reason, the afternoon has turned her the precise colour of the creamed chicken.
‘That sailing girl is drifting straight towards us. Unless the wind or the current swings . . .’ Meirong tips the first mouthful in, drops a grain of rice on the table. Everyone stares at it.
My eyesight, I am grateful to realise, is once again crisp.
‘Shit,’ Olivia swears. Her blue eyes show a rim of cerise. ‘We just need three days!’
Meirong turns on her. ‘We need two months, actually. We’ve got to finish three cycles to make it pay. We’ve got to . . .’ She loses two more grains of rice to her terror of failure. She pushes her plate away. ‘I’m not hungry, Janeé. I’m going up to tell Romano to switch off the deck lights tonight. We need a total blackout.’
Janeé tries to jump up but her thighs get stuck beneath the table top.
Meirong seizes a covered plate. ‘Is this it?’
Her black-and-white squares pull and push through the opening.
‘Good luck!’ Olivia calls after her.
Near the roof, the two fingers of sun turn pinkish, fade away.
‘Christ,’ Tamba says morosely. The chicken à la king has pulled him off his caffeine too quickly. ‘What if the search party finds us?’
‘Meirong won’t let them,’ Janeé says.
‘She’s not as perfect as you think, you know, Janeé.’ Tamba sips his raspberry juice, stains the chute between his nose and his lips. The green streak in his eye has almost been reabsorbed.
How is Tamba party to secret truths about the bosses?
Your half a story, Tamba. It’s a silent scream every time you open your mouth.
He sighs. ‘Come, Olivia. Let’s go and watch old movies. Let’s watch Tree of Life. I watched it once when I was h-’ He stops.
Only I know he was about to say, ‘high’.
‘Okay. But there’s a good chance I’ll fall asleep. Coming Janeé?’
‘Yes please,’ Janeé says too eagerly. She glances at me. ‘What about you, Malachi? Have you seen it?’
I shake my head. I put my hands together, rest my cheek on them. Mime sleepy.
What did you do, Malachi?
My knees have no wish to support me but I scrape through the doorway. My stomach is refusing the food for a noble king. I stagger along the corridor, take the three random steps on my hands and knees. I slam my shoulder against the wall, hurtle through the door of my living quarters. I dive into the bathroom. Bend over the toilet bowl.
Nothing wants to come up.
Nothing.
* * *
I shut the toilet seat, sit on it. No. This feels too scatological, like my trousers should be around my ankles. One shoe skids in the shower. I sit in a pool of Tamba’s morning water. It wets my buttocks through.
Good. This is appropriate.
For seven months afterwards, I was incontinent.
Truth only.
I pull Tamba’s phone from my pocket. The Samsung sign wanes, becomes watery. But I don’t need to see.
I feel the truth with my fingertips, let them say what will surely blind me if I look straight at it.
* * *
The guerrilla stabbed his rifle barrel into my father’s knee.
‘Yinawa kani unmiyu.’
My father took a ragged breath. He kept his reading speed measured, but his creamy sonnet was thickened by terror.
‘For Caesar’s I am, And wild for to hold, though I seem tame.’
The guerrilla’s lips were too soft for a killer. They separated with some vile desire as he hitched Araba’s skirt up with his bayonet. He made a shallow cut on her thigh. Nothing more than a thin, red stripe, but the blood, or perhaps the sonnet, inspired in him a hunger for her sweet, young beauty. I heard his whispered promise,
‘Later, I will love you.’
Araba’s brown eyes scorched into mine, begging me to save her. Or were they saying goodbye?
‘Any sign of trouble?’ Erniel’s father asked.
Erniel was sitting two desks to my right, imploring his father behind his thick glasses.
‘No.’
Hamri’s no was a shield that could wrap the earth and pull it tight, protect it from meteors and stray fire from the sun. Templeton Security clattered away with their machine guns. My words burst from my mouth.
‘Yes! They are here!’
A suicide bomber’s pin.
Erniel’s father stormed through the doorway. Glittering ions spun in orbit around his silhouette as he aimed his rifle at the devil crouched behind his child. But all he could see were his son’s desperate eyes. The guerrilla shot him six times in the breast, ripping up his Kevlar vest.
When the fathers were all dead, Araba’s guerrilla shot the clothes off her body. In my river of blood, in my halfawake state, I caught a glimpse of one young breast. A taut, tender swelling. Dead. Her scalp had lifted so her braids hung over her face.
* * *
I drop the phone on my lap, crash my head from side to side, silent, but the truth burgeons in my heart, incinerates my scar tissue. A soft groan tears from my throat.
I bow my head before the lord of shame in his long, dirty coat.
I killed Araba with my lust.
I thought she belonged to me.
I clasp the phone, write my final line.
I killed them all with my loquaciousness.
* * *
It has all come unstuck. The strings, the gristle, the fifteen years of silence that have smothered me. I try to cry, but a strange barking sound comes out. Dry.
I
