Tamba’s face is oriented our way. I can’t comfort the lion in cage number one.
Vicki tries to stuff sweet, soft words between Samuel’s sobs. ‘Samuel, don’t cry, please.’
All I want to do is whip out my Samsung and say, Stop crying, Samuel, stop. You just made a terrible, terrible mistake.
I bend over my bucket, hang upside down, make like I am scratching for a clean towel. Before I can imagine how funny I must look, I press my fingers to my lips, kiss them. Show them to Samuel.
It works. His crying quietens down.
Vicki, unbelievably, doesn’t even snigger.
‘See, Samuel,’ she says gently. ‘Even Malachi forgives you.’
As I snap the witch’s tough, old-age nails, she breathes like she is climbing up through rubble.
‘I should have said nothing,’ she mumbles.
She coughs up small stones as I wash her gnarled feet. A tear falls to her shrivelled thigh, the most enormous tear I have ever seen.
Is she crying for the prime minister’s wife?
I stare in amazement as more tears fall. How can one old, dry woman create all that water?
Eulalie’s tears flood the cracks of her cheeks, run between her empty breasts. I have no choice but to wash her feet, cover up the natural disaster happening on the factory floor.
Please don’t cry, Eulalie. My eyes sting as if I have stuck my face into the antiseptic. I extricate the witch’s feet, stumble to Vicki.
* * *
I secure the leather sheath, but all I see through my tears is a blur of white fingers. I clutch on to them, try to hold them still. I squeeze my clipper blades, feel a shard of something soft fly from the metal. I stare anxiously. Did I hurt her? But Vicki is watching me with the utmost pity. I tear my eyes back to her hands. It looks like all her blood has rushed from her ventricles into her fingertips. Tears stream down the back of my throat. I sniff.
‘You were just a kid, really.’
I shake my head. Fifteen.
Vicki frowns. ‘Fifteen is the dumbest time.’
I growl a refusal. No, Vicki. Youth is not an alibi.
But the mermaid is adamant. ‘When you’re fifteen you can’t think of . . .’ she searches her mind for the right word in her thesaurus. ‘Consequences.’ She gives me her feet. ‘I mean, that’s when I started cutting. Fifteen.’
My eyes climb the keloid ladder running up her shins.
‘How old are you, Malachi?’ Vicki asks. ‘Thirty?’
I nod, surprised.
‘So you lived for fifteen years. Died for fifteen. Am I right?’
Save me. I stare into the sweet, glistening mercy of the mermaid’s eyes. The crow’s croak, I don’t know where it comes from. It nearly sounds like, ‘Yes.’
Vicki shrugs. ‘I know how it feels. How many times have I thought – I’m not joking, a hundred times a day, a hundred times a night – why didn’t I just tell someone?’ She stares at her bubble toes. ‘Why didn’t I just . . . I don’t know, speak?’
I am very, very careful not to look up, but I feel Tamba’s stare hacking into my cheek. What happened to his head-banging to surround-sound music?
I rub the soles of Vicki’s feet. Stop staring, Tamba, please.
Madame Sophie gasps, ‘What’s wrong with Eulalie?’
I whirl towards the witch. She is slouched against the mesh, no longer weeping. Her damp-granite eyes have turned to soft rabbit fur, like the one that died of fright when a dump dog chased it into our hut. Eulalie’s bony shoulders slump as if her ancestors are whipping her from the roof. Her breathing becomes lighter and lighter until she has no need of it.
Is she still alive?
Her grey eyes are wide open, just like the rabbit after its heart attack.
I hit my button.
‘What?’
I bang my heart three times.
‘Heart attack?’ Tamba jumps up, darts from switch to switch. ‘No! We can’t afford this. I’m calling the doctor’s wing.’ He uses an emergency-room tone he might have heard on TV. ‘Suspected heart attack. BP eighty over sixty. Pulse fifty-seven.’ He loses his professional tone. ‘What? Umm . . . She looks kind of sleepy . . . A small one? . . . How much?’ Tamba adjusts a setting on his keyboard, touches a switch.
Eulalie’s entire body jerks like in a mild car collision. Her head whips forwards, hits the metal. Her chest rises and falls. She is breathing.
I give Tamba the thumbs-up, a crude overstatement of how I am feeling.
‘We must investigate this subject. That was really not funny.’
Not funny, no, to live with a regret so deep it can strike you dead just by surfacing.
It might be a muscle spasm, or some aftereffect of the ECG. It might be the electric shock. But Eulalie smiles at me.
* * *
The next three prisoners talk in troubled tongues about their deed or mine, I cannot guess. But the yellow man gives me his hands eagerly, grins like I just won a ribbon for his team. He says something earnest in his Sudanese dialect. The desert strangler, it seems, is not in the mood to interpret. He sits with his chin sunken into his chest, his hands turned up on his runner’s legs. Has he also had some kind of cardiac trouble?
But as I fasten the glove to his cage, he says quietly, ‘Life’s a swine.’ He watches me lop the nails off his sinewy fingers. He shakes his head gravely. ‘I will never forget her.’
Oh, no, please. Not more skeletons.
‘Sometimes the soldiers took prostitutes on their trips. Then they drank beer and had sex while they stole our food aid and drove it to Adigral.’
I cut into the hard nail on his wedding finger.
‘One time, I killed the driver and took the truck. I left the girl in the desert. The way she died, ahhhh.’ His voice is parched, like the poor girl in the desert, half dressed, calling for water. He shoves his broad feet
