I turn to the social worker. Put Lolie straight. Quickly.
Andride misunderstands, translates for me.
‘Lolie says she doesn’t blame you.’ He listens to her lilting speech. ‘She says she also killed when she was fifteen.’
I shake my head. No. Sorry. Forgiveness is not that easy.
The movement of my head has a shocking effect on Lolie. She buries her face in her hands and makes a high, hissing cry, the sound of a tree through an acoustic sensor as it’s being chopped down. She clamps her nose and mouth, smothers herself deliberately.
The prisoners click their tongues. ‘Lolie. Lolie.’
‘Honey . . .’ Madame Sophie calls sweetly.
What if she suffocates herself before my eyes? Above us, Tamba shoves against his back rest, stretches his arms in the air.
Do something, I command the social worker with my eyes.
Andride tries the tone of a terrorist. ‘Fight, Lolie. Fight.’
Still she will not breathe.
‘Shoot, Lolie! Or they will shoot you.’
Lolie whines like a tree amplified thirty thousand times.
‘Lolie?’ I try to say. I am surprised by the deepness of the sound that comes out. It is gentle, yet masculine. Lolie drops her hands from her mouth, stares at me. I shine my compassion into her kohl eyes.
Andride is right. They broke you, Lolie.
Lolie’s strange chuckle sounds more like a hiccup.
Upstairs, Tamba walks his roller chair to the window, exhausted by the violent coup he has just accomplished with his thumbs. I rap on Lolie’s cage, make a soft clang. She catches her erupting laugh, swallows it. I pull on the leather strap, gently tighten it.
Tamba turns a slow, bored circle on his roller wheels. I clip Lolie’s nails with the utmost gentleness. She bows her head, hides her smile from Tamba’s screen. Her smile is exhausting for her, I think, for it keeps falling to the floor. She picks it up and slings it back on, even sweeter.
What is this? Lolie, the child soldier finding happiness?
Lolie’s smile is like a disease. It sets off a whole lot of unpractised smiles among us.
‘I’ve never seen her smile before,’ someone murmurs.
‘First time.’
‘First time.’
Tamba must have caught the contagion of happiness on his screens. He skids back to the glass. ‘What’s happening, Malachi?’
I glare back at him, fake deep outrage. These pigs, I shout silently.
‘Are they laughing at you?’
I nod, a ridiculous, huffy figure.
Tamba lynches me with a grin, joins in what he imagines to be crowd mockery. ‘Sorry,’ he mutters insincerely.
I scowl until he ducks his head and finds something to do on the far side of his DJ desk. I shut Lolie’s cage, get away from the lethal weapon of her new, childish smile. I stomp to Shikorina, keep up my façade of fury in case Tamba should come back to double-check on my unhappiness.
* * *
Shikorina gives me her long fingers with their circular blue scars.
‘We are born from Satan. You and me.’
After the sweet assassin, Shikorina’s words are a cruel ambush.
‘We come from the place the devil eats bones. The place of graves.’
Maybe, Shikorina, you are right. Or maybe, just maybe, we made a terrible mistake.
Terrible. The intensity catches on my heart like the sharp end of a bone. I try to breathe through it, but it stabs my lungs like pleurisy. Which bone is it?
The blessing bone that says mistakes can be forgiven? Or the curse bone that says sin remains sin; I am spawn of Satan?
Shikorina takes back her hands, lifts her feet like they are waterlogged. As I bend over them, Eulalie’s words travel slowly down a broken-down telephone of prisoners, ‘The children . . . The children . . .’
The words come in wisps, until Lolie speaks in jagged English: ‘The children forgive you.’
I jerk up straight. Is the message for me?
But Lolie practises her crazy, crooked smile, holds up three fingers. ‘Three.’
The pleurisy pierces my ribs. No. Not for me. I killed more than three.
Shikorina turns her ear to the mesh, like the truth is caught in the wires. ‘Is it true, Malachi?’
I shrug. Maybe.
But maybe is not enough. Shikorina waits, still watching me. She is asking the wrong person, she should be asking God.
But I have seen Shikorina’s gentleness when she touches her ghost children. She took them into the sunshine and stroked them, I know. She held them close at night when the white wolves chased them in their dreams. But her mind cracked down the middle. Broke in half, like Lolie’s.
I can’t say, but one thing is for sure. Shikorina’s children still love the mother she half was.
I hold up two hands, exaggerate. Shove her children towards her, wholeheartedly, not half. They still love you, Shikorina.
Shikorina crashes back against the mesh, wraps her octopus arms around the three of them. She is careful not to crush them with a love so powerful it could accelerate the wash-spin cycle of the earth, make plants grow at the rate of three centimetres a second. I free her feet quickly. She murmurs to her children in soft decibels of love as she rolls from side to side, unconscious of the wire cutting into her bony shoulders. I see she has torn a strip of skin from her spine. I will have to keep an eye on the raw spot.
I lock Shikorina’s cage with a hope that makes me dizzy. I pick up my bucket, nearly skip a few steps. I stop, compose myself, walk more demurely to the trolley.
* * *
What if the witch is more sane than any High Court judge? What if Shikorina’s children still love her, all three?
Maybe I just got the lucky bone in my throw. In Bhajo they call
