I balance the tray on one hand, turn the copper key, but Frances is clambering to her feet, coming after me. I lock the door again quickly, sweep to the other end of the room, try to draw her from the door. Where the heck is Romano? I am not trained for this. The girl sways against the door, eyes my bunch of keys. Is she going to attack me?
I mime pouring water into the glass, lift it to my lips. I point outside like I was actually just going to look for a garden tap, with a row of impatiens perhaps, those pink-and-white flowers that bloom without thinking twice.
Frances shuffles slowly back to her bed. She lies back, exhausted from her flash of resistance.
‘Where’s Romano?’ she says accusingly. ‘At least he speaks to me.’ She rolls towards the wall, shows me a raw, emaciated shoulder. Her sigh, I can hear, has not a molecule of moisture in it.
I unlock the door, swing it wide enough to let the sun hunt her down one more time. I want so badly to say sorry. The rattle of the spoon on the soup plate surely won’t communicate my apology, but my deep, sorry sigh might.
I shut the heavy door, shut the nineteen-year-old child behind three barbarous steel locks.
* * *
I scurry across the deck and cross the little bridge to Romano’s lifeboat. I hang the keychain on the first engine, just as Meirong told me to. Romano’s snore is loud enough to be considered a serious security threat. He lies fast asleep on a thin mattress, still fully dressed in his Nadras Oil outfit. I stretch into the boat, touch Romano’s boot. He is on his knees in a split second, his Kalashnikov pointing straight at my heaving heart. I crash back against a metal mount with my butler’s tray, face the deadly glare of the AK97. My lungs have locked shut.
Romano lowers the barrel, flings the rifle beneath a bench.
Finally I wheeze out.
‘How is she?’ he asks.
I open my mouth, sweep a shaking hand up and out.
‘She sicked it up?’
I nod. I stab at a vein on the inside of my arm.
‘I know. She needs a drip! I told Meirong, but she’s done nothing.’ He shakes his head angrily, speaks my mind for me. ‘It’s not right!’
Romano climbs deeper into the lifeboat and throws out socks, a jersey, two tins of sweetcorn. He releases a long string of Kool-Aid sachets. Then he jerks on a massive drum and carries it to the back of the boat, grunting. He whips the keys off the propeller, shoves them into his pocket. This is Romano’s midnight, but he is sacrificing his sleep to help the girl prisoner. I nod at him approvingly. A mutual conspiracy leaps up between the security man and me. Even the sun softens its megalomania, gives us the privacy to agree, without words, that Romano and I must somehow try to save the poor child.
* * *
I let myself into the rig, shut the door behind me. The sun was too brutal on the surface, but I miss it, I miss it as soon as I turn my back on it. My heart sinks towards my shoes as I descend the metal stairs, my journey marked by the thousands of rivets I climb past. I pause at the door to the management wing. Private. Keep Out.
The door is digitally sealed but I want to shove on it, barge in and shout with my Samsung, ‘Look, that girl up there is very sick! She needs fluids. And she needs to go home, she is extremely upset. Can someone see to it?’
Don’t blow it, Malachi.
The door to the maintenance wing yowls as I open it.
I pass Olivia in her laboratory, squeezing a drop from a pipette. One fat tear that the solo sailor could not manage. I pass the empty canteen, still jangling with irritation from our lunch, reach the spiral stairs leading up to Tamba’s surveillance station. He has put the sound of his overland attack up high. I shut my eyes, steady myself against the stertorous blasts.
Romano nearly shot me up there in the sunshine.
I fumble for my key card, fall through the door, escape the fresh ammo, the flying grit, the stream of machine-gun bullets zinging past my ears.
* * *
They are waiting. The second row of prisoners are clicking their long nails, licking their teeth, loosening their tongues, getting ready to tell me what they think of my truth. But the first row were strangely kind to me. Will these ones hate me?
Number twenty-one is the white Zimbabwean with the vitamin deficiency.
‘Junk,’ he says with his chipped teeth. He gives me his hands. ‘You were junk on love.’ The funny thing is he sounds drunk with those teeth. ‘I was junk like you . . .’ He tries to say something about his felony, but I wish he would shut up. He sounds too absurd for the subject of either murder or love.
I nod politely, check his wires and his pipes.
Was I drunk on teenage love?
As I finish the next prisoner, Tamba must have lost his virtual life up there because he jumps to his feet and roams restlessly around his room. He throws himself in his chair, shows the underside of his shoes as he hitches them onto his control desk. Risky, I think. What if he accidentally kicks a switch and kills off a few precious assets?
* * *
As I work down the aisle, the priest killer crouches like he wants to head-butt me to the floor. His teeth are tightly gritted, his demeanour, one might say, nowhere near what one might expect of a lift attendant. The Moroccan looks like he could pounce on
