She tries again. ‘Aren’t you scared they’ll bust you for talking to us?’
I strap her feet in, tap my keys beneath the leather brace. ‘I am trusting you to look out for me.’
Vicki looks up, revealing a throat like a waterfall of cream. ‘Coast is clear,’ she says softly. Almost intimate.
I trim the bubble toes on the cutest pair of feet I have ever seen. Her ankle bones were sculpted by the tools of a genius.
Vicki cocks her head thoughtfully. ‘What’s the word Madame Sophie says, about helping people to die?’
I think I hear the rustle of her clean hair across her scapulas. It sends a tiny trickle of electricity through the cloth of my white trousers.
‘Euthanasia,’ I type. But my mind is very far from assisted dying.
Shut up, I tell my penis. Or I will shock you so badly they will harvest the heart that sends blood to you.
‘That’s what we did with Judge James.’
I shake my head fiercely, press too hard on her fingers with my white towel.
‘Eina,’ Vicki says indignantly.
I stroke my fingertips across her pink nails, type for the second time, ‘Sorry.’
She smiles with teeth so pretty God must have put each one in place with a magnifying glass.
‘It’s love-hate, isn’t it?’ she says softly. ‘This thing between you and me.’
My fingers grip the cell phone like it is my spokesman’s throat. I nod at Vicki, tap one word, the perfect word for us.
‘Ambivalence.’
My eyes feel starry bright, heavier to carry now with all the extra glitter.
The rest of the subjects are deathly quiet, perhaps silenced by their ambivalence about the giant. I work through four prisoners, thinking sometimes of the giant’s broken finger, sometimes his shattered teeth. Sometimes of the brute force I must use later to kill my admiration for Vicki.
But why must I hurt my penis when all it wants to do is exclaim at a woman’s beauty? Why?
I glance back, drop a little kiss on Vicki’s collarbone. Her surprised smile is shockingly sensuous.
What is so terrible about hardening at the sight of lips so full they make creases in the middle, eyes so intense they hold a deep purple sheen, ankles so prim, so perfect it can’t be they are worn by a woman whose home language is the knife? Vicki is breathtaking now that she is healing. Why must I punish myself for wanting her in my mouth?
I swallow, frightened.
Thankfully the yellow man is too subdued to call me Jesus today. Jesus would never have had to fight off an erection, would he? But perhaps these are the carnal truths the censors burnt.
Jesus, please, please can I perhaps let these feelings grow to a terrible tumescence rather than topple them with a hundred and twenty volts of agony?
As I groom the yellow man, I sense the truth quite clearly.
Yes. Jesus got an erection and he was not ashamed of it. Yes, he fell in love with a fallen woman, like me. It was my father who told me the rumour about Mary Magdalene, who was an ex-prostitute, wasn’t she? Hamri might have loved the oppressors’ tongue, but he was always wary of their religion.
Next door, the desert strangler nods sagely, like he knows the ancient secrets of all prostitutes.
I smile inwardly. Mary Magdalene was lucky to die a natural death, not be left stranded in the desert by this poor, sorry murderer.
As I clip the glove to Gibril’s cage, I sense a shadow high above me. Tamba looks somehow flatter, less three-dimensional than before. Even his dreadlocks lie down as if chastised, creating the beaten silhouette of a bedraggled thief. Like the other man on the cross. What was his name? Barabbas.
Tamba watches me work with a dead, inward-looking expression. What did Doctor Mujuru say to him; ‘I’ll feed you to Raizier and cut out your heart, if it still works after all that opium?’
I’d like to hit my switch, type to Tamba on his Samsung, ‘Hey, Tamba, why don’t you try telling the truth? You’d be surprised how high you can get just from confessing.’
* * *
I groom two more subjects, approach the cavernous, cold space past the tooth-extracting Indian. The skinny man, I am glad to say, is no longer obsessed with his teeth or his umbilicus. Which is more than I can say about me and my penis. I shut the Indian’s cage, take an extra-big breath. The whole hall watches me pass the struts that held the judge’s cage. By the time I reach Barry, the fat Australian, my journey through the hallowed space has brought tears to his tiny eyes.
His fingers droop in the sheath. ‘Judge James was the best friend I ever had.’
I pause with my clipper, astounded by his statement.
‘I mean, he said I was a pig, but . . .’ Barry’s sobs seem to come from deep below him and shove through his splayed bum. ‘I miss him so much.’ He weeps uncontrollably. Hysterical, for a man who ran a tight, violent business and got filthy rich.
‘The judge always told me, Barry, money is just paper with some ugly president’s face on it. It’s not like the president’s going to jump out and give you a hug . . .’ A deep-sea sound blows through his loose mammalian skin.
Above us, Tamba snaps out of his beaten-blue suffering. ‘Is that one laughing or blubbering?’
I tip my hand two ways. Both.
‘What’s the problem?’
I point at the terrible, tragic space next to Barry.
Barry rolls onto his back, once more blubbering. I release his feet so he doesn’t crack his little ankles. Yes, Barry. We will all miss our Gadu Yignae.
* * *
The skinny rapist does not touch his penis today. Angus, I think his name is, mourns for the giant without so much as a mind or muscle spasm. His whole body is an effigy of what is left of a rapist when his madness leaves him. Harmless, he is, a shipwrecked British tourist with not even the will to crack a coconut. Did the
