Satisfied with his pilot skills, Tamba drops down, disappears.
I slip the phone beneath my glove.
Tamba props a bare foot on his DJ desk. He begins to clip his toes.
I type with trembling fingers. ‘What if the judge is on the roof drinking a pink drink?’
I wring out a dripping white towel, wipe Andride’s hands, smother my crazy smile.
What if the girl with the fever can never burn up, even if the sun takes her right now as firewood?
I drop the towel in my bucket, meet the unearthly light in Andride’s eyes.
‘Does that man have a fever?’ Tamba’s feet have disappeared from his desk.
Andride lowers his eyes, hides the lasers of hope I seem to have lit with my African accent.
I jab at my eyes, tell Tamba to see for himself.
Tamba peers at a monitor. ‘Temp normal.’
I show him the O for okay, slide the cutting brace from the social worker’s feet. I lock his cage, walk away from Andride as if we have not just experienced some kind of earth-defying, light-firing revelation.
* * *
The prisoners near us laugh and gabble like they’re at a cocktail party. I don’t know where that stuff came from, but the prisoners love it. After all, if there is no death then how the heck can there be murder in the first, the second, or the third degree?
I settle down to a less record-breaking clipping speed, curiously exhilarated, but when I reach the priest killer he throws cold water on me.
‘It’s the people who love them.’ He shakes his head. ‘I am very sorry for the priest’s mother. Very, very sorry. Can you tell her for me? She is Sara Alaoui, from Assilah. Can you write her address?’
Oh no. They’re asking favours of my digital tongue.
‘She lives at Ali Ibnou Abi Taleb. Please. Tell her I love him now, Father Rayan.’ The priest killer’s eyes glow like olive oil in the fluorescent light. Healthy he is, even with an extra kidney ripening in him. He shows two fingers glued together like Siamese twins. ‘We are together.’
I smile at him. It’s going to be the party of the century.
I clip his healthy outgrowths, set his feet free. The priest burner, it turns out, is quite a sweet guy.
* * *
The next few prisoners smile dreamily, talk in foreign tongues about eternal life, perhaps.
But when I reach Charmayne, she spits, ‘Mohammed’s gone mad. It’s rubbish, Malachi.’
Her hair is madder, more split than it has ever been. One side of her parting looks like she has stuck her finger in a plug, the other half is the good twin, clinging and meek.
‘If it’s true, why did I bother to kill Bongi and Pete?’
Deep down I want to smile. A murderer’s worst dilemma.
‘Why?’
I spare a thought for the poor sucker before me who found himself on a sexy, sucking island inside Charmayne’s eyes. Tamba is watching us with an unnerving interest, I dare not reply. I turn away from her angry, shaking breasts as fine as midnight sand, work all the way to Madame Sophie.
* * *
She smiles at me like Olivia has given her intravenous heroin. Static lifts her hair, creates a blonde halo. Her fingernails are perfectly white-tipped as if she has spent the whole day getting ready for some awards ceremony. She smiles dreamily.
‘It makes me want to hurry up and die.’
Me too, Madame Sophie. I would take Janeé’s steak knife and sink it between my ribs right now if I knew I would see Cecilia. I would spill my own blood, create a red carpet leading to my mother.
Over the microphone I hear the shuffling of Tamba’s fingers. ‘Hurry up, Malachi.’ He is crumpled up, pressing his penis. ‘I need a piss. Number forty is nice and quiet. Is it safe for me to leave?’
I nod at him.
‘You sure?’ he squeaks.
I roll my eyes. Go and piss, Tamba.
He swipes some things from his desk. I give Madame Sophie’s nails an extra-tight trim to make sure she can’t use them to get to the big, beautiful occasion of death. As I shut her cage, I feel the careless caress of Vicki’s eyes behind me.
‘If my husband’s up there, I’ll have to tell him.’
I turn around slowly. Her eyes are the silken inside of an African violet. My body moves closer involuntarily.
Vicki whispers so softly I have to read her lips. ‘I love you much more than I hate you, Malachi.’
I stare at her mouth. I want to run my tongue in circles, feel its slippery creases. I drop my eyes, aching with longing. Vicki lifts her knees to protect her heart. She doesn’t realise she is showing me the flesh of her sexual parts. She doesn’t know how much I want to touch her. But I dare not talk to Vicki. I must save my survival instinct for the worst among us. The one with the biggest, darkest propensity to forget.
* * *
Josiah’s hairy hands are on his lap, his legs stretched out like he is retired on a beach, simply watching the sea. I switch my phone to Peremptory.
‘Hands please.’
I swallow my disgust for the knobbed, furry fingers he offers me. His own mother forgives him. Who am I to judge?
Josiah has blue-black bruises on his cheeks and dried blood on his top lip, but the usual cramp of hatred on his forehead has receded. His eyes, I notice, still show their scarring from a lifetime of violent psychosis.
Why are you so calm, you bastard?
A soft metallic music starts up behind me.
Eulalie is running the back of her hands against the mesh, strumming her knuckles like she is playing a strange guitar. She smiles tenderly.
‘She stroked your head like this. She kissed you, she said . . .’ Eulalie cocks her head to one side, listens. ‘These are not poison moths. They
