I peer along the deck towards the girl sailor’s makeshift jail. The storeroom door is wide open. I steal along the façade of the building. As I reach the door, the moon reveals the white spectre of the solo sailor’s bed. I slip into the room. Her crumpled sheet is twisted like an intestine. Was there a struggle?
The red ablution bucket stands next to the bed. I look inside. Dry. The solo sailor was too dehydrated to even produce urine. Tonight the weightlifting magazine is not a courtier’s fan, it is a grotesque anomaly. It curls on the crate, the tanned mammoth on the cover pumping his muscles for no one. It is too dark for me to see but I know his arteries are writhing just beneath his skin, which is that weird chestnut-red that white people go when they roast on a sun machine.
Move it, Malachi.
Stop slipping sideways, like Hamri.
I run back to the Dragonfly, stand on the circle of white paint that demarcates the landing pad. I wave at Romano’s silhouette. He paces a few steps, seems to look right through me. I catch a glimpse of a tiny spark on each shoulder. His Nadras Oil epaulettes. I shuffle along the white line towards the Dragonfly’s landing struts. I jump up and down, wave like I am trying to hail a taxi from the night sky. Romano gazes past the rotor blades. Am I invisible? I glance down at myself. No, my white Valentino outfit glows in the moonlight reflecting off the Dragonfly. Romano moves out of sight. I run to the base of the surveillance tower, duck through the small door. I climb a flight of stairs as long and steep as the escalator at Home Affairs in Joburg. I push up with my thighs, up, up the dark lighthouse.
* * *
Near the top I double over to catch my breath. The barrel of a gun straightens me up. I throw up my hands, feel my eyelids peel with terror. The AK97 expands, fills my vision.
‘Malachi!’ Romano drops his rifle, lets it swing like an umbrella he might need in inclement weather.
I jab frantically at my screen. ‘They killed Frances.’
‘What?’
‘She’s gone.’
Romano shakes his head, ‘They took her to the doctor’s rooms. Meirong said they were getting her ready to fly out.’
I falter. What if he is right? Who do I trust, the logistics controller or a ninety-year-old witch?
I think of Cecilia’s three moth-kisses above my ear.
Flutterbies.
‘They killed her with anaesthetic,’ I write. ‘They’re going to throw her in the shark pit.’
Romano raises his barrel again. ‘You’re lying.’
I stare into the twin steel chutes. A tiny bit of urine leaks down my leg. I type with jittery fingers, ‘Why would I lie?’
‘When?’
‘Some time before midnight.’
‘Where’s your proof?’
‘When do the sharks feed?’ I type hastily.
Romano glares at me fiercely. He thinks I am taunting him with a riddle.
I type ferociously, ‘When do they drop dead bodies? That suicide.’
Comprehension grows in Romano’s eyes. ‘Sunrise. The sharks come at sunrise.’
I glance through the door of his glass station. The moon, only slightly handicapped, sinks lower in the sky.
Romano snatches at his face, makes a funny, explosive squeal. ‘Motherfuckers. Frances!’ He turns ugly. ‘I don’t believe you.’
‘Come!’ I beg him. ‘Let’s go and see.’
We climb down Romano’s dark, dark tower in silence and the sweat of two confused men who want more than anything to see Frances alive. For me she is another schoolgirl I have let die. For Romano she is a daughter who clung to him for the simple chance to see the sky, breathe oxygen.
I follow Romano across the deck, glance up once at the splendid white Dragonfly that also let the young girl die.
* * *
Inside the rig, Romano locks the door behind us and takes off down the man-made cliff, lithe on the narrow landings and the steep stairs. He stops halfway down a flight. His eye-line, when he turns, is my sweating bellybutton.
‘If they see us, I’ll say you broke security. I’ll say I was bringing you in.’
He melts down the staircase, his epaulettes glinting like tiny wings in the surreal white light. I pour myself after him, pride myself on my near-silent rubber landings. Romano’s boots are huge yet shockingly stealthy. One longer lace clicks as it touches five thousand metal rungs. The tiny sound amplifies as we near the door to the management wing. I seize Romano’s shoulder, stop him. He flings me so hard I slam into a railing.
‘Aghh!’
The knob on my head swells beneath my fingertips. I jab at Romano’s boot, which in this light looks like it is made of crocodile skin. I kneel at his feet, shove the tardy lace into the tongue of his boot. Romano puts a heavy hand on my crown, blesses me with an apology.
I hate this man. I love him.
We tiptoe like midnight children past the door to the right that says, Private. Keep Out. Romano stops so my knee bangs into his back. He cocks his head, listens. There is no sound of the Raizier bosses sacrificing their beauty sleep. We steal past the entrance to the maintenance wing on the left. Again, Romano pauses. There is a muffled gushing sound. Is it a toilet flushing?
Romano hurries down a diagonal flight. I pinch the thick cotton of his shirt, hustle after him.
Slowly the vampire light fades until we are suspended in oily blackness. The lights have been snuffed out in this lower chamber. Is it near their graveyard?
There is the jangle of metal keys as Romano fumbles for something. An infrared ray cuts the dark into black chunks, counts the rivets for us as we descend the next ten metres. The roar of a restless liquid beast rises up through our shoes, louder and louder until it echoes through the steel of a heavily reinforced door. Romano lays his head against this final barrier to the sea. I put my ear to the door, listen with him. Millions of tons of sea
