‘This is a very sophisticated system.’ Meirong spins slowly, takes on a computer glow. She speaks with sincere pride. ‘A Chinese engineer set it all up for us.’
Tamba rolls his eyes at me.
And me, Malachi? Naturally I am speechless.
* * *
At the bottom of the spiral stairs, the murmuring returns. I recognise the sound now: it is the muted pulse of a foreign crowd. At the refugee centre in Zeerust, the people sheltered beneath the hum, sipped their sugary orange drinks, unwrapped their bread with their fingertips as if it might take fright and fly.
It is only now I realise that the people on the screens were completely silent. The subjects were suffering in mime.
Meirong stops before the door at the dead end. Through the steel, the wind of their breathing scrapes at the fine hairs in my ears.
‘The last maintenance man was a failure.’ Fury strikes her marble eyes. ‘The recruitment agent fucked up. Listen carefully, Malachi. The first rule for you is no communication. If you communicate, you’re out. And that agent,’ contempt curls her top lip, ‘will be fired.’
Now I see why Susan Bellavista was so excited by my inability to speak.
Meirong raises a key card, turns a tiny light green.
* * *
The inmates go quiet. I hear some whispers, a long, melancholic laugh. We are standing near the left-hand corner of the hall. The two rows of cages run towards Tamba’s glass kiosk, high above, on the left.
Beyond the mesh I see skin and hair, shifting. Animal madness, broken, still slightly stinking from the mêlée. The huge hall mimics the pull and heave of the sea. The room is breathing. I hear the swish of natural electricity.
No. They are not real people. The cages are too cramped for them to even stand up. They have no t-shirts, no sun-tan lines, nothing to show they were once a banker, a bin collector, a mother, a physician. They have no bags, no phones, no buttons to brand them. Only nipples, sunken parts, the pathos of ribs. I glimpse soft vaginal lips, the sudden drop of a skinny buttock. A sad reminder of fat pouched on a man with loose stomach skin. Meirong shuts the door behind us.
‘We keep them naked to avoid the logistics of clothes. And it’s easier for hygiene.’
She walks a few steps, stops at a metal trolley. She picks up a long tool with twin blades, and next to it some kind of leather sheath reinforced with metal strips. A giant dog’s muzzle or falconer’s glove, with steel locks attached to it. Meirong digs a fingernail into the fabric beneath her breast, presses a switch on a device on her hip.
‘Tamba, when did you last douse for lice?’
‘It’s been a while,’ Tamba replies through her speaker. He presses a key. ‘Yeah. Five days.’
Meirong nods grimly at him.
Tamba touches a switch. There is the hiss of nozzles unclogging. A soft mist drifts down from the roof. The sudden stink of pesticide as forty bodies cower and clench, try to escape it. There are some gasps, some words for God. Meirong leads me towards the cages, which, raised on their cradles, stand from my thighs to half a metre above my head. She waves her silver blades.
‘It is your job to clip and clean their hands and feet. Also report signs of parasites, bleeding, things the cameras could miss.’
She points to a transparent tube leading into a cage at mouth level. ‘Don’t worry about nutrition. We record their intake.’ She stops. ‘Are you understanding all this?’
I nod twice to convince her.
‘It’s a twenty-four hour cycle. Their supplements speed up nail growth abnormally. And you won’t believe what they get up to if you miss a clipping. They pick their wounds incessantly.’
She stops at the top of the two-metre wide aisle. Only now do I let my eyes sink behind the criss-cross wires. I was wrong about my libido.
The knees of these women will be my failing, with their smooth triangular caps, skin stretching over bone as they sit with bent legs. In row two, a huge, ruined beauty sits with her knee dropped to the side so her private parts open like a dutiful flower. I look away so as not to be mistaken for a man with normal, lurid tastes. I swing my eyes from a white woman’s finely hung collar bone, the way it dips, almost invisible, a mere shadow in the skin before it sinks into the roundness of her shoulder joint. I dream of my new radio beneath my tube of toothpaste, my aqueous cream, my Vaseline.
Meirong sighs. ‘Masturbation is okay.’
I almost choke.
‘We give them hormones to slow down their sex drive, but we can’t go too far. Too much suppression slows cell growth. No penetration though, it’s dangerous. Get Tamba to stop them.’
Does she mean a shock? My ears amplify the breathing, the shatter of a cough to my right.
Meirong turns to the sound, speaks into her device. ‘Tamba, number one, what temp?’
‘Umm . . . normal,’ Tamba replies.
‘Tell Olivia to check vitamins.’
The man’s eyes tilt upwards, chestnut with golden flecks. His face is so gaunt his cheekbones are like steel pins placed under his skin. He has a long penis. It lies lethargic, untrimmed against the mesh. There is a single burn mark on the inside of the man’s ankle.
Meirong points to the floor of the cage next to his. ‘Those are the waste plates. They look like nothing, but they’re very sensitive tools for measuring blood pressure, temperature, heart rate.’
An old woman sits with a full bum on the metal square, her legs, I am sorry to say, splayed. Her hair twists over her shoulder and drapes her groin in a long grey rope.
‘The subjects slide them to the side and excrete into a tray.’ Meirong’s face assembles into sweet, pretty smugness. ‘The waste is diluted with sea water and flushed away.’
I am relieved
