‘Watch carefully, Malachi.’ She clips the leather brace to the edges of the opening. Two pretty hands slide through the gap into the falconer’s glove. Meirong pulls on the leather strap so it traps and separates the hands in one drag. The metal buckle bites the leather, squeezes the knuckles together. Meirong sinks her cutter beneath the nail of a little finger. ‘This one’s a husband killer.’
There is a snigger inside the cage. ‘Only one, Miss China. You make it sound like there were a whole lot.’ The woman has glossy black hair tangled in knots. Her skin is as white as the polystyrene trays we slapped the chickens onto. Her breasts are perfect, curiously tilting, their eyes innocent. She has a mouth like a fig, plush with a dip in the middle. Inside her mouth there is sweet wet flesh, seeds of salivary glands, soft pink papillae. I can’t see them, but I know. The fig never disappoints.
We had a fig tree outside our hut. We watched every fruit grow, picked it at the first sign of pigeons.
I force my attention back to Meirong, sending a curve of nail flying against the mesh. The woman’s arms and legs are notched with healed cuts, a peculiar scaling; a strange mutation of a mermaid. And she sits like a mermaid, her knees bent to the side, her feet tucked under her bum. The soles of her feet are pink from the pressure, her only colour besides her thick, fig lips and her nipples like a rabbit’s nose. If you touched them they would retract. The fig splits, shows a dream of pink.
‘In case you’re wondering how I did it, I used a knife.’
Meirong smacks the buckle on the leather strap, loosens it. ‘You’re wasting your time, Vicki. This one can’t speak.’
Vicki withdraws her hands. ‘Can’t or won’t?’
Meirong steps back, delivers her high, triumphant line. ‘Malachi has no tongue.’
Forty pairs of eyes slide down my jaw, find the place where my tongue should be rooted. I lift my chin, try to blur my eyes, but the black-haired woman starts a giggle that staggers and trots along the cage walls. Behind me, a mad guffaw blasts from a large man with curling black sideburns trying to creep into his mouth.
‘Ah, Malachi.’ The refrain starts with the rope-haired crone, who, up close, looks like Granny Elizabeth. She, too, looks like she could do with an alcoholic drink.
‘Malachi-i-i . . .’ More voices coalesce, broken by higher notes.
‘Walk.’ Meirong marches me between the cages like I am mounted on a trolley. She warns the prisoners, ‘If anyone spits, you’ll get ninety volts.’
A woman’s imploring nipples press against the mesh, her hands against the cage making plump squares of skin. ‘Malachi . . . Help me . . .’
They whisper, they wail with open palms. Men, most of them, their voices deep with a raw catch. Oh God, beseeching. Meirong turns at the end of the aisle, leads me back the way we came. She bangs on number forty, the last cage on our right.
‘Josiah has killed over three hundred people.’
It is the man with coarse hair curling towards his teeth. He smiles at me. ‘Malachi.’ He savours my name like it is tender meat.
I want to run away as fast as my legs will carry me but I turn my back on him, swallow my spit. I walk after Meirong, suddenly foolish in white, a ball boy at Wimbledon, my shirt too thin across my spine.
* * *
Meirong shuts the door, stares at me in the sudden, sucking quiet. ‘Will you remember?’
The flames across my face, the agony that sent me into weeks of bloodless sleep.
‘Will you remember, when they get like this?’
A cocktail of shame and rage in the guerrilla’s eyes. Blood flowing like a river in the Tantwa watercourse, bodies arrested in the air then landing, weeping on the yellow linoleum.
‘We deliberately left the sedative out of their morning feed.’ There is not a nuance of remorse in her voice. She bows without a hint of respect. ‘I think you’ve passed the test.’
She leads me up the spiral stairs to Tamba’s observation station.
* * *
I ignore the flickering portraits on the wall, force my mind to register the piping diagram on Tamba’s computer screen.
‘We unclip the feed pipe when we winch the cages up,’ Meirong says. ‘As you can see, the irrigation is all done from above.’
Tamba notices my desperate composure. ‘Hey brother, you need a rest.’ He presses the switch on a printer, catches the sudden tongue of printed plastic.
‘Keep it.’ He hands me the picture.
But Meirong is not finished. She fixes on my useless mouth. ‘The two of you must work out a system of signals. The agent said you had first aid?’
I nod. A requirement for supervisors, but I learned more from watching doctors fighting to save flesh, not rubber mannequins.
‘Good. It’s too bad you don’t sign, but you’ll have to try. For instance, Tamba, how would he say, “Administer shock”?’
‘Umm . . .’ Tamba thinks. He presses his wrists together, mimes handcuffs.
‘Right. That’s punishment. Got it?’
I nod. Meirong watches my hand hanging uncooperatively against my thigh.
‘How would you say, “Check temp”?’
‘It’s okay.’ Tamba tries to spare me. ‘We’ll work on it later.’
Meirong slings a red lanyard around my neck, anoints me. ‘Your key card to the cultivation hall. Look after it.’ She flicks her liquid hair. A black wave breaks. She melts down the spiral.
* * *
It is a short passage and three unexpected stairs to the canteen. I stumble down them, suddenly weak. A woman gets up from a table with long benches fixed to it, all of it bolted to the minutely swaying rig. Her two big teeth make me believe her wide smile.
‘Hey, Malachi.’ She is thin and planed like a corner of a wall, with a prominent nose and protruding throat. In the deep, unpractised
