I glance at her arms, limp and hanging.
Meirong says, ‘Olivia’s baby boy needs lungs.’
‘They’re coming with this second cycle.’ Olivia exhales, her breath catching on the deadline. Her eyes are filmed with salt. She locks her fingers, twists her empty arms inside out. ‘I can’t wait.’
Meirong waves at a trolley piled with white crockery. ‘Come, let’s eat. Janeé is going to be late.’
The food is alien-seeming on this planet of sea. The carrots are a deathly grey, but I am not surprised. The memory of roots and plants and transpiration already seems incredible this far out to sea. My lamb chop looks like it was carved and cooked a year ago. My potato took the heat then crumpled into its plastic skin.
‘The food’s good tonight,’ Tamba says softly next to me. He laughs at my surprised twitch. ‘Yeah, brother . . .’
Across from me, Olivia shines the arm of her fork for nearly a whole minute. She is jittery about the days to harvest, shallow-panting to the date. I puncture my potato tentatively. This is my warning. She is falling to pieces after only thirteen weeks. I chew doggedly, tell my queasy body that the subtle shifting of the rig is a mere fantasy. Next to me Tamba checks the growth on my chin, assessing, perhaps, how thick my beard could be. He stares at my cling-wrap hands, sniffs discreetly for an odour off me, but I am sanitised by salt air and Solo deodorant. I don’t know what his story is, but Tamba is afraid of my black skin.
A woman sticks inside the door frame, forces her huge hips through the space. Her head is a plump pumpkin, her bum a plush double sofa on which two people could sit comfortably. She eyes me like she’s trying to guess if my species bites. ‘Malachi.’
I raise a hand to her, spoon some carrots in. As she sits, the joints of the bench surrender, then weakly fix.
‘Janeé used to cook for hundreds in the Craymar fish factory,’ Olivia says ingratiatingly.
Janeé’s face comes gently alive. ‘It was easy. After a few years, feeding a hundred people is the same as feeding ten.’ Janeé mulches her food like a waste-disposal machine, drains a glass of juice the colour of blood. The bench almost levitates as she gets up.
‘Thanks, Janeé,’ Olivia and Tamba sing as she crashes our plates onto the trolley and rattles it over the threshold. Her bum bulges and slides. I almost hear the pop as she arrives on the other side.
* * *
Tamba clangs with me down the passage, shoves on the door to my living quarters. ‘Here we go.’
It is a four-by-four yellow cell, painted lava thick. There are two beds against the walls.
‘You’re sharing with me.’ Tamba grins. ‘Sorry.’
My suitcase is already on one little bed, unzipped. Inside, everything is rumpled and rearranged. Tamba apologises on behalf of the bosses.
‘They’re serious about staying secret, dude. They trash our microchips. And their satellite shield is fifteen miles wide.’
They must have checked the lining of my case, my toothpaste, for what? I see it has been squeezed. I lift the jumble of my clothes. My radio is still there. The wires and the plastic plug. I think of the pretty bridge on the husband killer’s foot. I check the wall socket. Two-pronged. Good. I sigh. My very first sound since I arrived. I push my suitcase off the bed and lie down.
‘God, it’s like a gift Janeé’s got,’ Tamba laughs. ‘One thing’s for sure, they didn’t choose her for her cooking.’ I feel him prying at my shut eyelids. ‘She’s here to earn arteries for her son. They say it’s diabetes, but the truth is he’s a smack addict.’
My eyes sneak open.
Tamba smiles, teasing me with the mystery. ‘He doesn’t qualify for a transplant but the thing with a cook is, you need extra insurance. Think about it, Malachi, if the cook gets pissed off . . .’ He sprinkles air. ‘She can poison you.’
I stare at him without intelligence.
‘Do you wanna come and watch a movie?’
I shake my head.
Tamba backs out, dismayed by my meagre potential as a friend.
But I don’t rest easily.
The old woman in the cage brings me the scent of yeast from Granny Elizabeth’s palm beer. It brings me the shine of the crèche children’s skin, the sweat on their palms as they clutched on to my mother – with me, her little prince, always closest to her heart.
I roll over, face the wall, try to stifle the memories.
* * *
I fastened my lips to her nipple until I felt brave enough to wrestle and yelp with the children my age, while she helped feed the newborns with rubber teats.
The memories push up from the bottom of my spine, pass through the barbed wire around my heart. I roll into a ball, try to refuse them room at the inn. But they will not dissipate.
* * *
Cecilia worked night shift so she could be with me. She arrived home from the corn sheds and put me to her breast just as the sun was starting to sting her eyelids. There’s no point in having a child if you didn’t have time to love it, she said, and even then I knew she meant she would never leave me in a box to cry until my tears slowly dried in a factory crèche where I might as well be drip-fed. Where I would be lucky to get a turn to suck on hastily thrust rubber, thirty seconds to suck while my mother takes her slim place in the factory line, her elbows ticking, take, twist drop, hardly time to shift her weight to the other foot.
Sometimes my mother and Granny Amma would find a sliver of sun shining between the two crude fingers of the fibre-optic factory and speak of the politics of raising children who feel strong inside, not grow up to live on Granny Elizabeth’s palm-beer oblivion. Sometimes
