She once told me that you can distinguish between truth and lies by the way the speaker tilts their head: slightly to the side, truth; forwards, a lie. It’s not effective for everyone, of course. There are professional liars out there who know how to control such noticeable mannerisms, and there are people like Della, who spend their time marking these liars. They are the most accomplished deceivers of all. I am sure now that Della spun me more than a few mild deceits in the time I knew her.
There is a pile of bodies heaped against the harbour wall as I step from the gangway and onto the mole. Two or three deep, a hundred metres long, with seagulls darting their heads here and there to lift out moist morsels in their red-tainted beaks. I’d always wondered where that red mark came from, ever since I was a child. Della told me it was tomato sauce from all the chips the gulls used to steal, and I believed her for a while. Then she told me they were natural markings. Now, I know the truth.
“Where do they come from?” I ask the policeman who stands at the bottom of the gangway. He glances over his shoulder at the bodies, as if surprised that I even deigned mention them.
“No worries,” he grins through black and missing teeth. “Dead trouble, rioters. Normal, all is normal.” He grabs my arm and helps me onto the mole, nodding and never, for one instant, relinquishing eye contact until I tip him.
“Rioters, eh?”
The little man forces a mock expression of disgust, and I actually believe he wants me to smile at his display. “Rioters, wasters, trouble. No more worries.” He performs an exaggerated salute, then turns and makes sure my tip is safe in his pocket before helping down the passenger behind me.
I stroll quickly along the dock, sweat already tickling my sides and plastering my wispy hair to my forehead. I try not to look at the pile of corpses, but as I approach the gulls let out a raucous cry and take flight in one frantic cloud. Three young boys run to the corpses and begin levering at them with broom handles, lifting limbs so that they can scour the fingers and wrists of those beneath for signs of jewellery. Evidently they have already been picked clean, because by the time I reach the harbour and hurry by with my breath held, the kids have fled, and the gulls are settling once more.
II
“There’s a guy called String,” Della said, handing me another bottle of beer and lobbing a log onto the fire. “He may be able to help.” So casual. So matter-of-fact. It was as if she were talking about the weather, rather than my fading life.
“String?” The name intrigued me, and repeating it gave me time to think. He’d been all over the news a few months ago, but then I’d thought nothing of it. At the time I’d had no need of a cure.
Della stared over at me, the light from the fire casting shadows that hid her expression. Calm, I guessed. Content. That was Della all over. She had short hair, which she cut herself, and her clothes consisted of innumerable lengths of thin coloured cloth, twisted decoratively around her body and giving her the appearance of an old, psychedelic mummy.
She had no legs. They had been ripped off in a road accident, just at the beginning of the Ruin. She was too stubborn to wear prosthetics.
“Lives in Greece. On one of the islands. Can’t remember which.” She frowned into the fire, but I did not believe her faulty memory for a moment.
“So what could he do? What does he know?”
Della shrugged, sipping her beer. “Just rumours, that’s all I’ve heard.”
I almost cried then. I felt the lump in my throat and my eyes burning and blurring; a mixture of anger and resentment, both at my fellow humans for tearing the world apart, and at Della for her nonchalant approach to my fatal condition.
“I’m pretty fucking far past rumours, now. Look.” I lifted my shirt and showed her my chest. The growths were becoming visible, patterns of innocent-looking bumps beneath my skin that spelled death. “Just tell me, Della. I need to know anything.”
She looked at my chest with feigned detachment. It was because she hated displays of self-pity rather than because she didn’t care. She did care. I knew that.
“His name’s String — rumour. He’s a witch-doctor, of sorts — rumour. Rumour has it he’s come up with all kinds of impossible cures. I’ve not met anyone who’s gone to him, but there are lots of stories.”
“Like?”
She shrugged, and for the first time I realised what a long shot this was. I was way beyond saving — me and a billion others — but she was giving me this hope to grab onto, clasp to my rotting chest and pray it may give me a cause for the few months left to me.
“A woman with the Sickness eating at her womb. She crawls to him. Five days later, she turns up back home, cured.”
“Where was home?”
“London Suburbs. Not the healthiest, wealthiest of places since the Ruin, as I’m sure you know. But String, so they say, doesn’t distinguish.” Della poked the fire angrily with a long stick. I could see she wanted to give this up, but she was the one who’d started it.
“Which island, Della?”
She did not answer me, nor look at me.
“I’ll know if you lie.”
She smiled. “No you won’t.” From the tone of her voice I knew she was going to tell me, so I let her take her own time. She looked up at the corrugated iron roof, the rusted nail-holes that let acidic water in, the hungry spread of spider’s webs hanging like festive decorations.
“Malakki,” she said. “Malakki Town, on the island of Malakki. He’s got some sort of a commune in the hills. So rumour has it.”
“Thanks, Della. You know I’ve got to go?” I wondered why she had not mentioned it before. Was it because it was a hopeless long shot? Or perhaps she just did not want to lose me? Maybe she relied on me a lot more than she let me think.
She nodded. I left a week later, but I did not see her again after that night. It was as if we’d said goodbye already, and any further communication would make it all the more painful.
III
There is a good chance that I will never return from this trip. The lumps on my chest have opened up and are weeping foul-smelling fluid; the first sign of the end. I wear two T-shirts beneath my shirt to soak up the mess.
And if my disease does not kill me, Malakki is always there in the background to complete the job.
The island is awash with a deluge of refugees from the Greek mainland, fleeing the out-of-control rioting that has periodically torn the old country apart since the Ruin. From the harbour I can see the shantytowns covering the hillsides, scatterings of huts and tents and sheets that resemble a rash of boils across the bare slopes. All hint of vegetation has been swept away, stripped by the first few thousand settlers and used for food or fuel for their constant fires. Soil erosion prevents any sort of replanting, if there were those left to consider it. There is a continuous movement of people across the hillsides; from this distance they resemble an intermingling carpet of ants, several lines heading down towards the outskirts of the city.
In the city itself, faceless gangs ebb and flow through the streets, moving aimlessly from one plaza to the next or sitting at the roadside and begging for food. There are hundreds of people in uniform or regulation dress, most of them carrying firearms, many of them obviously not of standard issue. Whether these are regular army and police it is impossible to tell, but the relevance is negligible. The fact is, they seem to be keeping some form of radical order; I can see thin shapes hanging from balconies and streetlamps, heads swollen in the fierce heat, necks
