The Book of Malachi Read online

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Leave us a review

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Saturday

  Sunday

  Monday

  Tuesday

  Wednesday

  Thursday

  Friday

  Acknowledgements

  LEAVE US A REVIEW

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  The Book of Malachi

  Print edition ISBN: 9781789095197

  E-book edition ISBN: 9781789095203

  Published by Titan Books

  A division of Titan Publishing Group Ltd

  144 Southwark Street, London SE1 0UP

  www.titanbooks.com

  First Titan edition: October 2020

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  This is a work of fiction. All of the characters, organizations, and events portrayed in this novel are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead (except for satirical purposes), is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2020 T.C. Farren. All Rights Reserved.

  No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means without the prior written permission of the publisher, nor be otherwise circulated in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser.

  A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

  For David

  MONDAY

  My job is to check the plastic, see that it seals off the body parts, splays the flesh flat like faces against a windscreen. The vulnerability of a chicken is in the angle of their wings. If you pull them, the skin stretches, eases back. A newborn’s legs have the same elastic, I have seen this at the refugee centre in Zeerust. Their skinny legs stay up against their stomachs, the skin on their thighs rumpled and loose. Now it is my job to see that the skin on the chicken’s limbs is stretched and tucked to hide the hack marks. The machine must seal their pimpled skin, hide the tatters.

  I know what they say about me at New Nation. One of my assistants, Beauty, is eighteen. She chews gum while she tears the plastic off the corrections, a perfect black grape, her chewing gum the pip.

  ‘My granny’s getting old, she asks me the same questions, she forgets. “How was your day, Nono?” Later, “How was your day?” I told her about you, Malachi. I said not a sound comes from your mouth.’ Beauty smiles, her chewing gum stopped between her teeth. ‘Do you know how we say we will keep a secret? We say, “Don’t worry. I will make like Malachi.”’

  The phrase echoes in my head.

  I am a successful mute. Malachi, well done.

  * * *

  My boss and I meet on the packing-office steps. We almost kiss, we both fall back.

  ‘A woman was on the phone checking your psychometrics. A labour agent from Raizier Pharmaceuticals.’ Lizet’s face stays in the shadow, the sun colours her long neck yellow. ‘I said you’re always on time. You’re . . . appropriate. I said you understand instructions. Nothing wrong with his brain, I said. But, you know, he doesn’t communicate.’ Her mouth wilts. ‘The woman seemed pleased!’ Lizet steps outside. ‘Did you apply for something?’

  I shake my head.

  She checks my eyes for truth. Sighs, satisfied with the confusion she finds.

  ‘About two hundred corrections. It’s going to be a helluva day.’

  * * *

  All day I stroke the plastic back onto its track. I anticipate trouble, see it coming. My job is menial, but it doesn’t show. The plastic leaves no calluses. It erases my fingerprints, smoothes my hand into a black silk glove.

  I rinse off the static in my basin. Above it, the mirror has the skin disease mirrors get in gloomy rooms, dark spots that spread. In it, my hair is soft and knotted. My eyes are shallow sand at the edge of the Tantwa River. I have a cat’s head, wide across the eyes, tapering to the chin. The mirror is so high, I can only see the slight lift of my top lip. I cannot see my teeth, miraculously unblasted, unchipped by molten blade or machine-gun butt. I cannot see my fine scar, smoothed by a volunteer plastic surgeon.

  * * *

  I rest on the bed I bought from a man who went to jail for stealing chickens. The mattress has two dents, hollowed for a man and a wife, a virgin ridge in the middle.

  I can say that word now. Before, it would have meant a bolt through my body that ripped off my fingertips.

  Virgin. Virgin. I would say, over and over in my mind as I pressed the wires to my testicles.

  Virgin ridge.

  * * *

  Every twenty-four hours, I slip into the dent on the right. I take only the space I need, the air that I must breathe. At night, when the air is abundant, I run on the spot. I travel ten kilometres in the same place. In the morning, I go to the toilet in my shorts, drip two drops on the seat. Clean it. For breakfast I cook Jungle Oats in a small pan with no handle. I eat it with Huletts sugar and real butter. I am rich enough to buy butter.

  I inhabit number twenty-nine in the long line of the men’s hostel. They are stables, really, with a flush toilet in the corner. We peer over the top of the doors like dark horses at the scrappy grass. Beyond is a road pitted from rumbling trucks, bullies arriving with military frequency, carrying not men with weapons but live chickens with broken legs from being shoved into crates piled six storeys high. Now and then, a truck filled only with heads. I turn away.

  I have seen decapitation. The head disengages as if the spine is nothing. A mere rumour.

  TUESDAY

  The Raizier agent lets my hand go, shocked by its silkiness.

  ‘Susan Bellavista.’

  Her cheeks are florid, her accent American. Her eyes are cornflower blue, pale petals crushed by hooves or running feet. The only signs of danger are her thick, languid fingers and her shoes, pressed together under the desk. They are polished and stiff, the grey of gunmetal. The leather climbs all the way up to the ankle bone.

  ‘Malachi Dakwaa. I have a job for you.’ The agent reaches for her tall, curved bag, red leather with a black handle. She splits it open like a carcass. Pulls out Africa, unfolds the map. Sixteen plastic squares knock staccato on the wood. She points at my country, coloured in pink.

  ‘Which province are you from?’

  I touch the province next to mine.

  ‘Which village?’ she asks.

  A door shuts in my throat.

  ‘Malachi, who did this to you?’

  I see flying splinters, shattered school desks.

  She tries a gentler way. ‘Malachi, let me just say, what they did to you and your people . . .’

  I push back the people clamouring, steal air through their limbs.

  ‘You can correct it. Those monsters who kill with machine guns . . .’ She checks to see if she has hit broken skin. Her words drift out of focus, refuse to hold on to the tail of the one in front. The agent’s cinnamon breath disguises her predation.

  ‘What we do on our medical programme is get these murderers to save lives.’

  I blink, try to make h
er out against the sky.

  ‘They can’t harm you.’ She watches me for signs of fear. ‘No danger.’ When she smiles, I see her eyeteeth are slightly grey. ‘Malachi. Today is the luckiest day of your whole life.’ Her fingers creep across the desk, her soft arms stick to the top. She wants to touch me.

  ‘Do you want a tongue?’

  My head snaps back, startled.

  She nods. ‘Raizier needs a new Maintenance Officer. As payment, they will graft a tongue for you.’ She sews hasty stitches before her lips. ‘I’m talking about the best surgeons alive.’ She doesn’t trust my English. ‘The best medicine.’

  A force surges up my throat, completes my stump. A phantom tongue. She sees it boasting there like an erection. She sees the cataclysm in my eyes.

  I did not know I wanted it.

  My foolish eyes bathe themselves in salt. I cry before this large peach skirt and her two stiff shoes.

  God has decided I have been punished enough.

  ‘Go home and think about it,’ says Susan Bellavista.

  * * *

  I am a hungry animal, leading with my head as I gallop to the sound of my bullish breath. I will have a living, breathing tongue that can curl and lash and spit. A tongue that can tap the palate behind my teeth, suck air off my molars, make my Kapwa clicks. I am a broad-faced bull with a wet chest. I am Taurus in the Times.

  * * *

  My boss gives me the Times every week.

  ‘Take it for your fires,’ Lizet says.

  Each of us has a drum outside our room, but I don’t light fires, in case people come. I bring my lunch in the Times, vetkoek and jam, no evidence of it being read.

  If people knew I could read, they would ask me about my father, my mother, my lover. They would say to me, ‘Malachi, write a reply.’

  * * *

  Lizet is hunched forward like a chicken now, her shoulders flared to flap over her desk. ‘Why-y-y?’

  I turn up my hands, but there is nothing to read.

  She throws her digital pen on the release form on her desk. It bounces and hits the blades of her solar fan. She doesn’t laugh. ‘No explanation.’

  The stump of my tongue sinks into the floor of my mouth. I’m going to be reconstructed, I want to say. Remade.

  Lizet waves a trembling hand with faint purple patches. ‘You’ll lose a month’s pay. Why don’t you wait?’

  I let my head swing from side to side.

  ‘Malachi. You’re strange.’

  A conviction, for slipping from her life like a loose page.

  But she won’t feel any difference in the weight. She will train someone new in two afternoons, someone who can smile and sing, perhaps talk of their love life.

  I want to pick Lizet up, feel her pointed purple knees poking my thighs. I want to squeeze her hard, implanted breasts against me and say, Lizet, I will come back one day. Then I will laugh and say, Sorry for leaving you so suddenly.

  For seven years I have been her best quality controller, excellent with the automated plastic packing machine.

  * * *

  Only once did I have to electrocute myself for my boss. That day, she wore maroon high heels of soft leather with thin, crossed straps. It was not the shadow of her buttocks beneath her dress. I did not lust for the diamond that forms below a woman’s bum. The problem was, my boss had perfect ankles.

  * * *

  Lizet will miss talking without causing offence.

  ‘It’s because you don’t speak, Malachi. That’s why you have such good eyes.’

  She will miss my patronising shrug. Whatever, Lizet.

  She took my silence as affection, which is strange when you think that I never, not once, made a single sound. Not even when the locals slapped me at the Nelspruit taxi rank.

  ‘What’s this? Makwerekwere.’ An open-handed punch. ‘What country are you from? Darkie!’

  I showed my empty eyes, my open palms. For this I got a dislocated jaw, like a badly hung door.

  WEDNESDAY

  Today the agent’s hair lifts up like a wig. She wears a loose woman’s suit of baby blue. I check her feet under the desk. Her shoes are navy blue. On each ankle is a dark mark from pressing them together. Her hair follicles are black from constant chopping.

  ‘You will be working offshore. On the sea?’

  I nod.

  ‘On a rig. It’s like a boat, but it has . . . legs.’

  I smile inwardly.

  ‘Malachi.’ A thread of cold threat coils in Susan Bellavista’s voice. ‘Confidentiality is the most important thing about this job. The consequences are very, very steep.’ She taps the document with a clean nail. I give the plastic sheet a blank stare, but I read discreetly.

  The organ is awarded on a leasehold basis. If the signee speaks of what he/she has witnessed, Raizier has the right to retrieve the organ without legal recourse.

  ‘What this means, Malachi, is that if you ever talk about what you have seen, we will claim back your payment.’ She waits. ‘Do you understand me?’

  I swallow some stinging spit.

  ‘This is top-secret science,’ Susan growls. She whips a digital pen from somewhere. ‘Can you write your name?’

  I hesitate.

  ‘Just a mark?’

  I grip the pen like it’s a captured snake. I force its tip down near her fingernail, fight the reptile into a grim, deep M.

  Susan lets go of her breath. There is a bitter triumph in the way she says, ‘Good.’

  * * *

  I stop at the factory shop, buy a new radio for the deep sea. It will be my secret hardware. If they search me, they will see a radio for entertainment, not a strike that rips me inside out, a Molotov cocktail for my genitals.

  * * *

  I usually roll my clothes up tight like intestines but today I lay them flat in my suitcase, each pair of trousers, each shirt unfurled. I run my extra belt along the edge. My duvet, I roll up and tie tight. I bought it from Kashmir’s with my first New Nation salary. It has feathers inside, the dead chickens’ gift to me, perhaps for letting them spread their limbs on a polystyrene tray; not live crushed towards their own fat hearts, their cage cranking smaller every six hours. This is how fast they grow, their own fat cells shoving into each other, bruising their inflating heart that can do no other than punch back, pump.

  I throw in the cheap yellow Nokia Lizet gave me for after-hours callouts. I dare not take any books. In a sudden spasm of longing, I tuck an ancient roller-gel pen into the suitcase lid, and a thin white pad made from real paper. I’ll die without words, surely.

  For fifteen years I have lied about my literacy, when the truth is I read any words that dare to float close. I read the plastic magazines dumped in the shallow bush – Shutter Speed Photography, Cat Lover’s Journal, S.A. Motorboat. I read advertising flyers that truly fly in the wind. I read warning signs on everything, disclaimers. Ask me the ingredients on the Colgate shampoo bottle. In the bus I read long-distance over shoulders, so people think my fixed stare is vacant, perhaps autistic.

  Every three months I take my suitcase on wheels to the Hospice shop in Nelspruit. I pack in thirty-six books from the waste crates in the corner, three books to read per week. I rattle the case over my threshold, shut the door with a double bang. In my locked room, my boxer shorts on to cover my shame, I read with my electric wires standing by.

  Where will I hide those bodies now?

  * * *

  I have no choice but to light my first fire. A man is snoring two doors down. There is a whispering beyond, the whimper of a child. Someone else is smuggling what they love. No visitors are allowed overnight. Here at New Nation, the men sometimes sleep in the bush on cardboard sheets in order to cradle their children or make love to their wives. Tonight, the child in number eleven has two scared parents and two milky breasts. I know this from the uncertainty of his cry. His parents are risking their monthly income to touch the baby’s face in the candlelight, play at being family in the hours between midnight and
three a.m. when the chickens first feed.

  I quietly pile some clods of chicken droppings into my fireplace. The chicken-shit flames crash silently towards the stars, envious of their silver. I drop the books in threes. They shrink and leave a fragile shell of black. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Margaret Atwood, E.M. Forster. Louise Erdrich, Charles Dickens, Kweku Adobol. Even A Short History of Everything. I let it burn alone. Whoof. It conspires towards silence, as if the pattern of civilisation and the jealous, obsessive energy of science were all only worth an exhalation. I am not joking. It was a definite sigh. The child cries in number eleven as if the flames are flicking his tiny feet. It is a swollen breast that muffles the child’s shout. I hear it in the fullness of the silence. Some things I know because I am not living. I am listening.

  It is three a.m. A late, late cremation.

  THURSDAY

  I wheel my case into and out of the ulcers on the road. When I look back there are men’s eyes shining from every dark doorway. I breathe in, swing my case onto my head; keep a rough grip so I don’t look too womanly. It throws a shadow over my eyes, brings a Bhajoan sun to my thighs – a sun which was, a moment ago, South African. I forget my audience, drop my hands from my suitcase. I wipe the strange tears from my eyes.

  What are these? Why now?

  * * *

  The agent is waiting against a bullet-shaped BMW that looks like a huge, shining suppository. Susan’s buttocks have warmed against the metal and spread.

  ‘Ahhh!’ her hips thrust off the car.

  Relief ignites her eyes, illuminates the fluff on her orange trouser suit. Her suitcase is safely stored on the back seat, Scottish tartan. Next to it is a copper urn with a red ribbon tied around it. Susan clips open the boot. I don’t dust off my suitcase before I lift it: I have so much to apologise for, it’s better not to start. I’d have to apologise for the sweat I’m about to bring into her high-speed electric vehicle. And the fact that I won’t make a single sound for seven hours.

  Susan shuts the boot. ‘Righty oh!’

  I jerk my mouth into an awkward curve. That’s me, for seven hours. I get in with my sweat.