Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [17]
She glances over her shoulder, back along the path. ‘If I’m not mistaken,’ she says, removing her hand from his arm and placing it in her ermine muff, ‘one of those ladies once had a place in your affections.’
‘The Leblanc sisters? Well, they were beauties in their time, though you may find that hard to credit now.’
‘Did they always clutch each other so?’ she says, glancing back again. ‘Did they always carry themselves in that strange way?’
‘On the contrary, they were very fine dancers, once,’ says Gallantine mildly.
His wife is silent until he will look at her, and then for a while of looking.
She laughs a very little, through her beautiful nose. ‘How very gauche,’ she murmurs, narrowing her eyes at him. ‘How very crude of you.’ Her mouth is lovely, too. It is the only spot of colour in the whole wintry park. She hisses at him, almost inaudibly. ‘There are so many things for which to punish you.’
‘Madam.’ His voice cracks with gratification. He offers her his arm.
She reattaches herself to him, and they walk on.
{ An Honest Day’s Work
Jupi’s talkie-walkie crackled beside his plate. Someone jabbered out of it, ‘You about, chief?’
All four of us stopped chewing. We’d been eating slowly, silently. We all knew that this was nearly the last of our peasepaste and drumbread.
Jupi raised his eyebrows and finished his mouthful. ‘Harrump.’ He brushed the flour from the drumbread off his fingers. He picked up the talkie and took it out into the courtyard. Jumi watched him go, eyes glittering, hands joined and pointing to her chin.
‘Couldn’t have come at a better time,’ said Dochi. ‘Eat something other than pease for a change.’ He rolled his eyes at me.
‘Eh. Pease is better than nothing, like some people have,’ I said, but mildly. You don’t pick a fight with the prince of the household.
‘Sh!’ said Jumi, leaning towards the courtyard door.
‘Why don’t you go out?’ Dochi pushed his face at her. ‘Listen right up close?’ Dochi was sound in body, so could get away with rudeness. With my withered leg I had to be more careful.
‘Sh!’ she said again, and we listened.
From the squeal of the voice and the way it worried on and on, it was Mavourn on the other end—and from Jupi’s barking answers: ‘Yup...I’ll be there...I’ll fetch him on the way...Yup.’ Behind his voice, blue-daubs buzzed in the neighbour’s bananas, tearing strings off the leaves for nesting. Farther away were the cries of seabirds, and of that family down the lane, that always fought, that no one spoke the names of.
Then Jupi was in the doorway, the talkie clapped closed in his hand, his arms spread as if to receive, as only his due, this gift from heaven.
Jumi smiled frightenedly. ‘Incoming?’ she said.
Jupi tipped his head.
‘A big one?’
‘Mavourn says one leg and one arm, but sizeable. Good big head, good sex. Not junk, he says.’
Jumi clapped her hands, sparkling. Then she went modest, pulled the cloth farther forward around her face, and ushered our emptied plates towards herself. The anxiety was gone, that had been tightening her like slow-wrung laundry these past weeks.
And for us, too, all of a sudden the evening’s heat and approaching darkness weren’t oppressive any more. We didn’t need to flee from worried thoughts into sleep.
‘So I can be useful too?’ I said. ‘If it’s sizeable?’
Dochi snorted, but Jupi blessed me with a nod. ‘Armarlis can have work too, as I arranged with A. M. Agency Limited. Just as I arranged it, it comes to be, does it not?’
Jumi pushed the pease-bowl and the bread-platter towards him. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You will need your strength for working.’
So we went to the office of A. M. Agency Limited, and saw their hiring officer, and I was taken on as a team-onlooker, and put my mark on the dotted line.
‘Well, there is no problem with the boy’s hand, at least,’ said the hirer’s assistant. He thought it was a kind of