Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [18]
Jupi could have said, ‘Oh no, he makes a good mark.’ Or, ‘That’s right, every other part of him is fine and sound.’ Or, ‘There are many activities for which two good legs are not needed.’ Instead he went icy quiet beside me.
I didn’t mind what the man said. I was too happy to mind. I had a contract and I was going to do a useful job like any man—why would I care what anyone said? It was a nuisance only because Jupi minded so much that I had to mind on his behalf. And because, when we had finished our business, I had to swing along so fast and chatter so hard to make Jupi give up his minding with a laugh and hurry after me, and answer my questions.
Next morning before dawn, we took my job-ticket to the Commstore, and in the middle of the wonderful bustle there I was issued my onlooker’s whistle and megaphone. Jumi had plaited me a neck-cord for the megaphone, that would hold it close on my back while I walked so I could manage the crutches, and loose at my hip when I stood at my work and might need to reach for it fast.
Then we went down to number 17 plan to await the incoming.
The boss-men and the gangers grouped themselves, tense and sober, around my Jupi and his crackling talkie. My brother Dochi and his friends formed another group, as they did outside The Lips Club most nights, only without the showy bursts of laughter. They were tired; they were missing their sleep-in.
I was in the main crowd of workers. As soon as the general shape and proportions of the incoming were clear, we’d be teamed up. There was not much talk, just watching the bay and shivering in the breeze. Many of us wore the new Commstore shirts, bought on credit when the news came yesterday. The dull pink and mauve stripes were invisible in the dusky light, but the hot green-blue stripes glowed, slashing down a man’s left chest, maybe, with another spot on his right collar. To my eyes, as I read the plan over and over trying to make it real, trying to believe my luck, the crowd was sticks and spots floating in darkness, with a movement to it like long grass in a slow wind.
Every now and then another team-onlooker would come clearer against the others, his whistle a gleam, his megaphone swinging in his hand. These men I examined keenly; I was one of them now. I thought they all looked very professional. Their heads must be full of all manner of lore and experience, I was sure, and my own memory seemed very empty by comparison. Home life at my Jumi’s side was all I knew; I felt as if I ought to be ashamed of it, even as a pang of missing-Jumi made me move uncomfortably on the plan’s damp concrete.
Won’t this house be quiet without my little monkey! she had said this morning.
Which had made me feel peculiar—guilty because I’d not even thought about how Jumi might feel, that I was going to work; flustered and a little angry, it must be confessed, because it seemed that I could do no right, I could be a sort of stay-at-home embarrassing half-person by her side, or I could be a cruel son leaving her lonely.
While I was feeling all this, Dochi gave one of his awful laughs. Yes, he’s such a screecher of a monkey, he said. So loud as he swings from tree to tree!
Jumi gave him her mildest reproving look. She broke the soft-boiled egg and laid it on top of my soup in the bowl and pushed it towards me, under Dochi’s laughing at his own joke, which she was not making him stop.
Thank you, Jumi, I said.
The joke was that I was so quiet and so little trouble, anyone could ignore me if they chose. The joke was that, after some years of trying, of lashing out at Dochi with my crutches and being beaten for it, I would rather sit as I did now at my food, wearing a blank look, and let the laughter pass by.
The incoming appeared on the horizon like a small, weak sunrise. The workers stirred and gestured, and another layer bobbed above the shirt-stripes, of smiling teeth, of wide, bright eyes. My Jupi barked into the talkie, and the two tugboats crawled out from the headland’s shadow. They sent back on the breeze a whiff of diesel, and many noses drew