Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [23]
A slow shiver went through the whole length of the beast. At its foot, water splashed up from the drumming of its heel on the plan.
The knee-team’s onlooker flashed by, alone, whom I had thought so professional-looking this morning.
‘Down the ropes!’ Mister Chopes shouted.
My men, their knees bent to spring into a run, looked to me for the word.
‘Back up here!’ I megaphoned through the noise. A man fleeing past me clapped his hand to his ear and scowled as he ran on. ‘We’ll wait for the boss!’
But Mister Chopes, tiny on top of the quaking beast, was swinging his arms as if he would scoop us all up and throw us towards the head. ‘We’ll go,’ I said. ‘On boss’s orders. Form up and I’ll be the chanter.’
And so my men—all of them older than me, because it’s the younger and limberer workers who go up top—made two lines in front of me. I used my whistle like a chanter’s drum and held them to a rhythm. It was a fast one, but still I kept swinging nearly into the rearmost men—a crutch-pace is longer than a normal stride. We passed a man in the water, neither standing nor crouching; excrement ran down his legs and dripped from the hem of his loongy; his wide eyes were fixed on the vast shuddering looming shadow over us all, and his lips had drawn right back from his big, sticking-out teeth. Beyond him some stretcher-men were busy lifting a misshapen, screaming thing with red spikes coming out of it. I tried to watch only the water shooting out flat to the sides when my men’s feet hit it.
‘Is it electricity?’ one of my men asked the knowledgeable one, as we ran.
‘Is what electricity?’
‘With the dead frog. Has somebody hit a nerve?’
‘A nerve? There’s no nerve in a body can make the whole thing shake like that.’
When we got to the head end, people in the beast’s shadow were calling for help, but no stretcher-men ran to them. The harvested hair made a mountain on the plan, winched halfway to the hair-shed, strands trailing behind like giant millipedes. The shorn scalp had been taken off, and the sawyers had cut the full oval in the brain-case. As we hurried past—we were not close; it only felt close because the head was so big—the beast’s convulsions made this dish of bone tip slowly outward.
My rhythm went ragged, but my men kept it anyway, bringing me back into rhythm though it should have been me bringing them.
At the top of the plan near the steamer-sheds was a thick, panicky crowd, all trying not to be the outermost layer. I drew my team up on number 18 plan. Our formation was all gone to beggary, but we were together, tight together; none of us was missing, don’t worry. From number 17 we must look like a row of heads upon a single candy-striped body.
‘Is that Mister Chopes?’ I looked back down the plan. I wanted a boss. I wanted to be in charge of nothing, no one.
‘Look at them! And look at those raggedy foot-people coming after! Chopes will get commended for this, being so neat and ordered.’
‘If he doesn’t die.’
‘If we don’t all die.’
‘Look! Look at the stuff inside!’
The bone lid had tipped right out from the beast’s head. The head-contents sat packed in their cavity. They were supposed to be grey, a purplish grey. Once, I had seen some damaged ones go past, on a lorry; the good ones were shipped across to the Island for sterile processing.
Frog eggs, I thought. Sheep eyes. A lightning storm.
Inside each giant cell floated two masses of blackness, joined by a black bar. Through each cell, and among them, pulsed, flashed, webs, veins, sheets, streaks and sparks of light. Each flicker and pass began yellow, flashed up to white, faded away through yellow again—and so quickly that it took me many flickers to see this, to separate single flashes from the patterns, from the maps the light fast drew, then fast re-drew.
‘That’s the brain,’ said Trawbrij the chanter. ‘Those lights must be its thinking. It’s alive. They’ve not killed it properly.’
‘They’ve taken their economising too far,’ said Mister Chopes. ‘They