Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [28]
But he’d heard her talking to Dad in the kitchen one night as he passed the closed door on the way to the bathroom. There’s a place for me there, she’d said.
There’s a place for you here! Dad had said. With me! With your kids!
But I could do so much more from there, and not just for you and Marcus and Lenny. It’s bigger. It’s more. It’s closer to the centre of things—I don’t know how to explain. It’s another level.
I want you on this level, darl. I want you to stay here, and to be able to touch and see you, and talk to you, and the kids to be able to too, and—
I won’t be going anywhere. I’ll still be here. The air you breathe, the water you drink, the weather, the ground—
Marcus had let the bathroom door close with its usual loud click. He’d crossed to the toilet, and tried to drown out any sound of their voices with as rattling a pee as he could manage.
Dad had been good; he would wink at Marcus if he caught his eye; he would wrestle the same after tea on the lounge-room floor. (You boys—Mum would pretend to sound tired—Why do you have to be so boysie? And Dad, pinning Marcus down and laughing, would say, We just do, darl. Don’t we, mate? Don’t we? Don’t we? With every don’t he would dig his big strong fingers into Marcus’s side. Marcus hated it, loved it, didn’t quite know how he felt.)
But Dad had bought the phones, and some of their talk about the phones, and the rules about them, had leaked out where Marcus could hear. He remembered the importance in Dad’s voice: At all times, all right? And Mum saying, I heard you the first time, crossly, as if Dad was making a fuss about nothing. It’s not going to happen, I tell you. I’ve got a baby coming.
You had a baby this time. They’d both looked at Marcus drawing a stegosaurus for his homework at the kitchen table, and looked away again. You had a baby both times. Does that make a difference to them?
She’d turned away to the sink, started hissing water onto vegetables to make dinner. They didn’t take me, did they? she’d said in an only-to-Dad voice. There’d been a hint, in her voice, of wishing, of thinking she’d missed out on something. Marcus’s head had popped up and his gaze had quivered like arrows stuck in both of them.
Dad had winked at him, but there’d been no smile in his face to go with it. Not all the way, no, he’d said quietly, to the side of Mum’s bent head.
I need you to do something for me, Marcus.
He and Mum had settled themselves in Eastlands food hall with thickshakes. He’d felt so carefree, just before. It wasn’t as if he didn’t worry; it was just that the worrying part of his life flowed on separately from the rest, like the Blue Nile river-water moving alongside the White. He didn’t want them to meet and mix up with each other.
Dad won’t listen, Mum went on. He won’t do it. He doesn’t want to be ready because he doesn’t want it to happen. And maybe it won’t.
He tried to read from her face what she wanted. She looked around at the other tables, and he examined them too, the people putting chips into themselves, the food shops sleek and bright, some of the family-owned ones messier with signs and hanging pans and plastic fruit or flowers by their cash registers. He saw that a person who had been lifted off the ground by happiness could be unimpressed with the food hall. For Marcus it was a place of wonders—all he could think about here was how long he could stay, how much he’d be allowed to eat, how much of that could be treats and how much would have to be healthy food.
But somebody needs to know how to do these things, if it does, Mum said. He watched her from behind his thickshake, knowing what she was doing, knowing that the shake was a giant white bribe. Just in case, Mum said. I’m not saying it’s going to happen tomorrow or anything.
His hands folded themselves in his lap. It was a lot she was asking of him. Dad wouldn’t be happy.
The way I think of it