Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [3]
But there were no petals on the streaming air. Corin ran against the wind, blundered out of the yard and around the house. He must see what had happened.
At the corner of the house, the wind stopped him, like a rose-scented tarpaulin stretched across his path. But only he was blown and bewildered; nothing else moved, not a twig, not a leaf, not a flower. All Nance’s garden stood serene in the dying summer evening.
But along the fence the rosebushes were jagged black candelabra. The roses brightened in the bloom wind, the rose wind, big soft rose-lamps propped among the rough leaves and the thorns. They shone and they shed—was it a smoke? It was like dust, or tiny seeds, or tiny, numerous, distant stars gone to milk on the sky, or like the curls of grainy steam from your soup or your tea. This stuff purled and streamered across the lawn to Corin; he breathed it and it filled his brain, which had broken open when the wind first hit him.
Her name is Rose, he thought dizzily, and knew he had hit upon something.
Nostrils flared, mouth wide to keep catching the wind, he stumbled after the strand of thought, back along the house wall.
He saw Nance through the screen. The white tail of her hair was blown forward over one shoulder; hair-wisps danced around her face, which was all opened out and smoothed of its lines and thoughts by surprise. The newspaper lay flat on the kitchen table where Nance had pushed it back; it was unmoved by the wind. But the rose catalogue underneath—Nance held some of the catalogue pages down, but others rattled back and forth in the breeze, and the photographed roses were smudged on the pages, and shed sweet crimson, velvet mauve and soft ivory across the kitchen air.
‘Rose!’ He called her true-name through the screen. Because—he would never be able to explain to her!— she was the source of it. It was she who blew the rose-coals to brightness, it was she who, in the first place, had had the idea of the roses. It was she—it was the children all over again! He saw that, too! He had fumed and raged against each pregnancy, and snarled and boiled and beat at the children as they grew, and railed at her for enslaving herself to them—instead of to him! But there she’d been, swelling and dreaming and knitting and working and reading to them and making their little foods and fending him off them, all according to the garden plan in her head. She had had the children plotted out just so, as if on sheets of squared paper, and she had kept him out, just as she’d not let him do a spadeful of digging or bring a barrowload of bricks to edge the rose-bed—because he snarled and sneered so, because, allowed in, his anger would have thrashed about and damaged the whole project of the roses, of the children, of the garden.
‘I’m sorry about the roses!’ He felt as if he shouted, but it came out a child’s cry, afraid the night would hear and descend on him. The wind softened; the rose-colours were fading in the kitchen, Nance’s hair settled and she looked about, for herself and for him, the speaker beyond the door-screen.
‘It just seemed so old-womanish,’ he said falteringly, trying to get some words out before the wind, the thought, entirely went. ‘I just wanted you to stay my girl—’
And it was gone. The last colours slid off the catalogue pages and trickled to invisibility across the table.
Nance stood up and scraped the chair back. ‘Of course!’ She came around to the door. She was laughing, but not unkindly. ‘So that you could stay a boy, and all the girls still want you! Well, what kind of life is that, on and on and on? What is the use of that?’
‘I don’t know,’ he said, frightened. ‘But I didn’t know... what was the use of roses, either. I couldn’t see the point before, you see—’
She pressed her mouth to the screen, and he met it with his. Their warmths warmed the mesh. She put her hand up beside her face, and he matched it