Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [31]
‘What do you think you’re doing, Al?’ Dad murmured.
‘Um-mah!’ said Lenny, turning from his shoulder.
It was difficult to get the words out, and when he did, it sounded as if Marcus lisped, in the inaudible rush of noise. ‘She’s brighter than she was last time,’ he said.
‘Yeah, you better get that neck-lace on her quick.’
‘I’ll have to stand on the loo.’ Marcus made to go around her, but there was not quite enough room for him to squeeze past the glory of her, on either side.
‘Here, I’ll put it up,’ said Dad.
‘You want me to hold Lenny?’
‘No, she’s good.’ And he held her more firmly against his shoulder, took the ring of flowers from Marcus, and reached up and put it over Mum’s head. Her hair didn’t move where the neck-lace touched it. The flowers settled to her chest, but instead of coming awake as she had last time at their touch, and seeing Marcus and Dad, and easing down out of the air and hugging them all surprised, now she only hung as before, one leg bent as if she were taking a step upward, her face lifted to receive the joy that poured down from above, so that she could re-emit it to people down here—to Marcus and Dad, certainly, but not to them specially. To everyone beyond and around them, to everyone in this place, on this level, as she’d said.
Lenny exclaimed and reached up for Mum’s face. Her hands, soft and live and harmless, batted and pushed at Mum’s ungiving cheeks, Mum’s chin, grasped at Mum’s earlobe and slid aside on her stony-stiff hair.
‘Come on, Al,’ said Dad. ‘We’re all here waiting for you—me and Marcus and Lenny. Come on home, now. It’s a school night. Marky needs to get to bed, eh.’ And his big hand touched her face too, and rubbed the collar of her good dress, which should have bent at his touch, but which stayed stiff instead, would not move except to snap, it looked like.
‘She’s gone too far inside.’ Marcus hardly heard what he was saying through the joyous turmoil. ‘Too far away.’
‘Shh, don’t say that,’ said Dad. ‘She might hear you; she might think you’re giving her permission.’
‘I don’t think she can hear us. I don’t think she can hear anything. Not from here. Not any more.’
Any more. He heard himself say that. He knew what it meant, but was unable to mind or fear it. It was just a fact.
Marcus put his arms around the warm curves of Mum’s skirt-folds, around one of her warm stone stockinged legs; he laid his cheek against them, though they were the wrong texture, and resisted him. He closed his eyes. It was pointless for Dad to beg and plead and weep the way he did last time. Mum was too entangled, and she was entangling further; her self was somewhere else, and she was becoming—within Marcus’s arms, under Dad and Lenny’s hands—something else. She flushed hotter and hotter—hotter than normal blood should go. Marcus held tight, hoping she would burn him right up, or tangle him in and take him wherever she was going. The power brimmed and spilled out of her; it poured through Marcus’s flesh, through his bones, through his skull and tongue and teeth; Mum shook with the speed and strain, like a car or an aeroplane pushed to its very limits.
‘Alice, you can’t,’ said Dad, gently, hopelessly. ‘Please, love, me and these babies? We need you, we need you to stay.’
But she was gone already, to that other level. And they could not follow; her stiffened clothes, her hard hot skin, were effects of her being drawn through a barrier that would never give way to