Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [32]
‘Please, Al? Please?’ Marcus could hear that Dad knew he hadn’t reached her, and that he wouldn’t, ever.
They held on, all three, to what was left of her, the stinging-hot marble of her, the blare of solid light, solid noise, solid needles. She shook in their arms, and cracked soundlessly, cataclysmically; she split up and down and a foreign fire rushed out of her. There was a momentary pain, all the pain of burning alive pressed into a couple of seconds. Lenny shrieked. But then the pain was gone, and a perfect vacancy opened around the four of them, silent, black, cool. Yes, thought Marcus and he tried to pitch himself into it, but it was like that time Dad had tried to get him to dive into the deep end of the swimming-pool head first, with his arms down by his sides. Marcus had bobbed and crouched and laughed at himself, but without his arms to swing up, how could he point himself properly? How could he protect his head?
And as he stood there hugging the shards of her, unable to move, unable to dive, Mum fell, or flew, or melted into the blackness. Marcus stumbled forward, and barely felt the banging of his knees against the rim of the lidded toilet, he was so occupied watching her go, watching her be taken.
The invisible light, the inaudible racket, switched off. He opened his eyes. He and Dad held a rag-Mum between them; he had her skirt-end and stocking-legs, from which the shoes had clattered to the floor, while Dad held her collapsed upper dress. The handbag teetered where it had donked onto the toilet lid, and then it tipped and fell to join the shoes.
A little leftover wail eased from Lenny. ‘Here,’ said Dad. ‘Hold this girl.’ He unclamped Lenny from himself. She drew a shuddering breath and glistened with tears, as he transferred her to Marcus. Marcus was glad to take her; she latched hard onto him and pressed her face into his neck. He sat on the toilet lid and held her while Dad folded the clothes, and took down Mum’s shopping bags from the hook on the back of the door—the door that someone had kicked or shouldered open, the lock half-broken out of the shattered chipboard and melamine. Dad slid the clothes into the bags like so much other shopping. What had she bought, Marcus wondered? Had she had any clue that she’d never get to use it?
The Ladies’ door squealed open. ‘Y’all right in there?’ someone called—one of those tough women in the coveralls, it sounded like, who’d seen all sorts of emergencies in her time.
‘Yeah, we’re good,’ Dad called out. He tucked Mum’s shoes away in a bag and smiled up at Marcus. ‘You right there, champ?’ he said quietly.
Marcus nodded. He was all right, he realised. He felt warm all over, and as if his head was still mildly aflame; he’d been made a torch of, it seemed, by Mum’s going.
And she hadn’t quite gone; it was true, what she’d said to Dad that night. She hadn’t gone so much as she’d kind of exploded, and the powder of her had been sifted all through everything, from Dad’s hair to the mirrors over the basins, to the broken chipboard of the door, through the temperature-controlled, freshened air of the bathroom, to the whole Swathes building beyond this room, and outward to the city, and all around that to the countryside and the sea, all their weathers and waters. Every leaf was of her and every grain; every bird and bug had something of Mum in it. It was not as good, and would never be, as having her alive in her real body, falling asleep against her or having her tut-tut and busy about the house. But it was not as bad as doing without her entirely. He might still talk to her, he felt, and she would hear. If he were to need her badly, she might summon something of her self from its dispersal, and help him be calm and sensible,