Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [38]
‘Here I go.’
Ma crosses from her sweeping and kisses my right cheek. ‘Take that for him and this for you.’ She kisses my left. ‘And tell him about those pigeon; that’ll give him spirit till this evening.’
‘I will.’ I lift the door in the floor.
I used to need light; I used to be frightened. Not any more. Now I step down and my heart bumps along as normal; I close the lid on myself without a flinch.
I start up with ‘The Ballad of Priest and Lamb’. The stairway is good for singing; it has a peculiar echo. Also, Ma likes to hear me as I go. ‘It brightens my ears, your singing,’ she says, ‘and it can’t do any harm to those below, can it?’
Down I go. Down and down, down and round, round and round I go, and all is black around me and the invisible stone stairs take my feet down. I sing with more passion the lower I go, and more experimenting, where no one can hear me. And then there begins to be light, and I sing quieter; then I’m right down to humming, so as not to draw attention when I get there.
Out into the smells and the red twilight I go. It’s mostly the fire-river that stinks, the fumes wafting over from way off to the right before its flames mingle with the tears that make it navigable. But the others have their own smells, too. Styx-water is sharp and bites inside your nostrils. Lethe-water is sweet as hedge-roses and makes you feel sleepy.
Down the slope I go to the ferry, across the velvety hell-moss badged here and there with flat red liverworts. The dead are lined up in their groups looking dumbly about; once they’ve had their drink, Pa says, you can push them around like tired sheep. Separate them out, herd them up as you desire. Pile them into cairns if you want to! Stack them like faggots—they’ll stay however you put them. They’ll only mutter and move their heads side to side like birds.
The first time I saw them, I turned and ran for the stairs. I was only little then. Pa caught up to me and grabbed me by the back of my pinafore. ‘What the blazes?’ he said.
‘They’re horrible!’ I covered my face and struggled as he carried me back.
‘What’s horrible about them? Come along and tell me.’ And he took me right close and made me examine their hairlessness and look into their empty eyes, and touch them, even. Their skin was without print or prickle, slippery as a green river stone. ‘See?’ said Pa. ‘There’s nothing to them, is there?’
‘Little girl!’ a woman had called from among the dead. ‘So sweet!’
My father reached into the crowd and pulled her out by her arm. ‘Did you not drink all your drink, madam?’ he said severely.
She made a face. ‘It tasted foul.’ Then she turned and beamed upon me. ‘What lovely hair you have! Ah, youth!’
Which I don’t. I have thick, brown, straight hair, chopped off as short as Ma will let me—and sometimes shorter when it really gives me the growls.
My dad had put me down and gone for a cup. He made the woman drink the lot, in spite of her faces and gagging. ‘Do you want to suffer?’ he said. ‘Do you want to feel everything and scream with pain? There’s a lot of fire to walk through, you know, on the way to the Blessed Place.’
‘I’m suffering now,’ she said, but vaguely, and by the time she finished the cup I was no longer visible to her— nothing was. She went in among the others and swayed there like a tall, thin plant among plants. And I’ve never feared them since, the dead. My fear dried up out of me, watching that woman’s self go.
Here comes Pa now, striding up the slope away from the line of dead. ‘How’s my miss, this noontide? How’s my Scowling Sarah?’
Some say my dad is ugly. I say, his kind of work would turn anyone ugly, all the gloom and doom of it. And anyway, I don’t care—my dad is my dad. He can be ugly as a sackful of bumholes and still I’ll love him.
Right now his hunger buzzes about him like a cloud of blowflies. ‘Here.’ I slip the carry-cloth off my shoulder. ‘And there’s two fat pigeon for supper, in a pie.’
‘Two fat pigeon in one fat pie? You set a