Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [39]
‘You look buggered.’ I sit on the moss beside him. ‘And that’s a long queue. Want some help, after?’
‘If you would, my angel.’ Donk, says the cork out of the bottle. Pa’s face and neck and forearms are all brown wrinkled leather.
He works his way through a bunnock, then the meat, the cheese, the second bun. He’s neat and methodical from first bite to last sup of the lemon.
When he’s done, he goes off a way and turns his back to pee into the lemon bottle, for you can’t leave your earthly wastes down here or they’ll sully the waters. He brings it back corked and wrapped and tucks it into the carry-cloth next to a rock on the slope. ‘Well, then.’
I scramble up from the thick dry moss and we set off down the springy slope to the river.
A couple of hours in, I’m getting bored. I’ve been checking the arrivals, sending off the ones without coin and taking the coin from under those tongues that have it, giving the paid ones their drink and checking there’s nothing in their eyes, no hope or thought or anything, and keeping them neat in their groups with my stick and my voice. Pa has rowed hard, across and back, across and back. He’s nearly to the end of the queue. Maybe I can go up home now?
But in his hurry Pa has splashed some tears onto the deck. As he steps back to let the next group of the dead file aboard, he slips on that wetness, and disappears over the side, into the woeful river, so quickly he doesn’t have time to shout.
‘Pa!’ I push my way through the slippery dead. ‘No!’
He comes up spluttering. Most of his hair has washed away.
‘Thank God!’ I grab his hot, wet wrist. ‘I thought you were dead and drowned!’
‘Oh, I’m dead all right,’ he says.
I pull him up out of the river. The tears and the fire have eaten his clothes to rags and slicked the hairs to his body. He looks almost like one of them. ‘Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!’
‘Calm yourself, daughter. There’s nothing to be done.’
‘But look at you, Pa! You walk and talk. You’re more yourself than any of these are theirs.’ I’m trying to get his rags decent across his front, over his terrible bald willy.
‘I must go upstairs to die properly.’ He takes his hands from his head and looks at the sloughed-off hairs on them. ‘Oh Sharon, always remember this! A moment’s carelessness is all it takes.’
I fling myself at him and sob. He’s slimed with dissolving skin, and barely warm, and he has no heartbeat.
He lays his hand on my head and I let go of him. His face, even without hair, is the same ugly, loving face; his eyes are the same eyes. ‘Come.’ He leads the way off the punt. ‘It doesn’t do to delay these things.’
I follow him, pausing only to pick up the carry-cloth in my shaking arms. ‘Can you not stay down here, where we can visit you and be with you? You’re very like your earthly form. Even with the hair gone—’
‘What, you’d have me wander the banks of Cocytus forever?’
‘Not forever. Just until—I don’t know. Just not now, just not to lose you altogether.’
His hand is sticky on my cheek. ‘No, lovely. I must get myself coined and buried and do the thing properly. You of all people would know that.’
‘But, Pa!—’
He lays a slimy finger on my lips. ‘It’s my time, Sharon,’ he says into my spilling eyes. ‘And I will take my love of you and your mother with me, into all eternity; you know that.’
I know it’s not true, and so does he. How many dead have we seen, drinking all memory to nowhere? But I wipe away my tears and follow him.
We start up the stairs, and soon it’s dark. He isn’t breathing; all I can hear is the sound of his feet on the stone steps, which is unbearable, like someone tonguing chewed food in an open mouth.
He must have heard my thoughts. ‘Sing me something, Scowling Sarah. Sing me that autumn song, with all the wind and the birds in it.’
Which I’m glad to do, to cover the dead-feet sounds and to pretend we’re not here like this, to push aside my fear of what’s to come, to keep my own feet moving from step to step.
We follow the echoes up and up, and when I reach the end of the song, ‘Beautiful,’ he says. ‘Let’s have that