Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [40]
So I sing it again. I have to break off, though, near to the end. The trapdoor is above us, leaking light around its edges.
‘Oh, my pa!’ I hold his terrible flesh and cry. ‘Don’t come up! Just stay here on the stair! I will bring you your food and your drink. We can come down and sit with you. We will have you, at least—’
‘Go on, now.’ He plucks my arms from his neck, from his waist, from his neck again. ‘Fetch your mother for me.’
‘Just, even—’ My mind is floating out of my head like smoke. ‘Even if you could stay for the pigeon! For the pie! Just that little while! I will bring it down to you, on the platter—’
‘What’s all this noise?’ The trapdoor opens. Ma gives a shout of fright seeing Pa, and yes, in the cooler earthly light his face is—well, it is clear that he is dead.
‘Forgive me, wife,’ says his pale, wet mouth. His teeth show through his cheeks, and his eyes are unsteady in his shiny head. ‘I have gone and killed myself, and it is no one’s fault but my own.’ He has no breath, as I said. The voice, I can hear in this realer air, comes from somewhere else than his lungs, somewhere else, perhaps, than his body completely.
Ma kneels slowly and reaches, slowly, into the top of the stair.
‘Charence Armstrong,’ she weeps at him, her voice soft and unbelieving, ‘how could you do this?’
‘He fell in the Acheron, Ma; he slipped and fell!’
‘How could you be so stupid?’ she tells him gently, searching the mess for the face she loves. ‘Come to me.’
‘As soon as I step up there I am dead,’ he says. ‘You must come down to me, sweet wife, and make your farewells.’
There’s hardly the room for it, but down she comes onto the stairs, her face so angry and intense it frightens me. And then they are like the youngest of lovers in the first fire of love, kissing, kissing, holding each other tight as if they’d crush together into one. She doesn’t seem to mind the slime, the baldness of him, the visibility of his bones. The ragged crying all around us in the hole, that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. I lean and howl against them and at last they take me in, lock me in with them.
Finally we untangle ourselves, three wrecks of persons on the stairs. ‘Come, then,’ says my father. ‘There is nothing for it.’
‘Ah, my husband!’ whispers Ma, stroking his transparent cheeks.
All the workings move under the jellified skin. ‘Bury me with all the rites,’ he says. ‘And use real coin, not token.’
‘As if she would use token!’ I say.
He kisses me, wetly upon all the wet. ‘I know, little scowler. Go on up, now.’
When he follows us out of the hole, it’s as if he’s rising through a still water-surface. It paints him back onto himself, gives him back his hair and his clothes and his colour. For a few flying moments he’s alive and bright, returned to us.
But as his heart passes the rim, he stumbles. His face closes. He slumps to one side, and now he is gone, a dead man taken as he climbed from his cellar, a dead man fallen to his cottage floor.
We weep and wail over him a long time.
Then, ‘Take his head, daughter.’ Ma climbs back down into the hole. ‘I will lift his dear body from here.’
The day after the burial, he walks into sight around the red hill in company with several other dead.
‘Pa!’ I start towards him.
He smiles bleakly, spits the obolus into his hand and gives it to me as soon as I reach him. I was going to hug him, but it seems he doesn’t want me to.
‘That brother of mine, Gilles,’ he says. ‘He can’t hold his liquor.’
‘Gilles was just upset that you were gone so young.’ I fall into step beside him.
He shakes his bald head. ‘Discourage your mother from him; he has ideas on her. And he’s more handsome than I was. But he’s feckless; he’ll do neither of you any good.’
‘All right.’ I look miserably at the coins in my hand. I can’t tell which is Pa’s, now.
‘In a moment it won’t matter.’ He puts his spongy hand on my shoulder. ‘But for now, I’m counting on you, Sharon. You look after her for me.’
I nod and blink.
‘Now, fetch us our cups, daughter. These people are thirsty and