Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [41]
I bring the little black cups on the tray. ‘Here, you must drink this,’ I say to the dead. ‘So that the fire won’t hurt you.’
My father, of course, doesn’t need to be told. He drinks all the Lethe-water in a single swallow, puts down the cup and smacks his wet chest as he used to after a swig of apple-brandy. Up comes a burp of flowery air, and the spark dies out of his eyes.
I guide all the waiting dead onto the punt. I flick the heavy mooring-rope off the bollard and we slide out into the current, over the pure clear tears-water braided with fine flames. The red sky is cavernous; the cable dips into the flow behind us and lifts out ahead, dripping flame and water. I take up the pole and push it into the riverbed, pushing us along, me and my boatload of shades, me and what’s left of my pa. My solid arms work, my lungs grab the hot air, my juicy heart pumps and pumps. I never realised, all the years my father did this, what solitary work it is.
{ Heads
Sheegeh pulled a flimsy thing out of the heap.
‘Ah, one of these,’ he said.
Doppo looked up. ‘Can you eat it?’ That was always his first question, so they didn’t get loaded down with useless stuff. ‘It’s too little to burn. Could use it as a starter, maybe.’
‘No, it’s special, this one.’ Sheegeh cleaned the dirt-clots off the strip of paper with its printed numbers. ‘It’s all there, see? The whole thing. Not even torn.’
Holding the strip was like lifting a very small, brightly lit box to his eye. His mother was in that box in her pale-blue hospital uniform. She looked tired. She reached her hand into her pocket for something—her handkerchief, maybe, or a list she had written herself, of things to do—but a paper tape like this one came out instead, rolled up neatly. She was a great roller and folder and tucker-away of things. She put this on the table distractedly. Father was calling news from another room beyond this box. (And there were further rooms, two for sleeping, one for bathing and toileting, and a hallway, and cupboards all over the place that were as good as rooms in themselves; any one of those cupboards would be an excellent home, these days. It wasn’t like the Duwazza house, which was like a cage full of mice piled all on top of one another.) What is that? said the little invisible Sheegeh at the table, reaching for the rolled thing.
‘It’s for measuring the babies’ heads,’ he said to Doppo now. ‘At the hospital, when they’re born.’ There being no babies handy, he put it around his own head and held it flat with a fingertip between his eyes. ‘What’s mine?’
Doppo looked blankly at the finger, then screwed up his forehead to say that Sheegeh was mad. ‘How useful is that?’
Sheegeh didn’t know. Useful? Useful? The little box was so full of colours—the bright calendar-picture, the red doors of the cupboards, that pearly-green table. Everything in the box had been brushed and rubbed with cloths and cleansing powders, or soaked with waters and dried crisp in sunlight and clean air. Mother was trying to make dinner in her head and listen to Father and talk with Sheegeh and remember what she’d dipped her hand into her pocket for and not found. And she couldn’t see out of the box, poor Mother. She couldn’t see him looking in at her from this outside now. She’d gone on putting on the pale-blue uniform and writing on the form as if the studies would go on, as if the world would stay safe enough for babies to arrive and be measured. The little, clean-dressed Sheegeh, he had never been really surprised when all that scrubbing and polishing of things had failed, but of course he had often been dirty in his life, whereas Mother and Father had not. It was all a big shock to them.
‘We’ll run out of light,’ said Doppo. Sheegeh rolled up the tape. He put it in an inside pocket and went on with the hunt.
You catch the baby, Mother had said, in the underground room. That one had been quite spacious too, and neat, full of good-quality salvage and with food stacked all up the walls.
Like a football! Sheegeh had laughed.
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