Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [42]
Anyway, Father said heavily from the corner.
Well, said Mother, you check this and that and the other, and one of the things you check is the circumference of the head.
Couldn’t you see if it was very much too big or too small? said Sheegeh.
Yes, but it has to be on the form, to show the doctor, who might not see the baby. And also, studies of birth size...to show whether women from near industry or electricity, or who smoke—
It got complicated after that, and Sheegeh must have stopped listening, because he couldn’t remember any more.
‘You know what they’re doing while we hunt,’ said Doppo.
Sheegeh shrugged off Doppo’s oncoming words.
‘They brought back girls, you know. Didn’t you see? No, of course not—they don’t let you see the girls, for fear your golden hair might fall out with the shock. Well, they did, and now they’re warrumping those girls. Everyone’s having a go, one girl after the other, one Duwazza after the other.’
Sheegeh watched Doppo rage, rage against being too young even to want to go warrumping, rage at having to go out with Sheegeh on this pretend-errand, when the house was overflowing with loot and there’d never been a time when hunting was less needed.
‘And so?’ said Sheegeh. ‘Why would you want to sit around and watch that?’
Doppo turned on him. ‘It’s only that they’re not so perfect and so pure as you seem to think, Angel’s-Arse. Even that Michael, he’ll be doing it along with the rest. He’s no better—he just smiles more.’
Sheegeh watched Doppo empurple himself. Did Doppo’s rage fit these circumstances? It didn’t help that Sheegeh was not quite clear what warrumping was. He had thought it was a walloping, a beating, which he already knew the Duwazza did, on and on until the person died and then some, but this was clearly something worse. It sounded like some kind of awful violent dance, warrumping, maybe with Fat Owen beating out the music for it on the bottom of an emptied fire-drum, working up a sweat, the light on his glasses making him look blind.
‘Anyway,’ said Sheegeh, ‘if they’ve sent us away they must have good reason, is all I know. It’s surely something that we don’t need to see or do.’
They came back to the Duwazza house towards evening. Gayorg, Chechin and Michael had the fire going in the holey drum outside. Sheegeh was glad of it. The nights were beginning to nip now.
‘Hey-hey, Angel-Face,’ they said when they saw him, ‘come here and let me feel your lucky hair.’
Sheegeh let them stroke his head and tug his curls for luck—it hurt, but it was what he was here for, what they used him for, and better than what they used a lot of people for. Somewhere where he kept his thoughts from going, Sheegeh knew he was lucky.
Having had his bowl of the stew, he did not stay by the drum. He went inside and fetched the notebook from his bed-roll, and the pencil. He stuck them in his coat, and climbed up the rubble to where he could step over onto the house roof. He kept to the parts over the ceiling-joists. The tin scraped fearsomely on the nails, and people shouted, first inside, then out at the drum. ‘It’s only me!’ Sheegeh called out, and they were silent, until he showed his golden head to their view, and then they relaxed, seeing no one with a gun to his throat or temple, or more likely a knife these days.
‘What do you mean, scaring the squitters out of people?’ shouted Doppo.
‘Be quiet,’ said Gayorg. ‘He’s our angel; he can go anywhere he wants.’
Doppo grumbled something.
Sheegeh crossed to the Guardian on the roof. The half-man had been wired up here like a scarecrow, a long time ago. All his flesh was shrivelled to leather, and no longer stank. He had one of the old tin helmets on, jauntily angled. Sheegeh took that off and laid it on the roof.
‘Don’t you fall down,’ Michael called out. ‘You can’t really fly, you know, spite of your feathery wings.’
Down there they all laughed. But Sheegeh wasn’t going to fall—there was no such likelihood. He took out the tape and put