Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [43]
‘Fifty-five point two.’ He rolled up the tape and put it back in his pocket.
He sat and dangled his legs over the door, and took out the pencil and notebook. Starting a new page, he wrote 55.2 cm. ‘Hey, what’s the date today?’ he called down.
Michael took a newspaper out of his back pants pocket. ‘Yesterday was Wednesday the seventeenth of October,’ he said. ‘Today I didn’t manage a paper.’
Sheegeh wrote the date next to the measurement. Man on house roof, he wrote beside it, which filled the line to the end with a little cramping. Someone came out the door, bumped his legs and knocked the pencil off the end of the last word. ‘Aargh,’ he said. ‘Look where you’re going.’
‘Look where you’re hanging your feet,’ said Hyram, rubbing his head.
Sheegeh stood again and picked up the helmet. When he put it back on the man, though, something gave way under-neath. He was just in time to catch the face of the thing.
‘Whoops!’ said someone down below.
Doppo shouted, ‘What did you think would happen, fiddling with that?’
‘Stay there, Angel,’ said Gayorg. ‘I’ll come up and fix it back on.’
The nose-bones were sharp in Sheegeh’s hands. He turned the head over to sit in its helmet, like a pudding in a bowl.
‘Always showing off,’ said Doppo.
‘You’re just jealous you don’t have magic hair,’ someone said.
‘Why would I want girlie hair like that?’
There was a moment’s quiet, then Chechin said easily, ‘Yeah, it’d look pretty silly around your grogan face.’
Which was too true for anyone to answer.
‘Here.’ Gayorg crossed the roof, grinding and squeaking the tin on the nails much worse than Sheegeh had. ‘Give us it. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, tuck his head under his arm. I know just how.’
Sheegeh surrendered the head, held the wire that Gayorg took off the hand, then gave it back to him and stepped back down the roof. He put the notebook and pencil back in his bed, then went out to warm his hands at one of the drum-holes, and watch the flames poking out of them like horns, or pointy orange tongues.
Sometimes when he hadn’t had enough sleep, Sheegeh’s mind slumped straight from waking into a dream. All the noise of the Duwazza around him would fade to silence— it was a silent dream. And he could not make himself heard; the people were too far away. He stood on cleared ground and watched them come towards him across the mounds of rubble. The first—was it her?—came slowly, picking her way carefully, because she was wearing a pale-blue uniform and those soft white shoes. She hadn’t seen him yet. He was almost sure it was her. And the man behind, even slower, watched his feet in their pinching shiny shoes find a way down the treacherous rubble. Neither of them had given up hope of staying clean, of arriving without mishap at the cleared ground. They didn’t know as Sheegeh did that you throw yourself at such piles, spread yourself wide, scramble fast so that even if something does dislodge, you’re already past it, you don’t fall with it. You’re always covered with brick-dust, but so is everything, and everyone, so what matter?
He watched them in silence, but he never could decide enough that it was really them, to explode and run at them. Somebody’s clean mother, somebody’s dressed-up father, were coming, but the worst thing in the world would be to run to them, to let go and shout and start scrambling, and then look up and see that the faces were strange, that these were someone else’s people just like everyone else in the world.
He wouldn’t do that to himself. He would stand here and wait for them to be close enough, to be sure.
And he always woke while he waited. He might have just taken a first nearly-sure step, or opened his mouth and drawn breath ready. She might have just slipped a little and checked the state of her skirt with familiar hands, a familiar anxious angling of her head. The man might have just lifted his face, seeming to smile at Sheegeh, seeming easily to recognise him.
And then he would be back in the Duwazza