Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [44]
He was alone, in the old park, a bald, cratered place, the trees long gone for firewood, the circles and rectangles of flowerbeds marked out, built up, the curved-wire path-borders going from nowhere to nowhere, looking like safe ways marked across a mined place, or sown explosives themselves, conspicuous so as to warn people not to flee here into worse danger.
There was a muddy dog with him—or around him, anyway—printing its own patterns on the patterned ground.
The dog went into a crater, and nudged with its nose something on the bottom: a grey body, in grey clothing, lying in grey water. When the dog moved it Sheegeh discerned the top of a head, with black hair slicked across and coming away, and he veered down into the crater. He knelt and took the tape out of his pocket, lifted the head and slipped the tape underneath to measure it at the widest part.
He shooed the dog away, that had waded into the water and was bumping the body looking for a good part to eat.
There was a man in the hills somewhere, he’d heard, behind where the ski-jump had been, among those rich houses that were all but levelled now, the owners gone just while the forces were fighting in the parliament, before even a shot had been fired. Duwazza hated those owners; Duwazza had taken every scrap of loot whole or broken from those house-shells long ago, before Sheegeh’s time.
Anyway, this man, Owen said (Owen was disgusted by it), he went around collecting dogs.
What, to eat? Doppo had said.
No, to mind. To look after. Not only finds the dogs, but finds food for the dogs. Cooks ’em up big vats of the stuff. Keeps ’em in a big pen up there, hundreds o’ these flea-bit rag-dogs you see around the place.
That’s good, isn’t it? someone had said doubtfully from behind Sheegeh. Being kind to animals?
When there are people starving? People without houses? To care about dogs?
Yeah, why not?
‘’Cause it’s soppy and it’s wrong. People first, then the dogs and the horses and the budgies and the … you know?
‘Fifty-seven exactly.’ Sheegeh noted it in the book. In crater, M. W. Memorial Park.
He got up and walked up the slope again, tucking away the notebook and drying the back of the tape on his coat. Behind him the dog clomped on something, began to gnaw. Between the scraping noises were bits of voice, bits of whine, bits of yum. It was good not to mind any more. It was good to be used to these things.
He had found the Duwazza by accident, wandered onto their ground soon after the world had stopped making sense, looked up from his hunting and they were ranged around on the rubble-piles as if in a theatre, still, dark-clothed, some of them smoking. He remembered thinking, I must get some kind of woolly for my head like that— Gayorg, it had been, wearing it—because at that time too the weather had been gathering itself for winter. So it must be a year ago now.
‘Hey, Angel-face,’ said one, who would later become Michael. ‘Can you do us a favour?’ He asked in such a friendly voice that it didn’t occur to Sheegeh to refuse, even though there were so many watching.
‘What?’
‘Can you hold some stones for us?’
Sheegeh didn’t answer, because the request seemed too strange. He stood and thought how handsome Michael was—thin, like most people, but how his eyes stayed steady on you instead of switching away, and were full of kindness.
Michael picked up two stones, slithered down the mound and stood. He held a stone in each hand, his arms out either side of him. ‘Just like this,’ he said. ‘Can you do that?’
Sheegeh nodded.
‘Out to here.’ Michael