Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [46]
‘Good,’ said the boy, then added swaggeringly, ‘’cause I hate it when they do that.’
Michael felt the ugly boy’s wrist. ‘Nada,’ he said, dropping it, and straightened, and got out tobacco in a packet. He rolled himself a cigarette fast, with one hand, lit it with a pink plastic lighter and put everything away. Now he was looking at Sheegeh.
‘So you were lucky, eh? You’re still here.’
Sheegeh kept his eyes on the ugly boy, in case the ugly boy were popular and people were angry with Sheegeh for killing him.
‘We can give him another, make him do it again,’ said someone.
‘He’s lucky, not stupid.’ Michael came and touched Sheegeh’s hair. ‘The whole point is him not knowing what the stone does. Isn’t it, Angel-hair? Look at this golden fluff. How do you keep it so clean? You go to the beauty parlour?’
He was joking kindly, and Sheegeh pulled his mouth down in a smile and shook his head.
Which is how it all began with the Duwazza. They took him to their house and he was theirs. Michael gave an order that no one was to touch any part of him but his hair, so they washed that and combed it like a doll’s and marvelled at how it curled up again as it dried. They ran their fingers through it when they were all kitted up for a raid, for luck, and he would stay there with Fat Owen who was an encumbrance but loyal and could cook. They would sleep until the Duwazza came back in, either wild with weapons and loot, or silent with things they had seen. Sheegeh would wake, watch and listen to check that his luck still held, and go back to sleep until morning.
He walked down the safe street. They called it Dresses Street, because for a long time two of the shop windows stayed good, one full of bridal gowns, one of evening gowns. People had broken the glass themselves and taken the gowns, eventually, for the cloth, and the brides’ wooden dummies for fuel. Most of the metal ones were still in the evening-gown shop, though, woman-shaped cages on metal stalks, straighter-backed and more confident than any woman walked any more.
The day before yesterday, Dresses Street had not been safe, and there were the bodies to prove it, fallen quite neatly against the walls they had thought would shelter them. They were still good, with the cold—there was no smell. Boots and coats had been taken, so they lay rather vulnerable in cardigans, T-shirts. One of the younger women wore nothing at all, so Sheegeh didn’t look lower than her head. Her reddish curls made her hard to measure, so he put a question mark and the words thick hair beside his measurement.
He went zigzag up the street with his tape and book. It was quiet, so early; it was the hour when the city seemed to catch its breath, and stretch its cramped limbs just a little, but not enough to catch the eye of anyone with a weapon. There was just the rustle of the tape, the crack of the notebook cover as he wrote against his knee, and the whisper of the pencil on the paper.
‘Look what Gayorg brought me,’ said Sheegeh, holding up the textbook.
Fat Owen squinted across. The room was dim with only two candles, the windows blacked out with ply and duct-tape so as not to attract fire. ‘My heaven,’ said Owen, ‘I’ve seen that before, I think. Hang on, let me...’
He pushed some chopped thing off a board into the soup, stirred it, and came to the table. ‘Ah, my, yes. Maths Challenge. The green one—that’s for older kids than you, I think. Let me see.’ He took the book and opened it in a couple of places.
‘Does it make any sense to you?’ said Sheegeh. ‘I tried before. I can sound out the words, but...’
‘You need the yellow one,’ said Owen. He opened the cover where all the books were shown. ‘See? Right up here, to start with. This book is way down here—you have to know everything that’s in all these books before you can tackle this one—’
A shell exploded nearby. The house shook. Some dust trickled off a rafter and sparkled and spat in the candle flame. Owen looked around. When the house didn’t break anywhere, he went back to the book, pushing his glasses up his