Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [47]
Sheegeh slumped at the table. ‘I guess Gayorg’s not going to be able to find all the others. Can you understand this one?’
‘Oh, I did all this. This is cinchy for me. I was onto the serious books, where they didn’t colour them up and make them look fun, put in those little pictures. I was crunching hard numbers. I was going to be an aeronautical engineer.’
‘I don’t even know what that is,’ said Sheegeh. ‘You were good at school, huh?’
‘I had to be,’ said Owen, ‘if I wasn’t good at running or football, hey.’ He sat and leafed fondly through the pages.
‘Do me one of these triangles? Show me that first one.’
‘I need something to write on.’
‘I’ve got that.’ Sheegeh fetched his notebook and pencil.
Owen opened it at the page-and-a-half of Sheegeh’s head measurements. ‘This your work? Hmm, that’s a good sign, liking numbers.’
He opened a clean pair of pages and did the first task in the book. ‘I’ll do it, then I’ll see if I can explain it.’ He laid down neat codes on Sheegeh’s page, all his bulk concentrated on their neatness and rightness, muttering to himself the language of the book. ‘So it’s sixty-two degrees, that one,’ he said, sitting back after a little while. ‘Right, first you’ve got to understand some things about triangles.’
Sheegeh tried to listen, but he was distracted by the picture in his mind of them sitting there in the lamplight and the soup smell, Owen helping him, all cosy in the middle of the night’s darkness and the battle-noise.
‘You see what I’m saying?’ said Owen.
Sheegeh shook his head. ‘Tell me again,’ he said. And this time I’ll listen properly, he added to himself.
And Owen did tell him. Owen was that sort of boy. How he’d managed to get caught up by the Duwazza Sheegeh couldn’t imagine. Usually the Duwazza were not very nice to fat people.
In a ravaged place, looking for shelter from the rain, they came to a room full of cots, in each a withered child. Doppo went along the metal cupboards, making a great clash and rattle, talking his head off. ‘There might be medical supplies here,’ he said. Then, ‘Someone’s been through this place already. But they might have left something, if they were in a hurry. Some bandages, maybe, some drugs. Gayorg likes his drugs, doesn’t he? Likes boiling up his little cong-coctions?’
‘He will kill himself one day,’ said Sheegeh, repeating what he’d heard Michael say. He had hooked his armpits over a cot rail and was measuring the first head. And wasn’t it little! Only thirty-six point one!
And there were so many in here! He skipped past Owen’s triangle-work and started a new page. ‘Cot Room’, he called it, and drew a plan marking the door they’d come in at and eighteen rectangles for the cots. 36.1, he wrote in the first.
‘Nothing in here, either.’ Doppo kicked a broken cardboard box out of the other room, making as much noise as possible. ‘Someone has been through thoroughly.’ He went to the door and gloomed; the rain was hissing down out there, slapping to the ground from broken guttering, starting to make a deep tinny gurgle in a pipe that sounded happy to funnel it, even though half the roof it took rain from was gone, and there was nowhere but a crater for the run-off to go. ‘It could stay like this all day,’ he moaned.
‘It sounds as if it will.’ Sheegeh, across the room, stood next to an empty cot and wrote empty in its rectangle in the notebook. In each occupied cot, pale brownness stained the mattress where the fluids had soaked in, like a decorative border drawn specifically to the shape of that child. Sheegeh tried to move the heads as little as possible. When he took away the tape he made sure each head faced the same way as before, that it sat in the little dent its own weight had made in the mattress, when it had had weight.
‘We’re not proper Duwazza,’ Michael had said bitterly— in the summer it must have been, because the candlelight had shone on Michael’s rolled-up sleeves, in the hair on his arm next to Sheegeh at the table, and on his shaven head. They’d all shaven their heads in the summer, to stop the itching that had been