Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [49]
Owen went for the buttons. ‘Now, let’s—’
Brisk pushed him away. Both Brisk’s hands were washed and washed again with dried blood. ‘I just wanted to die at home,’ he said, ‘’stead of out there, on the ground.’ Something inside the jacket made a soggy sound. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said.
Owen caught one of the hands wandering on the chest of the jacket. ‘You take as long as you like, Brisk,’ he said. ‘We’ll try and make you comfortable.’ He brought the big hand up to his teeth and cried on it, silently.
The new boy swayed, holding himself up by the bunk-frame, staring down at Brisk.
‘Cobbla brought me home,’ said Brisk, but his lungs were seriously disturbed now, groaning and bubbling blood up onto his lips.
Sheegeh remembered Michael saying once, It’s a home. It’s got kids in.
Yeah, Doppo had said, looking pleased.
Not you. Gayorg had given him a push. Innocent kids. Angel.
And Doppo had looked at Sheegeh with open dislike.
‘Cobbla’s a good man.’ Brisk coughed up a last gout of blood. It spread its red shine down his chin and his noisy breathing stopped.
Owen closed Brisk’s eyes, and positioned his hands on his chest. Then he heaved himself up, his wet face grave.
‘No one else?’ he said to Cobbla.
‘They all got—they all—’
‘Show us,’ said Owen. ‘Take us there. Sheegeh?’
Sheegeh was already dressing. Owen never called me Sheegeh before, he thought. Owen never called me anything— not Angel, or Angel-hair, or Angel-face or anything.
Owen was going through everything in the hut. ‘Can you use this? Do you want this?’ he said to Cobbla. ‘Here, you can swap these for something useful, maybe.’ He put together a pack full of foodstuffs, and pots and utensils. ‘Here.’ He passed Sheegeh Michael’s pack. ‘Put a layer of mixed tins in the bottom of that, like mine, and fill up the rest with the good blankets.’
They covered Brisk with a couple of the thinner, more holed blankets, and went out laden into the silent city. Cobbla led them. Owen couldn’t move fast, couldn’t climb over things, so Cobbla took them the way he’d brought Brisk. It was still not fully light, and Sheegeh fancied that every dark mark on the ground was Brisk’s blood, dripped from his coat edge on the way home.
He had thought Cobbla was lying—Cobbla just had a lying way about him. Then he saw them, and thought, Now they’re dead, this time they’re dead. They were scattered across the mound just like the first time he’d seen them, but motionless, with their heads downwards, as if the black wraps had made their heads so heavy, they had dragged them down the slope.
‘Up there in the arch,’ said Cobbla, pointing up at the one remaining wall of the stadium. ‘Someone had a machine gun up there. They just waited and picked their moment and swept and swept. They all got mown down. I was just lucky. I just saw it happening up the other end, and I just got down in a lucky place—down there, see?—and I could get away bit by bit in between sweeps. I seen them. They was soldiers, or someone pretending to be soldiers.’
He went on, as if his voice had got unblocked somehow and now couldn’t be stopped. He described how Brisk had fallen and where, how he’d fetched Brisk and got Brisk out.
Sheegeh shrugged off his pack and went up the slope. The stadium wall shaded the whole rubble mound cold blue-grey from the dawning sky.
He started a new page, ‘Duwazza’. He had to unwrap every head; once he had measured, he covered the face with the black-flowered cloth. Christos and Melon had thick hair. Chechin’s skull was broken left side where he’d fallen on a corner of brick with some force. After Doppo, when the tape was soft and delicate and stained from Doppo’s head-ooze, Sheegeh felt his face contracted into a pig-face against the tears. He breathed in the tear-snot through his nose, held it there and breathed out through his mouth, going ‘Uh’ each time, moving from boy to boy, from head to head up the slope.
The tape didn’t come apart until he was oh-so-carefully rolling it up to put away in his pocket.