Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [5]
‘Think about the thing, the object!’ said Shai in a terrified whisper.
Billy locked his mind onto the image of a younger, red-haired Grandpa Corin. This Corin laid his cigarette in the ashtray, ignoring the fascinated Billy at his knee. He resettled his bum in the big armchair, hunched over the form guide. The cigarette smoke went up in straight lines to a certain level, then began to bend and twine. The tiny Billy itched, stuffed full of one desire: Press the button, Grandpa. Spin it away. Before Nance comes and finds me and snatches me up, and says, ‘Come away from that dirty thing. Leave your Grandpa to his smells, why don’t you’—
Jo straightened, and reached his skinny arms up, and spread his fingers, and gathered something down on himself, down on them all. It blotted out the sky in an instant. It crushed the boys flat to the ground, and filled their minds and mouths with ashes.
Corin pushed Nance away.
‘It’s coming again!’ He tried to see it beyond the walls of the bright kitchen.
‘You think?’ said Nance hopefully. Her lips were pinked from kissing him. Her whole face had come unset from its folds and habits; from here it might age any number of different ways.
‘It’s at Cowper Fen with the Travellers now.’ Fearfully Corin searched the ceiling. ‘Though it’s not from there; it’s from beyond there. It’s wobbling the church steeple! It’ll be here soon, it’ll be in the garden!—’
A cindery blast pushed him against the cupboards and the door. Who was he? Who was that old lady, clutching the table-edge? She was someone’s grandmother; she had one of those strong, capable, sexless bodies in the middle of all those wind-whipped clothes. But she would die anyway; he knew it.
He was running in the night. Things banged and obstructed his knees; things shattered in his wake. Tiny cries came after him. ‘Don’t call out like that!’ he muttered. ‘Don’t go right back to a baby!’
The bin-yard wall caught him in the ribs, smacked the breath out of him, lashed his head forward. The ground lit up orange. Hot air attacked his face, swooped down his throat and choked him.
The yard was a pit, full of magma that turned and split and sank into itself. In the time before the electric, Corin had gathered and stamped years’ worth of ashes, to make the yard floor; now these had all come alive again, and stank, and melted. The plastic bins drooped, and the raised letters on the council bin—NO HOT ASHES—glowed in the moments before the bin collapsed and was enfolded. Flames came and went across the mass, like runners of grass, only of fire.
Corin hung coughing, aghast, over the wall. New knowledge bounded through him, like a herd of black bulls caught along a narrow street and panicking: this ashy wind that pinned him here, it went nowhere; it blew only from one giant hollowness to another. He, Rose, everyone they knew, everyone they had ever known, every thing—put together, they were no more than one of those white sparks, there for a moment on the breast of the turning magma, and then engulfed and gone utterly.
‘Corin! Corin!’ she cried from the house. At any other time it would have started him running, it would have flicked him like a switch it was so raw, so full of fear and sorrow, so unlike the Nance he knew and wanted, the Nance he relied on to take the brunt of him. But now, with fumes in his eyes and the fire bawling and stretching and being consumed below him—What can she do for me? Or I for her? All we can do is scrabble at each other, moan our fear at each other as we go down.
Afterwards, Nance found him crouched by the wall, staring unblinking at the new-risen moon, coated like herself in the finest of fine grey ash.
‘That’s an ashtray, that one,’ said Jo cheerily. ‘Made of chrome-plated steel. A mechanism, activated by a Bakelite knob, spins the ash and cigarette butts into the bulb below, where any remaining spark is extinguished by oxygen starvation.’
‘Mechanism,’ said Shai through chattering teeth. ‘Extinguished. He don’t get those words from our family.’
Billy didn’t know