Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [53]
‘What is that? I say, pushing him away from the window, for should anyone come down the lane, hearing his shouts and wondering who needs help down there, who needs taking to the madhouse, they will see him all moonlit there, naked as a baby and with his hair all over the place. He’d be mortified, I’m thinking, if he were in his right sense. Let alone they might take him to the madhouse! Anyway, on he goes. He can ride a horse as well as any equestrian, he says, now that he knows how the horse feels, what it thinks. He can be the horse. He can multiply himself into many horses, he says, as many as we need—’
I love it when Dulcie gets to such a stage in a story, her face all open and lively, her eyes full of the sights she’s uttering, as if none of this were here, the tent or the gypsytat or the cold night and strange town outside. She goes right away from it all, and she takes me with her, the way she describes everything.
‘And he’s just about to show me what he can do on the trapeze—I will have a suit, he says, all baubles and bugle-beads like The Great Fantango and I will swing and I will fly!
‘And he’s going for the window and I’m fighting him and wondering should I scream for help if he gets it open? Will he push me out if I’m in his way? And how much do I care for him anyway? Am I willing to have my brains dashed out in an alleyway on the chance it will give him pause and save his life?
‘And up goes the window and the wind comes in, smack!, straight from the South Pole I tell you, Nonny, and a little thing like Tasmania was never going to get in its way! It took the breath out of me, and the room was an icebox like that.’ She snaps her dry fingers. ‘But you would think it was a … a zephyr, a tropical breeze, for all it stops Ashman. I will fly! he says, I will fly! And he pushes the sash right up and he’s hands either side the window and his foot up on the sill. With the greatest of ease! he shouts.’
Here Dulce stopped and looked crafty. ‘And now I must fill my pipe,’ she said calmly.
‘Dulcie Pepper, I hate you!’ I slid off the stool and ran around and pummelled her while she laughed. ‘You always— You torture a girl so!’
‘How can it matter?’ she said airily, elbowing my fists away. ‘’Tis all long over now, and you know he lives!’
‘If I could reach, I would strangle you.’ I waved my tiny paws at her and snarled, rattling my throat the way I had learned from the Dog Man.
‘And then you would never hear the end, would you?’ she says smugly. ‘Unless you ran and asked Ashman himself.’
Gloomily I went back to my stool and watched her preparations. Faintly bored, I tried to seem, and protest no more, for the more I minded the longer she would hold off.
At first she moved with a slowness calculated to irritate me further, but when I kept my lips closed she tired of the game and gathered and tamped the leaf-shreds into the black pipe. Before she even lit it she went on. ‘And right at that minute, as if they were sent to save his life, that drunken ghost starts below: Where’s me dashed money, you flaming dash-dash? And his woman starts to her crying. What do you mean you haven’t got it? he says. ’Cetra, cetra. It was funny, I could see the gooseflesh on Ashman. It ran all over and around him like rain running over a puddle, you know, little gusts of it. And back he steps, and takes my hands and makes me sit down on the bed. Dulce, he says, I see it so clearly. And it ought to have made me laugh, it were so daft, but the way he said it, suddenly it seemed so true, you know? Because he believed it so, he almost made it true. And also, the ghosts in the lane, they will turn things