Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [55]
‘Here he comes!’ said Sammy Mack, and down the hill strode Ashman in his shirtsleeves, but with his hat on. I could not imagine him naked and raving and covered in gooseflesh, as Dulcie had described him.
‘What’s up, Frogget?’ He pushed through the onlookers—he didn’t have to push very hard, for people leaped aside to allow in his part of the drama, his authority.
John Frogget ushered him into the shooting gallery. Sammy Mack peered in after, holding the cloth aside. There was the partition with the cowboys painted on it, and a slot of the yellow light beyond, at the bottom of which a booted foot projected into view.
‘Oh!’ Dulcie crouched to my level and clutched me, and I clutched her around the neck in my fright. ‘’Tis him, ’tis him!’
I had admired that boot in the Museum tent, to avoid looking further at his face as he took in the sight of us. ‘Hungry,’ I said, ‘that was the way he looked at us. I don’t like to think what is going through their minds when they look like that. But he was young, and not bad looking, and dressed so fine!’
‘He was doomed.’ Dulcie shivered. ‘I saw it. It was all over his palms, this possibility. It was all through his cards like a stain. When I see an outlay like that, I lie. Sometimes that averts it. I told him he would find love soon, and prosper in his business concerns, find peace in himself, all of that and more. Perhaps I babbled, and he saw the falsity in it. But I was only trying to help—oh!’ She covered her mouth with her hand to stop more words falling out, doing their damage.
‘Did you know the man, Dulcie?’ Ugly Tom had seen our fright and come to us.
‘You would have seen him too, Tom,’ I said. ‘He spent an age among your babies and your three-headed lambs.’
He looked startled, then disbelieving. ‘Oh, was he a young gentleman? Thin tie? Well dressed? Little goatee?’ He put up his hand to show how tall, and Dulcie and I nodded as if our heads were on the same string. ‘Well, I never!’ He turned towards the shooting gallery, astonished. ‘You’re right,’ he said to me, as if he had not noticed it himself, ‘he did spend a time with my exhibits. An inordinate amount of time.’
‘And with us outside, too, an ordinate amount,’ I said, holding Dulcie’s neck tighter. ‘Back and forth, back and forth, staring. Which is why we are there, of course, so that people may stare. Did he say anything to you, Dulcie, that made you think he might—?’
She shook her head. ‘He gave me no clue. He didn’t need to; it was all over his hands. I should have told him. You’re in terrible danger. Perhaps if he knew that I saw—’
It was then that she walked by, towards the tent. It was not someone understandable, like The Lovely Zalumna. It was perfectly ordinary Fay Shipley, daughter of Cap Shipley the head rigger.
I saw it as I’d seen the boot, when Sammy Mack opened the tent-flap, and held it open longer than he needed. The world, the fates, whatever dooming powers there were, that Dulcie sometimes saw the workings of before they acted, they conspired to show me, through the shiftings of the people in front of us, through the tent-flap Sammy was gawking through, beside the partition, in the narrow slice of gallery, of world-in-itself, its sounds blotted out by the closer whispers and mutterings of bone-in-his-nose Billy and Chan and Mrs Em and the Wild Man and—
She hurried in, plain Fay Shipley. She stood beside the partition, her hands to her mouth. Then she lifted her head, as someone approached her from inside, and—later I hated her for this—her arms loosened and lifted out to receive him, and as Sammy Mack dropped the canvas I saw John Frogget’s forehead come to rest on her shoulder, John Frogget’s arms encircle her waist, John Frogget’s boot block my view of that other boot.
Then they both were gone. ‘Did you see that?’ I said dazedly, in the cold, in the dark outside. ‘Fay and John Frogget?