Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [58]
I will have to discard some underparts, I think. All this heavy stuff where the lice-carriers install themselves, all this cement-work that is not really mall, but only ancillary to mall, all that can go, can be dropped away.
The loosening takes some work and time; I am stiff from my long sleep in the one position; I am unaccustomed; and my materials are not so flexible as lice-muscle, all oiled and made supple by bloods and waters. I don’t mind the work; from the breath of the breeze I can tell how far I need to travel; the night is long, if I remember right, and I have time.
When I am loosened I draw up my limbs—which are all walking limbs, none of those pick-and-manipulators lice have, that they handle things with, their desires and their treasures and each other—and themselves, too, picking their noses, scratching their ears, moving their hairs about. I draw my walkers up and with great pain and concentration accomplish the uncoupling, and in many cases the breaking, from all that needs detaching below. The carriage-places fall away well, for they were not strong-constructed; like folded stacked stock cartons they pile on themselves in their hole, and I can refoot myself on them and force upward, and snap the stubborner pipe-joints, the stretchier cords, the cables. The pain is refreshing after the itches; some of my irritations flow out of me with the wastewater, with the released sewage; some of them puff away on the breeze with the hissing gas from the main I crushed in my heavings.
I put my face-doors up and search the air with my clearer pores. There it is, that fresher level, that sweeter, without shit in it or breath or burps of lice, without their sweat-pong or their sick-smell or the odour of their linted crevices or their fungused, or of their decaying teeth. I turn myself about on the ruins, face into the breeze and set off.
Sendra counted the hours; she was so tired, she had to count them on her fingers: eight to eleven, then an hour and a half while Nuri fussed and refused to settle, then forty-five minutes and Nuri’s nightmare, twenty more minutes after that before the neighbour-boy came home, singing and banging and being scolded by his uncle, then another... Altogether, no more than four-and-a-half hours yet. All she would be able to think of tomorrow was how much she would rather be sleeping.
She paused by the window. Nuri readied himself to complain his way out of sleep, so she turned, jogging and shushing him, back to the room full of corners and obstacles and soft darkness, to the path she had cleared for herself between the stacked laundry and the boxed Turkish ovens they were minding for Veddi’s brother’s venture.
In the hall she rocked from foot to foot. Veddi’s breathing came out one door and the broken-pipe-and-soap smell flowed out the other. Together with the hour of night they made a grainy soup of darkness, unbreathable for Sendra, unbearable.
She fought her way free of it, crossed the cluttered room to the window again, and leaned her shoulder and pressed the corner of her forehead on the cool, gritty glass.
A slice of city, she could see; three lit windows, close, far and very far, and between them specks of street lighting and a moving taxi-lantern. Not so long ago, she would have seen those windows and thought, What is behind them? Night-owls dreaming great literatures, freed from the day’s distractions? Beautiful women, pining for their absent men? Insomniacs scrubbing, sorting, reading? Always she imagined them solitary, compelled by their own desires or diseases. Now she knew that they were all slaves, their masters tiny monsters like Nuri, in their wrappings, in the fitfulness and fancy of their sleeping. Exhaustion pressed like an iron bar across all their brows, lined their bones, leadened their blood so that when they sat down they could barely imagine rising. When they lay, listening to the renewed squirm-and-whimpering of the baby across the room, they lay under exhaustion