Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [59]
What?
Strange.
Sendra was used to waking, already half out of bed, to the sound of Nuri’s little cough, Nuri’s little drawing of breath for a cry. But now she stood motionless, back from the window, her head lowered and peering, entirely alert and wondering whether she had dreamed that sound. It was as if the very earth itself had coughed, just quietly, coming awake. All was silent now; all was still outside except that taxi-lamp—which had wobbled, had it not?, at the sound, at the movement, but now sailed on.
Nuri lay silent at her breast, attached but no longer sucking. Sendra felt a great fear. Her duty in the night was to keep Nuri from waking Veddi, who had the day-time job that kept the three of them housed and fed. Was it also her business, then, to keep the whole earth quiet for Veddi? How was she to quieten the outside for him? How could she pick up and settle the world?
No, it was the night hour, making her think such things, magnifying sounds and sensations. She had fallen to sleep a tiny instant, that was all, and dreamed that moment of startlement. The floor, the wall, the window, they had not really trembled; only Sendra herself had.
But there it came again: a deep uncertainty, a tearing underfoot like roots of some vast plant pulling free, a ticking of the window pane.
The woken piece of earth arrived, between the far and the very far window light. It might only have been shadow, some trick of cloud and moon, except for the sensations of its arrival, the drags and thuds of its steps—though these, like the voices of elephants and the harbingers of earthquakes, happened only at the very lowest edge of hearing, might not truly be happening at all. It bulked in the slot of city between Capri Towers and the government offices, blotting out the view of the square, starlit roofs like steps up to the distant hills. It blotted out those hills, and the lower stars, with its peaks and corners. It reared and sank, slowly, weightily, as a piece of the earth should.
It passed behind the offices. It was gone; the view was as it had been—stars, hills, three lit windows—although the deep rumbling, the scraping, continued awhile. Sendra watched the top of the offices, in case it should rise there, turn and approach and endanger her. But on it went and away. She stood, still watching, still watching nothing, in the silence it left, awake to her very finger and toe tips, with Nuri a sleeping stone in her arms.
Figuro whistled along the street, his last few bottles chiming white in the float behind him. His job was to bring the morning, a mass of cold white light from which he broke pieces, to deliver them to people’s doorsteps, a clot of sunlight here, a blob of cool dawn there. And only when he had dispensed the last light-globe from the float on the last round was the real sun, so vulgar and huge and hot, allowed to come up and begin its business.
Figuro was half-mad, and people complained about his whistling, which woke them when they had just fallen asleep from coming off-shift. They said their baby startled awake when his float took the drainway in front of their house, and jangled all suddenly. ‘He drives like a boy-racer,’ they cried. ‘What is his hurry?’
‘Flatten out your street, then,’ said Job the dairy boss, ‘or stuff rags in your ears. I don’t care what.’ For Figuro was half-sane as well, and the sane half of him was the perfect milk-delivering machine, an extension of the little three-wheel float with the wall-eyed cow painted across its back. Other milkmen came—out of nowhere, with references— and went—into gambling or drunkenness or, sometimes, who knew where they went? They did not show and they did not show, and then Job must find another. While these men churned past him Figuro stayed stolid and reliable at the centre of High-Minded Milk Incorporation, and if the flowers beyond the nuns’ hedge-top sang to the man, or the cats chattered, or there were three houses Figuro