Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [6]
Now here he was, back, boy in wood, so frightened he didn’t know how he was going to get home to Nance and Grandpa Corin’s. Jo was cackling and prancing naked in the shallows; the others were huddled around Billy, all warmth and gulping breath. Alex’s ear was pearly and intricate in the faint light; the very grubbiness of the hand, the very bitten-ness of the nails that came up to scratch it made Billy feel weepy and full of wonder. At the same time, he held in his guts a black cannonball of fear; it sat and sucked all possible movement out of his body.
‘Come on, you.’ Jo capered around them, scattering cold drops of brook-water. ‘One more!’
‘Put your clothes on, you geet,’ growled Castle. ‘You look like a death-doll, all head and willy.’
Jo laughed insanely and danced off to obey.
The four others risked looking at each other. Thank heaven, thought Billy. He had thought his own face must be peeled back to the skull; now he knew, seeing Castle’s wary eyes and Alex’s teary ones, that he looked like his old, young self.
‘That was horrible!’ whimpered Alex, and a hiccoughing breath made the juices rattle in his nose.
‘I’m sorry,’ said Billy. ‘The ashtray was a bad idea. But I used to like it. You said—’ He turned to Shai. ‘You said, pick things that mean something. So I did. I didn’t know it would—’ He broke off so as not to cry, waving his hands about.
‘It’s all right,’ said Shai. ‘You weren’t to know. How were you to know? Who’d have thought that, of an ashtray? My oath.’
They all four turned. Jo was trying to put his second leg in his shorts; he hopped sideways on the sand, bent headless over the task. Castle shuddered and turned away.
‘I don’t want to do another one,’ said Alex. ‘I just want to be at home. But I don’t want to walk home through this forest—it’s all shadows and noises.’
‘Well, you’ll have to, won’t you?’ snapped Castle.
Billy felt the same as Alex. What were they going to do? he wondered.
‘Wait a bit,’ said Shai, patting Alex’s shoulder. ‘Let it fade a bit.’
‘It’ll never fade,’ Alex whispered. ‘I’ll never forget.’
‘You will, too,’ said Shai. ‘Just like you forget a bad dream.’
‘I don’t forget those, either,’ said Alex, weeping. ‘I lie there going over and over it in my head, and trying not to go back to sleep and have it again. And sometimes I do go to sleep, and I do have it again—’ ‘Shut up or I’ll slap you, Alex,’ said Castle. ‘You’re working yourself up. Now stop it.’
Alex stopped, and mopped his eyes miserably.
‘Look,’ said Shai. ‘The moon’s coming up. That’ll be daylight, practically.’
Except that moon-shadows are blacker than sun ones, thought Billy. They can hide more things, to jump out at you. But he didn’t say it; he wasn’t about to frighten himself worse.
Nance went to Corin through the broken flowerpots. He was against a wall, and beyond the wall was the grave— she smelled its greasy sweetness. He was all bones wrapped thinly in flesh, then loosely in cloth; his hair was white scraps floating from his speckled scalp in the moonlight.
‘Come inside, Corin,’ she scolded in her crone’s voice. ‘Look at you! You’re all over ashes!’ How had they got to be so old, she and he? It seemed to Nance that they had held each other in a death-clasp all these years, meanly squeezing until every scrap of colour was gone from skin and hair, until their voices held no juice and their eyes too much. It seemed a dreadful desperate togetherness, this marriage, quite biological and loveless; she had watched frogs mating once, and it was like that, like a long, hard clinch with spasms of wrestling, now sinking, now floating, and all the while the eyes looking out, frog eyes, showing nothing. And here she was, kicking shards out of the way with her frog feet, and