Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [60]
Figuro himself did not mind either, about any such complaining or unpopularity. He was fixed in his methods and sunny in his disposition; he was intent on lighting the way into the day, with these two milk-lamps to number 29 with the shoescraper, and this one-cream-one-milk to number 31 where the tassels of the hall rug straggled out under the door as if pleading with him Help me escape! Help! I am trapped and trampled all the livelong day!
He laughed on 31’s step. ‘Foolish!’ he said. ‘You do not know when you are on a lucky wicket, do you?’ And laughing he went back to the little purring home on three wheels, its light diminished by half now. He rattled and released it into movement and on they went, him and the beast and the remaining bottles. The stars sang their thin song above, and one window squared up gold with twitching curtains while another blinked out to join the dark surrounding wall.
The stars had begun to be erased, gradually covered wash by wash by the upswimming greyness of pre-dawn, when Figuro cut his engine for the last re-load at the depot, and then cut it again, or tried to. But the engine noise did not stop as it ought.
He stood back and regarded the float disappointedly. Things should behave as they always did; they should not make difficulties; they should not ask for new stratagems from him. The float sat there paling in the coming dawn, becoming more and more its battered daily self, losing its beastness and its magic.
A darkness swung in the sky. Another darkness pushed across and covered the first. Beyond the float some kind of door slammed down, and the float tipped away from Figuro towards it. He swayed to keep his footing. The door flexed —rough, dark, crusted—and was gone, flailing upward into the thundercloud, the mothership, the shaggy black belly passing over.
It rained on him: clots of clayey soil, balled-up sweet-wrappers, fragments of mirror-glass and concrete. The rain bounced and tinkled on the depot float-park, while the thing blacked out all but the edges of the sky, all but the very fringe of what little light there had been.
Figuro was accustomed to not understanding. He stood in the shadow and waited, untroubled, for all the impressions to come together into sense, or perhaps not. Gusts of troubled air swiped at him, rattled the leaning float and the depot gates.
He ought to be afraid of it, perhaps. No other milkmen were here yet to show him how much danger he was in, to run about and drag him by the arm: Inside, simpleton! Only Figuro stood in the broken black field of asphalt, his tipped float somehow reproving him, and the thing, the storm, the aircraft, continuing overhead.
With a final spatter of its sand-and-stony rain it dragged its back end, waving threads and shiny tubes of tail, away over the plant, over High-Minded’s administration building with its cosy offices that Figuro had never seen, with its unsuspecting pediments and corbels and much-divided windows, now mirroring this star to that again, this crying sea-gull to that.
All around, the grit and gobbets were scattered on the tar like assorted jewels. Figuro could do nothing for the float; several men would be needed to lift it out; several men were not here to help him.
So he followed. Eastward, the thing had gone, towards the water, towards the light. He felt an inclination that way himself, most mornings, but dutifully back into the streets he always went, delivering.
He rounded the corner into Munificent Way and he could see it, its edge proceeding above the buildings, swaying in such a way, he could not tell how many legs it had. Certainly more than an elephant, quite a different rhythm. He hurried, he ran, because while it gave every impression of slow, considered progress it was shrinking in his eye. And another part of Figuro was caught up as a child is caught by a circus parade or a brass band or, yes, a string of elephants single file, as if such things had a wake into which unthinking beings were drawn, without