Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [63]
There was too much sky altogether, thought Sendra, stepping out onto Commercial Row. Too much sky and too much wall and pavement—where had everyone gone?
It was so quiet that she heard her own gasp twice— once from her mouth and again bounced back to her from the shopfronts opposite, a tiny moment later. Commercial Row was long and wide, inviting your eye, your feet, to wander. But today it didn’t end as it should, at the shining promise of Chumley Mall. Gone were the chrome and glass doors three times man-height holding in the cooled air, the giant billboard-faces with their intimate smiles, the ant-people passing in and out. Today only sky filled the street-end, and the inconsequential buildings beyond where the mall ought to be, and on the ground a crowd milling, excitement, indeed like stirred-up ants.
Slowly she walked towards the difference. It was as if her own head had suddenly changed shape; it was as if someone important had died—had anyone died? Would she see dreadful things? Still she walked. Nuri was tied onto her back, like goods, silent and warm, and she was a grown-up now; she was a mother, and she could bear anything; she could look any horror in the face.
Slowly the nothing approached her, towering and teetering emptied sky, with a fuss, a froth, of people below. She stood a little way back from them, catching between their heads and movements glimpses of torn earth, of a pipe gushing, concrete slabs stacked, or leaning in the clay crater-sides.
A tiny old woman was brought out of the crowd by her scolding daughter: ‘Well, by heaven, the suit is gone now, isn’t it? Gone to smithereens along with the rest. Come, mama. I need a cup of tea, I am so shocked.’
‘How can it be?’ said the old woman, bewildered. ‘All that explosion, and yet it woke no one. Nobody heard a thing.’
All sounds fell silent to Sendra then, although the mama and others continued to mouth, and a vehicle, a small type of digging machine, parted the crowd almost at Sendra’s elbow. The night-silence clutched her close, and the machine’s trundling reminded her feet of the apartment floor last night, of being bare and tired by the window.
She pushed through the crowd behind the machine. When it turned right she went left, and found the concrete apron everyone used to cross to reach the cool of Chumley Mall. Beyond its broken far edge, the ground gaped, the ground yawned, a muddy mouth full of broken teeth, broken grey biscuit, and tubes and piping slumped or poked cockily up, fountaining wires or dribbling water. On the far rim of the crater all the town’s levels of wealth were lined up in order, from the white Shogun Apartments with their flags at the hill-top, down to the woven-walled huts and lean-to’s along the river’s filth.
Right before her eyes men put up a barrier, a wire fence that broke up the crater-view into diamonds. People pushed around her and clustered to the wire, hooking their fingers in, and some of the children their toes. Sendra was glad of them, that they hid that again, that they began to fill the great be-furred silence it had been yelling forth, with their exclamations, the children with their questions, and everyone with their ordinariness—a man eating a banana as he stared through the wire, a child or two sidling up with their begging-faces on.
Sendra pushed back, so as not to be wedged at the front of the crowd. She was on Commercial Row again, walking away from everyone, with nowhere to go now, her market bag loose in her hand. ‘I dreamt it,’ she said to the empty street. The paving and the litter passed her eyes unseen. The memory of the woken thing lumped up out of the possible. Her footsoles crawled with its wrenchings, with its breakings, with its pullings free.
Acknowledgements
Publication history
The stories in this collection were first published during 2006–2009 in the publications listed below. I thank the following people