Yellowcake - Margo Lanagan [7]
She reached for something habitual to say. ‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she brayed at him. ‘Corin?’
He would not look up. She crouched in front of him, leaning against the tomb wall.
‘Corin. Corin.’
The moonlight gave him a great and glowing brow. His eyebrows sizzled along its rim. The bulls thundered from his skull-holes into hers, on and on. She could do nothing, for herself or for him; she couldn’t even blink. His eyes’ black beams had caught and locked her.
Slowly, carefully, chivvied by jolly Jo, keeping hold of each other’s shirts and elbows, and Alex and Castle holding hands because they were brothers and that was all right, they crept back up the hill. Billy kept himself going by thinking: As soon as I’m up top, I’ll tell them, No more. I’ll take Pumfter and I’ll go home. No, I’ll leave Pumfter. They can do what they want with him; they can bring him back to me tomorrow.
They reached the clearing. Jo climbed up and sat cross-legged on the table, grinning in the moonlight.
‘Don’t be creepy,’ said Castle.
‘Fetch the last one. Go on. I’m readier than ready.’
‘That’s obvious.’
Billy didn’t feel so bad after the climb. And now he didn’t fancy going home on his own, so much. So he went with Shai to the INDIA 4 STORM rock.
Shai picked Pumfter up and hugged him. Billy had to stop himself snatching at the dog: That’s mine! His rage was like the stiffness that happened in his throat when he was about to be sick; he swallowed down hard on it, and laid the ashtray next to the rose.
‘Here, you put him out.’ Shai handed Pumfter to him, and Billy felt ashamed of the rage—Shai had been through the nightmare too; he needed Pumfter just as much as Billy did.
Billy took a draught of Pumfter’s friendly face in the moonlight. He remembered when Pumfter had been as big as another person in bed next to him. Although he hadn’t kissed the dog for years, he knew exactly the feel of that felt nose, those rough seams. He didn’t need to kiss him.
‘All right,’ he said, and went up into the bushes and put Pumfter there. Then he huddled with Alex and Castle and Shai on the slope, watching Jo nervously.
‘Go on, then, Jo,’ called Shai, then added very softly to the others, ‘Now, think about that nice doggy.’
Alex’s free hand crept into Billy’s. Billy went still, feeling grateful and responsible and unworthy.
And then the feelings squashed themselves, and their insides leaked everywhere. The sky opened up in a wide, tooth-edged smile, and a sour, loving fog filled the clearing. It thickened and warmed and became shaggy. Jo jumped about trying to grab handfuls of it; the others sank unconscious to the ground. The dog-ness nosed around them for a moment, nudged Billy, gave Jo’s tiny hand a lick; then it sprang from the top of Cottinden’s Hill and exploded into the wider world.
Corin broke gaze with Nance to look up. This third thing sopped up moon- and starlight as it came; it had a different darkness from the sky’s—damp, grey-brown, ragged at its leading edge.
He half-rose to meet it. The mist, which was the exact temperature of his own skin, took away his balance, lifted him off his feet. He tumbled, slowly, over and over, until he fetched up against some wall or planet. He sank away under the smell of dog-fur and dog-breath and wet, new grass, and was nowhere for a while.
The clink of flower-pot pieces brought him back, the breathing of that woman Rose, the paving under his hip, the wall under his boot; the fact that there was a house nearby and that it was their house, his and the woman Rose, the woman Nance’s; the fact that every object in it, and in this garden, stood clean-edged, itself, and known to him.
They were walking along the path; they were helping each other along the path. They were very weak; they were a little hilarious with their weakness. Their legs were stumps and their arms were lumps