Yellowcake (14 page)

And very doubtful and frightened—but not muttering anything because hadn’t the prophet seen us correctly through that other stuff, the rust and phylloxera, and the nekkid-lizards all over the place?—everybody shuffled out. Last of all went the prophet himself, who put his thumb to our brows and
winked
at us, and said, ‘Don’t you fear now, through this long night nor no other. For he is with us, God Our God.’

‘Very well, sir,’ I said, my mouth obedient though my head boiled with horrors.

Once they’d gone, Dawn looked to me for some answers, but I had none. ‘I am afraid anyway, whatever he says,’ I said. ‘I’ve never seen anyone so crook as Hickory tonight.’

He climbed right into my lap then, though it was a hot night, and put his sticky arms around my neck and his sweaty head against my chest. ‘What is coming?’ he said. ‘Something is coming. I won’t be able to sleep.’

‘Ushshsh,’ I said and held onto him and rocked him as I used to when he was littler. ‘Don’t you worry. Your face is the right colour and so is mine.’

‘For now,’ he said buzzily into my breastbone. ‘For
now.
’

‘Well, now is all we’ve got and can know about.’ I hoped I sounded as wise as Mum did when she said it. I knew it was all a matter of the right tone, and the right rhythm of the rocking. Did Mum ever feel so lost, though, as she spoke and held us? Was the world ever so big and dangerous around her?

‘Has they all gone!’ Dad stumbled out of the stair at the sight. ‘Where is everyone? They went without their teas!’

‘The prophet sent them home,’ said Dawn quickly in case Dad felt like dealing out trouble in his worriment.

‘Oh.’ He sat to a bench end and looked about at the nothingness. ‘I was rather hoping they would stay and console me.’

‘Got their own lads to un-fever,’ creaked Gramp from the charpoy, ‘and their own wifes and children to keep calm. How is the lad?’

‘He looks dreadful,’ said Dad. ‘I have never seen such a thing, to uglify a boy so.’

Gramp wheezed—you cannot tell whether he is coughing or laughing most times. Laughing, it was, now, because then he said, ‘When I think the prettiness of the Gypsy prince, all hottened and spoiling.’

‘I wouldn’t wish it on him,’ said Dad. ‘On that bastard king himself I would not wish this, watching his boy melt away on his bed. Why can we not just stay as we have done, and work as we have done, and all stay healthy and uncrawled by vermin?’

‘What are you saying, son?’ says Gramp. ‘You know well why.’

‘Oh, I know. Only—’ And he sat a moment with his head in his hands like a man praying. ‘I am tired of the dramas, you know? I never thought I would hear myself say such a thing. But I have children now. All I want is settlement and steadiness in which to watch them grow.’

‘Which is the whole aim,’ Gramp said like a stick whacking him, a heavy stick. He was drawn up in such a way, I wondered what was holding him up—just his cloths there?

‘I know, Gramp. I know.’ Dad waved Gramp back down, with his big hands. ‘I will make us teas,’ he said. And he closed his mouth and stood.

‘Yes, you do that,’ said Gramp warningly. Dawn looked at him and he glowered back.

Sickness throws out the air of a house; you cannot do what you would usually do. Plus, the prophet had told us to stay in off the streets after sunset, when usually we would be haring about, Dukka and Gypsy together, funnelling and screeching up stair and down lane until we got thrown or yelled at, and then in someone’s yard, playing Clinks or learning Gypsy letters.
But you cannot be told one from the other like that,
he had said to us.
You must stay to your own houses, you children, with the sign upon the door.

Mum came down after a while. ‘I must make our dinner,’ she said, and she sent Dad up to do the soothing and sponging of Hickory. Which I was grateful for; I had thought she would send me. But he must be seriouser than that. Oh, I didn’t want to see him—and at the same time I wanted it very much, to see how much like a monster he was growing. I was very uncomfortable within myself about it all. When I remembered to, I prayed, stirring the foment there for Mum over the fire. But face the truth of it, praying is terribly dull, and who would be Our Lord, sitting up there with the whole world at you, praising and nagging and please-please-please? He must be bored out of his mind as well with it. Some days he must prefer to just go off and count grains of sand. Or birds of the air. Like he does. Like the prophet says he does, who gets to talk direct to him.

We ate and it was almost like normal, but after that, the light was gone entirely from outside and the usual noises— music trailing down the hill from the Gypsy houses and their laughter from their rooftop parties, and tinkling of glasses and jugs and crashing of plates sometimes—there was none of that.

Every now and again someone would tap-tap on our door and whisper to Dad, someone very wrapped—women mostly I think, who were less likely to be stopped and asked their business flittering about so in the evening. Dad would close the door and say, ‘Baron Hull’s boy has it, and all in that region.’ Meaning, by
all
, only the biggest boy of each family, we came to know. It was an affliction of the heirs and most precious—very cruel of God, I thought. Dad would go up and tell Mum, and come down again before long, and be restless with us.

Gramp lay abed but did not sleep; there was always the surprisingly alive glitter of his eyes in the middle of his wrappings and covers. No matter how hot the weather, he always was wrapped up warm.
It is because he does not shift his lazy backside,
Mum said,
so his blood sits chilling and spoiling inside him.

And I’ve a right,
he would say.
I’ve run around enough in my life at barons’ becks and calls.

‘Come, Dawn, lie down by me,’ he said when Dawn drooped at the table. No one wanted to send the boy to bed, or to go themselves. No one wanted to leave the others. Something
was
coming, and no one wanted to be alone when it came.

Dawn went and curled up in the Gramp-cloths, and before long slept, and the three of us stayed there, listening to his breaths, which normally would send
me
to sleep quick smartly, but tonight only wound my awakeness tighter, until my eyes took over my face, my ears took over my head, all my thoughts emptied out in expectation of the thing that was on its way. All I had left inside me was Dawn’s breath, softly in, softly out, trusting us to look after him while he slept.

I was leaning almost relaxed, making letters in a mist of spilled flour on the table.
Kowt … beerlt … hamidh.
One day I might have enough to make words, to read Gypsy signage, to get a job writing for them. Opposite me Dad knotted his hands together on the table, watching my clever finger in the flour.

Everything shook a little, that was the first thing.

‘Oh, God.’ Dad looked at the ceiling. ‘Please do not harm my family, please—’ But I ran around and put my hand to his mouth. I climbed up into his lap as Dawn had climbed into mine, because it is comforting to have a child to look after, and even when he dropped his prayer-gabble to a whispering I stopped him with my fingertips.

‘Shush, Dad,’ I said. ‘Just listen.’

Which he did.

How can we sleep, other nights, with that enormous darkness all about, going on and on all the way to the million stars, with all that room in it for winds and clouds, dangers and visitations?

A noise began, so distant at first I wasn’t sure of it, but then Dad and Gramp turned their heads different ways, same as me, so I knew it must be: a slow beating, that sucked and pushed the air at our ears.

Dad held me tighter as it grew, and Gramp curled smaller around Dawn on the charpoy, and his eyes glittered wider. The beating grew outside, and my own pulse thudded like horse-galloping in my chest, and then Dad’s heart
thumpa-thumped
in the back of my head, until I was quite confused which sound was the most frightening. The three of them together, maybe—the two frightened and the one almighty, not caring about either of us, about any of us, four beasts of the town happening to have life-times when this thing decided to pass.

Then an air came, gusts and punches of it, with stench upon it and with something else, with a power. It sent through my mind a string of such visions that next time I glimpsed the real world I was under the table, and Dad was clutched hard beside me crying out, and Gramp up there on the charpoy, a lump hardly bigger than Dawn himself, shook over my little brother, his forehead buried in Dawn’s sleeping shoulder.

The air of the room was clear, though it ought to’ve been black, or green and red, beslimed, chockablock with limbs and bits, a-streak with organs and tubing and drippings and sludges. Fouled fleshes and suppurating, torn bodies and assaulted, faces dead or near-dead, stretching in pain, greased with fever or a-shine with blood—the smell, the gusts of it, blossomed these pictures before me. Bury my face in Dad’s chest as close as I could, still the air got in, and like a billowing smoke the scenes built one another and streamed and slid and backed up, and gaped and struggled at me.

Next Mum was there with us, Hickory across her lap, sodden, burning at the centre of us. Then Gramp too, and we were a solid block under the table, all wound around Hickory, keeping the thing off him, keeping the air off, which
whap-whapped
through the room, which beat outside in the streets, over the town, shaking the night, shaking the world. Our house would fall down on us! We were all as good as dead! Thank God, I thought, at least we are all together. And I kissed Hickory’s hair which was like wet shoelaces tangled over his head, and I sucked some of the salty sweat out from the strands. He was
so hot
; he was throbbing heat out into us as if he were made of live coals. Gramp was whimpering in
my
shoulder now, and Dawn’s head lay sleeping on my hip. I grabbed for Mum’s hand and she held mine so tight in her slippery one, it was hard to tell who was in danger of breaking whose bones. The noise blotted out every other noise, louder than the wildest wind, and composed, in its beatings, of beating voices, crowds shrieking terrified or angry or in horrible pain I could not tell, and the groans of people trampled under the crowd’s feet, and the screams of mourners and the wails of the bereaved, all the bereaved there have ever been, all there will ever be, torrents of them, blast after blast.

I woke still locked among their bodies, my dead family’s bodies, still under the table. Outside people ran and screamed still, but they were only tonight’s people, only this town’s. And they were only—I lay and listened—they were only Gypsies. The only Dukka I heard were calming Gypsies, or hurrying past muttering to each other.

The room still stood around us; it was not crumbled and destroyed or bearing down on the table top. The air—I hadn’t breathed for a while and now I gasped a bit—the air was only air, carrying no death-thoughts, producing no visions.

Dawn sighed on my hip. His ear was folded under his head; I lifted him and smoothed it out, and laid him down again. None of them were dead; what I had thought were the remnants of the beating wind were all their different breaths, countering and crossing one another. Hickory, even. He lay, his normal colour so far as I could tell, in the lamplight-shadow of Mum and Dad, who were bent forward together as if concentrating very closely on Hickory’s sweat-slicked belly, that rose and fell with his even breathing.

It was still hot under there, and so uncomfortable. My right leg, pressed against the floor-stones that way, was likely to snap off at the hip, any moment. But it was safe— we were all safe. And it didn’t sound safe outside, and I didn’t want to
know
what awful things had happened, to make people make those noises. So I put my head down again, half on Hickory’s wet-shoelaced skull and half on Gramp’s rib-slatted chest, and I closed my eyes and went away again, there in my place in the tangle and discomfort of my family.