Yellowcake (16 page)

I know it’s not true, and so does he. How many dead have we seen, drinking all memory to nowhere? But I wipe away my tears and follow him.

We start up the stairs, and soon it’s dark. He isn’t breathing; all I can hear is the sound of his feet on the stone steps, which is unbearable, like someone tonguing chewed food in an open mouth.

He must have heard my thoughts. ‘Sing me something, Scowling Sarah. Sing me that autumn song, with all the wind and the birds in it.’

Which I’m glad to do, to cover the dead-feet sounds and to pretend we’re not here like this, to push aside my fear of what’s to come, to keep my own feet moving from step to step.

We follow the echoes up and up, and when I reach the end of the song, ‘Beautiful,’ he says. ‘Let’s have that again from the very start.’

So I sing it again. I have to break off, though, near to the end. The trapdoor is above us, leaking light around its edges.

‘Oh, my pa!’ I hold his terrible flesh and cry. ‘Don’t come up! Just stay here on the stair! I will bring you your food and your drink. We can come down and sit with you. We will
have
you, at least—’

‘Go on, now.’ He plucks my arms from his neck, from his waist, from his neck again. ‘Fetch your mother for me.’

‘Just, even—’ My mind is floating out of my head like smoke. ‘Even if you could stay for the pigeon! For the pie! Just that little while! I will bring it down to you, on the platter—’

‘What’s all this noise?’ The trapdoor opens. Ma gives a shout of fright seeing Pa, and yes, in the cooler earthly light his face is—well, it is clear that he is dead.

‘Forgive me, wife,’ says his pale, wet mouth. His teeth show through his cheeks, and his eyes are unsteady in his shiny head. ‘I have gone and killed myself, and it is no one’s fault but my own.’ He has no breath, as I said. The voice, I can hear in this realer air, comes from somewhere else than his lungs, somewhere else, perhaps, than his body completely.

Ma kneels slowly and reaches, slowly, into the top of the stair.

‘Charence Armstrong,’ she weeps at him, her voice soft and unbelieving, ‘how could you do this?’

‘He fell in the Acheron, Ma; he slipped and fell!’

‘How could you be so stupid?’ she tells him gently, searching the mess for the face she loves. ‘Come to me.’

‘As soon as I step up there I am dead,’ he says. ‘You must come down to me, sweet wife, and make your farewells.’

There’s hardly the room for it, but down she comes onto the stairs, her face so angry and intense it frightens me. And then they are like the youngest of lovers in the first fire of love, kissing, kissing, holding each other tight as if they’d crush together into one. She doesn’t seem to mind the slime, the baldness of him, the visibility of his bones. The ragged crying all around us in the hole, that is me; these two are silent in their cleaving. I lean and howl against them and at last they take me in, lock me in with them.

Finally we untangle ourselves, three wrecks of persons on the stairs. ‘Come, then,’ says my father. ‘There is nothing for it.’

‘Ah, my husband!’ whispers Ma, stroking his transparent cheeks.

All the workings move under the jellified skin. ‘Bury me with all the rites,’ he says. ‘And use real coin, not token.’

‘As if she would use token!’ I say.

He kisses me, wetly upon all the wet. ‘I know, little scowler. Go on up, now.’

When he follows us out of the hole, it’s as if he’s rising through a still water-surface. It paints him back onto himself, gives him back his hair and his clothes and his colour. For a few flying moments he’s alive and bright, returned to us.

But as his heart passes the rim, he stumbles. His face closes. He slumps to one side, and now he is gone, a dead man taken as he climbed from his cellar, a dead man fallen to his cottage floor.

We weep and wail over him a long time.

Then, ‘Take his head, daughter.’ Ma climbs back down into the hole. ‘I will lift his dear body from here.’

The day after the burial, he walks into sight around the red hill in company with several other dead.

‘Pa!’ I start towards him.

He smiles bleakly, spits the obolus into his hand and gives it to me as soon as I reach him. I was going to hug him, but it seems he doesn’t want me to.

‘That brother of mine, Gilles,’ he says. ‘He can’t hold his liquor.’

‘Gilles was just upset that you were gone so young.’ I fall into step beside him.

He shakes his bald head. ‘Discourage your mother from him; he has ideas on her. And he’s more handsome than I was. But he’s feckless; he’ll do neither of you any good.’

‘All right.’ I look miserably at the coins in my hand. I can’t tell which is Pa’s, now.

‘In a moment it won’t matter.’ He puts his spongy hand on my shoulder. ‘But for now, I’m counting on you, Sharon. You look after her for me.’

I nod and blink.

‘Now, fetch us our cups, daughter. These people are thirsty and weary of life.’

I bring the little black cups on the tray. ‘Here, you must drink this,’ I say to the dead. ‘So that the fire won’t hurt you.’

My father, of course, doesn’t need to be told. He drinks all the Lethe-water in a single swallow, puts down the cup and smacks his wet chest as he used to after a swig of apple-brandy. Up comes a burp of flowery air, and the spark dies out of his eyes.

I guide all the waiting dead onto the punt. I flick the heavy mooring-rope off the bollard and we slide out into the current, over the pure clear tears-water braided with fine flames. The red sky is cavernous; the cable dips into the flow behind us and lifts out ahead, dripping flame and water. I take up the pole and push it into the riverbed, pushing us along, me and my boatload of shades, me and what’s left of my pa. My solid arms work, my lungs grab the hot air, my juicy heart pumps and pumps. I never realised, all the years my father did this, what solitary work it is.

{
Heads

Sheegeh pulled a flimsy thing out of the heap.

‘Ah, one of these,’ he said.

Doppo looked up. ‘Can you eat it?’ That was always his first question, so they didn’t get loaded down with useless stuff. ‘It’s too little to burn. Could use it as a starter, maybe.’

‘No, it’s special, this one.’ Sheegeh cleaned the dirt-clots off the strip of paper with its printed numbers. ‘It’s all there, see? The whole thing. Not even torn.’

Holding the strip was like lifting a very small, brightly lit box to his eye. His mother was in that box in her pale-blue hospital uniform. She looked tired. She reached her hand into her pocket for something—her handkerchief, maybe, or a list she had written herself, of things to do—but a paper tape like this one came out instead, rolled up neatly. She was a great roller and folder and tucker-away of things. She put this on the table distractedly. Father was calling news from another room beyond this box. (And there were further rooms, two for sleeping, one for bathing and toileting, and a hallway, and cupboards all over the place that were as good as rooms in themselves; any one of those cupboards would be an excellent home, these days. It wasn’t like the Duwazza house, which was like a cage full of mice piled all on top of one another.)
What is that?
said the little invisible Sheegeh at the table, reaching for the rolled thing.

‘It’s for measuring the babies’ heads,’ he said to Doppo now. ‘At the hospital, when they’re born.’ There being no babies handy, he put it around his own head and held it flat with a fingertip between his eyes. ‘What’s mine?’

Doppo looked blankly at the finger, then screwed up his forehead to say that Sheegeh was mad. ‘How useful is that?’

Sheegeh didn’t know. Useful? Useful? The little box was so full of colours—the bright calendar-picture, the red doors of the cupboards, that pearly-green table. Everything in the box had been brushed and rubbed with cloths and cleansing powders, or soaked with waters and dried crisp in sunlight and clean air. Mother was trying to make dinner in her head and listen to Father and talk with Sheegeh and remember what she’d dipped her hand into her pocket for and not found. And she couldn’t see out of the box, poor Mother. She couldn’t see him looking in at her from this outside now. She’d gone on putting on the pale-blue uniform and writing on the form as if the studies would go on, as if the world would stay safe enough for babies to arrive and be measured. The little, clean-dressed Sheegeh, he had never been really surprised when all that scrubbing and polishing of things had failed, but of course he had often been dirty in his life, whereas Mother and Father had not. It was all a big shock to them.

‘We’ll run out of light,’ said Doppo. Sheegeh rolled up the tape. He put it in an inside pocket and went on with the hunt.

You catch the baby,
Mother had said, in the underground room. That one had been quite spacious too, and neat, full of good-quality salvage and with food stacked all up the walls.

Like a football!
Sheegeh had laughed.

More like a … Like when the ferry comes in and the man runs up and puts the ramp across, and the ropes. Like a ceremony, or a—

Anyway,
Father said heavily from the corner.

Well,
said Mother,
you check this and that and the other, and one of the things you check is the circumference of the head.

Couldn’t you
see
if it was very much too big or too small?
said Sheegeh.

Yes, but it has to be on the form, to show the doctor, who might not see the baby. And also, studies of birth size...to show whether women from near industry or electricity, or who smoke—