Yellowcake (8 page)
‘Madam.’ His voice cracks with gratification. He offers her his arm.
She reattaches herself to him, and they walk on.
Jupi’s talkie-walkie crackled beside his plate.
Someone jabbered out of it, ‘You about, chief?’
All four of us stopped chewing. We’d been eating slowly, silently. We all knew that this was nearly the last of our peasepaste and drumbread.
Jupi raised his eyebrows and finished his mouthful. ‘Harrump.’ He brushed the flour from the drumbread off his fingers. He picked up the talkie and took it out into the courtyard. Jumi watched him go, eyes glittering, hands joined and pointing to her chin.
‘Couldn’t have come at a better time,’ said Dochi. ‘Eat something other than pease for a change.’ He rolled his eyes at me.
‘Eh. Pease is better than nothing, like some people have,’ I said, but mildly. You don’t pick a fight with the prince of the household.
‘Sh!’ said Jumi, leaning towards the courtyard door.
‘Why don’t you go out?’ Dochi pushed his face at her. ‘Listen right up close?’ Dochi was sound in body, so could get away with rudeness. With my withered leg I had to be more careful.
‘Sh!’ she said again, and we listened.
From the squeal of the voice and the way it worried on and on, it was Mavourn on the other end—and from Jupi’s barking answers: ‘Yup...I’ll be there...I’ll fetch him on the way...Yup.’ Behind his voice, blue-daubs buzzed in the neighbour’s bananas, tearing strings off the leaves for nesting. Farther away were the cries of seabirds, and of that family down the lane, that always fought, that no one spoke the names of.
Then Jupi was in the doorway, the talkie clapped closed in his hand, his arms spread as if to receive, as only his due, this gift from heaven.
Jumi smiled frightenedly. ‘Incoming?’ she said.
Jupi tipped his head.
‘A big one?’
‘Mavourn says one leg and one arm, but sizeable. Good big head, good sex. Not junk, he says.’
Jumi clapped her hands, sparkling. Then she went modest, pulled the cloth farther forward around her face, and ushered our emptied plates towards herself. The anxiety was gone, that had been tightening her like slow-wrung laundry these past weeks.
And for us, too, all of a sudden the evening’s heat and approaching darkness weren’t oppressive any more. We didn’t need to flee from worried thoughts into sleep.
‘So I can be useful too?’ I said. ‘If it’s sizeable?’
Dochi snorted, but Jupi blessed me with a nod. ‘Armarlis can have work too, as I arranged with A. M. Agency Limited. Just as I arranged it, it comes to be, does it not?’
Jumi pushed the pease-bowl and the bread-platter towards him. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You will need your strength for working.’
So we went to the office of A. M. Agency Limited, and saw their hiring officer, and I was taken on as a team-onlooker, and put my mark on the dotted line.
‘Well, there is no problem with the boy’s hand, at least,’ said the hirer’s assistant. He thought it was a kind of joke.
Jupi could have said, ‘Oh no, he makes a good mark.’ Or, ‘That’s right, every other part of him is fine and sound.’ Or, ‘There are many activities for which two good legs are not needed.’ Instead he went icy quiet beside me.
I didn’t mind what the man said. I was too happy to mind. I had a contract and I was going to do a useful job like any man—why would I care what anyone said? It was a nuisance only because Jupi minded so much that I had to mind on
his
behalf. And because, when we had finished our business, I had to swing along so fast and chatter so hard to make Jupi give up his minding with a laugh and hurry after me, and answer my questions.
Next morning before dawn, we took my job-ticket to the Commstore, and in the middle of the wonderful bustle there I was issued my onlooker’s whistle and megaphone. Jumi had plaited me a neck-cord for the megaphone, that would hold it close on my back while I walked so I could manage the crutches, and loose at my hip when I stood at my work and might need to reach for it fast.
Then we went down to number 17
plan
to await the incoming.
The boss-men and the gangers grouped themselves, tense and sober, around my Jupi and his crackling talkie. My brother Dochi and his friends formed another group, as they did outside The Lips Club most nights, only without the showy bursts of laughter. They were tired; they were missing their sleep-in.
I was in the main crowd of workers. As soon as the general shape and proportions of the incoming were clear, we’d be teamed up. There was not much talk, just watching the bay and shivering in the breeze. Many of us wore the new Commstore shirts, bought on credit when the news came yesterday. The dull pink and mauve stripes were invisible in the dusky light, but the hot green-blue stripes glowed, slashing down a man’s left chest, maybe, with another spot on his right collar. To my eyes, as I read the
plan
over and over trying to make it real, trying to believe my luck, the crowd was sticks and spots floating in darkness, with a movement to it like long grass in a slow wind.
Every now and then another team-onlooker would come clearer against the others, his whistle a gleam, his megaphone swinging in his hand. These men I examined keenly; I was one of them now. I thought they all looked very professional. Their heads must be full of all manner of lore and experience, I was sure, and my own memory seemed very empty by comparison. Home life at my Jumi’s side was all I knew; I felt as if I ought to be ashamed of it, even as a pang of missing-Jumi made me move uncomfortably on the
plan’s
damp concrete.
Won’t this house be quiet without my little monkey!
she had said this morning.
Which had made me feel peculiar—guilty because I’d not even thought about how Jumi might feel, that I was going to work; flustered and a little angry, it must be confessed, because it seemed that I could do no right, I could be a sort of stay-at-home embarrassing half-person by her side, or I could be a cruel son leaving her lonely.
While I was feeling all this, Dochi gave one of his awful laughs.
Yes, he’s such a screecher of a monkey,
he said.
So loud as he swings from tree to tree!
Jumi gave him her mildest reproving look. She broke the soft-boiled egg and laid it on top of my soup in the bowl and pushed it towards me, under Dochi’s laughing at his own joke, which she was not making him stop.
Thank you, Jumi,
I said.
The joke was that I was so quiet and so little trouble, anyone could ignore me if they chose. The joke was that, after some years of trying, of lashing out at Dochi with my crutches and being beaten for it, I would rather sit as I did now at my food, wearing a blank look, and let the laughter pass by.
The incoming appeared on the horizon like a small, weak sunrise. The workers stirred and gestured, and another layer bobbed above the shirt-stripes, of smiling teeth, of wide, bright eyes. My Jupi barked into the talkie, and the two tugboats crawled out from the headland’s shadow. They sent back on the breeze a whiff of diesel, and many noses drew it in with delight—a breakyard is
supposed
to be all smells and activity. How long had it been since Portellian smelt right and busy? Long enough for all our savings to be spent. Long enough for us to be half a sack of pease, quarter a sack of drumflour away from starting starving.
At first, all we could see was the backlit bulk of the thing, with a few bright rags of aura streaming in the wind, thinning as it came closer. The light from the sun, which as yet was below the horizon, made the thick shroud glow, and the body shape was a dark blur within it. I thought I could see a head, against a bigger torso. But you can’t be sure with these things; they’re never the same twice in their build and features, in their arrangement of limbs.
What kind of people could afford to send craft up into the ether to find and kill such beasts? They must be so rich! A boy born bung-legged to those people would be no shame or disadvantage, I was sure—they would get him a new leg and sew that on. Or they would get him a little car, to drive himself around on their smooth roads. There would be so many jobs for him, his leg wouldn’t matter; he might do finecrafts with his hands, or grow a famous brain, or work with computers. Nobody would be anxious for him or disappointed; he wouldn’t have to forever apologise for himself and make up to his family for having come out wrong.
‘It’s a long-hair, I think,’ said someone near me. ‘I think I can see hair around that head—if it
is
the head.’
‘Hair? That’s good.’
‘Oh, every part of it is good.’
‘It’s low in the water,’ said another. ‘Good and fresh. Quality cuttings. Everything cheaper to process. Bosses will be happy.’
‘Everyone will be happy!’
People laughed. Now we could see that the thing was more than rumour and hope.
‘I will be happy when I hold that new reel of net-yarn in my hands.’
‘I will be happy when I’m seated in the Club with the biggest plate of charfish and onion in front of me—’
‘And Cacohao, he’ll be happy when he’s lying in the dirt
behind
the Club—won’t you, Caco?—singing lovesongs to a bottle of best throb-head.’
‘Oh. I can see her beautiful face now!’
People were spending their day-wage all around me. But when the incoming reached the tugs, and they attached their ropes and lined it up for the tide to bring it onto number 17, all fell quiet. The beast’s head loomed, a soft dark shape inside the radiant shroud, which had protected the skin from damage during the burning of the aura. The shape beyond the head was long, narrow, uneven, with a lump at the foot. Jupi jabbered nervously on the talkie to the tugs, checked the time on the clock-tower, and his gang around him grew now murmurous with advice, now silent with attention. Things could go wrong at this point; the moment must be judged exactly.