Yellowcake (17 page)

It got complicated after that, and Sheegeh must have stopped listening, because he couldn’t remember any more.

‘You know what they’re doing while we hunt,’ said Doppo.

Sheegeh shrugged off Doppo’s oncoming words.

‘They brought back girls, you know. Didn’t you see? No, of course not—they don’t let you see the girls, for fear your golden hair might fall out with the shock. Well, they did, and now they’re warrumping those girls. Everyone’s having a go, one girl after the other, one Duwazza after the other.’

Sheegeh watched Doppo rage, rage against being too young even to want to go warrumping, rage at having to go out with Sheegeh on this pretend-errand, when the house was overflowing with loot and there’d never been a time when hunting was less needed.

‘And so?’ said Sheegeh. ‘Why would you want to sit around and watch that?’

Doppo turned on him. ‘It’s only that they’re not so perfect and so pure as you seem to think, Angel’s-Arse. Even that Michael, he’ll be doing it along with the rest. He’s no better—he just smiles more.’

Sheegeh watched Doppo empurple himself. Did Doppo’s rage fit these circumstances? It didn’t help that Sheegeh was not quite clear what warrumping was. He had thought it was a walloping, a beating, which he already knew the Duwazza did, on and on until the person died and then some, but this was clearly something worse. It sounded like some kind of awful violent dance, warrumping, maybe with Fat Owen beating out the music for it on the bottom of an emptied fire-drum, working up a sweat, the light on his glasses making him look blind.

‘Anyway,’ said Sheegeh, ‘if they’ve sent us away they must have good reason, is all I know. It’s surely something that we don’t need to see or do.’

They came back to the Duwazza house towards evening. Gayorg, Chechin and Michael had the fire going in the holey drum outside. Sheegeh was glad of it. The nights were beginning to nip now.

‘Hey-hey, Angel-Face,’ they said when they saw him, ‘come here and let me feel your lucky hair.’

Sheegeh let them stroke his head and tug his curls for luck—it hurt, but it was what he was here for, what they used him for, and better than what they used a lot of people for. Somewhere where he kept his thoughts from going, Sheegeh knew he was lucky.

Having had his bowl of the stew, he did not stay by the drum. He went inside and fetched the notebook from his bed-roll, and the pencil. He stuck them in his coat, and climbed up the rubble to where he could step over onto the house roof. He kept to the parts over the ceiling-joists. The tin scraped fearsomely on the nails, and people shouted, first inside, then out at the drum. ‘It’s only me!’ Sheegeh called out, and they were silent, until he showed his golden head to their view, and then they relaxed, seeing no one with a gun to his throat or temple, or more likely a knife these days.

‘What do you mean, scaring the squitters out of people?’ shouted Doppo.

‘Be quiet,’ said Gayorg. ‘He’s our angel; he can go anywhere he wants.’

Doppo grumbled something.

Sheegeh crossed to the Guardian on the roof. The half-man had been wired up here like a scarecrow, a long time ago. All his flesh was shrivelled to leather, and no longer stank. He had one of the old tin helmets on, jauntily angled. Sheegeh took that off and laid it on the roof.

‘Don’t you fall down,’ Michael called out. ‘You can’t really fly, you know, spite of your feathery wings.’

Down there they all laughed. But Sheegeh wasn’t going to fall—there was no such likelihood. He took out the tape and put it around the head so that he could see the measurement by the firelight on the forehead.

‘Fifty-five point two.’ He rolled up the tape and put it back in his pocket.

He sat and dangled his legs over the door, and took out the pencil and notebook. Starting a new page, he wrote
55.2 cm
. ‘Hey, what’s the date today?’ he called down.

Michael took a newspaper out of his back pants pocket. ‘Yesterday was Wednesday the seventeenth of October,’ he said. ‘Today I didn’t manage a paper.’

Sheegeh wrote the date next to the measurement.
Man on house roof,
he wrote beside it, which filled the line to the end with a little cramping. Someone came out the door, bumped his legs and knocked the pencil off the end of the last word. ‘Aargh,’ he said. ‘Look where you’re going.’

‘Look where you’re hanging your feet,’ said Hyram, rubbing his head.

Sheegeh stood again and picked up the helmet. When he put it back on the man, though, something gave way under-neath. He was just in time to catch the face of the thing.

‘Whoops!’ said someone down below.

Doppo shouted, ‘What did you think would happen, fiddling with that?’

‘Stay there, Angel,’ said Gayorg. ‘I’ll come up and fix it back on.’

The nose-bones were sharp in Sheegeh’s hands. He turned the head over to sit in its helmet, like a pudding in a bowl.

‘Always showing off,’ said Doppo.

‘You’re just jealous you don’t have magic hair,’ someone said.

‘Why would I want girlie hair like that?’

There was a moment’s quiet, then Chechin said easily, ‘Yeah, it’d look pretty silly around your grogan face.’

Which was too true for anyone to answer.

‘Here.’ Gayorg crossed the roof, grinding and squeaking the tin on the nails much worse than Sheegeh had. ‘Give us it. I’ve been wanting to do this for ages, tuck his head under his arm. I know just how.’

Sheegeh surrendered the head, held the wire that Gayorg took off the hand, then gave it back to him and stepped back down the roof. He put the notebook and pencil back in his bed, then went out to warm his hands at one of the drum-holes, and watch the flames poking out of them like horns, or pointy orange tongues.

Sometimes when he hadn’t had enough sleep, Sheegeh’s mind slumped straight from waking into a dream. All the noise of the Duwazza around him would fade to silence— it was a silent dream. And he could not make himself heard; the people were too far away. He stood on cleared ground and watched them come towards him across the mounds of rubble. The first—was it her?—came slowly, picking her way carefully, because she was wearing a pale-blue uniform and those soft white shoes. She hadn’t seen him yet. He was almost sure it was her. And the man behind, even slower, watched his feet in their pinching shiny shoes find a way down the treacherous rubble. Neither of them had given up hope of staying clean, of arriving without mishap at the cleared ground. They didn’t know as Sheegeh did that you throw yourself at such piles, spread yourself wide, scramble fast so that even if something does dislodge, you’re already past it, you don’t fall with it. You’re always covered with brick-dust, but so is everything, and everyone, so what matter?

He watched them in silence, but he never could decide enough that it was really them, to explode and run at them.
Somebody’s
clean mother,
somebody’s
dressed-up father, were coming, but the worst thing in the world would be to run to them, to let go and shout and start scrambling, and then look up and see that the faces were strange, that these were someone else’s people just like everyone else in the world.

He wouldn’t do that to himself. He would stand here and wait for them to be close enough, to be sure.

And he always woke while he waited. He might have just taken a first nearly-sure step, or opened his mouth and drawn breath ready. She might have just slipped a little and checked the state of her skirt with familiar hands, a familiar anxious angling of her head. The man might have just lifted his face, seeming to smile at Sheegeh, seeming easily to recognise him.

And then he would be back in the Duwazza house, with everybody rugged up and murmuring, or maybe Gayorg singing his Gayorgian songs with the words that mysteriously made everyone laugh—everyone but Doppo, who pretended to laugh anyway, and Sheegeh himself. If they saw Sheegeh awake, someone jokingly put hands over his innocent ears. Or he would be out in the fire-lit cold, with two boys wrestling, and his stomach growling, and the spotter beam crawling all over the low cloud, as if enemies came from above instead of dwelling right down here among them.

He was alone, in the old park, a bald, cratered place, the trees long gone for firewood, the circles and rectangles of flowerbeds marked out, built up, the curved-wire path-borders going from nowhere to nowhere, looking like safe ways marked across a mined place, or sown explosives themselves, conspicuous so as to warn people not to flee here into worse danger.

There was a muddy dog with him—or around him, anyway—printing its own patterns on the patterned ground.

The dog went into a crater, and nudged with its nose something on the bottom: a grey body, in grey clothing, lying in grey water. When the dog moved it Sheegeh discerned the top of a head, with black hair slicked across and coming away, and he veered down into the crater. He knelt and took the tape out of his pocket, lifted the head and slipped the tape underneath to measure it at the widest part.

He shooed the dog away, that had waded into the water and was bumping the body looking for a good part to eat.