Yellowcake (18 page)

There was a man in the hills somewhere, he’d heard, behind where the ski-jump had been, among those rich houses that were all but levelled now, the owners gone just while the forces were fighting in the parliament, before even a shot had been fired. Duwazza hated those owners; Duwazza had taken every scrap of loot whole or broken from those house-shells long ago, before Sheegeh’s time.

Anyway, this man, Owen said (Owen was disgusted by it), he went around collecting dogs.

What, to eat?
Doppo had said.

No, to
mind.
To look after. Not only finds the dogs, but finds
food
for the dogs. Cooks ’em up big vats of the stuff. Keeps ’em in a big pen up there, hundreds o’ these flea-bit rag-dogs you see around the place.

That’s good, isn’t it?
someone had said doubtfully from behind Sheegeh.
Being kind to animals?

When there are
people
starving? People without houses? To care about
dogs
?

Yeah, why not?

‘’Cause it’s soppy and it’s wrong.
People
first,
then
the dogs and the horses and the budgies and the … you know?

‘Fifty-seven exactly.’ Sheegeh noted it in the book.
In crater, M. W. Memorial Park
.

He got up and walked up the slope again, tucking away the notebook and drying the back of the tape on his coat. Behind him the dog
clomped
on something, began to gnaw. Between the scraping noises were bits of voice, bits of whine, bits of
yum
. It was good not to mind any more. It was good to be used to these things.

He had found the Duwazza by accident, wandered onto their ground soon after the world had stopped making sense, looked up from his hunting and they were ranged around on the rubble-piles as if in a theatre, still, dark-clothed, some of them smoking. He remembered thinking
, I must get some kind of woolly for my head like that
— Gayorg, it had been, wearing it—because at that time too the weather had been gathering itself for winter. So it must be a year ago now.

‘Hey, Angel-face,’ said one, who would later become Michael. ‘Can you do us a favour?’ He asked in such a friendly voice that it didn’t occur to Sheegeh to refuse, even though there were so many watching.

‘What?’

‘Can you hold some stones for us?’

Sheegeh didn’t answer, because the request seemed too strange. He stood and thought how handsome Michael was—thin, like most people, but how his eyes stayed steady on you instead of switching away, and were full of kindness.

Michael picked up two stones, slithered down the mound and stood. He held a stone in each hand, his arms out either side of him. ‘Just like this,’ he said. ‘Can you do that?’

Sheegeh nodded.

‘Out to here.’ Michael strode out to Sheegeh and beyond him, where the ground was even flatter. Sheegeh followed. ‘Right here,’ said Michael, and turned to face the others, and put out his arms with the stones again.

Sheegeh stood beside him, and put his arms out.

‘Look straight back at us,’ said Michael.

The others were not very much different from corpses, lying there, but a head was raised here, those shoulders were hunched as corpses’ never were, a foot tapped. Bored as they were, they were full of thoughts and little movements.

‘Keep looking,’ said Michael. He threw away one of the stones and took a different one out of his pocket, and put it in Sheegeh’s hand.

‘That’s a funny one,’ Sheegeh said amiably.

‘It
is
a funny one,’ said Michael. ‘Don’t look,’ he added, ‘but you can feel it.’

Sheegeh felt the lighter stone. ‘Pattern of squares,’ he said.

Michael was between him and the stone. He looked at Sheegeh over his shoulder. ‘Yup. I just have to adjust something. Now, you just stand there very still, when I go. Don’t squeeze the stones, don’t drop them, don’t let them flop by your side. Just hold them out and stand there. All right?’

‘All right.’ It was nice to hear a kind voice, telling him what to do. It was a relief. He knew it was Duwazza, but not all Duwazza were so gentle.

Michael held his hand around the stone and made a sound there as if slicing part of the stone off with a single knife-stroke. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Stay exactly like that.’ He leaped away towards the other boys. They were all sitting up now, and looking out at Sheegeh.

Sheegeh looked back. He did just as Michael had told him. Michael went higher than the other boys up the rubble and crouched there. He didn’t move, though the others kept having little impatient spasms, unfolding, folding back up, staring, waving their arms. A voice called out, ‘Squeeze it!’, then ‘Squeeze them both!’, but because it was not Michael’s voice, Sheegeh did not do so.

The sky was low and grey with seams of silver sunlight throbbing through it. A breeze trickled through the place; Sheegeh couldn’t see it because there were no trees, no cloths, no blowing rubbish; he could only feel his own coat edge gently bumping the back of his knees. A bird came down, black, with a sticking-up tail; it bounced down onto a brick, eyed him, flaunted its tail one way and another, bounced—
boint, boint, boint
—away from him, then took itself off again. Sheegeh was good; his arms were getting tired, but he stayed where he was told.

Then someone ran towards him, one of the bigger boys. As he got closer, Sheegeh saw that he didn’t have Michael’s kind face, that in fact he had an ugly, injured, bristling face. But it was all right; Michael was watching; Michael had clearly told him to come.

‘Here, giss that,’ he said. Sheegeh gave him nothing, but he came and took the strange stone. He started walking back with it. ‘Yeah, it’s a dud,’ he called to the others. ‘It’s got that same look as the ones we got from Throwbrow’s.’ And he strolled back, gently tossing the stone into the air, gently catching it.

Would it be all right now to lower his arms, Sheegeh wondered? Some of the boys leaned back on the pile of rubble; some of them scrambled; all of them put up their hands as if to warn the ugly boy off.

Bang!
The stone blew up and the ugly boy fell. Silence packed itself into Sheegeh’s ears. The cloud of the explosion passed upward and was lost against the sky.

Sheegeh came from one side and the Duwazza from the other to look at the dead ugly boy. By now, Sheegeh was used to seeing all kinds of bodies, fresh and not so fresh. This one was not too bad. He regarded the bright colour of the peeled head in the middle of all this greyness.

Some of the Duwazza came around his side to properly examine the boy.

‘He’s not gunna wake up and start moaning, is he?’ said one unhappily. This was a boy Doppo’s age who Sheegeh never learned the name of; he had woken up screaming of stomach pains two nights later. The Duwazza had carried him off to the Red Cross doctors and Sheegeh had not seen him since.

‘No, no,’ said Michael. ‘Not with that head.’

‘Good,’ said the boy, then added swaggeringly, ‘’cause I hate it when they do that.’

Michael felt the ugly boy’s wrist. ‘Nada,’ he said, dropping it, and straightened, and got out tobacco in a packet. He rolled himself a cigarette fast, with one hand, lit it with a pink plastic lighter and put everything away. Now he was looking at Sheegeh.

‘So you were lucky, eh? You’re still here.’

Sheegeh kept his eyes on the ugly boy, in case the ugly boy were popular and people were angry with Sheegeh for killing him.

‘We can give him another, make him do it again,’ said someone.

‘He’s lucky, not stupid.’ Michael came and touched Sheegeh’s hair. ‘The whole point is him
not
knowing what the stone does. Isn’t it, Angel-hair? Look at this golden fluff. How do you keep it so clean? You go to the beauty parlour?’

He was joking kindly, and Sheegeh pulled his mouth down in a smile and shook his head.

Which is how it all began with the Duwazza. They took him to their house and he was theirs. Michael gave an order that no one was to touch any part of him but his hair, so they washed that and combed it like a doll’s and marvelled at how it curled up again as it dried. They ran their fingers through it when they were all kitted up for a raid, for luck, and he would stay there with Fat Owen who was an encumbrance but loyal and could cook. They would sleep until the Duwazza came back in, either wild with weapons and loot, or silent with things they had seen. Sheegeh would wake, watch and listen to check that his luck still held, and go back to sleep until morning.

He walked down the safe street. They called it Dresses Street, because for a long time two of the shop windows stayed good, one full of bridal gowns, one of evening gowns. People had broken the glass themselves and taken the gowns, eventually, for the cloth, and the brides’ wooden dummies for fuel. Most of the metal ones were still in the evening-gown shop, though, woman-shaped cages on metal stalks, straighter-backed and more confident than any woman walked any more.

The day before yesterday, Dresses Street had not been safe, and there were the bodies to prove it, fallen quite neatly against the walls they had thought would shelter them. They were still good, with the cold—there was no smell. Boots and coats had been taken, so they lay rather vulnerable in cardigans, T-shirts. One of the younger women wore nothing at all, so Sheegeh didn’t look lower than her head. Her reddish curls made her hard to measure, so he put a question mark and the words
thick hair
beside his measurement.

He went zigzag up the street with his tape and book. It was quiet, so early; it was the hour when the city seemed to catch its breath, and stretch its cramped limbs
just
a little, but not enough to catch the eye of anyone with a weapon. There was just the rustle of the tape, the crack of the notebook cover as he wrote against his knee, and the whisper of the pencil on the paper.