Yellowcake (2 page)

‘My eye, I don’t.’

‘You’re not really so bothered about Pumfter.’

‘Maybe not.’

Nance went back to the paper.

Corin sudsed on; plates clanked in the sink and then clacked into the rack. He heard his breath adjusting itself to every shift of his anxiety.

‘It’s nearly
dark
,’ he said.

‘It’s summer,’ said Nance in that
patient
tone he hated.

‘It’s long evenings. You go out there and let your eyes adjust and see how dark it is.’

‘Maybe I should. Maybe I should follow the little bugger and see what they’re up to.’

‘Maybe.’ There she went again. What she meant was,
Of course you shouldn’t! Leave the boy to his adventures, you clumsy great berk.

Corin heaved a sigh. He sneaked a look at Nance’s reflection. Was she smiling? He wouldn’t put it past her, to have a smile at his expense. Smug cow.

‘Where is he, then?’ asked Billy.

‘Up on the hill in the reserve,’ said Shai. ‘We’ll go up and signal when we’re near.’

‘He can’t spy down on us and see?’

‘It’s all bushy. And he doesn’t
want
to cheat, remember. Besides, he’d never guess
this
. What is it?’

‘It’s an ashtray.’

‘Like, for fags?’ Shai looked it up and down. ‘It’s huge.’

‘You stand it, beside your armchair.’ Billy stood it in the air as they walked. ‘Then you tap-tap your ash on the little tray there and
push
the button, and it spins and all goes in underneath, see?’

‘It’s a marvel. What a thing. Well, I know Jo’s never seen such a one. And a toy, there.’

‘It’s supposed to be a dog.’ Billy held Pumfter up and watched him do his work on Shai’s face.

‘That’s got a friendly look. Let me hold him a second— ooh, his flower came away.’

‘That’s the third thing. It’s a rose. My grandma grows them and they win prizes.’

‘I thought it were part of the doggy. You were very pretty with your rose, weren’t you, doggy? He’s a good size. For holding, eh. Or for tucking away here, look. I can carry him?’

‘Of course you can. I’ve got to keep this rose nice. And manage this ashtray, or it’ll trip me up. Have we got to go through bushes or anything?’

‘We can go around by the walking path. But we’ve to pick up Castle and Alex first.’

‘No, you’ve not.’ Their two forms bobbed darkly up out of the hedge.

‘You must have shovelled that dinner,’ said Shai.

‘We did. Dad said it was disgusting. Alex’s made himself sick.’

‘Don’t talk about it,’ said Alex. ‘I’ll keep it down if I think of something else.’

‘He wouldn’t miss this, not after I told him about last time,’ said Castle to Shai.

‘Hopefully we won’t get into such trouble,’ said Shai.

‘Hopefully we’re far enough away.’

‘In Cottinden’s Domain? It’s a bloody hike, all right. It’ll be dead dark coming home.’

‘It’ll be worth it. And there’ll be a moon.’

By the time they got to the hilltop Billy was just about puffed. No one had helped him with the long-stemmed ashtray or the fragile rose, although Pumfter von Schnitzel had been passed from boy to boy all the way. He was now in Alex’s shirt, his kind face poking out between buttons.
It’s all right,
he seemed to say to Billy.
None of them are clean, but you can wash me, remember? Just throw me in the machine.

Jo was idling on the picnic table at the hilltop. Trees crowded behind him. The pinking light in their upper branches glowed also in the pale, grubby cloth of Jo’s shirt.

Shai gave his whistle and Jo came alert and called out, in Travellers’ language, and Shai called back.

‘And bnah bnah blah blah Billy?’ said Jo.

‘He’s here.’

To Billy it was a marvel, that they could switch between one language and another. And a shame and an honour both, that they would stay in his language while he was with them.

‘You’re set?’ Shai called out.

‘It’s not a matter of
me
being set.’ Jo’s face moved against the dark trees, searching for some sight of them.

‘Well, we’ve got everything. You can start any time.’

‘You got three things?’

‘Aye.’

‘Choose one, then. Put it forward of you, and keep the others back. Behind a stone or a big tree or something.’

Alex scrabbled Pumfter out of his shirt. The boys all looked to Billy.

‘No,’ said Billy. ‘Let’s put this flower first, before it spoils or gets stepped on or something.’

‘Here.’ Shai ushered him towards a boulder covered with picnickers’ graffiti. ‘INDIA 4 STORM—remember that. Put the others behind there.’

‘Why?’ Billy laid Pumfter down and propped the ashtray against some stones so that it wouldn’t roll. ‘I mean, why remember? We’ll be right here, won’t we?’

‘Maybe not. There might be a bit of travelling involved. A bit of wandering.’

‘Oh.’ Billy had thought it would be more like a show, where they sat and rested and watched.

‘So. Put that forward on the ground there. But not anywhere Jo can see it.’

‘I can’t see nothing in those bushes,’ said Jo. ‘I’m not even trying.’

‘It’s forward. We’re ready,’ said Shai. ‘Do your thing.’

‘Yer, shake yer booty,’ said Castle.

‘Ah, shhh!’ said Shai. ‘You’ve got to be serious.’

‘I can’t help it. It’s funny.’

‘You spoil this, I’ll whack you so hard,’ hissed Alex.

‘Quiet in there, then,’ said Jo from the clearing. ‘I can’t go with all that racket.’

‘Can’t go? What’s he doing, working up a good crap? Ow.’

‘Shut up, you meelmeek.’

‘All right, I’m going,’ Jo sang out.

‘Where to, is he going?’ Billy murmured to Shai.

‘Off away to the inside of his own head,’ said Shai. ‘He’s got to use the psychic place. It’s right in the middle, he says. In his lizard brain.’

They waited. For quite some minutes they were four boys crouched in bushes, one boy on a picnic table, and a fragrant rose in between. Evening hung above them, its high, cool note singing on and on over the crickets’ pulsing. Birds flew home and put themselves to bed here and there. Some land creature moved, Billy couldn’t tell how far away, or what size, shrew or badger or wandering pony.

Then Jo got up and, with fluid movements that were not his own, stepped from table to bench to ground. He groped at the two buttons of his pinkish-whitish shirt, undid them by hauling rather than finger-work, dragged the shirt off over his head and stood there frowning, swinging his face blindly.

‘’S around here somewhere,’ he said in a deep, drugged voice.

He lifted his face to listen. Rose-ness welled up out of the evening and rushed at them. Alex gave a shout. A sweet-scented shock hit Billy, a velvety punch. Down the slope he tumbled, alone in a storm of blooms, streaked and scraped with darker leaves. His lungs struggled, his skin dissolved, his thoughts turned to vapour as the rose essence passed through, roaring.

Corin was at the bins. He felt it coming as you feel a wave in the sea; it sucked stuff away, ahead of itself. Corin gripped the rim of the council wheelie-bin, tried to stand firmer on the bumpy ground of the bin yard.

It hit, a powerful buffet of sweet air. It tossed his hair, rocked him, rocked the near-full bin. It must have rocked the roses. It must have stripped Nance’s roses from their stems, to carry such a scent.

But there were no petals on the streaming air. Corin ran against the wind, blundered out of the yard and around the house. He must see what had happened.

At the corner of the house, the wind stopped him, like a rose-scented tarpaulin stretched across his path. But only he was blown and bewildered; nothing else moved, not a twig, not a leaf, not a flower. All Nance’s garden stood serene in the dying summer evening.

But along the fence the rosebushes were jagged black candelabra. The roses brightened in the bloom wind, the rose wind, big soft rose-lamps propped among the rough leaves and the thorns. They shone and they shed—was it a smoke? It was like dust, or tiny seeds, or tiny, numerous, distant stars gone to milk on the sky, or like the curls of grainy steam from your soup or your tea. This stuff purled and streamered across the lawn to Corin; he breathed it and it filled his brain, which had broken open when the wind first hit him.

Her
name
is Rose, he thought dizzily, and knew he had hit upon something.

Nostrils flared, mouth wide to keep catching the wind, he stumbled after the strand of thought, back along the house wall.

He saw Nance through the screen. The white tail of her hair was blown forward over one shoulder; hair-wisps danced around her face, which was all opened out and smoothed of its lines and thoughts by surprise. The newspaper lay flat on the kitchen table where Nance had pushed it back; it was unmoved by the wind. But the rose catalogue underneath—Nance held some of the catalogue pages down, but others rattled back and forth in the breeze, and the photographed roses were smudged on the pages, and shed sweet crimson, velvet mauve and soft ivory across the kitchen air.

‘Rose!’ He called her true-name through the screen. Because—he would never be able to explain to her!— she was the source of it. It was she who blew the rose-coals to brightness, it was she who, in the first place, had had the idea of the roses. It was she—it was the children all over again! He saw that, too! He had fumed and raged against each pregnancy, and snarled and boiled and beat at the children as they grew, and railed at her for enslaving herself to them—instead of to him! But there she’d been, swelling and dreaming and knitting and working and reading to them and making their little foods and fending him off them, all according to the garden plan in her head. She had had the children plotted out just so, as if on sheets of squared paper, and she had kept him out, just as she’d not let him do a spadeful of digging or bring a barrowload of bricks to edge the rose-bed—because he snarled and sneered so, because, allowed in, his anger would have thrashed about and damaged the whole project of the roses, of the children, of the garden.

‘I’m sorry about the roses!’ He felt as if he shouted, but it came out a child’s cry, afraid the night would hear and descend on him. The wind softened; the rose-colours were fading in the kitchen, Nance’s hair settled and she looked about, for herself and for him, the speaker beyond the door-screen.