Yellowcake (22 page)
‘He was doomed.’ Dulcie shivered. ‘I saw it. It was all over his palms, this possibility. It was all through his cards like a stain. When I see an outlay like that, I lie. Sometimes that averts it. I told him he would find love soon, and prosper in his business concerns, find peace in himself, all of that and more. Perhaps I babbled, and he saw the falsity in it. But I was only trying to help—oh!’ She covered her mouth with her hand to stop more words falling out, doing their damage.
‘Did you know the man, Dulcie?’ Ugly Tom had seen our fright and come to us.
‘You would have seen him too, Tom,’ I said. ‘He spent an age among your babies and your three-headed lambs.’
He looked startled, then disbelieving. ‘Oh, was he a young gentleman? Thin tie? Well dressed? Little goatee?’ He put up his hand to show how tall, and Dulcie and I nodded as if our heads were on the same string. ‘Well, I never!’ He turned towards the shooting gallery, astonished. ‘You’re right,’ he said to me, as if he had not noticed it himself, ‘he did spend a time with my exhibits. An inordinate amount of time.’
‘And with us outside, too, an ordinate amount,’ I said, holding Dulcie’s neck tighter. ‘Back and forth, back and forth,
staring
. Which is why we are there, of course, so that people
may
stare. Did he say anything to you, Dulcie, that made you think he might—?’
She shook her head. ‘He gave me no clue. He didn’t need to; it was all over his hands. I should have told him.
You’re in terrible danger.
Perhaps if he knew that I saw—’
It was then that she walked by, towards the tent. It was not someone understandable, like The Lovely Zalumna. It was perfectly ordinary Fay Shipley, daughter of Cap Shipley the head rigger.
I saw it as I’d seen the boot, when Sammy Mack opened the tent-flap, and held it open longer than he needed. The world, the fates, whatever dooming powers there were, that Dulcie sometimes saw the workings of before they acted, they conspired to show me, through the shiftings of the people in front of us, through the tent-flap Sammy was gawking through, beside the partition, in the narrow slice of gallery, of world-in-itself, its sounds blotted out by the closer whispers and mutterings of bone-in-his-nose Billy and Chan and Mrs Em and the Wild Man and—
She hurried in, plain Fay Shipley. She stood beside the partition, her hands to her mouth. Then she lifted her head, as someone approached her from inside, and—later I hated her for this—her arms loosened and lifted out to receive him, and as Sammy Mack dropped the canvas I saw John Frogget’s forehead come to rest on her shoulder, John Frogget’s arms encircle her waist, John Frogget’s boot block my view of that other boot.
Then they both were gone. ‘Did you see that?’ I said dazedly, in the cold, in the dark outside. ‘Fay and John Frogget?’
‘Oh,’ said Dulcie. ‘Did you not know they were sweet-hearts?’
‘Just freshly, just recent?’
‘Oh no, months, at least. Where have your eyes been?’
She stood, then, away from me, and folded her arms up there. And Mrs Em came running up to busybody, so it was all what-a-dreadful-thing and poor-John-Frogget awhile there, with every now and then a pause to allow me to exclaim to myself, But I am
prettier
than Fay Shipley!
And, Look at my hair! When hers is so flat, as if she glued it down!
And, Why, I’ve never seen the girl laugh, to improve her looks that way!
‘What a thing to do on your last night, eh?’ said Mrs Em, with something of a giggle. ‘Come to the deadest night o’ the circus, and look at freaks and specimens.’
Oh, I was being so frivolous and vain, with the young gent dead in there, and why, ever? ‘I don’t know,’ I said. ‘
Is
it so odd? What would you do, if you had killing yourself in mind?’
‘Would you have your fortune told?’ said Dulcie wretchedly from on high. ‘To see whether you had the courage?’
‘I think I am too ordinary,’ I said surprised, staring at the tent-flap.
Mrs Em laughed. ‘That’s no sin, child!’
‘Oh, but I’m used to thinking how different I am from most people, how unusual. Yet this gentleman, and shooting himself in the eye … I don’t know that I’d ever take my life in my own hands so. I wouldn’t feel I had the right, you know? To such grand feelings, or even, to make such a mess, you know? Of someone else’s floor, that would have to mop it up—’
‘Ooh, he’s more of a freak than you or I, dear,’ said Mrs Em, right by my ear. Her stubby hand patted mine.
I folded mine away from her. I didn’t want her cosiness, her comforting me. I
wanted
to be grand and tragic; I wanted people to be awed by me as we were by the dead gentleman, not to say
How sweet!
and
But they are like little
dolls
! Flossie could pick one up, couldn’t you, Floss?
I wanted to be tall, to have dignity, to shoot myself in the eye without it taking my whole arm’s stretch to reach the trigger. I wanted to be all but invisible, too, until I did so, and to leave people wondering why I might have done it, instead of having them nod and say,
Well, of course, she could expect no kind of normal life
, as I lay freakish in my own blood on the floor, with my child-boot sticking out my skirts.
‘I’m going to ask Arthur, may I sit aboard his merry-go-round,’ I said.
‘What, when a man has just died?’ said Mrs Em.
‘I will not ask him to
spin
it,’ I said. ‘It will be safer. I will be out from underfoot, and it will cheer me up, and I will have a better view when they bring the body out.’
‘What a caution!’ said Mrs Em as I went.
I thrust myself in among skirts and trousers, painted legs and pantaloons, grass-dresses and robe-drapes. There is a privacy to being so small, a privacy and a permission—all children know it, and use it, and are forgiven. And ‘Oops!’, and ‘Oh, I’m sorry, Non’, and ‘I say—oh, it’s one of you!’ people said as I forged a way through them, pushing aside their thighs and cloths and shadows.
And finally I forced through to the golden light of the merry-go-round. The animals were stiff on their posts, and empty-saddled, that ought to glide and spin, and lift and lower their riders; the pootling, piping music was stilled.
‘Arthur,’ I commanded the ticket-man nearby, a rag hanging from his pocket smudged with the grease of the roundabout’s workings. ‘Lift me up onto a pony, before someone treads me into the mud!’
Which he did with a will, for people enjoy to be ordered by dwarves as they like to be ordered by children, up to a point. And there in the golden glow I sat high-headed, above the hats and feathers and turbans of the ghoulish crowd turned away from me. I wished the light were as warm as it looked; I wished the music were filling my ears. I dreamed—hard, as if the vehemence of my dreaming would make it happen—that my shiny black horse would surge forward beneath me, and that I would be spun away from this place and this night, lifted and lowered instead past Lake Geneva, past Constantinople, past Windermere and Tokyo Palace and Gay Paree, past Geneva again, and the Lake, again and again around the whole picturesque, gilt-framed world, for as long as ever I needed.
Itchy.
That was the thought that woke me, woke my hearing, woke my skins and mind. Threw a strong light, constant as if electric powered, back down my memory.
Louse-itch, mite-itch. They have been at me all day. For many days and evenings, certainly, but this day is freshest to me. All my terrazzo and my faux-parquetry is tapped and scuffed by their shoes, streaked with their dropped food, rolled on by their children’s tantrums and strollers. This is what happens when the doors of your face are opened: the lice crowd in. When the light goes, their business is finished, and they crowd out again, and leave only their itch behind.
It is all through my pipes and columns, this itch. The lice are the source of it, but it grows in places where they have not been, away from the thoroughfares, shop rooms and rest rooms and work rooms, escalators and lifts: in drains with other vermin, in germ-scummed sewer pipes; evaporating from my roofs’ trays and gutters. All along my steel, between the steel and the concrete it strengthens, gnawing here, making me twitch there.
I have so many seams where it can gather. Impervious to air, I am, a sealed unit with my own climate, but inside and out I am all corners, all niches and crevices, false walls and cavities. I have my glossy rooms and my disinfected, but parts of me are never seen and never polished, never swept or wiped or flicked with rag or feather duster. Much of me is only ever rinsed by rain; much of me goes untouched, and some of me is buried in dirt. Worms weave around my feet, rats run about my ankles, some small thing putrefies in a back corner of me.
And all around me in the night, they are still there, the lice, crawling in the other blocks, roosting, feeding, squabbling, ceaseless. Dogs trot the streets and cattle wander; rats run; more lice live there, the sort that wait in the day at the doors of my face and importune the others entering and leaving. And on their skins and the dogs’ and the rats’ and cattle’s, lice-vermin crawl and bite and bother, so that the lice twitch an ear, or scratch a leg, or rub themselves against a post or building, to relieve their own minuscule itches.
Overhead—it is insufferable!—the million sky-mites shine, fastened all across the heavens, their fat queen moving among them full of eggs, full of young. Their mandibles are sunk in the sky-flesh, and they hang, and suck, and suck, and crawl about, night to night, slowed by the weight of sky-blood they have drunk.
Limb and limb, support and strut of me—the itch is bad now in this sector and now in that. First my waters tickle me, all their suspended pestilence; next the stale chilled air in my ducts, listless against the furry vents, the black-rimmed vanes of fans, strokes me with its dusts and damps; next it is the strips of the pulled-down roll-doors, their blindness, their blurring plastic slattedness; then the emptiness vibrates, the very space; then the litter of lice-signage, and the bower after bower of sleeping offerings, unoffered, ready to be offered tomorrow.
A breeze begins, beyond me; it is the first weather I appreciate, though memory tells me I have baked in strong sunshine, borne up under long rains, conducted lightnings through myself into the earth below where they belong. This light, soft thing, though, this breath, opens pores all over my impermeables: my glass, my pebble-crete, my metal, my silicon. My asphalt and plastics all wake in it and register: where this breeze comes from, there is refreshment, and absence of all the crawlers and biters whose clawfalls and wheel-stripes and tickling wings bother me, whose tails drag across me thin and leathery, whose whiskers brush and toes stub and spittle stars me, whose hairs powder down, or drop in sheaves and spiral locks, and are never quite all swept away. All
through
me hair-snips, hair dust, dust of all things, worm-frass and beetle dung and flakes of skin and scab shift in the drafts. I shudder, and loosen one footing in the ground.
I will have to discard some underparts, I think. All this heavy stuff where the lice-carriers install themselves, all this cement-work that is not really mall, but only ancillary to mall, all that can go, can be dropped away.
The loosening takes some work and time; I am stiff from my long sleep in the one position; I am unaccustomed; and my materials are not so flexible as lice-muscle, all oiled and made supple by bloods and waters. I don’t mind the work; from the breath of the breeze I can tell how far I need to travel; the night is long, if I remember right, and I have time.