Yellowcake (24 page)

Now he saw the sea, the dark line of it through the railing beyond the paler stripe of empty highway. Now he smelt it over the other smells, muted as they were by morning’s coolness—the splashy, salt smell of play, of childhood. Now he heard it, beyond his own breaths and grunts, its thin collapsements on the shore beside the unawakened town. And he was out on the highway, and he could see the whole creature.

It brought the last several of its leg pairs, leg trios, over the railing after itself, while its jagged chin thrust out over the first shallows like a king’s sea-palace.

And palace it was, or at least architecture, Figuro saw clearly. It was made all of slabs and brittle stuff that ought not to move, and yet it had got something of sinew into itself, and something of flexible skin, something of a head— he wished he could see the face that belonged to this outreaching being, this clumsy animal, this great ugly child. Perhaps even it had ears, and if he went up close it would hear him. Perhaps he could help.

He ran straight across the highway, bent and stepped through the railing to the grassed area beyond. His joints were grateful for earth instead of paving; he had energy again with the creature-that-was-a-building in his sights, arrayed across the view and so unusual. He was glad his mother was gone; he would not have to describe the impossible thing to her. He could just see it and have it go unexplained, un-made-sense-of, wondrous.

He ran. He wished it would turn this way. ‘Hi!’ he cried, and ‘Hey!’, and he leaped and waved trying to make himself big enough to catch its eye.

Of course it did not see or hear him—or if it did, he was not important to it. Caterpillar-like it assembled its segments, hunching the shoulder-ish ones at the fore, sorting and shuffling the ones behind.

Then it shook its head—not monstrously, not cavalierly, but as if gathering courage before going to an interview with the High-Minded Milk boss, for instance. Momentarily it had a mane, and shards flew out of it, some black, some only flashes of beginning dawnlight, long triangles in the sky and then gone into the briefly furred sea-surface.

And into the water it walked. It was the wonderfullest thing. Figuro ran to the edge of the grass, scrambled down the slope of cemented rocks and stood, up to his ankles in the soft, cold sand. He struggled a few steps forward, but without the spring of grass his legs were uninterested, and his eyes were so busy—his mouth was open as if it could see, too—that he did not fight to force himself onward.

Anyway, he wanted this view of all of it, and to hear the creaks and grindings from its whole length, poppings and thumps. Besides, see all the stuff falling from its sides and undersides! If he went too close he could be speared, crushed, blinded by some small flying-off thing.

‘Oh!’ He clasped his hands and shook them up at the thing. ‘You are a marvel!’

Its forelegs sank in the soft watered sand and lifted, and sank again. On and in it went, still with its back end progressing across the grass. It breasted the little waves, breaking their ration of dawn-sheen into an unshining white splashiness. It was clumsy, of course, clumsier than a horse or elephant, meeting the water for the first-ever time and accustoming itself to its own shape against the water forces, the thickness and the wavebeats and the more tidal changes. It lumbered. Expecting the floor to be as flat as the city’s, it slumped and huffed and surged in surprise at the slope; it stumbled. Its underneath splatted wide sprays out to the sides and front. It seemed to fall to its knees, all its different sets of knees, one after another, floundering and slanting and gathering itself up to try again, as if it fled, rather than sought its right place.

But there, the back end of it was now over the sea-rim, and the front was shouldered well in, up to the eyebrows maybe—Figuro wished he could see. Spray flew up off the front edge and onto the roof. Would it float? Figuro hoped it would finish as something like a crocodile, just the top of it snaking its lumps and spines away into the sunrise, the legs working invisibly below.

The first water swirled pink and silver across the roof. Figuro was disappointed to see it, but still he had to admit that it was beautiful, it was right, just as when you washed yourself in the sacred river you had to immerse yourself completely, not merely splash water up onto your head-top but go right down, hold your breath and be part of the river for a moment. Figuro had opened his eyes under there, seen the pale misty water and the brown level of stirred-up mud, and his Uncle Pooti’s trousers flapping in the current as in a strong wind full of dust.

Down so went this creature entirely, piece by blockish piece, following itself ungainly into the sea. And behind its last legs and trailing tails, Figuro ran back and forth at the water’s edge, his cries lost in the sluicings of the shallows, in the up-bubbling blasts of air and wreckage. The mystery muttered against the sea-bottom; on the surface it left a slick path, edged with ragged fountains, from Figuro to the new sun a bright peck-mark out of the horizon, from the new sun a golden fingernail, across all of the sea, to the milk-man running on the shore.

I reach the edge of the world. There are no lice here, and no louse-carriages. Soft fur strokes my sore torn paws, and then even softer stuff, a kind of cloud-ground. It gives somewhat before holding, relenting.

Out there beyond are two skies, both shining full of hope. The gentlest colour creeps upon the upper one, colour of Ladies’ Underwear, and with a lace of clouds there, yes, a trim,
accents
. The same kind shade swims upon the water, cresting its night-darkness, spilling forward on its foam.

I step off into space, all itching. It’s cold, the morning, the water. It clings close in my crevices; it climbs up my outsides and into the lower beginnings of my innards, the first rooms there and the cavities; it soothes the broken places; it lifts the grit and grain off me. The loose pieces wag and break off and are gone from their dangling and banging.

Ah! I open my face. It rushes in, the morning, the light, the universe, the cleansing sea. I sink into the relief and it laps and laves me all around, hurries across the top of me to cover me, and rushes and spurts in all my compartments, soaking and floating the disordered goods there, dousing the memories of my electronica, pouring ruin along my walkways, tossing and tumbling my shelves, my stacks, my store-rooms of louse-ephemera.

Down farther I sink, quite covered now, quite gone from the world’s sight, from the world’s crawlings. Collected airs bleed upward through me; gouts and threads of bubble stream lightward. Everything is blurred here and stirring; every sound is muffled and closed in; the hollows resound differently, deeperly; nothing is sudden. Temperatures trail slow strings across my face, and softness sucks below. Rocks crack my underparts over themselves; growths lie down and make matting for my wounded belly.

I lie, all my itches gone or going, shifting this wing or that corridor to blub up a bubble, to complete my skin of cool, of wet, to drown the last louse-traces, any eggs they might have left, any irritants. Around me the vast blur moves, out and empty of those scraping creatures and those squalling. Instead come smoother others, moving without benefit of flooring, arriving on the slow treacly winds of the sea, eyeing me, kissing and nibbling my surfaces, rolling into my foyers and uncoiling, shy upon my travertine and my piled sharded glass. I lie and breathe of the free-moving tides, and let the sea-beasts have the run of me.

There was too much sky altogether, thought Sendra, stepping out onto Commercial Row. Too much sky and too much wall and pavement—where had everyone gone?

It was so quiet that she heard her own gasp twice— once from her mouth and again bounced back to her from the shopfronts opposite, a tiny moment later. Commercial Row was long and wide, inviting your eye, your feet, to wander. But today it didn’t end as it should, at the shining promise of Chumley Mall. Gone were the chrome and glass doors three times man-height holding in the cooled air, the giant billboard-faces with their intimate smiles, the ant-people passing in and out. Today only sky filled the street-end, and the inconsequential buildings beyond where the mall ought to be, and on the ground a crowd milling, excitement, indeed like stirred-up ants.

Slowly she walked towards the difference. It was as if her own head had suddenly changed shape; it was as if someone important had died—had anyone died? Would she see dreadful things? Still she walked. Nuri was tied onto her back, like goods, silent and warm, and she was a grown-up now; she was a mother, and she could bear anything; she could look any horror in the face.

Slowly the nothing approached her, towering and teetering emptied sky, with a fuss, a froth, of people below. She stood a little way back from them, catching between their heads and movements glimpses of torn earth, of a pipe gushing, concrete slabs stacked, or leaning in the clay crater-sides.

A tiny old woman was brought out of the crowd by her scolding daughter: ‘Well, by heaven, the suit is gone now, isn’t it? Gone to smithereens along with the rest. Come, mama. I need a cup of tea, I am so shocked.’

‘How can it be?’ said the old woman, bewildered. ‘All that explosion, and yet it woke no one. Nobody heard a thing.’

All sounds fell silent to Sendra then, although the mama and others continued to mouth, and a vehicle, a small type of digging machine, parted the crowd almost at Sendra’s elbow. The night-silence clutched her close, and the machine’s trundling reminded her feet of the apartment floor last night, of being bare and tired by the window.

She pushed through the crowd behind the machine. When it turned right she went left, and found the concrete apron everyone used to cross to reach the cool of Chumley Mall. Beyond its broken far edge, the ground gaped, the ground yawned, a muddy mouth full of broken teeth, broken grey biscuit, and tubes and piping slumped or poked cockily up, fountaining wires or dribbling water. On the far rim of the crater all the town’s levels of wealth were lined up in order, from the white Shogun Apartments with their flags at the hill-top, down to the woven-walled huts and lean-to’s along the river’s filth.

Right before her eyes men put up a barrier, a wire fence that broke up the crater-view into diamonds. People pushed around her and clustered to the wire, hooking their fingers in, and some of the children their toes. Sendra was glad of them, that they hid that again, that they began to fill the great be-furred silence it had been yelling forth, with their exclamations, the children with their questions, and everyone with their ordinariness—a man eating a banana as he stared through the wire, a child or two sidling up with their begging-faces on.

Sendra pushed back, so as not to be wedged at the front of the crowd. She was on Commercial Row again, walking away from everyone, with nowhere to go now, her market bag loose in her hand. ‘I dreamt it,’ she said to the empty street. The paving and the litter passed her eyes unseen. The memory of the woken thing lumped up out of the possible. Her footsoles crawled with its wrenchings, with its breakings, with its pullings free.

Acknowledgements