Yellowcake (4 page)

Jo laughed insanely and danced off to obey.

The four others risked looking at each other. Thank heaven, thought Billy. He had thought his own face must be peeled back to the skull; now he knew, seeing Castle’s wary eyes and Alex’s teary ones, that he looked like his old, young self.

‘That was
horrible
!’ whimpered Alex, and a hiccoughing breath made the juices rattle in his nose.

‘I’m sorry,’ said Billy. ‘The ashtray was a bad idea. But I used to
like
it. You said—’ He turned to Shai. ‘You said, pick things that
mean
something. So I did. I didn’t know it would—’ He broke off so as not to cry, waving his hands about.

‘It’s all right,’ said Shai. ‘You weren’t to know. How were you to know? Who’d have thought
that,
of an ashtray? My oath.’

They all four turned. Jo was trying to put his second leg in his shorts; he hopped sideways on the sand, bent headless over the task. Castle shuddered and turned away.

‘I don’t want to do another one,’ said Alex. ‘I just want to be at home. But I don’t want to walk home through this forest—it’s all shadows and noises.’

‘Well, you’ll have to, won’t you?’ snapped Castle.

Billy felt the same as Alex. What were they going to do? he wondered.

‘Wait a bit,’ said Shai, patting Alex’s shoulder. ‘Let it fade a bit.’

‘It’ll
never
fade,’ Alex whispered. ‘I’ll
never
forget.’

‘You will, too,’ said Shai. ‘Just like you forget a bad dream.’

‘I don’t forget those, either,’ said Alex, weeping. ‘I lie there going over and over it in my head, and trying not to go back to sleep and have it again. And sometimes I
do
go to sleep, and I
do
have it again—’ ‘Shut up or I’ll slap you, Alex,’ said Castle. ‘You’re working yourself up. Now stop it.’

Alex stopped, and mopped his eyes miserably.

‘Look,’ said Shai. ‘The moon’s coming up. That’ll be daylight, practically.’

Except that moon-shadows are blacker than sun ones, thought Billy. They can hide more
things,
to jump out at you. But he didn’t say it; he wasn’t about to frighten himself worse.

Nance went to Corin through the broken flowerpots. He was against a wall, and beyond the wall was the grave— she smelled its greasy sweetness. He was all bones wrapped thinly in flesh, then loosely in cloth; his hair was white scraps floating from his speckled scalp in the moonlight.

‘Come inside, Corin,’ she scolded in her crone’s voice. ‘Look at you! You’re all over ashes!’ How had they got to be so old, she and he? It seemed to Nance that they had held each other in a death-clasp all these years, meanly squeezing until every scrap of colour was gone from skin and hair, until their voices held no juice and their eyes too much. It seemed a dreadful desperate togetherness, this marriage, quite biological and loveless; she had watched frogs mating once, and it was like that, like a long, hard clinch with spasms of wrestling, now sinking, now floating, and all the while the eyes looking out, frog eyes, showing nothing. And here she was, kicking shards out of the way with her frog feet, and shaking the ash off his shirt with her frog hands—no, with her old-woman’s hands, all worn and creased—whoever would have thought moonlight could be so cruel? Look at them! She snatched them off him and hid them from herself.

She reached for something habitual to say. ‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she brayed at him. ‘Corin?’

He would not look up. She crouched in front of him, leaning against the tomb wall.

‘Corin. Corin.’

The moonlight gave him a great and glowing brow. His eyebrows sizzled along its rim. The bulls thundered from his skull-holes into hers, on and on. She could do nothing, for herself or for him; she couldn’t even blink. His eyes’ black beams had caught and locked her.

Slowly, carefully, chivvied by jolly Jo, keeping hold of each other’s shirts and elbows, and Alex and Castle holding hands because they were brothers and that was all right, they crept back up the hill. Billy kept himself going by thinking: As soon as I’m up top, I’ll tell them, No more. I’ll take Pumfter and I’ll go home. No, I’ll
leave
Pumfter. They can do what they want with him; they can bring him back to me tomorrow.

They reached the clearing. Jo climbed up and sat cross-legged on the table, grinning in the moonlight.

‘Don’t be
creepy
,’ said Castle.

‘Fetch the last one. Go on. I’m readier than ready.’

‘That’s obvious.’

Billy didn’t feel so bad after the climb. And now he didn’t fancy going home on his own, so much. So he went with Shai to the INDIA 4 STORM rock.

Shai picked Pumfter up and hugged him. Billy had to stop himself snatching at the dog: That’s
mine
! His rage was like the stiffness that happened in his throat when he was about to be sick; he swallowed down hard on it, and laid the ashtray next to the rose.

‘Here, you put him out.’ Shai handed Pumfter to him, and Billy felt ashamed of the rage—Shai had been through the nightmare too; he needed Pumfter just as much as Billy did.

Billy took a draught of Pumfter’s friendly face in the moonlight. He remembered when Pumfter had been as big as another person in bed next to him. Although he hadn’t kissed the dog for years, he knew exactly the feel of that felt nose, those rough seams. He didn’t need to kiss him.

‘All right,’ he said, and went up into the bushes and put Pumfter there. Then he huddled with Alex and Castle and Shai on the slope, watching Jo nervously.

‘Go on, then, Jo,’ called Shai, then added very softly to the others, ‘Now, think about that nice doggy.’

Alex’s free hand crept into Billy’s. Billy went still, feeling grateful and responsible and unworthy.

And then the feelings squashed themselves, and their insides leaked everywhere. The sky opened up in a wide, tooth-edged smile, and a sour, loving fog filled the clearing. It thickened and warmed and became shaggy. Jo jumped about trying to grab handfuls of it; the others sank unconscious to the ground. The dog-ness nosed around them for a moment, nudged Billy, gave Jo’s tiny hand a lick; then it sprang from the top of Cottinden’s Hill and exploded into the wider world.

Corin broke gaze with Nance to look up. This third thing sopped up moon- and starlight as it came; it had a different darkness from the sky’s—damp, grey-brown, ragged at its leading edge.

He half-rose to meet it. The mist, which was the exact temperature of his own skin, took away his balance, lifted him off his feet. He tumbled, slowly, over and over, until he fetched up against some wall or planet. He sank away under the smell of dog-fur and dog-breath and wet, new grass, and was nowhere for a while.

The clink of flower-pot pieces brought him back, the breathing of that woman Rose, the paving under his hip, the wall under his boot; the fact that there was a house nearby and that it was their house, his and the woman Rose, the woman Nance’s; the fact that every object in it, and in this garden, stood clean-edged, itself, and known to him.

They were walking along the path; they were helping each other along the path. They were very weak; they were a little hilarious with their weakness. Their legs were stumps and their arms were lumps and their heads were great heavy pots of brains, fitfully electric. Corin’s ears seemed to be stuffed with cotton wool. The door—the thin slapping screen door that his hands knew every nail and board of, the screen with its summertime load of moths and lacewings—Rose opened it and admitted them to the house, and it felt like some sort of ceremony.

He was at the table trying to explain, talking loudly, clumsily through the cotton wool.
And being angry was a kind of paint,
he bellowed,
and I splashed it all over everything, and everything looked the same. Everything was just something that would make me angry again. Because-because-because-because. All those becauses, on and on—for years, Nance! For my whole life!

Nance laughed and brought tea—in a cup!, gold-rimmed!, instead of his bitten-looking old mug that he might have insisted on. He rubbed the scarred table around the saucer wonderingly.
Do you think I’ve had some kind of stroke?

Well, if you have, we both have.
Her voice was woolly and distant. Her hair was bright white and wiry, and ashes and a leaf were caught in it. Her face was as old as his and laughing, and her eyes! My goodness, all their lives were in there. He would have to look more. He would have to ask her things—

And then, with a slap of door and a swirl of moths, here came the boy.

Billy!
said Nance—even through the wool Corin heard how much was in her voice, was in the name. But by the fact that she left her body facing him as she turned to speak, he understood that she was sharing, not trying to claim the boy all to herself.

You’re asleep on your feet, my darling!
she said.

Billy stood the ashtray on the floor to free up a hand. He closed the door properly behind him. He came to the table and laid the rose there.

I borrowed that,
he said, hugging the toy dog to his stomach.
It’s still good. Maybe you can put it in one of those special vases, the ones for one flower.

A bud vase?
And Nance was up getting one.

Billy kept his gaze on the rose, and Corin looked him up and down. He felt he had never seen this boy before; he didn’t know what to do with him besides beleaguer him.

He made his voice very low so that Billy would not mistake him.
How did the experiments go?

Billy gave one eye a sketchy rub.
Well, he guessed everything.
His hair was dull with cobwebs and sweat.

He’s good, then?
Corin felt as if he were walking out onto water, using small steps, heel-to-toe, freezing the water with his feet as he went, to make something strong enough to walk on.
He’s got the powers?

Billy looked at him. Corin thought, It’s possible I’ve not met eyes with this boy before. And how old is he? Ten? Twelve? I should know what ten and twelve look like. I should know, from my own children.

He’s got too much powers,
said Billy.
Says his mum, anyway; she says he’s getting too good. She says him and Shai are like babies with a box of bombs. She’s so angry. She’s sending Jo to the You-Crane to learn from her uncle. That’s a country.

The Ukraine? I’ve heard of it.

Nance brought the rinsed bud vase to the table and put the rose in it.