Yellowcake (9 page)

A breeze came ahead of the beast. Our shirts rattled on us; the hems of pants and loongies stung our calves. The air stank of the burnt plastics of the aura, a terrible smell that all the children of Portellian learned early to love, because it meant full bellies, smiling jupis and jumis. Coming in from the ether burnt the aura to almost nothing, to the pale dust we’d seen on the wind—all gone now—to this nasty smell. The sun crept up and took a chink out of the horizon. A lot of the men had gone forward into the mauve and silver wavelets that crawled up the
plan
.

The tugs, now unhooked from the beast, rode beside it, their engines labouring against the tide. Jupi stood with his arms folded, chewing his lip with the responsibility. The tugs retreated to the beast’s far end, and with Jupi warning and checking them through the talkie, helped the tide move the great shape the last little way to the
plan
. The head began to rise independently of the body, nudged upward by the
plan’s
slope. A cheer went up; the beast was arrived.

Teams were forming. Horse-piecers gathered with their spades at the head of the
plan
near the winches. Mincers, some with their own knives, drifted towards the try-house where the copper pots and boilers glowed in the shadows. Gangers came through the crowd shouting, claiming the workers they knew were good. As a team-onlooker, I didn’t have to jump and wave my arms and call out gangers’ names. I was a contractor, not a loose day-job man dependent on luck and favour. I could stand calm in the middle of the scramble.

As the incoming edged up the
plan
, the cutting-teams threw grapplers and swung themselves up the cloudy gel. Though they mustn’t drop any gel while the beast was moving, they could make all their preparatory slits. This they did with ropes and weights, pulling the ropes through the gel just the way a merchant cuts wax-cheese with a wire. The shroud began to look fringed about the head and shoulders. The nimble rope-clippers darted in and out; chanters’ voices rang on the stinking air from high on the beast’s torso.

The message came through on the talkie: the tugs were done. The beast was beached, all head to foot of it. Jupi walked up the
plan
and signalled the bell-man. The bell clanged, the teams cheered, the ground teams scuttled away from the body. Great strips of the gel began tumbling from above. They splashed in the shallows and bounced and jounced and sometimes leaped into curls across the other strips. Hookmen straightened them flat on the ground, making a wide platform on which the beast’s parts could be deposited.

Another smell took over from the burnt-shroud odour. I had smelt it before as I helped Jumi, as I cleaned and cooked and span. She would lift her head, happy because the work—Jupi’s and Dochi’s work—was going on, and if one of the other mothers was there she would say,
Smell that? It always reminds me of the smell of Dochi when he was born.
Like inside-of-body, but clean, clean. New.

Smell of clean, warm womb,
the other might say.

Yes, and hot, too! Hot from me and hot from him.

When I was born to her, I must have smelt not so good, not so enchanting, for it was always Dochi she mentioned. Maybe it was only the first-born who brought out the clean smell with him. I did not want the details of in what way I had smelt bad—or perhaps, how she had not noticed my smell from being in such horror at my leg. So I never asked.

Anyway, there would be other smells soon against this one: oil and fuel, sweat and scorched rope, hot metal, sawn bone, sea and mud and stirred-up putrefaction.

‘Amarlis?’

The way I sprang to face Mavourn showed that I’d been waiting not moments but
years
to hear my name, to be called to usefulness.

‘I’m putting you on a thigh-team,’ he said. ‘It’s got a good man, Mister Chopes, heading it. Are you happy with that?’

‘Very happy, sir!’

‘There is Mister Chopes with the kerchief on his head. I’ve told him you’re on your way.’

‘And I am!’

I swung myself across the watery
plan
, watching Mister Chopes count heads, scan the hopping hopefuls, pick out a good clean man and give him a job-ticket, shoo away a sneaky-looking boy. The team’s chanter stood with his drum and beaters, wrapped in his white cloth and his dignity. He too was a contractor; he had no need to fuss.

Mister Chopes counted again, then sent them off for their hooks and spades, and turned and saw me. ‘You Amarlis?’

‘I am, sir, Mister Chopes!’

‘You ready to look sharp?’

‘Sharp as a shark-tooth, sir!’

‘Mavourn says you’ll be good, but you’re new, right?’

‘That’s right, sir. This is my first day ever.’

‘I’ll give you plenty of advice, then. You won’t sulk at that, boy? You’ll take that in good spirit?’

‘I’ll be grateful for all you can give me.’

‘Then we’ll do fine. Main thing, no one gets hurt. All those boys have mothers. All those men have wives and children waiting on them, right? Your job’s to make sure they come home on their own legs, right? Not flat and busted by beast-bits. This here is Trawbrij; he’s our chanter.’

‘How do you do, Trawbrij?’ I shook hands with him.

‘Twenty years on the
plans
,’ said Mister Chopes. ‘He’ll tell you anything more you need to know. Now, let’s get down the thigh.’ Because all the team was tooled-up and running back to us.

Some of the hopefuls, lingering nearby in case Mister Chopes changed his mind, cast jealous looks at me. They were angry, no doubt, that someone so clearly handicapped could gain a job when they, able-bodied, could not. I swung away from them.

Trawbrij the chanter gave us a beat; I walked with him, behind the twenty-five chosen workers, while Mister Chopes went ahead. The knee-team preceded us, with their chanter and their onlooker; I tried to hold my head as high and my back as straight as their onlooker’s, to look as casual and unselfconscious as he.

We took a safe path wide of the torso, well behind the row of waiting hookmen. Slabs of shroud slapped down and jiggled on the
plan
, sending wavelets over the hook-men’s feet.

I had watched other incomings, up with the women and children on the hill behind town. What you don’t see from there are the surfaces of things: the coarse head-hair, which is like a great tangle of endless curving double-edged combs; the damp, waxy skin, pale as the moon, hazed with its own form of hair, dewy with packaging-fluid; the eye, the ear-hole and the mouth-slit, all sealed with grey gum by the hunters. What you don’t see from the hills is the
size
, is the
wall
of the cheek going up, behind the heaps of the hair, which themselves tower three houses high above the running workers. My eyes couldn’t believe what was in front of them.

‘He’s enormous, isn’t he?’ said Trawbrij beside me.

‘He makes us look like ants,’ I said. ‘Smaller than ants, even. Just look how much of the sky he takes up!’

‘And yet we smaller-than-ants, we little crawling germs, we’re going to set upon him, and pull him apart and bring him down and saw him into plates, and melt him into pots and pints, and there’ll be nothing left of him in three weeks’ time.’

‘Is there any part of him that’s not useful to someone?’ I turned to look properly at the chanter. He was slender and white-haired and wise-looking.

‘I have only ever seen tumour-rocks left lying on the
plan
, though even these reduce in time, and become parts of people’s walls and houses, though they do not export. And sometimes if an organ bursts, or if the tides delay the incoming and the beast is putrefying on arrival, there may be lumps of dirty gel that won’t melt, that sit about for a while.’

As we came level with the thigh, the first of our team threw up his grappler and shinnied up the rope, chopping footholds as he went. Others followed, each just far enough behind the previous man not to be kicked in the head. In this way we quickly had half a team at the top.

Mister Chopes turned with his foot in the first slot. ‘Where’s my looker? Amarlis.’

‘Here,’ I said.

‘What do you reckon your job is?’

‘Keep an eye out down here.’

‘’S right. Main thing is, teams getting in each other’s ways. So, stand well back, watch how stuff falls and give a hoy before someone gets hurt.’

‘I’m on it.’

I swung around, passed Trawbrij tucking up his robes for the climb, and went back as far as the other onlookers. There I could see right to the edges of my team’s activities, and keep track of Mister Chopes and the team up on top. I blew my whistle, straight away, and the whole ground-team turned as if I had them on strings.

I cleared my throat. ‘Back up,’ I said clearly through the megaphone, and waved them towards me. ‘Back to where these other teams are standing.’ And up they came to safety, which seemed a wonder to me, a great respectful gesture. I tried not to smile, not to look surprised.

The shroud on the side of the thigh, because it was so flat, could be cut away in a single piece. When it came down—with a smack and two bounces that I felt up my spine and in my armpits through the crutches—there above it was the white-clay wall of the thigh, height of a tanker-ship, running with pack-fluid. That clean, warm, newborn-Dochi smell was all there was to breathe now. The fluid ran off, and the skin-hairs lifted from the skin, then separated from each other, gleaming in the early sun. And as I watched, the side-lit skin covered itself with little bluish triangles, bluish scallops of shadow, as if the hairs were not just drying and springing free but pulling bumps up on the skin, in the sudden chill of the sea-breeze.

But then, without warning, the whole leg sprang free of the
plan
. Daylight shone underneath it, and water-splash, and I saw the tiny black feet of the far thigh-team fleeing— and in my fright I forgot about the gooseflesh on the thigh.

The limb smacked back down, and did not move again.

One man on my team had been shaken loose. He hung swinging and screaming from the cutting-rope. Several farther down the limb had fallen right off the top. Some had hit the gel; two had bounced from it onto the
plan
. Out of all the sounds that happened in those few moments, I managed to hear the ones their heads made breaking on the ground two teams away. It sounded unremarkable, like wooden mallets striking the concrete, but of course they were not tools but people who struck, not wood but brother or father or son, as Mister Chopes had said. My heart rushed out—but less to the fallen ones than to their onlooker. He could have done nothing, poor man, it had happened so quickly. How anguished he must be! What a failure I would feel, if that were me! And then relief swept through me, a professional relief, that it had
not
been me, here on my first day.

All our team, except for those helping the hanging worker, were clawing gel, or each other, or watery ground, trying to hold the world steady. ‘How can such a thing happen?’ I said to the man nearest me.

‘It’s a nerve thing,’ he said. ‘I’ve heard of it. It’s electricity. It’s metal on a nerve. It’ll be that team on the knee. See how they’ve just shot their cap-lever in there? You can do the same thing to a dead frog. Poke it in the nerve and the leg jumps, though the heart is still and the head is cut right off.’

‘Don’t the bosses know about that nerve?’ I said. ‘Shouldn’t they have the knee team do their work first, rather than endanger so many workers?’

The man shrugged. ‘When no two beasts are quite the same, how is anyone to learn all the nerves?’

A boss and some stretcher-men had run past us towards the shin, followed by day-jobbers eager to offer themselves as replacements for the dead and the injured. Mister Chopes got his top-team up and moving again. The hip-men were back at work; the knee-people cleavered open flesh so that the knee-cap could be brought free; The wall of the thigh was smooth, sunlit. The hairs had a slight red-gold tint; perhaps that was why the flesh looked so rosy in the strengthening sun.

Once all the shroud was off the thigh, our job was a plain job, a meat job. The top team cut blanket-pieces of thigh-flesh and lowered them to the ground-team. Hooked ropes were brought along from the winches at the top of the
plan
, and the ground-team hooked the flesh on, then jumped aside as it slid away, followed by the flesh from the calf-cutters, smaller and more shaped pieces than ours.

The hip-team to our left didn’t send anything up on the first load rope, or the second. Theirs was more technical work, cutting away the bags and scrags that were the beast’s sex, sewing and sealing up the bags and passing them down in tarpaulin sheathing so that not a drop of the profitable aphrodisiacs could seep out and be wasted on the
plan
, on our splashing feet, on the sea. Then they must excavate the pelvis, which was complicated— valuable organs lay there and must not be punctured in the processing.

‘That’s a lot of muck, on the shroud,’ someone said as the smallest of the three toes, on the last few rope hooks, slid up past us.

‘’Cause it’s so fresh,’ came the satisfied answer. ‘Them star-men done a good job this time. They’re getting more efficienter with every beast, I say.’

‘Do we
want
it this fresh?’ said the first. ‘Seems like a lot of the good oils coming dribbling and drabbling out of the thing, that could be bottled and used and profited from.’