Yellowcake (13 page)

‘Here, I’ll put it up,’ said Dad.

‘You want me to hold Lenny?’

‘No, she’s good.’ And he held her more firmly against his shoulder, took the ring of flowers from Marcus, and reached up and put it over Mum’s head. Her hair didn’t move where the neck-lace touched it. The flowers settled to her chest, but instead of coming awake as she had last time at their touch, and seeing Marcus and Dad, and easing down out of the air and hugging them all surprised, now she only hung as before, one leg bent as if she were taking a step upward, her face lifted to receive the joy that poured down from above, so that she could re-emit it to people down here—to Marcus and Dad, certainly, but not to them specially. To everyone beyond and around them, to everyone in this place, on this
level
, as she’d said.

Lenny exclaimed and reached up for Mum’s face. Her hands, soft and live and harmless, batted and pushed at Mum’s ungiving cheeks, Mum’s chin, grasped at Mum’s earlobe and slid aside on her stony-stiff hair.

‘Come on, Al,’ said Dad. ‘We’re all here waiting for you—me and Marcus and Lenny. Come on home, now. It’s a school night. Marky needs to get to bed, eh.’ And his big hand touched her face too, and rubbed the collar of her good dress, which should have bent at his touch, but which stayed stiff instead, would not move except to snap, it looked like.

‘She’s gone too far inside.’ Marcus hardly heard what he was saying through the joyous turmoil. ‘Too far away.’

‘Shh, don’t say that,’ said Dad. ‘She might hear you; she might think you’re giving her permission.’

‘I don’t think she can hear us. I don’t think she can hear anything. Not from here. Not any more.’

Any more.
He heard himself say that. He knew what it meant, but was unable to mind or fear it. It was just a fact.

Marcus put his arms around the warm curves of Mum’s skirt-folds, around one of her warm stone stockinged legs; he laid his cheek against them, though they were the wrong texture, and resisted him. He closed his eyes. It was pointless for Dad to beg and plead and weep the way he did last time. Mum was too entangled, and she was entangling further; her
self
was somewhere else, and she was becoming—within Marcus’s arms, under Dad and Lenny’s hands—some
thing
else. She flushed hotter and hotter—hotter than normal blood should go. Marcus held tight, hoping she would burn him right up, or tangle him in and take him wherever she was going. The power brimmed and spilled out of her; it poured through Marcus’s flesh, through his bones, through his skull and tongue and teeth; Mum shook with the speed and strain, like a car or an aeroplane pushed to its very limits.

‘Alice, you
can’t
,’ said Dad, gently, hopelessly. ‘Please, love, me and these babies? We
need
you, we need you to stay.’

But she was gone already, to that other level. And they could not follow; her stiffened clothes, her hard hot skin, were effects of her being drawn through a barrier that would never give way to pleading from this side. Whatever was on the
other
side wanted Mum, and only Mum. It might take them all eventually—it had a larger purpose, which Marcus was too small and too young and too
earthly
to see clearly—but for now, it was only going to perform this small subtraction from the world, this minor addition to the fullness of itself.

‘Please, Al? Please?’ Marcus could hear that Dad knew he hadn’t reached her, and that he wouldn’t, ever.

They held on, all three, to what was left of her, the stinging-hot marble of her, the blare of solid light, solid noise, solid needles. She shook in their arms, and cracked soundlessly, cataclysmically; she split up and down and a foreign fire rushed out of her. There was a momentary pain, all the pain of burning alive pressed into a couple of seconds. Lenny shrieked. But then the pain was gone, and a perfect vacancy opened around the four of them, silent, black, cool.
Yes,
thought Marcus and he tried to pitch himself into it, but it was like that time Dad had tried to get him to dive into the deep end of the swimming-pool head first, with his arms down by his sides. Marcus had bobbed and crouched and laughed at himself, but without his arms to swing up, how could he point himself properly? How could he protect his head?

And as he stood there hugging the shards of her, unable to move, unable to dive, Mum fell, or flew, or melted into the blackness. Marcus stumbled forward, and barely felt the banging of his knees against the rim of the lidded toilet, he was so occupied watching her go, watching her
be taken
.

The invisible light, the inaudible racket, switched off. He opened his eyes. He and Dad held a rag-Mum between them; he had her skirt-end and stocking-legs, from which the shoes had clattered to the floor, while Dad held her collapsed upper dress. The handbag teetered where it had
donked
onto the toilet lid, and then it tipped and fell to join the shoes.

A little leftover wail eased from Lenny. ‘Here,’ said Dad. ‘Hold this girl.’ He unclamped Lenny from himself. She drew a shuddering breath and glistened with tears, as he transferred her to Marcus. Marcus was glad to take her; she latched hard onto him and pressed her face into his neck. He sat on the toilet lid and held her while Dad folded the clothes, and took down Mum’s shopping bags from the hook on the back of the door—the door that someone had kicked or shouldered open, the lock half-broken out of the shattered chipboard and melamine. Dad slid the clothes into the bags like so much other shopping. What had she bought, Marcus wondered? Had she had any clue that she’d never get to use it?

The Ladies’ door squealed open. ‘Y’all right in there?’ someone called—one of those tough women in the coveralls, it sounded like, who’d seen all sorts of emergencies in her time.

‘Yeah, we’re good,’ Dad called out. He tucked Mum’s shoes away in a bag and smiled up at Marcus. ‘You right there, champ?’ he said quietly.

Marcus nodded. He
was
all right, he realised. He felt warm all over, and as if his head was still mildly aflame; he’d been made a torch of, it seemed, by Mum’s going.

And she hadn’t quite gone; it was true, what she’d said to Dad that night. She hadn’t gone so much as she’d kind of exploded, and the powder of her had been sifted all through everything, from Dad’s hair to the mirrors over the basins, to the broken chipboard of the door, through the temperature-controlled, freshened air of the bathroom, to the whole Swathes building beyond this room, and outward to the city, and all around that to the countryside and the sea, all their weathers and waters. Every leaf was of her and every grain; every bird and bug had something of Mum in it. It was not as good, and would never be, as having her alive in her real body, falling asleep against her or having her tut-tut and busy about the house. But it was not as bad as doing without her entirely. He might still talk to her, he felt, and she would hear. If he were to need her badly, she might summon something of her self from its dispersal, and help him be calm and sensible, as she had been, as she’d tried to teach him to be.

Marcus stood and peered into the shopping bags, checked on the floor on either side of the toilet. ‘Where’d the neck-lace go?’

Dad looked about too, even under the walls into the cubicles either side. ‘Huh, what do you know? She took the flowers.’

‘She doesn’t even really
like
gerberas, she told me.’ Marcus stepped out of the cubicle. A policewoman was standing against the far wall. First a man-cop peeped around the tiled divider-wall, then an army-looking man with little gold crosses on his collar.

‘’S what you made them into, matey.’ Dad picked up the shopping bags with a rattle and followed him out. ‘Worth taking with her up to that wherever-she-went. Heaven or wherever.’

‘Maybe it was the smell you put on them,’ said Marcus, and found himself laughing, following the policewoman out of the toilets.

‘Ha! Maybe it was! Told you the girls loved it, didn’t I?’ And Dad clapped a hand on Marcus’s shoulder, and left it there as they walked down the corridor, and out into the anxious crowd.

{
Night of the Firstlings

Hickory came down with it, same as all the big boys.
One minute he was sitting at prayers around the table, the next he hardly looked like himself, he was blotched so red and in between so white.

‘Augh.’ He sounded as if he had no teeth. ‘It’s like something thumped me.’

Dawn beside me was suddenly a little stone boy. I took his hand and we sat and could not blink, while the fuss was made of Hickory and for once we didn’t mind, so long as they got that livid-patched face out of our sight soon, those swollen-up lips. The blokes are always full of bravado; you cannot tell from them. But Mum with her sharp commands and then her tight silences told us well enough: we ought be very frightened. And we were.

We sat there in the silence of the broken-off prayer. The prophet’s children were there too, though his oldest, Nehemi, was home with the same horror.

‘Yer,’ they said. ‘It was just like that for ours, too.’

‘’T in’t any less awful the second time,’ whispered Arfur.

‘They looks like monsters.’

Then the prophet himself was back down among us, and he saw their faces and he went to their bench, gathered up little Carris and allowed the others to cling to him. He laughed across at Dawn and me. ‘Don’t worry,’ he said. ‘We have the protection. This is what we done all that for.’

It didn’t help, knowing how serious it had been while we hurried about that day with our secret and our buckets of blood.
If anyone asks you,
Dad had said,
tell them it is a Dukka festival, nothing more.

What kinda festival requires good blood slopped about everywhere?
I’d said.

It’s lamb’s,
Dad said patiently.
So a spring festival. But only some springs, tell them, because none of them will have seen it before.

I hoped some of the messier signs we had painted would still work. I remembered adding a few dabs to one of Dawn’s efforts while he ran off down the lane calling back that the Ludoes were down there, with their only one boy—but still that made him the eldest, didn’t it?, and unable to afford a lamb of their own.

Everyone but Mum and Dad came back down, some of them quite scared looking and sweaty. ‘It is just like with my lad,’ I heard one say in the stair. ‘Oh, what a night!’

‘Come, people,’ said the prophet in his prophet-voice. ‘Let us pray thanks that we have the Lord’s protection, this fearful night.’ And they all slid and clambered to around the tables again, and bent their heads.

While he intoned something special and beautiful, nearly singing those words and quite loudly, I bent my head, too, and Dawn leaned against me and I took his hand into my lap. But my attention, which should have been upon God, was wandering up the stair and dabbing about there like the tip of an elephant-trunk, sensitive to the least movement. It was unusual that Dad had not come down to play the host while Mum took care of sick Hickory. It was too too strange that Dawn and I were the only people of our house besides Gramp by the door, while the gathering swayed and responded and clutched its fingers and its brows. I prayed too, because now I could see there was something to pray for and it wasn’t thanks, it was please-please-please. Don’t let Hickory’s face explode. Please unflop him and roll his eyes back down so as we can see the colour in them again. I could not
think
how Mum and Dad would be if Hickory died; too much was possible, too much awfulness.

Once the prayer was sung to a close, the prophet said, ‘Very well, all youse go to your homes. And those with sons take the peace and strength of Our Lord with you.’