Yellowcake (15 page)

‘I
hate
this place,’ moaned Dawn, stumbling at Mum’s side.

‘I know, my darling. Not for long, though. Not for long.’

Strange breezes bothered us, hurrying along the channel, dipping from above. The sea had become like a forest either side, with upward streaks like trunks and froth at the top, dancing like wind-tossed leaves.
Shapes
moved in it; these were what terrified Dawn. They terrified all of us, and we hurried; we ran when we could, but it’s hard to run with all your belongings bundled on your head, or dragged in a sack behind you, all the gold and silver you’ve talked out of the Gypsies.

Did you know there are chasms in the sea? Did you know there are mountains and deserts, just as on land? God had granted us a dry path across, but he had not flattened it out for us, had he? The worst had been where we were forced to make a bridge of cloths and clothing, over that bottomless cleft where things churned on ledges and fell away into the darkness, where those clam-like creatures had progressed across the walls, wobbling and clacking.

Dawn tore his hand from Mum’s and stopped dead. ‘I hate this place and I hate the prophet and I
hate
it that we left Gramp behind!’

‘You need a beating,’ said another mum, hurrying past, a child under each arm.

‘Move it along, son; don’t get in the people’s way.’ A gran swiped at Dawn with her stick.

‘Stand to the
side
at least,’ gasped a bloke bent under a bulging sack.

I ran back and scooped Dawn up. He fought me, but I held on. ‘We didn’t leave Gramp,’ I said. ‘He told us to go, remember? I hate it too, but look—would he have kept ahead of
that
?’ I pointed Dawn’s screwed-up face to behind us, where the channel was closing like a zip, fitting its teeth back together, swallowing its own foam and somersaulting slowly along itself.

The sight of
that
set him flailing worse. ‘Lemme down!’ he shrieked. ‘I can run! I’ll run, I promise!’

‘You better!’ I dropped him, and managed to smack his bum before he ran off.

Ahead of us Hickory turned, and quailed at the sight of the channel. ‘Hurry!’ he cried.

‘We
are
hurrying. Aren’t we, Mum?’ Mum was hurrying in a dignified, Mum-like way that wasn’t very fast.

Steadying the bundle on her head, she flashed me a smile. ‘Have faith, daughter; He hasn’t made this escape just to drown us all in it.’

‘Look at it, though!’ The advancing foam was tossing up shapes: fishy giants,
trees
of seaweed, something that looked very much like a cartwheel.

‘I will not look,’ she said. ‘I will only hurry and keep my faith.’

‘We are coming
last
, Mum! Come on!’

She laughed at me; I could only just hear it over the thunder from behind us, the roar of foam above. ‘I don’t care if I drown now!’ she shouted. ‘At least I will not die enslaved!’

I ran on, a little way ahead of her. Whenever I turned, there she was, proceeding at her own brisk pace and calm. The wall of green-white water caught up to her and tumbled behind her, churning sharks and rocks, dead Gypsies and horses, tentacled things and flights of striped-silver fishes, but never touching her, not with fish or bubble-wrack thrown from its thrashings, not even with a drop of water from the violent masses it had to spare. It towered over us, for we were in the deepest depths of the ocean now. But it did not hurry Mum or overwhelm her, but crept along behind her, a great wild white beast tamed by her tiny happiness.

{
Ferryman

‘Wrap your pa some lunch up, Sharon,’ says Ma.

‘What, one of these bunnocks? Two?’

‘Take him two. And a good fat strip of smoke. And the hard cheese, all that’s left. Here’s his lemon.’ She whacks the cork into the bottle with the flat of her hand.

I wrap the heavy bottle thickly, so it won’t break if it drops. I put it in the carry-cloth and the bunnocks and other foods on top, in such a way that nothing squashes anything else.

‘Here I go.’

Ma crosses from her sweeping and kisses my right cheek. ‘Take that for him and this for you.’ She kisses my left. ‘And tell him about those pigeon; that’ll give him spirit till this evening.’

‘I will.’ I lift the door in the floor.

I used to need light; I used to be frightened. Not any more. Now I step down and my heart bumps along as normal; I close the lid on myself without a flinch.

I start up with ‘The Ballad of Priest and Lamb’. The stairway is good for singing; it has a peculiar echo. Also, Ma likes to hear me as I go. ‘It brightens my ears, your singing,’ she says, ‘and it can’t do any harm to those below, can it?’

Down I go. Down and down, down and round, round and round I go, and all is black around me and the invisible stone stairs take my feet down. I sing with more passion the lower I go, and more experimenting, where no one can hear me. And then there begins to be light, and I sing quieter; then I’m right down to humming, so as not to draw attention when I get there.

Out into the smells and the red twilight I go. It’s mostly the fire-river that stinks, the fumes wafting over from way off to the right before its flames mingle with the tears that make it navigable. But the others have their own smells, too. Styx-water is sharp and bites inside your nostrils. Lethe-water is sweet as hedge-roses and makes you feel sleepy.

Down the slope I go to the ferry, across the velvety hell-moss badged here and there with flat red liverworts. The dead are lined up in their groups looking dumbly about;
once they’ve had their drink
, Pa says,
you can push them around like tired sheep. Separate them out, herd them up as you desire. Pile them into cairns if you want to! Stack them like faggots—they’ll stay however you put them. They’ll only mutter and move their heads side to side like birds.

The first time I saw them, I turned and ran for the stairs. I was only little then. Pa caught up to me and grabbed me by the back of my pinafore. ‘What the blazes?’ he said.

‘They’re horrible!’ I covered my face and struggled as he carried me back.

‘What’s horrible about them? Come along and tell me.’ And he took me right close and made me examine their hairlessness and look into their empty eyes, and touch them, even. Their skin was without print or prickle, slippery as a green river stone. ‘See?’ said Pa. ‘There’s nothing to them, is there?’

‘Little girl!’ a woman had called from among the dead. ‘So sweet!’

My father reached into the crowd and pulled her out by her arm. ‘Did you not drink all your drink, madam?’ he said severely.

She made a face. ‘It tasted foul.’ Then she turned and beamed upon me. ‘What lovely hair you have! Ah, youth!’

Which I don’t. I have thick, brown, straight hair, chopped off as short as Ma will let me—and sometimes shorter when it really gives me the growls.

My dad had put me down and gone for a cup. He made the woman drink the lot, in spite of her faces and gagging. ‘Do you want to suffer?’ he said. ‘Do you want to feel everything and scream with pain? There’s a lot of fire to walk through, you know, on the way to the Blessed Place.’

‘I’m suffering now,’ she said, but vaguely, and by the time she finished the cup I was no longer visible to her— nothing was. She went in among the others and swayed there like a tall, thin plant among plants. And I’ve never feared them since, the dead. My fear dried up out of me, watching that woman’s self go.

Here comes Pa now, striding up the slope away from the line of dead. ‘How’s my miss, this noontide? How’s my Scowling Sarah?’

Some say my dad is ugly. I say, his kind of work would turn anyone ugly, all the gloom and doom of it. And anyway, I don’t care—my dad is my dad. He can be ugly as a sackful of bumholes and still I’ll love him.

Right now his hunger buzzes about him like a cloud of blowflies. ‘Here.’ I slip the carry-cloth off my shoulder. ‘And there’s two fat pigeon for supper, in a pie.’

‘Two fat pigeon in one fat pie? You set a wicked snare, Sharon Armstrong.’

‘You look buggered.’ I sit on the moss beside him. ‘And that’s a long queue. Want some help, after?’

‘If you would, my angel.’
Donk,
says the cork out of the bottle. Pa’s face and neck and forearms are all brown wrinkled leather.

He works his way through a bunnock, then the meat, the cheese, the second bun. He’s neat and methodical from first bite to last sup of the lemon.

When he’s done, he goes off a way and turns his back to pee into the lemon bottle, for you can’t leave your earthly wastes down here or they’ll sully the waters. He brings it back corked and wrapped and tucks it into the carry-cloth next to a rock on the slope. ‘Well, then.’

I scramble up from the thick dry moss and we set off down the springy slope to the river.

A couple of hours in, I’m getting bored. I’ve been checking the arrivals, sending off the ones without coin and taking the coin from under those tongues that have it, giving the paid ones their drink and checking there’s nothing in their eyes, no hope or thought or anything, and keeping them neat in their groups with my stick and my voice. Pa has rowed hard, across and back, across and back. He’s nearly to the end of the queue. Maybe I can go up home now?

But in his hurry Pa has splashed some tears onto the deck. As he steps back to let the next group of the dead file aboard, he slips on that wetness, and disappears over the side, into the woeful river, so quickly he doesn’t have time to shout.

‘Pa!’ I push my way through the slippery dead. ‘No!’

He comes up spluttering. Most of his hair has washed away.

‘Thank God!’ I grab his hot, wet wrist. ‘I thought you were dead and drowned!’

‘Oh, I’m dead all right,’ he says.

I pull him up out of the river. The tears and the fire have eaten his clothes to rags and slicked the hairs to his body. He looks almost like one of
them
. ‘Oh, Pa! Oh, Pa!’

‘Calm yourself, daughter. There’s nothing to be done.’

‘But look at you, Pa! You walk and talk. You’re more yourself than any of these are theirs.’ I’m trying to get his rags decent across his front, over his terrible bald willy.

‘I must go upstairs to die properly.’ He takes his hands from his head and looks at the sloughed-off hairs on them. ‘Oh Sharon, always remember this! A moment’s carelessness is all it takes.’

I fling myself at him and sob. He’s slimed with dissolving skin, and barely warm, and he has no heartbeat.

He lays his hand on my head and I let go of him. His face, even without hair, is the same ugly, loving face; his eyes are the same eyes. ‘Come.’ He leads the way off the punt. ‘It doesn’t do to delay these things.’

I follow him, pausing only to pick up the carry-cloth in my shaking arms. ‘Can you not stay down here, where we can visit you and be with you? You’re very like your earthly form. Even with the hair gone—’

‘What, you’d have me wander the banks of Cocytus forever?’

‘Not forever. Just until—I don’t know. Just not now, just not to lose you altogether.’

His hand is sticky on my cheek. ‘No, lovely. I must get myself coined and buried and do the thing properly. You of all people would know that.’

‘But, Pa!—’

He lays a slimy finger on my lips. ‘It’s my time, Sharon,’ he says into my spilling eyes. ‘And I will take my love of you and your mother with me, into all eternity; you know that.’