Yellowcake (19 page)

‘Look what Gayorg brought me,’ said Sheegeh, holding up the textbook.

Fat Owen squinted across. The room was dim with only two candles, the windows blacked out with ply and duct-tape so as not to attract fire. ‘My heaven,’ said Owen, ‘I’ve seen that before, I think. Hang on, let me...’

He pushed some chopped thing off a board into the soup, stirred it, and came to the table. ‘Ah, my, yes.
Maths Challenge
. The green one—that’s for older kids than you, I think. Let me see.’ He took the book and opened it in a couple of places.

‘Does it make any sense to you?’ said Sheegeh. ‘I tried before. I can sound out the words, but...’

‘You need the yellow one,’ said Owen. He opened the cover where all the books were shown. ‘See? Right up here, to start with. This book is way down
here
—you have to know everything that’s in all
these
books before you can tackle this one—’

A shell exploded nearby. The house shook. Some dust trickled off a rafter and sparkled and spat in the candle flame. Owen looked around. When the house didn’t break anywhere, he went back to the book, pushing his glasses up his nose.

Sheegeh slumped at the table. ‘I guess Gayorg’s not going to be able to find all the others. Can you understand this one?’

‘Oh, I did all this. This is cinchy for me. I was onto the serious books, where they didn’t colour them up and make them look fun, put in those little pictures. I was crunching hard numbers. I was going to be an aeronautical engineer.’

‘I don’t even know what that is,’ said Sheegeh. ‘You were good at school, huh?’

‘I had to be,’ said Owen, ‘if I wasn’t good at running or football, hey.’ He sat and leafed fondly through the pages.

‘Do me one of these triangles? Show me that first one.’

‘I need something to write on.’

‘I’ve got that.’ Sheegeh fetched his notebook and pencil.

Owen opened it at the page-and-a-half of Sheegeh’s head measurements. ‘This your work? Hmm, that’s a good sign, liking numbers.’

He opened a clean pair of pages and did the first task in the book. ‘I’ll do it, then I’ll see if I can explain it.’ He laid down neat codes on Sheegeh’s page, all his bulk concentrated on their neatness and rightness, muttering to himself the language of the book. ‘So it’s sixty-two degrees, that one,’ he said, sitting back after a little while. ‘Right, first you’ve got to understand some things about triangles.’

Sheegeh tried to listen, but he was distracted by the picture in his mind of them sitting there in the lamplight and the soup smell, Owen helping him, all cosy in the middle of the night’s darkness and the battle-noise.

‘You see what I’m saying?’ said Owen.

Sheegeh shook his head. ‘Tell me again,’ he said.
And this time I’ll listen properly
, he added to himself.

And Owen did tell him. Owen was that sort of boy. How he’d managed to get caught up by the Duwazza Sheegeh couldn’t imagine. Usually the Duwazza were not very nice to fat people.

In a ravaged place, looking for shelter from the rain, they came to a room full of cots, in each a withered child. Doppo went along the metal cupboards, making a great clash and rattle, talking his head off. ‘There might be medical supplies here,’ he said. Then, ‘Someone’s been through this place already. But they might have left something, if they were in a hurry. Some bandages, maybe, some drugs. Gayorg likes his drugs, doesn’t he? Likes boiling up his little cong-coctions?’

‘He will kill himself one day,’ said Sheegeh, repeating what he’d heard Michael say. He had hooked his armpits over a cot rail and was measuring the first head. And wasn’t it little! Only thirty-six point one!

And there were so many in here! He skipped past Owen’s triangle-work and started a new page. ‘Cot Room’, he called it, and drew a plan marking the door they’d come in at and eighteen rectangles for the cots.
36.1
, he wrote in the first.

‘Nothing in here, either.’ Doppo kicked a broken cardboard box out of the other room, making as much noise as possible. ‘Someone has been through thoroughly.’ He went to the door and gloomed; the rain was hissing down out there, slapping to the ground from broken guttering, starting to make a deep tinny gurgle in a pipe that sounded happy to funnel it, even though half the roof it took rain from was gone, and there was nowhere but a crater for the run-off to go. ‘It could stay like this all day,’ he moaned.

‘It sounds as if it will.’ Sheegeh, across the room, stood next to an empty cot and wrote
empty
in its rectangle in the notebook. In each occupied cot, pale brownness stained the mattress where the fluids had soaked in, like a decorative border drawn specifically to the shape of that child. Sheegeh tried to move the heads as little as possible. When he took away the tape he made sure each head faced the same way as before, that it sat in the little dent its own weight had made in the mattress, when it had had weight.

‘We’re not proper Duwazza,’ Michael had said bitterly— in the summer it must have been, because the candlelight had shone on Michael’s rolled-up sleeves, in the hair on his arm next to Sheegeh at the table, and on his shaven head. They’d all shaven their heads in the summer, to stop the itching that had been driving them all mad. Only Sheegeh had been allowed to keep a token lock, like a little tail on the back of his head. Michael himself had picked the louse-eggs out of that.

‘We are, too, proper!’ Chechin had sounded insulted.

Michael snorted. ‘Duwazza used to be
men
. I saw them. Kids like Doppo would hang around and they would laugh at them and send them away—they didn’t need them. They had uniforms. They had weapons, and all the weapons matched. They had an organisation, with proper cells, and membership papers and runners and passwords and executions. This, what we’ve got now...’ He looked around at them and Sheegeh watched their faces close down, except for the one or two that were angry.

‘This is just kids playing in the ruins,’ said Michael. ‘Not just the city ruins. The ruins of the Duwazza, too. I mean, apart from the mob in the University, who do we organise with? Who do we even
know
, since Temprance and Spek and their boys got theirs? It’s almost just us, the last little remnant.
In
glorious, it is. An
in
glorious end.’

Sheegeh didn’t quite follow him—wasn’t ‘glorious’ a good thing? He looked across the table at Gayorg, who could often say the thing that made everyone feel better.

Gayorg was looking back at Michael. His hand snuck up to the table as if he were trying to hide its action even from himself, and deposited one of his yellow pills there, a shiny flattened oval. It rocked there on the tabletop, and Gayorg watched it. Sheegeh could see him enjoying the sight, enjoying the anticipation.

‘I think we do pretty good,’ said Chechin hotly.

As Chechin started ticking off their deeds on his fingers, Gayorg, low over the happy pill, lifted his eyes and looked straight across at Sheegeh. His eyebrows slowly lifted, and a sweet, wondering smile crept onto his face. Just below his chin the little pill rocked and shone out its promise.

And so it was with some semblance of a uniform that they lined up for that raid. Chechin had found the black cloth after that summer night. It was patterned with flowers, but they were black too, woven in, and would be invisible in the dark. There was enough for everyone except the newest boy to have a new wrap for his head.

They went in late. Sheegeh stayed up later than usual, so that he would be there at the door when they left, and each could touch his hair on the way out. Doppo was with them this time; Doppo looked scornfully out of the slit in his head-wrap and trotted past Sheegeh without touching.

‘Hup!’ said the boy behind him. ‘Back here.’

‘I don’t need his
luck
,’ said Doppo over his shoulder.

The boy went after him and brought him back. ‘You want to kill us all?’ he said, banging Doppo’s stiffened hand onto Sheegeh’s curls and rubbing hard. ‘You want to be the hole in our defence?’

He let go and Doppo snatched back his hand. The other boy’s eyes rolled and he rubbed Sheegeh’s curls more gently. ‘Some people think they’re indestructible, don’t they, Angel-face?’

When they’d gone, Fat Owen said, ‘Triangles? Nah, too late for triangles. Look at you.’ But he sat up himself with
Maths Challenge
, writing his workings on pieces of foreign newspaper where the advertising pictures left good stretches of the page blank.

Sheegeh woke to see Owen lift his head from his arms on the table. The candle was dead, but there was first light outside. There was a stumbling sound, a rattle of rubble, a wounded moan. Owen heaved up and hurried to open the door.

‘Mother Mary!’ He came back to the table and fumbled to light a fresh candle.

The new boy filled the doorway, with someone else— Brisk, one of their biggest—around his shoulders. ‘They’re all gone,’ said the new boy. ‘Every one. Except us.’ He lowered Brisk to stand, propped him there.

‘What! Come in!’ said Owen. ‘Get him onto the bunk there. Let us look at him.’

‘No, no,’ said Brisk. ‘It’s too bad. Don’t touch me. Just lay me down.’ His vinyl jacket was buttoned all up and down. A row of blood-drips was gathering at the bottom edge, running along, dripping from the corner.

They helped him across the floor and sagged him onto the lower bunk, which was Michael’s, with Gayorg’s above.

Owen went for the buttons. ‘Now, let’s—’

Brisk pushed him away. Both Brisk’s hands were washed and washed again with dried blood. ‘I just wanted to die at home,’ he said, ‘’stead of out there, on the ground.’ Something inside the jacket made a soggy sound. ‘It won’t take long,’ he said.

Owen caught one of the hands wandering on the chest of the jacket. ‘You take as long as you like, Brisk,’ he said. ‘We’ll try and make you comfortable.’ He brought the big hand up to his teeth and cried on it, silently.

The new boy swayed, holding himself up by the bunk-frame, staring down at Brisk.

‘Cobbla brought me home,’ said Brisk, but his lungs were seriously disturbed now, groaning and bubbling blood up onto his lips.

Sheegeh remembered Michael saying once
, It’s a home. It’s got kids in.

Yeah,
Doppo had said, looking pleased.

Not you.
Gayorg had given him a push.
Innocent kids. Angel.

And Doppo had looked at Sheegeh with open dislike.

‘Cobbla’s a good man.’ Brisk coughed up a last gout of blood. It spread its red shine down his chin and his noisy breathing stopped.