Yellowcake (3 page)

‘It just seemed so old-womanish,’ he said falteringly, trying to get
some
words out before the wind, the thought, entirely went. ‘I just wanted you to stay my girl—’

And it was gone. The last colours slid off the catalogue pages and trickled to invisibility across the table.

Nance stood up and scraped the chair back. ‘Of course!’ She came around to the door. She was laughing, but not unkindly. ‘So that you could stay a boy, and all the girls still want you! Well, what kind of life is that, on and on and on? What is the use of that?’

‘I don’t know,’ he said, frightened. ‘But I didn’t know... what was the use of roses, either. I couldn’t see the point before, you see—’

She pressed her mouth to the screen, and he met it with his. Their warmths warmed the mesh. She put her hand up beside her face, and he matched it with his hand, and they were there for a moment, like reflections of each other, yet quite different. Quite different from each other, yet meeting at the mouth.

The other boys talked in Traveller, bubbles and scraps of noise. Billy lay on the hillside, gripping the ground with his hands, with the skin of his back, with the back of his head. Above him everything swirled in the aftermath, and a few stars sang, restoring the world to stillness.

‘Hum-humnah-Billy?’

‘Wait,’ he said sharply.

‘Oof. Arf,’ said Castle. ‘I’m all gone to petals and come back again.’

Yes, thought Billy, they’re about the words for it.

‘How does Jo go?’ he said. It was hard to shape his mouth around all that meaning.

‘Me?’ said Jo, in his normal voice. ‘I’m all right. I’m
very
all right. Don’t worry about me.’

‘It makes him feel good,’ said Shai. ‘It gives him jollies. He’ll be impossible, these next few days.’

Jo clapped and rubbed his hands. Both sounds seemed to happen right inside Billy’s head. ‘So what else have you got for me?’ he said.

‘What was that one, first?’ said Castle.

‘’Twas a rose. An old Bourbon rose called “Zéphirine Drouhin”, soft mid-pink in colour, with a strong fragrance. A little fussy in its habits and prone to black spot. The absence of thorns makes this rose ideal for children’s play areas, and—’

‘All right, give it a rest,’ said Shai. ‘Get back on your table.’

‘No, I’m down now. I’m ambillant. I’m good.’

‘Well, turn around, then.’

‘I tell you, I can’t see. It’s like a black curtain—well, dark grey, with branches and trunks.’

‘Turn around so
we
know. This is a scientific test.’

‘Sheesh, can we wait a bit?’ muttered Alex in a mooshed voice. He must have his face in his hands.

‘Not too long,’ said Shai. ‘He’s on his roll now. Billy, get that rose back and put out the next object.’

Billy pushed the spinning part of his brain into a corner. He bent and retrieved the rose from the bushes. He sniffed deeply of it as he took it to the INDIA 4 STORM rock, but no, it was only the merest hint of the rose-ness that had passed over and through him. It was nearly nothing in comparison, yet it was something enough to send him mad with sniffing and trying and yearning, if he let it.

Pumfter regarded him kindly, and he patted the dog’s worn cloth head. Then he laid the rose beside Pumfter and took out the ashtray.

It tinked and rattled as he pushed it into the bush.

‘It’s a cowbell; that was easy,’ said Jo.

‘Don’t be cheeky,’ said Shai.

Jo paced back and forth. His chest was narrow and bruised looking. ‘Are we ready, then? Are we good?’

‘Shut up, Jo. Alex, how are you coming?’

‘I’m a bit better.’

‘What about you, Billy?’

‘I’ll be all right,’ said Billy stoutly.

‘Right, Jo. We’re ready for you.’

A jittery silence fell. The forest sounds flowed into it.

Jo stood poised, as if about to take a step, or to bend forward and vomit.

‘Gawd,’ said Castle under his breath, ‘what will he make of
this
?’

‘He doesn’t
make
anything,’ said Shai. ‘He told me. He just connects. The object uses him to find, I dunno, something else. Something bigger. Oops—’

Jo had swung away from them, had started down the far slope.

‘Quick, after him!’ said Shai. ‘Sometimes he whistles along. Billy, you bring the object.’

Billy caught up with them at the forest edge. Jo moved on ahead, indistinct as a marsh-candle, as quietly as if he were flowing around the trees, floating over the ground, and the others thudded after him, grunting and swearing.

‘Where is the bugger?’ said Shai. ‘I’ve lost him.’

‘Down there,’ said Billy. ‘Headed for the brook. See?’

‘Good man.’

When they reached Jo, he had dropped his pants and belt on the thin crescent of sand. He stood up to his calves in the shallows of a pool, which a lacework of tiny waterfalls spilled into. A star-reflection rocked jauntily over the ripples he made.

‘Watch him,’ whispered Shai. ‘He can’t swim. When he’s like this he thinks he can, though. Fly, too, sometimes.’

Jo stood, bent as if cold, his hands dark on his knees. He turned and looked straight at them, his face skull-like and awful in the darkness. ‘Ssshhh,’ he said.

‘Think about the thing, the object!’ said Shai in a terrified whisper.

Billy locked his mind onto the image of a younger, red-haired Grandpa Corin. This Corin laid his cigarette in the ashtray, ignoring the fascinated Billy at his knee. He resettled his bum in the big armchair, hunched over the form guide. The cigarette smoke went up in straight lines to a certain level, then began to bend and twine. The tiny Billy itched, stuffed full of one desire:
Press the button, Grandpa. Spin it away. Before Nance comes and finds me and snatches me up, and says, ‘Come away from that dirty thing. Leave your Grandpa to his smells, why don’t you’—

Jo straightened, and reached his skinny arms up, and spread his fingers, and gathered something down on himself, down on them all. It blotted out the sky in an instant. It crushed the boys flat to the ground, and filled their minds and mouths with ashes.

Corin pushed Nance away.

‘It’s coming again!’ He tried to see it beyond the walls of the bright kitchen.

‘You think?’ said Nance hopefully. Her lips were pinked from kissing him. Her whole face had come unset from its folds and habits; from here it might age any number of different ways.

‘It’s at Cowper Fen with the Travellers now.’ Fearfully Corin searched the ceiling. ‘Though it’s not from there; it’s from beyond there. It’s wobbling the church steeple! It’ll be here soon, it’ll be in the garden!—’

A cindery blast pushed him against the cupboards and the door. Who was he? Who was that old lady, clutching the table-edge? She was someone’s grandmother; she had one of those strong, capable, sexless bodies in the middle of all those wind-whipped clothes. But she would die anyway; he knew it.

He was running in the night. Things banged and obstructed his knees; things shattered in his wake. Tiny cries came after him. ‘Don’t call out like that!’ he muttered. ‘Don’t go right back to a
baby
!’

The bin-yard wall caught him in the ribs, smacked the breath out of him, lashed his head forward. The ground lit up orange. Hot air attacked his face, swooped down his throat and choked him.

The yard was a pit, full of magma that turned and split and sank into itself. In the time before the electric, Corin had gathered and stamped years’ worth of ashes, to make the yard floor; now these had all come alive again, and stank, and melted. The plastic bins drooped, and the raised letters on the council bin—NO HOT ASHES—glowed in the moments before the bin collapsed and was enfolded. Flames came and went across the mass, like runners of grass, only of fire.

Corin hung coughing, aghast, over the wall. New knowledge bounded through him, like a herd of black bulls caught along a narrow street and panicking: this ashy wind that pinned him here, it went nowhere; it blew only from one giant hollowness to another. He, Rose, everyone they knew, everyone they had ever known, every
thing
—put together, they were no more than one of those white sparks, there for a moment on the breast of the turning magma, and then engulfed and gone utterly.

‘Corin! Corin!’ she cried from the house. At any other time it would have started him running, it would have flicked him like a switch it was so raw, so full of fear and sorrow, so unlike the Nance he knew and wanted, the Nance he relied on to take the brunt of him. But now, with fumes in his eyes and the fire bawling and stretching and being consumed below him—
What can she do for me? Or I for her? All we can do is scrabble at each other, moan our fear at each other as we go down.

Afterwards, Nance found him crouched by the wall, staring unblinking at the new-risen moon, coated like herself in the finest of fine grey ash.

‘That’s an ashtray, that one,’ said Jo cheerily. ‘Made of chrome-plated steel. A mechanism, activated by a Bakelite knob, spins the ash and cigarette butts into the bulb below, where any remaining spark is extinguished by oxygen starvation.’

‘
Mechanism
,’ said Shai through chattering teeth. ‘
Extinguished
. He don’t get those words from our family.’

Billy didn’t know how Shai could talk at all. Billy himself had died just now; he had felt himself choking, and death had twirled his brain out of his head and mulched it into some substance that would be used again and again, to make ants or trees, or maybe other people, or maybe gases for some other planet, and all Billy-ness had left the world forever.

Now here he was, back, boy in wood, so frightened he didn’t know how he was going to get home to Nance and Grandpa Corin’s. Jo was cackling and prancing naked in the shallows; the others were huddled around Billy, all warmth and gulping breath. Alex’s ear was pearly and intricate in the faint light; the very grubbiness of the hand, the very bitten-ness of the nails that came up to scratch it made Billy feel weepy and full of wonder. At the same time, he held in his guts a black cannonball of fear; it sat and sucked all possible movement out of his body.

‘Come on, you.’ Jo capered around them, scattering cold drops of brook-water. ‘One more!’

‘Put your clothes on, you geet,’ growled Castle. ‘You look like a death-doll, all head and willy.’