Yellowcake Read online

  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.’

  Jo laughed insanely and danced off to obey.

  The four others risked looking at each other. Thank heaven, thought Billy. He had thought his own face must be peeled back to the skull; now he knew, seeing Castle’s wary eyes and Alex’s teary ones, that he looked like his old, young self.

  ‘That was horrible!’ whimpered Alex, and a hiccoughing breath made the juices rattle in his nose.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ said Billy. ‘The ashtray was a bad idea. But I used to like it. You said—’ He turned to Shai. ‘You said, pick things that mean something. So I did. I didn’t know it would—’ He broke off so as not to cry, waving his hands about.

  ‘It’s all right,’ said Shai. ‘You weren’t to know. How were you to know? Who’d have thought that, of an ashtray? My oath.’

  They all four turned. Jo was trying to put his second leg in his shorts; he hopped sideways on the sand, bent headless over the task. Castle shuddered and turned away.

  ‘I don’t want to do another one,’ said Alex. ‘I just want to be at home. But I don’t want to walk home through this forest—it’s all shadows and noises.’

  ‘Well, you’ll have to, won’t you?’ snapped Castle.

  Billy felt the same as Alex. What were they going to do? he wondered.

  ‘Wait a bit,’ said Shai, patting Alex’s shoulder. ‘Let it fade a bit.’

  ‘It’ll never fade,’ Alex whispered. ‘I’ll never forget.’

  ‘You will, too,’ said Shai. ‘Just like you forget a bad dream.’

  ‘I don’t forget those, either,’ said Alex, weeping. ‘I lie there going over and over it in my head, and trying not to go back to sleep and have it again. And sometimes I do go to sleep, and I do have it again—’ ‘Shut up or I’ll slap you, Alex,’ said Castle. ‘You’re working yourself up. Now stop it.’

  Alex stopped, and mopped his eyes miserably.

  ‘Look,’ said Shai. ‘The moon’s coming up. That’ll be daylight, practically.’

  Except that moon-shadows are blacker than sun ones, thought Billy. They can hide more things, to jump out at you. But he didn’t say it; he wasn’t about to frighten himself worse.

  Nance went to Corin through the broken flowerpots. He was against a wall, and beyond the wall was the grave— she smelled its greasy sweetness. He was all bones wrapped thinly in flesh, then loosely in cloth; his hair was white scraps floating from his speckled scalp in the moonlight.

  ‘Come inside, Corin,’ she scolded in her crone’s voice. ‘Look at you! You’re all over ashes!’ How had they got to be so old, she and he? It seemed to Nance that they had held each other in a death-clasp all these years, meanly squeezing until every scrap of colour was gone from skin and hair, until their voices held no juice and their eyes too much. It seemed a dreadful desperate togetherness, this marriage, quite biological and loveless; she had watched frogs mating once, and it was like that, like a long, hard clinch with spasms of wrestling, now sinking, now floating, and all the while the eyes looking out, frog eyes, showing nothing. And here she was, kicking shards out of the way with her frog feet, and shaking the ash off his shirt with her frog hands—no, with her old-woman’s hands, all worn and creased—whoever would have thought moonlight could be so cruel? Look at them! She snatched them off him and hid them from herself.

  She reached for something habitual to say. ‘I’ll run you a bath,’ she brayed at him. ‘Corin?’

  He would not look up. She crouched in front of him, leaning against the tomb wall.

  ‘Corin. Corin.’

  The moonlight gave him a great and glowing brow. His eyebrows sizzled along its rim. The bulls thundered from his skull-holes into hers, on and on. She could do nothing, for herself or for him; she couldn’t even blink. His eyes’ black beams had caught and locked her.

  Slowly, carefully, chivvied by jolly Jo, keeping hold of each other’s shirts and elbows, and Alex and Castle holding hands because they were brothers and that was all right, they crept back up the hill. Billy kept himself going by thinking: As soon as I’m up top, I’ll tell them, No more. I’ll take Pumfter and I’ll go home. No, I’ll leave Pumfter. They can do what they want with him; they can bring him back to me tomorrow.

  They reached the clearing. Jo climbed up and sat cross-legged on the table, grinning in the moonlight.

  ‘Don’t be creepy,’ said Castle.

  ‘Fetch the last one. Go on. I’m readier than ready.’

  ‘That’s obvious.’

  Billy didn’t feel so bad after the climb. And now he didn’t fancy going home on his own, so much. So he went with Shai to the INDIA 4 STORM rock.

  Shai picked Pumfter up and hugged him. Billy had to stop himself snatching at the dog: That’s mine! His rage was like the stiffness that happened in his throat when he was about to be sick; he swallowed down hard on it, and laid the ashtray next to the rose.

  ‘Here, you put him out.’ Shai handed Pumfter to him, and Billy felt ashamed of the rage—Shai had been through the nightmare too; he needed Pumfter just as much as Billy did.

  Billy took a draught of Pumfter’s friendly face in the moonlight. He remembered when Pumfter had been as big as another person in bed next to him. Although he hadn’t kissed the dog for years, he knew exactly the feel of that felt nose, those rough seams. He didn’t need to kiss him.

  ‘All right,’ he said, and went up into the bushes and put Pumfter there. Then he huddled with Alex and Castle and Shai on the slope, watching Jo nervously.

  ‘Go on, then, Jo,’ called Shai, then added very softly to the others, ‘Now, think about that nice doggy.’

  Alex’s free hand crept into Billy’s. Billy went still, feeling grateful and responsible and unworthy.

  And then the feelings squashed themselves, and their insides leaked everywhere. The sky opened up in a wide, tooth-edged smile, and a sour, loving fog filled the clearing. It thickened and warmed and became shaggy. Jo jumped about trying to grab handfuls of it; the others sank unconscious to the ground. The dog-ness nosed around them for a moment, nudged Billy, gave Jo’s tiny hand a lick; then it sprang from the top of Cottinden’s Hill and exploded into the wider world.

  Corin broke gaze with Nance to look up. This third thing sopped up moon- and starlight as it came; it had a different darkness from the sky’s—damp, grey-brown, ragged at its leading edge.

  He half-rose to meet it. The mist, which was the exact temperature of his own skin, took away his balance, lifted him off his feet. He tumbled, slowly, over and over, until he fetched up against some wall or planet. He sank away under the smell of dog-fur and dog-breath
and wet, new grass, and was nowhere for a while.

  The clink of flower-pot pieces brought him back, the breathing of that woman Rose, the paving under his hip, the wall under his boot; the fact that there was a house nearby and that it was their house, his and the woman Rose, the woman Nance’s; the fact that every object in it, and in this garden, stood clean-edged, itself, and known to him.

  They were walking along the path; they were helping each other along the path. They were very weak; they were a little hilarious with their weakness. Their legs were stumps and their arms were lumps and their heads were great heavy pots of brains, fitfully electric. Corin’s ears seemed to be stuffed with cotton wool. The door—the thin slapping screen door that his hands knew every nail and board of, the screen with its summertime load of moths and lacewings—Rose opened it and admitted them to the house, and it felt like some sort of ceremony.

  He was at the table trying to explain, talking loudly, clumsily through the cotton wool. And being angry was a kind of paint, he bellowed, and I splashed it all over everything, and everything looked the same. Everything was just something that would make me angry again. Because-because-because-because. All those becauses, on and on—for years, Nance! For my whole life!

  Nance laughed and brought tea—in a cup!, gold-rimmed!, instead of his bitten-looking old mug that he might have insisted on. He rubbed the scarred table around the saucer wonderingly. Do you think I’ve had some kind of stroke?

  Well, if you have, we both have. Her voice was woolly and distant. Her hair was bright white and wiry, and ashes and a leaf were caught in it. Her face was as old as his and laughing, and her eyes! My goodness, all their lives were in there. He would have to look more. He would have to ask her things—

  And then, with a slap of door and a swirl of moths, here came the boy.

  Billy! said Nance—even through the wool Corin heard how much was in her voice, was in the name. But by the fact that she left her body facing him as she turned to speak, he understood that she was sharing, not trying to claim the boy all to herself.