Yellowcake Read online

  ‘Couldn’t have come at a better time,’ said Dochi. ‘Eat something other than pease for a change.’ He rolled his eyes at me.

  ‘Eh. Pease is better than nothing, like some people have,’ I said, but mildly. You don’t pick a fight with the prince of the household.

  ‘Sh!’ said Jumi, leaning towards the courtyard door.

  ‘Why don’t you go out?’ Dochi pushed his face at her. ‘Listen right up close?’ Dochi was sound in body, so could get away with rudeness. With my withered leg I had to be more careful.

  ‘Sh!’ she said again, and we listened.

  From the squeal of the voice and the way it worried on and on, it was Mavourn on the other end—and from Jupi’s barking answers: ‘Yup...I’ll be there...I’ll fetch him on the way...Yup.’ Behind his voice, blue-daubs buzzed in the neighbour’s bananas, tearing strings off the leaves for nesting. Farther away were the cries of seabirds, and of that family down the lane, that always fought, that no one spoke the names of.

  Then Jupi was in the doorway, the talkie clapped closed in his hand, his arms spread as if to receive, as only his due, this gift from heaven.

  Jumi smiled frightenedly. ‘Incoming?’ she said.

  Jupi tipped his head.

  ‘A big one?’

  ‘Mavourn says one leg and one arm, but sizeable. Good big head, good sex. Not junk, he says.’

  Jumi clapped her hands, sparkling. Then she went modest, pulled the cloth farther forward around her face, and ushered our emptied plates towards herself. The anxiety was gone, that had been tightening her like slow-wrung laundry these past weeks.

  And for us, too, all of a sudden the evening’s heat and approaching darkness weren’t oppressive any more. We didn’t need to flee from worried thoughts into sleep.

  ‘So I can be useful too?’ I said. ‘If it’s sizeable?’

  Dochi snorted, but Jupi blessed me with a nod. ‘Armarlis can have work too, as I arranged with A. M. Agency Limited. Just as I arranged it, it comes to be, does it not?’

  Jumi pushed the pease-bowl and the bread-platter towards him. ‘Eat,’ she said. ‘You will need your strength for working.’

  So we went to the office of A. M. Agency Limited, and saw their hiring officer, and I was taken on as a team-onlooker, and put my mark on the dotted line.

  ‘Well, there is no problem with the boy’s hand, at least,’ said the hirer’s assistant. He thought it was a kind of joke.

  Jupi could have said, ‘Oh no, he makes a good mark.’ Or, ‘That’s right, every other part of him is fine and sound.’ Or, ‘There are many activities for which two good legs are not needed.’ Instead he went icy quiet beside me.

  I didn’t mind what the man said. I was too happy to mind. I had a contract and I was going to do a useful job like any man—why would I care what anyone said? It was a nuisance only because Jupi minded so much that I had to mind on his behalf. And because, when we had finished our business, I had to swing along so fast and chatter so hard to make Jupi give up his minding with a laugh and hurry after me, and answer my questions.

  Next morning before dawn, we took my job-ticket to the Commstore, and in the middle of the wonderful bustle there I was issued my onlooker’s whistle and megaphone. Jumi had plaited me a neck-cord for the megaphone, that would hold it close on my back while I walked so I could manage the crutches, and loose at my hip when I stood at my work and might need to reach for it fast.

  Then we went down to number 17 plan to await the incoming.

  The boss-men and the gangers grouped themselves, tense and sober, around my Jupi and his crackling talkie. My brother Dochi and his friends formed another group, as they did outside The Lips Club most nights, only without the showy bursts of laughter. They were tired; they were missing their sleep-in.

  I was in the main crowd of workers. As soon as the general shape and proportions of the incoming were clear, we’d be teamed up. There was not much talk, just watching the bay and shivering in the breeze. Many of us wore the new Commstore shirts, bought on credit when the news came yesterday. The dull pink and mauve stripes were invisible in the dusky light, but the hot green-blue stripes glowed, slashing down a man’s left chest, maybe, with another spot on his right collar. To my eyes, as I read the plan over and over trying to make it real, trying to believe my luck, the crowd was sticks and spots floating in darkness, with a movement to it like long grass in a slow wind.

  Every now and then another team-onlooker would come clearer against the others, his whistle a gleam, his megaphone swinging in his hand. These men I examined keenly; I was one of them now. I thought they all looked very professional. Their heads must be full of all manner of lore and experience, I was sure, and my own memory seemed very empty by comparison. Home life at my Jumi’s side was all I knew; I felt as if I ought to be ashamed of it, even as a pang of missing-Jumi made me move uncomfortably on the plan’s damp concrete.

  Won’t this house be quiet without my little monkey! she had said this morning.

  Which had made me feel peculiar—guilty because I’d not even thought about how Jumi might feel, that I was going to work; flustered and a little angry, it must be confessed, because it seemed that I could do no right, I could be a sort of stay-at-home embarrassing half-person by her side, or I could be a cruel son leaving her lonely.

  While I was feeling all this, Dochi gave one of his awful laughs. Yes, he’s such a screecher of a monkey, he said. So loud as he swings from tree to tree!

  Jumi gave him her mildest reproving look. She broke the soft-boiled egg and laid it on top of my soup in the bowl and pushed it towards me, under Dochi’s laughing at his own joke, which she was not making him stop.

  Thank you, Jumi, I said.

  The joke was that I was so quiet and so little trouble, anyone could ignore me if they chose. The joke was that, after some years of trying, of lashing out at Dochi with my crutches and being beaten for it, I would rather sit as I did now at my food, wearing a blank look, and let the laughter pass by.

  The incoming appeared on the horizon like a small, weak sunrise. The workers stirred and gestured, and another layer bobbed above the shirt-stripes, of smiling teeth, of wide, bright eyes. My Jupi barked into the talkie, and the two tugboats crawled out from the headland’s shadow. They sent back on the breeze a whiff of diesel, and many noses drew it in with delight—a breakyard is supposed to be all smells and activity. How long had it been since Portellian smelt right and busy? Long enough for all our savings to be spent. Long enough for us to be half a sack of pease, quarter a sack of drumflour away from starting starving.

  At first, all we could see was the backlit bulk of the thing, with a few bright rags of aura streaming in the wind, thinning as it came closer. The light from the sun, which as yet was below the horizon, made the thick shroud glow, and the body shape was a dark blur within it. I thought I could see a head, against a bigger torso. But you can’t be sure with these things; they’re never the same twice in their build and features, in their arrangement of limbs.

  What kind of people could afford to send craft up into the ether to find and kill such beasts? They must be so rich! A boy born bung-legged to those people would be no shame or disadvantage, I was sure—they would get him a new leg and sew that on. Or they would get him a little car, to drive himself around on their smooth roads. There would be so many jobs for him, his leg wouldn’t matter; he might do finecrafts with his hands, or grow a famous brain, or work with computers. Nobody would be anxious for him or disappointed; he wouldn’t have to forever apologise for himself and make up to his family for having come out wrong.

  ‘It’s a long-hair, I think,’ said someone near me. ‘I think I can see hair around that head—if it is the head.’

  ‘Hair? That’s good.’

  ‘Oh, every part of it is good.’

  ‘It’s low in the water,’ said another. ‘Good and fresh. Quality cuttings. Everything cheaper to process. Bosses will be happy.’

  ‘Everyone will be happy!’

  People laughed. Now we could see that the thing was more than rumour and hope.

  ‘I will be happy when I hold that new reel of net-yarn in my hands.’

  ‘I will be happy when I’m seated in the Club with the biggest plate of charfish and onion in front of me—’

  ‘And Cacohao, he’ll be happy when he’s lying in the dirt behind the Club—won’t you, Caco?—singing lovesongs to a bottle of best throb-head.’

  ‘Oh. I can see her beautiful face now!’

  People were spending their day-wage all around me. But when the incoming reached the tugs, and they attached their ropes and lined it up for the tide to bring it onto number 17, all fell quiet. The beast’s head loomed, a soft dark shape inside the radiant shroud, which had protected the skin from damage during the burning of the aura. The shape beyond the head was long, narrow, uneven, with a lump at the foot. Jupi jabbered nervously on the talkie to the tugs, checked the time on the clock-tower, and his gang around him grew now murmurous with advice, now silent with attention. Things could go wrong at this point; the moment must be judged exactly.

  A breeze came ahead of the beast. Our shirts rattled on us; the hems of pants and loongies stung our calves. The air stank of the burnt plastics of the aura, a terrible smell that all the children of Portellian learned early to love, because it meant full bellies, smiling jupis and jumis. Coming in from the ether burnt the aura to almost nothing, to the pale dust we’d seen on the wind—all gone now—to this nasty smell. The sun crept up and took a chink out of the horizon. A lot of the men had gone forward into the mauve and silver wavelets that crawled up the plan.

  The tugs, now unhooked from the beast, rode beside it, their engines labouring against the tide. Jupi stood with his arms folded, chewing his
lip with the responsibility. The tugs retreated to the beast’s far end, and with Jupi warning and checking them through the talkie, helped the tide move the great shape the last little way to the plan. The head began to rise independently of the body, nudged upward by the plan’s slope. A cheer went up; the beast was arrived.

  Teams were forming. Horse-piecers gathered with their spades at the head of the plan near the winches. Mincers, some with their own knives, drifted towards the try-house where the copper pots and boilers glowed in the shadows. Gangers came through the crowd shouting, claiming the workers they knew were good. As a team-onlooker, I didn’t have to jump and wave my arms and call out gangers’ names. I was a contractor, not a loose day-job man dependent on luck and favour. I could stand calm in the middle of the scramble.

  As the incoming edged up the plan, the cutting-teams threw grapplers and swung themselves up the cloudy gel. Though they mustn’t drop any gel while the beast was moving, they could make all their preparatory slits. This they did with ropes and weights, pulling the ropes through the gel just the way a merchant cuts wax-cheese with a wire. The shroud began to look fringed about the head and shoulders. The nimble rope-clippers darted in and out; chanters’ voices rang on the stinking air from high on the beast’s torso.

  The message came through on the talkie: the tugs were done. The beast was beached, all head to foot of it. Jupi walked up the plan and signalled the bell-man. The bell clanged, the teams cheered, the ground teams scuttled away from the body. Great strips of the gel began tumbling from above. They splashed in the shallows and bounced and jounced and sometimes leaped into curls across the other strips. Hookmen straightened them flat on the ground, making a wide platform on which the beast’s parts could be deposited.

  Another smell took over from the burnt-shroud odour. I had smelt it before as I helped Jumi, as I cleaned and cooked and span. She would lift her head, happy because the work—Jupi’s and Dochi’s work—was going on, and if one of the other mothers was there she would say, Smell that? It always reminds me of the smell of Dochi when he was born. Like inside-of-body, but clean, clean. New.

  Smell of clean, warm womb, the other might say.

  Yes, and hot, too! Hot from me and hot from him.

  When I was born to her, I must have smelt not so good, not so enchanting, for it was always Dochi she mentioned. Maybe it was only the first-born who brought out the clean smell with him. I did not want the details of in what way I had smelt bad—or perhaps, how she had not noticed my smell from being in such horror at my leg. So I never asked.

  Anyway, there would be other smells soon against this one: oil and fuel, sweat and scorched rope, hot metal, sawn bone, sea and mud and stirred-up putrefaction.

  ‘Amarlis?’

  The way I sprang to face Mavourn showed that I’d been waiting not moments but years to hear my name, to be called to usefulness.

  ‘I’m putting you on a thigh-team,’ he said. ‘It’s got a good man, Mister Chopes, heading it. Are you happy with that?’

  ‘Very happy, sir!’

  ‘There is Mister Chopes with the kerchief on his head. I’ve told him you’re on your way.’

  ‘And I am!’

  I swung myself across the watery plan, watching Mister Chopes count heads, scan the hopping hopefuls, pick out a good clean man and give him a job-ticket, shoo away a sneaky-looking boy. The team’s chanter stood with his drum and beaters, wrapped in his white cloth and his dignity. He too was a contractor; he had no need to fuss.

  Mister Chopes counted again, then sent them off for their hooks and spades, and turned and saw me. ‘You Amarlis?’

  ‘I am, sir, Mister Chopes!’

  ‘You ready to look sharp?’

  ‘Sharp as a shark-tooth, sir!’

  ‘Mavourn says you’ll be good, but you’re new, right?’

  ‘That’s right, sir. This is my first day ever.’

  ‘I’ll give you plenty of advice, then. You won’t sulk at that, boy? You’ll take that in good spirit?’

  ‘I’ll be grateful for all you can give me.’

  ‘Then we’ll do fine. Main thing, no one gets hurt. All those boys have mothers. All those men have wives and children waiting on them, right? Your job’s to make sure they come home on their own legs, right? Not flat and busted by beast-bits. This here is Trawbrij; he’s our chanter.’

  ‘How do you do, Trawbrij?’ I shook hands with him.

  ‘Twenty years on the plans,’ said Mister Chopes. ‘He’ll tell you anything more you need to know. Now, let’s get down the thigh.’ Because all the team was tooled-up and running back to us.

  Some of the hopefuls, lingering nearby in case Mister Chopes changed his mind, cast jealous looks at me. They were angry, no doubt, that someone so clearly handicapped could gain a job when they, able-bodied, could not. I swung away from them.

  Trawbrij the chanter gave us a beat; I walked with him, behind the twenty-five chosen workers, while Mister Chopes went ahead. The knee-team preceded us, with their chanter and their onlooker; I tried to hold my head as high and my back as straight as their onlooker’s, to look as casual and unselfconscious as he.

  We took a safe path wide of the torso, well behind the row of waiting hookmen. Slabs of shroud slapped down and jiggled on the plan, sending wavelets over the hook-men’s feet.

  I had watched other incomings, up with the women and children on the hill behind town. What you don’t see from there are the surfaces of things: the coarse head-hair, which is like a great tangle of endless curving double-edged combs; the damp, waxy skin, pale as the moon, hazed with its own form of hair, dewy with packaging-fluid; the eye, the ear-hole and the mouth-slit, all sealed with grey gum by the hunters. What you don’t see from the hills is the size, is the wall of the cheek going up, behind the heaps of the hair, which themselves tower three houses high above the running workers. My eyes couldn’t believe what was in front of them.

  ‘He’s enormous, isn’t he?’ said Trawbrij beside me.

  ‘He makes us look like ants,’ I said. ‘Smaller than ants, even. Just look how much of the sky he takes up!’

  ‘And yet we smaller-than-ants, we little crawling germs, we’re going to set upon him, and pull him apart and bring him down and saw him into plates, and melt him into pots and pints, and there’ll be nothing left of him in three weeks’ time.’

  ‘Is there any part of him that’s not useful to someone?’ I turned to look properly at the chanter. He was slender and white-haired and wise-looking.

  ‘I have only ever seen tumour-rocks left lying on the plan, though even these reduce in time, and become parts of people’s walls and houses, though they do not export. And sometimes if an organ bursts, or if the tides delay the incoming and the beast is putrefying on arrival, there may be lumps of dirty gel that won’t melt, that sit about for a while.’

  As we came level with the thigh, the first of our team threw up his grappler and shinnied up the rope, chopping footholds as he went. Others followed, each just far enough behind the previous man not to be kicked in the head. In this way we quickly had half a team at the top.

  Mister Chopes turned with his foot in the first slot. ‘Where’s my looker? Amarlis.’

  ‘Here,’ I said.

  ‘What do you reckon your job is?’

  ‘Keep an eye out down here.’

  ‘’S right. Main thing is, teams getting in each other’s ways. So, stand well back, watch how stuff falls and give a hoy before someone gets hurt.’

  ‘I’m on it.’

  I swung around, passed Trawbrij tucking up his robes for the climb, and went back as far as the other onlookers. There I could see right to the edges of my team’s activities, and keep track of Mister Chopes and the team up on top. I blew my whistle, straight away, and the whole ground-team turned as if I had them on strings.

  I cleared my throat. ‘Back up,’ I said clearly through the megaphone, and waved them towards me. ‘Back to where these other teams are standing.’ And up they came to safety, which seemed a wonder to me, a great respectful gesture. I tried not to smile, not to look surprised.

  The shroud on the side of the thigh, because it was so flat, could be cut away in a single piece. When it came down—with a smack and two bounces that I felt up my spine and in my armpits through the crutches—there above it was the white-clay wall of the thigh, height of a tanker-ship, running with pack-fluid. That clean, warm, newborn-Dochi smell was all there was to breathe now. The fluid ran off, and the skin-hairs lifted from the skin, then separated from each other, gleaming in the early sun. And as I watched, the side-lit skin covered itself with little bluish triangles, bluish scallops of shadow, as if the hairs were not just drying and springing free but pulling bumps up on the skin, in the sudden chill of the sea-breeze.