White Time Page 9

  I can’t go up to him. I can’t apologize again. I can’t be embarrassed for myself, or for these wild people around me. There is no explanation, only the flash of their eyes in the firelight, only the sloosh of my mail-shirt as I lift my arm.

  ‘Come down, James!’ I call out.

  Of course he doesn’t; he won’t ever. He thinks he’d be sullying himself. He wants me to go up there, so he can tell me stuff: that he’s decided to give us another chance. But actually, he’s having doubts now – who are these people? Look, his hands are on his hips. What right have I got to come down to Sunny Bay and party? I’m supposed to be prostrate, weeping, curled around my mobile in the foetal position. But I haven’t rung you all night and all day, have I, James? Better ring up Marnie, find out where I am, start reeling me in by the umbilical cord – again.

  Well, I don’t think so.

  The singers stop, glancing from James to me. Some of them crawl to either side, so that there’s a pathway through to the dune.

  ‘No,’ I say in their language. ‘I’m not going. Not this time.’

  Scowling, James takes a couple of steps down the dune. I draw a deep breath. I breathe in and in and in, as if my whole body is one great big lung. More people crawl out of the way. I open my mouth, meaning to shout No! Go away!, good and loud and final.

  What comes out of me is fire. A roar of fire, a blast of fire, a curling, teeming, many-coloured chameleon-tongue of fire. It curves up the dune-side and scorches the scrub at the top. James’s spread hand, with the wedding ring on it, sticks out like a drowning man’s. He falls, he claws himself upright, he flounders flaming up over the dune-top and out of sight. He may be screaming – I hear nothing. The pain of breathing fire from my whole body has picked me up, flipped me back and forth like a dying fish, and dropped me, white-hot and without breath, onto the sand.

  Att-sada wakes me with a tiny shake, her fingers pinching my lips closed. The rain has eased; the dune-grass is all furry silver with rain-drops and fog-drops. All around me the people rise from sleep with slow care, hushing the children; the beasts in this country are too big for us, and we must move through without them catching our scent or sound. We’re on our way to the spring country, where there’ll be fruit and grains to eat as well as beast, and fewer bandits to plague us. We’ll follow the coast a long and lonely way, then cut inland at the tip of the mountain range.

  Kun-asta comes towards us, waking people, greeting with a look or touch. Oh, God – I try to look invisible.

  Last night he and Lie-Bold were the final pair in the fight-circle, when the singing had stopped and the children were asleep. I watched him and I was mortified, for ever thinking he was rough or ugly or smelly. I’ve never seen anything as beautiful as his duel with Lie-Bold, the speed and strength of it. It was like watching the workings of a smart, complicated machine, a machine for weaving, for loosening and re-locking, for combining thousands of smooth, high-polished movements in new ways. They fought on and on, and I sat dazed and dazzled by the leap and brace, the topple and save and search of the fighting. And at the end, when Lie-Bold conceded and Kun-asta stood laughing in his embrace, holding his injured side, the two of them panting almost too hard to laugh, I put down my head and gave in to my illness and upheaval, and sobs caught me by the throat and shook me. Att-sada and the others laid their hard hands on my head and shoulders. So much to learn, was all I could get out. So far to go.

  Kun-asta turns to Att-sada and me. Can you travel, Billie-saint? he says, very quietly. Can you walk?

  I raise my gaze from his worn boots to his sore-looking red eyes. There’s still some infection in him, from the bandits’ missile, just as there’s leftover burning all through me. For a moment my sympathy overrides my awe and I can sort of smile; for a tiny second his awesomeness wavers and he might be a young man again, maybe as young as me.

  My gaze sinks to his boots again. I can walk, I say, feeling lighter and frailer than a floating leaf of ash. I may fight like a blind bear, but I can put one foot in front of the other.

  A quiet ripple of laughter spreads out from us. Blind bear – What did the saint say? – Said she fights like a—

  But Kun-asta doesn’t smile. Let’s do it, then, he says, Let’s put one foot in front of the other.

  And he moves on, and so do we all move on; all together, we walk out of the dunes onto the beach. We head northward along the hard sand, while the fog slowly tumbles ashore, by turns thinning to show us the headland and thickening to blot it from our sight.

  THE NIGHT

  LILY

  When Dulcet died, Marda stopped telling stories – to Parda, to Chenko and of course to Dulcet, who’d pretended to be too old but always hung by, listening by mistake. ‘Story’s all gone to hell in a paper boat,’ Marda had wept, ‘when a child can be picked out of his life, without hardly beginning it.’

  He called it the Lily. It wasn’t white. It wasn’t a girl. But the Lily was its name the minute he saw it.

  It wasn’t a beautiful thing. Chenko had seen plenty of innards in his short time and this, in short, was innards. It piled and looped and swung like innards; it was mauves and pale greens and white-veiled pinks like innards; it glistened like innards. But it didn’t act like innards, and it didn’t have innards’ offal breath. It smelt the way water used to taste, of a blue lake among pine trees.

  Of a night-time, it came out to hang, heavily, above Chenko and his bedding. It lived in the head-space of the wardrobe, where the house-canker had grown so bad that anything stored there would stink of rotten concrete forever after. (But the Lily never stank.) Maybe it had followed him knowing he had room for it, seeing he was perhaps the one kid in this city who did.

  When the Duwazza picked Dulcet off, there was no family or friend left to put in that room with Chenko.

  ‘Don’t tell anyone we have a space,’ said Marda tiredly. ‘I don’t want to take anyone in, or anyone’s anyone. You got me?’

  Chenko nodded. He wasn’t likely to tell, didn’t she know? Dulcet was the one who did the talking, made the friends. And the girlfriends – did Marda know about that? Nifty Imogen Dawsey with her two amazing golden plaits, who’d been smithereened with her brother in the underground cinema a week before Dulcet got his. Smithereened or cindered – sometimes it was hard to tell which.

  It followed him home. What else could he do but take it in?

  ‘’Way you, Chenko Zlatter!’ the really-big boys had been calling down the street. And he had been ’waying, good and quiet. A stone or something had just popped him in the ankle, making his heart skip, but he’d been moving on, no worries.

  He’d gone past Dugget Cave, the big hole where Annerley Dugget and his four girls got theirs. It was just slightly bigger than a lot of caves along there. When he thought back later, the Lily must’ve come out of Dugget’s. It must have been hiding where there was just that bit more space; it knew that kind of place, it scouted out that kind of place.

  There was a hum about it that was nearly a tune, nearly not a sound at all, but he felt it, that first time. There was no one else on the street by then – only, behind and a bit above him, this trailing, almost-singing thing, the Lily.

  It wasn’t as if the Duwazza needed Dulcet. There were plenty of street-dwellers for their pleasure. Like everyone, Chenko hurried daily past those terrible silences with their bellies zlitted open and spilling on the street. There’d been that bad day with the heads spiked all along the park fence – some brave person had cleared that the next night. And all the time he was stepping over the general litter of pieces that lay for no more than a day, winter or summer, in winter white like pieces of statue, in summer black with flies.

  That day had been a latchkey day. They lived in one of a few blocks that had doors – and mostly unbroken windows, except on the south side from the June blasts – so there actually were latches, that worked. He opened the door and the Lily sidled in after him. When he’d snicked all the locks and slid all the chains across, he
turned and it was there, rearranging itself in the air so that he got glimpses of its shiny, crimson, slightly ruffled inner organs.

  He offered the Lily food, which it politely declined. He poured some water into the bowl they had, and it lowered a part of itself, pale blue-mauve and like a long thin toadstool, and took up half the water like that. He walked back and forth a lot between the kitchen and his bedroom, softly past sleeping Parda’s door, for the fascination of having it come after him. He lay on his bedding and it stretched out above him in all its glistening loops and clumps, and hummed, and shifted companionably. Chenko thought, This is what pet dogs must have been like. Except dogs didn’t hum – at least, not in stories.

  The Duwazza had dogs, to bring in the game. Two of them would have clamped onto Dulcet’s shoulders and dragged him back to the van from where he’d been picked off. He might easily have still been alive then, feeling the teeth, hearing the panting in both ears. Chenko couldn’t think about that for long.

  (Where had the hole been? Where had the blood been running from? Or had he been zlitted, with more than blood dragging out behind? It bothered him not to know, but it would bother Marda worse to be asked.)

  ***

  Next day he rushed home, frightened the Lily had run away – or worse, never been there at all. He swung into his room and his heart crashed and he flung himself on the bedding, already at work: You can manage. It doesn’t matter.

  And the wardrobe-cloth twitched aside, and the Lily came out, and its hum started, like Dulcet’s valve radio warming up.

  ‘Oh, you are here,’ Chenko said, smiling up at it.

  But the Lily didn’t answer anything, by sound or by movement, ever.

  Marda hugged him. ‘Ah, you smell like something, Chenk!’ She drew in a long breath of him. ‘You find some soap?’

  Chenko shook his head.

  She punched his shoulder. ‘Been sitting next to some sweet-flavoured girl?’

  ‘Nope, no way.’

  ‘You sure now?’

  He was too pleased to hear her teasing and see her smiling to bother being embarrassed. ‘I’m sure. What would I need a girl for?’

  She laughed outright. Then, ‘Oh,’ she said wistfully, ‘a girl can be nice.’ And he remembered that she was one, and he didn’t know how to say sorry, so he draped himself on her again, and that seemed to work just as well.

  ***

  The war would leave you alone for as long as you didn’t want anything too badly. Chenko was surprised Dulcet hadn’t seen that. He could’ve told him: the moment you fixed on that girl, you might as well have shelled her yourself.

  And then Chenko’s own worry had helped bring it on – first, his wondering, Should I warn Dulcet?, then, when he heard about the cinema, Dulcet will take this so badly; he’s the one in danger now. Chenko had tried to stay calm, to banish the worry as soon as it came to him, but still Dulcet had got it, on the very way home from the cinema people’s funeral. Chenko was startled – he thought he’d have more time than that, he thought Dulcet’d have more time – but if he thought about it, it made sense, the way the war always went.

  Nights, the Lily was there like a lamp, beaming something, but not light. With every flash outside, it was in a different place, piled in the damp-stain corner, puddling right above him with all its undersides flat on some air layer, hanging all baggy at the window. One night he woke and it was spread around the moonlit room like oil dribbled on water; its bare organs leaned in a clump near the door, swaying very gently. He reached up, touching nothing, just to feel the humming, like a soft bangle on his wrist. Over in the darkest corner some part of the Lily coiled and settled, as if it had noticed.

  Even the big blasts did no more than send a tremor through it. On bad nights when Chenko lay stiff as a corpse in his bed, scared almost to move his eyes, still the Lily only hovered, making its same slow turnings from place to place.

  He took thin-soup into Marda and Parda’s fusty room, that was full of Parda’s illness.

  ‘Who opened the window?’ His old man was getting whiter by the day, slowly all of him going the colour of his hair. ‘Who let the sunshine in?’

  ‘It’s Chenko.’

  ‘Chenko, son! You are a sight for sore noses. You are a field fulla spring flowers.’ Parda hadn’t made sense in a long time.

  Chenko smiled. ‘I’ve got some soup for you here, Par.’

  ‘Blessed boy.’ Parda looked up out of his whitening eyes. ‘Blessed boy.’

  It was very cold in Miz Izbister’s bedroom. Some of the kids had brought blankets, some were using Miz Izbister’s. Chenko had come too late for even a corner of one.

  Bang, thud. Miz Izbister quickly set up the old play-blackboard. She was nervous with the activity outside, Duwazza hollers and the odd shot.

  Maylette came in late, dressed thinly. She picked a way in among the kids on the floor, right back to Chenko against the wall. Since Dulcet got his there’d been a space next to him on Miz Izbister’s yellow-rosed grey carpet. Maylette slipped in there and took some shuddering breaths.

  ‘Today is the life cycle of the duck,’ said Miz Izbister.

  Maylette gasped from the cold and her teeth rattled. She smiled a tight, apologetic smile at Chenko.

  He put his feet apart and beckoned her. She scrambled crabwise in to him. The cold of her spindly back sucked the heat out of his belly; her arms and her legs were like slim cold-iron poles against his. The shivers went through her, and through again, but got slower bit by bit, and round about the time the duck and the curly-tail drake were getting together, she started making her own warmth, and giving some of Chenko’s back.

  Parda went quietly, in a quiet night. Chenko had put two spoonfuls of broth into him the evening before, wiped Parda’s mouth and made way for Marda to do the bathroom stuff.

  Marda hadn’t come into Chenko’s room for a long time. It had been Dulcet’s room too, and Dulcet’s stuff was still around – the dead radio, a little tossed clothing. As Chenko woke, he was already checking behind Marda as she bent, but there was only a twitchlet of movement in the wardrobe-cloth, and no hum.

  Marda was using a strange voice, deep and very frightened. ‘It’s only you and me now, Chenko. What a world to be left in.’

  She had already washed Parda, and he lay neat, his top half dressed in the beautiful shirt for going to the funeral parlour, the rest of him covered with the throw rug because there were no trousers or shoes that went with the shirt. Or there were, but they’d been on Dulcet, and you don’t get those things back from the Duwazza. You don’t get anything back – except the head, if they know you and hate you.

  Parda wasn’t so different from his sleeping self – and yet he was, so different, so gone from behind that candle-lit face. Chenko’s chest ached, hearing Parda’s voice clearly, knowing the voice would get quieter and go, with his old man gone.

  He leaned against Marda as she wept, then as she gradually slept. Just when he was dozing himself, the Lily came out of his room; he heard it investigating the hallway. It eased in and lay above Parda awhile, like a many-coloured cloud. All the rest of the night it sailed slowly from room to room, spreading out long and tumbling back together, trying new resting places, gently stirring all the apartment’s air.

  Miz Izbister at last got together a battery and showed them a few minutes of her lover-lamp. But the globs were only red, and just globbed up and down. Chenko sat quiet up the back, marvelling – the Lily was so, so much better! Every shape it made was different, and every part of it had different colour, vein work, muscle movement, scallop and frill.

  ‘It’s very calming,’ Miz Izbister said after a moment of silence when she’d explained the workings.

  ‘Mmm,’ said Maylette among others, but Maylette was leaning out of her corner to see around Annibell’s head, and her chopped black hair was flopping onto Chenko’s shoulder.

  Maylette was smart, too smart for most boys. She wasn’t mean or ugly, but she had a frightening brain w
hich she sometimes let out on a long leash. But if he could guarantee she wouldn’t tell anyone else, or speak there in the room with the Lily, he might show Maylette. She might be the one he could show.

  Miz Izbister held him back after class. ‘I heard about your parda.’

  Chenko nodded stiffly.

  ‘It’s been a hard few months for you Zlatters.’

  ‘Oh, not as hard as some people’s.’ It was what Marda might say.

  She sighed and sagged, and put her hands on his shoulders and squeezed. ‘No one would mind if you cried.’

  He looked up, surprised. Crying? He hadn’t cried since – oh, way back. Even during the June blasts – just shaking, that time, just lying wide-eyed, curled up and shaking. He remembered, laughing a little, a time when he’d cried several times every day, mostly to get Dulcet into trouble.

  ‘No, it’s OK,’ he said to Miz Izbister.

  She smiled in a way that didn’t get to her eyes. ‘I know you’ll look after your mother, and she after you.’

  Put like that, it did sound like something to cry over.

  He nodded again, not wanting to look impatient, and she let go.

  ‘If you need anything …’

  ‘Thank you, I will.’

  And he was out in the corridor, climbing over the rubble towards the lobby.

  Maylette came to the funeral parlour with Parda’s few friends that were left. She brought a jar of peanut butter.

  Marda gasped when she saw it. ‘Where’d you get that, lovely-girl?’

  ‘Sh,’ said Maylette. ‘We have a little stash.’

  ‘So kind!’ Marda hid it in her bag straight away.

  While the grown-ups talked, Chenko and Maylette went out onto the porch, because there was weak sunlight there, and morning was a safer time. They shoved their hands in their pockets and looked out over the craters. A lot of firepower had been spent on this park, where there’d been no buildings to flatten, only trees. Chenko raised his eyes to the gap between the distant church spire and the wrecked TV tower – somewhere in there was their apartment.