Yellowcake

  There was a muddy dog with him—or around him, anyway—printing its own patterns on the patterned ground.

  The dog went into a crater, and nudged with its nose something on the bottom: a grey body, in grey clothing, lying in grey water. When the dog moved it Sheegeh discerned the top of a head, with black hair slicked across and coming away, and he veered down into the crater. He knelt and took the tape out of his pocket, lifted the head and slipped the tape underneath to measure it at the widest part.

  He shooed the dog away, that had waded into the water and was bumping the body looking for a good part to eat.

  There was a man in the hills somewhere, he’d heard, behind where the ski-jump had been, among those rich houses that were all but levelled now, the owners gone just while the forces were fighting in the parliament, before even a shot had been fired. Duwazza hated those owners; Duwazza had taken every scrap of loot whole or broken from those house-shells long ago, before Sheegeh’s time.

  Anyway, this man, Owen said (Owen was disgusted by it), he went around collecting dogs.

  What, to eat? Doppo had said.

  No, to mind. To look after. Not only finds the dogs, but finds food for the dogs. Cooks ’em up big vats of the stuff. Keeps ’em in a big pen up there, hundreds o’ these flea-bit rag-dogs you see around the place.

  That’s good, isn’t it? someone had said doubtfully from behind Sheegeh. Being kind to animals?

  When there are people starving? People without houses? To care about dogs?

  Yeah, why not?

  ‘’Cause it’s soppy and it’s wrong. People first, then the dogs and the horses and the budgies and the … you know?

  ‘Fifty-seven exactly.’ Sheegeh noted it in the book. In crater, M. W. Memorial Park.

  He got up and walked up the slope again, tucking away the notebook and drying the back of the tape on his coat. Behind him the dog clomped on something, began to gnaw. Between the scraping noises were bits of voice, bits of whine, bits of yum. It was good not to mind any more. It was good to be used to these things.

  He had found the Duwazza by accident, wandered onto their ground soon after the world had stopped making sense, looked up from his hunting and they were ranged around on the rubble-piles as if in a theatre, still, dark-clothed, some of them smoking. He remembered thinking, I must get some kind of woolly for my head like that— Gayorg, it had been, wearing it—because at that time too the weather had been gathering itself for winter. So it must be a year ago now.

  ‘Hey, Angel-face,’ said one, who would later become Michael. ‘Can you do us a favour?’ He asked in such a friendly voice that it didn’t occur to Sheegeh to refuse, even though there were so many watching.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Can you hold some stones for us?’

  Sheegeh didn’t answer, because the request seemed too strange. He stood and thought how handsome Michael was—thin, like most people, but how his eyes stayed steady on you instead of switching away, and were full of kindness.

  Michael picked up two stones, slithered down the mound and stood. He held a stone in each hand, his arms out either side of him. ‘Just like this,’ he said. ‘Can you do that?’

  Sheegeh nodded.

  ‘Out to here.’ Michael strode out to Sheegeh and beyond him, where the ground was even flatter. Sheegeh followed. ‘Right here,’ said Michael, and turned to face the others, and put out his arms with the stones again.

  Sheegeh stood beside him, and put his arms out.

  ‘Look straight back at us,’ said Michael.

  The others were not very much different from corpses, lying there, but a head was raised here, those shoulders were hunched as corpses’ never were, a foot tapped. Bored as they were, they were full of thoughts and little movements.

  ‘Keep looking,’ said Michael. He threw away one of the stones and took a different one out of his pocket, and put it in Sheegeh’s hand.

  ‘That’s a funny one,’ Sheegeh said amiably.

  ‘It is a funny one,’ said Michael. ‘Don’t look,’ he added, ‘but you can feel it.’

  Sheegeh felt the lighter stone. ‘Pattern of squares,’ he said.

  Michael was between him and the stone. He looked at Sheegeh over his shoulder. ‘Yup. I just have to adjust something. Now, you just stand there very still, when I go. Don’t squeeze the stones, don’t drop them, don’t let them flop by your side. Just hold them out and stand there. All right?’

  ‘All right.’ It was nice to hear a kind voice, telling him what to do. It was a relief. He knew it was Duwazza, but not all Duwazza were so gentle.

  Michael held his hand around the stone and made a sound there as if slicing part of the stone off with a single knife-stroke. ‘Good,’ he said. ‘Stay exactly like that.’ He leaped away towards the other boys. They were all sitting up now, and looking out at Sheegeh.

  Sheegeh looked back. He did just as Michael had told him. Michael went higher than the other boys up the rubble and crouched there. He didn’t move, though the others kept having little impatient spasms, unfolding, folding back up, staring, waving their arms. A voice called out, ‘Squeeze it!’, then ‘Squeeze them both!’, but because it was not Michael’s voice, Sheegeh did not do so.

  The sky was low and grey with seams of silver sunlight throbbing through it. A breeze trickled through the place; Sheegeh couldn’t see it because there were no trees, no cloths, no blowing rubbish; he could only feel his own coat edge gently bumping the back of his knees. A bird came down, black, with a sticking-up tail; it bounced down onto a brick, eyed him, flaunted its tail one way and another, bounced—boint, boint, boint—away from him, then took itself off again. Sheegeh was good; his arms were getting tired, but he stayed where he was told.

  Then someone ran towards him, one of the bigger boys. As he got closer, Sheegeh saw that he didn’t have Michael’s kind face, that in fact he had an ugly, injured, bristling face. But it was all right; Michael was watching; Michael had clearly told him to come.

  ‘Here, giss that,’ he said. Sheegeh gave him nothing, but he came and took the strange stone. He started walking back with it. ‘Yeah, it’s a dud,’ he called to the others. ‘It’s got that same look as the ones we got from Throwbrow’s.’ And he strolled back, gently tossing the stone into the air, gently catching it.

  Would it be all right now to lower his arms, Sheegeh wondered? Some of the boys leaned back on the pile of rubble; some of them scrambled; all of them put up their hands as if to warn the ugly boy off.

  Bang! The stone blew up and the ugly boy fell. Silence packed itself into Sheegeh’s ears. The cloud of the explosion passed upward and was lost against the sky.

  Sheegeh came from one side and the Duwazza from the other to look at the dead ugly boy. By now, Sheegeh was used to seeing all kinds of bodies, fresh and not so fresh. This one was not too bad. He regarded the bright colour of the peeled head in the middle of all this greyness.

  Some of the Duwazza came around his side to properly examine the boy.

  ‘He’s not gunna wake up and start moaning, is he?’ said one unhappily. This was a boy Doppo’s age who Sheegeh never learned the name of; he had woken up screaming of stomach pains two nights later. The Duwazza had carried him off to the Red Cross doctors and Sheegeh had not seen him since.

  ‘No, no,’ said Michael. ‘Not with that head.’

  ‘Good,’ said the boy, then added swaggeringly, ‘’cause I hate it when they do that.’

  Michael felt the ugly boy’s wrist. ‘Nada,’ he said, dropping it, and straightened, and got out tobacco in a packet. He rolled himself a cigarette fast, with one hand, lit it with a pink plastic lighter and put everything away. Now he was looking at Sheegeh.

  ‘So you were lucky, eh? You’re still here.’

  Sheegeh kept his eyes on the ugly boy, in case the ugly boy were popular and people were angry with Sheegeh for killing him.

  ‘We can give him another, make him do it again,’ said someone.

  ‘He’s lucky
, not stupid.’ Michael came and touched Sheegeh’s hair. ‘The whole point is him not knowing what the stone does. Isn’t it, Angel-hair? Look at this golden fluff. How do you keep it so clean? You go to the beauty parlour?’

  He was joking kindly, and Sheegeh pulled his mouth down in a smile and shook his head.

  Which is how it all began with the Duwazza. They took him to their house and he was theirs. Michael gave an order that no one was to touch any part of him but his hair, so they washed that and combed it like a doll’s and marvelled at how it curled up again as it dried. They ran their fingers through it when they were all kitted up for a raid, for luck, and he would stay there with Fat Owen who was an encumbrance but loyal and could cook. They would sleep until the Duwazza came back in, either wild with weapons and loot, or silent with things they had seen. Sheegeh would wake, watch and listen to check that his luck still held, and go back to sleep until morning.

  He walked down the safe street. They called it Dresses Street, because for a long time two of the shop windows stayed good, one full of bridal gowns, one of evening gowns. People had broken the glass themselves and taken the gowns, eventually, for the cloth, and the brides’ wooden dummies for fuel. Most of the metal ones were still in the evening-gown shop, though, woman-shaped cages on metal stalks, straighter-backed and more confident than any woman walked any more.

  The day before yesterday, Dresses Street had not been safe, and there were the bodies to prove it, fallen quite neatly against the walls they had thought would shelter them. They were still good, with the cold—there was no smell. Boots and coats had been taken, so they lay rather vulnerable in cardigans, T-shirts. One of the younger women wore nothing at all, so Sheegeh didn’t look lower than her head. Her reddish curls made her hard to measure, so he put a question mark and the words thick hair beside his measurement.

  He went zigzag up the street with his tape and book. It was quiet, so early; it was the hour when the city seemed to catch its breath, and stretch its cramped limbs just a little, but not enough to catch the eye of anyone with a weapon. There was just the rustle of the tape, the crack of the notebook cover as he wrote against his knee, and the whisper of the pencil on the paper.

  ‘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 watch
ed 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.