Post apocalyptic story - Episode Three

Three - Sky

 

The time came when Dalyon would divide his time between the swing and the trampoline.  The swing didn’t mind. It was bored by now and amused to see Dalyon bouncing up and down.

Ma joined him in the yard every day. At the swing she exercised her arms, pushing him and growing as strong as she could.

‘Push me high as the sky,’ he sang.

‘Push me high as the sky please Ma,’ she responded automatically.

‘Push me high as the sky please Ma,’ he sang, over and over again, and when he was flying he hung his head back and let the sky take him.  

Finally she brought him back with her mystery words.

‘The train’s at the station now Daly,’ she said. ‘Slowing down, slowing down.’

‘What train the station?’ he said, sending her to a place where she could not speak. He fell back into his own silence.

She lifted him down, and there he stayed for a time dancing from one foot to another, until he noticed that she’d left a break in his construction of chairs and sticks and tin and rocks. His body let out the sound of his frustration, and he was off to fix it.

 Ma shrugged her shoulders, stepped over the low wall that he’d built to keep everything that was in, in, and everything that was out, out, and disappeared into the darkness of the house. He went back to his work.

Always, there was work to do, a never-ending going round and round and round.  The cat watched from under one of the fence chairs, ready to stay, ready to go, ready to stay, ready to go.  Dalyon’s song of words repeated and stretched out until they echoed back on one another and joined up with no breaks, no breaches. Stay-ready-go-ready-stay, ready-go-stay-ready-say-go, ready-say-ready-stay-ready, ready, go-stay, stay, stay, stay, stay-a-a-a-go-ready, stay, steady – until something, a movement or a thought, stopped the looping words and sent him spinning off onto another track, bouncing on the trampoline.  

She came back to watch his dance of twists and turns. ‘Listen to me Dalyon,’ she said. ‘Things change. That’s a good thing. You are growing bigger and stronger. The world will need you one day. One day you will need the world.’

He put his head over towards one of his shoulders, and smiled at the way that this song felt as it circled around inside his head.

*

On the morning of the day that the two men first came to see him, Ma was busy doing different things. He followed her around to watch. She washed the dishes twice. She went to the pantry-room and brought out some of the flour that was stored in the big drum. She gathered the eggs earlier than usual. The chickens squawked for a long time. She went back and fed them and poured some water for them. It was the wrong order of things, at the wrong time. Dalyon stood in the corner of the yard, covered his ears, closed his eyes and sang a long song to set it right. When he came back to watch she was foraging in the vege patch.   She found two ripe strawberries on the bush, brought them in, and placed them on a saucer. She lined up the cups without the chips, the teapot with, and placed them all on top of the small lace cloth made of blue hexagons bordered in white. Finally she stopped, stood back and looked at what she’d done. She spoke to him while she looked at the table.

‘Listen to me Dalyon. Two people are coming here today,’ she said. ‘Two men. Terry and Bob. I want you to be good. They will talk to me and drink some tea, and I am making cakes for them to eat. You can have a cake if there is one left. Don’t ask for it. You must sit quietly and listen to them when they speak to you, and do what they ask. Then you can have a cake. Will you do that?’

‘Yes,’ said Dalyon.

They came on bicycles. The tall thin man said, ‘Hello Dalyon. My name is Terry.’

The shorter man said nothing. He made a smile, lifted up his eyebrows and let them slip back to their starting point. His face was quite red and there was water coming out of him, his face and his neck. His light-coloured hair was damp, although there had been no rain. The other man called Terry had shiny black hair, black eyes, and small, neat fingernails. Both men had dark patches on their shirts under the top of their arms.

Ma made a smile with her mouth, rested one hand on the side of her neck, and lightly shook their hands with the other.  She had a feeling about her that made Dalyon feel scratchy. He wanted to run away and sit underneath the trampoline until they left, but he remembered his promise to Ma, and her promise to him about the cake. He watched her for signs of how he should learn the visit. She looked at the man with the neat fingernails, at his hands and at his head when he was turned to look at Dalyon, so Dalyon did that too. They all sat on chairs pulled up to the table. Dalyon had a cushion on his chair. The two men drank the tea that Ma poured, and ate the cakes. They sang a long boring song using flat, ugly words that had no music to them and provided no information at all. Dalyon sat quietly balancing on his cushion with his hands on his knees, watching as the shorter man took the last cake and lifted it to his mouth. When he brought his hand down to the plate again, half the cake was gone. He lifted the cake again, brought it part of the way to his mouth, and turned to look back at Dalyon who was watching the cake. He put the cake piece on the plate and put the plate in front of Dalyon.

‘Go on, eat,’ he said.

‘No,’ Ma said.

‘Yes go on,’ said the man.

She said, ‘Yes, go on then. Eat, boy.’ She looked at Dalyon and nodded.

Dalyon ate. The cake was good.

‘We will come once a week,’ Terry said. ‘Every Wednesday morning.’

‘What day is it today?’ she asked.

‘Wednesday.’

‘All right.’

That was how it started, these men who came to watch and instruct and change the way they did things. They gave her a calendar with a picture of a small yellow bird that Dalyon did not know, and she would cross off the days as Dalyon watched. At the circled day, Bob and Terry would come after Ma had collected the eggs and made the cakes. On the day of the last calendar cross, Ma would always say the same thing.

‘Tomorrow they come. Terry and Bob.’

He would dismantle his fence and tidy his room. The day after they had been he would put everything back in its place.  

One day they came on a day unexpected and he still had his fence up. She had no cake or tea ready. They said loud jagged words to her. Dalyon didn’t like that at all. It felt like the shirt he had put on once, with prickles stuck to its inside. He whispered a curse at Terry and Bob, turning away from them so that they couldn’t see him. Then he climbed up onto the trampoline and began to run around it in giant steps. He found an angry song coming through his mouth. He caught them in his lasso of sound, and tied them up.

‘I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come, I wish you didn’t come,’ he sang as he ran circles on the trampoline, round and round and round, and they stood there staring at him, dancing from one foot to the other. 

‘Don’t say that Dalyon,’ Terry said. ‘That’s not good.’

But it was the best he could do. He closed his eyes and wished very hard as he ran the familiar track.

‘I wish you didn’t come,’ he sang, circling round and round and round.

*

Beyond the perimeter of house and the fence that stayed with the house, in the vast and disturbing forest it seemed that other houses and other fences might hide amongst the trees. Sometimes Dalyon thought he could hear the faint sound of children’s voices in play, carried far across the still air. When he closed his eyes he would see a thin rise of smoke from a fireplace, moving like a vertical strand of cloud, tracking its way from the surface of the tree-tops to the edge of the blue, touching the boundary and spreading across until it became the slightest whisper, and faded away to nothing.

He thought Ma might be able to say something about the things he was seeing.

‘Where are those boys? Girls-and-boys,’ he said, remembering a sound chain in story she had read him. She pretended not to hear as she stirred the cake mixture.

She heard. She asked Terry and Bob about other houses and children when they came. She asked them at the part just before they were leaving, when they were eating cake and drinking tea, and feeling round and harmless. Bob stared into his tea and gave no news of others. Terry ate another cake. They pretended not to hear.

Dalyon could speak louder than she could with her frightened little song. He would ask them again, in his own way, looking at them right at the face. It hurt him to do that, but they liked him to try. They would give him a small glass ball to hold for awhile, each time he did. The glass ball had a black double triangle, and another ball inside.

’Where are boys-and-girls Terry-and-Bob, Bob-and-Terry where, where, where? Boys-and-girls and birds in trees, tree-birds singing gaw-aw, la, la, ah-oh.’

He said it looking at them right in the face, hard and loud. He waited for them to give him the ball to hold, but they didn’t. They looked at each other, picked up their hats and their backpacks, and left.

Perhaps they failed to understand what he was trying to say. He had his own language, using words that came into his head and felt right in his mouth, rather than those that others suggested, those harsh sounds devoid of music. Maybe it was that he was small and they were large. It seemed that all but him were large. He was the odd one out, except for the cat which made itself even smaller by creeping around all day on its hands and feet.

Bob and Terry would make themselves small by sitting down as soon as they could after they arrived. After spending some time watching him do his tricks on the swing and the trampoline, they would sit and eat and drink with her at the table. They would speak to her in low sleepy tones.  She sat with her mouth in a smile, wanting them to leave, as much as she waited for them to come with their presents of food and papers. They would go on and on, filling the room with a low buzz.

After a while other movements would join Ma’s smile. Her face would tighten and her eyebrows would stand closer together. This happened so much now that she had two lines that stayed between her eyebrows even when she slept. Dalyon knew this from watching her face by moonlight, once when the moon was big.

When Terry and Bob went away the time that Dalyon asked about the children, Ma sat with him. He felt her needing something from him, crowding in on his work.  It spoiled his concentration.

‘Don’t look. Go away. Go away,’ he said, and out of the corner of his eye he saw her face make a strange shape.  

‘I don’t want to’, she said. 

It became a game then. ‘Go away, go away, go away Miss moo-moo.’

She tickled him and made a funny laughing song.

‘What did you say? What did you say? What did you say?’

This made him laugh.

Sometimes she would close him up in her arms and rock him gently until he fell asleep. She would sing to him in her small dancing stream voice, so delicate and fragile that he would be afraid to move in case it broke.  When the singing came to its end she stroked his hair and said words that he felt as soft feathers against his cheek.

‘Where do you think you got such black shiny hair my baby? Such black eyes? Such pale skin. Where did you come from my little one, my child? Not that one, I hope. Oh, I hope you have learned enough. Have you learned enough? I love you Daly, so much. So much. What will become of us my son, my poor little one? Will you remember me? ‘

She sang to him again, a song filled with soft reds, purples and blues, as his eyes and body grew heavy.