White Time

by Margo Lanagan

  He gnawed and chawed all that day in a side-chamber. All the colony’s doings came to him on the breezes past his nose, in tremblings and skitterings transmitted through the earth to his sensitive paws. No one called him, to watch, to work, to anything. He crouched, he ate, he slept – in daytime, slept! And in the night ventured to pantry again, past his fellows heaped in corners, their warmth cupped in the dormitory chambers and trailing down the breathy tunnels. And Dybbol gnawed, and slept, and gnawed, and listened to the colony all around him – its vast, safe busyness so wonderful – and slept …

  … and woke to the queen’s screaming. ‘Arraaaagh! Where is my-bold-one-my-Dybbol?’

  He was fear all through, a throbbing thunder of it. The queen’s voice caught him low in the spine and spread out from there. He sensed her turning in her chamber deep below, shoving her cousins away, shoving her cousin-cousins harder, roaring and shrieking. The young are not in the queen-chamber, the echoes told him. And not long afterwards, The cousins also are cleared. Her-Madam awaits you. And the smell of the queen’s greatest need, wild and sweet, spread through the colony. It crept into Dybbol’s chamber and caught in the few outer hairs he had, around his nostril-folds, and clung there like thistle-fluff. He batted his own nose with his paws; he pressed his face into the earth wall, shaking all over.

  Fighters came for him. He reared, he gaped, he hissed, frantic. There were too many of them.

  ‘Come, now,’ said Barraud, ‘no one can escape the Queen’s Notice.’ And they dragged and shoved him, struggling, from the chamber. ‘Good man,’ said Barraud. ‘Fight all the way. Make yourself delectable.’

  For the first time Dybbol’s head-map of the colony failed him. He did not know where he was, only that the queen’s need was strengthening towards him, winding its tingling tendrils into his spine, spinning terror out of his loins as mean and hot as snake-breath.

  Then he was there, wrestled into the chamber by paramours and fighters. He tried to scrabble out, but they were digging, flinging earth, trapping him there with the roaring queen—

  —who fell silent; who loomed up and clouted him to the floor with her great paw; who stood over him, lust-breath whistling in her mouth-hairs. And humming in his jaws, boiling along his body, moving his nerveless paws for him was that fierce, new, intensely sweet scent that twirled out of the queen, behind.

  He dreamed he was young again, in a heap of young, interleaved with cousins. He chirped weakly, and they shifted, and their warmth intensified against him, pulsed him softly back to sleep.

  He woke in pain, from nose-bristle to tail-nub – and alone, in a chamber too small for a dormitory. The only sounds were above him.

  Amkarra came in, rolling a new-cut sweetbulb.

  ‘Where am I, Amkarra?’ said Dybbol. ‘Where is this chamber?’

  ‘Why, right by Barraud’s, of course, along from our Deepest Heart.’ She pushed the bulb towards him. ‘This is for you.’

  He found a feeble voice. ‘Enjoy it with me, cousin.’

  She put down her face. ‘I may not, bold one, queen’s paramour. But I hope it fills you as your children fill the queen, for our colony’s prosperity.’

  ‘For our colony’s prosperity …’ He lifted to the bulb a paw that shook with weakness.

  Amkarra abased herself and backed away down the tunnel. Dybbol felt her go, her earthy fighter-smell fading under his own sweet reek. Then the fresh breath of the sweetbulb asserted itself, and he turned from the tunnel and began to gnaw.

  BIG RAGE

  Where am I? I’m all in a sweat, but the air on my face is cold. My head’s jammed up against a bedhead, my heels are pressed hard against a footboard. Wherever I am, I’m totally alone – a mixed feeling, a kind of horrible relief.

  Is that moonlight or dawn-light bunched in the curtains? The rabbit-patterned curtains – ah. A mind-gate clicks open and memories roll in, of the rainy, steamy, sick-making bus trip down here, of walking the gravel verge past the closed-up beach-houses, of pushing through the rainy garden to Bunny Cottage, where we kids always used to sleep in the holidays, daringly apart from the main house. I must have lain down in my clothes and passed straight out.

  Blink, blink – my eyes feel fried and then dried. I get my watch to my face: four o’clock. If I were at Mum and Dad’s I’d be sneaking outside with my mobile to make a pathetic, weepy phone call right about now. Shivering at the bottom of the garden: What’s happened to us? I love you, James, I love you, trying to get the words to mean something, to be instruments for fixing things. Which they never were – that’s why I’m here, to stop myself trying that stuff. Just to stop everything, and think for a while. ‘Because if you don’t watch out, you’ll get yourself committed,’ my sister Marnie had warned me. ‘I mean it, Billie – you’re turning yourself into a crazy-girl.’

  Well, there’s no point pretending I’ll sleep any more. I push the quilt off and the wintry air bites down on me. I pull on my woolly jumper and my parka, and my chilled boots that are dull with rainwater. My brain’s about to grind into gear again, and this room’s too small for all that churning machinery. Any room’s too small.

  I go out, closing the door behind me. The rabbit doorknocker gleams brass-yellow; everything else is grey. Out the back gate. Into the dunes, the path pale under the scrub, whiskery marram grass leaning in from the edges. My feet feel over-protected in the boots – the air should be hot, my feet should be bare on the sand, I should be a little kid with a towel over my shoulder and cousins all around, hurling ourselves through the sunshine for a swim.

  The beach opens out, same old long curve, Dog Head Rock crouched at the north end, the sea washing and washing. The half-moon’s low, and a few fat clouds trundle across the stars – heaps of stars, heaps more than I ever see at home. They look three-dimensional, layer after layer going back and back forever, following some rule-system that’s too huge for my raggedy brain.

  I stump off to the south, where there’s nothing to stop me, ever, if I don’t want to. I veer down the beach to the harder, freshly washed sand, and put my bootprints there. My teeth are clenched grim, as they always are lately; my fists push hard into my parka pockets.

  I try to walk myself into a daze. I walk the moon down into the sea, walk the black sky grey, but my brain won’t shut up. It keeps replaying all those conversations, all those humiliating things James said, all my angry come-backs that never seemed to hit the mark. On and on it goes. I’m so bored with it, and so frightened of it, and so cut to ribbons inside, and it’s never going to be fixed, and even getting this far away hasn’t helped—

  ‘Just stop, why don’t you?’ I shout at the sea. ‘Just shut uuuup! Aaaah! Enaaaaarf!’ And I stand there for ages, just bellowing into the noise of the surf, until I feel, not better exactly, but a bit emptier, a bit off-loaded. Then I turn north, and stomp out my own prints one by one up the sand.

  I’m nearly back to the house when something calls my gaze to the dunes, something darker than dune shadow: a big man, flung there on his side, head to the sea, legs splayed up the dune.

  I could walk on; walking on would be the sensible-est thing for a girl on her own to do. Instead I stand there for a while, watching him for movement. It might be OK; he might be dead. I should at least see if he’s breathing? Slowly I walk up the softer sand.

  A man in armour. Seriously big. Long, dark, filthy hair in a spray across the sand. I crouch on the dune, trying to see whether his back’s rising and falling.

  Maybe he drank too much at some costume party and wandered down here to sleep it off. It’s a good costume; look at the hand there, the overlapping plate like fish-scales going down the fingers. It must’ve cost him a fortune. But where’s the party? I didn’t hear anything in the night.

  A sudden snarling groan breaks from him – I fall back with a whimper into the cold sand. Embarrassed, I get into my crouch again, ready to run if he rears up and comes at me.

  With a horrible scraping of sand on metal, he turns over
. He lets out a shout of … pain, surprise, anger? I hold still, my heart drumming hard, my eyes wide.

  Darkened sand is caked down his side. Through it, at the middle of it, dark fluid squishes out. Oh my God. The hand that was underneath him stretches out towards me, dark all over with dried blood, the shaky fingers shiny red.

  This is ambulance material. Phone 999. But there’s no phone. Marnie confiscated my mobile at the bus stop. ‘You don’t need that. The last thing you need is that.’ So I’ll have to run up to the shop. But you’re not supposed to leave an injured person, are you? So—

  Ah, he’s looking at me! He’s turned his head, and now his pale eyes – pale irises in red whites, far out! – are locked on me. All of a sudden it would be a Big Thing to get up and walk away. I can’t quite do it, right at this moment.

  He says something. His voice is used to bellowing, but he’s trying to talk softly; the sound breaks up and mixes with the wash of the sea.

  ‘Beg your pardon?’

  He says it again, adds something more. It’s not English.

  And not dottore, or ospedale, or anything I recognize from Year 9 Italian. I watch his lips. Total, nonsensical – and look at those teeth! Sheesh! It looks as if someone’s tried to ram, I don’t know, an axe handle or a spear butt in there, and knocked a couple of teeth out of upper and lower jaw. He’s looking rougher and wilder by the second – if it weren’t for the voice I’d be out of here, off at a run, wound or no wound.

  He starts to ease himself onto one elbow, talking at me, keeping his eyes on me so I’ll know we’re in this together. I get a better look at his face in the first sunshine. It’s not pretty. The pain, a skull-face, comes and goes behind his real face, which is weathered like a surfer’s or a yachtie’s, with a flattened nose like a gangster’s. It’s hard to tell how old he is.

  My own face starts to shake, it’s been held so long in this anxious wince. I want to leave, I don’t want to be here. I feel so not able to deal with this.

  But if I don’t, who will? Am I going to let the guy bleed to death out here?

  ‘I guess, if I can get you back to the house …’

  He’s just so bloody massive – piece by blockish piece he lifts himself upright, and I don’t know how he can do it, and I’m kind of laughing wondering how I can be any use to him at all. But when that big, armoured hand crunches onto my shoulder I’m not laughing. Right then I realize that (a) this can’t be done, and (b) this can’t not be done – if he slumps down again, he won’t be able to get up a second time.

  And so I turn superhuman. There’s no way I can manage this, but I just do. We must look like a pair of drunks – supporting only half his weight makes me weave almost uncontrollably on the cushiony sand. Not to mention the stink of him – not drink, but blood (I didn’t realize blood had a smell) and also that terrible smell derelicts get, of long-ingrained dirt, with a dash of urine. If it is a costume party he’s from, he’s a little too authentic for my liking.

  The beach is empty – where’s a jogger, when you want one, an early-bird surfer? I’m boiling hot again; I’ve got this big floppy man-hand making blood-prints on the front of my parka; my neck is going to snap; and all the while this guy is mumbling – possibly singing, but that might just be the language – and puffing like a steam engine beside my ear, and how are we going to manage that little dune path side by side?

  Well, we trample a lot of dune-preserving marram grass, is how, and damage a lot of replanted natural flora, and get very wet with shaken-down raindrops.

  In the porch of the beach-house I prop him against the wall so I can unlock the two doors, screen and main. He starts to slip almost straight away, and I work super-fast so I can duck back and dive under him on the bloody side and catch him. ‘Or I’ll never get you up!’ I gasp. His weight fuses every vertebra in my body, bows the bones in my legs, threatens to crush my collarbone. His great rock planet of a head droops forward as he goes unconscious; the doormat slides out from under me and my feet paw for a better hold. God, all this metal! My hands slip on the sandy chest-pieces as I try to hold him up, push him off me. He jerks awake again. A big gout of blood from his side splashes down my jeans-leg. I have serious doubts we can make it indoors. He’s got bad shakes, and his eyes keep swimming upwards.

  Scattering sand and blood, we stagger into the dead beach-house; the air’s cold and smells of mildew and perishing rubber. I take him straight across to Marnie’s room. ‘Finally! Made it!’

  He half lowers himself, half falls, onto the bed – which suddenly looks flimsy, the jazzy floral mattress cover wildly frivolous. He breathes hard, his eyes closed, his face pale. The room fills up with the smells of him and I go to the window.

  When I’ve finished wrestling with the lock and the runners that have lost their glide, he’s got himself sitting. His head kind of wanders on his neck, and he tugs at the fastening under a shoulder plate with a shaky hand.

  I have to get the armour off him. It takes for ever. This isn’t a costume-hire costume; it’s some kind of authentic recreation, each plate carefully laced to a reinforced leather shirt underneath. One plate’s damaged on the edge, near the wound at his waist, and the leather underneath has a neat, round hole in it. Then there’s a holed shirt made of some kind of hand-knitted metal, very soft and jingly and heavy, and then an undershirt, the dark grey weave clogged with old dirt – and a body smell I don’t believe. My eyes water. I have to breathe through my mouth.

  I peel the shirt off his shoulders. His whole top half is kind of comic-book massive, big chunky muscles like rocks under the skin – and they’re not even flexed or anything. James jokes – used to joke (past tense, remember) – that he had a greyhound’s physique, strong but lean and finely built. Well, this guy’s your bull-mastiff, your monster Rottweiler, one of those dogs you’d be afraid would just casually take a child’s head off like snapping at a fly. But the skin – I thought it’d be as weathered as his face. It’s young, though. He’s maybe even as young as me, but with, phew, what a different life behind him. Whole different kind of person from me or James. From anyone I know.

  I can’t get the shirt right off; all around the wound it’s stuck to him. ‘What I’ll do,’ I say, looking fearfully down at it, ‘I’ll get some water to soak it off, hey?’

  He looks up at me blankly, drunkenly. Then he pulls a horrible snarly face – Oh no, this is where he dies on me, I think – and with a yell that smacks me back against the wall he rrrips! the shirt off the wound.

  ‘Far out – you could’ve given me some bloody warning!’ I twitter.

  He sags forward, elbows on knees, head hanging as if he’s waiting to be sick.

  ‘No-no, I don’t think so. Not that too.’ And I get down and hoist one shoulder up so he falls sideways onto the bed. His leg comes up too, reflexively, to stop the wound stretching, and he lets out a string of what are probably swear-words, his voice deep and guttural, his face all bunched up. I’m glad he’s incapacitated, or I’d be mincemeat.

  I drag the other leg up onto the bed, and look at the boots and the metal-knit trousers. Still mouth-breathing from all the other odours, I think I’ll leave these on him for the moment.

  Then I give his belly one quick glance. It’s overrun with wet and dry blood from the small, serious mess in his side. Oh, God. I’m not one of those nursey type girls.

  ‘Yeah. Water,’ I say.

  There’s a lot of cleaning to do – so much blood, dried in layers on him. I go through four big bowls of warm water, squeezing blood out of the cloth over and over. The wound keeps oozing blood as I clean it, slow and dark, and a bad smell comes out of it – not intestinal, but kind of sour, smoky, unnatural.

  ‘You’re going to need help with this,’ I tell him. ‘Some stitching, some … treatment. Doctor,’ I say clearly to his uncomprehending eyes. ‘Hospital. Dottore? Ospedale? I’ll have to go into town and get help. I can’t fix this.’ I try to show him with gestures. Non capisce.

  I bend an
xiously over the wound. ‘Nasty.’

  He mutters at me. Then he touches my head, and when I turn it he pinches my lips closed with his shaky, blood-smelly fingers. He wards off something with his other hand – those people I waved in a moment ago. His pale eyes give off energy at me, warning or fear, I can’t tell.

  ‘Yes, but … this?’ I wave my hands over the wound. ‘You’ll die of this without—’

  He thumps his blood-black hand onto my shoulder, and says something very slowly, digging in the air over the weeping wound.

  ‘Huh? Well, it’s as clean as I can get it, you see. I’ve got all the sand out and everything …’

  ‘Graachh!’ He wrenches his head off the pillow, searches the room and waves a hand at the crumpled heap of his shirt on the floor.

  I fetch it for him. ‘But you can’t go out like this. You can hardly move.’

  He bundles it under his side. Then, with his thumbs, he pulls the wound open. My head jolts back as if he kicked it. With a long, low, grating growl he digs two fingers into the opening, two big man-fingers up to the knuckle, and works on something inside. I’m hovering over him, holding my head, wringing my hands, making feeble sounds; I think I’m going to be sick. His eyes roll in his head and he pauses, big rough breaths going in and out of that flattened nose, his working fingers swimming in blood, all his other fingers shuddering. Sweat has sprung out all over his arms and chest and face; it’s running into his sand-filled black hair.

  Then he hauls something out of himself, something small and hard and slick with blood. He holds it out to me, his face glowing with … triumph? Hatred? Relish? I take it in jittery fingers, my scalp crawling.

  I rinse it clean in the water bowl. It bubbles underwater, and keeps up a soft hiss when I take it out. It’s halfway between a bullet and an arrow, a battered silver cone with four sharp fins sticking out the sides. Specks of greenish-white froth are building from tiny holes at the fin-tips, giving off that poisonous burnt-out smell. ‘That’s a mean thing to have inside you,’ I say, to stop myself from gagging. I lay it gingerly next to the bowl on the bedside table.