The Fire-Dwellers (16 page)

Katie is dancing. In a green dress Katie MacAindra simple and intricate as grass is dancing by herself. Her auburn hair, long and straight, touches her shoulders and sways a little when she moves. She wears no make-up. Her bones and flesh are thin, plain-moving, unfrenetic, knowing their idiom.

Stacey turns and goes very quietly up the basement steps and into the living room.

  — You won’t be dancing alone for long, Katie. It’s all going for you. I’m glad. Don’t you think I’m glad? Don’t you think I know how beautiful you are? Oh Katie love. I’m glad. I swear it. Strike me dead, God, if I don’t mean it.

At ten thirty, Katie is in bed at last. Stacey is now off duty. Mac is at a conference and will probably not be home until midnight. Stacey has a scalding bath, puts on a nightgown and housecoat, and goes downstairs again.

  — What now? I should go to bed. Okay, Stacey, not more than one gin, eh? Well, all right, if it’s going to be only one,
let’s make it good and strong. Too much has disappeared from this bottle. I’ll go to the Liquor Commission tomorrow and get another bottle and pour half of it into this one. So Mac won’t think it’s odd. The other half strictly to be stashed away for emergencies. Yeh, I can see it all now. Every other minute is an emergency. Does he know? He must. Mac – listen. Just listen. I have something to tell you. No. It’s not up to him. It’s up to me. Any normal person can cope okay, calmly, soberly. And if you can’t, kid, then there’s something wrong with you. No there isn’t. Everything is okay. Everything is
all right
, see? Only I’m tired tonight and a little tense. Why not try Ovaltine, then? Oh get lost, you.

Stacey takes her drink into the living room and sits on the chesterfield with the lights off, looking out the window at the city which is both close and far away.

Going into the kitchen, Stacey swings the gin bottle out from the lower cupboard and fills a jug with water from the tap.

  — No use wasting tonic water. Of course this will taste like essence of pine needles with a dash of kerosene, but then my mother always used to speak very scornful-like of ladies whose taste was all in their mouths. Couldn’t say that about me. Nope. My taste isn’t anywhere. Between my legs, maybe. Okay, doll, that’s enough. So who wants to know?

Stacey returns to the living room and curls up on the chesterfield once more, her slippered feet underneath her. The big sliding door leads out into the hall and thence up the iron-banistered staircase to the bedrooms. Stacey leans around in the semidarkness to check. The door is closed. Should she put on the radio? She decides against it. If she uses her own voice, she can select the music.

  — Oh boy. Jen comes by her operatic tendencies naturally. Where did that song come from? Old man Invergordon used to sing it at local concerts in Manawaka when I was a little kid. Nobody knew how to tell him they’d rather he didn’t. They weren’t so bad, any of them, I now see. How I used to dislike them then, the Ladies’ Aid and mother’s bridge cronies and all of them, never seeing beyond their own spectacles and what will the neighbors think what will they say? But who here or anywhere, now, would put up with old Invergordon?
Drop dead
, that’s what he’d get here and now. He stank all right but he had a lovely baritone. Only difference between Invergordon and Niall Cameron was that my dad was a private drunk and the old guy was a public one. It isn’t the fact that there’s no gold mine in the sky which bothers me. I mean who wants to say hello to people who are dead even if you happen to be dead yourself? It’s the ones who say good-bye before they’re dead who bug me. I start thinking – it’s Mac. Then I think – hell, no, it’s not Mac it’s me and then I don’t know.

Twelve thirty. Stacey takes the empty bottle into the kitchen and places it behind three bottles of wine and a bottle of vinegar. She takes the frying pan down from its hook and puts it on the stove. She takes the bacon out of the refrigerator and puts two slices in the pan. Cheese. Bread. The fried sandwich is made. She looks at it seriously, considering it. It does not look edible.

  — Must eat something absorptive. Can’t. Repulsive. Mac, talk to me. Mac? Katie? Ian? Duncan? Where are you or is it just me I don’t know what the hell I’m talking about well what you should be talking about kid is coffee.

Stacey makes herself a cup of instant coffee. She looks again at the congealing sandwich in the frying pan and decides to heat it up. She switches on an element but does not put the frying pan on until the circular coil is red. She reaches for the frying pan, stumbles, puts out a hand to balance herself. The hand lands on the edge of the electrical scarlet circle.

  — It hurts it hurts it hurts what is it

She has without knowing it pulled her hand away. She regards it with curiosity. Two red crescent lines have appeared on the skin of her left palm.

  — My brand of stigmata. My western brand. The Double Crescent. It hurts hurts

She takes the frying pan and throws its sandwich into the garbage pail. She switches off the stove, reaches into the cupboard for baking soda, mixes some with water and applies it to her hand. She then applies a light gauze bandage, one which can be removed easily tomorrow morning without anyone noticing. She walks upstairs and gets into bed. Blackness scurries around her in the room but within her head the neon is white and cold like the stars in the prairie winters.

  — How to explain this? Anybody can explain anything, if they put their mind to it. It’s not difficult. I put the kettle on, and accidentally put my hand over the boiling spout. Mac – I’m scared. Help me. But it goes a long way back. Where to begin? What can I possibly say to you that you will take seriously? What would it need, with you, what possible cataclysm, for you to say anything of yourself to me? What should I do? I’m not sure I really want to go on living at all. I can’t cope. I do cope. Not well, though. Not with anyone. Jesus I get tired sometimes. Self-pity. Yeh, I guess. But sometimes I want to abdicate, only that. Quit. Can’t. What would it be like for one of the kids to come into the bedroom, say, one evening when Mac isn’t home yet, any one of them, maybe waking up in the night and calling and me not answering, and coming in here and finding I’d gone away from them for good, overdose? Maybe they’d think it was their fault. I couldn’t come back mysteriously and say
Listen, it wasn’t anything to do with you, or not in the way you think, and I love you, see?
Even if I left one of those I’m-getting-off-the-world letters, saying
I care about you
, they wouldn’t believe it. And they’d be right. Goddam you, God. I’m stuck with it. But I’m a mess and I’m scared. What if I had burned myself when one of the kids saw? Mac?

Stacey goes into half sleep, where the sounds of occasional cars and the light wind and the way-off ships can be heard but only in a way which needs no response.

Mac comes in at one o’clock.

It’s okay, Mac. You can turn on the light.

Hi, I thought you’d be asleep.

Well, I was, sort of. How was it?

Okay.

Mac?

Mm?

I want to tell

Christ, am I ever beat. What?

Oh – nothing

You okay, Stacey?

Yeh, I’m okay

Kids all right?

Yeh, they’re all right

Well, good night then.

Good night Mac

Stacey, neatly and matronly dressed, her gloves in hand, adjusts the despised veil on her white straw hat, pulling it down over her forehead and eyebrows as though she intends it to act as a disguise. She hesitates in the doorway of the large chair-filled hall, but the pressure of other people carries her forward and in. She chooses an aisle seat quickly, keeping her head down until she is sitting. But the precaution has been unnecessary. There are too many people around. Mac couldn’t possibly have noticed her. When she cranes her neck and peers over head tops, she cannot even see him. The platform at the front is decorated with gilded wicker baskets full of white roses. In between the baskets are tall white shields, each bearing one golden letter to form a word.

At the back of the platform there is a white velvet curtain, descending from the ceiling. A small gilt structure, a cross between a podium and a pulpit, stands in the middle of the stage, with microphone attachments.

Then Stacey spots Mac’s auburn brush-cut. He is sitting in the third row from the front, with all the other salesmen. Stacey twists and squints, trying to see around the magnolia-covered hat of the woman directly in front of her. Finally she manages to focus on Mac. His tallness is hunched a little, and while she watches, he puts up a hand and runs it over his hair. Stacey turns away, unable to look.

  — When he does that, is it like me looking in the mirror to make sure I’m really there? What’s he thinking? It may not be any of my business, but I’d like to know anyway. What if he starts coughing? Everyone will look at him. Maybe it would embarrass me more than it would him. Would he be livid if he knew I’d come? Well, come on, fellows, what are we waiting for? Let’s get the show on the road, eh?

The audience is mainly middle-aged, half men and half women. They sit quietly, for the most part, not looking at one another.

  — Maybe they’d all like to be incognito. I know damn well I would. I’d like to have a woolly muffler or a long trailing length of chiffon wrapped around my pan. If somebody like Bertha Garvey should chance to stroll in, I would crawl under the seat, so help me. Here we are – action at last.

The white velvet curtains part, revealing another section of stage on which six girls are gathered around a microphone. Their costumes are modest to a degree, long loose-fitting white robes, toga-like, with the Greek key design slanting diagonally across each bosom. The girls’ hair ranges from white-blonde to honey, all long and straight. The hall grows still, the whispers die, the ticking coughs are subdued, the feet compose themselves. When the audience is ready, the girls begin to sing, not loudly or jazzily, but in clear treble voices like a clutch of meadow larks.

Stacey surreptitiously slips out of her purse one of the tranquilizers Doctor Spender has given her for her pulsing-head condition, conceals it in her handkerchief and slips it into her mouth under the pretext of blowing her nose.

  — Lucky for me I always could swallow pills without water. Well, well. Listen to that. They sure aren’t what I would have expected. I thought it would be all zing-twanging and go-go-go. But unless you go to the hangouts of the young, I guess you only find that kind of noisy stuff in churches now. Those little birds aren’t even refined. They’re refeened. Has Mac got his eye on them? Well, naturally, what do you expect, Stacey? All the same. You bastard, Clifford MacAindra, they’re young enough to be your daughters.

The white curtain closes and the girls disappear. The audience sits uncertainly, not knowing whether applause is expected or not. Sporadic and nervous clapping breaks out like acne in isolated and obvious areas, then quickly fades.

Thor walks onto the platform alone and takes his place behind the gilt stand. A sprinkling of female exclamations can be heard, and he smiles a trifle, acknowledging them. This evening he is approximately seven feet tall. His newly laundered mane is accentuated by the spotlight which now comes to rest just above his head. He has abandoned his midnight blue in favor of a suit of silver, some luminous material that has the look of frost sheening on windows and patterning into faint ferns or snow flowers transferred from the farthest reaches of the polestar. But when he talks, his voice is not distant or un approachable. The reverse. He talks with
the people, not at them. His voice is warm, friendly, sincere.

You heard the girls, here, singing about richness. Well, richness is something we all hear a lot about these days, don’t we? Yes, we surely do, and sometimes we begin to wonder what it means, don’t we? Well, sure do all know it means money in the bank. I guess there isn’t one of us who doesn’t know that. But that’s not
all it
means. No, that definitely is not all it means, friends. It means response, happiness, a healthy mind in a healthy body. Wouldn’t you agree? You, sir, right there, would you agree? You would? Well, you’re right. Yes, richness means a healthy mind in a healthy body. But just how do we go about getting this? That’s what I used to ask myself. That was in the old B.R. days – before Richalife. I’m not asking you to believe a whole lot of printed data. I only want to tell you what happened to me personally. I’m not trying to sell you anything, either. Believe me, the kind of person who feels he’s being pressured into anything – We don’t want him. We only want people who can believe that the human body and the human spirit can be changed, changed beyond belief, in the short space of one month. Amazing? Certainly it’s amazing. But it can happen. I know. Because it happened to me. You know something? Once upon a time I could barely face the morning without three cups of coffee and as many cigarettes. Then I started reaching for a Richalife instead. And that is just what I got –
A RICHER LIFE
. Take my memory, for instance. My memory potential was hardly being tapped at all, before. Alertness-wise, the change A.R. – after Richalife – was really gratifying. I always had a good memory, mind you. Good, but not what you would call really excellent. Now I think I can honestly and truthfully say it’s reached the excellent mark. I don’t claim that the depth changes happened overnight. No, I wouldn’t claim that. Even Richalife can’t reach the deep cells of the mind instantly. When I began,
just over a year ago, it took – oh, I should say about three or four weeks, approximately, before the depth changes were really well established. These very slight depression feelings I used to get – they were alleviated almost right straight off, definitely alleviated, but it must have been more or less a month before they totally disappeared. Yes, totally disappeared. Another thing, now