The Fire-Dwellers (33 page)

Duncan sits up in bed and sips ginger ale through a straw.

Dad I almost

Duncan knows that Mac carried him from the beach. Mac did not tell Duncan. Stacey did, when Mac was not around. Now Mac is sitting on Duncan’s bed.

Yeh. Well, lucky for you that you didn’t, eh? Next time you better watch out for your footing.

Next time?

This is not something that Duncan has previously considered. Stacey, standing in the doorway, examines his face and wonders if he has taken for granted that the sea and himself will in future no longer be on any kind of terms.

  — Mac’s right. I know. But at the same time, it’s not Mac who has to go through with it. I don’t ever want to take that kid to the beach again.

After a week, Duncan is back to himself. It is the last week of the summer holidays, so Ian is agitating to be taken to the beach. Katie has gone with her friends. Mac, entrenched in myriad administrative responsibilities, has gone to work that morning absentmindedly. Matthew roams the house.

Dad – how be we take the kids to the beach?

Well, that would be quite nice, Stacey.

Okay, you guys – c’mon, then, get your swimsuits and let’s get going. C’mon, flower – you, too.

Stacey, Jen and Matthew station themselves fairly high up on the beach, equipped with plastic shovels and sandpails. Ian looks at Duncan and then flashes off on his own towards the sea.

  — Ian. If Duncan goes to the sea, Ian will keep an eye on him. But he doesn’t want to be responsible. I don’t blame him. Maybe he only thinks it would be an insult to Duncan, to watch over him.

Ian rushes into the high-tided water alone, plunging outward and then turning and swimming in, as he has been taught to do. Never swim outward, or you’ll get too far beyond your depth. One day he will disobey, and that will be right, then.

Duncan plays in the sand by himself, constructing a moated fort, shoring it up with walls of hard-packed sand. Then, after a while, as though it is something he knows has been laid upon him and which he cannot deny, he walks by himself along the wet reaches of the sand down to the sea.

Stacey watches him, but she makes herself not move. Duncan reaches the edge of the water and then he walks, ploddingly, into the sea.

  — I wonder how deep it is, at the deepest? How far out does it go? How many creatures does it contain, not just the little shells and the purple starfish and the kelp, but all the things that live a long way out? Deathly embracing octopus in the south waters, the white whales spouting in the only-half-melted waters of the north, the sharks knowing nothing except how to kill.

Duncan looks incredibly small on the rim of the ocean. But he keeps on walking outward until he reaches what he
judges to be a decent and to himself acceptable distance. Then he turns and swims back to shore.

September, and the kids go back to school. Stacey, half ashamed of her own relief, waves at them from the veranda. The morning is warm, so she fetches a lawn chair from the garage and sets it up in the back yard.

Dad – it’s such a lovely day, I thought you might like to sit in the garden for a while.

That was thoughtful of you, Stacey.

Stacey helps him down the steps.

  — I never know whether he’s being delicately ironic or genuinely grateful. If it’s the latter, I ought to warn him. Thoughtful, hell, I just don’t want him under my feet all morning, that’s all. He pussyfoots behind me until I begin to feel he’s my shadow, but a shadow that has to be spoken to, taken notice of, and then all I want to do is speak the unspeakable. Okay – so in some ways I’m mean as all getout. I’m going to quit worrying about it. I used to think there would be a blinding flash of light some day, and then I would be wise and calm and would know how to cope with everything and my kids would rise up and call me blessed. Now I see that whatever I’m like, I’m pretty well stuck with it for life. Hell of a revelation that turned out to be.

Stacey goes back into the house. Jen is in the kitchen and has dragged a chair over to the sink, climbed up on it and filled her plastic teapot from the tap. She holds it up for Stacey to see.

Hi, Mum. Want tea?

Stacey stares. Then, quickly, she recovers and manages nonchalance.

What did you say, flower?

Want tea, Mum?

Why – yes, thanks, Jen. I’d love some.

When she has drunk two plastic cupfuls of water, Stacey flies to the telephone in the hall. She speaks guardedly, glancing towards the kitchen, as though imparting top secret material to a co-spy.

Mac? That you?

Yeh. What’s the matter, Stacey?

Nothing. It’s Jen – she just talked.

Oh?

What d’you mean –
oh?
She
talked
, Mac. A whole sentence. A short one, mind you, but all the same

That’s great, honey. I always knew she would.

Well, I just thought I’d let you know. Sorry for phoning you at work. So long.

So long, Stacey.

  — What the hell. It may be nothing to him, but when you’ve listened to this child’s garbled gargling for the past year, and all the other kids talked before they were two, then it’s like brass bands and banners to me.

Flower, you’re a genius.

Want tea, Mum?

Sure.

  — Ye gods. What if she never learns to say anything else?

That afternoon, Katie comes home and goes into the back yard where Jen is playing and Stacey is reading.

Guess what, Katie?

What?

Jen talked – a whole sentence.

Katie picks up Jen and swings her high.

Hey – clever kid. What’s your name, eh?

Jen.

That’s right. My, my, such ability. You’re the best two-year-old talker in this entire house. Hey – Mum?

Mm?

I’m going out tonight.

Who with?

Oh – just this boy.

Stacey fights the impulse to ask instantly for a total record – name, age, ambition, appearance, scholastic performance, religion (if any), principles, scruples, manners?

Oh? What’s his name, Katie?

Don.

Don who? What’s his last name?

How should I know?

  — Good God. If it had been me, the name would be embossed on my mind in letters of silver, ten feet high. Maybe she’s not quite so desperate to latch on and get the hell out as I was when I was her age? Or is that only my wishful thinking? She’s always gone out before with a group of kids. This is the first time alone. It’s been bugging her, too. Why, I can’t think. At her age. Fourteen. To hear her, you’d think she was thirty and never been kissed. Oh, Katie, love. I hope everything goes well for you.

Okay Katie. Where you going?

Just to a movie. He’s a funny kind of guy, in a way. His home background sounds all loused up. He was telling me about this pot party some of them had last summer, and his dad found out and actually took him to the police. Can you imagine?

You mean he smokes marijuana?

Well, he did that time. That wasn’t what I was trying to say. Didn’t you hear?

  — Katie, I’m sorry. I guess I didn’t hear. I only heard what
was pertinent to you or what I imagined to be pertinent to you. In the same way that I used to wonder if my mother ever really listened to what I’d been saying. Sorry, Mother. Now I see why. I’m a stranger in the now world.

Sorry, Katie. Yeh – I agree. It seems a pretty low thing, for a person to take his own kid to the police. I guess the father felt desperate and worried and – you know – helpless. I don’t know. You don’t – you haven’t – have you, Katie?

You mean have I smoked pot? No. But it’s not up to me to judge what other people do, is it? That’s his business. It’s got nothing to do with me.

Well I guess I can’t really argue with that

  — It’s odd. I believe her. But I guess my mother believed me, too, although I certainly wasn’t telling her the truth. Do I know if this particular stuff will lethalize more than the tobacco and booze which are my cup of tea? No. I do not know. I, who may well expire from lung cancer or cirrhosis of the liver. It’s partly fear of the unknown, this, with me. But it scares me all the same. I don’t know what to tell Katie. I have the feeling that there isn’t much use, at this point, in telling her anything. She’s on her own, so help her. So help her. At least my mother had the consolation of believing herself to be unquestionably right about everything. Or so I’ve always thought. Maybe she didn’t, either. Although I really do wonder if she ever saw her codeine and phenobarb in anything like the same terms. She always put such a patina of respectability upon them.
Probably Katie thinks Mac and I do, too, with the gin and tonic. Ritualized props.

Stacey takes Jen and goes into the kitchen to start dinner. She turns the radio on and begins peeling the potatoes. The tune that is playing is “Zorba’s Dance.”

She is dancing alone. The café is in a village, a village of low whitewashed huts, surrounded by and threaded through with whatever kind of trees they have in Greece. Olive trees. Yeh, those. However they look. The café is small, and the band is only two or three men playing (unspecified string instruments). She starts slowly, following the beat of the music, her bare feet certain, confident. The sudden upswirling of the tune, and she is whirling, wrists gyrating, possessed by the god. Swifter, swifter, with the freedom of wild horses, the music races the wind. Then he is beside her, the man who also is enabled to hear the music, who also is directed by the god

AND NOW A WORD FROM OUR SPONSOR ARE YOU TIRED OF WAXING FLOORS?

Stacey immobile beside the sink, except for the movement of the potato peeler in her right hand, laughs with minimal amusement.

  — I was wrong to think of the trap as the four walls. It’s the world. The truth is that I haven’t been Stacey Cameron for one hell of a long time now. Although in some ways I’ll always be her, because that’s how I started out. But from now on, the dancing goes on only in the head. Anything else, and it’s an insult to Katie, whether or not she witnesses the performance. Well, in the head isn’t such a terrible place to dance. The settings are magnificent there, anyhow. I did dance at one time, when I could. It would be a lot worse if I never had. Funny –
I recall one of my mother’s bridge cronies in Manawaka, and every time she came over, she’d ask my mother to put on a record, and Mother would play the old-time one with a polka on one side and a schottische on the other, and the old dame would sit there as though under heavy sedation. Maybe she was dancing in her head.

The next morning the letter from Stacey’s sister arrives. She tells Mac about it after dinner that evening, when he has gone down into his temporary study in the TV room.

Mac – guess what?

What?

Rachel and my mother are moving out here. Here. This self-same city.

Oh holy Jesus that’s all we needed

Yes. I know. But the fact remains that Rachel has had her all alone all these years. We can have them over for Sunday dinners, I guess, and pray it won’t be much more than that. That’s a fine thing to say about your own sister and mother, isn’t it? But I can’t help it, Mac. I just can’t I don’t want

I know. I know, honey. Well

Never mind. Maybe my mother will strike up a rewarding relationship with your dad.

Mac laughs.

I can just about see that happening, can’t you?

Yeh. In a magazine story. Well, it’ll mean a lot to her to see the kids. I can’t begrudge her. She’s had her troubles. As I know now. You know something, Mac? I’ll be forty next week.

So you will. I’d forgotten. Do you mind?

To tell you the truth, I mind like hell. But there it is.

Yeh. There it is.

The butterfly priestesses flutter in winglike robes of pale mauve. The hairdryers sing whirringly like insects from another planet. Stacey flicks the heat control from high to medium.

  — It’s an ill wind and all that. At least since Tess’s breakdown I can get my hair done again. There’s a charitable thought.

She picks up a shiny-paged magazine and thumbs through until she finds the current pop psychology article. It is entitled “Mummy Is the Root of All Evil?”

What do you want for your birthday, Mum?

I don’t know. I can never think of anything. What about a nice wheelchair?

Katie laughs obligingly.

No – we’re saving up for that one next year.

Thanks, Katie. That’s big-hearted of you.

But then Katie swings away, turns into herself.

Ah, drop it, can’t you?

EVER-OPEN EYE STREETS IN CITIES NOT SO FAR AWAY ARE BURNING BURNING IN RAGE AND SORROW SET ABLAZE BY THE CHILDREN OF SAMSON AGONISTES VOICE: RIOTS ARE SAID TO BE WELL UNDER CONTROL IN

  — I see it and then I don’t see it. It becomes pictures. And you wonder about the day when you open your door and find they’ve been filming those pictures in your street.

On the bedroom chair rests a jumble of Stacey’s clothes, offcast stockings like nylon puddles, roll-on girdle in the shape of a tire where she has rolled it off. On another chair, Mac’s
clothes are folded neatly, a habit he acquired in the army, as he has remarked countless times. Two books are on the bedside table –
The Golden Bough
and
Investments and You
, Hers and His, both unread. On the dressing table, amid the nonmagic jars and lipsticks are scattered photographs of Katie, Ian, Duncan and Jen at various ages. Above the bed is hung a wedding picture, Stacey twenty-three, almost beautiful although not knowing it then, Mac twenty-seven, hopeful confident lean.

Stacey is already in bed. Mac crawls in beside her.

Christ, am I ever beat.

You better get to sleep right away, then, Mac.

I’ve got to.

It’s okay. I know.

  — I can’t very well say – look, don’t worry, you’re fine and what I’d really like from time to time is someone I’ve never been with before. No doubt he’d like that, too.