The Fire-Dwellers (2 page)

  — Maybe the best thing would be to bring them up in the very veins of the city, toss them into it like into a lake and say swim or else. But I couldn’t bring myself to do that. Mac would think I was off my rocker even to think of it, if I ever mentioned it to him, which of course I wouldn’t.

Stacey walks more quickly and uneasily. Then she finds she is beside the harbor. The gulls are spinning high, freewheeling. Wings like white arcs of light crescenting above the waterfront. Voices mocking piratically at the city’s edges. But the city is doing too much shrieking itself to hear the gulls.

  — If they’re prophets in bird form, they might as well save their breath. They aren’t prophets, though. They only look it, angelic presences and voices like gravel out of a grave. Birds in prophet form. They couldn’t care less. They scavenge from the city, that’s all, and from those black rusty freighters doing their imitations of monolithic ghosts, clanking and groaning out there. If this city were gone, the wings would skim unmourningly away, off to deride and suck up to some other city, if there were any. Even if there weren’t, the gulls wouldn’t be too upset. Change of diet, that’s all. No more sea-sodden bread crusts and waterlogged orange peel.

  — I don’t want to look any more. Why did I come here? I want to go home. The kids will be back from school for lunch. What’ll they think if I’m not there? Katie will make the sandwiches for the others. That’s no excuse. Mustn’t rely on her like that. She’s only fourteen. It’s not fair to her. Ian won’t be worried, but Duncan will.
Where’s Mum?
He always thinks I’ve been run over or something. Who made him that way? Where’s the bus stop? Here. Come on, blasted bus – I’ve got to get home, right now.
Ladybird, ladybird, fly away home –
now, stop it, Stacey. Just cut it out. They are perfectly all right. Everything is all right. Tomorrow I will go on the banana diet. With luck, I should be able to lose seven pounds in seven days. Will Mac ever be surprised. Yeh, you do that, Stacey, doll. You just do that, eh?

Stacey sits very quietly on the bus, looking out the window in the belief that if she does not look at other people, they will not look at her. It is her matronly coat, hat and gloves which make her self-conscious. She feels more at home in slacks, but cannot wear them downtown in case it should embarrass her children to know she had done so.

  — Must’ve been off my head, wandering around the harbor so long. Didn’t even get the nightgowns. Are the kids okay? Damn, I wish I didn’t always have to be home at the right time. At the Day of Judgment, God will say
Stacey MacAindra, what have you done with your life?
And I’ll say,
Well, let’s see, Sir, I think I loved my kids
. And He’ll say,
Are you certain of that?
And I’ll say,
God, I’m not certain about anything any more
. So He’ll say,
To hell with you, then. We’re all positive thinkers up here
. Then again, maybe He wouldn’t. Maybe He’d say,
Don’t worry, Stacey, I’m not all that certain, either. Sometimes I wonder if I even exist
. And I’d say,
I know what you mean, Lord. I have the same trouble with myself
.

The bus crawls. The traffic is like two shoals of great metallic fish, frantic to get back to the spawning grounds, but not moving with the fine silence of fishes. Hooting and honking. Grinding of gears. Starting and stopping. And people yelling. The noise strikes at Stacey.

  — I’m getting so I can’t stand uproar any more. I never used to be this way. Now one of the kids shrieks and I pounce, snarling. It’s unnatural. I used to have very steady nerves. Sometimes I look through the living-room window at the snow mountains, far off, and I wish I could go there, just for a while, with no one else around and hardly any sounds at all, the wind muttering, maybe, and the snow in weird sculptures and caverns, quiet. I said some of this to Jake Fogler once and he said I had a death wish. So now I don’t think I’ve got a right to think that about the mountains. How can you win? On the other hand, since when is Jake a psychiatrist?

The buildings at the heart of the city are brash, flashing with colors, solid and self-confident. Stacey is reassured by them, until she looks again and sees them charred, open to the impersonal winds, glass and steel broken like vulnerable live bones, shadows of people frog-splayed on the stone like in that other city.

  — Lunatic. Mac says
Less danger now than ten years ago
. I guess he’s right. I always say
I guess you’re right
. More fool me, for agreeing so easily, but is it worth the upset not to? I ask myself.
Pre-mourning
. Such a brainy female she was – which evening course was that? Oh yeh, Aspects of Contemporary Thought. I asked her if she didn’t worry. I’d worried for twenty years and couldn’t seem to stop. And she said in that aloof crystalline voice,
Pre-mourning is a form of self-indulgence
. What should I do? Make a sign and hang it up in my kitchen?

A girl gets on the bus and sits beside Stacey. She has clear skin, unpimpled and unpowdered, and long straight blond hair which looks as though she has ironed it. Stacey smiles a little, being reminded of Katie. Then her smile is lost in self-awareness.

  — What’s she seeing? Housewife, mother of four, this slightly too short and too amply rumped woman with coat of yesteryear, hemlines all the wrong length as Katie is always telling me, lipstick wrong color, and crowning comic touch, the hat.
Man, how antediluvian can you get?
Is that what she’s thinking? I don’t know. But I still have this sense of some monstrous injustice. I want to explain.
Under this chapeau lurks a mermaid, a whore, a tigress
. She’d call a cop and I’d be put in a mental ward.

Stacey gets off the bus at Bluejay Crescent. Then the sound she always dreads to hear.
Scree-ee!
Brakes. The white Buick shudders to a stop and the man climbs out. Very very slowly, as though he were moving underwater. He is terrified to look at the boy lying on the road. Stacey cannot see the boy’s face. Only the blue jeans. He could be seven years old, or ten. He is not making a sound. No cry. Nothing.

Stacey does not go over to look, because she cannot. Instead, she begins running. Along the sidewalk, heels snagging on the cement, running crazily, until she reaches the big dark-green frame house with gabled roof and screened front porch.

Katie!

Yeh? What?

Where are the boys?

How should I know? They were here a minute ago. Where you been?

Stacey runs through the house and out the back door. Ian and Duncan are playing in the back yard. The two auburn heads are bent over the wheels of the bug Ian is making. They look up and see her.

Hi. Where
you
been, all this time?

Sorry. I – I missed the bus. I’ll get your lunch right now.

Katie comes downstairs and looks curiously at Stacey, who is now sitting in the kitchen with her hands over her face.

Mum? You okay? Hey, what’s the matter?

I’m okay. I thought for a second – there was this boy – an accident – white Buick – just at the corner. I didn’t know –

Oh Mum. That’s awful. Please, don’t cry. Here – have a Kleenex.

Katie stands there, awkwardly, inexperienced at consoling, looking at Stacey from wide grey eyes. She is wearing a dress the startling color of unripe apples, and her long straight auburn hair looks as though she has ironed it, which she has. No lipstick, but green eye make-up. For an instant Stacey catches hold of her hand and holds it.

  — It’s supposed to be the other way around. What a rock of Gibraltar I turned out to be. Katie, you’re so goddam beautiful. Sometimes I feel like a beat-up old bitch.

Katie, I feel about a hundred.

Well, you don’t look so hot, either. Just at the moment, I mean. Want me to bring Jen downstairs. She’s playing in her room. I fetched her from the Foglers’.

Thanks, honey.

Normality is re-established, and Stacey takes off her coat and hat and starts making sandwiches.

You have to keep quiet about all that. Restraint. Some wise guy is always telling you how you’re sapping the national strength. Overprotective. Or else, you don’t really care about them – you’re just compensating because you’re guilty on account of the fact that in your core you’re trying to possess them, like hypnosis. Or something. Article in magazine at hairdresser’s. “Nine Ways the Modern Mum May Be Ruining Her Daughter.” I should never read them, but I always do, and then I check in my mind to see how many ways I’m ruining Katie. But how can you tell? I can see the doll who wrote that one. Jazzy office stuffed with plastic plants and never a daughter in sight.

The boys come in. Stacey does not hug them. She restricts herself to putting a hand on their hair and mentioning the need for haircuts. Ian’s hair is the exact color of Mac’s, dark red, and Duncan’s is a little lighter, red-gold.

At quarter to one, Katie and the boys go back to school. Stacey watches them go. Ian walks ahead, as usual, slim and wiry, tall for ten, impatient, moving with a quick grace, perfectly in command of his muscles. Duncan rarely hurries, and is largely unaware of other people. Yet he will tell Stacey what he is thinking, sometimes. Ian guards himself at every turn.

  — What did I do to make him that way? It’s the confusion that bothers me. Everything happens all at once, never one thing at a time, so how in hell do you know what effect
anything is having on them? That other article, last week. “Are You Castrating Your Son?” God, Sir, how do I know? It’s getting so I’m suspicious of my slightest word or act. Maybe I shouldn’t have ruffled Ian’s hair just now.

Stacey picks up Jen, who is robust enough but who seems fragile. Picking her up is like holding a kitten, when the first thing that is noticeable is not the softness of it but the fact that all its bones can be felt.

Come on, flower. Time for a sleep.

Babble babble

Come on, honey,
talk
. It’s easy when you try.

  — Maybe she’s got ESP, like those sickening kids in that SF movie, whose eyes glowed like lighthouses when they were communicating by mental telepathy with one another. She’s probably chatting away silently this very moment with some mutated kid in Samarkand or Omsk. Oh God, it’s not all that funny. What if there really is something wrong? Should I be doing something about it? What I should be doing right now is finding out who that boy is, and how badly hurt. I can’t. It’s all I can do to cope with what goes on inside these four walls. This fortress, which I’d like to believe strong.

After school, Ian and Duncan are in the back yard. The bug consists of wheels, planks, steering apparatus, nails, pieces of wire with some essential purpose. Ian works dartingly, knowing which hammer or screwdriver to use. Duncan has no mechanical know-how, but is trying hard to please Ian. Then wham. Chaos. Yells. Imprecations, threats, denials. Poundingly, they are both in the kitchen.

Mum, tell Duncan to leave my bug alone!

You said I could help. You
said!

I didn’t say you could wreck it, dumb idiot.

I wasn’t. I never.

You can’t just nail on the wheels, you moron. How do you think they’ll turn?

You think you’re so

You keep your hands off it

I won’t – it’s not fair

You better, or I’ll

Fighting, Ian holds himself back a little, using his brains to plan attack. Duncan fights with the flailing recklessness of the one who knows he cannot possibly win. The fury rises until at last Stacey is unable to bear their battle and their noise. Cain and his brother must have started their hatred like this.

Cut it out! Both of you! You hear?

Slam
. Only when she has done it does Stacey realize she has grabbed their shoulders and flung them both to the floor with as much force as she could muster. Ian does not cry. His pride sometimes permits him stomach cramps, but never tears. His bony face is bleached with anger. He rises and rushes outside, seizes the uncompleted vehicle and throws it down the outside cement steps which lead into the basement.

The hell with it then! I don’t give a damn!

The wheels come off and tumble across the basement floor. The cracking sound is the nailed boards coming apart. Duncan, listening, looks blank with bewilderment.

He
can’t
. He can’t go and break it, Mum.

Duncan does not ever destroy the work he has done. He draws pictures of the shark-shaped rocket which will one day take him to Mars or Saturn, and of the scarlet forests he will walk there, under the glare of innumerable purple suns. He puts them away, and sometimes digs one out and looks at it with amusement as the product of an earlier self. But he never destroys them.

Ian looks at the shambles for an instant, his face desolated.
Then he turns and runs to the garage, to the loft, full of tent poles and torn canvas chairs and sparrows’ nests, where once Stacey found a scribbler half full of writing, headed “Captain Ian MacAindra His Direy of How We Beat Enimy.” And she had wondered where he was bound for.

Stacey puts her arms around Duncan for a minute. Then he goes outside and glances up at the loft, as though wanting to go there but not daring. He stands on the lawn, looking as though he cannot figure out what to do.