don’t think I’m up to it, is that it?”
“You said it, I didn’t.”
These two would be a delight cooped up in a van together, I thought.
“Anyway, who cares about that stuff?” Brad went on. “We won’t be seen, anyway, right?”
“You’ll be in black from head to toe,” I said. “In the Flute, the actors are secondary to the puppets. You’ll get to take your hoods off for the bows at the end.”
“Guaranteed to bug Amber,” Meredith said. “She won’t like not being seen.”
“That’s not fair, Meredith,” Ruth said. “The kid’s enthusiastic as hell, and she doesn’t seem the type to worry about hood-hair.”
“You just wait,” Meredith said, darkly.
Tobin had joined us, and I wondered if anyone upstairs had noticed that the crowd in the lobby was getting thin. Everybody seemed to be in the “smoking room”.
“Thing I’m worried about is the lights,” Tobin said. “I’ve rigged up a new system that’s supposed to be easier to tour—lighter, more compact. But if more than one of the bulbs goes, we’re in trouble, ’cause I could only get two spares from Techtronics and they said they couldn’t get any more from the States until mid-June.”
“I’ve heard that UV lights are bad for you,” Brad said. “Like they’re radioactive or something.”
“Can you hit a high B-flat, Brad?” Ruth said. Shop talk, all of it. It bonded us.
There were footsteps on the stairs and Meredith, who was holding what was left of the joint, flicked it into the pool in the middle of the room. We all straightened up, just in case it was Juliet, who knew that people sometimes toked in the shop, but was known to throw tantrums if she caught them at it. It was dark down there. The lights were off, and we were all suddenly very quiet.
Down the stairs came two figures, Rico, or Ricki, I suppose, and a good-looking young man with short blonde hair and smooth, tanned skin, whose arm was around my friend’s shoulders. This must be Shane Pacey, I thought. The actor had been hired at the absolute last minute to play the lead character, Kevin, after Juliet’s first choice got a movie gig and backed out of his contract.
He was having a hard time with the stairs, and Rico was giggling like a school girl. Pacey was not wearing a costume. He had on a tight pair of jeans and a heartbreakingly lovely white wool sweater, which made his skin glow like a Mediterranean sunset in the dim light. He was as lovely as Amber was, but very male. I felt my mouth go dry, but it could have been the joint. Yay for Rico, I thought.
Neither of the men had seen the circle of dope-smokers. They thought they were alone. The blonde man suddenly stopped trying to stumble down the stairs. He straightened and pulled Rico towards him.
“That’s far enough, babe,” he said in a husky voice. Ruth Glass coughed, delicately, just before Pacey thrust his hand between Rico’s legs.
“Holy fuck!”
It all happened very fast. I was watching, not out of prurience, I swear, but grinning to myself, thinking that Rico had, you know, found someone he could have some fun with—God knows he doesn’t get much fun in Cedar Falls. I saw the lust on Shane Pacey’s face turn to utter disgust and horror. I saw that horror turn ugly in a fraction of a second, before it became something I hope I’ll never see again. He grabbed Rico by the shoulders and with all of his strength, threw him down the stairs towards the open pool of freezing water.
I stepped in the way, as did Tobin and Ruth, all at the same time. It was weird, all slow-motion arms and legs. I don’t know whose arm or leg hit my nose—it doesn’t matter, anyway. We ended up in a tangle at the bottom of the stairs, just inches from the black water. Pacey was screaming filth and scrambling down the stairs to get a second chance at Rico, and Tobin disentangled himself from the bodies to hold on to him. I was hugging Rico, and my face was inches from Rose’s, which was perched oddly on top of Rico’s shoulder.
“You’re bleeding on me,” Rose said to me.
“You fuckin’, fuckin’ faggot. Come on to me like a bitch in heat. Whaddya think, I’m a fuckin’ queer? You fuckin’ make me sick!” Pacey’s words washed over all of us in a stream of abuse. Rico’s eyes fluttered open.
“Polly, take me home, please,” he said in a small, frightened voice.
Three
CAT: It’s just a scratch, young man, but don’t you see? / It’s safer to stay out of it, like me.
-The Glass Flute, Scene v
The Sikwan District Hospital admissions nurse just missed getting nominated for the Tactful-Locals Award. She didn’t bat an eyelash when the big black guy in blackface, accompanied by a blood-spattered goat, staggered up to the admissions desk after midnight, May 13. She did, however, display mild shock when she saw Rico, tagging along behind us. Rico had refused to remain at the party after Tobin offered to drive me to the hospital to have my nose looked at.
“I’m not staying in the same building as that animal,” Rico had said. He meant Shane, who had been escorted forcibly up the stairs and into the lobby by Ruth.
Rico had been crying, and his careful eye makeup was plastered all over his cheeks. His wig was askew, and one of his breasts (water balloons, I found out later) had burst, leaving a wet patch on his nice red sweater. The harsh fluorescent hospital lighting did not help. Rico looked dreadful. So did I, I realized, catching my reflection in the glass separating me from the admissions nurse.
Both hospitals in Kuskawa had been renovated in the late eighties, thanks to a burst of pre-election spending by a provincial government trying to convince us that rural healthcare was high on their list of “Important Issues”. Someone had seen fit to replace the homey, country hospital atmosphere with a design scheme that had all the ambience of a Manhattan bank. There was bullet-proof glass all around the reception area, and the nurse’s face gleamed eerily green in the light from her computer screen. As I handed my health card through the little hole at the bottom of the window, I saw my swollen schnozz outlined right before my eyes, framed by the floppy brown velvet ears of my goat-costume. I snatched off the headpiece quickly and held it by one ear at my side. Tobin snorted.
“You’re lucky you can snort, buddy,” I muttered. My voice sounded muffled, as if I had a thundering great cold, and my head ached abominably.
Luckily, there was no-one else in the waiting room, so the doctor on duty could see me right away, which meant a thirty-minute wait while the nurse paged him. I guess if I had been bleeding to death with a severed artery, the service might have been a bit faster—at least I hope so. I had been triaged, and had factored in at less than critical. When I was ushered into an examining room by a cheerful young intern with coffee breath and muffin crumbs on his tie, I tried not to feel resentful.
“Well, what have we here?” he said. I swallowed an urge to tell him that the baby was due any second and instead pointed wearily at the purple turnip in the middle of my face.
He examined my nose gently, which hurt, sent me for an x-ray (although I figured that if any splinters of bone had slipped up to lodge in my brain, I would have been blowing spit-bubbles at that point), and then he
