Duration 4.46
Stachia Lacquer was an authority on vegetable-oils. She was a portrait photographer, a writer and an illustrator. Stachia finished writing and illustrating The Tar-Barrel Crow five years before the Violent Unknown Event, and three years to the day before she met Pulat Fallari.
Leasting Fallvo: "Stachia Lacquer had gone to Madras to cremate her father who had been killed in a public disturbance. She was drinking lemonade on a hotel verandah when Ipson Fallari fell on top of her. For his own amusement he had been walking the balustrade of the verandah above. He was on his own in Madras waiting for the return of his half-brother Pulat from conducting a party of English naturalists in Sri Lanka. Stachia suffered a sprained wrist and a bruised shoulder and a sliver of lemonade glass had sliced into her thigh. She was in hospital for three days. Ipson stayed with her and afterwards helped her to convalesce. On Stachia's recovery, they flew to Hamburg and got married."
Five day later, Pulat, Ipson's half-brother, found out, and determined not to let it disturb him, he played down its significance. He helped the couple set up house on the Vogelstrasse opposite the Statue of Friedrich Haberlein, the discoverer of Archaeopteryx. For three months they were vastly entertained with one another's company, then Pulat began to take long trips, flying off alone to towns without airfields. Eventually he crashed in North Africa and broke both legs. Ipson went to find him and promised to repudiate the marriage. For a time the arrangement worked, then Ipson began seeing his wife again.
Again Pulat found out, and crashed at sea. He turned up five months later on Smith Island in the New Hebrides. Srachia suggested that Pulat should come and live permanently at the Vogelstrasse. But after four months of impossible situations, swapped identities and frustrated privacy, Stachia could stand it no longer and she walked out.
Stachia wrote and illustrated a story for children concerning a wooden chair that grew back again into a tree, bore fruit and propagated a forest of chairs. The story was bought by a seed company and Stachia was employed to write their advertising copy. With funds from the company's publicity account, Stachia built up an aviary of seed-eating tropical birds in Mexico City and then in Amsterdam. Before long she met Van Hoyten, the Head of the Ornithological Department of Amsterdam Zoo and they were living together at the time of the VUE.
Stachia's VUE complaint is rare. It has been diagnosed as 'de faire blessure' or the 'opening of old wounds'. The first sign was inflammation of the skin around an old scar tissue on her left elbow. Stachia had fallen on her elbow when she was three years old. This was followed by the opening of scar-tissue on her ears. Her ears had been pierced when she was seven. Then bleeding under her arm. Stachia at 15 had cut her self shaving. Finally scar-tissue on her thigh started to haemorrhage and she had to be brought to hospital. It was the scar from the Madras lemonade glass. Stachia had spent most of her life in hospital since then, a permanent recipient of blood transfusions, prone to persistent low blood pressure and periodic blackouts.
The Directory Certificate states that Stachia's condition was caused by blood emulsification due to an inability to absorb organic oils.Bwythan Fallbutus: "Stachia Fallari is registered as an Allow speaker but she rarely opens her mouth to speak. Her doctor says that his patient felt that terse and impersonal Allow, full of abbreviations and imperatives, was antipathetic to all her sympathies. She is now learning Capistan, the language that is lazy and gentle and requires unusual amounts of saliva and above average exposure of the tongue."
Pages from Stachia's book
The Falls Biographies
