Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Dr Mousier will be out shortly,’ she said. ‘Have a seat anyway.’

  ‘If he’s going to be out, then is there much point in my waiting?’

  She didn’t smile, made no response; ambiguous semantics held no frisson for her — David took a seat anyway.

  Dr Alst Mousier was conspicuously home-grown, despite his name, which was the corrupted legacy from a Swiss cartographer who came to New Zealand in the 1870s to escape an unhappy marriage.

  ‘You know old Stenness then?’ said contemporary Alst. He led David back into his office, holding the application and reference in his hand. ‘You’ve done some general rehab work? It’s not so much counselling, or recreational therapy, that’s the thing here — more a sort of benign supervision. You know anything about Harlequin? The Slaven Centre is all about that, you realise?’

  ‘Only what I’ve read,’ David said. ‘Some new degenerative disease, right?’

  ‘Basically it’s a neurological thing, though eventually there are a whole raft of physical manifestations. Not psychiatric in the normal sense, but more akin to Tourettism. You know that?’ He saw from David’s expression that he didn’t.

  Mousier had a reduced face, in which his soft, dark, lemur-like eyes caught any light. Yet there was nothing passive, or furtive, in his personality. He was, and frequently asserted himself to be, a man of no bullshit. The thin paws of his hands rustled among the papers of his desk, and the hair was luxuriant upon his knuckles, as if eyebrows had been transplanted there by rubbing. ‘We’re not into bullshit here, David. You understand? We don’t quite know what we’re dealing with and so we need to work as a team, admit how much we have to learn.’

  ‘But it’s not catching, is it?’ asked David. He remembered what his friend Chris had said not long before in Wellington. ‘I mean people can work safely with this Harlequin thing?’

  ‘As far as we know there’s no direct contact transmission. No indication so far that it spreads within a family, for example. It’s one of the aspects we’re working on. Who knows, maybe it’s one of these predisposed hereditary things. Maybe there’s some environmental trigger — some food additive, some pollutant, some stress level exceeded. Our lifestyle is changing so fast that we’re creating bow ripple diseases.’

  ‘No nurses or anything looking after these people have caught it, though?’

  ‘Not in greater numbers than sections of the community quite removed from them, but then Harlequin is so recent that any data and any deductions from it are provisional. We don’t see dangers there, but can’t give guarantees. That’s the truth of it.’

  David thought of the priests who set up the leper colonies, and finally brought the disease on themselves, but then wasn’t there more threat for him outside the Slaven Centre than within? He said nothing of that to Mousier.

  ‘Why don’t we give it a go?’ said Mousier. ‘We need someone right now with a modicum of experience.’ He put his sprouting knuckles to his face, drew down his cheeks so that his great, soft eyes were about to spill. His office was all the modern age, all the business of human focus, all compact technology, winking lights and screens, but beyond the window behind him the hill ridges were still in an abandon of weeds, pigfern and gorse. The Slaven Centre was a sudden dome of uneasy civilisation in the old land. ‘A trial period say, of one month, and then if either you, or we, aren’t happy, it’s bye-bye time. Fair enough?’

  ‘Fair enough,’ David said.

  ‘Come into the main office and we’ll do the official paper-trail thing,’ said Mousier. ‘You’ll find yourself in Takahe block with Raf, who’s a mad hatter much loved by the guests. That’s the prevalent euphemism here — guests.’ His lemur eyes were sad and lustrous, as if a poet were imprisoned within the administrator.

  After the documentation, during most of which the receptionist kept her considerable back to them, Dr Mousier walked with David up to Takahe block, passing Hoiho and Weka. The flower beds, like the buildings, were new, and not even the shrubs above head height. A sensible allowance had been made for growth, but in the meantime the small, yellow conifers, birches and azaleas seemed each in quarantine. The lawns were landscaped and well kept, but here and there, darker than the introduced grass, were tiny sprigs of gorse: the primitive landscape not yet completely repressed. ‘We have a simple orientation programme for new staff,’ said Mousier. ‘Just a couple of sessions in which we help you to see how the place ticks, and there are regulatory guidelines. But, if you’ve got common sense, you’ll learn best by doing the job.’

  They were nearing Takahe, and being observed by the same big man who had watched David go down. Raf Hewson, so Mousier explained. Raf sat on a yellow, blow-up seat. Its back was against the wall and the dark valves stuck out from it like cows’ tits. Raf wore just togs and sunglasses; when he sat up as the doctor and David neared the steps, they saw on the inflated rest the deeper yellows from the sweat of his back. Only in his size was there any intimidation, for he took off his dark glasses and the newspaper as shelter when Dr Mousier introduced him, and met David’s eyes amicably. The soft, fair hair was drawn back to the pony-tail, and his considerable stomach was brown in the sun. ‘Welcome to the Bluebird of Paradise Motels,’ he said.

  ‘You’ll get used to his bullshit,’ said Mousier, ‘and he does a fair job.’

  ‘You’re a hard man, doctor. I hope never to fall into your clutches as a practitioner.’

  Mousier just flapped a hand at him, wished David good luck, reminded him of the orientation and began walking back to his office.

  David sat on the verandah edge and felt the heat from the wood on his thighs. There were few signs of patients, little noise from any; just a group at a distance putting up a volleyball net by the car park, and one quickfire laugh from inside the block. ‘Most of ours have gone down for a swim with Titi,’ said Raf. ‘We haven’t got a pool at the centre yet. The place seems pretty quiet, doesn’t it?’

  ‘Seems okay.’

  ‘I wish I could see it all as you do just at this moment,’ said Raf, ‘as I did when I came eleven months ago. A new place has that clean, special impression on you, don’t you think, and then after a while it becomes coded with your experience.’

  ‘Maybe you wise up,’ David said.

  ‘You do that, all right. See that fire-escape on the main block? That’s a case in point. Reg McConachy did a bungy jump from there after a concert by a visiting jazz trio, but he didn’t have a rubber band, did he? For me now, Reg always lies there.’

  David could see only the zig-zagging iron steps on the end of the high building and the white concrete beneath in the hot sun. ‘It’s pretty weird here, then?’

  ‘Well, it’s just that no one knows quite what we’re dealing with,’ said Raf mildly. ‘Two years ago there weren’t any residential centres for Harlequin in the country: now there’s several, though this is still the biggest. Even the doctors are working day by day. Round here precedent isn’t much of a guide. We pretty much make things up as we go along.’ Raf’s back had made a sweat suction with the inflatable seat, and when he leant forward they parted with a squeal. ‘Jesus, I’m frying here,’ he said. ‘And anyway, you’ll want to put your stuff away and that. This’s as good a time as any, while most of our mob’s in the sea.’

  They walked down the corridor of Takahe. Forty-five people to each block, Raf said. Most of the rooms were singles, with five doubles for people unable to make any contribution to their hospitalisation costs. No locks were allowed. Tolly Mathews was doing yoga in his room, rather than swimming in the sound. There was an edge of freneticism to his actions which didn’t match well with yoga, but which David was to come to see as typical of someone on the cusp of a Harlequin episode.

  ‘You okay, Tolly?’ asked Raf.

  ‘I’m going down to Treatment again soon to get stuff.’

  When David was introduced, Tolly took his hand with sudden fervour, touched all the nails fleetingly and released it as urgently. A sudden grin split
his face, yet his eyes flickered past David. As Raf led David further down the corridor to their own rooms at the far end, the sounds of Tolly’s yoga were anything but calming.

  ‘In time almost anything can become routine,’ said Raf. His hair hung fair and limp from his pony-tail, but pulled tight from his face, and he gave the half-glance, half-smile, that David was to know so well.

  Raf’s room looked over the approach and the sea; David’s, on the other side of the corridor, had a view of the steep slope beyond the centre, and he had to bend to bring any sky into view above the bushed ridges. It had the bland practicality of an institutional room: not even lived in long enough to gather much hybrid character from people who had come and gone. A cabinet bed with drawers beneath it, a recessed ceiling light, a table desk at the window, a built-in wardrobe with a sunken lock like a cat’s arse. Three cream walls and one mint green. A laminated Toss Woollaston print. How many such rooms do you have to live in, David wondered, before you die, and enter another such, except perhaps the print is one by archangel Raphael — or Lucifer.

  ‘When you’ve put your stuff away,’ said Raf, ‘come back into the lounge room. I’ll shout you a beer — probably the only one you’ll get out of me — and run over a few things before the others get back from their swim.’

  David found just one thing in the room that hinted at an occupant: a small, maroon handled screwdriver on the ledge above the window. British Made, it said, 5000 V, it said. The metal shaft was almost black with the slowest of rusts. That one tangible thing passed between the last occupant and David.

  ‘What happened to the last guy?’ he asked Raf, who had been along to see Tolly Mathews, and was buttoning a striped collarless shirt before he sat down in the Takahe lounge by the bench, Zip and fridge. All the chairs had the same fabric covering, in the same two shades of speckled green and speckled yellow.

  ‘Prue? How’d you hear about him?’

  ‘I didn’t.’

  ‘Prue didn’t last long. He started up his own church here, his own faith rather, and it caused friction between those he converted and the rest. There was actually a scrap one night between the two groups and Prue got his marching orders. He’s taken his missionary zeal to Patagonia, or somewhere. He was a pretty fair volleyball player, that’s the worst of it. How are you at volleyball?’

  David told him that it wasn’t his thing particularly, but Raf gave him a beer nevertheless, and they sat just far enough back from the lounge window to avoid the full glare of the sun, while Raf talked about the job.

  And as he talked, David saw people straggling up the unsealed road, peeling off from the Titi group to head for their own block. They carried towels and their hair was mussed and only half dry. He continued to hear Raf’s voice, helpful yet characteristically flippant. David would hold those people in his mind’s eye as they straggled back from the shoreline. Later each face, each posture, would be quite familiar to him, although then they appeared as strangers. Howard Peat in front, of course, not wanting any of his fellows in his field of vision; that way it was easier to deny where he was and why. Then Abbey and Jane, self-conscious of their appearance, but full of trivial talk that might give their outing some guise of careless recreation. Jason Brown and Sarah Keppler, who so often consoled each other with their bodies, and thought it a secret safe between them. Others also, in twos and threes, and all with the fear, the anger, the loneliness and despair, carefully buttoned away. Harlequin, Harlequin, come out to play.

  ‘Here they come,’ said Raf, breaking off from a summary of routines. ‘They don’t know what’s wrong with them, and nor do we. Today it’s them; tomorrow it may well be us. For what it’s worth, I find it best to keep my sympathy until it’s asked for, which isn’t often.’

  How do you account for the role you find imposed on you in life, places you inhabit without design, people who surround you, obligations that come uninvited? So bright the sun as David watched the people of Takahe come home. Harlequin, Harlequin, out to play.

  A great staircase leading from the hall, a landing at its turn with a green and red poppy plant window, and the stairs then again angling up, up. He would sit and rock on the landing when he should have been in his bed, and listen to the voices below. The landing was a halfway house, a fringe zone, a no man’s land, a pushmi-pullyu, between the up and down. The lights reached just that far from below and the dark encroached that far from above. He would rock, and hold the smooth, wooden leg of the stair rail until it was egg warm beneath his arm. If he held on and leant far back with tipping head, he could see the oval landing window, which was almost black unless there was a moon behind it, and in its darkness was the glimmer of the poppy caught in the faintest hall light, as a goldfish gleams with indistinct allure in a brown lily pond.

  The life downstairs was trivial and transient, no doubt: neighbours in for birthday drinks, an election night get-together, former friends passing through the district once again, his mother’s committee to make submissions on the beautification of reserves. Nothing of significance; nothing of remembrance beyond the time of it, unless recalled hazily from a diary entry, or more emphatically because linked with incident — Tommy Concoran’s heart attack, lightning striking the woolshed, Dot Maddox seeing the risen and glowing Christ walking down Hotten’s Spur.

  But for David then, the voices, scents, opening and closing of doors, the spilling of warm light along the hall, all had the enchantment of adult life of the night. And uniqueness a part of it, because not set among street lights, flashing signs, comings and goings, any companionship of buildings. Their house, surely, was the one bulwark against the night in all the world. If he stood and stretched to peer through the clear glass lozenges at the base of the landing window, what he saw, indistinct and restive, were the macrocarpa at the tractor sheds, the hill behind flayed with sheep tracks if the moon shone, the gully flowing darkness where the creek bore water for the day.

  And from his bed he could hear the sound foam away from the great ships that tossed among the pines, and spray on wet nights was slung like gravel against the windows of his room. Quiet nights, too, with the furtive rattle of a dog’s chain, the punctured cough of a ewe, the stark benediction of the morepork who sees all there is to see without need of sun, or moon.

  In the yard was the dog tucker ewe hung high in a tree by the kennels to beat the flies, and with a split sack to cover it. His father would unhook the rope and run it down the pulley, and swing the carcase on to the broad stump that served as butcher’s block. The heavy cleaver was never lifted high, but bit through the ribs as if they were kindling, and his father would throw a part shoulder, or leg, to each dog without moving from the block, and each dog took it according to character — with a snarl and twist to subdue it, with a fawning uncertainty, with a quick snap and retreat into the kennel. Usually his father tossed the meat with an odd, backward flip of his hand, as a card sharp deals in a routine display of skill.

  And when his father had gone on to the next chore, David might watch the dogs eat, the tucker in the sack sway high again, the white leghorns and the sparrows pick the meat and fat from the cuts in the stump. In time it was his own turn; with the same cleaver grown less mystical and the stump so much reduced, and the dog tucker in an old freezer under the tractor shed overhang, instead of strung and idling in the aromatic macrocarpa branches.

  At nine he was old enough to make mash for the chooks each morning before his own breakfast, while his father milked the cow, taking down to the fowl house one bucket half full of warm water and another of kitchen scraps, and mixing in the mash meal with an old butter pat. There were wooden troughs in the runs, and in the winter the mash steamed as he ladled it in, and the frozen chicken droppings glittered like agates in the first of the sun. When he dished out the mash, he always left the run gates open, because there were some leghorns that roosted in the sheds and trees of the yard, and they would come stupidly running, late for their share, beaks agape.

  Nothing of this
is ever lost, Alst Mousier and Schweitzer would say, though it may be inaccessible. The white leghorns run stupidly and incessantly, the dog tucker carcase sways on high, the glass poppy gleams in the faintest of light. Forever.

  THREE

  Pedder Culhane was the director of the Slaven Centre at Mahakipawa — the Great White Father of the place. Everyone said how lucky they were to have him. He’d been born in Bulls and gone on to a world reputation in some of those fearsome shape-shifters coming out of Africa: Lassa fever, Ebola, HIV. He could have stayed in any of the world’s research institutions, but he came back to Mahakipawa to do what he could against Harlequin. Schweitzer, people called him at the centre, and only partly tongue in cheek. There was pride and gratitude that someone of such ability, and with such career options, chose to be heading up things at the Slaven Centre. He had graced the cover of Time magazine without becoming convinced of his own divinity. He had a wife and three daughters in Wellington, and every second weekend flew out from Nelson to visit them. All other days but those, he was on call around the clock.