Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  David had accepted the responsibility of being tail-end Charlie, and did a quick check of the shore by the channel and weathered piles. The grass and rushes trampled somewhat, the gathered driftwood people had been sitting on, just one floppy, green hat, which he thought was Jason’s, and he put it on before leaving the mud crabs to salute the tide.

  ‘I reckon we’re heading for a drought,’ Wilfe was telling Eddie Simm as they crossed the road. Anything was welcome which took attention from their affliction.

  FIVE

  ‘Dragnet, Dragnet,’ shouted Raf as he opened David’s door and leant in: one hand anchored on the doorframe, the other on the knob and spilling him forward, although his feet remained in the corridor. Such was the length of his arms and the extent of his large body, that his head reached far into the room and was outlined against the corridor light. The crop of his pony-tail frayed into the glow behind him; his large nose was a restless shadow on his hung face.

  ‘Jason’s running berko on the hill,’ he said. A tone almost all urgent and genuine concern, but with some joy of the spectacle. ‘He’s lost it altogether, the poor bastard. He’s blown. I’ve buzzed the main block. He’s got some stuff from somewhere, and he’s setting fire to the goddamn hill.’

  It was one of those moments when you’re unsure if you’re emerging from sleep to reality, or moving from the world to nightmare. It wasn’t the first time such bewilderment had gripped David in that place. Nowhere, surely, had a more indistinct boundary between real and unreal. ‘Jesus,’ David said weakly from the bed, and then, trying for a stronger voice to match resolution to the event, ‘Right, Jesus, I’m with you.’

  ‘Come on, come on,’ called Raf. His voice was flung away, as in one movement he swayed from the room and made off down the corridor. ‘Get something on your bloody feet, though.’

  In the time it took David to reach the verandah, Raf had a torch, was over the fence that kept stock from the centre’s grounds and was a bounding shadow on the slope of the hill. Further up flared patches of gorse and bracken fired by Jason. The night enhanced the flames so that they were blood red and glittering, but the smoke was denied its true colour, and rolled away black as liquorice except immediately above the flames.

  David could hear the duty team coming up from the main block and, wanting to be on the hill before them, he slipped through the fence and headed up towards the fires, using his own issue torch to find the best way.

  There was nothing fugitive, or furtive, about Jason. As David passed some of the earlier fire patches, already dying down, he could hear him shouting exultantly ahead. Raf had taken the can of petrol from him by the time David arrived, and sat on it, trying to catch his breath, his pale pyjamas almost luminous in the night. ‘Look at him,’ he puffed. ‘He’s well away. Happy as a bloody sandboy.’

  Jason Brown stood agog before his last fire, his high laugh of release matching the jumpy energy of the flames which caught gorse barbs, or fern whorls, in a sudden grip and gave them brief, incandescent beauty. Jason wore a long, blue coat, unbuttoned, and his head rocked in excitement, his voice raced at the eternal fascination of fire: the threat and wilful power, the heat, the primitive wonder of it. Jason was unable to keep still. His mind and body were in spasm. His hands and feet and eyes had the sudden movements of the fox and ferret; his voice had release and abandon. ‘Look at the bright cunt,’ he shouted. He was dancing, as if in imitation of the flames. ‘Woosh, you beauty, away you go. Burn it all up, you fucker.’

  ‘He could have started on the buildings,’ said Raf. ‘Now, without the petrol, he can’t do much harm. We’ll let him bounce around until he wears off some energy, and then take him down for the shots.’

  ‘Let it all burn to buggery.’ Jason waved on the flames fiercely. He wanted the whole world consumed.

  ‘What’s the cocky going to feel about all this then?’ asked David.

  ‘I imagine he keeps well away,’ said Raf. ‘Do you know who’s coming up?’

  David hadn’t been able to see any faces behind him, but thought he’d heard Dr Sheridan’s voice, and sure enough he came puffing behind Colin Squires, who was one of the duty nurses.

  ‘Everything’s jake,’ said Raf, as Colin continued over to Jason, and Tony Sheridan made a special effort up the hill over the last few metres. ‘He can’t do anything without the petrol.’

  ‘I swear he picks the bloody nights I’m on,’ said Colin. ‘Who knows what mad thing he’ll get up to if we don’t get him down for treatment.’

  ‘Just leave him,’ David said. ‘Probably the excitement of the fires was all he needed. I’ll help Raf bring him down.’

  Colin pulled Jason’s long coat closed, and buttoned it for warmth as the last clump of fired gorse died down. He did it with no more sense of human contact than if Jason had been a scarecrow, and received as little reaction. ‘Yeah, I think I’d better go back down. There’s bound to be some other cracker about to blow. Okay, doc?’

  ‘Sure,’ said Tony Sheridan. He was still bent forward, hands on his knees, his face disappearing as the flames contracted to embers. ‘I’ll be down myself soon with Jason. I just need a breather here for a bit.’

  They heard Colin going back, the light of his torch winking down the slope towards the steady, broad glow of the centre buildings. And when the fires were no longer a dominant glare, the natural variations of the night could be realised again. A certain sheen to the dark sky, stars even, the absorbent black of the bush on the high slopes, a scaly glimmer from the distant movement of the sea. Raf and David moved over to Jason, and stood with him for warmth by the last fire. The smoke in their faces was powerfully aromatic, and David could feel the faintest touches of ash on his cheeks when Jason flipped branches with his feet. The last sparks flitted up and were gone. Jason still twitched and talked, his hands roved to make compulsive touches, but as the fire dwindled so did his euphoria. The red of the flames, the black winging of the smoke, were almost lost to him, and the accustomed profile of the hill crest against the sky came up quietly again. Fire wasn’t freedom for him after all, just an expression of some tyranny within. Atavistic responses are the heart of Harlequin.

  ‘Burn, you fucker,’ he said bitterly.

  David and Tony Sheridan walked with Jason down to the centre. Raf followed behind, with the sound of the petrol sloshing in the can to locate him. David had nothing on over his pyjamas, and felt cold when the excitement was over. His concern for Jason was partly overtaken by a wish that he’d thought to pull a jersey on before following Raf up the hill. He used the torch to keep to the clearer ground, but his light trousers were filthy with ash stripes and the dew from grasses and fern.

  ‘I’m okay, okay,’ said Jason. ‘It wasn’t a reversion.’

  ‘It’s the third time within a fortnight. Must be at least,’ said Sheridan. There was a morepork crying through the darkness from the shore. There was a small wind which rustled and fingered on the hill. There were embers which glowed briefly at its touch.

  ‘Jesus, I suppose I’m for it then.’ Jason said it with both fear and defiance, as a soldier might who can’t turn back. His head went up, and he gave an odd turkey cock cry which drifted on the dark slope. He walked in a way that made the long coat swirl about his legs.

  ‘You’ll be all right,’ David lied.

  ‘Once you have some stuff, you’ll be fine,’ lied Raf from behind them. ‘A time will come when you’ll look back on all of this, and have a laugh. All of us will. Won’t he, doc?’

  Tony Sheridan was busy climbing through the wires of the fence, and on to the lawn of the centre. He didn’t say anything, but the morepork floated a reply out of the darkness that was both sea and land. ‘I wouldn’t mind so much,’ said Jason, ‘but there’s this girl in Napier.’ None of them asked about the girl in Napier, or Sara Keppler closer to hand. They had enough with Jason right there at the centre; seeing anything of the life that he had come from could only make it more difficult. It was better, as a for
m of protection, to keep him in focus as a patient. Was there a point at which you drew a line and allowed no emotional concern, not even curiosity, to go past it?

  They took Jason back to Takahe, but only so that he could collect overnight things for the treatment room in the main block. Most of the others were awake, and had been watching from the verandah. Sara couldn’t bear to approach. She wept for him and for her loss of the sweet consolation that is a lover’s body, but some of the others saw him off, magnifying, or diminishing, the significance of it, depending on their way. ‘Rely only on your own resources, Jason,’ said Howard Peat dogmatically. ‘The fight is with yourself.’

  ‘God won’t be mocked, you know.’ The voice came from Dilys Williams’s window. She must have been standing there with her light out.

  ‘You’ll be all right, Jasie. Hang in there,’ called Abbey as Jason walked down from Takahe with Sheridan. ‘See you, Jasie.’

  ‘See you, Abbey,’ mimicked Jason. The voice exactly hers, and exactly Harlequin’s — not mockery from Jason. The coat swished around him, its blueness coming and going as he walked through the pools of light cast from the buildings.

  ‘He won’t be back,’ Raf said softly. ‘No chance.’ Blue faded to black; black was refurbished to blue. Jason’s head rose and fell because of the unnatural energy of his walk, whereas Tony Sheridan’s gait maintained him at an even height. David realised that Jason was building to blow again. His hands were raised as he talked urgently to the doctor, almost as if he were conducting an orchestra out of sight of the rest of them. Swish blue; swish black. See you, Jasie. The morepork was quiet by the sea. Swish blue, swish black. The guests began to withdraw to their own rooms. Sara had already gone in and closed her door.

  ‘Go back to bed,’ Raf said to David. ‘I’ll hang on a while till everything’s settled.’

  No one wanted to talk about what had happened, for they knew exactly what had taken place. It was old Harlequin, wasn’t it, coming out to play.

  Chris came to Collegiate at the start of the fifth-form year, when his parents shifted to a diplomatic posting in Berlin. The same dorm, the same form, as David, and so an opportunity for friendship. Not immediately, however; Chris was too much a showman to encourage early confidences. It was his way of settling in: attack as the best defence until he was accepted in the place. He was shrewd for his age. Within a fortnight he had to face up to a fight with the malicious Coddy Joux, and knew that to appeal openly to the masters was as bad as chickening out. So he appeared eager for a meet behind the library after prep, but set up such a din, swearing and shouting as they fought, that the hostel staff got wind of it before Coddy could do more harm to him than a torn ear.

  Chris was accomplished at art, at fives, at loyalty and at getting girls. He was hopeless at maths, science, honesty and keeping to any rules. His mother was part Chinese and passed on just enough to give him a smooth complexion and very dark, straight hair. When he was in the seventh form, an ex-Rangi Ruru girl in her first varsity year, and not half bad, asked him to partner her to an orientation dance. She lived near the school and had picked Chris out. It was almost as if girls liked the smell of him. David and the others had to work harder to be noticed, but they came to accept his appeal as just one of those things — like being born with odd-coloured eyes, or having the knack of holding your breath under water longer than anyone else.

  Several times Chris went home with David to Beth Car, where he charmed David’s mother, amused his father with general irreverence, and failed only with the dogs, which must have been averse to the pheromones that worked so well on women. Neither Chris nor David talked about school realistically to those outside it. The hostel was a separate life, a foreign land, and they kept it that way, tacitly acknowledging that special values and rules applied there.

  When you are young, friends are often made instinctively, without any assessment, any calculation of their intrinsic value as people, or the outcome of commitment. Only years later did David realise that Chris was amoral, and later still that perhaps that had been part of the attraction all along. Chris was a jesting plunderer of other people’s lives.

  By the sixth form they were so close that Chris hatched a scheme for both of them to score well in Sharkey’s history exam. Every system has a weak point, Chris said, that’s the thing to bear in mind. The staff were very aware of the need for security before and during the exams, but he sussed out an opportunity to cheat afterwards. Sharkey was their house master as well as their history teacher, and they knew his procedure well. Each question was answered on a fresh sheet, so that Sharkey could bundle them together and mark question by question, rather than script by script. And Sharkey never started marking until the weekend. On the night after the exam, Chris and David rewrote the three weakest of their answers from their class notes and took them to the flat the following afternoon while Sharkey was coaching junior rugby. Chris was a favourite with Sharkey’s wife, of course: she could barely keep herself from patting his gleaming black hair. Had she watched his dorm imitations of Sharkey giving her one, she might have felt differently. While Chris entertained her with school gossip that Sharkey never thought to pass on, David went into the study and readily found the question bundles on the desk.

  Chris was complaining about exam stress when David came guiltily back. ‘If only you could sit down after the exam and have another shot without the nerves.’ His smile was ingenuous.

  ‘I bet you’ll do all right,’ said Sharkey’s wife. Looks must be commensurate with ability after all.

  ‘Actually,’ said Chris, ‘I’ve a good feeling about the history, but then we’re lucky with the teacher there, aren’t we, David?’

  ‘I don’t butter up that easy,’ said Sharkey’s wife, but of course she did. She buttered up until she gleamed with it, and Chris could have trussed her legs for roasting.

  David got top marks for history that year, and the next year too, without any cheating, and at the university he was an A or B plus student in it, even though before Chris’s plan he couldn’t seem to get the hang of the subject. He thought it strange, because dishonesty was supposed to turn out badly, yet that one instance of cheating seemed to benefit him year after year.

  SIX

  Tolly Mathews was having a good patch. He brought a bottle of vintage port, and Raf, along to David’s room. Tolly was a designer and manufacturer of bathroom fittings. His business employed seventy-four people, and had plants in Auckland, Palmerston North and Christchurch. Mathews shower boxes with their non-drip doors were used all over the country, and exported to Australia. ‘Let’s sit down for a bit and enjoy ourselves,’ he said.

  ‘I’m on duty,’ said Raf.

  ‘So they know where to find you then, don’t they? It’s exceedingly conscientious of you not to leave the block. You’ll probably get a bloody medal.’ Tolly still had all the money he’d ever need, but he’d agreed with his family that he wasn’t running the business any more. There’d been the evening when he drove a forklift through the window of a rival’s showroom, and an indecent assault upon a lingerie mannequin. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘most of the others are watching that quiz thing on television. Abbey reckons it has a calming effect. So many nutters on the outside perhaps, that it takes the spotlight from our own behaviour.’

  David admired Tolly. Even though he was secondary stage Harlequin, and privately horrified by it, most of the time he kept an interest in other people and happenings. He had an expensive telescope set up at the window in his room, and was teaching himself astronomy. Sometimes he focused on Amelia Struthers getting undressed in Weka, but that didn’t detract from his serious study of the heavens. His enthusiasm was persuasive, and he’d given talks to societies in Nelson and Blenheim, as well as his fellow guests. Amelia had twin dimples low on her back, where the curve of her buttocks began, and the light of her room would cast them into oscillating saucers of shadow.

  That night, though, Tolly was more interested in drinking vintage port and
enjoying a time free of symptoms. He fronted to the cool air from David’s window, and inhaled the complex smell of the mudflats. He held his port glass at head height. ‘This in defiance of the shape shifter,’ he said. ‘We’re not dead yet.’

  ‘Really top wine could prove to be the cure,’ David told him. ‘The boffins are finding more and more benefits in it.’

  ‘English squires thrived on a bottle a day,’ added Raf. ‘Mind you, the rest of the population probably starved to death.’

  Tolly had an alert, boyish face, with only a hooked nose to spoil it. All his front teeth were immaculately capped. As well as design and business flair, he loved music and had a talent for squash, and that, unlike the other things, had been accentuated by Harlequin, as physical abilities so often were. ‘I’ve never played better than when in the grip of it,’ he said. ‘All sorts of athleticism becomes possible, or you think that it is. If Harlequin ever really takes off—’

  ‘What would you call it now?’ said Raf.

  ‘Full scale, though, then I reckon it would revolutionise professional sport. It might kill you, but Jesus, how much better than any performance-enhancing drugs. Harlequins will out-jump, out-run, out-wrestle and out-lift all the rest. You see it here with volleyball sometimes, don’t you, just before someone blows?’

  Tolly poured more port for each of them, and the taste of it was oddly mixed with the aromas drifting on the air from the sea. Tolly could afford the best of port, and it was darker even, more aromatic even, than the night. Raf’s flagon variety didn’t deserve the name. Was there any hierarchy among the three of them? Tolly was officially an inmate, and Raf and David his keepers. Tolly was rich, and Raf and David were not. Drinking and talking there, they were equal in the simple enjoyment of the night, and the shared ignorance concerning the illness moving all around them.