Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘With the telescope,’ said Tolly, ‘I’ve become aware of a scale of things that bears no relation to how we live here. Yet, after spending hours looking at solar systems beyond our own, I feel a micro-organism’s need to piss, or eat rissoles with onion.’

  ‘Or switch to a view of Amelia Struthers,’ David added.

  ‘That most of all,’ said Tolly, ‘though I bet it’s likely to provoke old Harlequin.’

  ‘Then we’re all sufferers from the same disease, if the odd hard-on is a symptom,’ said Raf.

  The small, impersonal room was briefly made a close sanctuary by friendship and tacit acknowledgement of a quiet moment, before time surged on. Life no doubt whirled as ever further out on the circle, but the thin walls, the lines of attention to each other, allowed them to forget it for a moment. A sheet of hardboard can sometimes separate agony from ecstasy. Tolly’s stars lay in the velvet of the sky, and myriad crabs gave their pincered salute from the mudflats.

  ‘What’s the news on Jason?’ said Tolly after a time. His voice was diffident, almost casual. David had earlier that day asked Dr Roimata Wallace the same question. On the way out, he’d been told, and knew that Jason wouldn’t be walking when he went.

  ‘Not so hot,’ said David.

  ‘Meltdown,’ said Raf.

  Tolly allowed a brief pause for respect, then turned the subject to fishing, so that they could stay cheerful. Fishing from the shore was useless apart from flounder, but Tolly’s money gave him options. He’d bought a large dinghy and kept it tethered in the mudflat rushes of the tide line. He found out the best fishing spot, which was about a third of the way across the sound, and on the slope of one of the deeper channels that brought a flow of nutrients. He anchored a craypot marker there. It was faded to a blush pink, and bobbed persistently in promise of sport beneath.

  David spent whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, in the dinghy, sometimes with Tolly, or another guest, mostly alone, rarely with Raf because of duty rosters. Fishing provided an accepted withdrawal from the world. The dinghy would snout on its anchor rope into the breeze, or the tide, the chop slap against the dinghy’s clinker sides, the shallow bilge water slop under the duck boards, the hand lines veer off sharply underwater, refracted, until lost in the intensifying green depths.

  Blue cod were the most common catch, sometimes tarakihi, occasionally the slim menace of a barracouta, even a starfish, or conger eel, if the bait had been long on the bottom. For David, none of them was more than a gratuitous justification for being isolated there in the long arm of the sea. From the dinghy, the Slaven Centre became only a small part of things again, though he could recognise Takahe, the walkways, the treatment block, the tractor mower revolving like a blowfly on a polished table, even Bryce’s blue ute going up with the deliveries. David thought some emanation from the centre should be visible: transpirations of bewilderment and defiance, fear and desperation, comfort and selflessness, stoicism and compassion — all rising up over the buildings. But there was nothing of that: no distortion of the mundane buildings unless just a shimmer from rising heat waves. Perhaps a faint diesel plume from the high, stainless steel boiler house chimney.

  As David talked with Tolly and Raf, enjoyed a rich man’s port, he knew that the faded float was out there on the dark water, holding against the fluid, tidal bulge towards the bone-dry moon.

  SEVEN

  Agony and beauty co-existed at the Slaven Centre: David suspected at times they coalesced, though he shied away from any serious consideration of that. Often when he sat at a lounge window while on night duty, or when sleep wasn’t easy, the sound was a pale trough between the hills rising from it, and the moving air bore scents of the salt, purpled mud, the bracken under dew, and the shellfish in all the small bays. The morepork was insistent, yet invisible. The stoat and weasel made no noise, but they struck as happily.

  It was a morepork-cum-stoat-cum-weasel night when Lucy Mortimer came to the centre. Big Pulii suffered several sudden attacks that left him almost dazzlingly euphoric, and after David and Raf had strapped him to the power trundler and delivered him to the main block for treatment, they came back just in time to see Jane Milton begin to die. She had wedged herself between her chest of drawers and the wall. Her fingers were already fully curled, which was a gloomy sign, and she had kicked in some of the hardboard so that the timber framing showed beneath. Abbey was sitting beside her, stroking her hair. With Tolly’s help, Raf and David got her face up on her bed. She was seriously regressed.

  ‘She was grooming most of the afternoon,’ said Tolly, ‘and while you two were away with Pulii, she blew. Everything except walking on the ceiling.’

  ‘Did you do anything about it?’ asked David.

  ‘Sure, sure, I fucking cured her, didn’t I. What do you think? Abbey stayed in here while I rang the main block and told them what was going on.’ Jane drew her knees up suddenly and shivered. The tissue white skin of her ankles was marked with little sunbursts and twists of red and purple from her veins. Two nights before, David had been interested in her description of ballooning in south Italy: ugly Brindisi at a distance and the green olive groves, the white charcoal field kilns, slipping past beneath. Harlequin reduced her to grimacing at the light fitting, snoring for air, checking the parts of her body with fluttering hands.

  ‘Well, you did what you could,’ said Raf.

  Jane began to baboon, turning her head and drawing back her lips to show the dog teeth. She stopped breathing for longer and longer periods, even though Raf gave her shots. No sign of the higher responses: all well gone, and even the involuntary functions were failing.

  ‘Jesus,’ said Tolly.

  ‘Remember you’re not here,’ said Raf. The protocols were insistent that fellow guests were not to be part of such observation.

  ‘I never thought she’d go downhill anything like as fast,’ said David.

  All so animalistic at the end, which made it easier for them — well, easier for Raf, David, Abbey and Tolly; something of a performance, though, for poor Jane.

  Afterwards, restful on the power trundler, Jane looked her old self again — the self of humour and acceptance. The pale face, glimpsed in the security lights as the trundler took them past the buildings, was civilised, apart from the wild hair across her forehead. Briefly, while still soft in the first of death, she was allowed her natural configuration. Tolly and Abbey were left behind. Officially they had no part at all in any of it once they’d rung the main block. Raf and David would have to write out their reports, and the duty doctor would have a good deal to do before Jane’s body went to the morgue annex — the locker room as it was called. Abbey went quietly around the Takahe rooms to tell her fellows what most already knew.

  Nearly two hours later Raf and David stood in the dark on the lawn outside the block, and looked down to the glimmer of light on the surface of the sound. When Tolly joined them quietly, they understood his need of companionship. Two of their people seized by massive Harlequin episodes in one night — Jane fatally, perhaps Big Pulii as well.

  ‘Christ, eh, I wonder if we do any good at all,’ said Raf.

  ‘What about me?’ said Tolly. ‘How do you think I feel? I’m the bloody patient here. I’m the one that’s got the frigging disease. You can walk away from it.’ He gave a stifled laugh as a release, which started the other two off.

  ‘Jesus, what a night,’ said David. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

  ‘Another few days and we’ll probably have everyone in remission again,’ said Raf.

  ‘Ah, Indian summers for us all.’ Tolly’s laugh was barely audible a second time.

  A land breeze through the sweet darkness from Havelock was cooling the greasy sweat on David’s face and neck. Labour in death’s service is arduous. Car lights were coming far away, winking, disappearing, flashing, vanishing again along the winding road which was itself invisible. Lucy Mortimer was on her way to the Slaven Centre.

  ‘Give us a joint,’ said Raf,
and David went to his room and came back with the flat Abdullah tin, an old friend, in the palm of his hand. Thank God for Chris’s Picton contact who made a regular drop. Raf’s lighter guttered briefly.

  ‘Maybe this is the stuff that’s doing it,’ said Tolly with no hint of alarm. He brought his hand to his face. Even unlit, the shit had a comforting smell.

  ‘No,’ said Raf. ‘They’ve been through all that.’

  The car turned up the drive to the centre, close enough for the two headlights to become distinct. ‘Maybe it’s the hearse for Jane,’ said Raf. ‘You know the pressure on bed space here.’

  Flippancy, like shit, might help them through the night. All three moved towards the car park quite unashamedly: decorum had little place in the centre on such a night. They were curious, sought distraction from Jane’s death and Big Pulii’s ordeal, were more desperate than they knew, so they wandered over the new lawns in which the small sprigs of indomitable gorse still came up. The lights became a dazzle, and the tyres scrabbled on the final, loosely gravelled corner.

  ‘Maybe it’s a rush delivery of a cure found in a secret government laboratory, and we’ll all end up laughing at the end.’ Tolly had a strong drag, cupped his hand about the joint protectively.

  After the station-wagon stopped, there was a small shock of silence and, when the lights were cut, the trio were blind for a moment before their eyes adjusted to the dim cast of the security light on the barge-board of Takahe. The smell and taste, indistinguishable, were of the fine clay dust drifting in behind the vehicle. David always found the taste half comforting, half disturbingly evocative. Country roads, take me home where I belong. Much of his life was printed in the senses.

  There were two people. A tall woman, and a small man who opened the back on a great number of cases. ‘Look,’ Lucy said to the little guy, ‘this must be the bearer party.’ A full, even careless voice. Only when they both laughed did David realise how Raf, Tolly and he must have seemed, standing rather vacantly in the poorly lit car park of Harlequin’s domain, itself sent to Coventry in an expanse of rough farmland and bush and sea. Tolly wore lime green shortie pyjamas and a grubby headband which he said absorbed perspiration while he slept. Raf had on grey sweatpants, and a borrowed T-shirt cutting into his great arms and chest. His hair was free of its pony-tail for night, and flowed biblically over his shoulders. David wore a blue singlet, and faded yellow shorts with a perished elastic waistband, so that he had to keep hitching them as he walked.

  Nothing could change their appearance, but Raf cranked his vowels up for the introductions as he became aware of Lucy’s poise. Tolly stepped back a little, accepting for the moment, and before strangers, his official subservience as a guest.

  ‘Lucy Mortimer,’ said Lucy Mortimer, ‘and this is my agent Laurie Connor, who’s delivering me to this place, but then gets to escape.’

  ‘Hi,’ said Laurie. He continued to pile cases by the side of the station-wagon.

  ‘I know you,’ said Tolly to Lucy. ‘You’re on television and radio. Christ, I never thought that this thing would get someone who was on television.’

  ‘You and me both,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Maybe you’re just using a cover to do a programme on the place,’ said David. His mind worked that way, and he also felt the need to make some feeble resistance to Lucy’s smooth hair and assurance. He was aware of what easy suckers they were, and how clearly it showed.

  ‘That’s not a bad idea, is it, Laurie? Remind me of that when I’m cured, or get bored waiting.’

  They did become the bearer party of course, a second time that night, and only just sufficient for all the stuff she had. Lucy had a way with her that made almost everyone a willing accomplice and assistant in her life. Clutching cases, the five straggled through the night towards reception, moving out cautiously from the security of each block’s lighting into the gloom, and then more confidently into the glow of the next. Laurie griped a bit. ‘Jesus, Luce, what’ve you got in here?’ and ‘How far is this bloody safari?’ He was a small man, not young, and maybe familiarity made him rather less susceptible to the honour Lucy was doing them all. David’s only worry was that his shorts would fall down as he walked, and he held one of Lucy’s cases hard to his groin as a precaution.

  Tony Sheridan was the duty doctor, and, having settled Big Pulii for the night and completed an examination and report on poor Jane Milton, he was kipping in the duty room. He had enormous feet which, Raf told all the women at the centre, were of course indicative of an equally prodigious cock. Tony was wearing suede shoes, two-tone mustard and purple, and they rose up at the end of the squab like figure targets on a shooting range. Raf prodded the soles of the doctor’s suedes with a rolled-up vacation magazine from the rack. ‘Sorry, Tony. There’s a special admission.’

  Lucy stayed in the doorway, aware of the courtesy that prevents you from looking down on the vulnerable, sleeping face of a stranger. David got his first look at her in good light. She wasn’t beautiful, her face was too broad for that, but she was tall, and supple with youth and physical health, her dark hair glinting, the sharp whites of her eyes catching attention.

  ‘It’s Lucy Mortimer from television,’ said Tolly.

  ‘I don’t suppose the poor beggar ever has time to watch any,’ said Raf. The brighter, inside lights showed the habitual creases on Tony Sheridan’s grey slacks, and the stubble of his chin and neck. Observing the slovenliness as if through Lucy’s eyes, David wished that Sheridan’s perception, kindness, the compassion, were more apparent than those physical features which meant so much less.

  Sheridan had a large, whitebread face, and a bald top with soft, grey hair like thistledown on the three sides apart from his brow, yet he was less than fifty years old. The thistledown undulated as he jerked upright. He drew his fingers down his face to arouse himself and, until he spoke, his bottom lip remained oddly exposed, the pink moistness showing the blood absent from his pale face.

  ‘She’s come all the way tonight,’ said David. ‘All the way from — wherever she’s come from.’ He was establishing himself as moron, he thought.

  ‘All the way from Nelson. We flew down from Auckland this afternoon, but there was some muck-up with the times, and then Laurie and I had one or two friends to see. Anyway, I’m to be a personal patient with Mr Culhane. He knows all about it.’ Lucy took this inclusion in the conversation as sufficient introduction. She joined the others standing by the couch, and watched as Tony Sheridan sat, then stood up, working a little to assert his position after being found at a disadvantage. His shirt had red and white stripes; furrowed a little at the buttons with the strain. He had an inoffensive smell of deodorant, the institution’s lasagna, the mild perspiration of sleep.

  ‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Let me welcome you to the centre. Just a brief formality of admittance, and then we’ll find a room for you. A meal if you haven’t eaten. I’m sure that Mr Culhane will want to meet you in the morning, and I see you’ve already met our Takahe staff.’ His gaze hardened when it reached Tolly, who knew that he shouldn’t have come on through into the doctors’ duty room, knew that he must draw back from the beguiling proximity of Lucy Mortimer. Lucy spotted his withdrawal, though, and thanked him for bringing her large, green case down.

  ‘Couldn’t have done without you,’ said Laurie, who was still sitting on it, getting his breath.

  Later, Lucy told David that she’d been fascinated by the size of Tony Sheridan’s mustard and purples. And appalled by the doltish inconsequence of the behaviour she saw around her.

  She knew nothing of Big Pulii and Jane. Later again, of course, she became one of them, and found that doltishness was a commonplace means of getting by.

  All the advice had been to have at least the first year in a hostel: that in itself was good enough reason for David not to follow it. And after five years of boarding school he had experienced enough bonding to be cynical of the team ethic, and be attracted to a more individual and selfish life. So flatt
ing then, with Louise and Kevin, whom he’d not known before, in Christchurch, in Avonside, in the back rooms of a jerry partitioned wooden mansion whose decline was obscured from the road by great elms. The tree roots humped up even the brick and concrete wall, so that cobwebbed cracks were there, and the wall had an acquired sinuosity in old age. The branches rubbed on the frayed guttering, and kept out the sun, so that in winter the weatherboards of the south side had a constant green mould; a verdigris that spread even to the windows.

  Lamar Haven was the name of the house, proclaimed on an Ozymandias bronze plaque on the main gate, which was pushed back permanently in to the hedge. The branches grew through the bars of the gate, and the twitch covered its raised footing, matted like a Clydesdale hoof. ‘Llama Heaven’, they rechristened the house, for students can rarely leave a word alone. Poverty has no power when you are young. They rejoiced in the almost derelict squalor of the place, for they foresaw great futures for themselves. Even as they lived there, they consciously stored experience so that they could retell it to great effect — when they had surpassed it, of course.

  The world of tacky, ill-partitioned flats, tall weatherboard boarding houses festooned with rusted fire ladders, working class homes that took in lodgers, pawnbrokers, second-hand furniture, fish and chip shops, bright, defiant op-shop clothing, bedroom televisions and computers, corner dairies and draught beer pubs, welfare grants and student loans, and garage sales. That world shook together alcoholic solo mums, emphysemic retired wharfies, ageing whores, perpetual victims, hard men grown old, ranting prophets of a new order, the marginally and criminally retarded, failed poets and illegal Island immigrants, the shickered and the shattered, bankrupt pyramid sellers and old women with visions of the crucifixion — and the students, just passing through. Young intellectuals experience poverty and the failure of others, as a bridal party passes through the graves of the churchyard.