Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  Dan Posswillow was challenged to provide a meal on a moneyless Sunday, and he went out as a baron into his fiefdom. He stole onions and carrots from a market garden in Heathcote, potatoes from a pensioner’s allotment by the Shirley golfcourse, a pineapple from a still life in the foyer of the McDougall Gallery, and under a small bridge in Hagley Park he caught two mallard drakes with a whitebait net. He should have been dared, like Maui, to pull down the sun.

  Motorbikes were stabled on the verandahs of Llama Heaven, where once Canterbury tea parties had been held. Weeds covered the gracious curve of the drive. Where roofing tiles had failed, they’d been replaced by sheets of second-hand corrugated iron. The leadlight windows on either side of the main door retained a few wonderful pieces of blue and gold; the gaps were covered with plywood and carton flaps, past which pollen, scraps of blossom and the winged insect husks eddied into the hall. Some vanished tenant of better days had hung three wire plant baskets on the west verandah, and they had filled up with cans, fried chicken boxes, collapsed candles and unmatched sneakers stiff and dark with sweat and toe jam.

  Llama Heaven, with some engineering students from the Coast in the front flat, a Baha’i couple in the side one, a retired jockey in the single room behind the garage. Llama Heaven, where David and Kevin played poker when they should have been working, partied when they should have been working, read Roth and Updike when they should have been working, lay on their beds and agonised over their lack of academic progress — when they should have been working. Louise, on the other hand, was diligent and organised, evenly friendly, and fitting in more sex than either of them — writhing and calling to her maker with a married solicitor who came through her window late at night to lay down the law.

  Come to Llama Heaven on a summer afternoon. The overgrown drive mottled with shadow and gold from the trees and the sun. David and Kevin join with all the engineers, but one, to throw screwdrivers at a centrefold target on the trunk of the cherry tree. They leap, shout, push each other, and shake the branches like a band of chimpanzees. Nick, the last engineer, lies on a stretch of verandah boards that has direct sun: all his underclothes make a modest collection, drying on twine slung above him, and he has a dishcloth to keep his cock from sunburn. The Baha’i woman has her foot on her window sill to cut her toenails, and her hair is free about her face. The retired jockey is obscurely within his lean-to as usual: just his sharp coughing to represent him, over and over, as if he tries to kick-start his life. All the youthfulness, promise and summer joy is a bitter surfeit for him perhaps.

  Come to Llama Heaven when a winter smog caps the city; when the elms sweat coldly and the mould glistens, but not quite able to match the iridescence that the drizzle unfolds from the oil where the motorbikes have stood. In a shallow puddle before the front steps the worms have come to die, pale and swollen, and dark leaves are star tramped on the hall floor. Each downpipe has a slightly different tune, and the colour supplements of junk mail plastered on the pavement by the gate catch the soft, winter light in a transient gleam. The swollen cupboard doors refuse to close, the one bar heater fizzes by David’s desk as he reads his mother’s letter from Beth Car, the engineers bicker in front of a video of violent heroism, Louise completes another A+ academic assignment, quite at ease because she is the lawyer’s brief for the coming night. The Baha’i couple make familiar love beneath a patchwork quilt, and the jockey, his professional recollections roused by that sound of energetic riding, coughs the more urgently.

  Louise achieved a doctorate and became something between a linguist and an anthropologist. She elaborated the history of people through their languages, and died suddenly in Andalusia of food poisoning. Kevin finally managed a BA in education, and became a futures broker in Melbourne. David met him afterwards only once, in an Irish pub in Sydney. They laughed each other silly over their reminiscences of Llama Heaven, and then had absolutely nothing else to talk about.

  ‘It’s all relative, though, isn’t it?’ Kevin would say in each discussion, or argument. His hair was straight, stiff, and like a sparrow’s wing jutting above his face. He would fluff it, bent over his desk, and then collect the dandruff into a small heap with his finger. He won brief fame when he pulled a schoolgirl out of the creek when she rode off the path while cutting through the campus. A thin, flat-chested girl, who wasn’t able to reward him immediately in any substantial way, he said.

  In the second year David was at Llama Heaven, the Baha’i woman had a need for him early in her pregnancy. ‘It’s not that I don’t love my husband just the same,’ she said. ‘It’s the energy I need.’ She never took him into their bedroom but, when her husband was at work, David would go to their small laundry and there she’d kneel and take him in her mouth. He never forgot the white parting in the centre of her long, free hair, and the flash of her eyes as she would look up at him to share his pleasure. A stage in her pregnancy, just two months or so, and then she dismissed him, and they were mere acquaintances again.

  Llama Heaven became in retrospect almost the whole of his higher education. Of the books, lecture rooms, plump, bearded academics, the assignments, the wider student population, numbing examinations, virtually nothing remained. All spun out of his recollection by the powerful centrifuge of Llama Heaven. He had the feeling that it was all still there, like a bright carousel, and that if he stepped aboard, all would start up again, just as before. Those who have no good times for regret, have regret indeed.

  EIGHT

  Lucy Mortimer went into Kotuku block, with Colin Squires and Polly Merhtens as the aides, and Roimata Wallace as physician nominally in charge of her treatment. Most patients had to park their reputations, and enter as uncomplaining equals until they proved themselves to be intrinsically more, or less, than others, but Lucy’s moderate media fame remained with her; set her just a touch apart. Not so much by admiration, certainly not envy, rather a sense that they knew her, when it was only recognition. And they saw in her the unexpressed, sad proof that no one was beyond the reach of Harlequin.

  Schweitzer himself had diagnosed her, after being contacted by someone high up in the TV business, and he took a part in her treatment with Roimata Wallace and Tony Sheridan. Lucy was resting privately because of overwork and stress, it had been announced. Schweitzer told all staff not to draw attention to the more high-profile guests. There were some far more newsworthy than Lucy — like Celia R who was the daughter of the deputy prime minister, like the Olympic triple gold medallist who had cut his way into the tiger enclosure at the Auckland Zoo, like Chandiwala and Bazarov, drawn from so far apart to Mahakipawa by Schweitzer’s reputation. The deaths that occurred at the centre shouldn’t be discussed either. People outside weren’t in a position to understand, Schweitzer said.

  David made no initial effort to approach Lucy. Guilt conditioned him to keep his distance. His self-esteem had taken a beating over the previous two years. Lucy, though, had smoked pot moderately for years, and made it her business to find out that David was one of the few guys who could supply the stuff. After three weeks she came over in an evening that had a sweet, fine rain drifting in from the sea. David was in the lounge room with others, sitting with Abbey and old Mrs McIlwraith as he helped the latter to glue a break in her reading glasses.

  Lucy wore a navy blue jersey, and the tiny droplets were caught on the fabric, and on her dark hair. She had a bruise beneath her left eye, from a fall in the night she said, but her tone didn’t invite commiseration. ‘I don’t want to be a pain, particularly if you’re not on duty.’

  ‘Can’t hear a word,’ said Mrs McIlwraith.

  ‘She’s not talking to us,’ said Abbey.

  ‘Eh? What’s that?’ Mrs McIlwraith had a hearing aid, but made no adjustment. She didn’t appreciate the progress on her repairs being threatened.

  ‘Just a minute or two if you’ve time,’ said Lucy. ‘I’m told you might be able to help. No hurry, though.’

  The low clouds were grey, the sound was grey, the dri
fting rain was silver grey, the bush high on the hills behind the centre was massed green-grey. It was still warm at eight o’clock as Lucy and David stood on the verandah of Takahe for privacy.

  ‘David, you’ve still got my superb glue,’ shrilled the old lady.

  ‘She means super glue,’ David told Lucy. Why should he feel a need to explain?

  ‘Take no notice of her,’ called Abbey.

  ‘Look, I’m in no rush.’

  ‘It’s fine,’ said David.

  ‘The thing is,’ said Lucy, ‘I need a few joints. Something to while away a wet evening in this paradise of yours.’

  ‘Schweitzer’s against it. You know that. It’s banned within the centre. Some people say it even sets Harlequin off.’

  ‘This is to jack up the price, is it? All the difficulties you face, the risks. I gather there’s others you’re happy enough to help.’ It was disconcerting the way that she kept direct eye contact: not aggressively, not at all flirtatiously, but to get the two of them talking on the same level if she could; make some connection she was able to assess.

  ‘I’m not a supplier here or anything,’ he said. ‘I give some of my own stuff to a few friends, that’s all.’

  ‘I didn’t mean it about jacking the prices up. Sorry, that’s shitty. I’ve been an occasional user for several years now. I could get Laurie to send it in somehow, but that takes time. At the moment I’m a bit down to it in this place. I haven’t got the knack of living here yet, you see.’

  ‘It’s not so bad.’

  ‘Compared to what!’ Lucy seemed to think she’d made a joke, and laughed at it herself. ‘For you it’s a job, isn’t it? Well, I had a life and job out there, and now it seems likely enough that I’m in this place for keeps. What’s a little happy baccy if it’ll schmooze the days.’

  David couldn’t come up with any reply that wasn’t fatuous, so he just smiled, lifted his hand as a sign that she should wait and went to his room for his stash. He had some in his pocket as he came back through the lounge room, but no one was paying any attention. Abbey had joined several others who were watching TV: lives almost as far removed from everyday existence as their own. Mrs McIlwraith was left upright in her chair, grasping the armrests like Abraham Lincoln. He could have injected himself with heroin before her face and she be none the wiser. Her eyesight was okay, but there was nothing in her past that gave awareness about such things. Indoor plants were what she knew, brass and copper antiques, and dinner parties in Merivale for six, or eight at a pinch. The Slaven Centre, and the episodes Harlequin imposed on her, were incomprehensible and therefore best ignored when possible.

  Lucy was well back on the verandah to avoid the drift of rain, and she took the four tinnies David offered and closed her hand softly over them.

  ‘These might do something for you,’ he said. ‘Some good head shit, and not just cabbage.’ She asked the price. ‘A little gift,’ he said, and she thanked him, but showed no inclination to stay and talk. ‘I’ll come over some time and see how you’re holding up.’

  ‘Okay, yes, but not for a few days,’ Lucy said. ‘I’m no company at present, and getting a fair belt with initial treatment.’

  She stepped into the greyness of the drizzle, and her dark jersey and hair bobbed through it towards her own block. What a thing it was, that she should get so far in her life and then be dragged down through no fault of her own. You can’t know how you’re going to act if such a thing happens. David wasn’t a great one for television, but she used to front a show about the lives of single people, he remembered. A documentary-style programme full of assured, artistic or professional people of a sort he rarely came across in his own life. And Lucy, with so much going for her, had stood out among them.

  He didn’t think that he’d go and see her, despite the sharp black and white of her looks, and her approach for shit. Who wanted to be a witness when Harlequin put her through the hoops? Who wanted to give up the personal secrets that a sincere friendship demands?

  His father had just cut a lettuce, and the milk of its blood marbled his hand. He stood upright, then swayed back that little further to ease the spine after stooping. The lawn, the vegetables, the trees and pasture beyond were part of Beth Car. ‘Someday,’ he said, ‘you’ll have to take care of all of this. You know that.’ His father enjoyed the exploitation of the cliché and David’s smile in response. His father had been to a wedding: his suit trousers were tucked into his dark socks, and he wore unlaced, old shoes from the porch. And he’d removed the red and black tie from the collar of his best, white shirt. A cool, scoffing day, and the breeze brought the smell of the rain that was falling in the hills at the head of their valley. With his free hand, his father drew the collar ends closer across the base of his throat, and tugged at the grey hair tufted there. ‘Your mother’s already begun to worry whether there’ll be enough graduation tickets. She wants a mass of clan witnesses again.’

  ‘You know how boring it is. The stage so bloody far away, and it seems like thousands going up to get their degree. It pays to be well up the alphabet: the clapping gradually gets less and less.’

  ‘In my day there was just one ceremony for everybody.’

  With a twist, David’s father took the rank outside leaves from the lettuce and spun them towards the compost heap. Greenfinches and sparrows darted over the garden. A couple of the dogs rattled the pipe and netting gate, wanting attention.

  ‘Congratulations, anyway,’ he said. ‘A good degree. No one can take that away from you. People think it’s all brainpower, don’t they, but there’s no end of bright students who can’t hack it for one reason, or another. No discipline, or something going wrong in their life — just loneliness even. Cheever said that loneliness is a kind of madness.’

  Had he been more than a passing fancy of pregnancy for the Baha’i woman of Llama Heaven, maybe David would himself have remained a perpetual, contented student. Sex can be a kind of madness too.

  ‘Gordon Aimes complained to me that his daughter never used her degree,’ continued his father. ‘As if it were a power saw, as if you can go through those years and then live without any influence of them. Right?’ His father extended a cool hand to shake, slightly wet with the dew from the heart of the lettuce and its white blood. ‘Anyway, go in and see your mother,’ he said. ‘She’s been so looking forward to you coming.’

  ‘Come in with me,’ David said.

  ‘I’ll be in shortly.’

  As long as he could remember that had been their way: neither of his parents comfortable in the presence of the other when they wished to express their feelings. It was a courtesy perhaps that they had developed in order to live together. How much of marriage which is called natural, is only customary.

  As David walked from his father in the garden, his mother appeared from the sunporch, came impetuously on to the steps. How he loved her. Yet, as always in that home, he felt passed from one affection to another, rather than included in their united love. ‘Oh, wonderful to see you,’ she called, and they went in together. Looking smart as ever, his mother. Appearance was for her a competition, like all else in life: against one’s earlier self, against every other woman in the world, though the intensity of the struggle rarely showed. She had a brief, fierce pressure when they hugged, and again David was her special boy, her vicarious opportunity. ‘Good for you. Good for you,’ she said. ‘I’m so proud.’

  ‘It’s all the help I had from you and Dad.’ Forgotten, then, all her actively expressed reservations about Llama Heaven, and the population he lived with there. Forgotten, her anger at the drunk driving charge, her exasperation with his failure to write, her objection to his obscenity and idleness. Remembered truly the love and letters, the financial help, the absolute knowledge of being in her thoughts every day of her life.

  His mother’s mid-brown hair still had a sheen, when that of most middle-aged women had become drab. The cream linen was crisp to his hand as they hugged, and she wore a perfume bought on her
last trip to Sydney. How well David knew his mother’s pride, from long experience as its main object and the main source of betrayal. As he’d grown up he had felt a sense of helplessness before such love, sensing that there was no way he could stop his achievement, or failure, from being felt in her heart. Through the dimpled glass door behind her, he could see the misshapen image of his father coming to the house.

  ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘I’m now qualified, but unemployed. I know more about glacial geomorphology than anyone would ever wish to hear, and already I’m starting to forget it.’ Sometimes he still woke from anxiety dreams in which he was fooling around at Llama Heaven, quite unprepared for exams.

  ‘Just think of all the opportunities to build a professional career,’ his mother said. The prospect made her face young, gave vibrancy to her tone. ‘I’ve told your father that we’ll celebrate, of course.’

  The shape of him became somewhat clearer behind the dimpled glass as he sloughed off his shoes. Was it David’s imagination that she seemed to hurry the things she went on to share with him, before his father joined them? His parents had a civilised marriage, which somehow ached with lost possibility.

  The Christchurch restaurants were stuffed with graduation groups on the night. Some wore gowns and hoods with self-conscious relief that, for the night at least, they weren’t failures. David and his parents had eaten a meal as expensive as most, drunk South African bubbly, leaned together for the freelance photographer who worked the room on an evening so ripe for business that his cajolery was quite untested. The photo is still in his mother’s album: he is between his parents, of course, and still clear behind David is a thin woman at another table, caught just for a moment and eternity in the lives of unknown people. The tendons of her long wrist show as she pauses with a forkful of cannelloni to shout joyously above the noise of the crowded room. She is old, defiant, risible, wears a short-sleeved green dress, and inhabits the family album with as much substance as any other figure there.