Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  David Stallman MA. Even Llama Heaven couldn’t last for ever.

  NINE

  One of their great failures was Alice Bee, who garrotted a male visitor departing from Hoiho. The caretaker’s Samoyed found the body beneath the ornamental flaxes far back from the car park. The guy was still in his tie and sports coat: well over six foot and heavy with it, Tony Sheridan said. It was assumed he had walked that far, lain down with little Alice Bee expecting favours, and got more head than he bargained for.

  Such a thing is so bizarre that, for a while, the sadness and horror of it can be avoided, but Alice must have remembered it from time to time. She went into the secure unit in the main block, where she made a beautiful wall hanging of angora wool for the reception foyer, before electrocuting herself with wire in the dayroom plug closest to the nurses’ station. Gaynor Runcinski, who knew all about textiles, considered it a thing of genius. Alice had written a card for her wall hanging which read ‘Fibre landscape: Mahakipawa 3’. There was no evidence that Mahakipawas 1 and 2 ever existed outside her mind.

  David was remembering that as he and Tolly went down to Sheridan’s office for Tolly’s session. There was a cold, steady wind up the sound, and barges of dull cloud were towed overhead. Only slightly lower were skuas, skidding by with fixed wings. The wind set up a resonance, part sound, part vibration, which made it unpleasant to be outside. ‘An ideal day,’ said Tolly, ‘to talk about illness. Don’t you think?’

  There was one other thing about Alice’s notoriety which came to David as they walked: an idle connection really, but that’s the way the brain works. The visitor garrotted by Alice had been visiting Lorna Ibbotson, whose brother years before won the Canterbury Closed Tennis Championship. David had been a spectator. He had sat there marvelling at Ibbotson’s touch with the drop volley, and none in that small audience could know that Harlequin and Alice Bee were waiting to make such indirect connection in the future.

  As an extension of whanau support, all guests at the centre were invited to take a companion to their regular reviews. David noticed that many of the sessions were descriptive and diagnostic, rather than providing alleviation. Maybe there was something therapeutic in just the opportunity to talk: to spill out the fear and fascination that patients felt for Harlequin. For each of them the illness was uniquely personal, no matter how often they saw the same symptoms in their fellows.

  ‘How do you find the Hazlitt spinner?’ asked Sheridan, when the three of them were comfortable. Yellow and green dwarf conifers outside his window heeled in the wind, and the caretaker’s Samoyed loped past to find its master, or a garrottee.

  ‘It quietens you, doesn’t it?’ said Tolly. ‘Takes you out of the world for a while, but I’d say there’s no permanent gain against the demons. No healing in it, seems to me. Healing seems to be the thing that no one much talks about, and yet it’s the word most of us are after — that, and a cure.’

  ‘The worst thing would be to build up a lot of false hopes,’ said Sheridan. He wore a sports coat with large, blue checks and there was a fair stretch of pale shirt the coat couldn’t cover. ‘As far as we can tell, Harlequin’s a whole new thing and, until we know the enemy better, the outcomes are unpredictable.’

  ‘It’s not as if nobody recovers,’ David said. He felt that he was there partly to be encouraging.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Sheridan. ‘Ones from your own block, like Edward Simm, who’s home and seems not too bad.’

  Tolly smiled at the positiveness of it all.

  They knew others too, didn’t they, like Jason, and Big Pulii, and Jane Milton; like Alice Bee, who had woven ‘Mahakipawa 3’, which hung in reception only two corners away from Tony Sheridan’s office. As they all knew, what they were trying to do at the centre was delay the progression of the disease until an effective treatment could be found.

  ‘Tolly,’ said Sheridan, ‘you’re in the best place in the world to have Harlequin, small consolation though that might seem. Schweitzer’s a near genius, and when this thing’s beaten, this is where it’ll happen.’

  ‘Maybe,’ said Tolly. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but when you’re sick yourself, the big picture is nothing to you, nothing at all. I had an aunt who used to piss me off with that trite saying that your health is all you’ve got. It’s still trite, of course, but now for me it’s true as well. Yet from sheer habit I find myself still worrying about my investments, whether my new shower mixers are taking on, and if abstinence will make me impotent.’

  ‘You’ve been feeling okay?’ asked Sheridan.

  ‘Up and down,’ said Tolly. ‘You know, my sense of smell becomes better than a ferret’s at times, just as Abbey said it would. Then I can tell anyone’s last meal from a single fart, and I know when the red clover’s out in the road paddock over the hill. Cows smell different to steers — did you know that? The blankets on the drying line almost smother me with fragrances, and when I bring my hands to my face I know all the day’s activities.’

  It was old primal brain again, wasn’t it; wonderfully unfettered power of the senses, which sophistication had overlain. David had caught many glimpses of Harlequin from such descriptions, and the behaviour of patients when they blew.

  ‘This acuteness of smell isn’t progressive, though, is it?’ Sheridan drew the case sheets to him. ‘I mean, it’s not heightened every time you have an episode?’

  ‘It’s probably growing. It comes on with the demons, of course, but it’s certainly lingering on much longer after I come right in other ways.’

  No good sign. Tolly must have known that as well, but none of them chose to say it. Atavism was the great symptom of the new plague. What threatened them most at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t aliens, wasn’t genetic or technical advance, but something looming up from way, way back. Maybe in the end the conclusive and final predator was their former selves.

  ‘The feeling is at once release, and lack of control.’ Tolly was detailing the way his bouts began. ‘Everything is self and gratification of self. Everything is now, and it presses out both the past and future. Colour, sound, taste and threat whirl around you. Response is everything.’

  David and the doctor knew that Tolly was well in the vortex, but to express it served no purpose. Tolly and Sheridan began to go over the diary that every patient agreed to keep: an attempt to find any triggers, predisposing factors, dietary connections, whatever. The futility of it lay shallowly behind their faces, and David felt it as well. His throat stiffened with the effort to prevent a yawn. His friend Tolly was dying, perhaps, but the horror couldn’t be taken head on, and David’s attention was displaced to the cool, Mahakipawa day, with the wind coming up the sound, the half-grown gardens of the Slaven Centre tossing, a mixed fruit yogurt six-pack in a supermarket bag by Sheridan’s desk, the papers heaped in the desk files, the baleful tweed expanse of the doctor’s jacket.

  ‘It must be just a matter of time,’ David said. ‘Until the causes of it, and a cure, are found, I mean. All these things are cracked in the end.’

  ‘How much time though, eh?’ said Tolly, and his face twitched somewhat. Maybe he was able to smell hypocrisy, too.

  TEN

  In closed institutions, priorities and prejudices evolve quickly, become quite distinct from what’s accepted in the general community. Local personalities and issues reform attitudes; things inconsequential everywhere else, are of great significance. A tribal life develops which is both nourishing and cruel.

  What was there to mock in the energy, and love, and desperation they sublimated in volleyball? Roimata Wallace had begun it by bringing back the first equipment from Nelson as recreational therapy, and Raf determined its rivalry by organising the team competition among the blocks and staff grouped by occupation. Staff and patients had parity within the confines of the game, and both saw a value in that. Schweitzer himself might be competing with a scrub-cutter, a tax collector, a prosthesis technician, a sharebroker grown cynical within his car
eer, a bathroom millionaire, or the most recent laundry employee. And, because of the nature of Harlequin, there were sometimes, in volleyball at least, advantages when the affliction began to stir. There was an ongoing controversy concerning the eligibility of patients to play when they had symptoms, for mild episodes of Harlequin sometimes gave them spectacular physical virtuosity and intensity. The doctors were still unsure if such activity was beneficial.

  Raf was a champion himself: not especially quick, but tactically cunning, physically imposing, and with a spike feared in the business. Only Big Pulii before his death, and Bunt Lorrigan from Titi, could do it better. Others were more unlikely competitors, yet proved themselves adept. Elspeth Jones of Kotuku was thin and pale, but had a superlative skimming serve. Tony Sheridan was an accomplished retriever in back court: the precise hands of a physician, great feet like platters steady on the ground, great cock at the sagging crotch of his playing shorts, which were grey with faded green piping.

  Players practised for hours on end, rejoiced or were cast down by selections, argued about the team tactics. A hundred or more people might turn out to watch a routine game between blocks. Rules were parochial; each team had to have two women. New patients and new staff were assessed by guests as much for volleyball potential as any other contribution. Their block allocation was a source of rancorous dispute, with corruption often claimed, and often evident.

  Takahe was a good team but, no matter what David and Raf did, they could never inspire a win over Hoiho. The winner’s pennant was made of Susan Wedderburn’s lilac silk knickers, with TOP DOG embroidered on them in red thread by Sister Galleter. When Hoiho got stroppy they would parade the pennant around the grounds, or fly it from their TV aerial under guard.

  The number one court was on the level lawn by the main block. The grass had been established there the longest, and the buildings were a protection from the wind. Evan Beal was the gardener, and knew that strip of grass was more important than any of the flower beds, even those around the director’s house. Evan marked the court with weedkiller, and was abused for any miscalculation, until the fresh growth enabled him to redeem himself. He complained of the fetish sport, his real grievance being that he was too old to make one of the competition teams. When games were on, he was usually loitering around behind a wheelbarrow with a transistor hung from the handle.

  Volleyball was the present thing that they could fix on, separate from pasts which had cast them out, and from a future too threatening for many of them to consider. Volleyball was both defiance of where they found themselves, and submission to a new order. Within the realm of the centre it seemed no more ridiculous as a preoccupation than religion, or superannuation investment, did elsewhere. We are more easily ruled by custom than by logic, after all.

  David and Raf went down with the Takahe team to the number one court to play Kotuku. The team had supporters too, who walked down with them carrying plastic bags, or anoraks, to sit on in case the moisture came up through the grass. Not Howard Peat, whose pride prevented any display of community, not Mrs McIlwraith, who thought civilisation restricted to the indoors — I will not abide a man with hair sprouting from his ears, she said to Tolly Mathews — but Wilfe Orme, Sara Keppler, Jock McPhie. Gaynor Runcinski went from loyalty and an expectation of some tapestry of life about the court, and Abbey, whose talents were also cultural, joined her in the support of friends.

  ‘Easy beats, you Takahe ones,’ crowed old Sidey. ‘We’re going to kick your arse.’ Sidey, living evidence that there is no just God. Almost forgotten thalidomide had given him hands without arms and half a leg, then Harlequin joined the queue. Was it any wonder that he had survived by becoming combative? He was avoided when possible, unloved, accorded grudging admiration for persevering with the lost cause of himself till the last. ‘We’ll piss all over you lot,’ he said. He alone broke the rules by having a white, issue bed pillow to sit on when he scrambled from his chair, and he alone would be unchallenged on it. His laughter was as loud as anyone’s, his eye as bright. Sidey wasn’t welcome, not because of his aggression, but because he made others wonder if their own troubles were unjustifiable self-pity.

  ‘Takahe will blitz you,’ said Tolly.

  ‘Blow it out your one-eyed arse,’ shouted Sidey, and it was a small victory for him to see Abbey flinch and Gaynor flush.

  Raf stood with David, adjusting a blue elastic band on his pony-tail before the game began. ‘They don’t even want him down below,’ he said quietly. ‘Old Nick’s told the Reaper to leave him up here as a bloody nuisance, rather than have him challenging the establishment among the embers.’

  Sidey settled what was left of himself on his white pillow, and began abusing anyone who could be offended, even before the game started. Evan Beal’s wheelbarrow was by the azaleas and his transistor provided wistful, on the road again country and western riffs as the Slaven Centre teams played volleyball at Mahakipawa. David didn’t want to think about the incongruities that pressed in if he attempted any scrutiny of his life, and was Harlequin’s domain any more a puzzle than Paparua prison, a house in Dog Gully Road, or a granny flat in Kaikoura?

  ‘Ahhh, you fucking moron,’ said Sidey, delighted at yet one more exhibition of human incompetence.

  Lucy played for Kotuku. She had a rangy athleticism without much competitive drive. Her edge had been expressed in her career, and she wasn’t going to bruise herself for a ball game. Yet a sweat was becoming on her, fixing the stray tendrils from her pony-tail to her neck and forehead, making darker back patches on her T-shirt. Her thigh muscles blocked when she landed from a leap, and the palm side of her wrists became red and swollen from striking the ball.

  ‘Jesus,’ she said, ‘I’ve had enough. I’ve been putting on weight like a bull calf since I came here.’ She gave up her place happily and sat with Gaynor and Abbey, whom she knew had good sense and a range of conversation. From a place on national television, she had declined to volleyball at Mahakipawa, but had the sense to make no comparisons. David found himself looking at her rather than the game. The long, smooth scope of her leg, the small moles like Afghan freckles on her neck and arms, the bright contrast of the irises with the whites of her eyes. He wasn’t quite close enough to hear what she spoke about with Gaynor and Abbey, and felt an odd pang of exclusion. The conversation of women always seemed to have greater warmth and intensity than that of his own sex. He accepted that women were the superior nation in all communication.

  More than her looks, David was impressed by Lucy’s determination not to go down easily. Maybe the hooch was helping her, and he should show more willingness to supply it. What warmth and animation she had, how Abbey and Gaynor responded to it with their own generosity and intelligence.

  Volleyball, then, for the flock of Harlequin and the keepers. The ball soared against the sky, and old Sidey’s sarcastic cries joined the adulation and the laughter, the country music from the gardener’s wheelbarrow, the private conversations quite unconnected with the setting.

  The farm was part of the skin of the world: always responsive to the elements that played over it, blossoming frosts, the fierce or pale-yoked sun, distinct, quartered winds, rain of imperious impact, or tremulous accumulation. And beneath the skin the close-packed flesh clays, the limestone bones, the secret flows of arterial water that would tug the willow wand of the diviner down.

  He had lived that land, hadn’t he? He had circled on the tractor, while the paddock undulated as a mirage beyond the hot engine. He’d stood in leggings and parka with his back to the southerly buster, and pulled lambs from their Romney wombs. He’d stooped on the shearing board so that sweat dripped from his nose on to the dark wood, where oil and blood and sweat and shit had been worked by shuffling sack slippers to give a burnish that hostesses would covet for their furniture. He’d had smoko sitting on bales of first-cut lucerne hay, and eased the skin back on palm blisters, while honkers went high overhead towards the lakes. He’d fed out the same hay, dropping the secti
ons between the wheel marks in the snow, and looping the bright bale twine around his neck with numb fingers. He’d sat quietly on a diesel drum in the dusty yard and noted where the hens came cackling from, and gone and found the egg caches. He’d spent nights in the back of the truck with a mounted spotlight, shooting rabbits that were eating out the downs. He’d had a dog make a fool of him, and experienced times when he was accorded tacit respect. He’d switched off the Case combine and walked away with his face a mask of dirt, and heard gradually the cicadas come back in chorus, the sheep cough discreetly like curates and the magpies sweep passionately from the pines towards the river.

  On the day that David made up his mind to go overseas, his father was fencing along one of the ridges of the hill block. Successive makeshift repairs over the years were no longer enough, and he was putting in a new strainer post at the gateway. He was silhouetted on the ridge line as David climbed up to him. The wind grew stronger, flinging away words and, after one attempt at talking over distance, during which his father just shrugged and smiled, David kept climbing and his father continued to work.

  Even though the older man was using the big, iron-tipped rammer around the post, and the muscles of his shoulders shook with the impact, David couldn’t hear the thuds. His father wore a green army singlet, shorts and steel-capped boots. And oddly studious glasses that mitigated all other appearances. The sweat in his hair made it more noticeable that it was thinning on top. Even in that strong, cooling wind, he took off his glasses and wiped sweat from beneath his eyes. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘I’ll be glad to get this big bugger in.’

  ‘Give us a go.’

  ‘Good on you.’ His father sat down thankfully in the grass, and blew his cheeks out in the wind. His boots were downhill, and he rested his forearms on his knees, so that the hands hung from the wrists. His fingers remained partly set in the grip for the rammer. ‘This fencing lark’s not much by yourself.’ He must have cut himself with wire earlier in the day, for there was blood dried black on the back of his left hand, and a red, moist centre.