Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  David wondered what his father thought about during all those working days and years on his own. Classical Greece, he supposed, and Rome, as well as the stuff of farming. That was his father’s degree, and when he’d done his thesis on Sulla, that old Felix, and spent the five university years that had been agreed on by his own family, then he’d come back to the farm, as if it had been the most natural progression in the world. Maybe it was, and maybe that combination of historical detachment by training and affinity for place by birth, was the reason that, whatever failings he showed, malice was never one of them.

  ‘I reckon I’m going to go overseas for a while. It seems a good time to have a look around before settling in here to help you.’ David hunkered down close beside his father, so that they could talk despite the wind. He held the handle of the rammer loosely, conscious of its surface, smooth from years of use. ‘Will you be okay to do without me for a while? A year maybe. No longer.’

  ‘Go for it,’ said his father. ‘I can get by fine. I just won’t put much crop in, because that’s the heavy work.’

  The two of them sat close in the short grass by the new strainer post, and the wind raced up and down the slope, plucking at the words passing between them about places overseas not to be missed, about the isolation of their own country, about opportunity and the old world. David’s father talked of his visits to the village of Spaniakos in Crete, and the family who at great risk had hidden his own father from the Germans in the war. He urged David to go there and meet them again.

  Such symmetries are attractive, but actuality takes no account of them. David never reached Crete. There came instead an evening in Gattinara, northern Italy, when David had a phone call from his mother asking him to come back. His father had suffered three strokes within a day. It was afternoon in New Zealand, his mother said, and David could see in his mind’s eye the view from the phone table by the large window — her summer garden immediately, and then the family land of Beth Car sloping to the hills. Almost he could catch the fragrance of white roses his mother would have in the heavy blue vase, yet his actual view was the pale, damaged ceramic tiles patched with snow and the cobbled streets of the old quarter beyond the hotel, the chunky girl, dark and sleek as a dormouse, who watched as he spoke to his mother, the smell of shoes, trivial histories and wine in the old hotel. The loose floor tiles clinked like silver beneath his feet, and the light fitting had a wizened fabric shade like an apricot corset.

  ‘You know what he’s like,’ his mother said. ‘He won’t ask outright, for anything, but he wants to see you.’

  ‘Guai, allora? Sei net guai?’ the girl was saying.

  David was home in three days. He was amazed how quickly his father had lost his tan: maybe it was that the blood had gone from his face. He sat rather awkwardly on a wooden garden seat facing up the slope of the farm, just as David had imagined it in Gattinara. A drought summer, as most of them were, and the dry grass was worn back from the ridges. Only the lucerne paddocks, the thistles and the windbreaks were green, and the willows and occasional poplars that followed the course of the creek. His father was quiet but calm: dispassionate concerning the cycle of growth and decay so apparent to him both in classical history and the seasons of his farm. He talked of the arrangements he had made for his wife and David, then he talked as calmly of what he wanted for himself. And he rested a hand on David’s arm in a way quite natural and habitual, despite the self-sufficiency of his nature.

  All done without the presence of his wife, of course.

  He talked slowly and with little inflection, but it was clear enough. ‘The thing is, I don’t want to linger on — no good to anyone, least of all myself. And you get to that time when you’re too sick to be at home, and so you have to pay the bloody earth to stay in some institution. A thousand dollars a week maybe, so that money that should be for your mother is gobbled up and for no reason. The professions close in when a family’s at its most vulnerable, and rip out what they can. You understand what I mean? You saw where your grandmother was — one of many in chairs lining the wall of the Eventide Home’s sunroom, their mouths open, but speechless, queuing even for death.’

  ‘What does the money matter if it gets you the very best of care?’ said David. How could it be that the farm was exactly the same, no matter what was said: that the drought persisted both dispassionate and remorseless, until the pine cones broke in submission and shed dry seeds with only one wing.

  ‘But the very best of care isn’t what I want,’ his father said. ‘I don’t want to be on my back for months, staring at the ceiling, clicking my tongue, having my bum wiped for me. I don’t want to be dismissively tended by nurses whose mothers would have blushed to meet my eye. It seems to me that you put up the best fight you can, but when the writing’s on the wall you pack up and go. That’s the best care — best for all.’

  And he never spoke of it again. Just the once, as if he wanted the record to be straight. When things got bad soon after, David feared sometimes that his father was going to ask him to take some action, or that he would choose the old Roman way in the large warm bath: all his blood easily tempted out. Sulla had died badly at the end. His father never contemplated any such drama: he had, on diagnosis, found a way to get the pills he required and, having persuaded his wife to go and play golf one cool, autumn Thursday, he took the lot. A stockman knows when a cull is needed.

  His body was surprisingly pale and unthreatening, and with signs of wear. David noticed his father’s hands had enlarged through years of farm work, that the sun had scarred his face, that his lips were pursed in a prissy way they had never been in life. Just a husk it was, with no power to move him. The man’s calm, quizzical yet loving presence was elsewhere.

  ‘He’d have to be by himself to die, wouldn’t he,’ said David’s mother. ‘I wondered what was up, when he was so keen I go to golf. How he hated any fuss at all.’

  ELEVEN

  Lucy’s single room in Kotuku looked across the gardens to the treatment suites, and to Schweitzer’s house further up the slope. Like David, she had no view of the sea at all.

  David didn’t need to go there to give her shit. She wasn’t heavily into it, and it was just as easy to give her some stuff in a paper bag on the way back from meals, or leave it in an envelope at her mail drop. But after talking to her briefly at the volleyball, and watching her there with Abbey and Gaynor, he was curious about her. What sort of life could she make of it at Mahakipawa? Did she have someone in her bed perhaps? What did she dream of once her ambitions were lost: did Harlequin release a new woman maybe?

  Lucy was writing an email letter on her laptop computer. She would send it to her acquaintances, she said, with just a few changes each time to personalise it. David watched her scroll it. In her letter the centre became quite a different place, a subterfuge to keep from all but her family and closest friends the truth that she and old Harlequin were drawing nearer. It gave David confidence to think that both he and Lucy were in hiding in a sense.

  ‘You brought some stuff over?’ Lucy asked.

  ‘No. Just thought that I’d come over for a chat.’

  ‘You’re all dressed up.’ Lucy’s half-smile showed she knew it was for her, and she made that direct eye contact as ever. David had put on his new denim shirt, and aftershave. Of course he thought her attractive, but her easy reading of his visit exasperated him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’m flattered. I only said it because I’m grotty myself.’

  She wasn’t at her best. She had on a loose halter top which had slipped to show her bra straps: trivial, yet a thing that always put him off. There were bands of sunburn on her chest and upper arms. Her heavy hair was held back with a practical elastic band.

  ‘It’s just that I’ve an hour or so before I take over from Raf, and I thought I’d look in. That’s all. See how things are going.’

  ‘I had a full session with Schweitzer yesterday,’ she said.

  ‘How come you’re so privileged then
?’

  ‘Charm,’ she said.

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Anyway, it was the works. The thing that pissed me off most was that I’ve gained almost a kilo.’ Lucy smiled again, but kept watching him. ‘That’s the way we are, maybe. You have Harlequin threatening to tear your mind apart, but what you can relate to is the fear of getting fat. Eh?’

  ‘Well, it’s a coping mechanism, isn’t it?’ He held back just a little from responding to her easy way. ‘You know the bullshit the psychologists give you.’

  Lucy pulled out of Windows and switched off, even though David said he could come back another time. She shifted some of her clothes from the one chair, and he sat there looking out through the window, and across the newly cut lawns to the treatment block. ‘How about I give you some of your own stuff?’ Lucy said. She closed the door, then took a brass trinket box from her wardrobe and came back to the bed. ‘A magic carpet for the evening,’ she said.

  ‘I’m on duty soon.’

  ‘And the more suitably prepared you’ll be for it.’ Lucy sat on her bed, curling her legs beneath her.

  Both of them concentrated on enjoying the joints, for that way they were less self-conscious with each other. They sat in the evening privacy of Lucy’s room and smoked some fair shit. But it took a while, because Lucy was down to it after her session. David drew in and held on a long time. Ah, Jesus, that friendly weed, and the very best shit, from the Coast. One thing he knew about was cannabis. An expertise that he’d suffered for, but he never considered giving up the stuff. A lot of his life was in the kick and smell of it, so that people and places, and even states of mind, rose up as he smoked, and were there just behind the superficial tableau of Lucy’s room in its stroke of present time.

  Who would wish to be restricted to that? All the life and success that Lucy had known, the affirmation by others who wished they could achieve as much, and then reduced to one bed, one chair, one room, and a joint with a minder, and no future that she could bear to think about. There was the single advantage as far as David was concerned — Harlequin had laid Lucy low enough to be with him, and even though she was sunburnt and sad and uneasy, almost a kilo up, even though her hair was greasy, he knew that he wanted the opportunity to be with her. He wanted to slip his hand along the inside of her thigh, but he wanted also to hear her talk, to make something of her life. It was a long time since talking had been any sort of priority in his relationships with women.

  ‘People get better, you know,’ he told her. ‘Even the doctors know bugger all about Harlequin, and some people beat it and walk away. Why shouldn’t you?’ David tried to remember the last guest who had done that — walked away from the centre with a clean sheet, rather than wrapped in one. Even Eddie Simm was about to come back, he’d heard.

  ‘What is the bloody cause? If they could find that for a start.’ Lucy stretched her legs out, and put a pillow between her back and the headboard.

  ‘Out of Africa. I reckon that’s what Schweitzer thinks.’

  ‘Out of Africa! I love it.’

  ‘You know. The monkey stuff mutation, or the mahogany rats. Ebola and all that.’

  ‘Jesus. And this one’s come all the way to us,’ said Lucy slowly. ‘Why some African rat or chimp disease over here, for God’s sake?’

  ‘Some carrier, I suppose. Who knows. Tony Sheridan says that there’s strong overseas opinion that it’s a result of cumulative pollution, but I don’t think Schweitzer goes for that.’ David wasn’t supposed to be talking so frankly to Lucy. At orientation he’d been told that only medically qualified staff should answer questions about Harlequin, but rules were never that important to him. That’s why he’d ended up at Mahakipawa, instead of still farming at Beth Car.

  ‘Is it pollution?’

  ‘I’m only an aide, but it seems strange, doesn’t it, that incidence rates here are just about the highest in the world, when we’ve been the clean, green people. It’s Africa, I reckon, or maybe some evolutionary crack-up. Tony says that’s something else that Schweitzer and Alst Mousier are on to. That our brains have reached evolutionary self-destruct, become too sensitive and complex to cope any more.’

  ‘It’s all beyond me,’ said Lucy. ‘Sometimes you’re surprised by your own reaction, aren’t you? I thought that I could put up a hell of a fight against something like this, because I have so much that’s worth fighting for, but a lot of the time I’m ready to give up. I’m just about resigned to anything in store for me.’

  ‘The first impact, I suppose. It must be numbing, but you’ll bounce back.’

  ‘No. I don’t think I’m going to feel any different about it. Helplessness is what you mainly feel.’

  ‘Maybe this shit we’re on isn’t helping?’ He watched as, for an answer, she drew deeply and smiled at him. From another room was the persistent sound of weeping; from the Kotuku lounge at a greater distance a fierce burst of combined laughter. ‘Maybe it’s just this bloody place,’ and he smiled in return. ‘How can any of us take our lives here seriously? A sort of purgatory maybe.’

  ‘I find it more like a jester’s hell,’ said Lucy, ‘yet I’ve got this preoccupation with food. All sorts of stuff I’ve had smuggled in, and I dream of going to a half decent restaurant.’

  ‘I’ll work on it.’

  ‘I didn’t say to share with anyone.’

  Maybe Harlequin really was the end, the final catastrophe, but how was it possible to conceive of that? All you could do was go on from one day to another, one personal experience to the next, and leave the grand outcome to the forces powerful enough to shape it.

  ‘Can you get stronger stuff?’ asked Lucy.

  ‘This is the best there is. All head from the Coast.’

  ‘No, I mean other stuff altogether. Heroin, say — ecstasy. Can you find that shit if need be?’

  ‘I don’t play around with any of that stuff.’

  ‘Not even if someone was going right under to Harlequin?’ An option was what Lucy was after: a recourse if she was going down and couldn’t pull out. David couldn’t blame her for wanting that, but neither could he buy in.

  ‘Jesus, Lucy,’ he said, ‘have you any idea what the doctors have got in this place? They’ve got legit drugs that could whack a blue whale. Don’t you worry about that.’

  ‘You don’t mind me asking?’

  The sobbing and laughing from other rooms in the block had stopped. It was the still, low ebb of the day, before guests and staff began their night routines. The joints made David and Lucy less aware of each other, and so oddly more comfortable together. That’s what shit did — it insulated you from life. Nothing was going on, and they smoked, and talked only idly of the centre and the people there, as if it were a summer camp. David couldn’t see the sound, and he wondered if Tolly might be out there in the dinghy, at the pink float, with two hand lines angling down into deepening colour.

  ‘So how did you end up here?’ said Lucy.

  ‘I needed a job.’

  ‘What did you do before?’

  ‘Farming.’

  ‘You don’t look to me like any sort of farmer.’

  ‘What do I look like?’

  ‘A travelling salesman,’ said Lucy. ‘Put you in a bloody suit and you could be a salesman, except you don’t talk as much, do you.’ In a way she was right. David had been a salesman of sorts in a popular line of merchandise, still had a minor interest in it, and he used to talk a good deal more readily as well. No bloody suit, though. Not everything can be told simply, and he didn’t want to get into the story of how a salesman of sorts might end up at Mahakipawa.

  TWELVE

  They met again when Lucy came to Takahe to talk with Abbey, and the three of them sat on the verandah of the block with Evan Beal’s wheelbarrow transistor somewhere out of sight, but bringing Europe’s culture to Mahakipawa, much to Abbey’s pleasure. A Bartok Rumanian Dance helped to take attention from the argument between Mrs McIlwraith and Jock McPhie in the lounge. Jock was not ab
out to apologise for spitting phlegm into the sink: he justified himself on the grounds that it constituted a natural function, and seemed sure that he had a good point in common law. Mrs McIlwraith was affronted at even having to interact with Jock. She considered him one of those people of such insignificance that they lack the intelligence to recognise it.

  Abbey’s hair was light brown and stood up even in the still air, as if there were a mild current of electricity coursing through her. And there was the charge of her talent and good will. She hadn’t been a presenter on national television as had Lucy, but she’d played with the National Symphony Orchestra, she’d made a tour of Australia and the Philippines, and another to South Africa. She, too, had dreams dispelled by Harlequin. Those things weren’t talked about, though, were they.

  ‘It’s a natural function, for Christ’s sake, isn’t it?’ protested Jock. ‘This is what’s happening today: women are denying a man’s natural functions, and no one will stand up to them. Women are trying to make men like themselves. Is it any wonder that the whole bloody world’s becoming sick?’

  ‘Bartok was one of those precocious musicians pushed on by parents,’ said Abbey. ‘He gave a public concert when he was ten.’

  ‘I was a great hunter of frogs when I was ten,’ said David.

  ‘I could do the splits,’ said Lucy.

  ‘Who’d have thought that we’d end up here together? Things go along nicely, don’t they, then they change utterly against you to prove that you were never in control at all.’

  David had never heard Abbey speak so directly before. He realised that she would talk to Lucy in a way she never would when alone with him, and the reason wasn’t that he was staff and she a guest, or that he was a man, but rather that he didn’t have the warmth and concern which invited confidence. He had a natural inclination to selfishness and reserve, which experience had strengthened. Guilt is a quiet strangler of feelings that incline towards sympathy and rapport. He listened to Abbey talking of a Basuto man who could whistle through a bullet hole in his face, and who came to her in Port Elizabeth wanting to become a professional performer. For Abbey it wasn’t a tourist anecdote, but proof of resilience of spirit. Maybe, although her face was unmarked, she had begun to do her own whistling in the dark to keep her spirits up.