Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  Growing shit was one of them perhaps. He’d used it on and off since his days at Collegiate, but had no thoughts of getting into the business until Chris came back from overseas. They met again at a wedding in Christchurch; the reception held in a yacht club’s rooms in Sumner, so that the guests walked in and out among trailer sailers, and cockle-shell Sunbursts for school kids, and the Best Man’s Adam’s apple bobbed against the trophy pennants on the hardboard walls.

  They talked of Coddy Joux the bully, who had become the boss of a national park, and Sharkey, who they’d cheated over his exams. Chris said that the happy couple would enjoy their honeymoon, since the bride was eager for it, pleasantly tight, and vocal when on her back.

  Chris came out to the farm several times after that, twice with a leather-skirted woman for the weekend. She was a telephone pollster from the city, with a quick voice and a manner anticipating hurt. She was dark and slim, with the slightly used, Bohemian look that Chris said turned him on. If the two men left the house and walked out into the farm, she would remain in the lounge looking out apprehensively as they diminished, as if she were inside a space capsule, and the men advancing across an alien world.

  All the characteristics that David recalled in the Chris of schooldays were still identifiable, but tainted with disillusion. His charm had run out on the wider world, and not all his adversaries there could be cheated as easily as Sharkey. Even his attractiveness to women had been found fallible in the very cases where power, or advancement, might have been gained. He was that sort of genre Casanova who looks out at you from behind the sliding doors of concrete-block motels; who has a dark onyx ring set in nine-carat gold, who buys with confidence in the cut-price lingerie shop.

  He came alone when he had a business proposition. A humid, still day of low cloud, and David had been tailing a mob towards the back of the farm, and was coming back with tractor and trailer to the sheds. His work jersey was stiff with dried blood, the netting rolls jolted on the trailer, the two dogs trotted with their tongues askew.

  Chris’s Falcon was in the drive, and the man himself leaning on the tubular gate that marked the division between the working area and the grounds of the house. In just the few months since David’s mother had shifted to Auckland, the lawns and garden had lost the clear lines and managed display which had been her mark. Not neglect, just that difference between the enthusiast’s care and more perfunctory maintenance. Chris waited as David nosed the tractor into the shed, humped gear from the trailer, then fed the dogs. ‘Quite the man on the land,’ he said, as David finally came up the track towards the house. ‘Master of all you survey.’

  ‘The bank runs us all on this country,’ David said.

  ‘There may be an answer to that too.’

  David had a shower when they went inside, and Chris got a meal under way without any prompting — cold mutton and pickle, cheese and tomatoes. Afterwards they sat looking out on to the garden and drank beer. ‘I can’t get used to your mum and dad not being here,’ said Chris. ‘If I look into the paddocks he still seems to be there, and if I look out at the garden, your mum, too, she’s there.’ David had no comment to make on such a truism.

  And they smoked some good stuff that Chris had sent down from Takaka. ‘It’s what I’m mainly into now,’ he said casually. ‘It’s a living without too much effort. I never was much on the nine to five, you know.’ He drew in, long and slow, and went slightly cross-eyed with the satisfaction of the joint. ‘The thing is there’s some very ropey people in the business, and I’d rather deal with friends for supply.’

  That’s how it began. A few rows of premium stock planted between the old orchard and the hay barn, and then strips within the shelter belts and along the back gullies. David was a willing enough partner. Cannabis was the best cash crop of all, and he thought that within three or four years the stuff would be legalised anyway. It was bound to come, Chris assured him. Even many of the Health Department boffins were saying that it was less damaging than alcohol, or tobacco.

  They’d just be jumping the gun a little, that’s all, and when decriminalisation came, they’d be there to exploit the opportunities — just like the first people into angora goats, ostriches, olives or truffles.

  At first it was a sideline that David enjoyed as much because it brought Chris’s company, as for the profit, but increasingly it became the easy way to do things at Beth Car. He and Chris would sit on the warm side of the shearing shed putting the seeds into wet cotton wool to germinate, or settling seedlings into trays where they would be left to grow to about milk-bottle height. David had a CD player above the portholes and, when they had talked all they wished, they listened to tracks of trad jazz, or blues. Even better was working in the plots, transplanting, pulling up the useless male plants, or harvesting. Growing cannabis well had all the satisfactions of farming other crops, and a better return. Where could be the harm in such a healthy association with the land? They concentrated on the heads and resin, hardly bothering to try to move cabbage, and they had a good deal of success with skunkweed, which had more grunt than the old stuff. In time they moved into hydroponics as well, which allowed additives, but David never had the same interest in the indoor process and largely left it to Chris.

  It was Chris who usually took the stuff away to their dealers, and no gang members, baseball bats or beatings marred the calm of Beth Car. The Romney ewes dropped no more deformed lambs than usual, the nor’-wester was no worse, roses still bloomed in his mother’s garden, the creek still ran clear through the watercress and wild mint. What damage to the world was a little more good quality shit? What better economic theory than supply and demand?

  FOURTEEN

  From the verandah of Takahe, David could see down the slope to the shore of mudflats and rushes, with Tolly’s white and blue dinghy bottom up. He was making a pretence of listening to Dilys Williams while waiting for Chris’s Picton contact to make a drop for him. ‘That woman who’s Minister of Health, that Janis Bloomfield, she’s made no reply at all to my letters about the goings on here. And the amount of taxpayers’ money that she gets too.’

  ‘I suppose she’s flooded with requests,’ said David.

  ‘I hardly got a word in when she came here. Write to me about it, she said, and I did, and now there’s nothing at all. But God won’t be mocked, you know.’

  ‘You’re right.’ David saw a yellow car park by the shore, and a person get out and wander down to sit on Tolly’s upturned dinghy.

  ‘You reap what you sow,’ said Dilys. There were some patches on her face as red as winter crab apples, and her hands shook with a vehemence out of all proportion to what she could express. Maybe her discovery of ubiquitous sin was the sublimation of her Harlequin fears, and who could blame her for that. David listened to her complaints with more sympathy for a time. ‘Is there anything I can do to help?’ he asked, but her face remained a vivid and preoccupied mask. Sin was everywhere.

  ‘What could you possibly do?’ she snapped. ‘If people won’t listen to me and the director. If the minister won’t act. I know for a fact that personal laundry is being stolen and sold second-hand in Nelson, and there’s a bald man in the kitchens who spits into the soup.’

  ‘Right,’ said David. He saw the yellow car carry on towards Havelock, and knew that his delivery had been made.

  ‘No one takes things seriously enough here. There’s just soothing talk and open slather for any behaviour at all. People have their hands all over other people. Remorse is unknown. No standards, no self-discipline, no rigour. Has indulgence ever solved or cured anything, answer me that? You can’t, can you?’

  After a time with Dilys the need for relief was considerable and David imagined a full draw on some good shit. Who did he think he was to be offering any help anyway. Wasn’t he one of the mockers on whom Dilys wanted to bring down the wrath of lightning? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘if you’ll excuse me, I think I’ll have a stroll, but I wouldn’t give up on a reply from the minister. You ne
ver know.’ Dilys said nothing, offered no release from the conversation, or thanks. She stared angrily away as he left.

  David went down the long drive of the centre until he reached the road. He crossed that, and went to the dinghy in the rushes with the anchor stuck in the ground, even though the boat was above high tide. He sat there for a while with his face tilted to the sun. After all, Dilys Williams might be watching, or someone with Tolly’s telescope. Mocking God was one thing; mocking the system was another. After a session with Dilys he fancied some time with a very different woman as an antidote. Lucy Mortimer might be in the mood for one of their talks, and she appreciated a few joints.

  He moved the diftwood log by the anchor, and felt in the stones beneath it for the plastic bag left for him. A good, solid package that promised release in its fashion from his past and future, and from the part played by Harlequin in the present. The more he came to know Abbey and Tolly Mathews, Gaynor and Howard Peat, the people in whose service he had agreed to be, the more their suffering oppressed him, despite his being so much more fortunate than them.

  He rang Lucy from Takahe when he returned. He heard the guest who had answered his call, shouting her name down the corridor as if she was just anyone at all. ‘Hello?’ Her voice at the phone. ‘Hello?’ How he wished he could have said, You’re cured, and both of them start on some new life.

  ‘The candy man’s been.’

  ‘Well bring some over then, for God’s sake,’ she said. ‘What do you want, a medal?’

  ‘You okay?’

  ‘Peachy,’ she said.

  ‘You’re sure?’

  ‘Come on over,’ she said.

  He put on aftershave and a fresh shirt. He left two tinnies under Tolly’s pillow where he knew he’d look. He gave his most genteel greeting to Mrs McIlwraith, who had her pearls on for mid-afternoon bridge at the rec rooms. ‘God won’t be mocked,’ he heard from the verandah, and chose another way to leave.

  All the original residential blocks were built to the same plan, and whenever David went into one not his own, he had an odd feeling that was a paradox of familiarity and alienation. Lucy’s Kotuku could be walked through in his sleep, and yet where was the Presley transfer on poor Jason’s door, and who was the stranger comfortable in Abbey’s room? Why were the drapes floral rather than plain in the otherwise precisely duplicated lounge, and if he went to room fourteen would the hardboard show the repairs necessary after Jane Milton’s head butting with the devil?

  Lucy had pillows along the wall side of her bed, so that it resembled a divan, and when she’d jammed a stopper under her door for privacy — no locks allowed — she and David sat there in bars of bright yellow sunlight from the slatted window. Her skirt, too, was yellow, and he noticed that not so much because of the colour, but because she was usually in jeans.

  She was happy because she felt well. She was happy because she’d talked with Schweitzer about the possibility of doing a programme on Harlequin that focused on interviews with staff and patients at the centre. Schweitzer was usually opposed to media coverage, but Lucy had emphasised that she had a foot in both camps, that she knew the world of Big Eye television and now that of the new disease. The director had said he was willing to consider a more detailed submission, though he warned that the politicians were apprehensive of anything which would increase public awareness of Harlequin.

  ‘Will you be running auditions?’ David asked.

  ‘Only for stars,’ she said.

  ‘Will I get a big chance?’ She couldn’t know how little he wanted to feature in any filming at Mahakipawa: that if it wasn’t for the pleasure the idea gave her, he would wish it never happened.

  ‘Maybe you’d have a small walk-on part.’

  ‘Not a lie-down role maybe?’ David said.

  Jesus, he hadn’t seen Lucy so happy for a long time. It was the way she had been before she got sick, surely, and the jolt of that was painful even as he put his arm around her. They lay together with their legs in the sun; their voices became softer, as less and less was said and more and more intended. They began that journey of languorous, almost helpless anticipation, which comes before a first, fierce lovemaking. Have we ever needed an Einstein to tell us that time is relative? Extreme joy or horror can rein in even the Pegasus of time. Lucy’s yellow dress was a response to the warm day, perhaps, or a less deliberate one to the possibilities of David’s visit. The dress was linen, with an open weave. How coarse the fabric was on the back of his hand, when her thigh was silk to the palm.

  ‘Open your shirt,’ Lucy said.

  It was unethical, of course: forbidden explicitly in the contract he had signed, even though he was too humble an employee to be professionally related to any treatment. But then what treatment was there at the centre except care, and what more caring restoration than he performed.

  ‘Easy, oh easy,’ she said.

  It was unethical, of course, but what were such observances within a death camp, where defiant love might be one way of fighting back. Lucy knelt on her bed and above her glossy hair was the slatted view of the gorse and broom flourishing in rough pasture on the hillside. All of it pulsated with the coursing of his blood. Wasn’t all of life in the moment? No past, no future, just the plummet of a present that had as much completeness as he’d ever know. His hands were brown and spread against Lucy’s back.

  ‘Not so loud, or half the bloody hospital will hear,’ she said.

  ‘Was I saying something?’ A language, surely, which transcended any script, or grammar, and came quite naturally to all throughout the world who were suffering such joy. Maybe, even, it was the speech of the good twin of Harlequin.

  Lucy smiled, lay on her side, and pulled the discarded linen dress across her hip. No other woman he had seen naked was as provocative, even though fucking had flushed her up, so that her neck and collar bones were mottled, and her hair was still ruffled from the bed.

  ‘Well, are you satisfied now it’s happened?’ she said.

  ‘Blown away,’ he said.

  ‘I hope so. I was really in the mood.’

  ‘So was I. Jesus.’

  ‘But men always are, aren’t they?’

  ‘Pretty much, I suppose,’ he said, and Lucy smiled at the honesty.

  It was unethical, of course, but what possible connection did prudent principles have to your real life.

  Lucy reached out and, with the tips of her fingers, brushed the hair back from his forehead: that reassuring contact that a woman makes with a man after the passion of lovemaking, and which affirms the satisfaction of it, but affirms also other reasons for closeness. ‘You’re sweating,’ she said.

  ‘From the best work in the world,’ David said. Didn’t every man go on with the hope of such times.

  ‘Guys always think that at first,’ she told him. There was a slight shaving shadow in her armpit, and an indistinct vee of browner skin above her breasts. Fine hairs parenthesised the upper corners of her mouth. She lay comfortably in his gaze once she had the dress over her bush. Her breasts pooled with their own weight as she lay on her back; the nipples shone with his spit. For an instant he remembered the married woman he’d slept with for several nights in Hobart. She had recently given birth to a son, and each time he left her bed to return quietly to his own, he had her milk on his chest.

  David experienced protectiveness, admiration, once that fierce consummation had subsided. Lucy’s face wasn’t beautiful in any fine-boned, profile emphatic way. Rather it was girlishly wide, broad-browed, smooth, the eyes so far apart that she couldn’t possibly enter the criminal fraternity. She had Hollywood teeth, though, and when David told her so, she said that all her front teeth had been capped because of her work on television. ‘It’s my fetish,’ she told him. ‘Always what I notice first, and television is cruel on teeth.’ She never ate anything during a working day, unless she had a toothbrush handy, she said. In a day of appearances she might go ten hours without eating, rather than risk food between her tee
th. And no red wine because it stained the natural teeth.

  ‘Keep talking,’ said David.

  ‘You’re not even listening.’

  ‘No, but keep talking.’

  As all on the hillside lost colour, but remained distinct because of texture and plane, Lucy and David lay on the narrow institutional bed. They heard the Kotuku people go down to the dining hall and then come back. He couldn’t believe that there’d ever been a better fuck in the Slaven Centre than that. ‘Tell me what it’s like to be so good-looking,’ he said. ‘No false modesty now, no bullshit. What’s it like?’

  ‘Do you think I am?’

  ‘Answer the question.’

  ‘Success always made me feel attractive,’ she said. ‘Success not just with men, but in my life. I felt good when I did my job well, and ugly when I got sick.’

  As David massaged her shoulder, the curve of her breast trembled in a perfection of arc and subtle movement. Never forget this, he told himself. Never forget this. Some time when he was waiting for death, he would restore the moment as a triumphant solace. Old age becomes the voyeur of its own past. Half alongside, half over her, graceful only because his body followed the line of hers, the whisper of his palm on her shoulder, the tremor of her unconfined tits, a laugh drifting from the lounge, their own candid talk, the faintly salty smell of her hair, shadows, her face with a smile which had complacency, and irony as well because she understood the transience of such idolatry.

  ‘Now that we’ve done it, you can tell me something personal about you and women,’ she said.

  ‘It took me ages to get past the assumption that good-looking women were more interested in sex. Somehow I took it for granted that anyone who stirred up so much desire must be looking for it.’

  ‘It sounds like your excuse for striking out.’

  ‘Maybe that too. Maybe I just grew up a bit,’ he said.