Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  Wilkin had a washed-out elegance — ivory wrists and eyes of faded blue china — but his talk transfixed people with a threat beyond even boredom. God knows what he had done to generations of children. Behind Wilkin’s words were the sighing of some universal futility and the rustle of chrysalid husks, the drift of wet Sunday afternoons, the gagging stench of railway station urinals, the barking of dog biscuit commercials in an empty room, winter afternoons with the light squeezed out of them before workers could get home to eat.

  Death, though, with sleeping tablets: that’s what Wilkin had tried. It must have been a day when even the flat tines prophecy of the giant elk was not enough, but a few days later there he was in the Takahe lounge telling David of Howard’s unapproachability. Whether in heaven or hell, Wilkin would end up chairing the dress code committee. ‘How serious is it with Howard this time, do you think?’ he asked David. His QSM was kept in its presentation box on the table in his room. What did it say of David’s life that he must make reply to a man who communicated with an oracular Irish elk, while Abbey went uncomforted, and Tolly fished alone on the green sound.

  While Lucy Mortimer, who was always in his thoughts, had her special session with Schweitzer.

  They got into it in quite a big way in the end, so that he found himself almost wealthy, able to put some aside, which turned out to be a wise precaution. Sneaky Pete had Sydney contacts, and David and Chris took a few days there combining work and recreation. King’s Cross was a disappointment to them, in appearance as much as anything else. David had imagined lurid skyscrapers, flashing lights, animated if superficial glamour, the scent of recklessness in the air. Instead, arriving with Chris on a mid-week afternoon, he found a suburban shopping centre with more pushchairs than tarts in the doorways. Only the disposable syringes lying in the alleys and at the backs of buildings hinted at the vivid desperation of the nights. The cafés by the small, ornamental park were half full of package tourists who would be able to say they’d been there, but most wouldn’t come back after dark.

  Just two or three teasers were out, as proof of trade. The best was at the entrance to the station. She was tall and had red velvet hotpants, a cigarette in the very centre of her lips and nipples outlined beneath the white stretch fabric of her top. She spoilt it by standing with one knee bent like an idle horse. Her face was implacable rather than impassive, deflecting the male glances with studied ease.

  ‘You need to get the weight off your feet,’ suggested Chris.

  ‘Got an idea about that then?’ she said. The cigarette twitched as she talked; her eyes continued to appraise the people going in and out to the subway.

  ‘Who’s got all the good weed around here?’ asked David.

  ‘Stumps me,’ she said.

  ‘You know where Piney Realty is then?’

  ‘Are you after it or not?’

  ‘Lawrence Meelan, Piney Realty.’

  ‘Fuck off and leave me alone,’ she said. Her voice was the real thing: like a crack of a whip. A voice that anticipated the appearance she’d have in fifteen or twenty years.

  They found the Piney office by the supermarket, and Lawrence Meelan walked with them to an Irish pub, where they talked about the sort of costings that would make it worthwhile to bring shit in from Christchurch. Once Meelan realised that they didn’t have a good source of hard stuff, only New Zealand resin, he lost a lot of interest. He must have misunderstood from Sneaky, he said. Maybe they’d like to pick up a reverse trade in ecstasy?

  That was the end of the business side of the trip. Chris spent the next four days with a separated woman he’d met at the Irish pub when David was talking to Kevin, whom he hadn’t seen since their time together at Llama Heaven. A good-looking woman, but with such a throaty voice that at first Chris had his doubts. It required a brief carnal interrogation then and there, before she was invited back to the hotel and onto the payroll. David left them to it, and flew to Auckland, spent a few days with his mother, who had a cross-lease town house of concrete block in Herne Bay. It wasn’t that he disliked Australia; he liked it a good deal, and had travelled there several times. But it wasn’t home. He liked the openness and humour of Aussies, the touch of flamboyance that came perhaps from the old outback characters as well as the middle European migrants. He liked their cities, and the vast heartlands without cities. He liked the gum trees fraying at their trunks, and deep, soft rivers. He liked the vineyards in wide valleys, and the old, façade pubs in the small towns. Beaches that met the horizon he liked, and the flocks of galahs at the artesian pumps. But it wasn’t home.

  Auckland wasn’t really home either. Why had his mother shifted so far away from Canterbury and Beth Car? So far from him? ‘You’ve got to keep challenging yourself as you get older,’ she said. ‘New places for new starts, otherwise the old population holds you back.’

  He had been able to give her an increasing payout from Beth Car, and she enjoyed spending it. How she loved to buy a new blouse, or jacket, with a good label. She dressed herself well on the proceeds of cannabis without realising it. The three days there were some of the best they ever had together, for as well as love for him, and that was never completely lost, she had then respect and pride. What David remembered most of the Herne Bay visit wasn’t the new clothes his mother displayed after her shopping trips, or the talks they had on the sundeck, but the memories that she evoked without the subject of them coming up in conversation at all.

  Her flat was a model of order and cleanliness, as if in perpetual readiness for land agents and their clients. The reasonable detritus of everyday living was never apparent in his mother’s house — no lightly balled long hair under the dresser from her brush, no crumpled tissues, no dockets tonguing from ornaments, no mummified scraps at the back of her refrigerator shelves, no sweat stains as rosettes beneath the sleeves of her clothes. Was it significant, perhaps, that for David her smell was always a perfume, while his father’s strong, clean smell of flesh was utterly distinct and individual.

  When he was seventeen, David and his mother had spent four days staying with the Corringers in Kohimarama. She instructed him in the etiquette of host and hosted. What should they do? she asked him. A gift, David suggested: flowers and chocolate. He thought it a good answer. He’d seen his mother give and receive as much. Did he think they’d been in a hotel? They were leaving after four days in the Corringers’ guest suite, and he wouldn’t clean from top to bottom? She gave him a lesson in cleaning the lavatory — the Harpic and brush, the Dettol cloth, the blue liquid squirted under the rim and left for fifteen minutes. Did he think lavatories cleaned themselves? Even in his exasperation, David admired the self-respect that lay behind such demon concern for appearances. On judgement day she would look every past host in the eye with equanimity. David had the uneasy recollection of the under-seventeen rugby tournament in Wellington, and the post-party vomit that he’d wrapped in a duvet and hidden in his host’s wardrobe. Always imagine your travel arrangements falling through, and having to come back to your hosts, his mother told him. There were a good many later year hosts to whom David fervently wished never to return.

  EIGHTEEN

  There was a pub at the top end of Havelock called by locals The Squat, although its official name made spurious claims to dignity. David went there sometimes when he was off duty, taking Raf’s little Mazda and driving over the Mahakipawa Hill with its slopes of pigfern and scrub. Very seldom were they able to go together, because of the rosters, and they agreed that was an added advantage on occasion. Friendship is always strengthened by the opportunity for privacy.

  David went on the Thursday afternoon after Howard Peat died. It was a relief at such times to be among a population who had a normal life expectancy, and whom he owed nothing. The Squat had an old-fashioned narrow bar, with a snooker table in the end away from the windows and the road. The nip bottles made a fretwork above the stools of the front bar; there was a child’s wood-framed blackboard listing the meals in white and yellow chalk.
Harlequin was just a hill and a world away. Like Shane in the cowboy book, David sat where he could see the door.

  Bev from the post office, her tear scar ever fresh, was having a brandy and Coke with Michael, her neighbour. David had talked with him once before, about night flounder fishing. Just a hill and a world away, but then it takes only a plywood wall in a block of flats to separate hell from heaven. Who was looking after the post office letters, David wondered.

  The barman was tall and courteous, his arms so muscular that it seemed an effort of his will was necessary to ensure the glasses weren’t crushed as he carried them. He put the drinks before them with a smile, and just a quick, inoffensive glance down Bev’s blouse as she scratched her ankle.

  ‘How are things at the centre?’ he said. Just a hill and a world away.

  ‘No riots as yet,’ said David.

  ‘All that new building though, eh,’ and the barman withdrew with a smile to show that he didn’t expect a reply. His powerful arms hung empty, at a loss, by his side.

  ‘Michael goes there a bit,’ said Bev.

  ‘Nothing to do with the new buildings,’ said Michael the flounder man. ‘That’s all Nelson contractors, but I do a bit of plumbing and electrical stuff when your own people there are pushed.’ Michael may once have been bigger, but his body had settled back into a comfortable size. His head sank comfortably into his shoulders and the sleeves of his green work jersey were given an extra roll at the wrists. The back of his neck had a greying, untrimmed fuzz like that on a dog’s leg, the sign of a man with no caring wife, or mistress, and who is spinning money out from one haircut to the next. ‘In the times I’ve been there, I’ve never seen a really crook one. You hear the stories of what they get up to, right off their chump, but I’ve never seen any poor bastard go off the deep end,’ said Michael.

  ‘People are usually put in treatment as soon as there are signs of an episode. Most of the time there’s no problem.’ Well, not for those on the outside, David thought. ‘Some come right and are discharged, go home for good perhaps,’ he said. It was better that he didn’t tell the stories of Jane, Howard, Jason, or Alice Bee.

  ‘Every now and again I see one or two over here for the day,’ said Bev. ‘I’ve had them in the post office, and they often go to see the little church museum. Nothing’s ever stolen as far as I know. Mostly they fossick around the shore.’

  Schweitzer’s policy was that patients could go into Picton, or Havelock, if accompanied by a staff member — one on one, and therefore inconspicuous. The ruling arose not through fear of an episode during a visit, but as sensitivity to the centre’s effect on the settlements on either side. They were too small and self-contained to cope with mass therapy visits. Also there was political pressure to draw as little attention as possible to Harlequin’s growth.

  ‘You came last with the millionaire — a chap with a Rolex, but no airs and graces at all.’ David had introduced Tolly Mathews to Bev. She had seen him with Lucy several times too, but tactfully said nothing of that.

  ‘A millionaire, eh,’ said Michael. ‘Is that right? You wouldn’t think a millionaire would get sick in the head, would you?’ Floundering was a good little earner on the side, but Michael had never known big money.

  ‘Well, I don’t know about millionaire.’ Some mild disclaimer was necessary. Before you knew it the locals would have the impression that the patients were all loaded. But he did know, and what he knew was that in terms of assets Tolly was a multi-millionaire, and that wasn’t uncommon any more. There were plenty of houses in Auckland and Wellington worth more than a couple of million. David thought it might be a good thing to get Tolly and Michael together. Tolly could supply the drinks and the news of the world; Michael could share his local knowledge of time and tide: the soft, slanting submarine places where flounder bulged their eye from artful camouflage and suckled in the sand. They’d get on fine.

  But rather than thinking of the future, or even the present with Michael and Bev in The Squat, it was his last visit with Lucy that David inhabited. He’d been compelled to go 0through the formality of asking Tony Sheridan for permission. There had been a moment when they both knew that Tony was about to ask him if anything was going on, but the doctor couldn’t quite get it out.

  David and Lucy had gone to the museum, as no doubt Bev observed from her window. It was a narrow, wooden church with solid plank chocks under the steps. The pews were gone, replaced by butter churns, pit-saws, dray wheels, sad photos of bullock drivers, bushmen and women with unwashed hair. There were glassed cases of fob watches on chains, sovereign purses, buttoned shoes, trade certificates, and the medals of Corporal Charles W. Riley, who died of disease on the Somme. Right at the front, under sufferance, the church was allowed some history of its own: a simple lectern pulpit made from the timbers of the Criccieth wrecked in 1887, and a dry, cracked board with the names of every minister, until all the congregation had been quite preached away.

  Lucy and he had gone down to the water too: down the same road he’d taken with his sandwiches when he came to Havelock to take his job at the centre, by Nottage & Son boat-builders again, though the clinker-built dinghy was gone, released onto the sea. They sat by the enclosing breakwater and watched the flotsam moving at the angle between the wall and the shore, like spittle at the corner of an incessant talker’s mouth. Lucy broke off pieces of a dock plant and flicked them into the incoming tide which was stirring up a fine sludge that moved over the mudflats as a faint skirt in front of the clean water behind.

  She wasn’t glamorous that day. Sitting pulled the cuffs of her jeans higher on her shins, showing the stubble there, and her hair was pulled back simply from her face, emphasising her high, round forehead. She had a slight rash behind her left ear, which she stroked with two fingers. He’d never loved her more, and ached to save her. ‘I bet you’d never heard of Havelock, had you?’ he said. ‘Certainly not Mahakipawa.’

  ‘No. Havelock North I know, though.’ Her slim fingers continued to snap and shred the dock plants, or trace the inching skin by her ear.

  ‘There’s a South Island Palmerston too, but of course it’s been forgotten for Palmerston North. You never know where your life’s going to, do you? Like a Havelock boy ending up getting shot on some Boer War donga, like an Auckland girl marrying a Yank soldier and then off to Minnesota to live, like a guy in Bulls owning the same dairy for sixty years and being buried beside his parents who had it before him.’

  ‘Like fronting on national television and then getting Harlequin and ending up here, right?’ she said.

  ‘Yes, that’s it. Can you hack it?’

  They could hear small children from the school playground not far away: the delighted shrieks of self-induced terror, the chanting and taunting, the hubbub of energy released. Perhaps what he was trying to say to Lucy was that all the moods and possibilities were there together in an instant, but experienced separately, as white light contains all the colours of the rainbow. Heaven and hell only a breath and a chance apart. The kids climbed the jungle gym, while over the Mahakipawa Hill new buildings went up to Harlequin. The wizened deerstalker, once mighty, choked to death on a cherry stone in the Picton Rest Home, while Abbey at the centre was acclaimed in concert for the playing of Liszt. The police continued to investigate a murder of passion in Kaikoura, while the history of the Te Tarehi Dairy Co-operative was launched with five cardboard casks of indeterminate white wine and seven kilograms of mild cheese.

  ‘I guess it was a pretty exciting life in television,’ said David.

  ‘In a way, but you’re so busy that the enjoyment of it tends to get squeezed out. There were plenty of parties, but I felt rather hunted all through it by the need to be prepared, to do a good job. People around are surprisingly supportive, but the system itself’s bloody unrelenting.’

  ‘So many people keen to get a look in, I suppose.’

  ‘Nothing’s settled,’ she said. ‘Change is always on the way. Restructuring is how the manageme
nt make a living, and it seems to me that the youth culture drives TV now.’

  ‘You’ll go back to it the better for a break,’ he said, and quickly wished he hadn’t.

  ‘Oh, sure,’ she said, ‘I’m relying on it.’ Heaven and hell just a breath away.

  They walked as far as it was possible along the breakwater, and looked back at the small town at the foot of the hill, saw the arm of the sound running up the valley that the road followed to Nelson. Beds of reeds, brush stiff at a distance, lined the shore. They relaxed in the sun, watched the tide coming, said little and didn’t kiss, but loosely held each other’s fingers. The perfumed wind came up the sound and cooled them. A sheep truck was busy on the Mahakipawa Hill.

  ‘You never say much about your life,’ Lucy said.

  ‘A farm, an arts degree, the big OE, a farm, a failure.’

  ‘And family?’

  ‘Just Mum and Dad. Both dead now.’ Just a breath away. Just a breath away.

  ‘Raf reckons maybe something went really bad for you,’ said Lucy. ‘That it’s knocked your confidence pretty much.’

  ‘Everyone’s a psychologist, don’t you think? I’m no more mysterious than anybody else.’ It was odd though to be reminded that other people spoke about you in your absence: that they had opinions about your life and behaviour which they’d never think to say to your face. ‘Maybe I just didn’t find something to hook into like other people,’ he said. ‘Some were into pop music, or travel, or career success. Sport was big for some, or getting pissed every weekend. I’ve just never found one thing to concentrate on.’ Except the shit, of course, but he didn’t like to see his entire life as revolving around that.

  ‘You liked farming, though?’ said Lucy.

  ‘Yeah, I did. Well, maybe I liked living on a farm rather than keeping up with all the stuff to be done there. I got lazy, I suppose.’

  ‘And it was round here?’