Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  Churchill called depression his black dog, and it followed him faithfully enough, drawing closer to his heels with old age. There were traces of white paint where David’s nails grew from the skin, yet he had no recollection that would serve as an explanation. Someone’s sneakers lay on their side with long laces limp on the verandah, and the stained ivory soles worn through to blue on the pressure points. Faintly yellowed sweat stains showed on Raf’s shirt as he leant back with his hands clasped behind his head. It was a poor creation after all: the uncouth gorse on the slopes, the sheen of the mudflats, the blatancy of the far hills’ appeal. No wonder that disease came easily. Raf and David talked without much interest in the topic, or each other’s company. They were considering an outing for their Takahe charges.

  Despair is the sense of loathing we have for the world. David had access to alcohol as well as cannabis. A combined dose when he longed to escape the glint of Wilfe Orme’s discoloured teeth, the sound of the inane games show through the thin wall, the crass sweetness of Jungle Glade toilet freshener, the reptilian touch of the communal plastic chairs, the cattle splattering shit on the gorse slope, the partly repressed memories of his more significant failures.

  David left Raf’s room, rang Tony Sheridan and asked if he could go down and talk with him: it was time perhaps to hand in notice and leave the Plague House before coming down with Harlequin himself. It was a temptation of fate after all, wasn’t it? No one could guarantee a lack of contagion. Maybe it would be like those nineteenth-century leper colonies, with the priests at last recognising on their own bodies the lesions that they had been ministering to on others. David certainly lacked sufficient sense of faith and calling to accept that with resignation. The Slaven Centre was a bolt hole as far as he was concerned, not a place of service. He thought about it as he went down to Sheridan’s office, but no matter how many considerations drew the scales down on the side of leaving, the single presence of Lucy was more than enough to outweigh them.

  ‘It’s natural to have downers here,’ said Sheridan. ‘All of us in the medical services are acting contrary to our natural instinct to avoid debility, sickness and disease and, though we repress it, that instinct will have its release in some way or another.’ He was in something of a philosophical mood, because he had no more treatment sessions for the day. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his huge shoes were like leather petals from a common centre. ‘I’m collating my research on the proclivity of Harlequin patients to experience episodes at much the same time, in the same way that communities of young women tend to a common pattern of menstruation.’

  ‘Or maybe it’s the food,’ David said unkindly. Silverside every Monday, pastas on Thursdays, Sunday simple salads that could clear out the digestive system of a Clydesdale. The whiff of mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs lingered through the buildings as a transpiration of religion.

  And Lucy was sick again.

  David realised he should be interested enough to draw Tony Sheridan out concerning his research, but his own boredom and discontent were more important than the conventions of friendship — or the possible salvation of the world. More than anything else he needed some change of scene, some distraction from the modern blocks of the centre on the hillside and the peep show that was Harlequin.

  And Lucy was sick again and there was nothing he could do for her.

  ‘Raf and I thought we might take some of our group on an outing,’ he told the doctor. ‘The ones stable at the moment. It must be good therapy.’

  ‘Where to, though? Picton and Havelock are out for groups — you know that.’

  ‘Oh, we’d be well hidden from everything but the sun and the sea and the sky. There won’t be any witnesses at Pan Bay. We could all writhe on the ground, and froth from various orifices without inconvenience, or alarm, to the locals.’

  Sheridan just wagged the leather petals of his feet, and stirred the baby-soft fluff at the sides of his balding head. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Sound off. I get paid to listen to everybody work off a shitty mood, but it’ll have to be done correctly all the same. You know, the form with the people who want to go for me to check through, the right ratio of staff, an itinerary — the full Scout manual stuff, otherwise it’s no go.’

  All the needs of bureaucracy were dutifully attended to that week, and on the day they were provided with packed lunches: those with mustard in the sandwiches marked with a green felt pen. Sara Keppler had been declared unfit to go, and she wept, sulked, then disappeared just before the mini-vans left. How she missed her old fire-bug, Jason, who had been friend and lover. Tony Sheridan assured Raf and David that he would find her, that they should go on and not give Sara the satisfaction of spoiling the picnic. ‘She hardly knows what she’s doing at the moment,’ he said. ‘Once you’re away she’ll forget all about it and be right as rain.’

  He stood at the car park with the Solomon twins from Titi, who happened to be passing, and the three of them farewelled the Takahe party down the shingle drive. Although only there by chance, the twins remained after the doctor turned away, and waved until the vans were out of sight.

  Dilys Williams was in the front seat of the van David drove. She adjusted the seatbelt so that her breasts wouldn’t be crushed if they had an accident. ‘Those Solomon twins,’ she told him as an equal. ‘They steal stuff from the laundry room. And when they had a search at Titi, there were dozens of knickers and vests and stuff in their room. Even though some of it was named, they never so much as made an apology. Can you believe that? All this stuff in their room and they were as brazen as you like.’

  ‘Is that so? Jesus.’ But what interested David more than the alleged kleptomania of the twins was that they should end up at the centre, both with Harlequin. He wondered what Schweitzer made of that.

  Pan Bay was one of the small inlets in the sound, with a creek flowing in a culvert under the road, and a shore of finer shingle — almost sand — because of some protection from the swell. The stiff rushes immediately behind the beach held up scurf from the last storm, and the wind was just enough to ruffle the shallow water of high tide. In all that they could see, there were signs of only one home: the red tin roof of a farmhouse above hedges, a pipe and netting gate at the road, a hand-written sign rigged up in a trailer at that gate which offered unshelled walnuts, and self-pick mushrooms at $15 a bucket, even though not one pale dome was in sight.

  The mini-vans were parked to provide shade, and those who wanted to read, or sit and talk, spread their rugs there. Wilfe Orme had a tubular, folding seat that was the object of much undisclosed envy: Gaynor Runcinski and recidivist Eddie Simm set one of the chilly bins between them to act as a chess table. ‘A little cell of fucking intellectuals,’ said Jock McPhie to the wind, as he went off with his thread line to fish.

  Fourteen was the limit that Raf and David were allowed to take away. David wondered how such a regulation ratio was arrived at — one to seven — and what was expected of the one if the seven ran amok. Aides were assumed to be like the little tailor perhaps: seven at one blow. ‘Remember,’ Raf told them, ‘no one beyond the sound of the car horns at any time.’ And how would they ever know until the horns were sounded? Mrs McIlwraith spent some minutes gaining a consensus as to which van would be the changing place for women and which for men. Raf said that he’d been on this course where they stressed the significance of delegating non-essential decisions to patients as a way of preventing dependency and a sense of powerlessness. ‘All crap,’ he said, as he watched Mrs McIlwraith stirring up resentment among her fellows. ‘And who would seek an excuse to catch a glimpse of her scraggy bum in any case?’

  David, Tolly and a few others went for a swim, but even though the sun was bright and the water warm enough, it wasn’t a great success, because you had to wade out and out before the water deepened much at all and, despite the stones of the small beach, they could find only mud as a footing further out. Even though they had light sneakers on to protect their feet from broken shells,
the mud clung unpleasantly to their legs, and swirled up into the shallow water when they tried to swim. So they went back and lay with their heads in the shade of a van, bodies in the sun.

  Tolly thought that maybe at low tide he would find a channel exposed and be able to walk out to clear, deep water. He was struck by the oddity of fate that had brought him to the place and the predicament. ‘Just a few months ago I’d never heard of Mahakipawa, or Harlequin’s disease, had no idea that God had a brother called Schweitzer. I had a five-bedroom three-bathroom architecturally designed house and was running three factories. I had women trying to catch my eye at conferences. The bank manager picked me up for golf. Now here I am with you guys: grass stalks up my bum, mud up to my crotch.’ He was right. Only the most trivial and the most fundamental concerns seemed to be left, nothing in between, and so the distinction blurred. Extinction, and the failure to win a volleyball game, were equals at Mahakipawa.

  ‘Don’t get on to all that today,’ David said. ‘Jesus, let’s just relax here and leave all that behind.’

  ‘I’ll tell you what, Tolly,’ said Raf. ‘I’ve got two cans of Speights for each of us. Strictly verboten as you know, but David and I have put our distinguished careers on the line for you all. So stop feeling sorry for yourself, and put them in a sack in the sea so they’ll be cool at lunch. And because you’re such a big businessman, it’s your shout all round. Right?’

  ‘Speights,’ grumbled Tolly, but he went willingly to get the cans from Raf’s van. ‘What is it with you people down here and Speights?’

  Abbey had replaced Gaynor as Eddie’s chess opponent, and they had the doors open in the other van so that music from the radio drifted out to them as they played. The aching falsetto of early Orbison seemed completely at home in a land and seascape that he would never know. Jock was smaller than a thumb, knee deep and casting at a distance; Gaynor, Wilfe and a couple of others were closer, idly looking for shells worth keeping; Tolly was almost full size and tying a driftwood marker to the sack of beer that he had sunk in the sea.

  The Big O had been dead a good while, and revived musically several times since. The great stuff just keeps coming back, Raf reckoned. David remembered those promotional photos of Orbison with his blank, pasty face, and dark glasses to hide his eyes. And the voice giving it all away. When their picnic was over, when they were back at the centre leaving only tyre tracks and orange peel in the rushes and gravel, then maybe the Big O would still be bouncing ‘Pretty Woman’ across the sound and up the slopes of the bushed hills that enclosed it.

  A launch was going steadily up the sound towards Havelock and, because any boat at all was a rarity, it held their attention. It hit the chop with regular reverberation and a person in a blue anorak went and stood at the stern for a brief time and then disappeared. ‘If I was in that,’ shouted Jock, ‘I bet I’d catch some bloody fish. This Pan Bay is hopeless: too shallow and with a mud bottom. Useless.’

  ‘You’ve not got what it takes, that’s all,’ said Tolly.

  A picnic is a dangerous, insubstantial thing once childhood is past, for it sets expectations that are never achieved, and an institutional picnic is the least favoured and most predictably disappointing of all. Like an artificial Christmas tree, or an orphanage reunion, it mocks the very feelings that it attempts to uphold. Abbey playing chess, Jock fishing, Gaynor stooping for a palely pink shell, Mrs McIlwraith exposing her demure ankles to the sun, Tolly wading back without the sack, were surely all wondering when the quiet, but fiercely spinning earth would throw them off, yet no one said a word of that, and they came and gathered at the vans for the apparently significant division of those packed lunches marked with green felt pen, and those untouched by mustard. The launch had become a water beetle far away, and Gaynor’s upper arms, well muscled from years of weaving, were already pink in the sun. ‘There are some small, dart-like shells,’ she said, ‘quite nondescript on the outside, but with exquisite colours on the inside lip.’ She had two like flint arrowheads in her palm, but only Abbey took a quick look.

  As well as sandwich packs to bicker over, there was the imperative of choosing a banana that wasn’t too badly blackened on the skin. David and Abbey caught each other’s eye, but nothing was said. What purpose is ever served by the mutual recognition of such ironies?

  ‘The thing I’d like to do is come back here at night with torches and spears. I reckon that there’d be a whole bunch of flounder on the bottom of shallow water here at night. You can pick them out with the lights, you know, and spear them easily. Flounder like a soft bed without much current.’ Jock was having no luck at all with the thread line, but the vision of darkness, quick with flashing lights and spears, countered his failure. The slick mud was drying to grey on his legs, and his hair was spiked up like a boy’s when he took off his yellow, floppy hat. How he would enjoy a night with Post Office Bev’s floundering friend from Havelock, David thought. Maybe it was something he could organise.

  On the hard, uneven shore, with just tartan rugs beneath them, many of the group slept in the afternoon while change was imperceptible: just the sea slinking back from the mudflats and the sharp shadows from the vans to tell the time. Those who were still awake were no longer urgent in action or conversation, and the murmur of their voices, the easy silences, the low laughter, were stitched to the noise of the breeze, a few piping birds drawn to the feeding opportunities of the receding tide, and the subdued snores of Tolly and Gaynor Runcinski. Although David faced Montgomery, who told of his plans to visit India once he was well, although he smiled and nodded even, he was by preference with Lucy, imagining her session with Schweitzer. Her unpainted nails had a trick of catching the light, and there were tendrils of dark hair at the nape of her neck which escaped the casual band she wore. Montgomery went off a few paces to find a more animated conversationalist, and woke Raf, whose face continued for a while to have the relaxed blandness of sleep. ‘Sometimes the more I sleep, the more I want to,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll die of it. Maybe it’s a sign I should take notice of the life I lead.’

  ‘Better than striking Alice Bee on a bad day,’ David said.

  ‘It’s odd you mention her. Roimata Wallace told me yesterday that Alice spent her time at the end balancing on her hands with her feet in the air no trouble at all.’

  Poor old Alice. She once told David, during a programme session in her block, that the very first thing she could remember was a golden Labrador standing in her kindergarten sandpit. The inside of its lips glistened, she said, and it had a feathered front foot in a red plastic bucket. What final recollection did she have when connected with the national grid through the dayroom plug?

  Montgomery’s talk of India was soon overridden by interest in the work of memory. Raf told them that neurological research increasingly suggested that all experience is completely recorded, and that it’s only the access which is limited. He knew of a woman who suffered brain damage in an accident and who for several days had the exact sights, scents, touch, conversations word perfect, from happenings thirty years before, which had never until then been available to her conscious memory.

  Raf’s own earliest recollection was of being smacked for sneezing mucus into his sister’s face without malice, or intention. He could still see the hokey-pokey ice-cream in her mouth as she opened it to yell, the concentric blue bands on the milk jug in front of him, feel the sudden pang of fear and anger that his mother should smack him hard and console his sister. ‘What can you remember, Abbey?’ Raf asked her. ‘What’s the very first thing?’

  And Abbey told them, with the candour that illness can bring; Gaynor and Wilfe drew closer to her side of the van to hear it. The first image of her life was not of any familiar face, or place of childhood, but a basement she never entered in a house visited only once. Some acquaintance when they were travelling, and she stood barefoot, unsteady, on dry scratchy grass outside a basement door. A heavy man with evident nasal hair came through the door, struck his head, reeled back,
came on again and struck again with an impact of great solidity. His smile was tugged away and replaced by such pain and fury, such full-throated obscenity, that Abbey panicked and ran. Beyond the brown lawn which curved endlessly away as she ran, was an equally boundless sea, she said, with a blue, eternal glitter.

  ‘How could you remember it so exactly?’ said Dilys derisively. ‘It’s a nonsense.’ Abbey had no more to say, but David waited until he could catch her eye again, and then smiled. The world was full of Dilys people, and had so few Abbeys. What was his own first tableau of the world? Riding Billy Bunter, the pet lamb that had become gargantuan. The crimped wool on Billy’s skin, the feel of muscles and sinews beneath, Billy’s powerful stench of life, the comfort of his father’s steadying hand. There had been a strong, low sun, hadn’t there, which spread great shadows right across the world.

  Raf decided on a walk for everybody before putting his mind to a barbecue tea. ‘Come on, you loafers,’ he called. ‘Let’s pull finger and get this show on the road.’ Like a school field trip party they began a walk along the water’s edge of Pan Bay, and only Jock and Montgomery remained behind: Jock to maintain the vision of himself as a confirmed fisherman, Montgomery because he’d had bad news from home and wanted to smoke the shit David had given him to assuage that news. But being left together brought them no closer. Jock waded into the sea once more with his thread line; Montgomery stood with studied indifference by the vans and gazed inland.

  ‘Where are we going?’ asked Tolly Mathews.

  ‘Round to the point of the bay and back,’ David said. ‘Work up an appetite for all the sausages we’ve got.’

  ‘It’s just so hot,’ said Mary Cross. She seemed to be swelling in her top, so that neck and upper arms bulged from the fabric.