‘Just the politicos as usual.’
‘Yes.’
‘How many deaths at that place in the last year?’ asked the super. At his elbow he had Cook’s file, which had gone with him to Wellington.
‘Over two hundred and eighty.’
‘And some very odd ones among those, for Christ’s sake, weren’t there? How many more people admitted in the last two months or so?’
‘Nearly two hundred.’ The detective senior sergeant knew his own report well enough to have given the exact figure, but he didn’t want to appear a smart arse. Smart arses didn’t go down well with the superintendent, who went on to tell Cook more about the high-level Wellington apprehension concerning Harlequin: the effects if no reassuring advance was made in its treatment; the establishment of two more centres in the North Island. The superintendent had been told to draw up contingency plans without the Slaven Centre medical people being made aware of all the objectives. Toby Cook was delegated the task of gaining the information needed, under the guise of setting up a more effective police response to the centre’s needs when Harlequin patients stretched the hospital’s resources, or broke out into the surrounding communities during episodes.
‘I’ve talked to the director,’ said the superintendent, ‘and he’s to arrange that you have the co-operation of the 2IC there, Dr Mousier. You’ve dealt with him?’
‘Yeah, a no nonsense guy.’ Cook realised that the job was a delicate one; that if it was botched it would mean the careers of them both. The super was reposing trust in him, not because of the detective’s MA in business management from Massey, but because he thought Cook had judgement. It was a significant opportunity, and carried that element of risk that such opportunities have.
‘Easy does it on this, Toby,’ said the superintendent.
‘Right.’
‘You understand the sensitivities?’
‘Right.’
After all, the superintendent has done quite well. Cook can admit that, even if his boss has only a regulation big Ford. There have been the expenses of the private schools for his son and daughter after all, and the retirement home on the hill above Ruby Bay. The super has a deep voice, suited to command, but physically he’s unimpressive: slight for a policeman and with glasses on his desk. He seems to be drying up gradually from the outside, so that his pale skin is flaky. His hair, once dark and springy, has faded to grey and sticks up sparsely from his scalp like drought grass. Only a stubble remains of his eyebrows. When he opens his mouth though, his palate and tongue are moist and red, the teeth brightly, whitely capped, and his voice rich from the resources husbanded within. ‘It’s a delicate job, Toby,’ he had said, ‘and one that I want you to do, working directly with me.’
Cook had agreed, of course, but he’d also told the super that while preparing the Slaven Centre file it had occurred to him that maybe they should look at the place for other reasons as well. It was conveniently cut off in many ways, wasn’t it, a world apart. Perhaps the answers to some backlog cases could be found there; maybe whatever the Harlequin disease was, its first inclinations may have been criminal. ‘I’d like to have a close look at patient personal records,’ he said, ‘without making my reasons obvious at all.’
‘And the staff, Toby. Don’t forget them. All sorts are employed out there, and as you say, it could be a neat little bolt-hole. Yes, that’s good thinking. Two birds with one stone, and neither of them the ostensible reason for you needing to work with Mousier. Easy does it, though — you know how prickly the medicos get about patient confidentiality.’
The superintendent is right, and so Cook in his second-floor office overlooking the car park is using his computer to compile a list of people whose whereabouts he would very much like to know. People concerned with cases so serious that a good cop never completely gave up on them. And Toby Cook is a good cop. He hopes on his visits to the centre to make an acquaintance or two who can, without quite realising their usefulness, be his ears and eyes there.
Cook finds his part in policing the Nelson district interesting and challenging. His previous posting was in Auckland’s North Shore, but he doesn’t disparage the provincial criminal. Nelson lacks the persistent city crime, the subtleties of high-level white collar corruption, but it’s full of intense individualism and intransigence — alternative beliefs, craft obsessions, powerful historical convictions, are all jealously maintained. On Toby Cook’s bad days the whole area appears overrun with glassblowers, potters, silversmiths, black sheep or kunekune pig breeders, screen printers, aromatherapists, naturopaths, Christadelphians, Montessorians, lesbian drop-in centre sponsors, flat fish dragnetters, idealistic Dutch migrants, cannabis growers and the proprietors of struggling boutique wineries. All of them doubtful of the need for a conventional society, and suspicious of a police force which claims to regulate it. Cook has come to the opinion that an individualistic community is just as resistant to good policing as one which maintains the united front of institutional crime.
On his visits to Mahakipawa, Toby Cook has an impression that there, too, people pretty much go their own way, that medical aims are put before any civic obligations, and that the authority which he upholds is poorly represented. Such a place would benefit from professional scrutiny from time to time, the senior sergeant thinks, and he will provide it. After all, if illness is permitted special dispensation, then half the buggers everywhere would get away with murder.
In the eighteen months that he served of his sentence, David was visited three times. Once by Chris after his own release from the new prison at Warkworth after a shorter term than David’s, because he hadn’t been the owner of Beth Car. Chris said that he was going to move to Wellington and get back into the business, but in a more subdued way. The police were increasingly losing interest in cannabis, he said, and political will was fading. They’d just been unlucky, he reckoned: perhaps got into it in too big a way.
Neither of them said much about prison at all, even when their conversation took place within one. They spoke of school, sport, Sharkey and Sneaky Pete: they spoke of overseas, women and whether Wellington would be a good place to live. They said nothing directly of friendship, or obligation, nothing of fear, remorse or apprehension. The bounds of their friendship had been prescribed a long time ago, and they never thought to alter them. Chris’s hair was still short from his time inside, and his neck had the beginning of habitual creases. He talked with very little movement of his lips. For the first time David realised that he and Chris weren’t young any more — not old, not even close to middle age, but not young any more, and the thought was a sour one. He wasn’t where he wanted to be by that time in his life.
‘You keep your pecker up,’ said Chris. ‘You haven’t got that long here now yourself.’
‘I’ll be okay.’
‘We’re not finished yet, don’t you worry. A year or so to set up, and I intend to be away laughing,’ Chris said. What had happened to his art skills, his love of Modigliani, whom he used to call the brightest alcoholic of them all? What had happened to his pinch of Asia looks, and his strut before the world?
The other visits were from his mother, who came all the way from Auckland. She told him again that she wanted that clean break with the south. ‘I wanted a complete change, otherwise I’d make no effort to start again,’ she said. His father had made a clean break too, hadn’t he, without ever leaving Beth Car.
Against logic, his mother was growing taller and thinner with age. You can’t fatten a thoroughbred, was his father’s saying. Her shins were all soup bone, her neck soaring, her hands and wrists such obvious articulation, even her teeth seemingly enlarged and packing out her mouth. It meant she was able to wear clothes with style, despite her age. On her second visit, in the July cold, she wore a black suit and a cherry red cape.
‘Let’s not talk of your father,’ she said when pressed. ‘He’s gone. A good father and provider, but he’s gone, David. Don’t sadden yourself with comparisons between then a
nd now.’
She showed no embarrassment to be in the prison; no doubt she would have come more often if she’d lived closer. There was no thought to deny him. She had come to terms with her disappointment in a practical way. David’s criminality was like polio, or retardation: it had to be acquiesced in. She must accept also that because of it he’d never have the same opportunities and attainments as other people. Love and allegiance were still there, but also disappointment that he was weak, lacking in judgement and responsibility. ‘Can I help in any plans you have for your release?’ she said.
No interest in his life in the place itself: how the long nights might be passed, whether he gagged on the fatty chops. No interest in his fears and apprehensions, which motherhood might encompass even if male friendship did not, because after all he’d chosen his own way. No interest in his work with Wiremu among the younger prisoners. No interest, above all, in the guilt he bore drawn tight like catgut around his heart, the origin of all the things he was. Guilt that lay further back than anything which he’d done wrong; the powerful, grieving guilt that comes from divided love.
Guilt’s consequence is the failure to any more see yourself as deserving.
‘I’ll just keep my head down for a while when I come out,’ he said. ‘Get some simple nine to fiver for a living.’
‘Come and live with me if you wish.’ What more pelican flesh did she have to give from that spare frame? ‘I mean it. Come if it’s any help to you. There’s a spare bedroom and a view across the sea.’ Love is never quite burnt out, no matter what is lost to age, to sickness, to disappointment, to years apart. And when he asked about her own life she said, ‘Things must be let go, or they tear out by the roots. All my good friends are dead.’ He was sure she intended the second sentence to defuse the first. Her cheeks were concave, as if the pressure within what little cavity her body held, was less than on the outside. Her black and red were in defiance of the visiting room’s regulation furniture, and the display of convict art at $250 a pop. The pictures were painted by Turtle Watts who jerked off into the mixed colours of his palette because the woman instructor told him to put more of himself into his work. As a result of a petition from the local arts society, Turtle was allowed to paint in his cell. He tore out magazine landscape photographs and set them up by his easel to copy.
What was permitted in the visiting room was defined by exclusion — no smoking, no liquor, no cellphones, no groups larger than three, no eating, no exchange of clothing, no carrybags beyond the door. But presumably you could be operated on for piles, or form barber-shop quartets. ‘Are you happy at Herne Bay, Mum?’ he’d asked. The thick hem of her cherry coat trembled as she sat in the tubular chair, and her hands shook slightly although her voice was strong. ‘I’m on the committee of seven organisations,’ she said.
Three weeks after that second visit, Wiremu came and told him that she’d died. His hair had been cut just an hour before and, as Wiremu told him about his mother’s death, David ran his hand up the back of his neck and there seemed to be bristles right to the top of his head. ‘I asked the cause of death for you,’ said Wiremu, ‘and evidently she had Parkinson’s disease, but it was a fast blood cancer that killed her. Nothing to be done even if they’d found it earlier, they said.’ Wiremu sat on the stool and David on the bed. Maybe it should have been dusk for such news, or a rainy day. Instead it was a bright, cold morning with a knife edge between the frost and the green grass further from the wall, and with a fine-cut mix of his own hair drifting before his eyes. ‘All her stuff is going to her sister’s in Devonport for the time being,’ said Wiremu, ‘but I’ve spoken with the office and you’ll be eligible to go up for the funeral.’ Eligible maybe, but not inclined to be the organ grinder’s monkey for the gathered relatives.
At the time of his mother’s burial — what thin bones they’d be — David was filling out a video order form for Wiremu, and he slowly and deliberately wrote down the titles of the idiot films approved. What composed greeting would his mother and father have when they met again? He remembered her sudden laugh as she prepared to leave the visiting room. ‘What appalling art,’ she said of Turtle Watts’ seminal works. ‘The man has no eye for country at all. No sense of structure beneath the surface. Limestone country, for instance, has a completely different look to the clays.’ The coat hem and the skirt quivered; her back was straight. Had he kissed her? Surely yes, he always did on parting. The barrenness of the room, the guilt, the gaze of others, the chokingly inarticulate history of his love — none of those things would have prevented him. That’s all right then. Body Count, Amazons in Space, Challenge the Reich, Alien Holocaust — all of those would give the sort of active unreality that was popular to distract inmates from their failure.
Surely the most savage and unforgiving grief is that felt for those you have both loved and betrayed.
There’s an inescapable nakedness to life in prison. You can no more hide the death of a parent than you can the nature of your crime, whether you’re prepared to take it up the arse, or if you believe in Baby Jesus. Grocott was an emotional dwarf from the next cell and felt a need to commiserate at lock-up time. He came close to his grille to talk, although there was no way he could see David. ‘Mother died, eh?’ said Grocott, who particularly enjoyed a time of sorrow, or weakness, in anyone else’s life. ‘The old mumsie six feet under, eh, and not going down too bloody happy about it either. And you buried her, Stallman, you bet you did, you useless bugger. You buried your own mother because you fucking amounted to bloody nothing. All she did for you was thrown right back in her face, and it killed her right enough. Too right. You buried her by growing all that shit and selling it. You buried her by being a useless cocksucker even though you went to some useless wankers’ school and then farted around at university.’ He was standing right up beneath the grille and his voice was muffled a bit by that and his sniggering. ‘So how does it feel now, Stallman?’ said Grocott.
‘Oh, shut your trap, Grocott,’ shouted Lund from across the corridor.
‘You think you’re as smart as a shit-house rat, Stallman,’ said Grocott, ‘and you’re no better than anyone else. Worse, because you didn’t even go to see your mother turfed over, although you buried her all fucking right, no doubt about that.’
That’s how it was when David’s mother was buried — a day that finished with a homily from Grocott the dwarf, and what was the use in making any reply, because an expression of grief and pain was what Grocott wanted above all, perhaps because he wasn’t able to generate any emotion of his own.
TWENTY–FOUR
Raf had drunk a good deal of Speights, and moved on to his cheap flagon port again. He was in one of his lost opportunity moods, so David said just enough to keep him jogging along, and gave most of his attention to his own thoughts.
‘Maybe this is where the world begins to end for all of us,’ said Raf. ‘Not in a war zone, not in a city riot, but here at Mahakipawa with Harlequin let loose.’
‘Humans have proved bloody persistent.’
‘Sure,’ said Raf, ‘but you never know. The thing that gets us all might have started as simply and oddly as what we’re dealing with here.’ He had his new shoes off, and the colour from them had stained his light socks in contusions of blue and brown. The light smell rolled about the room on the convections from the two-bar heater.
It was possible that Harlequin would finish them all, but present tribulations always seem greater than those of the past. People thought that the Black Death was the big one, but it passed. ‘Someone will make a reputation by coming up with a cure,’ said David. ‘Most likely our own hero, Schweitzer, and he’ll get a knighthood and his own stamp. You and I will establish careers on the strength of being on his staff.’
‘It’s the counter-attack of the old brain,’ said Raf. ‘That’s what I reckon. We’ve got to the stage in evolution at which we’re effete, and Harlequin lets loose that underlying, cunning old brain again. Maybe there isn’t even a virus, b
ut just some weakness in development.’
‘Maybe.’
‘The dinosaurs went because they were too stupid: maybe we’re going because we’re too sensitive. Crocodiles have the idea. A crocodile doesn’t go in much for self-analysis.’
‘The boffins will come up with something,’ said David.
‘No bugger has a clue about it, and I reckon if the numbers climb much higher there’ll be panic action.’
‘Shoot on sight,’ said David gravely, but Raf, even with plenty in, knew that he was being had on. He grinned and had another slice of the corned beef he’d got from Pauline in the kitchen. It had a coarse grain like quickly grown, cheap timber.
‘We’ll see in a few months,’ he said. His underclothes and dirty shirts were in a plastic bag by the door to go down to laundry. A paua shell wedged in a margarine pottle was his ashtray, and as an ornament on his desk was a piece of greenstone, polished on one side and with a whitened, oxidised rind. There was comfort in the ordinariness of such things. ‘Maybe Harlequin’s the one we don’t crack, and man goes down like the dinosaur,’ said Raf.
Tony Sheridan had told David earlier of an article in a psychiatric journal, which suggested that the worldwide and extreme celebrations of the new millennium had brought on Harlequin.
‘You must be kidding me?’ said Raf.
‘No, evidently it’s all there in very staid language.’
‘Jesus.’
‘Some argument about fundamental effects of mass hysteria.’
‘Jesus,’ said Raf wearily.
Darkness was on the way. The wind gusts were hunting over the ridges and gullies above the centre, and the waves broke with muffled intensity below. Those were the sounds of the place long before Harlequin, and they would be there long afterwards. Not everything has to do with people: not all is subject to the dominion to which they answer.
‘Anyway,’ said David, ‘you’re too thick to get Harlequin. It hits the most talented and sensitive.’
Harlequin Rex Page 19
