Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Like Simon Cryer and Woodsie, I suppose.’

  ‘Exceptions, and anyway they never had anything but a primal brain from the start. In their case, the whole world’s coming back to meet them.’

  Raf was pouring more port when a tap came on his door. Without any loss of concentration on his task, he asked who was there. ‘Dermot,’ said Dermot Sweeney, and when the door was opened for him, he stood there in his worn towelling dressing-gown with the sash of a different garment altogether. ‘I’m on the way up,’ he said, his tone both apologetic and fearful.

  ‘How bad do you reckon?’ said David.

  ‘I can smell the wet bracken on the hill and Tolly’s breath from two doors down. I can see moreporks on the wing, hear a stoat behind the car park and the sound of blood pumping behind my knees.’

  ‘When was your last episode?’ asked David. It was his duty night.

  ‘Shit,’ said Dermot, ‘corned beef. I knew there was something else and I couldn’t place it.’ He took up the knife and cut himself a wedge. ‘Silverside. Don’t you love the strands when it’s cold, and the bits of white fat in the body of the meat? This is what we had hot yesterday, isn’t it?’

  ‘I should be doing a round anyway. What’s the time? Did you see anyone else about?’ David got no answer, Dermot had assumed a protective half-crouch to eat his corned beef, as if the others might snatch it from him.

  ‘You have a wander then,’ said Raf. ‘Dermot’s in the aura. I’ll go with him down to the main block.’ He took up the clipboard with the duty sheet on it, and wrote in Dermot’s report. ‘What else tells you Harlequin’s on the way?’ he said casually, and then, ‘No, no port,’ as he caught Dermot’s glance.

  ‘Well, I’m hyped as hell, of course,’ said Dermot.

  ‘You always are, old son.’

  ‘True, true.’ Dermot was delighted with the compliment. ‘But not with the sense of striking power you get from this, eh.’

  ‘Colours?’ asked Raf, hand and biro poised.

  ‘I’ve been on the verandah, and the building lights where they fade in the night are the palest blue that you see in very old skim milk, and there are clouds as clammy as puff balls. But it’s the sounds this time. That’s the thing. You realise that the wind’s no more one sound than a bloody orchestra is. The whine from a corner guttering is quite different from the wind noise through the gorse, flat across the grass, or barrelling across the water.’

  ‘Maybe you can hear the steers farting in their sleep,’ said Raf.

  Dermot laughed more than the other two, his shoulders shaking furtively.

  ‘Yeah, but some day you guys may have to go through it. And what a frigging business. I tell you this, though, there’s something dead on Hitchen’s property. I can smell the guts of it coming over the hill. That’s probably your steer.’

  ‘Or tomorrow’s lunch,’ said Raf. ‘You want to go over now?’

  ‘I think I’d better,’ said Dermot. ‘I could blow pretty soon.’

  ‘Okay then.’ Raf put on his shoes, and navy blue jersey. He flipped his pony-tail free from it at the back.

  At the main door of Takahe David watched the other two go on down towards Treatment. He listened to the wind, trying to identify all the elements Dermot was aware of, but it was just the same indiscriminate swirl, and when he sniffed he could smell nothing from Hitchen’s farm that wasn’t from every other direction. The sea, the mudflats, were what the wind bore for him. He didn’t know whether to be relieved or not, and went back through the corridor to do his first night check. Chime time and all’s well. Outside the rooms at least: who wanted to pry further?

  It reminded him of Paparua, when the screws Petrie, or McMurdoe with the limp, would be doing the rounds, and David was one of those to be accounted for. McMurdoe had a son who went to the Olympics as a wrestler. He didn’t win a medal, but his father’s pride was a compensation for the job he did, lessened his limp, reduced his whining complaints about the prisoners’ recalcitrance and ingratitude.

  David would have spent twice as long in Paparua to avoid being a patient at the Slaven Centre. As a prisoner you could always kid yourself that you were falsely accused, or unfairly punished, but there was no logic, no deceit, and little future when Harlequin pinned you. Only luck saved you, or perhaps prayers superior to those of Jigger Fraser. David stood at the smaller, far door to hear the wind buffeting the sides of the building and bounding over the grounds. All manner of threats might be out there, but how much worse was treachery from within for Dermot and the others: with Harlequin able to turn intelligence, emotion, even, perhaps, the soul.

  ABBEY’S VIEW

  Is from the blanket storeroom on the third floor of the main block. On impulse she took the key from the lock two months ago and, after a cautious delay, has made the place a refuge. It isn’t that she feels persecuted, or even particularly unhappy most of the time, although she knows she may be dying. What the storeroom gives her is privacy: it allows her the heady feeling of being unlocated within the consciousness of the institution. Not Abbey is in her unlocked room, or Abbey is playing the piano in the Takahe lounge, or Abbey is swimming with a supervised group, or talking to Roimata Wallace, or halfway through the Thursday Neapolitan lasagne, or seeing a vision of the last supper of the great composers. Abbey is where no one knows, even if no one really cares, and she hugs that sense of secret location to herself.

  There are two varieties of issue blanket: a straight wool in yellow-cream with machined edges, and a slightly more therapeutic sky blue wool-acrylic mix, edged with blanket stitch in a darker blue. Abbey needs some of each to perch high enough to see from the single window. Her vantage point gives an unusual view of the long-run roofing iron used for the walkway covers, the sloping grounds with garden plots, the ridge running down to the sound. What Abbey does among the blankets and pillowcases, the table covers and throws, is to let her socialised face go — all the reassuring play of responses which make her so approachable, civilised, comforting even. Her face instead becomes utterly introspective, both older, in the unhindered sag of flesh, and younger, in an expression of quest, innocence and vulnerability.

  Abbey has loosened the dark blue edge stitching of the blanket she sits on, so that she can put fingers beneath it absently as she considers things. When she puts tension on the strand she sees her fingertips whiten, as the blood is forced from them. She doesn’t imagine that there is any personal malice in her affliction with Harlequin: nor anything of punishment. Though she hasn’t told the others lest it seem to be dealing in despondency, she thinks that Harlequin could well be the nemesis for them all, the catastrophe.

  And, if so, wouldn’t it be just the further descent from the paradise of childhood? Abbey’s father had been a reader in chemistry, and her mother a professor in the same discipline. Their marriage was a close and happy one, both of them preternaturally sensitive to passing good fortune. ‘Look at the full moon, Abbey,’ her mother would say, with her husky voice, to her only child. ‘How it glows for us, don’t you think?’

  Her father would press his lips close to Abbey’s hair as the three of them hung blissfully in a Queenstown gondola, or walked with her pony through the silver birches of the property at Pigeon Bay, or sat on their tiled patio in bleeding sunset. ‘Never forget this moment,’ he’d whisper. ‘Look at the kingfisher, Abbey,’ he’d say. ‘Look at the lights in your mother’s hair.’ ‘Listen to the sound of the ocean in the distance.’ ‘See how high the thistledown is carried, like pale flecks in the sky.’ ‘Can you smell the fleeces on the sheep, Abbey. Can you?’ For he was a man highly educated, and vulnerable to transience.

  Look, listen, smell, feel, taste — and oh, never forget, never forget, and there would be in their eyes tears for the unbearable happiness that was passing. And the thing was that she never did forget, so that nothing afterwards had quite the bloom, or ecstasy. Not even the post-childhood gift of sex was sufficient compensation. Hers was a largely self-conscious performance
, a localised and brief carnal pleasure. Her lovers tended to end up as friends, then seek new lovers elsewhere.

  There was nothing, not even Mahler and Grieg, that could stay the descent from childhood: the dimming of the colours. Listen, Abbey, to the sound of Canada geese across the lake. Look, how the puddle ice is fractured in a glittering web. The adult world is more compromised and compromising, and that temperate cynicism which is called maturity holds sway. And Harlequin? Maybe she had unwittingly summoned him, and he had come with his second childhood of terrible dimension.

  But Abbey isn’t thinking of this at present in the storeroom, as she looks out across the grounds. She’s thinking of her mother, retired in Tauranga with an honour for services to science and education, and the despair her mother feels because of Abbey’s illness. Her father has been saved that agony by a cardiac arrest which killed him while he picked lemons. Remember this, my darling. Always remember this — and his whisper at her ear, his arms lifting her up so that she would have a better vantage point from which to view the world. Look, oh, look at the kingfisher, Abbey; see the blue sheen of it, and the dark, strong beak. So she’s thinking also of her father, and she’s enjoying her bird’s-eye view over the grounds of the centre and the slope to the sea. The rushes there are like the morning bristles of a landscape face, and the road loops over the ridge by the one farmhouse, Picton one way, Havelock the other. The sound lies like that kingfisher’s wing, outstretched between the hills.

  Abbey sees David helping one of the laundry staff manoeuvre a trolley through the door of Takahe, and then stand, half turned to talk to someone out of sight, while the trolley is taken noiselessly down the ramp and towards the main block, just as the larger trolley carrying Jane Milton must have travelled. Abbey likes to talk to David, particularly after a serious episode, for she feels as if he suffers from Harlequin himself without the symptoms. He has empathy with her anguished powerlessness: transfixed like a butterfly, but still with an ache to take wing.

  He isn’t soft at all physically. His well-muscled neck is the feature of which she’s most conscious: the sinews, the shoulder muscles sloped away, the blue arteries on each side of his windpipe which swell and pulsate beneath the skin when he plays volleyball. What she doesn’t like is the loose, dark hair that too often needs a wash, his passive cynicism, the drug habit that he makes no effort to break, and even provides for in others — Tolly, Raf, Montgomery, Lucy Mortimer, who’s his lover, they say. How could you do that to someone you loved?

  She hopes David won’t be around if she blows, and is surprised by the thought. Maybe when you die a stranger to yourself — and isn’t that Harlequin’s way? — it’s better to go in the company of strangers.

  Who can know the truth before it happens? More and more her mind lurches and breaks free, akin to the sudden racing of the heart. Hasn’t she begun the withdrawal from other people which is necessary before you die? No more curiosity, or envy, in hearing of other pianists, no more casting into the future. Does she want her mother’s hand over hers? Let’s not forget this day together, Abbey. Look how the sky tucks down behind the hills.

  Don’t come. Of all the visitors warded off, her mother most of all. Abbey fears she will arrive to sit with her in her bedroom, or ringed by her fellows in the lounge. What would her mother choose of Harlequin’s world to seal away in recollection?

  In her special place among the blankets and linen, Abbey is already beyond official ken. She can float her consciousness away towards the shore with mud and rushes, the crabs flexing on the shining curvature of mud, or up to the ridge line with its rough pasture amid gorse and broom. If she focuses, if she holds herself very still, she becomes a held note of the clarinet, part almost of the music of the spheres. Never forget, no, never forget. Surely there is nothing now of her to be seen at all: nothing even for Harlequin to set his sights on.

  And in her case the doctors are so optimistic, aren’t they?

  ‘No shit?’ said Lund.

  ‘So the man said. All of us gets to eat this slap-up feed for free, because the woman’s son died in here last year, on the same fucking day that we get to eat the feed, and he only had a few weeks to go they say.’

  ‘No shit. What name?’ said Lund.

  ‘The name,’ said Bowden sharply. ‘What fucking name’s that then?’

  They were sitting along the sides of the rec hall on metal chairs screwed to wooden slides, three at a time. For videos and addresses the slides could be pushed out into the body of the hall. Tick, tack, tick, tack, went the light, hard table-tennis balls. David sat with Lund and Bowden, and sometimes he watched the table-tennis players who weren’t that good, and he half listened to Bowden on about the memorial meal.

  ‘The name of the guy who died in here,’ said Lund.

  ‘How would I know? Who gives a fucking toss. We’re not talking about any fucking names here, we’re talking about a free feed on Thursday. We’re talking about the menu, man, not the whys and wherefores of some old woman wanting to do it. And I hear it’s turkey, no fucking question: absolute primo Tom fucking Turkey.’

  ‘No shit.’

  ‘You heard anything about Tom Turkey, Stallman?’ asked Bowden.

  ‘No,’ said David. ‘I just heard that the guy’s family had been given permission to have a memorial dinner if they paid for it.’

  Tick, tack, tick, tack.

  Bowden had a large quince face, sallow and with full cheeks at the jawline, but he wasn’t a soft man at all. He had a considerable stretch ahead of him for embezzlement from his union and an assault from which the woman nearly died. ‘And a choice of puddings and bubbly with it all, I heard,’ he said. ‘Fucking oath. Now isn’t that the sort of mum you’d like to see every prisoner fucking have, eh?’

  Tick, tack, tick, tack.

  This was the consequence of cannabis first tried in the old band room at Collegiate, and later cultivated as something of a rural industry at Beth Car. Had David realised what diminished opportunity, what boredom, his punishment carried, just maybe he’d have thought twice. But then it too passed.

  ‘I seen the menu in the mess office,’ said Bowden. ‘All set down by the guy’s mother, and for the whole fucking wing, eh. And the dinner’s to be fifteen minutes earlier than regulation time, out of respect and to mark it special. And anyone who’s been playing up misses out. Let’s remember that one.’ Bowden played with the dense hair at the top of his chest as he talked, making curls of it around his strong, blunt fingers.

  ‘But you don’t know the name,’ said Lund.

  ‘I tell you the name won’t make no fucking difference to that Tom Turkey, nor lemon meringue pie. It’ll go down real easy without any fucking name.’

  ‘You’re right.’

  ‘Of course I’m fucking right. Aren’t I, Stallman?’

  ‘You’re right all right,’ said David.

  Tick, tack, tick, tack.

  ‘Anyway, the guy went out because of some very dodgy fucking poppy, but they never told the family that, of course. That’s what I heard,’ said Bowden. He blew his cheeks right out and stretched his arms casually towards the roof.

  ‘No shit,’ said Lund. Would the man’s sense of wonderment never leave him.

  Tick, tack, tick, tack.

  David didn’t care about the menu for the free memorial dinner. No way was he going to think about the elderly mother spending her money on a dinner for guys in the wing where her son died. He wasn’t going to consider that her motive might be that other prisoners would remember her son, and value that remembrance. He wasn’t going to consider the pathos and the history and the agony which might lie behind the old mother’s fucking Tom Turkey. He waited for an opportunity to replace one of the table tennis players. The movement and the competition helped him to forget his circumstances. But always, in the fortress of his heart, he continued to exalt honour, friendship, loyalty and love — the very attributes he found most difficult in life.

  Bowden stretched again and wo
rked his shoulders. ‘Christ, my fucking guts are bound up these days,’ he complained.

  ‘No shit,’ said Lund. ‘Maybe that dead guy’s Tom Turkey will do the trick. You know the name doesn’t mean a thing to me — just can’t place him.’

  Bowden caught David’s eye, and blew out his big cheeks in exasperation.

  TWENTY–FIVE

  They couldn’t meet in their rooms as often as they wished, in case what was readily accepted by their friends became known to other people at the centre who would move against, them. Often at night they talked on the phone: the extended, trivial, and discontinuous conversations a poor representation of the intimacy they shared as lovers.

  Lucy’s illness, too, came between them, and days went by during which they had no contact at all. David was angry and perplexed that circumstances prevented them from being together more often. It was likely that they had little time allowed them, and they were wasting it by keeping to petty decorum and self-consciousness.

  Lucy’s birthday was celebrated at Kotuku: a cake from the main kitchens, a present from fellow inmates, some carbonated bubbly, a few messages of uncertain tone — congratulations, best wishes, many more happy returns? — the hollowness of being surrounded by well-wishers chosen for her by Harlequin. How quickly things change. Only a year before she’d been with family and friends, with more than three hundred faxes and emails from her viewers. David was at the most recent birthday in a conventional role, singing the song, keeping a smile, ensuring that nothing in his glance towards her disclosed for others his love, or, more importantly, revealed to Lucy herself the pity he felt for her and the sense of his own powerlessness.

  Surely he could at least do better for Lucy by way of celebration: some special time away from the institutional cake and fellow Harlequins of the Slaven Centre, the communal ablutions facilities and the video operating instructions in blue felt pen on a card. He asked Roimata Wallace for help, and she suggested she take Lucy with her on a visit to Roimata’s family at Blenheim, where David could appear unofficially and put on a special night as a surprise. Not ethical, of course — again — for either the doctor or himself, but David didn’t give a damn about that, and Roimata thought the deceit worthwhile if Lucy gained by it.