Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  But it isn’t that taut line that his fingers hold; it’s Bellini’s letter, which leads in a quite different direction. The letter is deliberately circumspect and understated, using a casual medical and personal shorthand which the research colleagues and old friends fall into, but to Schweitzer the significance is quite clear: he and Bellini have been carriers of Harlequin from the Congo to their homelands. The incidence found by Bellini in his own part of the world has a correlation convincingly similar to Schweitzer’s findings in New Zealand. They are leading experts in the aetiology and treatment of Harlequin, and they now find they are also propagators of it. It isn’t a confirmation that Schweitzer welcomes, and not one that he would publicise, but neither is he distraught, or self-accusatory. Other lines of introduction are discernible, even though the carriers aren’t identifiable; Harlequin was bound to come out of Africa, just as the old brain it released had moved out millions of years before in an earlier colonisation. Schweitzer and Bellini possessed no inkling of Harlequin’s transmission during their time in Central Africa; and isn’t it likely anyway that it can occur spontaneously as a result of environmental factors, or the culmination of some genetic evolution? It’s not the exposure to Harlequin that’s the real issue, but the identification of susceptibility — why do some minds succumb and others apparently have immunity? Why is childhood a protection?

  Schweitzer is aware of irony rather than guilt. All his skill and energy devoted to the cause, yet almost certainly he’s a seedhead himself. Maybe the consolation is that he seems safe himself from Harlequin, at least for the time, and so can work even harder, make greater sacrifice to help those in his care. He has passed on nothing that he hasn’t exposed himself to in the course of duty. It’s too late for any form of quarantine anywhere in the world, the specific means of communication is still unknown, and to pass on what he and Bellini suspect would cause alarm and create no benefit. Schweitzer is optimistic — not for himself, or Lucy, not for the present population at Mahakipawa, but for his species, which has survived a whole series of brutal challenges before now.

  Schweitzer is buzzed by his secretary who reminds him that Dr Sheppard is coming for his professional development interview at two. Schweitzer can hear half-muffled laughter between Sandra and Elaine, who has come in with letters from the main office. He has worked in institutions all his professional life, yet he’s still struck by the ease with which staff detach themselves from the plight of the patients. There are hundreds of Harlequin guests at the Slaven Centre. Most will never recover, several of them are dying as the director thinks of the probability, yet Sandra and Elaine laugh, and Dr Sheppard takes the opportunity to discuss the possibility of advancement. David Stallman, or maybe Tolly Mathews, fishes quite out of reach of any cries, and Schweitzer himself can sit with Bellini’s letter and ponder the degree of responsibility he bears for Harlequin’s spread. People are hardened by the suffering of others as well as their own: war, prisons, bad families, hospitals — Schweitzer recalls Orwell’s dispassionate accounts of his hospital ward in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The pitcher goes too often to the well: sympathy isn’t inexhaustible. The capacity for such selfishness is part of the psychological strength of the species. In the same day Schweitzer must die with one patient, and be reborn in another. There’s a natural tendency for each generation to expect the end of the world to coincide with its own demise, but Schweitzer believes that in ten years Harlequin will be subdued, and later a harmless Slaven Centre will be pointed out on the hillside to passers-by, just as former tuberculosis sanatoria were two generations ago. And Schweitzer’s name might play some anecdotal role in the stories of Harlequin.

  Nothing is real once it has happened, and complex truth is corrupted by summary. Without memory there’s no civilised life, yet any documentation of the past bears a similar relation to it as the wedding photo does to the nuptials. The mother’s smiles belie the anguish she expressed at breakfast; the best man’s central place in the grouping conveys nothing of his utter uselessness on the day. Each of us has only a facet of happenstance, but takes it for the whole.

  Chance may flick out into the everyday and create small, random immortalities, perfect in their way. The Australian au pair girl turning up on a winter’s morning to hammer in vain on the door of Sylvia Plath’s suicide. Polenka, the coachman’s bruised daughter, passing Vladimir Nabokov on the little station of Siverski, Christmas 1916. ‘Look, the young master does not know me,’ she said. Neil Armstrong as a boy crouching beneath the bedroom window when Mrs Gorsky told her husband he could have oral sex when the kid next door flew to the moon. The Nelson magistrate, Thompson, who gave the order to fix bayonets at Tuamarina, and was later found with his hands full of hair torn from his head in the agony of death.

  Schweitzer’s six-year-old daughter drowned in their home pool. There are still times, both waking and dreaming, when he feels his daughter’s small, strong hand resting on his palm; when he smells the chlorine on her cheek, watches her run to meet him. All his brains and all his professional success haven’t freed him from being a hostage to fortune as is everybody else. Only occasionally, when fully concentrating on some subtlety of his profession, or even more fiercely focused as he fucks Lucy Mortimer, do the shackles fall briefly away. Yet he knows that sex is an appetite, not an achievement: a recurring hunger, and not the enduring possession that is parenthood.

  ‘Come in,’ he says, and stands from his desk to welcome Ormond Sheppard, comes from behind it, and sits with him looking out towards the sound and dinghy. If Harlequin is the herald for the end of the world, what does Ormond’s status in the centre matter, or his remuneration and, if there is a longer term, don’t those things remain profoundly insignificant within the process? People are dying in the treatment rooms as they speak, are in a flux of mental dissolution, the ferocity of which is appalling even to clinicians, but Schweitzer gives Dr Sheppard his attention. It’s possible that Ormond Sheppard might be the one who makes the breakthrough in the puzzle of Harlequin, whose name goes down in history, while Schweitzer is forgotten with all the others. All sorts of ironies are possible, and Schweitzer fully expects them to be played out against himself. He has brought Harlequin home with him, hasn’t he? He built a pool for his family’s pleasure, didn’t he?

  When his colleague has gone, bolstered by support for his advancement, Schweitzer allows himself a few more minutes with Bellini’s letter, before the meeting with combined ancillary staff which Mousier is to chair, and on which he has promised to sit in.

  Schweitzer worked for two and half years with Bellini at the Rushmilt Institute in Kinshasa, Zaire, and in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, attempting to determine if there was a history of Ebola in certain indigenous groups. They even went to the Kitum Cave on Mount Elgon together to take samples, protected almost like astronauts. Bellini’s long, seigneurial nose had its end pressed against the glass of his visor.

  The last time they met was eleven months ago, at Ventimiglia close to the French border, and they drove up to Tende in the Vallée de la Roya for a couple of nights, before Bellini went on to Genoa, and Schweitzer in the other direction to Paris. The mother of Bellini’s ex-mistress had a small hotel in Tende, and although the ex-mistress vowed to knife him, she was never much at home, and Bellini and her mother got on well. It was autumn, with few tourists, but a chill quite different from the coast. The old village was squeezed between the mountains. ‘It’s French now,’ said Bellini, ‘but its people and its history are more Italian,’ and he showed Schweitzer all the Italian names in the high cemetery.

  Schweitzer took a small gift from Ventimiglia for the mother of the ex-mistress: a basket of clementines with the fruit still attached to twigs of greenery as was the local custom. In the small hotel there was always the sound of French or Italian coming from one direction or another. He found that foreign languages, indistinctly heard, tended to be reformed by his ear into echoes of English, or perhaps the universal rhythms of conversatio
n. Almost intelligible phrases would make him turn with a smile of recognition, only to find as people neared him that both they and their language were strange to him.

  He and Bellini sat in a sunny nook away from breeze, and drank espresso as dark as used car oil. The conversation of old friends recognises no distinction between what is personal and what is professional, so the talk of Harlequin and performance contracts was mixed with talk of food and women, mutual acquaintances and common enemies, trivial and august recollections of Africa. Before leaving they walked in the steep hills above the village, where old terraces, the labour of centuries, were almost all abandoned to a beautiful encroachment of wild plants. The late autumn colours were far more varied than any part of home that Schweitzer knew. There were firs and chestnuts on lower slopes, but blues, yellows and greens of low-growing plants mottled the heights, with the smoke bush standing out a sharp red against the others and the pale alpine rock.

  Bellini’s face was lined, there was a tinge like grey slate beneath his eyes, but his hair was still dark and thick, left long so that it fell almost in tresses. He told a typical Italian joke, which was both political and sexual, and laughed at it so spontaneously that it was almost as if Schweitzer had told it, and he himself caught unawares.

  ‘You can’t see any way forward?’ asked Schweitzer. ‘Nothing new?’

  ‘Only in palliative treatment. Oh, and of course we’re making great strides in the description and prediction of symptoms, but little in the way of causes, or cure. The worst thing here in Europe is that because legitimate science is failing, then the quacks, the con men, the modern necromancers are moving in. The colour therapists, monkey gland and herbal people, cliques with doctrinal remedies, hypnotists. There’s even a muscular Albanian who claims that he can fuck it out of people. A twenty-first-century Rasputin, I suppose.’

  ‘Someone will crack it though,’ said Schweitzer as they walked single file through lavender. And he remembers how Bellini turned back to face him, shook his long hair and said, ‘The thing is, I’ve found that I’ve got it myself.’ The steep fall of the mountain slope was colourful with hebes, smoke bush and lavender. ‘Che minchia – what a bastard,’ he said.

  It’s time for Schweitzer to go to the meeting. He puts Bellini’s letter away. The tide is going out in the sound, and the dinghy is pulling for the shore, but still too far away for him to see who is rowing. A soft belly of mud is growing beyond the rushes. It is all a long way from the Vallée de la Roya and the ex-mistress’s mother in Tende. Bellini said he may retreat there and set up a hospice in the time left, and when they parted he quoted Pliny the Elder: ex Africa semper aliquid novi — There is always something new out of Africa.

  Almost always, those of our friends with the true sense of humour are the sad people too.

  Schweitzer will ring his wife in Wellington after the meeting, and much later Lucy will come through the darkness and use her own key to the side door of the director’s house. She will cook him pasta and they will talk of staff and patients at Mahakipawa; they will extend to each other the comforts that friends and lovers have to offer and there will be no talk of his daughter, or of Lucy’s future.

  Schweitzer will ask her if she knows the origin of the corrupted name Mahakipawa, and go on to tell her how the people of the place set fire to their pa and fled when they knew Te Rauparaha and Ngati Toa were coming. Te Rauparaha exclaimed that he saw smoke rising — and that was the origin of the name. ‘So maybe there’s a curse on the place,’ Lucy will say, but believe no such thing. Harlequin has brought all the powers he needs to this place of fire and smoke.

  Wake-up time. And the light from the high cell window was the colour of the bath water for the last brother in a large and poor family. Maybe David had been dreaming of Jocelyn Parks; maybe of separating out the head from some prime cannabis grown behind wind sacking in the shelter belt; maybe of happy companionship at Llama Heaven; maybe of Beth Car and the separate but undeniable love his mother and father gave him there. Maybe he wandered the steep, cobbled streets of Gattinara: visited the squat, old church that was scarred with bullet holes yet still protected its nondescript, saintly relics. Whatever. At wake-up in Paparua such personal treasures must be packed and stored in a fortified place.

  The grey light would manage a glimmer on the stainless steel rim of his lavatory, and show the tourist mountains of his calendar in a dim parody of sunrise. How well he knew the routine of the day — quite stuffed with lack of opportunity. The cell check and ablutions block, the breakfast amid the clatter of both cutlery and the broken language of his peers, the mail call that brought nothing personal — ever. The proximity of Grocott, and the almost companionship of Lund and Bowden. The table tennis, which was a dreary exercise, but helped to pass the time. The television programmes, which were so antithetical to his frame of mind that there seemed no distinction between fact and fiction — the Lotto celebrity and the talkshow celebrity no more real than the languid stars of soap opera. Maybe in his day there’d be the comparative peak of a reading recovery session that went well, or a chat with Mike Wiremu. Maybe a hail storm, and the novelty of the ice blocking the gutterings would pass an hour or two of his sentence.

  In prison two of the most melancholy and sapping convictions were able to flourish side by side. One was that precious, irreplaceable time was being wasted: the other that it couldn’t be wasted fast enough, such were the boredom and reduced possibilities of life there.

  Books should have allowed him a form of escape. Wasn’t that the advantage his education provided? And through Wiremu’s kindness he had access to books quite out of the ordinary. They didn’t do it for him, though: he seemed always aware of the base level noise of prison life around him, a vibration of disquiet and resentment and disappointment which never ceased; which was present day and night, as if Paparua were some blunt cargo ship pushing on to God knows where.

  Mike Wiremu had a rare judgement which allowed him to be at times completely open about feelings and opinions, without the intrusion that might cause awkwardness when the two of them met again. Apart from the programme they did together, the things they talked about were quite distinct from crime and punishment and rehabilitation. Wiremu was a country boy as well, from the Hokianga, and they yarned together about landscapes, family ties, seasons, stock and the habitual political neglect of heartlands. Wiremu talked also of his time as an army officer: the range of character and incident he’d run across, the stints overseas as a United Nations observer.

  How very few were the positive things David experienced during his time in prison. There was the passing but accepting friendship of Mike Wiremu. There were those sustaining images of better times which came to succour him during the night, and which he packed away at each grim wake up.

  TWENTY–EIGHT

  Tolly Mathews and Montgomery were planning to get their own back on Hoiho’s Woodsie because he was a whining bore who had complained directly to Mousier about the drug-taking at the centre — the non-prescribed variety. Rife was the word Woodsie used continually, liking its pejorative flavour. Others in his block said he had journalistic affiliations and was planning to do an exposé on Mahakipawa for one of his home city magazines. Auckland was the city. For Tolly and Montgomery ‘Auckland’ was far more pejorative than ‘rife’.

  Tolly called Woodsie Form Monitor, and sometimes, by extension, Lizard. Woodsie’s Harlequin episodes had the unusual symptom of being prefigured by his awareness of feral animal noises, and Montgomery had taped some from a television programme on the Serengeti. It was vindictive and inexcusable, of course, but then they all existed in a bat-wing door saloon life: care and comfort becoming at a stroke the free fall of terror. ‘It’s combat conditions here, isn’t it?’ said Tolly. ‘Even our bloody recreations have to be heightened to compete with Harlequin.’

  ‘It might flip him,’ said Raf. He was reluctant to put a damper on the fun, but his position demanded at least the protestations of fair play and caution.r />
  ‘So?’ said Tolly.

  Woodsie liked espresso coffee: it provided an opportunity for him to talk about his experiences in France. A week in Paris had made him an oracle on the culture. Montgomery and Tolly got hold of some coffee and thimble cups. They set up at the car park end of the Takahe verandah, and hid the cassette player in the facing azalea garden. Montgomery had the remote. The nights were becoming warmer: the buildings seemed to expand in it, and the lawns drifted into the shadows.

  Such was the complacency of Woodsie’s self-esteem that he accepted it all at face value — the invitation, the authentic coffee, the Dutch cigar that Tolly amiably extended, the presence of Montgomery, Raf and David. ‘Don’t mind if I do,’ he said. His eyebrows were dark, theatrical tufts, and he tilted his head to the left whenever he was about to speak.

  ‘Coffee, Woodsie?’

  ‘Don’t mind if I do. Jeez, the stuff here! Don’t you find?’ Woodsie pouted his lips to moisten the end of his cigar, and fetched up a tidy burp. ‘In Europe, though, now that’s coffee. This smells good.’

  He wore pale, linen slacks, and pale, summer shoes that could have been woven in rattan. Without eye contact, David and Raf sensed each other’s aversion. Yet the Monitor stretched out his legs in the warm dusk of the verandah, displaying his drongo shoes, quite undismayed, made the small noises, himp, himp, himp, as he drew in strongly to begin his cigar. David had the quick thought that perhaps Tolly’s vindictive humour had extended to lacing Woodsie’s cigar with cannabis resin.