Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘So Woodsie, how’s it hanging?’ said Montgomery, but Woodsie didn’t pick the false idiom, or the genuine contempt, and began without any attempt at paraphrase on the story of his battle as Hoiho block representative against a few intransigents there.

  Tolly grunted occasionally as a social lubricant, Montgomery fingered his concealed remote, Raf and David smoked and, although maintaining the physical presence, seemed to project themselves out somewhere above the garden plots, drifting in the warm and expanded night.

  ‘But how are you in yourself?’ said Tolly finally, the in-joke since the visit by the parliamentarians, and he stopped balancing the ash of his cigar and let it drop like a small dog’s turd to the boards. ‘Eh? In yourself.’

  Woodsie didn’t catch the ironic repetition, and he wasn’t offended by the interruption because it didn’t take the initiative from him, just gave an invitation to continue with a different aspect of his life. ‘A good patch, actually, I’d have to say. Nothing threatening for a couple of weeks. Roimata Wallace says I’m fortunate—’

  There came clearly from the azaleas the sound of spotted hyenas all stirred up about something. Woodsie’s face puckered, and he looked behind him to the Takahe lounge, although he knew the sounds weren’t from there.

  ‘So Roimata Wallace seems quite happy with you?’ said Tolly, his voice not raised at all despite the hyenas.

  ‘What’s that bloody racket?’ Woodsie had forgotten his cigar, and his shoulders were hunched a little in defence.

  ‘Racket?’ said David. He leant forward as if to listen more keenly. ‘What sort of racket?’ The laughing of the hyenas stopped, and just the echoes scattered for a moment through the darkened grounds.

  ‘Sometimes you can hear the laundry machines at night,’ said Montgomery helpfully.

  ‘More like bloody animals shrieking,’ muttered Woodsie. ‘You hear anything?’ He turned to Raf, who shook his head.

  ‘Anyway,’ continued Tolly, ‘you reckon you’re having a good trot — maybe even a pink form release coming up.’

  Woodsie tried to relax in his cane chair, and he took an interest in his cigar again. ‘Well, it’s early days of course, but with my motivation and professional backgr—’ There were lions coughing menace from the flower bed, and the challenge of a baboon troop. Woodsie stood slowly, with immense self-restraint, and went to the edge of the verandah. He leant forward from a post into the night. ‘You heard that.’

  ‘What?’ said Tolly.

  ‘Not a thing,’ said Raf.

  ‘Describe it,’ said Montgomery.

  ‘What are you on about?’ said David.

  ‘Jesus. Lions and stuff, that’s what,’ said Woodsie. ‘No bugger hears it?’ His voice was harsh with fear. The others didn’t reply; just continued with cigars and coffee. For several more seconds the lions and baboons were joined at Mahakipawa by wild dogs and zebra. ‘Then it’s bloody Harlequin’s menagerie,’ said Woodsie in the silence that followed. With a formal and unexpected dignity, he thanked Tolly for the coffee and cigar. His textured shoes were plaited across the instep. ‘I’m going down to the treatment block in case something’s coming on,’ he said. His left cheek twitched despite his tight control.

  ‘Do you want me to come?’ asked David, but the Monitor went off down the walkway, first one then another of his multiple shadows gaining dominance as he moved from the province of one light to the next.

  Woodsie’s punishment had gone according to plan, but there was less satisfaction in it than expected. Tolly knew that David and Raf felt a measure of professional guilt. ‘Don’t be sorry for him,’ he said. ‘He had coffee and a cigar, didn’t he, and think of the trouble he’s stirred up by whining to Mousier. The guy’s a prize prick.’ Woodsie’s opposition to drugs, apart from alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, reminded Tolly of his stash, and he brought out his tin of joints.

  ‘I suppose I expected farce,’ said Raf, ‘but seeing Woodsie trying to cope with the noises wasn’t all that funny.’ David felt the same, and rather regretted going along with it.

  ‘Come on,’ said Montgomery. ‘Just because some of us are on the way out, doesn’t mean we have to tolerate Woodsie. A pain in the arse is what he is, sick or not. You guys will be wanting us all to join hands and sing, next. Maybe it’ll come to that, but not yet, eh Tolly, not yet. If the jungle comes for Woodsie, then that’s his lookout.’ Montgomery stood up and went off the verandah to the far limit of the light which spilled from it. He looked into the night, as if he thought that Woodsie might have circled around and be out there somewhere, then he went further into the dark to the azalea plot and retrieved the cassette player. His disembodied voice preceded his return. ‘Those hyenas, eh, and those lions. How about that, then?’

  ‘Spot on,’ said Tolly and he lit up, drew in with prolonged satisfaction.

  Woodsie stayed only one night in Treatment for observation and there wasn’t any episode, but ten days later he heard elephants while in the main foyer, and then the big cats started again while he was in a therapy session painting a still life of quinces, oranges and mangoes. David was told that it was all over in a few days: one of the quicker meltdowns the centre had had. Woodsie had a hooting contest with a baboon troop and then a full-scale battle. No relative came to claim the body, despite Woodsie’s wide professional acquaintance, just the punctilious, bald-headed Picton undertaker and his offsider who whistled Beethoven with some skill on each visit.

  TWENTY–NINE

  There were mornings of such natural serenity at Mahakipawa that even the dying couldn’t be downcast, and for those not under immediate sentence, their lives stretched so far ahead that the end was diminished beyond threat. The sky was intensely blue in its centre and paled on all sides without losing lustre. The sun laid a blaze of silver on the water which fragmented in a dancing shimmer on the blue of the sound further out. On the far side, the dark, forested hills held the blues of ocean and sky apart and trembled with the strain of it. Bird and stock calls, and the laughter from the laundry, carried as sharply as percussion caps.

  It was the world’s display of eternal permanence, harmony and indifferent beauty. The trance might hold for an hour or more, then people fell back on the familiar focus of themselves — bellies and bowels, bank balances and basket weaving, bickering and bleating. Was there a letter from the outside? How dare Mr Paycock use their floral cushion on the verandah. And the chance that day of being called to dance with Harlequin.

  That morning the dance master would call for Takahe newcomer Rachel Ellison, but David and Raf didn’t know it as they checked the rooms, and reminded people it was laundry day. ‘There’s a Maori man with a bowler hat on the foreshore,’ complained Mrs Tunney as she put out her own washing despite injunctions which forbade it: no nightdress, but pyjamas with faded sprigs and flowers like an old wallpaper.

  ‘Tolly Mathews is telling dirty stories again,’ said Dilys, ‘and, what’s worse, the women laugh. But God won’t be mocked, you know.’ She wanted to be clearly heard, yet at the same time keep the door sufficiently closed to hide the box of Roses chocolates on her dresser, in case she was expected to share.

  Peter Taiaroa had already been for a run, and was warming down on the verandah. David found it hard to accept that someone so young and solid and strong should need to be with them at all. ‘All the way to the point again?’ he asked.

  ‘And a plunge at the end of it,’ said Peter, continuing his exercises as he spoke. A sea plunge after a sweat-up didn’t sound ideal, but what could it matter.

  Mr Sarasvati was fully dressed, but sitting neatly on his bed like a day one boarder. It was his wife’s birthday but, as he was coming down from an episode, he couldn’t be with her. He was waiting until it was the right time to ring her. It was a good day, wasn’t it?

  Mrs McIlwraith was outside, putting bread and butter on an ice-cream lid she had wedged into the fork of a crab apple tree for the birds. ‘A great morning,’ she said vehemently. David nodded. �
��What we used to call a real gas of a day,’ she said recklessly. Her face, still without make-up, had a peeled look that reminded him that once she must have been young. She stopped fiddling with the food when she remembered something she was meant to pass on. ‘That tall, staring man from Kotuku came over earlier. He said to tell you that Lucy Mortimer has had a bad turn and is in Treatment. Not such a gas that, I suppose.’

  The tall, staring man was Tilling, the noted soil scientist who had a room next to Lucy. He occupied his time by doing his own research on Harlequin, with Schweitzer’s blessing. Why shouldn’t his hypothesis of soil toxins be as good as any other? And it offset to some extent his sense of helplessness. Tilling must have known that David and Lucy were lovers, yet not once had he departed from his good manners to mention it. He had added to that courtesy by coming over and leaving his kindly message undemandingly second-hand.

  The blue, the gold, the silver and the far, deep green still cradled Mahakipawa as David walked down to the treatment block. He imagined Lucy lost to self-possession and ease, lost even, perhaps, to awareness of who she was. She was nominally one of Tony Sheridan’s patients, and David went to his office, gave his name to the secretary, sat on a padded bench in the outer office which served as a waiting room. Sheridan’s door had a glass panel, and David could see part of a Gary Larson poster on the doctor’s wall. A stag, standing on its hind feet, with arms akimbo and an expression of American candour. The murmur of Sheridan’s professional voice was even and reassuring. After a very long time of about five minutes, Sheridan accompanied his patient to the door, opened it to farewell her, rather than giving dismissal from his desk.

  David didn’t know the woman; didn’t give a damn about her except that she was preventing him from finding out about Lucy. A bony woman with a face so worn by humdrum domestic repetition that it was as plain and true as a bread-board. He stood up as a sign that he regarded her pause in the doorway as a trespass.

  ‘Thank you for your time, doctor,’ she said. Sheridan had already crooked a finger and turned back to his desk; David stepped past her to follow. By the time he had closed the door, Sheridan was already on the phone to Treatment to get an update on Lucy. David sat: the stag still stood with persistent candour.

  ‘I meant to tell you,’ said Sheridan when he’d spoken with the nurse, and crossed his heavy legs with an effort. ‘She came in at three this morning, but I’ve been absolutely flat out since breakfast.’

  ‘How is she?’

  ‘Bad is how she is, David. A pronounced degree of hyperactivity during the early morning, and by the time we got her down here, she was really stirred up and had a massive seizure in Treatment.’

  ‘Jesus.’

  ‘All of us are going to have to be more careful, but before she’s always had an aura warning of an episode. Not this time. She’s done no great damage to herself, but we’ve had to give her a fair cocktail to counteract the extreme vivacity of the attack.’

  Even with some understanding of professionalism, David wondered how Sheridan could talk about Lucy in a way that made her one among others, rather than the unique focus she was. ‘Can I go up?’ he asked.

  ‘Would she want you to?’ said Sheridan awkwardly, but it was a fair challenge. David was thinking of his own need, his own fear and love, rather than Lucy’s needs. They so rarely talked about the illness, preferring when together to create an exclusion, proof against even Harlequin itself for much of the time. Lucy had told him to keep away when she was sick. Would she want to be seen in the aftermath of an episode?

  ‘I would’ve expected the two of you to have come to some agreement on that,’ said Sheridan. ‘Sooner or later it was going to happen, wasn’t it?’

  ‘Can I just go up and see her?’

  ‘Okay, but not by yourself, you know that.’

  Sheridan took a few minutes from his appointments to go up with David, who was too selfishly involved to appreciate it. The doctor talked of the number of treatment admissions there’d been that morning; more and more there seemed to be some cyclic predisposition, he said. Off duty, Tony Sheridan could seem ineffectual, slightly bewildered even, like a bear who has lost his growl, but on the job his sincerity, judgement and concern were reassuring.

  ‘If you were anyone else,’ he said, ‘I’d tell you how young and strong Lucy is, how important those things are in any prognosis, but you know that, with this illness, physical condition doesn’t really come into it. The brain is the battleground with Harlequin, and if too many lights get scrambled there it doesn’t matter a toss how strong you are. You know that. On the other hand, think how few episodes like this Lucy’s had, and Culhane’s supervising her treatment personally.’

  Sheridan and David went past the nursing station, and into a small room where Lucy sat listlessly by the one window. There was a high view over the centre’s grounds and down to the sea. The perfection of the morning was all still there, undimmed, but Lucy seemed to be watching the glass pane itself. She looked up at David and Tony Sheridan when they came and stood beside her. Her expression was ambiguous, as if one film negative was laid over another of similar definition yet different significance.

  ‘Ah, shit,’ she said quietly, ‘my inseminators are here. Schweitzer before breakfast and now Davy boy.’ She turned her face away when David stooped to kiss her.

  ‘How are you?’ he said weakly. Schweitzer had been before him in ways he had to face up to, but not now, not now.

  ‘As you see.’ She was picking at her lips as if quite alone in the room. Her posture, the ugly splaying of her knees, the loss of self-consciousness concerning appearance, weren’t part of any Lucy he acknowledged.

  David put his hand where her neck met shoulder, but she gave no response. ‘I came as soon as I knew,’ he said. ‘You’ve had a real rough one. I can sit with you for a while.’

  ‘Not while I’m in this shithouse,’ she said. ‘Fuck off. I’ve nothing for you, David, and you’ve nothing that’s any use to me.’

  Sheridan had moved back towards the door to give them space, and he motioned to David to follow him, shook his head to discourage him from prolonging a conversation. ‘Is there anything you want?’ asked David and then saw in her face the recognition of the complete fatuity of the remark. There was so much she wanted, and so little he could give her.

  Even the medication hadn’t completely blocked out what had happened. How easily and utterly Harlequin could strike. As David was urged from the room by Sheridan, Lucy gave him a farewell without turning.

  ‘It’s not funny when it’s you,’ she said. ‘There’s no good way to deal with this shit when it hits. You could do to remember that.’ She kept looking at the window and her shoulders were hunched in a way that reminded him of a sick bird. ‘Don’t come here looking for me,’ she said. She wasn’t the Lucy he loved: she wasn’t even the startling jack-in-the-box Lucy that Harlequin released. She was a limbo Lucy harnessed and sickened by drugs.

  Sheridan told him in the corridor, and again in the lift, that he should remember that Lucy wasn’t herself, not responsible for the things she said because of the treatment and the severity of her episode. ‘Why am I telling you this, when you work here every day,’ said Sheridan with a short laugh when they reached his office again. He screwed his face up in unprofessional chagrin at not being able to offer something more personal and insightful, and said that, although he had a patient due, he could meet David later, perhaps have lunch in the grounds. ‘Damn,’ was the last thing David heard him say, self-referentially, at a distance, closing his door behind him.

  What David felt was not so much pain, or even sympathy, but grief, which swelled his chest so that when he’d tried to say a few words to Sheridan, those words had trembled before utterance, threatened to topple into shuddering incoherence, and he’d closed his mouth without allowing their weakness to escape. He walked from the main door into the sudden sunlight and left the path quickly in case he met someone, pressing on into the institutional nea
tness and display of the gardens.

  Must so many be struck down at random, with no regard to culpability? Lucy was a goner if she kept getting major episodes like that. Was she on the way out, and nothing that he could do in redress? David’s fingers cramped and his chest constricted so that he had difficulty in drawing breath. The things around him were distanced and diminished. The buildings hugged the ground, even the voices from the volleyball courts seemed to be coming through glass. The sun still burned gold in the unquenchable blue, the silver blaze still lay across the sound, but everything — the lights and colours, the voices and shapes, the buckled hills, the smell of laundry, the barking of the Samoyed — had about it a dying fall.

  When he first came out of Paparua he moved around a good deal, the freedom to do so giving the pleasure of novelty for a while, but then he got a job with Samuels Bros. Transport and drove sheeptrucks, and loads of hay, cereal crops and super throughout North Canterbury. The towns and districts became familiar through the distortion of the summer heatwaves, and then the frosted clarity of winter: Cheviot, Culverden, Parnassus, Waipara, Hundalee, Hawarden, Waiau, Hurunui. Drugs and prison may have hardened his attitudes, but his hands had grown soft again, and he had townie blisters for a time, which shamed him, but in a few weeks his fitness came back to him; he could feel the even and economical pull of muscle and sinews as he worked with bags, bales, cartons and pallets, on and off the deck. His senses sharpened so that he was conscious again of the slight soapiness of draught beer in the mouth, of the birds in a sky far too bright to scrutinise, of the aroma of sheep shit and oily fleeces, the easy song of the big diesel when its revs suited both load and road, the uneasy squeak of corrugated iron on the sheds in the feared nor’-wester. Only occasionally, on flat Sunday afternoons when regrets crowded in, did he lie in the Samuels’ bach at Gore Bay and smoke shit, until the water stains on the makeshift ceiling became most elegant decoration, and his decline from private school, university and ownership of part of the country itself, seemed the most natural and blameless of careers.