A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  ‘You just come on down,’ Dr Dunne is saying. ‘I think the two of you might make a useful combination. Your brain, such as it is, has been shaken up so much that you need conversation to stop it whirling and Miles has come to love inertia as a bulwark against further loss.’ She helps Slaven from the bed. He puts a hand on her far shoulder and she seems tucked under his arm. Yet Dr Dunne is compact and strong, manoevring Slaven easily down the ward and she wears no white coat, but a plain, dark blue dress and her only ostentation apart from intelligence is a very large ruby and diamond ring aflame on her left hand.

  ‘What are you reading?’ Slaven asks Vincent as they pass.

  ‘Poetry.’

  ‘Anyone we’d know?’ asks Marianne.

  ‘Burns perhaps,’ says Slaven.

  ‘Nice one. That’s a good one,’ she says. Vincent is shy in his ignorance and draws the book to himself. There is a smooth nape to his brown neck where the curls rest that the nurses would not resist if pressed. Dr Dunne considers it a double shame that someone with such perfect skin should be scalded so severely. Slaven now, has the typical leatheriness of his countrymen although he is not outside to any great extent, and he is putting on weight. ‘You’re putting on weight,’ she tells him in the corridor.

  ‘Isn’t it a reaction to the accident?’

  ‘Ah well,’ she says. ‘One thing at a time. Your wife came in to see me after Tuesday’s visiting. She was a little disappointed by what she called the evergreen regimentation of the lower garden. Your own treatment regime she endorsed, but she reserved judgement on that of the the succulents and hebes.’

  ‘Kellie’s something of a gardener.’

  Miles Kitson can hear them outside his private room. Go on past, he thinks, go on past. He dislikes the sound of Slaven’s voice, the elements of confidence and goodwill not permitted to enlarge themselves to arrogance. Miles repeats Slaven’s comment with a wordless mimicry. At the end of his life he wants no new acquaintances, and even less does he wish for new friends, having grown weary of most of those he has accumulated.

  Miles has been ignoring a nagging itch in his anus and composing the next letter to send to Georgina from his bedside computer. It is a recollection of their first meeting at Badmenheim fourteen years before, when he had been on his way back from inspecting a plastic extrusion plant in Dortmund. He had stopped at Badmenheim because a protest to save the Rhine had blocked the road further on and from the second terrace above the old town he watched the protestors attempt also to block the shipping of the river itself. They had a fleet of yellow and black inflatables with outboard motors and they endeavoured to link them together with cables across the broad river.

  At the door, where they stop walking, Slaven becomes self-conscious about the familiarity with which he has Marianne Dunne tucked in for support. He lifts his bandaged hands gingerly away and thanks her, while through the angle of the partly opened door he sees Miles for the first time. He’s predisposed to dislike him because of the man’s exceeding wealth and his exceeding sickness. Science has never convinced us that death isn’t contagious. ‘I’m sure he’d rather be left in peace,’ says Slaven.

  ‘Oh, go on in,’ says Marianne Dunne.

  ‘I would. I’d rather be left alone, which isn’t the same as being left in peace. That state departed with my health,’ says Miles. ‘I’m writing to my wife.’ They’ll come in anyway, he knows. People no longer recognise frankness; they mistake it for humour. He reaches out to the keyboard on his bedside table and with barely a glance at it, types in — meeting at Badmenheim — so he will have at least a starting point when alone again.

  ‘Don’t be a nark,’ says Dr Dunne. ‘I’ve brought Aldous Slaven who has been burnt too.’

  ‘A pity he isn’t twice shy then.’

  ‘I’ll stay just a few minutes to catch my breath and be the butt of your humour,’ says Slaven. ‘Whatever the company the healing process goes on just the same I’m told.’ So they begin the talk, first three of them, then the doctor slips away, and Miles also for unfinished business though he leaves a face and moderate contribution to the conversation. It had been windy and the Rhine provided a large enough surface for choppy waves to develop which made it difficult for the protestors to get all their inflatables in a line. The Riesling was not enough in itself to dispel his irritation and he remembers that what annoyed him was not the cause for which the young people disrupted the lives of others, he could agree in principle with that, but the self-conscious, self-righteous zeal with which they worked, calling loudly to each other, gesticulating in their collaboration as if the whole world were watching. Wilde was right enough when he claimed that youth was wasted on the young, for not only do they lack an absolute appreciation of their state, but also a comparative one. In the living experience it is all animalistic arrogance, magnificent though that is and only in retrospect can the spiritual opportunities be somewhat wistfully discerned. As a rich man grown poor, or a winter’s man remembering summer, it is having lived the contrasts which makes a true assessment possible.

  Slaven begins to explain the state of his burns in answer to Miles Kitson’s question.

  What Miles hankers for is the oneness of youth; the fusion of body and spirit so that the failure of one is the failure of both and the triumph of either is utter triumph. Five times he had cut across Lockhardt’s bull paddock and knew to less than a metre where that great, Minoan head would be when he somersaulted over the fence into the brown top and red clover. He was the only white businessman to fully gain the trust of Mr Ng of Hong Kong. He once shagged three sisters in one night, quite without realising it was the best he would ever do, and as a young businessman he could work to exhaustion, slip off his shoes and sleep on the office floor for an hour or two, then be up for another day at a pace which made his name and his fortune.

  But now body and soul have ceased to be natural allies and are kept together only by a fading act of will. He has eleven physical complaints that he can give a name to and four others which he can recognise when pronounced by the doctors as part of his stable as well. Recurrent piles are making his arse itch right now, the burns weep and Slaven’s voice comes to him through a whine of tinnitus.

  And disorders of the spirit? For these he is reliant more on self-diagnosis, and self-treatment for that matter, though the disabilities which he suffers by them are just as severe and numerous as those imposed on his body. And as with them it is as likely to be one of the minor, irksome things, as any of the more calamitous failings, which causes him regret. Like his aversion to new people. Almost all new faces, new voices, new personalities, disappoint him with their callowness, even before they disappoint him he feels them tiresome, intrusive. Miles no longer has any wish to be viewed.

  ‘You look as if you’ve had a fairly torrid time yourself,’ says Slaven. As the possessor of a leathery skin, Slaven is appalled by the tenuous separation that Miles Kitson has from the world. Not that he is burnt on any visible surface, but his skin is opaque, shiny and forms fine, gladwrap wrinkles when he talks. Some blood vessels are visible as they surface, or dive, twisting spermatozoa of capillaries, larger ones lighter if arterial, or the dark, sluggishness of veins. The rims below his eyes sag forward slightly so that they make a pink underscoring for his gaze and above his ears in the sparse, dry hair are plaques of cradle cap.

  ‘Yes, I’m completely broken down, as you see,’ says Miles. His voice is husky as old men’s voices tend to be, but there is as well an individual quality — a flat directness which can harden into derision.

  ‘Don’t humiliate me, Marianne, by examining my dressings in front of a stranger,’ he says when she is back.

  ‘There’s no latitude for your self-pity today. Remember that I’ve brought someone with brains to talk to you. You won’t see your wife and you’ve said you miss your friends.’

  ‘Friends, yes,’ says Miles with emphasis. He doesn’t have much hope of Aldous, who has a general air of liberal good intent, a wife
with the ridiculous name of Kellie and is a dentist. Who could be friends with a dentist for Christ’s sake. ‘So what happened to you?’ he asks when Dr Dunne has mechanically raised his pillow and gone.

  ‘I almost electrocuted myself on the power lines while painting the house.’

  ‘For me it was just a jug of water. Everything becomes a threat with age. I’d barely got mobile from heart surgery. There’s a message in it I suppose. Marianne said that you’ve undergone some sort of involuntary revitalisation and have a vision to put the world to rights. Isn’t that what they used to do in the funny farms years ago? A bit of the old electro-convulsive therapy. In my time in business I’ve seen a few candidates for it.’ Miles remembers the stiff breeze there had been on the terrace above the Rhine and the yellow and black inflatables pitching as they endeavoured to stay in line. The barges had pushed past with angry exchanges and in the distance, up river, Miles had seen the old Marksburg Castle high above the town of Braubach. ‘Have you ever been to Badmenheim?’ he says. ‘It’s in the Palatinate.’

  ‘Kellie and I have been to Munich and Augsburg in the south.’

  ‘They make a fine hock in the old way, above the river on the terraces. I met my present wife there.’ She had come back from the road-block, one of several English amongst the international group of protestors and immediately he had felt his cock stiffen. In those days he still received such healthy signs.

  ‘Have we anything in common?’ says Slaven. He surprises himself with this new directness which has come to him since his accident. His hands rest on Miles Kitson’s bed like two huge cotton buds. ‘Not that I don’t enjoy a good Riesling,’ he says. For the first time Miles feels some interest in him, not an interest that overides his wish to continue with his letter to Georgina, but a stirring nevertheless.

  ‘Well then, Aldous, tell me some belief that you have.’ His eyelids fall for a moment on the important word, an involuntary apology to himself for having mentioned it. Much further back than Badmenheim was the New Year’s Eve in Bosnia’s old city, with the special intensity of celebration which befitted both a new century and a new millenium. There were strobe lights, sirens, guns, fireworks flared against the snow and afterwards the relayed T.V. speech from the President which Miles had been unable to hear because of the marching bands and sky-larking in the streets. He had been forty-six years old, with thick, elastic skin that held his body in, and already rich.

  ‘We are alone,’ says Slaven.

  ‘Yes, good.’

  ‘So all the more important to have some links with others in an external life,’ Slaven continues. Miles turns down his lip in disappointment and the lids blink over his slate eyes again.

  ‘And?’ he says.

  ‘Since I’ve been in here I can’t get politics out of my mind. Well, not politics so much in the sense of government as in the means of empowering communal will. A sort of pre-government consensus.’

  ‘Tell me about it then,’ says Miles. Well, it is one way to pass the time. His dying is so slow that it is almost a life of sorts. He leans over and turns off his screen, but with Badmenheim in the memory there and in his own: that exact chop on the Rhine splashing on the inflatables so that their surfaces of black and yellow are seen to gleam at a distance, other protestors coming back from the road-blocks, talking mainly in German and French, and the proprietor advising Miles that it is better to wait longer until the glut of vehicles has sorted itself out. Georgina’s dark hair in cusps and her low-waisted denims. Maybe he will die thinking of Badmenheim where he first met her and with this dentist somewhat self-consciously laying out a humdrum metaphysic which is special to him because it has the scent of burning. The owl here is often calling names.

  Norman Proctor has died before we have come round to telling his story. Let’s just say that he had a good match temperament did Proctor. It used to be a treat to see him cope with the pressure at provincial, even national, tournaments. Oh yes, it’s easy advice to treat each ball on its merits irrespective of the state of the game, but Proctor actually managed to do so on occasions which seemed important at the time. Had we started at the bed furthest from the door there would have been more of him and less of Montgomery and young Vincent I dare say.

  Norman Proctor was dying anyway, but Kellie was the occasion of it, if not the cause, as the scholars say. Norman had very little movement and no woman. He had no enjoyment from watching Montgomery’s wife when she came to call, but he admired Kellie’s energy and sense of purpose. He made a considerable effort to watch Kellie inspecting the gladioli she had placed on his table the day before. Kellie’s shoulder was brown and well muscled by gardening. Unfortunately the strain brought on a cramp in Proctor’s neck and he suffocated in silence there as Kellie talked to Vincent of the Mount Cook lily she had seen below the Hooker Glacier.

  It is a Thursday, with a heat cloud pressing down on the city. The first trees and buildings from the hospital windows can be seen and then the white-grey uniformity of cloud like a well used sheet. The nurses wheel Proctor’s bed into the corridor and close the swing doors to the small ward so that the others don’t have to see Proctor being tidied away. For some reason there is a good deal of birdsong on such a day and in his room Miles can hear the throaty whistles of the thrushes as well as the voices of the nurses outside his door.

  ‘And I’ve just spent an age changing the dressings,’ says Elaine.

  ‘Ssh. Mr Kitson will hear you,’ whispers Jan. What happens to such an instant, Miles wonders, what record is there of the momentary coincidence of all the elements that are there. Proctor cooling in his transported bed, Elaine and Jan on the shift together only because Nicola is to be a bridesmaid in Dargaville, the white gladioli stems with five buds still to open, the slight vibrato whistle of the birds in the heat mist underscored for Miles alone from the faint orchestra pit of his tinnitus. Often after such a day there comes in the evening a welcome drizzle which drifts and trembles in the failing light without ever leaving any trace of itself as rain.

  Miles presses a key and begins to dictate the corporate structure that he wants for his new business in Indonesia. He wishes to carry his Board on the principle that stand alone financial accountability is the best yardstick for measuring executive potential. Also he wants to be doing something unless the owl decides that it might be as well to take him while in the neighbourhood.

  The orderly has arrived and Proctor is transferred to a trolley which squeaks cheerfully away down the corridor. ‘Leave it to me, darling,’ the orderly says. It won’t hurt to follow him just a little, not to depress ourselves with the aftermath of Proctor’s death, but rather see the misted grounds outside the corridor he travels. The corridor is long and narrow with many uniform windows on both sides, rather like a gutted railway carriage, and links ward seven with the main block. On the orderly’s left — Proctor’s too if you wish to be reminded — there are the dwarf conifers in the quartz pebble garden and on the right mainly Scoliopius bigelovii and ranunculus, which Kellie would tell us are prone to fungal blight after just such days as this. In the branches of a sycamore, just out of sight in the warm, gathering mist, is a canary which escaped from Mrs Wicks when she was cleaning the cage an hour ago. It adds nothing to the songs that Miles hears and Proctor is still relaxed enough about his death for his chin to quiver whenever the trolley jars over the joins in the flooring, almost as if he is attempting to join the orderly in a line or two of the Hoihos’ hit of the moment — Sure, all our friends are waiting in good old Half Moon Bay.

  Kellie is walking back to her car through the mist. Slaven goes in to see Miles. ‘Fancy that,’ he says. ‘Kellie had just been arranging the flowers on his table and the next thing he was gone.’ Jan stays a while in the ward to talk to Vincent and Mr Montgomery. Off-stage Mrs Wicks is weeping, because somewhere marooned in all the soft, massed vapour moving in from the sea, is her poor canary.

  ‘Kellie came in before she left,’ says Miles hoarsely.

  ‘She
finds you particularly interesting because of your money.’

  ‘Is that it.’

  ‘That’s not quite how I meant it. To be fair, she hasn’t any envious, or trivial, motive. It’s psychological effects she finds fascinating; how it might influence a personality, a view of the world.’

  ‘It means I don’t have to be so accommodating, rather as some of those who have nothing decide they won’t flatter, or appease anyone. At the two ends of the scale you see that, while the bulk of people are in between, oh, so very conscious of what and who can be to their advantage. To retain a conviction of freedom you should have nothing to lose, or so much that you don’t believe it could ever happen.’

  ‘That’s what she senses, I think,’ says Slaven.

  ‘She brought me in two arum lilies and laughed when I said they had the stench of the funeral parlour. She said they weren’t true lilies at all. I never knew that.’ The two lily stems are on the bedside table, their great fluted, sari flowers more arrogantly white than anything the hospital itself can provide, their yellow, parrot tongues upraised and the scent indeed crass and heavy.

  Miles Kitson begins to revise his opinion of Slaven. He has begun to look forward to their talks and not just because there are so few he would choose for company within the hospital. Almost anyone would come in at his request. He realises that he is seeing a man in the process of metamorphosis, a change of priority and intention, although Slaven’s commonplace exterior remains just the same. Well, almost the same. More and more there are times when his long, dentist’s face loses its expression of habitual professional caution, becoming animated with the intensity of new ideas. There are times also when Miles is aware of a greenish haze, an emanation, around his friend’s head, incongruous as a background to Slaven’s black, pig-bristle hair, as you recall. Miles can’t decide if this is some illusion arising from his own illness, an aura, or the lingering consequence of all that electricity suddenly surging through Slaven’s middle-aged brain cells. ‘When do you go home?’ he asks him.