A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Positively we are a social church rather than an institutional one you see,’ says Thackeray. ‘The ideas which you have and which you express so succinctly are precisely those which our church and the Cambrian membership have been working towards in the development of our outreach policy.’

  ‘I don’t think of my ideas as being religious and certainly not denominational. In fact it’s a sense of downing the barriers and classifications of all sorts that most interests me, the fellowship and unity of those people without any great power base of their own. I’ve never been much of a joiner. My profession has supplied almost everything for me as of right, but now I have this urge to attempt something on a public scale.’

  ‘I’m not suggesting that you become one of us, that you have any obligation to adopt a religious stance, just that you might find it helpful to accept some assistance in support of your ideas. We have a community programme which operates nationally for example, and which tries to respond to the needs people have instead of being just a recruiting agency for a political party, or sectional interest group.’

  ‘All I know at present,’ says Slaven, ‘is that I have a compulsion to speak out. I’m bursting with it and I don’t understand why. Maybe it’s some sort of folly that I’ll regret.’

  ‘Do you know Tuamarina?’

  ‘By Blenheim isn’t it.’

  ‘We’re planning a regeneration rally there in the winter. Us in conjunction with the Women’s League and local rural fellowship organisations. I have close ties with both Maori and Pakeha in the area. Come and speak at Tuamarina — a wider audience for your ideas. We get hundreds of people often and they’re just the ones you care most about I’d say. We think Tuamarina is appropriate for an ethnically inclusive meeting because of its history.’

  The young Thomases sit patiently against the house side of the patio and their lips move as their father discusses with Slaven the forthcoming Tuamarina rally, but moving at this time not in a silent rhetorical preparation, but because they enjoy the fruit loaf which Kellie has put before them. They have heavy, luxuriant hair hanging very straight and Kellie finds that their names are Iago and Dafydd. The names are so correct that Kellie can’t resist asking the Rev Thomas why his own Christian name sounds not at all Celtic. ‘There’s Anglo-Saxon in the family,’ he says in a tone which shows that such honesty is painful.

  Kellie asks him also what he finds in Slaven’s views which he thinks should be brought to a wider audience. ‘Fellow feeling, collectivism,’ says Thackeray. ‘An emphasis on the spiritual dimension in everyday matters. People can’t understand the social and political systems any more. They feel angry and threatened and disappointed because of their own ignorance and powerlessness. Most have no way of expressing what’s gone wrong, no concept of what can be done to correct things, so they fall back on isolation and selfishness, dog eat dog. But Aldous has the gift, you see. He’s been chosen to speak on the behalf of others. It’s a wonderful thing that.’

  ‘I’ve only done it once, just to twenty-three people,’ says Slaven.

  ‘It’s plain to see though. Most of those people are talking about it all the time. I’ve developed a skill for public speaking, I’m known for it, but you have the gift you see. Quite different. You’ll always be admired now, or hated, because people won’t be able to ignore what you say.’

  ‘Sounds as if it could be an albatross,’ says Kellie.

  ‘A phoenix, Mrs Slaven,’ says Thackeray. ‘Risen out of the arcing fire; the lightning,’

  ‘The gift is it,’ say Iago and Dafydd in unison as their only contribution.

  See Kellie’s garden spread around them, the sere birch leaves rattling a little on the paving alongside the patio, the anxious sound of the Hammond boy’s remote control model plane from the next four hectare block, the tension creases on the trousers of Iago and Dafydd as they sit politely. Here is the trough to be glimpsed beyond the flowers and shrubs. It has that bright show of green moss and algae at the leak. And on the breeze which rattles the leaves comes the oil-wool-dry shit smell of the hobby Romneys which can be heard cropping grass close to the fence. In the close texture of such boredom surely nothing of significance can be said, or planned. Victor Yee prepares a meal in the front flat with no sense of release, Miles, who has forbidden Georgina to visit him, watches on video while she strips, Norman Proctor’s memorial plaque at the Avon Crematorium dazzles the custodian with reflected sun.

  ‘You realise that it’s political action rather than any religious conversion that I’m interested in,’ says Slaven.

  ‘You want your aims to be spiritually and socially regenerative though. Isn’t that so?’ replies Thackeray.

  ‘And I don’t want to work within any particular party; certainly not yet. Just give people the opportunity to endorse a few basic principles, just give me the chance to gauge the opinions of ordinary people.’

  ‘For that you’ll find Tuamarina the ideal place,’ says Thackeray.

  ‘Is there provision for a fee?’ says Kellie. ‘Aldous has very little coming from the partnership while he can’t work you know.’ The minister spreads his fingers palm uppermost as if to make clear that he hasn’t any golden handshake.

  ‘Expenses though of course,’ he says.

  Kellie decides for the future that if indeed Slaven has the gift then it will not necessarily be passed on as such. She leaves her husband and Thackeray talking, and the Thomas sons, adult, but not yet come into their intellectual inheritance. These two rise in courtesy as she goes. Kellie imagines them late at night, roaming the beaches and parks while they practise their rhetorical skills and await their chance. Will the Charismatic Cambrian Church, the country even, be big enough for two of them when Thackeray has given up? Will they be new Lloyd Georges from the glass caves of the other side of the world? Do they harangue the possum, rat and morepork with wondrous eloquence despite the pebbles beneath their tongues?

  Thackeray and Slaven find that they can be straight with each other. There is in both a bedrock intelligence and good intention as a link despite the slightly gothic aspects of the Rev Thomas’s personality and the reverse in Slaven’s.

  ‘I see you as the keynote speaker at Tuamarina,’ says Thackeray, despite this role normally being his own. He is pleased with his insight in regard to Slaven’s significance and he takes an innocent pleasure in the comfort of Kellie and Slaven’s home, with its basking garden of colour and the hobby paddocks as a further privacy around it. He has no great wealth and possession and doesn’t direct his talent in that way, but it sometimes occurs to him that there may be Meyrick estates in Penrhyn which are owed to him perhaps. ‘Are you the gardener?’ he asks Slaven.

  ‘My wife.’

  ‘What a talent she has. My own wife now, she’s an equestrian. Dressage is the thing with her and I suppose that’s rather like being a gardener in a way. A sense of fitness, order, the contained display of nature. My own personality is rather archaic to a degree, tempestuous even, but you can’t deny your race. You’re not Celtic are you?’

  ‘More English and Dane.’

  ‘It’s of no consequence,’ says Thackeray, ‘but I do hope you’ll come to Tuamarina in June. We’re taking a risk in the weather, but the seventeenth of June was when the fight took place there — the massacre as it was once known. It’s fitting in that way you see and our organisation is quite strong in the countryside there.’

  ‘I rang Adelle and found out a bit about him,’ says Kellie. ‘Adelle’s into religion and influential figures and so on. She says the Cambrian Church is one of the big things now throughout the country, but they believe more in regional autonomy and grassroots help than a high national profile. She says Thackeray Thomas even goes overseas to speak by invitation.’

  ‘Well then, it seems reasonable to appear at Tuamarina. It’s not as if we’re joining up and it provides a ready made platform, a means of access to the people.’

  It is late evening now and the colours of their garden are
fading as the light goes. Bright, self-advertisements of distinctiveness are replaced by washes of shadow, blue and grey. Hedgehogs begin snuffling amongst the pea-straw that Kellie has laid beneath the shrubs, moths swerve clumsily towards the windows behind the patio where Kellie and Slaven have come out again. Kellie has a cardigan over her shoulders and as she sits surrounded by all the commonplace reassurance of her home, she stifles any fears of where Slaven’s new life will take them and how it will end. ‘What does it feel like?’ she says.

  ‘Feel like?’

  ‘To have yourself turned upside down, yet still look just the same. We’re heading off god knows where, with scarcely a remark about it. I imagined more emotion, long discussion, declarations of commitment and intent. Instead it’s just happening isn’t it.’

  Slaven makes a quick grimace in the dusk. He opens his mouth to make the impossible explanations to his wife. Even as he talks he is confounded by the realisation that the more urgently he is driven to influence other people, the more aware he becomes of an unspeakable and final isolation. There is no necessary sense to it, but consequences will be no less for that. Something has been burnt out of him, perhaps, or something exposed. All our troubles fall away, when we’re together at Half Moon Bay.

  It is cold and still when Slaven and Miles drive from Blenheim to Tuamarina on the Picton road. The grass is bowed down with the melt water of the night’s frost and where any stock have disturbed it their tracks are clear within the milky paddocks. At the Tuamarina turn-off there is little visible to encourage cars to stop: a lay-by, the cheese factory and primary school beyond the railway line, the small cemetery on the summit of the first, abrupt hill which overlooks the plain. The new prosperity of boutique vineyards and lifestyle organic horticulture has passed by this part of the Wairau. The trees are motionless and from a weatherboard farmhouse a trail of chimney smoke gradually topples to one side. Two border collies bark them past, the heads jerking at each release of the sound. The sky of the grey winter morning presses over everything like a shark’s belly.

  Slaven carefully negotiates the few, steep bends of the cemetery hill, the granite and concrete of the graves repeating the colour of the sky. At the summit, behind the patch of graves there, a park has been bulldozed out on the ridge which runs back to the gathering hills. No one else has arrived, but some preparations stand from the day before. A line of yellow portaloos has been set behind a green canvas screen and flexible pipes from them snake down the hill to a large tanker parked on the flat. There are stacks of chairs to be set out for invited guests and the infirm. The dew covers the tubular backs with droplets and has pooled in the top seat of each pile. Angel Hire, is stamped on each backrest. There is one strung banner to identify the day’s event, its vinyl background lighter than the morning sky and the blue lettering saying Praise The Lord. A cheerful, defiant banner, even if one end is held up by a manuka pole and the other attached to the eucalypt tree which grows over the grave of those Europeans killed in the skirmish with the Maori in 1843.

  It is all so ordinary, so do-it-yourself, so low-key New Zealand. ‘Perfect,’ whispers Miles from the car. For him it is the best moment of the whole occasion. He doesn’t want anyone else to come, doesn’t care if no one speaks, if no issues are raised, or resolved. He doesn’t want people gradually obscuring his view with their earnest, solid bodies and the equally solid belief in their own importance. The secret pride of New Zealanders is to be alone in their landscape. Miles wants to see the sooty fantail on the loo screen, the stacks of Angel Hire chairs amongst the grass drenched with the winter dew, the side-road bearing west to Waikakaho, the Wairau River in the middle distance and its plain, the modest monument to what in less sensitive times had been termed the Massacre, its concrete almost friable with age, and behind both Slaven and himself the hills in a jumble mounting higher; gorse, scrub and regrowth at first, but then the dark, true bush. And a banner in white and blue — Praise The Lord. Miles gives a shiver of joy. ‘Perfect,’ he says again. There are a few more recent graves, low plaques in contrast to the memorials of a more religious age. He could rest in such a place.

  ‘What about the acoustics?’ asks Slaven. ‘You know, I’ve no idea how loud I should be for an outdoors group. I’ll go further back a bit and you tell me how it sounds.’ He walks up the hill another twenty or thirty metres. ‘Thank you all for making the effort to join with us today. How’s that for carry?’ Miles has the car door open; his head lies back on the rest, but he lifts one hand in a gesture which reassures Slaven that his voice is fine for carry.

  Two vehicles come up the track while Slaven tests his voice, one a truck so old that it still has two-way glass and Miles and Slaven can see the workman driving it. He has a green jersey with honest holes and he walks up to Slaven when the truck is parked. ‘How many do you think I should put out?’ he says.

  ‘Chairs?’

  ‘Yes. How many do you expect?’

  ‘I’m not sure.’ Slaven has taken no part in the practical arrangements.

  ‘There’s one hundred. The Rev Thomas says they’re for old people and so on. I’ll set them all out and we’ll know where we are. Les Croad’s the name.’

  During the introduction four people come from the car which followed Croad’s truck and stand at a sufficient distance to give the impression that they are outside the conversation, but in line for attention. Two men and two women. Slaven recognises only one, the entreaty man from the Civil Defence seminar. He smiles and endeavours to catch Slaven’s eye as Croad moves away to do his thing with the chairs. ‘I’ve brought some business friends to hear you,’ says the entreaty man and he introduces them. Let’s see the second woman that Slaven shakes hands with, for she draws interest by kicking her feet to shake the water drops from her suede boots. Her face has the soft shine of a complexion nurtured with the very best of creams and she tutors in the textile arts, does good by stealth, yet can never forget the mischance which led her husband to land in the boiler funnel of Grudgling Alloys while free-falling over Rolleston. The quiet words she uses are overlaid by the noise of Croad swearing and using his boots to separate the chairs, yet from his distance Miles, who has not been introduced to either, imagines how a slap on her round and naked arse would ring across the cemetery. In the east the grey of the morning sky has a dull glow from the sun behind it and in the first breeze of the day the banner puffs its chest for a moment, then is still again. From their vantage point on the hill, all can see small groups of vehicles turning off onto the narrow road to the memorial. The entreaty man tells Slaven that they won’t intrude anymore, on impulse steps closer to clasp his arm.

  ‘Good luck. Good fortune for the message,’ he says urgently, before turning away with his eyes down once more. Slaven is flattered, but also disconcerted by the barely suppressed warmth, the heightened expectation, the distance they have come. What has he to give that merits such hope.

  The Rev Thackeray Thomas arrives with his two sons; such splendid fat cheeks. With Thomas are three elders of the Ngati Toa who have come to lift the tapu on the site before any Pakeha speak. Thackeray Thomas seems as fluent in Maori as the elders and given half a chance will no doubt lift the tapu himself. It is an irony bitterly evident to him that he speaks virtually no Welsh despite his lineage. A Thomas related to the great Meyricks and he speaks only the two New Zealand languages.

  Eleven o’clock and there are about two hundred people; some wandering over the site, some still at their cars in the school grounds below the hill. A few have claimed chairs, one or two are already slipping behind the screen to the portaloos. Thackeray Thomas shouts loudly that he wants to invite Paul Hurinui to make a start with the meeting, but people dislike to be called to order and so give their attention rather to a group of horse riders who come trotting up the track like a detachment of Boer guerrillas. Thomas walks down to welcome them, but finds that they have mistaken the Tuamarina gathering for the assembly point of the gay riders’ safari to Nelson. Despite the Rev Th
omas’s charity in inviting them to stay, the riders don’t want to miss the start of their trek. Several of the audience recall noticing riders heading towards Waikakaho and so the gay guerrillas move off again, some of the horses farting with the jolting of the slope. Despite the motive for the Tuamarina meeting and the example of Thackeray Thomas, not all those who remain are able to show toleration. Les Croad, resting by his truck, shouts that it’s a good riddance.

  Miles has been sleeping in the warmth of the car. The small excitement of the gays on horseback wakes him. It takes time for him to orientate himself, at first imagining that he is in old Otago. When the truth comes to him he is sad not to be accompanying the riders. Two or three days on a bridle-track across the Richmond Range to Nelson; the lower ridge-lines of scrub, the spongy trails through the valley bush which meets overhead and folds in sounds of the wood pigeon and bellbird.

  There are other places you must know. Past the street of car yards — bunting and flags strain in the wind’s gaiety, you didn’t know that the purchase of a vehicle is so much a carnival, pink, green, yellow, red and blue, the pennon strings lead up to the central maypole. Then a side road and a place with a reduced showroom at the front to display the kitset furniture made at the back. It’s close to the reclaimed harbour land, zoned light industrial, and across from it you will remember is the headquarters of the vintage car club and on one side is the crowd who import Persian rugs from Korea, on the other a large tin shed in which galvanised guttering is made for the trade. The kitset showroom was once the front two rooms of a cottage and the dull, tiled fireplace is still there at one end. They use mainly reconstituted hardboard and three-ply. You can buy your three-drawer desk built up and stained, or take the kitset and the single sheet of photocopied instructions in which the possessive its is apostrophied and a lacquer finish is termed most unique. Two men do the manufacturing, two men sell when necessary, two men are the proprietors. The same two. Perhaps Gavin Buttery is the one you knew better, killed by a monsoon bucket during the scrub fires behind the city. Quietus now.