A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  Rain begins: the finest drizzle which stirs and drifts like smoke and like smoke is grey and ethereal when caught in the car lights, or illuminated by the prancing red-yellow fires. So delicate and seemingly weightless are the drops that even when they settle the surface tension keeps them intact on fabric, leaf, hair, skin, on the cow dung slickered in the grass. As small jewels the droplets add their opaque spangles when caught in light. The mist gathers on the blue rug which Slaven wears over his shoulders as he speaks so that it becomes silver-grey in the headlights, and droplets tickle on the fine hairs high on his cheeks.

  Slaven has kept the people pumped up for another hour, casting out his ideas again and again and drawing them back like a net through the crowd. Now the fervour leaves him and he climbs stiffly down from the truck against the great roar of supporters. He takes his turn along the beaten track to that portaloo set aside for officials, then sits in his air-conditioned car and watches new speakers who have been drawn to the meeting to capitalise on its vast success: the Actuarian Legislator for Marlborough, a celebrity herbalist from Pelorus, and Professor Marian Pesetsky who has retired in Picton, but won fame in the twenties for her successful campaign to outlaw male circumcision.

  But it’s over, isn’t it, whatever held all these people in conviction. The singleness of purpose, the group identity almost all felt, yet none could adequately name, is no longer with them and despite the celebrities and the leaping fires, the media gunship overhead and the pizza stands, people are aware of the cold whisper of the drifting rain. They remember things neglected for too long — pets and children and lovers and nagging parents at home, seminar presentations and office meetings tomorrow, heaters perhaps unattended during all this winter day. So gradually the dispersal in the night begins, some in groups still singing to maintain euphoria, some couples, families, some singly, conscious that they are again alone and pleased that their state is inconspicuous in the dark. There’s been no method, or supervision, in parking and people call out, sound their horns and flash their lights in exasperation as the exodus begins. Cars circle through the long grass seeking easier ways to leave. Thackeray Thomas displays a weeping, lost child on the deck of the truck and the informal concert party sings Te Kuiti Dream. Paul Hurinui and his fellow kaumatua are waiting patiently to give a proper farewell to their land.

  Slaven watches from his car for a while, but is very tired. Has Miles reached the hotel without mishap and where has Kellie got to? He wishes she had seen his impact, his great success. He arranges the blanket around himself, damp side out, and lets down the seat back so that he can sleep comfortably. He begins to drowse, seeing the sparks dance upwards as the fire nearest to him is kicked to death. Tilted back as he is, he can see no people, not even Dafydd his protector, not even the body of the fire, just the tiger eyes of sparks gleaming in ascent. So, amidst continuing confusion, he rests.

  Kellie wakes him the next morning. She hadn’t got through until almost midnight and then only because of help from a bald-headed man, in shorts and tramping boots despite the weather, who pointed out a way against the flow. She has slept a few hours herself and while waiting for the late dawn considers the Tuamarina meeting as an exercise in organisation and finds it wanting. Sure, the numbers had grown quite beyond anything that could be expected, but there had been poor management nevertheless, too much left to chance, too few contingency plans made, too many actions taken as a response to events, rather than as an instigation of them.

  She makes her observations to Slaven as she provides him with fruit and sandwiches and coffee. She has brought a flannel and a towel. She winds down the windows for the one-way glass has misted from Slaven’s breath during the night and she wants to see the sun coming up, the sea of Cloudy Bay at a distance, the vineyards and orchards, the pasture land before Tuamarina and the hills rising behind. ‘You’ll feel dreadful,’ she says.

  ‘Not so hot. You’re right. You get stiff not being able to change position easily I suppose.’ Slaven rubs his face. His trousers and shirt are twisted uncomfortably around him and the rug has begun to smell because of the dampness. He wants Kellie to tell him that the triumphs of the day before were as he remembered. She pats his hair down at the crown and folds his coat.

  ‘We’ll get back to the hotel and have a clean-up and a decent meal,’ she says. ‘Miles is being made a fuss of there because they know how rich he is.’

  ‘And your sister?’

  ‘A beautiful big girl. Born on the very stroke of three o’clock.’

  ‘I think something was born here too,’ says Slaven.

  ‘There was something of it on the television before I left,’ she says. ‘You were standing on the back of a truck looking like a refugee, but speaking like a man possessed. Next time I’ll be with you and hear it all for myself. God, it must have been something.’

  See the cloud has gone, but its presence during the night has kept a frost from taking hold. The sky is a cool, slate blue, cleansed anew, the immediate environment beneath it soiled. On the hill around the isolated cemetery and in the paddocks by the country school and the minor cheese factory, whole areas of grass are trampled down, littered with pie wrappers and plastic kiwi juice containers. Some fire sites still smoulder and the hundred Angel Hire chairs have been taken late at night and set around them as the last of the crowd sought warmth. On the morning air a stench drifts from the portable loos which have been quite unable to cope with the numbers. The eucalypt tree in the graveyard has been partly broken down and Les Croad and a few helpers from the Charismatic Cambrian Church have already a pile of abandoned property on the gravel of the small cemetery carpark — coats, car rugs, bags and food bins, a hearing aid and a Panda Bear, a size eleven left shoe, a book of chutney and relish recipes, a Kurdish prayer belt with its crescents far from home. Cars are scattered over the lower site, some left because they wouldn’t start, some not found before the offer of a lift, some stymied in a search for a new exit, some used to sleep in by people who like Slaven were too dog-tired to face the drive. Old Hurinui is a small figure walking down from the bush where he has seen in the new day.

  ‘Ah,’ says Slaven. ‘Jesus, I’m stiff.’ He arches and stretches as best he can in the car.

  ‘Was it what you wanted though?’ says Kellie.

  ‘It’s odd. Only since the hospital have I felt the compulsion to speak like that, of those sorts of things, and now I find that people do respond. Do you know what I mean? You wonder whether there’s the possibility of real communication. I find I can do it.’

  ‘What’s the outcome, though. I mean if you can create all this enthusiasm for agreed views, how do you use it to make things better? What’s the process by which the gathering of so many people actually gets anything done?’

  ‘Political pressure, I suppose. We’re just feeling our way, aren’t we. At least now I know I’m not kidding myself. After all I could have had some aberration as a result of the accident. No one likes to be a laughing stock.’

  ‘You feel okay when you do it?’

  What can he answer. Does he tell her that when he gets underway, lifts himself and soars on the convections of expectation and identification from his audience that he feels too the stirring in the chrysalis of the world yet to be revealed. Look instead, then, on the reassuring texture of Tuamarina around them both, the exact physics of the kinks in the plastic of the kiwi juice bottles, the small, pale cross on the top of the Wairau monument and the cynicism in the lines of Croad’s outdoor face as he wonders how best to deal with the mess.

  ‘Do they remember when they all get home,’ says Kellie. Like Les Croad she is inclined to be disillusioned by the aftermath of such magnificent and complete conversion. ‘Perhaps it’s like a rock concert, or an open air Shakespearean performance and they get it all out of their system and carry on just the same as before.’

  ‘I guess we’ll find out about that.’

  Despite the stink of the latrines, the litter, abandoned fires and trampled c
amps and tracks in the grass as if a circus had moved on, Slaven is sure that an important thing has happened at Tuamarina. He has been given a sign, a mandate even. Croad is standing with Thackeray Thomas at about the place on which the speakers’ truck was parked last night. Croad waves an arm despairingly to indicate the enormity of the clean-up before them and Thackeray is placating him, telling him that there will be a full Cambrian youth team out within an hour. His church is very big on conservation and ecological matters. Thackeray comes over to Slaven’s car to congratulate him anew. There is no envy — he has his own achievements and is grateful to be part of what has happened. ‘I’ve never before seen the like of it,’ he says, taking Kellie’s hand in a greeting. ‘I can’t get over the way in which the people kept coming and coming and the great sense of release and identification they had each time you spoke. The power to grip people, to make them give voice like that, now that’s a special thing.’

  ‘We were just talking about it,’ says Kellie.

  ‘There was a sense of hope, wasn’t there?’ asks Slaven.

  ‘What’s begun here — who knows the end of it.’ Thackeray’s voice is rich with portent. ‘Last night when you were at the height of your powers I kept thinking of David Lloyd George. He had the gift.’

  Croad is taking down the banner as he waits for the youth teams to arrive for the clean-up. Hurinui talks with Iago and Dafydd Thomas and a long, thin man comes to claim the panda with assumed confidence. Maybe in his withdrawal he covers the exact spot where a Ngati Toa lookout watched the special constables coming from Cloudy Bay: more likely the spot where tourist lovers from Alberta lay in the summer grass and cicada rhythms of 2007, to conceive a daughter who would show great talent in software development, but be killed by a bouncing boulder in Yellowstone Park.

  ‘To be able to mobilise people like that,’ says Thackeray Thomas and he leans in at the car window to squeeze Slaven’s shoulder. Croad has the banner down at last and begins to roll it up.

  ‘But mobilised for what?’ says Kellie. ‘At present it’s all steam and no engine.’ Thackeray is delighted with the analogy. He mentally files it for his own use.

  ‘Precisely,’ he says.

  ‘Kellie is a born administrator,’ Slaven boasts. ‘She knows that efficiency is never the enemy of any worthwhile undertaking.’ He looks her in the face and wonders if she has fears about his new life, as he does — snide fears circling in hope of misfortune. ‘You can be the impresario. It will be like planning and planting a brand new garden, a landscaping of this political project we’re beginning.’

  In time the rally at Tuamarina becomes the recollection and the relics rather than the actuality: spools of video from the ground crew and the helicopter, the radio tapes, the selected memories of people who were there, the invoices for a double thousand beef mince pies, a lesbian thigh rocking to the movement of the horse’s flank, the banner blue and white, the drifting rain which enveloped them, the sparks from the fires which dazzled and escaped, Slaven’s oratory from the truck deck, the singing of Welfare Heaven and Remember Greenpeace as the noose tightened.

  In time the place itself recovers from such thoughtless possession. The grass grows back rank in the sun and the wind so that the fire sites and the few juice containers missed by Thackeray’s youth workers are hidden, the gum tree over the grave branches out again in directions not too obviously determined by the depredations made upon it, the broom flowers in summer and the stench from the latrines long gone is supplanted by a sweet wind coming over the bushed hills from Queen Charlotte Sound. And the words most likely to linger are those of old Te Rauparaha as he burst from the trees to fight. ‘Hei kona te marama. Hei kona te ra. Haere mai to po.’ Farewell the light. Farewell the day. Welcome night.

  At night, after a campaign dinner, Slaven wakes at seven minutes past four. He can see the blue figures on the display clock by his bed. Slaven thinks that he has woken simply because he needs to piss, but when he has done this quietly and come back to his side of the bed he realises that his stomach is queasy. He has overdone it somewhat with the Australian shiraz and the pork and bacon kebabs and the marinated mussels and the cocktail onions with gruyere cheese. Altogether, it leaves him with a sour weight low in his stomach and an inability to rest comfortably.

  He leaves the bed again, again quietly so as not to wake Kellie who faces away, just a sweep of hair showing on the pillow. By the drapes Slaven rubs his stomach up and down, not round and round. He grimaces slightly for his own benefit and looks through the narrow gap in the drapes to pass time.

  There are people on the front drive of his house.

  Seven of them, no, eight. All quite young; both sexes. The moonlight is not particularly bright, but he can see that they are throwing something from baskets at the house. Well, scattering rather than throwing, broadcasting with an action of the wrist rather than the whole arm and whatever it is they cast it makes no sound against the walls, nothing that would wake Kellie, or him. All of them wear pants and most the canvas jackets fashionable amongst the unfashionable, which show the dirt of constant use. They are dancing, rather perpetrating some parody, some travesty, of a pastoral dance, with the baskets hung on their arched arms and their bodies clumsily bending and swaying.

  Slaven has an unpleasant sense of their conceit and affectation, but they themselves take it all with arty solemnity despite the almost total lack of grace and skill. And every few minutes they put down their baskets in an unsynchronised way, hang themselves like scarecrows, then shake and quiver to mimic electrocution.

  Even though he can’t be seen, Slaven takes a step back. He has the right to be here, yet the last thing he wants is to reveal himself, to challenge the dancers. He is afraid of them, but not in the immediate and physical sense. Far worse than that. They are the manifestations of his worst fears concerning his work, proof that from the rational, humanitarian ideas he upholds, mutants can be spawned. Slaven watches the figures in the ludicrous repetition of their makeshift dance, yet what faces he can see have expressions of fixed intensity.

  Slaven knows that the Executive and staff try to keep such things from coming to his notice, yet he’s aware of a whole range of half-baked responses to his speeches and his campaign. Half-baked! A grim reminder of the fryers who continue to electrocute themselves in his name and to make headlines at last with their death. There are people who have fits at his meetings, women who wish to bear his child, or claim they have already done so, fundamentalists who insist that the coalition prefigures the Apocalypse, people who demand large sums of money and blessings, others who are intent on giving both. Sarah has a group of volunteers who go through his mail bag and weed out the most disturbing letters, but Slaven finds others thrust into his pockets when travelling, or under the door of a hotel room.

  At times the dancers go forward and bend in the garden close to the bedroom window — whether to pick, or place, it is difficult for Slaven to tell. He begins to feel cold, but won’t lie down while the ritual goes on. One man is very fat and his serious face shakes as he parades in the dance.

  Why don’t they just all bugger off. Whatever they see in Slaven’s beliefs he will never acknowledge. In fact he resents their appropriation of his name and movement even more than their appropriation of his drive and lawn before the sun has risen. In his heart he knows that the real source of his anger is a fear that his work could be corrupted, that what was so clear to him could still nourish opinions quite contrary to his intentions. The snake they say, hears nothing that the charmer plays.

  Finally the dancers leave, after whispered argument, trailing down the long drive with their baskets. The fat man has an arm around one of the women who doesn’t return his embrace. A more nondescript man waits long enough to secure a minimum of privacy and then pisses by the crabapple tree, his shoulders hunched protectively. When he has pranced after the others the drive is empty and Slaven at the gap of the curtains is hard put to keep the episode in mind as any more than a sour dre
am. Before going back to bed though, he moves through the house and checks on each of the other three sides, in case like wagon pioneers he and Kellie have been surrounded by the basket cases with their ungainly dance. He must talk to Kellie about security.

  In the morning Slaven says nothing to Kellie of all this, but he goes outside after breakfast and steps close to the bedroom wall. Kellie has musk mallow there and the gladioli which have seen off Norman Proctor without so much as a flourish. There are lines, small heaps even, of yellow-orange scraps set together by the dew. Slaven takes some of it to his wife. ‘Safflower petals,’ she says. ‘I’d say that’s what it is. Where did you get it?’

  ‘In the garden.’

  ‘I’ve never grown any.’

  ‘A gift then,’ says Slaven. ‘Has it got any particular folklore associated with it? Is it lucky, or anything like that?’

  ‘Not that I know. It can be used as a dye.’

  Slaven yawns to prove to them both that he is at ease. At least his stomach is settled. In his mind however, he has an involuntary reprise of last night’s dance. The earnest, self-absorbed clumsiness of it: bows and crooked legs, baskets dangling, hissed instructions, the fat man’s jowls trembling in the fish-belly light. What else goes on at the far ripple remove from his intentions. What things are fed on tail first which he has sent out with a sense of true direction.