A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  ‘A lot of this I didn’t count on,’ says Slaven. ‘A lot of these things you don’t expect when you start out. People hearing in my speeches a great deal that I’m not saying, or meaning, taking a word or two here and there, odd ideas out of context, confusing illustration with the point at issue, making them in some way evidence for the notions that they’ve been determined to push all along. Jesus, Kellie, fancy men and women deliberately electrocuting themselves and doing it in my name.’

  ‘There’s always a cost I suppose,’ she says. ‘Always a perverse element in a movement. It happened with feminism didn’t it, and with euthanasia and republicanism, but the essential progress was made all the same. I imagine the more democratic the organisation, the more crackpots and salvation seekers it attracts.’

  ‘But people killing themselves because of expectations they have of me. I dreamt of it last night. The thin, naked forms spread-eagled on the wires, convulsing in the blue flicker of the current. I even had the stink of it from the instant of my own agony.’ Slaven begins to rub one hand with the other through his gloves. Are the Hoihos still playing do you think? Foveaux storms are fading, baby, within the realm of Half Moon Bay.

  ‘In the end people must take responsibility for their own actions,’ says Kellie.

  ‘That’s just it. What are we finding of the consequences of mine? Isn’t there a temptation to make an impact just because you’re capable of doing it? Pride and power must be in there somewhere. I can see that.’ Slaven and Kellie take a heaped wheelbarrow of weeds each and in Indian file trudge to the shredder by the main compost heap. With the shredder on it’s too noisy for them to keep talking and they feed the machine, watch the mulch whirl onto the compost heap, and carry on with their thoughts. This is something they have done many times, only the thoughts are different this year and Slaven’s physical participation more limited.

  ‘We need a break of some sort,’ he says. The noise of the machine echoes for a moment. ‘Don’t you think? A chance to sort out our aims so that we’re not just swept along by the publicity and the agendas of the other groups — Thackeray and the Cambrian Church, Eula and Gender Plus, the unionists, the egalitarians, devolutionists.’

  ‘You want to be by yourself?’

  ‘No.’ He tells her that they could have a simple holiday; places and people they used to know, family members perhaps. Soon enough will be the point of no return.

  ‘I can understand that,’ says Kellie.

  ‘I don’t suppose that many people overall are born in one millenium and die in another.’

  ‘Is that what it’s about as well; some mid-life crisis?’ she asks. Above the smoke bush which won’t leaf again, the mountains seem so much closer than they really are. Usually at this time of the year she and Slaven would ski at Mount Hutt. His hands aren’t good enough for it yet. ‘You’ll be suggesting that the power line was a subliminal choice next.’

  ‘Hardly,’ says Slaven. The portrait of all the landscape before him seems to buckle for a moment as if in the throes of metamorphosis and he checks his breathing, intent on the new forms which surely will come raging forth, but not today either is the time for the detailed sheen of the chrysalis to shatter.

  Slaven finds his wife an astute counsellor. Their marriage is pretty much burnt out, but there are advantages in that — tolerance, familiarity, the ease of custom, tacit acknowledgement of disparity provide a basis for a bearable life of mutual routine and separate examination. There are betrayals of a sort, of course. Slaven nine years ago first persuaded one of his nurses to fuck with him, more from a sense of opportunities passing than any unbearable desire for her. The sexual pleasure quite astounded him at first, but the emotional obligation, the guilt, the planning of trivial deceit, the sense of limiting another’s life, were in total too high a price. Instead thereafter he allows episodes which are both discreet and discrete, but mainly he enjoys the visual pleasure women give, without the enjoyment too obvious on his face. Among his patients, friends, passers by, to register the frisson of a nape, a forearm, the fall of an eyelid, a tremor of a lock of hair, a jersey’s fold on the hip, the breasts’ undulation as a woman hurries at the lights, the glint of a zip beneath the tuck of a taut skirt. A voice, lowered in trust almost to a whisper. Such quick, glimpsed things to flare in his mind and there subside as he offers an observation on the new shopping mall, or gives money to a fund which will send Wendy Parmenter to Los Angeles for new lungs.

  For two weeks then, he agrees with Kellie, to make some reassessment of intentions, some scrutiny of the power he has discovered within himself.

  Maybe you can’t go back, that’s true, because as Proust said you’re looking for a time past as well as a place, but you can return which is a less satisfying thing. Waiouru is not on the tourist trail, a place by-passed by New Zealanders, let alone Americans, Arabs and Chinese. Slaven doesn’t inflict this visit on Kellie, leaving her with his mother in Palmerston North. For him Waiouru speaks as much of family and childhood as civilian cities and provincial towns do to other people. JGs on the line in married quarters, the zenith note as RSM Glassey gets the battalion on parade and the tarmac shimmers in the heat, the MP’s Landrover circling through the camp at night, helicopter gunships lifting off above the snow, the D Block Mess, the basic training confidence course with its walls, trestles, ropes and swaying logs which have been a playground to Slaven and his friends as swings and see-saws have to others. His father’s dress uniform, warrant officer second class, carefully pressed and on a hanger in the window of the lounge, turning first one way a little then the other, with the insignia of rank a splendid crest on his sleeve. All such things the motifs of a way of life at once totally familiar and completely unknown, A child’s view of a man’s world and a woman’s suspicion of it.

  ‘I don’t know quite when I’ll be back. It depends on how the exercise goes and what sort of chopper support we’re given. You know I won’t be longer than I have to.’ Slaven’s father had been part of GAMD — ground air missile defence — which became important after the Gulf and Moroccan wars. On Slaven’s study desk is a detonator case that he uses as a paper weight. It was used for the same purpose on his father’s desk in the company HQ room at Waiouru and when Slaven was there with his father out of hours he would play with the defused detonator, flat and heavy, watch his father working at the computer screen, regard from the window the birds amongst the regimented lawns and shrubs outside. In the summer the sparrows foraged in the mown grass, or fluffed their soft, lower feathers in the dust at the base of the shrubs.

  Outwardly the place remains the ultimate in clone development you might think. The repetition of barrack blocks, parade grounds, store and maintenance depots and its population walking in step, jogging in unison, saluting on cue. Uniformity in uniform, you say. It’s not true of course, with any knowledge, anymore than all Asians look the same. Slaven had known each street and building, each restricted zone, each training area, each armoured vehicle park and loading bay, for the special character it bore. Just where he could dig the spent bullets from the butts, how to fry an egg on the base of the receptor discs in a Waiouru summer. And personality persists despite a uniform. CSM Slaven played badminton with intensity and grace and had a musical snore. His profession was to kill, but cruelty to an animal would rouse him to a fury and in his bottom drawer were hidden correspondence papers in torts and legal history. A man’s reach should exceed his grasp, the poet says. Maybe his study was interrupted by service in the UN force to China, the Antarctic pickets some years later, or just the nights in the mess with his friends. Maybe he didn’t have the brains for it. Anyway, quietus now. He would lay out his personal gear on the lounge floor before an exercise and as Slaven called out each item, his father would tick the sheet and say, ‘check’. He died three weeks after Slaven graduated. Coddy Burns in the bar slipped a bottle top in his beer for a joke and Slaven’s father downed it and choked to death. After the graduation he had taken a pair of blue handled
pliers from his pocket and passed them to his son as the foundation, he said, for his equipment as a dentist.

  A regular soldier knows how to keep himself spruce. The CSM could have undressed in the main street of Auckland and folded his clothes beside him to pass inspection. He despised a slovenly belly, or a grubby collar. ‘You’ll do all right, Aldous,’ he told him after the graduation. He was pleased for his son even though Slaven tended to slouch because of his bookwork and his fitness was suspect. The CSM showed no sign of self-pity that he wouldn’t be a lawyer, would choke on a friend’s bottle top amid the benevolence of his mess. All his warlike skills, and he was undone by a bottle top. He would have seen the irony of that, given his quick smile which didn’t show his teeth.

  Slaven’s mother lives in a retirement village in Palmerston North; a self-sufficient community with a Maori name which means landfall after a long voyage. The air is heavier here than in the outside world and each small house has the silence of a trap-door spider’s lair. Even the garages are swept bare and the work benches in order, but it is a neatness which has the rigour of despair. It is close to the airport, but Mrs Slaven is deaf enough to be unconcerned by the planes angling in and out. She has played no sport during her life, taken no interest in her husband’s badminton, yet as she talks to Kellie and Slaven in the cubby hole of her town house, her eyes slide away to the screen on which the Kiwis play England at cricket and she gives a stifled cry when her son is explaining his political plans, because a catch is put down in the slips. ‘Yes,’ she says without taking her eyes from the sport. Old age is past the need for pretence. ‘I read all about it in the paper and watched the television that night. It seemed a very exposed place, that Tuamarina. I couldn’t get over you choosing it.’

  ‘I feel ordinary people should have a better time of it, Mum. Do you see?’

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘A better time of it. A way of life which is closer to the ideas important to them. Greater participation and control.’ Neetridge cuts for a couple. It’s almost a drinks break.

  ‘Everyone wants to have a better time of it,’ says Mrs Slaven. ‘We don’t need someone to tell us that, do we,’ and she leaves her chair to make tea.

  ‘But doing something about it is a different thing,’ says Kellie. Mrs Slaven pauses at the doorless entrance to the kitchenette, but instead of answering she looks past Kellie and Slaven to the screen on which the comments man is taking the opportunity to have a say. She likes his thick hair and his confidence.

  It’s easy to continue a conversation as she makes a drink and Slaven can stretch his legs out in her absence. ‘How’s Sarah and Cardew?’ she asks. Kellie tells her that they are overseas and doing well, which is only half true.

  ‘We get regular letters from Sarah, but Cardy, well you know him.’ Mrs Slaven doesn’t of course, and has over the years lost any great need to do so, but she just says that they will be all grown up, she expects. ‘Twenty-four and twenty-six,’ Kellie says. Mrs Slaven says they will have to put up with tea bags, because she doesn’t like the new fangled powdered tea. She uses a tone of voice as if they have been arguing the respective merits of each for some ten minutes.

  ‘I had quite a wander round at Waiouru. The old stamping ground,’ Slaven says when his mother has come back and he has drawn up his legs to make room for her.

  ‘Eh?’

  ‘Waiouru, Mum. I went there.’

  ‘I never want to see that place again,’ she says.

  ‘It’s so bare and the seasons so extreme,’ says Kellie. ‘Hardly anything grows there it seems to me.’

  ‘How many times were you stationed there?’ Slaven asks his mother. ‘How many years altogether did you spend in Waiouru?’

  ‘We’ve fallen behind in the run rate,’ she says and nods to endorse her own views. She holds her tea mug with great deliberation and talks to Kellie of her weekly finances, valuing her daughter-in-law’s budget skills. She allows no access to the years her husband and Slaven spent with her as a family. All that has been closed a long time ago.

  Simon Adderley and Slaven had taken her Staysharp kitchen knife to cut up stolen blanks for gunpowder which they used to blow up cans behind the gas hut. Lance-corporal Joux showed them his cock one Sunday afternoon in the old gym and afterwards on cue a hailstorm began which dislodged puffs of dust from the high louvres and heaped stones in the gutters like a whitebait shoal. In very different weather, Slaven met Sgt Hamate drunk and on his way back from leave and was warned in a comradely fashion of any surrender to women. Summer’s dusk it was and the smell of Hamate’s beer was rendered innocuous by the fragrance of the pines by the sports field and the acetylene and oils from the maintenance shops close at hand. ‘Ah, the most beautiful of God’s creatures, nevertheless,’ said Hamate sadly. ‘They fuck like angels and are almost human at other times.’ He sat down to buff his dress shoes with a handkerchief and then toppled sideways on to the grass of the sportsground. Slaven left him sleeping there in the warm night and with the resinous pines breathing above him in the same soughing way. Slaven remembers his mother helping him with his school projects on photosynthesis, votes for women and David Livingstone, when no doubt she had better things to do. She came to the prize-givings and saw him take an award or two; some recompense perhaps for their mutual industry. In all his childhood he never once asked her how she was feeling. He heard them arguing half out of earshot, but neither would make a criticism of the other to him. Yet his mother wept when CSM Slaven left for China to join the international forces assisting Democratic Reconstruction. She is dry-eyed now as she watches the cricket and doesn’t remark on the oddity that a man with such habits of neatness and with legal aspirations should survive in a land of over a thousand million foreigners and then choke on the top from a lager. There is a time in a relationship when intimacy is a possibility, but a failure to attempt it then means the opportunity will almost certainly not come again. So Slaven arrives at the end of this visit to his mother. A long life is lived in phases and for peace of mind it doesn’t pay to straddle too many at a time. Blow the egg of misery well the first time and the thing is always lighter thereafter. ‘I see you enjoy the cricket, Mum,’ he says.

  ‘Oh, very much,’ she says.

  Mrs Slaven is pleased to see her son and Kellie, but not disconsolate when it is time to part. She and Kellie wander from Slaven at the end, to see the gardens of the retirement village and talk of the plants there. It is the responsibility of someone else to look after them she says. Another plane comes down into the airport as Slaven stands by his car. He remembers that as he left Waiouru, he had passed a tramper resting on his pack. Perhaps his attention had been taken because it was the first civilian after many people in uniform, yet there was a familiarity wasn’t there — a bald headed man with powerful, brown forearms folded on his knees and a calm, observant face. The plane seems to sink into a clump of dwarf bamboo that marks the division between his mother’s small section and the next.

  When his father was attached to the recruitment office they had lived in Auckland for a time — Takapuna. His mother was happier there. His father had less odd hours to work, though he was no less punctilious in matters of personal hygiene and organisation.

  ‘Two video carousels.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Monitor.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Recruiting pamphlets for all three services.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Application forms; all three services.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Posters glossy.’

  ‘Check.’

  Mrs Slaven has been saying that there’s a much better show in the spring of course. ‘Is he all right now, after the accident?’ she asks Kellie and is told what the doctors have said. ‘Does he still say that his father choked on a bottle top?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘He made that up, you know.’

  Quietus now. Any more is idle curiosity on our part. See the parting here, in the r
etirement village with everything in place for the spring and the northern summer already in progress on the television that Slaven’s mother goes back inside to see. ‘She’s not interested in what I’m doing,’ says Slaven tolerantly. ‘She’s got past it.’

  ‘Also I think she’s wise enough to know what she can cope with.’

  ‘Not a word about my accident you notice. She didn’t ask how my hands were healing.’

  ‘She talked about it when you were at Waiouru. Lucky to be alive she said.’

  ‘No blessing then to be received for the new venture.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Nothing either in his new powers to make the past explicable.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Just the mirror image memories which can’t be read, though sharp and true as the scent of fennel.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Just the owl watching from the dark, evergreen trees.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Blizzards on the Desert Road and the white peak of Ruapehu.’

  ‘Check.’

  And in the summer the tar molten on the street and everything a shimmer so that his father’s work day camouflage dress was even more irregular in outlines.

  Slaven tells Kellie that, on the way back south, in Wellington, he wants to accept the invitation to call on Dr Royce Meelind, the political scientist who works in the Government Think Tank. ‘I feel sure in my own mind now,’ he says, ‘that I want full steam ahead. I think that we need to get the Coalition for Citizen Power up and running in as many areas as possible, and our next big rally should be in Dunedin.’ He uses the phone to reach Miles and get the financial backing he needs if they are to move quickly. Kellie has her turn then, making the appointments she wants in Wellington to set up an organisation there. It’s easier, healthier, to concentrate on the future and external things. Surely if you build up some speed in life you’re less likely to stall, and find yourself going down. Slaven is done with disquiet for the moment, with questions of what expectations may be aroused by the power of his message, with misgivings as to his health, with the loveless admiration he has for his wife, with his mother and his father. ‘Full bloody steam ahead. What do you think?’ he tells Kellie. ‘After all, before you know it the election will be on us.’