A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  Maybe too, there is a cowardice in it, but Kellie and Slaven don’t get on to that. A willingness in middle age to jog along, a position taken when others try for some great passion and are made fools of almost certainly.

  What they do talk of, with a solemn and reassuring intensity in the airport lounge, is the pressure of their new work, taking each other for granted, a greater need for open discussion, resolutions even, sincerely meant. You will know them from your own intimacy, or not at all, and each is a perilous promise as you become aware.

  Even as Kellie and Slaven talk, with some part of their minds they seek diversion, overhear the news of Jan’s death — suffering an implosion while lighting farts at Frankie Boyd’s stag night.

  Western Springs is going to mark the push on Auckland and the North Island as far as Slaven and the CCP are concerned and the political commentators as well consider it a crucial test. It’s one thing to draw the people at Tuamarina and St Kilda, to have a wildfire organisation spring up throughout the country amongst those of little clout in the main, but to come to the city of over two million, to try to work the heart-strings of a truly urban population, now that’s a different matter. Dr Meelind tells his Think Tank colleagues this is the test all right. It’s all very well to gather strength and combat temptation in the wilderness — yes, there is laughter — but after all in a democracy power should be where most people are. Nevertheless, Meelind reminds them that there is a gift at work here.

  It doesn’t take Kellie and her team long to realise that there is an alternative plan to their own for the Western Springs rally, a plan to ensure the throttling of the Slaven phenomenon. Not beheading by outright opposition, which might smack of official fear of the Coalition, but more oblique moves to make the occasion the sort of half-pie success which will damn it. The media take the line that Slaven is a Rip Van Winkle come to the city, a back to decency small-time South Island liberal who thinks that the problems of government can be solved by returning to the handshake as the sign of a person’s bond, and mandate politics. Preview television cover is scant, muted and vague, most of the 10,000 flyers advertising the event are never displayed despite the contracts signed and two days before the rally the Metropolitan Council revokes permission for a march from Victoria Park to the stadium via Williamson and Hepburn streets.

  The CCP has a special meeting of those executive members in Auckland for the campaign — Eula Fitzsimmons, Thackeray Thomas, union representative Sheffield Spottiswoode as well as Cardew, Kellie and Slaven — and Miles, who has come for his own reasons and the hell of it, sits in. Kellie gives the evidence she has for the pervasive, but covert opposition. ‘Who’d be behind it?’ says Slaven. ‘You think that Gebrill, or Gittings, even the Government, are doing it?’

  ‘More likely the United Party machinery here in Auckland,’ says Miles huskily. ‘People with the Government’s interests at heart and plenty of influence in the city. It’s less obvious for them to do it. They don’t want you to have the publicity either of success, or forced cancellation. They want it to be a fizzer. That doesn’t go down well in Auckland. They have a nose for losers. That’s my guess.’

  ‘Is there still enough time to call it off?’ says Eula.

  ‘Perhaps Miles could indemnify the Coalition for any losses,’ says Cardew. ‘We’ve put over $250,000 into this as it stands.’ Miles shows no more reaction to Cardew than a donkey does to a fly. He has said all he wishes. He runs a hand slowly over his head and envies Thackeray’s extravagant shock of natural hair.

  ‘Under the circumstances we could call it off I suppose, and issue a disclaimer. We might even get a good deal of sympathy which we could capitalise on, but it’s a backdown isn’t it.’ Kellie uses the word she knows all of them in their own way are temperamentally unlikely to find comfortable.

  ‘Surely we’re committed,’ says Thackeray. Kellie watches her husband.

  ‘It’s a test really, isn’t it?’ she says finally.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘A trial of strength in the camp of the enemy,’ says Thackeray.

  ‘Yet,’ says Slaven, ‘they underestimate the friends we have here, or can make. If we have what we claim to have then we’ll reach these people whatever disadvantages of publicity, or prejudice.’

  ‘All the same,’ says Kellie, ‘I’m going to have our people provide and operate all the audio-visual equipment themselves. No outsiders at all. Nothing must be left to chance with that. Sure, we expect the audience to respond, but for that you’ve got to be heard.’

  ‘Western Springs is the big one for us, if we’re going to be able to put the screw on before the elections,’ says Slaven and he feels a surge within himself at the truth of it, the challenge that bears down on him personally, the opportunity for achievement, or failure, on such a scale.

  ‘Hail, Caesar,’ says Miles. His baby bird head falls back with a smile. Everything that happens is for him lit richly with his own setting sun.

  ‘The clubs and the pubs have their own newsrooms, don’t you worry,’ says Sheffield.

  ‘Something like this can’t be ignored. Not a CCP rally; it’s too big.’

  ‘Remember what happened at Tuamarina and Dunedin.’

  Yet Slaven knows that unlike Tuamarina and St Kilda beach there will be actively hostile forces, a counter culture, on the night. It stands to reason that if he draws his power from the crowd, then the crowd is the best target. He wonders who is working against him and to what effect. Meelind perhaps and the dispassionate professionals, or the branch executive of the ruling United Party and its allies as Miles assumes. Maybe the Democratic Socialists because of the Coalition’s move to their own strongholds, maybe the Statos Nationalists because his views are almost all directly opposed to their own. ‘Not to be alarmist, but there could be an element of personal danger,’ says Thackeray. ‘That shouldn’t be overlooked. You’re becoming more and more a focus.’

  ‘Aw, come on,’ says Slaven, but Kellie is one to provide for as many contingencies as she is able.

  ‘I want every precaution we can set up,’ she says.

  Slaven decides to go and see Western Springs the day before the rally; a chance to get some feel of the place by himself. The gates of the old Mill Road entrance are open because of the dog obedience trials being held inside. It is smaller than he expects. The more he had heard of Western Springs and the more significant the happenings there, the more impressive it had become in his imagination. In the quiet reality of this evening, and hosting only the regular obedience trials, it is a modest enough place, steeply contained on the side from which he entered and with concrete tiers there making something of an amphitheatre. Slaven can see the scaffolding on the grass which will be his dais tomorrow night. The pipes have patches of paint, red, blue, white and yellow as some code to indicate their length and position and they are held together by grappling nuts. Slaven climbs the new stand, known as Shafters because of the propensities of the mayor before the present one. He watches the Labradors and Alsatians crossing from the sunlight to the sharp-edged shadow that Shafters casts across the grounds, as they prove their obedience around the flags. Good dog, good dog. What is it in the convergence of time, consciousness and space that can keep the dogs, their owners, their quiet, circling tasks, apart from the press, the massed response to message and conjuror of another night — the next. Slaven’s impressions of his future at Western Springs, the past of Tuamarina, may be aberrant fancies of his decline, or worse, and he might wake to the life before it all; the subdued talk of his nurses in the surgery, or Kellie’s call from the garden when he returns from work. Baby, baby come again and live with me upon the shore of Half Moon Bay. But his hands, you see, still held half curled and the scars of the grafts raised at the join with original skin. Almost there, you notice. The dogs wheel at their owners’ knees and trot with complacent obedience. The lake and the park are just a fence away. There is a clump of toi-toi on the fence line and finally the one golden retriever disgraces its
breed by succumbing to the temptation of the fragrances and deposits beneath the long, drooping leaves. Bad dog; no biscuit.

  There are other places, aren’t there? There’s the old place in the North Otago downs, where the pink road of crushed Ngapara gravel is bordered by gorse hedges with clay sods to fill the gaps and the road runs up the small valley like a stream and the shoulders of the downs are ringed with sheep tracks. Useless pines around the farm buildings heap the pig-pen, drill shed and fowl run with brown needles, and on the shattered branches which weep a whitening resin, the cones are fully open in the drought. There are single cabbage trees on the hillsides and rilled, limestone outcrops, grey where the weathered surface is undisturbed, yellow in the overhangs where the sheep pack in to find the shade. The yellow-ginger ground of the drought has only the thistles green. The house, see, has a red tin roof and a dish to suck a little glamour down from the satellites. Yet the letter box at the end of the track has a tin flag which can signal to the rural delivery in the same old way, the magpies squabble in the woolshed pines and in the copper evening skies the gulls fly slowly back to the shore. But you know all that.

  And it comes of course, much as has been predicted and planned; the evening at Western Springs with rather less sun and no dogs, or training flags — instead the scaffolding skinned over with orange tarpaulins, the cables and the lasers for the hologram and the sound systems and a small, subdued crowd of less than three thousand people. Most of them are middle-aged and somewhat less than middle-classed. Some of them sit towards the front of the main stand, outnumbered by the flip seats behind them. Some of the people stretch, amble a few paces and return, speak loudly, all in a pretence that they are at ease here at Western Springs.

  Thackeray Thomas begins promptly at seven thirty. He gets the big electronic speaker system up and running, but right from the start it’s obvious that there is to be disruption. The heckling is amiable enough while Thackeray is speaking, almost as if the opposition are checking the acoustics, their positions in relation to each other, the mood of the small crowd.

  ‘Move into the 21st century.’

  ‘Where’s the banjo, hillbilly?’

  ‘Another holy roller.’

  ‘Suck it up your arse.’

  ‘There’s nothing out there to feed on,’ says the minister as he comes off. ‘A dead mutton audience. I think Eula, or Sheffield, should go on for a while until things build.’

  ‘We need to grab them early,’ says Slaven.

  ‘You’re welcome to it.’

  Slaven feels pumped up; more excitement than fear, but the fear is that he will let down all the people who have supported him in the past months, rather than suffer some loss of personal importance. He is determined to be as direct and forceful as he is able, and then just trust the response — isn’t that what you have to do? The hologram is used for Slaven; it sets up his genie in three dimensions in the daylight sky. A huge figure in enhanced colour that revolves so that no part of the crowd always has his back, though the original Slaven on the platform faces only the one way.

  He begins quietly, conceding that in some ways these are good times, with less chance of war than for most of the last century despite the predictions that we would blow ourselves away, with the oceans still not open sewers, with a comparatively high standard of living and less illness and physical suffering than ever before. And he makes little reply to the wisecracks at his expense. He seems open to any number of free shots.

  ‘Then why bitch, fuckwit.’

  ‘Boring. Boring.’

  Slaven tells them how much he has been looking forward to this night in Auckland, how important it is for the Coalition if it’s going to bring any decisive pressure for change on the parliamentary parties before the elections. He reminds the people that the CCP isn’t in it for personal payoffs, that he’s not running for office, that the Coalition isn’t a parliamentary party.

  ‘Damn right. More like a funeral.’

  Slaven feels the compassionate power of his mission stir within him. A feeling he recognises, but which is never totally familiar, as if he is possessed by the best part of himself and the rest held in abeyance for a time by inner compulsions which he has no conscious means to summon. He feels his voice begin to throb with the increasing pulse of his ideas. He is charged, yes, charged again. He says that the loss of conviction is what he is bitching about. The lack of confidence throughout the country that people have common aims and that these common aims and interests can be defined, can be championed, can be achieved through a new community of spirit and a new revitalisation of political will.

  ‘Utopian crap.’

  ‘Double crap.’

  ‘Stick to drilling teeth.’

  Some of the audience are drawn into laughter at the interruptions, not from any wit in the shouts, but as a sign that they are free agents here and not yet committed to Slaven’s views.

  Slaven’s genie grows more solid, more glowing, above them all as the dusk intensifies and at a distance is the suffusion of lights from the suburbs of Pt Chevalier and Mount Albert. The genie’s increasingly vivid presence makes it easier for the hecklers to be ignored, reducing the impact of their animosity by the sheer size and magnificence of the image and by the enhanced reverberation of the banks of speakers.

  The full horror when a sense of individual and national purpose is lost is what Slaven wishes to convey. The genie in the gathering darkness has gestures which seem more flamboyant than his own, some compound effect of the enlargement. Slaven talks of the inner ache of inconsequence, of something missing.

  ‘Yea, a brain in your case.’

  ‘And balls, too, I’d say.’

  The opposition is well organised and prepared. They shine powerful beams into the holograph to dissipate the image. They have portable machines to manufacture a distracting cacophony. The stadium is a dark mass beyond the central field. Still further back the gardens and the lake. To reach the lake a squadron of mallards on a set descent cut through the genie with their fixed wings. There are iridescent flashes from their wing colours and the drakes’ heads as they pierce the hues of the twisting genie.

  ‘Shit on him! Shit on him!’

  ‘Most of our days are just lived through,’ says Slaven, ‘and if we’ve warded off misfortune we consider ourselves lucky. We spend a life getting by, determined not to be cheated, snatching at what we can, hoping it won’t be us in the gun for tax evasion, hit and run, cultural insensitivity, or masturbating in Anzac Square.’

  ‘That’s you all right.’

  But there is little laughter now as a response, an empathy is growing. It shows itself at first in small things, the heads tilted more steadily to watch the genie, the growing disregard of any distraction, the unconscious relaxation of personal distance amongst people most of whom have come as strangers. Slaven can feel the stirring of a unified will. As he speaks Slaven feels the first tears on his cheeks. The sense of any manipulation slips away and he is one with his spendid image in the sky of Western Springs.

  ‘We all go down to the grave in the end,’ he says. ‘All go down to the grave, but before that there’s an opportunity to have some unique experience of the world. A world unbidden by any of us, impartial beauty, random horror, which equally serve the immutable laws. And almost the only thing that we have power to determine in all this is our relationship one with another. The human fellowship. The collaboration amongst ourselves which is an act of trust.’

  ‘Bullshit.’

  The heckler has misjudged the changing mood and his shout ends in a sudden exhalation as he is punched hard in the small of the back. From now on those who have come to disrupt, turn largely to the roles of observers, although one woman who continues to shout is scragged, and runs weeping towards the carpark, drawing glances of mild curiosity from people on their way in.

  The full night draws around the lights and words at Western Springs and so sharpens the focus on Slaven’s genie. It is wondrously lit, translucent, yet w
ith a pulsing solidity of form and as Slaven moves and talks and gestures on the platform, so it moves, gestures in the sky on a grand and luminous scale. And it goes beyond aping its master, for although Slaven faces the one direction, the genie turns in the sky so that no one is denied its shimmering countenance for long.

  Slaven begins his exhortation concerning the need for spiritual values in private and public life, his vision of a successful community as an equilibrium of complementary personal and social forces. The crowd voices increasing approval at the Slavenisms familiar to them and draws closer. Slaven demands a new commitment from them, a pledge to the regeneration which manifested itself at Tuamarina and St Kilda. It is beginning to happen; the melding of the parts into a whole. Despite the deliberate lack of coverage by the media, despite the campaign of urban disparagement, the political put-downs, the hecklers, the bureaucratic obstacles, despite all, a growing number of Aucklanders are arriving. Some have been close enough to hear the singing of Glasnost Galaxy, Remember Greenpeace — and Half Moon Bay. Some have heard the speaker vans that tour the streets relaying Slaven’s message, some tuned into the anti-establishment radio stations AK SOS and Blue Sky which are covering the rally, some put aside the cynicism and apathy of their daytime selves when night fell, some simply followed others because the pubs and garage parties bored them.

  They come first from Grey Lynn and Ponsonby and Morningside and Mount Albert, but that only begins the capillary action which draws people from Parnell, Birkenhead, Onehunga and beyond. Slaven keeps speaking and the genie keeps turning, a gleaming titan in the sky above Western Springs, above the same grass on which the Alsatians and Labradors had answered to the whistles. Whistle and I’ll come. The arc lights of the rally are selective, catching a face, a feature, a stir of movement within the crowd while other things are left in darkness. And on the fringe of the lights and sensed beyond them, the place is alive with dim, bobbing heads and shoulders of people moving purposefully to join the listeners.