A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  If he takes his stool into the extreme corner of his room by the window, he is able to see, as well as one and a half kowhai trees, a thin strip of the cobbled courtyard, an azalea equally captive in a terracotta pot and something of the city beyond. Such a narrow strip, curtailed by the blank bulk of Beckley-Waite wings, that it is like a road lying very straight and still before him. In the daytime he watches visitors at the courtyard entrance, few enough, and beyond is one, brief turn of a street on which he can glimpse cars passing. Sometimes Slaven makes guesses as to what colours will come next. Red is the most common, if he allows some latitude in regard to shades.

  At night the cars are all far lights alike, each making a curlicue of beam and then snuffed out, but the band of courtyard closer to his window has an infinite variety of slight graduations. Slaven has the time to see nature go by on such a small stage. Moonlit nights reveal slight irregularities in the cobbles by hyphens and brackets of sharp shadow and the slaters can be seen questing out from beneath the terracotta pot. Winds test the aerodynamics of the place according to their origin, so that the southerly bluster sweeps his view clean and the nor’wester eddies leaves, bunion dressings, cats’ fur, cellophane, grit and old kowhai blossom into the lee of the azalea and the bluestone wall. Here the water lies longer and deeper so that worms from lawn plots never seen are drowned trying to escape across the cobbles. If the wet weather persists they turn pale and flaccid, reminding Slaven of those things preserved in bottles which had been familiar to him as a student.

  Slaven is unable to see the flats where the Yees and McGoverns live and has no reason at all to be aware of this disability, but often late at night he listens to a far clarinet expertly played and thinks what he has come to. He doesn’t share our knowledge of the nights without this music, when Victor Yee tends his ailing wife, marks his Polytechnic Cantonese, or visits the rooms above the Tahitian tattooist.

  Slaven is having his swimming session with the others. The Beckley-Waite prides itself on an holistic approach to patient welfare. The pool supervisor has a large body the colour of butter and is a man of hideous good cheer. Slaven listens for his laugh, ducks below the surface to evade it and wishes he could breathe the tainted water rather than surface to that sound again. The great, crass, braying laugh of a man with no claim to the attention of his fellows, but with the determination to impinge upon them nevertheless. A humourless, interrupting, vulgar laugh, that reeks of ignorance, shallowness and unwashed opinions despite his occupation.

  ‘Come along, Aldous, see how Helen and Astral keep their heads down in the glide at the completion of a stroke.’

  For many years Slaven has been accustomed to respect; for some months adulation even. The people in the Beckley-Waite don’t seems to care who he is. They are impervious to eloquence, should he try it, and fame from any outer world is a flickering shadow here. Slaven swims as one of the frumpish group, showing no aquatic skills to distinguish himself. He dances in exercise before a giant screen, is chided for his weight at the sensor plate, is humbled by the vast butter man’s praise of other members of the group. Slaven, who drew almost 250,000 to Western Springs and has taken the PM’s hand in a sense of equality, picks up his thin, issue towel and is harried down the corridor to the changing rooms by the instructor’s laugh. ‘What a guy. What a hard case,’ says Mathieson in front to a friend. Slaven wonders why Kellie hasn’t rescued him. Why the world that thinks so much of him isn’t at the gates of the Beckley-Waite Institute.

  ‘Cheer up, Aldous,’ the instructor says. ‘You look as if you’ve been pissing in the pool again.’

  In warm nights, Slaven pushes up his window the few centimetres it will travel. He sits by the grill and enjoys the air from outside. A relief from the dehumidified atmosphere of the air-conditioned rooms and corridors of the Institute. Tonight he notices again the fragrance of tobacco smoke: not the light, doctored brands which have given the habit a new impetus, despite regulation, but the coarse, lung-catching fume of the old days and with it some other fragrance that’s unknown to him, but which causes his eyelids to half fall in satisfaction.

  Slaven has never been a smoker, but finds himself inhaling with more than sufferance: a need for variety to compensate for the bland institutional routine which is itself calculated to be a sedative.

  It’s the sound of a cough and a tearing strike of a match which make Slaven question the source of the pleasure he shares. It makes him quieter in his corner at first, the knowledge of someone out there, down there. To be at ease, smoking in the courtyard means you are a free person. To be a free person within the Beckley-Waite means surely that you are part of the mechanism which restricts the freedom of others. Yet it’s natural to be curious. Slaven begins the effort to see him, or her. By standing with his head against the grill, he can see almost directly to the courtyard one floor beneath, but in that metre or so hard against the wall which he misses, the smoker chooses to stand, unseen, at the very start of that narrow road of view which takes Slaven’s eyes over the darkened cobbles, the terracotta sanctuary for the azalea, the entrance, foreshortened grounds and the brief, recurring headlights at the crest and bend.

  No good, no go. Slaven thinks of making a noise to let the smoker know that he’s above and not far away. A non-specific sort of noise which won’t signal awareness of the smoker’s presence: some humming say, or a companionable cough, but even this might be enough to lose him the drifting, occasional smoke and the sense of another person close at hand. They cannot see each other, yet share a greater intimacy — the breath of one drifts to the nostrils of the other.

  A man’s voice comes up to him. ‘How you going up there?’ A quiet voice with the slightly slurred, understated evenness of a working man.

  ‘I’m fine.’

  ‘Good on you.’

  ‘I’ve been enjoying the smoke from your cigarettes for some time now. Evenings when there’s not much wind. It’s something against the sameness of the nights here.’

  ‘Pipe actually. I know. I’d let you hoist a bowl up, but it would stink out the room and they’d get you for it sure enough.’

  Some ploy maybe, some indirect means of assessment and influence. Slaven isn’t going to be taken in as easily as all that, but he feels his spirits lift here at the window in the darkness, responding to the impartial goodwill he senses in the voice. ‘My name’s Aldous Slaven.’ He says it without much deliberation. Silence for a time, the tear and flare of another match and then after an interval in which Slaven imagines the smoke lazily rising, he has the complex flavour of it again. ‘What have you got in that stuff,’ he says. ‘It doesn’t smell like any tobacco I know.’

  ‘I was at Tuamarina.’ When Slaven hears that he sees the place again, but not with any of the transient dress for which he and Thackeray Thomas had been responsible. The bare, scrubbed Tuamarina — as it truly is. The squat gum tree spreading above the memorial for the European dead, the quiet, gravel track winding up the hill from the turn-off, the little school of Tuamarina on the flat below and with the paddocks around it. There’s gorse, broom and manuka on the ridges running up from the graves and the dark New Zealand bush way back. The same bush that watched Te Rauparaha as he watched the newcomers. High on a far hill towards Picton is a very large tree, quite dead, and its bare branches are like a drift of smoke against the green which surrounds it.

  ‘I have relatives at Mahakipawa,’ says the voice. ‘We all came over the hill to hear you at Tuamarina.’

  ‘So how come you’re up here. In this place?’

  ‘I’m the Caretaker.’ Is there a hint of a pause longer than usual between the parts of the compound word. ‘I take a break about this time at night, and sometimes I come out and smoke a bit of mixed weed. A nice spot when it’s warm enough and I can have a think about things. It’s different at night, as you probably know. It has a logic of its own.’

  ‘What, sadness.’

  ‘No, nothing like that,’ says the Caretaker. ‘I mean you can ge
t close to yourself. You can nut things out with not too many distractions. I’m a slow thinker, see, and I need a fair bit of time to get my ideas clean.’

  ‘Clean?’

  ‘Yeah. Clean of all the crap that hides the real outline of what people are telling you, getting you to believe. And your ingrained self-interest, your assumptions and the beliefs you take up because you admire something about the people who have them, rather than the ideas themselves.’

  ‘Some research suggests that at night the pattern of our brain is different; other insights and feelings are possible.’

  ‘I wouldn’t know about that, but it’s clean thinking time, the night, it seems to me.’

  They are quiet, as if neither wishes to put too much pressure on the contact they’ve made after several hours and nights of being close, invisible, sharing the smoke of the Caretaker’s pipe, but saying nothing. Slaven doesn’t move away however, lest the Caretaker thinks that he’s bored. He remains at the window, seeing the flashes of the car lights at a distance. He draws in his breath carefully, but there’s no smoke on the air. ‘I’d better get on,’ says the Caretaker and after a time in the silence that follows, Slaven knows that he is gone.

  Miles also experiences a Beckley-Waite of a sort, his ailments cutting him off not just from what is going on around him, but from his own life at times. Times of pain and discomfort, of trivial endeavour to eat, breathe, or defecate. To pass piss without blood is more important to him than Slaven’s six points, or the massacres in Mexico. There are times when he sleeps without meaning to, times when he might as well be asleep although his eyes remain open. The worst is when his past is denied to him and he can’t refresh himself in recollection. He comes close then to exercising his right to take his leave. No fears deter him from that, just a reluctance to abandon his influence, his memories, his friends, his wife, when there are still good times in which they may be enjoyed.

  Today, for example, is one of his better days.

  From his tower study in the Cashmere Hills, Miles can see across the city of Christchurch and the Canterbury Plains towards the mountains. He savours the taste of his orange juice untainted with pain and is trying to find out who is responsible for the Lyttlelton attack on Slaven, the Beckley-Waite committal, and if the two are connected. He is speaking to a woman who until recently was an inspector in a branch dealing with corruption. Miles is surprised how young she looks. The world has quite abruptly been filled up with young people who are unfazed by their lack of experience. Miles of course doesn’t allow the inspector the similar advantage of viewing him.

  ‘Anyone in the public eye to that extent is a target,’ she is saying, ‘but we can exclude the individual crank in this case — too practised, too well-planned and resourced. From what we’ve found out there are three main possibilities. The first is within the CCP itself; a group including Pollen and Laucoux, who’s the Wellington regional chairperson. They want to diminish the Slavens’ personal control and have a more corporate leadership. I do know that Laucoux has met Cardew Slaven at least once privately.’

  ‘They might beat him up, but how the hell would they pull this Beckley-Waite stunt by themselves. That’s been set up within the system wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Yes, but how I don’t know. There’s also a good deal of apprehension within the United Party about the CCP’s impact on the coming elections. The Parliamentarians won’t visibly support any dirty tricks of course, but within the wider party there’s people been pushing. Gittings in particular, who has the deputy PM’s ear and has been touting what he calls in private a pre-emptive strike. And he’s got other Cabinet allies of course.’

  ‘The very ones who want to dump the PM. It’s difficult for them probably. Do they wait and hope that Slaven will undermine the PM without costing the party the election, or do they have a crack at the Coalition now and deal with the PM in their own way.’

  The investigator is interested in the possibilities, interested also in the circumstance of Miles Kitson being her employer. She hasn’t admitted that in her time she’s done a good deal of research on his own power base and affiliations, and he hasn’t admitted to being aware of it. He is sick now, she’s heard, but can see only the blank phone screen. Miles admires her hair, which is dark, loose and long. He thinks that it has only been worn thus since her resignation from the force.

  ‘What I’m looking for,’ she says, ‘is the link if there is one between that bunch and the CCP Wellington chair. Someone like Ramon Aristeed.’

  ‘And the third possibility?’ Miles sincerely wants to help his friend, but also while feeling well he wishes to spend time with Georgina — he could arrange a chopper and they could fly to their bach at Le Bons Bay.

  The Statos-Nationalists. Of all the main parties, theirs is the support which most closely approximates the voter profile that Slaven’s been drawing to the rallies. And they’ve got plenty of sympathisers at the top end of the state service.’

  ‘But the least likely?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Could we get hold of the Beckley-Waite records and see who was pushing this thing along. A clandestine mission, is that what it’s called?’

  ‘I wouldn’t advise it,’ she says. ‘There won’t be anything in writing to point to political involvement, you can bet on that. No, just the case as set up and Cardew Slaven for the fall guy. Push too hard for the reasons for the committal, admission, whatever, and the whole thing blows up in the Coalition’s face. The son’s doing a lot of harm. He’s easy to use; the weak link.’

  ‘He’s driven by his prick,’ says Miles hoarsely.

  ‘Something to get hold of him by then,’ says the Investigator, who is used to working with men. Miles enjoys the sight of her shrewd face, her hair, her smile. It’s not a bad way to pass time in your eighties — some jock talk with a handsome woman.

  ‘Aldous isn’t in any danger is he, in that place?’

  ‘I’d say if they wanted that then it would have happened under the Lyttelton wharves, or a pot shot at his workplace.’

  ‘Something else that might be useful,’ says Miles. ‘Find out where that Pacifica article came from, with all that business about his health and only three days before he’s taken to the Beckley-Waite. A little conscious preparation it seems to me.’ Miles begins to find it difficult to concentrate on the welfare of anyone but himself, because the pain in his mouth is bad again. Illness is a great isolator. Already the mountains against the sky seem less admirable and the investigator’s hair folds with less appeal upon her shoulders. He has been told that an operation is the best thing and then a prothesis, less gross than Freud’s. These days science does marvels, but he doubts if he will loiter when such things become necessary. ‘Anyway,’ he tells her, ‘there’s the more important question of what’s for the best right now. I want you to go to Wellington and talk to friends of mine and someone trustworthy will need to go to Mahakipawa. It’s time we took the initiative.’

  Miles knows that Slaven will be hopeless in the Beckley-Waite, having almost no understanding of how to manipulate people except in the mass and for the general good. As he takes the medication for his throat, he imagines Slaven in the Beckley-Waite: that considerable intelligence and trust in a rational response under attack from both within and without. Miles has learnt that self-interest is the quickest and staunchest place to start.

  Miles has a famous cellar, stocked with care and enthusiasm over the years. He has considered the merits of drinking himself to death. He’s close enough that half a dozen first class reds would perhaps complete the process — go out on Chateau Lagune, or Mouton Rothschild ‘99. Oh, there are a variety of ways to move from one room to the next. Miles uses them as a blackmail against his illnesses: push me further and I’ll be off, and parasitic pain draws back then, just a bit, apprehensive that it might lose its host. Anyway, he is only camped on the divide. A chance to look back, to savour the journey in case even memory is stripped by the arrowsmith on the other side.<
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  He is amazed that he has done so much, experienced life as a treasure house, and it is served to him again when fortunate, in such completeness that he feels the quick sweat of a younger self, hears voices of utter accuracy, weeps for joy at the sight of friends come freshly back from sixty years.

  Ah, he feels better now. The medication leaves a light, mint taste as a disguise upon his palate.

  In 1974, when most of his friends were on the Ilam Campus, Miles had a courier business — himself and Izzy Paycock and two Honda 125s. The dispensing receptionists and secretaries were scrupulous in their insistence that Izzy and Miles signed for every item and the partnership in return insisted on acknowledgement of receipt. It was a statement of their commercial equality. Izzy finally became quite a big cheese in the union movement, but neither held the outcome of their lives against the other. Izzy died years ago. He must have been well into his seventies and he stumbled at the lavatory and fell headlong into the bowl. Mutual friends said he drowned, but Miles thought that just the process of trivial mythology. He considered a lavatory bowl, the constriction and the level of the water. No, not drowned, but there was no doubt that the hard, white circumference would deal a fearsome blow. Miles imagined the event with all its attendant bathos. So clearly he saw it and no less true because the lavatory was his own and the dead Izzy in it still barely twenty. The top grade mushroom carpet with Izzy’s feet and shoe soles uppermost and the powder blue tiles as a surround for the lavatory bowl and bidet. Izzy always wore their company jacket, which was red vinyl to stand out on the four stroke Hondas and keep out the wind. Payson Couriers the lettering said, though Miles and Izzy always wished they had the daring to amalgamate the surnames in the firm as Kitcock. Izzy was as local as they come, but wore his long, fair hair in a pony tail like a Swedish tourist and his knees would stick out absurdly on the bike which was too small for him and his pony tail would stream out from his helmet as he raced through the traffic of Riccarton Road, or Bealey Avenue. The pony tail, sun bleached more at the end, spread over the back of Izzy’s red jacket as he lay in the lavatory. Without the helmet his fair hair could be seen to be darker at the roots and on the side of his face turned up from the tiles, Miles could see the moles on his cheeks and the line of his long, nordic chin.