A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  They kept the company records in a ‘Warrior’ exercise book and at the end of each week Izzy entered under incidental expenses enough for two jugs of DB and they went to the pub. They accepted the trust and comradeship of that first business because they knew no other and after they had gone their separate ways they never wanted to meet again and so trammel what they remembered of each other.

  Izzy would smoke as he delivered around the city and in the bursts of acceleration the sparks would fly from his cheap cigarillos and pit his face between the moles. Miles could see the pale, sponge soles of Izzy’s shoes as he lay there with his head under the lip of the bowl. Quietus now, Izzy.

  Miles had first boarded with a de facto couple in Spreydon. The weatherboard house was surrounded with rank grass which pressed up to the wooden sides and swooned on the concrete steps, though from a distance there were just sufficient changes in the contours to suggest past garden plots, as stone age fortifications can still be seen from the air beneath a modern pasture. The woman was Suzanne and she called her man, Ger. Miles liked to assume it short for germ, but the rare letter was addressed to Gerald.

  It was eternally winter in Spreydon and from time to time Ger tore palings from the road fence to start a fire. The grass turned an odd shade of blue in the winter and the smog seeped along the flat streets and all the world was in a slow-moving semi-hibernation of cold and poverty, which included the imagination. Ger was rarely able to manage a complete sentence, but he would say things like, ‘is it ever’, ‘fat chance’, ‘bout fuck’n time’. He had a most wonderful, lolling, gap-toothed smile when Murphy’s law caught up with him, as it invariably did. The smile of the holocaust victim: the candid look that the sparrow has pinned by the sparrow-hawk. Ger could outstare a cat, or a piece of furniture, quite unwittingly. A blank, aching scrutiny until the cat walked away, or the armchair blinked first. His feet smelled always of cheese and despair. He sang to himself in the bathroom where he masturbated during those considerable periods when he was out of favour.

  Suzanne’s lineage was one that equipped her well for poverty. She was small, pale, wiry and of a rattish intensity. Her white nose tinged with pink in the winter cold and her hair had no more suggestion of a curl than has Spanish moss. She had no sense of community, or nationality, but a congenital determination for personal survival. A rat-hole, white trash, come and get me philosophy of life, which meant that she defied all demands and tariffs, tax returns, licences, honesty boxes, all trust and all compassion, and she lived a fierce struggle for what little she could command. Chinese takeaways she loved, hotdogs, supermarket chocolate which she would devour with head-jutting urgency while a crystal drop hung from the pink tip of that sharp nose. Miles imagined her in a minehead village in West Virginia, or a Glasgow tenement. When things pressed her particularly hard she had a friend home and dressed as though she had breasts a man could get a grip on. They would spend a good deal of time in the main bedroom, set another mug by the takeaways and Ger would spend more time than usual singing to himself in the bathroom. There were other times of course of great rapport and delicacy, when Suzanne said sharply to Ger at the door of the bedroom, ‘Get in here,’ as if he were a bad dog, yet one forgiven.

  Miles was never introduced to any of the temporary lodgers, never part of what passed for life in the eternal winter of Spreydon. Not once did Ger, or Suzanne enquire as to his life, or his views. When he stepped over the fence with so few palings to walk to the pub, or took the plastic cover from his Honda in the long grass behind the laundry so that he could go to work with Izzy during the day, or the Polytech night courses, then he stepped beyond their comprehension. Often he felt that even inside the house he was invisible and that if he were to walk directly in the way of them, there would be no contact, no collision, merely a slight visual flux as they passed through each other on different planes.

  Just occasionally though, occasionally and no more thank Jesus, as Ger and Miles sat in an atmosphere of cheese and despair in the only room heated, Miles thought that in Ger’s gaze was something intentionally sardonic, from the holocaust, or the sparrow-hawk. Maybe when there was the sound of the regular working of the springs in the main bedroom, maybe when the neighbour’s winter cheer rhododendron gathered the stains of coal fires to its blossom bosom, maybe as cats squealed in the black judder of the night.

  Miles remembers a cold May afternoon and the only story that Ger ever told him. Whole sentences of it. His lolling, Murphy’s law expression as he said, ‘Some cunt in front of me today found two hundred dollars, and me one away from it. That’s my life though, one cunt away from finding anything.’

  Miles can see over most of Christchurch, even the new sprawl beyond Orana and the airport. Spreydon must be down there somewhere, even the house itself, though Ger may have continued with it as he began with the paling fence. Izzy used to come round, quite unnoticed. They sat shivering in Miles’s room where the most delicate of mildew rosettes gave botanical ambiguity to the bamboo-patterned wallpaper. Izzy would jiggle his knees for warmth, draw up the zip on his company jacket of red vinyl and discuss prospects for the firm’s expansion.

  Miles finds his mouth much better. Is he doing all that he should for Slaven? He likes the man and fears for the effects of the strange talent which has seized him. Even as he talks with the investigator, he recognises that part of himself has only an academic interest, that as real to him as any hardship Aldous Slaven may be enduring is the pungency of Izzy’s cheap cigarillos and the memory of the fine mist which gathered like amoebic insects on the visors as Izzy and he couriered their dreams about the city.

  ‘Some reluctance to commit in the pool, I’m bound to say,’ says the butter man.

  The dayroom of ward 37 opens on to a fully enclosed, grassed compound which has many seats around the outside, and some, by a bed of dwarf conifers, brown, green, yellow and grey, in the centre. The gardens of the Beckley-Waite, like the inmates, are essentially low maintenance.

  Only Marianne, the salad lady, sits in the centre, content to consider herself the cynosure, or oblivious to it. She has a blue knee support, but never talks of sport. She keeps several small sores raw by devotion to the backs of her hands. Any movement directly in front of her draws cries of zucchini, shallots, garni, mushrooms, lettuce, or Russian bolds. Her lips are finely wrinkled and pout tremulously. No one takes any notice. High above the compound in the sky world are the trails of jets. No one takes any notice. Slaven is one of those sitting at the edge and with his tongue on the roof of his mouth he follows the mint trail of recent medication. There is occasional shouting, endless repetitions from some, catatonic peacefulness, restless shufflings caused by even the new generation anti-psychotic drugs. Mr Wormold has a habit of blowing on his fingers if he is prevented from circling and Roger Fielding charms the nurses with Italian verses when he’s not gripped by thought broadcasting. Vivien Catanach was one of Dr Collett’s successes until two days before planned release she choked on a ping-pong ball, thinking it one of the Satsuma plums of her happy, happy youth. Quietus now, in the green shade.

  Chives, lentils, cucumber, onions, red peppers, baby peas, radishes and mangetout.

  ‘He is never any hindrance to the satisfactory routine of the ward,’ says the Charge Nurse. ‘He’s never been put in the colour spinner yet.’ Slaven experiences a gratitude of absurd proportions.

  The category of ward 37 is chronic and the placement here more a matter of similar treatment and compatible symptoms, than commonality of illness. The schizophrenias predominate, Slaven finds the paranoid awake disconcerting possibilities in himself, but there are those who must put their hand up for major depressive syndrome, for bipolar disorder, for Korsakoff’s syndrome, for Huntington’s chorea, for the old Maupassant penalty and new consequences of the very same pleasure. There is even ancient Eddie Lime who was for too long a boxer. Collett sees him as a special gem in the collection, so much a rarity since the fundamental changes in the sport.

&nbs
p; Slaven has of course sought his own place in all of this. Post-traumatic stress disorder he has been told, but no glib explanation as to the posting — a chronic, a secure ward? Come, come gentlemen, there is more at work here than meets the eye.

  The Therapy Aide and Slaven have reached an accommodation — mutual good-will without any demands of each other. ‘Aldous does very well considering his hands,’ she says. ‘Mostly he likes to do things in his own room.’ Nothing, is what he does mainly in his own room. The Therapy Aide has been well-cured of idealism and has dark, clean hair in her favour.

  Violence is no more common in 37 than in the outside world, less in fact, and when difference is brought together it becomes the yawning commonplace. Insanity is like war; mostly discomfort and boredom, but that shot through with horror. Except that in the Beckley-Waite the assaults are launched from within.

  Red cabbage, parsley, tomatoes, leeks and avocados.

  What thrives is isolation and preoccupation. When you cannot trust yourself, then to place any reliance on others is a fearsome business. People share the ward almost unwittingly, and clumsily deflect contact when they come face to face, or turn away with indifference.

  Yet Slaven is excited despite himself. Today he is to have his weekly full-case meeting. Each time the experience disappoints him, yet each time the anticipation of focus on himself in all this dreary, time-dragging, throttling world, inspires a hope that from the limbo he will be taken out and dressed in a life again.

  Tarragon, salsify, endive and artichokes. Mint and carrot slivers.

  Dooley Shaw has his face pressed into a corner of the glass at the nurses station like an aquarium squid. Dooley weeps whenever he sees the moon, and he can see it in the midday sun.

  The case meeting is held in the largest of the counselling rooms. A room with a window door through which the chronics can see which of their number have been chosen by the great — those with colour coded keys and language besides which fits perfectly into the locks of what others say. The Charge Nurse is there, the butter man from the pool who is in charge of recreation, the Therapy Aide, the psychologist, and Collett who is Slaven’s case supervisor. Slaven struggles to keep down his anger when discussion moves from his treatment and progress to more general ward concerns, or the damage to staff cars in the special park. After all anger is not an appropriate response. Change the responses and you change the mood the behaviourists used to say.

  Chronics blow like thistle-down through the polished barrels of the Beckley-Waite. Chronics rattle like chrysalids against the full-length glass. Both true, both true, hey nonney no.

  ‘What comment have we then in regard to inter-action?’ asks Collett. He begins a good deal of the discussion if Morris the psychologist is present. In this way he underlines his position as the clinical psychiatrist.

  ‘Not great on the physical front I’m afraid,’ says the butter man. ‘Not a lot of outreach, I’m bound to say.’

  ‘Fennel, cress, beetroot, celery, aubergines and corn,’ shouts Marianne as Philip Mathieson passes in front. She will remind them all of their salad days.

  Let us suppose for Slaven then, that which will not be — leave from the Beckley-Waite Institute to visit Kellie. A compassionate parole of some kind, so that instead of lying on his back listening to the sedulous whisper of the air-conditioning and regarding the pock-marked firmament of his room, Slaven is by choice walking up the long drive from their road gate, through the colours and fragrances of the paddocks and garden, determined to speak honestly. Honesty is a tall enough order don’t you find, so let’s not make any reference at all to truth. Honesty is self-referential and so subject to some degree to individual judgement.

  Kellie watches him come, looking just the same as he has always looked, though she knows that can’t be true. He has a slightly awkward action, almost as if his large feet must overcome some suction as he walks. Off the stage there is no show with Slaven, no special effort to impress, rather an absent-mindedness, as if he’s still thinking of his surgery, of his beliefs, of the diminishment he suffers in the Beckley-Waite. So see him in this rather absent-minded way trail his hand among the red and purple hydrangeas as is his habit

  Kellie comes to meet him, doesn’t she? On the paved circle in front of the garages they kiss and weep and the last few petals flutter from his hand. It doesn’t matter what they say of course. Words are of little consequence between people who are truly familiar. She understands by his touch, the colour of his face, the tone of voice, what he experiences within the Beckley-Waite Institute. In the past it has always been his good fortune to be valued, in at least a modest way to be sought out and distinguished, yet in the Beckley-Waite he has some sort of rat-arsed existence of no hope and meaning. Even Mrs Wicks still has hope perhaps, though which of us will tell her of the clotted, yellow feathers in the mottled light beneath the coral japonica of Burwood Park. Can anyone live long who sees the world unmasked?

  The most ordinary things of his own home seem matters of tender regard to Slaven after the Beckley-Waite. The kitchen clock with animals on the dial, picked out by Cardew when he was seven, a magnetised ladybird on the fridge, a kauri tea caddy, the top worn dark and smooth, the green container for his gemfibrozil capsules close to the dining table. Kellie sits with him as a reassurance and she doesn’t talk of her own troubles, but gives of her strength and care. She tells him of all the things that are being done on his behalf and of which he’s been unaware. He looks just the same, but she wonders what’s happening to him. She wonders how it has come about that at this stage in their lives he addresses mass rallies with abrupt vehemence, is beaten beneath a Lyttelton wharf, is treated at the Beckley-Waite for threats to his sanity. What she talks of though, is the vitality of the Coalition and the enduring support of his friends. She takes his hand. She knows so much about him that she’s able to judge that there are parts to him she will never understand.

  When first they were married, Kellie had been the nurse as well. On Sunday afternoons they would ready the surgery for the week, Slaven making professional preparations while she tidied the waiting room, sterilised the instruments and cleaned the single window overlooking the Sooper Doop Market. No premonition in such days of the new millennium that a great mission and the Hoihos’s Half Moon Bay were on the way.

  So they comfort each other in this meeting. A constancy of affection, a willing assumption of obligation, may be in their own way as valuable as passion. Kellie is determined to have him free and tells him so. She thinks for his welfare it must be soon, but doesn’t tell him so. The rest for orisons.

  Some time together then we have allowed them, but no more, or else we will confuse our point of view.

  No one comes with the thumbscrews to the small individual rooms in the Beckley-Waite Institute. There’s no bare-bulbed basement with a chair clamped to the floor. Slaven hears no drumming of frenetic feet on the ECT table, sees no bruising on his fellow inmates, no root canals are arbitrarily drilled to encourage right-thinking views — how could he miss the signs of that. It’s not a sense of focused malevolence, or sinister agendas, that marks the masters of the place, but instead, pretence, and the burrowing, assiduous self-aggrandisement tempered with defensive duck-shoving which is the inevitable atmosphere of bureaucracy. It circulates invisibly within the air-conditioning more surely than Legionaires’ disease.

  The great fear of those who are official admissions is that they might be forgotten: NOT sent for, rather than the reverse, abandoned in the hard disc computer memory, missed from the counselling roster, or limited visiting list through weary inefficiency, randomly doomed because they happen to be among the case-load of Dr Burlapp who spends much of his working day ecstatically shafting young Penny Ambrose while the going is good.

  This brave new world is not a victory for the positive forces of either Lucifer, or Gabriel, but a stalemate of malaise and triviality. What undermines the character of those within the Institute isn’t a fear that they might be broken i
n renunciation of fierce allegiances, but an awareness that no one cares, that they are a part of no one’s vital life. Slaven decides that he could be vacuumed out of society and kept in a bag somewhere, a victim of nothing more than housekeeping on a national scale. Do people ask about him? Do the thousands who had wept and applauded at Tuamarina, St Kilda and Western Springs look up from their counters, crops and desks to demand information and explanation of his whereabouts?

  Two days following Slaven’s first conversation with the Caretaker, he has another session with Dr Collett. There is no connection between the two events, is there? Wednesday, hopefully at eleven, Collett had said. Slaven has some status in the dayrooms because of it, as do all who have contact with professional staff today. ‘I have my appointment with Dr Collett at eleven,’ says Slaven to Philip Mathieson and Neville Kingi. He can’t help it, yet despises himself for the comment and the tone just as he despises others for much the same on other days. ‘It’s quite a thing, isn’t it, to get medical confusion on these matters sorted out.’

  Slaven, who thought little of keeping people waiting in his own practice, is kept waiting by Collett. He idles in the cream dayroom, does some exercises in the corridor, has a sudden burst of tears in his own room, before the intercom requests him to come to Dr Collett’s office. Of course Collett is apologetic about the delay, tells Slaven that he knows how these things work, how difficult it is to have rigid time-frames when you are in a people-intensive profession. ‘I understand,’ says Slaven. His eyes still strangely brim with tears and he wonders what Kellie is doing. He thinks of Sarah, Thackeray and Miles.