Harlequin Rex (10 page)

As
David
walked
from
his
father
in
the
garden,
his
mother
appeared
from
the
sunporch,
came
impetuously
on
to
the
steps.
How
he
loved
her.
Yet,
as
always
in
that
home,
he
felt
passed
from
one
affection
to
another,
rather
than
included
in
their
united
love.
‘Oh,
wonderful
to
see
you,’
she
called,
and
they
went
in
together.
Looking
smart
as
ever,
his
mother.
Appearance
was
for
her
a
competition,
like
all
else
in
life:
against
one’s
earlier
self,
against
every
other
woman
in
the
world,
though
the
intensity
of
the
struggle
rarely
showed.
She
had
a
brief,
fierce
pressure
when
they
hugged,
and
again
David
was
her
special
boy,
her
vicarious
opportunity.
‘Good
for
you.
Good
for
you,’
she
said.
‘I’m
so
proud.’

‘It’s
all
the
help
I
had
from
you
and
Dad.
’
Forgotten,
then,
all
her
actively
expressed
reservations
about
Llama
Heaven,
and
the
population
he
lived
with
there.
Forgotten,
her
anger
at
the
drunk
driving
charge,
her
exasperation
with
his
failure
to
write,
her
objection
to
his
obscenity
and
idleness.
Remembered
truly
the
love
and
letters,
the
financial
help,
the
absolute
knowledge
of
being
in
her
thoughts
every
day
of
her
life.

His
mother’s
mid-brown
hair
still
had
a
sheen,
when
that
of
most
middle-aged
women
had
become
drab.
The
cream
 
linen
was
crisp
to
his
hand
as
they
hugged,
and
she
wore
a
perfume
bought
on
her
last
trip
to
Sydney.
How
well
David
knew
his
mother’s
pride,
from
long
experience
as
its
main
object
and
the
main
source
of
betrayal.
As
he’d
grown
up
he
had
felt
a
sense
of
helplessness
before
such
love,
sensing
that
there
was
no
way
he
could
stop
his
achievement,
or
failure,
from
being
felt
in
her
heart.
Through
the
dimpled
glass
door
behind
her,
he
could
see
the
misshapen
image
of
his
father
coming
to
the
house.

‘Anyway,’
he
said,
‘I’m
now
qualified,
but
unemployed.
I
know
more
about
glacial
geomorphology
than
anyone
would
ever
wish
to
hear,
and
already
I’m
starting
to
forget
it.’
Sometimes
he
still
woke
from
anxiety
dreams
in
which
he
was
fooling
around
at
Llama
Heaven,
quite
unprepared
for
exams.

‘Just
think
of
all
the
opportunities
to
build
a
professional
career,’
his
mother
said.
The
prospect
made
her
face
young,
gave
vibrancy
to
her
tone.
‘I’ve
told
your
father
that
we’ll
celebrate,
of
course.’

The
shape
of
him
became
somewhat
clearer
behind
the
dimpled
glass
as
he
sloughed
off
his
shoes.
Was
it
David’s
imagination
that
she
seemed
to
hurry
the
things
she
went
on
to
share
with
him,
before
his
father
joined
them?
His
parents
had
a
civilised
marriage,
which
somehow
ached
with
lost
possibility.

The
Christchurch
restaurants
were
stuffed
with
graduation
groups
on
the
night.
Some
wore
gowns
and
hoods
with
self-conscious
relief
that,
for
the
night
at
least,
they
weren’t
failures.
David
and
his
parents
had
eaten
a
meal
as
expensive
as
most,
drunk
South
African
bubbly,
leaned
together
for
the
freelance
photographer
who
worked
the
room
on
an
evening
so
ripe
for
business
that
his
cajolery
was
quite
untested.
The
photo
is
still
in
his
mother’s
album:
he
is
between
his
parents,
of
course,
and
still
clear
behind
David
is
a
thin
woman
at
another
table,
caught
just
for
a
moment
and
eternity
in
the
lives
of
unknown
people.
The
 
tendons
of
her
long
wrist
show
as
she
pauses
with
a
forkful
of
cannelloni
to
shout
joyously
above
the
noise
of
the
crowded
room.
She
is
old,
defiant,
risible,
wears
a
short-
sleeved
green
dress,
and
inhabits
the
family
album
with
as
much
substance
as
any
other
figure
there.

David
Stallman
MA.
Even
Llama
Heaven
couldn’t
last
for
ever.

One of their great failures was Alice Bee, who garrotted a male visitor departing from Hoiho. The caretaker’s Samoyed found the body beneath the ornamental flaxes far back from the car park. The guy was still in his tie and sports coat: well over six foot and heavy with it, Tony Sheridan said. It was assumed he had walked that far, lain down with little Alice Bee expecting favours, and got more head than he bargained for.

Such a thing is so bizarre that, for a while, the sadness and horror of it can be avoided, but Alice must have
remembered
it from time to time. She went into the secure unit in the main block, where she made a beautiful wall hanging of angora wool for the reception foyer, before electrocuting herself with wire in the dayroom plug closest to the nurses’ station. Gaynor Runcinski, who knew all about textiles, considered it a thing of genius. Alice had written a card for her wall hanging which read ‘Fibre landscape: Mahakipawa 3’. There was no evidence that Mahakipawas 1 and 2 ever existed outside her mind.

David was remembering that as he and Tolly went down to Sheridan’s office for Tolly’s session. There was a cold,
steady wind up the sound, and barges of dull cloud were towed overhead. Only slightly lower were skuas, skidding by with fixed wings. The wind set up a resonance, part sound, part vibration, which made it unpleasant to be outside. ‘An ideal day,’ said Tolly, ‘to talk about illness. Don’t you think?’

There was one other thing about Alice’s notoriety which came to David as they walked: an idle connection really, but that’s the way the brain works. The visitor garrotted by Alice had been visiting Lorna Ibbotson, whose brother years before won the Canterbury Closed Tennis Championship. David had been a spectator. He had sat there marvelling at Ibbotson’s touch with the drop volley, and none in that small audience could know that Harlequin and Alice Bee were waiting to make such indirect connection in the future.

As an extension of whanau support, all guests at the centre were invited to take a companion to their regular reviews. David noticed that many of the sessions were descriptive and diagnostic, rather than providing alleviation. Maybe there was something therapeutic in just the opportunity to talk: to spill out the fear and fascination that patients felt for Harlequin. For each of them the illness was uniquely personal, no matter how often they saw the same symptoms in their fellows.

‘How do you find the Hazlitt spinner?’ asked Sheridan, when the three of them were comfortable. Yellow and green dwarf conifers outside his window heeled in the wind, and the caretaker’s Samoyed loped past to find its master, or a garrottee.

‘It quietens you, doesn’t it?’ said Tolly. ‘Takes you out of the world for a while, but I’d say there’s no permanent gain against the demons. No healing in it, seems to me. Healing seems to be the thing that no one much talks about, and yet it’s the word most of us are after — that, and a cure.’

‘The worst thing would be to build up a lot of false hopes,’ said Sheridan. He wore a sports coat with large, blue checks and there was a fair stretch of pale shirt the coat couldn’t
cover. ‘As far as we can tell, Harlequin’s a whole new thing and, until we know the enemy better, the outcomes are unpredictable.’

‘It’s not as if nobody recovers,’ David said. He felt that he was there partly to be encouraging.

‘That’s right,’ said Sheridan. ‘Ones from your own block, like Edward Simm, who’s home and seems not too bad.’

Tolly smiled at the positiveness of it all.

They knew others too, didn’t they, like Jason, and Big Pulii, and Jane Milton; like Alice Bee, who had woven ‘Mahakipawa 3’, which hung in reception only two corners away from Tony Sheridan’s office. As they all knew, what they were trying to do at the centre was delay the progression of the disease until an effective treatment could be found.

‘Tolly,’ said Sheridan, ‘you’re in the best place in the world to have Harlequin, small consolation though that might seem. Schweitzer’s a near genius, and when this thing’s beaten, this is where it’ll happen.’

‘Maybe,’ said Tolly. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but when you’re sick yourself, the big picture is nothing to you, nothing at all. I had an aunt who used to piss me off with that trite saying that your health is all you’ve got. It’s still trite, of course, but now for me it’s true as well. Yet from sheer habit I find myself still worrying about my
investments
, whether my new shower mixers are taking on, and if abstinence will make me impotent.’

‘You’ve been feeling okay?’ asked Sheridan.

‘Up and down,’ said Tolly. ‘You know, my sense of smell becomes better than a ferret’s at times, just as Abbey said it would. Then I can tell anyone’s last meal from a single fart, and I know when the red clover’s out in the road paddock over the hill. Cows smell different to steers — did you know that? The blankets on the drying line almost smother me with fragrances, and when I bring my hands to my face I know all the day’s activities.’

It was old primal brain again, wasn’t it; wonderfully
unfettered power of the senses, which sophistication had overlain. David had caught many glimpses of Harlequin from such descriptions, and the behaviour of patients when they blew.

‘This acuteness of smell isn’t progressive, though, is it?’ Sheridan drew the case sheets to him. ‘I mean, it’s not heightened every time you have an episode?’

‘It’s probably growing. It comes on with the demons, of course, but it’s certainly lingering on much longer after I come right in other ways.’

No good sign. Tolly must have known that as well, but none of them chose to say it. Atavism was the great symptom of the new plague. What threatened them most at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t aliens, wasn’t genetic or technical advance, but something looming up from way, way back. Maybe in the end the conclusive and final predator was their former selves.

‘The feeling is at once release, and lack of control.’ Tolly was detailing the way his bouts began. ‘Everything is self and gratification of self. Everything is now, and it presses out both the past and future. Colour, sound, taste and threat whirl around you. Response is everything.’

David and the doctor knew that Tolly was well in the vortex, but to express it served no purpose. Tolly and Sheridan began to go over the diary that every patient agreed to keep: an attempt to find any triggers, predisposing factors, dietary connections, whatever. The futility of it lay shallowly behind their faces, and David felt it as well. His throat stiffened with the effort to prevent a yawn. His friend Tolly was dying, perhaps, but the horror couldn’t be taken head on, and David’s attention was displaced to the cool, Mahakipawa day, with the wind coming up the sound, the half-grown gardens of the Slaven Centre tossing, a mixed fruit yogurt six-pack in a supermarket bag by Sheridan’s desk, the papers heaped in the desk files, the baleful tweed expanse of the doctor’s jacket.

‘It must be just a matter of time,’ David said. ‘Until the causes of it, and a cure, are found, I mean. All these things are cracked in the end.’

‘How much time though, eh?’ said Tolly, and his face twitched somewhat. Maybe he was able to smell hypocrisy, too.