Harlequin Rex (19 page)

‘You
need
to
get
the
weight
off
your
feet,
’
suggested
Chris.

‘Got
an
idea
about
that
then?
’
she
said.
The
cigarette
twitched
as
she
talked;
her
eyes
continued
to
appraise
the
people
going
in
and
out
to
the
subway.

‘Who’s
got
all
the
good
weed
around
here?’
asked
David.

‘Stumps
me,’
she
said.

‘You
know
where
Piney
Realty
is
then?’

‘Are
you
after
it
or
not?’

‘Lawrence
Meelan,
Piney
Realty.
’

‘Fuck
off
and
leave
me
alone,
’
she
said.
Her
voice
was
the
real
thing:
like
a
crack
of
a
whip.
A
voice
that
anticipated
the
appearance
she’d
have
in
fifteen
or
twenty
years.

They
found
the
Piney
office
by
the
supermarket,
and
Lawrence
Meelan
walked
with
them
to
an
Irish
pub,
where
they
talked
about
the
sort
of
costings
that
would
make
it
worthwhile
to
bring
shit
in
from
Christchurch.
Once
Meelan
realised
that
they
didn’t
have
a
good
source
of
hard
stuff,
only
New
Zealand
resin,
he
lost
a
lot
of
interest.
He
must
have
misunderstood
from
Sneaky,
he
said.
Maybe
they’d
like
to
pick
up
a
reverse
trade
in
ecstasy?

That
was
the
end
of
the
business
side
of
the
trip.
Chris
spent
the
next
four
days
with
a
separated
woman
he’d
met
at
the
Irish
pub
when
David
was
talking
to
Kevin,
whom
he
hadn’t
seen
since
their
time
together
at
Llama
Heaven.
A
good-looking
woman,
but
with
such
a
throaty
voice
that
at
first
Chris
had
his
doubts.
It
required
a
brief
carnal
inter
rogation
then
and
there,
before
she
was
invited
back
to
the
hotel
and
onto
the
payroll.
David
left
them
to
it,
and
flew
to
Auckland,
spent
a
few
days
with
his
mother,
who
had
a
cross-lease
town
house
of
concrete
block
in
Herne
Bay.
It
wasn’t
that
he
disliked
Australia;
he
liked
it
a
good
deal,
and
had
travelled
there
several
times.
But
it
wasn’t
home.
He
liked
the
openness
and
humour
of
Aussies,
the
touch
of
flamboyance
that
came
perhaps
from
the
old
outback
characters
as
well
as
the
middle
European
migrants.
He
liked
their
cities,
and
the
vast
heartlands
without
cities.
He
liked
the
gum
trees
fraying
at
their
trunks,
and
deep,
soft
rivers.
He
liked
the
vineyards
in
wide
valleys,
and
the
old,
façade
pubs
in
the
small
towns.
Beaches
that
met
the
horizon
he
liked,
and
the
flocks
of
galahs
at
the
artesian
pumps.
But
it
wasn’t
home.

Auckland
wasn’t
really
home
either.
Why
had
his
mother
shifted
so
far
away
from
Canterbury
and
Beth
Car?
So
far
from
him?
‘You’ve
got
to
keep
challenging
yourself
as
you
 
get
older,’
she
said.
‘New
places
for
new
starts,
otherwise
the
old
population
holds
you
back.’

He
had
been
able
to
give
her
an
increasing
payout
from
Beth
Car,
and
she
enjoyed
spending
it.
How
she
loved
to
buy
a
new
blouse,
or
jacket,
with
a
good
label.
She
dressed
herself
well
on
the
proceeds
of
cannabis
without
realising
it.
The
three
days
there
were
some
of
the
best
they
ever
had
together,
for
as
well
as
love
for
him,
and
that
was
never
completely
lost,
she
had
then
respect
and
pride.
What
David
remembered
most
of
the
Herne
Bay
visit
wasn’t
the
new
clothes
his
mother
displayed
after
her
shopping
trips,
or
the
talks
they
had
on
the
sundeck,
but
the
memories
that
she
evoked
without
the
subject
of
them
coming
up
in
conversation
at
all.

Her
flat
was
a
model
of
order
and
cleanliness,
as
if
in
perpetual
readiness
for
land
agents
and
their
clients.
The
reasonable
detritus
of
everyday
living
was
never
apparent
in
his
mother’s
house
—
no
lightly
balled
long
hair
under
the
dresser
from
her
brush,
no
crumpled
tissues,
no
dockets
tonguing
from
ornaments,
no
mummified
scraps
at
the
back
of
her
refrigerator
shelves,
no
sweat
stains
as
rosettes
beneath
the
sleeves
of
her
clothes.
Was
it
significant,
perhaps,
that
for
David
her
smell
was
always
a
perfume,
while
his
father’s
strong,
clean
smell
of
flesh
was
utterly
distinct
and
individual.

When
he
was
seventeen,
David
and
his
mother
had
spent
four
days
staying
with
the
Corringers
in
Kohimarama.
She
instructed
him
in
the
etiquette
of
host
and
hosted.
What
should
they
do?
she
asked
him.
A
gift,
David
suggested:
flowers
and
chocolate.
He
thought
it
a
good
answer.
He’d
seen
his
mother
give
and
receive
as
much.
Did
he
think
they’d
been
in
a
hotel?
They
were
leaving
after
four
days
in
the
Corringers’
guest
suite,
and
he
wouldn’t
clean
from
top
to
bottom?
She
gave
him
a
lesson
in
cleaning
the
lavatory —
the
Harpic
and
brush,
the
Dettol
cloth,
the
blue
liquid
squirted
under
the
rim
and
left
for
fifteen
minutes.
Did
he
 
think
lavatories
cleaned
themselves?
Even
in
his
exasperation,
David
admired
the
self-respect
that
lay
behind
such
demon
concern
for
appearances.
On
judgement
day
she
would
look
every
past
host
in
the
eye
with
equanimity.
David
had
the
uneasy
recollection
of
the
under-seventeen
rugby
tournament
in
Wellington,
and
the
post-party
vomit
that
he’d
wrapped
in
a
duvet
and
hidden
in
his
host’s
wardrobe.
Always
imagine
your
travel
arrangements
falling
through,
and
having
to
come
back
to
your
hosts,
his
mother
told
him.
There
were
a
good
many
later
year
hosts
to
whom
David
fervently
wished
never
to
return.

There was a pub at the top end of Havelock called by locals The Squat, although its official name made spurious claims to dignity. David went there sometimes when he was off duty, taking Raf’s little Mazda and driving over the Mahakipawa Hill with its slopes of pigfern and scrub. Very seldom were they able to go together, because of the rosters, and they agreed that was an added advantage on occasion. Friendship is always strengthened by the opportunity for privacy.

David went on the Thursday afternoon after Howard Peat died. It was a relief at such times to be among a
population
who had a normal life expectancy, and whom he owed nothing. The Squat had an old-fashioned narrow bar, with a snooker table in the end away from the windows and the road. The nip bottles made a fretwork above the stools of the front bar; there was a child’s wood-framed blackboard listing the meals in white and yellow chalk. Harlequin was just a hill and a world away. Like Shane in the cowboy book, David sat where he could see the door.

Bev from the post office, her tear scar ever fresh, was having a brandy and Coke with Michael, her neighbour. David had talked with him once before, about night flounder
fishing. Just a hill and a world away, but then it takes only a plywood wall in a block of flats to separate hell from heaven. Who was looking after the post office letters, David wondered.

The barman was tall and courteous, his arms so muscular that it seemed an effort of his will was necessary to ensure the glasses weren’t crushed as he carried them. He put the drinks before them with a smile, and just a quick, inoffensive glance down Bev’s blouse as she scratched her ankle.

‘How are things at the centre?’ he said. Just a hill and a world away.

‘No riots as yet,’ said David.

‘All that new building though, eh,’ and the barman
withdrew
with a smile to show that he didn’t expect a reply. His powerful arms hung empty, at a loss, by his side.

‘Michael goes there a bit,’ said Bev.

‘Nothing to do with the new buildings,’ said Michael the flounder man. ‘That’s all Nelson contractors, but I do a bit of plumbing and electrical stuff when your own people there are pushed.’ Michael may once have been bigger, but his body had settled back into a comfortable size. His head sank comfortably into his shoulders and the sleeves of his green work jersey were given an extra roll at the wrists. The back of his neck had a greying, untrimmed fuzz like that on a dog’s leg, the sign of a man with no caring wife, or mistress, and who is spinning money out from one haircut to the next. ‘In the times I’ve been there, I’ve never seen a really crook one. You hear the stories of what they get up to, right off their chump, but I’ve never seen any poor bastard go off the deep end,’ said Michael.

‘People are usually put in treatment as soon as there are signs of an episode. Most of the time there’s no problem.’ Well, not for those on the outside, David thought. ‘Some come right and are discharged, go home for good perhaps,’ he said. It was better that he didn’t tell the stories of Jane, Howard, Jason, or Alice Bee.

‘Every now and again I see one or two over here for the day,’ said Bev. ‘I’ve had them in the post office, and they often go to see the little church museum. Nothing’s ever stolen as far as I know. Mostly they fossick around the shore.’

Schweitzer’s policy was that patients could go into Picton, or Havelock, if accompanied by a staff member — one on one, and therefore inconspicuous. The ruling arose not through fear of an episode during a visit, but as sensitivity to the centre’s effect on the settlements on either side. They were too small and self-contained to cope with mass therapy visits. Also there was political pressure to draw as little attention as possible to Harlequin’s growth.

‘You came last with the millionaire — a chap with a Rolex, but no airs and graces at all.’ David had introduced Tolly Mathews to Bev. She had seen him with Lucy several times too, but tactfully said nothing of that.

‘A millionaire, eh,’ said Michael. ‘Is that right? You wouldn’t think a millionaire would get sick in the head, would you?’ Floundering was a good little earner on the side, but Michael had never known big money.

‘Well, I don’t know about millionaire.’ Some mild
disclaimer
was necessary. Before you knew it the locals would have the impression that the patients were all loaded. But he did know, and what he knew was that in terms of assets Tolly was a multi-millionaire, and that wasn’t uncommon any more. There were plenty of houses in Auckland and Wellington worth more than a couple of million. David thought it might be a good thing to get Tolly and Michael together. Tolly could supply the drinks and the news of the world; Michael could share his local knowledge of time and tide: the soft, slanting submarine places where flounder bulged their eye from artful camouflage and suckled in the sand. They’d get on fine.

But rather than thinking of the future, or even the present with Michael and Bev in The Squat, it was his last visit with Lucy that David inhabited. He’d been compelled to go 0
through the formality of asking Tony Sheridan for permission. There had been a moment when they both knew that Tony was about to ask him if anything was going on, but the doctor couldn’t quite get it out.

David and Lucy had gone to the museum, as no doubt Bev observed from her window. It was a narrow, wooden church with solid plank chocks under the steps. The pews were gone, replaced by butter churns, pit-saws, dray wheels, sad photos of bullock drivers, bushmen and women with unwashed hair. There were glassed cases of fob watches on chains, sovereign purses, buttoned shoes, trade certificates, and the medals of Corporal Charles W. Riley, who died of disease on the Somme. Right at the front, under sufferance, the church was allowed some history of its own: a simple lectern pulpit made from the timbers of the
Criccieth
wrecked in 1887, and a dry, cracked board with the names of every minister, until all the congregation had been quite preached away.

Lucy and he had gone down to the water too: down the same road he’d taken with his sandwiches when he came to Havelock to take his job at the centre, by Nottage & Son boat-builders again, though the clinker-built dinghy was gone, released onto the sea. They sat by the enclosing
breakwater
and watched the flotsam moving at the angle between the wall and the shore, like spittle at the corner of an incessant talker’s mouth. Lucy broke off pieces of a dock plant and flicked them into the incoming tide which was stirring up a fine sludge that moved over the mudflats as a faint skirt in front of the clean water behind.

She wasn’t glamorous that day. Sitting pulled the cuffs of her jeans higher on her shins, showing the stubble there, and her hair was pulled back simply from her face, emphasising her high, round forehead. She had a slight rash behind her left ear, which she stroked with two fingers. He’d never loved her more, and ached to save her. ‘I bet you’d never heard of Havelock, had you?’ he said. ‘Certainly not Mahakipawa.’

‘No. Havelock North I know, though.’ Her slim fingers continued to snap and shred the dock plants, or trace the inching skin by her ear.

‘There’s a South Island Palmerston too, but of course it’s been forgotten for Palmerston North. You never know where your life’s going to, do you? Like a Havelock boy ending up getting shot on some Boer War donga, like an Auckland girl marrying a Yank soldier and then off to Minnesota to live, like a guy in Bulls owning the same dairy for sixty years and being buried beside his parents who had it before him.’

‘Like fronting on national television and then getting Harlequin and ending up here, right?’ she said.

‘Yes, that’s it. Can you hack it?’

They could hear small children from the school
playground
not far away: the delighted shrieks of self-induced terror, the chanting and taunting, the hubbub of energy released. Perhaps what he was trying to say to Lucy was that all the moods and possibilities were there together in an instant, but experienced separately, as white light contains all the colours of the rainbow. Heaven and hell only a breath and a chance apart. The kids climbed the jungle gym, while over the Mahakipawa Hill new buildings went up to
Harlequin
. The wizened deerstalker, once mighty, choked to death on a cherry stone in the Picton Rest Home, while Abbey at the centre was acclaimed in concert for the playing of Liszt. The police continued to investigate a murder of passion in Kaikoura, while the history of the Te Tarehi Dairy
Co-operative
was launched with five cardboard casks of
indeterminate
white wine and seven kilograms of mild cheese.

‘I guess it was a pretty exciting life in television,’ said David.

‘In a way, but you’re so busy that the enjoyment of it tends to get squeezed out. There were plenty of parties, but I felt rather hunted all through it by the need to be prepared, to do a good job. People around are surprisingly supportive, but the system itself’s bloody unrelenting.’

‘So many people keen to get a look in, I suppose.’

‘Nothing’s settled,’ she said. ‘Change is always on the way. Restructuring is how the management make a living, and it seems to me that the youth culture drives TV now.’

‘You’ll go back to it the better for a break,’ he said, and quickly wished he hadn’t.

‘Oh, sure,’ she said, ‘I’m relying on it.’ Heaven and hell just a breath away.

They walked as far as it was possible along the
breakwater
, and looked back at the small town at the foot of the hill, saw the arm of the sound running up the valley that the road followed to Nelson. Beds of reeds, brush stiff at a distance, lined the shore. They relaxed in the sun, watched the tide coming, said little and didn’t kiss, but loosely held each other’s fingers. The perfumed wind came up the sound and cooled them. A sheep truck was busy on the Mahakipawa Hill.

‘You never say much about your life,’ Lucy said.

‘A farm, an arts degree, the big OE, a farm, a failure.’

‘And family?’

‘Just Mum and Dad. Both dead now.’ Just a breath away. Just a breath away.

‘Raf reckons maybe something went really bad for you,’ said Lucy. ‘That it’s knocked your confidence pretty much.’

‘Everyone’s a psychologist, don’t you think? I’m no more mysterious than anybody else.’ It was odd though to be reminded that other people spoke about you in your absence: that they had opinions about your life and behaviour which they’d never think to say to your face. ‘Maybe I just didn’t find something to hook into like other people,’ he said. ‘Some were into pop music, or travel, or career success. Sport was big for some, or getting pissed every weekend. I’ve just never found one thing to concentrate on.’ Except the shit, of course, but he didn’t like to see his entire life as revolving around that.

‘You liked farming, though?’ said Lucy.

‘Yeah, I did. Well, maybe I liked living on a farm rather than keeping up with all the stuff to be done there. I got lazy, I suppose.’

‘And it was round here?’

‘No, North Canterbury.’

‘I always think of farms being such boring places. The same things done over and over again, and so many animals to be killed. People working all by themselves, whistling and spitting rather than having a conversation.’

‘Some things are best done over and over again,’ David said. Flippant innuendo was the easy out. What was the value in any defence of the land when Lucy had so little experience of it: when she could sit surrounded by hills and water and read no signs in them at all. David loved her no less for that. Guilt, too, prevented him from being advocate, for he had lost Beth Car, broken the continuity of his family there, and ended up packed in with people at the Slaven Centre, Mahakipawa, even though the quiet country was all around.

No one had seemed disconcerted by their presence in Havelock that day, but when they came out of the pub after a late lunch, there was a carton flap held to the windscreen by the wipers, and on it — ‘Fuck Off Crazies’. ‘Maybe it’s not paradise after all,’ Lucy said. It was a careful sign, and placed almost solicitously so as not to damage Raf’s car. There were no observers that either of them could see. Lucy took the sign into the car with her, and wedged it between the dash and the glass, so that it faced other people, not themselves. She enjoyed the reaction of the few oncoming motorists as they went back to the centre, and when they reached the car park she took the cardboard with her to amuse her friends in Kotuku.

David paused to admire a splendidly kept silver Audi in the end park, where there was less danger of a door being opened on its paintwork. David recognised it. It had
protective
clear covers over the front lights and
high-performance 
tyres. The owner was a plain clothes cop who was liaison between the centre and the Nelson police. Such information soon got around. David had seen the detective once as he walked past Takahe to the main block. A tall man with a plain, blue blazer and blue tie, but with the incongruity of white and red trainers instead of formal shoes. No doubt he sought the pleasure of using his own car on business, and thought it worth the cost.

Your
own
motives
and
experiences
are
always
in
a
different
category
from
those
of
other
people,
aren’t
they?
What
you
do
yourself
is
always
subject
to
special
pleading.
David
realised
that
when
he
had
his
first
full
session
with
the
lawyer
who
was
to
represent
him.
A
man
of
cautious
arrogance:
physically
clumsy,
but
well
dressed
and
highly
recommended.
David
told
him
almost
the
whole
truth,
and
as
he
did
so
could
see
on
the
lawyer’s
face
precisely
how
the
situation
appeared
to
people
on
the
outside.
David
as
a
man
greedy,
unprincipled
and
careless,
who
had
assumed
that
there
was
some
reason
why
he
wouldn’t
be
caught.
Someone
with
a
whole
heap
of
natural
advantages,
and
he’d
blown
them.
A
private
school
boy
who
thought
he
could
sneer
at
the
ordinary
world.