Harlequin Rex (29 page)

She hopes David won't be around if she blows, and is surprised by the thought. Maybe when you die a stranger to
yourself — and isn't that Harlequin's way? — it's better to go in the company of strangers.

Who can know the truth before it happens? More and more her mind lurches and breaks free, akin to the sudden racing of the heart. Hasn't she begun the withdrawal from other people which is necessary before you die? No more curiosity, or envy, in hearing of other pianists, no more casting into the future. Does she want her mother's hand over hers? Let's not forget this day together, Abbey. Look how the sky tucks down behind the hills.

Don't come. Of all the visitors warded off, her mother most of all. Abbey fears she will arrive to sit with her in her bedroom, or ringed by her fellows in the lounge. What would her mother choose of Harlequin's world to seal away in recollection?

In her special place among the blankets and linen, Abbey is already beyond official ken. She can float her consciousness away towards the shore with mud and rushes, the crabs flexing on the shining curvature of mud, or up to the ridge line with its rough pasture amid gorse and broom. If she focuses, if she holds herself very still, she becomes a held note of the clarinet, part almost of the music of the spheres. Never forget, no, never forget. Surely there is nothing now of her to be seen at all: nothing even for Harlequin to set his sights on.

And in her case the doctors are so optimistic, aren't they?

‘No
shit?'
said
Lund.

‘So
the
man
said.
All
of
us
gets
to
eat
this
slap-up
feed
for
free,
because
the
woman's
son
died
in
here
last
year,
on
the
same
fucking
day
that
we
get
to
eat
the
feed,
and
he
only
had
a
few
weeks
to
go
they
say.'

‘No
shit.
What
name?
'
said
Lund.

‘The
name,
'
said
Bowden
sharply.
‘What
fucking
name's
that
then?'

They
were
sitting
along
the
sides
of
the
rec
hall
on
metal 
chairs
screwed
to
wooden
slides,
three
at
a
time.
For
videos
and
addresses
the
slides
could
be
pushed
out
into
the
body
of
the
hall.
Tick,
tack,
tick,
tack,
went
the
light,
hard
table-
tennis
balls.
David
sat
with
Lund
and
Bowden,
and
some
times
he
watched
the
table-tennis
players
who
weren't
that
good,
and
he
half
listened
to
Bowden
on
about
the
memorial
meal.

‘The
name
of
the
guy
who
died
in
here,'
said
Lund.

‘How
would
I
know?
Who
gives
a
fucking
toss.
We're
not
talking
about
any
fucking
names
here,
we're
talking
about
a
free
feed
on
Thursday.
We're
talking
about
the
menu,
man,
not
the
whys
and
wherefores
of
some
old
woman
wanting
to
do
it.
And
I
hear
it's
turkey,
no
fucking
question:
absolute
primo
Tom
fucking
Turkey.'

‘
No shit.'

‘You
heard
anything
about
Tom
Turkey,
Stallman?'
asked
Bowden.

‘No,'
said
David.
‘I
just
heard
that
the
guy's
family
had
been
given
permission
to
have
a
memorial
dinner
if
they
paid
for
it.
'

Tick,
tack,
tick,
tack.

Bowden
had
a
large
quince
face,
sallow
and
with
full
cheeks
at
the
jawline,
but
he
wasn't
a
soft
man
at
all.
He
had
a
considerable
stretch
ahead
of
him
for
embezzlement
from
his
union
and
an
assault
from
which
the
woman
nearly
died.
‘And
a
choice
of
puddings
and
bubbly
with
it
all,
I
heard,'
he
said.
‘Fucking
oath.
Now
isn't
that
the
sort
of
mum
you'd
like
to
see
every
prisoner
fucking
have,
eh?'

Tick,
tack,
tick,
tack.

This
was
the
consequence
of
cannabis
first
tried
in
the
old
band
room
at
Collegiate,
and
later
cultivated
as
some
thing
of
a
rural
industry
at
Beth
Car.
Had
David
realised
what
diminished
opportunity,
what
boredom,
his
punish
ment
carried,
just
maybe
he'd
have
thought
twice.
But
then
it
too
passed.

‘I
seen
the
menu
in
the
mess
office,'
said
Bowden.
‘All
set
down
by
the
guy's
mother,
and
for
the
whole
fucking
wing,
eh.
And
the
dinner's
to
be
fifteen
minutes
earlier
than
regulation
time,
out
of
respect
and
to
mark
it
special.
And
anyone
who's
been
playing
up
misses
out.
Let's
remember
that
one.'
Bowden
played
with
the
dense
hair
at
the
top
of
his
chest
as
he
talked,
making
curls
of
it
around
his
strong,
blunt
fingers.

‘But
you
don't
know
the
name,'
said
Lund.

‘I
tell
you
the
name
won't
make
no
fucking
difference
to
that
Tom
Turkey,
nor
lemon
meringue
pie.
It'll
go
down
real
easy
without
any
fucking
name.'

‘You're
right.'

‘Of
course
I'm
fucking
right.
Aren't
I,
Stallman?'

‘You're
right
all
right,'
said
David.

Tick,
tack,
tick,
tack.

‘Anyway,
the
guy
went
out
because
of
some
very
dodgy
fucking
poppy,
but
they
never
told
the
family
that,
of
course.
That's
what
I
heard,'
said
Bowden.
He
blew
his
cheeks
right
out
and
stretched
his
arms
casually
towards
the
roof.

‘No
shit,'
said
Lund.
Would
the
man's
sense
of
wonder
ment
never
leave
him.

Tick,
tack,
tick,
tack.

David
didn't
care
about
the
menu
for
the
free
memorial
dinner.
No
way
was
he
going
to
think
about
the
elderly
mother
spending
her
money
on
a
dinner
for
guys
in
the
wing
where
her
son
died.
He
wasn't
going
to
consider
that
her
motive
might
be
that
other
prisoners
would
remember
her
son,
and
value
that
remembrance.
He
wasn't
going
to
con
sider
the
pathos
and
the
history
and
the
agony
which
might
lie
behind
the
old
mother's
fucking
Tom
Turkey.
He
waited
for
an
opportunity
to
replace
one
of
the
table
tennis
players.
The
movement
and
the
competition
helped
him
to
forget
his
circumstances.
But
always,
in
the
fortress
of
his
heart,
he
continued
to
exalt
honour,
friendship,
loyalty
and
love
—
the
very
attributes
he
found
most
difficult
in
life.

Bowden
stretched
again
and
worked
his
shoulders.
‘Christ,
my
fucking
guts
are
bound
up
these
days,'
he
complained.

‘No
shit,
'
said
Lund.
‘Maybe
that
dead
guy's
Tom
Turkey
will
do
the
trick.
You
know
the
name
doesn't
mean
a
thing
to
me
—
just
can't
place
him.'

Bowden
caught
David's
eye,
and
blew
out
his
big
cheeks
in
exasperation.

They couldn't meet in their rooms as often as they wished, in case what was readily accepted by their friends became known to other people at the centre who would move against, them. Often at night they talked on the phone: the extended, trivial, and discontinuous conversations a poor
representation
of the intimacy they shared as lovers.

Lucy's illness, too, came between them, and days went by during which they had no contact at all. David was angry and perplexed that circumstances prevented them from being together more often. It was likely that they had little time allowed them, and they were wasting it by keeping to petty decorum and self-consciousness.

Lucy's birthday was celebrated at Kotuku: a cake from the main kitchens, a present from fellow inmates, some carbonated bubbly, a few messages of uncertain tone —
congratulations
, best wishes, many more happy returns? — the hollowness of being surrounded by well-wishers chosen for her by Harlequin. How quickly things change. Only a year before she'd been with family and friends, with more than three hundred faxes and emails from her viewers. David was at the most recent birthday in a conventional role,
singing the song, keeping a smile, ensuring that nothing in his glance towards her disclosed for others his love, or, more importantly, revealed to Lucy herself the pity he felt for her and the sense of his own powerlessness.

Surely he could at least do better for Lucy by way of celebration: some special time away from the institutional cake and fellow Harlequins of the Slaven Centre, the
communal
ablutions facilities and the video operating instructions in blue felt pen on a card. He asked Roimata Wallace for help, and she suggested she take Lucy with her on a visit to Roimata's family at Blenheim, where David could appear unofficially and put on a special night as a surprise. Not ethical, of course — again — for either the doctor or himself, but David didn't give a damn about that, and Roimata thought the deceit worthwhile if Lucy gained by it.

‘You be sure she has a good time, and just be careful,' she told David as they made plans. ‘I won't have her upset.' Roimata was one of those thin, beaky Maori women who break the physical stereotype of her race, and are sufficiently numerous to suggest some genetic alternatives far back in Polynesian history. Her smile was like a slash in her dark face, and she took no nonsense from anyone. ‘Don't make me sorry that I'm doing this,' she said to David. He got the message that the motivation for her kindness was the benefit of the sisterhood, and not his interests.

Yet it was kindness, and she put herself at professional risk. On the Saturday of the weekend stay in Blenheim, Roimata took Lucy to some of the wineries. ‘Even my family has planted some grapes,' she said, ‘and now we sell our crop of chardonnay to Hunter's. When medicine gets too much for me, I'm thinking of retiring to the property and becoming a winemaker. I'm already doing a course from Massey.'

‘Let me come with you as publicist for the family business,' Lucy said. Maybe Harlequin would let her leave
the Slaven Centre if she had someone to vouch for her. She could get pissed among the vines and few people, perhaps, would know. She could become famous as a wine ‘nose' — a back-handed gift from Harlequin.

In the afternoon Lucy and Roimata drove up the Wairau Plain to the old Cresswell settlement and the new vineyards there, with a rose bush end to each carefully staked row. They took a cheeseboard and a bottle of sauvignon blanc to the wooden seats on the sloping lawn: the one green patch, by courtesy of sprinkler, in the dun, surrounding grasses. And Roimata made some excuse to leave Lucy sitting there; went back to the car park where David waited. He was surprised how awkward he found it to thank the doctor, and how awkward she was in accepting his thanks, as if both of them had a sense that their acquaintance was too slight to bear the burden should anything go wrong. ‘Anyway,' she said, ‘I've got to start back for Mahakipawa early tomorrow afternoon, so you'll need to drop her off at home by lunchtime.'

‘I'll have her there by twelve. Jesus, just to have some time together out of that place. You know? Everyone does a good job, but you can't forget what you're there for, what's happening around you.'

‘You help Lucy forget for a while then, David. You give her a good time until tomorrow afternoon, but remember how things are. You wouldn't do anything silly like going off, eh?'

‘No,' said David. How often he'd thought of that, and always reluctantly admitted to himself that Lucy wasn't up to it, even if she'd wanted to make the break.

‘Anyway, Lucy'll be wondering what's going on. Go on out to the lawn and let's hope she's pleased to see you.' Roimata Wallace drove away with just a flash of that smile from a face so sharp it always seemed to be one profile or the other, and David locked Raf's car, yet another favour, surely, of which he was scarcely deserving, and hurried past the tasting room to be with Lucy.

Just for a moment, as he approached across the lawn, before Lucy's attention, her recognition, caused any response in her, David perceived her as objectively as he found possible. She had put on some weight since coming to the centre, as she frequently complained, but she could carry it in her tall, loose-limbed way. A certain assurance and confidence had been beaten out of her by Harlequin. She wore little make-up, or jewellery; her clothes were comfortable rather than smart. She no longer felt it important to make a statement to others by appearance. Her attractiveness remained, but her focus had moved elsewhere, and her expression was one of closed vulnerability.

But when she saw him there was such quick pleasure that David felt the afternoon grow brighter, illuminated even, though there was nothing he could promise against her illness. He experienced a pang that was compounded of both joy and despair.

‘You bugger,' she said, ‘you planned this all along, didn't you.' Her even, capped teeth showed in a wide smile, and she reached for his hand when he sat down.

‘Roimata made it happen really. I don't think she's all that taken with me, but she'd do anything to please you. Just remember to give me a good report tomorrow, or she'll be on my case.'

‘She does all she can for me — she's a friend as well as being staff. I wish she hadn't gone so that I could thank her right now. You didn't make her go?'

‘Nobody makes Roimata do anything, you know that,' he said. ‘She wanted us to be alone when we met, I guess. It's a woman's sensitivity, isn't it? Even when you're as tough and realistic as the good doctor.'

Maybe that was how men should learn to be more responsive: observing the tender perceptions that women show in their dealings, the small vibrations through a web of emotion more delicate than the gossamer of spiders. He
found it an effort, though, being always alert to subtle signals, affirmations that contained denials, apparent disinclinations that were coded for rapprochement. David watched Lucy closely, sat close on the wooden bench seat, squeezed her hand in his. He promised himself — he promised her without declaration of it — that he'd make their time together the very best within his power. Pledges and resolutions are easy enough, aren't they, but so often circumstances change, and it seems that a compromise is in order.

There were other people at tables on the slope of the vineyard, with their own intentions and histories, their own illnesses and causes for celebration, but David didn't give a thought for them. He was concerned only with Lucy, and his own life. In any case, his background made him resistant to any glamorisation of rural land use.

The vineyards attracted the townies. The staked rows above the dry soil so familiar from the holiday programmes on television, the tasting shops and tarted up storage areas for the oak barrels, the artfully created pond with a few clipped geese, the gravelled car park big enough for tour buses, the restaurants offering a ploughman's lunch, or chicken kebabs in pockets of pita bread, the large, colourful signs at the frontages shimmering in the heat, the careful rusticity of vineyard and label titles.

David was more drawn to the diminishing number of conventional farms: the closely cropped dry pasture with sheep dung in scatters, the tracks meandering to the concrete water troughs, the lopsided tractor sheds, the implements among the nodding brown-top by the fence. No tour buses there, just the memories of a different Marlborough and a different life. Up the drive, however, might come that northern yuppie money, and another family farm reward its founder's descendants in a manner that even the most perspicacious had not envisaged.

‘Why aren't there more people?' asked Lucy. An observation rather than a criticism.

‘It's late autumn,' he said. ‘Some wineries will have closed for the year already.'

‘Around Auckland these places are busy all the time, just about.'

They were, and David disliked it: a gaggling, superficial engagement with the countryside as entertainment. How could he explain to Lucy that the fewer people he had around him, the more clearly he heard the voice of the land. How could he express the satisfaction it gave him to be quite solitary among hills. And part of the difficulty was that he suspected such feelings originated in arrogance and
selfishness
. ‘Isn't it better here, without so many others about?' he said mildly.

‘Yes, maybe it is,' she said. What did they care for other people anyway: each of them had reason to be blocking out much of life.

‘Sit closer to me,' she said. ‘It makes me feel good that you went to so much trouble to be here with me — you asked Roimata for help, you arranged things.'

‘I wanted you to have something for your birthday that was absolutely apart from the Slaven Centre — except me, of course.'

‘It's great to pretend we're normal, isn't it?' Lucy said. ‘Sit here as if it's an afternoon break in a conventional life. You could be a vet — you've got that half inside, half outside look about you, and I could be a teacher.'

‘Your tits are too good,' said David. ‘Women teachers never have a decent pair. It must be something that's determined in the selection process.'

‘Even my tits are getting bigger. It's all that institutional food.'

‘A joke. I'm kidding, right?'

‘I know,' she said.

He did sit close to her. He cut gruyère and blue vein, he toyed with dark olives, which the folded card stated were grown near at hand. They talked in that oblique, relaxed
way used by people who have let down some of their defences. They spoke when they felt like it, and not because of any need to prevent silences, for the spaces when they weren't speaking filled up with concern and affection and the pleasure of being together. They stayed there until all other visitors had left, until both the autumn sun and autumn temperatures dropped, then they drove a few kilometres back down the Wairau Plain to a farm that had converted its married couple's quarters to guest rooms. Lavender plots and rose bushes had replaced a vegetable garden, but there was still, by the steps, the large horseshoe used years before by workers to get their boots off.

They sat on the small verandah in old cane chairs painted yellow. The chair backs were shredded by cats sharpening their claws, and a tabby watched them from beneath the lavender, gradually indistinct as night came on. David had brought some shit, and they smoked it there away from the sea, away from the institution, away from people they knew, away, for the moment, from Harlequin itself.

‘Jesus,' said Lucy, ‘now this is prime stuff.'

‘Isn't it, though.'

‘You're the candy man all right.'

‘Happy birthday,' he said. The lavender had lost its bees and colour; just a tail from the shadow remained of the tabby. The hills across the Wairau had become a sharp, flat backdrop.

‘Let's not get heavy,' Lucy said. ‘Any crap about what might happen to us. Not tonight, eh?'

‘Okay. Anything you like.'

‘I'm going to drink and drag and you can keep me amused.'

‘Okay, sure,' he said.

That was the way to live in difficult times perhaps: concentrate on separate moments that held their own satisfaction, and not allow all of experience to be linked with some ultimate despair. David took a long, slow pull of
his best West Coast shit, and watched Lucy do the same. She was relaxed in the cane chair, her legs extended and crossed at the ankles. Her head was back, and her broad face quietly content. He was giving her a good time, wasn't he? She was happy?

Yet happiness accentuates the rest of life, as a candle in the still night draws attention to the darkness all around.