Harlequin Rex (30 page)

David knew from experience that if you treated the police as fools, then eventually you suffered for it. Although for a time you could look good because you chose alternatives for which they had no planned response, persistence by you, and them, almost always had the one result. That one mad gunman shoots the president, guarded by the whole FBI, isn't evidence they're all numbskulls, just the difference between the ease of selective initiative and the impossibility of covering every contingency. David didn't much want to play silly buggers any more, but in agreeing to take Tolly Mathews to the national symphony orchestra in Picton he knew there was risk. At first he'd resisted the idea, but after a few joints his fondness for Tolly won out. Abbey had been taken in the small, official group to the Nelson performance, and been impressed. Tolly didn't harp on to David, which only made his wish to go more importunate.

‘You're going to get me into trouble. You know that?' David told him.

‘Bullshit,' said Tolly. ‘Picton's nothing these days. There's no trouble to get into since it lost the ferry. It's all computer buffs, tourist chalets, goat cheese and yachts now, and
women making natural dyed skirts so thick you can't get your hand under them.'

Yet in winter's dusk it looked so much larger than it was: the lights a trembling margin of reflection at the port before the dark sea, and higher skeins of street lights, and the clustered yellow glow of the houses. All mundane and explicable enough, but David felt again that quick frisson of wonder at the diamond scatter of the lights on the plush of the night.

How Tolly looked forward to their breakout: a chance to hear Bartok and Schoenberg, to slip for one night free from the host of Harlequin perhaps, and be one of a normal, enviable assembly. Odd in a way, for Tolly's economics degree, his catch as catch can business pragmatism, his wealth, his physicality, his love of fishing at the float, all entrenched him against any refined art. But music was something entirely different, and more in keeping with the hours he spent with his telescope and the sky. ‘No, fair go,' he said, ‘only Abbey and I in that place have any clear love of music. It's the one pure language, isn't it?' He even took a tolerant interest in Raf's jazz, as a parent might encourage a kid with comics, so as to draw him on to books.

With no attention to the lights of Picton, Tolly was tapping the dash top of Raf's Mazda, and humming extravagantly. ‘A quiet night, Tolly. That's what we agreed. No nonsense, remember. We're bunking and can't afford to be noticed.'

‘Just some good music. Nothing else. I'm a pussy cat,' said Tolly. ‘Nothing coming up from the depths at all.'

‘Otherwise we could both cop it.'

‘Yeah, I know you're putting out for me, but no sweat, really.'

Tolly was wearing a dark suit and a tie with diagonal stripes of red and blue. A quality suit and quality tie, which he wore easily. David had never before seen him so close to his pre-Harlequin self of successful manufacturer, and it
made him aware of his own off-the-rack slacks and casual jacket with a stamped metal button missing. Some sort of role reversal in terms of responsibility could so easily occur.

There was a park behind the pie factory and from there they walked to the hall, which had a facelift entrance of glass and tiles, but a gaunt, wooden interior. Tolly had paid for two of the best seats, but could find little advantage in them. ‘At least we're not behind a bloody pillar,' he said loudly.

The concert was such a splendid novelty for Picton that there were speeches beforehand from the mayor and the chairwoman of some regional arts organisation. Each commended the other's part in achieving the event, and both were given applause only mildly derisive. Bartok began the programme.

David enjoyed it all, but largely as spectacle, because he had little musical understanding; no standards of skill for attainment, or comparison. What he saw was as memorable and as absorbing as what he heard: the variety of appearance and response in the audience and the orchestra. Those who were musical showed their affinity for the performance in their posture, their faces, with stirrings and whispers at the mention of their special gods. In front of David was a thin woman with grey hair piled up rather elegantly, and her neck became pink during a second movement. The oboe soloist had the forearms and fingers of a pit-sawyer, dark hair mole sleek on the backs of his hands, yet when he rose and played, the great plate of his face was full of tender pride because of the sounds he could create. One of the lead violinists had a necklace which she moved adroitly on her smooth neck each time she was to begin, and as she played her body swayed in its slim dress as a cypress does.

In times of exhilaration during the programme, Tolly quite ignored David, as if his musical incomprehension made him invisible, and communicated with complete strangers around him in a temporary bonding of musical appreciation.
The catching of another's eyes, nods, eyebrow flashes, small sounds of accord with the performance which were half grunt, half sigh. David noticed that Tolly became increasingly restless; not at all from boredom, but rather that he wanted to express his involvement and pleasure in ways more immediate than clapping. His face became almost comically animated, and his hands were an avian flutter as the tremors through his body ended there. David had seen it many times before — the first puckish breath of Harlequin through the system, which might be all that was manifest, or the sign of tempests to come.

After the concert, Tolly imagined that the orchestra would be delighted to see him, that he had a summons which would give him entry, but David talked him out of the main doors and into the Picton streets. ‘Take it easy,' he said. ‘You could be heading for an episode if you don't steady up.'

‘Oh, knock it off. Just because you've no feeling for music, you think I'm sickening for something.' Yet he had a very high walk, poised on the balls of his feet; his spread fingers combed the night; his eyes were expansive, and glittered with each street light as David looked across at him.

‘What am I doing at that bloody place of yours?' Tolly said. ‘Eh? A family, a business, enough money to burn, and I'm tucked away at your bloody Scout camp at Mahakipawa. Where's the sense to that?'

‘Pass,' said David. He wondered how those refinements of musical appreciation and astronomy had come to be among all those pragmatic aspects of Tolly's nature.

Around them moved many others of the audience on the way to the car parks. The majority were women, and Tolly Mathews suddenly slipped off among them, flicking up dresses and skirts with almost balletic dexterity, his soft hands half glancing from, half impacting on, thighs and buttocks. It was done so quickly as he eased past, that the reaction of most was a startled laugh, or a bewildered clutch at their own clothing. Tolly passed beyond threat so
smoothly, was so well dressed, that most of the women didn't realise what had caused their skirts to lift, and looked at companions, at the surroundings for snags, at the ground for some air vent and grille.

David made no attempt to follow. He didn't want any association with what was going on, and besides, he knew that even a whiff of Harlequin could provide enough juice to keep Tolly well in front. Just let it not be the start of an episode, that's all he asked. He walked to the car but, after a few minutes during which Tolly didn't come, he went back into the shopping area, walking down towards the lawns at the edge of the sea and the jetties. Tolly was sitting on the wall, looking out over the sound: quiet, so well dressed, almost as if he were the one being kept waiting and too tolerant to mention it. ‘I could do with a cigar,' he said.

‘Haven't a thing,' said David. ‘Jesus, it's cold here.'

Yet he sat down beside him, conscious that the wall and the lawns were a transition between the lights and movement of the town, and the darkness of the sea and the hills beyond. Not a flat, backdrop darkness, but one that had gradations of depth and colour, and winds that carried scents and sounds from a long way off in the capacious night.

‘Not even any shit?' asked Tolly.

‘I never carry it in a vehicle.'

‘I'm dying for one.'

‘It's all that playing silly buggers: putting your hand up skirts. You'll have the cops on us.'

‘They loved it,' said Tolly.

‘That's your story.' What was that fragrance on the dark air? ‘You feeling okay?' asked David.

‘Ah-h, stop worrying. I'm just glad to be out of the bin for a night. You know what pisses me off?' The concert audience had disappeared. There were just a few less purposeful folk on the street: some young people laughing, and ambling towards the fast food outlets, a few men changing pubs, a skinhead giving his Dobermann some air.
‘What pisses me off,' said Tolly, ‘is that five years ago nobody had heard of Harlequin, and now I'm likely dying of it. When they can't get you with any of the regular things, then they come up with something new. Christ.'

Somewhere macrocarpa was burning: far back, perhaps in time rather than space. David had the unmistakable smell of the resinous smoke, and it hit him so hard for a moment with the farm and his father, that he turned away from Tolly Mathews so that the street lights wouldn't show his face.

‘Ah, Jesus, the old macrocarpa, eh,' said Tolly quietly, as if he knew all that was David's legacy of it, and had his own as well. They were quiet for a time, and when Tolly spoke again he'd moved on to other topics. ‘Gaynor Runcinski did have someone run over by a bus, you know,' he said. ‘It's the fatalistic hazard, the cliché, isn't it, but Gaynor's aunt, or whatever, really was run over by a bus when she was coming back from a holiday in Fiji.' Tolly couldn't stop himself laughing, though he didn't mean to be unfeeling.

David's father had sold one of the oldest windbreaks for firewood, and when the contractors had finished they bulldozed all the rubbish around the stumps, and the next summer David and his father lit the piles, which smouldered on and on to become the scent of that year's drought. And it was back again, oddly out of season, just suggestions of it on the wind across the sound and across the years. Great stumps smouldering in the ground.

‘You never bloody know, do you,' said Tolly. He gave a shiver; a brief animation which went from top to toe, as a cat's-paw of wind travels a paddock's long grass. He stood up and wiped the seat of his good suit trousers. ‘On our way. On our way. There's no more music tonight,' he said.

‘Do you want a beer before we go?'

‘I'd rather have a joint in the bin.'

‘You'll be moaning in the car that you want a drink,' said David, but Tolly was already walking back into the streets.

Maybe he was in search of more women to goose — would he walk over parked cars and trash them? Did the placid window of the naturopathy shop seem an opportunity for mayhem? David put on a spurt to catch up but, as he did, Tolly sensed his apprehension, slowed to say, ‘It's okay. Nothing's going to happen. Harlequin's not coming out tonight after all. The music's just unsettled me, and now I feel grotty.'

‘We'll go straight back.'

‘As if I've been sleeping on a hot afternoon, and wake feeling absolutely crappy, you know?'

On their way to the car, they heard a man shouting in the distance — an urgent, ugly sound — and then the siren of a police car. They stopped to listen, but soon the town was quiet again. ‘It's not my night,' said Tolly, perking up a bit.

‘It's a wonder after you and those women. You could've got thumped, or picked up by the police.'

‘Some very nice skin,' said Tolly as he waited for David to unlock the car. ‘Very nice skin, and one of them had a lacy petticoat. Now that was a touching surprise.'

He was quiet while David drove out of town, gaining height on the hill above the old ferry terminal, and with the lights spread in the night again. Those lights had dropped away over the hill, before Tolly asked for a joint again, and got the same answer. David's caution was justified when, on the first flat stretch, there was a police car and two cops with beckoning torches beside it. No worries about a stash in the car, but for David there were dangers greater than that.

One of the cops came over and asked politely if they would step out of the car. Some spot of trouble in Picton, he said. His mate stayed back, by the police vehicle, towards which the others came. Tolly stumbled, and David explained that he was a bit under the weather. ‘Some sort of a do, was it?' said the back-up cop, as Tolly's immaculate suit became
evident in the car light. An older cop, with heavy, regular breathing even when standing still.

‘The New Zealand Symphony,' said David, and he got the programme from his friend's pocket. Tolly stumbled again on the loose shingle at the road edge, and began conducting the dark foliage of the bank. His eyes were lit for a moment in the younger cop's torchlight.

‘Oh yeah, the concert,' said the back-up, and he glanced at the programme.

The younger cop established that David was driving, even though he knew it. ‘Yes,' said David. ‘I'm the non-drinker for the night.' He said it with a laugh, hoping that way it wouldn't sound wowserish, but just the shrewd, masculine compliance of someone who'd have his share another time.

‘Can't smell anything on either of you,' said the younger man pleasantly.

Any moment Tolly might start saying things that would suggest Harlequin. The police wanted their names, and David's licence; just routine, of course. That was the thing which worried David. He had a trick licence, the photo fitted, but he didn't want any enquiries made. ‘So what was the trouble back at Picton?' he asked. Wasn't that the expected thing to do?

‘A fight and one guy got knifed,' said the younger cop with the easy manner.