Harlequin Rex (31 page)

Another car came from the dark hill that cut them off from Picton, and the older cop stepped out into the greater arc of approaching light. His big face, with salt and pepper moustache and neck bulge at the collar, leant towards the driver's window as the Honda Civic halted. It was natural, just for a moment, that they all looked in with him, and glimpsed a woman's face, mouth half open, beaver teeth exposed. Then the other cop brought attention back to the smaller focus. ‘And your licence?' he asked David, having taken down his name, and Tolly's, who stood unobtrusively supported by David's hand.

‘We're only a few k's down the road, you might say,' said David. ‘At the Slaven Centre.'

‘You're doctors there?' Tolly's suit was surely a professional statement in itself.

‘Block supervisors. Live-in supervisory staff,' said David.

‘You think that the bright boys there have a handle on this regressive brain thing?' the cop said. The car lights prevented David from getting his night vision, and he felt crowded into the space that was lit. The fine dust of the Beaver's car was in his lungs and the air. Her voice and the other officer's were still going.

But Tolly had scent of things further off. ‘The mudflats are in the air,' he said. ‘Storm kelp is in decay, and there's a faint drift of eucalyptus smoke that must be from the last Australian bush fires. The koalas must have fried with them.' David tightened his grip on the good cloth of Tolly's coat.

‘A hard case when he's had a few,' David said. The cop checked the number plate again, and told David to have his licence sighted at the Picton police station within a few days.

‘Strap your friend well in,' he said, ‘and I hope we haven't held you up.'

He would check with the centre, wouldn't he. Probably not that night, but the next day. David would have to cover it, and also take in his licence. The moonlit sound lay like a sword blade between the hills as they drove back to Mahakipawa.

‘The string section was the only weakness, I reckon,' said Tolly gently. ‘Especially the violas.' What further anxieties could a man have who knew Harlequin.

They had a joint together in Tolly's room before turning in. They sat in a companionable silence and focused on the strands of smoke spiralling up to the ceiling. ‘I had a great bloody night, David. Thank you,' Tolly said finally.

‘It's okay.'

‘No. Let me thank you. You took me because you knew how much I'd love the music.' Tolly moved the joint before
his face, playing with the smoke. ‘Music and the stars,' he said even more gently, ‘are the ways I hold out against Harlequin.'

David went to see Tony Sheridan early in the morning. At the price of a homily on following procedure, he agreed to confirm that two supervisors had been at the concert. His conscience stretched that far. And a day later David took his licence into Picton. Neither of the two cops who had stopped him were there, and the desk guy was only interested enough to find David's name on a clipboard sheet, see that his face matched the photo, and sign to prove the document had been sighted. David was relieved to see that he didn't record any information, because that meant that almost certainly no checks would be run.

‘And I hope that you pick up whoever did the stabbing,' David said as he went out. ‘No call for that at all, right?'

‘Not from where I'm sitting,' said the desk man, barely looking up. He had ears that seemed made from bacon rind, and a face weary of crime.

With Schweitzer's blessing, David offered a relaxed discussion programme on Thursdays: an hour and a half in the Takahe lounge. The block guests had agreed to the venue by consensus, though some still grizzled at the usurpation of their common space.

Thursday afternoons were also visiting time for Weka and from the lounge windows, the verandah if the sun drew them out, the discussion group would see and comment on the relatives and friends moving from the car park to Weka. A small parade of passing interest when the group's own topics flagged. David encouraged such apparent distraction, for often it led on to more unguarded and significant expressions of opinion than those which began from their own loose agenda.

Like Mrs McIlwraith waving to Dawn Loomis's sister, whom she had met socially. ‘An original Wanganui family,' said Mrs McIlwraith. ‘Such a lovely voice, and she's lost weight as well. Dawn was the deep one of the family, but it hasn't saved her from this affliction.'

‘I knew a Loomis once,' said Montgomery.

Mrs McIlwraith continued, in disregard of his
information, although her hearing aid was well attuned. ‘When I last talked with Dawn a few days ago, she used the words salutary and innate very naturally and precisely. I always feel, myself, that some command of language is so very important.'

‘The favourite word of the Loomis I knew was fuck,' said Montgomery cheerfully.

‘No possible connection then,' said Mrs McIlwraith. She was partly affronted, partly angry. Her face lengthened, the lips turned out in disdain.

‘No, fair go. She used it for people's names she couldn't remember. You could hear her halfway down the street. “Fuck's here,” she'd shout to her husband in the shed behind the garage, or, “Fuck's going,” when some visitor left.'

Mrs McIlwraith excused herself. She recalled
correspondence
to attend to in her room, she said, but the new, unconnected Loomis seemed to interest the rest of the group.

‘Was she typical of the neighbourhood, then, Monty?' asked Tolly.

‘Her husband made garden gnomes in his shed, and fired them in his own kiln. All undeclared income of course. When he got caught up with a Pentecostal church against her wishes, she fired some dogshit in his kiln, ground it and filled the pepper pot. The poor bastard used it for ages without knowing. She'd push it over to his plate with a wifely smile.'

‘You must be kidding,' said Wilfe.

‘God won't be mocked though, you'll see,' said Dilys.

‘She was a piece of work, I tell you, was Noreen Loomis,' said Montgomery in a tone of grudging respect.

The Loomis of original Wanganui family and her companions got into a Range Rover and drove away. She had no idea that she had sparked a conversation at Takahe, or that she had so rapidly been passed over in favour of a namesake. The discussion group were happily away on their recitation of outlandish personal foible. Gaynor told of a
guy whose gastric noises were so loud and ongoing that he was formally banned from the bridge club, but won a court case on the basis of discrimination, and had to be readmitted, and seated by the open door.

Mr Sarasvati, in his serene voice and impressive English, told of a colleague in his insurance office named Boylan, who sold pardons in the name of the Medici hedonist Pope Leo X, yet was perfectly normal in all other ways. Boylan wrote the pardons on pages from a Warrior school exercise book, and his sincerity was so patent that people rarely ridiculed him. Many even paid the money so that they could be absolved of venery and idolatry, and have something to dine out on as well. Boylan put the money in a green velvet Edwardian hat-box, and when he died there was over $17,000 there, which his widow took and invested in a successful small business making Anzac poppies.

‘Not paper poppies?' said Wilfe.

‘No,' said Mr Sarasvati evenly, ‘Oh no. The fabric ones with separate petals.'

‘Can't stand the paper ones — disrespectful in some way,' said Wilfe.

‘The poppies grow in Flanders and in Gallipoli,' said Gaynor. ‘Isn't that a wonderful thing? I've seen them there, and on the day we spent at Gallipoli it rained for the first time in ages, the taxi driver said.'

It was warm in the lounge, and the triviality of their conversation, their knowledge of each other, encouraged them to relax. Two small children bobbed past outside with their parents. Children were a novelty at the centre, and made Abbey and Gaynor smile.

Nothing had been said of Harlequin for half an hour.

Abbey once had a successful accountant as a neighbour whose house was quite unremarkable on the outside, but within was given over almost entirely to an aviary for budgies. Whole rooms, she said, aflutter with pastel blue and green, tiny scallop feathers and seed husks drifting in
the air, and just narrow netted corridors, a kitchen and a bedroom for the unmarried accountant. She asked him once if he wanted the birds to talk, and he said that they had a language already.

‘Was he bloody foreign?' asked Paul Coussins, who was comparatively new to the block and keen to fit in.

Abbey said she didn't think so.

‘I reckon most of the weirdos are foreign. They shouldn't be allowed,' said Paul. ‘They come here and start bloody telling us what to do, going on about how things are done some place else. Pigs can't fly, nor sheep neither, but your foreign buggers don't know we've got mutton-birds down here, do they. Isn't that so, Peter?' Peter's iwi possessed the right to all the mutton-birds, but he just smiled at the small joke.

‘Are you thinking that I am a bloody foreigner?' asked Mr Sarasvati, his face suddenly creased with agitation.

‘No, not you of course,' said Coussins cheerfully. ‘You know the sort of ones I mean.'

‘People can't be sent home now,' said Mr Sarasvati. ‘No use bolting the stable door when the horse has closed. Not at all.'

‘And we wouldn't want to be cut off from the rest of the world,' said Gaynor. ‘Openness in a community is a virtue surely.'

‘You can't mix oil and water,' said Paul with finality. ‘That's a fact, isn't it, say what you like.' That was the truth he had gained from his life; his heartfelt philosophy; his hobnailed Leviathan.

But, with Mrs McIlwraith gone, the discussion group was in a mood to find humour in prejudice, though Dilys made a mental note of any personal revelation for future accountability. Harlequin gathered there, in the warm institutional lounge, people who would otherwise never be sharing their lives. A bathroom millionaire and a fish filleter, a builder's stopper and a textile artist of renown, young Peter
Taiaroa and old Mr Sarasvati, who both had noble lineages and courtesy, but little else, in common. A woman who had given overseas concerts in the course of a career, and a man whose zenith had come in the seventh form at Te Kuiti when he was captain of the first fifteen. And David himself in refuge — possessed of health and education, but bereft of Beth Car, family, and on the run. Yet he'd found for the first time someone outside family to love. He'd found Lucy Mortimer, and that maybe was worth all the rest.

‘Who else has a story to tell?' he asked, sitting in the circle of matching chairs, while the sun gleamed on the chrome knobs of the Zip above the bench, and the Weka visitors ambled back and forth along the path outside, glancing sometimes with self-conscious curiosity into the lounge.

David knew that almost all in his group were dying. They must have been far more keenly aware of that than he was, yet they talked and laughed there in Takahe. They coped as best they were able; they persisted, for that was their nature. They tried to live out the fullness of their lives no matter what the circumstances.

‘Who else has a story?' he said, and they were willing to speak and to listen: to hold on to character and narrative which linked them to the world.

Culhane has the letter from Alessandro Bellini in his hand as he turns the swivel chair at his desk, so that he can look directly over the slope and across the sound to Tolly Mathews's dinghy at the fishing spot. Who is the solitary person in it? He's not close enough to tell. Probably David Stallman, or wealthy Tolly himself. Schweitzer readily substitutes himself for the distant figure so that he's able to feel the broad, free moving and heavily scented breeze over the sea, hear the slap of the small waves on the clinker-built
hull, see the hand line refracted and shimmering down into the depths.

But it isn't that taut line that his fingers hold; it's Bellini's letter, which leads in a quite different direction. The letter is deliberately circumspect and understated, using a casual medical and personal shorthand which the research colleagues and old friends fall into, but to Schweitzer the significance is quite clear: he and Bellini have been carriers of Harlequin from the Congo to their homelands. The incidence found by Bellini in his own part of the world has a correlation convincingly similar to Schweitzer's findings in New Zealand. They are leading experts in the aetiology and treatment of Harlequin, and they now find they are also propagators of it. It isn't a confirmation that Schweitzer welcomes, and not one that he would publicise, but neither is he distraught, or self-accusatory. Other lines of
introduction
are discernible, even though the carriers aren't identifiable; Harlequin was bound to come out of Africa, just as the old brain it released had moved out millions of years before in an earlier colonisation. Schweitzer and Bellini possessed no inkling of Harlequin's transmission during their time in Central Africa; and isn't it likely anyway that it can occur spontaneously as a result of environmental factors, or the culmination of some genetic evolution? It's not the exposure to Harlequin that's the real issue, but the
identification
of susceptibility — why do some minds succumb and others apparently have immunity? Why is childhood a protection?

Schweitzer is aware of irony rather than guilt. All his skill and energy devoted to the cause, yet almost certainly he's a seedhead himself. Maybe the consolation is that he seems safe himself from Harlequin, at least for the time, and so can work even harder, make greater sacrifice to help those in his care. He has passed on nothing that he hasn't exposed himself to in the course of duty. It's too late for any form of quarantine anywhere in the world, the specific means
of communication is still unknown, and to pass on what he and Bellini suspect would cause alarm and create no benefit. Schweitzer is optimistic — not for himself, or Lucy, not for the present population at Mahakipawa, but for his species, which has survived a whole series of brutal challenges before now.

Schweitzer is buzzed by his secretary who reminds him that Dr Sheppard is coming for his professional development interview at two. Schweitzer can hear half-muffled laughter between Sandra and Elaine, who has come in with letters from the main office. He has worked in institutions all his professional life, yet he's still struck by the ease with which staff detach themselves from the plight of the patients. There are hundreds of Harlequin guests at the Slaven Centre. Most will never recover, several of them are dying as the director thinks of the probability, yet Sandra and Elaine laugh, and Dr Sheppard takes the opportunity to discuss the possibility of advancement. David Stallman, or maybe Tolly Mathews, fishes quite out of reach of any cries, and Schweitzer himself can sit with Bellini's letter and ponder the degree of
responsibility
he bears for Harlequin's spread. People are hardened by the suffering of others as well as their own: war, prisons, bad families, hospitals — Schweitzer recalls Orwell's dispassionate accounts of his hospital ward in the 15th arrondissement of Paris. The pitcher goes too often to the well: sympathy isn't inexhaustible. The capacity for such selfishness is part of the psychological strength of the species. In the same day Schweitzer must die with one patient, and be reborn in another. There's a natural tendency for each generation to expect the end of the world to coincide with its own demise, but Schweitzer believes that in ten years Harlequin will be subdued, and later a harmless Slaven Centre will be pointed out on the hillside to passers-by, just as former tuberculosis sanatoria were two generations ago. And Schweitzer's name might play some anecdotal role in the stories of Harlequin.

Nothing is real once it has happened, and complex truth is corrupted by summary. Without memory there's no civilised life, yet any documentation of the past bears a similar relation to it as the wedding photo does to the nuptials. The mother's smiles belie the anguish she expressed at breakfast; the best man's central place in the grouping conveys nothing of his utter uselessness on the day. Each of us has only a facet of happenstance, but takes it for the whole.

Chance may flick out into the everyday and create small, random immortalities, perfect in their way. The Australian au pair girl turning up on a winter's morning to hammer in vain on the door of Sylvia Plath's suicide. Polenka, the coachman's bruised daughter, passing Vladimir Nabokov on the little station of Siverski, Christmas 1916. ‘Look, the young master does not know me,' she said. Neil Armstrong as a boy crouching beneath the bedroom window when Mrs Gorsky told her husband he could have oral sex when the kid next door flew to the moon. The Nelson magistrate, Thompson, who gave the order to fix bayonets at Tuamarina, and was later found with his hands full of hair torn from his head in the agony of death.

Schweitzer's six-year-old daughter drowned in their home pool. There are still times, both waking and dreaming, when he feels his daughter's small, strong hand resting on his palm; when he smells the chlorine on her cheek, watches her run to meet him. All his brains and all his professional success haven't freed him from being a hostage to fortune as is everybody else. Only occasionally, when fully concentrating on some subtlety of his profession, or even more fiercely focused as he fucks Lucy Mortimer, do the shackles fall briefly away. Yet he knows that sex is an appetite, not an achievement: a recurring hunger, and not the enduring possession that is parenthood.