Harlequin Rex (37 page)

What
had
happened
there,
dear
God?

‘
Green,
green.
Yes.'

‘
It
isn't.
It's
blue.'

‘Green.
Green.'

‘Bloody
cheat.'

‘Just
shut
up.'

‘Cheat.'

‘I've
won,
and
you
can't
take
it.'

‘Knock
it
off,
you
two.
I
won't
tell
you
again.'

Some
people
seem
to
get
away
with
expressing
their
weaknesses
without
much
consequence;
others
have
no
luck.
Or
maybe
it's
that
they
don't
learn
their
lessons
fast
enough.
He'd
done
it
this
time,
David
knew.
No
more
chances
to
put
things
behind
him,
to
straighten
himself
out
—
all
the
platitudes
to
excuse
a
past.
He'd
gone
too
far
to
be
able
to
return
and
make
any
more
than
a
pretence
to
be
like
those
people
who
could
live
frankly
and
with
some
self-esteem.
Acid
from
his
stomach
rose
to
the
back
of
his
throat;
his
hands
clenched
as
if
he
were
in
some
free
fall
and
knew,
even
as
he
counted,
that
there
was
no
rip-cord.
He
felt
his
body
throb
with
an
agony
which
was
part
remorse,
part
horrified
sympathy
for
Rebecca,
but
most
essentially
just
pity
for
his
own
predicament.

‘Do
you
do
much
fishing
yourself?'
asked
the
refrigeration
engineer
as
he
drove
along
the
rocky
coast,
past
surf
casters
and
crayfish
stalls.
His
wife
was
inspecting
her
nails,
his
boys
were
selecting
jubes
from
the
bag
—
again
by
colour.

‘Not
a
lot,
no,'
said
David.

‘Heading
any
further
north
than
Blenheim?
'

‘No,
no
plans
for
that,
'
said
David,
but
he
had:
he
wanted
to
reach
Wellington
where
Chris
lived,
someone
he
could
rely
on
for
help.

From Tolly’s dinghy at the pink float, well out in the sound, the buildings of the Slaven Centre were pleasantly distant, but the greater satisfaction was that no solid ground linked them. Between the two in the boat and anything that happened at Mahakipawa, was a disconnecting fluidity. Other times, other selves, as well as other places, could be kept at some remove by the green and sinuous ocean arm of the sound. The weak chop apologetic on the dinghy, which sidled on its anchor rope in response. The bright sun sharply metallic in faceted reflection from the water: both David and Lucy wore dark sunglasses and relaxed against the bleached canvas cushions. Were they hidden there perhaps? Were they out of sight and out of mind for the world, for Harlequin, for any past and any future?

Lucy had caught one large, blue cod, which had come up dark and spiralling from the depths, and it lay on the slatted bottom of the boat, its passionate colours drying and beginning to fade.

David stroked Lucy’s warm forearm and said he felt like making love. She reminded him of Tolly’s telescope: quite possibly half of Takahe were clustered round it, and they’d
be visible from other vantages in the centre too. When he asked where those others might be, Lucy just smiled and her eyebrows lifted at the rims of her dark glasses. Did she want to talk about Schweitzer? David had just themselves on his mind.

David recognised that, for the first time in his life, he was in love. What else could he call it? Not anything as crass as simple happiness, but an aching focus on another person, and on the unbearable awareness of the simultaneous power and transience of
now
. Love is that singular form of suffering which moves concern from yourself to another, so that you are freed a while from stultifying selfishness. More than anything else, he wished he could do something to protect Lucy from Harlequin, but there was also his desire to move to her there in the dinghy, fiercely bringing them together as one. And simultaneously there was a need to lie absolutely still and talk to her in a trusting way that was quite apart from sex. Isn’t all that part of love’s jumble, so that poise, caution and common sense are upset? He could smell the sunblock on her skin, see the winking, silver studs in her ears. There was that pale scimitar of a scar on the underside of her left arm.

‘Schweitzer suggested that each week I make an
hour-long
video of things going on around the place, and copies be sent to all the blocks,’ she said. ‘I thought that it could sort of tie in with your own group programmes — something we could work on together. Now that the numbers are increasing so much he thinks there’s a danger the sense of community could be lost.’

‘What would we call it, Harlequin’s Parade? Thalamus Review?’

‘More Mahakipawa Mahappy Days,’ said Lucy.

‘Think of the feature sections we could have: Episode of the Week, Most Prolix Personal Abuse, Volleyball Highlights, Victimisation Prize, Trite Condolence Award.’

‘It’s bloody marvellous out here,’ Lucy said.

‘It is, isn’t it.’

‘So warm, but that dry heat of the South Island rather than the muggy stuff.’

‘We’ll come out again some time,’ he promised.

They would begin the regular video reports together, they would have more weeks together as friends and lovers, they would be concerned for each other, attentive by turns and then pissed off for reasons which were at times quite beyond the control of either of them, and which at other times arose from those weaknesses and fallibilities that are retained even by those in love.

But they would never be there together again at the blush pink fishing marker, so happy in the bright sun with their dark glasses on, and Tolly’s dinghy nudging and shifting on its deep tether. Talking there, laughing there, with no solid connection at all with the rest of the world. David told Lucy about the island of Burano in the lagoon of Venice, an upstairs room so low he couldn’t stand upright, and the small birds flocking in over the flat water to roost in the one big tree in his view, swooping and wheeling in the twilight, and the shrill babble of their congregation, which seemed to have some Latin pitch of excitement and provocation greater than the birds of Beth Car’s pines. Until at last the darkness subdued them and, looking out at the tree against the pale sky, he saw the still birds outlined there like a thousand small cones on the branches, and farther in the perspective of the night the leaning spire of the island church.

Lucy told David about going to Kuala Lumpur several years before as part of the TV coverage of the
Commonwealth
Games. They stayed in an old-fashioned but rather grand hotel with heavy, brass-handled wooden furniture in every room. All night, with little change of tempo, the traffic hustled on Jalan Kuching across the Gombak River. She wondered what was so different in the sound, and then realised that it was the waspish domination of mopeds and small motorbikes. One day in heat that was almost liquid,
they were taken to the butterfly gardens and saw them as big as birds on the hibiscus flowers. Gaudy blues and greens in the shimmering wings, and bodies banded red and black like plaited pipe cleaners. And when Lucy peered through the lush leaves she saw that some of the huge butterflies had died, and lay spread on the earth like stained glass ornaments.

That is how life goes, things held in unique juxtaposition for a moment in time and space — Burano and Kuala Lumpur, small birds in the night and great butterflies in the light, the dinghy on the sound and the buildings on the slope, David and Lucy talking, generous intentions and slender gains — then all whirls on again for a different throw.

Abbey and David wandered towards the latest
accommodation
block being built in the sloping pasture behind the car park. The expansion of the centre was forcing gorse and cattle steadily higher. The activity on the building site drew Abbey: a natural curiosity about the workers as much as structures, for there was a novelty in seeing non-Harlequin people getting on with their lives. The new block was to be larger than any of the earlier ones, and was growing in a series of great, empty, load-bearing oblongs, so that even at the beginning of its life it had the appearance of a ruin, with fissures and broken seams, with raw concrete, and protruding ringed reinforcement rods already rusting. Unlike the earlier residential blocks, it reared up several storeys and the ground floor was still as barren and derelict as the third, on which the men were working. Harlequin had become a growth industry: disease was providing job opportunity. The workers had dark singlets and yellow helmets and shouted and gestured to each other like Italian brothers. Somewhere within the great concrete slabs, the scaffolding, the wooden boxing like patches, drills or grinders were working, and their wailing was like some harsh,
territorial cry which drove the farm stock still further back.

Abbey and David continued to talk of Alst Mousier's proposal for a concert, but both knew they were thinking the same thing — that Harlequin was set to make some sort of breakout in the general population, and that the level of care provided by the Slaven Centre and those at Omapere, Whatatutu, Mayfield, would have to be discarded as a luxury. Already there were plans for old army camps and long disused sanatoria to be prepared for emergency use. ‘Nothing's doing any good, is it?' said Abbey, coming to the point at last, and the drills wailed from the monolith. ‘It'll become one of those great epidemics beyond control, and no one knows what to do.' The workmen shouted and laughed, unperturbed by the reason for their employment, or the likelihood that they'd inhabit the rooms there soon enough.

‘Schweitzer still thinks there's some genetic inhibitor for most people, and no children under twelve get it at all, so there must be reasons.'

‘But nobody knows,' said Abbey.

Nobody did know, and understanding would probably follow the event, so that years afterwards, when it was too late for the sufferers, Harlequin would be in the history books and medical texts, and readers would be mildly surprised that it killed so many people before a cause and cure were found. How could you expect those living it, though, to be objective? It was like enjoining a Flanders infantryman to consider that he was taking part in the last great example of static trench warfare.

And if Harlequin was
it
, the conclusion of that short evolutionary experiment which was
Homo
sapiens
, only those at the very end would know.

David's own grasp of the generalities kept slipping, yet be wasn't a Harlequin. He could respond only to the particular, the personal, one thing at a time. Lucy, who was the one really precious thing he had found; his other friends at the centre, such as Abbey beside him. What else could
matter? His role as an aide was, after all, little more than a convenient camouflage of his past.

He and Abbey moved back from the building site, with its ashen concrete and red plastic tape perimeter, its yellow hard hats, shouts and wails. They went together across the car park, the seal broken in places by the recent passage of heavy machinery, the surface scattered with cakes of pale clay from the caterpillar treads. On the lawn, and paralleling the entrance road, was a line of quick-growing birches, with tissue bark curling from the slender trunks like cigarette paper and vibrating in the breeze.

‘I reckon you're going to be all right, Abbey,' David said.

How much quieter it was there. He had been talking to Tony Sheridan about Abbey's good spin, the probability of her release, but he hadn't realised how strong was his
conviction
of her remission until he voiced it. He felt an assurance that was so much more than the doctor's opinion, yet not dependent on wishful thinking at all. ‘I know you're going to be all right,' he said again firmly.

‘Oddly enough, so do I,' said Abbey, and she put her small hand on his arm. It was the first time she had touched him in such a deliberate way. ‘The last episodes have been different: even though I can't stop them coming, I don't get pushed out completely any more. I have some influence left, even if it's only that of a bareback rider.

‘You'll be able to go home soon, and all this will lose its grip.'

‘It doesn't pay to look Harlequin in the eye,' said Abbey. ‘Just some good months, some remission, would be enough.'

Apart from Lucy, who better than dear Abbey to beat the odds, and walk out of the shadow to carry on her
self-contained
life in her own quiet, stubborn way: playing music for herself and anyone else who would shut up long enough to listen. The joy of being reunited with her mother to share all the memories of family yet again: Look, Abbey, the snow is falling on the sea, remember, remember this.

And Abbey did go home three weeks later, on a fine Sunday morning when the construction site was silenced, and called for by her aunt who wore a similar cardigan, and an expression of complacent superiority because she had a husband with her. No one stood on ceremony: to do so would only heighten the awareness of her fellow patients that they must remain. Besides, Abbey had been too much the intellectual and too little the gossip, to be widely popular, though her fellows at Takahe had given her a small
presentation
the night before. A biography of Franz Schubert with his boyish face on the cover.

Sheridan, Raf and David represented the staff, and Tolly Mathews and Gaynor Runcinski came along as friends, as Abbey left Mahakipawa. Dilys Williams did go as far as the lounge window by the Zip, and stuck her head out to shout, ‘And God won't be mocked, you know. Give him thanks, Abbey, for deliverance. Oh, give him thanks, or he'll smite you with the jawbone of an arse.' Abbey's aunt and her husband were startled; the aunt overlapped her cardigan across her bosom for protection, the husband gripped the suitcases more securely, but no one else was at all
disconcerted
, and Abbey called goodbye to Dilys, as though the jawbone of an arse was an everyday farewell.

A parting rarely expresses the truth of feeling we wish for it. What should be said is lost amid petty practicalities and our fear of the vulnerability that honesty inflicts. The aunt and her husband fluffed about the car with the cases, Jock, walking back from the shore, felt obliged to join in the farewell, Tolly told anecdotes to save himself from
awkwardness
. Abbey became more and more subdued.

David kissed her cheek. It was soft and downy, and he could smell no make-up or perfume, just the quality soap she used on her skin and the dry, grassy smell of her hair. She looked away to lessen the intimacy, and conceal her need of it. She got into the back seat and gave a soft laugh that had nothing to do with humour.

‘Thank you all for your help,' said the uncle, and almost ran over Tony Sheridan in backing out, despite the doctor's clear bulk.

‘Nice to meet you all,' said the fatuous aunt.

So at the end David and the others found that their last words were being taken by complete strangers, when they cared only for Abbey. David put both hands and both thumbs up and he called out loudly as the car went, ‘Good luck, Abbey.' She looked back and he saw for the last time her plain, decent face, which disguised sharp intuition and talent insufficiently acclaimed. Abbey had a curious half-smile, like that of a child who sees, from a train, circus clowns and animals practising in a field still untrampled.

Chris
was
living
in
a
wooden
villa
in
Hataitai,
the
house
on
a
steep
slope
above
Evans
Bay,
which
allowed
the
wind
full
access
to
buffet
it
until
the
place
boomed
like
a
drum.
He
never
asked
David
why
he
wanted
to
keep
his
head
down
for
a
bit,
and
was
happy
enough
to
see
him.
Chris
was
still
distributing
shit
and
found
Wellington
the
natural
place
to
operate
from
—
a
bottleneck
if
it
wasn't
handled
right,
he
told
David,
but
a
money
tree
if
it
was.
After
what
had
happened
with
Beth
Car,
he
was
keeping
it
very
much
low
key,
he
said.

But
Chris
was
living
with
an
older,
divorced
woman
who
worked
in
one
of
the
city's
rehabilitation
units,
and
she
made
it
plain
that
she
expected
David's
visit
to
be
very
temporary.
She
disliked
drugs
because
of
what
she
saw
of
the
effects
at
her
work.
She
thought
Chris
was
an
occasional
user
only,
and
that
his
job
was
something
to
do
with
cargo
transfers
and
Trade
Aid
imports.
She
had
one
of
those
half
ugly-half
beautiful
southern
European
faces
—
all
rearing
nose,
cheek
bones
,
and
lipstick
—
and
the
green
veins
were
like
intricate
road
maps
on
the
underside
of
her
pale
arms
and
wrists.

‘We
need
the
time
together
to
build
up
our
partnership,'
she
told
David,
as
if
she
and
Chris
were
in
business
together. 
‘And
then
there's
the
renovations.
Working
through
each
room.
We're
stripping
back
to
the
wood.
I
wouldn't
be
surprised
if
the
doors
are
solid
kauri.
My
boss
said
that
some
of
the
villas
of
the
twenties
and
thirties
used
a
lot
of
kauri,
because
it
was
freed
up
when
metal-hulled
boats
became
the
thing
and
so
demand
fell
off.'

‘Quite
a
job
ahead,'
said
David.
Such
conversations
reduced
him
to
a
helpless
despair.
He
tried
to
keep
the
existing
place
in
focus
—
the
Hataitai
villa
leaning
towards
the
sea,
Chris
and
Antonia
definite
in
their
own
life,
but
insubstantial
in
his,
for
they
gave
way
so
easily
to
Rebecca
on
her
Nan's
marriage
bed,
to
the
crayfisherman
as
crucifix
in
the
doorway,
to
the
blows
upon
his
wife's
body,
to
Nan's
bewildered
face
as
David
ran
through
the
sitting
room,
her
lips
lifting
oddly
away
from
her
teeth.
In
the
paper
it
said
that
the
woman
died
from
internal
injuries,
that
the
police
confirmed
their
enquiries
suggested
it
was
a
crime
of
passion,
with
alleged
perpetrators
still
at
large.
It
was
happening
again:
the
complex
experience
of
his
life
being
reduced
to
a
public
cliché
which
permitted
no
mitigation.