Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

‘I never made love until I was twenty-two, although I had boyfriends from the time I was in the fourth form. The intensity of men’s interest put me off, even though I enjoyed the flattery. I could get them off quite happily with my hand. Many didn’t even need that encouragement. I had a good deal of wet trouser material up against me.’

  ‘And then?’

  ‘What?’ said Lucy. She turned to look at him directly, the shadow in the darkening, small room moving on her face, her hair falling in a cusp from her cheek.

  ‘The first time. When you were twenty-two.’

  ‘Oh, no. You won’t get me started on the jag of talking about other guys that way, and I don’t fancy hearing about your adventures in the sack. I was joking before. I’m not into it.’

  ‘What about right now?’

  ‘You know what I mean,’ she said.

  No other woman is like you, he thought.

  How many times would they do this good thing together?

  It was unethical, of course, as so much of what is important in our lives is.

  Dog Gully Road was in the hills behind Nelson, and it was no-exit, narrow and gravelled, winding up to a fair-sized pine plantation, planted years before when prices were looking good. In the summer the dust from the road was a talc over the nearby pigfern and blackberry; in winter the gravel sank into the slick, yellow clay and the potholes held a rich slurry. The fenceposts tottered alongside, grey with age, scabbed with lichen, sometimes borne down by old man’s beard, or gorse. Narrow stock tracks fanned out from the gateways, and eased up the hillsides to the patches of rough pasture among the scrub. The flash magpie ruled by day, and at night the possums hunkered in the branches and the morepork cried to reinforce the silence.

  Towards the top of the gully was the wooden farmhouse Sneaky Pete rented, the land around it long sold for forestry. One of the verandah poles had rotted through, and the bowed iron of the roof was lower there. The giant macrocarpa hedge on the south and west sides had been felled to let in some light, and so attract a tenant. Most of the hedge had been scavenged for firewood by successive occupants, but the great stumps still held on, with the scars of the chainsaw on their surfaces. One of the most even was used as a chopping block. Its ringed surface had additional axe and knife marks, stains and libations; there was a scurf of fine chips, fur, feathers and bone at its base. The waxy head of a white leghorn lay close to David’s boot as he stood smoking, the comb granulated and the beak ajar.

  ‘I could take half as much again,’ said Sneaky, as he splintered the rib cage of an appropriated hogget for his evening chops. ‘But I’d want a sharper fucking price, of course. I’m making you guys rich. That skunkweed resin, though, I must say is top shit.’ Sneaky was very tall, thin, bald and revealed by his voice as Australian. At rest he tended to hold his skinny arms across his stomach, as if something had caved in there and was causing discomfort, yet all his actions and opinions were resolute, showing that he was in good form.

  Sneaky always complained that the price was too high, but he knew that he was onto a good thing. The quality was consistent and so was the supply. Sneaky collected and distributed for more than a hundred and fifty kilometres around, and although the rented place in Dog Gully Road aroused no envious comment, when Sneaky flew to Wellington as Mr Ferris, bank managers came from behind their desks in welcome.

  After they had helped Sneaky put the stuff into the bunker beneath the shed, David and Chris went into the old farmhouse and drank Napoleon brandy and coffee. Sneaky was generous with that, but he made no offer of accommodation and David didn’t expect one. It didn’t pay to become too personal in their business. So they left quietly in the small hours, when the country was beginning to creak with the hardening of the frost, and Dog Gully Road was just the beginning of a long drive.

  The pines were very dark and the sides of the small valley kept out the moonlight. The new Holden’s headlights swept over the tottering fence posts and the gleam of ice on the mud of the potholes. Briefly, before the demister took effect, the windscreen grew delicate hachures of frost like the blades of a Spanish fan.

  ‘Sneaky must be raking it in, I reckon,’ said Chris.

  ‘He has to take more risk though, doesn’t he — dealing with a lot more people to distribute it, and some of them very odd bastards with no loyalty, or talking too much at the pub. We can just come up here once in a while and dump a fair load, yet no one knows us except Sneaky.’

  ‘And you don’t think that if Sneaky takes a fall we go down as well?’ Chris said. ‘Come on.’

  ‘I’m just saying that we’re doing very nicely and that Sneaky’s business, good or bad, is up to him.’

  It was odd, wasn’t it, that you could be a criminal, and yet, having made that one move from orthodox practice, you continued to expect many of the principles which applied in the legitimate world to hold good. How else could you operate? How was it possible to escape a middle class upbringing even if you stepped outside the law?

  On the drive back, Chris told David that coming through Nelson reminded him of a job he did there with two mates before he went overseas. A shipment of spirits and top wines which they knew was stored in a warehouse in Neath Street. There hadn’t been a snatch of booze for ages and the place had got slack. They used two stolen trucks and got away with a hundred and seventy cartons as easy as pie, but one broke down in the Rai Valley and they had to ditch it, and then the other one conked before Blenheim. ‘Jesus, can you believe that, though? Weeks of planning and we ended up hitching into Blenheim. On the bones of our arse again, and all we took was one bottle each to carry.’ Chris had a good laugh at his misfortune from the vantage of better days. ‘One bottle of top whisky,’ he said. ‘That’s what I got out of that lot.’

  Growing and selling shit was a much better business, wasn’t it? Sneaky Pete was doing just fine, and so were they. Meeting the market, you might say.

  FIFTEEN

  Claire Townes was one of those who slid into a trough and stayed there: one of Harlequin’s muted and uncharacteristic ways to go. So predictable were her last weeks, and free of threat, that she was left in Takahe where she wanted to be. Except when sleeping or sedated, and increasingly the two were combined, she called for her daughter, Sandra, who had become an archaeologist and found work in Yucatan. Before her death, Claire wanted above all to farewell her daughter. It couldn’t happen, because Sandra had gone ahead, killed in a helicopter accident on the plateau seven months before. No matter how many times Claire was told the news, she blotted it out as more than she could bear. Her conscious hours were dominated by the failure of her daughter to visit her at the centre. Sometimes she blamed Sandra, sometimes she blamed the staff; she even claimed that it was a conspiracy by her ex-husband, as a punishment for not investing in his olive-growing venture just outside Thames.

  Claire’s night and day cry, ‘Where’s Sandra?’, became integrated into the acoustic life of the centre, eventually losing any intrinsic and personal significance, becoming as generic as the cry of the skuas over the mudflats, or the bellowing steers on the hillside. Sometimes in the darkness and their agony, other guests too, cried ‘Where’s Sandra?’, not for cruelty’s sake, but just to share the solace of the familiar.

  ‘Couldn’t we arrange for Sandra to come, for Christ’s sake?’ asked Lucy, in David’s small room. She had heard Claire’s piercing cry as Raf and Abbey wheeled her to the sluice bay. David was quiet to listen to the calls as they diminished down the corridor. They had become so customary over weeks, that he had to make an effort to register them as having a specific origin.

  ‘What — a seance?’ He wondered whether Claire or Sandra would have the most difficulty in crossing over.

  ‘Just an ordinary visit,’ said Lucy. She was leaning on the window sill so that the hills above the centre were visible to her. ‘Have Sandra come to visit after all.’

  ‘I don’t get it.’

  ‘She’s going quite fast now. The doctors told you, didn’t they?
All she wants is that one last thing. Soon she’ll be taken down to Treatment to stay, where people won’t know her the same.’

  ‘The daughter’s dead, though. Tony Sheridan said she was killed in a plane crash in Mexico or somewhere, but Claire won’t take it in.’

  ‘All Claire cares about is getting an okay from her daughter to go. A sort of release. At this stage I reckon it could be done by proxy: there’s so much need. I mentioned it to Schweitzer, but he said it was dubious in terms of ethical practice.’

  It surprised David that Lucy was on such terms with the director, that during her sessions with him she would discuss Claire Townes in such a way. And David shared Schweitzer’s unease with the proposal. The deceit of taking advantage of Claire’s illness, even if it was for her own good. The assumption of power and decision over what was left of her life. ‘Oh, come on. No more than a prognosis held back, or a drug-induced calm,’ said Lucy. ‘No more than anything else which is the means to the end of dying more easily. We should just do it, and it’ll all happen and be over before anybody really knows about it.’

  So Lucy began her successful persuasion.

  ‘Where’s Sandra?’ called Claire on the wet evening they had chosen to grant her an answer. The rain came in on the wind: cats’ claws on the windows. There was a downpipe on the outside wall close to Claire’s head, and it gave a vigorous orchestration for the performance inside. ‘Where’s Sandra?’ Few people would be moving from block to block on such a night to provide any interruption. The pigfern on the hill slope had a subdued gleam in the twilight. ‘Where’s Sandra?’

  ‘She’s on her way, isn’t she,’ answered David.

  ‘On her way?’ Claire had almost renewed her habitual cry when she realised what he’d said. ‘You mean she’s coming?’

  ‘All the way from Yucatan,’ said Abbey. ‘You remember, we’ve been telling you for days. She’s arriving any minute.’

  ‘All that way just to be with you,’ said Raf.

  The three of them kept on for some time about the visit, the history of preparation and acknowledgement, until the idea was taken up as valid by Claire herself: until she complained that she had grown sick of waiting for what she had long been promised. Yet David didn’t see how it could work, and was embarrassed by their well-intended conspiracy against the sick woman.

  Lucy walked across to Takahe, and came with a transparent, plastic hood which she almost shook from her head. ‘That rain,’ she said. ‘It’s driving in with the wind.’

  ‘Here she is,’ said Abbey in a voice of conviction. Unlike David, she entered into the spirit of the performance utterly. As a patient herself, although not in Claire’s condition, she more easily acknowledged the supremacy of need.

  ‘Here’s Sandra to see you, Claire,’ said Raf. He had no sense of shame whatever, or rather, perhaps, he was willing to be actively ridiculous if it would help Claire. He delighted in the challenge to shallow reality. Well, isn’t life after all a theatre of the absurd, in which bit players are forced to take larger parts because a God is lacking.

  Lucy went to the bed and seized Claire with a hug. Not a wary embrace for the sick, but emphatic, outgoing, expressive. Claire was startled rather than welcoming. Her face appeared for the others at Lucy’s shoulder: the many lines at the mouth emphasising it as orifice, the slight rash around her nostrils, the eyebrows rubbed almost bare.

  ‘I love you so much, Mum,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve come all this way to make sure you know that.’

  Claire allowed herself to be held, but looked at Abbey for affirmation. ‘You never used to hug me,’ said Claire, when her head and shoulders were back on the double pillow. ‘You liked your father so much better because he spoilt you rotten. Do you ever see him?’

  ‘I haven’t time for any of that,’ said Lucy. ‘I’ve only a moment and all I want to say is thank you, and that I love you.’

  There was brief eagerness and intensity then in Claire’s face which transfigured it, and for the first time David saw something of the personality that had been Claire Townes; recognised a full individual beneath the spoil of the illness. ‘Sandra, Sandra,’ she said, yet her eyes went up and she tilted her head back towards the gurgling downpipe. She had a full handhold on Lucy’s arm, but perhaps she knew better than to regard her gift horse in the face. Lucy had made no effort to resemble the daughter in the bedside photo. ‘I’ve kept all your letters,’ said Claire. ‘I just wish you could work indoors more in that place. Everything’s so dirty in archaeology, isn’t it? All that grubbing after what’s better buried. And what must the smells be like.’

  David found it so difficult to play a part. The whole thing teetered between the grotesque and the sublime: at once a profound reality and a mockery of itself. Perhaps, too, he was reminded of another old woman, and a granny flat in Kaikoura by the sea. He went out of Claire’s room and stood in the corridor by one of the windows, which showed the rain and wind moving like shoals in the liquid evening. Raf followed him, and stood and stretched his face oddly as a commentary on what they’d seen, and as relaxation after a long duty. ‘She’s bought it, hasn’t she?’ he said. ‘She thinks her Sandra has really come to say goodbye, I reckon.’

  ‘She’s taking what she needs most, just as Lucy said she would. Heart’s ease, no matter what the source.’

  ‘Weird really,’ said Raf.

  ‘She’s dying.’

  ‘And going very differently than most of the others, isn’t she? I guess you have to take any short cuts there are. Self-deception may be even more necessary at death than in your life.’

  Lucy was at the door. ‘I’ve got to go now, Mum,’ they heard her say, and Claire calling her back for one last thing. And Abbey was talking too: the three of them in conference. Then Lucy was back again with tears on her cheeks and a catch to her voice. ‘She needed so much to say things to her daughter.’

  ‘What did she call you back for?’ asked Raf.

  ‘She said the doctors kept telling her that Sandra was dead, but she knew it wasn’t true because she could see letters from me on their desks. But they never passed them on.’

  ‘Come and have a drink in my room,’ said David. He put his hand on her shoulder. ‘Let’s have a joint, eh?’ She was trembling slightly.

  ‘No, honestly I’m fine, but it’s got to me more than I expected. I’ll come over tomorrow and have a talk then. You can tell me how she’s taken it.’ Her voice was firmer with each word. She put on the plastic hood again and started down the corridor. ‘See you, Raf,’ she called.

  ‘See you, Lucy.’

  ‘Is this some strange place, or what?’ said David.

  ‘On the edge, mate, on the edge,’ said Raf. He pulled one of his half-grotesque, half-mocking faces. He spread out his large arms and balanced up the corridor towards his room, one foot perilously after the other on some invisible tightrope.

  Claire and Abbey had bundles of Sandra’s letters out on the bed, but they were talking of the doctors, and which of them could be trusted. Animation made Claire look especially ravaged, her face like some glaring, piecemeal, papier-mâché head. She looked up as David re-entered, but her quick smile was for herself only. ‘And I’m not going to tell anything to you men either,’ she said. ‘Maybe you think it’s funny, do you?’

  ‘Why should I think your daughter’s visit funny?’ said David.

  ‘Men still think women are a joke,’ said Claire fiercely.

  ‘Yes, go away now and leave us in peace,’ said Abbey. And he did; taking orders meekly from those in his charge, because the whole evening had become topsy-turvy anyway, and Abbey was twice the comforter he’d ever be.

  In the three further days that she lived, Claire didn’t call for Sandra any more. Maybe she was convinced; maybe she knew that the trick wouldn’t work a second time. Others continued the cry ‘Where’s Sandra?’ for a time, but eventually, with the source gone, even those mimics of good intention realised that the power of the incantation was lost forever.
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  SIXTEEN

  David did his final late check before midnight. Nothing at Takahe was untoward, provided you accepted that all was untoward. Happiness could not be made mandatory at the centre, but decorum and routine were laid down. David had his long, aluminium-bodied issue torch, which swung like a baton, but, like the beat cop, he knew his round so well that all he required was the spill from the security lights. He paused at one of the lounge windows to look out and across the sound. The sea had shrunk in the great ditch, become almost as still and dark as the hills that contained it. One large moth, like a piece of chalk, was pit-pitting on the glass by his head although there was no light to draw it in. Had he been sixteen again, it would have been a night for possum shooting, with the torch held along the barrel of the .22. Their eyes shone red hot in the beam just before they died.

  There was something adhesive beneath the sole of his left shoe which caused a slight noise on the corridor vinyl with each second step, as if the moth was pit-pitting close behind him. Maybe his charges were asleep behind each unlocked door; maybe they had escaped into the lupins and the gorse, and lay with the tears running down the back of their throats. As long as all was quiet, no disturbance, that’s the thing. Mrs McIlwraith was snoring, but in a genteel, upper register, and Tolly turned on his bed, because his stiff back didn’t allow him to rest long in one position. Nothing to worry about.

  David went through the main door and stood on the outside step. Evan Beal had used the roller on the lawn, and forgotten to come back for it. David moved out and found it as a rest for his dak tin while he lit up. After the flare of the match all was black for a moment, until his night vision recovered. Shit burns differently from tobacco, and those familiar with it know also that the smoke acts in its unique manner: heavier and with a more florid scroll in the still air.

  Ah, the first breaths of it, and the deep punch of it in the lungs. It reached far back in his life and on the continuity of it were strung so many associations. The first furtive joints with Chris in the old band room late at night, seated on cushions of sheet music and looking through the gaunt lattice of clustered music stands at the moon. How innocuous was that early weed compared with the stuff he later grew and sold. His room at Llama Heaven fugged up with the smoke of it and the fumes of extravagant talk. The glaring heat, litter and traffic noise at the bridge over the narrow-cut Corinth canal, where he waited for five hours for a scheduled bus that never arrived. The warm boards in the open door of the shearing shed at Beth Car, with his own land covering most of the world he could see. Lying with Jocelyn Parks in the spare room of her house, their free arms held up, the fingers twined, talking with the absolute candour of intimate strangers. The tinnies taped behind the light fitting of his cell at Paparua. The water-marked ceiling of the fibrolite bach at Gore Bay, which Samuels Bros. Transport allowed him to use. He would lie there smoking himself silly until the world went away. The smell of it — that old cats’ piss, ammonia flavour — was as familiar to him as the smell of his own sweat.