Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  Takahe was as settled for the night as it would become, and David, walking back to his room, found Raf still awake. ‘If you’ve finished being the Wee Bloody Willie Winkie, then come and have a drink,’ said Raf. He filled most of the available space in his room, but David found a perch on the bed end. Raf drank cheap port which he bought by the flagon in Havelock. He was in a mellow mood that inclined him to confidences: how he’d flunked out of med school, and then a BSc course, not through laziness, but an obsession with iron man triathlon eventing. A sports career for three successful years but, just when he was starting to make money out of it, he tore the ligaments of his right foot on Mount Kosciusko in New South Wales, and it never came completely right. ‘That’s what it is with professional sport,’ he said. ‘A lottery as far as fitness goes, and a quick end to dreams.’

  ‘You could’ve gone back to varsity.’

  ‘Couldn’t face it. It reminded me too much of the time I’d lost, and decisions that didn’t pan out.’

  ‘Doesn’t this remind you even more?’ said David. He watched Raf cradling the port flagon on his lap. ‘You could have been one of the doctors here, maybe, and now you’re a supervisory aide. Doesn’t that stick in your throat a bit? Better to be something completely away from medicine and hospitals?’

  ‘Normally you’d be right.’ Raf swirled the ruby port in the unbreakable glass mug from the kitchenette. ‘But here I feel so lucky in comparison with those who have to come. It’s an insulation, isn’t it, and if you don’t have old Harlequin for a dancing partner, then any other misfortune seems pretty trivial.’

  True enough, but human nature isn’t that logical, at least not all the time. There were occasions when David felt down, and the best times were attributable to Lucy Mortimer, not the intellectual appreciation of his good fortune to be free of Harlequin. The past was a very uneasy place to visit, and he normally went there only when pitchforked by sudden, compulsive association — or overcome by dreams which visited without invitation. Lucy was in his present life, and all the apparitions from earlier times, the ongoing sorrows at Mahakipawa, couldn’t completely subdue the wonder of that.

  ‘Do you want to make a night of it?’ asked Raf.

  ‘Why not. It all seems pretty quiet.’

  ‘I’ll supply the port if you chip in with some shit?’

  ‘Only if you agree to get off your backside and help if something comes up later. Okay for you, but I’m on duty.’

  ‘Knock it off, for Christ’s sake,’ said Raf.

  In some ways it was Llama Heaven all over again: just talking and kicking back, leaving all the rest of the world behind the closed door. Raf had it tougher than David as a kid. He grew up in Invercargill and had worked part or full time since he was thirteen, first to have some spending money, and then saving to get himself to university. His parents had only seasonal jobs. He enjoyed telling David about the supermarket work he did in the sixth and seventh forms. On weekday evenings he’d been a trolley and fruit and vege boy. Customers left the trolleys all over the car park and throughout the mall, and Raf collected them in a growing concertina and shunted them back to the supermarket entrance. When he’d rounded up all the trolleys, he then had to bring in the crates of fruit and vegetables which the delivery guys unloaded in the service alley for the next day. In the summer all that was done in daylight, but in winter the car park and alley were getting dark by the time he started, and he and Philip Hika would fool around charging trolleys at each other, and playing soccer with early drumhead cabbage. On cold or drizzling nights the regular staff hardly ever bothered to come out and round them up.

  Raf was starting to talk about the owner of the mall when Wilfe Orme came to the door and asked if he or David knew the word for a fossilised turd.

  ‘I can’t remember,’ said Raf.

  ‘I can’t remember, but I think it starts with C,’ said David.

  ‘I need it for Scrabble,’ said Wilfe. He sniffed the fumes wistfully, and his eyes lingered on the flagon of port.

  ‘Try to get some sleep, eh Wilfe,’ said David, but lifted his mug from which Wilfe took a good swig. ‘You’ll have some of the others wandering about.’

  ‘Close the door when you go out,’ said Raf.

  Raf said that Mr Ovenden owned that whole mall in Invercargill, though he ran only the supermarket, and leased out the other retail spaces. He had a red Jaguar, and his office was on the floor above the supermarket. It had a window overlooking the car park and often Raf saw him working there in the evenings.

  Sometimes he ran Serena Astle home. She would go out and wait by the Jaguar, and later Mr Ovenden would walk through the aisles and the staff would be deferential. They would say goodnight, Mr Ovenden, goodnight, goodnight Mr Ovenden, goodnight, and then they’d watch from the windows as he let Serena into the Jaguar, and the guys would snigger and the women would look superior. Serena was a provincial netball rep and had an arse like a film star, Raf said, and he was in love with her for those two years.

  One night when Raf was due to leave, and the sleet was driving in from the south, Mr Ovenden came out to his Jaguar and called out to Raf, told him to put his bike in the boot and that he’d run him home. It wasn’t a Serena night: perhaps the windows misted up too much with Serena on such evenings, and made driving dangerous afterwards, Raf speculated. Mr Ovenden knew his name, Raf said, even though he owned the whole mall and had dozens of supermarket employees, and Raf was only the part-time kid. On the way home Ovenden encouraged Raf to go on to university, and said that all his life he’d wanted to be a veterinarian and he knew it wasn’t going to happen. Years later Raf heard that Mr Ovenden started up a racing stables with his supermarket money, and when the horses lost all his money, he fled to Indonesia. Even with a mall and a Jaguar you can’t escape regrets, Raf said.

  David told his story of being accosted by two North Africans beneath a Marseilles overbridge, and escaping by throwing his francs in the air and jumping onto the scooter platform at the back of a passing mobile home. It stopped just past the bridge, and the driver came around shouting in English, and threatened him with a bulky Lonely Planet guide.

  Raf’s port was cheap enough, but the shit was quality, the company good, the time a pleasant relaxation. As they talked, David had the feeling that Raf’s experiences were his as well, just as authentic and detailed in his own recollection as the driver’s shirt loose from his trousers, the pale parting in the Baha’i woman’s hair in her Llama Heaven laundry, or the thistledown streaming above the summer yards at Beth Car. He saw the chrome of the trolleys glint in the dim car park, he hurled a Giant Rocca onion grenade above the rusted skips of the service alley to the hoots of Philip Hika. He knew the tight furrows on the skirt over Serena’s film star arse: he looked into the grey eyes of fifty-three-year-old Mr Ovenden and saw the man’s realisation that he was trapped by comestibles.

  Suck enough good shit in, and all of experience is as readily available, isn’t it? The selfish and self-contained boundaries give way to universal cognisance. Your own life is reduced in proportion, and even Harlequin becomes less than the sum of everything.

  The steers bellowed on the unseen slopes, the sound lay invisible beyond the dark window. Raf interrupted himself with a sudden query. ‘What the hell is the name for a fossilised shit?’ he said.

  SEVENTEEN

  Howard Peat was getting restless, fidgety again, tapping his fingers on the surface of objects as he passed, stepping with a slight exaggeration as if he syncopated with a Walkman, funnelling out his lips, rubbing his face as Harlequin began to itch.

  ‘Yes sir, here we go,’ he said. ‘Bugger me, the old roller-coaster is pulling right alongside.’ The prissy language of the everyday Howard was in retreat; his back almost allowed itself a slouch.

  ‘I’ll sign you out a couple of these tabs, and ring to tell them that we’re on our way to Treatment.’ David had become accustomed to sizing up his charges; to making an educated guess as to how long they had
before an episode was fully on. With Howard he thought they had maybe twenty minutes. He watched him standing in the doorway, breathing heavily through his mouth as if he were going to seize the sides, like Samson, and bring the place down.

  ‘Bugger me, yes. I don’t know what I’m doing in this place. Buggered if I do. You know, there’s a lot of very plain people in this hole. I mean seriously plain — plain ugly. You know that?’ Howard followed David down to the dispensary, which was little more than a locked cupboard by Raf’s room. He watched while David signed out Schweitzer’s magic balls and, without a quibble, walked back to the lounge and took them with a tumbler of water. ‘I mean, you’re no oil painting yourself, but you’re male, so that doesn’t bother me. Some of the women, though, some of the women here could holiday in a men’s prison and still not get laid.’

  David’s experience was otherwise: there were guys inside who would mount a broomstick given the chance, but he knew Howard wasn’t interested in debate.

  ‘Jesus,’ Howard said, ‘I don’t know what I’m doing here.’

  ‘Let’s get your bag of things in case they want you to stay down in Treatment a while. Anyway, maybe when you’re better you can shoot through.’

  ‘Better than what? Who knows if this thing isn’t as natural as any other way of feeling, eh? You thought of that?’

  ‘Don’t start on me with any philosophy,’ said David. ‘Today I can hardly think of a reason for breathing myself.’

  But the unregenerate Howard was barely listening. His eyes flickered to David and away again, as if he were following the flight of a bird trapped in the room. ‘Sometimes you get a feeling when it’s coming on,’ he said hastily. ‘Like that flux that hits you in the stomach just before the trots begin, except that it’s also in your head. Something dark comes looming up from the depths, and the surface starts to wash away from it.’

  ‘I’ll come down with you to Treatment and we’ll see who’s on duty,’ said David, but Howard had tired of him, moving quickly to those urgent imperatives which had been unshackled. He hissed his impatience, and began quickly walking through the block, pausing just long enough at the doorway of any occupied cubicle to toss in an insult, or a quip, to entertain.

  ‘By Jesus, your breath stinks, Bernie, my man. Have I ever told you that? What garbage have you been putting inside yourself. Cheer up, Wilfe, when it’s your turn you may make the volleyball team at last. It’s a fucking wanker’s game, although the way I am now I could see that ball like a fucking pumpkin, that’s for sure, and bounce up so high you’d see the treads on my sneakers. Abbey, you intellectual bitch, I bet you’ll be a goner before the end of the week even with your music, and I won’t be far behind. The bite’s fairly on, isn’t it? Maybe when you’ve croaked, we might be able to get someone in your place with decent tits, for the intellect will have its day, but the cock will have its night. I reckon that the supervisors at Kotuku have nobbled the doctors, so that women with a decent pair like Lucy Mortimer and Sally Clark always end up there.’

  Abbey knew that it was Harlequin talking rather than the formal, fastidious Howard she knew, but she blushed even so. Wasn’t old Harlequin spokesman for the real man after all perhaps?

  ‘Ah, McIlwraith, you stuck-up old cow. You’ve voted National all your life because you were born to it, and always used a bloody cup and saucer for your tea. You told me off for sitting in the lounge in socks, yet after your fancy cheeses your own hands smell as if you’ve been fingering the crotch of a corpse.’

  ‘God won’t be mocked,’ called Dilys Williams.

  ‘Oh, bite your arse.’

  But Howard had no objection when David walked down towards the main block with him. ‘I reckon I should make a break for it,’ he said. ‘No reason to hang around here and hope for any miracles. Who knows anything about fixing this Harlequin’s anyway, that’s what you ask yourself. They’re all fishing in the dark, that’s what, even the great Schweitzer. No fucker knows. Clear out, make a break for it, that’s the thing to do. During the Black Death, you know, the clever ones walled themselves up so that they couldn’t be contaminated.’

  Howard had taken his coat with him into the grounds despite the sun, as a sign that he was prepared for departure from the centre. He stood on the concrete walkway looking alertly about him — the gardens, the car park, the separate blocks at a distance and the main buildings, the rough hillside behind, the sound blue and expansive at high tide. David wondered how many opportunities for escape, or salvation, Howard saw; what message his mind chose to read in it all. ‘Come on down to Treatment,’ said David. ‘One or two of the nurses there are very easy on the eye. You might strike it lucky.’

  ‘You’re right.’ Howard knew very well what awaited him: medication to shut him down, so that Harlequin would have hardly any stage on which to strut for a day or two. The receding personality was still just strong enough to contain the other psyche that was bursting out.

  David and Howard went down together. David talked of the shooting star the night before, and the busloads of new guests arriving at Mahakipawa. That’s how the insurmountable is dealt with, isn’t it? Both of them going down to the Treatment block, past the lavender and hebe plots, the small birches, talking of shooting stars, and all the time knowing that the odds were that Howard was for it.

  David wasn’t threatened in the same way as Howard Peat, but more and more he was aware of the whisper of time passing, the mundane intersections of experience which would never happen in quite that way again. Abbey, say, with her hand on the jetty pile at the swimming hole and glancing self-deprecatingly back; his father, say, looking out under the shade of his palm to watch stock on the next slope; early spring, say, surprised by a brisk southerly so that a snowfall of white plum blossom blows over the yard and the kennels; Lucy Mortimer, say, sliding the sleeves of her dark jersey up her arms as she talks, until the wool is taut around her flesh; Howard, say, walking past the lavender on his way down to Treatment, with tears in his eyes as he talks, and two denim shirts with a single dark sock between them, strung on an illegal line behind him.

  Here and gone, so absolute a presence for the moment, a sum of the immediate world, and then so utterly put behind. ‘I don’t feel too bad,’ said Howard vehemently. His eyes jittered. ‘I reckon it’s not too bad an attack.’

  ‘Sure.’

  They went on down. Roimata Wallace was on duty. ‘Don’t you worry,’ she said. What she meant, and what Howard clearly took from it, is that the worst would happen if they worried or not. Look away, is what she told them. Look for some jig of distraction from the known direction of their lives.

  ‘Don’t you worry, Howard,’ David said as well. ‘Raf or I will come down later to see how things are. Okay?’

  He watched him walk away with Roimata Wallace. Howard turned at the stairs and gave one ringing Indian whoop: he was jiving up again. David had no great affinity with Howard, yet respected his independence and demand for dignity. He didn’t wish him dead; he didn’t wish anyone dead. Even in prison he’d not wished anyone dead: well, maybe Grocott. But there were people you couldn’t mourn when they did go: people who meant nothing to you, though you made no confession of that, even to yourself.

  Wilkin was one of those, and David was unfortunate enough to be accosted by him in the Takahe lounge after returning from Howard and Roimata Wallace at Treatment. Wilkin, too, was getting worse, but he was avoided not because he was dying, but because he was boring. Wilkin had a regular visitation; a giant Irish elk which prophesied for him as its monstrous antlers moved against the sky. The elk had told him who would win the volleyball final between Hoiho and Weka, although that required little enough prescience, also that Wilkin himself would recover and have a second term as president of the National Archery Federation. David and Raf, however, the elk had it in for. They were marked for sticky ends, so Wilkin let slip to Tolly.

  It was surprising that more patients didn’t see visions, as the mind’s way to seek release
from an unbearable reality. Perhaps Wilkin’s Irish elk kept all else at bay. The poet Cummings said that the fear of madness is a sign of unjustifiable self-importance.

  ‘Elk’ Wilkin was a primary headmaster from the Manawatu, but his life interest was archery. He made that choice to give himself the maximum chance for advancement. He was no marksman, but a tireless administrator at all levels, and finally he received a QSM. He must have outlasted everyone else at the committee table, but it was at the cost of any warmth or spontaneity. From Wilkin’s account, even the giant elk oracle spoke within rules of procedure.

  ‘So how is poor Howard?’ Wilkin asked, and he stepped just that much further into David’s personal space than was comfortable. ‘I’ve tried often to get alongside him, but he’s not an easy man to help is he? Not approachable, I’d say.’