Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘No, North Canterbury.’

  ‘I always think of farms being such boring places. The same things done over and over again, and so many animals to be killed. People working all by themselves, whistling and spitting rather than having a conversation.’

  ‘Some things are best done over and over again,’ David said. Flippant innuendo was the easy out. What was the value in any defence of the land when Lucy had so little experience of it: when she could sit surrounded by hills and water and read no signs in them at all. David loved her no less for that. Guilt, too, prevented him from being advocate, for he had lost Beth Car, broken the continuity of his family there, and ended up packed in with people at the Slaven Centre, Mahakipawa, even though the quiet country was all around.

  No one had seemed disconcerted by their presence in Havelock that day, but when they came out of the pub after a late lunch, there was a carton flap held to the windscreen by the wipers, and on it — ‘Fuck Off Crazies’. ‘Maybe it’s not paradise after all,’ Lucy said. It was a careful sign, and placed almost solicitously so as not to damage Raf’s car. There were no observers that either of them could see. Lucy took the sign into the car with her, and wedged it between the dash and the glass, so that it faced other people, not themselves. She enjoyed the reaction of the few oncoming motorists as they went back to the centre, and when they reached the car park she took the cardboard with her to amuse her friends in Kotuku.

  David paused to admire a splendidly kept silver Audi in the end park, where there was less danger of a door being opened on its paintwork. David recognised it. It had protective clear covers over the front lights and high-performance tyres. The owner was a plain clothes cop who was liaison between the centre and the Nelson police. Such information soon got around. David had seen the detective once as he walked past Takahe to the main block. A tall man with a plain, blue blazer and blue tie, but with the incongruity of white and red trainers instead of formal shoes. No doubt he sought the pleasure of using his own car on business, and thought it worth the cost.

  Your own motives and experiences are always in a different category from those of other people, aren’t they? What you do yourself is always subject to special pleading. David realised that when he had his first full session with the lawyer who was to represent him. A man of cautious arrogance: physically clumsy, but well dressed and highly recommended. David told him almost the whole truth, and as he did so could see on the lawyer’s face precisely how the situation appeared to people on the outside. David as a man greedy, unprincipled and careless, who had assumed that there was some reason why he wouldn’t be caught. Someone with a whole heap of natural advantages, and he’d blown them. A private school boy who thought he could sneer at the ordinary world.

  David wanted to explain that it was something else, that he and Chris had fashioned a life based on more than money and indifference to the fate of others. He wanted the lawyer to experience the evenings of discussion beneath the country stars, to appreciate the reputation they established for full weight and full value in their dealings, to understand the satisfaction of the work and planning needed for their crop. In the first interview he tried to open all that up, but saw almost immediately how incidental it was to his lawyer, or anybody else: how expressly common rather than unique his crime was, how self-serving and selective his account, how obviously a camouflage for the easy out.

  And sitting with the lawyer, whose hands bumbled on the desk, David understood something of the indignant anger of many accused, at having their complex and subtle experience tossed into a job lot marked fraud, or rape, or theft as a servant, or treason against one’s country.

  ‘Maybe in three or four years,’ said his lawyer at that first full discussion, ‘all this will be perfectly legal and invoke no penalty at all. There’s been strong lobbying for years now.’

  David had relied on the strength of it, and been made all the more the fool. In the end, although neither David nor the lawyer realised it at that meeting, it was to cost him the farm. Chris made no effort to evade his share of the blame, but it wasn’t his property. In reduced form their friendship survived even the loss of Beth Car, but it would never be the same again.

  David was grateful that his father wasn’t alive to see him take the fall.

  The lawyer’s firm had just that day moved into new offices of marble veneer and stained wood above a Thai restaurant, and looking out over Cranmer Square. He told David that he was only the second client he’d seen in the premises, and apologised for his files, which were in cartons on the floor until the polyurethane dried in the storage alcove. How narrow was the point of contact between their lives. The lawyer that night talked to his wife of the new offices, the polyurethane, the disagreement with the senior partner on vertical slat blinds, and said nothing at all of David — an overeducated farmer, who had become a grower and supplier of cannabis, and would be sent to prison for it.

  ‘The positive angle,’ the lawyer said, clumsily adjusting the computer screen on his desk, ‘is that there are no elements of intimidation or violence whatsoever. I shall indeed bring that out strongly, quite strongly.’

  Their lives met just briefly on the ricochet, but David’s case may still be on disk, and also, as a precaution perhaps, in a manila folder tied with a pale pink ribbon, and scented still faintly with polyurethane.

  NINETEEN

  The cardboard with its abuse of crazies was still there in Lucy’s room when David next went across. It was pinned to the back of the door, directly in David’s line of sight as he listened to Lucy talk about herself in a way quite uncharacteristic.

  ‘Maybe it’s not all bad. Maybe there’s some opportunity in it to understand more about yourself: things that are never able to be acknowledged when you’re healthy. Among all the dangers there’s the exhilaration, too, of freedom, of letting the old nature dance free of the leash at last.’ Lucy was talking quietly, as much to challenge herself as for communication. ‘Everyone who has it, talks of that release, as well as the fear that comes with loss of control. The last couple of episodes I’ve felt something of it for the first time.’

  Of course the guests talked among themselves, but David was surprised by the realisation that Lucy sought such comfort, and then surprised by his own selfishness in assuming that, as a lover, he supplied all she needed. ‘I’m buggered if I see any opportunity in this thing,’ he said.

  ‘There are people who think Harlequin is the beginning of some fundamental psychic change for both individual and community. Did you know that? A leap into the future.’

  ‘Jesus,’ David said. ‘A leap back, you mean. That’s what the clinical record shows. It’s old brain emergence, you know that. It can kill you, and you talk about opportunities.’

  ‘Yes, the past too,’ she said, ignoring death for the time. ‘Sometimes I’m in several places at once — an overlay of experiences. Maybe I’m standing watching the volleyball, and hear a squeaking that I recognise as my sister’s trike, smell the faint Rive Gauche of Mum’s wardrobe, see the water pellets on the polished bonnet of Dad’s Camry, or the faces of a studio audience across the court. They don’t move their heads although the ball goes back and forth. In the dining room I put battered fish into my mouth, but taste the metal of the braces I wore when I was ten. I can sit waiting for my treatment appointment, and feel Ron Sanders’s hand edging down to my breasts after the leavers’ dance.’

  ‘Like this?’ said David.

  ‘Better.’ Her hand stilled his. ‘Something said ages ago comes back again not as recollection, but as an interruption when I’m in the middle of another conversation.’

  ‘Who knows what Harlequin does inside the brain.’ Almost he wished that he was a patient too, that there was some way that he could share the thing that was the difference between them far greater than gender, background, or belief. How honest should he be?

  Usually they kept Harlequin out of their talk, their love: he had domain enough in other aspects of their lives,
but Lucy was for once getting it all out, and she sat up as if the posture helped her to order her ideas. The softest of rain fell on the lawns and gardens of the Slaven Centre, and brought out blackbirds hopeful that the worms would rise. The birds on the ground cocked their heads in alert silence, but those on the gutterings cried ‘Ruby, ruby’. Lucy looked out intently as if close observation helped her to focus her thoughts about Harlequin. ‘Structures break down, you see. Things don’t keep their place, but whirl around. The whole box of tricks starts to shake loose, and finally there’ll be no divisions at all. Once your brain starts that — the deceit, I mean — then you’re gone. No firm ground any more, even within yourself. Everything you hear is both achingly sublime and ultimately incomprehensible, like hearing your name called longingly in a crowd, but when you turn no one welcomes you.’

  ‘The medics go on about the heightening effects.’ David tried to keep talking as if Harlequin was at a distance; as if Lucy wasn’t a host; as if his throat wasn’t tight with the effort to talk normally. With his tongue he could feel where the utterly smooth skin of her shoulder blade changed to the slightly rougher texture that was more often exposed to the wind and the sun.

  ‘Oh, yeah, Harlequin can take you for a real ride: better than the happy baccy you bring me, better than a good cab sav, better than — go on, ask me?’

  ‘Better than sex?’ He tightened his arm around her to comfort them both.

  ‘Well, lover boy, let’s make conjunctions, not comparisons. Sex and Harlequin, now there’s some hell of a buzz: whirling up from the fire and not knowing when you’ll ever fall again.’ She knew what he was thinking. ‘Of course with you it’s like that even without Harlequin.’

  ‘Don’t joke about it,’ he said. The university guy, Tilling, who had the next room to Lucy, walked away across the lawn and left footprints where he trod the fine droplets down.

  ‘Often I’m so scared I can’t sleep.’

  ‘But don’t joke about it.’ He didn’t turn round. He made no further movement of physical condolence — to do so would have brought him to tears.

  ‘You get punished for fucking in so many ways,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe Harlequin’s in there too. Maybe when you’re giving me one, I’m giving it to you.’

  ‘No, that’s one of the first means of transmission they checked, with Aids and so on.’

  ‘Schweitzer said an interesting thing.’ Lucy had these titbits from her sessions with the director, but David was thinking about the Black Death: how people thought that it came from the air. A vapour, like gassing in the First World War, because no one knew it was fleas on rats moving from the East. It would be like that with Harlequin. The textbooks would record that people blamed sex, stress, evolutionary degeneration, or pesticides, while all the time it was something right under their noses. ‘—yet no one at the conference had come across a case of a patient with a properly diagnosed psychiatric illness catching Harlequin. Now that is odd,’ said Lucy.

  ‘It’s like Jenner using cowpox to inoculate against smallpox. You protect yourself from going mad in the new way, by going mad in the old way. Some of the staff here must be trying it, don’t you reckon?’ He was able to turn to her as they laughed, joking as he’d told her not to, and they stretched out again on the narrow, firm bed. Everywhere their bodies touched was pleasure. Combing his fingers through hers, he noticed how gracile were hers in contrast; how free of the hair and roughness of his own. ‘Jesus, though,’ he said, ‘no known cause, no established mode of transmission, no effective treatment and contradictory statements of essential symptoms. We’re doing so marvellously bloody well. If it wasn’t for thousands of people dying, we wouldn’t recognise it at all.’

  ‘They’ll crack it in the end, of course,’ said Lucy softly, ‘as they cracked the others that people despaired about. People will learn to live with it as they have with cancer and Ebola. But for me it’ll be too late. I won’t learn to live with it, or die with it either and, because I won’t come through it, I don’t give a fuck for all those saved later. Is that awful?’

  ‘It’s natural, and anyway not everybody’s dying. There are some natural remissions, you know that.’

  ‘Eff all. You want me to put balloons up for that?’

  ‘Why shouldn’t you come out of this?’ he said doggedly.

  ‘You love me and you help me and you’ll suffer with me, but you’re still glad that it’s me and not you.’ She said it without urgency or anger, as if she knew the feeling herself, and she traced the lines at the corners of his mouth as if she spoke of love.

  ‘Not as glad as I used to be.’ David was galled with guilts and failures, though free of Harlequin as yet, but he didn’t want to get into all that.

  They lay down face to face, with just a sheet drawn partly up. On her side that way, her breasts lay together in slight shadow, their beauty a reminder that Harlequin left any distortion of the body until close to an end, and then, mostly by chance, did harm.

  No physical appetite can be assuaged by recollection, yet the mind retains semblances of joy. Moments, glimpses, a spontaneous sequence, the sharpest focus of experience, ineffable repleteness, become a store of the marvellously erotic on which the spirit draws. They kissed. They pressed closer in the early afternoon: the drift of voices came from the corridors, laughter from those guests before the television in the lounge. Sex gave a brief dispensation from any threat, every weakness: from past and future even.

  ‘Feeling alive now?’ Lucy said.

  ‘Blow my brains out,’ said David huskily, and Lucy laughed and widened her eyes. Her breasts trembled as they rode together. ‘Look at me,’ he demanded. ‘Look at me.’ It was a good time to be struck down, but they weren’t that blessed.

  And no Nan nodding in the outer room, no whaleboats putting out from Kaikoura, no guilt even, for a few moments. A kiss, with their throats still throbbing, then they lay, cast up, on the institutional sheet. The brief, blithe spirit of abandonment was over, but their warm fingers touched with complete affection. So it must have been all over the world for the fortunate, as women kissed women, men caressed men, men and women kindly opposed their differences, all holding each other with such a passionate intimacy that no distinction was possible between giving and taking.

  ‘I wish the door locked,’ Lucy said. Both modesty and caution were too late anyway. David could feel the sweat cooling on parts of him not pressed against her. From the car park the sound of Bryce’s ute, from the lawns came the soft scents of grass and flower beds in the drizzle, from the sky a paua glow of the sun hidden by the flimsy cloud.

  Yet the unpleasant truth was that Harlequin had brought them together. Perhaps David took advantage of the situation, to be of service, to lie with her on fewer occasions than he wished in the narrow bed of his room, or hers. He felt no guilt at all in regard to ethics, but a sense of the sad yet fortuitous way in which their lives had been drawn together. Everything for Lucy, her life most of all, was put at risk, and yet Harlequin also created his opportunity to love her.

  Lucy was never willing to discuss her illness with such candour again. She endeavoured to ensure David never saw her during an episode. She made him promise never to come to her room without warning; never to visit the treatment suites if she was there. Yet he did see her when old Harlequin was in attendance. On a warm, aromatic evening when the several hundred of them had eaten lasagne, so it must have been a Thursday. Pasta was the designated menu on Thursdays: cannelloni, spaghetti alla carbonara. Great trays of pasta, with the Parmesan cheese sprinkled late perhaps, and its odour of succulent decay mingling with that of the mudflats below, and the stainless steel servery turned to ivory by a trick of the light.

  A Thursday then, with just that combination, and all of them at the centre, coming, or going, or seated at the laminated tables to feed an inner man — one of the cruel jokes they shared there. Lucy Mortimer then, fighting like a fourth former with a Maori woman from Hoiho, and getting the worst of it: fists dog-padd
ling, language shrill and unbridled. Had it been anyone else, David would have been one of those who separated the pair, apologised to the Maori woman and soothed the other participant before taking her to the treatment suites. As it was, he kept his distance lest Lucy see him, remained seated before the pasta, watched Polly Merhtens and Philip Tyler smooth Lucy’s clothes as they stood close and persuaded her to go down with them to Treatment. ‘I won’t be shoved about like a bloody five-year-old,’ said Lucy. It was a voice he hardly recognised. A voice utterly self-centred, and stripped of all the subtlety that comes from personal and social awareness.

  He turned away from Lucy then, not in disgust or dismissal, but in helplessness and loving knowledge that it was too cruel to be a witness. She might catch sight of him. He grimaced over the dining table, and popped his knuckles. The Slaven Centre at such times was just another prison: and Harlequin wasn’t big on parole.

  TWENTY

  David told himself that death wasn’t restricted to any institution: that a natural conclusion to life should be accepted with healthy philosophic resignation. Some die because of growths within them, and some because no growth occurs. Some go spectacularly in the jaws of a shark, or a greater white crevasse. Some become small and flat in their beds, with no more movement, or relevance, than the green flecked wallpaper which they plumb-bobbed twenty-five years before. Some with eagerness await the dark angel; others are driven to a fine old Celtic rant before they leave the stage. Death is generous in the variety allowed its players.

  Death, that great egalitarian: that customary and modest victor.

  Lucy was unwell for some time after fighting in the dining room, and David observed her wish by not visiting. He was left subject to all his old guilt. And the most powerful new one, which was his inability to help her. He had a feeling that the air was congealing, and that after the final agony of suffocation, they would each be set there in time’s amber: all movement and resolution abandoned, despite the sea wind, in one last glaze of futile boredom.