Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Haven’t a thing,’ said David. ‘Jesus, it’s cold here.’

  Yet he sat down beside him, conscious that the wall and the lawns were a transition between the lights and movement of the town, and the darkness of the sea and the hills beyond. Not a flat, backdrop darkness, but one that had gradations of depth and colour, and winds that carried scents and sounds from a long way off in the capacious night.

  ‘Not even any shit?’ asked Tolly.

  ‘I never carry it in a vehicle.’

  ‘I’m dying for one.’

  ‘It’s all that playing silly buggers: putting your hand up skirts. You’ll have the cops on us.’

  ‘They loved it,’ said Tolly.

  ‘That’s your story.’ What was that fragrance on the dark air? ‘You feeling okay?’ asked David.

  ‘Ah-h, stop worrying. I’m just glad to be out of the bin for a night. You know what pisses me off?’ The concert audience had disappeared. There were just a few less purposeful folk on the street: some young people laughing, and ambling towards the fast food outlets, a few men changing pubs, a skinhead giving his Dobermann some air. ‘What pisses me off,’ said Tolly, ‘is that five years ago nobody had heard of Harlequin, and now I’m likely dying of it. When they can’t get you with any of the regular things, then they come up with something new. Christ.’

  Somewhere macrocarpa was burning: far back, perhaps in time rather than space. David had the unmistakable smell of the resinous smoke, and it hit him so hard for a moment with the farm and his father, that he turned away from Tolly Mathews so that the street lights wouldn’t show his face.

  ‘Ah, Jesus, the old macrocarpa, eh,’ said Tolly quietly, as if he knew all that was David’s legacy of it, and had his own as well. They were quiet for a time, and when Tolly spoke again he’d moved on to other topics. ‘Gaynor Runcinski did have someone run over by a bus, you know,’ he said. ‘It’s the fatalistic hazard, the cliché, isn’t it, but Gaynor’s aunt, or whatever, really was run over by a bus when she was coming back from a holiday in Fiji.’ Tolly couldn’t stop himself laughing, though he didn’t mean to be unfeeling.

  David’s father had sold one of the oldest windbreaks for firewood, and when the contractors had finished they bulldozed all the rubbish around the stumps, and the next summer David and his father lit the piles, which smouldered on and on to become the scent of that year’s drought. And it was back again, oddly out of season, just suggestions of it on the wind across the sound and across the years. Great stumps smouldering in the ground.

  ‘You never bloody know, do you,’ said Tolly. He gave a shiver; a brief animation which went from top to toe, as a cat’s-paw of wind travels a paddock’s long grass. He stood up and wiped the seat of his good suit trousers. ‘On our way. On our way. There’s no more music tonight,’ he said.

  ‘Do you want a beer before we go?’

  ‘I’d rather have a joint in the bin.’

  ‘You’ll be moaning in the car that you want a drink,’ said David, but Tolly was already walking back into the streets.

  Maybe he was in search of more women to goose — would he walk over parked cars and trash them? Did the placid window of the naturopathy shop seem an opportunity for mayhem? David put on a spurt to catch up but, as he did, Tolly sensed his apprehension, slowed to say, ‘It’s okay. Nothing’s going to happen. Harlequin’s not coming out tonight after all. The music’s just unsettled me, and now I feel grotty.’

  ‘We’ll go straight back.’

  ‘As if I’ve been sleeping on a hot afternoon, and wake feeling absolutely crappy, you know?’

  On their way to the car, they heard a man shouting in the distance — an urgent, ugly sound — and then the siren of a police car. They stopped to listen, but soon the town was quiet again. ‘It’s not my night,’ said Tolly, perking up a bit.

  ‘It’s a wonder after you and those women. You could’ve got thumped, or picked up by the police.’

  ‘Some very nice skin,’ said Tolly as he waited for David to unlock the car. ‘Very nice skin, and one of them had a lacy petticoat. Now that was a touching surprise.’

  He was quiet while David drove out of town, gaining height on the hill above the old ferry terminal, and with the lights spread in the night again. Those lights had dropped away over the hill, before Tolly asked for a joint again, and got the same answer. David’s caution was justified when, on the first flat stretch, there was a police car and two cops with beckoning torches beside it. No worries about a stash in the car, but for David there were dangers greater than that.

  One of the cops came over and asked politely if they would step out of the car. Some spot of trouble in Picton, he said. His mate stayed back, by the police vehicle, towards which the others came. Tolly stumbled, and David explained that he was a bit under the weather. ‘Some sort of a do, was it?’ said the back-up cop, as Tolly’s immaculate suit became evident in the car light. An older cop, with heavy, regular breathing even when standing still.

  ‘The New Zealand Symphony,’ said David, and he got the programme from his friend’s pocket. Tolly stumbled again on the loose shingle at the road edge, and began conducting the dark foliage of the bank. His eyes were lit for a moment in the younger cop’s torchlight.

  ‘Oh yeah, the concert,’ said the back-up, and he glanced at the programme.

  The younger cop established that David was driving, even though he knew it. ‘Yes,’ said David. ‘I’m the non-drinker for the night.’ He said it with a laugh, hoping that way it wouldn’t sound wowserish, but just the shrewd, masculine compliance of someone who’d have his share another time.

  ‘Can’t smell anything on either of you,’ said the younger man pleasantly.

  Any moment Tolly might start saying things that would suggest Harlequin. The police wanted their names, and David’s licence; just routine, of course. That was the thing which worried David. He had a trick licence, the photo fitted, but he didn’t want any enquiries made. ‘So what was the trouble back at Picton?’ he asked. Wasn’t that the expected thing to do?

  ‘A fight and one guy got knifed,’ said the younger cop with the easy manner.

  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.

  TWENTY–SEVEN

  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.

  SCHWEITZER’S VIEW

  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.