Harlequin Rex

by Owen Marshall

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.

  THIRTY–ONE

  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, cheekbones, 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.

  ‘It’s not that you’re not welcome for a few days, like. No, old friends are nice,’ said Antonia. ‘It’s just that we have to prioritise at this stage of our lives.’ And unemployed old friends with vague pasts, and even more vague prospects, who turned up on the doorstep were low priority in anyone’s book. David could understand that, would feel the same way if the situation was reversed.

  Yet it was Antonia who unwittingly provided the means for him to move on. The three of them were having Caesar salad for tea, in an evening which cast the hill shadows across the bay. She said that the rehab had been sent a circular for staff about vacancies at the Slaven Centre at Mahakipawa in the Sounds. Residential positions both medical and ancillary, and well paid too, but of course it was the place that took people with the new disease — that regressive behaviour thing which was popularly called Harlequin’s disease, because it got at the brain with such bizarre, ill-sorted effects.

  ‘Mad cow stuff, isn’t it?’ said Chris.

  ‘You mean Creutzfeldt-Jakob Disease,’ she said. ‘No. Bill Stenness says it’s a regressive brain disorder: atavistic, involuntary behaviours.’

  ‘Jesus — atavistic? What’s that when it’s at home?’ said Chris.

  ‘The oldest parts of the brain take over again, I think.’

  ‘So, mad caveman disease.’ Chris became increasingly cheerful. All those people gathered up by Harlequin, while he was nicely set up in Hataitai with a villa, a low-key distribution business, and a divorced woman adequately keen on bed sports.

  ‘What’s so bad about it?’ asked David.

  ‘No one’s sorted out how you get it, have they,’ said Antonia. ‘It could be contagious, and the whole place is that isolated, stuck away up the Sounds somewhere. No wonder they struggle for staff. The rehab’s no picnic, but I wouldn’t have a job in a Harlequin place for any salary you could name.’

  ‘Out of sight, out of mind,’ said Chris happily. ‘Who wants people like that living next to them. A sort of Halloween for real, eh. I bet the authorities wish they hadn’t closed down all those loony bins now.’

  David had a letter from Mike Wiremu, commending his assistance in Paparua, without exp
licitly saying that David had been himself an inmate. And Antonia left the headed notepaper of her rehab unit on the sunroom table, allowing David to create more support for his quasi-counselling skills by forgery above the name of Dr William W. Stenness, Director.

  Such modest credentials were sufficient to bring an invitation for David to go to the Slaven Centre at Mahakipawa for an interview which should confirm a residential aide position. The letter came from a Dr Alst Mousier and was direct and candid. ‘Working with our patients requires resilience of body and spirit,’ he wrote. ‘This is no place for the faint-hearted.’

  Although Antonia had unwittingly provided for David’s chance to go to ground, he told her nothing, and when he said he was leaving Wellington, her relief expressed itself in an affectionate attention which increased as his departure grew closer. ‘Old friends are nice,’ she said, flaring the nostrils of her Castilian nose as if to keep from being overcome at the thought of parting. ‘I said to Chris that no one could say you’ve been any bother.’ No more need she attempt to smother the involuntary cries from their bedroom. Be loud, be loud, you gorgeous bitch, Chris would say. No more would David distract her from determining if all her villa doors were solid kauri. No more would she hide her pay packet under the tissue box in the top drawer. No more would his long friendship with Chris be any possible threat. Nor did he give any destination when he parted with Chris, and he wasn’t pressed. That was the sort of life they had — and understood. Didn’t everyone when moving on have reasons why it was better not to leave a forwarding address?

  David did ask for Chris’s Picton contact, so that he would know how to get hold of the prime West Coast shit that he liked best. ‘It seems to be giving you a real edge,’ he told Chris, as they walked up the hill from the pub for the last time.

  ‘I’ve got to keep it out of Toni’s sight,’ said Chris. ‘Anyway, I’ve got together a few bucks for you, and some tinnies. You need anything, you know where I am.’