A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  ‘Within a week I think. Dr Dunne said that I would have to keep on making out-patient visits for a while of course, but there’s no need for me to be taking up a bed here for much longer.’

  ‘I’m going myself soon, at least for a time. You won’t be able to return to your practice though. Not with your hands.’

  ‘No. I’ll have an enforced lay-off for some time I suppose.’ The old Slaven would have been very concerned about that; not just for selfish reasons, but from a reluctance to let down the many people he regularly cared for. But now there is a new willingness to let go of some responsibilities and so allow other opportunities to come within his grasp. ‘I want to find out a lot more about people.’

  ‘You want to save them, perhaps,’ says Miles gravely and his eyelids fall closed in his delight at Slaven’s ingenuous ambition.

  ‘Come off it. What I think is that we’ve got to revitalise social action, have some concept of ourselves that’s clear enough for us to charge the politicians with its accomplishment. We spend far too much time proving to each other that the process is tainted, rather than ensuring that the aim is pure.’

  ‘So this is what you’re going to tell people?’

  ‘Government is just a process, not an end,’ says Slaven. It is in time to become the first Slavenism.

  ‘I like it,’ says Miles. It isn’t quite worthy of the energy to laugh aloud, but his breath comes more quickly and commensurate with that the scent of Kellie’s arum lilies more strongly, so that for a moment he feels unpleasantly overpowered. ‘Do you mind if I rest for a while now?’ he asks Slaven and as his fellow patient is at the door, ‘Is it still foggy? Is it raining?’

  Through the window behind the bed, Slaven watches the mist unwind and stretch in the hospital gardens. Some billows are thicker than others so that there are sudden scene changes, the grey forms of trees and buildings standing out for a moment and then so utterly erased. Where is the sycamore and the canary within it? Where in this drifting fiction, has the trolley borne our Proctor away?

  When Slaven goes, Miles cannot sleep. Instead he activates his computer and begins a letter to Georgina — ‘Aldous Slaven, the dentist, has decided to save the country.’

  Aldous Slaven arrives home from Burwood Hospital quite ready to be a new man in respect of social involvement, but he’s at something of a loss as to how to begin. He considers this as he steadies the new, wooden ladder with his left hip and elbow and Kellie putties and primes on the barge board where the power lines had been attached to the house — before the accident and before she had called in the private contractor.

  ‘Be careful down there,’ Kellie calls. Slaven feels guilty that he hasn’t expressed the same concern for her, even though his hands are still paws because of the bandages.

  ‘You’re the one to watch out,’ he says.

  ‘I’m fine,’ and so she is; effortlessly assuming all the extra responsibility since his accident as a simple extension of the planning skills she demonstrates in her garden and home.

  ‘Lions perhaps, or Rotary, or Ozone Bak,’ he says. ‘Some active service organisation for a start. Then again, a more obviously political organisation, do you think?’ They have many acquaintances, but the links are social; chances to relax, gossip, sublimate the tensions of maintaining a professional income and image. To do more than talk in passing of any issue unconnected with immediate self-interest is considered a bore.

  ‘Or Astley School Board of Trustees, even your own professional organisation,’ says Kellie. If Slaven looks up he can see the pale, ribbed soles of his wife’s sneakers nine rungs above, if he looks down he can see the camellia and lemon bottlebrush which he damaged ten weeks before. Nowhere on the soil, the plants, is there any trace of the bright blue paint he was using. The garden is quiet, subdued and orderly in all its detail. He isn’t high enough to see the hills to the west, or his sheep beyond the garden, but if he breathes in deeply there is a catch of some awful smell which was part of his ordeal.

  ‘See the kelp and crayfish pots, beneath the rocks of Half Moon Bay,’ murmurs Slaven.

  ‘What’s that?’ Kellie doesn’t look down. There is one splash of bright paint on the brickwork close to the ground. Now that he sees it, how could he not have noticed it before. His hands itch at such times. He hears a voice much like Birdy Knowles’s, muffled now though by a more resistant present.

  ‘Just singing,’ he says.

  ‘What? I remember now there was one call asking you to speak.’

  ‘Really?’

  ‘It was from the Civil Defence Officer, Ayesbury. I didn’t really see how you being almost electrocuted was a disaster on that sort of scale, but I took his number for you on the hall pad.’

  ‘Perhaps they want my views on how it feels to be a victim. The psychological aftermath that they’d have to deal with, but on a scale of thousands.’

  ‘Maybe.’

  When Slaven rings, the Civil Defence Officer is happy to go along with this. He’s committed to an evening seminar on the nineteenth and has been let down by a meteorological spokeswoman, then the Hospice Superintendent, his second choice, was called to a conference on economy euthanasia. So Ayesbury rather clutches at Slaven, who is a professional man at least and has time on his hands because he is unable to employ them for much else. Ayesbury had intended that Slaven talk about precautionary dental care, but victim psychology will do.

  ‘Think of the management skills required,’ he says in his introduction of Slaven at the seminar. ‘Imagine the state of mind of a thousand earthquake survivors and we’re asking them to line up quietly and then fill in an identification report which has twenty-three questions.’

  Although it is only eight pm and daylight saving is in force, the Civil Defence Headquarters are lit by recessed bulbs, for they occupy what was once the basement of a bank, protected there from fire and tsunami impact. The rent is also lower. Slaven can see lines of videophones and radio telephones in the communications room through a glass divide and the compact Controller’s room all set to go, with its message pads and CD plan on the desk.

  In the largest room, where they gather, the walls are covered with display screens, maps and flow charts. An operations room, says Ayesbury, from which he and his volunteers constantly practise the salvation of a city which largely ignores them.

  Slaven has been a small part of that disregard, but as he stands up to address the twenty-three people in the bunker-like operations room, he feels a curious warmth towards them. They are here on a summer’s evening, having put aside other duties, pleasure even, to come to a Civil Defence seminar. Slaven spreads his legs slightly to ensure a good footing, as he often does when about to begin a challenging piece of orthodontic surgery. Now for the first time he will put to the test his new compulsion to promote a cause, to influence others. He feels his hands begin to tingle, reclothed in skin and muscle from his thighs. He has nothing to say regarding the maintenance of dental health, or the management of disaster victim psychology. He realises that despite his notes he never intended to follow them.

  He begins with the irrevocable sense of isolation he assumes all to feel and the great act of will necessary if it is to be sufficiently controlled to allow a sense of community. He goes on to talk of personal and social conscience, the need for policies which cater not just for physical and material needs, but for the hungers of the spirit. Hungers for moral certainty, for the validation of love, for less parsimony in an experience of life and less secrecy in death. He speaks of his new faith that beyond the cumulative, sporadic, stultifying assemblage of experience which is life there is a secular redemption possible through empathy and co-operation.

  ‘In the hospital,’ says Slaven, ‘I had moments of vision. Should I be ashamed to admit that? Ashamed of my convictions because I can’t account for their origin?’ Before him some of the small audience make unconscious movements of support. ‘I was still fried I suppose.’ Some laugh, uneasily. ‘The best civil defence it seems t
o me is civil action, restoring the deliberative power to the people and insisting on a spiritual dimension in politics as in life. No citizen is dispensible. The most sustaining idea we have, surely, is that collectivism will work, and the most enduring fear that we have no part in the direction of our lives.’

  Slaven has mulled over his ideas lying in his hospital bed at night and expressed them in conversational fragments to Marianne Dunne, to Miles Kitson and to Kellie, but he is himself amazed at the fluency which has come to him. He hears his voice ring in the operations room and feels himself the focus of the twenty-three people gathered there. He can stand a little apart from himself, regulate his breathing, calculate the ongoing performance and make the fine tuning adjustments, yet all the time a convert anew to the power of his own message.

  He has tapped a new man within himself — born from the fire perhaps.

  This first time, Slaven retains something of caution. He pauses only twenty minutes after he has agreed to finish. The applause is sudden and fierce, some of the audience almost embarrassed by the intensity of their reaction. They will be unable to account for it by any reiteration of Slaven’s speech that they can manage. In the midst of the clapping a male voice cries, ‘Yes, a message at last,’ and Ayesbury’s thanks are disregarded in the press and chatter. A red-headed woman takes the opportunity to seize Slaven’s arm.

  ‘How wonderful,’ she says, ‘to hear someone talk openly of practical Christianity again.’ She is in middle-age, attractive in a horsey way: all nose and blunt, sound teeth. Her name tag identifies her as Marjorie Usser, Red Cross. ‘In particular I commend your emphasis on gender equity,’ Marjorie says, another aspect of his speech of which Slaven has been unaware. Several other people are grouped here, smiling, nodding in agreement with Marjorie’s congratulations. One tall, diffident man has a half-smile of entreaty and a tear, surely, glistening at the bottom of his left cheek.

  ‘Good one,’ he says and all the while his entreating eyes meet Slaven’s to say, you and I know, don’t we, you and I know the workings of the bloody world.

  Slaven feels a sharp gratification that he has moved them, but even with Marjorie Usser’s hand on his arm and in the gaze of other admirers, his eyes slide away for an instant in defence against the unspoken, yet insistent, emotional demand. By the door, looking uncertain whether to join the queue for coffee, approach Slaven, or leave altogether, is a bald-headed man in shorts and tramping boots. Maybe he is a CD volunteer on stand-by, thinks Slaven. He wears a tartan shirt with the sleeves rolled up on his brown arms and the muscles on his legs would satisfy any life drawing class. On the wall behind is a dark glass square which can be activated to display a map of the city in any one of four modes — location of diesel and petrol stores, hospital services and GP clinics, supermarkets and grocery warehouses, warden posts and CD zone divisions.

  ‘You must, must talk to us at the Red Cross,’ says Marjorie. Her upper lip has the soft, pink fullness some horses’ lips have and it is finely lined.

  ‘Yes, yes.’ It is the man with the tears on his cheek, wishing to register vehement concurrence without being sure of its object. At a distance Ayesbury raises and lowers a coffee mug as a sign to Slaven. A solid, plastic mug best suited to withstand the holocaust. Marjorie takes her hand from Slaven’s arm.

  ‘I mustn’t take all your attention. But heavens, what ideas, and the time is right for them,’ she says with a departing squeeze. Slaven, watching her go, sees also that there is no one standing at the door, just the dark glass of the map screen reflecting the lights of the operations room.

  ‘Some of them took to it greatly. Very well done, but not quite what I expected.’ Ayesbury’s voice has a tinge of envy which adds to the sincerity. Slaven remembers those nights when he lay prone and his mind was prone also, to race unpleasantly. He would lie in the darkness looking towards the corridor light and hear Norman Proctor sighing with each breath, a sound of hopeless submission. How Slaven’s burns had tormented him when the drugs were wearing off in the night and also strange, new imperatives which took possession and began to plan the rest of his life.

  ‘Of course in Civil Defence it’s not so much the theory of things that matters,’ says Ayesbury. ‘Logistics, communications, accurate assessment, decision making and deployment of personnel, they’re really the concern when the crunch comes. What has happened and what can be done about it. Why isn’t a priority when the shit hits the fan.’

  ‘You’re a counter-puncher.’

  ‘Exactly. Good to get all the background settled beforehand though. There’s no doubt about that. Last time I had along a missionary from Bangladesh who talked of the floods there and the different attitudes to disaster according to religion. She went down very well too, very well.’

  ‘Of course I’m not talking about religion,’ says Slaven.

  ‘No?’ says Ayesbury.

  Slaven tells Kellie about it afterwards, not the Bangladesh business, but his own talk and its reception. The tall man’s tears, the cheers, Ayesbury’s envy and acknowledgement as a professional motivator. ‘That’s great,’ she says.

  ‘I moved them, Kellie.’

  ‘I wish I’d been there,’ she says. ‘Did you get a fee?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I think you should for other times. Everything needs to be on a business-like footing and then you can judge people’s real feelings. To pay for something is to acknowledge its value.’

  ‘But the two are distinct aren’t they. The money and the value. What you say may be true, but still the two things don’t equate.’

  ‘That’s a different point,’ says Kellie.

  They talk inside and the garden is hidden by walls and the night, but they know it so well that they see it still, the colours and shapes, perspectives and fragrances, those plants in health and those which Kellie has been ministering to with special care. Talk of the garden is never really an interruption in any conversation with Kellie and Slaven has become used to that. ‘I’m thinking of extending the west bed somewhat, with a plot for tulips and a site built up for japonicas at the back. The lovely dark variety especially, rosacea.’

  ‘Ah,’ says Slaven, as if his own teeth have been probed and a weakness found. Slaven likes plants. He admires both the garden and his wife’s ability as its creator, but there has been that one last spot looking westward from the patio from which a more primitive landscape could be seen. A strainer post at a distance on which his sheep can rub themselves, a grey trough amidst the clover and grass with a bright stain from the crack on its side, and further back three cabbage trees.

  ‘You like japonica,’ says Kellie.

  ‘So I do.’ Yet they might cost him his view of the strainer post and the leaking trough.

  ‘And next?’ says Kellie.

  ‘Next?’

  ‘What organisation are you going to approach?’

  ‘I’ve no idea, but I feel a need to keep on with it. A need not just in me, but out there; a need out there. Tonight’s shown that, even with only twenty-three people. I can see that I won’t be at ease with myself until I’ve tried to give leadership and direction in the way which has become clear to me since the accident. Does that sound pompous? I’m not clear on what it all means yet. Perhaps it will be just for the time until my hands have healed and I can go back to the surgery.’

  ‘A mission,’ says Kellie matter of factly. ‘You’ve found a mission, I’d say.’

  There is a place, as you well know, quite close to the Beckley-Waite Institute in Wellington, but a private home, flats in fact with the Yees in the front one, the McGoverns in the back and Walter Tamahana in the bed-sit. The Yees have been out since the Democratic Reconstruction over thirty years ago, but have broken with precedent by not working the pants off their new countrymen and becoming rich. Instead Victor Yee tutors part-time in Cantonese at the Polytechnic, stoically looks after his wife who is a severe asthmatic and has the passing joy of a fortnightly visit to the brothel above the Tahitian t
attooist. Very late and very often in the intervening nights he opens his window and plays his clarinet with exemplary skill while looking at the dark mass of Beckley-Waite. He does not, you will notice, spend a great deal of time rejoicing in his adopted country. Will he ever get to hear the dentist from Christchurch do you think?

  Following the Civil Defence seminar Slaven has three calls. Ayesbury rings to thank him again and give him the address of the missionary from Bangladesh. Marjorie Usser proves that her enthusiasm hasn’t abated and the entreaty man, whose surroundings on the vidphone appear surprisingly opulent, claims that at last he has a clear purpose in life. He says also that he has taken the liberty of mentioning Slaven’s gift to a friend — the Rev Thackeray Thomas.

  Enter then, Thackeray Thomas, when the first autumn winds whirl old leaves and seed heads and husks of insects into Slaven’s double garage. He is sweeping it out clumsily because of his maimed hands, when Kellie comes in and tells him that a Thackeray Thomas from the Charismatic Cambrian Church has rung to see if he may come out and talk. Kellie says that the Rev Thomas has been struck by reports of Slaven’s comments at the seminar and would appreciate the opportunity to meet him. ‘Have you ever heard of the Charismatic Cambrian Church?’ asks Slaven.

  ‘Never heard of it. But he speaks well.’

  Thackeray Thomas brings his two sons when he comes to visit: fat, freshly scrubbed young men who are determined to gain the power of rhetoric. ‘Pay no attention to them,’ says Thackeray after the introductions. ‘They’re here to learn.’ So the sons sit with Slaven and their father in the autumn sun and listen to this conversation of their elders and betters — occasionally twitching their mouths as they silently practise some orotund sentence of their father’s, or understatement from their host.

  Thackeray Thomas is a man of average height who appears taller because of his bearing, the large Brythonic head, but most of all a voice which he wields as excalibur. New Zealanders remain suspicious of any pride, or skill, in words, but Thomas claims a heritage beyond his five generations locally — descent from the great Meyricks of Bodorgan who fought for Henry VII at Bosworth under the Red Dragon standard of Cadwaladr, and were rewarded for it.