A Many Coated Man

by Owen Marshall

  Les Croad drives quickly on the motorway. The lights set into the island embankments wink past as regular as heartbeats. The lights beyond are a delicate shimmer which disguises the reality of the city — the main thoroughfares traced with yellow through the starlight private whites, the commercial clusters of flashing blue and green. And from the outside, on the one-way glass of the car is all this same reflected, except that in the windows the lights stream past like sparks of phosphorescence in a dark wake.

  There is a place, in an arcade, or is it a mall. A cave in a main street and so out of the light night breeze, but still allowing sight of the main chance. A large, slot video on which the guys play permissible pornography, but they are so familiar with it that their eyes slide away to the clothed women walking on the main street. They want the real thing. At the entrance is a Pacific Bank distribution point and the wind fluffs the discards on the paved floor and the guys even as they laugh together watch sideways to see how much is withdrawn, who has good tit, who’s well hung. They are the real thing. The laughter has no humour in it, just an act of territory and when they see good tit and arse the guys lift their shoulders instinctively within their yellow, leather jackets and laughter beats out to the wind at the entrance. There is a takeaway bar which helps to warm the arcade with tacos, burgers, fries and pizza. There is a video parlour and plastic pot plants used as urinals, dispensers for kiwi juice and condoms, a cubicle shop that sells posters of the video rock stars — Doctor Normie, Little Nell and the Hoihos. There is a bright, red arrow which starts, runs and disappears towards the parlour and starts again, except that in its length is one malfunction so that the moving finger vanishes for an instant in just the same place over and over. There is movement and light and heat. There is a crass energy which has its own appeal. An arcade, a mall, in the city you understand. It is the real thing.

  Slaven. In the week following Western Springs, with the residual triumph of that underpinning the quiet sun and flowers of Kellie’s garden. He has agreed to an interview with Ms Zita Lee of ‘Here and Now’ and he waits in a deck chair by the rose plots and the weeping willow whose skirts sweep the ground bare in patches. He has been so busy that to be at ease in the garden is a heady novelty, simple, external things a feast for the senses. After all, the recent advice has been not to lose contact with a physical reality. Kellie has mainly modern roses, but there is Annie Vibert with its small, white flowers prim amongst the less inhibited generations. Regensberg, Pot o’ Gold are here and Blue Nile with the bruise tint to its pale petal. Kellie has a spray which will flush the buds at her whim.

  They are in need of a different spray now. Slaven can see beneath almost red new leaves and clustered on buds, aphids, and on the thorn of a Kerryman with a red-purple flower nodding above is a mantis in a sheath of pea-green. Cicadas cry for their lives from secret places and there’s the whiff of sheep dung and oil and wool on the drifting air. ‘Actually I haven’t had time to read A New Drummer, though the political editor gave me a copy before I came,’ says Zita. Tipped back somewhat in the chair she is aware of vulnerability. ‘But I saw some of the St Kilda rally on the television and think you spoke marvellously well.’ Slaven wishes that he could ask her the most personal things — where she comes from, whom she first loved, the story of the small scar on her left ankle, does she bleach the fine hair on her upper lip, did she have a pet rabbit with eyes of jellied innocence, does she realise that her life is being passed in this way and that the sun liberates from her skirt a fragrance of washing liquid and wardrobe. Loving Memory, a hybrid tea, Kellie has told him, is such a beautiful bloom; dark, glowing red, rolled petals with just the suggestion of down. And he can smell the bleached canvas of the deck chair close to his face. ‘Our readers are interested particularly in the human dimension of the celebrity I suppose. Does that sound trivial? I mean an impression of you as a person apart from your political image. Things about your family and your background and whether you restore steam engines, or velum manuscripts, as a secret relaxation. Can you cook, for instance, delighting your wife with an egg and pasta dish.’ On the stem of the Kerryman the praying mantis slowly climbs, two sways forward and one sway back. The new growth of the weeping willow rustles on the earth and the cropping of his sheep is as scissors through fabric beyond the garden. ‘I can see your point. That you don’t want to be photographed by the side of the house where the accident happened,’ says Zita, but she knows the editor will be disappointed nevertheless. ‘You’ve been generous in tribute to the part your wife plays in the organisation of the CCP. That’s something I want to cover as well.’

  Several times Slaven’s father took him camping in the Kaimanawa Ranges, using all army gear of course, ration packs of mostly dried stuff, plastic water bottles in lined belt carriers, stainless steel pannikins which fitted and folded tightly together, gossamer tents which yet had strength and so low that after a night the breath’s condensation gathered and ran only inches above their faces. ‘Would you say you’re fully recovered from all the effects now?’ says Zita, ‘apart from the hands. You must have been very lucky.’ Slaven would wake early in the mornings and from his tent hear, or see, his father already up, washing at the ablution point he had established in the creek, or fetching a pannikin of water from further upstream. From training and pride he kept a tidy camp, things tucked away after use so that the site was never strewn and he could be packed and gone when quick movement was required. Before they left a campsite his father insisted that they walk the area to ensure it remained as they found it. Always there were the flies that found them out however, loathsome, yet with bodies of iridescent green, or blue. What could they possibly feed on normally in such isolation. Even his father had no answer. ‘You’ve said that you won’t stand for parliament yourself and that the Coalition has a policy of not putting up candidates. Is that firm, or a ploy as some people have suggested, to gauge support before committing the movement?’

  Only years later did it occur to Slaven that his father was something of an ascetic. It didn’t sit well with the idea of a soldier perhaps, but nevertheless it was true. His father hated indulgence and any easy way, He loved a rigorous self-discipline and a challenge, whether in the plotting room of GAMD, on the tracked missile carriers, or a ridge above the bushline. And a practical joke got him in the end: topped him. ‘Not that you’re old of course,’ says Zita, ‘but it does seem comparatively late in life to become so intensely and controversially involved in public life when before you didn’t even belong to a party. The PM was quoted as referring to you as a menopausal prophet. Any response?’

  French lace is one of Kellie’s favourite floribunda and Slaven picks a few buds for Zita as they go in. On the heavier stems are the sculptured thorns that Cardew and Sarah when small would snap off, lick and place on their noses so that they could play the rhinoceros. Cardew has his own horns now and ruts wherever he is able. His interest in Zita had been obvious when they were introduced on her arrival and no doubt he will be joining them for afternoon tea. He has been yawning over CCP accounts and arranging a rendezvous with a postal clerk in the Woolston branch. ‘I don’t suppose you’ve decided yet where the next CCP rally will be? It would be a scoop you know, even if I could say that it was to be within a certain region. The central North Island for instance.’ Zita feels more confident out of the deck chair. A more upright posture suits serious enquiry. She begins to determine Slaven’s star sign, the trials of his adolescence, his response to sudden fame, what regime of physical fitness, if any, he follows. ‘I hear that you have a bodyguard at the meetings, because of the enthusiasm of supporters,’ says Zita.

  The warrant officer had a good feel for a route when moving over rough country. He always said that you shouldn’t give away hard earned height easily and he would walk just below the ridge lines out of the wind, rarely taking what might seem like short cuts across the gullies. Slaven can’t remember his father talking in an overtly emotional way, anything about relationships, or persona
l despair. His conversation was more likely to be about his time in China during the Reconstruction, what Slaven would be able to do after university, evidence of the damage that deer and possums were doing to the bush. Slaven could tell what a natural, unexamined joy he drew from his own physical prowess: the steady, uphill pace, balance on a fallen trunk greasy with moss and decay, a vault across a creek, the pack close and high on his shoulders. He told Slaven that the countryside of China was full of litter and none of them gave a damn about cleaning up, because there wasn’t any money in it.

  ‘Professor Wheeler in the Horizons article said that the CCP appealed to a residual non-conformism inherent in our society. He said that the Coalition’s true progenitors were the anti-nuclear movement and the Prohibition movement a hundred years before that. Carbuncles that rise on the body politic, give vent to inner toxins, but disappear in better times.’ Kellie has a drink for them and as they come across the patio, Cardew joins in. He has done his hair and decided to be one of the family. Already he is shagging Zita Lee on the flagstone steps from the garden. ‘Do you feel like a carbuncle?’ Zita asks Slaven.

  Slaven’s father told him that he had expected a hot country, but had suffered from the cold. He said that the bits of China he saw had been worn down, walked over and handled too much and that it would happen in time to New Zealand. The people were surprisingly tough and ruthless, he said.

  ‘Emergency dressings.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Water additive tablets.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Attestation documents.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘Calculator and Veeb. Issue.’

  ‘Check.’

  ‘We like a human interest slant to our profiles, really,’ says Zita. ‘It makes it easier for our readers to identify with people in the news. Some earlier photographs would be great. A wedding one even.’ She thanks Cardew for his offer of a ride into Christchurch, but says she has her own car. ‘I’m keen to do a follow up,’ she says, ‘after the elections when the impact of the CCP is clear.’ The rose beds and the willow are still visible and the faded yellow and blue stripes of the deck chairs, but they have come too far to be able to see the oscillation of the praying mantis, the suckling aphids, or smell the combination of rose and dunging sheep. Slaven remembers the wilderness flies he hasn’t seen for many years, the astounding glitter of their blue and green and gold as flashes amongst the subdued landscape of tussock and bush.

  Kellie has a sure instinct of course as to what Zita’s readers want and an equally sure knowledge of what it is advantageous to provide. The reporter’s shorthand is tested more now than at any other time of the interview and Slaven abandons himself to the indulgence of this free afternoon. Even his son’s presence cannot spoil it. The sun causes a slight and pleasant itch on the new skin of the palms of his hands. Tonight he and Kellie are going to visit Miles and Georgina in their tower on the Cashmere Hills. Miles’s diet is restricted, but he still provides generously for his friends, but more than that, Slaven looks forward to the astringency of his cynicism, the disillusion without bitterness, or regret.

  Sarah comes to the patio to make the family complete for Zita’s interview. She claims an equality of journalistic achievement because she writes a horoscope page and she talks in great detail concerning her father’s subjection to Mercury ascendant. Of all the family she has the lightest disposition, which made her first a sparkling child and now a shallow woman. ‘People are coming round to it a lot again now,’ she says. ‘They’re realising that as astrological science has been about for thousands of years, there must be something to it.’ She is excited by the new life the family is swept up in, without worry about its origin, or outcome. She puts a hand on her father’s shoulder and her face is more than merely pretty in youth and animation. Slaven appreciates her touch. He has all his fatherly affection for her, which Cardew has lost, but little means of other communication. Today it seems not to matter.

  Slaven and his family interviewed on the sunny patio, with laughter, rapid questions and answers, Kellie’s effortless management, Sarah’s vivacity, Cardew’s silence and lacquered stare, Slaven’s certainty in his course, Zita’s warmth and sense of professional opportunity.

  We are several people within our one life. Slaven remembers his mother and father taking him to ‘Cavaliers’ on the evening of his graduation, the slick wetness of a Dunedin winter outside, the best of everything within, his parents dancing on the small floor amidst the tables while Kellie and he watched. His mother with a gentleness and ease which she lost, or was forced to sacrifice, somewhere along the way to the woman who lives in a retirement village in Palmerston North and who has grown used to the jets sinking below her window.

  See them; Slaven, Kellie, Cardew and Sarah come out to the tiled turning circle as Zita Lee leaves them. ‘There will be so much happening for you all, leading up to the elections,’ she says. ‘I hope you’ll let me do that follow-up,’ and she promises Sarah again that she will mention to the editor about a possible horoscope page. Cardew says he may perhaps call in a day or so just to bring financial figures concerning the CCP which may be useful to her. It is almost evening now and the Slavens’ quiet four hectares of the western fringe of the city are all smiles of garden, trees and Romneys in their small paddocks. The light breeze makes a gracious passage and just a score or so gawpers at the road entrance watch Zita leave and envy her the time spent within.

  The PM stands by his Western Springs promise of exploratory talks between the Coalition and the United Party. Slaven wanted Kellie to come with him in the delegation and she was drawn to the idea, but she decided that it would appear too much of a family thing and thought Eula could represent any special view of women. One private school voice being replaced by another, except that Eula Fitzsimmons is more conscious of her vowels, particularly when Sheffield Spottiswoode is of the party. Thackeray and Slaven occupy the middle ground in both elocution and ideology.

  They meet in Royce Meelind’s office and he is disappointed at Kellie’s absence. ‘What a flair for logistics has been discovered there,’ he tells Slaven and goes on to explain that the PM will come in as soon as he can wind up an urgent meeting with the Heads of the Producer Boards. Slaven wonders if by chance the workmen may return to the outer office and punctuate the PM’s deliberations with talk of sport and pig shit. Alan Warden is also here, not as Minister of Police, but as a member of the Caucus Policy Committee and confidant of the PM. Meelind is interested to talk of Western Springs and national development of CCP support since he and Slaven last met, the charter take-up in middle range urban electorates and what Meelind calls the South Island Breakout.

  Warden is more openly and cheerfully pragmatic. ‘Really though,’ he says, ‘you’re just a set of policies in search of a party, aren’t you. And in politics you find through experience that a party structure is the far more valuable of the two.’

  ‘We believe there’s a third element — a constituency, and that it’s the most important of all,’ says Slaven.

  ‘The power of opinion, you see.’ Sheffield takes up the point proudly. ‘People standing as one.’ He holds up a fist as misshapen as Slaven’s, but made so by the more gradual distortion of physical work in cray boats and tunnel gangs.

  ‘Coherence through leadership,’ adds Eula. ‘All groups and sectors fairly considered. That’s how it can work.’ So Thackeray must be given his own humour too and he runs a hand through his tousled hair as a preliminary to speech.

  ‘The moving inspiration of the word,’ he says. ‘Ah, the power and the revelation that come from authentic gifts of vision. Who can deny what those so many thousands came seeking at Tuamarina, St Kilda and Western Springs.’ The clergyman from habit stands up to deliver his lines and barely restrains himself from remaining upright and enlarging on his text. His words are always for an audience and ring in the confines of Royce Meelind’s office.

  ‘A parliamentary party though,’ says the Mi
nister. ‘A thing of structure and permanence which provides for able people a context for a professional life in politics.’ Slaven knows that Kellie would enjoy hearing all these views. She would appreciate, but not be convinced by, Warden’s enthusiasm for loyalty, for orderly and efficient function, for continuity and structure. ‘You’re holding a lottery of sorts I understand, or rather an auction, at which the Coalition will sell its endorsement to whichever party will accept the greatest number of the charter claims.’

  ‘All uphold the rights of working people,’ says Sheffield.

  ‘And others disadvantaged by a residually patriarchal system,’ says Eula.

  ‘The CCP is a means of restoring a more direct democracy.’ Thackeray half rises and then remembers the place. ‘One less distorted in its operation by political horse-trading. With no candidates of our own we’re not subject to the corruption and compromise attendant on personal ambition and favours owed. We state the policies of sound and fair government and we demand the parties give their intention in regard to them.’

  Warden aped the movements of a violinist and rolled his eyes at such naivety. ‘Intentions,’ he says with emphasis. ‘Oh yes, intentions.’

  ‘The thing is,’ says Meelind, ‘that I imagine parties such as the Statos Nationalists, the Electoral Revisionists, agree with all your points quite willingly. They know they’re not likely to have to implement them even with your support, but they’re dead keen to pick up a good number of extra seats.’

  ‘Bloody right,’ says Warden. He has a genuine, relaxing laugh. To be with Dr Meelind receiving the CCP delegation and with the PM due to join them, is a piece of cake compared with the tough decisions and aggravation that he’s often called upon to take as Minister of Police and Gaming.

  ‘Fair comment,’ says Slaven, ‘but the Democratic Socialists under Fassiere can win with our backing can’t they. And for you people, our endorsement would do more than guarantee your retention of the front benches, it would mean that no coalition would be necessary, even allow the PM to have the purge of his right wing that he’s been aching for.’