A Many Coated Man (23 page)

‘When can I talk to him?’ The rain is methodical, restful. Cardew wishes the conversation over. He works at keeping his voice patient and cheerful.

When she is rung, Sarah says she had a premonition. When she last talked to her father he had no aura at all and the tic was bad beneath his eye. Cardew looks away into the steady rain and the low, pale cloud which closes down a longer view. Next he will talk to the Wellington Chairman. Having paid the piper he now wishes to call the tune. Sarah says she’s surprised Cardew managed to persuade him to go in for a rest. ‘Where is the Beckley-Waite?’ She’s never heard of it she says, but the horoscope is for change.

Slaven should have all the trauma of being taken into Babylon, an evening of loss and hatred and fear, but in fact the ease and goodwill do not rapidly wear off and are no less real to him for being chemically induced. As companion it’s not Bliss who most impresses him, or deputy-director Eugene, but the fellow passenger who remembers him from Tuamarina and who has been seconded to Montana to study the regenerative conservation of high country grasses. Vivien Castle. Dr Bliss is pleased that Vivien admires Slaven and shares an interest in the activity of the CCP. In the economy class also there are many who would like the opportunity to see and hear Slaven, but they make do with the small fame of having travelled on the same plane. Slaven talks for some time very freely about his own background and intentions, then is keen for Vivien to evoke Montana for them. She describes the high plains in both summer and winter, the small and mid-size towns with their distinctive culture, but most passionately the lonely, quiet places beyond Epsie and Sonnette in Powder River where she has done research for months at a time. The Montana air is the closest to our own South Island high country she says.

Ms Castle leans across to see the alps from the window and so make comparison. Slaven enjoys the fragrance of her and reaches a hand to stroke her hair, but finds Bliss
restraining him. The doctor knows what he is going through and encourages Vivien to become more technical in the discussion of her grasses. With Bliss between them, Slaven’s encouragement can be only verbal. He asks questions himself, then listens to Vivien and Bliss. If he turns to the window side he finds Eugene as observant as ever, though not entering the conversation. Eugene watches carefully the face of each person who speaks, as if to determine the psychological workings behind the sounds. Finally he leans to Slaven and says quietly, so as not to interupt Bliss and Castle, ‘How fortunate to live in old Montana.’

‘Why old Montana?’ asks Slaven, but the plane is coming in to land at Wellington. The runway extensions are like vast and empty piers under which the waves disappear.

‘I very much look forward to your campaign speeches in the run up to the elections,’ says Vivien Castle.
Baby,
baby
come
again
and
live
with
me
upon
the
shore
of
Half
Moon
Bay.

‘Upon
the
shore
of
Half
Moon
Bay,’
repeats Dr Bliss, who can hold a tune. Slaven feels tears well up.

Down from the sky. Slaven begins to feel both sick and tired, with tremors which flood his mouth with saliva. He can hardly bear the sight of the sleek fur on the backs of Dr Eugene’s hands. A car from the Beckley-Waite takes all three quietly away. Slaven can hear Eugene and Bliss talking of Vivien Castle. ‘Old Montana’s the place,’ he says. The others take no notice, except that Eugene tells Bliss that at one point he thought Slaven was going to saddle up their Ms Montana.

‘Anyway, he’s coming down with a bump,’ says Bliss.

See ahead of them spatially, chronologically, epistolarilly — the Caretaker, though the arrival of yet another inmate is no immediate concern of his. The Caretaker is removing a branch from a sycamore tree which has been keeping the sun from the second storey window of the east wing secure day-room. See the women and men standing close to the large window to watch. In their affliction most have lost an awareness of themselves as possible objects of desire, even scrutiny. Posture, appearance and expression reflect the change. Their stomachs are allowed a natural slump beneath
the dresses, or over the rough tuck of waistbands, their noses are ripe for picking, they watch the Caretaker with open-mouthed solemnity, or release sudden, secret smiles for no earthly reason. The Caretaker is working high up, on a plank he has locked between two ladders and his movements are both steady and cautious. It’s not an ideal day for the job, but he committed himself before that was apparent. The large branch is constrained by two strung ropes so that the Caretaker can ensure at least the approximate path of its fall. He wears goggles and the racing chain of the power-saw doesn’t disturb his smile. In a quiet spell, when the Caretaker is planning ahead and the women with their uneven hems are a frieze at the window, Ovens, the Beckley-Waite dentist, calls out as he passes about desecration and sparing a tree. He is a hard case. ‘Dont’ you worry,’ says the Caretaker. ‘I’m the bloody native here, not the tree.’ He and Ovens shout with laughter and some of the women at the window are startled into joining them.

At the entrance to the Institute the car stops long enough for the window to be lowered so that the deputy-director can be recognised, then carries on to the admissions suite. There is nothing auspicious, or impressive, concerned with Slaven’s arrival. The rain which in Canterbury was welcome and steady, is here just another blustery drizzle which stains the stonework and plasters litter to the ground.

‘I know you’re not feeling great,’ Dr Eugene tells Slaven. ‘We want to make you comfortable as soon as possible, but if you don’t mind we’ll just get you registered and make a quick admission check as the procedures lay down. Our Director’s known as a stickler for the rules.’

Dr Eugene has his own key and lets them in to the admissions area which is well lit, but deserted. Slaven is becoming confused and angry as the induced goodwill wears off. He isn’t sure of his surroundings, his companions, even his immediate past. Who uses these computer monitors during working hours? Who looks from the glassed offices? Who walks the strip of moss green carpet with the wood tiles polished on each side?

‘If you’ll just come into one of the interview rooms, Dr Slaven, we’ll get through it all as soon as posssible. Then
I’m sure there will be a meal for you,’ and Eugene ushers Slaven in and pauses in the doorway to thank Bliss for his help and tell him that he needn’t stay.

‘I’ll say goodbye then,’ says toppling Dr Bliss. ‘I’ll tell whoever is on duty in the wing that you’re here. I trust the rest will be beneficial.’ He shows his excellent teeth in a final affable smile and is gone.

‘We don’t need to do a lot,’ says Eugene. ‘Most of the questions I’ve already put to you, but there are a few things, rudimentary physical tests mainly and response notes that need to be covered on admission. Procedures snowball for everything these days, don’t you find. In dentistry I mean.’

Slaven begins shuffling his feet, then marching on the spot; the spot being beside a walking frame which has been left in the interview room to save anyone fetching it from stores. Dr Eugene carries on taking Slaven’s blood pressure and asking questions — has Slaven ever suffered from a communicable disease for example and has any member of his family committed suicide.

‘Discipline is a form of pride.’

‘Check.’

‘Eventually the body betrays the mind.’

‘Check.’

‘Never rat on a mate.’

‘Check.’

With one part of his mind, Slaven is able to view the scene quite clearly, see himself marching nowhere in a room unknown to him and before a man who is a stranger. He feels great pity for himself, but as he would feel it for another. An embracing Russian pity for the plight of all as one.

There are one and a half trees in the quadrangle outside Slaven’s window. One and a half are all that he can see even with his face pressed to the security pane and so he hesitates to assume more, whatever logic and experience on the outside might lead him to expect. They are kowhai trees, not particularly thick in the trunk, or very tall, but a roosting place for sparrows in the evenings. The last dull, yellow blossoms litter the cobbles like heaped corpses of bees. The sparrows come careering in over the west wing
and jostle for perches in the top kowhai branches which are almost bare as a result. The birds are slow to settle and move from one tree to the other, or swoop out of sight to a different place altogether. They make a great chorus of sharp, high cries which go on into the dusk. The conviviality of the birds makes Slaven more aware of his isolation, the long night which is coming, the next day when he will wake to find the sparrows gone without chance of flight himself.

The ceiling is lined with baffle squares, to cut down noise and conserve heat. Each one has a myriad of holes like a chinese checkers board, yet he has done all the calculations many times of course as he lies on his bed. Thirty holes on each side, but those in each corner are counted twice in that reckoning and he spent a good deal of time initially deciding how that would affect his sums. And the dimensions of his room aren’t determined by the ceiling squares and so there are thirteen hole part-baffle boards along the window side of the ceiling and a six hole sequence at one end above his bed. And there is one individual square, just one, which has one row of dots less than all the others which are complete. Slaven thinks perhaps that’s where the microphone is.

If he takes his stool into the extreme corner of his room by the window, he is able to see, as well as one and a half kowhai trees, a thin strip of the cobbled courtyard, an azalea equally captive in a terracotta pot and something of the city beyond. Such a narrow strip, curtailed by the blank bulk of Beckley-Waite wings, that it is like a road lying very straight and still before him. In the daytime he watches visitors at the courtyard entrance, few enough, and beyond is one, brief turn of a street on which he can glimpse cars passing. Sometimes Slaven makes guesses as to what colours will come next. Red is the most common, if he allows some latitude in regard to shades.

At night the cars are all far lights alike, each making a curlicue of beam and then snuffed out, but the band of courtyard closer to his window has an infinite variety of slight graduations. Slaven has the time to see nature go by on such a small stage. Moonlit nights reveal slight irregularities in the cobbles by hyphens and brackets of sharp
shadow and the slaters can be seen questing out from beneath the terracotta pot. Winds test the aerodynamics of the place according to their origin, so that the southerly bluster sweeps his view clean and the nor’wester eddies leaves, bunion dressings, cats’ fur, cellophane, grit and old kowhai blossom into the lee of the azalea and the bluestone wall. Here the water lies longer and deeper so that worms from lawn plots never seen are drowned trying to escape across the cobbles. If the wet weather persists they turn pale and flaccid, reminding Slaven of those things preserved in bottles which had been familiar to him as a student.

Slaven is unable to see the flats where the Yees and McGoverns live and has no reason at all to be aware of this disability, but often late at night he listens to a far clarinet expertly played and thinks what he has come to. He doesn’t share our knowledge of the nights without this music, when Victor Yee tends his ailing wife, marks his Polytechnic Cantonese, or visits the rooms above the Tahitian tattooist.

Slaven is having his swimming session with the others. The Beckley-Waite prides itself on an holistic approach to patient welfare. The pool supervisor has a large body the colour of butter and is a man of hideous good cheer. Slaven listens for his laugh, ducks below the surface to evade it and wishes he could breathe the tainted water rather than surface to that sound again. The great, crass, braying laugh of a man with no claim to the attention of his fellows, but with the determination to impinge upon them nevertheless. A humourless, interrupting, vulgar laugh, that reeks of ignorance, shallowness and unwashed opinions despite his occupation.

‘Come along, Aldous, see how Helen and Astral keep their heads down in the glide at the completion of a stroke.’

For many years Slaven has been accustomed to respect; for some months adulation even. The people in the Beckley-Waite don’t seems to care who he is. They are impervious to eloquence, should he try it, and fame from any outer world is a flickering shadow here. Slaven swims as one of the frumpish group, showing no aquatic skills to distinguish himself. He dances in exercise before a giant screen, is chided for his weight at the sensor plate, is humbled by the
vast butter man’s praise of other members of the group. Slaven, who drew almost 250,000 to Western Springs and has taken the PM’s hand in a sense of equality, picks up his thin, issue towel and is harried down the corridor to the changing rooms by the instructor’s laugh. ‘What a guy. What a hard case,’ says Mathieson in front to a friend. Slaven wonders why Kellie hasn’t rescued him. Why the world that thinks so much of him isn’t at the gates of the Beckley-Waite Institute.

‘Cheer up, Aldous,’ the instructor says. ‘You look as if you’ve been pissing in the pool again.’

In warm nights, Slaven pushes up his window the few centimetres it will travel. He sits by the grill and enjoys the air from outside. A relief from the dehumidified atmosphere of the air-conditioned rooms and corridors of the Institute. Tonight he notices again the fragrance of tobacco smoke: not the light, doctored brands which have given the habit a new impetus, despite regulation, but the coarse, lung-catching fume of the old days and with it some other fragrance that’s unknown to him, but which causes his eyelids to half fall in satisfaction.

Slaven has never been a smoker, but finds himself inhaling with more than sufferance: a need for variety to compensate for the bland institutional routine which is itself calculated to be a sedative.