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Authors: Owen Marshall

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BOOK: A Many Coated Man
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‘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 to 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 tattooist. 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.

‘Positively we are a social church rather than an institutional one you see,’ says Thackeray. ‘The ideas which you have and which you express so succinctly are precisely those which our church and the Cambrian membership have been working towards in the development of our outreach policy.’

‘I don’t think of my ideas as being religious and certainly not denominational. In fact it’s a sense of downing the barriers and classifications of all sorts that most interests me, the fellowship and unity of those people without any great power base of their own. I’ve never been much of a joiner. My profession has supplied almost everything for me as of right, but now I have this urge to attempt something on a public scale.’

‘I’m not suggesting that you become one of us, that you have any obligation to adopt a religious stance, just that you might find it helpful to accept some assistance in support of your ideas. We have a community programme which operates nationally for example, and which tries to respond to the needs people have instead of being just a recruiting agency for a political party, or sectional interest group.’

‘All I know at present,’ says Slaven, ‘is that I have a compulsion to speak out. I’m bursting with it and I don’t understand why. Maybe it’s some sort of folly that I’ll regret.’

‘Do you know Tuamarina?’

‘By Blenheim isn’t it.’

‘We’re planning a regeneration rally there in the winter. Us in conjunction with the Women’s League and local rural fellowship organisations. I have close ties with both Maori and Pakeha in the area. Come and speak at Tuamarina — a wider audience for your ideas. We get hundreds of people often and they’re just the ones you care most about I’d say. We think Tuamarina is appropriate for an ethnically inclusive meeting because of its history.’

The young Thomases sit patiently against the house side of the patio and their lips move as their father discusses with Slaven the forthcoming Tuamarina rally, but moving at this time not in a silent rhetorical preparation, but because they enjoy the fruit loaf which Kellie has put before them. They have heavy, luxuriant hair hanging very straight and Kellie finds that their names are Iago and Dafydd. The names are so correct that Kellie can’t resist asking the Rev Thomas why his own Christian name sounds not at all Celtic. ‘There’s Anglo-Saxon in the family,’ he says in a tone which shows that such honesty is painful.

Kellie asks him also what he finds in Slaven’s views which he thinks should be brought to a wider audience. ‘Fellow feeling, collectivism,’ says Thackeray. ‘An emphasis on the spiritual dimension in everyday matters. People can’t understand the social and political systems any more. They feel angry and threatened and disappointed because of their own ignorance and powerlessness. Most have no way of expressing what’s gone wrong, no concept of what can be done to correct things, so they fall back on isolation and selfishness, dog eat dog. But Aldous has the gift, you see. He’s been chosen to speak on the behalf of others. It’s a wonderful thing that.’

‘I’ve only done it once, just to twenty-three people,’ says Slaven.

‘It’s plain to see though. Most of those people are talking about it all the time. I’ve developed a skill for public speaking,
I’m known for it, but you have the gift you see. Quite different. You’ll always be admired now, or hated, because people won’t be able to ignore what you say.’

‘Sounds as if it could be an albatross,’ says Kellie.

‘A phoenix, Mrs Slaven,’ says Thackeray. ‘Risen out of the arcing fire; the lightning,’

BOOK: A Many Coated Man
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