Harlequin Rex (20 page)

David
wanted
to
explain
that
it
was
something
else,
that
he
and
Chris
had
fashioned
a
life
based
on
more
than
money
and
indifference
to
the
fate
of
others.
He
wanted
the
lawyer
to
experience
the
evenings
of
discussion
beneath
the
country
stars,
to
appreciate
the
reputation
they
established
for
full
weight
and
full
value
in
their
dealings,
to
understand
the
satisfaction
of
the
work
and
planning
needed
for
their
crop.
In
the
first
interview
he
tried
to
open
all
that
up,
but
saw
almost
immediately
how
incidental
it
was
to
his
lawyer,
or
anybody
else:
how
expressly
common
rather
than
unique
his
crime
was,
how
self-serving
and
selective
his
account,
how
obviously
a
camouflage
for
the
easy
out.

And
sitting
with
the
lawyer,
whose
hands
bumbled
on
 
the
desk,
David
understood
something
of
the
indignant
anger
of
many
accused,
at
having
their
complex
and
subtle
experience
tossed
into
a
job
lot
marked
fraud,
or
rape,
or
theft
as
a
servant,
or
treason
against
one’s
country.

‘
Maybe
in
three
or
four
years,
’
said
his
lawyer
at
that
first
full
discussion,
‘
all
this
will
be
perfectly
legal
and
invoke
no
penalty
at
all.
There’s
been
strong
lobbying
for
years
now.’

David
had
relied
on
the
strength
of
it,
and
been
made
all
the
more
the
fool.
In
the
end,
although
neither
David
nor
the
lawyer
realised
it
at
that
meeting,
it
was
to
cost
him
the
farm.
Chris
made
no
effort
to
evade
his
share
of
the
blame,
but
it
wasn’t
his
property.
In
reduced
form
their
friendship
survived
even
the
loss
of
Beth
Car,
but
it
would
never
be
the
same
again.

David
was
grateful
that
his
father
wasn’t
alive
to
see
him
take
the
fall.

The
lawyer’s
firm
had
just
that
day
moved
into
new
offices
of
marble
veneer
and
stained
wood
above
a
Thai
restaurant,
and
looking
out
over
Cranmer
Square.
He
told
David
that
he
was
only
the
second
client
he’d
seen
in
the
premises,
and
apologised
for
his
files,
which
were
in
cartons
on
the
floor
until
the
polyurethane
dried
in
the
storage
alcove.
How
narrow
was
the
point
of
contact
between
their
lives.
The
lawyer
that
night
talked
to
his
wife
of
the
new
offices,
the
polyurethane,
the
disagreement
with
the
senior
partner
on
vertical
slat
blinds,
and
said
nothing
at
all
of
David
—
an
overeducated
farmer,
who
had
become
a
grower
and
supplier
of
cannabis,
and
would
be
sent
to
prison
for
it.

‘The
positive
angle,’
the
lawyer
said,
clumsily
adjusting
the
computer
screen
on
his
desk,
‘is
that
there
are
no
elements
of
intimidation
or
violence
whatsoever.
I
shall
indeed
bring
that
out
strongly,
quite
strongly.’

Their
lives
met
just
briefly
on
the
ricochet,
but
David’s
case
may
still
be
on
disk,
and
also,
as
a
precaution
perhaps,
in
a
manila
folder
tied
with
a
pale
pink
ribbon,
and
scented
still
faintly
with
polyurethane.

The cardboard with its abuse of crazies was still there in Lucy’s room when David next went across. It was pinned to the back of the door, directly in David’s line of sight as he listened to Lucy talk about herself in a way quite
uncharacteristic
.

‘Maybe it’s not all bad. Maybe there’s some opportunity in it to understand more about yourself: things that are never able to be acknowledged when you’re healthy. Among all the dangers there’s the exhilaration, too, of freedom, of letting the old nature dance free of the leash at last.’ Lucy was talking quietly, as much to challenge herself as for communication. ‘Everyone who has it, talks of that release, as well as the fear that comes with loss of control. The last couple of episodes I’ve felt something of it for the first time.’

Of course the guests talked among themselves, but David was surprised by the realisation that Lucy sought such comfort, and then surprised by his own selfishness in
assuming
that, as a lover, he supplied all she needed. ‘I’m buggered if I see any opportunity in this thing,’ he said.

‘There are people who think Harlequin is the beginning of some fundamental psychic change for both individual
and community. Did you know that? A leap into the future.’

‘Jesus,’ David said. ‘A leap back, you mean. That’s what the clinical record shows. It’s old brain emergence, you know that. It can kill you, and you talk about opportunities.’

‘Yes, the past too,’ she said, ignoring death for the time. ‘Sometimes I’m in several places at once — an overlay of experiences. Maybe I’m standing watching the volleyball, and hear a squeaking that I recognise as my sister’s trike, smell the faint Rive Gauche of Mum’s wardrobe, see the water pellets on the polished bonnet of Dad’s Camry, or the faces of a studio audience across the court. They don’t move their heads although the ball goes back and forth. In the dining room I put battered fish into my mouth, but taste the metal of the braces I wore when I was ten. I can sit waiting for my treatment appointment, and feel Ron Sanders’s hand edging down to my breasts after the leavers’ dance.’

‘Like this?’ said David.

‘Better.’ Her hand stilled his. ‘Something said ages ago comes back again not as recollection, but as an interruption when I’m in the middle of another conversation.’

‘Who knows what Harlequin does inside the brain.’ Almost he wished that he was a patient too, that there was some way that he could share the thing that was the
difference
between them far greater than gender, background, or belief. How honest should he be?

Usually they kept Harlequin out of their talk, their love: he had domain enough in other aspects of their lives, but Lucy was for once getting it all out, and she sat up as if the posture helped her to order her ideas. The softest of rain fell on the lawns and gardens of the Slaven Centre, and brought out blackbirds hopeful that the worms would rise. The birds on the ground cocked their heads in alert silence, but those on the gutterings cried ‘Ruby, ruby’. Lucy looked out intently as if close observation helped her to focus her thoughts about Harlequin. ‘Structures break down, you see. Things don’t keep their place, but whirl around. The whole box of tricks
starts to shake loose, and finally there’ll be no divisions at all. Once your brain starts that — the deceit, I mean — then you’re gone. No firm ground any more, even within yourself. Everything you hear is both achingly sublime and ultimately incomprehensible, like hearing your name called longingly in a crowd, but when you turn no one welcomes you.’

‘The medics go on about the heightening effects.’ David tried to keep talking as if Harlequin was at a distance; as if Lucy wasn’t a host; as if his throat wasn’t tight with the effort to talk normally. With his tongue he could feel where the utterly smooth skin of her shoulder blade changed to the slightly rougher texture that was more often exposed to the wind and the sun.

‘Oh, yeah, Harlequin can take you for a real ride: better than the happy baccy you bring me, better than a good cab sav, better than — go on, ask me?’

‘Better than sex?’ He tightened his arm around her to comfort them both.

‘Well, lover boy, let’s make conjunctions, not
comparisons
. Sex and Harlequin, now there’s some hell of a buzz: whirling up from the fire and not knowing when you’ll ever fall again.’ She knew what he was thinking. ‘Of course with you it’s like that even without Harlequin.’

‘Don’t joke about it,’ he said. The university guy, Tilling, who had the next room to Lucy, walked away across the lawn and left footprints where he trod the fine droplets down.

‘Often I’m so scared I can’t sleep.’

‘But don’t joke about it.’ He didn’t turn round. He made no further movement of physical condolence — to do so would have brought him to tears.

‘You get punished for fucking in so many ways,’ Lucy said. ‘Maybe Harlequin’s in there too. Maybe when you’re giving me one, I’m giving it to you.’

‘No, that’s one of the first means of transmission they checked, with Aids and so on.’

‘Schweitzer said an interesting thing.’ Lucy had these
titbits from her sessions with the director, but David was thinking about the Black Death: how people thought that it came from the air. A vapour, like gassing in the First World War, because no one knew it was fleas on rats moving from the East. It would be like that with Harlequin. The textbooks would record that people blamed sex, stress, evolutionary degeneration, or pesticides, while all the time it was
something
right under their noses. ‘—yet no one at the conference had come across a case of a patient with a properly diagnosed psychiatric illness catching Harlequin. Now that
is
odd,’ said Lucy.

‘It’s like Jenner using cowpox to inoculate against smallpox. You protect yourself from going mad in the new way, by going mad in the old way. Some of the staff here must be trying it, don’t you reckon?’ He was able to turn to her as they laughed, joking as he’d told her not to, and they stretched out again on the narrow, firm bed. Everywhere their bodies touched was pleasure. Combing his fingers through hers, he noticed how gracile were hers in contrast; how free of the hair and roughness of his own. ‘Jesus, though,’ he said, ‘no known cause, no established mode of transmission, no effective treatment and contradictory
statements
of essential symptoms. We’re doing so marvellously bloody well. If it wasn’t for thousands of people dying, we wouldn’t recognise it at all.’

‘They’ll crack it in the end, of course,’ said Lucy softly, ‘as they cracked the others that people despaired about. People will learn to live with it as they have with cancer and Ebola. But for me it’ll be too late. I won’t learn to live with it, or die with it either and, because I won’t come through it, I don’t give a fuck for all those saved later. Is that awful?’

‘It’s natural, and anyway not everybody’s dying. There are some natural remissions, you know that.’

‘Eff all. You want me to put balloons up for that?’

‘Why shouldn’t you come out of this?’ he said doggedly.

‘You love me and you help me and you’ll suffer with me,
but you’re still glad that it’s me and not you.’ She said it without urgency or anger, as if she knew the feeling herself, and she traced the lines at the corners of his mouth as if she spoke of love.

‘Not as glad as I used to be.’ David was galled with guilts and failures, though free of Harlequin as yet, but he didn’t want to get into all that.

They lay down face to face, with just a sheet drawn partly up. On her side that way, her breasts lay together in slight shadow, their beauty a reminder that Harlequin left any distortion of the body until close to an end, and then, mostly by chance, did harm.

No physical appetite can be assuaged by recollection, yet the mind retains semblances of joy. Moments, glimpses, a spontaneous sequence, the sharpest focus of experience, ineffable repleteness, become a store of the marvellously erotic on which the spirit draws. They kissed. They pressed closer in the early afternoon: the drift of voices came from the corridors, laughter from those guests before the television in the lounge. Sex gave a brief dispensation from any threat, every weakness: from past and future even.

‘Feeling alive now?’ Lucy said.

‘Blow my brains out,’ said David huskily, and Lucy laughed and widened her eyes. Her breasts trembled as they rode together. ‘Look at me,’ he demanded. ‘Look at me.’ It was a good time to be struck down, but they weren’t that blessed.

And no Nan nodding in the outer room, no whaleboats putting out from Kaikoura, no guilt even, for a few moments. A kiss, with their throats still throbbing, then they lay, cast up, on the institutional sheet. The brief, blithe spirit of abandonment was over, but their warm fingers touched with complete affection. So it must have been all over the world for the fortunate, as women kissed women, men caressed men, men and women kindly opposed their differences, all holding each other with such a passionate intimacy that no
distinction was possible between giving and taking.

‘I wish the door locked,’ Lucy said. Both modesty and caution were too late anyway. David could feel the sweat cooling on parts of him not pressed against her. From the car park the sound of Bryce’s ute, from the lawns came the soft scents of grass and flower beds in the drizzle, from the sky a paua glow of the sun hidden by the flimsy cloud.

Yet the unpleasant truth was that Harlequin had brought them together. Perhaps David took advantage of the situation, to be of service, to lie with her on fewer occasions than he wished in the narrow bed of his room, or hers. He felt no guilt at all in regard to ethics, but a sense of the sad yet fortuitous way in which their lives had been drawn together. Everything for Lucy, her life most of all, was put at risk, and yet Harlequin also created his opportunity to love her.

Lucy was never willing to discuss her illness with such candour again. She endeavoured to ensure David never saw her during an episode. She made him promise never to come to her room without warning; never to visit the treatment suites if she was there. Yet he did see her when old Harlequin was in attendance. On a warm, aromatic evening when the several hundred of them had eaten lasagne, so it must have been a Thursday. Pasta was the designated menu on
Thursdays
: cannelloni, spaghetti alla carbonara. Great trays of pasta, with the Parmesan cheese sprinkled late perhaps, and its odour of succulent decay mingling with that of the mudflats below, and the stainless steel servery turned to ivory by a trick of the light.

A Thursday then, with just that combination, and all of them at the centre, coming, or going, or seated at the
laminated
tables to feed an inner man — one of the cruel jokes they shared there. Lucy Mortimer then, fighting like a fourth former with a Maori woman from Hoiho, and getting the worst of it: fists dog-paddling, language shrill and unbridled. Had it been anyone else, David would have been one of
those who separated the pair, apologised to the Maori woman and soothed the other participant before taking her to the treatment suites. As it was, he kept his distance lest Lucy see him, remained seated before the pasta, watched Polly Merhtens and Philip Tyler smooth Lucy’s clothes as they stood close and persuaded her to go down with them to Treatment. ‘I won’t be shoved about like a bloody
five-year
-old,’ said Lucy. It was a voice he hardly recognised. A voice utterly self-centred, and stripped of all the subtlety that comes from personal and social awareness.

He turned away from Lucy then, not in disgust or dismissal, but in helplessness and loving knowledge that it was too cruel to be a witness. She might catch sight of him. He grimaced over the dining table, and popped his knuckles. The Slaven Centre at such times was just another prison: and Harlequin wasn’t big on parole.