Harlequin Rex (21 page)

David told himself that death wasn’t restricted to any
institution
: that a natural conclusion to life should be accepted with healthy philosophic resignation. Some die because of growths within them, and some because no growth occurs. Some go spectacularly in the jaws of a shark, or a greater white crevasse. Some become small and flat in their beds, with no more movement, or relevance, than the green flecked wallpaper which they plumb-bobbed twenty-five years before. Some with eagerness await the dark angel; others are driven to a fine old Celtic rant before they leave the stage. Death is generous in the variety allowed its players.

Death, that great egalitarian: that customary and modest victor.

Lucy was unwell for some time after fighting in the dining room, and David observed her wish by not visiting. He was left subject to all his old guilt. And the most powerful new one, which was his inability to help her. He had a feeling that the air was congealing, and that after the final agony of suffocation, they would each be set there in time’s amber: all movement and resolution abandoned, despite the sea wind, in one last glaze of futile boredom.

Churchill called depression his black dog, and it followed him faithfully enough, drawing closer to his heels with old age. There were traces of white paint where David’s nails grew from the skin, yet he had no
recollection
that would serve as an explanation. Someone’s sneakers lay on their side with long laces limp on the verandah, and the stained ivory soles worn through to blue on the pressure points. Faintly yellowed sweat stains showed on Raf’s shirt as he leant back with his hands clasped behind his head. It was a poor creation after all: the uncouth gorse on the slopes, the sheen of the mudflats, the blatancy of the far hills’ appeal. No wonder that
disease
came easily. Raf and David talked without much interest in the topic, or each other’s company. They were considering an outing for their Takahe charges.

Despair is the sense of loathing we have for the world. David had access to alcohol as well as cannabis. A combined dose when he longed to escape the glint of Wilfe Orme’s discoloured teeth, the sound of the inane games show through the thin wall, the crass sweetness of Jungle Glade toilet freshener, the reptilian touch of the communal plastic chairs, the cattle splattering shit on the gorse slope, the partly repressed memories of his more significant failures.

David left Raf’s room, rang Tony Sheridan and asked if he could go down and talk with him: it was time perhaps to hand in notice and leave the Plague House before coming down with Harlequin himself. It was a temptation of fate after all, wasn’t it? No one could guarantee a lack of
contagion
. Maybe it would be like those nineteenth-century leper colonies, with the priests at last recognising on their own bodies the lesions that they had been ministering to on others. David certainly lacked sufficient sense of faith and calling to accept that with resignation. The Slaven Centre was a bolt hole as far as he was concerned, not a place of service. He thought about it as he went down to Sheridan’s office, but no matter how many considerations drew the scales
down on the side of leaving, the single presence of Lucy was more than enough to outweigh them.

‘It’s natural to have downers here,’ said Sheridan. ‘All of us in the medical services are acting contrary to our natural instinct to avoid debility, sickness and disease and, though we repress it, that instinct will have its release in some way or another.’ He was in something of a philosophical mood, because he had no more treatment sessions for the day. His legs were crossed at the ankles, and his huge shoes were like leather petals from a common centre. ‘I’m collating my research on the proclivity of Harlequin patients to experience episodes at much the same time, in the same way that
communities
of young women tend to a common pattern of menstruation.’

‘Or maybe it’s the food,’ David said unkindly. Silverside every Monday, pastas on Thursdays, Sunday simple salads that could clear out the digestive system of a Clydesdale. The whiff of mayonnaise and hard-boiled eggs lingered through the buildings as a transpiration of religion.

And Lucy was sick again.

David realised he should be interested enough to draw Tony Sheridan out concerning his research, but his own boredom and discontent were more important than the conventions of friendship — or the possible salvation of the world. More than anything else he needed some change of scene, some distraction from the modern blocks of the centre on the hillside and the peep show that was Harlequin.

And Lucy was sick again and there was nothing he could do for her.

‘Raf and I thought we might take some of our group on an outing,’ he told the doctor. ‘The ones stable at the moment. It must be good therapy.’

‘Where to, though? Picton and Havelock are out for groups — you know that.’

‘Oh, we’d be well hidden from everything but the sun and the sea and the sky. There won’t be any witnesses at
Pan Bay. We could all writhe on the ground, and froth from various orifices without inconvenience, or alarm, to the locals.’

Sheridan just wagged the leather petals of his feet, and stirred the baby-soft fluff at the sides of his balding head. ‘Go ahead,’ he said. ‘Sound off. I get paid to listen to
everybody
work off a shitty mood, but it’ll have to be done correctly all the same. You know, the form with the people who want to go for me to check through, the right ratio of staff, an itinerary — the full Scout manual stuff, otherwise it’s no go.’

All the needs of bureaucracy were dutifully attended to that week, and on the day they were provided with packed lunches: those with mustard in the sandwiches marked with a green felt pen. Sara Keppler had been declared unfit to go, and she wept, sulked, then disappeared just before the
mini-vans
left. How she missed her old fire-bug, Jason, who had been friend and lover. Tony Sheridan assured Raf and David that he would find her, that they should go on and not give Sara the satisfaction of spoiling the picnic. ‘She hardly knows what she’s doing at the moment,’ he said. ‘Once you’re away she’ll forget all about it and be right as rain.’

He stood at the car park with the Solomon twins from Titi, who happened to be passing, and the three of them farewelled the Takahe party down the shingle drive. Although only there by chance, the twins remained after the doctor turned away, and waved until the vans were out of sight.

Dilys Williams was in the front seat of the van David drove. She adjusted the seatbelt so that her breasts wouldn’t be crushed if they had an accident. ‘Those Solomon twins,’ she told him as an equal. ‘They steal stuff from the laundry room. And when they had a search at Titi, there were dozens of knickers and vests and stuff in their room. Even though some of it was named, they never so much as made an apology. Can you believe that? All this stuff in their room and they were as brazen as you like.’

‘Is that so? Jesus.’ But what interested David more than the alleged kleptomania of the twins was that they should end up at the centre, both with Harlequin. He wondered what Schweitzer made of that.

Pan Bay was one of the small inlets in the sound, with a creek flowing in a culvert under the road, and a shore of finer shingle — almost sand — because of some protection from the swell. The stiff rushes immediately behind the beach held up scurf from the last storm, and the wind was just enough to ruffle the shallow water of high tide. In all that they could see, there were signs of only one home: the red tin roof of a farmhouse above hedges, a pipe and netting gate at the road, a hand-written sign rigged up in a trailer at that gate which offered unshelled walnuts, and self-pick mushrooms at $15 a bucket, even though not one pale dome was in sight.

The mini-vans were parked to provide shade, and those who wanted to read, or sit and talk, spread their rugs there. Wilfe Orme had a tubular, folding seat that was the object of much undisclosed envy: Gaynor Runcinski and recidivist Eddie Simm set one of the chilly bins between them to act as a chess table. ‘A little cell of fucking intellectuals,’ said Jock McPhie to the wind, as he went off with his thread line to fish.

Fourteen was the limit that Raf and David were allowed to take away. David wondered how such a regulation ratio was arrived at — one to seven — and what was expected of the one if the seven ran amok. Aides were assumed to be like the little tailor perhaps: seven at one blow. ‘Remember,’ Raf told them, ‘no one beyond the sound of the car horns at any time.’ And how would they ever know until the horns were sounded? Mrs McIlwraith spent some minutes gaining a consensus as to which van would be the changing place for women and which for men. Raf said that he’d been on this course where they stressed the significance of delegating non-essential decisions to patients as a way of preventing
dependency and a sense of powerlessness. ‘All crap,’ he said, as he watched Mrs McIlwraith stirring up resentment among her fellows. ‘And who would seek an excuse to catch a glimpse of her scraggy bum in any case?’

David, Tolly and a few others went for a swim, but even though the sun was bright and the water warm enough, it wasn’t a great success, because you had to wade out and out before the water deepened much at all and, despite the stones of the small beach, they could find only mud as a footing further out. Even though they had light sneakers on to protect their feet from broken shells, the mud clung unpleasantly to their legs, and swirled up into the shallow water when they tried to swim. So they went back and lay with their heads in the shade of a van, bodies in the sun.

Tolly thought that maybe at low tide he would find a channel exposed and be able to walk out to clear, deep water. He was struck by the oddity of fate that had brought him to the place and the predicament. ‘Just a few months ago I’d never heard of Mahakipawa, or Harlequin’s disease, had no idea that God had a brother called Schweitzer. I had a five-bedroom three-bathroom architecturally designed house and was running three factories. I had women trying to catch my eye at conferences. The bank manager picked me up for golf. Now here I am with you guys: grass stalks up my bum, mud up to my crotch.’ He was right. Only the most trivial and the most fundamental concerns seemed to be left,
nothing
in between, and so the distinction blurred. Extinction, and the failure to win a volleyball game, were equals at Mahakipawa.

‘Don’t get on to all that today,’ David said. ‘Jesus, let’s just relax here and leave all that behind.’

‘I’ll tell you what, Tolly,’ said Raf. ‘I’ve got two cans of Speights for each of us. Strictly verboten as you know, but David and I have put our distinguished careers on the line for you all. So stop feeling sorry for yourself, and put them in a sack in the sea so they’ll be cool at lunch. And because
you’re such a big businessman, it’s your shout all round. Right?’

‘Speights,’ grumbled Tolly, but he went willingly to get the cans from Raf’s van. ‘What is it with you people down here and Speights?’

Abbey had replaced Gaynor as Eddie’s chess opponent, and they had the doors open in the other van so that music from the radio drifted out to them as they played. The aching falsetto of early Orbison seemed completely at home in a land and seascape that he would never know. Jock was smaller than a thumb, knee deep and casting at a distance; Gaynor, Wilfe and a couple of others were closer, idly looking for shells worth keeping; Tolly was almost full size and tying a driftwood marker to the sack of beer that he had sunk in the sea.

The Big O had been dead a good while, and revived musically several times since. The great stuff just keeps coming back, Raf reckoned. David remembered those
promotional
photos of Orbison with his blank, pasty face, and dark glasses to hide his eyes. And the voice giving it all away. When their picnic was over, when they were back at the centre leaving only tyre tracks and orange peel in the rushes and gravel, then maybe the Big O would still be bouncing ‘Pretty Woman’ across the sound and up the slopes of the bushed hills that enclosed it.

A launch was going steadily up the sound towards Havelock and, because any boat at all was a rarity, it held their attention. It hit the chop with regular reverberation and a person in a blue anorak went and stood at the stern for a brief time and then disappeared. ‘If I was in that,’ shouted Jock, ‘I bet I’d catch some bloody fish. This Pan Bay is hopeless: too shallow and with a mud bottom. Useless.’

‘You’ve not got what it takes, that’s all,’ said Tolly.

A picnic is a dangerous, insubstantial thing once
childhood
is past, for it sets expectations that are never achieved, and an institutional picnic is the least favoured and most
predictably disappointing of all. Like an artificial Christmas tree, or an orphanage reunion, it mocks the very feelings that it attempts to uphold. Abbey playing chess, Jock fishing, Gaynor stooping for a palely pink shell, Mrs McIlwraith exposing her demure ankles to the sun, Tolly wading back without the sack, were surely all wondering when the quiet, but fiercely spinning earth would throw them off, yet no one said a word of that, and they came and gathered at the vans for the apparently significant division of those packed lunches marked with green felt pen, and those untouched by mustard. The launch had become a water beetle far away, and Gaynor’s upper arms, well muscled from years of
weaving
, were already pink in the sun. ‘There are some small, dart-like shells,’ she said, ‘quite nondescript on the outside, but with exquisite colours on the inside lip.’ She had two like flint arrowheads in her palm, but only Abbey took a quick look.

As well as sandwich packs to bicker over, there was the imperative of choosing a banana that wasn’t too badly blackened on the skin. David and Abbey caught each other’s eye, but nothing was said. What purpose is ever served by the mutual recognition of such ironies?

‘The thing I’d like to do is come back here at night with torches and spears. I reckon that there’d be a whole bunch of flounder on the bottom of shallow water here at night. You can pick them out with the lights, you know, and spear them easily. Flounder like a soft bed without much current.’ Jock was having no luck at all with the thread line, but the vision of darkness, quick with flashing lights and spears, countered his failure. The slick mud was drying to grey on his legs, and his hair was spiked up like a boy’s when he took off his yellow, floppy hat. How he would enjoy a night with Post Office Bev’s floundering friend from Havelock, David thought. Maybe it was something he could organise.