Harlequin Rex (33 page)

How
very
few
were
the
positive
things
David
experienced
during
his
time
in
prison.
There
was
the
passing
but
accepting 
friendship
of
Mike
Wiremu.
There
were
those
sustaining
images
of
better
times
which
came
to
succour
him
during
the
night,
and
which
he
packed
away
at
each
grim
wake
up.

Tolly Mathews and Montgomery were planning to get their own back on Hoiho's Woodsie because he was a whining bore who had complained directly to Mousier about the drug-taking at the centre — the non-prescribed variety. Rife was the word Woodsie used continually, liking its pejorative flavour. Others in his block said he had journalistic
affiliations
and was planning to do an exposé on Mahakipawa for one of his home city magazines. Auckland was the city. For Tolly and Montgomery ‘Auckland' was far more pejorative than ‘rife'.

Tolly called Woodsie Form Monitor, and sometimes, by extension, Lizard. Woodsie's Harlequin episodes had the unusual symptom of being prefigured by his awareness of feral animal noises, and Montgomery had taped some from a television programme on the Serengeti. It was vindictive and inexcusable, of course, but then they all existed in a bat-wing door saloon life: care and comfort becoming at a stroke the free fall of terror. ‘It's combat conditions here, isn't it?' said Tolly. ‘Even our bloody recreations have to be heightened to compete with Harlequin.'

‘It might flip him,' said Raf. He was reluctant to put a
damper on the fun, but his position demanded at least the protestations of fair play and caution.

‘So?' said Tolly.

Woodsie liked espresso coffee: it provided an opportunity for him to talk about his experiences in France. A week in Paris had made him an oracle on the culture. Montgomery and Tolly got hold of some coffee and thimble cups. They set up at the car park end of the Takahe verandah, and hid the cassette player in the facing azalea garden. Montgomery had the remote. The nights were becoming warmer: the buildings seemed to expand in it, and the lawns drifted into the shadows.

Such was the complacency of Woodsie's self-esteem that he accepted it all at face value — the invitation, the authentic coffee, the Dutch cigar that Tolly amiably extended, the presence of Montgomery, Raf and David. ‘Don't mind if I do,' he said. His eyebrows were dark, theatrical tufts, and he tilted his head to the left whenever he was about to speak.

‘Coffee, Woodsie?'

‘Don't mind if I do. Jeez, the stuff here! Don't you find?' Woodsie pouted his lips to moisten the end of his cigar, and fetched up a tidy burp. ‘In Europe, though, now that's coffee. This smells good.'

He wore pale, linen slacks, and pale, summer shoes that could have been woven in rattan. Without eye contact, David and Raf sensed each other's aversion. Yet the Monitor stretched out his legs in the warm dusk of the verandah, displaying his drongo shoes, quite undismayed, made the small noises, himp, himp, himp, as he drew in strongly to begin his cigar. David had the quick thought that perhaps Tolly's vindictive humour had extended to lacing Woodsie's cigar with cannabis resin.

‘So Woodsie, how's it hanging?' said Montgomery, but Woodsie didn't pick the false idiom, or the genuine contempt, and began without any attempt at paraphrase on the story
of his battle as Hoiho block representative against a few intransigents there.

Tolly grunted occasionally as a social lubricant, Montgomery fingered his concealed remote, Raf and David smoked and, although maintaining the physical presence, seemed to project themselves out somewhere above the garden plots, drifting in the warm and expanded night.

‘But how are you in yourself?' said Tolly finally, the
in-joke
since the visit by the parliamentarians, and he stopped balancing the ash of his cigar and let it drop like a small dog's turd to the boards. ‘Eh? In yourself.'

Woodsie didn't catch the ironic repetition, and he wasn't offended by the interruption because it didn't take the initiative from him, just gave an invitation to continue with a different aspect of his life. ‘A good patch, actually, I'd have to say. Nothing threatening for a couple of weeks. Roimata Wallace says I'm fortunate—'

There came clearly from the azaleas the sound of spotted hyenas all stirred up about something. Woodsie's face puckered, and he looked behind him to the Takahe lounge, although he knew the sounds weren't from there.

‘So Roimata Wallace seems quite happy with you?' said Tolly, his voice not raised at all despite the hyenas.

‘What's that bloody racket?' Woodsie had forgotten his cigar, and his shoulders were hunched a little in defence.

‘Racket?' said David. He leant forward as if to listen more keenly. ‘What sort of racket?' The laughing of the hyenas stopped, and just the echoes scattered for a moment through the darkened grounds.

‘Sometimes you can hear the laundry machines at night,' said Montgomery helpfully.

‘More like bloody animals shrieking,' muttered Woodsie. ‘You hear anything?' He turned to Raf, who shook his head.

‘Anyway,' continued Tolly, ‘you reckon you're having a good trot — maybe even a pink form release coming up.'

Woodsie tried to relax in his cane chair, and he took an
interest in his cigar again. ‘Well, it's early days of course, but with my motivation and professional backgr—' There were lions coughing menace from the flower bed, and the challenge of a baboon troop. Woodsie stood slowly, with immense self-restraint, and went to the edge of the verandah. He leant forward from a post into the night. ‘You heard
that
.'

‘What?' said Tolly.

‘Not a thing,' said Raf.

‘Describe it,' said Montgomery.

‘What are you on about?' said David.

‘Jesus. Lions and stuff, that's what,' said Woodsie. ‘No bugger hears it?' His voice was harsh with fear. The others didn't reply; just continued with cigars and coffee. For several more seconds the lions and baboons were joined at Mahakipawa by wild dogs and zebra. ‘Then it's bloody Harlequin's menagerie,' said Woodsie in the silence that followed. With a formal and unexpected dignity, he thanked Tolly for the coffee and cigar. His textured shoes were plaited across the instep. ‘I'm going down to the treatment block in case something's coming on,' he said. His left cheek twitched despite his tight control.

‘Do you want me to come?' asked David, but the Monitor went off down the walkway, first one then another of his multiple shadows gaining dominance as he moved from the province of one light to the next.

Woodsie's punishment had gone according to plan, but there was less satisfaction in it than expected. Tolly knew that David and Raf felt a measure of professional guilt. ‘Don't be sorry for him,' he said. ‘He had coffee and a cigar, didn't he, and think of the trouble he's stirred up by whining to Mousier. The guy's a prize prick.' Woodsie's opposition to drugs, apart from alcohol, nicotine and caffeine, reminded Tolly of his stash, and he brought out his tin of joints.

‘I suppose I expected farce,' said Raf, ‘but seeing Woodsie trying to cope with the noises wasn't all that funny.' David
felt the same, and rather regretted going along with it.

‘Come on,' said Montgomery. ‘Just because some of us are on the way out, doesn't mean we have to tolerate Woodsie. A pain in the arse is what he is, sick or not. You guys will be wanting us all to join hands and sing, next. Maybe it'll come to that, but not yet, eh Tolly, not yet. If the jungle comes for Woodsie, then that's his lookout.' Montgomery stood up and went off the verandah to the far limit of the light which spilled from it. He looked into the night, as if he thought that Woodsie might have circled around and be out there somewhere, then he went further into the dark to the azalea plot and retrieved the cassette player. His disembodied voice preceded his return. ‘Those hyenas, eh, and those lions. How about that, then?'

‘Spot on,' said Tolly and he lit up, drew in with prolonged satisfaction.

Woodsie stayed only one night in Treatment for
observation
and there wasn't any episode, but ten days later he heard elephants while in the main foyer, and then the big cats started again while he was in a therapy session painting a still life of quinces, oranges and mangoes. David was told that it was all over in a few days: one of the quicker
meltdowns
the centre had had. Woodsie had a hooting contest with a baboon troop and then a full-scale battle. No relative came to claim the body, despite Woodsie's wide professional acquaintance, just the punctilious, bald-headed Picton undertaker and his offsider who whistled Beethoven with some skill on each visit.

There were mornings of such natural serenity at Mahakipawa that even the dying couldn't be downcast, and for those not under immediate sentence, their lives stretched so far ahead that the end was diminished beyond threat. The sky was intensely blue in its centre and paled on all sides without losing lustre. The sun laid a blaze of silver on the water which fragmented in a dancing shimmer on the blue of the sound further out. On the far side, the dark, forested hills held the blues of ocean and sky apart and trembled with the strain of it. Bird and stock calls, and the laughter from the laundry, carried as sharply as percussion caps.

It was the world's display of eternal permanence,
harmony
and indifferent beauty. The trance might hold for an hour or more, then people fell back on the familiar focus of themselves — bellies and bowels, bank balances and basket weaving, bickering and bleating. Was there a letter from the outside? How dare Mr Paycock use their floral cushion on the verandah. And the chance that day of being called to dance with Harlequin.

That morning the dance master would call for Takahe newcomer Rachel Ellison, but David and Raf didn't know
it as they checked the rooms, and reminded people it was laundry day. ‘There's a Maori man with a bowler hat on the foreshore,' complained Mrs Tunney as she put out her own washing despite injunctions which forbade it: no nightdress, but pyjamas with faded sprigs and flowers like an old
wallpaper
.

‘Tolly Mathews is telling dirty stories again,' said Dilys, ‘and, what's worse, the women laugh. But God won't be mocked, you know.' She wanted to be clearly heard, yet at the same time keep the door sufficiently closed to hide the box of Roses chocolates on her dresser, in case she was expected to share.

Peter Taiaroa had already been for a run, and was
warming
down on the verandah. David found it hard to accept that someone so young and solid and strong should need to be with them at all. ‘All the way to the point again?' he asked.

‘And a plunge at the end of it,' said Peter, continuing his exercises as he spoke. A sea plunge after a sweat-up didn't sound ideal, but what could it matter.

Mr Sarasvati was fully dressed, but sitting neatly on his bed like a day one boarder. It was his wife's birthday but, as he was coming down from an episode, he couldn't be with her. He was waiting until it was the right time to ring her. It was a good day, wasn't it?

Mrs McIlwraith was outside, putting bread and butter on an ice-cream lid she had wedged into the fork of a crab apple tree for the birds. ‘A great morning,' she said vehemently. David nodded. ‘What we used to call a real gas of a day,' she said recklessly. Her face, still without
make-up
, had a peeled look that reminded him that once she must have been young. She stopped fiddling with the food when she remembered something she was meant to pass on. ‘That tall, staring man from Kotuku came over earlier. He said to tell you that Lucy Mortimer has had a bad turn and is in Treatment. Not such a gas that, I suppose.'

The tall, staring man was Tilling, the noted soil scientist who had a room next to Lucy. He occupied his time by doing his own research on Harlequin, with Schweitzer's blessing. Why shouldn't his hypothesis of soil toxins be as good as any other? And it offset to some extent his sense of helplessness. Tilling must have known that David and Lucy were lovers, yet not once had he departed from his good manners to mention it. He had added to that courtesy by coming over and leaving his kindly message undemandingly second-hand.

The blue, the gold, the silver and the far, deep green still cradled Mahakipawa as David walked down to the treatment block. He imagined Lucy lost to self-possession and ease, lost even, perhaps, to awareness of who she was. She was nominally one of Tony Sheridan's patients, and David went to his office, gave his name to the secretary, sat on a padded bench in the outer office which served as a waiting room. Sheridan's door had a glass panel, and David could see part of a Gary Larson poster on the doctor's wall. A stag, standing on its hind feet, with arms akimbo and an expression of American candour. The murmur of Sheridan's professional voice was even and reassuring. After a very long time of about five minutes, Sheridan accompanied his patient to the door, opened it to farewell her, rather than giving dismissal from his desk.

David didn't know the woman; didn't give a damn about her except that she was preventing him from finding out about Lucy. A bony woman with a face so worn by humdrum domestic repetition that it was as plain and true as a
bread-board
. He stood up as a sign that he regarded her pause in the doorway as a trespass.

‘Thank you for your time, doctor,' she said. Sheridan had already crooked a finger and turned back to his desk; David stepped past her to follow. By the time he had closed the door, Sheridan was already on the phone to Treatment to get an update on Lucy. David sat: the stag still stood with persistent candour.

‘I meant to tell you,' said Sheridan when he'd spoken with the nurse, and crossed his heavy legs with an effort. ‘She came in at three this morning, but I've been absolutely flat out since breakfast.'

‘How is she?'

‘Bad is how she is, David. A pronounced degree of
hyperactivity
during the early morning, and by the time we got her down here, she was really stirred up and had a massive seizure in Treatment.'

‘Jesus.'

‘All of us are going to have to be more careful, but before she's always had an aura warning of an episode. Not this time. She's done no great damage to herself, but we've had to give her a fair cocktail to counteract the extreme vivacity of the attack.'

Even with some understanding of professionalism, David wondered how Sheridan could talk about Lucy in a way that made her one among others, rather than the unique focus she was. ‘Can I go up?' he asked.

‘Would she want you to?' said Sheridan awkwardly, but it was a fair challenge. David was thinking of his own need, his own fear and love, rather than Lucy's needs. They so rarely talked about the illness, preferring when together to create an exclusion, proof against even Harlequin itself for much of the time. Lucy had told him to keep away when she was sick. Would she want to be seen in the aftermath of an episode?

‘I would've expected the two of you to have come to some agreement on that,' said Sheridan. ‘Sooner or later it was going to happen, wasn't it?'

‘Can I just go up and see her?'

‘Okay, but not by yourself, you know that.'

Sheridan took a few minutes from his appointments to go up with David, who was too selfishly involved to appreciate it. The doctor talked of the number of treatment admissions there'd been that morning; more and more there
seemed to be some cyclic predisposition, he said. Off duty, Tony Sheridan could seem ineffectual, slightly bewildered even, like a bear who has lost his growl, but on the job his sincerity, judgement and concern were reassuring.

‘If you were anyone else,' he said, ‘I'd tell you how young and strong Lucy is, how important those things are in any prognosis, but you know that, with this illness, physical condition doesn't really come into it. The brain is the
battleground
with Harlequin, and if too many lights get scrambled there it doesn't matter a toss how strong you are. You know that. On the other hand, think how few episodes like this Lucy's had, and Culhane's supervising her treatment personally.'

Sheridan and David went past the nursing station, and into a small room where Lucy sat listlessly by the one
window
. There was a high view over the centre's grounds and down to the sea. The perfection of the morning was all still there, undimmed, but Lucy seemed to be watching the glass pane itself. She looked up at David and Tony Sheridan when they came and stood beside her. Her expression was ambiguous, as if one film negative was laid over another of similar definition yet different significance.

‘Ah, shit,' she said quietly, ‘my inseminators are here. Schweitzer before breakfast and now Davy boy.' She turned her face away when David stooped to kiss her.

‘How are you?' he said weakly. Schweitzer had been before him in ways he had to face up to, but not now, not now.

‘As you see.' She was picking at her lips as if quite alone in the room. Her posture, the ugly splaying of her knees, the loss of self-consciousness concerning appearance, weren't part of any Lucy he acknowledged.

David put his hand where her neck met shoulder, but she gave no response. ‘I came as soon as I knew,' he said. ‘You've had a real rough one. I can sit with you for a while.'

‘Not while I'm in this shithouse,' she said. ‘Fuck off. I've
nothing for you, David, and you've nothing that's any use to me.'

Sheridan had moved back towards the door to give them space, and he motioned to David to follow him, shook his head to discourage him from prolonging a conversation. ‘Is there anything you want?' asked David and then saw in her face the recognition of the complete fatuity of the remark. There was so much she wanted, and so little he could give her.

Even the medication hadn't completely blocked out what had happened. How easily and utterly Harlequin could strike. As David was urged from the room by Sheridan, Lucy gave him a farewell without turning.

‘It's not funny when it's you,' she said. ‘There's no good way to deal with this shit when it hits. You could do to remember that.' She kept looking at the window and her shoulders were hunched in a way that reminded him of a sick bird. ‘Don't come here looking for me,' she said. She wasn't the Lucy he loved: she wasn't even the startling
jack-in
-the-box Lucy that Harlequin released. She was a limbo Lucy harnessed and sickened by drugs.

Sheridan told him in the corridor, and again in the lift, that he should remember that Lucy wasn't herself, not
responsible
for the things she said because of the treatment and the severity of her episode. ‘Why am I telling you this, when you work here every day,' said Sheridan with a short laugh when they reached his office again. He screwed his face up in unprofessional chagrin at not being able to offer something more personal and insightful, and said that, although he had a patient due, he could meet David later, perhaps have lunch in the grounds. ‘Damn,' was the last thing David heard him say, self-referentially, at a distance, closing his door behind him.

What David felt was not so much pain, or even sympathy, but grief, which swelled his chest so that when he'd tried to say a few words to Sheridan, those words had trembled
before utterance, threatened to topple into shuddering incoherence, and he'd closed his mouth without allowing their weakness to escape. He walked from the main door into the sudden sunlight and left the path quickly in case he met someone, pressing on into the institutional neatness and display of the gardens.

Must so many be struck down at random, with no regard to culpability? Lucy was a goner if she kept getting major episodes like that. Was she on the way out, and nothing that he could do in redress? David's fingers cramped and his chest constricted so that he had difficulty in drawing breath. The things around him were distanced and diminished. The buildings hugged the ground, even the voices from the
volleyball
courts seemed to be coming through glass. The sun still burned gold in the unquenchable blue, the silver blaze still lay across the sound, but everything — the lights and colours, the voices and shapes, the buckled hills, the smell of laundry, the barking of the Samoyed — had about it a dying fall.

When
he
first
came
out
of Paparua
he
moved
around
a
good
deal,
the
freedom
to
do
so
giving
the
pleasure
of
novelty
for
a
while,
but
then
he
got
a
job
with
Samuels
Bros.
Transport
and
drove
sheeptrucks,
and
loads
of
hay,
cereal
crops
and
super
throughout
North
Canterbury.
The
towns
and
districts
became
familiar
through
the
distortion
of
the
summer
heatwaves,
and
then
the
frosted
clarity
of
winter:
Cheviot,
Culverden,
Parnassus,
Waipara,
Hundalee,
Hawarden,
Waiau,
Hurunui.
Drugs
and
prison
may
have
hardened
his
attitudes,
but
his
hands
had
grown
soft
again,
and
he
had
townie
blisters
for
a
time,
which
shamed
him,
but
in
a
few
weeks
his
fitness
came
back
to
him;
he
could
feel
the
even
and
economical
pull
of
muscle
and
sinews
as
he
worked
with
bags,
bales,
cartons
and
pallets,
on
and
off
the
deck.
His
senses
sharpened
so
that
he
was
conscious
again
of
the
slight
soapiness
of
draught
beer
in
the
mouth,
of
the
birds
in
a
sky
far
too
bright
to
scrutinise,
of
the
aroma
of
sheep 
shit
and
oily
fleeces,
the
easy
song
of
the
big
diesel
when
its
revs
suited
both
load
and
road,
the
uneasy
squeak
of
corrugated
iron
on
the
sheds
in
the
feared
nor'-wester.
Only
occasionally,
on
flat
Sunday
afternoons
when
regrets
crowded
in,
did
he
lie
in
the
Samuels'
bach
at
Gore
Bay
and
smoke
shit,
until
the
water
stains
on
the
makeshift
ceiling
became
most
elegant
decoration,
and
his
decline
from
private
school,
university
and
ownership
of
part
of
the
country
itself,
seemed
the
most
natural
and
blameless
of
careers.