Harlequin Rex (4 page)

The
next
morning
he
caught
her
up
as
they
walked
down
to
meet
the
school
bus,
and
looked
her
over
carefully
while
talking
all
the
while
of
Podge
Nicholson
being
strapped
for
insolence.
There
was
hardly
any
sign
that
she
had
good
tits
at
all.
It
struck
him
that
those
girls
who
had
a
show
in
a
dress,
must
have
a
real
pair
on
them
when
stripped.
At
school
he
told
his
friends
of
his
hypothesis,
but
they
were
more
interested
in
their
own
stories
of
the
female
form
observed.

The
old
house
was
made
of
timber
pit-sawn
on
the
property,
and
it
gave
way
only
grudgingly
to
the
cold
rot
of
neglect
that
came
as
the
trees
enclosed
it.
The
laundry
and
dairy
had
been
lean-tos,
and
the
lavatory,
originally
a
long
drop,
was
a
short
walk
from
the
back
door
and
shielded
by
a
trellis
of
roses.
The
last
time
David
had
looked
at
the
old
house,
a
red
hand-separator
had
been
rusting
on
the
dunny
seat,
and
moss
bulging
on
the
crumbling
concrete
of
the
 
path.
The
trellis
had
suffered
a
soft
collapse,
but
there
were
small
rose
flowers,
fresh
and
white
in
the
shade.

He
was
forced
to
sell
all
of
Beth
Car,
which
three
generations
had
built
up
for
him,
and
had
nothing
to
show
for
it
but
echoes,
fugitive
scents,
the
flicker
of
things
seen
there
—
the
Lawson
girl
before
the
mirror,
hills
white
with
frost
as
the
sun
rose,
pencil
tallies
on
the
wall
of
the
shearing
shed,
a
hand-separator
on
the
dunny
seat
of
the
old
house,
the
poppy
window
at
the
bend
of
the
stairs
in
the
more
recent
home,
his
mother
in
the
garden,
his
father
on
the
hill.

All
of
these
memories
should
have
been
enriching
but,
instead,
each
was
stained
with
guilt.

‘I’m taking my lot for a dip,’ Raf said. David told him that they were his lot just as much. ‘Ah, but I’m the senior aide, though,’ Raf said. ‘It’s like that strict army hierarchy: even if you’re gazetted only minutes before someone else, you take absolute precedence in field command. In your case you’re well behind. Fucking useless, in fact. I should by rights be taking half your pay.’ Raf scrutinised his port bottle while he talked, as if reading his lines from the label. ‘Bloody stuff’s made in the North Island,’ he said despondently.

‘They can’t all go,’ David told him. ‘Abbey, for example. Abbey’s been peculiar all morning. She’s going to blow.’

‘Let her blow. If it happens, then the mudflats are ideal. All give, yet complete retention. She’ll be better there than down at Treatment.’

Raf began going through the block urging people to go down for a swim. Some rooms were empty, but most of Takahe had walked back after lunch for want of any more pressing destination. Ham it had been: a great mass of green salad it had been, slick with a clear dressing, as if dipped in sweat.

Many of the guests had been significantly decisive in the
lives they had before Harlequin, but their confidence was knocked, and most had become resigned to suggestion. Only trivial or peevish expressions of self-determination were shown — like not waiting in the car park for all to assemble as Raf wanted, but straggling down the long drive to the sea. In time over twenty were on the move in the hot, still afternoon.

David noticed how clearly their order of march reflected their state of health for the day. Gaynor Runcinski, Eddie Simm, Howard Peat, Big Pulii and Sara Keppler were in the front, and interacting as a group. They could quite well have been a seminar syndicate on super nova, or a progressive dinner party between courses. At the back, however, and falling further behind, were the odd-gaited and self-absorbed like Abbey, Wilfe Orme and Jason Brown. Like mob
stragglers
with foot-rot, they wavered and wandered on the gravel drive, kept generally in the direction of the shore only by Raf’s insistence. Jason was smacking his bare arms and assuring himself, and others within earshot, that the cork in his arse would prevent him from bleeding to death.

‘God won’t be mocked,’ Dilys Williams was saying peevishly. ‘Why won’t people take any notice of the things going on in this place? Surely in a hospital there should be godliness and better meals.’

Across the public road, down a runnel of a track through the matted grass and stiff, yellow-brown rushes to the shore. Short rushes, thick as an upturned scrubbing brush, and holding aloft small pieces of driftwood and other flotsam as a sign of some stormy high tide. The mud was there all right, a dark kidney lying heavily inert, but there were also tide channels across it where the currents swept away the mud, and the bed gleamed with runs of compact pale sand,
blue-grey
stones, shell pieces, dark shards of wood heavy as the stones. The whole mudflat was pocked with crab burrows and, as the first of the group came down, the crabs stopped fossicking and fighting, and scurried home. One receding
flicker of movement across all the wet slick, and then nothing for a time. The sea way out was very blue: like a child’s ocean beneath the sun, but flexing and with fleeting pinpoints flashing white, violet, gold, because of the breeze blowing up the sound.

The track ended by the largest of the channels, which had become a swimming point for the centre. It must have been a good possie long before that, too, a place from which the deeper water could be reached, for there were three dark piles left as the remains of a jetty, no higher than a man, and these filed out from the shore like people also — thin and dark, with nothing to say of their former usefulness.

‘I’m getting in before the droolers arrive and start pissing in the water,’ said Howard. Like most of the others he wore his togs beneath his shorts, and in seconds he had stripped, clamped his towel on the peak of the first pile and begun wading into the channel. ‘Corker,’ he said in his
old-fashioned
way. He turned back to see Gaynor fumbling with her dress. ‘I’m going a fair way out,’ he said testily, as if there’d been some move, or murmur, to restrain him. His white legs seemed even thinner beneath the water, and were refracted away in apparent deformity. ‘No one’s to touch my towel, remember.’ He remained facing the sea as he called.

‘Yes, my liege,’ said Gaynor.

‘Silly old prick,’ said Sara.

‘I’m leaving my sneakers on this time.’ Undressing so informally made Gaynor rather prim. ‘Remember Sonya McDonald slashing her toe on something in here.’

‘Fair enough,’ David said.

Gaynor waded softly into the clear channel, the water at first just lapping her ankles. As she went deeper and further she lifted her arms up, and the water rose around the blue and white checks of her costume. The laces of her sneakers writhed, and the soles sent up puffs of mud and sand. The wind moved on the broad surface of the sound far beyond Howard. More people gathered at the shore, not quite as
eager as Howard and Gaynor to get in. ‘Look at the tits on her,’ said Dermot Sweeney with institutional frankness. Gaynor blushed, lowering her arms and folding them across her chest as the water reached there to make her shiver.

She was a textile artist of renown in her field: she had taught at the Palmerston North Polytechnic, and been awarded a travel grant to Tuttle, North Dakota, to study indigenous weaving. Her large piece, ‘Maui Fishing’, hung in the National Gallery. Nothing of that gave her credence as she waded in the mudflats. She was just a guest — an overweight woman not good enough to make the Takahe volleyball team, and diagnosed only eight weeks before as suffering from Harlequin’s. All was different now. All bets were off.

‘Oh, it’s very bracing,’ she cried. She didn’t turn round. The tears ran over the curve of her cheeks. Is that how dying is: joining with strangers in a place that means nothing to you? All bound on the wheel, but trying to avert your eyes from the agony of others. As her sneakers trod the channel bed, she must have been aware of the kidney mud stretching fatly beside her, the crab holes gaping like anuses to the splendour of the sun. ‘So refreshing, but there is that glare on the water,’ Gaynor said, and was immediately aghast at her own empty civility.

Gaynor was known to hold her breath in the latrine until her head went dizzy, but she swam well and swallowed in a sea that was shat in by a thousand creatures for a thousand years — sperm whales, conger eels, fur seals, penguins, purple-topped men-o’-war, Taiwanese fishermen and birds migrating to the other side of the world.

Behind Gaynor, others were stepping into the sea, making their own comments, and behind them more of the group again, arriving and beginning awkwardly to take off their clothes. Abbey had brought no togs, and was to swim in
T-shirt
and white knickers. She was too confused to feel demeaned.

‘Now this is the life,’ said Raf firmly. ‘Everything you’d get at Club Med at a fraction of the price, and you provide your own cabaret.’

There was a deal of wading to be done before the sea was deep enough to swim in. Some of the group were only paddlers and potterers anyway: working shells from the bottom with their feet, bending to inspect the reduced
creatures
which, on close view, could be seen to populate the apparently barren mud. Small crabs were the most numerous — green-backed and with flashes of yellow beneath their pinchers. They held a transfixed posture of minor threat, or vanished at a snap; seemingly no movement in between.

Raf stood yawning amid the rushes. His mouth stretched immensely, his eyes were forced to close, he gave the
high-pitched
sound that accompanies a full yawn. A sound that no doubt had preceded speech and now, millions of years later, was inexplicable. His hair, drawn back to the
pony-tail
, was damp at his temples with sweat. ‘Jesus George,’ he said. ‘It’s an odd way to make a living, isn’t it? Leading a bunch of Harlequins to water. It’s just as well we’ve no way of knowing our future, otherwise we’d never be happy. I thought I’d be rich in the city by now, and here I am as a minder, watching these good people by the sea, maybe killing myself in the process.’

‘There’s worse things to be doing,’ David said.

‘You reckon.’

‘Well, almost everybody here is worse off than us, after all. It’s all relative, isn’t it? In the country of the blind, the one-eyed man is king.’

‘Ahh-h-h-h-uh.’ Raf yawned to the sky and rubbed his eyes. He then made a seat of driftwood so that he could sit down in the rushes without getting his bum damp. David knew that Raf came down in the evenings when off duty, and swam far into the sound, his long, maidenly hair flowing out behind him.

The tide began to turn. Small surges were at first
contained within the channels, and then fanned out over the mudflats. Black swan were at a distance, and a single blue heron. A few pied oystercatchers and mallard ducks followed the tide in, fossicking for advantage along the water line. The guests began coming in also: well, at least those who had made any appreciable move away from the piles. The first in to swim were also the last out — Howard and Gaynor. Howard had an intrepid air about him, but no one praised him for being so heroic, so far out. Gaynor had mastered her self-pity in the privacy of the deeper water, and was cheerful and considerate once more. She put a dry towel around Abbey’s shoulders and began walking with her, after the others, towards the road to the centre. ‘There’s a broadcast of the Ivashkin recital tonight,’ Gaynor told her friend. ‘Rossini’s “Une Larme” and something by Astor Piazzola.’ The surface of the sound glittered between the hills, except where ruffled and dulled by a passing wind. A stock truck rumbled by to Havelock.

David had accepted the responsibility of being tail-end Charlie, and did a quick check of the shore by the channel and weathered piles. The grass and rushes trampled somewhat, the gathered driftwood people had been sitting on, just one floppy, green hat, which he thought was Jason’s, and he put it on before leaving the mud crabs to salute the tide.

‘I reckon we’re heading for a drought,’ Wilfe was telling Eddie Simm as they crossed the road. Anything was welcome which took attention from their affliction.