Harlequin Rex (6 page)

When
you
are
young,
friends
are
often
made
instinctively,
without
any
assessment,
any
calculation
of
their
intrinsic
value
as
people,
or
the
outcome
of
commitment.
Only
years
later
did
David
realise
that
Chris
was
amoral,
and
later
still
that
perhaps
that
had
been
part
of
the
attraction
all
along.
Chris
was
a
jesting
plunderer
of
other
people’s
lives.

By
the
sixth
form
they
were
so
close
that
Chris
hatched
a
scheme
for
both
of
them
to
score
well
in
Shar
key’s
history
exam.
Every
system
has
a
weak
point,
Chris
said,
that’s
the
thing
to
bear
in
mind.
The
staff
were
very
aware
of
the
need
for
security
before
and
during
the
exams,
but
he
sussed
out
an
opportunity
to
cheat
afterwards.
Sharkey
was
their
house
master
as
well
as
their
history
teacher,
and
they
knew
his
procedure
well.
Each
question
was
answered
on
a
fresh
sheet,
so
that
Sharkey
could
bundle
them
together
and
mark
question
by
question,
rather
than
script
by
script.
And
Sharkey
never
started
marking
until
the
weekend.
On
the
night
after
the
exam,
Chris
and
David
rewrote
the
three
weakest
of
their
answers
from
their
class
notes
and
took
them
to
the
flat
the
following
afternoon
while
Sharkey
was
coaching
junior
rugby.
Chris
was
a
favourite
with
Sharkey’s
 
wife,
of
course:
she
could
barely
keep
herself
from
patting
his
gleaming
black
hair.
Had
she
watched
his
dorm
imitations
of
Sharkey
giving
her
one,
she
might
have
felt
differently.
While
Chris
entertained
her
with
school
gossip
that
Sharkey
never
thought
to
pass
on,
David
went
into
the
study
and
readily
found
the
question
bundles
on
the
desk.

Chris
was
complaining
about
exam
stress
when
David
came
guiltily
back.
‘If
only
you
could
sit
down
after
the
exam
and
have
another
shot
without
the
nerves.’
His
smile
was
ingenuous.

‘
I
bet
you’ll
do
all
right,’
said
Sharkey’s
wife.
Looks
must
be
commensurate
with
ability
after
all.

‘Actually,’
said
Chris,
‘I’ve
a
good
feeling
about
the
history,
but
then
we’re
lucky
with
the
teacher
there, aren’t
we,
David?’

‘I
don’t
butter
up
that
easy,’
said
Sharkey’s
wife,
but
of
course
she
did.
She
buttered
up
until
she
gleamed
with
it,
and
Chris
could
have
trussed
her
legs
for
roasting.

David
got
top
marks
for
history
that
year,
and
the
next
year
too,
without
any
cheating,
and
at
the
university
he
was
an
A
or
B
plus
student
in
it,
even
though
before
Chris’s
plan
he
couldn’t
seem
to
get
the
hang
of
the
subject.
He
thought
it
strange,
because
dishonesty
was
supposed
to
turn
out
badly,
yet
that
one
instance
of
cheating
seemed
to
benefit
him
year
after
year.

Tolly Mathews was having a good patch. He brought a bottle of vintage port, and Raf, along to David’s room. Tolly was a designer and manufacturer of bathroom fittings. His business employed seventy-four people, and had plants in Auckland, Palmerston North and Christchurch. Mathews shower boxes with their non-drip doors were used all over the country, and exported to Australia. ‘Let’s sit down for a bit and enjoy ourselves,’ he said.

‘I’m on duty,’ said Raf.

‘So they know where to find you then, don’t they? It’s exceedingly conscientious of you not to leave the block. You’ll probably get a bloody medal.’ Tolly still had all the money he’d ever need, but he’d agreed with his family that he wasn’t running the business any more. There’d been the evening when he drove a forklift through the window of a rival’s showroom, and an indecent assault upon a lingerie mannequin. ‘Anyway,’ he said, ‘most of the others are watching that quiz thing on television. Abbey reckons it has a calming effect. So many nutters on the outside perhaps, that it takes the spotlight from our own behaviour.’

David admired Tolly. Even though he was secondary stage
Harlequin, and privately horrified by it, most of the time he kept an interest in other people and happenings. He had an expensive telescope set up at the window in his room, and was teaching himself astronomy. Sometimes he focused on Amelia Struthers getting undressed in Weka, but that didn’t detract from his serious study of the heavens. His enthusiasm was persuasive, and he’d given talks to societies in Nelson and Blenheim, as well as his fellow guests. Amelia had twin dimples low on her back, where the curve of her buttocks began, and the light of her room would cast them into oscillating saucers of shadow.

That night, though, Tolly was more interested in drinking vintage port and enjoying a time free of symptoms. He fronted to the cool air from David’s window, and inhaled the complex smell of the mudflats. He held his port glass at head height. ‘This in defiance of the shape shifter,’ he said. ‘We’re not dead yet.’

‘Really top wine could prove to be the cure,’ David told him. ‘The boffins are finding more and more benefits in it.’

‘English squires thrived on a bottle a day,’ added Raf. ‘Mind you, the rest of the population probably starved to death.’

Tolly had an alert, boyish face, with only a hooked nose to spoil it. All his front teeth were immaculately capped. As well as design and business flair, he loved music and had a talent for squash, and that, unlike the other things, had been accentuated by Harlequin, as
physical
abilities so often were. ‘I’ve never played better than when in the grip of it,’ he said. ‘All sorts of athleticism becomes possible, or you think that it is. If Harlequin ever really takes off—’

‘What would you call it now?’ said Raf.

‘Full scale, though, then I reckon it would revolutionise professional sport. It might kill you, but Jesus, how much better than any performance-enhancing drugs. Harlequins will out-jump, out-run, out-wrestle and out-lift all the rest.
You see it here with volleyball sometimes, don’t you, just before someone blows?’

Tolly poured more port for each of them, and the taste of it was oddly mixed with the aromas drifting on the air from the sea. Tolly could afford the best of port, and it was darker even, more aromatic even, than the night. Raf’s flagon variety didn’t deserve the name. Was there any hierarchy among the three of them? Tolly was officially an inmate, and Raf and David his keepers. Tolly was rich, and Raf and David were not. Drinking and talking there, they were equal in the simple enjoyment of the night, and the shared ignorance concerning the illness moving all around them.

‘With the telescope,’ said Tolly, ‘I’ve become aware of a scale of things that bears no relation to how we live here. Yet, after spending hours looking at solar systems beyond our own, I feel a micro-organism’s need to piss, or eat rissoles with onion.’

‘Or switch to a view of Amelia Struthers,’ David added.

‘That most of all,’ said Tolly, ‘though I bet it’s likely to provoke old Harlequin.’

‘Then we’re all sufferers from the same disease, if the odd hard-on is a symptom,’ said Raf.

The small, impersonal room was briefly made a close sanctuary by friendship and tacit acknowledgement of a quiet moment, before time surged on. Life no doubt whirled as ever further out on the circle, but the thin walls, the lines of attention to each other, allowed them to forget it for a moment. A sheet of hardboard can sometimes separate agony from ecstasy. Tolly’s stars lay in the velvet of the sky, and myriad crabs gave their pincered salute from the mudflats.

‘What’s the news on Jason?’ said Tolly after a time. His voice was diffident, almost casual. David had earlier that day asked Dr Roimata Wallace the same question. On the way out, he’d been told, and knew that Jason wouldn’t be walking when he went.

‘Not so hot,’ said David.

‘Meltdown,’ said Raf.

Tolly allowed a brief pause for respect, then turned the subject to fishing, so that they could stay cheerful. Fishing from the shore was useless apart from flounder, but Tolly’s money gave him options. He’d bought a large dinghy and kept it tethered in the mudflat rushes of the tide line. He found out the best fishing spot, which was about a third of the way across the sound, and on the slope of one of the deeper channels that brought a flow of nutrients. He anchored a craypot marker there. It was faded to a blush pink, and bobbed persistently in promise of sport beneath.

David spent whole mornings, afternoons, evenings, in the dinghy, sometimes with Tolly, or another guest, mostly alone, rarely with Raf because of duty rosters. Fishing
provided
an accepted withdrawal from the world. The dinghy would snout on its anchor rope into the breeze, or the tide, the chop slap against the dinghy’s clinker sides, the shallow bilge water slop under the duck boards, the hand lines veer off sharply underwater, refracted, until lost in the intensifying green depths.

Blue cod were the most common catch, sometimes tarakihi, occasionally the slim menace of a barracouta, even a starfish, or conger eel, if the bait had been long on the bottom. For David, none of them was more than a gratuitous justification for being isolated there in the long arm of the sea. From the dinghy, the Slaven Centre became only a small part of things again, though he could recognise Takahe, the walkways, the treatment block, the tractor mower revolving like a blowfly on a polished table, even Bryce’s blue ute going up with the deliveries. David thought some emanation from the centre should be visible: transpirations of bewilderment and defiance, fear and desperation, comfort and selflessness, stoicism and compassion — all rising up over the buildings. But there was nothing of that: no distortion of the mundane buildings unless just a shimmer from rising heat waves.
Perhaps a faint diesel plume from the high, stainless steel boiler house chimney.

As David talked with Tolly and Raf, enjoyed a rich man’s port, he knew that the faded float was out there on the dark water, holding against the fluid, tidal bulge towards the
bone-dry
moon.