Harlequin Rex (7 page)

Agony and beauty co-existed at the Slaven Centre: David suspected at times they coalesced, though he shied away from any serious consideration of that. Often when he sat at a lounge window while on night duty, or when sleep wasn’t easy, the sound was a pale trough between the hills rising from it, and the moving air bore scents of the salt, purpled mud, the bracken under dew, and the shellfish in all the small bays. The morepork was insistent, yet invisible. The stoat and weasel made no noise, but they struck as happily.

It was a morepork-cum-stoat-cum-weasel night when Lucy Mortimer came to the centre. Big Pulii suffered several sudden attacks that left him almost dazzlingly euphoric, and after David and Raf had strapped him to the power trundler and delivered him to the main block for treatment, they came back just in time to see Jane Milton begin to die. She had wedged herself between her chest of drawers and the wall. Her fingers were already fully curled, which was a gloomy sign, and she had kicked in some of the hardboard so that the timber framing showed beneath. Abbey was sitting beside her, stroking her hair. With Tolly’s help, Raf and David got her face up on her bed. She was seriously regressed.

‘She was grooming most of the afternoon,’ said Tolly, ‘and while you two were away with Pulii, she blew. Everything except walking on the ceiling.’

‘Did you do anything about it?’ asked David.

‘Sure, sure, I fucking cured her, didn’t I. What do you think? Abbey stayed in here while I rang the main block and told them what was going on.’ Jane drew her knees up suddenly and shivered. The tissue white skin of her ankles was marked with little sunbursts and twists of red and purple from her veins. Two nights before, David had been interested in her description of ballooning in south Italy: ugly Brindisi at a distance and the green olive groves, the white charcoal field kilns, slipping past beneath. Harlequin reduced her to grimacing at the light fitting, snoring for air, checking the parts of her body with fluttering hands.

‘Well, you did what you could,’ said Raf.

Jane began to baboon, turning her head and drawing back her lips to show the dog teeth. She stopped breathing for longer and longer periods, even though Raf gave her shots. No sign of the higher responses: all well gone, and even the involuntary functions were failing.

‘Jesus,’ said Tolly.

‘Remember you’re not here,’ said Raf. The protocols were insistent that fellow guests were not to be part of such observation.

‘I never thought she’d go downhill anything like as fast,’ said David.

All so animalistic at the end, which made it easier for them — well, easier for Raf, David, Abbey and Tolly;
something
of a performance, though, for poor Jane.

Afterwards, restful on the power trundler, Jane looked her old self again — the self of humour and acceptance. The pale face, glimpsed in the security lights as the trundler took them past the buildings, was civilised, apart from the wild hair across her forehead. Briefly, while still soft in the first of death, she was allowed her natural configuration. Tolly
and Abbey were left behind. Officially they had no part at all in any of it once they’d rung the main block. Raf and David would have to write out their reports, and the duty doctor would have a good deal to do before Jane’s body went to the morgue annex — the locker room as it was called. Abbey went quietly around the Takahe rooms to tell her fellows what most already knew.

Nearly two hours later Raf and David stood in the dark on the lawn outside the block, and looked down to the glimmer of light on the surface of the sound. When Tolly joined them quietly, they understood his need of
companionship
. Two of their people seized by massive Harlequin episodes in one night — Jane fatally, perhaps Big Pulii as well.

‘Christ, eh, I wonder if we do any good at all,’ said Raf.

‘What about me?’ said Tolly. ‘How do you think I feel? I’m the bloody patient here. I’m the one that’s got the frigging disease. You can walk away from it.’ He gave a stifled laugh as a release, which started the other two off.

‘Jesus, what a night,’ said David. ‘I can’t take much more of this.’

‘Another few days and we’ll probably have everyone in remission again,’ said Raf.

‘Ah, Indian summers for us all.’ Tolly’s laugh was barely audible a second time.

A land breeze through the sweet darkness from Havelock was cooling the greasy sweat on David’s face and neck. Labour in death’s service is arduous. Car lights were coming far away, winking, disappearing, flashing, vanishing again along the winding road which was itself invisible. Lucy Mortimer was on her way to the Slaven Centre.

‘Give us a joint,’ said Raf, and David went to his room and came back with the flat Abdullah tin, an old friend, in the palm of his hand. Thank God for Chris’s Picton contact who made a regular drop. Raf’s lighter guttered briefly.

‘Maybe this is the stuff that’s doing it,’ said Tolly with
no hint of alarm. He brought his hand to his face. Even unlit, the shit had a comforting smell.

‘No,’ said Raf. ‘They’ve been through all that.’

The car turned up the drive to the centre, close enough for the two headlights to become distinct. ‘Maybe it’s the hearse for Jane,’ said Raf. ‘You know the pressure on bed space here.’

Flippancy, like shit, might help them through the night. All three moved towards the car park quite unashamedly: decorum had little place in the centre on such a night. They were curious, sought distraction from Jane’s death and Big Pulii’s ordeal, were more desperate than they knew, so they wandered over the new lawns in which the small sprigs of indomitable gorse still came up. The lights became a dazzle, and the tyres scrabbled on the final, loosely gravelled corner.

‘Maybe it’s a rush delivery of a cure found in a secret government laboratory, and we’ll all end up laughing at the end.’ Tolly had a strong drag, cupped his hand about the joint protectively.

After the station-wagon stopped, there was a small shock of silence and, when the lights were cut, the trio were blind for a moment before their eyes adjusted to the dim cast of the security light on the barge-board of Takahe. The smell and taste, indistinguishable, were of the fine clay dust drifting in behind the vehicle. David always found the taste half comforting, half disturbingly evocative. Country roads, take me home where I belong. Much of his life was printed in the senses.

There were two people. A tall woman, and a small man who opened the back on a great number of cases. ‘Look,’ Lucy said to the little guy, ‘this must be the bearer party.’ A full, even careless voice. Only when they both laughed did David realise how Raf, Tolly and he must have seemed, standing rather vacantly in the poorly lit car park of Harlequin’s domain, itself sent to Coventry in an expanse of rough farmland and bush and sea. Tolly wore lime green
shortie pyjamas and a grubby headband which he said absorbed perspiration while he slept. Raf had on grey sweatpants, and a borrowed T-shirt cutting into his great arms and chest. His hair was free of its pony-tail for night, and flowed biblically over his shoulders. David wore a blue singlet, and faded yellow shorts with a perished elastic waistband, so that he had to keep hitching them as he walked.

Nothing could change their appearance, but Raf cranked his vowels up for the introductions as he became aware of Lucy’s poise. Tolly stepped back a little, accepting for the moment, and before strangers, his official subservience as a guest.

‘Lucy Mortimer,’ said Lucy Mortimer, ‘and this is my agent Laurie Connor, who’s delivering me to this place, but then gets to escape.’

‘Hi,’ said Laurie. He continued to pile cases by the side of the station-wagon.

‘I know you,’ said Tolly to Lucy. ‘You’re on television and radio. Christ, I never thought that this thing would get someone who was on television.’

‘You and me both,’ said Lucy.

‘Maybe you’re just using a cover to do a programme on the place,’ said David. His mind worked that way, and he also felt the need to make some feeble resistance to Lucy’s smooth hair and assurance. He was aware of what easy suckers they were, and how clearly it showed.

‘That’s not a bad idea, is it, Laurie? Remind me of that when I’m cured, or get bored waiting.’

They did become the bearer party of course, a second time that night, and only just sufficient for all the stuff she had. Lucy had a way with her that made almost everyone a willing accomplice and assistant in her life. Clutching cases, the five straggled through the night towards reception, moving out cautiously from the security of each block’s lighting into the gloom, and then more confidently into the
glow of the next. Laurie griped a bit. ‘Jesus, Luce, what’ve you got in here?’ and ‘How far is this bloody safari?’ He was a small man, not young, and maybe familiarity made him rather less susceptible to the honour Lucy was doing them all. David’s only worry was that his shorts would fall down as he walked, and he held one of Lucy’s cases hard to his groin as a precaution.

Tony Sheridan was the duty doctor, and, having settled Big Pulii for the night and completed an examination and report on poor Jane Milton, he was kipping in the duty room. He had enormous feet which, Raf told all the women at the centre, were of course indicative of an equally prodigious cock. Tony was wearing suede shoes, two-tone mustard and purple, and they rose up at the end of the squab like figure targets on a shooting range. Raf prodded the soles of the doctor’s suedes with a rolled-up vacation magazine from the rack. ‘Sorry, Tony. There’s a special admission.’

Lucy stayed in the doorway, aware of the courtesy that prevents you from looking down on the vulnerable, sleeping face of a stranger. David got his first look at her in good light. She wasn’t beautiful, her face was too broad for that, but she was tall, and supple with youth and physical health, her dark hair glinting, the sharp whites of her eyes catching attention.

‘It’s Lucy Mortimer from television,’ said Tolly.

‘I don’t suppose the poor beggar ever has time to watch any,’ said Raf. The brighter, inside lights showed the habitual creases on Tony Sheridan’s grey slacks, and the stubble of his chin and neck. Observing the slovenliness as if through Lucy’s eyes, David wished that Sheridan’s perception, kindness, the compassion, were more apparent than those physical features which meant so much less.

Sheridan had a large, whitebread face, and a bald top with soft, grey hair like thistledown on the three sides apart from his brow, yet he was less than fifty years old. The thistledown undulated as he jerked upright. He drew his fingers down his face to arouse himself and, until he spoke,
his bottom lip remained oddly exposed, the pink moistness showing the blood absent from his pale face.

‘She’s come all the way tonight,’ said David. ‘All the way from — wherever she’s come from.’ He was establishing himself as moron, he thought.

‘All the way from Nelson. We flew down from Auckland this afternoon, but there was some muck-up with the times, and then Laurie and I had one or two friends to see. Anyway, I’m to be a personal patient with Mr Culhane. He knows all about it.’ Lucy took this inclusion in the conversation as sufficient introduction. She joined the others standing by the couch, and watched as Tony Sheridan sat, then stood up, working a little to assert his position after being found at a disadvantage. His shirt had red and white stripes; furrowed a little at the buttons with the strain. He had an inoffensive smell of deodorant, the institution’s lasagna, the mild perspiration of sleep.

‘Quite,’ he said. ‘Let me welcome you to the centre. Just a brief formality of admittance, and then we’ll find a room for you. A meal if you haven’t eaten. I’m sure that Mr Culhane will want to meet you in the morning, and I see you’ve already met our Takahe staff.’ His gaze hardened when it reached Tolly, who knew that he shouldn’t have come on through into the doctors’ duty room, knew that he must draw back from the beguiling proximity of Lucy Mortimer. Lucy spotted his withdrawal, though, and thanked him for bringing her large, green case down.

‘Couldn’t have done without you,’ said Laurie, who was still sitting on it, getting his breath.

Later, Lucy told David that she’d been fascinated by the size of Tony Sheridan’s mustard and purples. And appalled by the doltish inconsequence of the behaviour she saw around her.

She knew nothing of Big Pulii and Jane. Later again, of course, she became one of them, and found that doltishness was a commonplace means of getting by.

All
the
advice
had
been
to
have
at
least
the
first
year
in
a
hostel:
that
in
itself
was
good
enough
reason
for
David
not
to
follow
it.
And
after
five
years
of
boarding
school
he
had
experienced
enough
bonding
to
be
cynical
of
the
team
ethic,
and
be
attracted
to
a
more
individual
and
selfish
life.
So
flatting
then,
with
Louise
and
Kevin,
whom
he’d
not
known
before,
in
Christchurch,
in
Avonside,
in
the
back
rooms
of
a
jerry
partitioned
wooden
mansion
whose
decline
was
obscured
from
the
road
by
great
elms.
The
tree
roots
humped
up
even
the
brick
and
concrete
wall,
so
that
cobwebbed
cracks
were
there,
and
the
wall
had
an
acquired
sinuosity
in
old
age.
The
branches
rubbed
on
the
frayed
guttering,
and
kept
out
the
sun,
so
that
in
winter
the
weatherboards
of
the
south
side
had
a
constant
green
mould;
a
verdigris
that
spread
even
to
the
windows.