A Many Coated Man Page 10

  ‘I went for days you know, before I plucked up the courage to ring and ask for an appointment. I kept thinking of how valuable your time was.’

  ‘What I’m keen to do as well,’ says Anatasia, ‘is talk to your wife and Eula Fitzsimmons. Absolutely essential to get their perspective on what the CCP offers women. An issue you address often I’m sure.’

  Slaven thinks he can hear the Hoihos — Someday, baby, there’ll be time for sailing, on the ebb tide from Half Moon Bay. A radio in one of the other rooms perhaps, or one of those odd bursts he gets within his brain. Several of the people kindly rebuffed by Iago Thomas are standing in the drizzle to catch a glimpse of him through the window. Slaven hopes it’s just idle curiosity, but knows there’s more to it. ‘When I think of everything we will achieve, it’s almost too much for me,’ says Anna Fivetrees.

  Dr Dunne comes down from the Euthanasia Clinic after supervising the send off for a top-dressing pilot with inoperable cancer of the bowel. Such occasions leave her subdued, but thankful that the option exists. The pilot’s wife initiated the sequence of injections and there was a video on the large screen showing the pilot working over blocks of the inland Kaikouras; virtually no wind and the plane banked into the evening sun at the head of the valley where the scree slopes led up to the divide. The pilot watched himself, the plumes of super drifted above that steep, lonely country. Dust to dust. ‘Look at her go, the beauty,’ he said to his family.

  Yes, Marianne Dunne comes down from Euthanasia and thinks that she has fought her old enemy to a draw. A few quiet minutes in her office before she goes to see Miles Kitson, who is back in for a spell of treatment. She has videos for him too, but not terminal. One is from Aldous Slaven and covers the St Kilda rally. The other is from Miles’s wife — the only access he allows her when he is at his worst and in care. Marianne has already seen the first, watched the vast crowd on the long open beach and the sports fields, wondered what is really happening to her patient and friend. Slaven with his burnt hands and a mind subject to magnificent alteration by the surge through all its circuits.

  Miles watches Georgina trying on a selection of new clothes that are heaped on the window squabs of her bedroom. She talks to him as she does so, remarks sometimes occasioned by the garments which are reflected in the full length mirrors, or a commentary of her life without him. ‘I’ll go ski-ing with the Railles if you’re not back by the fourteenth. There’s been a final dump, Polly said.’ Georgina is trying on a lace camisole. She shows no awkwardness, no posturing before the recorder that their housekeeper holds, for she is both confident in her beauty and familiar with such display as a form of communication in their marriage. She and Miles are perfectly aware of the sexuality; the slipping of a shoulder strap, hip rotation, the tightening of her breasts as she stretches her arms up, but transcending that, or at least complementing it, is the need for such display of grace in the face of illness and time.

  Miles in a private room lies propped up on his pillows. The tears gather beneath his eyes. Marianne Dunne sits further towards the bed-end. She is so short that her legs won’t touch the floor and she tucks them beneath her on the spread. ‘I love the black dress cut low at the back,’ she says. ‘Georgina’s back is very smooth, yet with little sign of the sub-cutaneous fat which gives that effect. One of the things with black is that it suits both a pale skin and a tan.’

  ‘I read that everyone has a birthmark somewhere on the body. Is that true?’ Miles can see the skin taut on Georgina’s collar bone and hair falling over one side of her face. See how definite the hip is, how fragile the wrist bones raised beneath the skin.

  ‘Maybe if you accept any minor blemish, and some that come out after birth. But there’s no genetic imperative.’

  ‘Georgina has one on her heel for god’s sake.’

  ‘Mulberry, wine, or bleach?’

  ‘Oval and white as spider’s silk.’

  ‘A bleach mark then. Just lack of pigmentation. It’s stable and of no consequence whatsoever.’

  ‘I’ve told her that it’s a reminder from the manufacturer that nothing’s perfect.’ Georgina, naked to the camera and the glass, pauses to talk to him. Her stomach has a slight forward curve with just the single navel tuck in its upholstery. She has the nails of both feet painted — purple almost.

  ‘I spend a good deal on clothes in these sessions,’ she says. ‘So many of the things I try on, I like.’ Miles gives a barely audible laugh. Money has become at last a source of humour for him.

  ‘Lucky thing,’ says Marianne Dunne, ‘to look like a model and be able to buy what you like.’

  ‘And be married to a package of disintegration,’ says Miles. ‘I imagine that the poor see mortality as their greatest ally. The one alternative to their lifestyle they can afford and the one thing the rich can’t buy off. It’s the only justice they can be sure of.’ Georgina is trying on beige, linen culottes; through the window behind her, Miles catches a glimpse of his grounds and the view beyond. The wall of Central Otago schist he helped to build, Christchurch city spread below, and the gondolas, reduced by distance, passing up and down the Port Hills.

  ‘Don’t take the morbid approach on me,’ says Marianne. ‘I may take you up on it. You’ve had a great time both rich and poor and you’re still pleasing yourself. And Georgina wants nothing more than to visit you, you know that. It’s just your pride that means you lie here and watch a video of your own wife.’

  ‘Well, thank god I can indulge my pride. I can afford my own nurses, I can afford you, I can afford the periodic services like this which may give me a few hours a week when I don’t feel like a bag of shit loosely tied. If I can’t go back home in better shape than this then I’ll be asking you to do a different job for me.’

  ‘And what will you leave me in your will? I calculate that you’re good for a new surgical annex at least.’

  Miles turns the video off. He’s interested in planning his death. ‘There’s a potion for everything I suppose, but the old Roman way must still have its supporters. I’ve always enjoyed a hot bath.’

  ‘There are several appropriate parts of the body very poorly served with nerves, yet with large enough arteries. The side of the foot for example. Virtually no pain need be felt at all. You have to get special dispensation to use anything but the procedure laid down by the Council. Anyway, if the time comes I think you’ll find our way the best.’ Marianne Dunne is always quite candid with Miles; it is their way together. ‘I still think you should let Georgina come to see you.’

  ‘Once, you know, I was a man for women to reckon with. Confidence and humour are more important than looks. I learnt that.’

  ‘I’ve always wanted to be taller, of course,’ says Marianne, ‘but thank god I was given a good brain.’

  ‘I used to have that,’ says Miles, ‘but it’s gone.’ He watches the doctor swing her feet from his bed. When she is standing though, her head is not much higher than before.

  ‘I’m serious,’ she says, ‘about asking for money for the hospital. I don’t feel guilty at all about asking. You know what we do here and the value of it. I bet Georgina wouldn’t miss enough to build the extensions I need.’

  ‘We’ll see. You’re as bad as Kellie Slaven, who’s conned me into bankrolling the activities of the Coalition until their financial structures are in place. I’ve had the bite put on me by people most of my life and many of them with better offers than you can make. So, an annex is it? Kitson Castle, or the Miles Mausoleum. You think I’m a sucker for it, because I’m dying. It’s shameless of you. You need reporting to the Medical Council.’

  ‘Why should dying be an excuse for not accomplishing things before it happens?’

  ‘Now there’s something worth arguing about if you had the time,’ says Miles. ‘It reminds me of old Roland Purcell who was at the university and was intrigued with a delivery van with the words Door to Door Transports. He became preoccupied with the semiotic implications and went out on to the road to determi
ne if the van was signified, or signifier and was run over by it. Struck with his own research.’ His own mention of Roland Purcell leads Miles on to recollections of Albie Purcell, the son, and he doesn’t notice when Marianne Dunne quietly leaves the room.

  Albie flatted with Miles in a converted garage by the Addington Saleyards and they went to lectures at the Canterbury Campus with the landscaped humps of smooth lawns, the streams through them, the faculty buildings in ugly and rectangular contrast. At every party, when he was sufficiently drunk, Albie would start to shout, ‘It’s frontal lobotomy time,’ and thereafter talked with a lucidity and passion of higher things which were completely beyond him when sober. He scraped through a law degree and then went into local government. When he felt stifled there, he established a small farm in the Hokianga, raising frogs and mushrooms for the gourmet restaurant trade. Miles eventually became the major shareholder for old times’ sake. The only tangible return Miles ever receives is in kind, cartons of frog pieces and mushrooms when Albie makes the occasional visit to indulge in undergraduate memories and ask for more capital. He thinks the glory of their early experience together comes from the poverty. Miles knows it is rather the recollection of youth. Unfortunately, no amount of drink now restores to Albie the frontal lobotomy of that time.

  Miles lies alone in his private room and watches more video: not Georgina now, but Slaven at his second great rally. The huge crowd on the beach with their backs to the wind from the sea which hasn’t been told of spring. The wind snatches at Slaven’s voice and sends the words scudding and swirling away over the people packed on the beach, the top carpark, the recreation fields on the other side. The camera pans the sea to show the swell breaking white far out from the beach. The Rev Thackeray Thomas stands behind Slaven on the stage, wearing his red dragon jacket and hyped up in the turbulence of emotion and weather as if it is some great pit-head deliverance. Miles is at once appalled and fascinated by the energy, the conviction, the transience of it. What can they expect, all these Otago people — the worst dressed and least progressive section of the country’s citizenry. They haven’t grasped the essential premise of life; that nature has no sense of justice.

  The soundtrack has a portion of the song ever more closely associated with Slaven and the Coalition. Hear the secret night parrot from its booming grounds. Love has many calls to offer from the place of Half Moon Bay. The video runs on, but Miles’s thoughts move back to his own life. Even the sensational involving a friend is no competition for your own thoughts. The outcast is lonely, they say, the adolescent, they say. Lonely at the top as well and lonely in the face of grave decision, yet Miles wishes that much more of his time had been spent with no company, but his own. The weak and the mediocre cluster into groups. He has wasted years in total dealing with people of no interest to him. Miles lies in the private room darkened for his viewing. The changing colours from the screen play across the sheen of his face. He is flat on his back as he thinks, eyes to the ceiling, mouth opened by the slackness of his jaw. Only the arc of nose cartilage, clear beneath the waxy tissue of his skin, maintains his face as a living head, below it is all mandible, socket and brow ridges, the topography of skulls.

  Miles is thinking of the chance encounters and opportunities which can begin success. His own first coup at Zapp Corp, which set him on the way, was the trip to Chile to investigate distribution outlets. He was too junior at the time to be anyone’s nomination in the boardroom, but he had by chance come into the executive washroom only seconds after Jasons, the Chairman, had cleared his bowels and must still own the stench of his excrement in the confined, tiled room. Miles had with humble obstinacy blocked Jasons’ way and asked for the opportunity to represent the company in Chile. With his passing and common mortality so blatantly in the air, even the Chairman was at some disadvantage. ‘Oh, very well, very well,’ he had said in passing, and Miles had gone and managed — very well. Such a recollection is a pleasant sophistry in part, for Miles knows that there have been a hundred chances of ruin which he has avoided by talent, hard work and good fortune, but all the same there’s enough truth to prompt his soft, hoarse laugh. A career so well known and envied — launched by the trivial humiliation of Jasons in a latrine.

  See Miles Kitson lying alone as he prefers it and the St Kilda video still on, the southern images of excitement and opportunity casting movement and colour into the hospital room. Slaven’s speech although turned low has resonance and power. Yet Miles’s pale eyes are on the ceiling and he goes back years for the replays that he needs. Two lines from the poet Alberto Valdivia come back to him.

  Everything will go — afternoon, the sun, life:

  evil, which cannot be undone, will prevail.

  In the spring also, Cardew Slaven flies in on a hush jet from Sydney to see for himself what his old man is up to. He has received no invitation from home, rather the stimulus was Australian reports of the political backwoodsman setting the normally morose New Zealanders to bay at the moon. Also, somewhere in it all, Cardew gets the sniff of money.

  His parents are pleased to see him of course. They say so as parents do, though Slaven’s greetings are at second-hand. Kellie meets her son as he comes through customs at the overseas terminal. She almost kisses him, but at the last moment puts her hand on his shoulder instead and both of them are relieved by the restraint. ‘Your father’s preparing his speech for the Western Springs rally,’ she says.

  ‘Fair enough,’ says Cardew. ‘He’s certainly come right after the accident. Bounced back and into the news and the big time. What on earth’s got into him?’

  ‘He can’t go back to the surgery because of his hands and some emotional effects, but he’s working harder than ever. He has this sudden passion to accomplish improvement and it’s brought out this special leadership in him. It’s a whole new life. Everything is topsy-turvy now.’

  Cardew drives his mother’s car towards the outskirts on the west of Christchurch. Going from the airport that way he avoids most of the city, although the suburbs continue to encroach, with subdivisions amongst the nurseries, orchards and horticultural units. ‘Is there any money in it?’ he asks casually.

  ‘If he asks for money they give it. They’ve even been sending it in without being asked, along with every other sort of thing that’s important to them. The Coalition’s been backed by Miles Kitson you know?’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘But we’ve got our own financial structures in place now and money’s not a problem. Anyway, we’re not in it for that reason, though I think there should be prudent policies and reserves.’

  ‘Yeah,’ says Cardew. He was a partner in Placemate Personnel Agency in Sydney, but has come out of it with next to nothing. He looks forward to the eventual half share in his parents’ assets, but the new activities offer the chance of more immediate returns. ‘I could stay on for a bit and give some help. I’d say there’d be a good deal of pressure on you and Dad in all of this. Often it’s sensible to have someone close to the family dealing with the business side of things.’ Cardew’s large fingers hang over the steering wheel as he drives. He has large, soft hands and feet like a bear, but despite the belief about the size of appendages indicating final growth, he has never grown tall. The suede expanse of his shoes covers most of the car floor in front of him. ‘So what are the arrangements for Western Springs,’ he says. He sees the chance to do himself some good. A chance for once to be on the inside and to make that work in his favour. He thinks of the professional issues promoters, protest campaigners and political frontmen who have made it big and the managers and agents who made it big with them. Cardew wants some real money so he can afford one of the top blondes he admires in Sydney. S-shaped blondes with breasts like flotation devices and thighs which never meet. Cardew’s bear paws tremble on the steering wheel; the world blurs for a moment. ‘Who’s setting up the Auckland thing?’ he says.

  ‘I am,’ says Kellie. ‘After Tuamarina — you heard about that?’

  ‘
Uh-huh.’

  ‘In many ways Tuamarina was a shambles and not just because the numbers caught them out. Things are a lot more business-like now. Aldous and I worked all through what was needed. St Kilda was so much better; the first that the new CCP took responsibility for. You can’t afford to have it any other way in a political movement. A lot of people make no distinction between method and message, you know.’

  ‘Any organisation needs clear financial structures.’

  ‘More than that; needs accountability in all it does. A weakness in the movement at all, anything goes wrong, and Aldous will be blamed. It’s no use saying that ideals are distinct from the management of things. I said at the meetings, if we’re going to be responsible for the whole show then we have to be able to influence the whole show. It’s not bearable any other way. Responsibility for an outcome should be accompanied by authority to affect the outcome. The thing we can’t control of course is the response people have. That’s what your father worries most about. Anyway, we’ve some clever people on the team now.’

  ‘I reckon family control gets around a lot of problems. Have you considered making a charge at Western Springs. People never value what they get for nothing.’

  ‘Except sex, poetry and money,’ says Kellie. Cardew doesn’t answer. He thinks his mother’s being a smart-arse and he doesn’t remember her as talking in that way. These new activities of his father’s though, this Coalition for Citizen Power rapidly developing a national profile. Cardew sees possibilities.

  His asks his mother about the garden next, something closer to her traditional interests, but doesn’t listen to her replies. Two years apart and yet within half an hour he is tuning her out. Don’t talk too much of the power of flesh and blood. Cardew thinks of Steven Wybrow as they pass the street in which he had lived. He sees himself running down that street having punched Steven Wybrow in the face and making his lip bleed. It was the only reaction he had at the time to the humiliation of eleven straight losses at computer Galaxwar during the course of a Sunday afternoon. ‘Another win to the Champeen of the entire, wide world,’ Steven kept crowing. Cardew remembers the surprisingly firm impact with Steven’s face and the sprint down the Wybrow’s drive which seemed endless. He’d left a red anorak at the house which was never returned and Cardew denied knowing where he had lost it. ‘Champeen of the world, aye,’ murmurs Cardew.