A Many Coated Man Page 13

  Slaven takes a break so that he can stretch and drink. He goes down from the back of the scaffold stage and stands unnoticed in the night on the same level as that part of the audience on the field. lago and Dafydd provide a bulk of security at a little distance. Most of the crowd and the genies of Thackeray and Eula are blocked by the scaffold and its tarpaulins, yet Slaven knows that he has brought about another success and he squeezes his eyes closed with joy and thankfulness in the darkness. Seized with the conviction of it, the drama and passion of it, he goes back up the steps and takes centre stage again. They are chanting his name and he lifts his arms as if he can encompass them all within the span.

  ‘Tonight,’ he says, ‘we lay down another challenge in the name of the people. We make a pledge with our presence that the political establishment can’t ignore.’

  ‘Slaven, Slaven, Slaven.’

  Kind hearts are waiting, baby, amongst old friends at Half Moon Bay.

  Auckland is a large city and accustomed to spectacular activities, yet when the genie still hovers in the night sky at midnight, the speakers still sound, when people continue to flow in as if pulled by the moon, the Coalition rally can no longer be ignored. The police arrive to ensure that the Great North Road remains clear and that the stands are not dangerously overfull. Prodded by insistent and inquisitive callers the late-night talk back shows begin to provide coverage — the woman who has miscarried in the midst of the crowd, the man in the wheel chair howling in euphoria, the possibility of a breakdown in order as the audience grows. By one thirty the police estimate there are over 150,000 people at Western Springs.

  Such a crowd develops an increasingly brazen self-confidence, a sense of potency. So in the small hours Slaven’s audience has a narcissistic delight in itself. Here we are, see us, see us. Except that it is see ME, the singleness, the heart of wildfire, the swaying serpent of anonymity which rose also in the Colosseum, in Savonarola’s Florence, with Robespierre, Demosthenes, with Soong Shih when she brought down communist China. From the few thousand who came originally to Western Springs, the crowd has grown to a base majesty whose roar carries for miles across the city and is finally lost over the dark emptiness of the sea.

  ‘Let this smug city hear the voice of its true masters,’ cries Slaven. He hears his own words coming back from the speakers, with a half-echo because the system isn’t quite in phase and he sees his magnified image in the sky turn and glint in electronic radiance. Slaven says there is a message going out from this place about a spiritual renewal in the country and that they must all insist upon a political manifestation of it.

  The Hoihos sing. Let the movers and the shakers of the day, heed the rhythm of the tide in Half Moon Bay. Slaven begins to sing as the massive sound of the multitude rises up. Some in the crowd are swaying, some crying, some take the hands of strangers and raise them aloft to salute the genie.

  Still the people gather as close as they can to Western Springs, as they gathered at Tuamarina and St Kilda, but here the numbers are so much greater. Kellie and her management team can no longer maintain estimates. The carparks are full, the people stretch beyond the discovery of the lighting across the park, into streets. All that can be done is to have the laser project the hologram at the greatest possible size and turn up the sound. Cardew has stopped yawning, got his mind from shagging for a moment and urges his unofficial collectors further into the throng.

  Slaven has the holograph bring up the CCP’s chartist claims across the lower portion of the genie. One after another they appear following his vehement submissions.

  The right of two annual political ostracisations by plebiscite.

  A return to one citizen one vote.

  A reduction of the Presidential term to three years.

  Formation of a Ministry of moral and spiritual renewal.

  Increased regional devolution.

  Proportional gender and ethnic representation in political office.

  The Commissioner of Police rings his Minister when he can no longer control vehicle and foot traffic in the area of Western Springs. Also more and more residents are becoming frightened. Alan Warden, whose appropriate name made it no easier for him to become Minister of Police, has his chauffeur drive him as close as they can conveniently come to the rally. He uses his influence to gain entry to a penthouse in Finch Street and the legs of his blue silk pyjamas show beneath his robe as he clings with some agility to a railing there. Warden can see the glow of the arc-lights and the genie posturing at a distance. The huge audience is invisible, but when it gives voice the sound rolls into the city. ‘Jesus.’ A lesser man may wish that he was not within his electorate; from Wellington he could have told the Commissioner that he must use his own discretion.

  Warden climbs down and more comfortably descends the building by lift. As he is driven home to change, he talks on the phone to the Commissioner and says that he will join him in the operations room within the hour.

  ‘Is it over yet?’ he asks on arrival.

  ‘Still growing,’ says the Commissioner. It’s two thirty-five. Slaven is just hitting his straps.

  ‘What are they doing?’

  ‘Listening, singing. I haven’t heard anything quite like it. It’s on the radio now.’ The Commissioner turns up AK SOS and Slaven’s voice is in the room with them. Into that room of watchful hierarchy, regulation efficiency and professional inhibition it brought a gust of soaring entreaty, elation, emotions cut loose. Slaven’s voice rides on the crests of the crowd’s tumultuous response. ‘We’ve got people there,’ says the Commissioner, ‘but I haven’t created any police profile very deliberately. No chopper, or anything, to show that we’re concerned, though we could do with our own pictures. It’s a tinder box.’

  ‘Will they disperse from there do you think, or will they march?’

  ‘No idea, but he didn’t march at Tuamarina and St Kilda did he. He’s pushing a list of demands though and they’re shouting for them like crazy.’

  ‘Will they all move off together somewhere, that’s the thing.’

  ‘We’ve had some reports as high as 180,000.’

  ‘Jesus, ‘says the Minister.

  ‘Nothing confirmed of course.’ The Commissioner takes a piece of grilled chicken from the pack on one of the computer screens. He feels a slight discomfort at eating in front of the Minister at such a time, but the food will get cold and besides he has been in the Ops room for an hour longer than Alan Warden. A man must live, even if there are 180,000 people at Western Springs howling at the sky. The Commissioner is a man used to crises, though not immune to their pressures.

  ‘One hundred and eighty thousand. Christ Almighty. I thought there was some campaign to defuse this guy. It was all going to die a natural death, so we were assured.’

  ‘Well it wasn’t my brief. Local boy scouts again I suppose.’ The Commissioner wipes his fingers with a paper napkin. He isn’t in uniform, but the shoulders of his blue reefer jacket are inordinately expansive, as if for epaulets. ‘This Slaven is really tapping into something that’s hot, you know. Television won’t keep out of it. Even if we get all these people home tonight without the top blowing off, Dr Slaven is the big news tomorrow and if he decides to march them somewhere, then we’ll all be front page news.’

  ‘We can’t just sit around.’

  ‘We can get a line through to Western Springs.’

  ‘Yes, that could be useful. Have it laid on.’

  Nothing human is ideal in conception, or execution. The Coalition’s rally becomes what the street guys call The Main Course. The language chapters, the outre gays, the patch gangs, the royalists, the hoons who drive restored American cars with otherwise forgotten names like Chrysler and Chevrolet, the whatitiri and the vague population of drifting lassitude which eddies in the heart of the city until it feels a current, all have been drawn to Western Springs.

  The police watch them go by and radio in again. The marginal elements don’t alter the essential nature of Slaven’s audien
ce, but add an edge of free-falling irresponsibility. Some begin a predatory assessment of the crowd, some are genuinely responsive to the atmosphere, even the issues, some copulate, some masturbate, or down pills to the rhythm of the mass singing and Slaven’s harangue.

  It will be light in a few hours. The Commissioner and the Minister of Police are at the main window of the Operations Room. Its view is not towards Western Springs, but the downtown area and the waterfront — dark blocks of offices with occasional high lights still showing and the more numerous security, sign and street lights at ground level. One fat truck sucks litter from the gutters while it can do so undisturbed. Above everything is a scrubbed, moon grey sky.

  ‘Get in touch,’ says Warden. ‘The dentist himself if you can.’

  ‘Are you going to do the talking?’

  ‘We don’t want them to know we’ve got the wind up. You talk to them and say that strictly on grounds of logistics and public safety you think they should break up.’

  ‘I’m having a check made on their permit,’ says the Commissioner.

  ‘Perhaps technically they’re not entitled to be using the venue after midnight anyway.’

  ‘Good idea. I’m going to have to ring the PM,’ says Warden.

  Kellie has been hoping for just such a call from the Commissioner. She and the others in the control booth recognise it as the cautious opening of negotiation. She has Thackeray change places with Slaven on the stage and while Slaven stands in the canvas wings wiping sweat from his throat and sipping mango and apple juice, Kellie talks to him on the phone.

  The Prime Minister receives his call with no pleasure, but Alan Warden is a friend and supporter within Cabinet and so there will be good reason for it. The PM sits on the side of his single bed and flexes his back so that it cracks. He pushes a hand above his hip and rotates his shoulders as he listens. He can see Alan Warden, but has not activated his own visual. With one part of his mind he is assessing his Minister’s appearance. Warden has both a good face and a direct manner for the screen. When the PM speaks he does so quietly, not wishing to disturb his wife who sleeps in the next room. ‘Ah, god, Alan. There’s always something isn’t there. Not 200,000 though, surely. Not 200,000 up there at Western Springs for this. I heard a bit on the radio — the guy can’t even sing for Christ’s sake.’

  Warden laughs. He admires the PM’s equilibrium, but out of view of both of them, one in the Ops Room of Auckland Police HQ, the other far to the south in Wellington, the great crowd carries the melodies of Capetown Races, Glasnost Galaxy and Half Moon Bay.

  ‘We’ve made contact through the Commissioner and Slaven says he wants an orderly dispersal as much as we do.’

  ‘Will they march?’

  ‘Depends what we come up with. The Slavens say it would be enormously helpful if they could announce some positive Government response to their concerns right away.’

  ‘I bet they do. Have they much control over all those people at three in the morning anyway. Two hundred thousand you say! Jesus, Alan, this man’s surely the next Prime Minister.’ They both enjoy that, particularly as the PM is under a lot of pressure from the ideologists in his Cabinet.

  ‘I think we must respond. This whole thing has proved he can’t be ignored. The media will be into this like big dogs.’

  One more crisis, thinks the PM. One more bushfire to be dealt with at the expense of actually governing. The consistent, responsible establishment of policies and their implementation is what he imagines people require him to do, but most of his time is spent coping with political misadventure, rivalries, ambitious animosity, ignorance, overseas shifts of influence, lobby groups, the marital difficulties of his Cabinet colleagues and all the while the civil servants despair of quality political direction, form their own society and get through one day after another.

  ‘There’s that list of demands that Slaven’s been pushing,’ says the Minister. ‘If we could make a gesture in regard to one or two, then maybe we could squeeze out okay.’ The PM listens to them and in the glow of his bedside light looks with distaste at the flaky skin of his ankles, the veins raised across the tendons of his feet, the ingrowing, oyster-coloured nail on the left small toe which gives trouble. All done up the PM is still an imposing man, but a regime of health and fitness is becoming just another casualty of office. When he wears his robes to address the conference of university vice-chancellors, or sports tails at a banquet in his honour at The Hague, he is conscious of muscle wastage on his thighs, a mild hernia and persistent catarrh. He hesitates over the menu despite his excellent French, because he needs to find the best length of focus. It is so in all things: although considered a pragmatist and political realist, he is continually surprised at the gap between the appearance and the actuality, the symmetry of theory and the debasement of practice.

  The PM touches the mute and clears his throat into a handkerchief. He decides again that he must make more provision for his own health. ‘We could take up the reduction of the Presidential term,’ he says. ‘Who’d give a damn really. It’s part of the preoccupation with the Executive that’s popular now. And we could form a spiritual ministry, after all we’ve several with no substance already.’

  ‘Right enough.’ Warden has a surprisingly uninhibited laugh for a Minister of Police. Almost joyous.

  ‘Nothing else though. Ostracisation. He’s been on about that ever since St Kilda. Now everyone’s started on about it and I’m sick to death of it. Caucus bristles at the very mention of it. Christ, it’s too late now to be a Greek city state. The idea is bad pyschology and it’s bad politics.’

  You are a power in the land, aren’t you, when the Minister of Police scales railings in blue, silk pyjamas to suss you out and the Prime Minister must sit swearing on his bed at three in the morning to find a convenient concession. You have come a long way from a bed in the burns ward at Burwood, from presumptuous dreams of a calling, from the one hundred Angel Hire chairs in the dewy grass of Tuamarina. Haven’t you?

  Slaven’s voice is as hoarse as a rock star’s, more husky than Miles Kitson’s even. His eyes are red-rimmed and his linen jacket heavy with sweat which extends from the armpits to the buttons. He enjoys the PM’s call. The PM says that he had meant to ring earlier to congratulate Slaven on the interest he has aroused amongst Auckland voters and on the succinctness of his charter points and he assures Slaven that the Government is always open to what he terms non-partisan canvassing of views. The PM says that he wishes to extend an invitation to the CCP to meet with senior members of the United Party Campaign and although he can’t pre-empt the stance of the party, nevertheless the PM feels that there are at least two of the charter points in line with recent United Party policy suggestions. The PM ends by complimenting Dr Slaven on his oratory and saying how appreciative he will be when the great gathering has been brought to an orderly conclusion.

  So Slaven is able to use the call and its concessions as a culmination of the rally. ‘The Prime Minister, the Right Honourable Brian Hennis, has it seems woken early this morning,’ he says and the crowd roars triumphantly. As Slaven speaks for the last time the others come out on the stage with him, led by Kellie, Thackeray, Cardew, Eula and Sheffield Spottiswoode. Slaven’s genie is resplendent still and when Slaven has finished the crowd sings as it begins its exodus; the edge of the vast assembly fraying away, the centre swaying to the Hoihos’ Half Moon Bay.

  So Western Springs, having drawn them all in since early last night, now exhales and the people surge out into the carparks, the streets, the suburbs and the watching police and camera crews marvel at the seemingly endless passage of them.

  Slaven and Kellie leave the aftermath to others of the team. Together they are lifted from the heliport atop the Tizard stand in the first light of day. Below them is still a huge crowd, but the noise of the rotors covers the singing. Who doesn’t know the words? Everybody finds they have a neighbour, it they come back to Half Moon Bay.

  ‘That was some experience there ton
ight,’ says Kellie. ‘Was that a success, or what! But the scale of it finally was frightening, didn’t you find? I mean it’s exhilarating and it’s flattering, particularly for you, but in the end I had this feeling that something about the crowd had outgrown our reasons for being there, their reasons for coming. There was otherness freewheeling there in the dark and it wasn’t bound by any logic, or conscience, and it might do anything at all.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Slaven, but he is too tired and victorious to talk of it. A physical reaction is setting in. Although the sweat is still a sheen on his skin, he starts to shiver, his fingers tremble. He becomes aware of trivial discomforts such as a sore throat, a shoe that rubs and a thirst simultaneous with a desire to piss. But he recalls the Prime Minister’s voice which had a placating rather than a patronising tone, the tears and the shouts and the cheers, the passionate singing and as the helicopter banks steeply he can see in the first light the great amoeba of the crowd still breaking up beneath them. ‘But I reckon we took Western Springs all right,’ he says.

  Yes, but this has been for us a sort of slip glaze of talk and action which has glibly covered things which might be pertinent if given space. See Slaven still sitting in Shafters in the sun and watching the dogs and their masters define their roles on the grass of Western Springs. Feel the blessed heat that tightens the face, hear the easy sounds of this accustomed activity. There is a clump of toi-toi on the fence line and finally the one Dalmatian disgraces its breed by succumbing to the temptation of the fragrances and deposits beneath the long, drooping leaves. The other owners display no derision, but rather a courteous sorrow at such a lapse and the Dalmatian’s owner fingers the dog’s ears in affection rather than punishment. The owner is very bald, very brown and strong, with the legs of his shorts completely filled by muscled thighs and instead of immediately rejoining the circuit with his dog, they stand together by the fence and the toi-toi enjoying the view into the park where there is a lake. And all these quiet, obedient dogs will have homes throughout the city though people never know of them and instead hear askance of a loathsome brute which menaced little Howie James. Good discipline, Slaven’s father always said, is the same thing as self-respecting pride.