Harlequin Rex Read online

  David saw him first on the orientation day for new staff. Three male and four female nurses, Polly Merhtens and David who were block aides, a visiting radiologist from Adelaide and a pudding-faced payroll guy from central admin. They were such a small group, that after Alst Mousier had taken them for a tour of the facilities, and after the nurses and radiologist had displayed a deal of medical knowledge while Polly, David and Pudding Face added little, they were all able to fit into Mousier’s office, which was roomier than most because he was chief administrator. It was hot, and Mousier altered the slat blinds to keep out the glare of the sun.

  Mousier’s secretary brought in glasses of dilute and artificial orange drink, and Schweitzer carried one too when he came. He had a candy-striped straw in his, though, and he sat on the end of the desk with easy informality, and his cheeks sucked in as he drank. Then he said, ‘You won’t have been in any place like this before, and neither have those of us you’re joining. We’re not sure at all what we’ve got by the tail here, but it’s sure as hell some sort of tiger.’

  He sat amid the trays and papers on the desk, while lifeguards pursued bikini babes as screen savers on Mousier’s computer. He wore very light, blue fabric shoes and no socks. On his left ankle a vein curved over his Achilles tendon. He had a tight, nimble body and a heavy shaving shadow on his cheeks and neck. Sustenance for the follicles there was perhaps drawn by gravity, for by contrast the hair on his head had retreated to accentuate the brow.

  ‘The aetiology of this one is so lacking as to be both ludicrous and scary,’ Schweitzer said. ‘The pathology of it, on the other hand, is all around us, and dauntingly complex. The treatment we’re making up as we go along.’ He paused, and seemed to concentrate on an even swing of his blue shoes. ‘But that’s enough reassurance for you on arrival at Mahakipawa,’ he said. Had there been more of them for induction they would no doubt have laughed, but as it was, intimate within Mousier’s office, they smiled and leant back in their vinyl chairs.

  He had presence, did Schweitzer. You didn’t listen to him long before admitting the intelligence, the concern, the quiet confidence, and only that degree of unconscious arrogance which arose naturally from a long time living with the deference of those around him. Schweitzer himself had coined the name Harlequin, which was increasingly used for the illness, because he thought primal brain regression inaccurate and unhelpful. ‘After all, primal brain dominance, if you must. The regression is from powers more recently acquired. Over hundreds of thousands of years higher brain functions evolved which imposed control over more rudimentary responses, and what we seem to have in Harlequin is the failure of these later functions for some reason, and so the archaic response of primal brain, the thalamus, hypothalamus, limbic system, are set free again. Our original soul: call it what you will.’

  ‘And it’s an odd brute,’ said Alst Mousier from behind them. ‘Evolution can never go back to the drawing board. It’s had to build on what’s there.’

  The sun glowed at the chinks of the blinds, Schweitzer went on to explain how the Slaven Centre worked; and all the time the primal brain, old Harlequin, was biding its time in them, and rampant within the patients they were there to help. The only difference was that, with the guests, he was already able to slip his collar and come out dancing. It never paid to bait the monkey man.

  How had they all come to be there: the nurses, Polly, the Aussie radiologist, the pudding pay man? And which of David’s many poor decisions had brought him to Mahakipawa when all his ambitions had been different?

  ‘I hope that your choice will prove a happy one for us and you,’ said Schweitzer before he left. David noticed that he had wound the candy-striped straw around his left index finger as he’d been speaking, and that there was a slight sheen of sweat on his frontal baldness.

  The farm was named Beth Car by David’s great-grandfather, who had come out from Wales. It was near the head of the valley, and Coal-pit Road went only a few kilometres more past their gate, and finished in a trivial reserve where there was a picnic area among the broom and lupins, a shallow swimming hole under heavy willows, a concrete fireplace smudged black, and beer cans in the lank grass within throwing distance. The place altered little, and was too far from town to be under any pressure of use. Occasionally the Palliser kids, or the Mercers, would pedal up in the shimmer of a summer afternoon; sometimes in the evening a local guy would take a girl there, the family Commodore, or Falcon, throbbing through the dusk.

  The creek ran through Beth Car, and the farm sloped up to the west, steeper and drier, although still with limestone beneath it which sweetened the soil, so that grass came away quickly with the rain. The house David’s great-grandfather built was tucked behind the macrocarpas, close to the business of the farm — the yards, the old concrete dip, the shearing and equipment sheds. The new house, built over forty years ago, was higher up, to claim a view and get above the shit, shingle and shout of the working area. It had a feature stone chimney that was visible both inside and out, and feature greywacke boulders covered most of the house end that could be seen from the road.

  For years the lower house was used by married couples. David had recollections of them coming and going. The Lawsons and Hayters stayed the longest, and were the only ones David remembered well. The Lawsons had a daughter he had his eye on, but, before David was old enough to make anything of it, Gavin Lawson went into a mussel farm partnership.

  John Hayter bred border collies, and took over his wife’s washing machine for weeks on end to make home brew. She had a thing with Stella Jones who taught at the Waipounae primary school, and it was the talk of the district until the three went their various ways. Hayter went to Ashburton and set up a business making mud and cement bricks, but the booze got him, which was always the likely outcome.

  After the Hayters there wasn’t another married couple. Times were tighter. David was old enough to do more at weekends and holidays, and his father would also get casual labour in. His mother didn’t like the idea of renting the old house to people they had no connection with, so it was just shut up for a few years, and then downgraded by random convenience to a storage place. Eventually it was gutted, and used for hay and super. On winter feed-out days, David would haul bales from a window through which he once saw Wendy Lawson inspecting her new breasts.

  He’d been out with the .22 after possums, which swarmed in the walnut trees in season, and he walked back past the yards with the dark, shifting macrocarpas behind him, and the air gathering the weight of night. There, clear as you like, was Wendy Lawson having a look at herself in her mirror. She held her arms at different angles; she leant and turned. It was as if she were trying on a garment and liked the fit of it. So did David. Tits of a thirteen-year-old, but shapely, high, the nipples more pronounced than he expected.

  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 whi
te 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.

  FOUR

  ‘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.