A Many Coated Man (34 page)

‘I suppose it’s a free-range cat,’ says Slaven.

He thinks again of talks with Marianne Dunne concerning the almost complete recall that is possible if the brain is surgically, or electrically, stimulated. Experience complete in all respects, the very sounds, hues and fragrance extant and the impressionistic, emotional responses welling up anew. What can be the reason for the memory having such a store and releasing so little, except to force the organism to go on striving for stimulus and not too readily fall back on time past, in the way that Miles seeks that escape. What has Slaven left of his first schoolroom except the smell of felt pens and the blue of plastic chairs. Thousands of family meals are only a multiple exposure and all the hours in his surgery spun into oblivion except those few moments of danger, or eccentricity, as when Danny Fougerie stopped breathing under anaesthetic and Mrs Wybrow pissed in the chair and claimed that her waters had burst.

Our life recedes to vanishing point and we’re left with a small grab-bag of cyphers to represent it. A smack in the face, a lightening storm, a betrayal, Melanie’s tartan skirt, the appalling threat that is the sound of the sea wind in a stand of pines, smoke on the winter mist, a text book once
known almost by heart and still the title an open sesame to the faces of student friends.

A moral view of responsibility has been replaced by a pharmaceutical one; bulking up, or bulking down, stress management, rape, gambling, anal and mortality fixations, hearing choirs of angels, or the snort of the unicorn when others know there’s only traffic noise at a distance — all can be dealt with by delaying the reabsorption of serotonin and norepinephrine in the synaptic gap, or the blocking of the enzyme monoamine oxidase. Pills to prevent life, or prolong it, or end it, have become customary, now too there are drugs to justify, explain and excuse it. The molecular biologists have in the end made a divinity redundant.

Slaven can hear his sheep coming quietly back into the shade. ‘What’s the story with Cardew, though,’ says Kellie. ‘We must do something there. It’s the one thing that can blow up in our faces before the election. I think we knew all along that he’d be working against us if we let him into any position. ‘There’s no doubt about that now, is there.’

‘It’s hard to believe all the things Miles found out. I’d say he’s up to all that and more. Cardy got a whiff of advantage for himself and that’s all he cares about. All that happened to me at the Beckley-Waite is up to him in the end. He’s been letting us down for years of course. Now he threatens the chances of thousands and thousands of people he’s never met.’

‘He’s ours though,’ says Kellie.

‘I reckon he’s stunted in some way,’ says Slaven. ‘Maybe it’s not all his fault. I don’t know.’

‘But he’s still ours.’

‘I don’t know what it is about him.’

‘I can still hardly believe he brought in the Beckley-Waite doctors.’ Kellie finds it difficult to talk of Cardew, to make any decision against him. But it must be made. Although her voice remains controlled, she gets up and touches the foliage of her plants for comfort.

‘We tried with him, didn’t we?’ asks Slaven. ‘Did we do such a rotten job? Fed and clothed him, took him to the doctor and the park, helped with his dinosaur projects — well you did, watched him play soccer, put up with his mates
coming round, suffered his adolescence petulance. I didn’t secretly sodomise him, or thrash him with a dog collar, and I don’t suppose you did either. Sarah turned out all right: turned out very well. I bought him a car when he first went to Australia for god’s sake, after he didn’t want to go back to varsity.’

‘It disappointed you.’

‘He pranged the damn thing within a month.’

‘I mean about going to varsity,’ says Kellie. Slaven is arching his back to ease the stiffness he still feels as a result of his cycling escape on the Kaikoura coast. He almost starts talking about Cardew and university, then checks himself and comes back to what is important.

‘So what are we going to do?’ he asks. From the road gate they hear faintly the querulous discussion as another group of devotees is firmly prevented from approaching the house. Will there be more infiltration of the grounds in the night? More dancing beneath a gibbous moon and the casting of spices against the wall? The CCP supporters sing the anthem,
Half
Moon
Bay,
while Kellie and Slaven decide how to rid themselves of their son.

‘It’ll have to be right out, cut off, not just for our sake, or the Coalition’s, but for his own. He’ll do something really stupid and they’ll arrest him to get at us,’ says Kellie.

‘It’ll come down to buying him off. You know that. There’s no better nature, no sense of responsibility, or guilt. It’ll be a combination of threat if he doesn’t go back to Aussie and reward for doing it.’

‘A form of exile really, I suppose,’ says Kellie. She is still moving amongst her plants. ‘For his own good and essential for the run up to the elections.’

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

‘Sla-VEN, Sla-VEN, Sla-VEN.’

‘Who are these people all the time?’ says Slaven.

He remembers a holiday in the Queen Charlotte Sounds, not all that far from Mahakipawa perhaps. The four of them in a dinghy at the point and instead of blue cod, both Cardy and Sarah hooked up a starfish and none of them had caught one before, or did after. Cardew insisted that his be
stuck on his bare back and he wore it there all the way to the shore, even though it slowly crawled over his skin. The brightness of its orange colour still burns in Slaven’s mind. Cardy bent forward on the wooden seat to encourage the starfish to stick, grinning as the centre of attention and daring Sarah to stick hers on as well. The colour of an old-fashioned pumpkin and all the myriad feelers writhing underneath. ‘So you’ll see him soon then?’ says Kellie.

‘I’ve asked him to come tomorrow. He pretended that there was nothing we needed to settle of course, that he’s been going great guns on my behalf all this time.’

Those within an organisation often base their personal opinion of their leader on the extent to which tough issues are faced, which is quite a different thing from the public conception of how successful, or unsuccessful, a person may be. Slaven knows that the people in the Coalition he most relies on are watching to see if he’s prepared to tackle Cardew’s corruption, faithlessness, opportunism. For everything that’s been proved there’s almost certainly a double betrayal, but between father and son special, extenuating circumstances are always in force, aren’t they? Isn’t it a son’s function to usurp his father’s powers and shouldn’t the father despite all disappointment and provocation in the end present himself as pelican? A son who supplants his father by any means assures his own future — a father who defeats his son destroys the future of them both.

‘Sla-VEN, Sla-VEN, Sla-VEN.’

‘Maybe you should go down and talk to them. Capitalise on your return.’

‘Once I did that, there’d be ten times as many. They’d swarm over the paddocks despite the security and hide in the garden here. They’d garrote themselves with trellis ties, make sacrifice in the bird bath and flatten their faces on the window panes. Thackeray said there were three more electrocutions yesterday; one here in Christchurch. A retired Harbour Board navigation instructor who said that the world was to end with my deliverance from the Beckley-Waite and climbed into the Addington substation.’

‘I hoped you hadn’t heard,’ says Kellie. She sits beside him again. She puts one hand over one of his.

‘So you’ll talk to him tomorrow?’

‘Yes.’

So he comes. They don’t touch, but Cardew says how pleased he is that his father’s looking good and that he’d been working closely with the others to put pressure on so that Slaven would be released the minute he was well enough. A few sentences is all that Cardew needs to include some sort of lie. Slaven notices his son’s big feet and the way he walks with his hands busy — trying to occupy a little more space than he can naturally fill. The distaste between them is heavy on the air, a reason perhaps for them both to prefer their meeting outdoors.

‘Let’s not try to fool each other,’ Slaven says.

‘Cut the crap you mean?’ Even his language he knows, is a way to antagonise his father.

‘Okay, cut the crap. You see I know what you’ve been up to. All the deals and little scams. The money that’s ending up in your pockets, the kick-backs from some of the parties, the women you kindly interview on the Coalition’s behalf, you and Pollen and Marr and others in Wellington.’

They argue in the double garage overhang and it is raining, as it was raining when Dr Eugene and Dr Bliss came down from the Beckley-Waite at Cardew’s invitation. This time it is his turn to take a trip into the rain. The garden in which Slaven and Kellie talked yesterday is bowed with it, blossom and leaf drenched and so drawing the slighter stems down. There are puddles on the broad, paved turning circle in front of the garages and the heavy rain impacts there, forming clear bubbles even, which drift for a moment and then are gone. The worked soil of the plots, always fertile in Kellie’s garden, is darker, richer, in the rain and seems to breast up.

‘Miles tells you all this stuff, I suppose. The old stoat. The stinking, old stoat. Got a finger in everything, including up your arse.’ Cardew is still young. I’m young, his look says and the voice beneath the words also. He’s guilty of every accusation made and more. He’s selfish, weak, ignorant and unimaginative; less than his father in all the things that don’t matter as much as that he’s young, and
Miles old and dying and Slaven ageing. What has right, or wrong, got to do with a sense of life.

Neither Cardew, nor his father, express anything of this as Slaven lays down the deal that Cardew must relinquish any connection with the CCP, go back to Australia and in return he’ll get enough money to start some sort of business there and no action will be taken on what he’s done. ‘So I’m wiped off like an arse,’ Cardew says. Yet he is young, see, young.

‘You’re still part of the family. Kellie and I will stick to that,’ says Slaven and Cardew’s eyes slide away with a boredom as absolute as if the subject has become non-penetrative sex. Slaven sees his son’s face in all its unleavened physicality. Slaven has been disappointed — more, betrayed — so often by his son that the original love has become detached and persists only as a less specific, nagging pain, rather like a stomach ulcer.

‘How much?’ asks Cardew.

‘How much?’ Is it affection he wishes to quantify.

‘How much will you give me to get started?’

Kellie maintains precise boundaries between lawn and garden and the water begins to collect in the small moats there, stretching back like a line of quicksilver in the light of a rainy day. It isn’t the parting that either of them would have wished. I suppose you have your own beliefs,’ says Slaven.

‘Yes, you’re a long time dead is what I say.’ And he is young.

So see him off, yes, certainly that, with the rain still heavy and the two of them standing in the garage doorway. ‘We’ll come out with Sarah to the airport when you go,’ Slaven tells him and Cardew gives his smile which turns down at the last moment. They glance into the rain which hachures the sky and sounds on the garage roof.

‘I never liked this as much as the old place in Allen Street,’ says Cardew. ‘It’s too far out of town.’ People say they’re alike physically in some ways and in some mannerisms. Judge for yourself as you watch them. The small, but fleshy, ears perhaps, the narrow wrists which make by contrast their hands appear large, a way of dipping
a shoulder when they are called and turn back. Cardew has lost somewhat more of the dark hair than his father — yet he is young, young. Baldness is inherited through the mother, Slaven has told Kellie with some complacency.

‘Two hundred thousand isn’t that much,’ says Cardew, ‘when you’re talking about a business. Anyway, I hope that the big Hagley Park rally goes off okay. I really do. Just remember that the blue bird of happiness can so soon become the chicken of despair.’ He has turned back from his car to say it with a laugh and his shoulder dips; the rain already wetting down his hair exaggerates his young baldness and the two of them look just past each other as they make farewell.

‘See you later then,’ says Slaven as he sends his son into exile. And so epigone is, yes, gone.

Kellie and Slaven go on to the ostentatious house on the Cashmere Hills after talks with the Regional Council officers in which civic apprehensions concerning the coming rally are quietened. Miles has a German housekeeper and a Chinese gardener, gathered somehow in his business travels, though Georgina claims the roles should be reversed. He has a nurse, too, all Kiwi, who leaves Slaven and Miles together once the latter’s artificial kidney has been replaced. There is a brief spiral of life blood in the catheter. Miles chooses a green silk shirt to cover it. ‘Just like an oil filter really,’ he says. ‘I can wear it strapped to my stomach. There’s a knack to everything you know, even dying.’

They have their meal in the tower, with the city of the plains traced with lights of pulsating, jewelled colour. Miles especially loves such evenings with his wife and the Slavens. He calls them his patient reunions and is intrigued by the irony of his support for Slaven and the CCP when he is utterly in disagreement with most of the beliefs they have. He has a sneer of pure delight to hear Kellie talk with conviction of the common interest as a means of gaining support, for he has long understood that the common interest is far too broad and too just an application to make anyone enthusiastic. Only personal and factional advantage provide an urgent motivation. A notion of fair play, justice,
is unknown in nature and one of the most recent masquerades in human society.

‘He likes to play at cynicism,’ says Georgina, ‘because somehow he thinks it appropriate for his success.’ She is fully-dressed, and just as lovely, at the table tonight so as not to scandalise the guests. They are having venison for the main with a burgundy and ginger sauce. Miles is not allowed the sauce. They are having a turn-of-the-century Haut-Brion. Miles is not allowed the Haut-Brion, but has it all the same. He drinks it as a libation and his old face smiles.