A Many Coated Man (7 page)

Now that Slaven is rested and ready to speak again, even people from Nelson have begun to arrive, city people with knee-length coats who stand next to the clansfolk of Renwick, Springcreek, Koromiko, Havelock and the townies of Picton and Blenheim. There must be over six thousand people on the slope here at dusk when Slaven speaks again.
Thackeray Thomas has had Croad rig up a flat deck truck to act as a platform which can be seen by the expanded audience. Slaven is helped up there and his voice is hoarse in starting, but comes back to him once he has settled in. As he looks out from the back of the truck the detail of his view, so familiar during the day, is indistinct, features and demarcations fading in the night, or obscured by the press of such a crowd. The new, red fires catch rings of exultant faces, the media crews jostle for prime positions at the edge of the tray.

‘What we’re part of here at Tuamarina is a reaffirmation of faith in collective action. Even more, it is an assertion of trust in the existence of a collective will and sympathy which must precede action. The greatest fear is not death, but futility, not mortality, but inconsequence, not failure, but alienation. A united people instructs its representatives; a divided and selfish people are manipulated by their leaders.’ There is still movement in the crowd and singing around the fires which grow brighter in the night and are far out from the original chairs from the Angels. Slaven has no microphone and for a time many don’t notice that he has returned to speak, but his voice stills those before him with its unhurried insistence and they can see the aura forming at his head again. Attention spreads outwards until almost all are listening and voices which before had their own direction become individual or chorused exclamations of endorsement which fill the pauses in Slaven’s speech, buoy up his delivery and gestures for them all.

‘This
is
the message.’

‘Power to the People.’

‘Brotherhood and sisterhood is all.’

‘Back to the heartland.’

Slaven feels a sense almost of exultation, not from personal vanity he assures himself, but because here in the gathering winter night of Tuamarina, individual, ineffective, disparate identities are being supplanted by a holistic mood, the personality of a community, a sum greater in wisdom than its parts. It’s here only fitfully at first, a quick current through the crowd when the people are most united in their response. It is a change of aspect in
accordance with a force, as the contours of a familiar face alter in a headstand because of gravity. ‘Any cause which makes a good neighbour is a cause to uphold,’ Slaven tells them.

‘Here is our drummer.’

‘A new start, thank God, at last.’

‘Politics is not a party,’ says Slaven, and they love to hear it. The mood is palpable, so that the audience even though now grown so much greater, draws together again, tighter, revelling in a unity of purpose. ‘All we need is honesty and agreement. Anything shared benevolently with others bears interest. You and I know that for too long the centre ground of politics has been left to those of personal ambition and professional attitudes, while the rest of us have concentrated on our personal lifestyles. It’s time for all of us here, and more like us elsewhere, to direct this country again. Isn’t it? Isn’t it time for spiritual values to be as powerful in the formation of manifestos as any other motivation. There’s nothing so crippling in a citizen as a lack of self-respect and that self-respect comes most readily from involvement with our fellows.’

‘It is time.’

‘Politics isn’t a party.’

‘Remember Greenpeace.’

‘We’re getting to the guts of it here.’

‘Fucken true.’

Slaven is still speaking at seven-thirty when the helicopter comes from Television South to hover with its red eye cameras which penetrate the dark to give home viewers an excellent picture, but the scene as viewed without augmentation is the more authentic. See the great crowd as a dark pelt on the hill and spilling to the paddocks beneath, Slaven on the truck deck lit by car headlights and the unstable, wheeling flames around which the people sway. Many children lift their arms and faces to the helicopter, trying for their moment of national exposure on the screen. ‘Jesus,’ says the pilot. The main road to Tuamarina is lit by a press of vehicles, a capillary in which the glowing cells flow, gather when checked and flow again. Picton is hidden by the hills, but on the plain of the Wairau the lights of
Blenheim just show. To the east however, where Cook Strait lies unpopulated and unseen, there is no movement, no light at all, no surface life to hint at what goes on beneath.

Rain begins: the finest drizzle which stirs and drifts like smoke and like smoke is grey and ethereal when caught in the car lights, or illuminated by the prancing red-yellow fires. So delicate and seemingly weightless are the drops that even when they settle the surface tension keeps them intact on fabric, leaf, hair, skin, on the cow dung slickered in the grass. As small jewels the droplets add their opaque spangles when caught in light. The mist gathers on the blue rug which Slaven wears over his shoulders as he speaks so that it becomes silver-grey in the headlights, and droplets tickle on the fine hairs high on his cheeks.

Slaven has kept the people pumped up for another hour, casting out his ideas again and again and drawing them back like a net through the crowd. Now the fervour leaves him and he climbs stiffly down from the truck against the great roar of supporters. He takes his turn along the beaten track to that portaloo set aside for officials, then sits in his air-conditioned car and watches new speakers who have been drawn to the meeting to capitalise on its vast success: the Actuarian Legislator for Marlborough, a celebrity herbalist from Pelorus, and Professor Marian Pesetsky who has retired in Picton, but won fame in the twenties for her successful campaign to outlaw male circumcision.

But it’s over, isn’t it, whatever held all these people in conviction. The singleness of purpose, the group identity almost all felt, yet none could adequately name, is no longer with them and despite the celebrities and the leaping fires, the media gunship overhead and the pizza stands, people are aware of the cold whisper of the drifting rain. They remember things neglected for too long — pets and children and lovers and nagging parents at home, seminar presentations and office meetings tomorrow, heaters perhaps unattended during all this winter day. So gradually the dispersal in the night begins, some in groups still singing to maintain euphoria, some couples, families, some singly, conscious that they are again alone and pleased that their state is inconspicuous in the dark. There’s been no method,
or supervision, in parking and people call out, sound their horns and flash their lights in exasperation as the exodus begins. Cars circle through the long grass seeking easier ways to leave. Thackeray Thomas displays a weeping, lost child on the deck of the truck and the informal concert party sings
Te
Kuiti
Dream
. Paul Hurinui and his fellow kaumatua are waiting patiently to give a proper farewell to their land.

Slaven watches from his car for a while, but is very tired. Has Miles reached the hotel without mishap and where has Kellie got to? He wishes she had seen his impact, his great success. He arranges the blanket around himself, damp side out, and lets down the seat back so that he can sleep comfortably. He begins to drowse, seeing the sparks dance upwards as the fire nearest to him is kicked to death. Tilted back as he is, he can see no people, not even Dafydd his protector, not even the body of the fire, just the tiger eyes of sparks gleaming in ascent. So, amidst continuing confusion, he rests.

Kellie wakes him the next morning. She hadn’t got through until almost midnight and then only because of help from a bald-headed man, in shorts and tramping boots despite the weather, who pointed out a way against the flow. She has slept a few hours herself and while waiting for the late dawn considers the Tuamarina meeting as an exercise in organisation and finds it wanting. Sure, the numbers had grown quite beyond anything that could be expected, but there had been poor management nevertheless, too much left to chance, too few contingency plans made, too many actions taken as a response to events, rather than as an instigation of them.

She makes her observations to Slaven as she provides him with fruit and sandwiches and coffee. She has brought a flannel and a towel. She winds down the windows for the one-way glass has misted from Slaven’s breath during the night and she wants to see the sun coming up, the sea of Cloudy Bay at a distance, the vineyards and orchards, the pasture land before Tuamarina and the hills rising behind. ‘You’ll feel dreadful,’ she says.

‘Not so hot. You’re right. You get stiff not being able to
change position easily I suppose.’ Slaven rubs his face. His trousers and shirt are twisted uncomfortably around him and the rug has begun to smell because of the dampness. He wants Kellie to tell him that the triumphs of the day before were as he remembered. She pats his hair down at the crown and folds his coat.

‘We’ll get back to the hotel and have a clean-up and a decent meal,’ she says. ‘Miles is being made a fuss of there because they know how rich he is.’

‘And your sister?’

‘A beautiful big girl. Born on the very stroke of three o’clock.’

‘I think something was born here too,’ says Slaven.

‘There was something of it on the television before I left,’ she says. ‘You were standing on the back of a truck looking like a refugee, but speaking like a man possessed. Next time I’ll be with you and hear it all for myself. God, it must have been something.’

See the cloud has gone, but its presence during the night has kept a frost from taking hold. The sky is a cool, slate blue, cleansed anew, the immediate environment beneath it soiled. On the hill around the isolated cemetery and in the paddocks by the country school and the minor cheese factory, whole areas of grass are trampled down, littered with pie wrappers and plastic kiwi juice containers. Some fire sites still smoulder and the hundred Angel Hire chairs have been taken late at night and set around them as the last of the crowd sought warmth. On the morning air a stench drifts from the portable loos which have been quite unable to cope with the numbers. The eucalypt tree in the graveyard has been partly broken down and Les Croad and a few helpers from the Charismatic Cambrian Church have already a pile of abandoned property on the gravel of the small cemetery carpark — coats, car rugs, bags and food bins, a hearing aid and a Panda Bear, a size eleven left shoe, a book of chutney and relish recipes, a Kurdish prayer belt with its crescents far from home. Cars are scattered over the lower site, some left because they wouldn’t start, some not found before the offer of a lift, some stymied in a search for a new exit, some used to sleep in by people who
like Slaven were too dog-tired to face the drive. Old Hurinui is a small figure walking down from the bush where he has seen in the new day.

‘Ah,’ says Slaven. ‘Jesus, I’m stiff.’ He arches and stretches as best he can in the car.

‘Was it what you wanted though?’ says Kellie.

‘It’s odd. Only since the hospital have I felt the compulsion to speak like that, of those sorts of things, and now I find that people do respond. Do you know what I mean? You wonder whether there’s the possibility of real communication. I find I can do it.’

‘What’s the outcome, though. I mean if you can create all this enthusiasm for agreed views, how do you use it to make things better? What’s the process by which the gathering of so many people actually gets anything done?’

‘Political pressure, I suppose. We’re just feeling our way, aren’t we. At least now I know I’m not kidding myself. After all I could have had some aberration as a result of the accident. No one likes to be a laughing stock.’

‘You feel okay when you do it?’

What can he answer. Does he tell her that when he gets underway, lifts himself and soars on the convections of expectation and identification from his audience that he feels too the stirring in the chrysalis of the world yet to be revealed. Look instead, then, on the reassuring texture of Tuamarina around them both, the exact physics of the kinks in the plastic of the kiwi juice bottles, the small, pale cross on the top of the Wairau monument and the cynicism in the lines of Croad’s outdoor face as he wonders how best to deal with the mess.

‘Do they remember when they all get home,’ says Kellie. Like Les Croad she is inclined to be disillusioned by the aftermath of such magnificent and complete conversion. ‘Perhaps it’s like a rock concert, or an open air Shakespearean performance and they get it all out of their system and carry on just the same as before.’

‘I guess we’ll find out about that.’

Despite the stink of the latrines, the litter, abandoned fires and trampled camps and tracks in the grass as if a circus had moved on, Slaven is sure that an important thing
has happened at Tuamarina. He has been given a sign, a mandate even. Croad is standing with Thackeray Thomas at about the place on which the speakers’ truck was parked last night. Croad waves an arm despairingly to indicate the enormity of the clean-up before them and Thackeray is placating him, telling him that there will be a full Cambrian youth team out within an hour. His church is very big on conservation and ecological matters. Thackeray comes over to Slaven’s car to congratulate him anew. There is no envy — he has his own achievements and is grateful to be part of what has happened. ‘I’ve never before seen the like of it,’ he says, taking Kellie’s hand in a greeting. ‘I can’t get over the way in which the people kept coming and coming and the great sense of release and identification they had each time you spoke. The power to grip people, to make them give voice like that, now that’s a special thing.’

‘We were just talking about it,’ says Kellie.

‘There was a sense of hope, wasn’t there?’ asks Slaven.

‘What’s begun here — who knows the end of it.’ Thackeray’s voice is rich with portent. ‘Last night when you were at the height of your powers I kept thinking of David Lloyd George. He had the gift.’