Harlequin Rex (13 page)

‘What
does
the
money
matter
if
it
gets
you
the
very
best
of
care?’
said
David.
How
could
it
be
that
the
farm
was
exactly
the
same,
no
matter
what
was
said:
that
the
drought
persisted
both
dispassionate
and
remorseless,
until
the
pine
cones
broke
in
submission
and
shed
dry
seeds
with
only
one
wing.

‘But
the
very
best
of
care
isn’t
what
I
want,’
his
father
said.
‘I
don’t
want
to
be
on
my
back
for
months,
staring
at
the
ceiling,
clicking
my
tongue,
having
my
bum
wiped
for
me.
I
don’t
want
to
be
dismissively
tended
by
nurses
whose
mothers
would
have
blushed
to
meet
my
eye.
It
seems
to
me
that
you
put
up
the
best
fight
you
can,
but
when
the
writing’s
on
the
wall
you
pack
up
and
go.
That’s
the
best
care
—
best
for
all.’

And
he
never
spoke
of
it
again.
Just
the
once,
as
if
he
wanted
the
record
to
be
straight.
When
things
got
bad
soon
after,
David
feared
sometimes
that
his
father
was
going
to
ask
him
to
take
some
action,
or
that
he
would
choose
the
old
Roman
way
in
the
large
warm
bath:
all
his
blood
easily
 
tempted
out.
Sulla
had
died
badly
at
the
end.
His
father
never
contemplated
any
such
drama:
he
had,
on
diagnosis,
found
a
way
to
get
the
pills
he
required
and,
having
persuaded
his
wife
to
go
and
play
golf
one
cool,
autumn
Thursday,
he
took
the
lot.
A
stockman
knows
when
a
cull
is
needed.

His
body
was
surprisingly
pale
and
unthreatening,
and
with
signs
of
wear.
David
noticed
his
father’s
hands
had
enlarged
through
years
of
farm
work,
that
the
sun
had
scarred
his
face,
that
his
lips
were
pursed
in
a
prissy
way
they
had
never
been
in
life.
Just
a
husk
it
was,
with
no
power
to
move
him.
The
man’s
calm,
quizzical
yet
loving
presence
was
elsewhere.

‘He’d
have
to
be
by
himself
to
die,
wouldn’t
he,’
said
David’s
mother.
‘I
wondered
what
was
up,
when
he
was
so
keen
I
go
to
golf.
How
he
hated
any
fuss
at
all.
’

Lucy’s single room in Kotuku looked across the gardens to the treatment suites, and to Schweitzer’s house further up the slope. Like David, she had no view of the sea at all.

David didn’t need to go there to give her shit. She wasn’t heavily into it, and it was just as easy to give her some stuff in a paper bag on the way back from meals, or leave it in an envelope at her mail drop. But after talking to her briefly at the volleyball, and watching her there with Abbey and Gaynor, he was curious about her. What sort of life could she make of it at Mahakipawa? Did she have someone in her bed perhaps? What did she dream of once her ambitions were lost: did Harlequin release a new woman maybe?

Lucy was writing an email letter on her laptop computer. She would send it to her acquaintances, she said, with just a few changes each time to personalise it. David watched her scroll it. In her letter the centre became quite a different place, a subterfuge to keep from all but her family and closest friends the truth that she and old Harlequin were drawing nearer. It gave David confidence to think that both he and Lucy were in hiding in a sense.

‘You brought some stuff over?’ Lucy asked.

‘No. Just thought that I’d come over for a chat.’

‘You’re all dressed up.’ Lucy’s half-smile showed she knew it was for her, and she made that direct eye contact as ever. David had put on his new denim shirt, and aftershave. Of course he thought her attractive, but her easy reading of his visit exasperated him. ‘It’s all right,’ she said, ‘I’m flattered. I only said it because I’m grotty myself.’

She wasn’t at her best. She had on a loose halter top which had slipped to show her bra straps: trivial, yet a thing that always put him off. There were bands of sunburn on her chest and upper arms. Her heavy hair was held back with a practical elastic band.

‘It’s just that I’ve an hour or so before I take over from Raf, and I thought I’d look in. That’s all. See how things are going.’

‘I had a full session with Schweitzer yesterday,’ she said.

‘How come you’re so privileged then?’

‘Charm,’ she said.

‘Right.’

‘Anyway, it was the works. The thing that pissed me off most was that I’ve gained almost a kilo.’ Lucy smiled again, but kept watching him. ‘That’s the way we are, maybe. You have Harlequin threatening to tear your mind apart, but what you can relate to is the fear of getting fat. Eh?’

‘Well, it’s a coping mechanism, isn’t it?’ He held back just a little from responding to her easy way. ‘You know the bullshit the psychologists give you.’

Lucy pulled out of Windows and switched off, even though David said he could come back another time. She shifted some of her clothes from the one chair, and he sat there looking out through the window, and across the newly cut lawns to the treatment block. ‘How about I give you some of your own stuff?’ Lucy said. She closed the door, then took a brass trinket box from her wardrobe and came back to the bed. ‘A magic carpet for the evening,’ she said.

‘I’m on duty soon.’

‘And the more suitably prepared you’ll be for it.’ Lucy sat on her bed, curling her legs beneath her.

Both of them concentrated on enjoying the joints, for that way they were less self-conscious with each other. They sat in the evening privacy of Lucy’s room and smoked some fair shit. But it took a while, because Lucy was down to it after her session. David drew in and held on a long time. Ah, Jesus, that friendly weed, and the very best shit, from the Coast. One thing he knew about was cannabis. An expertise that he’d suffered for, but he never considered giving up the stuff. A lot of his life was in the kick and smell of it, so that people and places, and even states of mind, rose up as he smoked, and were there just behind the superficial tableau of Lucy’s room in its stroke of present time.

Who would wish to be restricted to that? All the life and success that Lucy had known, the affirmation by others who wished they could achieve as much, and then reduced to one bed, one chair, one room, and a joint with a minder, and no future that she could bear to think about. There was the single advantage as far as David was concerned — Harlequin had laid Lucy low enough to be with him, and even though she was sunburnt and sad and uneasy, almost a kilo up, even though her hair was greasy, he knew that he wanted the opportunity to be with her. He wanted to slip his hand along the inside of her thigh, but he wanted also to hear her talk, to make something of her life. It was a long time since talking had been any sort of priority in his
relationships
with women.

‘People get better, you know,’ he told her. ‘Even the doctors know bugger all about Harlequin, and some people beat it and walk away. Why shouldn’t you?’ David tried to remember the last guest who had done that — walked away from the centre with a clean sheet, rather than wrapped in one. Even Eddie Simm was about to come back, he’d heard.

‘What is the bloody cause? If they could find that for a
start.’ Lucy stretched her legs out, and put a pillow between her back and the headboard.

‘Out of Africa. I reckon that’s what Schweitzer thinks.’

‘Out of Africa! I love it.’

‘You know. The monkey stuff mutation, or the mahogany rats. Ebola and all that.’

‘Jesus. And this one’s come all the way to us,’ said Lucy slowly. ‘Why some African rat or chimp disease over here, for God’s sake?’

‘Some carrier, I suppose. Who knows. Tony Sheridan says that there’s strong overseas opinion that it’s a result of cumulative pollution, but I don’t think Schweitzer goes for that.’ David wasn’t supposed to be talking so frankly to Lucy. At orientation he’d been told that only medically qualified staff should answer questions about Harlequin, but rules were never that important to him. That’s why he’d ended up at Mahakipawa, instead of still farming at Beth Car.

‘Is it pollution?’

‘I’m only an aide, but it seems strange, doesn’t it, that incidence rates here are just about the highest in the world, when we’ve been the clean, green people. It’s Africa, I reckon, or maybe some evolutionary crack-up. Tony says that’s something else that Schweitzer and Alst Mousier are on to. That our brains have reached evolutionary self-destruct, become too sensitive and complex to cope any more.’

‘It’s all beyond me,’ said Lucy. ‘Sometimes you’re
surprised
by your own reaction, aren’t you? I thought that I could put up a hell of a fight against something like this, because I have so much that’s worth fighting for, but a lot of the time I’m ready to give up. I’m just about resigned to anything in store for me.’

‘The first impact, I suppose. It must be numbing, but you’ll bounce back.’

‘No. I don’t think I’m going to feel any different about it. Helplessness is what you mainly feel.’

‘Maybe this shit we’re on isn’t helping?’ He watched as, for an answer, she drew deeply and smiled at him. From another room was the persistent sound of weeping; from the Kotuku lounge at a greater distance a fierce burst of combined laughter. ‘Maybe it’s just this bloody place,’ and he smiled in return. ‘How can any of us take our lives here seriously? A sort of purgatory maybe.’

‘I find it more like a jester’s hell,’ said Lucy, ‘yet I’ve got this preoccupation with food. All sorts of stuff I’ve had smuggled in, and I dream of going to a half decent restaurant.’

‘I’ll work on it.’

‘I didn’t say to share with anyone.’

Maybe Harlequin really was the end, the final catastrophe, but how was it possible to conceive of that? All you could do was go on from one day to another, one personal experience to the next, and leave the grand outcome to the forces powerful enough to shape it.

‘Can you get stronger stuff?’ asked Lucy.

‘This is the best there is. All head from the Coast.’

‘No, I mean other stuff altogether. Heroin, say — ecstasy. Can you find that shit if need be?’

‘I don’t play around with any of that stuff.’

‘Not even if someone was going right under to
Harlequin
?’ An option was what Lucy was after: a recourse if she was going down and couldn’t pull out. David couldn’t blame her for wanting that, but neither could he buy in.

‘Jesus, Lucy,’ he said, ‘have you any idea what the doctors have got in this place? They’ve got legit drugs that could whack a blue whale. Don’t you worry about that.’

‘You don’t mind me asking?’

The sobbing and laughing from other rooms in the block had stopped. It was the still, low ebb of the day, before guests and staff began their night routines. The joints made David and Lucy less aware of each other, and so oddly more
comfortable
together. That’s what shit did — it insulated you
from life. Nothing was going on, and they smoked, and talked only idly of the centre and the people there, as if it were a summer camp. David couldn’t see the sound, and he wondered if Tolly might be out there in the dinghy, at the pink float, with two hand lines angling down into deepening colour.

‘So how did you end up here?’ said Lucy.

‘I needed a job.’

‘What did you do before?’

‘Farming.’

‘You don’t look to me like any sort of farmer.’

‘What do I look like?’

‘A travelling salesman,’ said Lucy. ‘Put you in a bloody suit and you could be a salesman, except you don’t talk as much, do you.’ In a way she was right. David had been a salesman of sorts in a popular line of merchandise, still had a minor interest in it, and he used to talk a good deal more readily as well. No bloody suit, though. Not everything can be told simply, and he didn’t want to get into the story of how a salesman of sorts might end up at Mahakipawa.