A Many Coated Man (12 page)

From the plain room that the Coalition rents, Slaven sees a toi-toi bush and a neglected garden before the road. Weeds are obviously assured of equal divinity with the flowers here. Diamonds of water gather on the leaves of dock, twitch and chickweed. As a background to everything that is said are modest sounds of water dripping, seeping, plopping, trickling and the sounds of the earth drinking. Dafydd Thomas is talking in a room in the other wing, visible to Slaven. Framed by the window he is obviously working up a good head of steam, though no sound is heard and no audience visible. He is counselling seniors perhaps, or merely practising his rhetoric so that he’s more his father’s son.

‘You might say that I’ve powers of plenipotentiary,’ says Bruce Anderson. ‘Why restrict yourself to being a pressure group, however powerful, when you could have direct political influence as a representative. It stands to reason.’

Anatasia is well and comfortably dressed and comfortably assertive. Slaven notices that her legs are shapely and that on one ankle is a small tattoo. ‘I appreciate your wife plays an important part in the movement,’ she says, ‘but it’s a matter of perceived stance and public profile. The law is quite clear on equity in executive structures and if you have a copy of Coalition appointments and responsibilities I can quickly check whether it’s in compliance. You know how such things can be picked up for political purpose by the unscrupulous.’ A thrush is on the rough lawn, listening for a worm that the soft rain will tempt to rise. How much more delicate its colours than the greasy, pin-flecked dark feathers of the starlings, or the full gloss of a blackbird.

‘I mightn’t have the qualifications on paper, not the actual qualifications on actual paper, but then I always say that’s what they’re worth, aye. Paper. No, but from the school of hard knocks I’ve learnt a few lessons I can tell you. Aye? What I see myself being able to bring to the CCP is promotional skills that I’ve developed in the world of insurance and bereavement support.’

‘Form one with Ms Kedgley it would be wouldn’t it. I said to my sister that there wouldn’t be many Aldous Slavens. Fancy that. And there was that boy with us for just a term from the foster home and he broke into the school office and set fire to it, no, sprayed everything with the foam extinguisher, that’s right. It all comes back to you, doesn’t it. And he’s copped it you know. Oh, yes. Locked accidentally in a commercial freezer and when they found him he’d built a snow cave of 1kg bags of free flow peas. It all comes back to you, doesn’t it.’ Jocelyn Piers looks at Slaven expectantly as if there has been a clear reward posted for Slaven’s identification and she is here to claim it.

Slaven realises these are the people who come to Tuamarina and St Kilda. These are his people. He’s not long back from Dunedin and he saw clearly there the thousands of people just like these. Standing high on the sealed road at St Kilda he had addressed the crowd on the beach and on the recreation grounds below him. The people had covered the ash-blonde sand on the seaward side and also the sports fields on the city side. He had seen the line of generating windmills on the hills behind the city and looking south along the beach where the great audience finally thinned he had seen a scud of white blowing up into the dunes from the beach — drifting spray, or the pale sand wind-driven. They had sung the protest songs
Capetown
Races
and
Remember
Greenpeace
; they had begun the vogue of the CCP’s own theme song —
Half
Moon
Bay
. And all of them are the same people that write the thousands of letters, send money and policies unsolicited, come to the Cambrian Church Hall so that they can talk to him. Iago right now deals with a number who have come without appointments, but find they can’t by-pass Kellie’s system.

‘You think about it. Don’t dismiss it out of hand. We feel that you have all that it takes for a major political career and a place in Parliament would guarantee a continuing profile for your policies. Otherwise, you know what will happen once the elections are over.’

‘And then when I first heard you,’ says Anna Fivetrees, ‘I could hardly believe it. After always feeling totally alone in my views, to find someone who has the same values and
the ability to make them known. I talk to people about you all the time. They must think I’m terrible, terrible.’ Anna Fivetrees puts both hands to her face in confusion at her own daring. ‘That bit when you talked of the need in adulthood to regain the trust of youth. How true, how beautiful.’

Behind the chair on which each of Slaven’s visitors sit in turn is a poster of platitudes and as each person’s head comes to a different height, so from Slaven’s vantage they have individual adages. There are no strangers here, only friends you haven’t met, is Anna’s halo; for Nicholas Halley, today is the first day of the rest of your life.

‘The Council has given me a complete runaround, never mind that I’ve been a ratepayer and reserve fireman for over thirty years. They won’t see me any more, because they know there’s no bloody answer to my argument, Aye? The papers have refused to publish my letters now. The buggers have been got at I reckon, and I’ve been individually to every Christchurch MP. They all say they’ll look into my case, but do nothing. Everyone’s knuckled under to the big boys except me.’

‘One of the things that interests people, Dr Slaven, is that apparently you weren’t active in politics at all until the accident meant you had to stop working.’

‘I went for days you know, before I plucked up the courage to ring and ask for an appointment. I kept thinking of how valuable your time was.’

‘What I’m keen to do as well,’ says Anatasia, ‘is talk to your wife and Eula Fitzsimmons. Absolutely essential to get their perspective on what the CCP offers women. An issue you address often I’m sure.’

Slaven thinks he can hear the Hoihos —
Someday,
baby,
there’ll
be
time
for
sailing,
on
the
ebb
tide
from
Half Moon
Bay.
A radio in one of the other rooms perhaps, or one of those odd bursts he gets within his brain. Several of the people kindly rebuffed by Iago Thomas are standing in the drizzle to catch a glimpse of him through the window. Slaven hopes it’s just idle curiosity, but knows there’s more to it. ‘When I think of everything we will achieve, it’s almost too much for me,’ says Anna Fivetrees.

Dr Dunne comes down from the Euthanasia Clinic after supervising the send off for a top-dressing pilot with inoperable cancer of the bowel. Such occasions leave her subdued, but thankful that the option exists. The pilot’s wife initiated the sequence of injections and there was a video on the large screen showing the pilot working over blocks of the inland Kaikouras; virtually no wind and the plane banked into the evening sun at the head of the valley where the scree slopes led up to the divide. The pilot watched himself, the plumes of super drifted above that steep, lonely country. Dust to dust. ‘Look at her go, the beauty,’ he said to his family.

Yes, Marianne Dunne comes down from Euthanasia and thinks that she has fought her old enemy to a draw. A few quiet minutes in her office before she goes to see Miles Kitson, who is back in for a spell of treatment. She has videos for him too, but not terminal. One is from Aldous Slaven and covers the St Kilda rally. The other is from Miles’s wife — the only access he allows her when he is at his worst and in care. Marianne has already seen the first, watched the vast crowd on the long open beach and the sports fields, wondered what is really happening to her patient and friend. Slaven with his burnt hands and a mind subject to magnificent alteration by the surge through all its circuits.

Miles watches Georgina trying on a selection of new clothes that are heaped on the window squabs of her bedroom. She talks to him as she does so, remarks sometimes occasioned by the garments which are reflected in the full length mirrors, or a commentary of her life without him. ‘I’ll go ski-ing with the Railles if you’re not back by the fourteenth. There’s been a final dump, Polly said.’ Georgina is trying on a lace camisole. She shows no awkwardness, no posturing before the recorder that their housekeeper holds, for she is both confident in her beauty and familiar with such display as a form of communication in their marriage. She and Miles are perfectly aware of the sexuality; the slipping of a shoulder strap, hip rotation, the tightening of her breasts as she stretches her arms up, but transcending that, or at least complementing it, is the need
for such display of grace in the face of illness and time.

Miles in a private room lies propped up on his pillows. The tears gather beneath his eyes. Marianne Dunne sits further towards the bed-end. She is so short that her legs won’t touch the floor and she tucks them beneath her on the spread. ‘I love the black dress cut low at the back,’ she says. ‘Georgina’s back is very smooth, yet with little sign of the sub-cutaneous fat which gives that effect. One of the things with black is that it suits both a pale skin and a tan.’

‘I read that everyone has a birthmark somewhere on the body. Is that true?’ Miles can see the skin taut on Georgina’s collar bone and hair falling over one side of her face. See how definite the hip is, how fragile the wrist bones raised beneath the skin.

‘Maybe if you accept any minor blemish, and some that come out after birth. But there’s no genetic imperative.’

‘Georgina has one on her heel for god’s sake.’

‘Mulberry, wine, or bleach?’

‘Oval and white as spider’s silk.’

‘A bleach mark then. Just lack of pigmentation. It’s stable and of no consequence whatsoever.’

‘I’ve told her that it’s a reminder from the manufacturer that nothing’s perfect.’ Georgina, naked to the camera and the glass, pauses to talk to him. Her stomach has a slight forward curve with just the single navel tuck in its upholstery. She has the nails of both feet painted — purple almost.

‘I spend a good deal on clothes in these sessions,’ she says. ‘So many of the things I try on, I like.’ Miles gives a barely audible laugh. Money has become at last a source of humour for him.

‘Lucky thing,’ says Marianne Dunne, ‘to look like a model and be able to buy what you like.’

‘And be married to a package of disintegration,’ says Miles. ‘I imagine that the poor see mortality as their greatest ally. The one alternative to their lifestyle they can afford and the one thing the rich can’t buy off. It’s the only justice they can be sure of.’ Georgina is trying on beige, linen culottes; through the window behind her, Miles catches a glimpse of his grounds and the view beyond. The wall of
Central Otago schist he helped to build, Christchurch city spread below, and the gondolas, reduced by distance, passing up and down the Port Hills.

‘Don’t take the morbid approach on me,’ says Marianne. ‘I may take you up on it. You’ve had a great time both rich and poor and you’re still pleasing yourself. And Georgina wants nothing more than to visit you, you know that. It’s just your pride that means you lie here and watch a video of your own wife.’

‘Well, thank god I can indulge my pride. I can afford my own nurses, I can afford you, I can afford the periodic services like this which may give me a few hours a week when I don’t feel like a bag of shit loosely tied. If I can’t go back home in better shape than this then I’ll be asking you to do a different job for me.’

‘And what will you leave me in your will? I calculate that you’re good for a new surgical annex at least.’

Miles turns the video off. He’s interested in planning his death. ‘There’s a potion for everything I suppose, but the old Roman way must still have its supporters. I’ve always enjoyed a hot bath.’

‘There are several appropriate parts of the body very poorly served with nerves, yet with large enough arteries. The side of the foot for example. Virtually no pain need be felt at all. You have to get special dispensation to use anything but the procedure laid down by the Council. Anyway, if the time comes I think you’ll find our way the best.’ Marianne Dunne is always quite candid with Miles; it is their way together. ‘I still think you should let Georgina come to see you.’

‘Once, you know, I was a man for women to reckon with. Confidence and humour are more important than looks. I learnt that.’

‘I’ve always wanted to be taller, of course,’ says Marianne, ‘but thank god I was given a good brain.’

‘I used to have that,’ says Miles, ‘but it’s gone.’ He watches the doctor swing her feet from his bed. When she is standing though, her head is not much higher than before.

‘I’m serious,’ she says, ‘about asking for money for the hospital. I don’t feel guilty at all about asking. You know
what we do here and the value of it. I bet Georgina wouldn’t miss enough to build the extensions I need.’

‘We’ll see. You’re as bad as Kellie Slaven, who’s conned me into bankrolling the activities of the Coalition until their financial structures are in place. I’ve had the bite put on me by people most of my life and many of them with better offers than you can make. So, an annex is it? Kitson Castle, or the Miles Mausoleum. You think I’m a sucker for it, because I’m dying. It’s shameless of you. You need reporting to the Medical Council.’

‘Why should dying be an excuse for not accomplishing things before it happens?’

‘Now there’s something worth arguing about if you had the time,’ says Miles. ‘It reminds me of old Roland Purcell who was at the university and was intrigued with a delivery van with the words Door to Door Transports. He became preoccupied with the semiotic implications and went out on to the road to determine if the van was signified, or signifier and was run over by it. Struck with his own research.’ His own mention of Roland Purcell leads Miles on to recollections of Albie Purcell, the son, and he doesn’t notice when Marianne Dunne quietly leaves the room.

Albie flatted with Miles in a converted garage by the Addington Saleyards and they went to lectures at the Canterbury Campus with the landscaped humps of smooth lawns, the streams through them, the faculty buildings in ugly and rectangular contrast. At every party, when he was sufficiently drunk, Albie would start to shout, ‘It’s frontal lobotomy time,’ and thereafter talked with a lucidity and passion of higher things which were completely beyond him when sober. He scraped through a law degree and then went into local government. When he felt stifled there, he established a small farm in the Hokianga, raising frogs and mushrooms for the gourmet restaurant trade. Miles eventually became the major shareholder for old times’ sake. The only tangible return Miles ever receives is in kind, cartons of frog pieces and mushrooms when Albie makes the occasional visit to indulge in undergraduate memories and ask for more capital. He thinks the glory of their early experience together comes from the poverty. Miles knows it
is rather the recollection of youth. Unfortunately, no amount of drink now restores to Albie the frontal lobotomy of that time.