A Many Coated Man (13 page)

Miles lies alone in his private room and watches more video: not Georgina now, but Slaven at his second great rally. The huge crowd on the beach with their backs to the wind from the sea which hasn’t been told of spring. The wind snatches at Slaven’s voice and sends the words scudding and swirling away over the people packed on the beach, the top carpark, the recreation fields on the other side. The camera pans the sea to show the swell breaking white far out from the beach. The Rev Thackeray Thomas stands behind Slaven on the stage, wearing his red dragon jacket and hyped up in the turbulence of emotion and weather as if it is some great pit-head deliverance. Miles is at once appalled and fascinated by the energy, the conviction, the transience of it. What can they expect, all these Otago people — the worst dressed and least progressive section of the country’s citizenry. They haven’t grasped the essential premise of life; that nature has no sense of justice.

The soundtrack has a portion of the song ever more closely associated with Slaven and the Coalition.
Hear
the
secret
night
parrot
from
its
booming
grounds.
Love
has
many
calls
to
offer
from
the
place
of
Half
Moon
Bay.
The video runs on, but Miles’s thoughts move back to his own life. Even the sensational involving a friend is no competition for your own thoughts. The outcast is lonely, they say, the adolescent, they say. Lonely at the top as well and lonely in the face of grave decision, yet Miles wishes that much more of his time had been spent with no company, but his own. The weak and the mediocre cluster into groups. He has wasted years in total dealing with people of no interest to him. Miles lies in the private room darkened for his viewing. The changing colours from the screen play across the sheen of his face. He is flat on his back as he thinks, eyes to the ceiling, mouth opened by the slackness of his jaw. Only the arc of nose cartilage, clear beneath the waxy tissue of his skin, maintains his face as a living head, below it is all mandible, socket and brow ridges, the topography of skulls.

Miles is thinking of the chance encounters and opportunities which can begin success. His own first coup at Zapp Corp, which set him on the way, was the trip to Chile to investigate distribution outlets. He was too junior at the time to be anyone’s nomination in the boardroom, but he had by chance come into the executive washroom only seconds after Jasons, the Chairman, had cleared his bowels and must still own the stench of his excrement in the confined, tiled room. Miles had with humble obstinacy blocked Jasons’ way and asked for the opportunity to represent the company in Chile. With his passing and common mortality so blatantly in the air, even the Chairman was at some disadvantage. ‘Oh, very well, very well,’ he had said in passing, and Miles had gone and managed — very well. Such a recollection is a pleasant sophistry in part, for Miles knows that there have been a hundred chances of ruin which he has avoided by talent, hard work and good fortune, but all the same there’s enough truth to prompt his soft, hoarse laugh. A career so well known and envied — launched by the trivial humiliation of Jasons in a latrine.

See Miles Kitson lying alone as he prefers it and the St Kilda video still on, the southern images of excitement and opportunity casting movement and colour into the hospital room. Slaven’s speech although turned low has resonance and power. Yet Miles’s pale eyes are on the ceiling and he goes back years for the replays that he needs. Two lines from the poet Alberto Valdivia come back to him.

Everything
will
go
— a
fternoon,
the
sun,
life:

evil,
which
cannot
be
undone,
will
prevail.

In the spring also, Cardew Slaven flies in on a hush jet from Sydney to see for himself what his old man is up to. He has received no invitation from home, rather the stimulus was Australian reports of the political backwoodsman setting the normally morose New Zealanders to bay at the moon. Also, somewhere in it all, Cardew gets the sniff of money.

His parents are pleased to see him of course. They say so as parents do, though Slaven’s greetings are at second-hand. Kellie meets her son as he comes through customs at the overseas terminal. She almost kisses him, but at the
last moment puts her hand on his shoulder instead and both of them are relieved by the restraint. ‘Your father’s preparing his speech for the Western Springs rally,’ she says.

‘Fair enough,’ says Cardew. ‘He’s certainly come right after the accident. Bounced back and into the news and the big time. What on earth’s got into him?’

‘He can’t go back to the surgery because of his hands and some emotional effects, but he’s working harder than ever. He has this sudden passion to accomplish improvement and it’s brought out this special leadership in him. It’s a whole new life. Everything is topsy-turvy now.’

Cardew drives his mother’s car towards the outskirts on the west of Christchurch. Going from the airport that way he avoids most of the city, although the suburbs continue to encroach, with subdivisions amongst the nurseries, orchards and horticultural units. ‘Is there any money in it?’ he asks casually.

‘If he asks for money they give it. They’ve even been sending it in without being asked, along with every other sort of thing that’s important to them. The Coalition’s been backed by Miles Kitson you know?’

‘Right.’

‘But we’ve got our own financial structures in place now and money’s not a problem. Anyway, we’re not in it for that reason, though I think there should be prudent policies and reserves.’

‘Yeah,’ says Cardew. He was a partner in Placemate Personnel Agency in Sydney, but has come out of it with next to nothing. He looks forward to the eventual half share in his parents’ assets, but the new activities offer the chance of more immediate returns. ‘I could stay on for a bit and give some help. I’d say there’d be a good deal of pressure on you and Dad in all of this. Often it’s sensible to have someone close to the family dealing with the business side of things.’ Cardew’s large fingers hang over the steering wheel as he drives. He has large, soft hands and feet like a bear, but despite the belief about the size of appendages indicating final growth, he has never grown tall. The suede expanse of his shoes covers most of the car floor in front of him. ‘So what are the arrangements for Western Springs,’ he says.
He sees the chance to do himself some good. A chance for once to be on the inside and to make that work in his favour. He thinks of the professional issues promoters, protest campaigners and political frontmen who have made it big and the managers and agents who made it big with them. Cardew wants some real money so he can afford one of the top blondes he admires in Sydney. S-shaped blondes with breasts like flotation devices and thighs which never meet. Cardew’s bear paws tremble on the steering wheel; the world blurs for a moment. ‘Who’s setting up the Auckland thing?’ he says.

‘I am,’ says Kellie. ‘After Tuamarina — you heard about that?’

‘Uh-huh.’

‘In many ways Tuamarina was a shambles and not just because the numbers caught them out. Things are a lot more business-like now. Aldous and I worked all through what was needed. St Kilda was so much better; the first that the new CCP took responsibility for. You can’t afford to have it any other way in a political movement. A lot of people make no distinction between method and message, you know.’

‘Any organisation needs clear financial structures.’

‘More than that; needs accountability in all it does. A weakness in the movement at all, anything goes wrong, and Aldous will be blamed. It’s no use saying that ideals are distinct from the management of things. I said at the meetings, if we’re going to be responsible for the whole show then we have to be able to influence the whole show. It’s not bearable any other way. Responsibility for an outcome should be accompanied by authority to affect the outcome. The thing we can’t control of course is the response people have. That’s what your father worries most about. Anyway, we’ve some clever people on the team now.’

‘I reckon family control gets around a lot of problems. Have you considered making a charge at Western Springs. People never value what they get for nothing.’

‘Except sex, poetry and money,’ says Kellie. Cardew doesn’t answer. He thinks his mother’s being a smart-arse and he doesn’t remember her as talking in that way. These
new activities of his father’s though, this Coalition for Citizen Power rapidly developing a national profile. Cardew sees possibilities.

His asks his mother about the garden next, something closer to her traditional interests, but doesn’t listen to her replies. Two years apart and yet within half an hour he is tuning her out. Don’t talk too much of the power of flesh and blood. Cardew thinks of Steven Wybrow as they pass the street in which he had lived. He sees himself running down that street having punched Steven Wybrow in the face and making his lip bleed. It was the only reaction he had at the time to the humiliation of eleven straight losses at computer Galaxwar during the course of a Sunday afternoon. ‘Another win to the Champeen of the entire, wide world,’ Steven kept crowing. Cardew remembers the surprisingly firm impact with Steven’s face and the sprint down the Wybrow’s drive which seemed endless. He’d left a red anorak at the house which was never returned and Cardew denied knowing where he had lost it. ‘Champeen of the world, aye,’ murmurs Cardew.

‘What’s that,’ says Kellie.

‘Steven Wybrow thought he was Champeen of the whole damn world.’

‘Sarah’s with us,’ says Kellie. ‘You knew that?’

‘How is she.’ Cardew attempts brotherly warmth, but there’s only jocularity. He is seized with a boredom sprung from return to what is familiar and unloved.

‘She’s come back for a while as well. It’s been relatively slow with her freelance astrology, I think. She says she might do some psychology papers.’ Cardew opens his mouth to make reply, but is not supplied with even the most banal of comments suitable for his mother to hear, and he is left with an expression half fatigue, half adenoidal idiocy as he turns off the main west road and into the fringe belt of four hectare blocks which includes his parents’ home. Jesus, though, freelance astrology.

Something then of exposition from a distance this has been. A hush jet delivery, but no deliverance. A hand upon a shoulder and externals like a short order cook. A placing of each in relation to the others you understand,
but you come right up close with me and meet the man. All right?

It is Cardew, evident by a distinctive bad breath in the air and a less explicable, but equally characteristic aura of physicality such as strikes the observer of an empty baboon cage at the zoo. Everything about him is too obvious, too carnal, as if a model
homo
sapien
has been made in the flesh. So here he is: the nostrils drawing attention to their vital function, his moustache not quite the colour of his hair and offset a little because he always trims it with his right hand. His expression is one of ignorant presumption, of scrabbling for a living in the here and now because there will be nothing after death — not even brief immortality in the fond memory of others. No shadow of the spirit, no tincture of the divine, no faint stirring of apprehension at the potential of the mind.

So you see him. Cardew Slaven with no letters after his name and no approbation in its pronounciation. How like his father though in the hair which stands up from his crown and the way he shakes his wrist to bring his watch strap down, the way his big foot hangs from the ankle when he has crossed his legs, his dark, lacquered eyes. How like Kellie in the thin, lobeless ears and jawline. How like himself in that he looks away while he is talking and his mouth is tight with a barely suppressed yawn before people who have no immediate advantage for him.

So here is Cardew Slaven for you, the son, cast as the cast off in the list of company and deserving it. Not the villain because he lacks sufficient malicious interest in others, not the fool because he lacks the pathos of the true jester and any grasp of the symbolic utterance. Experiment with him in that dark laboratory which shuts down external stimulus in sequence and he will in stages close down himself, until he is inert there in the dark, only his blood coursing. For nothing sublime originates from within to motivate him, no sense of higher aspiration, no vision to which the metal of the world and self must be beaten — just the instincts of gratification, or survival.

Shagging is the thing he likes best. That’s how he spent his money in Sydney. That’s how he will spend the money
the CCP will unwittingly supply. He has a cultivated appetite. He shags in hotel and motel rooms, in old villas renovated for the purpose, in chalets which never see the snows, in staff quarters reached by a narrow path with a tin fence hard beside it, in bean bag lounges and maisonettes. He shags with the glow of television casting bruises on the white arses of his loves. He shags in dormitories, changing rooms, vans, and after hours cafeterias with all the legs turned up to the ceiling; yes, all the legs turned up. He shags in the bed and breakfast which overlooks the croquet green and shags in the deep doorway of the St Vincent de Paul in Mitre Street while a group of drivers yarn at the taxi stand ten metres away. He is indiscriminate, except that he dislikes women who come to sex determined to enjoy it, as they might join a tennis club on advice to make friends.

He shags always with the same fixed, lacquered eyes, not looking at a woman, not registering the things that seem the object of his fierce stare, but shagging as if he is knocking at a secret door and in the greatest pitch of the act the flicker in his eyes is brief anticipation of the opening of that door. Knock, knock, knocking at Heaven’s door.

If he isn’t shagging in any of those places, then he’s most likely shagging in his mind. Shagging Eula Fitzsimmons at the meeting of the Coalition Executive until his mouth slackens from its yawn, shagging the weather reader in her own deep depression, shagging the girl who comes with the keys for the rental cars until her breath mists up the windscreen, mounting the shapely shoppers and catching their exclamation from behind while a cool wind blows on his balls at the top of his stroke.