A Many Coated Man (20 page)

The great majority of us are conscious of ourselves from the inside out, we observe events in which we are invisible, but those few people who are cynosures have an additional view of themselves as the focus of the interest and regard of their fellows. Slaven has been disconcerted by it. The PM is accustomed to it and every impression that he gives, each change of expression, or stance, is as visible and predictable to him as to those who join in the observation. He inhabits his own image quite naturally and with assurance. He knows from thousand-fold experience the reaction of those he meets for the first time — the initial sense of familiarity, undermined almost immediately by the realisation that he’s a stranger to them after all.

Brian Hennis is concerned about his health you will remember; a hernia to be dealt with when there is time,
some pooling veins, an ingrowing toenail, persistent catarrh, but there is only confidence, presence, in the entry he makes. ‘I am sorry to be late,’ the PM says as he is introduced to the CCP representatives. ‘Give me a moment to adjust my mind from double dump wool exports to Korea and aphrodisiacal deer velvet and I will be able to take account of
vox populi
.’ It’s a pity that he chooses to use the term from his briefing by Dr Meelind so soon after the advisor has used it himself. The effect for both is diminished. ‘I would say that I’ve rather less than twenty minutes before my executive assistant will bear me away to a diplomatic briefing and yet I regard the present meeting as the most important of the day.’

‘Then I wonder, Prime Minister, how much of the CCP charter you can accept as policy to be implemented if you are returned to office?’

‘I like someone who is forthright in discussion,’ says the PM. ‘Okay, let’s lay it out so far. A reduction of the Presidential term, we can live with it. The setting up of a ministry for community regeneration. Well within certain resource limits we can go along with that. Your regional devolution is much the same in essence as a new policy we have arrived at through independent initiatives within the Party, so there’s probably common ground in this regard as well. For the others the answer is frankly no, for reasons that I think Dr Meelind and the Minister have explained.’

‘I hardly think…,’ begins Sheffield.

‘Three then, from six,’ continues the PM, ‘and as a sign of good faith we’d require a genuine CCP endorsement from you personally, Dr Slaven, within two weeks and a pledge that there will be no more rallies before the December elections.’

‘Three out of six,’ repeats Alan Warden, ‘and that from the Government, not some minority party that will accept anything, but can deliver nothing.’

‘Our Party has its integrity too. You of all people will be able to appreciate that, Dr Slaven. There are things that we aren’t prepared to compromise on whatever the electoral outcome of that decision might be.’ The PM is so good at this sort of thing. He has been seizing the moral high ground
ever since he was Head Prefect and he has been salting that ground ever since. ‘It’s no secret our policy committee is most impressed with what the Coalition has achieved. Spectacular in its way. There’s a feeling the energy and rapport with the public that the movement has, should be given direct access to policy-making. Wouldn’t you say, Alan?’

‘That was certainly the feeling.’

‘There was talk of a joint working party after the election, or a Commission, to consider social issues in an integrated and bi-partisan fashion and I for one would certainly support a CCP convenor, when we’re successful at the election and such a body can be formed.’ The PM has an almost ingenuous enthusiasm and a most excellent, expensive, soft-collared shirt held by a red and blue tie. He pays the delegation the great compliment of giving it his full attention, when it is one important aspect of a day with several events of equal significance. The information from the Chairpersons of the Producer Boards is already filed below the surface for later consideration, the briefing to come on the ruction at the Pacific Talks held back from impinging on his present concern. Even the discomfort of his hernia and fear for his ailing mother, do not really distract him. After all, on such eternal vigilance does power depend. His smile encompasses the delegation of four. ‘Don’t feel you have to make up your mind immediately. There’s no ultimatum here. We’re excited by the possibility of coming to some arrangement.’ Prime Minister Hennis gives a smile that both he and they know from a thousand photographs and television shots. A smile pulled off slightly to the left of his mouth with ironic self-awareness, his face lifted somewhat to the eternal camera in assurance rather than aggression, the good teeth, the straight, dark eyebrows and the greying, abundant hair swept back directly with just the odd tress straying to the side of his face. It is the hair of a mafioso chieftain, or an intellectual novelist of the 1930s, and is at once the cause of intuitive feminine response and the joy of his cartoonists. Slaven, Spottiswoode, Thomas and Eula Fitzsimmons watch as they would the screen, and even the Minister and Meelind have to make the small effort to break the common pose and begin again with discussion.

During it Slaven realises that the only thing at issue is priority. The Coalition, its charter points, the service of its supporters, are the entirety of his new and zealous public concern, but only one piece of the action for the PM, one item of the agenda on which he’s engaged.

‘My door is open,’ says the PM. ‘Don’t hesitate to contact Royce Meelind, who keeps up with everything about your organisation and is impressed. I must admit I thought the time of the mass orator gone forever. The 21st Century would be against it, everybody said.’ The PM’s assistant is standing at the door as a reminder of the diplomatic briefing.

Why is it that the central issues of people’s lives which seemed in the context of Tuamarina and Western Springs, the Coalition policy sessions, meetings in the Dungarvie community hall in Central Otago and the Te Tarehi Anglican vestry in the King Country, to be indisputable, are here strangely moved from centre stage and diminished by imperatives which have not figured before. And how can Slaven go back and explain it all. Every activity and institution is dangerously misunderstood if judged by the common statement of its purpose. A democratic Government is no more the expression of the people’s will than is a Church the defender of its faith. The intention of things is finally subverted by the exigencies of day-to-day functioning. A process of getting by rules the world, for always in their hearts people know that any ideal, any whole truth, or absolute accomplishment is beyond them. Humanity’s greatest skill always lies in just managing to shore things up.

Meelind has a moment alone with Slaven as the deputation is leaving, as the Minister of Police mentions to Eula Fitzsimmons that if she has no objection he will have his department invite her to be the keynote speaker for the plenary session of the Conference on Humour Clinics.

‘You’re not disappointed?’ asks Meelind. ‘It’s a balancing act you know, trying to keep all the elements of the party on side. Impossible in fact, but the PM usually avoids having too many aggrieved at any one time. You could do a good deal worse than take what advantage you can get for the moment and then be in a position of greater influence following the election if things go well.’

‘But it’s the soft demands which he’s willing to accept,’ says Slaven.

There are twelve reporters and two camerawomen to record the outcome of the meeting. Slaven thinks how cleverly the PM has slipped away, as there is nothing conclusive, or advantageous, that can be said. Even as Slaven speaks he notes a certain pomposity and complacency in his manner, and the others also, despite themselves, are a little puffed up at having met with the PM and the Minister for Police and Gaming. Spottiswoode musters his most appalling grammar when his chance comes, Eula Fitzsimmons’ vowels cause a feedback glitch in the sound system, and the Rev Thackeray Thomas, last to speak, wields his delivery like Excalibur for as long as the reporters will listen.

The October dusk is lapping at the Beehive before the PM has a chance to talk again with Alan Warden. The PM isn’t on visual and so his face relaxes from its photogenic lines and he sits close to one of his windows so that he can see much of the city: the concrete cubes of the mid-twentieth century, the higher glass blocks of the eighties and nineties, the more ornate buildings of the new millenium. The addition to the National Museum on the waterfront has a splendid copper dome and the more recent speed-rail station close at hand has facings of Takaka marble and huge figures of Maui, Kupe and a northern taniwha in Mount Somers limestone. It is a pleasant thought for the PM that he had supported the project when a junior Minister in the second United Government.

‘I don’t warm to him, Alan,’ says the PM. ‘He thinks too much, as Shakespeare would have it.’

‘Well, who ever really likes a dentist.’

‘That’s right. You’re right. The thing is he’s not political, it seems to me. I can respect the integrity and ability. Meelind gives a good account of all that, but there’s fixation of purpose isn’t there. You don’t get far in public life with the blinkers on. He’s stiff, don’t you think? Can’t see beyond his own ideas. He’s driven from the inside, not by what happens outside. Now that’s dangerous.’

‘Then again, he’s had virtually no experience, has he.
Amazing in a way. He’s just come out of nowhere and taken the place by storm. The pundits all said you couldn’t do it without televison and that the people aren’t susceptible to eloquence any more. That they won’t listen any more. Well he showed them, didn’t he.’ So he has, thinks the PM. The lights come on automatically at the main station, throwing sharp light and shadow on the great tail of the taniwha and the hewn figures of Maui and Kupe.

‘The novelty will wear off soon though,’ says the PM. ‘If we all just keep our nerve, the people will tire of Slaven and move on to something else, serenity drugs again, or gender therapy.’

Life is a multiple exposure, so turn aside for a moment, see Neville Hambinder in the back of a garage overlooking Meola Creek kiss his cousin, while a metre away through roughcast their mothers watch the heedless salt tide from the harbour and talk of double knit and raglan sleeves. While the spiders’ webs tremble with the cousins’ breath, at the Beckley-Waite Institute so much closer to the PM’s office, it’s smoko for the Caretaker. He shares it with a sandy electrician who has come from J.J. Orme Ltd in Guy Street to fix the laundry thermostats. The Caretaker repeatedly stretches his left arm behind him as they talk. His shoulder gives him trouble after all the years of League. They have mugs so large that on the surface of the tea, ripple patterns form. The Caretaker tells the Orme’s man of an inmate who just yesterday claimed there was a monstrous tsunami sweeping north to engulf them from a seismic catastrophe in Antarctica. It makes a good story. The inmate said he could hear the headlong rush of it in the night. The electrician has finished his work for the day. He is relaxed in the evening and laughs until the tears run over the freckles of his sandy face. At this very moment Athol heads his Harley-D turbine Hog westward from Christchurch with the last light catching the greenstone stud in his nose and with the goose girl in a dreamy swoon against his back and he’s scarcely five ks from Slaven’s place though that’s nothing to him and he’s thinking of a rendezvous in the state forest and a sack of good leaf grown there. He passes
a closed roadside stall for mushrooms and organic pumpkin where Norman Proctor had made purchases in better days.

What’s all this in the process of time passing I wonder.

Slaven is on his way to Governors Bay. The Christchurch office has set up a meeting there with a group of peninsula identities who want to know the CCP’s stance on rural zoning and historic sites. Influential people in their own quiet way, Kellie told him. Les Croad drives past the high rise apartment blocks at the head of the Heathcote Valley and into the tunnel. ‘In we go me darling,’ he says.

The tiled sides have recessed lights which flit past with the regularity of heartbeats. For an instant it reminds Slaven of the bathrooms in Burwood Hospital; sanitary, shiny, impersonal. Slaven recalls Norman Proctor resting on the floor there one evening, just a day or two before he died while Kellie was arranging his flowers. The ruckle of his death so subdued that no one heard it you will remember. ‘Hello,’ says Croad. The engine surges twice, stops. Croad coasts to the emergency lay-by, close to the Lyttelton entrance. Slaven can see a reduced, postcard view of green and blue framed in the arch of the tunnel entrance as Croad uses the red phone on the wall. Norman had said he was buggered: exactly that word and he had sat with his arms straight and the palms flat on the tiled bathroom floor as if he wanted to take some weight from his bed sores. He was buggered he had said and he didn’t mean just too tired to get back to the ward.

‘Someone’s coming in a jiff,’ says Croad. He’s keen to show that he’s well able to cope with the situation. He lifts the bonnet although the light isn’t good enough for inspection, let alone repair. ‘She crapped out very sudden.’

‘We’ve got a bit of time,’ says Slaven. Croad closes the bonnet and leans on it, watching the cars coming past. The service car is prompt and the two men in it have powder blue overalls. They link the vehicles quickly and ask Slaven to ride with them for insurance purposes, while Croad is left at the wheel of the other car.

‘The fourth today, oddly enough,’ says the serviceman sitting with Slaven in the back. As soon as both cars emerge
into the light beyond the tunnel the tow is dropped and as Slaven is accelerated ahead he glimpses only the dark reflection of the one-way glass which hides Croad’s reaction. ‘A little ride, mate,’ says the man beside Slaven. He is calm and heavily-built and he puts a hand on Slaven’s left forearm as a friend might to ensure attention to a joke worth hearing.

After a few swift turns to disguise direction, the car slides down to the wharves, the tyres vibrating on the heavy, uneven timbers. The breathing rise and fall of small boats as they pass, coastal freighters, fishing boats, a working launch or two. Looking out at such mundane things as the car slows, Slaven feels foreboding rather than sharp, active fear. He can think of nothing which he can do immediately to his advantage. He is reminded by the attentive grip of his arm that his is to be a passive role, though nothing more is said. The car stops close to the open doors of a landing building which has a sign — Wholesalers Only. M.F. Products.