A Many Coated Man (3 page)

Norman Proctor has died before we have come round to telling his story. Let’s just say that he had a good match temperament did Proctor. It used to be a treat to see him cope with the pressure at provincial, even national, tournaments. Oh yes, it’s easy advice to treat each ball on its merits irrespective of the state of the game, but Proctor actually managed to do so on occasions which seemed important at the time. Had we started at the bed furthest from the door there would have been more of him and less of Montgomery and young Vincent I dare say.

Norman Proctor was dying anyway, but Kellie was the occasion of it, if not the cause, as the scholars say. Norman had very little movement and no woman. He had no enjoyment from watching Montgomery’s wife when she came to call, but he admired Kellie’s energy and sense of purpose. He made a considerable effort to watch Kellie inspecting the gladioli she had placed on his table the day before. Kellie’s shoulder was brown and well muscled by gardening. Unfortunately the strain brought on a cramp in Proctor’s neck and he suffocated in silence there as Kellie talked to
Vincent of the Mount Cook lily she had seen below the Hooker Glacier.

It is a Thursday, with a heat cloud pressing down on the city. The first trees and buildings from the hospital windows can be seen and then the white-grey uniformity of cloud like a well used sheet. The nurses wheel Proctor’s bed into the corridor and close the swing doors to the small ward so that the others don’t have to see Proctor being tidied away. For some reason there is a good deal of birdsong on such a day and in his room Miles can hear the throaty whistles of the thrushes as well as the voices of the nurses outside his door.

‘And I’ve just spent an age changing the dressings,’ says Elaine.

‘Ssh. Mr Kitson will hear you,’ whispers Jan. What happens to such an instant, Miles wonders, what record is there of the momentary coincidence of all the elements that are there. Proctor cooling in his transported bed, Elaine and Jan on the shift together only because Nicola is to be a bridesmaid in Dargaville, the white gladioli stems with five buds still to open, the slight vibrato whistle of the birds in the heat mist underscored for Miles alone from the faint orchestra pit of his tinnitus. Often after such a day there comes in the evening a welcome drizzle which drifts and trembles in the failing light without ever leaving any trace of itself as rain.

Miles presses a key and begins to dictate the corporate structure that he wants for his new business in Indonesia. He wishes to carry his Board on the principle that stand alone financial accountability is the best yardstick for measuring executive potential. Also he wants to be doing something unless the owl decides that it might be as well to take him while in the neighbourhood.

The orderly has arrived and Proctor is transferred to a trolley which squeaks cheerfully away down the corridor. ‘Leave it to me, darling,’ the orderly says. It won’t hurt to follow him just a little, not to depress ourselves with the aftermath of Proctor’s death, but rather see the misted grounds outside the corridor he travels. The corridor is long and narrow with many uniform windows on both sides,
rather like a gutted railway carriage, and links ward seven with the main block. On the orderly’s left — Proctor’s too if you wish to be reminded — there are the dwarf conifers in the quartz pebble garden and on the right mainly
Scoliopius
bigelovii
and ranunculus, which Kellie would tell us are prone to fungal blight after just such days as this. In the branches of a sycamore, just out of sight in the warm, gathering mist, is a canary which escaped from Mrs Wicks when she was cleaning the cage an hour ago. It adds nothing to the songs that Miles hears and Proctor is still relaxed enough about his death for his chin to quiver whenever the trolley jars over the joins in the flooring, almost as if he is attempting to join the orderly in a line or two of the Hoihos’ hit of the moment —
Sure,
all
our
friends
are
waiting
in
good
old
Half
Moon
Bay.

Kellie is walking back to her car through the mist. Slaven goes in to see Miles. ‘Fancy that,’ he says. ‘Kellie had just been arranging the flowers on his table and the next thing he was gone.’ Jan stays a while in the ward to talk to Vincent and Mr Montgomery. Off-stage Mrs Wicks is weeping, because somewhere marooned in all the soft, massed vapour moving in from the sea, is her poor canary.

‘Kellie came in before she left,’ says Miles hoarsely.

‘She finds you particularly interesting because of your money.’

‘Is that it.’

‘That’s not quite how I meant it. To be fair, she hasn’t any envious, or trivial, motive. It’s psychological effects she finds fascinating; how it might influence a personality, a view of the world.’

‘It means I don’t have to be so accommodating, rather as some of those who have nothing decide they won’t flatter, or appease anyone. At the two ends of the scale you see that, while the bulk of people are in between, oh, so very conscious of what and who can be to their advantage. To retain a conviction of freedom you should have nothing to lose, or so much that you don’t believe it could ever happen.’

‘That’s what she senses, I think,’ says Slaven.

‘She brought me in two arum lilies and laughed when I said they had the stench of the funeral parlour. She said
they weren’t true lilies at all. I never knew that.’ The two lily stems are on the bedside table, their great fluted, sari flowers more arrogantly white than anything the hospital itself can provide, their yellow, parrot tongues upraised and the scent indeed crass and heavy.

Miles Kitson begins to revise his opinion of Slaven. He has begun to look forward to their talks and not just because there are so few he would choose for company within the hospital. Almost anyone would come in at his request. He realises that he is seeing a man in the process of metamorphosis, a change of priority and intention, although Slaven’s commonplace exterior remains just the same. Well, almost the same. More and more there are times when his long, dentist’s face loses its expression of habitual professional caution, becoming animated with the intensity of new ideas. There are times also when Miles is aware of a greenish haze, an emanation, around his friend’s head, incongruous as a background to Slaven’s black, pig-bristle hair, as you recall. Miles can’t decide if this is some illusion arising from his own illness, an aura, or the lingering consequence of all that electricity suddenly surging through Slaven’s middle-aged brain cells. ‘When do you go home?’ he asks him.

‘Within a week I think. Dr Dunne said that I would have to keep on making out-patient visits for a while of course, but there’s no need for me to be taking up a bed here for much longer.’

‘I’m going myself soon, at least for a time. You won’t be able to return to your practice though. Not with your hands.’

‘No. I’ll have an enforced lay-off for some time I suppose.’ The old Slaven would have been very concerned about that; not just for selfish reasons, but from a reluctance to let down the many people he regularly cared for. But now there is a new willingness to let go of some responsibilities and so allow other opportunities to come within his grasp. ‘I want to find out a lot more about people.’

‘You want to save them, perhaps,’ says Miles gravely and his eyelids fall closed in his delight at Slaven’s ingenuous ambition.

‘Come off it. What I think is that we’ve got to revitalise social action, have some concept of ourselves that’s clear
enough for us to charge the politicians with its accomplishment. We spend far too much time proving to each other that the process is tainted, rather than ensuring that the aim is pure.’

‘So this is what you’re going to tell people?’

‘Government is just a process, not an end,’ says Slaven. It is in time to become the first Slavenism.

‘I like it,’ says Miles. It isn’t quite worthy of the energy to laugh aloud, but his breath comes more quickly and commensurate with that the scent of Kellie’s arum lilies more strongly, so that for a moment he feels unpleasantly overpowered. ‘Do you mind if I rest for a while now?’ he asks Slaven and as his fellow patient is at the door, ‘Is it still foggy? Is it raining?’

Through the window behind the bed, Slaven watches the mist unwind and stretch in the hospital gardens. Some billows are thicker than others so that there are sudden scene changes, the grey forms of trees and buildings standing out for a moment and then so utterly erased. Where is the sycamore and the canary within it? Where in this drifting fiction, has the trolley borne our Proctor away?

When Slaven goes, Miles cannot sleep. Instead he activates his computer and begins a letter to Georgina — ‘Aldous Slaven, the dentist, has decided to save the country.’

Aldous Slaven arrives home from Burwood Hospital quite ready to be a new man in respect of social involvement, but he’s at something of a loss as to how to begin. He considers this as he steadies the new, wooden ladder with his left hip and elbow and Kellie putties and primes on the barge board where the power lines had been attached to the house — before the accident and before she had called in the private contractor.

‘Be careful down there,’ Kellie calls. Slaven feels guilty that he hasn’t expressed the same concern for her, even though his hands are still paws because of the bandages.

‘You’re the one to watch out,’ he says.

‘I’m fine,’ and so she is; effortlessly assuming all the extra responsibility since his accident as a simple extension of the planning skills she demonstrates in her garden and home.

‘Lions perhaps, or Rotary, or Ozone Bak,’ he says. ‘Some active service organisation for a start. Then again, a more obviously political organisation, do you think?’ They have many acquaintances, but the links are social; chances to relax, gossip, sublimate the tensions of maintaining a professional income and image. To do more than talk in passing of any issue unconnected with immediate self-interest is considered a bore.

‘Or Astley School Board of Trustees, even your own professional organisation,’ says Kellie. If Slaven looks up he can see the pale, ribbed soles of his wife’s sneakers nine rungs above, if he looks down he can see the camellia and lemon bottlebrush which he damaged ten weeks before. Nowhere on the soil, the plants, is there any trace of the bright blue paint he was using. The garden is quiet, subdued and orderly in all its detail. He isn’t high enough to see the hills to the west, or his sheep beyond the garden, but if he breathes in deeply there is a catch of some awful smell which was part of his ordeal.

‘See
the
kelp
and
crayfish
pots,
beneath
the
rocks
of
Half
Moon
Bay,
’ murmurs Slaven.

‘What’s that?’ Kellie doesn’t look down. There is one splash of bright paint on the brickwork close to the ground. Now that he sees it, how could he not have noticed it before. His hands itch at such times. He hears a voice much like Birdy Knowles’s, muffled now though by a more resistant present.

‘Just singing,’ he says.

‘What? I remember now there was one call asking you to speak.’

‘Really?’

‘It was from the Civil Defence Officer, Ayesbury. I didn’t really see how you being almost electrocuted was a disaster on that sort of scale, but I took his number for you on the hall pad.’

‘Perhaps they want my views on how it feels to be a victim. The psychological aftermath that they’d have to deal with, but on a scale of thousands.’

‘Maybe.’

When Slaven rings, the Civil Defence Officer is happy to
go along with this. He’s committed to an evening seminar on the nineteenth and has been let down by a meteorological spokeswoman, then the Hospice Superintendent, his second choice, was called to a conference on economy euthanasia. So Ayesbury rather clutches at Slaven, who is a professional man at least and has time on his hands because he is unable to employ them for much else. Ayesbury had intended that Slaven talk about precautionary dental care, but victim psychology will do.

‘Think of the management skills required,’ he says in his introduction of Slaven at the seminar. ‘Imagine the state of mind of a thousand earthquake survivors and we’re asking them to line up quietly and then fill in an identification report which has twenty-three questions.’

Although it is only eight pm and daylight saving is in force, the Civil Defence Headquarters are lit by recessed bulbs, for they occupy what was once the basement of a bank, protected there from fire and tsunami impact. The rent is also lower. Slaven can see lines of videophones and radio telephones in the communications room through a glass divide and the compact Controller’s room all set to go, with its message pads and CD plan on the desk.

In the largest room, where they gather, the walls are covered with display screens, maps and flow charts. An operations room, says Ayesbury, from which he and his volunteers constantly practise the salvation of a city which largely ignores them.

Slaven has been a small part of that disregard, but as he stands up to address the twenty-three people in the bunker-like operations room, he feels a curious warmth towards them. They are here on a summer’s evening, having put aside other duties, pleasure even, to come to a Civil Defence seminar. Slaven spreads his legs slightly to ensure a good footing, as he often does when about to begin a challenging piece of orthodontic surgery. Now for the first time he will put to the test his new compulsion to promote a cause, to influence others. He feels his hands begin to tingle, reclothed in skin and muscle from his thighs. He has nothing to say regarding the maintenance of dental health, or the management of disaster victim psychology.
He realises that despite his notes he never intended to follow them.

He begins with the irrevocable sense of isolation he assumes all to feel and the great act of will necessary if it is to be sufficiently controlled to allow a sense of community. He goes on to talk of personal and social conscience, the need for policies which cater not just for physical and material needs, but for the hungers of the spirit. Hungers for moral certainty, for the validation of love, for less parsimony in an experience of life and less secrecy in death. He speaks of his new faith that beyond the cumulative, sporadic, stultifying assemblage of experience which is life there is a secular redemption possible through empathy and co-operation.