A Many Coated Man (30 page)

Certainly the six in front are slow enough and Slaven has ample time to watch an iceberg being towed north off the Kaikoura coast and to see the crayfish speciality stalls and tourist boat trip operators as the town grows closer. The handler is told that there’s a checkpoint ahead, so he has the van pass the riders and flag them down for a change of personnel.

That’s how Slaven comes to enter Kaikoura on a Torricelli touring bike with a thin, uncomfortable seat. He sweats in the morning sun and some of his new tan stains the fold of the white socks he’s been given. There’s some apprehension when the road-block is sighted, yet since the very beginning of his escape things have been so very much in the hands of others that Slaven has become fatalistic. Having no part in the planning against threat, he finds it difficult to believe in the threat itself. The sweat moves, tickles in the short hair by his ears. The sea breeze evaporates it on the side of his face and so there’s coolness there. The breeze comes from the direction of the iceberg which is in plain view directly offshore. How marvellously out-of-place it is. Vast and with touches of the milky green of the lightest jade, it is towed captive far from its own world.

Miles has chosen his men well. They know that the best disguise is not to change a person’s appearance, but to alter the context. Slaven and his fellow riders barely put their feet to the ground at the check-point before they are waved through. They are urged on by a bald-headed man in shorts and tramping boots who uses a megamike to extoll the virtues of Australasian Union. Rather than fearing a last minute shout of recognition as he moves through, Slaven
has to concentrate on keeping up with the woman in front. Her bum swallows up the seat, but her brown legs provide a seemingly effortless propulsion. Slaven puts in a special effort as they climb the hill behind the town centre and he wonders when the whippet will order another change. At all his meetings, Slaven has spoken out against sexist attitudes, but sweating on the coast road he prays to a male god to deliver him from the humiliation of not being able to keep pace with a woman. He lowers his head so that his effort can’t be read and he counts each thrust of legs as an encouragement — 702, 703, 704, 705. The tremor of small muscles in his thighs is a warning of cramp.

The back-up van overtakes them while still on the flat of Goose Bay. Slaven has no wish to be cycling over the Hundalees. ‘I thought that just a small stage would do you,’ says the whippet. ‘Though it might pay to have you back on if we strike other checks. Just one other thing; you actually had your helmet on back-to-front.’

‘I’ll get it right next time.’ Slaven is aware of the irony. He has never been on the run before and he’s becoming aware of an aspect of it which he has never suspected — it is demeaning.

The others in the van are a cheerful enough lot, though by no means all youthful protesters. Nor is there any reprise of the advantages of union which is the reason for them coming together. Slaven could talk to them regarding that. Hadn’t he been completing an article for
The
Australasian
when Drs Eugene and Bliss called. Rather the talk within the van is of stage distances, muscle massage, energy foods and the reason for the police checks. The ample woman whose fitness Slaven found a threat, says they were after the man who tried to assassinate the Maori King and the manager, thin as a whippet, says that’s it and catches Slaven’s eye.

Slaven rides only one more stage — through Cheviot and the yellow downs immediately beyond — because there is a second check made by the police at the crossroads which you come on suddenly around a left-hand sweeper. The whippet however is constantly and well-informed. With his helmet on correctly, Slaven feels quite at ease during
the short pause and breathes deeply only to ensure he’ll be well oxygenated when he resumes.

In the van again, eating a parrot mixture of dried fruit, seeds and nuts, which the others relish, Slaven thinks of the weeks before the elections and how they can best be used. He wonders if he will have to operate undercover, if it’s possible even, or if once he has a following around him again the authorities will accept his presence.

He goes over his six points in case there are things in his experience since Lyttelton and the Beckley-Waite which necessitate changes, but finds his mind circling back to the person most responsible for recent weeks — Cardew. For years his son has been both puzzle and disappointment; complete in all corporeal respects, but lacking character, having in its place only an instinctual drive for self-gratification. Slaven accuses himself of failing to pass on any of the values which guide his own life. Perhaps he proclaims, rather than exemplifies. Gradually Slaven’s dislike of his son has sapped the love that can for a long time exist with it in paradox of parenthood. They have sat in the bath together. Slaven has carried him on his shoulders and can remember the joy in Cardew’s face at the modest enough prospect of a video game. But soon he must be dealt with for the common good.

The stop for the night is a church hall at Amberley and Slaven’s fellow riders are almost euphoric at the thought of rest and recreation, then their triumphal ride into the city the next morning and the official presentation of their petition. The whippet promises savoury sausages and mashed poatato, but when Slaven climbs stiffly from the van and makes to follow the others, the manager gives a whistle and raises his eyebrows and points to the quiet end of the hall where Les Croad is waiting in another vehicle again. The manager says nothing, just gives Slaven his clothes within a supermarket bag and squeezes his arm with thin fingers. The manager whistles and makes his way to sausages and mash, for he’s done his bit.

‘Almost there,’ says Les. Slaven follows him to the car, flexing his arms and back as he does so. Les rather enjoys the cloak and dagger stuff, enjoys also the sight of a stiff
and absurdly-dressed Slaven, with eyes reddened by the wind and borrowed white socks stained with the false tan sweated into them.

‘We were going to have a hot meal here, you know,’ says Slaven.

‘Hotter than you bargained on perhaps. When people have satisfied their bellies they start taking an interest in other people, start asking questions. I’m afraid we can’t take you home either, or to anyone you know. No visitors even until things quieten.’ Les is grimly pleased by the inclusive isolation for it prolongs Slaven’s reliance on him. ‘I’ve an address though. You could say a safe house, I suppose. Famous last, eh?’ When the glass has Slaven invisible within the car, Les Croad takes his time, even a few paces back to the corner of the hall so that he can see down the path towards the rooms where the supporters of Australasian Union are relaxing. Their noise is unmistakable in quiet Amberley. There is no apparent surveillance. ‘I smell sausages,’ says Les.

‘Tell me about it,’ murmurs Slaven from the car.

The Christchurch place that the advisers have arranged for Slaven to lie low in. An old house divided into flats, and the back flat where Les Croad leaves him has an addition which juts over the Heathcote stream. A banana-passionfruit plant grows all around the door, its fluted flowers lit like candles there in the low evening sun. Les puts a case for Slaven on the step and gives him several letters held together with a rubber band. ‘Better I shoot through, now,’ he says. ‘These people don’t know who you are. They’re not well up on politics and national happenings, but Kitson’s guys are sure you’ll be okay. The boy is called Athol and he understands that you need to be quietly out of circulation for a while. But we won’t be far away.’ Les shakes hands with Slaven vigorously, then raps on the window and gives a thumbs up to someone inside. He leaves before the someone comes, cutting across the rough, brown lawn and perfectly at home. His shrugging walk and jutting, restless face seeking stimulus. The close-crimped, almost yellow hair, the creases of his grubby twill trousers well-suited to the movement of his legs. This is his happy hunting,
thinks Slaven. What does he wish from the Coalition except a wage. Les Croad would have been born and grown up in a succession of back flats on railway and river sections. He would have crouched with his mates in the macrocarpa when he should have been at school, smoking and spitting on the spider webs and starting to resent those people who had it better. Les should stay by the less-than-crystal Heathcote and Slaven should cut across the lawn and away. Slaven opens his mouth to say so, to call Les back to natural surroundings, but he realises how absurd it all is, how weary and confused he has become, how hungry, how unwilling to meet more strangers who will constitute yet another interlude in the scheme of his escape from the Beckley-Waite.

Does the woman painter still relax in the room two along from the Emergency ALW, the skipper still gun the company van at Oriental Bay? The derelict buildings at Grassmere — are they still there? Have they ever been? Has his piss dried at the top of the stairs with no sides and is there a flamingo flush on the abandoned sea pans? Has Tigger done the deed with Alice? Does the woman cyclist with powerful legs and hair held back with a simple green band now deftly test the skin of a gravied sausage with her teeth and imagine the presentation? Does the road manager, that whippet of leather and feathery bone, rest in Amberley and peace? Where do the seedlings wave and where have the few children gone who shouted to each other at Tuamarina? Is the owl once more on the wing?

There is a fragrance of kerosene, or boot polish, in the calm air and Slaven’s aware of the sliding feel in his left hand as the plastic bag of clothes slips, the sharp feel of the letters in his other hand. The residue of a day’s sweat is on him, the salt of it drawing the skin tight and brittle. His leg muscles twitch with the poisons of unaccustomed strain and the banana-passionfruit flowers only inches from his face have a pearly, yet slightly yellow sheen, like the gloss on a pelt peeled from the steaming beast. A duck with one leg is swimming upstream in the Heathcote — he can tell by the compensatory movement that its body gives to each surge of propulsion. From an upstairs flat comes the Hoihos,
but not
Half
Moon
Bay
. A huge Harley Hog leans on the wall and the richness of it contrasts with the surrounding neglect. Upwards, through the corroded grin of the guttering, Slaven can see the jewelled dazzle of the western sky. Ah, the mockery of indifferent precision.

So no discriminatory initial description of our Athol, as he first glances from the flawed window then opens the door and blocks it with his spread arms. He leans there, tilted cheerfully forward and he looks at this guy who has come as a windfall. ‘You’ll be okay here, mate. No sweat,’ he says. So Slaven comes into the home and lives of more people when he has home and family of his own. Coming back from the dead, in a manner of speaking, isn’t as easy as he had imagined that morning at quiet Lake Grassmere. ‘You need somewhere to crash for a while,’ says Athol and he takes up the case and leads the way through a living room of mismatched furniture into a bedroom of obvious femininity — shadow curtains at a window which overlooks the Heathcote and the smell of kerosene and boot polish overlaid with that of deodorant, fabrics and pot pourri in bowls of glass.

‘Get your head down for a bit. I can see you’re almost knackered, and then we’ll talk about a feed.’ Slaven has nothing in reply. He can’t be bothered with the emotional effort of acknowledging yet another stranger. He undoes his cycling shoes at the side of the bed and lies on the blue covers with his arms spread out. The Heathcote’s sluggish water idles by outside, but by some trick of evening reflection there is a rippling pattern on the ceiling — so ethereal and chaste in its silently breaking then coalescing flow that Slaven feels his essential self drift upwards to join it. ‘Absolutely knackered,’ says Athol as from habit he hefts the small case to assess its contents.

While Slaven sleeps there is an opportunity to make free with those tinctures of verisimilitude which he’s in no condition to record. The greenstone stud, say, in Athol’s left nostril, a blue, folded handkerchief — yes, to match the cover — between the lamp clamp and the bedhead as padding and across the Heathcote in an overgrown backyard is a netting compound in which unregistered pit-bull terriers
are hidden from the world. See each of these, and the things which link them are just as certain and as clear to you as they are to Slaven when he wakes. The purple plums, say, each of which has been pecked by the birds sufficiently to be a token of possession and the hair in the portal of Slaven’s facing ear, little cutlasses which catch the light and which he cannot describe even when awake. The goose girl’s closest friend of earlier days was brained with a baseball bat at the back of the Gethsemane Hotel, but his pueblo carving from New Mexico still hangs on to a life on the wall. And ah, the comforting, orbital repetitions which knit up the world we know, for as you say, it is indeed a sticker for Australasian Union on the mirror of the goose girl’s duchess. It hides a glass flaw there, rather than showing political awareness.

So Athol leaves us to it and goes back to the kitchen for a jar and to count the first of the money which has been his without delay. The poor, old bugger’s completely knackered, he thinks, and will need a good feed when he wakes. Something to stick to the sides of him and put lead in his pencil. As Athol stands at the bench, looks through the window above the dishes in the sink, it doesn’t occur to him that the one-wheeled trailer askew in the long grass is an eyesore, or that the landlord’s brother-in-law would have done better not to mix his paints on the concrete path. Some things just are: a one-legged duck chugging on the Heathcote to match a one-legged trailer in the grass, lunar paint stains in orange and cream to walk upon, a battery of pit-bull terriers in a neighbouring yard, a pounamu nose stud, a pueblo carving whose expression changes with subtle reflections of the stream and the banana-passionfruit flutes with the most delicate tinge of purple at their base.

Live and let live. Do any of these things ever prevent Athol from going round his man on the outside and scoring a good one for his Heathcote League side, or threaten his concentration as he steadies the goose girl with a hand behind her buttocks?