A Many Coated Man (31 page)

So here she is then —the goose girl — who has been visiting her sister in Hoon Hay. She has boots despite the heat and an Azerbaijan patterned skirt, very popular since the planned immigrations. And her short, white hair and
her long, white neck and her features gathered to her mouth. Athol has a hand on her shoulder as they stand at her bedroom door and watch Slaven asleep on her bed. His socks are stained on his thin legs, his hair prickled with a former sweat, and the stubble a salt and pepper scatter over his chin and throat. Now that his face is relaxed, the creases that he had drawn in against the wind and dazzle show as pale lines in the sunburn.

‘Who is he?’ says the goose girl.

‘Some rich, old bugger who matters. I think he’s been in the clink and it’s all very bloody hush-hush, understand. We look after him here for a while until his cobbers pick him up. And it’s money for jam; easy money by Jesus.’

‘Why here then if he’s a bigwig? Why stuck with us?’

‘Because no one will find him here, will they. No guest lists, or sign in, no credit cards, or cleaners with keys to fossick around, no nosey people at the desk to recognise a photo. We’ll let him sleep and then he can spruce up and we’ll have a feed. A big bloody order of pork nuggets and chips is what we could do with and a bottle of plonk for him to down with it.’

‘Perhaps he’s one of those lawyers who’s got off with millions from some outfit that’s collapsed.’

‘No idea, and what does it matter. The thing is that some heavy people are behind him and he’s a bloody good meal ticket while he’s here, so you look after him. You treat him better than your own dad, better than me almost,’ and Athol pushes his hand over the breast of the goose girl. The swell of her skin is firm feathered and the curve of her neck is almost classic beauty despite the closely-gathered features of her small face. She smiles and tilts up that small face as she does when things are going well. Her long throat shows to best advantage and her short hair shivers as a crest shivers.

‘I wonder who he is,’ she says. ‘I reckon he’s one of those business guys with all the money and they’ve got onto him.’

‘Anyway, you be good to him. A goldmine to us is what he fucken is.’

Slaven sleeps until after ten o’clock at night and then wakes because of the changing temperature and the
constriction of his cycling clothes. He comes back to himself slowly from a landscape which fades only just before his recollection of it. He’s a stranger here and so begins to orientate himself by a cautious process of deduction, before giving himself away by movement. The initial alienation means he’s nowhere in his own domain. There’s no angle of Kellie’s garden, or their spacious bedroom, no round adjustable light of his surgery. Is it the hospital then, with the cover of
The
Beaver
Trade
to Vincent’s face and Norman Proctor to his left, if not already dead? Is it the Beckley-Waite and his hotbed of insignificance there, with the whine of the air conditioning preventing the quiet voice of the Caretaker from being heard? Is it the chinked vastness of the old building at the salt works with a sea mist wreathing in, or the rocking motion of the protesters’ van slowing for another check-point. No?

It is a bedroom unknown to him, partly lit by a passage light, so that he can see the blue of the duvet on which he lies, the cluster of the goose girl’s bottles on the duchess and her slippers bottom up by the wardrobe door. And a young guy with his hair in a bun, a stud in his nose, and the balance of an athlete in his walk, coming in from the passage.

Athol doesn’t introduce himself, but smiles at Slaven so that the stud lifts at the side of his nose and he asks Slaven if there’s anything he wants and just to say if there is.

‘A bath if that’s okay.’ So Athol leads him along to the bathroom and then sends the goose girl for the pork nuggets, the chips and the wine. The cold tap gives a forceful stream, straight from the Heathcote beside them perhaps, but the hot tap coughs and pants steam and is easily overpowered, so that Slaven has to leave it full on, yet turn the cold down. He hadn’t realised there are places still without a mixer.

Even when he has the taps off and is soaking in the narrow tub, the pipes keep arguing and rattling in their sockets. Pale green the walls are mainly, but at bump level the chips reveal flashes of other colours which once held sway — lemon is well noted, mushroom is here and the deepest injuries disclose a pre-cambrian gloss white which is close to the bone.

Slaven dries himself with a large, thin towel which has the odours of a locker room and combs his hair with his fingers as best he can. He knows no other place to go than the goose girl’s bedroom and so he walks back there in his trousers and carries the lycra gear in the supermarket bag. The small case brought for him by Les Croad has been packed by Kellie. He should have opened it before he went to wash, for the comb, towel, shaver are all there as well as a change of clothes, pyjamas and a tube of ointment for his lips. On top of it all is a single sheet of notepaper — ‘You can’t keep a good man down,’ she’s written. What will come of her loyalty, he wonders.

Slaven shaves at the goose girl’s duchess with all its bottled promises and Athol keeps a cheerful check on progress and when he thinks the moment right comes in with the food. ‘Grub,’ he says. The goose girl follows with her head down, but still curious. She has the wine and mugs. The three of them begin to eat and Slaven feels the rich bite of the pork nuggets. Athol can make an anemone of chips between thumb and forefinger to dunk in the organically grown tomato sauce. The goose girl can tilt her head and clack her teeth in satisfaction. And no introductions are made, none necessary, or at least too late, for Slaven’s slept in the goose girl’s bed and drawn across his back the bow of the communal towel. His fingers have locked with Athol’s in the pursuit of a nugget in the box and his eyes found easy rest on the whiteness of the goose girl’s arching neck. Her legs are folded beneath the hem of her Azerbaijan skirt as she sits on the bed with the men to eat and her shallow, bright, goosey eyes are alive with the novelty of a man with money, on the run.

‘A few more hours in the pit and you’ll be back to par, I reckon,’ says Athol. He clumsily pours Chardonnay into three mugs and tasting it is privately convinced that it’s gone off, but gone off from what he hasn’t the experience to say.

‘But I don’t want to take your bed from you,’ protests Slaven to the goose girl.

‘No sweat,’ says Athol. ‘She can doss down with me.’

When they leave him, going out without any fuss, Slaven
folds his trousers at the end of the bed and settles beneath the blue duvet in merely singlet and fresh pyjama bottoms. Athol has turned out the bedroom light and again there is just that from the passage, too faint for Slaven to read the writing on his small wad of letters which he idly turns before his face. Everything can wait until he’s enjoyed more of freedom’s sleep. There’s a small hollow in the pillow where the goose girl’s head often lies and a scent throughout all the fabric of down and chips and cologne and the light perspiration of sleep. How different from the Beckley-Waite and the air conditioning unit which there seemed to service all of the world, but is silent here.

Athol and his flatmate finish the pork nuggets in the kitchen and he pours the remaining wine into the sink. They have no idea who Slaven is and no interest in the public world he represents. The only television they watch is cable sports and Afro-rock. Conventional society has no advantage for them, no means of access and no contact with their lives apart from their necessity to know what money they can claim and to keep a watchful eye on the enforcers of the law. The goose girl, I assure you, couldn’t give us the name of the Prime Minister.

‘His friend called again,’ says Athol. ‘They want to know if he’s happy here and I said of course he was, but he wants to sleep most of all. You remember to be good to him. These people aren’t fucken short of a few dollars, I can tell you.’

‘Enough for a knee-length calf-skin coat?’

‘Maybe piss in,’ says Athol.

So when Slaven wakes at last, the goose girl is here beside him and although she doesn’t look at him, but watches the abstract ripples on the morning ceiling, her left hand gently holds his cock and moves sufficiently to keep it of a size to be gripped. The goose girl lies with her head back so that her throat is taut and white. There is a ridge almost cylindrical along the centre of her throat and the faintest of lines diagonally across it, which form creases when her head’s forward. It is a throat so long that it possesses a sinuosity between shoulders and head, like the smoothly muscled body of a snake, and Slaven, looking past it at her tilted face can see her eye-lashes as serrations,
because of the odd angle of his view. The small, smooth head of a goose and that muscular neck and one hand lying gently on the surface of the duvet while the other continues, enquiring, solicitous.

‘I’ve only started doing this in the last year or so,’ says the goose girl.

‘Why?’ but such is the pleasure of the engrossing present that he has no real curiosity of motive.

‘I was saving myself.’

‘From what?’ says Slaven and the goose girl laughs. The muscles move in her powerful neck.

‘Not from anything. You know; for something. Saving myself for the right man, person even.’

‘Are you having me on,’ says Slaven.

‘Dead bloody right,’ says the goose girl.

Well, it has been a long time in the Beckley-Waite even for a mature man and there’s the sense of dislocation, of hiatus in the principles which he would conventionally accept. Of other things, Miles has told him that political correctness is the side door to hell. As well there’s the unsought opportunity, but we can agree to make that secondary. There is the adjustment of the bed in time with their breathing and the river light dappling, sliding, convections and fronds of movement on the ceiling. The whine from the bull terriers, as if they too have a scent of gift.

Slaven closes his eyes with the joy of entering the goose girl and feels tears run down his nose. The goose girl’s breathing is hastened and a feathery loop of her white hair caught on her damp forehead. How beautiful. Slaven experiences a welling affection for women — their strength, humour and steadfastness, the slight forward curve of their bellies, the movement of skin on their collar bones. As he holds the smooth-feathered goose girl, he loves also the young Kellie and Rebecca Maitland from a New Year’s Eve and Charlotte his first crush and Paula who tasted of chlorine from the town baths, Shelley who drew blood with her teeth, Miss Carlisle his standard four teacher who leant over his poster and aroused in him a longing for he knew not what.

Slaven isn’t able to make any of this explicit to the goose
girl, or shape it fully within his own consciousness. Instead he follows with his finger the white curl on the goose girl’s temple and feels the tears slide down his nose. Is release a form of beauty?

Some other place then, for privacy’s sake and it may be in your own town with the Lotto sign and the stars of the BNZ, with the arcades of specialist boutiques and the large shops that have a score of active screens so that you may order a life on any scale which suits. Buskers in the street who can’t sing, or play their instruments, but will be paid by all of us flattered by a sense of the cosmopolitan. Shops of window stools, gossip and coffee; shops of exquisite lingerie in case you get knocked down in the street, or knocked up at the office party. See those friends of yours who have made professional careers and wear black shoes. Tell me why it is that they are grey at the temples in a distinguished way, while you and I are bald. See twenty-three pastries in the one window and not two alike. See seventeen cold meats, including four in jelly, eleven vertical and nine pastel horizontal blinds, a turnstyle of flashy books, the price and product expressly uniform. See power tools that have the masculine appeal of automatic weapons and the creams and ferns in the window of the naturopath. See our mutual friend who has been diagnosed as possessing a most obscure and terminal disease. See the joy on children’s faces as if they travel through a different world.

‘Lovely, lovely,’ Slaven murmurs. On the bedside table is a digital clock, a ginger nut and a pork nugget, a box of lavender tissues, an owl made from blue and emerald felt and embroidered with golden thread. They look very settled together, comfortable in their accustomed spatial relationship. They and the pueblo carving are part of the exact scene and company for Slaven’s climax with the goose girl, as they had no doubt been exactly present even if at a distance while he lay in Kellie’s flower garden beneath the power line, while he galvanised 250,000 people at Western Springs, while he was beaten beneath the wharf at Lyttelton. Well, perhaps not the pork nugget.

The goose girl smiles at him in a surprisingly maternal way, considering her age. ‘There now,’ she says.

‘Ah, Jesus.’

‘We thought it would relax you. Athol reckoned you’d probably been missing out. That’s not prying, or anything.’ She props herself on an elbow so that she can see him better as she talks and her white breasts move to one side. They are full and the nipples still gleam pinkly from the wetness of Slaven’s mouth. ‘A guy brought round a special phone,’ she says. ‘You’re going to get a ring about midday.’

‘Thank you. I haven’t been welcomed to the morning in that way for years.’

‘I didn’t mind it slower for a change. Young guys are so bloody quick, aren’t they. Athol’s very strong, overpowering. He comes off with a hell of a rush.’ She gets on to her hands and knees and then stands by the bed to put on her dressing gown. The harp swing of her hips, the heft of her breasts; there’s a sensuous ungainliness in her movement and her long neck, her too small head with compressed features, aren’t beautiful in any conventional way. ‘You like it here don’t you?’ she asks. The phone guy brought even more money and she likes Slaven’s formality and all the words he uses without swearing. And she likes his gratitude.

‘You know,’ he says, ‘I’ve been trying to change things for the better in our country. There’s been too much separation, too many categories for too long. We need to be more a part of each other.’ Slaven has particularly strong conviction of this at present and his voice has a rich vehemence which comes only when he begins to fire up. The goose girl enjoys how he talks rather than what he says. She sits back on the bed, watches the Heathcote flow on the ceiling and wonders if he’s one of those extra rich guys who has been kicked out of Mexico by the Hispanics and hasn’t a permit to be in New Zealand. When she looks at him she’s not sure he’s like a Kiwi and he doesn’t speak like Athol and her.