Harlequin Rex (22 page)

On the hard, uneven shore, with just tartan rugs beneath them, many of the group slept in the afternoon while change
was imperceptible: just the sea slinking back from the
mudflats
and the sharp shadows from the vans to tell the time. Those who were still awake were no longer urgent in action or conversation, and the murmur of their voices, the easy silences, the low laughter, were stitched to the noise of the breeze, a few piping birds drawn to the feeding opportunities of the receding tide, and the subdued snores of Tolly and Gaynor Runcinski. Although David faced Montgomery, who told of his plans to visit India once he was well, although he smiled and nodded even, he was by preference with Lucy, imagining her session with Schweitzer. Her unpainted nails had a trick of catching the light, and there were tendrils of dark hair at the nape of her neck which escaped the casual band she wore. Montgomery went off a few paces to find a more animated conversationalist, and woke Raf, whose face continued for a while to have the relaxed blandness of sleep. ‘Sometimes the more I sleep, the more I want to,’ he said. ‘Maybe I’ll die of it. Maybe it’s a sign I should take notice of the life I lead.’

‘Better than striking Alice Bee on a bad day,’ David said.

‘It’s odd you mention her. Roimata Wallace told me yesterday that Alice spent her time at the end balancing on her hands with her feet in the air no trouble at all.’

Poor old Alice. She once told David, during a programme session in her block, that the very first thing she could remember was a golden Labrador standing in her
kindergarten
sandpit. The inside of its lips glistened, she said, and it had a feathered front foot in a red plastic bucket. What final recollection did she have when connected with the national grid through the dayroom plug?

Montgomery’s talk of India was soon overridden by interest in the work of memory. Raf told them that
neurological
research increasingly suggested that all experience is completely recorded, and that it’s only the access which is limited. He knew of a woman who suffered brain damage in an accident and who for several days had the exact sights,
scents, touch, conversations word perfect, from happenings thirty years before, which had never until then been available to her conscious memory.

Raf’s own earliest recollection was of being smacked for sneezing mucus into his sister’s face without malice, or intention. He could still see the hokey-pokey ice-cream in her mouth as she opened it to yell, the concentric blue bands on the milk jug in front of him, feel the sudden pang of fear and anger that his mother should smack him hard and console his sister. ‘What can you remember, Abbey?’ Raf asked her. ‘What’s the very first thing?’

And Abbey told them, with the candour that illness can bring; Gaynor and Wilfe drew closer to her side of the van to hear it. The first image of her life was not of any familiar face, or place of childhood, but a basement she never entered in a house visited only once. Some acquaintance when they were travelling, and she stood barefoot, unsteady, on dry scratchy grass outside a basement door. A heavy man with evident nasal hair came through the door, struck his head, reeled back, came on again and struck again with an impact of great solidity. His smile was tugged away and replaced by such pain and fury, such full-throated obscenity, that Abbey panicked and ran. Beyond the brown lawn which curved endlessly away as she ran, was an equally boundless sea, she said, with a blue, eternal glitter.

‘How could you remember it so exactly?’ said Dilys derisively. ‘It’s a nonsense.’ Abbey had no more to say, but David waited until he could catch her eye again, and then smiled. The world was full of Dilys people, and had so few Abbeys. What was his own first tableau of the world? Riding Billy Bunter, the pet lamb that had become gargantuan. The crimped wool on Billy’s skin, the feel of muscles and sinews beneath, Billy’s powerful stench of life, the comfort of his father’s steadying hand. There had been a strong, low sun, hadn’t there, which spread great shadows right across the world.

Raf decided on a walk for everybody before putting his mind to a barbecue tea. ‘Come on, you loafers,’ he called. ‘Let’s pull finger and get this show on the road.’ Like a school field trip party they began a walk along the water’s edge of Pan Bay, and only Jock and Montgomery remained behind: Jock to maintain the vision of himself as a confirmed
fisherman
, Montgomery because he’d had bad news from home and wanted to smoke the shit David had given him to assuage that news. But being left together brought them no closer. Jock waded into the sea once more with his thread line; Montgomery stood with studied indifference by the vans and gazed inland.

‘Where are we going?’ asked Tolly Mathews.

‘Round to the point of the bay and back,’ David said. ‘Work up an appetite for all the sausages we’ve got.’

‘It’s just so hot,’ said Mary Cross. She seemed to be swelling in her top, so that neck and upper arms bulged from the fabric.

‘You North Islanders are learning a thing or two down here at last. We’re between Nelson and Blenheim, and one or other of those has the sunshine record every year.’

‘You can get too hot, you know,’ said Eddie Simm, who was from Wanganui, but he was laughed down by
mainlanders
, and his fellow North Islanders in the group gave only half-hearted support, for, as well as being out of their territory, they were sick somehow, weren’t they, and so old loyalties were weakened.

It wasn’t a simple, firm shoreline to walk. The rushes and sea grasses hid slight undulations where the mud lay deeply, and every now and then miniature inlets pushed back towards the road. Some of the group picked their way fastidiously from vantage to vantage, others went as the crow flies, but plopping and stumping through whatever happened to be underfoot. Dermot Sweeney found the body of a large cod: much of its tail and fins had either been eaten or rotted away, but its eyes were quaking and reproachful. There were
also several loops of nylon string, faded to a coral blue. Tolly and Wilfe strung some together, tied it to driftwood sticks and went whipping as if they were ten years old again.

‘You flick me with that, and I’ll thump you,’ said Raf.

‘Just a little tune-up to get you trotting,’ said Tolly.

‘Get out of it, you dozy prick.’

‘Mush, mush,’ said Wilfe, and he cast the nylon so that it lightly rapped Mrs McIlwraith’s prim back.

‘I shall give you just this one warning,’ she said.

‘Why is it,’ said Raf, ‘that any change of routine sets off some people to play silly buggers?’

At the point it was stony and without mud. Wilfe, Gaynor and Dilys, who arrived first, stood gazing across the sound as if the few hundred metres they had covered opened up quite a new vista of the bushed hills on the other side, or a sky of different colour above them. The others came up and added to the scrutiny for a while, and only when all the twelve had made the full trek was it considered fitting that they turn round and walk back the same nondescript way to the vans. Wilfe was mastering the use of his nylon and driftwood whip and he darted the cord out at almost
everything
he passed. Tolly had lost interest in his, and let it fall among the rocks of the point.

When they were back at Pan Bay no one bothered to say how much fun it had been. Montgomery had begun building up a rock surround for the barbecue fire, and put aside all evidence of cannabis except increased good humour and the smell on his breath. ‘He’s caught bloody zilch, of course,’ he said mildly of Jock McPhie. Jock had his back to them and, out of earshot, fished on.

‘Now for the barbecue,’ said Raf. The Takahes gathered to him reluctantly, as there was no other messiah at Pan Bay that quiet, hot day. ‘A barbecue’s delightfully appropriate for us, because, like Harlequin, it’s total atavism, you see.’ Raf said that quietly, and glanced about to check that those close to him wouldn’t be offended by what he intended.
‘Through civilisation we pushed on until we had jugs which filled themselves and never boiled dry, fan ovens and
microwaves
, blenders and beaters, and now we ignore it and go out and stand up-wind to char meat and wrap it in bread to eat.’

Abbey and Tolly saw the darkly funny side of it with Raf; appreciated the parallel of eating habits with primal brain regression. What a sign of trust and tacit friendship their reaction was, though, accepting he should joke about a fatal illness and be free of it himself. Tolly continued to laugh and smile as he laid the sausages and chops on the heavy, black tray that he and David had set up over the fire.

‘Who knows,’ he said, ‘maybe it’s a therapy worth trying, to fight fire with fire. Come and dance around the barbecue, Abbey, and we’ll make the vans like bongo drums and beat on them with sticks.’

‘You just want to see my legs.’

‘A glimpse of heaven,’ said Tolly, gallantry put ahead of truth.

The sun was still bright, but heat shimmered away from the fire between them in strange, colourless whorls. Tolly and Gaynor across from David were distorted so that their outlines broke and shook, their faces convulsed in a fleeting mirage of expressions completely alien to them. Even as they mocked Harlequin, maybe he was moving almost invisibly among them.

‘Jock, Jock,’ Tolly called, ‘we’re keeping a place on the barbecue for the fish. Where is it?’ But there was no real malice: they all admitted, to themselves at least, that they had no more success with their various salvations than Jock with his fish. Jock dismembered and put away his rod, and came and joined the others by the barbecue. He was one of the most prickly of Takahe’s inmates, a successor to Howard Peat in his wounded pride, which kept him a bit apart. ‘What chance of catching fish with the noise you ones are making?’ he said with his fierce smile.

The novelty of the day, and the exercise, gave them more than usual appetite. The pallid sausages, the candy red and white chops, heaped in the chilly bin, were soon burnt and eaten. Tolly brought in the sack of Speights cans to a great reception. Even Mrs McIlwraith took one gingerly, though she was accustomed to chardonnay, and put can to mouth only when she realised no cup at all was available.

Raf had borrowed a half-size piano accordion for Abbey to play, and he brought the custom-made black and yellow carry bag from his van. Abbey cleaned her hands carefully of sauce and fat before beginning to perform. It wasn’t Ahab and Pod, or any of the latest stuff, it wasn’t even the Big O’s ‘Pretty Woman’, or U2 still not having found what they were looking for, but they could have
Phantom
of
the
Opera
; they could have Celtic ballads, couldn’t they. Old familiar faces.

There was hardly any traffic on the road behind them. No one stopped, though Bryce gave a toot and a wave. Maybe it would have been more appropriate at dusk around the campfire. As it was, the sun still had a good deal of heat at seven in the evening, and they were clustered there singing to Abbey’s accompaniment. In the end there was an audience of sorts: three children hanging on the pipe and netting gate across the road where the trailer sign advertised mushrooms and walnuts. Two prepubescent spindly girls and a younger boy, with legs twining like creeper around the pipes. They were too far away to be spoken to, but their body language was of embarrassment, whether for themselves, or the Mahakipawa guests, who knew.

Once they’d done the singing, most felt the picnic must be almost over. The tide was coming in again, but the
channels
were still obvious — mud free and the best places for a swim. Montgomery, Tolly, Gaynor and several others wanted a last quick dip, and David went out with them. By keeping to the nearest channel, only ankle deep at first, they were able to move quickly through the mudflats and wade well
out into the sound. There was a noticeable breeze out from the shore and it paid to swim with it at your back so that the chop wasn’t blown into your face. Montgomery,
normally
no model of preparedness, had swimming goggles which made him look like a First World War participant — a dispatch rider perhaps, or the pilot of a Sopwith Camel?

Only after admiring Montgomery’s purposeful, awkward overarm for some time, did David realise that he had no intention of husbanding any strength to return. Had
Montgomery
been a better swimmer, he might have achieved release on his own terms, but Gaynor was a strong swimmer, and Tolly and David rather better than Montgomery. Gaynor overhauled him, kept him partly restrained, partly supported. When David caught up he endeavoured to change
Montgomery’s
priorities by grabbing his hair. It wasn’t a time for subtlety, even when dealing with a man whose wife had left him the week before. Montgomery’s eyes couldn’t be read behind the flat, misted glass of his blue goggles. They all swam back together and, when the bottom was underfoot again, David told his charge that those on the shore need never know, but both were aware that the pantomime had been clear even at that distance. Nothing was said of it, though, as they dried and changed. Although they were in the real and mundane world of Pan Bay, they were also in the world of Harlequin, which has allowances, deceits and conventions all its own, where suicide is no more disparaged than any other touted cure.

‘Now, Monty,’ Tolly whispered to him as they pulled on their underpants, ‘how could we let you go? There’d have been only thirteen green bottles left and that’s very unlucky.’

‘I was in the frame of mind for it, that’s all,’ said Montgomery. ‘Nothing personal at all. No reproach upon the company, or the day.’ The weed, the circumstances, his wounded pride, necessitated some formality.

In other circumstances David might have been willing for him to have his wish: to decide on the direction of his
own life, but at the Pan Bay picnic the responsibility of supervision was too direct. A loss of a patient would almost certainly have meant no more outings, and the assumption of dereliction of duty. His generous but illegal provision of the shit might have come out. ‘No bloody gratitude at all,’ said Raf.