Harlequin Rex (40 page)

Schweitzer smiles and puts his free hand over hers, so that there is a pancake of three. ‘I suppose it's the cannabis they're after him for, though it seems a big deal for that.'

‘Maybe. It's difficult to tell with David. Something's gnawing away there.'

‘Where will you get your stuff if he goes?'

‘You?'

‘If we started on the run of drugs I've access to, Lucy, you really would ride the roller-coaster. Good try, but no luck.'

‘So what then?'

‘Alessandro Bellini told me that there's an Albanian doctor with a clinic in Paris who claims to cure everything with sex.'

‘Theoretical, or applied?' says Lucy.

‘Maybe there's a New Zealand franchise available.'

They can talk on like this for quite a while, but what is really happening is the light pressure of their hands, a warmth of contact nothing to do with sex, and their eyes meeting in recognition of those things impossible to discuss, incapable of solution.

A little later, while Schweitzer prepares to visit his office although it's Sunday, Lucy sees David leaving Takahe. He wears his best boots, which she has always thought too yellow by half, and leans slightly into the strong wind. He walks in the direction of Kotuku, which is out of sight, and yes, she does want to be there.

‘He's going, I think,' she calls. A voice louder than necessary to reach Schweitzer in another room, almost as if the cry is for David.

‘Are you sure that you don't want to go down?' says Schweitzer, quickly back to be with her. ‘Quarter of an hour won't be any danger I wouldn't think. It's going to take the police a while.'

She watches David, his longish hair blown up in the wind, his boots resplendent, until he's out of sight behind Weka. He's going to her room and will find it empty. If she'd been well, she could be there and they could hit the road together, like the conclusion of a bitter-sweet romance, but she's sick isn't she, Harlequin's bride, and if she wasn't then she wouldn't have met David, or Schweitzer, anyhow, so a script didn't
work either way. And if she can't go with him, then she doesn't want to say goodbye. She thinks of the last really good time they were together, and it wasn't to make love, but fishing in Tolly Mathews' dinghy. Only a light breeze then, but salt in the sea air, the boat rocking, the large blue cod on the slats mouthing for water and finding air which provided nothing. They had told stories against themselves, and exchanged memories, laughing so much together that they almost forgot their fears, just as some mornings she woke happy and
complete
, had a moment of her former life, before it was
overwhelmed
by the realisation of where and what she was.

David had seemed relaxed there, as if most securely insulated from the reach of what troubled him in the world: together in the boat, the sea around them, the third
embracing
protection of the quiet hills of Mahakipawa. He had even talked of visiting Havelock as a boy to stay with family friends, of shimmering summer afternoons spent hunting the crabs and butterfish, nights on an open porch with moreporks sounding the chiming hours, waking to the touch of a breeze moving up Mahau Sound. In all the time they spent together he rarely talked of the past.

‘What do you think he'll do?' asks Schweitzer. He has four more minutes he can spend with Lucy, before he must go to his office to talk with Alst Mousier and the contractor about the official opening of the amenities extension. Maybe he'll be interrupted there by news of the police raid which he's had to keep quiet about.

‘Go back to Christchurch, I suppose,' says Lucy, ‘or overseas again. He gets by okay wherever he finds himself. I don't think that his expectations are that high.'

‘Then he was damn lucky here to find you, Lucy.'

‘Did the police really say nothing about what he's done?'

‘No,' says Schweitzer. He smiles and waits for her next question.

‘Did you ask them?'

‘No,' he says. Both of them still look out of the window,
although David had long vanished behind Weka, and is unlikely to come back that way. Schweitzer moves behind Lucy and holds her loosely, rests his chin on her shoulder, looks out at the grounds. ‘Stay here as long as you like,' he says. ‘Make yourself something to eat. What is it down there on Sunday nights anyway?'

‘Salads and cold meat,' says Lucy, but she's wondering if David has left any note in her room, how he's getting away from Mahakipawa, if this is how it ends: watching a lover being driven out, knowing it's for the best and hurting like hell. She goes with Schweitzer to the door. They don't kiss there, but he squeezes her hand in his, before leaving for the main block. ‘Don't worry too much,' he says. ‘What else could we do for him at such short notice?'

And what else, what more, could she have done for him when notice wasn't so short? It's what happens to couples, families, communities when they're harried too much by life — they split up and make a run for it as individuals, partly to survive, but more importantly because they can't bear to be a witness, or have a witness, to the way things will end. There have been those close, heightened times, though, haven't there? Moments when some real contact was made between them, and not all, or even mainly, physical. Nothing could take those away. Lucy imagines David slipping away from the Slaven Centre: his closed, quiet face as he becomes solitary again, the wary resilience in his regard of the world. He has his dis-ease too, as she has Harlequin.

Lucy will stay in Schweitzer's house a while, which is her entitlement. She will cry and swear, she will smoke shit and think of David and Schweitzer. She will try to remember the way her life was before she got sick. She will twist on the hook, but nothing will change how things are for her. She will wait till Schweitzer returns, and take and give what comfort is left. But after David, after Schweitzer even, Harlequin Rex will be her final suitor.

That great pied piper of malady.

He was there, still and quiet, watching the empty sea, when Bev came and parked on the seaward road edge, which was extended somewhat where a culvert ran underneath. David recognised her at once, but he waited to make sure there wasn't a car close behind, then scrambled down the bank and went over. She wore her old-fashioned wasp stripe trackpants, and a New Zealand Post top. ‘You okay?' she said.

‘I'm on the run. Just like in the movies. The police are coming over from Nelson.'

‘Lie down in the back then, and we'll go straight back.'

‘You're sure?' said David.

‘Put that tartan rug on top. You can convince me of your innocence later.' Bev looked into his face keenly. ‘I hope,' she said after the pause. The bright scar by her eye didn't crease when she smiled. They turned around and headed for Havelock. What a brief acquaintanceship they had, and yet his trust was quite complete. She had a down-to-earth sympathy which instinctively responded to individual need rather than civic generalities.

The space between back and front seats was hardly big
enough for David to lie down but, with the rug over him, a quick glance from a car going the other way could well miss him. He could see a muslin rag under Bev's seat, and a red, boiled sweet with a fuzz of carpet strands, and a small, black plastic shank that he recognised as the clicker from a cheap biro. That was his view as he passed the centre where the Reverend Weymouth was finishing his service with a mildly feminist joke; that was his view as they passed two police cars on the Mahakipawa Hill. Senior Sergeant Toby Cook, travelling in the rear seat of the first car, gave Bev just a glance — the ageing Ford without a passenger barely merited that.

‘Two cars and a fair bunch of gendarmes,' said Bev. ‘You must be popular.'

‘All from a long time ago.'

‘That's peachy then. I guess you're all reformed now.'

‘Absolutely,' said David. His voice came muffled from beneath Bev as she drove, and the oddity of it caused her to laugh.

That is what he had to do, wasn't it? Not allow himself to stay physically or emotionally with Lucy, pretend no concern with either past or future, and just concentrate on himself in the present, move by instinct as a survivor should. He thought that was the quarry Harlequin would admire. Maybe all of it was just a fox hunt, and making a good run was all the satisfaction you could expect.

All of life is the play of sparks between the poles: night and day, men and women, life and death, ignorance and recognition, community of spirit and essential isolation, sadness and joy. How urgent are the sparks between them — flash, flash — electric colours that singe the air and leave the charged ions drifting there. Flash, flash they go.

As he lay ingloriously on the floor of Bev's car, borne away from Mahakipawa, it came to David, with strong conviction and without premeditation, that he would get out of his own country and never come back. If he left the
old places behind, maybe he could leave the worst of the past there, and the best, which could never be recaptured. If he came to foreign places determined to stay, maybe he could find a new language of experience.

It seemed fair to him that, having no control over the beginning of his life, he should attempt mastery of its end.

Owen Marshall is considered New Zealand’s finest contemporary writer of short fiction; he is also a novelist, editor and poet. His previous novel,
A
Many
Coated
Man
, was a finalist in the 1995 Montana Book Awards. He has won numerous awards and fellowships. He lives in Timaru, working as a
full-time
writer.