Harlequin Rex by Owen Marshall

coat: well over six foot and heavy with it, Tony Sheridan said. It was assumed he had walked that far, lain down with little Alice Bee expecting favours, and got more head than he bargained for.
    Such a thing is so bizarre that, for a while, the sadness and horror of it can be avoided, but Alice must have remembered it from time to time. She went into the secure unit in the main block, where she made a beautiful wall hanging of angora wool for the reception foyer, before electrocuting herself with wire in the dayroom plug closest to the nurses’ station. Gaynor Runcinski, who knew all about textiles, considered it a thing of genius. Alice had written a card for her wall hanging which read ‘Fibre landscape: Mahakipawa 3’. There was no evidence that Mahakipawas 1 and 2 ever existed outside her mind.
    David was remembering that as he and Tolly went down to Sheridan’s office for Tolly’s session. There was a cold,steady wind up the sound, and barges of dull cloud were towed overhead. Only slightly lower were skuas, skidding by with fixed wings. The wind set up a resonance, part sound, part vibration, which made it unpleasant to be outside. ‘An ideal day,’ said Tolly, ‘to talk about illness. Don’t you think?’
    There was one other thing about Alice’s notoriety which came to David as they walked: an idle connection really, but that’s the way the brain works. The visitor garrotted by Alice had been visiting Lorna Ibbotson, whose brother years before won the Canterbury Closed Tennis Championship. David had been a spectator. He had sat there marvelling at Ibbotson’s touch with the drop volley, and none in that small audience could know that Harlequin and Alice Bee were waiting to make such indirect connection in the future.
    As an extension of whanau support, all guests at the centre were invited to take a companion to their regular reviews. David noticed that many of the sessions were descriptive and diagnostic, rather than providing alleviation. Maybe there was something therapeutic in just the opportunity to talk: to spill out the fear and fascination that patients felt for Harlequin. For each of them the illness was uniquely personal, no matter how often they saw the same symptoms in their fellows.
    ‘How do you find the Hazlitt spinner?’ asked Sheridan, when the three of them were comfortable. Yellow and green dwarf conifers outside his window heeled in the wind, and the caretaker’s Samoyed loped past to find its master, or a garrottee.
    ‘It quietens you, doesn’t it?’ said Tolly. ‘Takes you out of the world for a while, but I’d say there’s no permanent gain against the demons. No healing in it, seems to me. Healing seems to be the thing that no one much talks about, and yet it’s the word most of us are after — that, and a cure.’
    ‘The worst thing would be to build up a lot of false hopes,’ said Sheridan. He wore a sports coat with large, blue checks and there was a fair stretch of pale shirt the coat couldn’tcover. ‘As far as we can tell, Harlequin’s a whole new thing and, until we know the enemy better, the outcomes are unpredictable.’
    ‘It’s not as if nobody recovers,’ David said. He felt that he was there partly to be encouraging.
    ‘That’s right,’ said Sheridan. ‘Ones from your own block, like Edward Simm, who’s home and seems not too bad.’
    Tolly smiled at the positiveness of it all.
    They knew others too, didn’t they, like Jason, and Big Pulii, and Jane Milton; like Alice Bee, who had woven ‘Mahakipawa 3’, which hung in reception only two corners away from Tony Sheridan’s office. As they all knew, what they were trying to do at the centre was delay the progression of the disease until an effective treatment could be found.
    ‘Tolly,’ said Sheridan, ‘you’re in the best place in the world to have Harlequin, small consolation though that might seem. Schweitzer’s a near genius, and when this thing’s beaten, this is where it’ll