Harlequin Rex by Owen Marshall Page A

happen.’
    ‘Maybe,’ said Tolly. ‘I don’t want to seem ungrateful, but when you’re sick yourself, the big picture is nothing to you, nothing at all. I had an aunt who used to piss me off with that trite saying that your health is all you’ve got. It’s still trite, of course, but now for me it’s true as well. Yet from sheer habit I find myself still worrying about my investments , whether my new shower mixers are taking on, and if abstinence will make me impotent.’
    ‘You’ve been feeling okay?’ asked Sheridan.
    ‘Up and down,’ said Tolly. ‘You know, my sense of smell becomes better than a ferret’s at times, just as Abbey said it would. Then I can tell anyone’s last meal from a single fart, and I know when the red clover’s out in the road paddock over the hill. Cows smell different to steers — did you know that? The blankets on the drying line almost smother me with fragrances, and when I bring my hands to my face I know all the day’s activities.’
    It was old primal brain again, wasn’t it; wonderfullyunfettered power of the senses, which sophistication had overlain. David had caught many glimpses of Harlequin from such descriptions, and the behaviour of patients when they blew.
    ‘This acuteness of smell isn’t progressive, though, is it?’ Sheridan drew the case sheets to him. ‘I mean, it’s not heightened every time you have an episode?’
    ‘It’s probably growing. It comes on with the demons, of course, but it’s certainly lingering on much longer after I come right in other ways.’
    No good sign. Tolly must have known that as well, but none of them chose to say it. Atavism was the great symptom of the new plague. What threatened them most at the start of the twenty-first century wasn’t aliens, wasn’t genetic or technical advance, but something looming up from way, way back. Maybe in the end the conclusive and final predator was their former selves.
    ‘The feeling is at once release, and lack of control.’ Tolly was detailing the way his bouts began. ‘Everything is self and gratification of self. Everything is now, and it presses out both the past and future. Colour, sound, taste and threat whirl around you. Response is everything.’
    David and the doctor knew that Tolly was well in the vortex, but to express it served no purpose. Tolly and Sheridan began to go over the diary that every patient agreed to keep: an attempt to find any triggers, predisposing factors, dietary connections, whatever. The futility of it lay shallowly behind their faces, and David felt it as well. His throat stiffened with the effort to prevent a yawn. His friend Tolly was dying, perhaps, but the horror couldn’t be taken head on, and David’s attention was displaced to the cool, Mahakipawa day, with the wind coming up the sound, the half-grown gardens of the Slaven Centre tossing, a mixed fruit yogurt six-pack in a supermarket bag by Sheridan’s desk, the papers heaped in the desk files, the baleful tweed expanse of the doctor’s jacket.
    ‘It must be just a matter of time,’ David said. ‘Until the causes of it, and a cure, are found, I mean. All these things are cracked in the end.’
    ‘How much time though, eh?’ said Tolly, and his face twitched somewhat. Maybe he was able to smell hypocrisy, too.

TEN
    In closed institutions, priorities and prejudices evolve quickly, become quite distinct from what’s accepted in the general community. Local personalities and issues reform attitudes; things inconsequential everywhere else, are of great significance . A tribal life develops which is both nourishing and cruel.
    What was there to mock in the energy, and love, and desperation they sublimated in volleyball? Roimata Wallace had begun it by bringing back the first equipment from Nelson as recreational therapy, and Raf determined its rivalry by organising the team competition among the blocks and staff grouped by occupation. Staff and patients had parity within the confines of the