Harlequin Rex Read Online Free

unsealed road, peeling off from the Titi group to head for their own block. They carried towels and their hair was mussed and only half dry. He continued to hear Raf’s voice, helpful yet characteristically flippant. David would hold those people in his mind’s eye as they straggled back from the shoreline. Later each face, each posture, would be quite familiar to him, although then they appeared as strangers. Howard Peat in front, of course, not wanting any of his fellows in his field of vision; that way it was easier to deny where he was and why. Then Abbey and Jane, self-conscious of their appearance, but full of trivial talk that might give their outing some guise of careless recreation. Jason Brown and Sarah Keppler, who so often consoled each other with their bodies, and thought it a secret safe between them. Others also, in twos and threes, and all with the fear, the anger, the loneliness and despair, carefully buttoned away. Harlequin, Harlequin, come out to play.
    ‘Here they come,’ said Raf, breaking off from a summary of routines. ‘They don’t know what’s wrong with them, and nor do we. Today it’s them; tomorrow it may well be us. For what it’s worth, I find it best to keep my sympathy until it’s asked for, which isn’t often.’
    How do you account for the role you find imposed on you in life, places you inhabit without design, people who surround you, obligations that come uninvited? So bright the sun as David watched the people of Takahe come home. Harlequin, Harlequin, out to play.
     
    A great staircase leading from the hall, a landing at its turn with a green and red poppy plant window, and the stairs   then again angling up, up. He would sit and rock on the landing when he should have been in his bed, and listen to the voices below. The landing was a halfway house, a fringe zone, a no man’s land, a pushmi-pullyu, between the up and down. The lights reached just that far from below and the dark encroached that far from above. He would rock, and hold the smooth, wooden leg of the stair rail until it was egg warm beneath his arm. If he held on and leant far back with tipping head, he could see the oval landing window, which was almost black unless there was a moon behind it, and in its darkness was the glimmer of the poppy caught in the faintest hall light, as a goldfish gleams with indistinct allure in a brown lily pond.
    The life downstairs was trivial and transient, no doubt: neighbours in for birthday drinks, an election night get- together , former friends passing through the district once again, his mother’s committee to make submissions on the beautification of reserves. Nothing of significance; nothing of remembrance beyond the time of it, unless recalled hazily from a diary entry, or more emphatically because linked with incident — Tommy Concoran’s heart attack, lightning striking the woolshed, Dot Maddox seeing the risen and glowing Christ walking down Hotten ’ s Spur.
    But for David then, the voices, scents, opening and closing of doors, the spilling of warm light along the hall, all had the enchantment of adult life of the night. And uniqueness a part of it, because not set among street lights, flashing signs, comings and goings, any companionship of buildings. Their house, surely, was the one bulwark against the night in all the world. If he stood and stretched to peer through the clear glass lozenges at the base of the landing window, what he saw, indistinct and restive, were the macrocarpa at the tractor sheds, the hill behind flayed with sheep tracks if the moon shone, the gully flowing darkness where the creek bore water for the day.
    And from his bed he could hear the sound foam away  from the great ships that tossed among the pines, and spray on wet nights was slung like gravel against the windows of his room. Quiet nights, too, with the furtive rattle of a dog’s chain, the punctured cough of a ewe, the stark benediction of the morepork who sees all there is to