Harlequin Rex Read Online Free Page B

‘You won’t have been in any place like this before, and neither have those of us you’re joining. We’re not sure at all what we’ve got by the tail here, but it’s sure as hell some sort of tiger.’
    He sat amid the trays and papers on the desk, while lifeguards pursued bikini babes as screen savers on Mousier’s computer. He wore very light, blue fabric shoes and no socks. On his left ankle a vein curved over his Achilles tendon. He had a tight, nimble body and a heavy shaving shadow on his cheeks and neck. Sustenance for the follicles there was perhaps drawn by gravity, for by contrast the hair on his head had retreated to accentuate the brow.
    ‘The aetiology of this one is so lacking as to be both ludicrous and scary,’ Schweitzer said. ‘The pathology of it, on the other hand, is all around us, and dauntingly complex. The treatment we’re making up as we go along.’ He paused, and seemed to concentrate on an even swing of his blue shoes. ‘But that’s enough reassurance for you on arrival at Mahakipawa,’ he said. Had there been more of them for induction they would no doubt have laughed, but as it was, intimate within Mousier’s office, they smiled and leant back in their vinyl chairs.
    He had presence, did Schweitzer. You didn’t listen to him long before admitting the intelligence, the concern, the quiet confidence, and only that degree of unconscious arrogancewhich arose naturally from a long time living with the deference of those around him. Schweitzer himself had coined the name Harlequin, which was increasingly used for the illness, because he thought primal brain regression inaccurate and unhelpful. ‘After all, primal brain dominance, if you must. The regression is from powers more recently acquired. Over hundreds of thousands of years higher brain functions evolved which imposed control over more rudimentary responses, and what we seem to have in Harlequin is the failure of these later functions for some reason, and so the archaic response of primal brain, the thalamus, hypothalamus , limbic system, are set free again. Our original soul: call it what you will.’
    ‘And it’s an odd brute,’ said Alst Mousier from behind them. ‘Evolution can never go back to the drawing board. It’s had to build on what’s there.’
    The sun glowed at the chinks of the blinds, Schweitzer went on to explain how the Slaven Centre worked; and all the time the primal brain, old Harlequin, was biding its time in them, and rampant within the patients they were there to help. The only difference was that, with the guests, he was already able to slip his collar and come out dancing. It never paid to bait the monkey man.
    How had they all come to be there: the nurses, Polly, the Aussie radiologist, the pudding pay man? And which of David’s many poor decisions had brought him to Mahakipawa when all his ambitions had been different?
    ‘I hope that your choice will prove a happy one for us and you,’ said Schweitzer before he left. David noticed that he had wound the candy-striped straw around his left index finger as he’d been speaking, and that there was a slight sheen of sweat on his frontal baldness.
     
    The farm was named Beth Car by David’s great-grandfather, who had come out from Wales. It was near the head of the valley, and Coal-pit Road went only a few kilometres more   past their gate, and finished in a trivial reserve where there was a picnic area among the broom and lupins, a shallow swimming hole under heavy willows, a concrete fireplace smudged black, and beer cans in the lank grass within throwing distance. The place altered little, and was too far from town to be under any pressure of use. Occasionally the Palliser kids, or the Mercers, would pedal up in the shimmer of a summer afternoon; sometimes in the evening a local guy would take a girl there, the family Commodore, or Falcon, throbbing through the dusk.
    The creek ran through Beth Car, and the farm sloped up to the west, steeper