You never know what you’re going to find
on a morning stroll through paradise.
Marigold takes up a bucket of pig food
and picks her way down through the garden in
the rising heat. Lately, rainbow lorikeets
have been coming each morning to the blossoming
flax – interlopers, the purists tell her,
but honestly, can you have too much
colour? Who’s going to quarrel with
this, for example: a cock pheasant
scratching between the corn rows, scarlet-
complexioned, horny-wattled, dauntless
in his sumptuary splendour? True, her
morning began with a smoke. Her outlook
is, let’s say, susceptible. That a kererū
plumped in a loquat tree should fix her
with its pink-rimmed eye and allow
her to pass within touching distance is
not necessarily a sign from the gods.
And yet – as her boys now come blundering
out of the underbrush with their happy cries,
scrummaging one another out of the way
in the fight for their share of her scratches
and smooches – isn’t there something (she finds
herself wondering) slightly off-key in
their over-excitement? ‘What’s up with
you lot, then?’ she demands, as the biggest
and bossiest paws at her gumboot,
heavily, with a stubby white trotter –
‘Fuck you, buster!’ she mutters, as she spanks
his fat arse. That’s when she spies, in the trampled
mud by the drinking trough, the tell-tale
pug. A big-footed someone has been here
to drink. Someone who isn’t a Berkshire hog!
Below the pig run, her mother’s garden
falls through a sequence of landings till it
ends at the beach. Here, above the high-tide
mark, screened by a crumpled pōhutukawa
(just now embarked on its sanguinary
shtick as the barbecue season lights up
the gulf), is the place she assembles her
beachcomber mulch, a pungent confection
of pig straw and fish-frames and kelp.
It’s simpler to keep this away from the house;
its charms can be lost on visitors. But
not, she observes, on the author of last
night’s mysterious footprint – for here she
discovers him: smeared from groin to
Adam’s apple with chocolatey nutritious filth,
a scrawny, suntanned child of Nature,
tossing the stinky midden with a driftwood
crutch! And apparently not discomposed
to be happened upon like this in his
sky-clad trespasses. Exuberantly
he throws down his weapon and thrusts out
in greeting a grungy paw. ‘Bardruin!’
he announces, affably. ‘Bardruin, Arthur.
You’ll have to forgive me, my dear, but
it’s truly the most splendid compost –
you know how it is – I just couldn’t resist!’
A scruffy green parrot with a powder-blue
face is perched on a ladderback chair
in Marigold’s kitchen. Chuck is his name
(or, more formally, Chuckles – somewhat
misleadingly, given his temperament).
‘Chaddie’s back! Chaddie’s back!’ the moth-eaten
creature announces, obscurely. ‘¿Dónde está
tu ropa, cabrón?’ ‘Chuck, don’t be rude!
Ignore him, he’s like this with visitors.’
Briefly, Marigold explains: how the bird
first belonged to her analyst friend;
how he’d gatecrash her sessions, then
share – ‘You mean parrot?’ – ‘Exactly!
Our Chuck’s an inveterate gossip. You can
picture the scandal. So he needed a home.’
‘I’m guessing your Freudian friend must be
Spanish?’ ‘Almost. Juanita’s from Buenos
Aires. You miss her, don’t you, darling boy?
You want to go back to your Mami and all
that talk about fucking.’ When her huffy
companion disdains to reply she attempts to
cajole him with peanuts and kisses. The bird,
though, is not to be bought off so cheaply.
‘¡Chupa mi pinga!’ he irritably croaks.
When the castaway has been fed and watered,
showered, shaved and acclimatised – his
matted locks trimmed, a bathrobe proffered,
his outlandish, bony dimensions recorded –
his rescuer embarks on her afternoon errands.
‘You two boys get to know one another.
I’ll be back to make dinner. You never
know – we may have Arthur dressed for it.’
And so, as events transpire, they will. For
St Vincent de Paul has the very thing:
baggy old cords, a grey cotton shirt, even
a Harris tweed jacket. ‘For my nephew,’
she explains.
Before that, however, there’s
a stop to be made at an unassuming
weatherboard home just this side of the causeway.
Marigold finds June Te Patu in the shade
of the villa’s back porch at her fly-tying
vice. ‘Hey, that’s a banger!’ she rightly
observes of a psychedelic, shrimp-like
confection receiving a last dab of
lacquer. The old lady beams. After
kisses and cuddles, Marigold puts on
the kettle and unwraps her offerings.
‘I’ve made up that kawakawa ointment,
e kui.’ ‘Did you do it like I told you?’
‘Of course I did.’ There’s a comfrey paste
and rosehip oil, and a freshly caught
snapper (‘Look, it’s a beauty!’). ‘You’re
good to us, child. Ae, Koro will love it.’
She slides the fish onto a baking tray.
‘You’re good to us, child, but’ – here we go,
it’s a game they’ve played a hundred times –
‘what you need is a man to look after.’
‘Auntie, shush!’ ‘Don’t shush me, girl, it’s true!
Now what did you do with that fellah, used
to stay up by you – the airline pilot –
what was his name again?’ ‘Carlos, Auntie.’
‘Carlos! That was a nice-looking boy. Auē!
You young people, you don’t know what’s good for you!’
‘Auntie June, I’m fifty-one.’ ‘Nonsense!’
Marigold strokes her hand. ‘Anyway, Auntie,
it wasn’t my fault. I liked him, truly,
I did, but then he just . . . disappeared.’
Marigold, Bardruin swiftly discovers,
is not averse to Life’s Good Things. First up,
garfish, dusted in flour and fried to a golden
nicety, pearlescent flesh unzipping
with a sigh, flinty Italian white
mouth-puckeringly dry; the artichoke
and red pepper soufflé arrives with
a crumpety local chardonnay, the compote
of wild mushrooms with a barnyard burgundy.
For one who has lived for the past several
months on a diet of oysters and wild spinach –
but they’ll get to that soon enough . . .
Meanwhile his hostess has swept up an
expertly cantilevered armload of
dishes and dead soldiers, departing for
the kitchen, whence, a few moments later,
she emerges with an artful plateau
de fromages. They slump in companionable
lassitude, mopping up the pinot.
The silence between them is interrupted
only by incoherent avian
scolding, and the cracking of pistachios.
Finally Marigold calls them to order.
‘It’s not compulsory,’ she says, half-
truthfully, ‘no one need sing for his supper,
but . . .’ – with a pause, just a hint of theatre –
‘. . . I do have a token from a grateful
client laid by for just such a moment
as this. And if you’ll forgive me, my
waterlogged friend, it strikes me you’re
not one to shy from a drink.’ A Baron de
Lustrac Armagnac, honeyed of hue and of
unfathomable age, brings Bardruin
out in a boyish grin. The cork is consigned
to the fireplace. And so he begins . . .
Marigold, may he safely assume, is not
a consumer of poetry? In which case
she is perhaps unaware of the scandal that
lately, in certain small circles, has attached to
the Bardruin name: to wit, his naming,
shaming and slating for re-education
by the Continence Police. No?
His hostess looks amiably blank.
‘The story is long more than edifying.
I am, you will gather, a maker of
verses. In the Age of Universal
Enjoyments (which you, I suspect, are too
young to remember) I entertained briefly
a modest fame. Celebrant of the happy urge,
I wrote, I declaimed my works in public,
I was even received in the precincts
of higher learning. Girls would come out in
their long summer dresses, smoking, pressing
flowers in their notebooks, attending
gravely as I teased apart the great
perplexities of the day. There were problems,
you see, and we fully meant to solve them:
the problem of leisure, the politics of Joy,
the toxic cathode, the Militant
Orgasm. My poems were like drugs. Like
explosives! Like radios!! Ah, well . . .’
The part that comes next demands a three-finger
refill. History takes its pound of flesh:
the Age of Austerity, the first Great
Divestment, the rise of the Excellence
Party, the Commission for Outputs.
‘Remember the first talk of private prisons?
Lord how we laughed. It will never work!
What would be next, we asked, private
police? We all should have bought shares in
Punishment Corp. Haaarrgh!’ There’s a clatter
of indignant birdlife as poor Chuckles scatters
his shells in alarm, then hops from the table
to his mistress’s shoulder to be petted
and soothed. (‘Just war stories, darling.’)
The Shouting Man stares with reflective
mien, as if waiting for the narrative
to clear in his brandy balloon.
‘The motherfucking Salvation Army, how’s
that for a joke? All that real estate standing
idle, the hospitals, the drying-out centres . . .
the bean-counters dream up Citizen Law
and next thing you know we’ve got the Gulag
Archipelago! Salvation Redux
– a refit for every new crime!
There’s all these brand new consortia, right,
then the Poetry Instructors get in
on the act: the PIs, the Sallies, the Culture
Bureau, Punishment Corp. Well, here I am . . .’
‘What you seem to be telling us,’ Marigold
offers, ever attentive, repairing
their drinks, ‘what you seem to be saying is
you’re a fugitive.’
‘What I seem to be
saying, my dear, is that I’m dead! Listen . . .
‘A year ago as a birthday treat (a round
number, please don’t ask!) my publisher,
bless him, let me have a New and Selected.
My star, as I’ve said, was a little tarnished,
I’d not been exactly in the public eye.
Well, I got some attention all right – it was
just the wrong kind! They hauled me in
front of the Continence Board. When they find
you in breach they give you a choice: you can
either recant – you hand in your card, you
grovel, you promise not to publish again –
or they ship you out for re-education.
They gave me a week to decide . . .’
Proceedings by now have become rather loose.
When Marigold comes to, the following morning,
the sky bright, Bardruin cast up beside her,
she will find that the Baron has gone to
his grave and taken with him all but scattered
fragments of the tale’s remaining stanza.
A drowning was staged, she remembers that,
and an exit contrived in a dinghy
to an offshore islet . . . a menu of shellfish
and dried beef jerky in the course of a
month or two outstayed its welcome . . . something,
too, about the loss of the transport, floating
away on a spring flood, the decision
to swim which, as tide flows would have it,
brought the trouserless poet to Marigold’s
shore. A poet no longer entirely
resigned – this much she recalls quite plainly,
accompanied as the announcement was
by antic dance moves, chest percussion
and vehemence enough to send a startled parrot
fluttering roofwards in fear of his life:
Fuck those sanctimonious fucking class
monitors – Bardruin isn’t finished yet!