Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  Averil patted my leg. It was my turn. I was walked to the lectern, looking down at my hand-written notes. The first line was, ‘Oh, Dad, he was your kindest friend …’ I knew there was no way I could say that without dissolving into tears myself. I had to think of something else.

  Let’s be honest here, we all know Allan liked a drink. He was a very heavy drinker, no question. Not to put too fine a point on it, he was an alcoholic. I’d hate to guess how much alcohol there was in his bloodstream when he died, so I feel I have to ask—is cremation really the safest option? When that coffin goes through those curtains I’m going out that front door before the fireball engulfs the whole place!

  I said it for me, but the whole chapel erupted in grateful laughter. Allan would have approved. I was then able to read what I had prepared.

  That night, back in Wellington, I was falling asleep when a familiar voice called out from the stairs, ‘Goodnight, dear boy.’

  ‘Did you hear that?’ I whispered to Averil, wondering if I had imagined it.

  ‘Yes. I heard it,’ she replied softly. ‘Allan is wishing you goodnight.’

  Goodnight to you too, dear boy …

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  THE SPY WHO CAME IN FROM THE WARM

  ON 14 FEBRUARY 2014, AMID press coverage and speculation about former computer mogul Kim Dotcom’s boast that he would play a spoiling role in the New Zealand elections at the end of the year, I drew a cartoon of John Key in a trench coat spying on Dotcom’s mansion through field glasses. A soldier assisting Key is suggesting to the Prime Minister that he really should leave this sort of thing to the GCSB.

  Within hours of publication, I received an email from a familiar source, an ‘Arch Pol’, requesting the original. Arch had purchased a good number of cartoons over the years. Every time I did anything related to espionage, Arch would contact me and I would send it to him with an invoice to a nondescript P.O. Box number. This time I got a phone call as well.

  ‘Hi, Tom, this is Arch Pol. You have probably guessed by now that this name is a pseudonym.’ I told him I had no idea, confirming, if any proof were needed, that I was gormless as well as harmless. ‘We have a collection of your cartoons here at the GCSB,’ he continued. ‘Would you like to come and see them and have afternoon tea with the director?’ You bet!

  I arrived ahead of the appointed hour, stepped through a security X-ray machine, had my cell phone confiscated, was given a special card and told to wait for someone to come and fetch me. Someone did. I was taken up in a lift to the foyer of the GCSB section. In pride of place was an Enigma machine from World War Two. Around the walls were framed cartoons by every newspaper and magazine cartoonist in the country. A good many were mine.

  Arch ushered me into an inner sanctum to have afternoon tea. ‘We keep the ones we don’t think are suitable for public display in here.’ Hanging in this small boardroom were cartoons highly critical and mocking of the SIS and the GCSB. They were entirely mine.

  The director arrived. Tea was poured and convivial conversation ensued. I said something to the effect that they would have been run off their feet spying on me way back in the ’70s. They exchanged knowing looks and giggled.

  I don’t blame them if they were. At that time Christine worked for the New Zealand University Students’ Association. Most of the organisers were members of the Wellington Marxist Leninist Organisation, which later became the Workers’ Communist League. Communism, like the world’s other great religions, had deep schisms. Christianity split into Protestant and Catholic wings, Islam into Shia and Sunni faiths, and Marxist-Leninist doctrine into the Russian industrial model and the Chinese agrarian model. The University Students’ Association comrades were Maoist. These reds weren’t under the bed. They were sitting at the desks and answering the phones. They were austere, severe and sincere, a deeply committed cadre fired with a migraine-inducing zeal—everything I’m not.

  You can’t be a fellow traveller when you are travelling in opposite directions, and Christine and I were moving in opposite directions. As a court jester, no matter how rude I was to the king, I was part of the established order that Christine and her chums were opposed to and wanted to replace. She told me that a colleague and his wife had taken to reading the collected works of Lenin out loud to each other in bed, and it had brought them closer together. She wanted me to consider this. Small wonder then that when I started working at Parliament our mail began being opened surreptitiously with a blunt breadknife, and when I picked up the phone the line would snap, crackle and pop like Kellogg’s Rice Bubbles. Sometimes it was so noisy you half expected a man wearing a raincoat and headphones parked in a van at the end of the street to ask you politely to speak up.

  It must have been a nightmare breaking the elaborate codes. ‘If it’s raining I’ll take the kids to the museum. If it’s not, Christine will take them to Scorching Bay. Ollie’s allergic to peanut butter, right? Or is it strawberries?’ Anyone monitoring my conversations would have quickly determined that—apart from to Ollie, obviously—I was no threat to anyone.

  But Muldoon wasn’t taking any chances. Shortly into his first ministry, a Parliamentary security guard took me aside and lowered his voice. ‘Don’t ever misbehave in this building, Tom. They want us to keep an eye on you. If you’re ever drunk or disorderly, the ninth floor wants to know about it.’ I thanked him and he shot away. I hadn’t been planning to misbehave, but I took his advice seriously, which ruled out adventures in the Speaker’s chair.

  I remember one wet, miserable afternoon in Karori when Christine’s friends were around and the conversation turned to Cambodia and the genocidal Pol Pot regime, which was ostensibly Maoist and thus allowed a degree of artistic licence. Things got heated when I protested that he had butchered two million of his own people. An otherwise perfectly reasonable young woman replied along the lines that you couldn’t make an omelette without breaking a few eggs, adding that the real figure was one million, tops. I knew right then that our marriage was doomed.

  Had I been more honest and more courageous we would have parted painfully but honourably then. I wasn’t and we didn’t, so it was a train wreck when it finally happened.

  The child-minding family group dined together once a week, rotating the duty. They were messy, high-decibel affairs. The kids loved them, and if parents guzzled enough cask wine we had a great time as well.

  It was at Kevin and Margaret’s home in Wilton on a wet Sunday that I met Helen for the very first time. She was visiting from Auckland with her three cute kids. She was tall and beautiful, funny and smart. I was smitten the instant I saw her, just as I had been with Christine. My heart is the only thing remotely reckless about me. I hardly said a word to her that night. I couldn’t look her in the eye. So I poured a huge effort into entertaining the room hoping to impress her indirectly.

  My mate Kev reported later that Helen had asked lots of questions about me, and said that she found me interesting and amusing. It could have gone either way. On the evidence presented she could just as easily have found me shrill and tragic. As a result, I couldn’t get her out of my mind.

  —

  THERE WAS A TWO-WEEK ROYAL TOUR of the country in February and March 1977 and Ian Cross assigned me to follow it in full. The Listener devoted four pages to my story and put me on the cover, which they asked me to draw.

  My copy wasn’t memorable, but Muldoon’s ability to greet the Queen everywhere she went surely was. He would wave her off at one airport and greet her descending the steps at the next. She could have been forgiven for thinking he had cloned himself. Fleet Street scribes were appalled at first then eventually amused, joking that should Her Majesty require a gynaecological examination on tour she should brace herself while on the examination table with her feet in stirrups for the very real possibility that the doctor would lower his mask and it would be Muldoon.

  I met Her Majesty in person on a clear and warm Auckland evening at a cocktail party on the Royal yacht Britannia. After pa
ssing a rigorous vetting on the jetty, the media joined a queue on the scrubbed breadboard decks to be introduced to the Royal couple. Flip and facetious conversation died away to nervous silence as the queue shortened.

  The Queen took my suddenly damp palm and gave me a warm smile and disconcertingly shrewd gaze. As everyone comments, she was smaller than expected and more attractive and animated than her photographs and film footage suggest. It was a weird experience to meet up close the person whose face is on every banknote, every coin and every second Woman’s Weekly cover. (I am not alone in thinking this. After performing in a royal variety concert at the Albert Hall, the singer Glen Campbell was formally introduced to Her Majesty back stage. In his soft southern drawl, Campbell commented later, ‘I’d seen her face on so many stamps I had to fight the urge to lick the back of her head …’)

  The media could have stayed and drunk hefty gin and tonics all night, but the Royal Navy whisked us off with a courteous but steely resolve when our allotted time was up. As arranged I caught up with Helen for a drink. She was wearing a long, figure-hugging, dark green frock. On a lithe, tanned arm she had a silver bracelet that could have been from the Andes or Tibet. The metal embraced a turquoise stone mottled like an ancient map of the world. Everything about her was exquisite and beautiful. It was just like ‘Norwegian Wood’—apart from the ‘time for bed’ bit.

  I had severe abdominal cramps all evening and desperately needed to go to the toilet. In great pain, I gabbled incessantly for hours. In the foyer, in mounting agony, I waited desperately for Helen’s cab to arrive, pecked her demurely on the cheek when it did, then raced for a ground-floor loo. The detonation left me semi-concussed. The only consolation was that if it had happened on the Britannia, the Special Forces who guard the Queen would have riddled the toilet cubicle with gunfire.

  The next morning the press contingent assembled at Whenuapai airbase for a Hercules flight to Whangarei. Inside the cargo bay our Hercules had a decidedly unfinished look. Wiring, cables and piping flowed everywhere like a da Vinci sketch of a dissected arm. Already nervous, the British press were taken aback when advised there were no lavatories in the accepted sense, just a wide funnel and a tube leading to the exterior of the plane, and that paper bags were available if anyone got sick, along with earplugs if we couldn’t tolerate the deafening noise.

  ‘Any parachutes?’ someone joked.

  ‘No,’ said the commander, equal to the task. ‘But, if the worst comes to the worst, hold your nose and put a cross on your head—that way we’ll know where to dig.’

  My chum Phil Melchior, who had flown with Kirk’s coffin in this very cargo hold, nonchalantly strapped himself into his webbing seat and with a knowing smile leaned across to me. ‘OK. How did it go last night?’

  ‘I’m in love,’ I whispered.

  The rest of the trip passed without incident, though in a walkabout down New Plymouth’s Devon Street the crowd made almost as much fuss of me as the Queen—squealing and shouting out my name. They were kidding, of course. It was the verbal equivalent of a Mexican wave—they were doing it to amuse themselves. Still, the Fleet Street hacks were astonished and the Telegraph’s royal correspondent wrote about it at some length in her next piece on the tour. There wasn’t a lot happening; much like the Devon Street crowd, the press were also clutching at straws.

  I returned to Wellington and was somewhat distant with Christine, who wanted to know why. I am a member of a particularly shallow generation. To allay suspicion, I played her ‘There is Someone Else’, a cheesy Boz Scaggs ballad from his cheesy Silk Degrees album, which I still play from time to time. It implied that the ‘someone else’ I’d finally found was her. Christine was thrilled, but it was a calculated, dishonest diversion measure that shames me still.

  We had moved to Thorndon by then, within walking distance of Parliament, which was perfect, and just around the corner from the Katherine Mansfield Memorial Park with its scented garden for the blind. I played there most afternoons with Shaun, laughing and being silly together until it got too dark to see and the air was filled with scent. Shaun was happy and that delighted me.

  IN TIME FOR THE CHRISTMAS market in 1977, my first book, Tom Scott’s Life and Times, was published. The celebrated poet Brian Turner, a man with a wit so dry it should come with a fire warning, did a brilliant job editing and assembling a collection of my better writing and drawings. In some ways, it was a stocktake of my career to date, and if you took my personal life into consideration it was a fire clearance sale as well.

  Back in the days before Wellington coffee bars and bistros burst into existence there were very few places for families to eat out in the city. A church hall in Mount Victoria that sold lasagne, pumpkin soup and garlic bread had queues of parents and kids queuing around the block on Friday nights. That’s how desperate we were for novel cuisine. We launched the book there. Being in the presence of a famous, published author did not overawe Shaun and the rest of the kids from the family group who wrestled at my feet, tugged my jeans and asked for drinks as I was giving a speech and their parents were studiously pretending it wasn’t happening. The book sold very well.

  One night I was drawing a cartoon for a Listener cover of the Parliamentary chamber in pandemonium and riot. It was four in the morning, just five hours until my deadline, and I was nowhere near finished. There was an urgent tapping on the door. The live-in nurse and housekeeper from upstairs who looked after a very old lady was intoxicated and crying—could I come and help?

  I followed her upstairs and she waved me into the old lady’s bedroom, remaining outside herself. The old lady was frail, had lost almost all of her hair and was the same colour as her sheets. Clearly on death’s door, she was fretting about something. Mumbling something in a barely audible whisper, she kept pointing to a glass of what I took to be cloudy orange juice on her bedside table.

  I thought she wanted a sip, and lifted it up to her lips. She recoiled in horror and shook her head. I took a sniff. It was urine. She’d had a last little pee into the glass. I asked her quietly, ‘Would you like me to flush this down the toilet for you?’ She nodded, sank back into her pillows and gave me, a complete stranger, a relieved smile. Her last smile probably. She died that night. An ambulance and her adult children were on the way and she wanted to keep what little dignity she had left intact.

  There were photographs of her as a beautiful, stylish young woman covering the walls. I returned to my desk noting to myself that we pass this way but once and there are very few happy endings.

  Many nights after this I spent my last waking moments before tipping into sleep wondering if I would ever see Helen again. But events not of my making set in train almost a year earlier in the debating chamber would change everything with a brutal swiftness that I accept responsibility for.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  THE SEEDS OF A DOWNFALL

  IN THE MIDDLE OF 1976, Speaker Richard Harrison, who liked my columns, called me into his office and poured me a Scotch. Something was preying on his mind. It was a recent conversation he’d had with the Prime Minister concerning Labour’s Colin Moyle. A handsome man with pompadour hair and a Kirk Douglas dimpled chin, Moyle was easily the Opposition’s best performer in the House, fuelling rumours that he would soon replace Bill Rowling as leader, which would not be good news for National. According to Harrison, Muldoon had chuckled and said that was never going to happen. He had the goods on Moyle, which he would reveal when the time was right. ‘When things get heated in the House,’ said a pale Harrison, ‘I think to myself, is this it? And I feel sick. What can it possibly be?’

  I didn’t know either, but we would both find out on the evening of 4 November 1976. During a bad-tempered, three-hour debate on the supplementary estimates, and amid a flurry of competing points of order, Muldoon thought mocking laughter had come from Moyle. He responded, ‘I shall forgive the effeminate giggles of the Member for Mangere, because I know his background.’ Ignoring the implied threat, an angry
Moyle walked into an ambush, asking if it would be in order to accuse the Prime Minister of being a member of a dishonest accountancy firm. Muldoon, who had been drinking, lowered the boom. ‘Would it be in order for me to accuse the Member of being picked up by the police for homosexual activity?’

  Both sides of the House were stunned and sickened by Muldoon’s behaviour. When I checked out Rowling’s office after the House had risen, Moyle was curled up in a foetal ball on a couch, weeping—a broken man. Who knows how things would have turned out had he crossed the floor of the chamber and smacked Muldoon or risen to make a point of personal explanation, as Standing Orders allow: ‘Mr Speaker, I would like to assure the Honourable Member for Tāmaki that he is so physically unattractive he has nothing to fear on my account.’

  A year earlier, in a seedy part of Wellington, late at night Moyle invited an undercover policeman into his ministerial car—not a good look at the time. As absurd and as cruel as it sounds today, homosexual acts between consenting adults were deemed shameful, sinful and criminal back then. When the late British actor Denholm Elliott, who specialised in playing sweating district commissioners, died of AIDS, his widow was asked how this could have happened. She responded cheerfully, ‘Having a bloody good time, I imagine.’ Incapable of such sangfroid, Moyle offered three differing and increasingly tortuous explanations. In the wake of an official inquiry that scolded him, he resigned his safe Mangere seat so he could contest it in a by-election and return to politics with a fresh mandate. Under pressure from his own party and under intense media scrutiny, he subsequently pulled out of the by-election. The candidate nod went to a human dirigible in a black kaftan cut in the shape of a suit, a jaw-droppingly obese defence lawyer with a pudding-bowl haircut, heavy horn-rimmed spectacles, a booming voice and an astonishing, rollicking, mischievous, rapier wit—David Lange.