Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  Roberts was a big strong boy, but I managed to get a table lamp off him. Wrestling him to the floor, I dragged him by his heels out into the corridor. Just opening the door was an experience. The breeze became a howling gale, flattening the curtains against the ceiling. The whirlwind subsided once I’d locked Roberts outside but he immediately began pounding on the door. I had no choice. I had to open the door again. My advice to him that he had to behave himself was lost in the maelstrom, as bending double into the head wind he surged past me and started dragging the double bed towards the window. I restored a modicum of calm by shutting the door, then raced after him. I had to knock him over and drag him by the legs back to the door again. I was wondering just how often this cycle would need to be repeated when hotel security burst in.

  I said as calmly as I could that there was no cause for alarm and everything would be paid for. They didn’t say much. They could have got very heavy but obviously they assumed I was a government MP or a highly placed National Party apparatchik and things were best hushed up. Neil, who had become unaccountably meek all of a sudden, was led away gently. The man in charge surveyed the carnage and asked me menacingly if I wanted another room. I shook my head and said I’d caused them enough trouble. He grunted agreement and reached for the door handle. The curtains billowed like spinnakers and he was gone. I stole this pantomime for my screenplay Separation City.

  It was so freezing I got into bed fully dressed. Sleep when it came was fitful and tormented. I was awakened early by a phone call. It was Jim McLay, talking in hushed tones. His wife’s handbag was missing—had I seen it? I told him I would ring him back, and searched through the debris with no luck. Finally, I pulled the bed out from the wall and something thudded to the carpet. I rang Jim and he said he’d be down in a tick. No kidding. Barely had I put down the receiver when there was a soft tap on the door. Peering anxiously up and down the deserted corridor, Jim had one hand tucked into the small of his back, palm open. I pressed the purse into his trembling fingers and he was gone in an instant.

  The incident was the talk of the hotel. Some thought it had been a terrorist attack. There was a rumour going round that the pressure of the libel suit had been too much for me and I had jumped to my death. I decided to skip the conference and spent the day with my old friend A.K. Grant and his wife, Liz. I returned to the Town Hall for the evening session and a burly farmer who’d been at the party came up, grinning broadly.

  ‘By Christ, this senior whip bloke Friedlander has got his knickers in a twist. He was giving me the third degree. He wanted to know if any MPs were there.’

  ‘If he asks again,’ I joked, ‘tell him you didn’t recognise anyone because no one had their clothes on.’

  ‘Jesus.’ He beamed. ‘I just might do that. He’d go apeshit!’

  Feeling that the worst was over, I wandered into the house bar at Noah’s later that night and was having a chat to television producer Derek Fox and reporter Amanda Millar when Frank Gill sighted me, leaped up from his seat and came charging across, shouting angrily that I owed him and his wife an apology—the noise of the chair going through the glass had nearly given her a heart attack. I replied that I was sick and tired of apologising for something I hadn’t done. He got even angrier, shouting that as Minister of Police he could order an inquiry and I could find myself in deep trouble. I replied heatedly that I didn’t take kindly to threats. At this point Derek intervened and led me away.

  The next morning, I rang Air New Zealand to see if I could get an early flight north. There was one about midday and I booked myself on it.

  Almost as soon as I had put the phone down, it rang.

  ‘Hello,’ purred a woman’s voice.

  ‘Who is it?’ I enquired cautiously.

  ‘It’s the barmaid you spoke to the other night. I couldn’t come to your party, remember? My husband has gone to work and the kids are at school. I could come to your room now if you want.’

  ‘I’m so sorry,’ I lied. ‘I’m literally heading out the door to the airport …’

  I hung up, checked out, and headed out to the airport two hours early. ‘Where was she,’ I asked myself, ‘when I was nineteen?’

  CHAPTER SIXTEEN

  INDIA, BUT NOT CHINA

  BEFORE THE OLD PARLIAMENT BUILDING was closed for earthquake strengthening, the Press Gallery used to occupy a corridor on the second floor just a hop, skip and jump from the debating chamber. Every office had a radio tuned to the parliamentary broadcast frequency, and at the first hint of a headline we could be leaning over the balustrades in seconds flat. The back corridor was the horizontal equivalent of a fireman’s pole, and as an added bonus Government MPs had to walk down it to attend their weekly caucus meetings. Journalists merely had to prop themselves in office doorways and thrust out microphones to conduct interviews.

  My office was a desk in the ‘smoko’ room between Radio New Zealand and BCNZ. I shared it with a teleprinter, a coffee machine, a fridge and an ominously stained couch. I have always maintained that if parliamentary couches could talk they would have a bad stammer. Late in the afternoon the sun poured in, rendering me drowsy. Only sheer terror kept me awake when an article was due.

  I was slumped at my desk one day in 1980 when the BCNZ’s chief political reporter, Dennis Grant, strode in for some coffee and mentioned casually that he’d just completed costings on his forthcoming trip to India and China with the Prime Minister.

  I responded wistfully that the Listener never sent me on trips like that. Dennis almost dropped his coffee.

  ‘No one sends you on these things out of the goodness of their hearts, you daft bugger,’ he snapped. ‘You have to submit a proposal. You make a case for why they should send you.’

  He told me I could use his costings and insisted that I got on to it right away. I did as I was told and about half an hour later handed the document to Dennis.

  ‘No, no, no …’ he sighed. ‘I wouldn’t give you a taxi chit for this. For Christ’s sake, you’ve got to sell them the idea. Build it up a bit. Make it sound absolutely imperative that you go. Don’t pussyfoot around.’ With him yelling advice at me to stress how the unique grouping of world leaders in India and Muldoon being the first Western leader to visit China since its major leadership shake-up provided the Listener’s loyal readers with an unprecedented window into the normally closed world of geo-political intrigue, I typed away furiously, producing two pages of hyperbole that I found deeply embarrassing, but which Dennis insisted would do the trick nicely.

  He knew what he was talking about. The new Listener editor Peter Stewart got very excited and came close to writing me out a cheque on the spot. The only conceivable hitch would be getting the Prime Minister’s approval to be part of his official party.

  The next morning, quite fortuitously, I ran into his deputy Brian Talboys in a corridor and I told him I wanted to follow his ‘boss’ around Asia, not as a satirist but as a serious journalist, and did he have any good advice?

  ‘Drop him a note telling him just what you’ve told me.’ He grinned. ‘Good luck.’

  I dispatched a suitably sober and craven letter off to the PM’s office and two days later his press officer Gerry Symmans told me that as Muldoon had scrawled ‘seen’ on the bottom of the note it could well mean I would be allowed to come. At the very least he hadn’t rejected the idea outright.

  Over the next week, however, the news from the ninth floor was not good and time was running out. Dennis suggested I sound Muldoon out personally by giving a note to a parliamentary messenger to take in to the chamber requesting a quick word in the lobby. I wasn’t all that keen.

  ‘Go on,’ urged Grant. ‘He can only say no.’

  I handed the note to a messenger and waited nervously for the man himself. He came out a short while later, scowling. His voice was sharp and deliberate when he spoke. He told me I wouldn’t be going to China or India if he could help it. My usual response to authority is casual insolence. (It must be genetic. My o
wn children do it to me.) I enquired if he was serious or if this was just another tantrum. He assured me that he was deadly serious. I conceded that refusing to have me in his official party meant I couldn’t go to China, but I doubted whether he could stop me going to India. He jutted his jaw and told me that he could and he would.

  Going back upstairs to the gallery I suddenly felt weak at the knees and in a daze told the others what had happened. Within minutes they were thumping away on their typewriters—Prime Minister threatens to ban Listener journalist from China. It was a slow news day. I don’t know how he found out, but within half an hour, Radio New Zealand’s Richard Griffin came dashing into my office to alert me that Muldoon had already been on the phone complaining about my rudeness to the BCNZ chairman, my former editor and mentor Ian Cross. The new editor, mild-mannered Peter Stewart, not long at the helm, suddenly found himself embroiled in a controversy he could have done without. He was very good about it, however, and as the media storm gathered momentum he issued a cautious press release.

  I regret the Prime Minister has not given approval for Mr Scott to join the official New Zealand party attending the Commonwealth Heads of Government conference in Delhi next month and afterwards visiting China. The Listener intends sending Mr Scott to the New Delhi conference independently. The situation regarding China is different and Mr Muldoon is exercising his prerogative although I disagree with that use …

  In print and on radio Muldoon and I engaged in a bizarre war of words. He claimed that I wrote garbage and I riposted that it was garbage of the very highest quality—hardly Oscar Wilde, but enough. Then it became a battle of Chinese sayings, with Muldoon claiming that his reluctance to have me along could be explained by the old Chinese proverb that one rat dropping spoiled the soup. I replied with a quote from Chairman Mao that you couldn’t smell the flowers from the galloping horse—but you could smell the horse and that was good enough for me. It was all very silly. The Dominion interviewed me for a front-page story.

  BANNED SATIRIST MOURNS WORLD’S LOSS

  Listener satirist Tom Scott was unfazed last night after the Prime Minister rejected his application to accompany Mr Muldoon on next month’s visit to India and China. Scott said that he was not upset for himself but for a quarter of the world’s population who would miss out on the chance of meeting him.

  The Press Gallery, the people who had once debated whether I was a suitable person for membership, put out a statement.

  The Press Gallery Officers met the Prime Minister, Mr Muldoon, this morning to discuss his decision not to allow Listener columnist, Tom Scott, to accompany him on this forthcoming overseas trip. Gallery Chairman, Alastair Carthew, pointed out to Mr Muldoon that Mr Scott was entitled as a journalist to cover the Delhi conference but the only way he could cover the China leg of the trip was to be included in the official party. ‘However,’ Mr Carthew said, ‘Mr Muldoon stuck to his earlier decision saying he could not afford to have Mr Scott on the trip in view of the delicate nature of these missions.’

  Privately Muldoon took journalists aside to tell them I threw chairs out of hotel windows—the implication being that you couldn’t take me anywhere. While the latter was true enough, the former was incorrect. Then, as good as his word, he wrote to the Commonwealth Secretariat asking them to ban me from the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting. They replied it was out of their hands—the Indian government was solely responsible for journalist accreditation. The Indian government, to their credit, opted to accept the untouchable.

  The Commonwealth Press Union condemned Muldoon’s actions. Editors and leader-writers across New Zealand came to my defence. Murray Ball did a cartoon on the issue for the Sunday Star. Eric Heath did a cartoon for the Dominion. Dear old Sid Scales from the ODT drew one. Nevile Lodge drew two cartoons in support in the Evening Post. Talkback-radio callers and letters to the editor ran overwhelmingly in my favour. The Northern Journalists Union urged the Prime Minister to reconsider his stand.

  We believe your attitude raises important issues for press freedom and deprives a recognised political journalist of the right to work.

  And the debate was still raging on my return from India. On 23 October 1980, the Southland Times ran correspondence from a Mrs M. Quinn, a self-declared friend, confidante and adviser to the Prime Minister, that took up almost all of their letters page. One paragraph in particular intrigued me.

  In respect of the Tom Scott affair there was an unpublished reason why it was in the national interest for the Listener columnist to be left in New Zealand. Instead of criticising Muldoon for trying to get him banned from the Delhi conference, right-thinking people would admire and respect the PM for his stance if they were aware of the facts.

  I would have dearly loved to know what the unpublished reason was, what national interest was at stake and what these facts were. I should have asked the Director of the GCSB if he knew when we had afternoon tea together. I assume that ‘national interest’ meant protecting New Zealand from the possibility I might hurl an armchair from a twelve-storey New Delhi hotel room.

  IT WAS ACTUALLY A RELIEF to finally board the Air New Zealand flight at Auckland airport and get away from it all. At the end of the air-bridge the Prime Minister’s official party, which included his staff, foreign affairs wallahs and journalists, turned left into first class. I turned right into economy. Speakers hummed to life and the pilot came over the intercom:

  ‘Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen. We’re just waiting for clearance from the tower and we’ll be closing the door and pushing back from the apron. Our flight time to Singapore is ten hours, forty-five minutes. We should have you on the ground at Changi at six o’clock local time. We’re very privileged to have a special guest on board today. It’s Tom Scott from the Listener. He’s down the back!’

  I’m told that Muldoon, who had been almost purring seconds earlier, went dark with fury. But that wasn’t the worst part. The worst part was the tsunami of cheering and applause that raced up the plane and smacked into the first-class compartment.

  It was pitch black when we landed, and by the time I got through customs Muldoon’s motorcade with its police outriders and wailing sirens had long departed. I emerged into the frangipani-scented sauna that is Singapore, envious and clearly agitated. A local scam artist with no English but fluent in body language offered me a cheap taxi ride into the city. I followed him and should have twigged things weren’t right when we crashed through two hedges and across a garden to an unlit car park and a battered car with no meter. Feeling committed, I clambered into his vehicle and he drove out of the car park with his lights off, only switching them on when we hit the freeway. There was no air-conditioning that I could detect. He refused to drop me at my hotel, pulling up a quarter of a mile from it, telling me he was a poor man and demanding an exorbitant sum of money in cash. I paid up limply and stepped out into air so humid it was close to being submerged.

  I was staying in an older, less salubrious wing of the same hotel as the official party. Muldoon had already held a press briefing. Australian politician Joh Bjelke-Petersen famously called these sessions ‘feeding the chooks’ and he wasn’t wrong. Reporters compete for miserable scraps of information. Back in Wellington newsrooms they were more interested in my stumbling progress, and scribes were waiting in the lobby for me to arrive, sweat-sodden and trailing tropical vegetation. They recounted a tale of a bedraggled, bewildered yet curiously heroic figure doggedly pursuing his craft.

  That very same night, by incredible coincidence, my mother was staying in another, less sumptuous Singapore hotel on the return leg of her trip to Ireland—her first since immigrating to New Zealand in 1949. In those days before cell phones and the internet she knew nothing of the controversy surrounding my trip, which was a relief because it would have sent her into an extreme panic state, clutching her throat and asking people with poor English to fetch her angina pills—which in her Irish accent came out sounding like ‘vagina pills’. Still, as a freela
nce worrier when it came to her offspring, doubtless she was sending out anxiety vibes which I unwittingly picked up. I’m sure that it was because of her unknown proximity that I slept fitfully with my passport and wallet tucked under my pillow and had to fight the urge to stack up all the furniture against the securely chained door. The next morning the local paper The Straits Times printed a small piece on the saga, which thankfully she missed.

  DELHI INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT IS now vast, elegant and state-of-the-art. In 1980 it was a teeming, exotic, chaotic shambles. By the time I had weaved my way from the rear of economy, across the tarmac, through the customs and immigration halls, to the barn dance of the arrivals hall, only a New Zealand High Commission staffer in charge of Muldoon’s luggage was left. He nervously offered me a ride in their panel van, but I would have to crouch in the back with the suitcases. I accepted. It proved to be only marginally cooler than the surface of the sun.

  It was a relief to get to The Ashok Hotel, a majestic, imposing edifice built in the Mogul style. It had a tatty splendour, suggesting a glory from centuries gone by. It was in fact barely 30 years old. English is an official language of India, as are Hindi, Urdu and Punjabi. In addition, hotel receptionists speak fluent Air Traffic Control. When I gave my name on arrival as ‘Scott’, the tall, handsome Sikh behind the marble counter beamed happily.

  ‘Sierra, Charlie, Oscar, Tango, Tango.’

  ‘No,’ I explained patiently. ‘Scott.’