Drawn Out

by Tom Scott

  I WAS FORTUNATE ENOUGH TO see him in Middlemore Hospital just a few days before he died. Gary McCormick told me that he was asking to see me. At the desk there was a list of approved visitors. My name wasn’t on it. Margaret had just ducked out. The nurse said she’d check with David. She came back smiling. ‘You’ll have to be quick.’

  One leg below the knee was dark and swollen from the onset of gangrene. His belly was distended because morphine-based painkillers had slowed his alimentary tract to a halt. The muscles of his chest and shoulders had wasted from diabetes, his emaciated arms wore a welter of bruises and sores from nursing staff giving injections and inserting drips, and he had a thin plastic hose up his nose delivering oxygen. His hair was plastered to his head with sweat. Yet he lit up with a grin when he saw me.

  ‘Have you seen Jonathan Hunt lately? He’s huge. He’s going to be the first High Commissioner to the Court of Saint James’s to explode in office! How are your kids? How’s your mum—how’s Joan?’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  EMERALD GLEN

  MEANWHILE, BACK IN THE MANAWATŪ my father’s heart was threatening to explode inside his ribcage. Corrective measures were needed following coronary bypass surgery and he was transferred from Palmerston North Hospital to intensive care in Wellington Public.

  My relationship with him at best was fraught with inhibition and apprehension. It was easier for both of us if I took someone with me when I visited.

  Allan Grant happened to be in town so I dragged him along. Dad was a big fan of Allan’s writing. He grinned and told Allan that he was a daylight atheist.

  ‘During the day I don’t give a fuck about God. God can get fucked as far as I’m concerned, but at night, when it’s pitch black outside, the lights are dim in here, and all you can hear is the sound of nurses’ plimsolls on linoleum and the building’s creaks and groans, I believe in God like you wouldn’t believe. I’m a daylight atheist!’ I was impressed and quite proud of him. I could see Allan was impressed too. He was less impressed with what my father had to say next.

  ‘Why are you wasting your time with McPhail and Gadsby? Don’t bother with them! They’re shite.’ Allan got huffy on their behalf.

  ‘I beg to differ, Mr Scott.’

  ‘Yew can beg all ye like. They’re shite!’

  David McPhail and Jon Gadsby did good work together and were household names, but some of their finest work was done separately—Jon was a terrific writer and David was a brilliant actor on stage and screen in both comic and straight roles. He was fabulously accomplished in an Auckland Theatre Company production of Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and pitch-perfect in the lead role in Seven Periods with Mr Gormsby, which I co-produced with Danny Mulheron, who also directed, and co-wrote with Danny and Dave Armstrong.

  While my father was in intensive care, a teenage boy on oxygen and various arterial drips, trailing tubes, cables and catheters, was wheeled in and placed next to him. Forty-eight hours earlier this boy had been a highly promising rugby player. A gash in his leg became infected, pumping streptococci into his bloodstream. In a case of mistaken identity that can sometimes happen with antigenic responses, his white blood cells attacked his own heart valves, all but destroying them. To save his life a Skilsaw was taken to his sternum, his ribcage pulled open, his heart bisected and his wrecked valves replaced. His rugby dreams in tatters, he just wanted to die.

  I was at a tennis tournament in Lower Hutt a few years later when this boy’s mother approached me tentatively. She knew I didn’t have the best relationship with my father but she had something she needed to tell me—something she thought I needed to know. She remembered the man with white whiskers, missing teeth and the Goon Show voices in the bed adjacent to her son. He was so different, so eccentric and so continuously funny about everything, he’d restored her son’s spirits and helped save his life. She would be forever grateful.

  It was a bittersweet moment. I was proud of my father, pleased for her son and envious that I never saw this side of him. I know my brother Michael did, and he was standing next to me. As real estate agents attest, location is everything. We start out as one cell, then millions of divisions later cells with identical DNA, based purely on location, have transformed into nerve cells, heart muscle and so on. They look different and have different roles and responsibilities forced on them by location alone. Small wonder then that siblings living under the same roof at the same time can have quite different parents.

  DAD CONVALESCED WITH US IN our Wadestown house before returning to Feilding. He was interested in the children, who found him mysterious. He was polite with me. He adored Helen. She was an attractive woman and as his photograph album attested he loved attractive women. Helen was so beautiful, in fact, that a drunken colleague, apologising in advance, asked me once what she possibly saw in me. I think it was a question she was increasingly asking herself. I told him that I had lied to Helen about my looks. There had to be some explanation and he seemed perfectly satisfied with this one.

  Helen was kind and patient with my father. They enjoyed each other’s company. They had things in common. He was a brilliant man, a comic genius at times, denied by fate and circumstances the chance to express his creativity, which left him deeply frustrated. Helen, hugely creative in her own right, feared her life was going the same way. They shared another bond. I got on their nerves.

  My career was going well. I did some of my better journalism for the Auckland Star. With the help of Rod Deane and Don McKinnon in particular, and many others who wanted the whole story told properly, I wrote two lengthy pieces on the snap election, the currency crisis that left New Zealand teetering on the edge of insolvency, and the constitutional crisis that left us with a power vacuum when we needed someone to take charge. When Treasury officials eventually compiled an official account of the currency crisis, my name and someone called ‘ibid’ appeared repeatedly in the endnotes. Ian Fraser wasn’t handy, so I had to look up what ‘ibid’ meant in the dictionary—it was Latin for ‘same source or place’. It was slightly unnerving knowing I was the mother lode for this turbulent chapter in recent New Zealand history.

  HELEN WANTED THINGS TO BE different. She embraces change while I shy away from it. She had been talking for some time about us living in the country, but I wasn’t keen. Every time we drove up-country out of Wellington she would ask if I had changed my mind yet. Just north of Paekakariki, at MacKays Crossing, on the opposite side of the railway line, there stands a beautiful two-storey colonial homestead with double verandahs just visible through tall trees. My stock answer was always, ‘I’d consider it if that place ever came on the market at a price we could afford.’ It seemed a fairly safe thing to say, but to make absolutely certain I added a caveat—it needed to have a pond with an island in the middle of it with ducks and geese. Helen would sigh.

  ‘So if it’s for sale at a price we can afford, has a pond with an island in the middle, with ducks and geese, you’d buy it?’

  ‘But of course!’ I lied. ‘Who wouldn’t?’

  In the summer of 1985 we were renting a bach on the beach at Paraparaumu. One day it was too cold and overcast to swim, there was nothing worth watching on television, no curling paperbacks in the bookshelves worth reading, we were sick of Trivial Pursuit, and the smell of burnt toast and wet sea-grass matting was getting steadily more oppressive, so Helen suggested we pile into the van and go for a drive. She wanted to take a closer look at the homestead that we had both long admired from the main road.

  Little warning bells began to ring as we drove up and parked at the gate of a property named Emerald Glen.

  ‘Look!’ said Helen excitedly. ‘There’s a little lake with an island in the middle!’ Too frightened to open my eyes, I asked in a dry whisper if there were any ducks or geese.

  ‘YES!’ chorused the kids.

  Helen was all for driving up and offering to buy the place from whoever owned it. I argued that would be a vulgar invasion of their priva
cy and was about to turn the van around when one of the kids spotted the sign saying that free-range eggs could be purchased at the back door.

  ‘Are we going to buy some eggs?’ asked the kids.

  ‘No!’ Helen laughed. ‘We’re going to buy a house!’

  I felt sick.

  Up close, the old house was run-down. Guttering sagged from the top verandah, it badly needed painting and some of the weatherboards were rotten, but it was still elegant and beautiful. It reminded me of the farmhouses of Vermont I had coveted as a boy while reading National Geographic in dentists’ and doctors’ waiting rooms.

  We knocked on the back door, and Barry the owner came out. He was solidly built and craggy-faced. You just knew he would have been a filthy rugby player in his day. And he was voluble and extremely loud. Handing over the money for the eggs, I commented neutrally that it was a lovely old house.

  ‘WANNA BUY IT? I DECIDED TO SELL IT LAST NIGHT. MY BLOODY HIP IS GIVING ME GYP! THROBBED SOMETHING AWFUL LAST NIGHT. YOU WOULDN’T CREDIT THE PAIN I’M IN! THE QUACK RECKONS I’LL BE A CRIPPLE IF I DON’T SELL THE PLACE. SO I RUNG THE REAL ESTATE AGENT THIS MORNING. HE’S A DUTCHMAN BUT HE’S OK. I SAID, “GERRY, PUT THE BLOODY PLACE ON THE MARKET!” YOU’RE THE FIRST BUGGERS TO KNOW! APART FROM GERRY, THAT IS!’

  ‘Well, that is interesting …’ I stammered.

  ‘We’ll buy it,’ said Helen calmly.

  I RAN INTO NATIONAL’S CONVIVIAL Warren Cooper, the MP for Clutha, in a parliamentary corridor shortly after we had moved in.

  ‘I hear you’ve bought a farm, Tom. How many acres?’

  ‘Eleven.’

  ‘Hundred or thousand?’

  ‘Eleven as in eleven.’

  ‘Bloody hell. How many sheep?’

  ‘Ten.’

  Warren rolled his eyes and sighed deeply.

  ‘What are their names?’

  I grew up in the country. I had forgotten how dark the nights can be and how bright the stars. And I had forgotten how much sheer hard work farming involves.

  The property had many moods, none better than dawn on a good day. The sun rising over the Maungakotukutuku hills scattered delicate mists and turned the dark blue hillsides and valley floor a brilliant golden green. It was bucolic and idyllic, but impossible to fully appreciate when you had to rise early to chop kindling for the wood range or there would be no hot water, you had four acres of inkweed to clear by hand with a slasher, you had hens to feed and pigs to feed (some of whom were carnivorous, and some mornings all that was left of the peacocks that foolishly slept on the wooden gate beside the pigpens were their bloody legs, their talons embedded like staples into the timber). Everywhere you looked there was work that needed to done and money that needed to be spent. Mercifully, our small flock of sheep looked after themselves pretty much. And our two steers, Short and Tall, were no problem—apart from when they escaped and they were worse than Charlie Upham. And you couldn’t blame them for making a bolt for it—the grass was greener on the other side of the fence.

  There was a good reason for that. Barry told me proudly he’d sold the topsoil off the two bottom paddocks for a small fortune, and the new pasture was struggling to take hold. He also told me that the hens scrambling around the barn were mostly for show—he got most of his ‘free-range’ eggs from a mate who had a battery farm in the next valley. If you threw a piece of straw into a carton with the eggs most people were thrilled to pay a hefty premium. His mate was keen to continue the arrangement if we were. We weren’t.

  We also inherited a pregnant sow that presented us with a litter of sixteen piglets. One piglet, Runty, was so tiny we didn’t think he’d survive. For the first six weeks of his life he was the same size as a pound of butter and had to be hand-fed. According to Darwin he was the least fitted to survive, but it worked in his favour when it was time to take his siblings to the Levin saleyards. Right on cue, the moment he knew he had escaped becoming a Christmas ham, Runty inflated like a dirigible to gargantuan proportions.

  When he was small he used to slip through the fences like a cat and run to the back door to be fed scraps. When he grew truly massive he pushed his way casually through the fences as if they weren’t there, poked his great pink snout through the cat-flap and honked like a foghorn for attention. If he saw the door was open he picked up speed and careened into the pantry, where he drilled holes in sides of sacks of flour and sucked up the contents with the brainless ecstasy of a Hollywood producer snorting cocaine. My patience ran out the night we came home late and found he’d devoured half a sack of spuds, two bags of apples and a bag of flour, and had been stricken with a sneezing fit while snorting it. A fine white powder covered the walls, the ceiling and the floor of the kitchen. Well almost all the floor—Archimedes’ principle decreed that he had to make room for this extra cargo and there were giant glistening circles on the floor where pig urine and pig poop held the flour at bay.

  I knew I was taking a risk, because Runty was very popular, but I told the family that either the pig went or I would. They asked for a couple of hours to think it over. Runty and I were sent out onto the verandah, like contestants on MasterChef, while they deliberated. The first vote was a draw. I won on a recount. Runty was gifted to a farmer who had a small-holding next to the Big Tex restaurant on Highway One. The first evening, when the deep fryer warmed up and the smell of sizzling French fries reached Runty’s nostrils, filled with an insatiable curiosity of Christopher Columbus proportions when it came to food, he just had to check it out. Again, fences were no obstacle. Runty raced in the back door of the kitchen, and snatching all food in his path he rocketed into the dining room. Screaming customers and sobbing children pressed against the walls while he proceeded to clean plates more efficiently than the best German dishwasher or hospital autoclave. The manager failed to see the funny side of it and warned the farmer that he had a gun and would use it if necessary. He spent much of the next day repairing and strengthening the fence. He needn’t have bothered. When the siren odour of boiling beef dripping caressed his nasal epithelium, Runty went through the sturdy fence like it was a bead curtain in a harem. Seconds later a terrible shot rang out from within the restaurant. I dearly hope Runty got to swallow a few mouthfuls and died happy. Customers shocked at the sight of a giant pig convulsing to death at their feet could take some consolation from the fact that of all the things on the menu the pork at least was fresh.

  Our steers were bloody lucky we weren’t armed. One memorable evening, while driving off to a flash dinner party in the city, we caught Short and Tall sneaking up the road. Despite being dressed in her finery, Helen insisted on chasing them home. Holding her shoes and stockings in one hand and pulling up her white frock with the other, she plunged bravely into the ditch and herded them back the other way. Lit from behind by the headlights of our van, the steers cantered off into the gloom pursued at speed by a mad woman holding a skirt over her waist, exposing her knickers.

  THROUGH ALL OF THIS I was still covering Parliament, writing and illustrating a lengthy Saturday article on politics for the Auckland Star. My fourth book, a collection of political columns called Ten Years Inside, was launched in the Beehive, in time for the Christmas market in 1985, by Prime Minister David Lange, who made a big fuss of my mother. But not as much fuss, according to Mum—who measured these things with the precision of a Large Hadron Collider particle physicist—as Jim Bolger when he launched another book of mine when he became Prime Minister. This made Jim the better man in Mum’s book.

  In the early days, parliamentary stories lay ankle-deep on the ground, like wind-blown fruit in an orchard. Fourteen years on I had scooped up most of them and helped myself to all the low-hanging fruit. Fresh stories or rather fresh angles on familiar stories were harder and harder to find, or further and further out of reach. A bunch of top-notch young reporters like Greg Shand in the New Zealand Herald and Jane Clifton and Bernard Lagan in the Dominion (now with the Listener and The Times of London respectively) were turning o
ut brilliant copy, leaving me panting and puffing in their wake. I was exhausted, physically, mentally and emotionally. Moving to the country hadn’t changed things in the way Helen had hoped.

  One Thursday night, after covering a late sitting of the House, I stumbled to my old heap of a car after midnight and found it wouldn’t start. It was nearly 1 a.m. when I finally got it going and I had an hour’s drive ahead of me before I got home, where I set the alarm for 4.30 a.m. to give myself time to write an article and deliver it back to my office at Parliament by the 10 a.m. deadline. I wrote it in a close-to-tears zombie state, drove it into Wellington awash in black coffee to ward off slumping over the wheel in a coma, handed it across in a daze and lapsed into blessed unconsciousness on the small office couch. I refused to read it again when copies of the Star arrived next week. I was surprised and relieved when some of my colleagues congratulated me warmly on it, but I never wanted to clap eyes on it again.

  Two weeks later it happened again. This time the car never started and I ended up spending a fitful night at Parliament, tossing and turning on the office couch. Breakfast consisted of half a packet of chocolate biscuits and black coffee. Sitting in my now rancid clothing, with furry teeth and a sore back, typing a woefully inadequate article, I decided there had to be more to life than this.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  THE BOLGER YEARS

  A LOT OF COLUMNS FROM this period are lacklustre, but there were some diamonds in the rough. The following is a personal favourite of mine, on National coming to terms with the radical, free-market, neo-liberal economic policies of Labour’s Minister of Finance Roger Douglas.

  It was the leader who finally broke the oppressive silence. ‘Does anyone have any bright ideas?’ He was clutching the pointer so tightly in his powerful farmer’s hands the blood had drained from his knuckles and MPs in the front row thought they could smell wood burning. Behind him on the blackboard someone had printed in capital letters the word POLICY with a question mark beside it. The rest of the board was bare. The blank surface seemed to stare accusingly at the room full of MPs, who just as blankly stared back.