by Tom Scott
It was to this house, through a dark corridor of brooding conifers, that I drove in my Corolla with my share of the marital spoils bouncing around in the back. I seem to remember a gathering darkness and rain falling as I unloaded the car, but this might be a figment of my imagination and my tendency to embellish every story. It was certainly raining in my heart.
Chris and Ruth had been going through a painful separation of their own. Chris moved out. Then Ruth moved out. Then Chris moved back in. For two years we were middle-aged bachelors together on the hill, me rising at dawn to draw a cartoon and, if Chris was awake, making him a cup of tea while he checked my spelling. More often than not he emerged from his bedroom closer to noon, then sat at his desk for hours in his dressing gown playing Leisure Suit Larry on his computer, one of which I was years away from owning. He also had one of the first cell phones. It was the same size and weight as a brick. And he introduced me to lattes at Caffé L’affare. These truly were days of miracles and wonders. We were a remake of Neil Simon’s The Odd Couple. Mostly I was the uptight, fastidious Felix Unger and Chris the more relaxed, slovenly Oscar Madison, but to be fair we occasionally swapped roles.
Big Shaun came to live with me permanently. He was now producing testosterone in industrial quantities, which meant his socks breached the Geneva Convention on chemical weapons and had to be transferred to the washing machine with tongs. There were now three bachelors on the hill, two of them playing Oscar.
When Shaun was in London flatting with my brother Michael’s first-born, the effervescent and gorgeous Milly, she came home from shopping one sunny Saturday afternoon to find him in the curtains-drawn lounge watching a soccer match on television. He hadn’t shaved in three days. His long, lank locks were a stranger to hair products. He wore a stained T-shirt covered in pork scratchings and potato-chip crumbs. His shorts were baggy and frayed. His socks didn’t match. He was sipping beer. Barely looking up, he said one or more of her beautiful friends had to come across soon as he was getting very little action in the sack. Milly adored Shaun, and in exasperation said he needed to tidy up his act.
‘Take a good look at yourself, Shaun,’ she said, not unkindly. ‘You need to get in touch with your feminine side!’
Shaun took another sip of beer.
‘Trust me on this, Milly,’ he drawled. ‘If I had a feminine side, I’d be touching it all the time.’
Rosie and Sam came to visit every second weekend. Often I collected them midweek from Wadestown School, took them out for afternoon tea, a play in a park or early dinner at my place, then dropped them back at Helen’s house. It wasn’t ideal but it was the best I could do.
Chris threw great parties, but finding myself a single man again I reverted to my Massey University single-man mode—mania alternating with bouts of wretched melancholia. As those wise philosophers the Brothers Gibb asked so presciently, how can you mend a broken heart? How can you stop the sun from shining? What makes the world go round? I had no answers. My self-pity gauge was still reading full.
TVNZ approached me about being in the pilot of a proposed show called On the Couch, where prominent people would be interviewed about their childhoods by a psychiatrist—a dumb idea, so of course I agreed to take part. I had a strict proviso: it was never to be broadcast. Shielded by this and blinded by self-pity I told raw stories about my father’s drinking and our grim upbringing. TVNZ was delighted and immediately commissioned a series, but wisely none of the other guests were blabbermouths, or at least not in my stellar class. TVNZ said my episode was easily the best and begged for my permission to broadcast it. Vanity got the better of me and I consented. I shouldn’t have. I was so hard on my father some of Mum’s friends assumed he must have died and rang her offering their condolences.
He was alive all right. He never rang me. Not once in the twenty years I had been gone from Owen Street, Feilding, nor I him, for that matter. But shortly after it went to air I got a phone call that was quite impressive. It was icy cold, calm and composed, with no traces of a stammer.
‘Is that you, Egghead? It’s your father here. I see you’re quite the man these days. You’ll be in a lot of demand, driving back and forth to Auckland. It’s a long trip. You’ll need to break your journey. If you’re thinking of calling into Feilding for a refreshing cup of tea, don’t fucking bother!’
Three years earlier I had dedicated Ten Years Inside to him.
To my father, from whom I inherited my sense of humour and bad table manners.
Much like him, I suppose, I had to add a dash of vinegar in with the oil. He didn’t attend the Beehive launch—he didn’t attend his children’s weddings so he was hardly likely to attend a book launch. Plus his health wasn’t the best, so I posted him a copy, adding a hand-written inscription—again adding a splash of vinegar.
To Tom Scott Senior
Who I love but can’t remember why.
Cheers
Tom Scott Junior
He must have been following proceedings closely. He cut a story about the launch out of the Dominion and stapled it to the page facing the inscription. The press clipping included a photo of me standing with the Prime Minister David Lange and Mum. All three of us are beaming.
Within days of On the Couch going to air, the book was posted back to me. In the photo Lange has ‘FATSO’ scrawled in capital letters on him. Mum is labelled ‘DINGBAT’. An arrow points to my mouth: ‘NOTE BIG GOB’. In giant letters he has scrawled ‘HORSESHIT’ over my inscription and smeared the bottom of the page with something that looked and smelled like excrement.
I was taken aback but I still didn’t get it. I was hanging out with Carol Hirschfeld that summer and one evening I proudly slipped a VHS copy of the programme into the player and sat down to watch it again with her. Three minutes in she rose from the couch. ‘I can’t watch this! It’s too cruel!’ I drove her back to her place in uncomfortable silence. I still didn’t get it.
Murray Bramwell, my comrade-in-arms from Masskerade and Chaff ‘Long March’ days, now a professor lecturing on theatre and film at Flinders University in Adelaide, happened to be holidaying in New Zealand and we spoke on the phone.
‘Did you see the show?’ I asked expectantly.
‘I read your father’s hurt response in the papers,’ he replied cautiously. ‘Everything you said was undoubtedly true, but that’s not the point—you punished a powerless old man in a public forum with disproportionate force. Not everything that can be said needs to be said. Sorry …’
I wasn’t sorry. Expecting fulsome commendation for my candour I was instead all wounded indignation. Murray is the sweetest man, who would rather detour a thousand miles if he thought a direct route might cause hurt or offence, but this time with uncharacteristic force and bluntness he had said what I needed to hear, even if I wasn’t listening.
Despite living in Adelaide for nearly half a century, and despite not driving, he makes annual pilgrimages home laden with books, CDs and DVDs of television shows and distributes them like John the Baptist to his old chums across the land, keeping us all connected with each other. In 1970 he introduced me to Miles Davis’s masterpiece Bitches Brew and is still introducing me to new sounds to this day. I don’t block my ears to them.
A few years later, when Averil arrived in my life like a shaft of pure sunlight, I showed it to her. Averil is beautiful within and without. She didn’t want to watch it all. She didn’t need to. She didn’t chide me, she just said quietly that it was unnecessary and unfortunate, but it was done now and I should put it behind me.
I finally got it.
Had my father been still alive I would have driven to Feilding and apologised to him in person, but it was too late for that. It sounds easy to say after the fact, but apologising in person is one of my strengths. I’ve had to do a lot of it over the years.
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
WALLS COME TUMBLING DOWN
ON 2 NOVEMBER 1990, JIM BOLGER’S National Party defeated Mike Moore’s Labour Government
in a landslide. On election night I was a comments man for TV3 in its Auckland studio. Afterwards I ended up at a party in Neil Roberts and Karen Soich’s townhouse on Parnell Rise. I briefly toyed with the idea of throwing an armchair out of their lounge window, but it would only have landed on their patio and that wouldn’t have been anywhere near dramatic enough to justify the damage.
At this party a striking Māori woman arrived late. She was wearing a white blouse, a natty black bolero jacket, a tan, knee-length skirt and stunning high-heeled black boots. She was lovely, quirky and charming. I didn’t catch her full name. It was Eliza something. Back in Wellington I thought about her a lot. I rang Neil asking for her full name, phone number and advice.
‘Yeah, Eliza’s lovely. Dude, don’t ring and tell her you’re coming to Auckland to see her. That’ll freak her out, man. Say you’re gonna be in town next weekend and it would be cool if you could catch up for a drink. Keep it casual. Rock on!’
(A true original and a charismatic force of nature, Neil was cut down by cancer in 1998. He was just 50 years old. The night before the funeral I met up with Bob Jones and TVNZ’s Richard Harman for drinks. Bob was trying to tell me about his latest project, but I was more interested in what Richard was telling me about his last visit to Neil in hospital. ‘His last words to me,’ said Richard, on the edge of tears, ‘the very last words he said to me were, “Harman, Harman—”’
‘Oh for fuck’s sake!’ interrupted Bob. ‘Stop going on and on about Roberts. He was a good bastard. None of us dispute that. But he’s dead. He’s dead! We all live and we all die!’ There was no disputing this either.)
I followed Neil’s instructions to the letter, sounding as relaxed as I could. I couldn’t believe how easy it was. She would love to catch up. She laughed at my jokes. She nominated a time and a place—6 p.m., CinCin On Quay, on the waterfront. I got off the phone feeling lighter than air.
I was still lighter than air boarding my cheap flight to Auckland. I had arranged to have lunch with some friends at Prego on Ponsonby Road. I have a theory that lonely guys in need of female company have a flashing sign above their heads saying ‘desperate for sex’. Only women can see this sign and their first instinct is to turn on their heels and walk briskly in the opposite direction. Their second instinct is to turn on their heels and run like the wind, never looking back. Men who are fully sated sexually have a sign saying ‘Not in service—testicles empty’ and women hurl themselves at them. It is one of the cruel ironies of nature that the best way to get invited to an orgy is to look like you have just come from one.
So I hit Prego brimming with confidence. I don’t want to get too technical here, but I was exuding pheromones like I had extractor fans in my armpits. My self-pity gauge was low and my smugness readings dangerously high. I was sitting outside in Prego’s courtyard when a tall, strikingly attractive woman came striding in. She was six foot in her boots, wearing a black leather jacket and tight denim skirt that came dangerously close to breaking my friend Kerre McIvor’s cardinal rule that a woman’s skirt should never be shorter than her tampon string. Heads swivelled, men’s mouths gaped and women’s lips pursed. Her eyes met mine. She joined our table. (It wasn’t exactly random. She knew someone.) She sat next to me.
‘You are a Scorpio, yes?’ I confirmed this.
‘October twenty-nine, yes?’ I confirmed this as well. Her delighted laughter pealed out and she nestled into me. She was Katia Pavlak—a Polish actress who had been to a Polish film festival in Melbourne, decided to defect and had escaped her minders. What Churchill had famously dubbed the ‘Iron Curtain’ was still in place. Poland was under the cruel yoke of the Soviet Union. Fearing that Poland’s secret police, the hated SB, were searching for her and would abduct her if they could, she fled to Auckland. She’d been in New Zealand a few weeks and was looking for work.
When she heard I was doing nothing that afternoon she invited me to come with her to play snooker. I don’t play snooker. I went. Trying not to look when Katia bent low over the pool table was agreeable torture. When she asked me what I was doing that night I told her I was going to CinCin to have drinks with a woman friend. Clutching her throat, she exclaimed excitedly, ‘Oh my Got! This is amazink! Katia going to CinCin tonight also. I start my first job. I am maître d’ and waitress at CinCin. I wheel see you!’
When I arrived at CinCin, Katia was at the door looking absolutely stunning in a figure-hugging, ankle-length jade green frock. ‘I miss you! I miss you!’ she squealed, kissing me lightly on the cheek. She seemed to know intuitively who I was there to meet and led me around the corner to where Eliza was sitting at a high table, also looking gorgeous. Katia lingered longer than was strictly necessary, looking wistful. ‘I will see you later.’ She smiled shyly.
Eliza cocked a quizzical eyebrow when she had departed. ‘Who is that?’
I explained nonchalantly that it was just someone I had bumped into recently, as if beautiful women were constantly attaching themselves to me. As my good friend Mark Sainsbury says, ‘Hey, they’re only human!’
Eliza was every bit as lovely as I remembered. She reached out to take my hand. She had booked a table for two at an Indian restaurant in Ponsonby. We were due there in an hour’s time. My heart skipped a beat. But first she had something important to tell me. She was getting married in a few weeks’ time. I tried to be cool. ‘Congratulations, that’s wonderful …’
Before devastation had time to sink in, Katia, who must have had hearing that could give sonar on a nuclear submarine a run for its money, was at my side.
‘Getting married?’ she hissed. ‘You are having drinks with Tom and you are getting married? This is not right. You should not be doing this. This wrong!’ She shot away again, watching us like a hawk when we ordered more drinks, unnerving Eliza.
‘I think we should split this funky scene …’ she muttered. ‘Let’s take off now.’ Out on the footpath she hailed a cab. As we were opening the rear door Katia, minus her white apron, raced up. ‘I tell manger I haff to come weeth you. I have to look after my friend, Toma Scott. He famous writer. He innocent. Toma need looking after.’ She squeezed in between me and Eliza, who was too shocked to say anything.
At the restaurant Katia sat between us again like a stern chaperone, asking Eliza pointed questions about her upcoming nuptials. Before the food arrived Eliza rose, smiled tightly and said she would leave us to get on with things.
I wasn’t hungry. Nor was Katia. She took me to a friend’s party. They were all in their twenties and thirties, dancing frenetically and passing around joints. I felt out of place and told Katia it was great meeting her and I would just slip away. She insisted on coming with me. Under a starry sky we walked through narrow Ponsonby streets to Sam and Barbara Pillsbury’s beautiful old villa on Beaconsfield Street. At the back, nestled in palms, they had a hot tub, a swimming pool and guest cottage where I was staying. Katia looked at the double bed and said she would sleep with me, but nothing would happen. I had to promise. I promised. I would sleep below the top sheet. She would sleep above it.
Sam and Barbara had exquisite taste. Separated by fine 600-thread-count Egyptian cotton, Katia lay beside me in just her bra and leopard-skin knickers. In the morning the movie star kissed me lightly and stepped into the shower while I pinched myself to make sure I wasn’t suffering the effects of second-hand cannabis smoke.
We had breakfast with Sam and Barbara on their deck overlooking the pool. Sam could barely contain his excitement. ‘You tinny bastard! She is so beautiful!’ he grinned when she had left. I assured him that nothing had happened. He took this as absolute and irrefutable proof that it had and was stricken with envy.
I called in to see her at CinCin on my way back to the airport. The manager had forgiven her and she was back at her post. She hugged me when I was getting back into my cab. ‘I miss you,’ she said with tears in her eyes. We arranged to meet again in Wellington. A few weeks later she came down for an indefinite stay.
&nbs
p; SHE MOVED INTO A CUTE little attic room at the top of the stairs. We went to a Miles Davis concert together. Miles was frail but with surprising force and great delicacy played classic tracks from his Kind of Blue and Bitches Brew albums. We walked on beaches. We went to art galleries, museums, movies and Wellington City Library—an embarrassing first for me. She wanted me to read the translated works of her favourite Polish playwright. She had read some of my journalism and urged me to write stage plays—something I had never previously considered. I took her to a supermarket and she got enraged in the fresh fruit section. Holding up an orange plucked from a huge bin of the same she cursed loudly. ‘FUCKING FUCK! FUCK! CHRISTMAS PRESENT IN MY FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING COUNTRY!’ It was the same feeding Lady, my black Labrador dog, sausage. Katia would wave it like a shillelagh and swear, ‘THIS IS WHAT HUMAN BEINGS EAT IN MY FUCK! FUCK! FUCKING COUNTRY!’
All that passion, I noted ruefully to myself, should not go unrequited. I turned to Chris for advice. ‘Thomas Joseph, as a gentleman and a scholar it behoves you to make the first move.’ That night, after she had gone to bed, I waited a decent interval then crept up the stairs with a bottle of Baileys Irish Cream, which she loved. She was fast asleep. I didn’t want to startle her, so I placed the bottle by her bed and tiptoed away. I was making coffee in the morning when she came downstairs wearing one of my shirts as a nightie and waving the bottle, puzzled and alarmed.
‘What is theees? I don’t remember …’ I mumbled an explanation. She smiled softly. ‘Oh, so you want Katia to come to your room tonight?’ I stared at the floor. ‘Yes please …’