by Tom Scott
That night, when I wanted to pore over the interview notes, the normally workaholic McGee insisted we go to a good Georgetown steakhouse and knock off a bottle of red wine, arguing, ‘You must enjoy every step of the journey because you may never arrive.’ I repeat this dictum with tiresome frequency to suitably impressed people. Who cares if it was Greg’s line originally?
A YEAR AFTER FALLOUT SCREENED, Barrie and Rob went to the Auckland District Court seeking summary judgment for a substantial sum of money that they felt they were owed. Again, like all legal arguments that present only one side of a case it seemed open and shut—they had been wronged and were entitled to compensation.
Greg wrote an elegant, comprehensive, coolly factual reply, leaving me free to treat Judge F.W.M. McElrea like someone reading an article of mine in the Listener or the Auckland Star. I wrote a long, discursive, conversational colour piece. I wanted him to know just how much blood, sweat and tears are shed in getting a script to screen.
In conclusion, I wrote:
In the final analysis, Fallout was never going to be an Everard film. Everard did not have the production skills or industry contacts necessary to get such a project up and running. When there was a chance to make it as a wholly New Zealand funded mini-series his keenness to take inflated producer’s fees off the top of the budget denied him that option. Despite everything I remain grateful to Everard and Fenwick for sending Greg and I to the US to conduct research and I regret that Rob Fenwick and I are no longer friends. There was a time when I hoped they would get some of their money back but I no longer hold that view. The brutal reality was that back in 1989 Everard Films took a punt along with Greg and I and it did not come off. Fenwick became a financial partner with Everard in this venture after the partnership arrangement had expired. That was another punt that did not come off. When consideration is given to the thousands of unpaid hours Greg and I put into this project, and the expenses we never sought reimbursement for, it is we who are out of pocket, and for considerably more than the plaintiffs are claiming.
On 10 May 1995, in an oral decision, Judge McElrea ruled that the plaintiffs’ application for summary judgment in respect of rights and services payments was declined. Greg and I were hugely relieved, but it was a bittersweet moment, and a pyrrhic victory. The repercussions were terribly sad. Twenty years on, my relationship with Rob remains irreparably damaged. A once boisterous friendship has been replaced with a cool, detached politeness—an outcome I deeply regret. Rob is a good man, a passionate and articulate advocate and activist for a range of pressing environmental causes. If not for Rob and his funny, vivacious, stylish, mischievous wife, Jenny, I would never have met the love of my life, Averil Mawhinney. Forget the development costs for Fallout—that is the real debt that I can never hope to repay.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
AVERIL
I DIDN’T KNOW HER NAME but I remember seeing her in Toad Hall, a tiny hole-in-the-wall, hot muffin and caffeine joint on Bowen Street that legendary Wellington restaurateur Jeff Kennedy opened in the ’70s. It was opposite Parliament, where I worked, and down the street from the Reserve Bank, where she worked as a junior accountant. From the privacy of my booth I took note of a beautiful, willowy girl in her early twenties making her friends laugh out loud. She was radiant. She didn’t see me, or if she did she didn’t recognise me. Come to think of it, I had cut small peepholes in my newspaper and all she would have seen would have been newsprint.
It turns out she was a fan of my columns, delighting once to read that we shared the same three favourite books—The Wind in the Willows (Toad Hall was a sign!), Three Men in a Boat and Catch-22. I finally got to meet her at 3 p.m. on the afternoon of 8 October 1992 in the French farmhouse kitchen of Rob and Jenny Fenwick’s Remuera home. When I am completely gaga and can barely remember my own name I will never forget this date—it started the best years of my life.
It could have been six months earlier. Jenny had been insisting for months that I should meet a friend of hers called Averil—I would just adore her. She was gorgeous, funny and clever. To this end she organised a dinner party in her own home and invited us both. I duly flew up from Wellington and knocked on the door at the appointed hour, clutching wine and roses. Jenny let me in ruefully, biting her lip. Single for a year, Averil had met someone the night before. I hardly spoke to the poor woman who came off the subs bench and returned to Wellington wondering what might have been.
Months later Jenny rang me, very excited. Averil had broken up with this guy. If I was coming up to the Auckland launch of Sir Edmund Hillary’s book Sagarmatha she would arrange for Averil to come as well, and we could all meet beforehand at her home.
In the end Jenny was strategically absent and I was on my own when Averil walked into their kitchen and into my heart. Lithe and lovely with a confident physical grace, she wore a natty linen trouser suit with a belt tied like a judoka dan at the waist. (This was years before Hillary Clinton almost singlehandedly destroyed the concept of the trouser suit for women.) I felt at ease with her instantly and if I wasn’t madly in love with her at the beginning of the joke she told, I was at the end …
I forget the precise preamble, but a man in a bar is telling his friend that he’s had one of those dreadful days where his tongue wasn’t working properly and everything he tried to say came out sounding wrong. His mate nods sympathetically. ‘I know how you feel. I was sitting with the wife at the breakfast table this morning and I meant to say, “Could you please pass the marmalade, dear,” and it came out, “You fucking bitch, you have ruined my life!”’
We both started laughing and Averil blew a blob of mucus out of one nostril and had to dash for a paper towel, which reduced us both to hysterics. We rocked up to the book launch in Parnell in good spirits.
Mark Sainsbury of course was both thrilled for me and insanely jealous at the same time—exactly how I would have felt if the roles had been reversed.
‘How is that rash? Is the cream working?’ he asked loudly. ‘Has the VD lab managed to isolate the pathogen yet?’ and ‘I would sue Regaine if I were you. It’s clearly not working!’
At dinner later in a restaurant next door it was Lady Hillary’s turn in the barrel when she asked what we were doing later.
‘Well, unlike some people, June,’ boomed Mark, ‘we’re young with our whole lives ahead of us!’
‘You cheeky bugger!’ exclaimed June, joining in the laughter.
Afterwards Averil drove me back to Rob and Jenny’s place, where I was staying. She parked her old dunger VW in the drive and we talked, laughed and even got damp-eyed at one point. I didn’t want to go inside. She didn’t want to leave, but she had to. She had to go to work in the morning. A demure goodnight peck seemed only right and proper. Our lips touched lightly. The taste of butterscotch flooded my senses. Things that you never thought would come to this, as Hot Chocolate sang, started with a kiss.
Twenty-one days later in the Your Birthday Today section of the Dominion horoscopes there was this prediction:
A romance you think temporary could prove surprisingly durable.
I cut this prediction out and put it in my wallet as well. I never read horoscopes now. I decided to quit while I was ahead. They are mumbo-jumbo, voodoo and superstition, but when I read that prediction my heart skipped a beat.
AVERIL AND I HAVE BEEN together ever since. For a short time we lived in two cities—Auckland and Wellington. Then, Averil and her bright, delightful son, Will, and her extraordinary, lovely mum, Claire, came to live permanently with me and Shaun in the big house in the forest on the side of the hill. The house filled like a tidal pool on the weekends Sam and Rosie came to stay too.
Averil adored my children and they adored her in return. It was the same with Will and Claire. Six-foot-five Shaun and tiny Will, bookending the whānau, formed a special bond that was magical to observe. One day Will told Shaun a joke that reduced them both to helpless laughter, Will laughing for much longer than Shaun.
‘Hang on there, Shorty,’ boomed Shaun. ‘You’re not as funny as you think you are.’
Will grinned back. ‘Aaah, you may be right, but you don’t know just how funny I think I am!’ Guffawing as only he could, Shaun threw in the towel. Will was seven.
Shaun’s guffaw can remove wax from ears at four hundred paces. One time, flying back from a family trip to Sydney to celebrate Rosie’s birthday (she was living there at the time), he sat across the aisle from Averil, Will and me, thank God, and watched a Mr Bean movie, laughing and rocking so violently the pilot had to come on and ask people to buckle their seats securely as we were experiencing some turbulence.
Will recently married Sanae, his beautiful, super-smart, utterly delightful Japanese girlfriend, on Australia’s Gold Coast, a halfway point for both families. He made a point of asking big Shaun, who had flown directly from London with his knees tucked under his chin, to sit at his elbow at the wedding breakfast, a spot traditionally reserved for the best man. As a consequence, honestly, I don’t know who was most radiant on the day, Shaun or the bride.
AVERIL’S FIRST JOB IN WELLINGTON was managing a personnel company. I used to pick her up most evenings. One night she was still finishing up and she suggested that I sit a short multiple-choice personality test while I waited. I scoffed—what could that possibly prove?
Averil giggled when she looked at the results. I was the client from hell. I was unemployable. No jobs matched my personality profile. I was good for nothing. The algorithm concluded that I should work on my own or if I worked with others I had to be in complete control. I was Hitler. In the corporate world I had to be CEO of ExxonMobil or the self-employed guy who came in once a week to wax the leaves of the aspidistras in the boardroom. Essentially, I marched to the beat of a different drum and I was most probably out of step with that as well.
There was no denying it. It was true. Apart from brief stints in the freezing works and teaching I have been self-employed all my working life. I like working my own hours and not being beholden to anyone. I hate being ordered around. In that regard I am identical to my father, though I never took it to his lengths of refusing to pay for high-school uniforms if they were compulsory.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
IN SEARCH OF HIGHER GROUND
BY THIS TIME MY MOTHER was living with my sister Sally, her husband, Bruce, and their brood on a small-holding outside Hamilton. Mum had been a tremendous help to Sally and Bruce when the kids were young. They were grateful, but Mum wasn’t always the easiest person and they needed a break from her and vice versa. Mum needed some independence and a home of her own, but where?
There was a huge basement under our house. It wouldn’t be cheap, but after giving it a great deal of thought and discussing it with our respective families, Averil and I decided to build two granny flats under our house. We commissioned Athfield Architects to design it. The one binding stipulation was that the new basement flats had to perfectly match the same colonial style as upstairs. They had to look as if they had always been there—or more precisely as if they had been there since the 1890s.
JOAN, THE PLAY I WROTE about my mother, is not the reverse side of the coin of my play about my father, The Daylight Atheist. Nor is it an antidote—though it will have medicinal properties for anyone still reeling from that confronting piece. It is first and foremost, front and centre a stand-alone work that requires no a priori knowledge of my family history. All that is needed to appreciate Joan is to be of woman born—to borrow from Macbeth, my mother’s favourite play.
Tolstoy said that all happy families are alike but unhappy families are unhappy in their own way. That was certainly true in our case. When you are growing up you have no initial basis for comparison but it gradually dawned on the Scott children that both our father and our mother were singular and utterly unique.
Joan follows the arc of our mother’s life from a humble but magical and mystical childhood in Southern Ireland between the two world wars, to raising six children in gruelling, reduced circumstances in small-town New Zealand with an angry, alcoholic husband, ending in a measure of qualified peace and contentment in a genteel retirement home in Hawke’s Bay.
Joan is a piece for two performers, who share the narrative load and are in constant conversation with each other—Joan, wounded, disappointed and cynical, who feels robbed by life, and Johanna, her younger self, who is full of fun and optimism. A continuing tension throughout is that Joan knows what is coming but in the natural order of things cannot reveal them to her younger self—Johanna must find these out on her own. The play ends with past and present resolving and folding into each other.
EXT. WELLINGTON
Strains of John Coltrane’s ‘TOO YOUNG TO GO STEADY’ from Ballads comes up—
JOAN: Tommy and Averil offered to build two granny flats under their house in Wellington’s Town Belt—one for me and one for Averil’s mum, Claire. They flew me down to Wellington to talk it over. Tom picked me up at the airport. I’d not met Averil in person yet. It was hard keeping track of Tom’s love life. This was the complete reverse of high school when he had plenty of hair, but no girlfriends.
JOHANNA (as AVERIL): I’d heard a lot about Joan of course, from Tom, and was looking forward to meeting her. She got out of the car—and before I could say a word—walked briskly back down the driveway and stood stock still for a few moments.
JOAN walks to the far side of the stage, pauses a moment, ponders something, then walks back—
JOHANNA (as AVERIL/amused): Then she came striding back, shook my hand and smiled.
Sorry about that, darling. I thought I was about to fart.
IN 1993 I WAS STILL in Hillary screenplay-research mode, and with Averil’s blessing I returned to Nepal with Ed and June again for the fortieth anniversary of the first ascent. Many of the surviving members would be in attendance, so it was too good an opportunity to miss. Mark Sainsbury came back as well, with independent award-winning director and producer John Keir on board to make an hour-long documentary on Ed for TVNZ.
At a function in the ballroom of the Kathmandu Hotel the expedition climbers sat on stage at a long table, like disciples at the Last Supper. There was no disputing the god amongst them. Ed had a commanding physical presence that put him head and shoulders above his climbing companions.
The leader of the expedition, Sir John Hunt, pointed at me and asked George Lowe questions. When the formalities were over, he made a beeline in my direction.
‘Tom Scott, what a thrill to meet you, I’ve heard so much about you!’ In 1953, Ed resented Hunt replacing his hero, Eric Shipton, as expedition leader, but when they met he was immediately won over by his charm. I now knew why.
I was able to interview all of the surviving climbers and returned to my desk in Wellington with screeds of notes, jottings and interview transcripts. Hemmed in by mounds of reference books, and to put myself in the right mood listening to CDs of beautiful Nepalese folk music by Sur Sudha, I spent every spare second of the next year fashioning such a sprawling treatment that you risked rupturing a lumbar disc if you picked it up without bending your knees first.
WITH NO REAL IDEA WHAT to do next, I set off in 1995 to the American Film Market (AFM) in Los Angeles, bumping into a number of Kiwi film-makers who had their travel and accommodation paid for by the New Zealand Film Commission. I remember looking at them with awe and unabashed admiration, thinking, wow, how do people do that?
To steal a line from a sports writer and crime novelist I admire, Paul Thomas, the AFM had all the charm of a third-world zoo in a heatwave. Like a little old lady holding a racing guide, I made appointments with every company whose name or logo hinted at anything mountaineering—Crampon Pictures, Frostbite Films, Pulmonary Oedema Movies. You get the picture.
On several occasions I would be halfway through my pitch when producers would interrupt me kindly, ‘Hey, dude, this would make a great film. You’re in the wrong place. We make shit!’ When I protested feebly, pointing to
posters of what looked like great films being made, they confessed that many of their movies started with the poster and worked back.
I was staying with Sam Pillsbury at the time, and noting my growing despair and despondency he decided I needed a change of scenery. One evening he took me up into the Hollywood Hills to meet a producer friend who might be interested in making a film about the conquest of Everest.
Jim—I’ll call him Jim—was a short, angry guy with a headful of very strange crinkly orange hair. I tried my best not to look, but it was impossible.
‘You’re staring at my fucking hair, aren’t you?’ he barked.
‘Not really, no …’ He then insisted on explaining that he was an ugly Jew whose receding hair had been forcing him to have sex with women his own age.
‘Imagine that? Women my own age! In this town!’
He gagged, and for a moment I thought he was going to be sick. He went on to explain that he’d recently had a hair transplant. The dermatologist wanted to do the plugs in stages but he insisted on doing them all at once. They ran out of hair on the nape of his neck so they harvested his armpits, and when that wasn’t enough they took pubic hair to fill in the top of his scalp. You couldn’t help thinking that his head would look better wearing underpants. Then against all medical advice he went straight back to work. His scalp got infected, turning into a seething, pussy cap. The infection got into his bloodstream, spread through his body and lodged in his lower spine. He was facing paralysis. They had to operate. They accidentally severed nerves to his dick. Now he had a full head of hair and a dick that didn’t work. It was a total bitch.