‘And not just women,’ said someone.
‘Absolutely,’ said Budgie. ‘Don’t you worry about that. No travel, no bodily fluids, no bruises, no hidden cameras, no risk you see.’
‘And no real shag at the end of it,’ said the skipper derisively.
Ian agreed with that, but Budgie’s claims for the money impressed him a good deal. That night at home he looked at the personal ads in the newspaper, while Noleen watched a programme in which people competed for 100,000 US dollars by comparing their terminal illnesses. ‘Chat live with Kiwi babes one on one 24/7: fantasies come to life’, one ad promised. The charge was $3.99 a minute plus GST. You paid by credit card and there was a 0900 number. Even if the babes got only half of that, it was bloody good money for just talking dirty to a phone. Ian didn’t see any ads offering a chat with studs, but supposed they were out of place in a family newspaper. Ian wrote down some 0900 numbers. He didn’t hunger for fantasies, but he did need money. You did what you had to do, didn’t you, like the woman on the television at that moment who was writing with her teeth to show how little function her extremities retained. The live chat babes were probably not at all like the small photographs shown in some of the ads: they’d be home-bound, lank-haired women with their own desperations.
When Noleen went to a chick film with Frieda on Tuesday night, he rang a 0900 number. The answer was pre-recorded and confusing. He reached Beverley with his third call. Beverley said she hadn’t had any guy ringing to offer services before, and wasn’t sure of the procedures. She said maybe she could get someone to ring back, but Ian said he didn’t want anyone to ring him at home. Beverley said maybe if he rang again in about an hour someone could speak to him about it. ‘You sure you wouldn’t like to talk to one of the girls now?’ she asked.
‘No thanks, Beverley. I’ll ring back.’ She was still there when he phoned back, and passed him on to Nick, who asked him if he was married, and told him that he had the wrong idea if he thought that he’d meet up with all the girls this way. ‘I’m just looking to make some money by doing a good job,’ said Ian.
‘Well, we don’t hire anybody over the phone,’ said Nick. ‘You come and see me on Friday afternoon if you’re interested,’ and he gave Ian a time and a place.
Ian told Mr Menzies that he had a dentist appointment on Friday. He took his best shoes and jacket in the car, and put them on before going up the narrow stairs to Nick’s rooms above the local MP’s electorate office. On the frosted glass panel of the door were the words Eureka Communications. Ian wasn’t specially nervous. He could handle himself in most circumstances. If it didn’t work out, then it didn’t work out. He’d never had any trouble talking to women, and there was no guilt in talking: nothing to threaten what he and Noleen had, though of course you couldn’t expect her to understand that. He loved Noleen and wanted to make her happy.
Nick was younger than Ian expected. He was short, slim, wore a dark suit and glossy black shoes. He couldn’t have been much more than thirty-five. ‘The chat stuff is only a part of what I do,’ he told Ian a little defensively. ‘I started with telephone polling and canvassing and let it develop in response to client need. Now people are much more comfortable with personal calls, and that’s certainly grown. There’s more money in it, that’s for sure. People don’t realise the extent of self-regulation, of course. There’s some pretty nasty traps if you don’t have that. You done anything of this nature before, Ian?’
Ian said he hadn’t, and Nick went on to explain about some of the rules behind what might seem an anything goes arrangement to outsiders: about establishing adult status of callers, about never revealing details of location or identification, about never agreeing to meet personally with callers, about not making emotional attachments and never asking for extra money, or favours, about strict confidentiality. ‘We’re in the business of therapy, that’s what it is,’ said Nick, who was a very easy talker. ‘People get a sense of release, of relaxation, from the social restrictions on conversation between the sexes in everyday life. Just a couple of weeks ago a guy who’s responsibile for forty-three female staff told one of our women that if it wasn’t for her he reckoned he’d be in police custody. There you are, you see. Therapy.’
Ian knew that Nick wasn’t talking just to explain the sex chat line business, but as a way of sussing him out. After fifteen minutes or so, Nick came round to business. He said that most callers were men wanting to talk to women, of course, but there was a demand the other way around. He said Ian’s voice had possibilities, had a certain timbre, and the suggestion of rough trade without threat. He asked if Ian had ever done any singing, and was pleased with himself to be proved right.
‘It’s all in the voice, see. Not so much what you say — Jesus, there’s only so many parts, practices and positions, aren’t there — but how you say it. Particularly with the women. Women are especially sensitive to a wooing voice. Basically they just want to be wanted.’ Nick talked about that, about the approaches and language he’d found most effective himself. Maybe with a few pointers Ian could be given a chance, he said. Maybe he could be a professional sportsman, say, seeing he had that background, or the owner of a fishing boat.
‘I couldn’t work at home at all,’ said Ian. Nick said most of the women did, but he did have booths in the other room, so that needn’t be a problem. ‘Officially I’d be doing that polling and survey stuff you talked about,’ said Ian.
‘Sure,’ said Nick, ‘but early days yet. We’d have to give you a trial and see how you went. People think it’s easy, but it’s not.’
That’s how Ian started as a pollster at Eureka Communications. Noleen was chuffed with his initiative. ‘Good on you,’ she said. ‘Just don’t ring people right on teatime. That’s bloody irritating, that is, to be rung right when you’re getting the meal and asked about your banking habits, or how many times you’ve had a tropical holiday in the last year. Yeah, right, I tell them. What is it you ring about?’
‘Politics mainly,’ said Ian, ‘and it’s all later at night when people have settled. I quiz them a bit about their positions on the issues and what would make things better in their lives. How they’d like to see themselves in the future — stuff like that.’
‘Someone’s got to do it, I suppose, and at least you’re sitting down.’
He started with one night a week, eight to ten, sitting at Eureka in a booth soundproofed with Pink Batts and unpainted chipboard. There was a sheet on the wall with twenty-three of Nick’s rules of engagement typed on it. Ian became Russell, who’d played league in Aussie for the Bulldogs and was skipper of an orange roughy boat. Most of the calls were far less hard core than he expected: a good many were from curiosity only, and often he could hear smothered laughter from other women in the background. Nick’s main advice was a parody of the mantra of real estate agents — compliment, compliment, compliment. Above all the women wanted to be flattered, to be the centre of smooth-talking male attention, even at $3.99 a minute. The number of regulars grew as time went on. He judged by their voices and conversation that most of those were older women. Two said they were widows, and one he worked out was a prominent lawyer. Conversations were risqué rather than pornographic, often surprisingly confessional on the caller’s part. Everyone likes to be flattered, to be wanted. Ian didn’t despise the need, or abuse it: he tried to give fair measure without shame on either side. It gave him insight, even sympathy, into the world of women.
‘I must say you’re a bit of natural,’ Nick told him, ‘and you seem to have a knack of avoiding the pitfalls. Guys more often than the women end up making dates with callers, and that can come to all sorts of grief.’ He gave Ian a greater share of the $3.99, and Ian could work most nights he wanted. Some weeks he made $350 or more. Noleen was thrilled with his success, and showed it by being particularly supportive. She took a lot of trouble with their meals — Ian just loved a roast, or a rack of lamb — and washed his footy gear with cheerful care.
‘I’m
proud of you,’ she said. ‘Jesus, we’re just forging ahead,’
‘Yeah, well don’t tell everybody, or they’ll be all be down there at Eureka Communications asking to do it.’
‘I never thought there’d be such a good business in phone surveys and selling. You never know, do you.’
‘It’s the convenience of it,’ said Ian. ‘People get used to doing everything with computers, or phones. Nick reckons that in twenty years there’ll hardly be anything on the roads except freight vehicles, because people will be doing their work and recreation all without leaving the house.’
After five months Noleen arranged a meeting with a loans and mortgage officer at their bank. It was a piece of cake, she told Frieda later. She and Ian had three income streams between them, and a minimum deposit. They were lent money to buy a villa several blocks back from the beach, and two months after they moved in, Noleen was pregnant. It suited her: she became less concerned with the lifestyle of those better off than herself, and more thankful for her own situation.
Ian continued in good standing at Eureka Communications, and could pretty much work the hours he chose. He thought a time might come when he left his job at Central City and set up for himself in a workshop specialising in customised suspensions, which had become quite the thing with the petrol heads, but he didn’t say anything to Noleen, or Mr Menzies, about that. He didn’t want to get ahead of himself and come a cropper. Once he’d got on top of the mortgage, though, he promised himself.
They had a boy, and called him Thomas. Ian was there at the birth and a bit rocked by it all, but tried not to show it. He felt an instant love for the little guy. Tears of relief and joy from Noleen, enthusiasm from friends and both sets of grandparents. Frieda brought a three foot-high blue monkey, and said she was determined to get married herself. ‘I wish your lovely man had a brother,’ she told Noleen.
Frieda was there at the hospital on the second day, as Noleen and Ian prepared to return home. The blonde nurse came to say goodbye, and as she went away, Noleen said she was the one who’d said she liked Ian’s voice. ‘Said you had a cute, masculine voice,’ Noleen said.
‘Well, he has too,’ said Frieda. ‘All that singing you used to do, I suppose.’ Ian just laughed and took one of the cases and stood in the corridor.
‘He can sing to the baby then, can’t he,’ said Noleen, ‘but not any nurses.’
‘No, but seriously, you’re dead lucky with Ian,’ persisted Frieda.
‘I will say he’s been bloody good over the house and baby, but don’t you say so and give him a big head. We talk a lot more about stuff now. He seems more switched on and understanding about women’s things than he used to be. We share a lot more stuff now, and he’s really chuffed about the baby. We’re closer somehow. I could’ve done a bloody sight worse I have to say.’
‘He wouldn’t touch another woman I reckon,’ said Frieda.
Ian couldn’t hear them, but even if he’d been able to, he could have said with a clear conscience that he’d never touched another woman since marrying Noleen. A guy had to take his responsibilities seriously, set his mind to getting ahead and coming right for the sake of his family.
HOWELL
Even the most plebeian of families has some jewel in its history: a grandmother whose early talents surpassed those of Baron Rutherford when they were primary kids together in Brightwater; a Pitcairn cousin related to Fletcher Christian; an ancestor who fought as a fusilier at the Battle of Waterloo, losing an eye, but retaining a brass button to pass on; a Viennese landlady who tended Ludwig van Beethoven in his deafness.
My neighbours in Palmerston North could trace themselves in unbroken line to a Dutch paymaster who came to England after the crowning of William and Mary in 1689. Ted Gilley, who was custodian at the Foundation for the Blind, had the middle name Unpeas, which the eldest male of the Gilley family had been given for so long that everyone had forgotten the provenance of it. Noleen Browne told me that her great-great-grandmother was frightened in pregnancy by a carriage horse, and the child was born with a chestnut mane all the way down its neck. Hec Liddey, who played senior rugby with me, claimed that on his Maori side he was descended from Tuhawaiki, the Bloody Jack who beat Te Rauparaha. Certainly, no one liked to take Hec on when his temper was up.
My family has one touch of richness in its tradition. My grandfather was a Welshman who came out to New Zealand for the Better Life of the colonial dream. An ex-insurance agent and foundry worker, he was served up a bush farm in the Hokianga that gradually broke him, and then reverted to its natural state. Perhaps that experience made him all the more devoted to the story of our lost birthright.
Our late eighteenth century family had owned a colliery in south Wales we were told. In the retelling of the story my father often felt obliged to point out, with a scrupulousness which enhanced credibility, that coal mines then were not the huge concerns of later years, and often privately owned. A colliery nevertheless; a basis for family industrial strength over generations to come. Howell was the one son of three who developed a fine, early Victorian conscience about the treatment of miners in the family firm, and when fierce argument with his father and brothers failed to achieve better conditions, he repudiated his stake in the business and moved to Middlesbrough where heavy industry was booming. All of which is part explanation for a later Welshman with a Yorkshire accent hopelessly felling bush in the Hokianga.
The touch that I best remember my own father dwelling on, was that for Howell’s lifetime his profit share was religiously put aside for him year by year, and he as religiously refused it. My father’s tone was a mixture of wistfulness, resignation and quiet Methodist pride at an exercise of principle at the expense of us all. He often talked of Howell and Gladstone in conjunction, so that when I was a boy I thought they were known to each other, and only gradually realised that the thing in common was their rectitude.
Youth has little patience with nostalgia, and apart from a brief selfish reflection that I would have preferred Howell to have been less rigorously moral and more concerned for his progeny, I didn’t care for family history. My father, though, had it close to his thoughts, perhaps because of the struggle he remembered in early years. As young men he and his brothers had worked on the roads in the Depression, and he hated to see a light on in an empty room.
I suspect that, in his more indulgent moments, he imagined some rock-solid Swansea dynasty willing to make amends: saw himself gravely accepting his due as Howell’s heir. Money would have been welcome, but even more a scarred shield from the time of Owen Glendower, with the family crest inlaid: three boars rampant on a gold field perhaps. Despite the Depression, my father had a streak of bookish romanticism.
As an adult I became more interested in the sense of personal history, and in my turn passed on to my wife and children the saga of Howell, with a self-righteous stress on the theme of sacrifice. It wasn’t until I was in my late forties that I had the inclination to begin research on my family background, and I expected to recover the full Howell saga from the mists of family folklore. Instead I destroyed that sustaining belief, for our Howell was listed in an early census as a fifteen-year-old miner at Blaenavon, South Wales, and his father as a bit carpenter in the ironworks there. He shifted to Middlesbrough sure enough, and signed his wedding certificate soon after with a cross: hardly an indication that he was a member of gentry descended from the Princes of Powys.
There must be something that began the petty legend, a brother who stayed behind and prospered perhaps, or a determination during a Welshman’s courting to enhance the family’s social standing. I regret having found poor Howell out, though the claims were not necessarily his own.
I never told my father. Several times before his death I heard him again tell the story of our lost birthright. It had an almost biblical fitness and balance: a story that had accompanied our family for generations, and embodied a good many precepts.
‘I believe,’ my father would say, ‘that at the
end of every year the family set aside that portion of the colliery’s considerable profit due to Howell, and that each year for the rest of his life he refused to accept it because of the abominable working conditions for the men they employed.’ I dare say Howell knew those conditions well. ‘Had it not been for his stand on principle, we wouldn’t be in this country today,’ my father would say.
I haven’t written off the story altogether. Maybe more intensive research will show a sound basis for its persistence, and anyway, belief has always been more powerful than actuality. Howell certainly existed, and made the break from Wales that led first to Yorkshire, and in time, for some of his descendants, to this country, carrying in their imagination at least, some honour of lineage.
Rather than diminish Howell, I have decided for the future to increase his stature and significance, partly in memory of my father, partly because the family is short on impressive ancestral achievement. I shall weave in claims for an imposing physical presence, an evangelical crusade in the tenements of industrial Middlesbrough, and a misplaced deed of transfer recording his donation of the signet ring from the line of the Princes of Powys now displayed in the historical gallery at Harlech. Every family needs a hero.
TRAVELLING IN EDEN
I have a blank concerning my entry into the Palliser Centre, and little recollection of the desperate weeks before, which made attendance essential. My conscious history there begins with an interview with Dr Austen. Academics always assess an office, for it reflects not just something of personality, but of the incumbent’s position within the hierarchy of the institution. More generally, it speaks of the corporate body itself: the function, the largess and the degree to which staff are valued. Dr Austen’s second-floor room was small and the furniture nondescript, but the one large window overlooked a neat lawn with an oblong garden of staked, yellow roses. Better a small office with such a prospect, than a large one above the kitchens with a view of pig barrels, lavatory louvres, a heap of discarded heating radiators and a shed for ride-on mowers.
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