The imminent parting with a large sum of money focuses the mind, like death, and we crawled over the boat metre by metre. It was like inspecting a grand piano. Beautifully-polished pieces of mahogany swung open on silent hinges, revealing yet more mahogany inside. Finely-cast bronze fittings held coats and towels, kept things shut. Best of all, its teak after-deck featured a banquette, upholstered in rich red, crossing the entire width of the stern.
‘I won’t take anything less than the asking price,’ said Jan. Why should he for such a splendid thing, we thought? Every desiring organ within us wanted to pour money into his outstretched hands. But we’d discovered, well, not faults, because how could they exist in this lovely craft? No, issues.
The engine leaked a lot of oil. The shower was unusable because while it streamed water into the boat in the way showers are supposed to do, there was no way of getting the water out again. ‘I’ve never used it,’ Jan shrugged. The gas water heating proved obsolete. ‘I don’t use hot water either,’ he said.
We did, though. We visited a nearby boat builder. Lots of talking and measuring went on. He announced he could fit a new shower pan with pump, and a new boiler to heat the water, for about $4,000. Possible, we thought. But while I was talking to the boat builder, Sally was deep in conversation with one of his clients, a man working on his fine new cruiser. ‘I had a Super van Craft,’ he told her. ‘I took it to France. Within three months, in the heat, the varnish was ruined. The boat looked a wreck. You must keep them inside, in a boatshed. You must not buy one. There is only one boat you must buy, and that is an Altena, like mine here.’ His hand flapped at half a million Euros worth of boat.
It was a telling blow. Ours was a flawed beauty. A rich person’s boat.
‘I’m very sad,’ I texted Glenn and Trish that night, ‘and Sally suicidal.’ ‘Me too,’ Glenn wrote back. ‘Find another one or I jump.’
That left the Beast. She was a solid lump of metal, seventeen tonnes of steel and gear. She was a Beachcraft, owned by Dirck, whose surname we never quite discovered. Dirck skippered one of the huge barges plying the rivers and canals. He seemed to be an on-call skipper, for he never knew where he’d be next, or for how long he’d be away. At least, that was his story.
He was a good-looking man in his mid-thirties on the run from his ex-wife.
He talked of her lawyers as the dark pursuers, and gave the impression he was always aware of who was behind him. He was funny, furtive. We never knew whether to trust him or not.
He kept his boat in the small town of Alblasserdam, between Rotterdam and Utrecht. She was a blocky beast. No one would ever call her pretty. Utilitarian, with a touch of workboat, and a very long way from the Alcyon. ‘Why am I selling her?’ said Dirck. ‘Because I now have a girlfriend who has a boat, and because I need the money.’ Both stories seemed entirely plausible. Lots of women skipper boats in Holland. His girlfriend’s boat, the Yvette, was moored not far away, a fine ship, much better than Dirck’s, and Dirck definitely looked short of cash.
Whoever had fitted out his boat started from the back with a magnificent after-cabin, all in white, containing twin beds and a huge wardrobe. Next came a household-size shower and a capacious toilet, then a big saloon, followed by a newly installed, well-crafted kitchen with a brand-new stove complete with oven, a good fridge, and a dinette opposite. Alas, the forecabin paid the penalty for all of this. It was little more than a slot in the wall in front of the kitchen, like a letterbox where you might post your guests. But, we told ourselves with that rationalising now so familiar over our tortured list of must-haves, how much do you owe guests anyway?
New gear was everywhere, pumps, stoves, engine-room equipment, even a new four-blade propeller instead of the usual three-blade. ‘For better manoeuvring,’ said Dirck, looking as if he knew all about manoeuvres.
But Sally had noticed a whole lot of things that escaped me. She had a much better eye for detail, and a vastly improved feel for what was right. I might wax over a water pump while she was waning over a settee which, she pointed out, had come from someone’s lounge and had simply been chopped off to fit. And the dinette cushions had come from another boat. And the mattresses in the back bedroom were brand new but the room was panelled in what seemed to be melamine.
We asked Dirck where he kept the ship’s papers, the documentation of its gear, receipts and lots of reassuring print. He looked nonplussed. He rooted around and emerged with a couple of tatty bits of paper. ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘No receipts. I pay cash. Cheaper. Under the table.’ Or off the back of a truck, we thought.
Sally asked, ‘And how will anyone, such as authorities in this country and others, know this is our boat?’ Dirck laughed at this. ‘Because it is your boat,’ he said.
We would have to pay for it by telegraphic transfer of funds from New Zealand to Holland and for that Dirck needed a bank account.
‘Is a problem,’ he said, and his face appealed to us as reasonable, understanding people. ‘I pay no tax. This money appears in my bank, I get caught.’ He seemed to glance over his shoulder, catch a glimpse of a grey suit. The taxman, his wife’s lawyers, they were all the same to Dirck: tormentors. ‘Well, we don’t carry this amount of money in cash,’ said Sally who, I felt, was starting to sympathise with the ex-wife.
Another problem appeared. Dirck had sold the boat to someone else. They’d paid a deposit, and were to settle in six weeks. ‘But I don’t know whether they will,’ said Dirck, with the scent of immediate cash strong in his nostrils. ‘I get rid of them.’ ‘We’ll let you know by five o’clock,’ said Sally. ‘You get everything sorted out by then.’
It was now three p.m. We drove off. Neither of us felt good. The boat stacked up well, but didn’t feel right. Both of us had learned to trust that feeling more than any engineer’s report. The boat, like Dirck, had a strong dash of bodgie. It was called the Nothing. Any good boat deserved a better name than that. We decided we had time to visit another yard.
Chapter Two
Sally hunched over the map.
Sally did not drive. She had a driver’s licence, but she had a problem which her examiners had missed: she could not tell right from left. This made driving quite interesting. If you needed to turn right, and she turned left, matters could become fraught. They’d become even trickier if you wanted to go somewhere in particular. We might be driving from Christchurch to Picton, or even from Wellington to Taihape, and Sally would insist that we were driving the wrong way because we hadn’t passed through Ashburton yet. For her, Swahili was easier to read than a map. Maps were kaleidoscopes.
Now, here in Holland, something had clicked into place. She could read a map. Not just read it, but follow its tricks and whims and work out the best way through the maze. ‘Not this way,’ she’d say briskly. ‘Take the A-28 until we get to Harderwijk, then the N302.’ Or, ‘This is Exit 17. We need Exit 21.’ Lois Lane must have felt the same way the first time she realised Clark Kent was not hopping into the telephone box just for the fun of it, and all that blue and red and yellow suddenly made sense.
Moreover, Sally now knew her right from her left. ‘Keep to the right,’ she’d say, avoiding disaster several times as I absent-mindedly tootled off on the wrong side of the road. With this new Sally beside me I felt I could tackle the universe, or at least navigate the motorways, roads and country lanes between Alblasserdam and Alem, a tiny village beside a broad inlet leading off the River Maas. There, along a long avenue of trees bursting into leaf, lay the Jachthaven de Maas.
It was lunchtime in the yachthaven. No one was about. I wandered around the little marina and saw our boat immediately.
She had a jaunty bow and a proper look, and through her windows I could see finely-crafted teak furniture. She was an Altena, built by a good firm still run by the same family. So I fetched Sally who read the name River Queen on her side, and she was as good as sold. The name was OK, I thought, but I’m not going to wear the T-shirt.
Ricardo Bosma, the broker, tu
rned up, recognised the smitten looks and called the owner who came immediately. ‘I’ve been to New Zealand sixteen times,’ said Leen Bakker, a retired seaman who peered at the world through a face full of deep cracks and crannies. ‘You come from the South Island? I know where Bluff is. Why do you want to come to Europe when you live in such a beautiful country?’ It was the age-old question for Kiwis, although none of us knew the answer; besides, we were more interested in his boat.
We did everything wrong, of course. We should have thought it over, but we had Dirck’s deadline hanging over us. We should not have trusted Leen, or Ricardo, but we did. We should have made our offer conditional on a full survey, rather than the limited one we thought was enough. We should have mulled, and considered, and prodded and poked, and come and gone, and feigned reluctance. Instead, I called Dirck and told him we weren’t buying his boat after all. He didn’t sound surprised. More slings and arrows from outrageous fortune.
Then we went ahead and bought the River Queen, for around $135,000 at the day’s exchange rate and including various fees and charges.
We trusted our instincts. And Leen and Ricardo did everything they said they would. And we got a proper set of ship’s papers, and Leen’s old deck shoes, and his coffee-maker, blackened by countless cups. We never regretted any of it, and the River Queen never missed a beat.
Leen shook hands and wished us well. I recited the old adage to him: ‘They say the two happiest days in boat-owners’ lives are the day they buy the boat, and the day they sell it. So we’re probably the three happiest people in all of Alem today.’ ‘Ah,’ he said. ‘I am perhaps not so happy.’
We were all set for adventure.
It had all begun when they gave me a new neck and I knew something had to be done.
I’d picked up the latest copy of the magazine where I’d worked for more than twenty years, the Listener, and turned to the editorial. It was about Auckland’s snarled traffic, and began:
I can report both as a pedestrian and a South Islander that if there’s one thing worse than being stuck in Auckland, it is being marooned there without a car. It is slightly worse even than being trapped there with a car, for then, as you crawl over the harbour bridge in lines of belching traffic, angry drivers and cybercreatures whose cellphones seem surgically implanted, you know the true meaning of being caught between the devil and the deep blue sea.
The title said: ‘Foot Slagging’. I liked the rest of it too, but that was because I’d written it. Then I saw my picture above the byline. I didn’t like it. I should have known.
Pamela Stirling, the editor, had called a few days previously.
She’d said that the picture they were using over those editorials was wonderful, fabulous, but she wasn’t sure about the black T-shirt. I believed she was being remarkably restrained. Combined with a shaven head, a feeble sneer and a red complexion colour-coded with hung-over eyes, I looked the kind of person who should be reported to police immediately and not otherwise approached.
Stirling believed in the miracle of photo-shop. I replied that I didn’t give a bugger and why didn’t she get photo-shop to give me some hair and a tan while she was about it?
Oh, foolish bravado. In the next issue I appeared still bald and redeyed with the slimy grin but possessing a complexion as khaki as the second expeditionary force. The black T-shirt had gone all right but was replaced by a striped blue shirt I knew was owned by Tim Watkin, then the deputy editor. Moreover, the shirt was open at the top, so they’d thrown in his neck as well.
Now, Watkin was an upright fellow, a good quarter-century younger than I, and in other circumstances his neck might have been a prized item. In the present situation, however, it looked rather like those fairground photographs where you shoved your head through a hole above Dan Carter’s body.
I stared at the photograph for a long time. I was quite attached to my neck actually, and had spent a lot of my working life saving it. But I remembered Tom Scott saying he knew that Prime Minister Rob Muldoon was on his way out when his TV colour changed from khaki to yellow. I was going from pink to khaki. What could it mean? Like traffic lights, that I was ready for the off? Something had to be done about my life, and I was the man to do it.
I thought about my long career in journalism. It had been lovely, adventurous. It had taken me around the world many times. I’d covered Moscow’s bungling efforts to stage the Olympics, the Commonwealth Games in Edinburgh, the America’s Cup in Auckland and Valencia. I’d had a midsummer swim in the Antarctic. I’d met the King of Spain in Madrid, Ian Paisley in Belfast, Nelson Mandela in Kuala Lumpur, Prince Charles in Wellington. I’d won fellowships to both Cambridge and Oxford Universities, where I’d learned to drink sherry, pole punts, eat bony trout and dream in dusty libraries.
I’d worked in radio and television and written for the television programmes A Week of It and McPhail and Gadsby, but print was my favourite. Earlier I’d hacked for the notorious Sun in London, pulling night shifts in Fleet Street, been London-based feature writer for a big chain of provincial newspapers, and had come back to New Zealand determined to live my life the way I wanted to.
I didn’t fancy ever using that tired old line of politicians and executives when someone finally found them out: I didn’t want to spend more time with my family then, I wanted to do it now. My job had to fit around my life, not vice versa. So I became a columnist for the Christchurch daily, The Star, then moved to Wellington with the Listener.
I’d always loved the Listener. When I was young, editors like Monte Holcroft, Alexander McLeod, Ian Cross, Tony Reid and David Beatson were national news. They presided over a mighty journal, in every sense. When the Listener said something, it remained said. When the Listener pronounced, the pronouncement was writ in stone. When it declared something to be good, then that object was so elevated in public esteem it became immediately iconic. When the Listener touched the shoulder of a budding artist, or writer, or media savant, the nation bowed before them.
Its writers were stars themselves: Cross, Reid, Tom Scott, Helen Paske, Sue Macaulay, Geoff Chapple, Gordon Campbell. At its height, more than 400,000 people bought the Listener each week, passed it on to spouses, relatives, children, patients, customers. Half the nation was in thrall to its heavy type, or at the very least, its television listings. It was huge. The aged and infirm could scarcely lift it, much less open its broad pages. Caught in the wind, a Listener was as powerful as a galleon scudding in the trades. A single page could wrap fish and chips for a large family, including friends and relatives.
When such a discerning eye descended upon a mortal journalist, who could not pass through those pearly gates? Not me. I sniffed fame. I quit my job and moved my family, my wife Sally and twin sons Sam and Simon to Wellington, persuaded the magazine it needed a South Island office, moved back to Christchurch and did what I liked doing most: writing stories about people, where they lived, how they lived.
I wrote about the biggest land swap of all time: high-country cockies giving up their mountaintops to the conservation estate in exchange for freehold title to public land. I stumbled over land claims on the East Coast in the vanguard of the modern Māori land claims movement. I wrote about group hysteria and mass panic over the alleged offences of the so-called paedophile Peter Ellis, still the most dangerously unjust conviction in the country after Rex Haig’s, whose story first appeared under my byline in the Listener. I covered rock and roll contests in Lower Hutt, poodle clipping in Papanui, sheep rustling in South Canterbury, gang fights in Timaru, country music awards in Gore, oyster-opening in Bluff, property panic in Stewart Island, gold rushes on the West Coast, kōtuku squabbles in Whataroa. I wrote about Ed Hillary, Tim Wallis, Colin Meads, Helen Clark, Todd Blackadder, Bub Bridger, Cilla McQueen. I puzzled over Rick Mayne’s revolutionary new engine, which came to him in a vision as he sat in a jail cell and never ran and despite this, attracted millions of dollars from droves.
I’d had a lovely, adventurous time. But times ha
d changed, as times do. The print industry was in the throes of yet another revolution, and print journalism with it. Magazines were caught between falling sales and boardroom banalities which ignored a fundamental truth: you had to be good at what you did.
At its best, the Listener was what any decent magazine with an intelligent readership was: it questioned accepted wisdom, declined to accept face value. Often, it simply took the piss. Its touch of subversion was handy. No one ever lost readers through being sharp, and well-written. In an increasingly conservative age, though, it was taking on the colours of its environment, however drab.
Listener readers stubbornly remained the same as they’d always been: older, intelligent, critical, curious and not easily fooled. But that was exactly the demographic coming to be regarded in the industry as dinosaurs who joined libraries, switched off lights and never watched Survivor on TV, much less attended away-days or cared a jot about mission statements.
A succession of good writers became disillusioned, went elsewhere or were pushed. The survivors tackled health, property, lifestyle with as many celebrities as were desperate enough to show their faces.
I seldom left the office now, no longer met and talked to people in person. I telephoned them. Bald, beautiful, shrewish, perceptive, smart, stupid, rotting teeth or artificial limbs were synthesised by Telecom and presented to me in one neat, uniform package. I was sick to death of focus groups and surveys, of circulation graphs and budget projections, of marketeers whose idea of a good read was a text message. I was tired of the ten steps to happiness and the insider’s guide to becoming a more beautiful you.
Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A Page 3