Long Slow Affair of the Heart, A

by Ansley, Bruce

  One proper look at her and I knew chaos didn’t stand a chance. I fell in love immediately and abandoned my charge. After all, that’s what friends were for.

  I turned all my charm upon her, although in truth that cupboard was as bare as my later promise concerning all my worldly goods.

  Yet Sally was interested enough to walk home with me, and I was helped in the charm job by my staunchest ally, my dog Henry. Henry was a golden Labrador bought as a gun dog by the corner grocer. Henry was not keen on guns. When he heard one, he went the other way. The grocer gave him to me. Guns and I were all the same to Henry for a while. He often went away and hid. He and the dog ranger were on first-name terms.

  Now Henry was waiting outside with a can of Fido in his mouth and the kind of reproachful look in his eye that I had so narrowly avoided back at the bash.

  Henry was the clincher. His foresight fascinated Sally. He gave her a cheery hello, as much as he was able with his mouth full, and off we went to my flat. Sally looked at the décor: Hugh Hefner meets Woolworths. What’s a nice dog like you doing in a place like this? she asked Henry, and left.

  Two days later I took her for a ride on my Triumph Thunderbird motorbike, which had a goldflake petrol tank and lots of chrome. We blasted along Kaikorai Valley Road on a crisp autumn night. She got bronchitis and was in bed for a week.

  That was March. In May we decided to marry, not so much a leap of faith on her part as an act of lunacy.

  I couldn’t believe my luck. She was finishing her studies at a university which had told me never to darken its doors again. She liked Bob Dylan, I liked Pink Floyd. She loved people and wanted to help, I was a professional sceptic. She came from an orderly family with a nice house on the hill, I sprang from confusion. She was sure of herself, my psyche showed the pinholes of borer.

  No one gave tuppence for our chances, but we loved each other. Why else would she do it? Her flatmates were busily pledging their troths to doctors, dentists, lawyers, accountants. She planned to marry someone whose weekly wage could be blown in one good night in the City Hotel’s bar, and often was, until I threw in my job (not for the last time).

  I had bigger fish to fry. Tonnes of them in fact, for I planned to become, not the lawyer I had once set out to be, nor even the reporter I was pretending to be, but a sturdy fisherman, of the kind who, when you were tucked up in blankets snug and warm, was riding out the storm. My partner Ian and I planned to ride it out to Fiordland, and make our fortune catching crayfish.

  But first, as Mrs Beaton might have said had she chosen a more aromatic vocation, find your boat. Ours was then a pile of steel in a Dunedin boat builder’s yard. It had to be converted to a thing of beauty by skilled, experienced, hardworking men, and me.

  It was an exciting prospect. I, however, was not.

  Look at it from Sally’s point of view. She was taking on an unemployed bodgie who by then had been thrown out of not one but two universities on the grounds of laziness, whose only asset was a motorbike which gave her bronchitis, and who for months brought his work home with him in the form of paint, oil, rust and lots of body odour. My hands were scarred and calloused from the steel work, I was usually covered with paint so durable it took months to wear off, dirt was ingrained in every pore. I was scared of touching Sally’s perfect skin for fear of spoiling it. Sally seemed everything I was not: intelligent, thoughtful, considerate, resolute and of course, unscarred. My shambles orbited around her core like space rubble.

  Also, I was broke, for as boats do, this one was taking much longer and costing far, far more than we ever thought possible. We were in debt not just up to our necks but well into the airspace above. I ran out of money. Some friends, David and Anne McPhail, took me in, fed me and gave me somewhere to sleep.

  They say that just when you think things can get no worse, they do; and they did. We decided it was time for me to meet Sally’s parents in Christchurch. Sally had already met mine. My mother had been in tears because my father had accused my brother’s friend of being a drug dealer, and decided to pulp him with a golf club.

  Sally had called her mum and dad and told them the good news: she’d met a man and was going to marry him. No, he wasn’t a doctor. Her sister had married one of those. He was a journalist. No, not like that awful Brian Edwards (whom her mother, somehow or other, had met, and disliked intensely). Well, actually, he wasn’t a journalist right now either. He was a fisherman. Well, in fact, he wasn’t a fisherman just now, exactly …

  With an entrée like that, it just had to get better didn’t it? Well, didn’t it?

  For me this was the natural order of things. For her parents it was something else altogether. A reporter was bad enough. A fisherman was worse. An unemployed fisherman ran the needle right off the scale of undesirable sons-in-law.

  I’d traded in the motorbike for a turquoise Rover, now repainted an impressive black which I felt lent a certain gravitas so far missing from my make-up. I loved the car. It was the most luxurious thing I’d ever owned. The engine muttered in a genteel sort of way, the tyres hummed, the woodwork glowed softly in the light, the dashboard shone and tinkled like a cocktail cabinet. The effect was of a drinks party in a kennel.

  We arrived in the Garden City in good time for the dinner that Sally’s mother was preparing for the occasion. But first, I had to call at my home in rumbustious New Brighton, close to the sea. Then, on the way to Sally’s home in Sumner, also beside the sea but more affluent, I had to drive onto the big car park we called the Ramp.

  This was traditional. The Ramp was one of the formative influences of my childhood. My brothers, my friends and I had spent more time there than almost anywhere, including university. It was one of the reasons I’d been evicted from that institution, which had foolishly timed its examinations for October when the wild nor’west surf was, unlike them, not to be missed.

  When you weren’t in the surf, you were hoping to be, so it had to be studied endlessly, and the best place to do that was the Ramp. Beside it stood the surf club, where my father and his brothers and nephews (but not his sons) featured in the gilt-lettered lists of office-holders hung solemnly on walls. Surfboard riding was not popular with clubbies in those days: it was considered subversive, took young people away from the proper business of beach patrols and competitions which seemed to me to involve far too much marching about and standing to attention, not to mention lots of hard work.

  At night, when we could no longer see the surf from the Ramp, we sat there in old cars with our girlfriends. So it was illogical and possibly illegal to pass the Ramp without driving up for a gink at the surf, and the old Rover’s wheels turned onto it as if on rails.

  I sat for a while genuflecting while Sally looked at her watch and worried about being late for dinner. But I was a responsible fellow now. I drove off, with a last look over my shoulder at the surf — my undoing, for since I’d last been there the authorities had planted a large post in the carriageway, and the Rover barrelled straight into it.

  I’d always felt the car was built like a tank, but it was no match for the post, which now stuck up from the bonnet in a position which should have been occupied exclusively by the engine. The switches and levers which jutted everywhere usually changed gear, operated windscreen wipers and so on. Right then they were impaling Sally. Switches had become spikes, levers cudgels.

  She wasn’t badly hurt, but she certainly looked as if she was. Blood trickled from several cuts on her forehead and face. The skin had been taken off her knees by a previously benign heater. One arm had been grazed by a door handle with no previous criminal record. She looked a mess.

  ‘I’ll take you straight to the doctor,’ I said decisively.

  ‘No,’ she said, probably tight-lipped but it was hard to tell through the blood. ‘I. Want. To. Go. Home.’

  ‘Well,’ I thought, not aloud. ‘No accounting for it.’

  I ran around the corner to my home. All of the five brothers had friends. All of the friends stayed
in the house from time to time. Quite long times, sometimes.

  Usually their cars littered the yard, my mum and dad appealing for us to pick them all up and put them away. I’d borrow one, take Sally home, and we’d all have a nice drink, once she’d stopped bleeding. But only one car sat on the front lawn that day.

  The car was an old Holden. It belonged to a friend of my brother’s who’d come to visit, and stayed. It was painted black, but its owner had relieved the tedium with long red and orange flames painted along both sides. Take it, he offered, and with no option, I did.

  The car started with a clamour and set off with an even louder one. Straight pipes, I heard him yell after me, in case I imagined Holdens emerged from the factory sounding like World War Two. It roared in a way which, when they heard it approaching, made the fathers of daughters sit bolt upright in bed and reach for weapons.

  I blatted back to the car park, packed the battered Sally into the passenger’s seat (I thought I heard a faint ‘oh no’) and drove to her parents’ house up a hill which brought out the best in the car’s acoustics.

  Her mum and dad were sitting outside on their terrace, admiring their splendid view of the city. Alarm turned to horror as the Holden turned into their drive.

  Sally opened the car door and spilled into view. They looked aghast at her bloodstained face, gory knees, bruised arm. Her mother trundled down the drive with the stoic expression of a wartime stretcher-bearer and bore away her bleeding daughter for emergency surgery inside. Her father surveyed the wheels. ‘Quite good cars these Holdens,’ he said.

  All right, I knew I had some work to do with my prospective in-laws. But look on the bright side, I thought. At least I had a decent excuse for being late for dinner.

  We finished the fishing boat just in time to save me from penury, painted her bright orange (‘You’ll thank me if we ever need to get rescued,’ said Ian, prophetically) and christened her the Nina with the cheapest bottle of wine we could find. We filled the hold with brawn pie which was supposed to be good for us. I had a couple of teeth pulled just in case. (‘Rinse with salt and water,’ the dentist advised. ‘It’s as good a treatment for teeth as anything, and much cheaper than me.’)

  Sally asked when we’d be back.

  In the autumn, I said.

  Well, wouldn’t that be a good time to be married, she said.

  Yes, I said, and we set off for Fiordland with Sally and Anne and David waving goodbye from Taiaroa Head, Sally sadly (I think) and the McPhails gaily (I think) as I’d been living in their spare bedroom and sponging on their hospitality for months.

  We steamed around Puysegur Point into Preservation Inlet and Chalky Sound, where we caught crayfish, packed their tails into big plastic bags which we stored in our freezer, went off eating crayfish in three days flat (not a record among crayfishermen), complained about the freezer-load of food we’d brought which soon all tasted like seaweed, got sick of blue cod, ate only the cheeks of groper and put the rest of those fine fish into the pots as bait, cursed the sandflies and soon, each other. At night the ship’s radio picked up the hit parade: ‘I beg your pardon, I never promised you a rose garden….’

  For months we stayed there, seldom setting foot on land, rafting up with other boats at night, setting off each morning before dawn, living a surreal life in the deep, still water and primeval bush of the farthest, quietest part of all New Zealand.

  In the southern latitudes night didn’t fall so much as frolic in the dusk for a while and if you were out at sea then for ages there’d be enough light in the sky to show the outline of Stewart Island, Rakiura, isle of glowing skies. We sheltered in Preservation Inlet, where fishermen rafted their boats at night and told stories of a river of gold, the purest gold in the world, between Coal and Steep-to islands where no one could reach it. The lost lode.

  Australia was six days by good boat from there, Auckland seven days.

  The crayfish boom was just ending; that is, in the New Zealand way they’d been fished almost to exhaustion, never to recover in the same numbers. The work was wild and exhilarating. Occasional slips showed rock polished smooth by glaciers. The heavy, sweet smell of honeydew hung over the bush. Beaches white as dreams fringed the black water. Pale green kina shells jewelled in white lay on the sand like Fabergé eggs.

  Europeans had lived here only a few years after Cook’s third voyage. Under the bush lay remains of old civilisations where people once hacked a living until they were beaten, and the forest mended its scars. Bits of an old timber railway could still be seen at Sandy Point. The finely-crafted long brick chimney of the Tarawera mine rested in the bush with its big iron driving wheel nearby. In Cuttle Cove there was a little plaque for the whaling station there from 1829–36. It didn’t say anything about a gold mine, although nearby a shaft went deep into the mountain through solid rock branching two ways with a great cavern in the middle and driven with god knows what effort.

  Just a few steps off a beach you might find the remains of a stamping battery, or a railway beneath the bush canopy. Hut sites were marked by old bottles, a few bricks, a heap of rusting iron. Life must have been dark and hard for those people who slaved in the mountain’s bowels by day and squatted in primitive huts by night.

  Not far from where twentieth-century entrepreneurs built a luxurious lodge, incongruous in the wilderness, Māori had sheltered in cave networks. Stone walls still marked living and sleeping areas. The mounds of calcified middens remained on floors alongside tool-working areas, escape routes and waka slipways. In 1877 the scout Walter Traill discovered the body of the Ngāi Tahu chief Tarewai entombed in limestone in a cave not far from Cuttle Cove. The chief had been mortally wounded in an attack on the Kati Mamoe’s last stronghold at nearby Matuira.

  On fine days we could see the mysterious Solander Islands at the entrance to Foveaux Strait, with their story of the sailor accused of sleeping with a sailing ship captain’s wife and marooned there on the rocks. The ship sailed on to Timaru where the real culprit promptly absconded with the missus. Heartbroken, the captain sailed for London and it was three years before a passing ship rescued the very hairy castaway.

  We left this magical place one fine morning when the Puysegur Point light was still flashing. It was three weeks before my wedding day. A small fleet of fishing boats, held up by weeks of bad weather, popped from Preservation Inlet like corks. We skirted the white water of the Marshall Rocks into Foveaux Strait, passed reefs glittering black in the morning sun, steamed by the dark V of Big River draining the thin Lake Hakapoua, the Knife and Steel and the low Long Point, and saw the jelly mould shape of the Solanders faint on the horizon.

  We creamed smoothly over great rollers left over from one of the fierce storms which swept Foveaux Strait, running down their backs and pausing for a moment in their valleys before the next picked us up and we surged forward again, the deck stacked high with steel craypots.

  Yet something strange was happening. Each time we ran down the face of a wave, the boat listed, more and more, until it tipped dangerously at the bottom and threatened to turn side-on.

  We checked the pots. Nothing had shifted. Maybe it was the load, said Ian. In the refrigerated hold lay stacks of frozen crayfish tails in their plastic bags. I left him in the wheelhouse and checked the deck. The heavy steel hatch cover was buried beneath crayfish pots. I lifted them away, stacked them as best I could, raised the hatch cover and the insulated metal plug below it and wedged them open against the pots. I climbed down into the hold.

  The boat was now listing horribly. Everything seemed as we’d left it down there. Still, I began shifting the bags of frozen tails to the high side of the boat.

  A wave lifted the stern. A big one. In the steel bowels the rush of water as we raced down its face sounded like waterfalls. I braced myself for the heavy swerve the list would cause at the wave’s bottom.

  This one was sharp. We seemed to go over, and over, and I heard the pots grind on the steel deck above my head. There was a c
lang and a crash, and a thud from my heart as I realised what had happened: the pots had moved, the plug had fallen awkwardly at an angle into the hatchway, and the hatch cover had snapped closed, wedging it in.

  I knew it was jammed because no amount of heaving and cursing made the slightest bit of difference: I was well and truly trapped with the ghosts of ten thousand crayfish.

  I realised something else: I was stuck in a freezer which was still working perfectly. Now I was sitting still and growing colder by the second. I was starting to freeze like the crayfish beside me, and they’d have the last laugh: dead, they were worth considerably more than I was. I sat there shivering, as much in fear as from the cold, for not only was my position hopeless, but I am irretrievably claustrophobic.

  At last I heard Ian shouting for me. He was convinced I’d fallen overboard. I shouted back. He couldn’t hear. I shouted louder. Nothing. I screamed. He must have heard something, for he came back. I saw a chink of light as the hatch cover lifted a few centimetres.

  ‘Bruce?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘What are you doing down there?’

  ‘I’m stuck.’

  ‘Doesn’t matter. The boat’s going to sink anyway.’

  His footsteps retreated, then returned. I heard him force the hatch cover back against the pots and lash it there as I should have done. He wrestled with the plug. It didn’t move. ‘It’s stuck,’ he announced, and went back to the wheelhouse. He returned and threw a big screwdriver down the gap.

  ‘You’ll have to get yourself out,’ he said. ‘I’ve got to look after the boat.’

  I began levering at the plug. Nothing happened. Mustn’t panic, I told myself. Oh what the hell, panic! Attacked the thing in a frenzy. Saw it move a fraction, calmed down, worked at that side. It lifted, and so did I, through the hatch without conscious movement, levitation of the kind that meditation never produced. I stood on the deck breathing proper air and taking no notice at all of what was going on in the wheelhouse. Another boat appeared in the murk to escort us. We turned around, very carefully because at one point we’d be side-on to the swell, and limped back to Endeavour Inlet.