I woke at dawn to the sound of helicopters. I've never liked that sound. If I'm outside and one flies over I always instinctively duck. Too many war movies, maybe … this crazy day though, the noise was so insistent and continuous I think I almost got used to it.
Because I was already committed to the search there was no time-occupying punishment available to my parents for me having been in the pub, so they were still ignoring me instead. This suited me down to the ground. I'd already decided I couldn't be bothered with the hassle. If they had spoken I was planning not to reply anyway. I had my reasons for what I'd done, and if they weren't prepared to listen to my side of the story why should I listen to theirs? I left without having breakfast.
I had a vague, half-crazy plan to find the woman and have it out with her. Just get the whole story straight. I tried to think of where she might be, but of course there were only guesses. I walked up and down the main street a few times, had a good look round the motorcamp. I even sussed out the motels. I knew in my heart it was useless. For a start it was early in the morning and she was probably still in bed … I tried to put out of my mind the sick feeling that the older guy might be with her.
My father was wrong about the marijuana. Helicopters flew in and out all day from a clearing behind the Memorial Hall in a kind of bizarre shuttle service, each time returning with more dope to add to the pile. They carried it in big nets; you could see large hunks of it falling out as they flew in. All over the place there were bits of marijuana lying about on the ground, kids sprinting around trying to pick it all up.
The main street was lined with buses, caravans, police cars, army trucks and mobile television units. Soldiers were standing round in small groups, eating. Everywhere you looked there were empty bottles and cans and the remains of takeaways; paper bags rolled lazily down the street. At one point a reporter jumped out from behind a tree and asked me for an interview, but out of the distant mists of time I remembered my promise to Robert and refused. Besides, I didn't want to waste the time. I needed to find the woman. Panic and exhilaration swept through me as it occurred to me I'd never before been this much in love. To think that so far only four words had passed between us. Soon, soon. Soon there would be more. Over and over I played through the possible conversations, fine-tuned them a little more each time.
I met Matt. He was looking for Julie.
Jesus, Alan, he said. I wish you'd never introduced her to that cop. She didn't come home last night. If Mum finds out she'll kill her.
Honestly? I kicked the ground. How come women went for stupid fuckwits like Robert while normal people like me couldn't get anywhere? What was wrong with the world?
I've got some dope, said Matt. He pulled a bit out from his sock. In case I get searched, he explained. Do you want some?
I hesitated. Did I really want this on top of everything else? But what the hell did it matter? Maybe it would take my mind off the woman for a while. Yeah, okay, I said. Sure.
We bought papers and matches at a dairy on the way and went down to the spa. There was a hole in the fence on the far side known to every sexually active teenager in Hope Springs; even in its rundown state the place remained witness to rites of passage. We sat on the edge of an empty swimming pool while Matt rolled up. It was a relief to go somewhere without people.
There were plants growing up through cracks in the bottom of the pool and the sides were covered in graffiti, mainly obscenities and promises of love; WHITE LIES in fluorescent pink at the deep end. I tried to imagine people swimming in it.
As we smoked the joint I felt all the worries slowly lifting from my shoulders. I felt pleasant and light, more relaxed than I'd been in months. I began to think about the shape of the swimming pool: the deep end, the shallow end. The deep end. The shallow end. I thought of Jasmine Harvey sitting cross-legged on the pool floor, me diving in to save her before I realised it was empty. Maybe it was really Jasmine I was in love with. I tried to think of her face.
Matt told me the army and some volunteers had organised a touch rugby tournament.
Aren't they out searching?
I think it's a rest day, he said. The police are tied up with the dope. I realised I'd largely lost track of what was going on with the search. Too many other things had been happening, and I hadn't seen Gary or Robert for a couple of days. Gary. It had seemed almost too absurd for belief that he might actually have fancied me, even though that was how it had looked. Now, wasted, it seemed obvious.
Shall we go watch some of the touch? said Matt.
We wandered slowly to the rugby ground and stayed for a couple of games. The first one ended in a nil-all draw, the second in a fight. It all looked pretty physical. One guy on the sideline had a gaping cut above his eye. Two men next to us were arguing about the idea of the All Blacks playing at Gallipoli. One thought this would be the ultimate possible national symbol. They could change ends at half time, too, he laughed. That's one thing sport has over war.
His friend shook his head. You don't seem to understand. This is the All Blacks you're talking about. No way would they want to associate with a bunch of losers like those Anzacs.
The marijuana was wearing off. I could feel myself being drawn once more into the simple world of my TV3 reporter: the conversations we were yet to have, the love we were yet to explore; the hollow pain in my gut that told me none of it was true.
Somehow we heard they were going to burn the pile of dope. We got there just as they were pouring petrol on it. There were already a lot of people, even kids up trees; an excited, expectant air. A man behind me had a crate of home-brew he was sharing around, complete with plastic jug and glasses. He gave one to Matt and me to share. A friend of his seemed to know quite a bit about who exactly had been busted and repeatedly reeled off a list. A couple had even been caught red-handed at their plots. Everyone was making jokes about getting out of it on the smoke from the fire. A rumour came past that a whole search party had gone missing and they were sending out another to look for them in the morning.
By the time they lit the fire the crowd had grown huge. Many of them were soldiers. There was a sense of pulsing, as if we were all one giant heart. A couple of drunk guys kept running in towards the fire with their arms out like aeroplanes and swooping away at the last moment. A few bottles sailed over my head from behind and into the fire. Everyone cheered.
I felt hot and faint, frightened I would be crushed. I remembered I hadn't eaten all day. I wanted to lie down, sleep, my head on the knee of my beloved. Down at the spa, maybe: me and her instead of Matt. After I'd rested myself back to strength we could screw on the floor of the pool: slowly, gently.
I discovered I'd become separated from Matt. The crush imposed a random, gradual motion on everyone; the man with the beer had also disappeared. The fire was getting so hot people at the front were trying to force their way back, packing those of us in the middle ever more tightly. It took all my strength just to stay standing. The smell of the burning dope was overwhelming, the noise of the crowd a single cacophonous bellow. Out of the corner of my eye I saw a boy fall from a tree.
Beyond this it gets vague and confused, unreal. Someone must have come from the Railway with news of the riot. You can imagine the message rippling away through the crowd, the people it reaches confused, torn between attractions. A few starting to move slowly off, wanting to find out what's happening at the Railway but unwilling to leave, still entranced by the fire. Others, not fully committed either, joining them. As the news spreads, though, more men, less reluctant, now jogging to catch up, and then more still, running now, till the crowd is like an unravelling jersey, an ever-lengthening line of men running off towards the Railway, most of them not even sure why.
Was I in that running line? I'm uncertain. Somewhere, as I'd always known was inevitable, I came across my beloved by the side of the road, leaning over a body, presumably the older man.
He's okay, she was saying. He's okay. She looked up at me. I felt her eyes in mine. I
s this chair taken?
Sirens. Shouting. Her frightened eyes. Her bare shoulders. Her breasts. Her belly.
Her desperate longing for me.
So there you have it. I don't know that I need to add anything, really, other than to maybe tell you what happened to Dean Kidd and Heidi Johannes—though I suspect you'll have that one covered. So maybe not.
One of the most interesting things for me was how it all worked out numerically. I think of what Kidd might have got if anything apart from actually escaping had stuck—ten years? fifteen?—and add up all the jail sentences of everyone busted and done for the riot and of course it's many times that. Some interpreted that as a success. The Minister thought so.
As for Tumanako, well, you wouldn't recognise the place now. It's much smaller, for a start; quieter. Most of the residents have left and far fewer come for their holidays now. The metal trout is long gone. There aren't really that many empty buildings; generally they seem to knock them over, slowly removing the evidence of a town ever being there in the first place. The paddocks advance. Our cottage is still there, but the houses on either side are gone. Miss Taylor's, gone.
If you're passing through and hungry the takeaway bar in the main street is still going—you can watch the kids try and out-order each other or wipe out invading hordes from other galaxies—though if you're after something a bit more seemly there's a good Indian place a few doors up; God knows how they make it pay. One night recently I went and the air was full of some evil spice, as if someone out the back had dropped a whole sack of it. Everyone in the place was coughing, even the staff. Over about ten minutes, though, the irritation declined and in the end it was just a vague, almost sweet odour, like incense.
There's the old spa to visit, of course. A spot of fishing? Not like the heydays, but where isn't worth a spin? The roadworks, too, though if you come in from the north you're not likely to miss them. Apparently they're going to make it into the Guinness Book of Records for being the longest ever continuously running roadworks anywhere in the world. For some years now they've actually been deliberately maintaining them simply to get the record. Now, the word is, they intend to keep it.
As for somewhere to stay, well, there's the motorcamp and, believe it or not, a choice of motels. There's Cedar Lodge by the lake, the older View Inn near the spa. It actually has its own little spa, but of course that's no longer functional. My personal choice is the View Inn, but to be honest neither place does very good business. They both struggle on, testimony to the spirit of competition. Angus, the manager here, he's always telling me things are looking up.
There's a knock at the door: my breakfast. I like the miniature cornflakes, the tiny packets of sugar. As a child I collected the little one-slice parcels of butter and jam; vegemite was particularly prized. Cass got into it too, the bitch. Not that we often stayed in motels.
Hey, here we are. There we were. There we'll be. My knife crushes the toast. The TV is on: cartoons. One of the wardrobe doors is open; empty coathangers line up like a row of question marks. Last night I was reading the bible. It's still open by the side of the bed. I'm a little bit sad, but it's nothing I won't get over. In the end you get over everything.
from BLUFF
If you're driving the length of Highway 1 from north to south, Bluff is the final stop. Ignorant people sometimes assume that Invercargill—30 or so k to the north—must in fact be the end of the main highway, that Invercargill to Bluff could only be worth a 77, a 96a, some other belittling large number. Geoff Murphy's Goodbye Pork Pie makes this exact mistake. The little yellow mini starts in Kaitaia and improbably overcomes a series of mainly official hazards in travelling the length of both islands before finally coming to rest, doorless, in Invercargill. A pedant might argue that the pretensions of myth implied in its thousand-mile journey from one end of Highway 1 to the other are perhaps to a degree undermined by the omission of those last 30 k, something like that Greek guy running from Marathon collapsing dead still a couple of hundred metres out from the city walls, his big news undelivered … either way, I wouldn't like to think what they'd put in his burger if Geoff Murphy ever actually showed his face in Bluff. No one likes being left off the map.
Highway 1 itself ends one last corner beyond the town, petering tamely into a carpark. There are tearooms, a scenic walk. On a clear day you can just make out Stewart Island. Parka-clad tourists briefly leave their cars to photograph each other beside the multiple signpost pointing the way, with mileage, to Antarctica, the Equator, New York.
In legend at least, Bluff is the southernmost point of all the South Island, the coldest, windiest, most miserable backwater there is, hub of a thousand jokes. There's probably only a thousand people actually live in the place—that's a joke each. You get it most of all when people first find out that's where you're from. Does your piss really freeze before hitting the water? Are you really all related? It's like having an unusual name. After a while they forget.
Bluff's a port town, full of people with grand fishing stories, famous for the oysters which are its real contribution to the census. The bulk of it sits on a north-facing hill—actually quite protected from the southerly—looking out over the smelter at Tiwai Point on the other side of the harbour. By day you can only see indistinct grey and black lines, like a half-done pencil sketch; by night, with the coloured lights, it's one of the prettiest sights you could imagine. For some reason real estate agents have been slow to cash in on this one big plus, and property values have suffered.
A bus pulls into the carpark. It has double rear wheels and dark parallelogram windows hiding the passengers from view. Maybe there aren't any. It noses a slow U-turn, seems uncertain where to stop.
All long thin countries have these end-to-end quests. In Chile a person who has visited both north and south extremes inside the same calendar month is said to be blessed for fourteen years. In Japan there's the annual Hokkaido—Kyushu bicycle race, while Italian students run their crucifix relay from the Alps to the tip of the country's toe every Easter.
In New Zealand a singer rides a horse the whole way to raise money for Drug Education. An old woman leads a march for land. A guy in a Ford Laser proves its superior suspension driving the entire distance with an egg balanced on the dashboard. At Cape Reinga he smashes it live on camera to prove it wasn't hard-boiled. And of course there's this bus, shuddering finally to a halt between two large puddles fresh from a lunchtime shower.
A boat chugs into view, heading back to the harbour with a catch. A cat sleeps on the tearoom steps. Inside they're making sandwiches in a race against time.
Think of it as an advertisement. Think of it as a prayer. At the very least a dedication … so many people love you: I see them on this bus. One by one, blinking, they step down to the asphalt.
KITCHEN WHIZZ
Now if you've been counting, you'll know there's just the one glass left. I'm washing it now, with special care. It's a special glass. A solid specimen, the winner. Jane is beside me, waiting to dry it.
We got the set when we told everyone we were thinking of getting engaged. In a salivatory moment of joy my parents came up with a special set of cutlery. Jane's came up with the glasses. Apparently they were going to get us a kitchen whizz, but cash was tight.
Parents love it when their children get engaged. It means they may soon be able to recline in the pleasure of being grandparents. Being a grandparent is far more satisfactory than being a parent. When you're a parent, both your own parents and your children are against you. When you're a grandparent, your parents are suddenly old or dead, and your children have moved into the firing line. So it's in your interest—as a parent—to hurry the process along. Hence the quick rewards for any promising signs, like the possibility of engagement.
It's not the desire for sex that keeps our species going. It's the desire to be a grandparent.
The cutlery was a better idea. We've still got all of that—except the two knives we used for hash which I hid too well—I'm s
ure they'll turn up eventually. The glasses were obviously bought in a hurry, probably on special. They haven't survived well.
Still, there's this one left, a battler. I hold it up to the light. Suds float down its sides onto my hand. It winks in the sun.
I throw it lightly into the air. It somersaults once, lands easily in my palm. It winks again, keen for a bit of play.
I throw it higher so it nearly touches the ceiling. This time it spins three or four times before returning to me, and I throw it straight up again, and again, and once more after that.
What are you doing? says Jane. Stop it!
Too late for that. I arch right back and put the glass on my forehead, walk backwards around the kitchen. Too insipid, so I do the same again, only this time with the glass on my nose. After a few seconds it starts to quiver and topple, but that's no problem for me.
It rolls back over my head, but I'm up in a flash, kicking my left foot back so the shoe sole is facing upwards. The glass lands perfectly, right way up, as if I'm about to serve someone with my foot.
Here you are sir. Here's the dishwater you ordered.
Thank you. Tell me, garçon, where are the toilets?
Just down the corridor, sir, second on your left. The first is my bedroom.
How interesting. Thank you garçon. That will be all.
Certainly sir.
I flick the glass back up with a quick upward jab of my foot and it sails high into the air, just nudging the light so the bulb starts swinging in a merry little circle.
Just what the hell are you doing? says Jane again in a bored voice, leaning against the bench. Out of the corner of my eye I can see a small smile on her face.
As the glass falls back to me, I take an unwashed fish slice and put it in my mouth. The glass lands upside down on the blade, and I flick it up again, and then again after that. It skips through the swinging light bulb's wire.
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