To Emily and Minka
Hicks Bay
A Brief History of Meat
There was an old man who lived at the edge of the world. ‘When I look back on my life,’ Lance Roberts said, ‘I’ve done a lot of killing.’
I met him at his monstrous house. Someone had once written that they heard screams and bleats there on still nights. Outside, the long horizontal line of the blue Pacific looked sharp as a knife. The blade flashed in the bright sun. It cut the sky in half.
‘Good on you, boy,’ Lance said with real enthusiasm whenever I did something as incredible as pass the sugar. There were bones in the ashes of his woodstove. He lit the stove with chainsaw shavings and put on the kettle. It was late summer.
Small, nimble, in gumboots and an oily jersey, he had approximately one yellow tooth left in his old bristled head, and his voice croaked from a swamp inside his throat. He was about to turn 85. When I first saw him he was sitting outside at the top of his wooden staircase and something like ten or eleven cats had formed an orderly queue to take food from his mouth. His hands were black. So was his neck. It was moot when he had last changed his clothes or showered, but Lance didn’t live in civilisation. The deserted shoreline, driftwood tipping out of the surf – you could buy a car for an ounce of dope in the East Coast village of Hicks Bay, where Lance lived in a kind of converted loft.
Hicks Bay was a long line of sand beneath high green hills. It had a shop. Across the road there was a bus shelter and a stack of firewood. It had a road. There was a sign in front of a house that read NO TURNING ON THE FUCKING LAWN. Two other words had been painted over. ‘They were a lot worse,’ said the woman who lived next door. There was a two-litre plastic bottle filled with water on top of a fence post at the cemetery for visitors to wash their hands.
A river beat a path through gorse and shingle; Lance’s peculiar home was on the other side of the riverbank. He boiled the kettle and recited terrible verse. ‘The clock of life is wound but once,’ he said. He’d committed the poem to memory. ‘And no man has the power to say just when the hands will stop.’
The old and almost toothless head, the cup of tea and plate of Cameo Cremes – he wept when he talked about how his father had found relief work building a railroad in the Great Depression and secretly opened up a Post Office savings bank account in Lance’s name. ‘I always think of the past,’ he said. ‘As far back as I can remember my mother used to carry me on her back in her shawl. She’d go out looking for pūhā and watercress, and when she’d bend over to pick up this stuff I was that fearful of falling out of the shawl I used to cry me bloody head off.’
And then he said, ‘I was about six when she died. I’m not too sure what happened. I think she ended up with pleurisy or something. She was always looking for mussels in cold bloody weather: that’s probably what done for her. Yeah.’
The warmth of the fire, the gummy voice – he had a high yapping laugh and a big cut on the back of his head. He didn’t know how it’d got there. He searched a drawer for one of his most prized possessions, his knife. It had a wooden handle. The blade was sharp and clean. It looked good in his grip, the way it rested in his palm. I tried to imagine him using it. Later that afternoon, a man in a caravan would give him the opportunity.
I went to Hicks Bay because no one went there. For three years, whenever I could, I went to places no one went to, drawn to their averageness, their nothingness, their banal and exhilarating New Zealandness. I went to the damp Wellington town of Wainuiomata, to the vigilant Otago town of Mosgiel, to Mercer, Greymouth, Collingwood and Tangimoana, to 20 places: small towns, unremarkable suburbs, frozen bases and equatorial outposts, in the country, in the cities, out of the country altogether, wherever there was any sign of New Zealand civilisation.
I chose them at random. I’d look at a map and say out loud, ‘There.’ People said, ‘Where?’ The next question they asked was, ‘Why?’ They especially asked that in the places themselves. They couldn’t believe anyone would find where they lived of any interest.
But I wanted to go and live in just about every one. I adored the qualities of silence, the sunlight on fence posts, the sound of river water on rock. I wanted to belong, to be part of the established order of the town clock and the menswear store, the main street deserted by six p.m., the cat curled up on the windowsill.
I arrived without any exact purpose. I spoke to anyone who had the time. I asked about their everyday life and took note of everyday objects. I craved the normal but I seemed to spend a lot of time visiting people living in abodes as weird as caves. They were sometimes damaged people, often solitary, always resourceful. They hung on in there.
New Zealand did the same. The country was broke. It drank at home and read Dan Brown. Its bum looked big: McDonald’s registered record sales. It filled the supermarket trolley with Home Brand and Pam’s. It bought Christmas presents at the $2 Shop, and put up the same signs over and over: SPACE TO LEASE; EVERYTHING MUST GO; WINZ QUOTES. There was a change of government and nothing changed. Ordinary people living in ordinary homes, bringing up the kids and bringing in the washing, getting on with the uncelebrated business of being New Zealanders in
