Wendy put on the jug, rustled up a plate of crackers and spread. She said that when Graye left on his first tour of Vietnam in 1968, she was left at home in Papakura with their first child, aged six months. Graye talked a bit about Vietnam, the SAS, and his private security work. But the story I liked most was what happened when he and Wendy decided to sail around the world.
They bought a yacht. It was called Supremacy. What an awful name, I said. Yes, they said, but it’s bad luck to change the name of a boat. Their luck could hardly have been worse. They planned to sail to Tahiti, then follow the trade winds north to Alaska. They didn’t get very far. The steering broke. They couldn’t move; the yacht was taking on water. They radioed for help. They were a thousand miles from land, marooned and at serious risk.
That night they saw something amazing: a city, its lights blazing – a container ship. The sea was rough and they were told rescue was impossible until the morning. They woke up when they heard the massive iron sides of the ship bumping against their yacht. A rope ladder was thrown down; they had only minutes to pack their most precious things in a shoulder bag. For some reason Graye took a set of knives, a Christmas present from his daughter. The ship took them to the United States. All hell broke loose at Customs when officials detected the knives. The date was September 12, 2001.
They never saw the yacht again. ‘And now here we are,’ Graye said, ‘two shipwrecked mariners as far away from the sea as possible.’
A year later there they were, Graye and Grahame, standing next to each other and smiling very widely on the front page of The Otago Daily Times beneath the gigantic headline GONE WITH THE WIND. The news was stunning: the Environment Court had upheld their appeal against Meridian’s wind farm and refused Meridian consent to do its worst on the Lammermoor Ranges. Graye wore a jersey. Grahame was dressed in jeans and T-shirt. They were photographed on the side of the road in St Bathans. All you could see was blue sky and tussock grass, ruffled by the wind.
Ohinemutu & Whakarewarewa
How to Cook a Fish Head
The mist parted and there were a couple of drunk people. Heriata Porter was 49 years old with slender legs, a sensual, blurry face, and a man’s hat jammed on her head. Her partner, Nathan Rayner, 36, stood behind her wearing baggy grey track pants and a loose grey top. His head floated like a balloon above her shoulder. They were outside their caravan, which was parked on a scruffy patch of gravel next to a cabin. ‘That’s our bedroom,’ Heriata said. ‘We pay $50 a week to whoever we hire it off of.’
A garden table and chairs were set out in front. A mob of garden gnomes squatted in the dust. The couple walked inside the caravan and resumed drinking from cans of Brenner, a cheap German lager brewed in Papakura. They crushed their empties into a plastic bag hooked over the door handle.
It was getting on to tea time. Dinner: fish heads. Heriata’s recipe: ‘You boil them in fresh water with onions and salt. That’s it.’ But that wasn’t it. They had no electricity – no TV, no lights, no fridge, no stove. They watched the sky, lit candles, kept their beer cold in a chillibin filled with ice water, and cooked outside. Heriata said, ‘We live off steam.’ The pot of fish heads sat in a thin trickle of hot springs that bubbled and steamed out of the earth in one of the most amazing places on Earth.
Rotorua, world-famous for its geysers and its mud pools and its dancing, painted Māori; Rotorua, New Zealand’s battered old shopfront, fuming and humid, rampantly erotic, with public pools for many and private tubs for two. It attracts an estimated three million ‘visitor arrivals’ each year. They come to boil their flesh in hot pools, to marvel at and possibly eat shrimp cocktails. They come from Korea, Australia, Germany, England, Japan, America. Mostly they come from the principality of Auckland.
On this Friday afternoon in January, under a grey drizzling sky, every visitor looked the same: limp and disappointed. Misery is a great leveller. International tourists caught on fast to the distinctive melancholy of a lousy summer’s day in New Zealand.
The wind flew up and tore at the surface of Lake Rotorua, shredding it with its claws. The water looked foul and cold, like a bucket of suds. In the distance Mokoia Island assumed the shape of a fat dark lump. At the lake’s edge, a colony of feral black swans bobbed up and down, screaming and shitting. The wind gained strength, rain began to fall in fat dark lumps; two days later residents would emerge to find unusual carnage and a death toll of about three hundred.
Glyssa Bosworth told The Daily Post she was strolling downtown with her one-year-old daughter when they noticed a dead sparrow. ‘I could smell something absolutely horrific.’ She turned around and saw a great many dead sparrows at the base of a tree. ‘There was a humongous pile of them. It was gross.’
She immediately thought of bats, which had been seen in nearby trees a few years earlier. There had been no recent sightings of bats. Council staff blamed the storm but that didn’t account for the slaughter. Later, the SPCA accused person or persons unknown of poisoning the sparrows with the pest control agent alphachoralose, but the birds had already
