He had lived in a comfortable pensioner flat for ten years. ‘I’d have stayed another ten if I’d had my way. I was happy as Larry. I had TV, a stove.’ Then a woman from South Africa bought the flats and evicted him. It had something to do with his drinking. The room in the Lakeside was small and cheap. ‘I sit up there and read cowboy yarns,’ he said.
The shabby pub left to rot, the weak sunlight, the two tough bastards probably on more than dope – I felt nostalgic for Ata and Nathan’s snug caravan, their friendly company, their bond. ‘Together,’ sang Leo Sayer. ‘They’re gonna make it together.’
‘I was brought up in Catholic schools,’ Ata said. ‘My mother told me I was going to be a nun. I was like, “None at all.” They made us pray so hard it wasn’t funny.’
Nathan said, ‘I go up to St Faith’s sometimes.’
Ata said, ‘I haven’t been to church for years.’
‘I go up and have a listen, eh,’ Nathan said, staring at the floor.
I asked Ata whether she had been good at school. ‘Nah. The only class I liked was typing.’ Was she fast? ‘Oh, yes, tweet, tweet… Everyone calls me Tweety Bird.’ Tweety Bird’s hands were covered in faded tattoos. She said, devastatingly, ‘I knew I wasn’t going nowhere right from day one.’
She said she had two children. ‘The eldest is 34 but I don’t know him. He got taken away from me. The father took him away ’cos I was sixteen when I had him. He was thirty-one. He kidnapped my baby, actually. I say to the family, “Tell him to come home. Mummy’s waiting.”’
No one said anything for a while. I thought about the stack of ancient paperbacks at my motel, where I’d flipped open Fenwick Houses by Catherine Cookson and read: ‘I was just sixteen when I realised that you don’t go to hell because you sin but because you love.’
The love story was in the room. The older woman, the younger man: she was wise to the ways of the world; he seemed confused, hesitant. They were gentle with each other, protective, tender, patient. The long hours in the caravan with their cans of Brenner… They had been together ten years.
‘I was boarding with his mum,’ Ata said. She brought out a plastic folder that contained news clippings. She had been photographed for a story about smoking. He had been photographed talking to a police officer about his mother’s death – the cops had viewed the death suspiciously but concluded the poor woman had just fallen over and cracked her head.
Ata continued, ‘His mum used to go with one of my cousins. So yeah, I’m boarding there and next minute he rocks in and I’m like, “Hey, he’s got a job! Fuck, he’s making good money! He can fucking keep me going!” Hah, hah, hah!’ Her raucous laugh tailed off and she said, ‘No, it wasn’t like that. I just fell in love with him.’
Nathan stared at the floor. He was thinking about his job as a scrub-cutter. ‘I just got laid off this year actually.’ And then: ‘No, it was last year I got laid off.’ I asked about employment. He said, ‘There’s no jobs around Rotorua. The mills and that, they’ve all laid people off.’ I asked about his dealings with welfare offices. He said WINZ made him attend ‘senimars’. They weren’t much help.
While Ata wrote and read phone texts about the house she was caregiving, Nathan held up his beer can and said, ‘Up to me, I can stop just like that, eh. I just choose to carry on. But I can give up drink if I want to, if I had to. But she won’t stop.’ He said it without rancour or judgement, just as a hard little fact.
Ata held up her beer can and said everyone called their caravan the ‘canavan’. Who was everyone? The friends who liked to visit and, as she put it, ‘rock’. Then: ‘But any men try to rock here, I stand in my doorway. That means they can’t come in. ’Cos they think they can come here and drink our beer and smoke our smokes.’
‘And spot on the stove,’ Nathan said.
‘There is no spotting in here, eh,’ said Ata. ‘I don’t mind people having a joint, but hash oil – nah. It stinks.’
So all the friends who came to rock were women? ‘Yeah,’ said Nathan. ‘Bee-atches.’
‘They’re not bee-atches,’ said Ata.
‘I go next door when they come over,’ said Nathan. ‘Just sit in there by myself.’
‘Nobody’s around me, I’m bored,’ said Ata. ‘I’m a crowd person.’
‘I’m a loner,’ said Nathan. ‘I haven’t got any friends.’
‘Hello!’ said Ata.
‘I haven’t got any mates.’
What about his scrub-cutting crew? ‘Nah, ’cos they’re all recovering alcoholics,’ he said.
Ata received another text and said to him, ‘Do we want to go to Di’s?’
‘Who’s that?’ he asked, nodding at her phone.
‘Auntie Eru,’ she said. ‘Yay or nay?’
‘Nah.’
‘Can I?’
‘Yeah.’
She got up to leave and put on the man’s hat. Nathan got up too. He said he’d go for a walk and when he got back he’d either sit in the caravan by himself or in the cabin by himself. I waved as he walked off. His grey tracksuit was the same shade as the lake and the sky.
When night fell, Rotorua’s main drag, Fenton Street, glowed from one end to the other with the neon force of its motels. The lollipop reds, emerald greens, golden yellows – the names made for happy reading. La Mirage. Bel Aire. Golden Glow. Emerald. Geneva. Havana. Baden. Rob Roy. Four Canoes. There were so many. They were like TV shows, little extravaganzas, points of light shining and twinkling in the dark, with their heated pools in private
