The unimaginable numbers, streaming in from the four-lane expressway, flicking cigarette butts in the car park, yawning in the forecourt, busting for a piddle inside the service centre mall on the banks of the slow, broad Waikato River. There were five tenants: McDonald’s; an ice-cream parlour; a food court with a choice of Country Chicken or Indian curry; an Esquires Coffee House next to a Pokeno Bacon Café. For children, entertainment options were limited to a small carousel with three luridly painted ponies sniffing each other’s bottoms, and another coin-operated ride with a notice in Chinese above a notice with an incredible English translation: DON’T SPLIT AND FOR PROFESSIONAL ONLY.
Inside the mall, filling their faces, were the tourists, the families, the lovers, the hungry and muttering teenage hordes. Also, the truck drivers and the duck shooters, and the drag racers on their way to the nearby tracks at Meremere and Hampton Downs. Everyone was on their way to somewhere else: like all departure lounges, the service centre could be anywhere. It felt like nowhere.
Even stranger, the town was neither here nor there: it had been pushed aside when the State Highway One bypass was built in 1992. The new expressway separated the houses from the river. The shops closed down and up went the service centre, like some sort of squat, brightly lit robot. It became the central fact of Mercer’s existence, reducing the rest of the town to a bystander. Does the centre belong to Mercer, or does Mercer belong to the centre?
North lie Pukekohe and the Bombay Hills, the fresh air and open countryside of the Franklin district, with winter crops in the long brown fields and signs advertising a possum shoot. South is the Waikato, potent with the forces of Taupiri Mountain and Tūrangawaewae Marae. In between, in the middle of this grassy and riverine nowhere, is cramped, damp Mercer, dissected and disassembled by a motorway. It was always a transport hub: it used to be a shipping town, a railway town. But it also used to be a town.
By the river, where welcome swallows skimmed the water’s surface and goldfinches rustled in the tops of willows, the rugby clubrooms were abandoned, the H of the rugby posts bent out of the shape. At the Mercer Reserve, steps led to a flagpole draped in thick moss. On a side street in the shadow of the service centre was a compelling and eccentric war memorial, a statue of a First World War soldier on top of a gun turret rescued from British gunship HMS Pioneer, which had blasted at Māori in the land wars.
Opposite the memorial was something alive and thriving: the famous Mercer Cheese Shop, recognised in over 30 national awards as producing New Zealand’s best cheese. Dutch cheesemaker Albert Alferink opened the shop in 1982. It used to be the butcher store. It’s now a destination for gourmets. Life, too, was good on the river. Just before dusk on Friday afternoon, three teams of rowers emerged from the rowing club on the western side of the bank and set off towards the sunset. They followed the tide, flowing north.
After dark, life was played out in great high spirits at the Last Post Tavern, a small friendly bar with room for a pool table and a wood burner. The jukebox played The Drifters and Bruce Springsteen very loudly. There were about a dozen drinkers in on a Friday night. Friday night is always a happy ending to the working week – or, for that matter, the non-working week. I got drinking with a bunch of unemployed men who drove in from nearby Meremere. I went to Meremere the next day. It had a dairy surrounded by barbed wire, and an abandoned dementia unit, painted turquoise. On the balance of things, I preferred Mercer.
I took my glass out on to the Last Post’s smoking deck. Dennis Dunbar lit up. His hair had turned white and his face bright pink. He said he had come to Mercer twelve years earlier. He’d been living in Pukekohe, on a lifestyle block he’d agreed to buy from a friend. The friend’s marriage broke up and the man’s lawyer kept phoning to demand he settle the deal. The lawyer was a woman. ‘I told her, “Listen. I only deal with men.” She had a right go at me. I thought, fuck this. I’m off.’ I saw a house for sale in Mercer. Drove up and couldn’t see a fucking thing, the mist was so thick, but it had a two-car garage, big enough for my Indie racing car, and I thought, right. The day I moved in the sun was shining and I could see straight out to the Coromandel ranges, the Waikato Heads and Mount Pirongia. No, true! Best views in New Zealand! And what I always remember is I looked over and saw this hawk. It fucking winked at me. Winked, the bugger. I could not believe it. I was set.’
Hawks circled, and possibly winked, over Mercer all that wet Friday. On Sunday, the place surrendered to something else Dennis had mentioned. Amazing white Waikato fog rolled down the river, sat low on the swamps, and rubbed up against pine trees in the hills. It disappeared at the touch of rain, waited until the rain cleared, and then rolled back in. Strange to think of it descending through the ages, before the Māori and then after Mercer was settled, the town named after Captain Henry Mercer, shot through the head and killed at the battle of Rangiriri in 1863, descending when the railway line from Auckland reached Mercer in 1875, and in the winter of 1970, when Harvey and Jeanette Crewe were murdered.
Mist descended on
