I said, ‘Told you they’d come back when you were feeling better.’ He looked stunned. It was the wrong answer. ‘No,’ he said. ‘They should have got me some medical help.’
He returned to his story. They – O’Connor and his people – took advantage of a sick man. He sold up. Christine left. ‘Someone said, “You can get a house in Nightcaps for $10,000.” I was so sick I didn’t even think what the hell I’d do when I got there. I just thought, I can afford that.’
Nightcaps is a small coal-mining town near Winton. The real estate salesman, he said, lied to him. ‘I got sucked in. Again.’ Life was dreadful there. He moved to Winton. ‘But I’m not living anywhere,’ he said. ‘I just exist.’
That was the long and the short of it. ‘Imagine how angry I am. I should never have sold in Motueka. I can’t get over losing Christine and losing my property. Look where I am now!’ He waved a hand at the house. It was a dump, a shabby wooden box – if it looked haunted, then Graeme was its ghost. The signs, he said, were ‘my way of poking something back at them’. Why had he also targeted National MP Phil Heatley? ‘Oh well,’ he said. ‘They’re all crooks.’ As for the car wrecks, he used to work as a panel beater and had bought the wrecks with the intention of fixing them up and selling them. ‘But that all turned to custard. My health just got worse.’
In October 2008, though, he discovered the true cause. ‘I was suffering from vitamin D deficiency. I’ve probably had it all my life. If the soil in the garden’s no good, your plant won’t be any good. I was a sick plant. I’ve been taking pills since finding out, and I’m just about back on track. Two weeks ago I started feeling really good.’
Thank god. He frankly admitted he thought of his situation as hopeless – 60 years old, apparently friendless, no prospect of work – but on the plus side his health was returning. He said he’d started taking long walks. I thought, maybe things aren’t so bad for Graeme. But then he invited me inside the house.
The air was fresh and clean at the farm of Todd and Fleur Anderson. The couple ran sheep and cows. Todd’s passion was genetics. ‘I just love breeding animals,’ he said. He had broken the world record three times, paying $13,200, then $15,500, then $16,000 for Southdown rams. He always bought his rams from Chris Medlicott, a legendary stud breeder in Waimate, Canterbury.
Chris and his wife Shelley were visiting the Andersons. Freshly picked roses stood in a vase. The house was tasteful and immaculate, despite the presence of Todd and Fleur’s three young kids. Todd came from Invercargill; Fleur had worked in human relations at TVNZ and Sky City in Auckland. ‘We love Winton,’ she said. She had taken her eldest and youngest children to the town’s maternity centre for five nights of antenatal care. ‘It’s beautiful there. Just beautiful.’ Todd spoke fluently about farming – ‘protein production, you can call it. That’s exactly what it is really’ – but I was dying for him to show me his latest acquisition, a Southdown ram he had bought from Chris Medlicott for $13,000 at the Canterbury A&P Association’s Stud Ram and Ewe Fair in January.
The ram was in a pen with six ewes. Todd grabbed hold of him. ‘He’s just all power,’ he said. ‘Sheer power. He’s exceptionally balanced. Good top line; it flows all the way to the shoulders. He doesn’t look very big. That’s the secret to a good Southdown: they don’t look big, but they weigh… I saw him as a lamb. He was an excellent lamb. All power, early maturing.’
Todd claimed, ‘We’ve had vegetarians eat Southdown meat.’ Well, it was entirely permissible to stare at the ram’s compact, well-muscled hindquarters and imagine the delicious rib-eye cuts he would father. He had a name: Tasvic 308, an abbreviation of Tasmania and Victoria. Friends of Chris Medlicott’s father who lived in those places had given Chris his first Southdown ewe when he was fifteen, a thank-you for his family’s hospitality. The gift led to his Southdown stud farm in the Hook district near Waimate.
In 2005, when he sold Todd Anderson a ram for $16,000 – still the world record – he said in an interview with The Press, ‘I want to breed one better than him. … You always have to aim high. I have yet to breed the perfect sheep.’ And now perhaps he had. I asked Todd which was his best-ever Southdown ram. He grabbed hold of Tasvic 308 again and said, ‘I think this is it. This is the most excited I’ve been in a long time.’
His excitement was contagious. It was a genuinely thrilling experience to witness sheepy perfection in the flesh, but after I left and came back to town to gnaw on a Winton Stop Over, I ran into Graeme Ingils. The joy I’d felt drained away. Every time I saw Graeme, I was reminded of his home and contents.
He had taken to walking, a lot, several times a day. I ran into him every time I returned to my motel. His perambulations were no doubt just something to do, but also for the exhilaration of feeling alive and well. It was the most exercise he’d taken
