Well, he needed a good airing. The stench and abominable filth inside his house had hit me like a shock. The sitting room wasn’t a sitting room. There was nowhere to sit. It was piled to the ceiling with axles, fenders, tyres. It didn’t make any sense; it was like a house that had been turned inside-out. A scrap metal yard had become the interior of his home. It wasn’t a home, it was a prolonged nervous breakdown.
The kitchen wasn’t a kitchen. It was a pond of grime. Every room was dark. All the curtains were drawn. The coatings of dust were thick as toast. There was the smell of damp and the stink of dog; the two scents added up a stench that was high and very bad. He searched for a photo of himself before he was sick. I stood in the hallway as he dragged a suitcase out from under his bed. The bedroom was, vaguely, a bedroom. It had a bed, a TV, a closet. It was dark and it stank. There was no way I was going to ask to see the toilet.
I felt dizzy, short of breath, but it was not my own health I was concerned about. I imagined the poor hairy devil living in this foul hovel day after day, obsessing about his vitamin D, bitter and monomaniacal, behind closed doors and shut windows and drawn curtains, moving among the junk and the rust. What was it he’d said on the front steps: ‘I’m not living anywhere. I just exist.’ I couldn’t wait to leave. I’d felt afraid – for him, and of him. Also, I began to hate him. He felt something much worse: he was ashamed.
Well, he had every right to feel ashamed about what he’d allowed himself to sink to in his disgusting house. He refused to shoulder the blame. He saw himself as a victim, pushed around, sucked in, left for dead. But the strangest thing about Graeme – for all his physical weakness, his emotional collapse, his insane decor – was that he was completely sane.
He listened. He had a sense of humour. He was generous. He had good manners. He had friends too, if you counted Gillian McFarlane, and he also referred to a ‘mate’ who visited from nearby Ōtautau. And despite his insistence that he was a kind of hermit, there he was, out and about on the streets of quiet pretty Winton, getting some air and exercise, scarfed up as a cold wind blew in from the south. Maybe the town would reach out and save him. Maybe he would reach out and save himself. He looked good for his age, and he had beautiful blue eyes.
Tangimoana
Lament of the Ocean
You couldn’t hear yourself cough in Sanson. All the world and his wife gunned its engines through that dot on the map of the North Island at the intersection of State Highway One and State Highway Three. It was like a delta town, small and quivering on the banks where two great roaring rivers met, but there was nothing watery about it. The dry, biscuity flatlands of the Manawatū Plains stretched out as far as the eye could see. There wasn’t much to see. The only thing that rose above the line of the horizon was exhaust smoke burning from cars and rigs and horse floats about to pass through Sanson, pop. 450.
The motel’s striking colour scheme – white with red trim – gleamed in the bright summer light, and put you in mind of the Red Cross. A caravan park at the back of the property was a retirement home for John Field, 74, a big man with a big red nose and a body as brown as a chestnut. He sat outside his caravan wearing only a small pair of shorts. ‘The ex-missus is in Havelock North and I’ve got two children somewhere in London. So I’m happy.’
He had set up a portable TV on a picnic table and was watching Trackside. ‘I don’t gamble,’ he said, ‘but if I was I’d be making a lot of money.’ How much money? ‘Well, I predicted the winners of a quinella in Wairoa yesterday. Five dollars would’ve got me two hundred and twenty.’ Betting was a luxury. He stuck to the necessities. There was an eighteen-can carton of Double Brown at his feet, and a loaf of bread and a pair of pliers on the picnic table.
At the petrol station, Peter White from Bulls was inside paying for gas. His large beard looked as coarse as horsehair. He’d graffitied his own car. A theme had emerged: POLICE SUCKS. ACC SUCKS. RUTH SUCKS.
The headlines drew a crowd – me and a teenage kid. I observed, ‘A lot of things suck.’ The kid nodded, and said, ‘Apparently.’ I asked, ‘Why d’you think Ruth sucks?’ He said, ‘Be a girlfriend who dumped his arse. He’s all bitter and shit.’
The kid was wrong about the girlfriend and right about the psychological state. Ruth, Peter said, was Ruth Dyson, a former ACC minister. It was under her watch that the department had wronged him.
Peter ranted about his ancient grievances for a while and then drove away. Everyone drove away at Sanson. That was the point of the place. The few who remained gathered after dark at the Sanson Club, a private bar set up in a classroom of the former primary school. John at the caravan park claimed the school closed down because it was beneath the flight path of the nearby Ōhakea air base.
Sanson’s theme was noise. Automobile traffic, air traffic – such volume for a dot on the map. It inspired a quest for peace and quiet. Half an hour away, out west, was the peace and quiet of beach settlement Tangimoana.
The road to Tangimoana led past low fields of crops. It led past Ōhakea, where a black RNZAF helicopter fluttered and flapped like a lovely black moth, and indulged in a lengthy exercise that had something
