Sunday night in Tangimoana, and an AC/DC fan suddenly inspired by a reality TV show to grab some cables from his garage and use them to hogtie a kid squealing on the lawn.
‘And then,’ he continued, ‘the police turn up. I thought they were gonna say, “Rightio, that’s all good. You can go home now and we’ll contact you if we need to.” But no, suddenly we’re the bad guys.’
There was something missing in his narrative, a crucial detail unaccounted for. ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘that when you raced home to get the cable ties, you were wearing slippers. Why was that?’
‘I normally wear slippers to the club,’ he said.
Nikita’s 21st birthday party went off. There were drunk, affectionate speeches. I talked to an astronomer wearing a sombrero. Michael McKay wore what appeared to be a scarf but was actually an ingenious beer-holder – there were pouches at either end. Kieran was legless, his heart near bursting with how proud he was of Nikita. Nikita was there with her very cute child.
I talked to a guy who said his licence plate read GDNYM8. I asked him to translate. ‘Good on ya, mate.’ He’d got it in honour of the line on the Speights’ TV commercial. Marcus was there. Tracy wasn’t. The previous night at the boating club she had got tanked on gin and screamed at him, ‘Go back to your fat teenage whore!’ She fled and he ran after her, his work boots crunching on the gravel. ‘Let her go,’ voices shouted from the bar.
Grant McDowall was there. I’d met him earlier when he was in his backyard, hosing down his boat. He’d just come back from fishing and had three enormous albacore tuna in a white bucket. He was with his son, Aaron, sixteen, who has Down Syndrome. ‘Only his second time out at sea but he was good as gold, eh Aaron?’ Aaron gave a thumbs-up.
We went inside. ‘I’ll just put some music on for the boy. He loves Irish music, Scottish music. Drinking songs.’ Aaron sat back, listened, and drank Diet Coke.
Grant worked for the fire service. He’d been living in Palmerston North but his marriage had broken up. ‘There wasn’t anyone else. We just got sick of pissing each other off. We parted on good terms. I was at a bit of loss as to where to go and I thought, where have I gone where I was happy? I’d always liked fishing in Tangimoana so I looked for a house here under $100,000. That was all I could afford. I found this for $82,000. The grass was up to your neck but no worries.’
He’d built the shed with Kieran, Marcus and Tracy. ‘The skills among us are pretty awesome,’ he said. ‘Marcus is a top, top engineer. Kieran would have to be one of the most sought-after welders in the whole of the Manawatū. And Tracy – well, it was really Tracy who built that shed. It was all her that did it. Her idea, her know-how.’
I mentioned that a woman at the boating club had told me Tangimoana was full of lonely people – ex-husbands, ex-wives, widows. ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ Grant said, and off the top of his head he named five people who lived by themselves. Then he described the weather. ‘We get horrific westerly storms, very strong winds.’
He said it was time he made Aaron his lunch. ‘He loves his sausages. He’s always hounding me to put them on for him, eh Aaron? You all right there, mate?’ Aaron looked over at his dad and gave a thumbs-up.
Hell was over the fence. Grant lived next door to Willie Seabrook, 54. There was a face lurking somewhere behind Willie’s beard, and a human being floating somewhere within the 30 litres of beer he said he drank on average every week. His house stank of damp and dog. The furniture was chewed down to the slats. There were old stuffed toys inside a glass cabinet. ‘My youngest has some kind of brain disorder. I don’t know what they fuckin’ call it – motor neuron or something. His skull never grew. He’s normal, he just can’t read or write.’
There was a massive hole in the ceiling: I smelled a rat. There were cobwebs and stains decorating the wallpaper, a hot-water bottle on the floor. He was married once. ‘The old girl left me.’
Every time I came back to Tangimoana I picked up a whiff of the boozy fug drifting from Willie’s dog-eaten, rat-nibbled, bachelor shack. It followed me down the street on Saturday afternoon, when a tough bastard with wraparound dark glasses, a goatee and a shaved head swung his hips along the pavement, his pit-bull terrier straining at the leash and squinting its pink heartless eyes.
At the boating club on Sunday afternoon, there were drinkers arguably less damaged than Willie. Conversation turned to a sixteen-year-old girl in town. ‘Rooted her,’ lied an elderly man with a face so red with alcohol it was nearly black. ‘Didja? Good on yer, boy,’ said the fire chief.
No one said anything for a while. Elbows bent back glasses. A woman said, ‘I used to laugh so much here that it hurt. Not like that anymore.’ The fire chief said, ‘I’m thinking of doing something about that.’ He refused to comment any further. He looked as though he’d last made someone laugh in about 1712.
A jeep came to a squealing halt in the car park. The driver, a woman with flared nostrils, slammed the door shut and bounded through a cloud of dust. She talked very fast; her swollen eyeballs were as big as her head; she ground her teeth and bounded to the bar for a drink. The elderly man swayed on his heels and said, ‘Rooted her.’ The fire chief said, ‘Didja? Good on yer, boy.’
Earlier that day I had been invited in for a cup of tea by a man who had just finished mowing his front
