He was raving. ‘They’re baddies. Druggies. Always boozing up and drugging up. Kieran used to be quite a nice guy until he got tangled up with the Thomsens. Tracy’s a good worker, I’ll give her that. It’s the best thing about her. But nah.’ He screwed up his face. ‘She’s bad news.’
He bagged the fire chief. I didn’t mind that. I did mind when he bagged a friend of Kieran’s whom I’d met at the twenty-first. He was a decent gentle guy who’d suffered a terrible accident working at the Port of Tauranga. He got whacked with a crane, had sixteen screws put in his back and now couldn’t have children. He was married. He and his wife were saving to pay for in vitro fertilisation. ‘I just want a family and to be able to work.’ Could he work? ‘I can do maybe four hours a day before the pain makes it unbearable and I gotta lie down.’
He wasn’t exactly getting a lot of sympathy from the man who made me a very weak cup of tea – he skimped on the tea leaves and poured less than a teaspoon of milk. He said, ‘I know who you should talk to.’ He made a phone call. I was given an address. I walked around the corner in the peace and quiet of a weekend afternoon in Tangimoana and was met by a woman lurking at her front gate. She looked right, she looked left, and then said, ‘Okay. You can come in.’
We sat in the backyard by a hedge, but first she checked with her husband that their neighbours were away. He said they were. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We can talk here.’ But, just in case, she lowered her voice, and sometimes she whispered, and now and then she hissed.
While she talked about how much she loathed Tracy Thomsen, and described how Tracy had, apparently, managed to profoundly damage Tangimoana, I started thinking about the US spy station. I had visited it earlier that day. The woman hissed, ‘She’s nearly ruined this town but most people won’t speak out because they know what’d happen.’ What’d happen? ‘A brick in the window. Or there was one lady – they pumped raw sewage on to her paddock.’
Just before Tangimoana there was a turn-off that led to the spy station. The station was a modest office compound, white, only one level, surrounded by barbed wire and a sign that read DEFENCE AREA. NO ADMISSION EXCEPT ON BUSINESSES. It didn’t advise that trespassers would merely be prosecuted; they would be DETAINED AND SEARCHED.
‘We don’t want her here,’ my hostess said, as her husband ferried out two glasses of iced water. ‘She’s overstayed her welcome.’ Gordon McDowall, the fireman from Palmerston North, had told me Tracy had ‘done shitloads for the community’. He’d mentioned her volunteer work on the reserve committee. But my hostess said, ‘She stood over people to get on to the reserve committee. It’s a need for power and control.’
The spy station was next to a heap of sawed-down trees.
‘Over the years people have discovered what she’s really like.’
There were two cars and a motorbike inside the compound.
‘All the riff-raff come here because there’s no policing.’
The New Zealand flag flicked and flapped.
‘We won’t associate with the boating club or the volunteer fire brigade. They’re all her drinking buddies. You’ll see them loading up their boats with crates of beer.’
The spy station looked like a demented bunker. The wind got up. It shrieked through the pine forest on the other side of the road. I looked at the forest and thought about Phil Cowan, a 26-year-old dope dealer who disappeared in Wellington on March 25, 2001. His silver Nissan was found dumped in Bulls with traces of his blood inside. The car’s ignition barrel had been tampered with, and the passenger door interfered with. By September, police had decided Cowan had been murdered and his body disposed of. In 2003 three men were accused of the murder but discharged after the judge stopped their trial. Cowan’s parents believe their son is buried somewhere in the Tangimoana forest.
The hissing on the summer lawn: ‘She told everyone how she’d told the kid they were going to take him to the forest and kill him. She was laughing about it, saying he was so scared that he literally shit his pants.’
It was a really hot afternoon. I needed that glass of water. I sat there sweating, and leaning forward to catch what my hostess was saying as she lowered her voice for fear of being overheard, and I started thinking, what the fuck is this? It was absurd to be hiding in the corner of a backyard in bright, sea-salty Tangimoana. It felt less like an interview than an undercover assignation.
She kept apologising. ‘I know what I must sound like.’ No, no, I said, thinking that she sounded malicious, petty, vengeful, bitter. Well, she said, I was asking about Tangimoana and so I may as well hear it straight. ‘It’s the truth behind the scenes.’
She said if I didn’t believe her she could arrange for me to meet other people to hear their views, but I cringed at the prospect of another clandestine appointment. I wanted out. I wanted away from Tangimoana. It was lovely, friendly and beachy, also oppressive, pissed, plain weird and just going about its business. Perhaps it only seemed as though it were intent on minding everyone else’s business. It felt smaller each
