Enough. It inspired a quest for civilisation. Half an hour away, quivering on the banks of State Highways One and Three, was Sanson. Every time I returned there it felt as though I were journeying towards higher ground, could breathe easier.
One afternoon I went for a walk. I suspected I was the first person to go walking in Sanson since about 1712. I turned the corner from the motel and walked along the side of State Highway Three as traffic shot past. I headed for the rugby ground. I liked the look of it. It had an old wooden stand at one end, with a corrugated iron roof. I climbed up the stand and sat down in one of the rows. It was nice sitting there looking down on to an empty field, the H of the rugby posts. I turned around and saw a sentence graffitied along one of the back rows. It read: LET’S ALL BE HUMAN BEINGS.
Mosgiel
Looking for Trouble
It was out there in the dark night, crime, covert and creeping, up to no good in the small Otago town, with its Scottish street names and splendid rhododendrons, or fanned out on surrounding Taieri Plain, that flat lonely expanse of long country roads with windbreak walls of solid hedge. To the untrained eye, there was nothing to worry about. You might think Mosgiel’s population of 10,000 were safe in their beds. You might even misconstrue the town as desperately boring. But all you had to do was wait. Mosgiel would reveal its secrets.
‘Okay,’ said Malcolm Macleod. ‘This is what we’ve been talking about.’ He was behind the wheel of a snug four-door-drive Toyota Ipsum emblazoned with the legend ‘Mosgiel–Taieri Community Patrol’. The writing made it resemble a police vehicle but the occupants were citizens. It was just after eleven on a cold evening. The windows of the car were open so the inhabitants could listen for signs of trouble or distress.
Malcolm had pulled up behind a factory in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town, pop. 10,000. Allister Green, sitting in the passenger seat, shone a high-beam torch on a factory door. Malcolm said, ‘See how the white undercoat of the door frame is showing through? It makes it look as though the door is slightly open. That’s a classic example of what we were saying earlier about using our eyes.’
But the door wasn’t open. Saturday night and Mosgiel slumbered on. Nothing was happening.
The community patrol drove around from ten p.m. until two a.m. every Friday and Saturday night, always as a pair, one driving, the other shining a torch, both staying alert, focussed and, hardest of all, serious. Allister had an agile build and thinning hair; he worked in IT. Malcolm was overweight and short of breath; he supplied equipment to treat sleep apnoea. They were men of middle age, decent citizens, husbands, fathers – a dad’s army. They wore fluorescent vests. Neither was likely to panic and squawk, ‘Don’t panic!’ There wasn’t the opportunity.
The patrol car crawled along a residential street. ‘See, there’s a hazard,’ Malcolm said. He shone his torch on a dumpster bin on the pavement. ‘Someone not watching where they were going could do themselves an injury.’ On the pavement? ‘There are no street lights,’ Allister said.
They drove around the corner. There were still no street lights, nor lights in any of the houses. ‘Just to make you feel safer,’ Malcolm said, ‘I’ll lock the doors.’
It was a few days before Guy Fawkes Day; a sky rocket fizzed up into the night air. Allister and Malcolm identified the launch pad at Memorial Park. There were two adults, three small kids and a teenage couple holding hands. The powdery remains of fireworks lay on the grass. ‘Hopefully they’ll pick it up when they’re finished,’ Malcolm said. The patrol car crawled on.
They knew about the man who spent weekends in a lock-up he rented at the industrial estate. He lived in Ōamaru and came to Mosgiel on weekends; he put a sleeping bag on the floor and made meals on a gas cooker. ‘There’s another guy lives there,’ Allister said. ‘He feeds 50 or 60 feral cats.’
Mosgiel by night, the alleyways, the deserted lots, the back streets – Allister and Malcolm made excellent tour guides. There was an astonishing voyeurism, an officially sanctioned nosiness. Allister said, ‘You start to find sly ways of observing people without being watched.’ Malcolm said, ‘We find all sorts of nooks and crannies.’
The car crawled along at 30 kilometres an hour. It turned off the main street, Gordon Road, and crept behind a pharmacy. Malcolm said, ‘This is just a typical alley. We’ll do a wee scout. This is where you sometimes see pissed young kids fornicating, all sorts of things.’
But no one was fornicating. Saturday night and Mosgiel slept on. Nothing was happening.
‘It’s amazing what you can hear just driving slowly along with the windows down,’ Malcolm said. ‘You might hear broken glass, or you might hear nothing.’
He drove into the grounds of Taieri College. Allister said, ‘We check on doors and windows. A couple of weeks ago I saw a light on in the school gym. I thought, that’s a bit strange, and called it in to the police.’ Had there been anything amiss? ‘No.’
Later, on a deserted side road near a sawmill, Malcolm said, ‘The police tell us a sexo frequently comes here.’ A sexo? ‘That’s what the police call sex offenders.’ How did the sexo offend? ‘He parks up at night and pretends he’s listening to the radio, but he could be masturbating, looking at a video, reading dirty books.’ Interesting. What crime was being committed? ‘At the end of the day,’ Malcolm said, ‘a sexo is a
