And then he snapped back to the present. A man called in on him on Saturday afternoon. ‘Got a goat for you, Lance,’ he said. His name was Rick and he’d parked up by the beach in his caravan. He said he’d been watching a fishing show on TV when he saw a flash of white in the bush. He grabbed his gun, rushed outside and shot the goat in the head. He hoped Lance could butcher it.
We went out to the yard. There was the dead goat. Big flies had settled on its bloodied head. Lance got to work with his knife.
‘You shot him in the right place, Rick. Good stuff, boy.’
He took off the pelt.
‘He’ll cook up well, that bloody goat.’
He tied the goat’s insides into a knot.
‘That’s so when you take the guts out, the liquid won’t run into the rib cage.’
He cut the head off.
‘Now I’ll do the bloody brisket.’
He cut its legs off at the knee.
‘It’s a bugger of a joint to find.’
He hung it up on a hook, and got to work on the guts.
‘Look at the bloody stomach bloat.’
Rick said, ‘Sorry. Couldn’t get it to you any sooner, mate.’
Lance said, ‘No, she’s right, Rick, she’s bang on. Just what the doctor ordered.’
He took out three grey stomachs, and inspected his handiwork.
‘Oh, that’s as rough as guts, Lance,’ he said to himself. ‘You’ll get the boot, boy. You’ll get the bloody boot.’
Rick crouched at Lance’s feet, inspecting and admiring the work of the master. The pigs and cats snuffled closer as blood and bits of goat flesh fell from the hook into the grass; the butchery had taken place by the wing of the meatworks where Lance had been working on the engine of his beloved Komatsu bulldozer, which he’d bought in 1967 and still took out now and then to cut tracks for neighbours in return for firewood.
The sun was sinking; there were long shadows, and the light in the sky was golden. It buttered the ruins, crept into Lance’s bedroom. He slept on a single mattress. The blankets were old and rough. He’d pinned photos of his past beside the bed. When night fell, he’d think about the men who looked after him when he left school at fourteen and went out into the world. He had been motherless almost his entire life.
The shadows lengthened. The castle of the meatworks looked as dark as a tomb. Hicks Bay, Calliope Bay: like young Harry Baird, Lance hoarded a cargo of home-made ginger beer. He’d poured the precious fizz into about a dozen empty Sprite lemonade bottles and written the bottling date on each. They were on the floor of his bedroom. Outside, he completed his dismembering of the goat. The sharp knife doing its work, the goat in pieces on the grass, dinner ready to store in the fridge and freezer – I could have watched him all day.
Pegasus
Newest Zealand
They damned it at the Saturday morning flea market in horsey Rangiora, where the stink of horsehair clung to jigsaw puzzles and alarm clocks and books about horses. They mocked it, insulted it, wished a pox on it. Most damagingly of all, they pitied it. They said: Poor bastards. They got specific. They said: It’s too windy, the summer easterly’ll dry up the grass, and the whole place’ll look like a desert. They said: It’s too damp, the mould’ll be halfway up the ceiling before you know it. They said: It’s too cold, the winter westerly’ll blow off the beach and make life miserable.
Such scorn, so many heads shaking from side to side, during a weekend in spring when I visited the Canterbury Plains and asked about Pegasus, New Zealand’s newest town, out in the open in the middle of flat featureless nowhere on 400 hectares of virgin swamp, 25 kilometres north of Christchurch.
They damned it on Sunday afternoon at Kairaki Beach, where black dogs sniffed the driftwood, a little boy played with a black toy gorilla in the sand, and whitebaiters sifted for creatures in the black lagoon. ‘Caught half a dozen,’ said one baiter. He scowled. He had been at his spot since six in the morning. The subject of Pegasus appealed to his sour mood. He rubbished it, predicted nothing but woe, and concluded, ‘I wouldn’t give you two bob for it.’
The town, dreamed up by property developers Infinity Group, was yet to be built but a lot of it had already sold: it had set a New Zealand record when $122 million worth of sections sold at auction in one day. It was strange walking around. The whole place felt odd, obnoxious, soulless. It didn’t feel like New Zealand.
The population of Pegasus was sometimes projected as 5,000, other times as 7,000. When I visited, the population was precisely two. I walked around the empty streets and stared at the empty sections. Pegasus was under construction, a work in progress. The signs read PEGASUS SCHOOL COMING SOON and PEGASUS TOWN CENTRE COMING SOON.
On the corner of Tutaipatu and Waireka Streets there were four park benches on which no bum had yet to rest. The only restaurant was the Grub Hub takeaway van for onsite workers. With its new streets driven on only by vehicles marked NORTH CANTERBURY CONCRETE CUTTING and PETROTEC 24-HOUR EMERGENCY RESPONSE UNIT, its rubbish bins as clean as whistles, its rows of bare spindly scarlet oaks and American sweet gums, its weeds of red, white and blue electrical cables sprouting out of the ground, Pegasus was perfectly lifeless.
What to make of this town of the future, this barely formed blot on the landscape? I should have damned it, too. I wanted to. I tried my best. I scoffed at the homeowners’ covenants: clotheslines and letterboxes had to be of good quality, garden statues and fountains had to be approved, no caravans or tents were allowed, and no more than two cats or
