He talked about leaving Australia at fifteen to pursue his dream of being a professional football player in the English Premier League. He lived the dream. He played for Watford. He scored a cracking goal against Manchester United. But then he picked up a bad injury, and drifted, falling back down to a club in Australia. He was hoping for a transfer to Malaysia. It fell through and he got drunk, then drove, and when the cops tried to pull him over he did a runner… He was looking at maybe six months in jail.
His voice slowed down. He looked at the floor. The shadow of his former self crept into classroom twelve. Johnson closed his eyes, took in a mouthful of air, and puffed it out. He said the judge gave him a break. He now lived at Jack’s Point in Queenstown with his wife and son.
The Slovakian painter about to escape, the nobbled Australian soccer player back on his feet – the makeshift press centre in classroom twelve at Mount Aspiring College wasn’t fussy about where it got its pound of tears. One day they came from Robyn Bardas. Red-haired, 45, opinionated and Australian, Robyn lived in Hāwea Flat. She told the class she wanted to write about and come to some kind of terms with, her parents, but she also wanted to find a way, ultimately, to write about, and possibly come to a semblance of some kind of terms with, the death of one of her children. It happened eight years ago. She swayed on her feet: it was happening again.
Then there was the day senior constable Mike Johnston was going to come in but had to cancel – he was telling a Queenstown family that their son was dead. Trainee pilot Marcus Hoogvliet, 21, had died with instructor Graham Stott, 31, when their Robinson 22 helicopter crashed in strong winds in Mount Aspiring National Park. A ground and aerial search by 20 volunteers helped recover evidence from the wreckage at the head of Arawhata River. Most of the machine was in a ravine. ‘It was a difficult thing to see if you weren’t on top of it,’ Johnston told reporters.
The moon, shaped like a bracket and white as ice, was softly sinking towards a black line of some nearby hump. To its left and down a bit was Venus, bright and obvious. Two other planets were to the right and down a bit. It was exhilarating to witness the planets in the night sky, just before dawn, in the cold autumn air of a mountain town – I walked past the school and up the road to the reservoir, where I sat and rested, stargazing.
Mercury, Jupiter, Mars – one of them was missing behind cloud. Cloud! That clean, immaculate sky, as scrubbed as a sink, had finally budged. The first light of dawn began to smudge the sky. It was too early to return to my room at the Manuka Crescent. I had too much air in my lungs, I needed to keep going, somewhere, so I set off towards the nearby hump beneath the moon, and walked on the side of the highway towards Cromwell and Queenstown. I looked up: I could see the moon, Venus, and now only one of the other three planets.
All I had on were the pyjamas beneath the clothes I stood up in. I was free, floating through an empty stretch of road, clinging on to my last few hours in Wānaka. I thought about Toni Cathie, 68, who played bridge and tennis, and wrote with a delicate touch and fine wit. I thought about Prue Kane, red-haired, a quarter of an inch short of six foot tall, at 30 the youngest in class, who wrote amusingly about returning to live in Wānaka after her OE. Family friends gasped and clutched at their throats when Prue told them she was still unmarried. They’d ask, ‘What’s wrong with you?’
Jeanette Emmerson, 63, small and pale, from a high-country farm in the Lindis Pass, was related to someone famous: her daughter Anna had won the 2009 World Wool Record Challenge Cup for producing the world’s finest bale of merino. The cup was presented at a function in the Italian Embassy in Paris; there were 200 people, and a five-course meal at which the waiters wore uniforms. Anna, Jeanette wrote, was born on New Year’s Eve in 1975, grew up ‘non-conformist and antagonistic’, outdoorsy, a deerstalker who once spent a solitary winter in a cabin on an island in the middle of a frozen lake in Alaska, then came back to New Zealand, bought a block of land, built her own woolshed and farmed a thousand merinos. The fleeces in her award-winning bale were shorn from a mob of 450 wethers.
Mylrea Bell, 55, mother of two boys, tutor in business consultancy, wrote a comic and entertaining memoir about her pig. Caroline Harker, 46, a former documentary maker who came to Wānaka for love, composed a memoir about her dinner.
I was quite happy to eat Alice. I expected to be a bit squeamish about it. After all, we were friends.
A year ago the farmer went away and left me in charge of our herd of nineteen cows. They were calving. I had to go up the hill every morning, check they were okay, and count them.
The first day I counted eleven calves and nineteen cows. The next day I counted eleven calves but only eighteen cows. I found number nineteen alone on the other side of the hill. She seemed to be in labour. I left her to it.
The following morning she didn’t look too comfortable. She was still standing up but the calf’s head was hanging out the back of her. I managed to get up close by walking very slowly and crooning softly. I like the way some animals let you near them when they need help.
I rubbed her
