It was supposed to be the end of the world that weekend. May 21 was the doomsday predicted and widely publicised by a California radio preacher, Howard Camping, who had spooked the superstitious Christians of Samoa when he erected doomsday billboards in Apia in March. News of the apocalypse travelled to Collingwood as a joke, something to laugh at on Friday night in the tavern, where Len and Buttons and their mates drank from a long, thin, sensuously designed glass holding three litres of beer. They called it The Barmaid. The Barmaid cost $30. Steak pies cost five dollars, and the bar also sold Panatella cigars.
‘Mate,’ Len said, ‘you should have been here when I had my sixtieth. Mate,’ he said, ‘I had a rock ’n’ roll band, a pig on a stick. Mate, I had this place honking.’ There were riotous photos on the wall.
Buttons was about Len’s age, maybe older, with suspiciously jet-black hair. It looked like a toupee. It wasn’t a toupee. His mother had jet-black hair and she was ninety. Buttons drank his beer and talked about fishing. ‘You should try smoked stingray,’ he said. ‘Some people say it tastes like bacon.’ What people? ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I do.’
Len drove a Fonterra milk tanker, a rigid truck and trailer carrying 25,000 litres. It didn’t interest him. ‘Nah’, he said, ‘I’m into classic Ducatis. Got a 1928 Ford Sports Coupé.’ Where? ‘In the shed. I’m a shed man.’ He was also a gold man. He’d found some good nuggets over the years. ‘You want to talk to this fella fossicking for gold up in Devil’s Boots,’ he said. Good guy? ‘A bit strange, but you have to be strange to fossick for gold.’
Did you have to be strange to live in Collingwood? Len said you had to pull your head in to live there, but he was too hilarious, too full of life, to observe any code of dourness, and there was nothing dour about Collingwood.
The last two drinkers at the tavern were young farmhands, one from Westport, the other from Ukraine. The one from Ukraine said he was related to Osama bin Laden. ‘No,’ he said, ‘I am, true.’ The one from Westport said, ‘Haha!’ He had his mate’s bush shirt on top of his pool cue and was threatening to poke it into the open door of the wood burner.
Jamie the barman dried the glasses. His marriage had gone bust. His wife had got caught up in Christ College of Trans-Himalayan Wisdom. He had an intelligent face and it also seemed to be on pretty intimate terms with suffering. He said he had moved to Collingwood after the Christchurch earthquake. He had been in the shopping mall at Shirley on February 22. He said it was like being in a matchbox. He picked up a matchbox and shook it. He said, ‘I write poetry.’ He hung his head, sipped his beer; the next second, he was gone.
There was only one car parked on the main street. It was a ute, covered in mud. It wasn’t parked anywhere near the kerb.
Doomsday dawned with a high tide, and big snow-white flowers twitching and trembling in the top branches of the lone pine tree on Māori Island. The flowers were actually a colony of fifteen royal spoonbills. According to local birder Chris Petyt, they arrive in Collingwood around March and winter over at Ruataniwha Inlet, returning to the Wairau River in Blenheim in September.
Len came into town at about nine for a loaf of bread. He left, and then a mud-covered ute came around the corner. ‘How’s it?’ said the Ukrainian. He took his gumboots off at the door of the dairy and walked in to buy a packet of Park Drive. The dairy was opposite the Collingwood volunteer library, open on Tuesdays and Saturdays.
At about ten, Briar Saunders, 49, drove her wheelchair into town to open the library door. Borrowers paid a fee. ‘Today,’ she said, ‘I might make thirteen dollars. Or it could be one dollar sixty.’ She had lived in Collingwood for 23 years. She arrived as a single parent and raised three kids, and had had MS for 20 years. She said, ‘My whole left side is shot.’ She said, ‘This place has adopted me. Collingwood owns me. It’s put so much money into me.’ The community organised a sheep on a spit and a raffle, and raised funds to buy her a heat pump. She said, ‘It’s humbling.’
Denny Gillooly, 73, walked in the door. He was sixth-generation Collingwood and lived in a blue stucco house on Collingwood Quay, where his wife had dozens of pots of begonias hanging up on hooks in the sunroom. Danny had an office with historic maps, photos, and documents of Collingwood and Golden Bay. His people founded Collingwood in 1853 when they came looking for lost cattle and found gold. By 1857 the population was 1,300. The boom didn’t last long, Denny said. He talked about placentas buried on Māori Island, and leaving school at fourteen, and the first hippies, who arrived in the 1970s.
He walked across the road to the banks of the river. ‘Look,’ he said, ‘that’s fossils in these rocks.’ He pointed across the river. ‘That’s the Wakamarama Range. We call it the Sleeping Lady. There’s her face, her boobs, her knees.’ It really was a sleeping lady, gigantic and supine. She apparently ate food of the gods: on the shortest day of the year, Denny said, the sun went down in her mouth.
He talked about the December floods. The rain
