More make-believe: Greg O’Connor, secretary of the Police Association, sold his nimble intelligence short of the mark as he settled into yet another monotonous avowal of utter faith in every single serving police officer. Yet more make-believe came in the shape of Ross Meurant, the former hard-line cop and right-wing National MP who performed a complete about-face by slamming police for their surveillance and arrest of alleged terrorists. What knowledge did he have? It just didn’t sound right, he said, and he phoned up a couple of other retired detectives, and they agreed it was fishy. Ex-police work at its finest.
The interview was held, at his request, in a discreet corner of a cafe inside a garden centre. Meurant damned pretty much every aspect of police culture. It was like he was making things up as he went along. I thought he was an unstable sort of rooster, and that was even before he started talking to me about his nervous breakdown. What was the cause of it? Well, he said, he had just felt so powerless, so invisible, since he was dumped out of parliament. Purpose lost. But now the media had renewed their interest in him, and given him back his identity, restored his fragile purpose.
A High Court jury had dismissed Louise Nicholas’s rape accusations against – here goes that squalid threesome, groping into print once again – Clint Rickards, Brad Shipton and Bob Schollum. Was her story make-believe? The New Zealand Herald named her woman of the year. John Haigh, the QC who represented Rickards, wrote to the paper to say that decision was ‘truly insane’. Well, he would, but Haigh’s letter was a worthwhile reminder that Rickards had actually been found not guilty.
It’s entirely possible to feel sympathy for Rickards, once the assistant commissioner of police, now one of New Zealand’s most prominent gargoyles. Sympathy for Nicholas, however, seems to be compulsory. I gave in to it when I interviewed her on a winter’s afternoon in Hawke’s Bay. We sat in front of an open fire in an adobe house owned by Phil Kitchin, the journalist who broke her story and became her friend. Kitchin refilled her glass of rum and Coke. His wife came home from work. Nicholas brought along a friend, a woman who also claimed she had been abused by Shipton. The whole set-up was overbearing, a kind of church service devoted to Nicholas.
Her story may very well be no more than what she claimed – she was raped, bullied into silence for nearly twenty years, and had now named names, fought back. Her purpose was to stick to that story. It was, she said, the truth; like the ancient mariner, she poured out her familiar tale as the afternoon wore on. There was something about her furtive, defensive manner that made me suspect she had a child’s cunning. But I was eventually shamed into accepting her rage, her version of her bleak past, as she threw another complaint about Rickards and his lawyer on to the fire.
You could say these are the confessions of a travelling pessimist. What was my own sense of purpose during those twenty-seven weeks? I was a harried, fretful sort of rooster, needing to find fresh blood each week – the worst thing about the job was waiting around for someone to say yes. Surprisingly, only a few declined. John Banks was the most expressive piker. He was running for the Auckland mayoralty when I called to ask for an interview. His voice rose to a squeak as he replied, ‘No, no, no, no!’ I’d long suspected he was a coward.
The work was claustrophobic, week after week of the same rigid discipline. First, catch your rooster. Then, sometimes, roast them alive. Now and again I suppose I was ruthless. But I never formed an opinion about the subject during the interview, never knew what I was going to write until I started writing. There were a couple of experiments. The story about Kerikeri woman Pauline Jespersen was an exercise in conversational prose, the story about health minister David Cunliffe was an attempt to write a profile as narrative. A man from Auckland wrote to The Sunday Star-Times saying the Cunliffe interview was a wasted opportunity. He thought the story ought to have answered the question: ‘What makes him run?’ But Cunliffe didn’t run.
Eleven interviews were held on a Friday morning. At 10 or 11 a.m., I’d switch off the TDK, shake hands, and if I were out of town, hare off to an internet cafe to transcribe the tape and then write a headline and then a story between 1500 and 1700 words, not in haste, but fast, emailing it back to the office by 5 or 6 p.m. before meeting a far more important deadline: the last flight home.
I’ve always liked the urgency of journalism – the worst thing about writing is not writing, waiting around for a word or a thought. I didn’t have time to wait on those Fridays. I didn’t want or need it: the governing principle was for each profile to be an honest response, and I felt there was a better chance of that happening in a limited time. (As such, I’ve only indulged in minor literary revisions for this collection. Most of the profiles – their hostilities, their mood swings, their errors of judgement – remain as they were first published in The Sunday Star-Times.) I went by instinct. I never felt especially pressured, just intensely alert to the task at hand – selecting quotes, writing
