I said, ‘But is it unwise for you to say so? Are you making the same mistake over and over?’
‘Maybe. Maybe.’
I said, ‘The whole thing between you and Kim that day at the lights — many people will say to themselves, “What would I have done?” It’s like a test, that you can never anticipate.’
He said, ‘Yes. In the fraction of the second you have, you don’t know until you get there what’s going to happen. The path you take through life is a random walk, unfortunately.’
‘If it was a test, did you fail it?’
He said, ‘Yeah. Yeah.’
‘Do you also think you failed your family?’
He said, ‘Yes, probably.’
I liked Hallwright. He lacked imagination, and empathy, and compassion, but he had a kind of poise, and there was a suspicion of wit. I remembered the speech he gave when he described how he saved Issie from stepping too close to the edge at Kings Canyon; on that occasion, he protected his family. He achieved the opposite when something inside him broke on Mt Eden Road five years ago. A moment in traffic, at one of Auckland’s busiest intersections — the French Café on one side of the street, Duchess Home Bakery on the other, a shoe store, a toyshop, something called Asia Works . . .
I said, ‘It’d be dreadful if the scene on Mt Eden Road was the last thing that ever crossed your mind before you died.’
He said, ‘It would. It would.’
‘Your whole life compressed to one stupid moment.’
‘Yes. Then again,’ he said, attempting a smile, ‘you wouldn’t be around to worry about it.’
Chapter 6
The lair of the white worm: Derek King
1
Monday night was art gallery night, and he’d always dress for the occasion. He favoured big aviator sunglasses. He wore cream pants and grey shoes. He’d spruce up his haircut of tight little blond ringlets, that ‘baffling perm’, as photographer Patrick Reynolds described it, that ‘mad hair’ as remembered by gallery owner Gary Langsford. His skin was very pale. He carried a damp flannel in his pocket.
He’d walk. He lived in downtown Auckland, on the pretty green hump of Constitution Hill, in an ivy-covered Edwardian townhouse, bought when he was about 32, in 1978. He rented out the top floor. He kept his yellow Ferrari Dino and his burgundy Jaguar in the downstairs garage. He lived in-between. The front door was gated, and the windows were barred; visitors knew to come around the side.
He attended Monday night openings at the Anna Bibby Gallery on the corner of Kitchener Street and Victoria Street, and the Gow Langsford Gallery in Lorne Street. ‘He used to show up to every bloody opening,’ said Langsford. ‘Just there for the free wine. Never bought anything. Even when we took him off the invite list, he turned up! Always in the same clothes. Crumpled linen jackets. And that mad hair.’
The last time he saw Derek King, he thought, was at the exhibition opening of Karl Maughan’s vast, luscious botanical paintings in May 2011. The beautiful painted flowers, the excellent conversation — and King, who looked like no one else, looking on, observing, evidently deranged. Anna Bibby emailed from her home in France: ‘He was quite aloof and never spoke to me, actually come to think of it he never spoke with anyone but rather used the room as his private catwalk, did a few circuits, just to make sure that everyone was aware of him and left. Who was he?’
He would sip, he claimed in the High Court, ‘only a little half-glass of wine’. It sent his blood pressure ‘through the roof’; his health was delicate, due to his coeliac disease, an extreme intolerance to gluten.
He arrived alone and left alone. He’d walk back home, take off his clothes, and put on a robe. He owned three terry-towel robes. They were all he ever wore inside the townhouse. He was naked underneath. He continually wiped his hands with a flannel — he was afraid of germs from the outside world, but he lived in chaos and filth. A friend recalled the incredible layer of grease that had built up on the stove: ‘It was at least an inch thick. I mentioned it to Derek and he said it must never be cleaned, he wanted to keep it that way as he wanted to see what happened to dirt like that as time wore on.’ The house was a tip, ‘a hovel’, said Detective Sergeant Andrew Saunders of the Auckland police. He couldn’t believe the smell. ‘It stunk of, like, rotten vegetables,’ said Nikita Jones, a lively 30-year-old former street-kid.
She first visited him when she was 13. Her best friend took her. They were both runaways, sleeping in the gazebo in Albert Park, and ‘the hole in the wall’ in Myers Park.
The what?
‘You know, the hole in the wall,’ said Nikita. ‘It’s like a hole in the wall, and you can lie down in it.’
We met at her flat on a treeless street in Onehunga. It was the middle of the day in the middle of the week, and there were three other adults smoking on the deck, and four kids, aged between one and 10, playing on the trampoline. It was welfare and wagging, the usual hopeless cycle — ‘I’ve missed 18 days of school,’ said a pretty seven-year-old with something like pride. But love fell in a light, steady rain on the kids, who were hugged, stroked, kissed; it was a happy home. Nikita remembered back to 1997, and said, ‘Me and my mate knew one or two people whose houses we would go and stay at. Older street bums that had a flat in town. My mate said, “I’ll introduce you to Derek.”’
Air-raid tunnels were dug beneath Constitution Hill in 1941. They connected to Albert Park, and provided sanctuary for an estimated 24,000 people, in case
