Machete and the Ghost

by Griffin, James; Kightley, Oscar;

  Gunner — The Man, The Legend, The Submarine

  [Gunner was, without a doubt, the best captain we ever played under. He was The Man. Sometimes you just couldn’t help but call him ‘The Man’ to his face and he’d just look at you, shake his head in that way that he did a lot, and then he’d walk away. Gunner was a man of few words. The Few Words Man, we’d sometimes call him.]

  MACHETE: Just not to his face.

  GHOST: No way. To his face you called him Gunner. Or Sir Gunner, after he got his knighthood.

  M: Most of the time, off the field, you just gave him the eyebrows. And if you were real lucky, he’d give you the eyebrows back. But never the whole eyebrows. Always just a hint of the eyebrows, like you still had to earn the rest of the eyebrows. That is a true leader, right there.

  G: And, man, talk about tough.

  M: Yeah, Gunner was one of those leaders who led by example.

  G: Which, given that he very rarely said anything, was probably lucky, otherwise no one would have had any idea what the f**k was going on.

  M: Yeah, the general rule of thumb was ‘be like Gunner’ or, at least, ‘try and be a bit like Gunner’ — depending on your pain threshold.

  G: The inevitable result of Gunner’s style of play . . .

  M: Which was to throw himself into everything like he was one of them Viking berserkers who thought they could walk through fire . . .

  G: . . . was that Gunner used to get injured. A lot.

  M: One time, as we were shaking hands after having beaten the Boks on this freezing-cold Wellington night, I noticed that Gunner’s broken clavicle bone was sticking through his jersey — just this little piece of white bone, poking out, just above the fern. When I pointed this out to him, he looked down at it like it was the first time he’d realised another part of his body was broken. ‘Oh,’ he said. Then he carried on shaking hands. Later, in the dressing room, after Doc Doc had reset the bone, Gunner — who was a bit high on the pain medication Doc Doc had secretly given him, after telling him they were vitamins — came up to me and we had the longest conversation of our lives. He asked me if I knew why we wore black. I started to talk about how the absence of colour in a way represented all colour. He slapped me across the face to shut me up. ‘Because it hides the blood,’ he said. Then he wobbled away.

  G: One time, in a room off the dressing room at Twickenham, at halftime, I accidentally walked in on Doc Doc using an electric drill and a couple of woodscrews to put Gunner’s foot back together. In the second half Gunner scored a try, made two try-saving tackles, and charged down England’s last-minute dropped goal that would have meant they lost the game by only one point and could have claimed it was a glorious defeat, like Dunkirk. To the Pommie supporters and rabidly-one-eyed press, Gunner was a cheat who took their Dunkirk away from them, but to me, that night, he was part-superhuman and part-freakish-Frankenstein’s monster.

  M: By the end of his career Gunner had so many bits of metal holding his body together that airport security scanners would start going off the moment he stepped off the team bus.

  G: And when he stepped off that bus, making that kind of graunching, clanking sound he did when he moved, towards the end — what was it he was still carrying, even then?

  M: His book.

  G: Exactly. Whenever the ABs were on a bus or on a train or flying somewhere . . .

  M: Any form of transportation, really.

  G: Gunner always had this book, and he was always writing things in this book. He never ever showed anyone what was in the book, or even talked about what was in the book, but the word was he was using the book to set his life goals. He’d have these real big life goals — like being captain of the ABs . . .

  M: Tick.

  G: And then he’d have these year-by-year goals, and then his week-to-week goals, and then his daily goals; it probably went all the way down to his hourly goals — Gunner was that sort of person.

  M: Real focused; real driven.

  G: Pretty soon, because we all wanted to be like Gunner, everyone had notebooks and was writing all manner of deep and meaningful shit in them.

  M: Watching some of the tight forwards, clutching their pencils in their big gorilla hands, their lips moving as they wrote their names in the front of their books — that was a real crack-up.

  G: But I tell you what, keeping a journal of life goals is not as easy as Gunner made it look. After a while of struggling with it, me and Machete agreed to swap — let each other read what we’d written.

  M: Which, it turned out, was pretty much the same thing.

  G: Lists.

  M: Films and TV shows we wanted to see; places we wanted to go on vacation . . .

  G: Hot reality show competitors we wanted to date.

  M: You — that was all you, not me.

  G: Fair call. But the thing was, we realised that we sucked at writing deep and meaningful stuff down and if we were going to set goals for our lives and careers then we needed to learn from the master.

  M: So we thought about asking Gunner what the secret was, but then we realised that he’d probably just give us the eyebrow and walk away, enigmatically.

  G: And we didn’t want enigmatic eyebrows, we wanted the real deal.

  M: So we waited until we were on tour and we knew that Gunner was doing one of those press conferences where he said nothing to the media in the hotel ballroom, and we broke into his room.

  G: And there was the book.

  M: And we opened it and started to read.

  G: And it was full of pictures Gunner had drawn of submarines and underwater battles . . .

  M: And mermaids and seahorses that looked a lot like mutant underwater unicorns.

  G: It was at the same time charming and childlike but also kinda weird and disturbing. And a bit disappointing because Gunner wasn’t that flash at drawing.

  M: But it also made sense, given how much Gunner liked the water. At pool recovery sessions Gunner would always be the first in and the last out.

  G: And if the pool had a real deep end Gunner would sometimes just keep walking until he was totally submerged and then just stand there.

  M: ’Cause his body was so full of metal screws and rods and bits, it made him very negatively buoyant.

  G: And he would just stay under the water until everyone started to worry and then he would walk back to the shallow end, with this real happy look on his face.

  M: So it was no surprise that when he retired he went into the miniature submarine business.

  G: Well, it was a bit of a surprise because it was a batshit crazy idea.

  M: But Gunner made it work.

  G: For a while.

  M: For a short while.

  G: I miss Gunner.

  M: Me too.

  G: He was everything you could want in a leader.

  M: He was an inspiration to all who knew him.

  G: And anyone who ever played under Gunner would follow him anywhere.

  M: Even though the man never spoke . . .

  G: He said it all with his eyebrows.

  M: True, they were very expressive and alluring eyebrows.

  G: And then he retired and left us all alone.

  M: And then he was gone. One day he’s taking his new mini-submarine out for a test drive and the next . . .

  G: Gone. And for many days after that — still gone. Until everyone realised he was never coming back.

  M: New Zealand mourned. The loss of a leader.

  G: But sometimes — and I’ve never said this out loud before — if feels to me like Gunner is still out there, in his mini-submarine, chasing weird seahorse/unicorn creatures and fighting underwater battles.

  M: That’s beautiful.

  G: Isn’t it.

  M: But the oxygen for his submarine would have run out years ago.
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  G: I know that, but does Gunner?

  M: Deep.

  G: Literally, probably.

  M: But still beautiful.

  Another Man’s Scandal

  [Or, why the disabled toilet at a busy airport is not the best place in the world to say your goodbyes to the woman you’re with when you’re not with your girlfriend — and why listening to a teammate with no legal expertise whatsoever when they’re offering you what is essentially legal advice is an even worse idea.]

  GHOST: To get this out of the way, right at the beginning here, I want to say, in my defence, that my intentions were good.

  MACHETE: But then they made things worse.

  G: Which is not the point.

  M: It kind of is.

  G: I’m talking about my intentions, which were to help a mate, caught in an awkward situation.

  M: The situation which was kind of your making.

  G: Again, that’s beside the point. In The Book of Black it says, ‘In the belly, not the back’, right? Squidgy was caught in a real tricky situation and something in my belly said that I needed to help him out, no matter what the cost to myself.

  M: The thing that was telling your belly that was probably because you were stabbing him in the back at the time.

  G: No. Although, I guess, on one level it could be misread that way . . .

  M: On the level you were doing the nasty thing with his girlfriend at the time.

  G: No, not at the time. At a time just before the time. At a time when Squidgy and she were taking a break and she needed a shoulder to cry on and someone to be there for her. And there was nothing ‘nasty’ about it, thank you very much. It was a beautiful experience between two people who needed each other during a difficult time.

  M: How, exactly, was it a difficult time for you?

  G: I was between girlfriends. But getting back to the matter at hand, the important thing here is that my intentions, when it came to helping out Squidgy, were entirely above board, because at the actual time of the actual thing in the actual disabled toilet at the actual airport, he and she were back together and whatever had passed between she and I had stopped passing weeks before that. At least three weeks. Or maybe two and a bit. It was done, is what I’m saying, and in no way did it cloud my judgement that day.

  M: Sure.

  G: Besides, it’s not like you weren’t involved. You were the one who sent Squidgy in the direction of the disabled toilet.

  M: No, I told him not to go into the non-disabled bogs. That was all. At no stage did I ever point him in the direction of the disabled bogs.

  G: Yet that is where he went, straight after he left you.

  M: Yeah, sure, but I didn’t know what he wanted the toilet for, did I? I presumed he wanted the toilet for the usual toilet reasons.

  G: You didn’t notice he was standing with a woman who wasn’t his girlfriend at the time?

  M: No, I didn’t actually, because all those palagi women Squidgy used to date always looked the same to me.

  G: Okay, fair call, he certainly did have a type.

  M: You were the one who saw all the texts, you could have given me a heads-up, man.

  G: You weren’t there when Squidgy came up to me and told me he had a moral and ethical problem and then showed me his phone. You were off buying new headphones while I was doing my pre-flight visualisations.

  M: The ones where you visualise the plane taking off and landing in one piece.

  G: You know I’m not the best when it comes to flying. So you, of all people, should understand I was somewhat distracted when Squidgy sits down beside me and shows me the texts this woman is sending him.

  M: The woman who was most definitely not his girlfriend at the time.

  G: Totally. Complete other woman.

  M: In other words, definitely not the girlfriend with whom you had so recently been . . .

  G: They’d got back together! Get past it! And I know what you’re trying to do.

  M: What?

  G: You are trying to establish, in the minds of the readers, the perception that I am somehow guilty for what followed just as we are getting to the bit where you were even guiltier than anything I did — which was nothing, by the way.

  M: Yeah, well if you did nothing, then I did less than nothing. And at least I didn’t tell Squidgy to destroy the evidence and lie about it.

  G: That was after. We’re not at after, yet. We’re still at before, when Squidgy is showing me his phone and these texts from this totally new, brand-new woman who is very — and I mean very — keen to say goodbye to him, in an intimate and personal way. Which I think is hilarious because I can’t help but think the idea of a hooker being such a playa is inherently funny.

  M: I worry about you sometimes.

  G: So he’s showing me all this stuff and I tell him that it’s very flattering that she wants to do these things to him, but it is probably best that he doesn’t show these texts to the rest of the team and especially not to his girlfriend. It’s only then that he tells me the one he’s texting with is sitting across the other side of the departure lounge, waiting to catch a flight to, like, Vancouver or somewhere, on business. And, sure enough, he points across the lounge and there she is, smiling at Squidgy.

  So now Squidgy is in a moral conundrum, which is not a good place for a man with no morals and who doesn’t understand the meaning of the word ‘conundrum’ to be. On one hand he’d be cheating on his girlfriend a week after they got back together again. But, on the other hand, he’s going away on tour for six weeks so the chances of him getting any for a while are slim. But, on the first hand again, she’s over there and she is definitely ready to go. But, on the second hand again . . .

  That was when Squidgy ran out of hands and looked at me and asked me, as a man with some experience with the fairer sex, if he should go for it.

  M: And you told him ‘yes’.

  G: No! I reminded him that in The Book of Black it says: ‘In the belly — not the back.’

  M: I don’t think that was the best aphorism you could have chosen from The Book of Black — given what he then went and did.

  G: I know that now, but at the time I meant ‘belly’ as in ‘heart’ — to follow what he felt in his heart was the right thing to do. The thing was, by then, Squidgy was thinking more south of the belly than north and he was off like a shot.

  M: You enabled him, man.

  G: How?

  M: You know what hookers are like. They have no impulse control. They’re like jockeys who when they see the horse, they have to ride the horse.

  G: That’s not very nice towards the young lady.

  M: I don’t mean it like that, and you know it. I mean that what you should have said was, ‘Squidgy, no! Now is not the time or the place — or the right woman!’ If you wanted to quote The Book of Black you should have used the ‘It’s not the jersey. It’s the man in the jersey’ aphorism.

  G: That wouldn’t have stopped him.

  M: True, but it would have been a lot better than the ‘In the belly — not the back’ aphorism. You might as well have used the ‘Front up — or f**k off’ aphorism, for all that slowed him down.

  G: At least I wasn’t the one who suggested the disabled toilets.

  M: I did not suggest the disabled toilets, and you know it.

  G: As near as dammit, you did.

  M: I was trying to do a good thing, alright? Not my fault it had unexpected and unfortunate consequences.

  G: Yet it absolutely and utterly did.

  M: Hey, you were there, on the Flight to Hell, the year before. So you know I was trying to save a life.

  G: Of course I was — I was sitting next to you on that flight.

  M: Auckland to Tokyo is 11 hours — longer if you get stuck on the tarmac at Narita. It was two hours in when Helmet went to
the dunny and did his business and blocked the bogs. Nine hours it was, when Helmet’s doings overwhelmed the air recirculation system and the whole plane had to breathe his stench.

  G: Again, I was there.

  M: Yeah, you were the genius who had the idea to spray your Issey Miyake duty-free eau de Cologne around the place.

  G: In my defence, I was not to know it would somehow bond with and amplify the eau de Helmet.

  M: People actually kissed the carpet in the Tokyo arrivals lounge — like the Pope — they were so happy to get off that flight.

  G: Never has Tokyo smog smelt so good.

  M: So, you know, just as well as I do, that it is now official team protocol that all front-row forwards must go number twos at the airport, prior to departure, and to then put a cork in it, no matter how badly the brown bear wants to leave the cave.

  G: Yes, I was at that meeting too, when all the fatties grunted their disapproval but no one had any sympathy for them.

  M: So, you can understand why, on that day, when I’d just seen Helmet, Flipper and Bobo come out of the bogs at the same time, that when I see Squidgy heading in, I’m like, ‘Dude, don’t go in there — you won’t survive!’

  G: And you didn’t notice the hot chick who wasn’t his actual girlfriend standing beside Squidgy at the time?

  M: Look, I know your olds are all kinds of freaky, but where I grew up toilets are for one thing and one thing only. Well, two things, I guess. And you always wash your hands afterwards.

  Also, I never actually suggested an alternative venue for Squidgy’s shameful tryst. I saw him heading for the bogs, I suggested it wasn’t wise to go in there, everything afterwards was about his choices.

  G: And a lot of bad luck.

  M: A lot of bad luck.

  G: Who knew the Wheel Blacks were also at the airport, on their way to some tournament in Seoul?

  M: That was bad luck for Squidgy, sure.

  G: And who knew they also had a protocol about in-flight bathroom usage, so there was, like, a queue of people in wheelchairs when Squidgy came out?

  M: Very bad luck.

  G: And who knew the Wheel Blacks would be travelling with a documentary crew who also just happened to be shooting at the time, as Squidgy came out of the disabled toilets?