by Tom Scott
First published in 2017
Copyright © Tom Scott, 2017
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or by any information storage and retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publisher.
Allen & Unwin
Level 3, 228 Queen Street
Auckland 1010, New Zealand
Phone: (64 9) 377 3800
Email: [email protected]
Web: www.allenandunwin.co.nz
83 Alexander Street
Crows Nest NSW 2065, Australia
Phone: (61 2) 8425 0100
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN 978 1 877505 91 1
eISBN 978 1 76063 966 2
Internal design by Carla Sy
Cover concept: Dennis Hearfield
Cover design: Kate Barraclough
Cover images: Cameron Burnell
To Averil, my magnetic north
CONTENTS
CHAPTER ONE Egghead hatches
CHAPTER TWO Irish whakapapa
CHAPTER THREE Learn by doing
CHAPTER FOUR Telling stories
CHAPTER FIVE The only boy with courage
CHAPTER SIX Egghead has failed!
CHAPTER SEVEN Dreaming spires
CHAPTER EIGHT Love and death
CHAPTER NINE Locked in
CHAPTER TEN Drawing the line
CHAPTER ELEVEN Going once …
CHAPTER TWELVE Goodnight, dear boy
CHAPTER THIRTEEN The spy who came in from the warm
CHAPTER FOURTEEN The seeds of a downfall
CHAPTER FIFTEEN Breaking bad
CHAPTER SIXTEEN India, but not China
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN 1981
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN The money lenders
CHAPTER NINETEEN Lange takes the reins
CHAPTER TWENTY Lange in repose
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE Emerald Glen
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO The Bolger years
CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE Raiders of the Lost Dog Kennel
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR A thousand miles behind
CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE Kotinga Street
CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX Walls come tumbling down
CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN More walls, and bridges
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT Meeting Ed
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE Experiences near death
CHAPTER THIRTY Fallout from Fallout
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE Averil
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO In search of higher ground
CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE The Daylight Atheist
CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR Heart murmurs
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
PIC SECTION
Me and Sue, the twins.
CHAPTER ONE
EGGHEAD HATCHES
TO START AT THE BEGINNING, my first memory is of being pink and naked. So is my twin sister, Sue. We are Rubens’ cherubs without the wings. We are screaming in terror, which none of his cherubs ever appeared to be doing. Our screams are echoing off white tiles wet with steam. We are clawing at the walls, scrambling over one another to escape a piping hot bath. Amid the thrashing and wailing I am transfixed by steam settling on a metal tap and blistering off again. I can see it still. It is mysterious and oddly beautiful. For a brief moment, this strange transformation blanks out the frenzy and muffles the screaming. Sue and I are not yet eighteen months old …
Sue has no memory of this. I remember only because it became the recurring nightmare of my childhood. I returned to the white-tiled bathroom many nights and woke heart racing, gasping for air. Too frightened to go back to sleep, I lay perfectly still in the dark afterwards, waiting for what seemed like days for dawn to arrive before approaching my parents at the kitchen table—the kauri table my mother ‘improved’ by gluing imitation Formica vinyl on top to make it ‘modern’.
‘I had that dream again, Mum …’
Mum would look shifty and swallow nervously.
‘Did we ever have a bathroom with white tiles, Mum?’ I always addressed the question to her. There was little point asking my father anything. Getting a straight answer out of him was like picking up mercury with chopsticks. Chopsticks held in wicketkeeper’s gloves, while blindfolded. Mission impossible, but we foolishly persisted.
One sodden Manawatū afternoon, when the view out of the windows was of sheets of rain compressing the landscape to a handful of paddocks with sheep huddling motionless under macrocarpa trees, we begged him to take us to the pictures. He had a thick Northern Irish brogue, harsh and metallic yet surprisingly nimble—think Fred Astaire tap-dancing in hobnail boots on sheets of corrugated iron—and he was never at a loss for words. Except when he was on the phone to clients, when speech deserted him and his stammering was painful to listen to. He needed some sort of Heimlich manoeuvre for sentences stuck in his throat. We hid from view to spare him witnessing us witnessing his humiliation—and to spare us his subsequent rages. On at least two occasions he rectified the situation mid-conversation through the simple expedient of ripping the phone, cables and all, from the wall. The picture request, though, caused him no problems.
‘What do ye want pictures for?’ he asked. ‘Yee’ve got pictures on the wall!’
‘Pictures that move!’ we wailed in unison.
‘In dat case, I’ll move dis picture over there, and I’ll move dat picture back here!’
His replies were quicker than a Nadal return of serve, almost as if they were waiting in ambush for us. They came in fusillades as well as single shots. For example, he rose from bed late one Anzac Day (he was never one for shivering to death at dawn parades; he believed that brave men had made the ultimate sacrifice so that other men could sleep in and this was his way of honouring their memory; besides, he drank at the RSA once or twice a week anyway) and I stupidly asked him what he did in the war. Without hesitation he responded, ‘I was a hero. Your father, Egghead, was a hero!’
Just about all the dads on Kimbolton Road had served in the war. Some worked on their farms in summer in the faded flapping khaki shorts that had been part of their kit in the scorching sands of North Africa. They had seen good friends and close mates blown apart, showering them in blood, brains and shit. They didn’t want to talk about the war. Not so Tom Scott Senior.
‘When Churchill called for a volunteer to assassinate Hitler, I put me hand up. They flew me into Berlin under cover of darkness in a Lancaster bomber. I parachuted down, hitch-hiked to the Chancellery, shot around the back to the bunker, knocked on the door and who should answer but Herr Hitler hisself! I grabbed the little fucker and strangled him to death with me bare hands, I did! When I got back to London they wanted to give me swags of medals. I said, “No! No fuss! No medals for me! It’s just something any extraordinarily brave man would have done in my place!”’
So there was no question, really, that all questions were better put to Mum. She always went as white as the tiles I was describing when I asked about the nightmare, though, insisting that it was just a silly dream and that I should pay it no mind, while my father looked on with a knowing look on his face, basking in her discomfort. It wasn’t until I was in my last year at Feilding Agricultural High that I learned the truth.
TENSION MOUNTED MOST NIGHTS IN our house as pub closing time approached. Conversation stilled as we waited for the familiar sounds of Dad’s Vauxhall Velox whining down the street, lurching into our pitted driveway and coming to a shuddering halt beside the massive palm outside the front steps. The engine ran on, backfiring like a mortar for quite some time after the ignition had been switched off.
Dad was partial to fish and chips. When replete, he disposed of the greasy papers by
throwing them over his shoulder into the back seat of his car. When that space was full to overflowing, he began stowing them in the front passenger seat, tamping down the piles when they threatened his visibility. Eventually there was barely enough room to wedge himself into the driver’s seat and operate the handbrake and gears, much like a Formula 1 driver’s cockpit today. Imagine fully inflated air-bags made of cellulose and beef dripping. Apart from the fire risk, it made him very safe. A goods train on any one of Feilding’s multiple railway crossings could have slammed into him amidships and, apart from reeking of vinegar and a light coating of batter, he would have emerged without a mark on him.
Extricating himself from the car always took some time. There would be another delay if he elected to empty his bladder on the verandah steps. Provided the engine had finished coughing up phlegm, the next sounds were keys rattling in the front door and his heavy tread in the hall.
He rarely fully entered the lounge. He preferred to stand in the doorway, a swaying silhouette, asking with tart, exaggerated politeness, ‘Did anyone ring for me? Did the Pope ring for me? Did the Holy Father hisself ring for me? Did the Pontiff, perchance, ring for me? The Duke of Edinburgh? The Duke of Argyll? The Queen Mother? The Shah of Iran? Frank Sinatra? Did Frank Sinatra ring for me?’
The list went on and on. It was truly impressive. He was mocking his own reduced circumstances, of course. And when he was done with that he turned on Mum. ‘Christ Jesus, yer ugly, woman! Put yer teeth in. That might help! They are in? In dat case try taking them out!’
The pattern was repeated endlessly, with only minor variations. Mum would pretend it wasn’t happening, obliging us to pretend it wasn’t happening either, which was fine as none of us had the courage to confront him. It was easier to ride it out silently until he staggered off to his room: the front room, with four dead television sets stacked on top of each other, and blonde-oak twin beds with yellow candlewick bedspreads. Mum’s half, long abandoned, was piled high with clothing and books, including encyclopedias and his treasured anthology of Robbie Burns poetry. A pump organ worked by a foot pedal, a purloined aluminium aircraft seat painted fluorescent green, tinkling Venetian blinds and frail dark-brown roller blinds that partially disintegrated into dust if released with too much force.
Thanks to labouring on the chain in the freezing works in the school holidays I was physically stronger and taller than my father—not that it would have ever come to a physical confrontation. Once when I wasn’t big enough or strong enough and he was pushing Mum around in the kitchen in a different house I had nervously asked him not to.
‘Or what?’ he barked.
‘You’ll have to deal with me,’ I said, blinking rapidly. It was his turn to blink. He took a step back and looked at me in astonishment.
‘Well, well, look who’s up on his hind legs! Look who’s up on his hind legs!’ He left it at that, which was a relief. A few weeks earlier, bellowing madly, he had chased me down the hall over something I had said that he considered insubordinate and probably was. I made it to my bedroom and slammed the door shut, wondering nervously what was going to happen next. I didn’t have to wait long. With a splintering crash, his fist came straight through the timber, shocking us both. He retreated wordlessly.
Three years on, when I was big enough and strong enough to splinter doors myself if I chose to, I challenged him. I can’t recall exactly what I said, but it must have been blunt.
Suddenly he was the one rearing up on his hind legs, whinnying and snorting.
‘LET ME TELL YOU SOMETHING ABOUT YOUR PRECIOUS MOTHER, EGGHEAD! YOUR PRECIOUS MOTHER AND YOUR FUCKING DREAM!’
Mum gave a loud cry and collapsed back onto the sofa, sobbing, as he began spewing out a story he’d clearly been saving for a moment such as this.
It was 1949. The war had been over for four years. My father had been a Flight Sergeant and airframe engineer in the RAF before enlisting in the New Zealand Air Force. He was stationed at Ohakea airbase on the Manawatū coast when he got a letter from my mother, writing to him from London.
Mum, Sue and I were sharing a one-bedroom flat in Brixton with a woman Mum deemed, possibly uncharitably, to be a prostitute. To a good Irish Catholic girl in 1948, even a fallen one, the label prostitute was all-embracing, ranging from girls who sold their bodies for money through to girls who went to parties exposing too much cleavage. Whatever the case here, this poor girl needed lots of sleep—sleep denied her when, just a few feet away, sharing a single bed with Mum, Sue and I came down with chickenpox, scratching and crying continuously. It drove her mad.
In the small hours of the morning she persuaded Mum that total immersion in a hot bath would take the sting out of the pox and help us settle. A hot bath was run and Mum detailed in her letter how she looked on with mounting alarm as this girl, now quite crazed, held me underwater, kicking and struggling until I went limp. She ignored Mum’s pleading to stop, and a wrestling match ensued. Mum needed all her strength to get me to the surface.
‘YOUR PRECIOUS MOTHER, EGGHEAD, WATCHED YOU NEARLY GET DROWNED!’
Mum was howling now. My response wasn’t what either of them was expecting.
‘I knew I wasn’t imagining it!’ I declared jubilantly. ‘There was a bathroom with white tiles and steam!’
I thanked Mum effusively for saving my life. Not for the first time, my father backed wordlessly out of the room.
CHAPTER TWO
IRISH WHAKAPAPA
I DIDN’T GET TO IRELAND, the land of my parents, until I was 30 years old. Apart from my Aunt Catherine, who helped Mum with Sue and me in London when we were very small, growing up in New Zealand, none of the Scott children ever met a single relative. It was as if our family had arrived in the Manawatū from another galaxy. We had no cousins, no aunties, no uncles, no sisters-in-law, no brothers-in-law and no grandmothers or grandfathers. It was just us—a small microclimate of Irish lunacy set in the dull and sober Manawatū landscape.
The only evidence of a wider family came from Mum’s side—fuzzy photographs smaller than postcards, with a pinking-shear trim. People not much more than white dots for faces and black and grey splotches for clothes pose en masse on a mailman’s dray or stand singly with a favourite dairy cow. Very Borat. A tall, gaunt man, splay-footed like Charlie Chaplin, with high cheekbones, cigarette in his mouth, wearing a rumpled suit, pullover and tie and a broad cloth cap on his head, was Mum’s father, Michael Ronayne. ‘Kindness itself’ is how she described him. He picked her wildflowers, sang her songs and carried her on his shoulders along the banks of the Blackwater that flowed slow, deep and wide past their thatched cottage. White swans trailed silver wakes amongst golden reeds on their side. Castles and grand mansions half hidden in forests of Sherwood green rose up on the other.
Unlike Mum, our father never spoke of his family. The closest he came to acknowledging kith and kin of any sort was when declaring bitterly that our mother’s brothers were thugs who deserved go to prison for assault and battery. He didn’t elaborate, but it was clear he had been on the receiving end of some sort of thumping. He didn’t celebrate birthdays or acknowledge anniversaries—though, to be fair, two years after I had been accredited University Entrance, he appeared in the living room one evening and chucked a watch in my direction, slurring, ‘That’s for passing University Entrance, Egghead.’ Until very recently I had no idea he had two sisters, who visited Mum in London after Sue and I were born and were very kind to her.
Having no connection with the past is curiously liberating. I have no heritage defining or confining me. No family tree determining how far the fruit can fall. I grew up believing I was a blank cheque and I could fill in as many zeroes as I wanted, this number varying widely as my self-esteem waxed and waned.
The Māori concept of whakapapa has no meaning for me. As a political reporter, on numerous campaign trails I accompanied party leaders onto many marae in chilly weather. The welcomes were always elaborate and the protocols always strictly observed. Thi
s often meant standing in drizzle for hours or sitting on hard benches in drizzle for hours, as dignified elders on the edge of tears paid interminable homage to ancestors represented in beautiful carvings on the walls and ceilings. When I wasn’t fretting about frostbite or deep-vein thrombosis I marvelled at their obsession with people and things that went before.
I did wonder if whakapapa would have more relevance and make more sense to me on my first visit to Ireland in 1977. I pondered this and other things as I stood on the deck of the rail ferry taking me across a lumpy Irish Sea—aluminium-saucepan grey flecked with mashed-potato foam, a portent of the national dish slapped in front of me every night for the next week. Swimming in molten butter, it was usually accompanied by the strict instruction, ‘Work away, boy. Ye must be famished! Work away!’ Only the Irish treat eating like a weights session at the gym, where you push your body to the absolute limit, eating until you can’t take another bite, but do anyway. It must be a genetic memory from the potato famine.
THE TRIP TO IRELAND WAS one I very nearly didn’t make. After six months in England and France, I just wanted to hightail it back to New Zealand. Spring refused to arrive, daffodils refused to flower, robins refused to sing, snow refused to melt. The family had already departed and I was left desperately circling Australia House on the Strand in a badly dinged Commer campervan that I hoped to sell to another poor sucker like me. Ahead of me and behind me, a convoy of homesick Aussies and Kiwis in similarly dented VW Kombi vans were hoping to do the same, all of us shooed away like seagulls at an airport by aggressive policemen every time we threatened to settle. In the end I sold the lumbering lemon to a sweet middle-aged English couple on Hampstead Heath, who told me apologetically that it was a buyers’ market and they had me over a barrel. Had they actually sodomised me I seriously doubt that it could have hurt more.
I spent some of the pitifully small bundle of notes on the train fare back to the Georgian manor with a gatehouse in rural Sussex which was the residence of my de-facto in-laws, the only people I have ever heard shout ‘DON’T COME FOR LUNCH!’ down a phone line when friends rang to say they were contemplating a spin in the countryside. That night I rang my sister Jane in Palmerston North—Mum was living in her tiny sunroom—to tell them I wouldn’t be heading to Ireland this trip due to my straitened circumstances. Mum worked in a shirt factory and Jane was a talented artist living off the smell of an oily rag, albeit paint-splattered. Somehow they telexed me £160. How could I refuse them? I boarded the boat-train at Paddington filled with gratitude and not a little apprehension.
