Civilisation

by Steve Braunias

  ‘I went around to see Tracy, and Marcus and said, “Jump in the wagon.” I’d heard through the grapevine where the little bugger was hiding.

  ‘We grabbed him and he’s crying and pleading, “Let me go, let me go” and lashing about continuously. Wouldn’t sit still. I thought, how do we restrain him? And then I thought, shit, I know – cable ties.’

  What gave him that idea?

  ‘You know, like on Police Ten 7.’

  Sunday night in Tangimoana, and an AC/DC fan suddenly inspired by a reality TV show to grab some cables from his garage and use them to hogtie a kid squealing on the lawn.

  ‘And then,’ he continued, ‘the police turn up. I thought they were gonna say, “Rightio, that’s all good. You can go home now and we’ll contact you if we need to.” But no, suddenly we’re the bad guys.’

  There was something missing in his narrative, a crucial detail unaccounted for. ‘I understand,’ I said, ‘that when you raced home to get the cable ties, you were wearing slippers. Why was that?’

  ‘I normally wear slippers to the club,’ he said.

  Nikita’s 21st birthday party went off. There were drunk, affectionate speeches. I talked to an astronomer wearing a sombrero. Michael McKay wore what appeared to be a scarf but was actually an ingenious beer-holder – there were pouches at either end. Kieran was legless, his heart near bursting with how proud he was of Nikita. Nikita was there with her very cute child.

  I talked to a guy who said his licence plate read GDNYM8. I asked him to translate. ‘Good on ya, mate.’ He’d got it in honour of the line on the Speights’ TV commercial. Marcus was there. Tracy wasn’t. The previous night at the boating club she had got tanked on gin and screamed at him, ‘Go back to your fat teenage whore!’ She fled and he ran after her, his work boots crunching on the gravel. ‘Let her go,’ voices shouted from the bar.

  Grant McDowall was there. I’d met him earlier when he was in his backyard, hosing down his boat. He’d just come back from fishing and had three enormous albacore tuna in a white bucket. He was with his son, Aaron, sixteen, who has Down Syndrome. ‘Only his second time out at sea but he was good as gold, eh Aaron?’ Aaron gave a thumbs-up.

  We went inside. ‘I’ll just put some music on for the boy. He loves Irish music, Scottish music. Drinking songs.’ Aaron sat back, listened, and drank Diet Coke.

  Grant worked for the fire service. He’d been living in Palmerston North but his marriage had broken up. ‘There wasn’t anyone else. We just got sick of pissing each other off. We parted on good terms. I was at a bit of loss as to where to go and I thought, where have I gone where I was happy? I’d always liked fishing in Tangimoana so I looked for a house here under $100,000. That was all I could afford. I found this for $82,000. The grass was up to your neck but no worries.’

  He’d built the shed with Kieran, Marcus and Tracy. ‘The skills among us are pretty awesome,’ he said. ‘Marcus is a top, top engineer. Kieran would have to be one of the most sought-after welders in the whole of the Manawatū. And Tracy – well, it was really Tracy who built that shed. It was all her that did it. Her idea, her know-how.’

  I mentioned that a woman at the boating club had told me Tangimoana was full of lonely people – ex-husbands, ex-wives, widows. ‘Yeah, I suppose so,’ Grant said, and off the top of his head he named five people who lived by themselves. Then he described the weather. ‘We get horrific westerly storms, very strong winds.’

  He said it was time he made Aaron his lunch. ‘He loves his sausages. He’s always hounding me to put them on for him, eh Aaron? You all right there, mate?’ Aaron looked over at his dad and gave a thumbs-up.

  Hell was over the fence. Grant lived next door to Willie Seabrook, 54. There was a face lurking somewhere behind Willie’s beard, and a human being floating somewhere within the 30 litres of beer he said he drank on average every week. His house stank of damp and dog. The furniture was chewed down to the slats. There were old stuffed toys inside a glass cabinet. ‘My youngest has some kind of brain disorder. I don’t know what they fuckin’ call it – motor neuron or something. His skull never grew. He’s normal, he just can’t read or write.’

  There was a massive hole in the ceiling: I smelled a rat. There were cobwebs and stains decorating the wallpaper, a hot-water bottle on the floor. He was married once. ‘The old girl left me.’

  Every time I came back to Tangimoana I picked up a whiff of the boozy fug drifting from Willie’s dog-eaten, rat-nibbled, bachelor shack. It followed me down the street on Saturday afternoon, when a tough bastard with wraparound dark glasses, a goatee and a shaved head swung his hips along the pavement, his pit-bull terrier straining at the leash and squinting its pink heartless eyes.

  At the boating club on Sunday afternoon, there were drinkers arguably less damaged than Willie. Conversation turned to a sixteen-year-old girl in town. ‘Rooted her,’ lied an elderly man with a face so red with alcohol it was nearly black. ‘Didja? Good on yer, boy,’ said the fire chief.

  No one said anything for a while. Elbows bent back glasses. A woman said, ‘I used to laugh so much here that it hurt. Not like that anymore.’ The fire chief said, ‘I’m thinking of doing something about that.’ He refused to comment any further. He looked as though he’d last made someone laugh in about 1712.

  A jeep came to a squealing halt in the car park. The driver, a woman with flared nostrils, slammed the door shut and bounded through a cloud of dust. She talked very fast; her swollen eyeballs were as big as her head; she ground her teeth and bounded to the bar for a drink. The elderly man swayed on his heels and said, ‘Rooted her.’ The fire chief said, ‘Didja? Good on yer, boy.’

  Earlier that day I had been invited in for a cup of tea by a man who had just finished mowing his front lawn. ‘Ron told me about you,’ he said; he’d been talking with Ron Gardner, the lonely widower. He looked both ways down the street before he opened the gate. ‘I don’t want them knowing you were here,’ he said. ‘I knew the boy they beat up. A bad bugger. But the way they did it was just wrong. It was a police job but they grabbed him and give him a bloody hiding. They threatened him they were gonna cut his head off and bury him in the forest.’

  He was raving. ‘They’re baddies. Druggies. Always boozing up and drugging up. Kieran used to be quite a nice guy until he got tangled up with the Thomsens. Tracy’s a good worker, I’ll give her that. It’s the best thing about her. But nah.’ He screwed up his face. ‘She’s bad news.’

  He bagged the fire chief. I didn’t mind that. I did mind when he bagged a friend of Kieran’s whom I’d met at the twenty-first. He was a decent gentle guy who’d suffered a terrible accident working at the Port of Tauranga. He got whacked with a crane, had sixteen screws put in his back and now couldn’t have children. He was married. He and his wife were saving to pay for in vitro fertilisation. ‘I just want a family and to be able to work.’ Could he work? ‘I can do maybe four hours a day before the pain makes it unbearable and I gotta lie down.’

  He wasn’t exactly getting a lot of sympathy from the man who made me a very weak cup of tea – he skimped on the tea leaves and poured less than a teaspoon of milk. He said, ‘I know who you should talk to.’ He made a phone call. I was given an address. I walked around the corner in the peace and quiet of a weekend afternoon in Tangimoana and was met by a woman lurking at her front gate. She looked right, she looked left, and then said, ‘Okay. You can come in.’

  We sat in the backyard by a hedge, but first she checked with her husband that their neighbours were away. He said they were. ‘Good,’ she said. ‘We can talk here.’ But, just in case, she lowered her voice, and sometimes she whispered, and now and then she hissed.

  While she talked about how much she loathed Tracy Thomsen, and described how Tracy had, apparently, managed to profoundly damage Tangimoana, I started thinking about the US spy station. I had visited it earlier that day. The woman hissed, ‘She’s nearly ruined this town but most people won’t speak out because they know what�
��d happen.’ What’d happen? ‘A brick in the window. Or there was one lady – they pumped raw sewage on to her paddock.’

  Just before Tangimoana there was a turn-off that led to the spy station. The station was a modest office compound, white, only one level, surrounded by barbed wire and a sign that read DEFENCE AREA. NO ADMISSION EXCEPT ON BUSINESSES. It didn’t advise that trespassers would merely be prosecuted; they would be DETAINED AND SEARCHED.

  ‘We don’t want her here,’ my hostess said, as her husband ferried out two glasses of iced water. ‘She’s overstayed her welcome.’ Gordon McDowall, the fireman from Palmerston North, had told me Tracy had ‘done shitloads for the community’. He’d mentioned her volunteer work on the reserve committee. But my hostess said, ‘She stood over people to get on to the reserve committee. It’s a need for power and control.’

  The spy station was next to a heap of sawed-down trees.

  ‘Over the years people have discovered what she’s really like.’

  There were two cars and a motorbike inside the compound.

  ‘All the riff-raff come here because there’s no policing.’

  The New Zealand flag flicked and flapped.

  ‘We won’t associate with the boating club or the volunteer fire brigade. They’re all her drinking buddies. You’ll see them loading up their boats with crates of beer.’

  The spy station looked like a demented bunker. The wind got up. It shrieked through the pine forest on the other side of the road. I looked at the forest and thought about Phil Cowan, a 26-year-old dope dealer who disappeared in Wellington on March 25, 2001. His silver Nissan was found dumped in Bulls with traces of his blood inside. The car’s ignition barrel had been tampered with, and the passenger door interfered with. By September, police had decided Cowan had been murdered and his body disposed of. In 2003 three men were accused of the murder but discharged after the judge stopped their trial. Cowan’s parents believe their son is buried somewhere in the Tangimoana forest.

  The hissing on the summer lawn: ‘She told everyone how she’d told the kid they were going to take him to the forest and kill him. She was laughing about it, saying he was so scared that he literally shit his pants.’

  It was a really hot afternoon. I needed that glass of water. I sat there sweating, and leaning forward to catch what my hostess was saying as she lowered her voice for fear of being overheard, and I started thinking, what the fuck is this? It was absurd to be hiding in the corner of a backyard in bright, sea-salty Tangimoana. It felt less like an interview than an undercover assignation.

  She kept apologising. ‘I know what I must sound like.’ No, no, I said, thinking that she sounded malicious, petty, vengeful, bitter. Well, she said, I was asking about Tangimoana and so I may as well hear it straight. ‘It’s the truth behind the scenes.’

  She said if I didn’t believe her she could arrange for me to meet other people to hear their views, but I cringed at the prospect of another clandestine appointment. I wanted out. I wanted away from Tangimoana. It was lovely, friendly and beachy, also oppressive, pissed, plain weird and just going about its business. Perhaps it only seemed as though it were intent on minding everyone else’s business. It felt smaller each time I visited, as though its few streets were creeping closer together. And each time it felt more infected by the US spy station, by the crackle and pop of static, by the white noise and the intercepted broadcasts, and the pursuit and accumulation of state secrets.

  Enough. It inspired a quest for civilisation. Half an hour away, quivering on the banks of State Highways One and Three, was Sanson. Every time I returned there it felt as though I were journeying towards higher ground, could breathe easier.

  One afternoon I went for a walk. I suspected I was the first person to go walking in Sanson since about 1712. I turned the corner from the motel and walked along the side of State Highway Three as traffic shot past. I headed for the rugby ground. I liked the look of it. It had an old wooden stand at one end, with a corrugated iron roof. I climbed up the stand and sat down in one of the rows. It was nice sitting there looking down on to an empty field, the H of the rugby posts. I turned around and saw a sentence graffitied along one of the back rows. It read: LET’S ALL BE HUMAN BEINGS.

  Mosgiel

  Looking for Trouble

  It was out there in the dark night, crime, covert and creeping, up to no good in the small Otago town, with its Scottish street names and splendid rhododendrons, or fanned out on surrounding Taieri Plain, that flat lonely expanse of long country roads with windbreak walls of solid hedge. To the untrained eye, there was nothing to worry about. You might think Mosgiel’s population of 10,000 were safe in their beds. You might even misconstrue the town as desperately boring. But all you had to do was wait. Mosgiel would reveal its secrets.

  ‘Okay,’ said Malcolm Macleod. ‘This is what we’ve been talking about.’ He was behind the wheel of a snug four-door-drive Toyota Ipsum emblazoned with the legend ‘Mosgiel–Taieri Community Patrol’. The writing made it resemble a police vehicle but the occupants were citizens. It was just after eleven on a cold evening. The windows of the car were open so the inhabitants could listen for signs of trouble or distress.

  Malcolm had pulled up behind a factory in an industrial estate on the outskirts of the town, pop. 10,000. Allister Green, sitting in the passenger seat, shone a high-beam torch on a factory door. Malcolm said, ‘See how the white undercoat of the door frame is showing through? It makes it look as though the door is slightly open. That’s a classic example of what we were saying earlier about using our eyes.’

  But the door wasn’t open. Saturday night and Mosgiel slumbered on. Nothing was happening.

  The community patrol drove around from ten p.m. until two a.m. every Friday and Saturday night, always as a pair, one driving, the other shining a torch, both staying alert, focussed and, hardest of all, serious. Allister had an agile build and thinning hair; he worked in IT. Malcolm was overweight and short of breath; he supplied equipment to treat sleep apnoea. They were men of middle age, decent citizens, husbands, fathers – a dad’s army. They wore fluorescent vests. Neither was likely to panic and squawk, ‘Don’t panic!’ There wasn’t the opportunity.

  The patrol car crawled along a residential street. ‘See, there’s a hazard,’ Malcolm said. He shone his torch on a dumpster bin on the pavement. ‘Someone not watching where they were going could do themselves an injury.’ On the pavement? ‘There are no street lights,’ Allister said.

  They drove around the corner. There were still no street lights, nor lights in any of the houses. ‘Just to make you feel safer,’ Malcolm said, ‘I’ll lock the doors.’

  It was a few days before Guy Fawkes Day; a sky rocket fizzed up into the night air. Allister and Malcolm identified the launch pad at Memorial Park. There were two adults, three small kids and a teenage couple holding hands. The powdery remains of fireworks lay on the grass. ‘Hopefully they’ll pick it up when they’re finished,’ Malcolm said. The patrol car crawled on.

  They knew about the man who spent weekends in a lock-up he rented at the industrial estate. He lived in Ōamaru and came to Mosgiel on weekends; he put a sleeping bag on the floor and made meals on a gas cooker. ‘There’s another guy lives there,’ Allister said. ‘He feeds 50 or 60 feral cats.’

  Mosgiel by night, the alleyways, the deserted lots, the back streets – Allister and Malcolm made excellent tour guides. There was an astonishing voyeurism, an officially sanctioned nosiness. Allister said, ‘You start to find sly ways of observing people without being watched.’ Malcolm said, ‘We find all sorts of nooks and crannies.’

  The car crawled along at 30 kilometres an hour. It turned off the main street, Gordon Road, and crept behind a pharmacy. Malcolm said, ‘This is just a typical alley. We’ll do a wee scout. This is where you sometimes see pissed young kids fornicating, all sorts of things.’

  But no one was fornicating. Saturday night and Mosgiel slept on. Nothing was happening.

  ‘It�
��s amazing what you can hear just driving slowly along with the windows down,’ Malcolm said. ‘You might hear broken glass, or you might hear nothing.’

  He drove into the grounds of Taieri College. Allister said, ‘We check on doors and windows. A couple of weeks ago I saw a light on in the school gym. I thought, that’s a bit strange, and called it in to the police.’ Had there been anything amiss? ‘No.’

  Later, on a deserted side road near a sawmill, Malcolm said, ‘The police tell us a sexo frequently comes here.’ A sexo? ‘That’s what the police call sex offenders.’ How did the sexo offend? ‘He parks up at night and pretends he’s listening to the radio, but he could be masturbating, looking at a video, reading dirty books.’ Interesting. What crime was being committed? ‘At the end of the day,’ Malcolm said, ‘a sexo is a sexo.’

  But no one was wanking. At 11.21 there were rabbits at the electricity sub-station. At 11.49, in the nearby village of Outram, a hedgehog crossed the road. At 11.56 Allister said, ‘It’ll all kick off in four minutes. I’ve seen it happen before. Nothing, all quiet, and then with a click of the fingers’ – he clicked his fingers – ‘all hell breaks loose on the stroke of midnight.’

  On the stroke of midnight, the patrol car pulled off the road and along the dirt track leading to Outram Glen, a popular swimming hole in the Taieri River – and out of the darkness, suddenly, illuminated by the car’s headlights, was a gang of 40 or 50 teenagers.

  Something was happening.

  In Mosgiel in broad daylight the most common signs of life were approaching death – old people, squadrons of them, their mobility scooters whispering along Gordon Road. Mosgiel could lay claim to the biggest concentration of rest homes and retirement villages in New Zealand. The inmates formed ten percent of the population – an estimated 800 people and 300 staff. There were Brooklands, Mossbrae, Birchleigh and Glendale. Holy Cross College had townhouses for retired priests. In the very clean, very quiet, very spooky retirement village of Chatsford, Isabella Divers, 94, sat on a deckchair in her garage with a packet of Toffee Pops in her lap – she was waiting for a lift to visit her nephew in hospital. On her cardigan a badge advised I AM VISUALLY IMPAIRED, but she was in fit and dandy spirits. She said, ‘I have a tot of whisky every night. That helps.’