Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  And: ‘There was a war. We won, they lost. Get over it.’ Also: ‘Your Maoris aren’t like our Aborigines.’ How did he mean? ‘Degenerate. Toothless.’ It went on and on. ‘I hear they teach Maori to kids in New Zealand!’ That’s right, I said. ‘Brown and white kids! Fuck that.’ And: ‘Their land rights in New Zealand— that makes me sick.’ Also, of course: ‘I’m not a racist, but…’

  It was breathtaking. They were ordinary people living in an institution of racism, and it struck me that they were saying what a lot of people in New Zealand also say, or would like to say, out loud, in public, without censure or argument, without what they would pathetically call political correctness. It felt like home. I was so happy I was leaving.

  [August 6]

  Home

  Honey, I can say to her at any time of day or night, I’m home. Home is where I work. Home is where we live, together, since last weekend, in a three-bedroom rented house owned by a chemist. It’s in a suburb where the streets are named after birds. Two of the birds are extinct. We live in an extinct street.

  Home is a kitchen with a German stove. It has an instruction manual. I don’t have time to cook; I’m too busy reading the manual. ‘It is best to bake several cakes one after the other.’ And: ‘Do not sit on the oven.’ Also: ‘When baking and basting roasts, steam may be generated … This is a question of physics.’

  Home is a porch, a garage, and a shed with two rooms. The shed looks like a classroom. You could teach kids a good lesson in manners in that shed. It has a cupboard with a door that locks.

  Home is a backyard with trees covered in apples, nashis, figs, lemons, oranges and birds, including a quiet, handsome pair of spotted doves. The house next door has a caged sulphur-crested cockatoo called Elliot. Elliot can talk. His most spectacular use of the English language is: ‘Puss, puss.’

  Home is around the corner from a mysterious white cottage called The Legion of Mary Centre. All I know about it is that the legionnaires keep a beautifully manicured lawn. But there are clues to other places of interest, thanks to an excellent hand-drawn map courtesy of a neighbour. ‘Some mangroves … Secret park … Abandoned shopping trolley.’ One house is marked: ‘Anorexic woman who walks all the time and collects fruit.’

  Home is safe as houses. The neighbourhood is patrolled by a community policeman called Brendon. Brendon is thirty-one and owns a moustache. Home is nearby to the necessities of New Zealand life—a bakery, an RSA, a Mad Butcher, and a Work and Income office.

  Home is a neighbourhood where a family of Somalians delivers mailbox leaflets from Harvey Norman, Noel Leeming and someone called Domino Pizza. There are a large number of large people in wheelchairs on their way to order pizza. Parents play with their kids on the front lawn after work. Black shags fly overhead, towards water. The sky softens when you look west, towards water.

  Home is rent and bills, but home is happy. Home is a woman’s touch, her lingerie, her high-heeled shoes. Home is where I never, ever want to leave. On the day we moved in, I went into the local service station and glanced at an unusually large front-page headline on that morning’s paper: WORLDWIDE TRAVEL CHAOS. I was too tired to buy it. I was too tired to think. My head was full of heavy cardboard boxes with the felt-tip headline: KITCHEN.

  But I trudged back around the corner that night, bought the paper, and read how police raids in England had apparently prevented the ‘terror plot’ that aimed to make 8/16 the new 9/11.

  The big story was a riot of insane sci-fi. Explosives concealed in baby formula and fizzy drinks. Three planes, maybe more, to be blown up in mid-air, possibly above American cities. Westerners falling out of the sky. The vaguely Christian world going to hell in a prayer cap. Lurking behind the inevitable phrases—‘martyrs’, ‘British-born Muslims’, ‘links to al Qaeda’—was the shadow of Osama bin Laden in his cave.

  How to respond? We live in an age of threat, real and imagined, its sandy edges crawling with furious Islamic militia, and a hole in the bottom of the Earth where bin Laden paces; you may or may not choose to read it as the consequences of an American foreign policy that is called Israel.

  In the WORLDWIDE TRAVEL CHAOS story, reporters scurried among the thousands waiting for hours and hours to pass through airport security at Heathrow, and got an effective quote from a female passenger. Her comment was published as what’s known in the trade as a pull-quote—big bold letters, easy to find. She asked, ‘What sort of world are we bringing our children into?’

  That question has been asked for approximately quite a long time. Versions of it are being asked right now with terrible immediacy in Lebanon and Iraq. From this distance, in New Zealand, the answer can so easily look like a mad pattern of short, burning fuses, of American lies and Arabic menace.

  How to make sense of it, whom to believe? Did the British police really halt an 8/16 air attack? Robert Fisk has scorned claims of that latest ‘terror plot’, dismissing it as a fiction, an invented scare to divert attention away from Israel’s invasion of Lebanon, as some kind of monstrous PR exercise on behalf of the Blair and Bush administrations. Nothing to see here, he argued. Go back to your homes.

  Gladly. Home is what you know. Home is close to hand. Home is life. Home is the happiness waiting to fill the third, spare bedroom in our house with the spotted doves.

  [August 27]

  Notes from the Underground

  Every now and then readers track me down to ask about particular columns I wrote four, five, sometimes six years ago. The inquiries have a seasonal quality. Winter means I get letters or emails about a column published in October 2000. It’s remained a burning topic, because the subject was New Zealand’s hot springs. You could, I fancied, drip your way across the country from one boiling outdoor soak to the next, like the man in John Cheever’s classic short story ‘The Swimmer’, who navigates his way home through the fifteen swimming pools in his neighbourhood: ‘He seemed to see, with a cartographer’s eye, that string of swimming pools, that quasi-subterranean stream that curved across the county.’

  Readers continue to ask whether it really could be done, whether a quasi-subterranean stream of New Zealand hot springs could be mapped. They ask in winter, their cold bones and feverish imaginations stirred by the thought of rainwater sizzling on underground volcanic rock, then rising up, as hot as the sun, fuming and sulphuric, until it collects as a thermal oasis in pools and tubs all over New Zealand. They want to follow that line, that curve, these hot-water sailors, who write wishing to discover New Zealand until they are as boiled as eggs.

  I write back and refer them to an October 1998 issue of National Geographic that claimed to list exactly 107 hot springs in New Zealand. ‘Is there any one explorer,’ I wondered in my 2000 column, ‘who has navigated their way around the whole steaming lot? Which wrinkled soul holds the record?’ It now seems as though the answer is Sally Jackson, author of Hot Springs of New Zealand, which numbers ninety-three hot springs, and a further fifty in motels, camping grounds, bed and breakfasts, and backpacker lodges.

  Jackson knows her numbers: she is a former economic statistician. But she also knows her way into hot water. She is a sleuth, dogged in her pursuit, her nose alert to the high, sleepy scent of sulphur in the most remote corners of New Zealand.

  Yes, she goes to the famous spots in Te Aroha, Hanmer, Waiwera, Miranda, Mount Maunganui, Rotorua, Tokaanu, Maruia. But she also stalks her prey, tramping four hours to find a fibreglass tank up the Mohaka River, six hours to fiddle with a black plastic pipe connected to cool spring water in a dammed hillside pool above the Hurunui River, thirteen hours to ford and re-ford rivers to sit in a 40-degree pool with views of a pale blue glacier on the West Coast, and four days in the Southern Alps to locate New Zealand’s most isolated hot springs somewhere in the Mungo River.

  There is the one that got away, the fabled Perth River hot springs. Although Jackson had obtained a DSIR report claiming it could be the largest thermal spring in the South Island, her best efforts—a helicopter
ride, a rugged two-day slog—left her as dry as a cake. The closest she gets to this steaming El Dorado: ‘Elusive wafts of sulphur are detected along the Whataroa River… ’

  Jackson notes the intentional lack of showers at the public Waiariki Pools—the idea is to leave the precious, healing minerals on your skin as long as possible. She hands out the phone number for the farmer who owns the private kauri-lined tubs at Te Maire. She lists the nudist hot springs, the hot springs beneath hot waterfalls, the hot springs on beaches requiring the use of a shovel, the hot springs that are as hot as the fires of hell: the devil plays the best tunes, then relaxes.

  And so it really is possible to hotfoot your way across New Zealand. Seventy-two dips in the North Island, twenty-one in the South. Jackson’s navigations head as far north as Ngawha, and as far south as Welcome Flat in Westland—a six-to eight-hour tramp, large pools with a surface of green mud, 57 degrees. West, to the Amethyst hot springs dug into a river near Harihari. East, to Te Puia; there is a charming account of visiting these springs in 1945 by dear old A.H. Reed, who ‘gingerly’ approached the pools in his pyjamas, stripped off, found his dip ‘exhilarating’, and marvelled at the notion of water boiling up from beneath the thin, seething Earth’s crust, ‘suggesting constant relays of subterranean sweating titans stoking unquenchable fires’. Reed was seventy. The heat had obviously got to him.

  But it gets to everyone, makes the crotchiest old bitch or lousiest middle-management wretch feel strangely grateful, shinily alive. There is a photo of Jackson at the back of the book. Lissom, wet-haired, she rests her bare arms on boulders, the rest of her body submerged in a hot spring beside a waterfall. What a picture of happiness. But the star of the photo is all that soft water, that sensual underground gift, that bath in the New Zealand curve.

  [September 3]

  According to Pals

  Monday

  Hollywood heart-throb Brad Pitt has stunned Angelina Jolie with the shock announcement that he wants to jump on the next train leaving the empty platform of their romance.

  ‘She didn’t know what he was talking about at first,’ revealed a close pal. ‘She asked him to draw a diagram. He did quite an artistic job. Nice lines.’

  Another close pal said that Ange was shaken side to side, like a frail passenger forced to stand in a bus doing corners at speed.

  ‘Trains, buses—she didn’t know whether she was coming or going, or on what route.’

  Meanwhile, parenting experts warn that the couple’s stormy relationship will destroy any possibility that their infant daughter Shiloh will ever know a moment’s happiness.

  Tuesday

  Hollywood hunk Brad Pitt has launched a scathing attack on partner Angelina Jolie.

  The tanned Troy boy told close pals he was sick to death of her and thought her the worst person on the entire planet, according to insiders, who filtered the news to sources.

  The sources said, ‘When they first got together, all Ange wanted to do was shag Brad.

  ‘He wanted to be a dad bad, but since they had Shiloh all Ange has done is nag Brad.

  ‘He’s a sad Brad. We all miss the glad Brad.

  ‘It’s because she’s driving Brad mad. It’s like she’s the US military, and Brad’s Baghdad.’

  Meanwhile, relationship experts warn that their fallout will hasten global warming and lead to the extinction of most life forms on Earth.

  Wednesday

  Hollywood hothead Brad Pitt has let fly at close pals, say sources.

  In another sign that his whirlwind romance with tattooed love vixen Angelina Jolie is on the rocks, the Ocean’s Thirteen star has bitterly complained that his close pals are running around spreading vicious rumours that his whirlwind romance with tattooed love vixen Angelina Jolie is on the rocks.

  Sources say they are keeping well out of it, according to insiders.

  But the insiders fear they might be next to feel Brad’s wrath, say close pals.

  Thursday

  Hollywood has-been Brad Pitt has been neither seen nor heard in the past twenty-four hours and close pals are worried.

  Sources say the close pals feel robbed of their existence. One lay in bed all day with the curtains drawn, another fell into a drug-induced coma, and a third went on a violent rampage that left two family members and five innocent bystanders dead.

  Insiders are likewise concerned about their own grasp on reality in the wake of Brad’s silent treatment.

  Meanwhile, the American Association of Parenting and Relationship Experts have also cried foul at Brad’s mystery disappearance.

  In a press statement, they called for Brad to act as a generous host to their parasitic dependence.

  They say no one has called them for comment, and the lack of publicity threatens their livelihood.

  They asked him to remember that they have partners, children, ex-partners, stepchildren, therapists, analysts, and drug and alcohol counsellors to support.

  Friday

  Hollywood horn-dog Brad Pitt was thought to be in the same city as sex-mad socialite Paris Hilton last night, fuelling rumours of a whirlwind romance, according to desperate insiders.

  Relationship experts were quick to warn it wouldn’t last, but added that you never know these days.

  Parenting experts were quick to warn it could inflame Islamic militants, and lead to another terror attack on US soil.

  Close pals were slow to admit they still haven’t seen Brad, or heard so much as a peep.

  Saturday

  Hollywood hellraiser Brad Pitt, who has gone on many a marathon drinking session in the past, probably, has had his drinking exploits put in the shade by a close pal.

  Sources say the pal did his best to drink Los Angeles dry in a crazed seventy-two-hour binge.

  Insiders say they’ve got their own problems.

  Sunday

  Hollywood hero Brad Pitt has come to the rescue of a close pal who tried to kill himself.

  ‘He gave me enough gossip about his life with Ange to keep me going for another week,’ said the pal, who claimed he was visited by the reclusive star in hospital.

  Insiders got together with sources over the latest development, and have agreed to offer their services to Hollywood heart-throb Tom Cruise.

  ‘Brad’s too unstable,’ they said.

  [September 17]

  English Honey

  Late summer in England is as warm as toast, the long days light until seven in the evening. Here in Cambridge, the brightly painted Salvatore & Son ice-cream van chimes past my door at about four in the afternoon on Saturday and Sunday. I scamper out in bare feet and buy a banana ice for 70p. Salvatore turns his van around the cul-de-sac, the chimes softening in the distance, and the quiet afternoon swings back on its hammock. You can hear the houses sleeping in the street.

  It’s so pretty, so tidy. The hedges are folded like sheets, the buttery sun melts on Victorian red brick and Tudor orange stone. As a Press Fellow at Wolfson College for the Michaelmas Term, my life is measured in plates. I walk along paths, never on the lawns, to the dining hall—three long rows of tables, upstairs by the bust of Lord Wolfson, who has a kind, gentle face—for breakfast at eight, lunch at twelve-thirty, and supper, never dinner, at six-thirty. In between, there are so many newspapers to read. Press Fellows take The Guardian and The Times, and there is a quiet parlour set aside to read The Independent, The Daily Telegraph, Financial Times, The Times Literary Supplement, The Spectator and New Statesman. My days are drowning in honey, stingless.

  Fed, watered, housed and inked, I have also been transported: a few days after arriving, I took receipt of a college bicycle. The first thing I did was set sail into the green and pleasant countryside. Past the familiar H of rugby goalposts, past meadows, past fields, and then just past the village of Grantchester towards—the past.

  For a visitor the first thing about England is always the past, its history laid out like souvenirs at every turn. That graveyard, that inn, that cobbled path. Tea rooms, t
oo. The past I biked towards, and keep returning to, is a popular tourist spot called The Orchard Tea Garden, made famous by Rupert Brooke.

  Brooke, handsome, sickly, doomed, took up lodgings at Orchard House in 1909. He was a student at King’s College. He commuted to Cambridge by canoe. At the Orchard, he took his tea outdoors, on a deckchair in the long grass, in the shade of apple trees; the place remains in that state of idyllic grace, with its wooden pavilion, its scones, its stingless honey. A little museum commemorates Brooke’s short life—he died from septicaemia in World War I, on a troopship bound for Gallipoli. He was twenty-seven.

  Poor man. But what a shit he was, and so were his friends who gathered at the Orchard—the so-called Grantchester Group, also known as the Neo-Pagans, or The Apostles, then later, immortally, as Bloomsbury. Brooke was a casual, sneering anti-Semite, like Virginia Woolf, who met her husband, Leonard, around the time of Grantchester and wrote of him: ‘I do not like the Jewish voice. I do not like the Jewish laugh.’ She followed Brooke’s example by bathing naked under moonlight at Grantchester. It’s creepy to imagine horse-faced Woolf in the nude, with her repulsion of sex so strong that she refused to consummate her marriage: when Leonard tried it on, she became ‘excited’, which sounds promising but means agitated, alarmed, adamantly against the idea.

  Brooke, in his poem remembering those sweet years at Grantchester ‘flower-lulled in sleepy grass’, wrote: ‘The woman here do all they ought; / The men observe the Rules of Thought.’ Lytton Strachey was there, and so were E.M. Forster, Bertrand Russell, Maynard Keynes, Augustus John, and that fabulous misanthrope, Ludwig Wittgenstein. The museum allows an excellent story about Wittgenstein in Grantchester. He visited a professor called Whitehead. He was shown into the drawing room for afternoon tea, ignored Whitehead’s wife, paced up and down, and finally roared: ‘A proposition has two poles! It is apb.’ Whitehead: ‘I naturally asked what are a and b, but found that I had said quite the wrong thing. “A and b are indefinable,” Wittgenstein answered in a voice of thunder.’