Fish of the Week

by Steve Braunias

  And then there was Erebus. Bev never married; after her father died, she continued living at home with her mother at 184 Mount Albert Road in Sandringham. Their address is listed in the names of those who died at Erebus, because the two of them were on that flight. The tickets were a Christmas present to each other. Beverley Williamson called Bev Price the day before. She said to her, Aren’t you lucky. When the first reports came through about the crash, before it was known that it had claimed all 257 lives, it was thought that if anyone could survive it would be Bev Price, with her experience and her strength and her intense determination.

  Beverley Williamson remembered the afternoon when Bev—‘BP’, she called her—suggested they bash their way through Oakley Creek. It was BP’s idea to form a walking track, which now allows for two or three kilometres of sweet relief from traffic, homes, noise. A volunteer group picks up litter, and plants native trees and shrubs. The creek and the waterfall attract ducks, welcome swallows, dragonflies. It’s a very good place for a picnic, an amble, an escape, and it takes no particular effort to sometimes think: Thank you, Beverley Joy Price.

  [March 9]

  Father’s Days

  Fame is a terrible burden, with its demands and impositions, but I try to be good-humoured about it. I was good-humoured about it when a woman nervously approached me the other day and asked, ‘Excuse me, but are you Steve?’ It was at a park near my house. I like taking the baby there, and lifting her out of the pram and putting her on her favourite swing, where she laughs, and gasps, and eyes other children with wild surmise. It’s a popular park. It has a barbecue area. It has a lake. It has birds—tui, geese, ducks, coots, shags, all three species of gull. The park is where my daughter said her first word: ‘Duck.’ In the cool of the evening, the trees lay down long shadows on the grass.

  I smiled at the woman and said yes. I was pushing the pram towards the playground. I could see that the blue swing was empty. It was in the afternoon; my fiancée was at work. She usually leaves when the baby is in her highchair slobbering over her breakfast, which is one of her three favourite times of the day. Sometimes I take her to day care, where staff always write the same comment on the parental form: ‘Ate all her lunch.’ Dinner is at five o’clock sharp. She has her mother’s smooth slender limbs, and my stomach.

  The woman asked, ‘Are you really Steve?’ I told her I really was, and tried to arrange my face so that it looked like the only photograph of me that I allow to be used by my book publisher. It’s a Jane Ussher portrait. I look dim and old and simpering. It didn’t take much of an effort to arrange my face. But the woman was staring at me hard. Her hair needed a comb, she wore sandals, she fluttered her hands when she spoke.

  Fame requires patience. I waited for her compliment. This sort of thing usually happens in airports, bars and shopping malls. The swing was still empty, but it was getting dangerously close to five o’clock. She was either going to say something nice about my columns or my book, which had finally cracked the best-seller list—sandwiched between Michael King’s The Penguin History of New Zealand and a tramping guide. No doubt the royalty cheques are about to be delivered by the mailman hefting a great big sack. My third book is due in May, the fourth in October, but my main income is from other writing. Since quitting work as a journalist late last year, I have become just what New Zealand needs: another fat columnist who occasionally writes for television.

  Fortunately, my real purpose in 2008 is to look after the baby. It’s a privilege. She’s one year old, an expansive gasbag, moronic, relaxed, adorable, in love with ducks, laundry baskets, books, moisturiser, pillows, watermelon, peaches, cucumber, raisins, boiled eggs, spinach, pasta, her high chair, and her mother—her second word was ‘Mamma’. I take her to the auction rooms and the creek and the café and the zoo, and I kiss her and stroke her golden hair and put her down for naps and when I close the bedroom door I tell her, ‘I love you.’ In the weekends, and in the mornings and evenings, we are a family, the fat columnist with his lovely baby and beautiful fiancée, and I couldn’t be happier if I tried, and I’ve tried in the past, and always failed. The thought of failing now is more than I can imagine, too dark to see, a nihilism, an end.

  The woman asked, ‘Are you by yourself?’ I hadn’t expected that. Yes, I told her. She asked, ‘And you really are Steve?’ Yes, I told her. And then she said, ‘Well, it’s great to meet you! I didn’t think you were going to make it.’ It was a warm summer’s afternoon, but I was suddenly drenched in hubris. This wasn’t about fame. I didn’t know what this was about until she started saying I was very lucky to have time with my daughter, a lot of fathers in my position were denied access, the law was shocking, it really was, but anyway don’t be shy, we’re over by the barbecue, come and meet the rest of the solo father support group.

  I looked over her shoulder and saw about eight or nine men standing around eating sausages. It was a terrifying sight. They looked mad, sad, and desperate to know, quiet and restrained— I suppose in a legal sense—and abject, and there were traces of shame, and belligerence, and the black, black stain of some gigantic failure. This may be entirely and notoriously false. I wasn’t really paying close attention. I was looking at a vision of my own possible future. I thought: This is how it ends, this is happiness undone, marooned at a barbecue beside an empty blue swing.

  Mind you, the sausages smelled good. I saw someone waving a steak around. There were plastic cups and white bread. ‘You don’t have to stay long if you don’t want to,’ said the woman. A goose waddled by. ‘Duck,’ said my daughter. Her mother would be home soon, and that appearance is my favourite time of day, a shared fame—the togetherness of the household’s three names.

  [March 23]

  Diary of a Trout

  What a week! It had seven days in it, which I heard happens only around about fifty times a year. First there was Monday, then Tuesday, then Wednesday—honestly, it was 24/7 sometimes.

  Things were bound to get a little crazy. I phoned Paolo the florist to deliver phalaenopsis orchids for the launch of a new range of Swedish light switches, but instead got through to the voice mail of a woman who said in a sexy, kittenish voice, ‘You’ve reached Antonia Trout from Trout PR. Please leave a message, because I promise to return your call. Ciao!’ I started to leave a message—‘Antonia, darling…’—until I realised I’d phoned myself.

  Word of mouth is the best publicity. I really believe that. If I didn’t, I’d end up talking to myself. My challenge is to get people talking, which isn’t something you can always rely on in Auckland, because everyone’s busy making calls and taking calls. I say to my clients, ‘I can bring you cut-through.’ I tell them, ‘I can create a buzz in the static.’ If they want detail, I can talk to them about developing and implementing media strategies to ensure maximum impact of key issues, and the importance of building on the understanding of key audience attitudes and behaviours. Key is a key word.

  Most clients just want to know whom I can invite to their launch, but that involves a lot of careful planning. It worked out brilliantly on Monday, when a new pair of scissors was launched at Ponsonby hair salon Patrick, wowing beauty editors and A-list celebrities who included Gilda Kirkpatrick, Anna Fitzpatrick, Sean Fitzpatrick and Patrick Reynolds. I wanted to stay longer but I had to rush across town, where a new collection by designer Kate Walker was launched at the funky Pigg bar, wowing fashion editors and A-list celebrities who included Murray and Angela Crane, Mike and Brigid Chunn, and Marc and Rick Ellis. Kate’s stunning Tooth Fairy show is inspired by school dental clinics— think stiff white smocks, demure mid-calf hemlines and thick stockings, I think.

  I loved it, but the truth is that I had a more intellectually stimulating time the next afternoon, when a new blog by former Alt TV presenter Jumbo Trudgeon was launched over a barbecue at his Grey Lynn home, wowing his family and fellow bloggers. Jumbo’s hotly anticipated Yoo Hoo! blog promises wry, pungent observations of politics, media, cricket, and his personal grooming
habits. Conversation topics at the after-party were The Sunday Star-Times, the Herald on Sunday, the Listener, Metro, North & South, Campbell Live, Close Up, Breakfast, Sunrise, and National Radio shows Afternoons with Jim Mora and Mediawatch. What fun!

  But then it was off downtown, where the new menu by master chef Taffy Morgan was launched at his waterfront restaurant Sodom, wowing food editors and A-list celebrities who included Bill Ralston, Louise Wallace, Hamish Keith and other people over fifty. Morgan’s wry, pungent menu included a subtle reworking of his famous signature dish of twice-cooked confit of duck on a ragoût of celeriac and shallots with a tamarind and kaffir lime glaze. The shallots are now organic.

  Later that night I ran into Robert Niwa, Delaney Tabron, Sara Tetro, Ricardo Simich, Kimberley Crossman, Helene Ravlich, Rachael Churchward, Grant Fell, Keri Ropati, Antonia Brotherton-Ratcliffe, Gabrielle and Zara Mirkin, Adele Cluett, Gemma Wigg, Casey Green, Jessie Gurunathan and other A-listers whom no one has never heard of. That was fun! It was the launch of a new charity for breast cancer, or maybe it was child abuse. One thing’s for sure: Auckland cares.

  Up early the next morning to a champagne breakfast at boutique hotel Fatties, for John Key to launch a new idea. The idea didn’t come, but Oliver Driver, Noelle McCarthy, Mikey Havoc and the Exclusive Brethren were in attendance, so no one asked any difficult questions. But I felt I let down the clients who launched their new range of Swedish light switches that afternoon at a Mercedes showroom. I’d specifically asked for phalaenopsis orchids, and they didn’t arrive. The launch failed to wow light-switch editors and A-list celebrities, who included Neil Finn, Tim Finn, Liam Finn and Finlay Macdonald.

  My disappointment led to a fresh attack of bipolar disorder, which I’m pretty sure I contracted from the Devonport barista I slept with last year. I was low-key—that word again!—the next morning when a new website protesting the Electoral Reform Bill was launched at Newmarket café Hogg, wowing the elderly, lame and mentally impaired. One gent argued in favour of traditional forms of protest, and attempted to hold up a placard reading NEW ZEALANDERS LOST THEIR LIFES IN TWO WORLD WARS FOR THIS MUGABE LAW, but the effort brought on respiratory failure.

  Sometimes I despair of Auckland. On Friday night, still feeling very depressed, I ran into Gilda Kirkpatrick, Mike and Brigid Chunn, Hamish Keith, Delaney Tabron, Oliver Driver, Tim Finn, Dean O’Gorman, Kate Elliot, Milan Borich, Petra Bagust, Billy Apple and Jeffrey Dahmer on Jervois Road. Inspired by their bright presence, I steered them towards an underground drain for the launch of a new range of really long Swiss knives. Everyone was wowed, especially Dahmer, who police tell me was the last to leave. What a week!

  [March 30]

  Autumn

  On the first day of autumn I burned roses. I cut away hanging vines that had released their clutch on a fence to loop in the air and drag on the ground. They were like a whip of barbed wire, a lasso of nails. I was acting in the best interests of health and safety: their thorns could have done someone an injury, possibly with serious or even tragic consequences. The fact of the matter is that it served as an excuse to throw the vines on a bonfire on a thin, still afternoon.

  The sky was already all smoke. That’s what autumn looks like. Wispy and filtered, the clouds take light steps, mooch from dawn ’til dusk. The sun is there somewhere. It pales the light. These are the wan months. Autumn is a delicate art, old-fashioned, a faded antique. Autumn is the remains of the day, the end of Empire. In short, autumn can look Victorian.

  It can look like another borrowed way of life, brought out by ship to our colony of bright, sensual islands at the end of the world. Guns, religious delusion, legal documents, alcohol and tobacco, political nicety, architectural plans, newspapers, glass, sparrows, stoats, grass seed, sheep—all dumped here at wharves and ports, then taken to various destinations by coach to replicate England. Was autumn another import? Records suggest it arrived on July 9, 1863, when the first English oak was planted in Hagley Park, Christchurch. Autumn lives in deciduous trees.

  It’s settled in very well in Canterbury. It manages in Wellington. It does better than you’d think in Auckland. It prefers to be inland; it shrinks away from coasts. It looks its best in Cambridge, in Taihape, in Havelock, in Arrowtown, in the magnificent Eastwoodhill Arboretum—where the trees of the world gather to drop their leaves—near Gisborne.

  But the resolute New Zealandness of autumn asserts itself in the sky, in the colour of lakes and rivers, in the knowledge of absences. Warmth heads north. Arctic wading birds pack their bags and follow. Leaves and fruit accept the gravity of the situation. Nothing very much is left behind.

  Autumn draws a veil of silence. Summer talks its head off, winter whines and rages, spring can’t ever make its mind; autumn keeps its finger to its lips. It was like that on its first day this year. It crept in wearing socks, and set out its usual lyrical stall. The fallen leaves from the fig tree crumbled in my hand. I assembled the rose vines in a great clump in the backyard. The air was as silent as a grave.

  One day it was summer, the next it was autumn—it was like an overnight sensation, as much as sober autumn ever allows itself sensationalism. But it seemed unlikely it would ever happen this year, after New Zealand enjoyed its hottest summer on record, the sun as fat as a hog and rolling in blue goodness all January and February and most of March. A suspicion remains that autumn’s days are numbered. A terrifying interview with the climate scientist James Lovelock, published in The Sunday Star-Times on April 6, foretold of various and assorted global-warming catastrophes: by 2020, extreme weather will be the norm; by 2040, much of Europe will be Saharan; by 2100, about 80 percent of the world’s population will be wiped out. Autumn, with its tender mercies and dreamy repose, doesn’t stand a show.

  Perhaps its days will be exactly numbered—four days a year, five at most. Or none at all. It really might become a faded antique, a relic of times past, a display stored away in museums as that remaining 20 percent of the world’s population toil and gasp in an eleventh circle of hell, of blazing, constant heat.

  Autumn has always felt old hat. On its first day of 2008, it hung around, sleepy and quiet, whispering its familiar remembrances of past autumns. I snapped twigs off the peach tree, and lit the newspaper. The pale afternoon light seemed distant. The end of daylight saving means the start of darkness saving. Autumn squirrels darkness into an account, and doles it out at six o’clock. It slumps over the cities, slips inside alleyways and avenues, fills the valleys and smothers the beaches. But just before dusk, at about four o’clock, is the loveliest time of autumn, when darkness approaches like a hint. The darkness of winter is something else altogether. It’s an obliteration, a complete drag. Autumnal darkness is a patient caress.

  Smoke, flame, ember: I carefully laid a few rose vines on to the bonfire: the leaves crackled, the sap began to spit. I wondered whether they would burn at all. Green, pithy, succulent, the vines looked as though they might be a wet blanket. But the fire got the hang of it. The flames hacked like blades. Soon I was able to add more and more vines from the great clump, and soon I had a delicious inferno in the backyard. The smoke crawled on the grass, languidly drifted straight up. Its scent was fine and peculiar. It dabbed the air with a kind of perfume. The day felt as though it were asleep at the wheel, in no danger, supremely indolent. I thought: Autumn can stay as long as it likes.

  [April 20]

  Blog Food

  APRIL 10

  Terrible events demand something of those of us who make a living with the written word. Previous posts feature my reflections on September 11, the Bali bombing, the New Year’s Day tsunami, Hiroshima, Gallipoli, the Black Death, and the crucifixion. Today’s post marks the fortieth anniversary of the Wahine disaster. Everyone in New Zealand was caught up in the tragedy on that dark day in 1968. I was three years old and living in Huntly and it rained. The very thought of it still makes me sad but the great thing about a blog is that I’m able to share that feeling. Already I feel better.
It’s 3.14 a.m. and I think I’ll make myself a nice hot cup of tea. Previous posts feature my thoughts on the comparative merits of Choysa, Earl Grey and English Breakfast.

  APRIL 11

  So I’m toasting a midnight snack and notice that although the toaster speaks to my router, it doesn’t pick up a DHCP address—and without that, I can’t download the USB driver on to my Ethernet LAN port, even though the service is ADSL2+ offering up to 24 Mbit/s downstream and 1 Mbit/s upstream. Eat cereal instead.

  APRIL 12

  Notice that one of my feet is bigger than the other. It’s these things which make us human. Later, I put on a pair of socks, and this sets off a whole new train of thought.

  Today’s post was written to the following soundtrack: Anthony Donaldson Introduces Village of the Idiots’ School of Hard Knocks—sonic high-jinx from the veteran Wellington jazz/improv percussionist.

  APRIL 13

  It’s 2.56 a.m. and I’ve been reading an interesting thread on that always lively blog by Te Rauparaha. The subject is the failings of the mainstream media. I agree with others who say there’s too much trivia and almost no coverage of the things that really matter. Here’s a good example. For a couple of years I was forced to use IE (4, then 5) until Firefox appeared. Since then, Windows Updates are the only things I’ve touched IE for. So how can I transfer the files from my OS9 Mac to OSX? But I’ve just listened to the 3 a.m. news and they didn’t even mention the issue.

  APRIL 15

  So I’m looking at the back of a shampoo bottle. And thinking there’s bound to be something in the fine print that I ought to blog about. But I just can’t see it. So I read it again and reread it and reread it and keep rereading it till 6 a.m. and so then I have a shower and wash my hair and stand on the street for eight hours.

  Today’s post is written to the soundtrack of Cult Cargo: Belize City Boil Up Volumes 3—a heady stew of jazz fusion, electronica and pan pipes played through a Roland synthesiser.