Round here

She looks up at the building
Says she's thinking of jumping
She says she's tired of life
She must be tired of something
- Counting Crows, 1994

The sun was bright. Hideously, offensively bright. The sky was startlingly blue, reflected in the glassy lake which stretched into the distance to my left and right. In fact, the whole 360 degree panorama around me was a concerted assault on the senses, which in my case had already been assaulted plenty enough over the past day or two. I leant on the cold steel railing, for support as much as anything, as the jagged mountains towered crazily above me. You remember the first time you ever walked through a big city CBD as a kid – Sydney or Melbourne or somewhere – and looked up at the skyscrapers towering into the sky above you? That dizzying, disorienting sensation? That was me, Sunday morning, standing on the edge of the road, looking up in shock and awe at the vertical mass of the Southern Alps. The fact I’d been drunk for most of the last two days of course had nothing to do with it. I needed a Powerade and a kebab. And my sunglasses. There was a lot of stuff I was struggling to deal with right now, and the scenery wasn’t the least of it.

I’d read that photojournalists – war correspondents and the like – tended to use the lens through which they viewed the world as a filter against the horror of what they were seeing. The camera, and the reminder that they were here to do a job, had been all that had prevented them from taking it to heart and losing it completely. I figured I’d give that a bash. All I had was the iPhone – which is like saying ‘I kinda needed a calculator but all I had was Big Blue’. I took a few snaps. The mountains and the lake – your standard issue picture-postcard backdrop. And a drop of another sort – that from the railing down to the lake, across a rock and tussock-strewn slope which dropped practically one in one, running about a hundred yards to the water’s edge. Didn’t stop there, of course, just kept on sinking. Lake Wakatipu was a glacial lake, an enormous mountain valley filled with snow-melt water; basically those mountains that kept going UP UP UP from the water’s edge, kept going DOWN DOWN DOWN until they met a couple of hundred metres below the surface.

So yeah, I took some photos, and even dicked around taking some video – because I could, having figured out how, not because I thought anyone would want to see it. Didn’t work worth a pinch of shit. I still wanted to go back to bed, pull the blankets over my head – seeing as though we still needed them at this time of year in the South Island, being soft Australians and all – and sleep until all of this was done and dusted.

Teaspoon of concrete, princess. Harden the fuck up.

In the middle distance, maybe fifty yards away, Bear’s grit-spattered ’05 Outback ticked quietly in the silence, parked in the little layby used by tour buses and the like to take advantage of the remarkable near-360 degree view that Bennetts Bluff provided of the northern arm of Lake Wakatipu. Bear himself was out of the car and slumped against the railing, resting his head on the cool steel. It was too much for him, I winced. Never should have let him come along. Too much shit to deal with already with Tractor’s funeral tomorrow.

Nah wait on, he’s just throwing up. As you were.

It was so very, very quiet. The distant sound of a car on the coarse-chip seal of the Queenstown-Glenorchy Road ribboning along the edge of the lake was about all she wrote. Amazing, even overwhelming solitude. And this on a welcoming bright sunny day in early January. In the witching hours of a bitterly cold, icy morning in April, it would have been something else. It would, I decided, have been a bloody lonely place to die.

Of all the places I expected to be standing on Sunday morning, Sam McCarthy’s gravesite didn’t really feature in betting.

I’d expected grief and got it. Tractor’s dead. Tell Maddy I’m taking the next flight to NZ. Why? What could I usefully do there? When was the funeral? I had no answers to any of those questions, but it didn’t stop me blowing them off and reiterating my point: Tractor’s dead. I’m taking the next flight to NZ. It was never going to be a stand-up argument – neither Maddy nor any of her underlings would have been so tactless to my face – but the passive-aggressive pressure to take a rational, pragmatic response was hard to ignore. Not hard enough, though, as it happened. By the time Marty was dropping me at Brisbane airport for the mid-afternoon Friday flight to Christchurch – still with the same bag of (dirty) clothes I’d taken to Byron, but with a brand-spanking iPhone in my pocket courtesy a flying visit to dB’s Valley offices where it’d been sitting in its box waiting for me – we knew the funeral was Monday, dB were making arrangements for Phil and Marty to fly in and out for an overnight visit, and rationally, pragmatically, there was no reason I couldn’t have done the same. But fuck that, Tractor was dead and I was taking the next flight to NZ. End of fucking argument. I wasn’t trying to one-up the rest of the lads, I just wanted to be there, do what I could for Aroha, the family and the lads.

That mission became pretty condensed once I got onto the ground. Aroha was calm, clear-headed, surrounded by good people, and was coping about as well as could be expected. Her extended family were caring for the kids; his sister (all that was left of his family apart from his cousins who ran the old family farm on the Taieri) was winging her way back from London. Hollywood and D were on their way down. Nothing more I could do there, really. Bear, though... Aroha winced. Bear was all over the place. He was a mess.

“He didn’t sound too good on the phone,” I nodded with a grimace.

“When was that?”

“This morning, around five… seven your time.”

A sad smile. “You didn’t hear this from me. He spent last night in his car, parked outside Hope and Sons, the funeral directors. He said he just wanted to keep an eye on Dan…” She blinked away tears against my shoulder as I squeezed her in as reassuring a hug as I could come up with.

“I’ll look after him,” I promised.

Bear was from the Mick Martin school of My Stuff Is Your Stuff. He’d already offered (read assumed I’d accept) the use of his place to stay at, over the phone that morning. I dialled my crappy little rental Hyundai Getz – an asthmatic rollerskate with a grey plastic binliner for an interior – up the switchbacks of the St Clair hillside towards Bear’s place.

“What’s that fucken piece of shit?” bellowed a voice more heavily gravelled than the driveway it boomed down. Bear looked like he’d just come from the set of a low-budget zombie apocalypse flick. Hero or victim, I couldn’t tell.

“It was cheap,” I called back. “As am I.” Since it was my money I was spending on this trip, not Maddy’s.

Bear stank of rum and sweaty unwashed Viking rankness, so much so that one Bear hug later so did I. Tractor had passed away late Thursday night, about the time we were getting on stage at the Bangalow Hotel. Looking at his haggard, bloodshot features I guessed Bear hadn’t slept since, nor washed, nor eaten – and probably not for some time before that either, if he’d been by the Tractor’s side in his last days and hours. In theory I wasn’t in much better shape – up all night after the show in Bangalow, frantic mission back up to Brisbane with Marty to get the afternoon flight to Christchurch, missing my initial connection to Dunedin and somehow sweet-talking my way onto the overbooked last flight southwards of the day, before cramming myself into that rollerskate and driving wearily into town - but compared to Bear I felt almost human.

“Come on in. Drink?”

“Erm…” We both looked at the 1.5L bottle of Coke in his hairy paw. It was about half-full and probably had enough spirits in it to use as mower fuel. Bear read my thoughts.

“Now available,” he intoned, “in two-stroke.” The makings of a grin. “Just fucken easier this way mate, saves me getting off the couch… Got some beers in for ya of course. Speights alright?”

The house was a bomb site. It’d been a while since a girl graced the premises on any sort of long-term basis. Which was the way Bear liked it, or had grown to. Still, it made even our place in St Lucia in the grimmest days of Karen/Desparia the dodgy Goth – when the power and phone had been cut off because Dr Cletus and I refused to cover her share of the bills (again) and we were basically camping rough in the house, using Stalingrad siege tactics to get her to move the fuck out – look like the monthly centrespread for Better Homes and Gardens. Pizza boxes, empty Coke and rum bottles, dirty clothes, dirty magazines, surf and ski gear.

“Love what you’ve done with the place,” I remarked.

“I’m all about the feng fucken shui mate,” he grunted, rustling through the fridge for a beer. It wasn’t like he needed to look that hard, ‘getting some beers in’ apparently meant replacing all the food with Speights. He was looking forward to the company, even if my liver wasn’t.

Teaspoon of concrete etc.

So we sank piss and talked shit. We dissected the lack of tactical nous underpinning Aurelio Vidmar’s coaching as the Newie Jets ripped Adelaide a ‘newie’ of their own in the Friday night A-League game from EnergyAustralia Stadium. We slagged off the latest and greatest filmclips on C4, before just muting the TV and putting on some decent tunes, leaving the gyrating bitches ‘n’ hos as eye candy. We sorted out each others’ problems with women (by ‘sorted out’ read ‘sat around nodding and grunting in agreement about’, League of Ordinary Gentlemen style). Pizza from Hell (literally – it’s a NZ pizza chain) turned up at some stage. Later still Bear cracked open one of his stockpile of huge duty-free bottles of Bundy OP – he’d been hammering locally available Coruba rather than his duty free stuff or the standard-label Bundy he got in by the case from a small bottleshop in Hamilton, the nearest regional centre to his north island base in Raglan – and insisted I get off the Speights and give him a hand with the mother’s milk. If that stuff was his mother’s milk she needed to get off the molasses. After that it got progressively messier, even by Bear’s current standards. I narrowly managed to talk him out of heading into town to either punch on with South D(unedin) bogans or stuff twennies down the knickers of the girls at Cleopatra’s – or was it Stiletto’s now, Bear couldn’t remember – which was an achievement considering I’d long since lost optimal functionality and the idea of ogling tits and/or punching idiots sounded pretty tops to me. Don’t think I even need to point out how far this was from normal moral standards for either of us. The girls who own the Zoo might be right – rum’s dickhead juice.

“Jesus, what the fuck…” Some hideous R&B ringtone pealed dischordantly against the Black Sabbath on Bear’s stereo.

“Not mine mate. It’s yours. It’s the fucken Batphone,” Bear slurred. “DANA-NANA-NANA-NANA DANA-NANA-NANA-FUCKEN BAT CUNT…”

In my current state I thought that was just about the funniest shit ever made up, and wished I’d recorded him singing it as my new ringtone. If I could figure out how the fuck to do so, which didn’t look likely. Figuring out how to answer the phone was challenging enough. The name bewildered me. Not who, but why.

“Daniela?”

Bear broke off his serenading of Bat Cunt to ask, as loudly as he could project, “Thass the current fuck then?”

I put my hand over the phone. No idea whether it responded to such low-tech muting approaches. “No mate, it’s Richie’s stepkid.”

“Fuck me, you’re taking your life in your fucken hands if you’re banging her…”

“Yeah Danno, what’s doing?”

“Going OK over there?” There was a hint of irony in Daniela’s voice, masking her concern. They were an interesting couple, she and Joey. Danno rarely told you what she really thought, Joey couldn’t stop herself from doing so.

“Yeah we’re struggling on. Fighting the good fight.” I was too drunk to conceal the confusion in my voice.

“Listen, sorry for calling so late… Joey said you’d probably still be up.” In the background, a scowl of ‘Don’t drag me into this you preppy fucking white-bread princess’ which I interpreted as friendly. I wondered, in that way that stoners assume everyone on TV is also stoned, whether the girls had knocked back a few drinks between them for their Friday night and might be equally as slashed as we were. I’d thought Danno was headed back to Sydney after the Bangalow trip, and said so.

“Yeah, Joey’s here too. Album launch at W.”

“Whose album?”

“Ethereon,” she said. Which explained the high-NRG dance-trance doof-doof stuff in the background. Either that or Danno’s washing machine was out of balance on spin cycle. Ethereon were a local dance act who were one of the handful of other acts in the Venn diagram of being both managed by dB and signed to Exocet. So much for Richie’s founding vision of ‘Don’t techno for an answer’. Mind you that had been modified through the years to ‘Anything so long as it’s loud’ and finally ‘Anything so long as it’s good’.

“Ask her what she’s wearing,” bellowed a voice from the cheap seats, which then went back to hollering “BAT CUNT, BAT CUNT, BAT CUNT…”

“Little black dress,” she replied directly.

“No knickers,” came the voice from the cheap seats nearest Danno.

“Look, do you want me to put Bear on so you two can flirt with him directly?”

“BAT CUH… Yeah, fucken still got it ay,” burbled Bear. “They know where it’s at.”

Meanwhile Danno was making non-affirming noises, while in the background Joey was loudly offering helpful suggestions like “You know he’s hung like a fucken donkey, [name deleted] from Channel V fucked him… no seriously! Yeah I thought she was with [name also deleted] too!” I decided to file this all under Too Much Information and move on.

“Did this phone call have a point, Danno?” I asked. “Not that it’s not great to hear from ya, but I’ve got drinking to do and all.”

“Yeah, kind of,” she said. “Can you do a favour for me?”

“For you, Daniela, anything,” I replied grandly.

“A friend of mine is coming over for the funeral… I was wondering if you could keep an eye on her for me… you may have heard of her.” And gave the name.

“Anything apart from that,” I growled.

“Huh?” mumbled Bear.

“They want to send fucking Lena over here,” I growled at him.

“Aww fuck that,” he bellowed. “Not after she fucken fucked you up the fucken arse. Fucken fuck that with a shitty fucken stick.”

“What he said,” I added, figuring Bear’s soliloquy had been plenty audible enough.

I heard Danno begin to say something conciliatory in response, but over the top of that was a strident “No, no, no, wait a fucking minute” – was I on loudspeaker here? – followed by Joey’s voice suddenly up close and personal, like she’d grabbed the phone off its owner. “That’s fucking ungrateful of you dude. I’m sorry, but she got you this fucking gig. Do I have to spell it out? Who got my boss’s balls in a vice – and she has them, don’t fucking worry about that – and fucking blackmailed them into letting Marty play with fucking Gasket?”

“Keep it down,” hissed Danno. “For God’s sake, Jo.”

“Blackmailed them with what?” I retorted.

Silence.

“Go on then? Blackmailed with what?”

A sigh from Danno, who’d wrested control of the phone again. Joey wasn’t going to be Princess Popular among the twins tonight.

“It’d appear that a certain company’s taxation arrangements are not strictly speaking in line with the statutes of company law,” Danno said carefully. “As uncovered by a certain investigative journalist of our acquaintance.” Most people got less verbose when they were several sheets to the wind. Danno just started regurgitating thesauruses.

“Six fucking months she worked on that story…” chuntered Joey.

“Any idea who her source might have been?” I remarked acidly.

“Fuck you, I told her nothing. What the fuck would I know about that shit, it’s well above my level.”

“And what, I’m meant to believe she threw that away for what, so Gasket could play the Big Day Out? As some sort of grand fucking gesture of reconciliation for fucking humiliating me publically?”

“Andrew, you’re welcome to believe what you want,” Danno replied tartly. “I was in the room when it happened. Jo wasn’t. It was couched in pretty direct terms. This is how this little problem can go away.”

A flicker of memory to New Years Eve, and Marty mentioning the ‘ambush’ he was expecting in their next contract meeting with Exocet… possibly not entirely what he was expecting, though. It would have made a hell of an exclusive, I realised. Would have also carved massive rifts through her relationships in the industry, as well as that between Exocet and dB, or what was left of it after the ATO had finished with them. Much wiser long-term to be shouldertapping Maddy to let her know, hey, found a few anomalies in your company setup, could be messy, but probably just honest mistakes on behalf of your old man’s people, yeah? By the way, completely unrelated, any chance we could borrow your boy for a few Gasket sets at the BDO?

Danno started to tell me details of flights and whatever but my brain had decided none of this made any fucking sense and it was going on strike until it started to. “Just fuckin’ text me when I’m supposed to go to the airport and get her,” I told her.

“You don’t have to get…”

“JUST. FUCKING. TEXT. ME. Not leaving her in a fucking cow paddock waiting for a sixty buck cab ride into town.”

“Cow paddock?”

“Should try flying into Dunedin one day Danno, it’s… rural.” Three o’clock entertainment in the departure lounge was watching the cows in the neighbouring paddock lining up to file into the milking shed.

“You sure you’re OK with this?”

“No,” I said. “Now go get drunk. Er.”

“Because you will?”

I glanced up to see Bear, who’d knocked off the last of the OP, digging noisily through his bar stocks to unearth the super-primo, weapons-grade tequila he’d brought back from Mexico and had been looking for an excuse to crack open ever since.

“No, not in any way. Goodnight ladies.”

Tequila, like kebabs and one-night stands with drunken first-year SCU education hotties with large gym-freak nightclub-bouncer boyfriends (don’t ask), only exist in a brief window of opportunity in the wee small hours of the morning when one is drunk enough to think them a good idea, rather than the fucking appalling concept they actually turn out to be. My last memory was lying flat-out on the carpet, holding on for grim death against the self-inflicted centrifugal forces, as from the other room a very tired and emotional Christian 'Bear' Sorensen was wailing and howling along at window-shaking volume with Counting Crows’ album August And Everything After, as per usual in his current condition. Frankly, it sounded fucking awful. As did Bear.

“SHE LOOKS UP AT THE BUILDING, SAYS SHE’S THINKING OF JUMPING, SAYS SHE’S TIRED OF LIFE… SHE MUST BE TIRED OF SOMETHING… ROUND HERE…”

Luckily the song that had earwormed into my head, for reasons that made absolutely no sense at all, was Judas Priest’s Living After Midnight. DAAH NAAH. DAAHNT-DA DAAH NAAH. DAAHNT-DA DAAH NAAH. DAAHNT-DA DAAH NAAH… well that and NANA NANA NANA NANA BAT CUNT!!! which was still making me giggle stupidly.

“MIS-TER YOUNG AND ME… LOOK INTO THE FUTURE, YEAH WE STARE AT THE BEAUTIFUL WOMEN… SHE’S LOOKING AT YOU, MAN THERE’S GOT TO BE SOMEBODY FOR ME…”

I’d hidden his phone in case he decided to go through the exes in his contacts folder and find out for himself if there was somebody for him, which he’d inevitably regret. In fact he’d asked me to do exactly that earlier and soberer in the evening. Can’t say I wasn’t looking out for him.

DAAHNT-DA LIVIN!… AFTER MIDNITE. ROCKIN!… TO THE DAWWN. LOVIN!… TIL THE MORNING. I’M GOOONE. I’M GOOORRRNE…

Too fucking right I was.

I’d slept better than this. In fact, this was anti-sleep; I woke up feeling much, much worse than I did before. That, of course, had NOTHING to do with the grotty carpeted floor I’d passed out on, nor the many, many beers, rumbos and tequilas which had preceded that. I only woke up because the Batphone – more of a Batcunt right about now – was bleeping at me. Message received along the lines of ‘Lena, at Chch airport, Dn in 1hr.’ Which made no sense, it was eight in the morning. Though I remembered very hazily that some airlines had trans-Tasman flights which left Australia last thing before airspace curfew and got in around six or seven am NZ time. In any case there was no fucking way I was driving anywhere. ‘Tell her to get a fucking shuttle’, I responded, impressed my predictive text had already learned to swear. It was some time later that I worked out the text had come not from Danno but from Lena herself. And Lena probably didn’t know the address. Oh well. Back to sleep. Darkness, imprisoning me, all that I see, absolute horror. And I hadn’t even seen what Bear had done to the bathroom yet.

We needed to get Bear out of town for a few days, at least until Monday. It’d been Aroha’s suggestion originally, yesterday when I’d met her after flying in, and it wasn’t a bad one. Bear was amenable - through the haze he was still self-aware enough to realise hanging around here wasn’t doing him or anyone else any good. We’d thrown around a few ideas last night – going surfing in the Catlins, heading up the wineries of Central Otago and going silly Sideways-style, heading up to Christchurch for Sunday’s one-day international between the Black Caps (sorry, the BLACKCAPS) and the West Indies, though the weather sounded arsebiscuits – but nothing had been concreted into place, and the morning had brought with it the soul-sucking inertia of the monumental silverback-gorilla hangover. It was a grey, dull, I-wanna-be-sedated sort of day, as though St Clair had been wrapped in cotton wool soaked in chloroform.

I got up. I knew, as soon as I did, the hangover would hit properly – mine are altitude dependent I’ve found, much worse at six feet above feet level – and sought out the Panadols in the bathroom, then thought better of it seeing the sight of the facilities. Instead I wandered out onto the balcony, where a pale, drawn looking Bear was camped by the railing, sipping reluctantly from a big bottle of Coke.

“Hair of the dog?”

Bear shook his head. “Nah, straight. Black Aspro. Bit fuckin’ warm though. Probly cos it was out here all night.”

“How do you feel?”

“How do I look?”

“Shithouse,” I told him.

“That’d be it then,” he grinned. The grin didn’t last long. “Oh fuckin’ hell, here we go... just what we fuckin’ need.”

He nodded down the hillside. The street that led to Bear’s began waayyyy down the hill at the roundabout behind St Lucia Esplanade, then snaked up the ridge towards where we were currently standing. A shiny red object sliced through the roundabout like it was the Ascari chicane at Monza, left-right-left-power-on, back end stepping out then settling, bark of the engine echoing off the houses even from this range. It didn’t take too long to recognise the shiny red wedge of molten metal as a current-shape Porsche 911 (though they’d been that shape, give or take, since 1961) with a big fuck-off towel rack spoiler – suggesting a Turbo or GT3 or something. The colour, officially, was Guards Red. Because, as Hollywood had declared last time he’d talked at us about the unwritten rules and responsibilities of Porsche ownership, Guards Red was the ONLY colour to get a 911 in if you were a proper Porsche aficionado and not a badge-chasing tryhard arriviste.

Bear grimaced – whether from the warm, flat Coke or from the prospect of Hollywood’s Hollywood-ness turning his morning to a bucket of egregious wank, I wasn’t sure – and promptly tossed the two-thirds-full bottle over the side of the balcony. He was a strong bloke, built like Roy Symonds’ bigger brother – so one short-arm backhand flick had the thing sailing through the air, tumbling and spinning as it descended, towards the switchbacks of the street below…

Splat.

Just short.

“Fuck me,” Bear swore, shaking his head, the moment after a litre or so of warm, well-shaken Coke burst free from the exploding bottle a foot or so in front of the onrushing Porsche and showered the front of the thing in sticky nasty shit. The burst bottle itself flicked off the bonnet and over the windscreen of the Porsche before being clobbered by the rear wing and punted off into the gutter, bent into a banana shape. As Hollywood and his superannuated Vee Dub would have ended up being, had he and Porsche Stability Management not gathered up the twitch-slither, unpuckered the upholstery, reoriented themselves in a straight line and continued on their merry, law-defying way.

“That was a cunt’s trick,” I said.

“Yeah,” he grinned. “I know.”

Like I said, we needed to get Bear out of town for a few days.

The 911 pulled up in Bear’s driveway moments later, the ABS biting and releasing in the gravel, heat haze shimmering from the vents and shrouds around the rear wing. Hollywood jumped out. He dressed like you expected a Porsche driver to do, i.e. in a way that made you want to slap him, repeatedly, until he went away. Gold-rimmed Aviators, slicked-back blonde-highlighted hair that even Brett Lee would have called gheyer than ghey, gold chains likewise, a silk-blend figure-hugging shirt that was closer to a fitted blouse than anything someone with a penis should own or wear, several hundred dollar Diesel jeans, tan crocodile-skin loafers and a watch that could have paid my mortgage for a month. Almost like a fifteen-years-younger version of Chris Kurtin with a lot more money and a lot more hair. It was just as well we still liked him even though he was a wanker. The heat haze was shimmering out of him, too. He was THAT hot, ladies. And some men.

“Jesus suffering fuck, Chris, what in the hell has happened to this suburb? Since when did scumbag South D kids start waterbombing cars on Cliffs Road?”

“Better hope it was just water,” Bear remarked. They shook hands guardedly, before transitioning into a reluctant hug, permissable given the circumstances. Hollywood’s overbearing cologne versus Eau de Bear was outright chemical warfare on a scale not seen since the back end of WW1. When my turn came I went for the half-hug – right handshake with left arm around the back. Hugging blokes was always World of Weird, and Kiwi blokes more so than any, since they had the whole staunch Southern Man thing going on down here. Not in that blouse obviously, though Hollywood was of course a JAFA and could be assessed on that basis.

“Where’d you come from?” Bear grunted.

“Picton,” Hollywood nodded. “Stayed on the boat last night.” By ‘the boat’, he meant his sixty-foot cruiser which was parked in the Marlborough Sounds, about twenty minutes’ drive out of Picton on the scenic drive to Havelock. Hollywood had the art of pretentious understatement down to a tee. “Good drive.”

Bear frowned. “What, left Auckland yesterday, drove all day, five hours getting the shit kicked out of you on the Interislander…”

“Three.”

“Never less than five when I’ve been on the cunt,” he replied. “Overnight on the boat, then another fuckin’ seven hundred kays…”

“681, by the GPS.”

“Whatever… just a thought, ever thought of hardening the fuck up and flying down?”

“Yeah, yeah,” he waved his hand dismissively. It was an old argument. “I’d have taken the chopper, but it’s in being serviced...”

It wasn’t that Hollywood was afraid of flying commercially. Sorry, scratch that. Hollywood was afraid of flying commercially, in fact he was completely shit-scared of it and would do anything in his power to avoid it. Like drive for two days to get down to Dunedin rather than take, for instance, an hour-forty direct flight on Air NZ or Pac Blue. His problem wasn’t the flying itself, the being-in-the-air bit – he flew his own chopper after all – but the surrendering of control once in the air to others, in particular commercial airline pilots who he saw as nothing more than superannuated bus drivers. (Ironically his sister was a flight attendant and had married an Emirates pilot. He hated family reunions.) Usually he drove late at night, so he could get away with completely flouting the speed limits instead of sneeringly ignoring them, but that strategy would have been buggered up by the need to match schedules at short notice with the Interislander ferry from Wellington to Picton. By that maths, he must have found out first thing Friday morning too. Or putting it another way, he hadn’t been down here when Tractor died. Hmmm.

“Catch up with D?”

Hollywood shook his head. “No time,” he said.

D hadn’t been here either, but his excuse was far sturdier – in a head-shakingly awful bit of timing, his grandmother, the matriarch of his large and welcoming Polynesian family, had also passed away on Thursday. The funeral was this afternoon, just for family, followed by a large community gathering in his maternal family’s ‘hood of Porirua on Sunday. D was going to try and get down tomorrow (Sunday) night, though his family commitments meant Monday morning was more probable, for which he was massively apologetic. Hollywood, by contrast, had spent Tractor’s last days fucking about in Auckland with his fucking punishing fahhhhssshun designer girlfriend and their even more fucking punishing scenester friends. Or so Bear had outlined it to me.

“Where you staying?”

Hollywood sniffed. “Fucking hay fever. THIS is why I avoid this fucking place like the fucking plague this time of year…” Sure, nothing to do with what you were doing with the GF and company the night before last, read my thoughts and probably Bear’s. “Yeah, I’ve not looked into that yet.”

“Welcome to crash here,” Bear said without a lot of conviction.

“You sure?”

“Yeah, fuck, ‘course. My stuff is your stuff, my house is your house…”

“…And my girl is off limits,” Hollywood finished with a grin. “I’d appreciate that, thanks. I presume it’s no issue if Savannah joins us later? Her flight gets in this afternoon.”

Bear grimaced, momentarily. Hollywood was contemplating his reflection in his Aviators, which he’d momentarily taken off – he’d have said inspecting them for scratches – so he missed it.

“Should be no problem, yeah Bear?” I confirmed. “Seeing as though we were gonna fuck off for the weekend anyway?”

“Yeah?” Hollywood said warily.

“Yeah,” mumbled Bear. “I’m fucked, hey. Haven’t been out of town in months. Seen a lot of the inside of this place and a lot of the inside of Tractor’s fuckin’ ward.” And a lot of the inside of the local bottle-o, you could probably add.

“Aroha mentioned you weren’t going so well,” Hollywood said. In all honesty he probably didn’t mean it as patronisingly as it came out.

Bear let it slide, as he always did, and asked whether he’d been to see them.

“Not yet, thought it best to come and touch base with you guys before heading out to the farm and seeing what I can do to help.”

“Not fuckin’ much,” Bear predicted. “Hence our fucking-off out of town for the weekend.”

I nodded in assent. “Seems like everything’s pretty much covered. The family are out in force, they’ve got good people managing the funeral arrangements… it’s going about as well as you could hope.”

Hollywood had been nodding through that, which meant any second now he was about to start talking over me. Yup. “And let’s face it gents… just between us… a relief to have it all over, yeah?”

Bear was biting his tongue so hard I expected the end of it to spurt out from between his teeth and splatter against Hollywood’s expensive girly blouse.

“Where were you thinking of going?”

“Probably up into Central, tour around the wineries, chase some backpacker chicks around Queenstown… the usual,” I remarked. “Say mate, has your joint up there reopened for cellar door tastings yet?”

“Uh… yeah… yeah, it has.”

Funnily enough, Hollywood had sounded much more effusive about the redevelopment of his winery complex when we caught up back in November. When we didn’t sound like we were fishing for an invite to crash there.

“Any chance we could crash there?” Bear wasn’t that keen on fishing. “The new chalets would be good to go by now? Opening Feb, think you said last time…”

“Uh, yeah.” Hollywood repeated. “Yeah, that’s no problem. My stuff is your, erm, stuff. I’ll give the office a call and let them know you’ll be up… when?”

“Soon as possible,” Bear nodded, with the makings of his first heartfelt grin in some time. “Look, if we’re not here when you and Sienna get here…”

“Savannah,” corrected Hollywood, with the tiredness of someone who could tell an honest slip-of-the-tongue from a direct and deliberate sledge.

“Her too… I’ll leave the keys to here in the letterbox, yeah? Clean sheets and towels… somewhere. Probably. Actually fuck that, give us thirty seconds, I’ll get my shit together and you can have the bloody keys now.” He practically jogged back into the house. Right then my phone bleeped a message from Lena asking curtly what the address was so she could tell the cabbie. I gave Hollywood an apologetic shrug and wandered away to answer the message (OK, I was wandering down the driveway to check what number the house was because I couldn’t remember). As I was about to punch in the address, the automatic door opened and Bear’s metallic blue (though more dirty grey-brown than anything given he never washed it) Subaru Outback began reversing down the drive. He pulled up and jumped out, tossing house keys to Hollywood. He flicked a thumb over his shoulder.

“Just grabbed whatever was in the dryer and chucked it in your bag, yeah?”

“Sounds optimal,” I agreed. He seemed to want to get moving pretty fucking sharpish so I climbed aboard.

“Right then Hollywood?”

“Yeah mate, no problems. So long as you’re up there by four, cellar door’s only open until then…”

“Done and done. And look, if Aroha needs us, give us a call, we’re there in three hours. No questions asked.” He revved the three litre flat-six lustily. “Catch ya Monday.”

Hollywood offered a disconsolate wave, which turned to a grimace as the Outback narrowly missed sideswiping his 911 Turbo, peppering gravel against its flanks. Bear backed out onto the street and we began to wend our way down the hill, but had to stop further down, out of sight, because Bear was laughing too hard. He pulled up in a bus-stop layby and wiped his eyes.

“I say, nice work brother,” he grinned. “Not spending a weekend with that punishing fucking tosser. Not today.”

“But it’s a relief though…”

Bear shook his head gravely. “Could’ve fucking killed him. There and then. Bled him out on his pretty little Vee-Dub, matching colours and all… Anyway. It’s all good,” he reckoned.

“You right to drive?” I queried.

“Fuck no,” he laughed. “You up to it?”

“Yeah, I reckon. Anyway, Australian licence,” I reasoned. “Kiwi fuzzy muff can’t take it off me can they?”

“Fair call.” He tossed me the keys and we swapped chairs. On shutting the passenger door, he burst out laughing. “You know the best bit?”

“What’s that?” I asked, flicking the ignition.

“Never got around to cleaning that fucking bathroom...”

We had a good laugh about that. Even after half a bottle of Coke – must have been one still left up there – bounced off the ski racks of the Outback on the way down the hill. Hollywood had just discovered the task that lay ahead of him before Savannah would be prepared to enter the premises.

“Cunt,” Bear observed, with a grin.

“Honours even?”

“Yeah, honours even. But he’s still a cunt.”

I’d given Lena directions to hold station at Dunedin International Airstrip and await further instruction – actually Bear had, though given he was still too drunk to operate a motor vehicle I was surprised he was able to operate something much more complicated like the message function on an iPhone – so we made for the southern motorway, aiming for the airport. The idea of meeting up with Lena again, under obligation from my label and my management (well sort of) was something that had me simmering along with resentment, anger and all those productive sorts of emotions, but when we actually pulled up outside the arrivals terminal, all that kinda went by the wayside. Lena looked so lost, so tired, so old. She was smoking a cigarette – scratch that New Years resolution already – by the Southern Man statue, squinting into the misty rain. In real terms she’d suffered more than me already for the Weekend Australian piece. But she could probably do with a bit more suffering. Starting with a big sweaty hungover hug she got from big sweaty hungover Bear, who’d been first out of the car. I took my time. Not that we had much, it was a two-minute set-down/pick-up area.

I looked at her and she looked at me. No hug. No running into each other’s arms. Not even a handshake. I looked at her with detached contempt and she looked at me with the sullen defiance of a wayward teen.

“Ash that,” I directed, “we’ve got to get on the road.”

“Where to?” she asked breezily.

“Central,” I replied, using the local shorthand. “You’ve got another story to file, yeah? That’s why you’re here? Or is this one going in the book rather than in the paper?”

She flared slightly. It was a wild, woeful shot in the dark, but it’d paid some sort of dividend.

“Is what going in the book?”

“Come on, girl. What around here could possibly of interest to someone writing a book about Sam McCarthy?” Now I was really fishing. “Apart from, say, the place he dropped off the twig?”

She recovered her composure quickly. I was glad we’d never dated, she’d have been no fun to fight with. “I’m not writing a book about Sam,” she sighed, as though trying to make a small child understand the importance of not pooing themselves in public.

“So you came over two days before the funeral… for what, the weather?”

“Yeah. Yeah, that’s it,” she replied sardonically, flicking her ash at the Southern Man. (BLASPHEMY!!!)

“You’d better hope your book’s better than mine, anyway.”

Yup. A reaction. Which meant she was writing a fucking book. She’s WRITING a FUCKING BOOK. I wasn’t, and didn’t intend to, but there was no harm in having her think I was. She denied it, again, but I wasn’t listening. Bear opened the boot and threw her bag in the back of the wagon. Chivalry wasn’t dead, it was just very, very drunk.

“One other thing,” I told her.

“What’s that?”

I tossed her the keys. “You’re driving.”

As technically I was still too drunk to be operating a motor vehicle as well.