Illustrated by Thijs Janssen
Contents
Prologue
The first time I ever went through an airport stoned was in Queenstown. I was down by the lakeside around lunch time, nice day, eighteen years old and too young and bright to feel paranoid. I smoked my weed until I couldn’t smoke any more without losing my sense of direction, and so stopped and poked my pipe down the underside of a boulder near the lake’s edge, then went through the airport like a flower waving in a breeze. A decade later I took a holiday to find that pipe. I had ten days to travel down the South Island to Queenstown before I had to be back at my job again, which was washing dishes at a restaurant in a small white room. I don’t know why I wanted to find my pipe; I guess I just wanted to get away from that sink of greasy water filled with pots and pans.Ten days left...
The ferry neared its dock through the mist and rain and the hundreds of people inside it began for the exit immediately, forming huge lines up and down the floating mega structure.“It’s so dumb,” Peter said, him a tall glass of milk with a thin moustache. “Why does everyone go crazy about getting off the boat first? They just end up standing in line for ages anyway.”
We sat and everybody else stood. “It’s not like the shops are going to run out of souvenirs.”
“Maybe they’re all just keen to find their weed pipes, too,” Dom said, his face tanned and stubbly and his hair like a long brown curtain that was sometimes drawn across his face.
“I don’t know about these people, man,” I replied. “Most of the stoners I know are calm, respectful people.”
“Timmy the Ambassador,” John said. “You should show these people how to chill out. Look there’s children here, man. They need you, Timmy.”
“Man, none of this would have happened if Jesus had of just gone for weed instead of wine.”
“I don’t know about that,” Dom replied, “people love conflict. Latest global census results show it’s considered more important than water.”
“Look at these guys,” Peter blurted out, and we all watched two groups of tourists bicker about who was in front, behind the hundreds of other people waiting to explode out of the ferry and into the South Island; everyone in search of something.
Nine days left...
John can’t throw a stone up in the air and hit it with a stick; it’s embarrassing to watch him for five minutes and him not connect even once. And so when I lobbed a tennis ball in a high arch from about forty meters up on the side of a grassy hill, and John connected with it clean and smooth and it rocketed into the air above the winking mirror waters of the Queen Charlotte Sound, he lost his shit, dropped the driftwood-bat, and ran crunching down the pebble beach with his arms in the air and his long copper-brown hair flowing behind him, and his mouth all open like he was collecting plankton. We all raced down the hill after him and threw our arms around him and told him how great he was. The rest of us could throw a stone up in the air and hit it with a stick, but none of us could hit a ball thrown from that height.We walked back from the beach down a sometimes-used farm driveway, past empty paddocks crouching under hills covered in ferns and tall trees and from where birds sung and screeched,
From out of the hills and across a paddock came a man smoking a cigarette and carrying a hunting rifle.
“Hey,” we said when he climbed a wire-fence and crossed our path. He had a short messy beard and wore gumboots and a green fleece jumper.
“You boys smoke?” he asked, exhaling the wonderful pepper of weed from his lungs.
“Sure,” we all replied.
“Well this joints nearly done, but I’ll roll another one,” he said.
So we went back to our campsite and he rolled a joint and we smoked, and each of us took turns shooting his rifle at a can. Dom took photos of us but the man stepped behind me, so Dom stopped.
“So what do you do out here?” I asked the man.
“I’m the caretaker for this campsite,” he said. “Got the Mrs and the
“A ranger only comes out here twice a year to check up on things,” he said. “Pretty much I do what I want out here.”
“Don’t you get bored?” I asked. I knew I would. Sitting still was like turning to stone.
“Not really. I like it out here. Times passes and I get older. Things stay the same,” he said and smoked the joint.
Later that night there was an earthquake; the one that destroyed the highway around Kaikoura. We were all too stoned to realise what was happening at first, standing around a campfire, the earth like baby fat; soft and rippling.
“I think I’ve drunk too much,” Dom said, until he realised it wasn’t just that.
The man with the gun and the weed had gone home long before this, back to find what was his.
Eight days left...
In Nelson McDonald’s was closed: under repair. “This sucks!” John said, so we had to settle for Burger King.John and Peter bought cheeseburgers and sundaes and Dom got a veggie burger, and I got nothing. It was five in the afternoon and raining and we didn’t know where we were going to stay that night. I looked at a map to figure out where we could camp, while the boys ate and used the internet which was slow. I wanted to get
In a booth with red plastic bench-seats and a framed picture of Marilyn Monroe above it holding her skirt down to keep it from blowing up, two girls, one about thirteen, the other about fifteen, sat with two older guys who looked about eighteen; a boy and girl on each side, the boys with their arms behind the girls and slouching coolly. The guys wore big puffy skate shoes and baggy t-shirts and had baseball caps on and looked like they never listened to their teachers or their parents, only rappers. The girls sat there smiling in their school uniforms with their skirts folded up at the waist to bring them higher; their eyes nibbling at the boys then each other, then over the restaurant and back again.
John and Peter ate their sundaes without looking at them, checking e-mails on their phones or whatever it was they were doing, when
“Get up!” the woman yelled in a thick accent that was muddy water to those not from around here.
The girls looked at her with ripe-tomato faces.
“Get up!”
The girls looked at the boys then the woman and slowly slipped from the booth they were sat in.
“You paedophiles!” the women yelled. “You fucking paedophiles. She’s only twelve! She’s only twelve you fucking rats.”
“Mum, don’t,” the older girl pleaded.
The half-dozen other customers in the restaurant went quiet and focused on their meals, but stole glances in between bites. The staff went on working like this happened every Monday. The toddler sunk its head into the woman’s side and held on.
“Not a word! Out!” the woman yelled and the girls meekly made for the door.
“You fucking rats!” the woman yelled again and swallowed the
She turned and followed the girls, and just then a man in overalls smeared with grease came in and the woman and he had a brief exchange, and she pointed to the boys then she and the girls left. The man looked at the boys and pointed at them with a rough, dirty hand.
“I know who you both are,” he said. “You better fucking watch yourselves,” and he stared at them for a few heavy seconds, then left.
“Man, that was crazy,” Peter said. “Is all New Zealand like this?”
Before dusk we camped by Lake Rotoiti, where two huge breasts of earth rose together around the lake and below on the lakeside under a pier in the cold dark water, hordes of black eels floated on its surface. I touched one’s slimy back and it ripped down into the water and I sprung up with a fright.
“Man that’s a slippery eel!” Peter said with a big smile.
“Yeah, they’re weird,” I replied.
“I wonder if we can get out onto the lake?” John asked looking out towards it.
“What?” John said and laughed.
“Man, eels are so strange.” Peter said, kneeling down and looking at them.
“I’m sure we’d all be a bit strange if we lived in a cold isolated body of water our whole lives,” I replied.
“Some people do it,” John said. “Damn,” he exclaimed, “we should have brought some beers,” and we all agreed as the lake gently slapped against the pebble shore.
Three guys came along and stood on the pier too, blond and fair. One had a Go Pro on a selfie stick and dipped it into the water, into the mass of eels.
“Where you guys from?” John asked.
“Germany,” one said and the other two stood there awkwardly.
“Cool,” John said, then they turned and began to leave.
“See ya,” John said.
“Bye,” one said, the other two didn’t speak.
“Oi, Peter, come back and look after your rice,” John said.
“What have you done to my rice?” Peter said from a nearby table.
“It wasn’t me, and I’m tired of your accusations,” John replied and smiled and picked up his beer and went over to the group in the corner and introduced himself.
“How’s your rice, Peter?” I asked while I stirred a pot of sizzling diced beef and sweaty onions.
“Man, it’s a sloppy time,” he said now standing beside me.
“Just put some sawdust in there,” Dom suggested upon coming over and having a look.
We all sat together; us and the people in the corner, who turned out to be French. When we had eaten our peppered beef and sloppy rice, one guy started rolling a joint. He had long dirty hair and wore a green hemp shirt and had a tiny key hanging from his left ear. His name was Francis.
“I’ll roll one too,” John said, and Francis agreed that two joints were
“So it’s Madeleine?” I ask the young woman sitting next to me. She had on a big green woollen jumper and a black beanie and her hazelnut hair fell out of it and down the sides of her face in great delicate heaps.
“Yes, it’s Tim?” she asked, her nose like a little sharpened weapon.
“It is.”
“What do you do Tim?”
“Well, normally I try to keep all the different bacteria and microorganisms living on my body working in unison so I don’t die,” I replied.
She smiled and across the table John was talking with Francis about Colombia, while the other French guy, wearing a bright red jumper, sat listening. Dom and Peter were talking about some cult film from the 70s.
“What do you do?” I asked Madeleine.
“I paint, but before that I studied medicine and electronics. I quite enjoyed it, but some of the men were assholes, so I quit.”
“Some men are assholes,” I replied. “What do you paint?”
“I paint people, or should I say, what’s inside them, like organs and
“Man,” John exclaimed from across the table talking to Francis, “going across the border from Colombia to Panama on acid was so intense.”
“So where do you normally live?” Madeleine asked.
“We all live in Melbourne, except for Dom, he lives in Wellington.”
“I will be having an exhibition in Melbourne next month.”
“That’s awesome.”
“Yes it is,” she said. “If you can find some way of looking at the world that other people cannot, you have a chance to free yourself, and when that happens, well, you don’t need to work for stupid little men anymore.”
John and Francis finished rolling their joints and lit them and passed them around, and smoke rushed in and tumbled back out of
mouths and the kitchen slowly filled with smoke like a great cloud of ideas.
“Bullshit,” Madeleine said, “you smoke with anyone. Don’t you remember that fat bus driver in Christchurch? The one who kept talking about all the women he had slept with?”
“Yes, he was horrible, but he had good weed. He sold us this weed,” and Francis held up the joint.
The joints finished and Francis said, “Another? Why not?” and so he started rolling another, and John did too. Peter went to the car and got the portable speaker and came back and put on some ambient electronic music, which was like droplets reverberating in a vast underground cave.
“Dom,” I said, leaning towards him, his eyes red and dripping like everybody else’s. “If you could be anything in the world, what would you be?”
“Hmmm,” Dom said, “maybe a language.”
The next joints were passed around and the several conversations
“Have you guys seen the eels under the pier?” I asked Madeleine and Francis, their friend still sitting there, saying nothing.
“No,” Francis replied.
“How long have you guys been in New Zealand?” Peter asked.
“We are coming two weeks ago,” Francis said.
“How have you found it?” John asked.
“How have you found it? Found what? What is this mean?” Francis asked and lit his joint.
Madeleine just smiled.
Seven days left...
It’s hard to not look at a woman’s ass when she wears yoga pants. I get confused if that’s what women want or not. I guess they like the fit. So when we were playing cricket at a campground with an English couple and the girlfriend was wearing yoga pants, I couldn’t help but look at her ass from time to time, my eyes like the needle of a compass coming back to point north after having been tossed around, even though I tried not to, because I wanted to find a girlfriend of my own, who would also happen to have an ass as well as a sense of humour like that of a drunk traffic conductor.So we were playing cricket, John’s favourite.
“I can’t see how people don’t like cricket,” he said. I could.
“Man, it’s so boring,” Peter said. “Not now though. When you’re playing it’s fine.”
I call Peter, twice as nice, because even if he doesn’t think much of what you like, he’ll still be nice about it.
So John was playing backstop, but when four guys from Eastern
The game finished and we went back to sitting at a picnic table on the edge of the campground; mown grass on one side of us and high grass on the other. All around were low jutting hills covered in a tangle of trees and ferns and low bush, and everywhere was the tar of weeping plants in the air.
“Man, I can’t believe how rude those German girls were,” Peter said.
We were staying at a private campground run by backpackers, young German women, who were snappy with their run-down of the place and who wanted to be left alone, and when you walked by them they pretended you didn’t exist. “You can’t go in there,” one said when Dom and I wandered into the little bar they had.
“But we're already in here,” Dom replied.
“It’s closed. And we have no pizza today. It’s the weekend.” It was
“Man, fuck this place,” John said, and he was right. “We should leave. We should go get our money back and leave.”
“I don’t think they’ll make that easy,” I said and he agreed, and so we stayed, but we all felt like fools, like here we were in a desert buying sand. There was land everywhere and no one around, and yet we weren’t allowed to pitch a tent for free anywhere. But I guess it wasn’t the nineteenth century anymore. All the land was owned and none of it by us. Plus we didn’t have any guns to shoot the natives for theirs. Our forefathers had brought muskets; we had brought some cans of beans and a little bit of weed. We paid for our Unique Kiwi Experience just like everybody else.
Six days left...
We turned off the highway going south along the west coast and followed a road to its end. We parked and got out, surrounded by farmland, and above it, back from where we had come, the Southern Alps, jagged and snow-capped. Parked at the end of this road, too, was a van. An older man sat inside it reading a newspaper, parked like he could make a quick exit if he needed to. John and I waved as we walked down onto the beach; he raised his index finger in reply.The beach was windy and exposed so we decided to camp a little
“We should take some of that wood,” John said, pointing to a pile of it near the van, and so John went over and began helping himself.
The man saw John and opened his door and said, “What the bloody hell do you think you’re doing? That’s my wood.”
We explained ourselves.
“I wouldn’t camp down there,” the man said. “It ain’t been raining down here much, but if it has up in the mountains, all that water’ll come down here and flood that lower part down by the beach out. If I were you boys, I’d camp up here tonight.” His face was covered in stubble and he had a big paunch and his eyes were red like he’d been up all night doing a vigil.
So we pitched the tent up by our car and the man’s van and then took some beers and walked back out onto the beach.
Each way down the beach low spiny scrub and dark sand sat watching the ocean. The only living things flew in a small feathery
“You reckon if we died out here, anybody would miss us?” I asked.
“Yes,” John replied.
“Yep,” Peter said.
“I think so,” Dom said.
“Yeah me too,” I finally replied.
A little down the beach we found a car tire washed up on the sand and played a game of who could throw a stone into it from ten metres away. Turned out we all could, which was great for morale; the alcohol helped, too.
“Man this is so fucking cool!” Peter said, looking up and down the wild empty beach. “I’m so happy to be here with you guys.”
We all had a group hug together then, all of our arms overlapping and the heat of our bodies pressing against each other. It seemed like our lives were all somehow very fortunate.
“I was wondering when you boys would get back,” he said when we came up and stood by the fire. He had a can of cheap beer in his hand and smiled like we were his new cell-mates.
“You boys smoke?” he asked.
“Sure,” we all replied.
“Get ya lips round this,” he said and offered his pipe to me, packed full of weed.
I smoked and my head felt like a little cloud rising slowly. I passed the metal pipe to John through the fire’s glow, and the man said, “Know what that is? That bloody pipe came out of a diesel engine from a fishing boat.”
I was impressed. It even had a little lid with hinges.
“I’m just waiting for me mates,” he said all of a sudden. “They’re out there, on the river,” and he pointed off into the darkness behind him. “They’re fishing for whitebait. I’m just here to make sure they all get in safe. When the weather turns it gets bloody messy down there.”
The pipe went around and came back to him, “Me name’s Phil.
“So you’re from the Waikato?” he asked me. “I guess you’re all right then.” Dom was from the Waikato too, but his family were from Lebanon, and Peter was from Holland, and John was from Australia although his mother was Chinese, so I guess they weren’t all right.
“So what do you boys do?” he asked and looked at me.
“I work in a restaurant, John studies screenwriting, Peter does graphic design stuff, and Dom does video editing and makes music videos,” I said.
“Oh, so you’re a chef,” he asked me.
“Fuck no, I just wash the dishes. My hair’s already beginning to recede, I don’t want the rest of it to fall out.”
The man laughed then asked, “Any of you boys married?” and we said none of us were.
“Bloody hell. I have been twice,” he said and laughed. “Once for a year, then again for about ten months!”
He brought his pipe up to his mouth and hovered a flame over it, but then brought both his hands down and stared at the fire. “I remember when I was your blokes’ age; I thought marriage would
“Can’t you still do that?” I asked.
“Nah, I’ve given up on that. Anyway, I’ve got me sickness benefit and me weed plants all up and down these hills round here. I’ve got enough weed to get the whole fucking West Coast stoned,” he said and he let out a short abrupt laugh. “Yeah, nah. I’m happy enough,” and he raised the pipe to his lips and smoked.
I watched his pipe plume smoke through the fire light and remembered mine, that non-descript green metal pipe under a rock somewhere. I wondered if I really cared about it that much. I wondered if there wasn’t something else I could be doing with my time other than chasing some past life.
My god, I thought, coming back to the fire’s glow and the man’s yammering voice; I always wanted to sail around the world. I wanted to be a skipper, too, once.
The night kept on and the weed pipe went round, and the man
“What were your names again?” he asked and I told him our names and he said, “Oh, you’re the one from the Waikato!” as if I had been hiding in a bush this whole time and had only just jumped out. Then I remembered seeing those red eyes earlier in the day, and guessed he was now so stoned he probably couldn’t remember where he put his feet.
After we had cooked dinner and finished our box of beers, we all went off to bed and left the man beside his fire to smoke his pipe alone.
“If you’re ever down in Reefton, look me up. Just asked around for me, everybody knows me,” he said.
In the morning trucks rumbled by our tent and men yelled and called to each other through the cool morning air, and when we finally got up, we were all alone.
Five days left...
After some discussion it was agreed we would take acid. So after breakfast we divided fifteen tabs into four, and took three and three quarters each. We had all taken one tab on the day of the earthquake, but it had done nothing, so we thought we might as well take it all and see if it did anything.We took the tent and the gas-cooker and everything else we needed and left the car, and walked down the desolate beach about a kilometre and set up camp. 29
“Let’s ride it out into the blue,” I said. “It’ll be our new guide. We can’t fail if we pretend it’s a whale.”
“Oh great idea,” Peter said. “Whales are natural leaders.”
“I knew you would agree!” I replied.
“I’ll go with you,” John said, “down into the crystal depths.”
“Yeah man, me too,” Dom said and smiled and the sun was out and the sea rushed and rumbled at us and tugged at the tree trunk.
“Who needs a credit card when you have gills?” I said.
“Yeah man, let’s go barter with the Crab Men for some sequin dresses,” Dom suggested. “Then all we have to do is fuse our legs together and we’ll be mermaids.”
“Exactly. Just what any intelligent person would do,” I replied, and just then when we were all grinning stupidly at each other like philosophers who think they’ve found the answer, a rogue wave
“Well, I think our work here is done,” I said and the water receded back into the ocean and we left the tree trunk for the dry midday heat of the sand.
The acid did nothing and we wanted beer and some meat to cook on the fire, so John and Peter volunteered to go back to Hokitika for supplies.
Waves like whales slammed themselves against the shore, and behind me, a long steep spiky ridge, like a tuatara’s spine, covered in thistle and bush, blocked us off from all-man’s land on the other side.
“Shall we play a tournament?” I asked Dom.
“Sure,” he said.
“All right. Do you mind if I get naked?”
“Not at all,” he said, and so I did, and he did, too.
“Want some whisky?” I asked Dom, standing there holding the bottle at my side and feeling every inch of wind.
“Sure man. Look at this thing,” he said, crouching over a bug that wore the ripe reds and gleaming greens of an emperor.
John and Peter came back and night fell, and Dom and I had our clothes on now. We all wrapped pork and potatoes in tinfoil with butter and seasoning and threw them in the fire on a bed of embers. It was dark and we were drunk and had no table, and so when we came to eat our food, it crunched with sand, but it still tasted good, because no one had come around to ask for camp fees. We had found something of our own.
Four Days Left...
Sex is like the ever present hum of a refrigerator, and John has a hard time with that. And so when he saw a young sandy-haired woman with a face like a polished pearl, he couldn’t help but go and speak to her. She was from Ireland, and this was at Pancake Rocks where the earthy coastline is carved like a ham from the constant lashings of the sea, and where seals lie out on rocks down below the cliffs. Tourists wore Kathmandu rain jackets and walked slow and stopped often to look down at the seals or far out to sea, while sea spray drifted through the air, tangy and sharp from an erupting blowhole that shook the ground around us, and us in awe like ants around a boiling tea kettle.So John spoke with the Irish woman who had spotted quail eggs
“So you guys just traveling with your girlfriends?” I asked the guys while the girls talked to John.
“I am,” one said, “but that’s not his girlfriend, that’s his sister,” and he point to the Irish woman.
“She’s been gushing over every good-looking guy we’ve come across,” he said and smiled and looked at the brother.
“Shut up,” the brother said and turned away from us.
“Man,” John said after they’d left, “she was beautiful. She studied film, too. She wanted to know if we’d go north with them, but I told her we’d just come from there.”
It seemed such a lousy thing, to be alive and not making love.
We got changed into togs and came out into the open-aired hot pools in Franz Joseph. John had a book with him.
“You’re not going to read any of that,” I said to John.
“John, you won’t.”
John spent the first hour in the hot pools talking to a young German woman. They were both reading near each other off in some little part of one of the pools, floating under a canopy of emerald-green ferns, and then John started the conversation.
“So what did you guys talk about?” Peter asked after John had come back to us.
“Political science and her career, and how stupid tourists are,” John replied.
“That’s funny,” Dom said, “because we all paid twenty eight dollars each to come in here.”
In the car on the way to Wanaka that night, through dark bulbous mountains, John and I sat in the back and drank beer as cars passed infrequently and lit up the backseat with their lights and John’s face with it.
“You’re smooth like butter,” I said to John.
“What?” he replied.
“Really?”
“Yeah, you have so much confidence. I mean, you can walk up to anyone.”
“I don’t always find it easy. Sometimes I have to push myself into those situations.”
“But you always seem so composed,” I replied.
“From the outside maybe.”
“Then why do you do it?” I asked.
“Because you never know what people will say until you talk to them. And for me, not to talk to people because I’m too shy would be the biggest regret of my life.”
Peter had sex in Wanaka that night. We were all so happy for him, because he was always in such a good mood and maintained the group morale, and for that he deserved it. Dom lost his boss’ camera in Wanaka that night, because we had hot-boxed the rental car, and because of that his boss should probably never find out.
“We should roll a joint each,” John said when we returned to our car parked in a back street after going out in Wanaka for the
“I don’t really like drum and bass!” John yelled over the music at me, Domcing with other people in a dark room that flickered with lights and throbbed with bass. That was about the time Peter vanished, that tall lamppost of a man. So back in the car John and I rolled a joint each, Dom rolling one too seemed a bit much. Halfway through the first joint, we were all cooked. John went sideways and so Dom and I finished the last of it.
“I can’t do the other one,” John said, folded up in the back seat like yesterday’s newspaper. I didn’t know if I could handle the second one either, but I did it anyway.
“So you leave tomorrow, Dom?” I asked, looking up at all the stars in the sky rippling like fish in an ocean.
“Yeah man, got to fly back for work. Wish I could finish this trip with you guys though. I hope you find your pipe,” he said and passed the joint.
“Yeah the pipe,” I replied and we sat there a while passing the joint back in forth, exhaling weed smoke into thecrisp midnight air.
Finally I said, “Dom, how did you work out what you wanted to do?”
“You mean my job?”
“No, I mean what you wanted to do, like what interested you.”
“I guess it just sort of happened. I liked cameras and making weird shit. But now it’s not like I get to make all the things I want to everyday. Sometimes I have to make boring stuff for the company I work for, like video stuff for other companies.”
I had seen some of the boring stuff Dom was talking about. Conferences and corporate videos of farm industry people talking about lambing procedures and proper pasture management; IT
“I guess it’s that simple,” I said and Dom looked at me. “I mean, if you do what you like then you like what you do, then you like who you are, and fuck, maybe you’ll spend your life happy.”
“What do you like doing?” Dom asked me.
I thought for a second then replied, “I don’t know; smoking weed, having sex, watching the sun rise, writing poetry. Basically the same as everybody else.”
“I don’t know, man, not everybody likes poetry,” Dom said.
Three Days Left...
The next day we dropped Dom off at the Queenstown airport. People weaved by us with trollies full of luggage; children yelled and ran about; couples held hands; other couples kept apart as if they’d been on holiday for too long together and had found out more about each other than they had wanted to.“So good to meet you, Dom,” John said and hugged him. “I hope we meet again.”
“Yeah, man, it’s been great,” Peter said. “I’m glad to have met another weird New Zealander,” and he hugged Dom in the warm noon sun.
“Who says I’m weird?” Dom replied.
“You’re not weird, man, you’re just a very creative guy,” I said and hugged him.
We sat drinking beer in a small park in the centre of Queenstown
“So how was your time with your lady friend last night, Peter,” I asked. “You just disappeared.”
“Yeah sorry guys, I was drunk and it all happened real fast. It was… I don’t know, it felt weird. That was the first time I’d ever gone home with a chick after just meeting her. Like a one-night stand, is that what you guys call it?”
“That is,” I replied.
“Man, I’m happy you did it,” John said, “because now you have another insight into what it means to really connect with someone.”
“It’s just bizarre,” Peter replied, “waking up in the morning and you’ve had sex with this person, but you don’t know anything about them.”
We sat there drinking beer, and when I had finished mine I asked if we should go get dinner and buy more booze, but John and Peter still had a full beer and wanted to stay, so I went off to look for a bottle store by myself.
I walked into an art gallery next to a bottle store and looked around at landscape paintings of the Milford Sound and other iconic places in the South Island popular with tourists. I checked the price of one painting, about one metre by one metre, meticulously done with dark wet colours: $85,000. God, I thought, it would take me three years washing dishes to make that.
“I am,” he said, and I introduced myself.
“You look arty. What do you do?” he asked.
I wore pants and a brown buttoned-up long sleeve shirt, and had on a black felt broad-rimmed women’s hat and black-framed aviator sun glasses.
“I write short stories,” I replied.
“A writer?” he said and smiled. “I should’ve known.”
A writer? I thought, is that who he thinks I am.
A tall slim blond women in her forties with big cheek bones and lips like shoes laces, came from out of a room wearing a long black dress and gold earrings and a gold necklace and a gold bracelet and a huge ruby on one finger that looked like a
wet strawberry. When she saw me she
swanned over and introduced herself. She
must have thought I was a famous artist,
me wearing a women’s hat. “I like the
“It’s about the details, isn’t it Tim,” he said.
“Of course,” I replied. “But knowing which to include is the hard part.”
“You seem like a smart young man, I’m sure you have no trouble.”
An old Chinese couple came in and walked around the gallery, and the woman dripping with gold went and greeted them.
“So tell me, what are you writing now?” Tim asked with his back to me, him painting.
“I haven’t written for about a week,” I replied.
He turned around and looked at me like I had slapped one of his children.
“Been traveling,” I said, and the woman came back and stood beside me.
“Well, I paint every day,” Tim said and went back to dabbing a tree with a smoky-green colour on the edge of a raging river.
“And he can’t paint fast enough,” the women I took to be his wife said, her jewellery worth more than my annual salary, not that I’ve
“So business is good?” I asked and he turned around again and smiled.
“We’re having friends around tonight. Coffin Bay King Oysters for dinner. You know how expensive Coffin Bay King Oysters are?” he asked and raised his eyebrows.
“I wouldn’t know,” I replied.
When I came back to John and Peter, they were sitting with an Italian guy. John as usual had gone and spoken to a stranger, and then brought him back to talk. The guy sat on a skateboard and had a tanned caramel face and a long moustache that had its ends twisted up. He looked like a painter.
“I wash dishes at a restaurant in town,” he said.
“I wash dishes, too,” I replied.
“How shit is it!”
“It’s not that bad,” I said, but then realised I had been telling myself this for years. Literally years.
A backpacker with a shaved head and who wore blue jeans and no
“You listen to Fela Kuti?” I asked the Italian, who had introduced himself as Federico.
“What! Fela Kuti? I fucking love him, man. I can’t believe you. Why you ask this? I have been in New Zealand more than one year, and never someone talk about Fela Kuti.”
And so we talked about Fela Kuti and afro beat music.
“We make afro beat scene in my village in Italy. We have many
We said we didn’t, but we still loved the music, the rhythm, the feeling.
“Now I fucking love you guys,” he said. “I cannot believe this!”
The sky clouded over and the wind picked up, and I said we should get dinner on the go. We had plans to go to a public barbeque along the lakefront to cook, and invited Federico to come with us.
“The weather is shit. You come to my house,” he said. “I make pasta for dinner. Real pasta. Not this fake shit you Kiwis eat.”
“I have every single album he ever make,” he said. “All fifty two of them. Tell me, how did you find Fela Kuti?”
“It was easy,” I said. “He found me.”
Two Days Left...
People were everywhere; they crowded the sidewalk and stood in a messy line in the liquid noon sun. It seemed there was a dignitary from every country in the world that had been specially sent to Queenstown to try a Fergburger, to see why all these other people were in a massive queue that could been seen from space. I did and didn’t want to be in the queue. I couldn’t see the start of it.“You won’t wait long,” a young woman said walking down the queue wearing a Fergburger t-shirt and a smile.
“About twenty minutes to get to the front,” she said.
I think the burger was good, but I don’t recall it much, only paying for it, and the queue, and those two golden women we met at the supermarket while waiting for our burgers. They were from Brazil and worked at the supermarket as cashiers.
“Working here is ok,” they said. “But work is just work.”
“We wish, but we have to earn money so we can go to Australia,” they said, their voices soft butter mixed with brown sugar.
“I thought you loved New Zealand?” I asked.
“We do, but we are sick of Queenstown.”
For some reason it made me remember that my cousin, who is thirty three, has lived his whole life in New Zealand and has never been to the South Island.
“Have you been to the North Island?” I asked.
“No, but we have heard of it,” they replied.
There was no one anywhere down a gravel road forty kms from the highway; herds of sheep in paddocks under bare mammoth hills; dust rising behind us and the sun sinking in front of us. We found the DOC campsite beside a long flat lake surrounded by native bush with the sweat of leaves in the air; the lake reflecting a mountain on the other side of it, and the mountain covered and weeping trees down to the lake’s shore. We all got a little drunk down by the lakeside where green moss met the water and little waves lapped against it. We threw stones that skipped
“You guys ever afraid to try and achieve the things you want to achieve?” I asked.
“Of course, you ever seen me try to cook rice?” Peter asked and I laughed.
“Man,” John said, “everybody’s terrified of trying and failing.”
“It’s the funniest thing that feeling,” I said, “like you just need to take one step over the edge but you hesitate. Like when you’re sitting with a girl you really like and you know, you can feel that she wants you to kiss her, but you second guess yourself, but then finally you do kiss her and she kisses you back, and you laugh at how much of a fool you would have been not to have followed your gut.”
“We’ve all been there,” Peter said and threw a stone and it skipped on the sleeping lake three times before dropping into it.
“It’s confidence,” John said. “It’s belief in yourself.”
“I just want to be proud of who I am,” I replied.
“Of course,” John said, “we all want to be proud of ourselves. But finding that thing that will make us proud is the hard part.”
“Maybe it’s being able to cook rice well,” I said.
“I’m trying to,” I replied.
“Well you just keep trying, Mr Timmy,” he said.
“That’s it,” John replied, “you have to try, or else you’ll never be proud of yourself.”
John and Peter went to put up the tent while I walked along the lake’s shore to look for firewood. In the sky a white and speckled bird floated on a rising current of air against the woolly mountain, going in slow, swift circles up and up and then jumping to another current of rising air, as if from one stone to another across a stream. Behind the first bird was another gliding up in the same arch, and behind this more and more, all white and speckled and glinting in the pale sun like singing seashells; all following and jumping from one pocket of rising air to another, rising up and up together in a big corkscrew, as if with eyes closed, following the leader, a living tornado, unscrewing the sky, crossing the stream, finding their way.
One Day Left...
We woke up and left the campsite in the late morning with two and a half hours to get to the Milford Sound, which was cutting it fine. I sped the car back down the gravel road to the highway, past the sheep and the mammoth hills. A man came the other way on a quadbike and I slowed down and he gave a wave and I waved back.We got to the highway and Peter drove, and as we got closer to the Milford Sound and our boat tour leaving from it, time began to run out and Peter sped.
“I never drive like this,” he said.
Caught behind slow traffic on a narrow road that bent and dipped, swallowed up on all sides by the green dripping lust of the planet, we all swore and exclaimed, “Why doesn’t he just let us pass?”
“I’m sorry,” the young woman said, her face healthy and clear like she never ate junk-food, “it has to leave. It can’t wait.”
The ship was still out there, stationary.
“Why can’t we just run and jump on?” Peter asked.
“I’m sorry. We have a very tight schedule,” she said.
Another minute passed and then the ship slowly peeled away, without us on it, and we would not see what every tourist who comes to New Zealand sees.
Peter and I went and sat on a nearby couch and I tried to eat a sandwich but I wasn’t hungry. John stood with the young woman at the desk. They talked then she picked up a phone and waited and then spoke a little and hung up. I couldn’t hear her but her face told me nothing good. John leaned against the desk then walked around
Tourists, mostly old and foreign and in large rain jackets like little
I shouldn’t have been driving because the car wasn’t under my name, but when we camped that evening and wanted beer, I volunteered to drive the twenty five kms down to Te Anau.
I came into the supermarket wearing gumboots and blue jeans and an old polar fleece jumper with cat hair on it and a few cigarette burns in it. I went into the walk-in chiller and a man in his thirties was in there. He wore gumboots and a dirty jacket and wafts of grass and delicate notes of cow shit came from him. We looked at each other and nodded while each of us decided on a box of beer. Two tall, blond guys came in speaking German and got a box of
“Bloody tourists,” the man said.
“Yeah, they’re bloody everywhere,” I replied.
“One bloody crashed into me at the start of this year. They should make them take a driving test when they get here,” he said and stared at me, his face stubbly and rough and his eyes like a hornet’s sting. “You from round here?” he asked.
I turned up my Kiwi accent and put on like I was a farmer and said, “I’m from up north, just down here helping my uncle. He’s got a farm out of town. We run deer.”
“From the north ay? Well at least you’re a bloody Kiwi.”
Just then two young women came in talking in vowel-stretched American accents. One wore short shorts; the other a short skirt. The one in the short skirt bent over and struggled with a box of beer. Her legs were tanned and sculpted but looked soft like they were made from caramel. She also had a 9mm hand gun tattooed on her thigh.
“Bloody hell!” the man said after they had left, “if they were all like that I wouldn’t bloody complain. It’s hard to find any young single
Days Spent...
A few hours before we flew out from Queenstown, we went down to the lakeside so I could find my pipe. John and Peter wandered along behind me as I searched around for the boulder where I had hid it ten years before, but everything seemed different, the lake seemed to have swelled and there were more bushes along the shore — I didn’t recognise any of it. I found a few boulders where it may have been and dug along their sides but found nothing. After an hour of walking up and down a stretch of the lake, I gave up.“It doesn’t matter,” I said, and the lake shimmered under a smiling sun and a snowy-white bird flew low across its water then up into a cloudless, blue sky.
“You guys ever read Tolstoy?” I asked.
“Yep,” John and Peter both replied.
“I love the stuff,” I said, looking at a book of short stories written by him that I held in my hands.
“The Cossacks is a good story. It’s about this poor rich Russian guy who doesn’t know what he wants, or maybe he does, it’s hard to tell. But anyway, I’ve been thinking. I’m going to quit my shitty dish washing job.”
“Hell yeah!” Peter exclaimed.
“That’s great, man. What are you going to do instead?” John asked.
“I’m going to become a writer.”
James Edward Leeson
- James.edward.leeson@gmail.comCurrently writing in his spacious mountain home in wild New Zealand.
Working on a new collection of short stories, 'A World on Fire'.
Working on a new collection of short stories, 'A World on Fire'.
Illustrated by
Thijs Janssen
- hi@Thijs.com.auThe friendly Dutch merchant of smiles.
A freelance designer working in the hustle of Melbourne.
A freelance designer working in the hustle of Melbourne.
