A shooting, mate

It’s not like Anthony ever expected any journey by car to be easy or smooth or to be undertaken in a reasonable amount of time – he had lived in Auckland long enough to get over that expectation.

Back in the 90s, when ‘let’s go and hit the slopes in Howick’ was a new and exciting joke, there had been the night that Mr Hin So, fresh off the boat, had jumped his brand-new car over the median strip and sent Anthony and his mates rapidly from the Vic Park Viaduct to Auckland Hospital.

A decade later – and how many tens of thousands more cars? – the year spent widening the Mangere Bridge on the South Western had resulted in a year of a narrowed Mangere Bridge. Sometimes it took Anthony longer to drive the fifteen kilometres home than it took him to cover the fifteen kilometres home the times he ran.

Then there had been the work at the corner of SH20 and Kirkbride – enormous excavations and constructions all done while maintaining some kind of flow of traffic to the airport. Sometimes the tail was backed up to not far from the bridge. Zero kilometres per hour.

But that Tuesday morning there was a helicopter hovering over Greenwood Road, and a fire engine and more police cars than Anthony had seen before in one place.

Greenwood Road is not Broadway. On one side, behind the wire fence, a mix of harakeke, ti and manuka, the inevitable piles of rubbish – a broken television, a tire, carpet, bottles, a cushion, random pieces of timber, lurid pink artificial flowers, junk mail, a toaster and a fan. On the other side – a green paddock with a herd of black-and-white steers and, beyond that, a line of tall pines.

And at the end of the road, preventing further access, a single policeman – and, held across his chest: the Bushmaster XM15 M4A3 Patrolman assault rifle, used by special forces in the invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq and … on Greenwood Road.

"It seems like a shooting, mate," Sharon Davis told 1 News.

Barnaby McBryde

Detour Ahead (with fond memories of Essie Summers)

"Don't forget to tell your mother I won't be in tonight - I'm on late shift."

James gathered up the parcels his dad had carefully packed, grabbed his bike and headed to the hospital. It was January 1945. He had left school a year earlier, and was assisting the war effort by working around the district on farms where and when required. Now with his mother in hospital he was required to assist at home. Arriving at the hospital he parked his bicycle and headed inside. He never went in the main entrance. The little door at the side entrance was a lot shorter and therefore quicker.

Today he was in more of a hurry than usual. The local football team for which he played, was running a social dance and he was pretty keen to attend. It was important to get back home, finish the other tasks, be ready to meet the team and catch the bus out to the country where the dance was to be held. He took the service lift up to the second floor, got out and sped down the long corridor. Two signs halfway down appeared. One said Detour; the other said Wet floors. There was also a lot of equipment scattered about. Ignoring all the signs and increasing his pace he slipped, fell awkwardly and went crashing into a sturdy network of trestles and ladders, some of which he managed to dislodge, falling across his spreadeagled legs.

Two tradesmen came to help him up. A sharp pain indicated something was broken. He was in the right place. One of them walked down the corridor to a phone. A few minutes later the medics appeared. A quick jab and he was pain free and on his way to the A and E centre. From there to the hospital ward. The bone had to be reset once the swelling was down The packages accompanied him. A nurse called Elizabeth Bennett came to look after him. She offered to have the packages delivered to his Mum and to inform his Dad of his current predicament. Over the next couple of days he saw quite a lot of Nurse Bennett and at one time he heard the Ward Sister chiding her, "Nurse Bennett there are other patients in need of your attention!!!"

The courtship was not whirlwind but two months later, after the Nurses' Ball and a number of outings, they became an item. Chance intervened when James entered the side door and took that particular route. Ignoring the detour sign, though calamitous, had been opportune for him. Yes! Two years later he and Elizabeth married. The course was straight. It was full steam ahead but it was not without some deviations.



Grant Ward

September

This is the fourth offering that the Artistic Director offered for this month. The power of veto is alive and well. See how you go this month with 'Detour Ahead'.

Stories to rosemary.mcbryde@gmail.com by 30 September, as usual.  Happy writing!

Peanut Butter

Maahnoor, on her way from Wellington to New York, stayed with Gerard only for a few days – she had sort of asked, sort of demanded. It was an unreasonable thing to ask and she behaved in her usual unreasonable manner: she complained about the cold; she complained that he did not have a clothes rack; she criticised the art on the wall and the colour of its frames; she bought a lamp and put it on the coffee table; she stalked in one evening and snapped off, with an imperious flick of her fingers, the BBC news he had been listening to.

She hadn’t changed a bit.

There was no way that she would put up with drinking whatever tea he had in the cupboard, and so, when she departed, she left behind a half-empty box of her Himalayan Ayurveda Ashwagandha tea.

*

What had the questions in the census been?

14: Is your dwelling damp?
A damp dwelling may feel or smell damp or have damp patches on the walls, ceiling, floor or window frames.

15: Can you see mould in any part of this dwelling that, in total, is larger than an A4 sheet of paper?
mould (mildew) may grow on the walls, ceiling, floor, doors, window frames, curtains or blinds..
Yes – always
Yes – sometimes
No
Don’t know.

Gerard had spent a long time cleaning the house before Maahnoor arrived.

*

It seemed to Gerard that the left-over tea would keep better in a jar than in its exquisite blue box. He washed the empty peanut butter jar: ‘Pic’s really good Peanut Butter – no salt – Crunchy – Aussie’s legendary Kingaroy nuts fresh roasted and lovingly squashed in Sunny Nelson, NZ’

Did life get weird even at that point? Did the light change imperceptibly, did time begin to fluctuate and slow, did his stomach start to spin even then?

He picked the corner of the label – it seemed to be one of those labels that would peel in one piece if you were careful. Ashwagandha should not be kept in a jar with a peanut butter label on it.

Gerard slowly peeled the label and things definitely got weird. On the back of the label, visible before only from inside the jar, were words:

Right down the end of Lonely Street

You’ll find the Stone Hotel

One punter watching rugby on TV

No one to hear you crying

No one to call your name

Out loud, falling down, out loud

No room here called Self-pity
No room called Desire

And no name to be mentioned in your grief

Your love affair is dead and gone

Your deal has been done

Your tears are falling fast and falling free

You took a walk down Lonely Street

You booked yourself a room

And now it’s loss you’re keeping company

No one to hear you crying

No one to call your name
Out loud, falling down, out loud.

Dhiraja

On not shooting cuckoos

One of the things Maximilian loved about himself above all else was his impeccable sense of timing. Vital for a professional percussionist, it was also an art he was perfecting elsewhere in his life.

Of late, Maximilian had been refining his entrance to the concert platform, just a little after the rest of the orchestra. Standing at the stage door, Maximilian waited as the rank and file zigzagged through the empty chairs, sat, shuffled, picked up their instruments, played through the tricky phrases in cacophonic disharmony, sucked their reeds, adjusted their tuning pegs, tightened their bows, and aimlessly rifled through the music on the stand. Only once stillness had settled did Maximilian sweep forth, his golden locks glinting in the lights as he ascended to his position behind the gleaming brass kettles of the timpani.

Finding this too easy, Maximilian had upped the challenge by waiting until he glimpsed the conductor hovering in the wings on the other side of the stage. Once he had held his beat so late that the audience had burst into spontaneous applause as he entered.

This night, Maximilian arrived just as the lights dimmed and the rustling and whispering in the audience subsided. Imperious on his swiveling stool, Maximilian regarded the scene before him. There was violist Baxter, still scrabbling with his rosin. And bassoonist Fleming with the wrong music on his stand. Not Saint-Saens’ great Organ Symphony but Frederick Delius’ First Cuckoo of Spring and Summer Night on the River. What an idiot…!

Maximilian’s blood ran cold, and his heart ka-thumped in time with the paradiddle of the conductor’s patent leather shoes, now stepping on to the podium. He was early, a whole work early. The hardware of the percussion section and the organ console were deserted. He alone inhabited the outer reaches of the orchestra.

What to do? Maximilian was caught in the glare of the lights; he could neither slip off stage, nor slide gracefully to a crouch behind his instrument. Could he feign a part, a gentle thrumming on the skins? The baton rose and Maximilian knew that a whisper of timpani in Delius’s pastoral lilt would shoot the gentle cuckoo right out of the sky.

He sat, staring straight ahead in as regal a pose as he could maintain for twelve long minutes, enduring the conductor’s puzzled glare as he stood with the whole orchestra to acknowledge the warm applause.

Maximilian slunk from the stage at the conclusion of the concert, shrugging on his coat and hustling to the foyer so he could pour out the whole sorry story to his wife.

Oh! the shame, the mortification!

She hadn’t even noticed.




Rosemary McBryde

The man in the yellow shirt

Totara Park is like a painting by John Constable – a green, pastoral idyll; rolling, grass-covered hills interspersed with trees and woodland; placid cows graze. The trees are perhaps a little darker in hue than the oaks and beeches of blessed Albion – the dark khaki of the vegetation of an antipodean archipelago – with a smattering of white manuka flowers.

Totara Park is one of Manukau’s premier parks and stretches over 216 hectares. The park has something to offer everyone, with a wide range of facilities and activities to enjoy. From this entrance you can take an easy scenic walk, horse ride, or bike ride along the historic bridle trail. Please share with care.

Spring, like a timorous suggestion, can be felt. Rabbits scamper at the pasture edge and tui swoosh overhead.

‘There’s no nice way to put it: he got fucked up’, the New Zealand Herald reported.

It has been a long, wet winter; the ground is waterlogged and pugged with the hoof prints of cattle, each footfall a stinky little lake in the sward.

The sign says ‘Keep to the trails’. Walking off the trail, a man sinks in the muddy slopes, his boots and the bottoms of his trouser legs soon caked with slimy mud. The cows squelch as they walk, and, when they pick up speed, gouts of water splash up around them.

‘A herd of “possessed” cows attacked and injured a man in South Auckland’s Totara Park on Sunday afternoon ripping hunks of flesh from his body.’

Scattered beneath the puriri trees are fallen, crimson flowers like the reminiscence of blood.

‘The cows were rocking back on their hind legs and raining down on the victim who tried to free himself from the attack.’

‘Blood makes noise’, Suzanne Vega sang – it was an odd thing to remember:

But blood makes noise
It’s ringing in my ear.
Blood makes noise
And I can’t really hear you
In the thickening of fear.

Once you are down, and time fails to move at all, the only thing you hear is the pounding of blood in your ears; and a strange, bright light fills the air as the great shapes move above you and the pain explodes.

Barnaby McBryde

Red and Grey don't make Yellow

The ridiculous looking machine sits in front of me, its wheels no bigger than a side plate and when fully inflated looking like something off a bloated garden wheelbarrow. I think about the HMX500 BMX bike I had wanted for ages and the daily pleading that would be met with a ‘We’ll see’ from Mum. Ultimately, I did get a bike; a pinky-brown thing the same colour as school radiators with a carrier and no crossbar. It was effectively a girls Raleigh 20 (second hand); however despite the heavy steel construction I later found that it could do satisfactory jumps and even better skids.

“So, are ya gonna get on?” Dale asks, jolting me back to my present surroundings of the small neighbourhood park as he stands beside the throbbing machine, the two-stroke motor emitting hideous blue smoke.

“Ah. yeah, sure,” I reply trying to recall the stop and go mechanisms. Right-fast, left-slow. Got it - I confirmed to myself. Maybe I’m not so sure I’m ready for this; it wasn’t all that long ago that our fun consisted of making an aeroplane cockpit out of cardboard boxes joined together, a transistor radio and curled telephone cord forming the imaginary coms to the tower. Now I am about to step onto a real, ‘live’ machine, even if my Raleigh 20 might have dwarfed it.

I can feel the wind around my ears, I’ve got the hang of this. What was I so worried about?

“I can’t stop!”I shout in mild panic to my friend not that I can see him. My right fingers are attached to the throttle like PVA glue holding my digits together by a second skin. I feel I’m getting faster and now I’m faced with my first serious choice of my ten-year-old life. I don’t fancy dying until I have at least three paragraphs of achievements to place in the paper.

Coming up very quickly is a wooden power pole on my right and on the other side, a corrugated iron fence. Decision making not being a strong point, I lay down the bike at speed in some idiotic form of surrender. Neither pole nor fence have won, but neither have I. My left hand a casualty of the footpath, gravel embedded into the open palm wound and my forehead chipped and grazed. Blood makes a curious colourful addition to the drab grey pants and jersey of the Main school uniform.

I can’t yet decide if this is going to help or hinder my chances of obtaining a bright yellow BMX bike.



Andrew Hawkey


BONUS STORY

The boy who jumped off a cloud

Once upon a time there was a 8 year old boy that wanted to jump off a montain because he likes to go and amagine that he was in a reall clowed his pearince wur very sand and lonely so they drove up the montain to see if they could find the 8 year old but they didint see him so the pearince Jumped too and then they found the 8 year old boy we went back to the car and drove back home but there was a ginat rock in the way and the cars enjen was brokend. then we had to call the towtruck to come. It took 10 minute then the totruck came they hocked the hook. The Pearince and the boy wur safe. they lived happely ever after.



Cole Hawkey aged 7 (and a half)