Random Play by Graham Reid

My mother died this week. And I don’t know what to think about that.

She was 82, and only as far away as the Gold Coast but I saw her just three times in the past decade. The last time was perhaps three years ago and she was confined to a bed, skeletally thin and made no sense at all. She made a noise like a ring-tone at one point and my sister Barbara and I felt utterly helpless.

Mum was in there but couldn’t come out.

I think she knew who I was. As I was leaving she pointedly blew me three kisses. I have three children.

There will be no funeral to go to, there is some kind of immediate cremation apparently, so my two sisters and I agreed to that and thought we’d sort out a scattering of her ashes at some mutually convenient time. My sisters Bobbie and Barbara live in Melbourne and on the Gold Coast respectively.

I heard the news when I walked back through the airport here after two days in Sydney. It was midnight and it was a silent cab ride home.

I don’t know what to feel but maybe writing something down -- because, God forgive me, that’s about all I do -- might help. And my mum’s strange life deserves it.

Hers was a life in two parts: she changed from an extremely social, well-liked, intelligent and much respected woman into what I sometimes carelessly called “a gangster’s moll“.

It was a helluva turnaround after my father died -- just ask my older sister Bobbie who got death threats from Mum’s new man Gary (whom I had the good fortune never to meet) or my younger sister who endured years of verbal abuse from my mum and this dangerous man.

My mum perjured herself in court to protect Gary (who went to jail anyway), lied to the family, and cut herself off from her friends.

And of course Gary, ensured that this formerly vivacious woman ended up alone and penniless. He took her for everything she had, and then had the good grace to die of cancer. Painfully I hope.

My mother was born in Edinburgh in 1922, left school at 14, was entirely self-educated, and worked in the office of the Scotsman newspaper. She met my dad when he came over from New Zealand. She was then working for some shonky doctor I think and dad was selling his own homemade concoction which he said was a hair restorer. My dad was a decade older than her.

They fell in love and married during the war, my older sister Bobbie was born in early 1944 when my father was a radio operator in the British Merchant Navy. Just before the war ended he was walking across a rooftop of an Edinburgh shipyard. He stepped on what he thought was solid roof but which was blacked-out glass. He fell through. On VE Day my dad was in hospital not expected to live, my mum had an 18 month old daughter and no money. She was 22.

Dad recovered and eventually they moved to New Zealand. Actually they moved backwards and forwards for many years, I was born in Edinburgh and started school there, my younger sister Barbara was born here.

My parents bought a big house in Mt Eden and my father’s mother moved in with us. She left in a flaming row and went to live with Dad’s sister in Pt Chev, an estranged side of the family I never knew: there are cousins and such probably.

Later my mother’s father moved in and Pop and I shared a bedroom for a while. I remember him as a tall man who taught me how to melt wax in tobacco tins and press coins in to make an imprint, and he was a gardener. He too left after a family argument and I never saw or heard of him again other than a whispered mention of his death when I was about 12.

My mother oversaw a busy household.

My dad and a friend hollowed out the ground beneath our house and put in a lovely flat. The first tenants were a Jewish couple -- whom I still refer to as Uncle Jack and Aunty Doris -- and over time their various family members arrived from London’s East End. I grew up with a big Jewish family and my mum would regularly entertain more than 20 people with four course dinners.

Then there were the boys from the Rangi-boats. Because we had been backwards and forwards to Scotland -- always on the Rangitiki funnily enough -- and because my dad loved the sea, my parents had a long association with the New Zealand Shipping Company.

So every time a Rangi-boat -- the Rangitiki, Rangitane or Rangitoto -- came into port my mum and dad would invite many of the crew around. They also knew a lot of people in the hospitality industry like Bob Sell.

My childhood was filled with parties of all kinds. And memories of my mum making rollmops, pavlova, porridge, black pudding, Christmas cake with raisins and threepences wrapped in foil, and of a famous dessert called Danish Peasant Girl With A Veil. It was a Jewish-Scottish-Kiwi culinary journey in our home.

Christmas was always spent at Stanmore Bay. My parents had bought a small bach there in the early 60s. We’d always have the Jewish family up on Christmas Day and it was until I was in my mid-teens before I recognised the happy irony in that.

My mum and dad started a business and mum did the books, she drove for the blind, was involved in Jewish functions, and for a while sold real estate.

My parents travelled often and no sooner were they back from one trip than they would be planning another to Singapore, Chiang Mai or Hawaii (where they fell in with some Hollywood types). In our lounge there was a large atlas on the coffee table, in the room we called the back kitchen there was a framed PanAm map of the world on one wall.

I remember the home of my childhood filled with laughter and plans.

At a significant wedding anniversary Uncle Jack quoted from the Book of Proverbs in reference to my mum: “Who can find a virtuous woman? For her price is far above rubies.“

Then in the mid 80s my dad died.

Some while later my mum sold the huge home at 23 Kakariki Avenue -- I cannot believe what the new owners did to that bright, light-filled home -- and moved to the Gold Coast. She had been there before, had a few friends from Stanmore and some of the Jewish family over there, and like many of us would do I guess, didn’t want to live alone in an empty home crowded with memories.

She bought a lovely unit near the ocean at Main Beach and was quite happy there.

Then Gary came along. He was well-known to the police, had served time, threatened old ladies and took their money, and as he progressively weaselled his way into my mother’s affections he turned her against the family, my two sisters particularly.

And my mum -- increasingly dependent on booze and pills and Gary --- defended him, disowned my sisters and was barely on talking terms with me.

I am told she was once found unconscious in the toilet of the casino with thousands of dollars in cash in her purse. Dunno. Selling drugs through the casino maybe? Maybe I wasn’t joking when I said, “a gangster’s moll”.

She was in her 70s.

Then Gary died and she was penniless.

My younger sister Barbara -- who has the grace of forgiveness -- got Mum into an all-care rest home. I went there. The people were friendly and active, they had outings and weekly barbecues, guest speakers -- and mum hated it. She resented being with old people.

An old man badgered her for cigarettes. She drank. She seldom left her room other than for meals, and even then sometimes not. She became bitter and withdrawn, resentful and lonely.

Then her brain atrophied. Her memory went. Barbara got her into another place which used her modest pension to keep her comfortable. She spent her last years in a bed, unable to communicate.

Barbara visited regularly, Bobbie would go up from Melbourne, I went once. Mum withered and ceased to be part of our life, she wasn’t even a participant in her own.

Then this week Barbara called me on Wednesday morning when I was in Sydney and said she had been told to be prepared. It happened eight hours later.

The three of us spoke about what to do and agreed there would be no funeral. We all felt strange: Bobbie said she had done her grieving long ago, Barbara had been so much closer than either of us that it has hit her harder. My kids were upset because they had only ever known grandma from the good days back here, one of Barbara’s sons who only knew her over there said, “What can I say, that she was my grandma and never wanted to see me?” Bobbie’s kids were very upset because they had seen her recently. It has affected us all in very different ways.

We will scatter her ashes somewhere. We scattered our dad’s at Stanmore Bay because back then it made sense, but while there might be some romantic symmetry in doing that for mum it would be a lie.

Bobbie said mum once told her she wanted to be scatted at the Broadwater on the Gold Coast so she could be with Gary.

Bobbie -- wise Buddhist that she is -- said to Barbara it didn’t really matter where, all the waters of this world are connected so mum will find where she wants to be.

So the Broadwater it probably is because Bobbie and Warwick can come up from Melbourne, and Megan and I can go over for a long weekend in the sun.

We’ll all have fun and talk it over, swim and have barbecues. And you can bet someone will mention Danish Peasant Girl With A Veil and we’ll laugh. And we’ll be sad.

So that was my mother: Margaret Noble Lamb Reid.
She was a wonderful, then a woeful, woman.

And I feel I never really knew her.

A few months ago I did a phone interview with the popular British author Tony Parsons. Old folks may recall him as an NME writer during the heady days of punk, others will remember him for his hugely successful novel Man and Boy, but I suspect now he is famously known for his non-interview with Kim Hill during which, by mutual agreement, they hung up on each other.

God knows what that was all about. I got on well with him, so well in fact I put a complete transcript of our conversation onto the Herald website because we chatted about the writing process, his working method, the source of his inspiration, the music he was listening to, and so on.

At one point he played a track down the phone to me and we joked that now it would be my turn to play him something by the Monkees. (They’d come up earlier.)

Great conversation, no doubt helped by our openers. It was 8pm here and after I’d asked how he was and he’d returned the question I said I was good, I had just come from a wine tasting. He laughed, it was morning where he was, and said so had he.

Starting a long distance interview with a stranger who makes a joke is always a promising sign.

I thought he was a thoroughly agreeable man but maybe Kim Hill caught him on a bad day, or maybe she was having one. Whatever.

But one thing Parsons said impressed me: it was his pattern to drop off his draft of a new work at his publishers and then head to the airport for a holiday in some place like Barbados. I thought that impossibly exotic and romantic, the kind of life as a writer I want.

And this week, bugger me …

On Monday I dropped off the hard copy of my collection of travel stories to the helpful people at Random House, and we talked over what happens now. The collection is intended for publication next year, check my www.elsewhere.co.nz website for more details if you care to.

I needed to talk a bit of it through because I was sure the pieces could mystify the editor assigned me by their sheer diversity, and I wanted to point out there was a general theme and actually a structure at work over the 20 stories.

So they are variously serious, sad, funny or informative. Some are like short stories, others like essays. I think my pitch will be, “You’ll laugh, you’ll cry, you’ll kiss $29.95 goodbye.”

Anyway that was Monday and in true Tony Parsons form the following dawn I flew to Sydney. Unlike real authors such as Parsons however mine was a work trip to interview former Beach Boy Brian Wilson and see the Smile show which he is bringing to this country shortly.

I won’t anticipate what I will be appearing in the Herald’s TimeOut section about this, but it was a good interview (he was twitchy and I was nervous it could all fall apart) and the show was superb. Go to it.

So that Tuesday night after the gig I went back to my hotel, had a brandy and felt on top of the world. There was a joyous soundtrack in my head, my work was done, and I had the outline of the story for publication. I also had all the next day until about 4pm off to go to the new gallery of aboriginal art, or the museum of modern art which was just 10 minutes away on the other side of Circular Quay.

Or I could go to the museum which was right outside my door. I would certainly be having a relaxing seafood lunch somewhere with a view of the harbour.

It would be a rare day off and, Parsons-like I could just kick back knowing my book (or at least the first part of its journey to publication) was behind me. I went to sleep happy.

My phone rang five hours later. It was my younger sister rang from the Gold Coast.

Our mother was dying and didn’t have long.

Quite a week.

And it was still only Wednesday and the sun was barely awake.

Without wishing to diminish the death threat to Tariana Turia might I just ask this impertinent question: You mean she’s had only the one?

I would have thought that in public life, especially if you are saying things which might get right up the noses of some people, you could at least expect one a month.

Maybe we are still the passionless people that Gordon McLaughlan once said we were?

In good news however the prime minister still gets them -- and an axe in the window of her office on the corner of my street which was very inconvenient for us, traffic-wise.

Might I politely ask that if activists are going to get creative with their vandalism could they please factor in the bus lane and the works with road cones up on the corner by Kingsland Station The last thing we need is a dozen cops, a couple of journalist and a few photographers standing on the roadside for 90 minutes at rush hour. It’s a one-lane thoroughfare, guys, let’s have a little consideration for the average commuter-cum-rubbernecker.

And some of these slow-driving people are already of the kind you’d cheerfully throttle. Which reminds me . . .

Like Dover Samuels, who said you just toss death threats in the bin and get on with the job, I have put my various menaces behind me. I don’t know that I’d want to trouble the cops with them, and certainly wouldn’t ring 111.

And not because of the taxi-thing -- which is becoming a very bad joke and credits no intelligence to the teller, or the person laughing -- but that the cops might not answer for about 30 seconds. Which must be a bitch if someone has done a runner with your handbag and fled the scene, as happened the other day to a lady. If we are to believe what was reported in a newspaper. Seems she waited for ages for her call to be answered and by that time the villain had not only fled the scene but probably the immediate vicinity, if not the province.

Imagine how far he could have got if she had been connected and a car had been dispatched. Hamilton is my guess, probably one of those outer suburbs, in a garage with a red roller-door, the street near the park with the dairy on the corner.

Anyway, that thief got away and neither victim nor perpetrator was in danger, unlike Mrs Turia and I who have been on the sharp end of threats to our person.

My first came when I was about seven and my mum threatened to kill me for setting a mattress on fire. In the attic.

It had smouldered for a couple of days before it burst into flames and had to be cut up and tossed out bit-by-bit through a tiny window where it burned away on the lawn for another few days.

I’ve never smoked since. At least not for life insurance purposes anyway.

I also recall my dad having a go at me when I came home drunk and bloodied after being set upon by thugs near Albert Park one night. I was about 16 and they were much older than me, but of course they also had the advantage of nimble sobriety. I had the disadvantage of youth and three mates who buggered off quick when the fists flew.

When my dad recovered from seeing my nose plastered across my face and realised that I had been less than abstemious on the alcohol front the said: “By God boy, I’ll bloody throttle you!”

(Words which sounds eerily like the threat made against the prime minister when you think about it. Hmmm.)

“Against an ugly backdrop” -- to steal a quote from the Herald on Oneday journalist Jonathan Milne writing about the Turia complaint -- I protested my innocence and vowed that the next time I would “fight to the death”, to cop a phrase from Pita Sharples.

Which only goes to show when it comes to death threats, outrageous statements to get attention, and even name calling (I have been a “white maggot” more than once but you don’t se me running of to the cops now, do ya?) no one has a monopoly on them.

Turia was right to get in the police, just as Sharples was right to rack up the rhetoric on an issue about which he feels passionate. To hear Don Brash condemn Sharples’ language as not befitting New Zealand made you wonder which world he was living in: the one Gordon McLaughlan wrote about all those years ago perhaps?

Although that said, frankly I could do with a whole lot fewer people feeling “passionate” about things right now.

In the past month I have read of people being “passionate” about their vodka, fashion designs, oddball cooking methods involving coriander, sport, the hair they style, the books they write, and the wine they make.

As Graham Parker sang back in the late 70s, “passion is no ordinary word”. So, as with “awesome”, let’s save it for when it might actually means something.

Like the foreshore?

We came home from a farewell function a bit later than expected the other night so missed the beginning of that other farewell, the one to Sex and the City. No bad thing as the bit was saw was the most self-serving, dishonest, cloying and manipulative programme I have seen in years.

Now I don’t read the women’s gossip rags that much but even this ignorant civilian knows that a couple of those actresses hated each others guts by the end of the series. But there they were all tears and huggy and being emotional. Acting in other words.

I’ve never been much taken by the sincerity of actors, they can fake it so well you’d never know when they were being serious or otherwise. These are people who can laugh or cry on demand.

But I suffered through this kiss-off to Sex and the City because of the programme being a cultural phenomenon. And that some women I know take it as seriously as I do laughing at Matthew Ridge.

Before you conclude I’m just a nay-saying male cynic about Carrie and the rest might I say in my defence that I am not ignorant about this show at all: I’ve actually seen almost every episode because when we were in the States a few months back they were having a DVD sale at some chain store so we bought every series except the last. (I guess we will buy that too when it becomes available just to complete the set.)

And I watched them through, increasingly astonished at the formulaic writing (“Then I realised …” “So I started to wonder …”) and the one-dimensional nature of the characters. Let it be said, and this is an informed opinion, that Carrie Bradshaw has to be the most disingenuous, self-centred, emotionally anorexic and obviously coquettish character ever to swish onto the small screen. She is immature and inexcusable.

Much like those script writers and fashion designer types who were trotted out in the final farewell to fake sincerity and talk up the cultural phenomenon of the show. The shoe guy saying he was surprised that he had become such an icon?

C’mon Mr Manolo, we aren’t all stupid. We’ve heard of product placement.

For my money the best character in Sex and the City was the witty, neurotic and very self-aware gay guy Stanford -- but maybe that’s because I’m a guy too.

Meanwhile across town no sooner had that final farewell finished than me, Dave, Ray and Tugger got to thinking about which character we most resemble in the show we love: was I a Sam, or a Norm, or a Cliff, or a Coach?

Yep, over brewskis we guys got together and watched the first series of Cheers, and howled with laughter at the clever scripts and snappy dialogue (“How’s life Norm?” “Not for the squeamish”).

Then I realised that Cheers, long before Sex and the City, had set the template for role model behaviour amongst healthy males.

So I got to thinking: is life a bar and we’re all in it, or are we in a bar and that’s our life?

Or something seemingly paradoxical like that.

So me, Dave, Ray and Tugger knocked the scabs off another dozen and considered the characters in Cheers. By the end of the third dozen we’d come to the conclusion that in Cheers (the first season, before Woody and Frasier Crane) there is every aspect of modern maleness.

Now I’m not one for putting my emotions out there for scrutiny as it were, but I can admit there are times I feel like Sam: confident, good-looking, smart-casual in attire, vain and utterly self-centred.

At other times I know when I am Cliff: an annoying know-all with little self-respect and even less spine.

Then sometimes, like when people start using big words or jump too quickly from one idea to another, I am Coach: confused, but diligent and harmless.

But I guess mostly I am like Norm, one of the greatest characters in American sitcoms who can wring more base cynicism and humour out of a simple enquiry than anything Sex and the City had to offer.

Yep, there are days when I feel Norm disentangles the great mysteries of life, addresses the male angst of our time, and best embodies the indomitable male spirit which says, no matter how bad the job, no matter how warm the beer, no matter what petty slights and insults you have had to endure during your working day you just have to get up and do it all over again. Because it’s going to be just as crap tomorrow.

“How’s life Norm?”
“Like it just caught me sleeping with its wife.”

And the way through this depressing metaphysical condition isn’t anything as mundane as buying shoes, moving on to another one night stand or wearing clothes no sensible person would even want to be buried in.

Nope, Norm embodies the male answer to the great conundrums of life with a simple, elegance.

“What’s the a story Norm?”
“Thirsty guy walks into a bar, you complete the rest …”

This might be a belated response, but thank God for Eating Media Lunch which, even more belatedly, took the scalpel to Fashion Week and the fawning media coverage it received.

For weeks I have been telling my friends about the new low in New Zealand television when TV3’s late evening bulletin, with grim stories about Iraq, was beamed in from somewhere near a catwalk. Caroline Robinson (whom, despite this appalling failure of taste, is still the best television newsreader in the country) was dressed up like a dolly bird and behind her the shallow parade carried on.

Disgraceful, and who’s idea was that?

Lately, perhaps with the luxury of time out and a chance to consider, I have been alarmed by some of the lapses of common sense within news organisations.

The night the Walter’s Prize was awarded we were told again, by a young and previously unsighted television journo, that et.al who had just won it was the person who made the braying toilet which was going to be sent to the Venice Biennale.

Well, actually no sweetie. That work isn’t going to be sent there, and I thought that one had been cleared up long ago. But apparently the news hasn’t filtered through to a television reporter covering the arts.

Then there was the outrage about removing the white crosses from roads. But no one, other than newsreaders and then their misinformed public, said the crosses were going to be removed from roads. They were going to be removed from motorways. Which is a very different thing and had that man in Bluff been told that we might have spared him exploding all over talkback radio.

I have been on the pointy end of a couple of these misinformation ploys lately.

When author Craig Marriner abruptly quit the house in Albert Park he had been given to write in there were small detonations all over the place. He seemed to be being painted as some ingrate, and didn’t writer Graeme Lay sound like a prissy school teacher when he said good riddance, we didn’t much like him anyway?

Well, having met Craig and being one of the few who read his book before it was unexpectedly given some big award two years back I could understand he might not want to be there. The last time I spoke to him he told me about scribbling away in the backs of London pubs, and that’s his milieu.

Irregardless, as Pauly in The Sopranos says, here’s where I came in.

Late that afternoon I got a phone call from a reporter following it up who said that the story was going to be that this was life imitating art, that Craig had done a runner just like the character in his book Stonedogs.

I asked where he had got that information from and he referred to his seniors. I asked if any of them had read Stonedogs because there were no similarities at all. I told him to ring back in 10 minutes after I’d parked the car and I’d give him a rather more rounded picture of the book, Craig and the stand-off.

A couple of days later I was invited to appear on the show which has taken Holmes’ old slot. The debate would be about the new Eminem album and the fact that some record store had announced while it was selling the album it wouldn’t condone all the terrible things he said so it would donate some part of the profits to a worthy cause (women’s refuge or something).

I said to the woman researcher who called me that we needed to slow down here: you don’t have to be too smart to see what was in operation and I said that the cynic in me might have something to say about that, and how a record chain managed to get news coverage out of a canny ploy.

Then the researcher asked me about the censorship of the album. I pointed out that not only was the album not being censored but it was going to be advertised and sold widely. What censorship?

As it happened I was busy so Susan on the show was spared having to listen to me rain all over their parade of outrage, or whatever it was they were cooking up.

It seemed to me in that instance, the Marriner thing, and the white crosses affair that misinformation was usefully going to serve to make a story, at the expense of a few simple facts.

The story angle, the outrage and the artificially created controversy were all predetermined.

Unbridled enthusiasm can be dangerous, as dangerous as just believing what people tell you. For example…

Wouldn’t you like to know just how much Fashion Week is worth?

In three days I heard $30 million, $50 million and that no one could say because such figures weren’t able to be isolated in the general “apparel” export figures.

I quite like fashion, but that doesn’t mean my brain disconnects as so many people’s seemed to do when there was the chance of free champagne and a goodie bag.

And finally, because I have been away and busy I haven’t been able to say this, “I hate to say I told you so, but … “

It seemed tragically early in Dick Hubbard’s career in public life to be shown up as a noddy, but Bruce Hucker’s animal instincts managed to do that with astonishing ease.

This was always going to happen of course. It does when those who have sat so long in the wings finally command the spotlight. But Hucker’s fleet-footed manoeuvring followed by disingenuous pledges of support have been painful to watch.
Almost as much as the new mayor’s protestations that he was still in charge.

Well, we’ll see who has their hand on the tiller: the guy people voted for in one of the most negative mayoral elections in memory (anyone-but-Banks, wasn’t it?), or the group who have wanted this for so long they can barely contain themselves.

Auckland’s local body politics, always amusing for outsiders, will only get more embarrassing. I’m not looking forward to leaving town in the next few years. I might get abused, or miss something.