Stories: Endings
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Hamilton, 1996
I was walking home along Clyde Street, the long straight one that goes from the Bridge Street bridge to the university, when some guys in a passing car threw the slushy remains of a cup of Sprite at me. It was obvious what this meant: Hamilton was actively rejecting me.
1996 had been all over the place. I'd become bored with tech, dropped out, gone to uni, started my website, been kicked out of my flat for not being social enough, become bored with uni, and my favourite band had broken up. Reasons to stay in Hamilton were dwindling by the day.
So I formulated a plan to get out of the Waikato. I found something at Auckland Uni that seemed worth studying, and in early 1997, laptop in hand, I made the move north.
I didn't feel lost or like I was in a crazy new place. Auckland felt normal. It felt like the city I was supposed to live in. Soon enough I had a posse, stuff to do, places to be. No one threw cups of icy slush at me.
But I never did finish uni.
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Aww cheers Russell, Robyn and Sue - but it's all about the endings! Youse guys will have to wait for the novel/zine to find out more.
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Jackie I mean, not Sue. Silly reading two threads at once.
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Jeremy, that was a beautiful eulogy to your father in law. Made me all weepy, and I do like a good weep. Robyn (and with all due respect to Jeremy being a Hamiltonian), my dearest friend in the whole wide world lives in Hamilton, and I can't stand the place. It's so........other. To me, anyway.
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Jackie, my pleasure, he was a good bloke, and deserved a better death. He fought cancer for 7 years after the doctors gave him six months to live. He had been in remission for over two years when the pneumonia hit him.
He waited for years to be a grandfather, and then only got to enjoy it for a few months. He should be teaching my kids to play golf, and other bad habits. He was incorrigeable, and the kids have inherited that.Ham-town's cool, its home. Its not the whole world though, but its a damn sight better than Tokoroa, where I grew up.
Auckers doesn't do it for me at all, but Welly is my kind of city, I could live there. -
This one I like to call the last train home.
I was all packed up (well nearly) and as ready as I was ever going to be to leave my koibito, my sweetheart Tokyo. I was snoozing across several chairs at one in the morning in my favourite cafe cum living room. I don't like goodbyes and I don't like crying in public and I thought I was going to get away without too much of either. Snuggled in hand-me-downs, skins that were soon to be shed, so tired, my last evening swimming in Japanese language soup. Finally the last of my girls arrived from the late shift and I dragged myself up for a last beer. Yukiko got out her guitar and sang the sad love song about walking the streets that you have walked with someone who is no longer there. Japanese folk songs will get you every time. But so far so good. Now I am being castigated loudly from all sides, what is my crime? Well, at my farewell party the week before I had not looked at the musicians enough when they were singing me farewell songs.
Was I even listening?
Were they going to have to sing them all again?
Hell no, of course I was listening I just didn't want to cry. So they bought out the big guns. Yukiko tunes up, Naoko swings to face me and they sing....."If you miss the last train home, you know that I'll be there, even if the whistle blows a thousand miles."
....and so on and so on.
I crack first and then we all get the release that the Japanese seem to so enjoy; a good cry.
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"I'm just going over to brother Jack's to get my car back. He borrowed it a week ago. The little devil is hanging onto it."
It's 2005. Brother Jack died, an old man, in 1989. Dad's car was sold just before his own 90th birthday.
"Dad sit down and read this. It's a letter from your doctor saying you are not allowed to drive. We sold the car, don't you remember?"
Long silence. He watches Robert Carlyle on television playing Hitler, comments sharply that the actor looks nothing like the man. We talk of the War, and of the Spectre of the Brocken he once saw on a training flight. He perfectly remembers the physics of that light phenomenon. Then:
"I'm just going over to brother Jim's. He borrowed my car over a month ago and hasn't given it back. I'm going over to see what the matter is."
"Dad, read that letter in your hand. You've got a heart condition and you're not allowed to drive. We don't have a car."
Brother Jim died in 1971.
Long silence. On the television, a comedian is finding himself very funny.
"I'll just pop out and see if my car is all right."
He walks down the pavement trying some suitcase keys in the driver's doors of strangers' cars. The neighbours have known him for years. They don't worry about him.
We look on, watchfully, from the gate, in case he loses his way.
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Oh golly this goes on forever....
Looking back with adult eyes I think I understood why they did it, one step further form the pawnshop and some control over their lives. I don't think either my mother or my father really grasped the consequences though. At the time they had been running an off license (bottle shop) for three years after dad left the Navy. The pay was so bad that mum earned more as a Legal Sec for three days a week than dad did for seven. So the talk swung towards "going back out again". This meant dad working abroad though not this time for the Navy as had been the case when I was born. At first dad went away and we stayed in the UK, renting a cottage out in the countryside. This didn't last and here was the pitch; Do you want to go to Boarding School ? (Wha?) You can fly out and visit in the holidays (you're leaving me behind)...you'll be one of the "jet set" (not sure what that meant but it sounded good)...You will have a privileged education, you get to live away from home (Images of plush Hotels...how naive). I agreed, I didn't understand what I was being asked to do but I knew from the look in my mums eyes that it was important and I was expected to be "responsible". Mum and I had talked a lot about responsibility while dad was away; me sat on the kitchen stool watching, listening and learning. Those talks were an escape from school, bullying and stupid farmer’s kids who despised the smart townie with the funny aaacsn't. It was as close as mum and I we were going to get. My agreement secured a tour of likely establishments; it then occurred to me then that this wasn’t going to be any holiday. But I still I agreed to go, I couldn’t by this stage bear the thought of saying no.
Eight weeks later and I am delivered to my third new school in three years, this time to stay. I arrived on the Friday; mum, dad and my sister flew out to Saudi Arabia on the following Tuesday. Mum phoned once over the weekend and I got caught up in the excitement and fear of my new home. In an effort to keep from being bullied I fought and beat the first kid who called me out. It proved an unwise move as it got me a beating from the older boys “to keep me in my place”. I quickly came to learn what young gentlemen where made of. Monday evening at shortly after six I was called away from my tea to answer the phone. This was my family’s last call to me before they left on the early flight on Tuesday. My sister told me all the things she was going to do in a room of her own, my dad reminded me to work hard and that it wouldn’t be long. Mum must have wondered if something was up, she asked me if I really wanted to do this. I had sufficient grasp of the situation to believe I knew what my answer had to be. I swallowed hard, banished the bursting tears and in my best responsible voice said I was fine. Mum said goodbye, I said goodbye, she said “I love you” and conscious of where I was I said “yeah……”. I was Ten years old and had made my first decision for my whole family.
I said goodbye to twenty years of my life that day. Wasted years, living with responsibility, spent not being me, not speaking with my own voice, never crying again. Harder than knowing what I had to do without question, was living through the consequences with no complaint. A lot happened in the following seven years (not much good) that finally led to me leaving school a year early. That July I had been expelled on a technicality. I got them to take me back, but in September when I was due to return I chose not to, I went to an FE in Oxford instead. But before then I had to get my leaving papers signed so I went back one more time to say goodbye. For all the misery, it was my home my family and seemed at the time like all that I had known. I actually turned and said goodbye to the place before getting on the bus. My family were already overseas.
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I said goodbye to twenty years of my life that day. Wasted years
Just because they weren't good years, doesn't mean they were wasted. Experience of any sort is never a waste. Truisms are called that for a reason. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger and all that shit, eh?
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<smile/embarrassed> Sorry Jackie it was perhaps a bit selfish of me to write in that way; victim in the tragedy of my own life and all. For much of the last ten years I would have agreed with you and I remind myself daily of how very fortunate I am. Progress is made by learning from mistakes; not a complete waste then.
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I didn't feel lost or like I was in a crazy new place. Auckland felt normal. It felt like the city I was supposed to live in. Soon enough I had a posse, stuff to do, places to be.
This is scarily exactly how I feel about Christchurch. Moving here from Timaru was like (ironically) being able to breathe for the first time. Timaru had been all about oddity and abuse and violence and hiding who I was. (Three hours at the pointy end of an ex-boyfriend's loaded crossbow, ffs, and that was without telling him I was now having a secret lesbian affair while her boyfriend was training at Burnham.)
Christchurch was about walking down the street wearing a hat and not being abused. Going from being 'ugly' to having strange, drunken men giving me flowers. Coming out and knowing I wasn't going to get beaten senseless.
The year I left Timaru, two guys were killed in the Scenic Reserve over a pig. The year after I left, the boy who lived with his grandmother next door to my mum was actually literally stoned to death. He had spina bifida.
My friend jsr and I made a deal: if either one of us thought about going back, the other would stage an intervention.
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Sheesh Emma, your ending sounds like a better beginning.
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We decided to head home to New Zealand for a variety of reasons: landlord troubles, a drying-up of revenue in my line of freelancing, the recent (three months) arrival of Jimmy ...Fiona said "should we just go back to New Zealand?" I'd been in London five years, and we really hadn't thought of returning, but as soon as she said it, we immediately knew it was right.
We stayed in a friend's squat in Lambeth for the the last couple of weeks, and had a pretty nice time. The evenings were warm and a bunch of us played cricket and cooked on a barbecue while the English council tenants looked at us like we were mad.
Come the big day, we heaved everything into a taxi and headed for Victoria Station, where we'd discovered that we could check in our luggage for the flight before we got on the train. Only trouble was, the limits for the train journey were different to those for the plane.
The enormous trunk containing my Amstrad, records, etc, weighed up at over 60 kilos. The limit at Victoria was 50 kilos, so we had to unpack on the spot and try and artfully redistribute the excess into our hand luggage.
I got busted trying to nonchalantly carry the additional luggage (mostly vinyl records) onto the plane like it was really nothing, and they put my open courier bag in the hold. Jimmy didn't cry much and really had a better flight than we did. The living purgatory that is an LAX transit (even back then!) has, mercifully, been forgotten.
On landing in Auckland, MAF men came and sprayed the plane. It was so funny: they were wearing walkshorts.
Then came baggage claim. Jimmy was awake and protesting, so I had to grab the bags on my own. I was exhausted and as I watched the big trunk coming around, I knew I was going to have to get it in one: no mean feat given that the handles were as far apart as I could reach and it was moving. I did it. I had to go looking for the courier bag, but found it, with the contents in reasonable order.
The Customs guy frowned at our trunk like it was a really big problem, but I happily opened it for him and he made a derisive noise and waved us through.
Outside, my friends were waiting. They'd been up all night because the club my buddy was running -- where I was supposed to do some DJing -- had had its last night.
New Zealand in the morning was beautiful. It seemed like a long time since we'd seen that. With mother and infant in a different car, we had a joint between the international and domestic terminals and then a snifter of Oban single malt with coffee at the cafe. I felt grounded. It was the end of the beginning of the new thing.
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The scare had not pained Harry for nineteen years. All was well.
I've ended the last HP and can stop hiding from Che Tibby on the buses again.
And that's an ending in itself, he's a big fulla, Che.
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The year I left Timaru ...
OMG, I have a leaving-Timaru story.
I was sent there for a rather challenging year to the Christchurch Star's branch office, near the end of which I scored a job as deputy editor of Rip It Up. On my final day, my boss took me to the pub and, not wanting to appear uncourteous, I had a few. There was also a party at my flat later on, and by that time I was pretty pissed. Not long after I had a couple of bong hits, I was puking in the garden. (The late Kevin Smith subsequently related to me an account of this that still makes me cringe.)
The tragedy of it was that I had been tipped off by a friend of hers that the girl I'd been seeing was planning to give me the goodbye shag to end them all. And there I was, too pissed to reciprocate. She, quite rightly, went home.
I woke up the next morning feeling terrible, and with a good deal of my donated-by-Mum tableware dirty and spread around the flat. I grabbed what I could, and rinsed some of it. The rest, I just left and got in my car. It was time for the next thing. And that was good.
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(The late Kevin Smith subsequently related to me an account of this that still makes me cringe.)
My mum used to give him lifts home from rehersals. That guy could really tell a story.
Sheesh Emma, your ending sounds like a better beginning.
Yeah, sorry, I'm either an optimist or really avoidant.
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"Going from being 'ugly' to having strange, drunken men giving me flowers."
Sure we haven't met Emma?A soccer comp at Timaru in the early '90s. The team were staying at the Hydro or the Grand (both as bad as each other) and a few of us popped into the lounge bar & grabbed a beer. Just then in walked four or more skin-heads, at least two couples. They were roudy and then the arguement had one of the guys punch his girlfriend in the face. We stood up, more in fear than chivalry. His girlfriend shook her head, lent forward, smack, nutted the tall skinny f*&ker clean out.
We were still laughing as the nice bar staff sheparded us out the back and into the safety of the public bar. -
I got busted trying to nonchalantly carry the additional luggage (mostly vinyl records) onto the plane like it was really nothing,
Snap. Nonchalantly toting my handluggage that had about 30kg of excess baggage. Mostly if I recall, crockery & glass.
The guy showing us onto the plain was not deceived. But it worked in our favour, they took it off me & put it in the hold & we didn't get charged for the excess baggage. And nothing broke.
What REALLY fucks me off though in those situations, is after the airline has humilated you over your luggage, or charged you for the excess, and you're sat on the plane, all these other passengers stagger in with trunks, and suitcases & about 100 bags & try & cram them in the stow areas over your head.
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I've ended the last HP and can stop hiding from Che Tibby on the buses again.
you're kidding! you mean there's at least one person i didn't get the spoilers to before the they read the book!!
better reconsider my comms plans...
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don't you just lurve the new 20kg allowances? We got pinged by EasyJet for 'excess baggage' that cost more than the three seats we'd bought.
Anyway, an ending to Bastards I Have Known:
I started working for Rainton Haistie (in the mid 80's) because I had lost my life savings and I saw it as an opportunity to earn a lot of money fast. So I set a goal of how much money I wanted and the day I reached it, I quit. I took a lot of pride in that because once you get inside that business there are many temptations (I got to sleep with his young wife) and it's easy to be seduced to the dark side. Very easy.
It might seem like a small thing to be proud of (leaving when I did) but for most people that industry is like that lyric from Hotel Calfifornia: 'You can check out any time you like, but you can never leave'. -
I got to sleep with his young wife
Ewww....that's the kind of thing best kept to oneself, as in too much information!
Forever tainted by Rai Hai...
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you're kidding! you mean there's at least one person i didn't get the spoilers to before the they read the book!!
It was more the "remedial reading lessons" I was worried about.
The outcome was never in doubt.
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When I was about 13 my dad's mother suffered a fairly severe stroke and went into a nursing home in Howick. We went out to visit her most Sundays, and we'd stay there for an hour or so and talk to her about what had been happening in the family. She was quite alert, and for quite a while it looked as though she might gradually regain her power of speech; she certainly recognised us, and seemed to be listening to us with interest. (I'm not entirely sure she was, but it feels right to me eight years later to think she did, and I think she deserves to be remembered that way.)
This pattern of Sunday trips went on for about half a year, until on one visit in mid-1999 we went out to the back of the station-wagon to get some things for lunch and I sat down on the tailgate and started to cry. Initially I didn't know why but later on I realised it had suddenly struck me that she wasn't going to get better and that she probably wasn't going to live much longer. I don't know how long I sat crying on the back of that bloody car, but eventually I calmed down and we went back to share some lunch with Grandma.
As endings go it sticks in my mind because it came several months before Grandma died, and yet the grief seemed to come early, in one complete parcel that suddenly struck and left me more or less at peace.
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It was more the "remedial reading lessons" I was worried about.
apparently most news media is written for a reading age of 12. what struck me about harry potter was that it was written in a similarly simple style.
i thought at the time that rowling had written the books to pitch the story at that demographic.
but the remedial reading quip was basically just me being a prick to try get conversation started.
:)
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OMG, I have a leaving-Timaru story.
It's good to see you are getting over your sensitivity about being from there Russell, and are now able to talk about your origins.
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