Tony

 

I played rugby in Johnsonville with a huge cast of young men struggling to understand themselves and how they were ever going to fit into this world.

Tony was the toughest of them all, not the biggest, but the toughest. I thought he didn't have a care in the world. 

He came with me one Christmas, when I headed back home to see the beach, Waihi Beach, in the Bay of Plenty, to see my mum and dad, and my brother. I thought he just wanted to taste some of the world. He started early every morning, a pastry chef in the big city of Wellington, he was doing well and living at home and he had a Ford Laser sport. I was flatting and dead broke, he picked me up when I finished work, drove out of Wellington, up the coast about as far as Paremata, pulled over, said 'you drive', swapped seats and fell into a snore filled coma. I drove all the way, we stopped when I pulled into one of those huge truck stops along the desert road, and we wolfed down burgers or pies, or something served hot on polystyrene.

He woke up as I slowed into the streets leading to mum and dad's place in Hamilton, dark streets wet with warm summer rain. 'I wanted it to be just you and me', he said. 'Sledge, all those guys, they think we are inseparable, friends for life. And all they do is pick at me, pick, pick, laugh, pick some more. Not you.'

I sent a letter to an address Tony had given me in London. He worked on the formula 1 circuit by then, cooking for the drivers. Eddie Irvine loved his brioche. 6 months or more circuit to circuit and then back to London for the off season, drinking, fighting, going broke. He never replied.

I flew in in the early morning, had a minor disagreement with customs when they realised I was another free loader Kiwi claiming grandparent entry because my grandma lived in Glasgow for about a year from birth.

Walked out into the terminal looking for a taxi rank, and there was Tony.

A couple of years later they tried to kick Tony out of the UK as on overstayer on a tourist visa. We went out to Ireland because his mum had always talked about her mum being born near Dublin. We went into a village and had a pint, and the barman said, 'Hoare, that's your surname. Ah, there's a lot of them about round here, Hoares. You should see the priest. We wandered down to the church and had a cup of tea with the vicar, and he wrote a letter on letterhead saying Tony was probably the great great grandson of someone. We took it back to London and bobs your uncle Tony had grand parent entry.

That first day Tony grabbed my back pack and we walked out of the terminal, and caught the tube towards Swiss Cottage. I was trying to spot the flat I would be dossing at, but the street disappeared into the binding of the tattered London A-Z Tony had.

When we came up to street level at Swiss Cottage the sun was out and it was a beautiful day. We were standing there holding the A-Z at strange angles and a white van stopped in the street in front of us. 'Are you lost Beauchamp?'. It was a bloke I had played soccer with when I was about 13. He was delivering boxes of wine and the streets made sense to him, and he dropped us round the corner.

Air Tajikistan Flight 1 and only

 

I flew to Delhi in May 1995 with Air Tajikistan.

At least I think I did. The more the years pass, the more I wonder. 

1995 in London meant teletext was your internet, accessed through your cathode ray tube tv, I can't remember if you pushed a 'teletext' button or if you just scrolled down the channels until you passed BBC45 and Eurotrash. The text was live, it would bob up at the top of the screen in bold colours with a three digit number at the left edge. The colours meant something, sports headlines were different to entertainment gossip etc etc, and orange (maybe?) meant travel deals. The deals would always have exclamation marks all over the place, as in PARIS!99QUID!7DAYS!

You would enter the numbers, and a text page would open detailing the offer. Usually the PARIS!99QUID! offers meant you had to leave at 3am on a Wednesday from Gatwick, and hang on to the undercarriage.

The flight to Delhi was incredibly cheap, and it left on a Saturday, amazing. 

I was living in Elephant and Castle at the time, a literal stones throw from the Bakerloo line tube, so close the trains parked just over our high back stone wall when the line closed around midnight.

Who knows how I paid, but I did, and I had about three weeks to wait to leave.

The mail used to drop through the front door and sit on the mat until someone got home, I was often later than the others and would look to see if anything had been left on the little hallway table.

This is where we get to the first 'did that really happen' moment. I am pretty sure I had a letter saying I would receive my ticket forthwith, but Friday rolled around and nothing had forthwithed, so I rang Air Tajikistan. They were incredibly sanguine, 'no worries, you don't need the tickets until tomorrow, we'll get them to you'. Friday night I was in the pub on the corner with a line up of pints and no tickets.

I remember getting up on Saturday morning and having a coffee with one of my flatmates, he was very empathetic but his head hurt and he was soon off to bed. And then there was that metallic thwack of the mail slot opening and closing in the front door. It was Saturday. I don't think there was any Saturday mail delivery.

It was my tickets.

I got the long long tube to Heathrow, I think there were something like twenty seven stops.

The plane was enormous, yet slightly dishevelled. It dwarfed the 747's all around it, but it was as if a mammoth had been dropped into the middle of a herd of elephants in the dead of night and the elephants didn't quite know what to make of it.

There weren't many people on the plane. Each middle bank of seats seemed to be a group of about eight, and the few other passengers were dotted along the window seats so I put all the armrests up and went to sleep.

We landed in Dushanbe. I think one person got off, probably the president. I wandered down the aisle to see what Dushanbe looked like. There was a two storey terminal, with Dushanbe written in big simple neon letters along the top, red. I think all the letters were lit, although there was that look about the building that often the sign might have said 'Du...be' or 'ushanb'. I was standing next to a stewardess, and I thought, well, she's seen Dushanbe lots of times, I'm sure she won't mind me sneaking past her to the doorway  to have a better look.

I man stepped forward to meet me at the door, he was young, maybe younger than me, in a classic Soviet era uniform with lots of grey and flashes of red, and a hat with ears folded up. He said 'no photo' and touched the rifle slung across his chest. I looked at the terminal and thought American intelligence probably had a pretty good idea of what Dushanbe airport looked like, but I nodded and stepped back inside.

Delhi air control seemed to think Air Tajikistan flight one and only looked alright and we pulled up to the terminal. Of course soon after I was reading an English language paper which detailed how and an Air India flight had caught fire because a man didn't like the look of the inflight snacks and lit a gas ring in the toilets. Passengers rang the bell and pointed out smoke was billowing out of the locked cubicle but air crew told them that was absolutely normal. The plane landed with the tail fully alight and taxied in to park next to the refuelling trucks.

I think that Soviet era behemoth must have expired shortly after, because when it came time to fly back to London a few months later we were sheperded onto a 737. We had lots of stops on the way back, one in Latvia, I remember flying in decreasing circles over the unending forests stretching out from the runways, with a little white truck trundling unhurriedly along one of the straight, empty roads between the trees. It refuelled us, eventually, and we carried on.

We stopped somewhere I can't now remember and swapped planes, we just walked along the tarmac behind the pilots and they picked what looked like exactly the same plane out of a long line of 737's. Maybe it had a full tank.

When we eventually got back to Heathrow it was dark. And I swear we must have looked like the Air India plane with the tail on fire, because we touched down, and then as we began to taxi there was one of those funny moments where you lean the wrong way, thinking you are turning right and the pilot turns left so that you baulk and catch yourself. We turned away from the lights of the terminal, and seemed to taxi forever, until we finally came to a halt somewhere out the back of long term parking, and caught the shuttle back.