Awa

 

Masses of dark ringleted hair waving from the open window of the station wagon crawling away along Fairfield Road after school, trailing back to catch in the rusty roof racks, a final, slow farewell.

The same wagon where I found him, fast asleep stretched along the back seat, one Saturday morning when our school boy cricket was about to start. ‘Too many cousins in there’. Said it tossing his head toward the two-storey state house, tossing that hair. Took five wickets and hit a six.

He played hooker, me, lock, in high school rugby. Huge opponents would tear at me in every ruck, until voluptuous hair would cover me, shield me, blanket me, safe.

Hot summer, heat sat down in that town, refused to leave. He was at the river, the mighty Wai, jumping off the pier with the big boys. The strong flow caught the weed, reefed at it so that huge swathes of darkness rose and fell, rose and fell. His hair mimicking the swirl as he rose, gasping up into the sun. The small boy jumped, and didn’t rise, and he followed, down, down, down so long. Told me so much later of the hands, pulling, pulling so his hair was gone in clumps, pulling so he could feel each last, lost word.

Years later, a late-night petrol stop, passing through. Same smile, languid smile, behind the counter. Shaven head shining. ‘He was there, in the hair. Now, just the Awa, Awa, safe’.

Trestle tables

 

My kids were young when I separated from their mum.

 

I didn’t go very far away. That’s what adults would have said, ‘it’s only round the corner, they’ll hardly notice.’

It was a nice new townhouse with two bedrooms. They were still young enough to share a bedroom and it would be a few years before I had to think about the fact that they needed their own spaces. They were with me lots of the time because of my work, four days on, four off. I made the place as welcoming as I could as I moved in, a new bed each and their books and toys between the beds in their room.

I had a sofa a friend gave me, and a small table the tele could sit on for now.

I picked them up from school and we went and rode the bikes at the local park, just as we often did before. We got something each from the bakery on the way past towards the new home.

I had some bits and pieces in the kitchen and we had a drink and the pink buns or whatever we had chosen sitting on the couch.

After dinner and showers, they were on the couch watching Simpsons, and I sat down at the trestle table to do some of the paper work you always do with changing addresses. My daughter was always drawing. I would buy a pad of printer paper and she, and he, would go through it in a week. She had a big cook book on her lap on the couch and was doodling away while I filled in forms.

The next day I dropped them back to their mums after school, before I went to work for the night. I went back home to get a few things for the shift.

There was a picture sitting on my trestle dining table, placed neatly at the end where my folding chair was. It had a couple of highlighters on top to make sure it didn’t blow away with the open window behind.

It was a picture of me. Just me, sitting at a long table on my own with a pen in my hand and papers on the table. Nothing else. Except there was a little framed picture on the wall, just behind my head. There had been one picture hook in the wall when I moved in, you never know about such things with renting. I had taken a picture of the two of them at the park the week before, on their bikes, and had it printed with a few others. I had a frame or two in my things when I moved in, and put the picture up once I had moved the few pieces of furniture in.

I looked up at that little picture then with my dinner and a change of clothes in my hands. They were smiling, really smiling the way kids can. I looked at her simple picture, there hadn’t really been room for more than stick figures in the picture with the scale. Both stick kids had massive smiles on their faces, arcing around to touch the start of their ears.

I had a big smile on my face in the picture, I don’t think I would have smiled once filling out dreary forms. I was looking straight ahead to where the couch would have been if the picture was a little wider, to where I would have met their eyes.

When I first saw that figure at the long, long table it was as if my heart had been torn away.

I looked at those smiles, and she had put it back again.

Foothills

 

 

 

We carried day packs with nothing more than a change of clothes, toothbrushes, and a ton of water. Up into the foothills above Pokhara.

Nepalese women cooed quietly at our heels, passed by smiling; huge loads of wood and canned goods held tightly against their backs. A tiny tot would peek around mum's waist and watch your laborious steps as she drew inexorably away.

Late afternoon coming into the summit village the light was languid honey with monsoon clouds hovering.

Shower? The answer passed slowly back along a line of teenagers crowding the guesthouse doorway.

Three stone walls no taller than my head, no roof, it clung to the valley wall at the back door. A plastic bucket floated half submerged in a 44-gallon drum.

Stripped to battered shorts I threw a first bucket over my head, and buckled in half at the cold. As I scooped a refill the lights went out, cloud suddenly so low and dark it seeped in at the open window in the outer wall. Lightning sheeted the valley, on and off, over and over, showing snapshots of the sudden waterfalls running white streamers down the bare hills and away to Pokhara.

The thunder would roar even before the lightning was done, so loud it would answer itself up and down the valley and hide the giggles of the children peeking around the corner at the skinny man with his head thrown back to the rain, no need for the bucket anymore.

Slow

 

For a while when I was young I was in awe of runners, especially those who ran over the middle distances. Part of the fascination was that New Zealand was good at running middle distance, always had been. We had the Olympic champion at 1500m in 1976 in John Walker, always a good chance for a bad pun. He followed Peter Snell and Jack Lovelock and others.

Part of the fascination like any other was that I wasn't very good at running. I was okay, but just when I thought maybe I was going well in the school sports the real runners would float by and my legs would turn to stone. 

I recognised running as a necessary evil for the football and cricket and tennis I longed to be good at, and in the last year at primary school I'd pounded pavements for months getting ready for the cross country at the end of the year. I was going well for the first half of the course and more, and I could see the perennial winner maybe 50m ahead, with the last few hundred metres to come. 

Things were pretty agricultural back then, we would have all been in bare feet. To finish the course we had to run along the school boundary and the turn sharp left at the last of a long line of trees shading the playing fields, and sprint home between the parents strung out the length of the 100m track recently marked on the grass. I sprinted as hard as I could to that last tree, and could have almost reached out and grabbed the tail of his flying t-shirt as we reached it. He turned left and accelerated so fast I think he beat me by the whole 100m.

I read that John Walker had the 'perfect' heart rate, barely reaching 30 beats a minute at rest. He trained by running over 100 miles a week. Some said he was mad, as if he was following a regime that would end in ruin with his legs flying off at the Montreal games. 100 miles blew my mind. In New Zealand it didn't really matter where you lived, if you ran 100 miles in a straight line you'd be 50 miles off the coast by the time you finished.

Later on in my life it turned out I had a pretty slow heart rate too, just some natural quirk. I only really found out because I had to have some surgery on my inner ear, and the surgeon talked me through the recovery process before the surgery began. He talked about the pain, the huge wad of padding and silly looking mummy like bandages I would have to put up with for a couple of nights. No real hardship. The only point he stressed was that I wasn't to sit up, I had to minimise movement that first night. He wrote all that on the charts they hang on the end of your bed. 

I think nurses have a natural tendency to want to touch their patients, get up close enough to see them face to face. And I have a memory of a woman taking my arm as I was just moving towards coming to, and next thing I was sitting bolt upright and there was quite a lot of noise and light and people coming into the room. I think my heart rate had been something like 26 and it scared the bejeesus out of her. 

Luckily the surgeon was still about. He came down and put everyone's mind at ease. He stood there looking down at me for a while, told me not to worry. I went back to sleep and woke up much later needing the toilet. The nurse came down and said that was fine, the surgeon had said I could walk that distance by then. I got up and went into the small bathroom, and saw myself in the mirror. 

He'd written 'DON'T PANIC, REALLY SLOW HEART'  on two post it notes and sellotaped them to the bandages across my forehead. I went back to bed and sat up watching a bit of TV, and I swear a couple of kids walked past the big open doors transfixed by the mummy with operating instructions.

I really admired John Walker for having such dedication to get to that level which made him an Olympic champion. Even he, though, saw himself as very much a normal man with a huge work ethic.

I read about Jack Lovelock, the kiwi who won the same event at the '36 Olympics. He was seen as having run the perfect race, and won effortlessly it seemed. His heart rate was taken after the race and had returned to his usual resting rate, as if nothing extraordinary had taken place. He would have been an exemplar to those who wanted to make those games about comparisons of strength and speed and skill. Only Lovelock was studious, almost obtuse and his win, to him, seemed to have nothing to do with asserting dominance over others. It was just something he could naturally do, perfectly.

I always wanted to believe Maradona was a better footballer than Pele, for some strange version of the same reason I had come up with in my head. I believed Pele had worked and worked and perfected his art, and Maradona simply walked onto the pitch and it was something he could do beyond the ability of anyone else, anytime, at the drop of a hat.

I liked the English footballer Paul Gascoigne for much the same reason. It was so obvious that he was hell bent on self destruction, and yet he could always walk onto a pitch and in a moment do something that no one else in the world would have even thought of, let alone been capable of. Sometimes it looked as if he had come straight from another unsuccessful rehab, and he might wander about aimlessly for 89 minutes. But he longed to give the people the moment they'd never forget, that would make cold wet nights at Vicarage Road or The Den something you would tell your kids about. And he did, over and over.

I'm much older now. Maradona is gone. Pele goes into hospital, comes out, goes in. I don't have any allegiances any more. 

In some ways I think one wouldn't exist without the other. Pele and Maradona. Walker and Lovelock. Gascoigne and anyone who makes a hundred covering tackles.

Processes

 

I hadn't been a fireman very long, maybe a couple of years. I had just got my Rescue qualification, and I'd been rostered to drive on a night shift with a Senior Firefighter who had been doing rescue so long I felt as if he didn't even need me along.

It was one of those funny things at the start. We had practiced and practiced so much, cut so many cars to tiny pieces that I knew I could do it. I wanted to do it for real though, just to make really sure. You wouldn't wish one of those wrecks on your worst enemies though, you sort of knew then, and would grow to really know.

Years later my mum would ring me sometimes and after some time ask how my work was going, how my shifts had been. Sometimes I got to say, 'we haven't been doing much at all'. And she would say 'well isn't that good for everyone', and I'd agree, and never feel bad, I wished I never had to do another one by then.

Part of knowing you could do the work was the repetition. I had set up the equipment so many times I knew distances and angles and where to stand, where not to.

Looking back now I can feel how much concentration that took, how my head would be full of all the things I needed to do next. Sometimes as the ambulance drove away other firemen would ask me about the people we had just released to the ambos and I wouldn't really have a clue, that's how feverish the effort was, for me. Just make sure you follow the sequence, keep going and get to the end.

That first night we had a job just like that. It was way up on the escarpment so our light truck got there fast, long before any of the lumbering pumps could catch us. 

The Senior went over to the car, and I began the process, started the generator, ran the lines, connected the tools, put the lights up, stabilised, on and on, ready and away we go. I made all the cuts just the way I should have. The ambos were right there in the car, with any number of lines into the woman driver and you could tell they were thinking, this is good, we'll be gone soon and she'll make it.

I made one more cut, and that was it, she died. There were so many ambos, and so many lines and machines. And in a moment she was gone, something to do with a terrible pressure injury. As we released the last part of twisted metal holding her down.

I couldn't remember anything about her, her hair colour, what she was wearing, nothing. That's how much of my thinking was taken up in the process of getting to that point. And it never bothered me that job.

Years later I did all those same things on automatic, so I could hear the things the ambos said, the cops, even people standing nearby straining for a view.

That's when everything started to bother me, I knew exactly what those people looked like, every time, I knew what sort of shoes they were wearing, recognised aftershaves and perfumes.

I couldn't fill my head up with details, so when the ambulance drove away I had known those people for twenty minutes, forty five, more. 

I couldn't help but know what was to come, what had come to an end.