The two-metre club will let you down

Hoo-wa! Which is to say, hello. I sit here with a singed head, following the minor (head) surgery mentioned at the bottom of the first entry on this page, not as much the worse for wear as I anticipated, and without any bald spot. I didn’t much like having the stinging syringes of local anaesthetic injected into my head, nor the buzzing of the soldering iron-type appliance that burned the errant capillary nevus back to mother, but all’s well, I sincerely hope, that ends well.

Plus I had the pleasure of hearing my doctor say, “If I had any cause to be worried about your drinking I would have mentioned it to you by now” (this remark unrelated to the head cauterising above). Given that I’d just related to him Mariella and my cherished theories of consumption (also cited in the first entry on this page), one could take that as medical licence to go nuts in Melbourne next week. We’ll see.

So now I’m on two days’ sick leave for a head that doesn’t really hurt, which gives me time to make one of those epic-scale What I Did On My Holiday kind of entries. I’ve considered experimenting with narrative form and chronology, but figure that I’ll stick to my usual guns of linear story-telling avec digressions.

Gladdie and I hit the road at a run mid-Friday morning, yakking all the way to Ashburton in the time-honoured tradition of travelling women, where we stopped and found that handy small-town convenience, the combined pub-cafe, the lone open business on a main street of Good Friday law-abiding concerns. Coffee only fuelled our optimism and anticipation for the break ahead, and led us into the interesting topic of when it is alright to date students. (Our consensus: after the course has ended, and with the brakes on all the way. This may or may not be more relevant to this journal come July.) Through Timaru and South Canterbury we rolled without much of a care, stopping in Oamaru for the ancestral tiki-tour (Glad: “That’s an imposing looking rest home”. Bird: “My great-grandmother died there”).

Members of the society of New Ziln’s under-powered Toyotas will understand my pleasure at successfully ascending the Kilmog and the motorway into Dunedin, and will note my winning combination of second gear and foot-to-the-floor. We found our accommodation just out of the central city, at the top of a driveway of foolish steepness and curves, at the foot of which we were able to do little other than spin the left front wheel on the leaf-sodden wet asphalt. Fortunately there was on-street parking nearby.

Gladdie took the first in what would become her weekend’s theme of power-naps that turned into superpower naps, and I prowled the premises for a while, amongst the usual gatherings of British, Euro and Australian backpackers, before Glad’s declaration that “I’m thinking … pizza!” took us to Etrusco, whose food and extremely reasonable prices seem to be a happy consequence of a local woman marrying an Italian restrateur. The modest but particularly camp young waiter who attended us Gladdie recognised, in her typical fashion, on the street the next day.

Friday night brought a minor but fierce drama to our bunkroom, when Glad’s otolaryngological night-symphony (which is to say, her snoring) drove a furious young Israeli traveller to sleep in the hall. It turned out our unfortunate room-mate had opted for a night of paid rest instead of staying at a camping ground. The next morning she asked for a case history of my bleeding head (damn nevus), explaining, “I’m almost a doctor”, then, when I told her about it, said with a certain imperiousness, “in Israel we have the saying, ‘let this be your problem’”. Well, she had been travelling with a grumpy boy who’d just got out of the army, and had the much-frayed air of someone who’s all sceneried-out.

We had also in our room the pleasure of the company of Victor, a Melburnian engineer who’d been working and surfing in Mount Maunganui and was about to head home before relocating to the UK. He made us laugh, although Glad set the tone when we met him by demanding, “are you a rapist?” It’s always an interesting thing to hear your country appraised by a visitor, especially one who had the measure of “ten dollar Tauranga” and the various tyrannies practised in the name of being told how to pronounce Maori words.

Saturday we ate, drank and pottered around town, getting bad and worse service at the Bronx Bagel House and Percolater [sic], the latter claiming delays due to a new chef but still failing to make a toasted sandwich after a thirty-minute wait. Gladdie is a long-standing seeker of merchandise variously cheap and nasty-cheap (she has an impressive collection of awful Mary and Jesus art at home, including a plastic wind-up Jesus who walks on little legs and has a bleeding sacred heart on his front) and I was more than happy to follow her investigative instincts. However, while she was inspecting the lovingly-crafted beige tie-dyed dresses at Yaks and Yetis, I found a red sequinned purse that was too genuinely pretty to pass up. Later, my remark that “I hate Glass*ns” scandalised a clutch of twelve-year olds in front of me making entrance into that eponymous store.

And the ball, Cinderella? Well, we fluffed up our hair and duly tarted ourselves up, hiking down the drive in our clodhoppers so I could change into my pretty shoes at the non-slippery roadside. Plenty of people were already waiting at the station, among them a distinctive group of eighteen-year old giantesses in full ball regalia: taffetta, tulle, tiny heels, boned bodices, brooches and big hair. They were smoking their last six to eight cigarettes before embarking. Red-faced chubby farm boys in aertex shirts with turned-up collars were standing in the carpark, already fairly liquored. Indeed, Glad and I seemed to be the only ones getting on the five o’clock train who weren’t carrying cases of cheap booze.

The young Amazons joined us in our carriage, where they introduced themselves as from Invercargill and polished off another bottle or two of sparkling wine before departure. Also with us were a couple of women in their twenties who like us had come down from Cannerbury and three local uni students who impressed us with their sweetness and general enthusiasm for life. Later in the night we saw them spinning on the dance floor with local boys; on the ride home they compared pash statistics with good humour.

A walk through the train to the buffet carriage/beer vendorama was an educative experience and one which suggested to both Glad and me we might not be in the best company to hit the turps that night. Already a few people in our carriage had discussed those in their party who had declared their husband-finding intentions for the evening, and the way in which Gladdie and I were visually sized-up by the clusters of women of all ages made us think our carriage wasn’t alone in that distribution. In keeping with what was already becoming the spirit of the evening, Glad’s drink (a humble cup of tea) was knocked out of her hand on the gangplank by a very drunk, very angry woman in her fifties who was randomly barrelling down the corridors, fists swinging. She was later one of the few who wasn’t allowed off the train due to extreme drunkenness. While thus isolated at Middlemarch, she beat up another incarcerated passenger; the police were called and the ball organisers later put the unfortunate victim’s arm in a sling.

At Middlemarch we were met by boggy grass and mud, into which our young Invercargill travellers promptly sank up to the extent of their pointy heels. As they tottered along the railway line to the marquee, already weaving and cursing, we heard some local farmhands say, “she’d be not much good in the woolshed”. A fashion parade of farming gear started the evening; a woman of a certain age clad in polyester leopard print leapt the fence and gave herself a catwalk wedgie to show she was also wear leopard undies. It was about seven o’clock in the evening.

So there was a muddy paddock beneath a marquee, a huge majority of angry anxious women both young and old but with a demographic heavily weighted towards the nineteen year-olds, and a slick Maori showband whose amplification produced a bass-heavy mix that did their sound no favours. (I felt less impressed later in the evening when I saw they were reading their lyrics off a booklet on the music stand.) There were few places to sit, which meant that socialising depended upon grabbing people on the dance floor rather than introducing oneself; Gladdie found this particularly frustrating. By about nine we had wandered back into town to see if the night might be more convivial at the village pub. There, we found a few offcasts from the ball going into the toilets in druggie girl-pairs, while we, unable to get anywhere near the bar, sat outside for a while. Our attempts to talk to the local people–who were determinedly avoiding the ball as a townies’ folly–were largely unsuccessful. Some young farmers and farmhands asked us what we did.

“We teach international students,” I said.

“Well,” said one farmie, “I hope you tell them all to fuck off back home.”

As you can imagine, the conversation rather died after that.

Back at the marquee, one of the Invercargill princesses was being attended to by the event organisers with blankets and water, while near where we finally found a seat was a boy so altered by drink that his arms were contorted by his sides in a spastic position. When a couple of still-hopeful girls brought him a chop to eat, he held the whole thing in his jaw and ran around, arms flapping like a chicken. Glad and I talked a while with a man from Mosgiel whose heavily-bloodshot eyes suggested an existing disposition to the alcohol; he was frustrated by the presence of a German camera crew making a documentary about the event.

“Isn’t life already hard enough for single people?” he said.

“Just don’t mention the war,” was Gladdie’s reply.

For the last hour or so I returned to the dance floor solo, where I had another chance to see how my various travelling companions were getting on. Our trio of uni students spun in and out of my view with waves and hugs; the southern amazons were variously catching and releasing the few farmhands not yet hooked up for the evening. (We saw one of the prettier boys from the fashion parade leaving in the arms of two determined ball guests, who had perhaps resigned themselves to a threesome since neither would let him go). My red shoes did their duty even on the boggy ground, while Gladdie struck up conversation nearby with a few of the area eccentrics, including a man in a fire chief’s jacket who, bekilted, seemed a local embodiment of Fat Bastard, sans expressing the desire to eat babies.

The ride home was freezing and subdued. A fellow passenger blew up, in digust at their non-use, the six condoms she had brought for the evening’s adventures. The lubricant on their inside gradually dried out in the cold; the volunteer attendant sighed as he spied them in the luggage rack while picking up rubbish from the floor.

We were in the hindmost carriage returning to Dunedin and subject to frequent blasts of cold air as passengers came through looking for their missing friends (the train returning the next day had already been dubbed the “train of shame”). When someone inquired where the rest of the Invercargill princesses were, one explained. Two were there, one had stayed over, and one was currently having sex in the train toilet.

Later, Gladdie and I told Victor this story at the backpackers.

“I’ve heard of the mile-high club,” he said, “and even the half-mile club. But there’s something about the two-metre club that’s kind of a let-down.”

The wisdom of the Australians. We could only nod our heads in appreciative concurrence.