Misbehaving

Green...circley...things? Steve leaned in a little and pitched his voice low. "Spring onions," he confided. "Poncey towny rubbish. Yeah, I know. Look, most of the population here is...a little fruity, I guess, but if you can just keep an open mind and give them a bit of latitude, they're actually fairly solid on the whole."

Mmm, I thought. And will they keep an open mind on me? What are the chances?

But the wedges were hot and crunchy and tender inside and surprisingly good, and the beer slid down easily and took the sharp edge off of things, and neither of the codgers had asked me my name and I thought, well, I wanted something different and okay, this would be really different, but maybe I could give it a crack? It's not like I'm signing up for life or anything. If it's too off-the-wall I can always go somewhere else. But then...

Steve broke in on my thoughts. "You'd need somewhere to stay, of course, if you were gonna shift up here." Addressing the others, he said, "Either of you know whether there are any vacant houses at the mo? Liveable ones, I mean. Michel here is looking at being my HAZMAT guy."

"That Tamati bloke with all the hair moved in with what's-her-tits, the tall girl, last month," no-sour-cream offered, "so his place'll be free."

Aaaand zero bites on my name. Crickets. Wow.

He looked at his watch. "He'll be coming by shortly enough. Could give him a bell and ask him to stop in. Hey Jack, can we use the phone?"

"Colin, I have a phone," Steve said, waving it in front of him. "Just tell me his number."

"So cellphones do work out here?" I asked him. Because I am out, otherwise.

"Oh, for sure," he replied. "I mean, being a valley, there's pockets where it's...not so great, but we get by." He then proved the point by calling Tamati, identifying himself as 'bossman Steve', and carrying out a conversation that showed no hint of being interrupted by poor service.

"Bossman Steve, eh?" I said, as he tucked his phone away.

He sighed. "I did not come up with that. It's just that there was already a Steve and a Steve-o and a Stevie by the time I turned up, so I had to take what I got. It's the same everywhere I go - you have no idea."

"You're right," I told him. "I have no idea at all."

He laughed. "Yeah, Cordell's never been thrilled at having a non-standard name either. Tamati said he'd coming by in about ten minutes and he can pick you up, so you'll want to head outside shortly and wait for him."

Well, in fact nobody's consulted me about what I want, I thought. But I wasn't capable of being properly annoyed with most of a jug of beer doing its thing inside of me, so I docilely picked up my things and went to wait by my car.

At least that was the plan. But when I got outside, there was a horse - a whole actual horse - using my driver's side mirror to give its ribcage a scratch. Fuck! I thought. Fuckety fuckety fuck! Don't fucking break it! I started forward and it gave me a very 'yeah whatever' look, before sauntering out of the carpark and onto the road.

Fuck, I thought again. That's not so good. I poked my head back in the hotel's door, setting off the bell. "Uhhh....guys? There's, like, a horse out here."

Nobody was surprised. Nobody even got up. The one called Trev simply leaned back toward the door to the kitchen and bellowed, "Hey! Jack! Jacky! Better call Bonnie and tell her her horse is on the lam again!"

As the door swung closed, I faintly heard, "Trev, I have a phone..."

The horse was having a mouthful of somebody's tree by the time I made it back to my car, then a few mouthfuls of their hedge, followed by a good hard lean on their fence to reach in for some tasty morsel out of my sightline. Then it walked back out into the road and just stood there like it owned the whole damn place. Now every stand-up comedian in NZ has a piece in their set about about how Palmerston North ain't nearly so hip as it'd like to think it is, about how grungy and inherently provincial it'll always be no matter how hard it tries...but hey, it does have all the conveniences of modern life, and it doesn't have horses just casually wandering around the place sampling the vegetation. Am I seriously going to do this thing? I asked myself, again. Am I gonna move...here? As if reading my thoughts, the horse swung its neck round and eyeballed me directly, a moment before cocking its tail and depositing a pile of khaki coloured poop precisely on the white centre line. I burst out laughing, because suddenly everything was hilarious, including the fact that I was, seriously, going to do this thing.

Fortunately, it had clip-clopped away down the sole side street when Tamati-with-all-the-hair showed up behind the wheel of a Fulton Hogan ute and threw open the passenger side door.

"You the dude wanting to look at the house? Hop in."

I wedged myself in with difficulty around a toolbox, an all-weather radio and a large gym bag, as he said, "Yeah, sorry about that - wasn't expecting company. And, ah, same thing with the house. I haven't exactly moved all my shit out. Or tidied. Or anything. But I will, obviously, if you think you're keen."

Keen might not be the exact right word, I was thinking fifteen minutes later...the place was a tip, and it smelled of a thousand stale cigarettes, but it was provoking some deep nostalgia in me nonetheless. It was a near-replica of the house I grew up in, except it had two bedrooms instead of four, and in place of all the French tat it was decorated with ashtrays and titty calendars, but the flimsy bronze-toned aluminium joinery was exactly the same, and the wrinkled carpet, and the cantankerous ranch-slider that I could just tell would behave in especially cunty fashion any time it was raining buckets, or I had my arms full, or something like that.

"What would you want for it?" I asked, after we'd completed the tour and were outside again, leaning against his ute.

"Ahhh, dunno," he said, pulling a pouch of Port Royal out of his pocket. "Hundred and sixty maybe? Yeah?"

Holy shit, I thought. I'm paying a hundred and eighty for a room, in what's not exactly a metropolis.

"And if you wanna use, I dunno, the fridge, and the freezer, and the washing machine, I can just leave them," he continued. "I mean, the missus has all that jazz already. In fact, even the furniture...let me know what you want left, and whatever you don't, I'll shove it in the garage. I think I should be able to fit it all in one bay, so you'd still have one for your car and whatever."

"Don't stress," I told him. "The car's never been kept inside, and I've never rented a place where the garage didn't have sixteen metric tons of the landlord's shit stored in it."

He laughed. "I'll leave a bay free for you. So whaddya think?"

Well, I wouldn't have to put up with any neighbours...I scratched my head and rubbed my eyes, beginning to feel the early start.

Tamati nudged me. "All a bit much for you, eh, city boy?"

"Ah, fuck off," I said. "I got up at four-thirty this morning and I haven't had breakfast or lunch. Also, I'd hardly call Te Puke a city."

He tipped his head to one side and regarded me for a long moment. "Te Puke? You don't happen to know Levi Ormsby, by any chance?"

"Yeah," I said, "he was a year behind me at school. And, um...Chantelle, she was a year ahead. How do you know them?"

"They're my cousins," he said.

No fucking way. Small pond. Tiny, tiny pond.

Tamati was shaking his head. "This bloody country, eh? Still, where else are you gonna go?" There was a pause, then he said, "Levi's over in the mines at the moment, earning himself a shit-ton of money. All power to him, but I couldn't do it. I can't be away from the bush for too long, or I get...itchy, I can't settle. I gotta be near it."

I followed his gaze over to the valley's eastern flank. Though it didn't feel like rain, there was a wall of slate-grey cloud built up, which, in combination with the westering sun, was illuminating the tree-clad slopes in a fascinating way, making the palette of greens intensely vivid and highlighting the canopy's textural qualities. It was definitely kinda magic. Maybe even a little bit holy. I felt myself falling.

"It's really beautiful," I whispered.

"It's alive," Tamati said, hushed as me. "I mean, obviously the trees are alive, and the birds and the insects, as well as the fuckin' possums and goats and pigs and deer, but, like...the whole thing. As an organism. It's alive. And I think it kinda, I dunno, sustains us." He flicked away the stub of his cigarette and shrugged. "See, now I sound like one of those strange females who're all into crystals and shit, like the chick with the horse."

"The horse that just wanders around the place eating people's hedges?" I said.

He laughed. "Ah, you saw it? Yeah, it's out more than it's in, I reckon. It's smarter than her, basically. She's alright, though. In her own way."

Well, I'd already decided I'd do it, so I shook hands with Tamati and let him drop me back to the hotel. I told Bossman Steve yes, got myself another jug of beer and another plate of wedges and a room for the night, and next day I drove back to Palmy and started shucking responsibilities and packing up my shit. Ten days later I moved into a house so totally transformed that I suspected 'the missus' had been called in to give it a going-over. I wonder if he got to the titty calendars first, I thought, wandering through the place, taking in the gleaming surfaces...

-----

First morning on the job, it took me over an hour to successfully log in to the program they used to inventory and order their chemicals and protective equipment. Once I was in, I could see it was going to take the next very many hours to bring everything up to date, because clearly nobody else had recorded anything since the last guy left. Fifteen minutes into that task, the whine of machinery died away and Tui, the forewoman, poked her head around my door.

"Smoko. C'mon, time to cram a few more names and faces into your memory bank."

Yeah. It's not one of my top skills, that. But when we got to the break room there were a whole four people there, two guys and two women, sitting in two knots of two, one close by the door, the other over in the far corner.

"Whaaat?" I said, before I had time to think better of it. "Where is everybody?" I knew there were nearly thirty people employed here.

The close guy, who was probably in his fifties, with what can only be described as a curated selection of teeth, gestured over his shoulder with his thumb. "They're all out there under the awning, sucking away on their cancer sticks like there's no tomorrow," he grunted, "getting their dose of their arsenic and their formaldehyde and their-"

Tui laughed. "He only gave it up last year," she murmured to me, "so he's still got a real hate on about the whole thing. I keep telling him it gets better. Don't I, Lester? Wiremu and I quit a decade ago - bad example to the mokopuna, y'know. Doesn't bother me at all by now. And this is Ria, she does all the accounts and the pay, and over there that's Lisa and Zac, our forklift drivers. Hey, Zac! Lisa! This is Michel, the new HAZMAT guy."

The two of them looked up from their phones for as long as it took to nod at me, and then back down again.

"Now there's another addiction," the Lester guy grumbled. "They fry your brain, you know. The light, and the waves they give off, plus they have things in them that track your movements."

"Well, I know that," I said, pulling out a chair, "it's called GPS."

"No-no," he told me, wagging a finger. "I'm talking about the other tracking software, the stuff they don't tell you about."

Tui sat down, pushing a coffee in front of me. "Lester," she said, "he just arrived. Give him a day or so to acclimatise before you really get started, huh?

"Oh?" I said. "What else can I expect down the road, then?"

She rolled her eyes. "It's quite the list. There's big tobacco, obviously, and big pharma, and big brother is watching you, and earthquake prediction and MMR and autism and fluoridation and..."

I heard bossman Steve's voice in my head; 'if you can just give them a bit of latitude'...nope. I locked eyes with Lester. "A word of warning on the last one. You really don't want to have that argument with me. I'm a chemist. I will eviscerate you."

As an opening gambit, that could've backfired fairly badly, especially given that both Ria and Tui responded to my throwdown by clapping and whooping and stamping their feet on the floor, which caused the phone-starers to look up again for a few milliseconds, but he didn't seem fazed at all. Just grinned slyly and nodded and took a white-bread sandwich from the open lunchbox in front of him. Ria was eating an apple which'd come from the same box, so I guessed they were a couple. I wondered about Lisa and Zac. There was something about the way they were sitting in close proximity but totally ignoring one another which sort of suggested a long-established relationship. On the other hand, they weren't sharing food...

The sound of the plant gearing back up reverberated through the floor as Tui pushed back her chair, calling, "Alright, e tu! Back to it, everybody," and I went to wrestle some more with my program.

At lunch, the same suspects were populating the break room, arranged exactly the same, but this time a steady trickle of others passed through, making coffees, grabbing stuff from the fridge, heating leftovers in the microwave, before scuttling back outside to combine it with a smoke. As each of them appeared Tui did introductions. I tried to keep up in between listening to Lester tell me how earthquakes were caused by sunspots or some such shit, which...whatever...

By the end of the first week I had the inventory up to date, and after another couple of weeks I could see how the rhythm of the job was going to work. Trucks came in and offloaded with raw materials, including the chemicals it was my responsibility to order, other trucks came in empty to be loaded up with with wrapped bundles of finished panels. People showed up in the mornings, parked in the same spot every day and got quite pissed off with you if you failed to respect that, worked while the machinery was running, smoked when it wasn't, and headed straight for the bar at the hotel after work on Fridays.

Or at least most of them did. Lisa didn't, because she was a crossfit freak and didn't drink, Ria and Lester didn't, because Lester was nursing some kind of long-running grudge against Jack, and Zac didn't, because he was too busy getting the hell out of dodge or some such thing. He seemed like a reasonably surly guy most of the week, but on Fridays he was noticeably more enthused about life, and by knocking off time he was almost jaunty. He'd fist-bump Lisa after they clocked out and say, "Nuff of this shit - time for some misbehaving," and walk off jangling his keys and nodding his head to some imaginary beat.

As he came bopping past me on the way to his car one of those times I said, "So, what kinds of misbehaving can you get up to in Whangarei?"

He looked at me like I was insane. "Whangarei? Fuck that. I'm goin' to Auckland."

I nodded. "Okay." But watching him fishtail his way up the gravel driveway in a cloud of dust, I decided that he was the one who was insane. That was a significant drive that he was tacking on the end of a week's work, after which he was apparently going to spend several hours clubbing or bar-hopping or something. Maybe I'm getting old, I thought. That'll be it. I'm getting old. I'm twenty-fucking-five and I have no interest in going clubbing anymore. How sad is that? Oh, but wait, I never really was all that into it...

——

Before long, I got into the habit of staying on at the hotel after the Friday post-work drinks and having dinner there. And not long after that I started heading there for dinner on Saturdays as well. Alongside the many, many upsides of not having to share a house with anyone, I discovered there were a couple of teeny tiny downsides. When you don't have any flatmates, you're on cooking every day. And dishes. So I gave myself those two nights off. It might've had something to do with those nights being the best nights for watching Sky Sport, which I also didn't want to pay a subscription for without any flatmates to share the cost.

I made some connections outside of the lunchroom crew, in the way that you do in these places - the kind of subtle bonding that results from watching the same games at the same time, finding yourself shouting the same sort of thing at an inanimate screen: Offside, offside! Jesus christ, he's so far offside he's in Spain!...A couple of people felt the need to have a go about my name, but mostly folk seemed mildly intrigued by this newcomer trying to bed himself down in amongst their community.

I discovered that bossman Steve had helpfully told approximately everybody that I used to be a very promising junior rep player, probably because it provided a conversational intro for him to yammer on about how amazingly Cordell was doing, playing professionally over in Australia. It meant that I ended up talking shop about rugby a lot more than I wanted to, because there was this general assumption that it was my main interest in life.

It also had the effect of causing Tui to suggest that I should coach the local primary school's Rippa Rugby team. She had a bunch of grandkids at the school (and a bunch more living out of the district), and I'd already picked up that she was one of those people who's everybody's aunty by default - interested, involved, sympathetic, but at the same time not looking to put up with any of your shit, mister...

God, I tried so hard to say 'no' to her. I came up with so many reasons. I never did any coaching, coaching's a whole different skill set to playing. I never played Rippa Rugby anyway, only full contact, I wouldn't know where to start. I've never worked with kids, I don't know anything about them. I even reached for 'my knees are a bit fucked', which wasn't totally true. She kept brushing my excuses off and telling me to 'just think about it' and coming back a couple of days later until I realised that unless I brutally said 'I have absolutely zero interest in helping out in my local community so would you please piss off', this shit was never gonna end.

But I didn't want to say that. So I had to say the other thing instead.

After listening to her put her case for the fourth time as we walked to our cars after work, I told her, "Here's what concerns me. I'm a single guy. Is it...are people gonna think it's appropriate for me to be spending a load of time with a bunch of little kids?"

She gave me a confused frown. "Plenty of teachers are single guys."

"Yes, but that's not...I didn't..." Agh, fuck...

We'd reached my car. "Hop in for a moment," I said. She eased herself into the passenger seat with a grunt, and I sat down behind the wheel and gripped it with both hands, holding on like a drowning man. I took a deep breath. In, out.

"So, yeah," I said. "There's more, obviously. The thing is, I'm gay, and...and I'm not really out, and I don't think I really want to be out...here...and anyway I haven't told my folks yet, and so...but the thing is, there are people who know. Like, people from Palmerston North. And...and on the very first day I show up here I run into two people who know somebody I know - okay, so in both cases they were from way back, but still...and if I haven't been open about things, and then it...comes out...and in some people's minds, if you're that kind of pervert then you're probably every kind of pervert, and..."