Chapter Twenty: The Duke, the Queen, and Fifteen Kids
A part of England that no longer exists
“If you like, you may leave a message after the tone—”
“Ma, if you’re there, pick up the phone.”
“Give her time, Beau. She’s probably resting on the easy chair with Kanji on her tummy. Trying to get all the way through her rosary.”
“Ma, are you there?”
“Maybe she didn’t hear the phone ring.”
“Ma, Ma, are you there? Pick up the phone.”
“Beau, for goodness sake! Mr. IBM! So impatient! Where are you Boys now?”
“Ma, we’re flying from Queenstown today up to Blenheim in the Marlborough Sounds.”
“Where?”
“Top of the South Island. That was our second scouting trip to New Zealand, back in 2001, Ma, looking for our dream place, so now we are going to do the Sounds all over again. Nostalgia. We’ll get a car and drive up to Picton—”
“Where the big ferryboat comes into the Sounds from the North Island? You told me, I remember.”
“Yeah, Ma. Then we’ll get a boat and cruise around the Sounds, around Queen Charlotte Sound and around Pelorus Sound. Maybe we’ll spend a couple nights at the sheep station on Pohenui Island like we did before and then we’ll cruise up to the very top and see Toby’s place again on Arapawa Island.
“Remember the photos? The big sheep station we almost bought? I think we’re going to try to do the Queen Charlotte Track again. If we have time. It takes three days to tramp it.”
“Tramp it?”
“It means ‘hike it’ in New Zealand, Ma.”
“Who’s Queen Charlotte, Beau? Queen of what? Queen of tramps?””
“Queen of England, Ma. Married to Mad King George. George III. The one who lost the American colonies.”
“Oy gevalt! Did they come all the way to New Zealand? In those days?”
“No, Ma, but he was king when New Zealand was first visited by Captain Cook and he was king right up through the first years that the Pakeha started settling here. I guess Captain Cook wanted to honor King George somehow.
“Or flatter him.
“They had fifteen children.”
“King George and Captain Cook? What are you trying to tell me, Beau? Captain Cook was trans?”
“No, Ma, King George III and Queen Charlotte. They had fifteen kids.”
“Oh. Well, no wonder he lost America. No wonder he was crazy mad. Charlotte had to be crazy too. Fifteen kids! They could’ve populated both the islands down here with their own meshugganeh kids.
“Bloody limeys! Bloody whinging Poms!”
“Ma, who’s teaching you to talk like that? Who you hanging out with in Whatuwhiwhi?”
On all of our earliest trips to New Zealand in the early years of the new millennium, we were still searching for our own piece of Paradise on the South Island because we knew it was bigger and less populated than the North Island. We really wanted space after Southern California.
Beau had seen advertised a piece of land known as Snake Point, jutting out into the Queen Charlotte Sound, about twenty-five minutes by boat from Picton and so we rented a boat and traveled there with a Picton real estate agent.
We puttered up the Sound from the little town of Picton to see this land in the wilderness.
After Southern California, this was indeed Paradise to our minds. Empty and beautiful nature. Water, space, light. Hardly any people. We began to imagine ourselves living on one of the sheep stations in one or other of the Marlborough Sounds with no road access.
The mail boat comes in twice a week with supplies from Picton, milk and fresh produce and whatever you order from the grocer. And the mail too, of course.
After years of two hundred-plus e-mails a day at IBM and two or three plane trips back to the East Coast from California every month, and up to San José and the Silicon Valley at least once a week, after all the high-pressure sales meetings with all the big computer companies in the world, Beau was falling in love with the idea of a pioneer lifestyle.
And I always had that romantic notion of living in nature. Even when I lived in Paris, I always wanted a getaway in the Dordogne or the Pyrenees.
And after driving the twenty-six-laned freeway five days a week to and from my classes, after all those years in Southern California where the population was growing like a dangerous fungus, I too was becoming mesmerized by the prospects of life in faraway, quiet, beautiful, and empty New Zealand.
I think Beau and I both envisioned our treks in the Himalayas, our adventures in Africa and Bali and so many other places that were not yet completely invaded by the post-modern, high-tech, crowded, and frenetic world, and we were probably growing somewhat desperate to have a peaceful, idyllic existence as our day-to-day, mundane reality.
Hiking, reading, writing, meditating, living a quiet, peace-filled life in nature. We tried not to romanticize New Zealand but it was hard not to — everything we saw was so beautiful and seemed so perfect.
I guess deciding to move to New Zealand was our own slightly off-kilter version of a Declaration of Independence, searching for a freer life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
We had been granted a temporary residency by the Beehive — the Executive Wing of the parliamentary complex in Wellington, the building where the prime minister and the cabinet ministers have their offices. So named because it is shaped like a giant beehive. Hey, at least it is not shaped like a giant sheep corral.
This permit was our first step on the road to full citizenship. Beau and I came in legally as a couple—the immigration attorney explained that it was easier that way since Beau was five years younger than me and the government gave extra points the younger you were. And so I was granted my papers as a dependent. As a domestic partner. I was wifeized by the NZ government.
A straight colleague at my university had exclaimed that she hated that term. Said it sounded like a blow-up doll. I didn’t mind as long as it smoothed our transition into our new country.
All we needed in those early days was a place in New Zealand to call home.
****
“There she is, mates, Snake Point,” said Stan, the captain of the mail boat. “And did that land agent who brought you up here yesterday tell you about the Americans they sold Snake Point to last time?
“No? I’m sure he didn’t. Built a lovely house there, right there, see, right there,” he pointed to a little part of the point that jutted out even farther.
The land there was tangled over with gorse and thistles and tall weeds and some young tea trees. No house to be seen. What was Cap’n Stan talking about?
“The next year that house slid right into Queen Charlotte, plop! She’s down there now in the Sounds somewhere. You Boys best watch out for these land agents in Neo Zed.”
Beau and I looked at each other. “The agent didn’t say a thing about that. We thought this was virgin territory here,” said Beau.
“And why do they call it Snake Point anyway?” I asked. “Since there aren’t any snakes in New Zealand and it doesn’t really look like a snake, not even close. Maybe from the air it does?”
“They call it Snake Point, mate, ’cause of all the snakes running around out here and calling themselves land agents, real estate agents, trying to sell Kiwis and Poms and Yanks a piece of worthless, unbuildable land at a high price.
“I tried the business of real estate me’self for almost a year but had to get out. A filthy business in Neo Zed. No regulations, no protections. Keep your wits about you!
“These land agents look human but they are so low they’d fuck a snake, so watch out who you do business with.”
Half an hour later, the mail boat pulled into a long wharf coming down into the Sounds from a long expanse of greensward that stretched up to a huge, old, elegantly decaying Victorian mansion. A stout woman was waiting on the wharf and waved at us happily, her other hand shielding her eyes from the bright sun.
Two little boys came right along behind her, one of them with both arms in white plaster casts up past his elbows.
“Now, Grantie, me boy, what happened to you?” said Stan.
The boy looked embarrassed and just smiled.
“Graham, now what happened to your little brother, Grant, there?” said Stan.
The young lad said something we didn’t understand, his South Island accent was so strong, and so Stan repeated it for us.
“They were at campout last week and Grant fell out o’ the top bunk. Nighmarin’ I guess,” said Stan. “The poor wee thing,” he muttered then under his breath as he secured the boat to the wharf with his ropes.
I was left to wonder, when you lived so remotely, where you went for camp.
Just then, a huge wooly sheep came running down the wharf, along with two beautiful Australian shepherd dogs. The three of them seemed to be great pals. The sheep was the first to arrive and started nuzzling Stan as he finished securing the mail boat.
“Oh, he wants his bikkies, he does.”
Stan fetched a bag of milk-bone dog biscuits — bikkies — from the boat cabin and fed a few to the huge sheep, who was clearly overdue for a shearing. This sheep actually looked twice as big as a normal sheep simply because of its thick long wool.
The dogs waited patiently until the sheep had been fed and they were both rewarded with a few milk bones each.
The youngest boy struck a pose, one cast-covered hand on his hip and the other cast waving in the air. I couldn’t believe what came out of his mouth.
He sounded like an old sea captain, maybe Long John Silver in an old Hollywood flick, with a loud and very thick Scottish accent. He was declaiming.
“Edie dozen loik REED and ’e dozen loik AH-RINJ!!! The MAYL BOOT hiss soom-thin t’ do weeth it OI reek-n!!!”
It took me a few moments but I figured out what he was saying. Edie was the sheep and he wasn’t a girl sheep. He was a boy sheep, probably a wether, and his name was “Eddie.” Pronounced by the wee lad “Edie.”
Eddie doesn’t like red and he doesn’t like orange!!! The mail boat has something to do with it, I reckon!!!
The mail boat, she was white, with red and orange accents to brighten her up. Eddie was smacking his sheep lips with delight, hoping for more dog biscuits.
As we helped Stan off-load the mail packets and the supplies, handing everything up to the sheep station wife and her son who didn’t have broken arms, the other wee lad kept declaiming about one thing and another.
At first, I thought he was putting on a show for the strangers on the mail boat, for Beau and me, but, no, that is really the way he talked. And his brother and his mother as well.
Just about then, they were joined by the patriarch of the little clan.
“Noice die!” he said. And that’s all that he said the rest of the time we were there at their wharf.
It was a nice day, indeed.
These isolated families living on the sheep stations of the remote Marlborough Sounds continue a way of life that much of the rest of the world has lost long ago. Almost no roads, no water or electricity from any town, no towns, steep forested hills and quiet bays and coves, the Sounds have remained largely unchanged since the first European settlers arrived in the early 1800s.
END OF CHAPTER TWENTY
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Aaron Allbright’s novel in five parts will be published soon.
IN A DESERT OR A CITY
BOOK I
‘PRINCE CARTIER’ or HOW I LEARNED TO LOVE BEING GAY WITH MY SAUDI PRINCE AND TO START WORRYING
BOOK II
MONSIEUR LE PRINCE, PARIS
BOOK III
THE MYSTERIES OF PARIS
BOOK IV
TYROMANCY AND LUCIFER
BOOK V
WHY WAIT FOR THE LIGHT?