Joe Bennett: Words and goats that stick
Most things we do, most words we say, mean nothing. No sooner are they said or done than they go gurgling down the plug hole in time’s sink and are forever lost. But some moments, some words, for some reason, stick. I don’t know why.
Last Saturday afternoon I was watching a tui in a kowhai. I wish we had tui in Lyttelton. I admired the white bib on the bird’s chest, the bluebottle sheen of its flanks, but most of all its river of noise. Even as it stabbed the kowhai flowers, it burbled, chuckled, barked and clucked. It reminded me of a bird I saw once on some Attenborough nature porn, a bird that mimicked with uncanny accuracy the human sounds it heard - the whirr of a camera shutter, the wail of a police siren and, with ominous irony, a chainsaw.
I was on a footpath and the kowhai was in a front garden and the front garden was in Mapua, near Nelson, to which I’d come for a literary festival. Mapua is a smidgen of a place, a wooden wharf and a scatter of silent streets, but every other year it stages a festival to raise funds for its library. I’ve attended four of them and met nothing but kindness.
The tui was 10 feet from me and trusting of my presence. Not so the woman at the living room window. Half hidden by a curtain, she was looking at me as intently as I was looking at the tui. To show my innocent intentions I waved to her. She took a cell phone from her pocket and put it to her ear.
When I suspect someone of suspecting me I tend to behave suspiciously. Even as the woman spoke into the phone I felt my spine hunch, my face warp into a Popeye leer. I thrust my hands deep into the pockets of my easyopen raincoat and lugged my lechery round the corner into Toru St before a husband or a constable could arrive. The tui hooted its mockery. ‘‘Hello Joe.’’ Two women were sitting on a veranda with tea and crosswords. I had met them the night before at the festival quiz. To my shame I have forgotten their names. Let me call them Jan and Joan. ‘‘Would you like a cup of tea?’’ asked Joan. ‘‘It’s Lady Grey.’’
I explained that I was trying to cut down on non-alcoholic fluids but sat down all the same, because these were quick and funny women. Somehow the conversation turned to goats. I said that goats had made me buy the house I live in. It’s almost true.
I came to see the house, liked the steep drive, the isolation, and especially the vertiginous paddock out the back where two goats lived. So I bought the place, then rang a friend to boast. The friend asked how many bedrooms it had.
‘‘I don’t know,’’ I said, ‘‘but it’s got two goats.’’ (Honesty compels me to admit that there were also a couple of sheep, but I have learned over the years to omit them. Sheep lack a goat’s narrative clout.)
‘‘Goats are all very well,’’ said Joan, who had been kind enough to smile at my tale, ‘‘but one has to draw the line at 64 of them.’’
She paused. I waited for her to go on.
Jan and Joan lived, she explained, on Nelson’s rural fringe and some time last year, 64 feral goats, driven by hunger or poor navigation, had swooped down from the hills and onto their street.
‘‘How did you know there were 64?’’
‘‘I counted them,’’ said Joan in a tone that did not admit the possibility of contradiction.
‘‘What happened?’’ I said. ‘‘Goats are mammalian locusts.’’ I pictured gardens stripped of greenery, lines stripped of washing.
‘‘A man came and shot fifty of them,’’ said Joan, ‘‘and the rest ran away. Apart from one that ran under the neighbour’s house and got stuck by the horns.’’
‘‘Oh dear,’’ I said. ‘‘Did they get it out?’’
‘‘They didn’t know it was there till they smelt it. And then they accused us of having a broken sewer. It was the weka that found it first.’’
‘‘Oh,’’ I said. ‘‘I wish we had weka in Lyttelton.’’
‘‘Not if you’ve got a vege garden, you wouldn’t,’’ said Joan. ‘‘Weka are avian locusts. They’ll eat anything. And that includes rotten goat. They picked its skull clean, inside and out.’’
‘‘Gosh,’’ I said, and shortly afterwards I left Jan and Joan to their crosswords and their tea. And as I went down Toru St in the warm spring sunshine, I started chuckling like a tui. I don’t know why.