An unforgettable holiday
Kiran Dass recalls one particular teenage summer vividly for good – and bad – reasons.
It was a humid, sun-stabbed Waikato summer, steeped in a sickly wash of illicitly obtained rum. The fifth form school holidays had roared into action. My older friend Nick, from the art school across the road from my high school, had lent me a dub-of-a-dub-of-a-dubbed cassette of a Cure album.
Degraded, it sounded like it had been recorded in the bottom of a tin can. On the first night of the holidays, I dopily popped an incense cone on the tape and went to have a shower. When I walked back into the room, expecting it to be smoky rose scented, I instead found that the cone had seared a perfect hole through the plastic, leaving a scorching acrid tang in the air.
Nick was a good sport about it, and I can still picture him, holding the cassette up, a bovine-like eye peering through the hole.
Our friend Simon’s parents were away for the weekend, so we were all going to stay the night at their nice brick home on the main Huntly highway.
Years later, long after I’d lost touch with Simon, I’d look out for that house while driving through on my way somewhere from Auckland. I’d considered knocking on the door to see if his parents still live there, to get a contact for him. There’s a bypass there now.
There were two Johns, prosaically referred to as Big John and Little John. Big John was the oldest and was the only one not at high school or polytech – he had an actual job, he was an electrician.
He lived in Cambridge, I lived in Nga¯ ruawa¯ hia, Hayley and Stephanie lived in Hamilton, and Simon, Nick and Little John lived in Huntly. A real Motley Crew.
Hayley and I had each put a Glints rinse through our hair for the first time and laughably, I was disappointed that the eggplanty purple hue didn’t make much difference to my black hair.
Big John picked us up in his yellow ute. Hayley, Stephanie and I were larking about in the back, and he had to tell us to sit with our backs against the cab. Safety first.
I was wearing my 20-up Doc Martens and when we arrived at Simon’s I asked if I could leave them on, despite the pristine carpet. It was a gruelling palaver unlacing those boots, and even worse getting them back on.
Stephanie’s father had just died. None of us had any experience with losing a parent. We wanted to support our friend but none of us really knew what to say or how to behave. Stephanie never spoke about it, and the only sign at school that something serious had happened was when the guidance counsellor pulled her out of class to ‘‘check in’’.
Hayley pulled out a giant bottle of Coruba that she’d found and nicked while away on a horse riding camp. It was the first time any of us girls ever got drunk. My previous encounters with alcohol was the customary one small measure of fizzy pink wine that I was allowed on my birthdays.
That night, someone put the horrendous Pink Floyd film The Wall on the video player. I remember the head-spinning feeling of the grog hitting me. It seemed that as soon as
Bob Geldof cut his nipple with a razor, the room immediately started woozily spinning.
It hit Stephanie hard, too. She was distressed about her dad. She fell into the swirling spa bath. Everybody freaked out because she still had her new burgundy suede Doc Marten shoes on, so we prised them off her feet and placed them away from the soapy jets.
Later that summer Simon moved into a flat on Russell Rd in Huntly.
Sixteen-year-old me was impressed by his domestic skills. I even saw him hand-cut potatoes into chips and fry them in an orange 1970s saucepan furiously bubbling with hot oil.
The other flatmate cooked fish fingers, it was straight out of a Mike Leigh film. He’d moved in with a friend James, and Stephanie’s new boyfriend Mark, a lanky grungy, dopey guy with shoulder-length ringlets. Mark’s loyal sidekick was a beautiful and docile German Shepherd named Penny. And Simon had adopted a biscuit tin-adorable salmon pink-coloured kitten. I tried to convince him to call it Pookie but he settled on Hetfield, after the Metallica frontman.
We were a pretty tight unit and despite the four-year age gap between us girls and the older boys, it was a fun and safe space. We just watched music videos, dubbed albums for each other, and shared mixtapes. Nothing dodgy, just pals.
That was until two new shifty jokers showed up. Luke and Paul. They were skulky and vaguely skinheady. And unnervingly quiet. I say unnerving because if they were that quiet, you knew it meant they were watching, plotting.
At the end of the summer holidays when we were heading back to school, I found myself stranded in Huntly on a Sunday evening after staying at the flat over the weekend. I had no way of getting home to where my school uniform was for the next day.
To this day, I have a fear of being far from home and being trapped anywhere, and for the longest time, I only ever lived in flats that were a maximum half an hour’s walk from town. I need to know I have an easy getaway. For some reason, in that careless adolescent way, I hadn’t told my parents when I’d be coming home.
Mark, the only one who lived at the flat who could drive, decided he couldn’t be bothered driving me home. But one of the skinheady guys, Paul, suddenly piped up. ‘‘I’ll take her home.’’
I felt uneasy because I didn’t really know Paul. And being brown-skinned in a fairly bogan scene came freighted with extra caution. I’d learnt how to clock the room from an early age. People have always called me a worrier, but they’re oblivious to what it’s like to constantly have to assess risk.
One time, Hayley invited me to visit one of her friends. When we got there, I realised he was a proper ‘‘white shoelaces’’ skinhead who lived close to the Outcasts skinhead gang headquarters – a foreboding steely grey building encircled by razor wire, and with a steel-plated lookout post and video surveillance.
I found myself sitting in his bedroom with Hayley and looking at the wall behind him, which had a swastika flag proudly pinned up. He showed us his binoculars.
‘‘Good for watching the n ..... s next door,’’ he smirked.
Wincing, I was trying to act normal, one eye on the door. Couldn’t Hayley see how uncomfortable this was for me? And couldn’t this skinhead see that I was brown? I’d heard later that he had a violent temper. Once when his girlfriend made him a mug of Milo, he threw the cup against the wall in a rage because it had specks of Milo crusted on the outside.
‘‘If it has that s... on the outside, what’s it like inside the cup?’’ he’d ranted. All I could think was that there was something preposterous about a so-called tough skinhead drinking Milo.
Paul borrowed and fired up Mark’s brown Ford Escort (we would usually all cram into it and there would often be one unfortunate lad who had to ride in the boot, emerging lightheaded from inhaling dangerous levels of toxic fumes), and off we went. We didn’t talk much on the way, and it felt like the longest car ride ever. It was dark and I concentrated on looking out the window to the inky Waikato River. I remember he stopped off at the BP to gas up with a $2 coin.
When I got home – miraculously safely – I was greeted with a stony silence. My mother had been worried sick, and I remember a pork chop supper optimistically laid out in anticipation of my return. I still feel bad about this.
The next week we found out there had been some kind of robbery at the Russell Rd flat.
It had been ransacked. But the most devastating and haunting thing of all was that Hetfield and Penny had been slaughtered.
We were rattled and chilled to the core. In Penny’s blood, someone had smeared the words ‘‘MARK THE NARK’ and ‘‘JAMES THE EGG’’ on the walls. It was disturbing – the incongruity of insipid, childish words matched with such a brutal act of violence.
People reckoned that Paul and Luke were behind it. But we never saw either of them again.
They just vanished. And eventually, after that summer Stephanie, Hayley and I drifted away from that scene, too.