Rocking Horse Road (18 page)

The ones who stopped, no more than half a dozen,
faced off against the pro-tour crowd. Only a few
metres separated the two groups. There were twenty-five
or so from the Empire and they were physically
bigger and more intimidating. We knew who we had
our money on if things turned nasty. Tiny Wilson
was there and he still played lock for the local club's
masters team. Mr Bonniston, the butcher, was in the
thick of things too. He was no soft-cock.

The woman in the purple dress was now holding
the megaphone at her side and she also stopped to
address the men. We didn't hear what she said but
there were jeers. She seemed to be speaking to the five
or six men directly in front of her. Some dag loudly
called out something about dykes and fingers. We
heard that clear enough. All the men laughed.

'Piss off home, love. You're not welcome here.' We
heard that too.

The guy from HART joined her. He also began to
talk to the crowd. There were louder shouts. A guy
was a better target than a woman. Within seconds
the whole front row was yelling at him. A big guy, six
foot with a beer gut hanging over his belt, stepped
forward and shoved the HART guy in the chest. He
staggered backwards but was caught by the marchers
behind him and did not fall. More of the protesters
stopped moving forwards. They turned and squared
off against the group on the footpath.

The Empire has a long balcony on the street side
leading off the upstairs rooms. Something heavy and
white thudded to the ground right in the middle of
the protest group. There were several screams and the
woman in purple dropped the megaphone.

A white cloud enveloped them. For a moment it
looked as though a freak weather pattern had brought
down a patch of fog over the marchers. Flour. We
realised that some joker had thrown a full bag of flour
from the balcony. The bag must have been partly open
because the contents had spilled out even before it hit
the ground. We watched the cloud settle gently on
the marchers' clothes and on their hair. They became
photo negatives of themselves against the darkness.
We looked up and saw that there were about four
or five guys up on the balcony. They began to throw
other things. Small missiles flew through the air, hit
the road and shattered. Now it was eggs. One hit a
protester on the shoulder and yolk splattered up over
her cheek. She screamed.

The men on the footpath were laughing. One of the
marchers on the edge of the crowd had had enough.
He shoved a guy who was still shouting abuse. We saw
that it was Mr Jenson, the teacher from school, who
was doing the shoving. The guy shoved him back and
then they had each other by the shirt fronts. The two
crowds merged around them and a couple of punches
were thrown. Surprisingly (to us), it was the heckler
and not the young English teacher who staggered
back clutching his face. Men from both groups rushed
to join in and we lost sight of Mr Jenson in the flurry
of flailing arms and short vicious jabs.

People from both groups jumped in to join the
fight or to try and break apart the fighters. Old Mr
Robinson was in there, trying to restrain a drinker
twice his size. We saw that Robinson was in danger of
getting clocked himself. There was Jenson again, fiery
eyed, nose to nose with an equally worked-up rugby
supporter. They were yelling into each other's faces.

'Racist!

'Traitor!'

'You're pig ignorant, mate!'

'Go back to Russia, you communist!'

They were both still yelling abuse when they were
pulled apart. Other people from both groups were
dragged back into the ranks.

For lack of any real alternative the march carried
on. The pixie-faced woman with the megaphone was
silent, staring straight ahead. There was flour on her
hair and egg on her dress. All of the protesters looked
grim and several of the younger women were crying.
What the organisers must have hoped would be a
show of solidarity and strength against the Springbok
tour now resembled nothing more than a straggling
group of refugees. Several of the men had cuts and
bruises on their faces. Others limped as they brushed
at the flour on their clothes. Everyone seemed to be in
shock but they marched on stoically. The two holding
the main banner were almost side by side so that the
words sagged and were unreadable. There was no
more singing. The torches were all on now and as we
trailed further behind, the body of the march looked
like a lit ship, damaged and listing, slipping away into
the darkness to sink.

Luckily only a few of the men from the Empire
bothered to follow. The ones who felt the most
aggrieved shadowed the march for a while, taunting
and jeering, 'We Want Rugby!' until, getting no
response, they too turned and drifted back to the
Empire. No doubt they stood around the bar until
closing time and recounted the role each had played,
with the vigour associated with fishing stories or old
rugby games.

Some of the marchers began to drop out. People
simply moved to the side without comment, singly
and in pairs, so that the march moved away from
them. Enough was enough. They could tell people
that they'd done their bit. No doubt they would use
the side streets to avoid the Empire on the way back
to their cars.

The march was supposed to finish at the mall,
where there were going to be more speeches. But
when the group finally arrived at the space outside
Farmers, the woman in the purple dress and a few
other organisers huddled together. There was very
little lighting in the mall. The roar of a cruising car
could still occasionally be heard in the distance. We
sat on our bikes back in the shadows and watched as
the woman in purple said a few words. Maybe the
megaphone had been broken when she dropped it
outside the Empire, because now she spoke without
it. Mind you, the group was so small by that point
she hardly need to be amplified. Only about twenty
people stood in front of her. The remaining marchers
shone their torches in the speaker's direction so that
she had twenty shadows scattered around her. When
she finished speaking, the people who were left
quickly dispersed and went home.

We were biking back down Rocking Horse Road
when Mark Murray said, 'Mr Jenson's first name is
Simon.' In the end it was as simple as that.

We tried to discover all that we could about SJ. We
quickly found out that he was twenty-three years old
and unmarried. He had moved north from Dunedin
at the beginning of '81 and his voice carried a hint of
southern burr; the Rs in the words 'Shakespeare' and
'pentameter' rolled like a sea-swell into the end of his
sentences. SJ rented a two-bedroom cottage near the
middle of Rocking Horse Road, only five minutes'
walk down from the Ashers' dairy. It was an old bach,
barely more than four rooms and a corrugated-iron
roof, with the edges of the garden plots marked by
hundreds of whitewashed rocks the size of fists. The
bach sat in the middle of a quarter-acre section, the
back of which was only distinguishable from the
dunes by two strands of sagging wire.

Enquiry revealed that SJ was well liked by his
students, the girls at least. They considered him
handsome. We felt uncomfortable about judging his
physical attractiveness. SJ was tallish. His eyes were
brown. His hair was dark and slightly longer than was
normal for a teacher. But we were reluctant to draw
any conclusions from the parts of the man we could
observe. Only Matt Templeton with his five older
sisters was unequivocal in his assessment: 'Sure, girls
would go ga-ga over him.'

Between the girls in SJ's classes, petty rivalries and
jealousies darted like lightning. Not that SJ seemed
to do anything to feed the girls' interest. Nor did he
show favour. Even Martha Ferguson, the plainest of
the plain, had occasionally been given a smile and
an encouraging word. Martha was a member of
the photography club that SJ ran after school every
Wednesday. All but one of the members were girls,
and the only boy had an undisguised interest in
theatre: he was a sixth former regularly referred to as
'the poofter'. Most boys who had been taught by SJ
simply reported him to be an okay teacher.

In our interview with Martha, she described SJ as
being 'different' since the new school year had begun.
'In what way?' we asked, anticipating a revelation.
Her plain, round face gazed earnestly up at us and
her mouth gaped like a deep-sea fish in a rock pool.
'It's like,' she said at last, and sighed deeply, 'like he's
gone away and now all that's left is his body.'

At every opportunity we trailed through the school
behind SJ, down the corridors and over the parched
school grounds, like blowflies behind a shit-stained
dog. Our eyes crawled all over him.

June rolled over into July and with real winter came the
first disharmony in our ranks. The afternoon meetings
in Jim Turner's garage became tense as we debated
what to do next. SJ had done nothing incriminating,
or even unpredictable, for three weeks. Apart from his
damning initials, and a plain girl's opinion that he was
'different', we had nothing. One faction, led by Roy
Moynahan, wanted to make an anonymous call to the
police telling them of SJ's identity. There was a special
phone number still occasionally being advertised in
the paper for people with information about Lucy's
murder. It must also be said that Roy and Al Penny
and a couple of others had wanted to hand the diary
over right away but had been outvoted.

Jase Harbidge was the most vocal against both
ideas. Jase argued the best we could count on from
the police was that they would interview SJ. 'If he's
covered his tracks and he's a good liar he'll walk away,
no worries. It happens all the time.'

Our arguments went nowhere. We were like two
tug-of-war team so evenly matched that neither side
moves an inch.

It came as a surprise when Jase and Pete Marshall
took it upon themselves to end the stalemate by
breaking into SJ's house. It was not a group decision.
They arranged to meet near his place at a time they
knew SJ would be teaching his fourth form English
class. It was a Friday, July the sixth, and a few dark
clouds were hanging around out to sea — a big
southerly storm was predicted for that evening.

Pete told us later that they left their bikes in the
overgrown section next door to SJ's rented house. They
stood in the long grass gathering up their courage. The
grass was wet from an earlier light rain and it shivered
and shook itself dry in the cold easterly.

Pete and Jase entered SJ's section where broken
boards in the fence had left a gap. They came out
behind the garden shed with its two-stroke mower
visible through the open door. The back of the house
was locked but Jase broke the lower pane of glass with
an old rugby sock that he'd found hanging on the line
and wrapped around one of the whitewashed stones
from the garden. He reached through gingerly and
flicked a latch. Suddenly, against all their expectations,
they were in.

Pete told some of us privately that Jase immediately
began to pull drawers out and empty the contents on
to the lino. 'He seemed really mad. He just went nuts.
I didn't think it was a good idea to try and stop him.'
Knives and forks and spoons monsooned down, along
with whisks and corkscrews and an eggbeater. Soon
the kitchen floor was flooded with cutlery.

Jase and Pete did not know what they were
looking for and Pete admitted that very soon it didn't
matter. In a later interview, he confessed to personally
hurling a bag of flour against the kitchen wall so that
it exploded in a white cloud. All the food was pulled
from the cupboards. Packets lay scattered around.
Dried macaroni and cornflakes crackled beneath
their shoes like shells in the silvery water. Eggs were
thrown against the walls. The hot tap was left running,
in imitation of the anti-tour protest.

When they were finished in the kitchen they moved
on. SJ's bedroom was quickly turned upside down.
His surprisingly small collection of clothes was tossed
around the room and a couple of shirts ended up
ripped. The sheets on his bed were roughly stripped
off and the mattress tipped from the wire base so that
it lay drunkenly, half blocking the door.

The second bedroom had been converted into
a darkroom. When they opened that door a heady
aroma of chemicals poured out. Pete fumbled along
the wall for the light switch. When he finally found
it, they saw that the windows were blacked out with
sheets of black polythene, taped down at the edges. A
trestle-table against the wall was covered with plastic
bottles of developer and fixer. SJ even had an enlarger,
tall and spidery, where images could be manipulated.
The packet of photographs was sitting in plain view. It
was Jase who picked it up and slipped out the prints.
Jase has always been reluctant to talk about what
happened that morning, possibly because of guilt
about what he did to SJ's home. Maybe he still feels
a lingering outrage at what he discovered there. But
years later Pete still remembered hearing Jase gasp as
though he had been sucker-punched in the stomach.

Even by today's standards the pictures of Lucy
were pornographic.

Southerly storms were not unusual on the east coast.
Every winter they blew up from Antarctica, blustery
and laced with froth from the Southern Ocean. It was
the intensity of the storm that hit on July 6 1981 that
caught everyone off guard. Of course there are no hard
and fast rules when it comes to the weather. People
forget that the
Wahine
was sunk in '68 by a storm that
came out of nowhere. That was the roof-lifter that our
parents spoke about with awe.

By mid-afternoon the wind had risen to a howl.
Although no one was down on the beach to see it, we
could all hear the waves thrashing the shore. Although
it wasn't raining yet, the temperature had dropped
sharply. After school we walked and pedalled down
the road with debris from knocked-over rubbish-bins
blowing around us and sand plucked from the dunes
stinging any exposed skin. We arrived in the Turners'
garage raw. The photographs awaited us, fanned
out on the pool table. The wind pushed through the
cracks in the walls and fingered their edges. It stirred
the dry piles of spilled sheep-shit in the corner and
buffeted the yellowed clippings pinned to the walls so
that they rustled uneasily.