Despair and Disgust in Sky City - Or How I Came to Loath New Zealand

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Despair and Disgust in Sky City - Or How I Came to Loath New Zealand

03/04 - 13/04/08

My taxi pulls up outside the departure lounge at KL international airport. I explain to the driver that I need to dash inside to use the ATM, as I haven’t enough cash to pay him. As I head for the cash machines, I glance at the departure board. The time is 8 ‘O Clock. My flight has been moved forward by half an hour to 8.45pm. Motherfuckers.

I reach the ATM and insert my card. A slow wave of horror passes over me as my card is rejected. I move to another machine, and then another. No joy, just those little fucking slips that slide out of the machine telling me to contact my bank. Anxiety beats like a drum, with a baseline of pure venomous anger. Why does HSBC keep doing this to me? Why do they insist on the worst possible moment to tear down my pants and fuck me?

I run back outside to the waiting taxi. The driver doesn’t speak much English, and struggles to understand why I don’t have the money to pay him. I open my wallet. I have half the fare in Malaysian ringits, and some US dollars. Their combined value is more than the cost of the trip, and I hand the wad of notes to the taxi driver, hoping he will accept. He doesn’t look happy, but seems to understand what has happened. I keep saying how sorry I am, and then leave him there and hurry to a check in counter.

Waiting in the departure lounge, I see I have a voice mail from the bank. They ask me to contact their fraud department. I check my credit. I don’t have enough for an international call, not by a long way. My wallet is totally empty. I use the last of my credit to text my parents, asking if they can contact the bank on my behalf. I’m fucking furious now. I am sure there has been no fraud. My card has now been blocked in every country I’ve visited, for no good reason. If they suspected something was amiss, why let me take out cash for four weeks, and then decide that the £30 I tried to withdraw today is worthy of shutting me down?
I just want to commit hideous violence. I need to destroy and annihilate. I will now have to wait until I reach Auckland, and hopefully meet up with my aunt, before I can sort out this mess and get my hands on some cash. No airport food or entertainment for me on this journey.

I touch down after an uncomfortable flight. I bump into my aunt in the departure lounge almost immediately and she suggests I come back to theirs for my first night. I’m booked into a backpackers hostel for my first 7 nights in Auckland, but my aunt is not the sort of person you bother arguing with so I accept.


3rd - 13th April - things get weird and tense:
I end up spending three nights with my relatives in Remuera, Auckland. I think this must be the time that my mind started to slowly unravel, and things got on top of me. Firstly, my aunt has some kind of personality disorder, which makes her veer back and forth between moments of clarity and outright, bark at the moon insanity. She’s incredibly kind to let me stay in their house and feed me, but her unpredictability puts me under constant pressure.

So far, my travels have been fairly easy going. There have been some wild, dangerous moments, but I like to think I just rode it all out with an air of calm and a happy, dope-fiend grin on my face. Now, though, I am beginning to become stressed. There a certain problems I have to overcome, such as waiting for my new HSBC card to be delivered to Auckland (I decided to cancel the card after the cunts repeatedly blocked it for reasons too long, and far too stupid to go into here. Basically, if your reading this and you should happen to pass by your local branch of HSBC at any point henceforth, just calmly walk in and up to the nearest counter, and inform them that I said hi, and wish them all death by excessive faeces ingestion. If you want to take things further, and smear the walls with shit or take out an AK-47 and cap some fools, don’t think I won’t thank you later. Better still, unleash a pack of wild dogs, or flesh-eating air-borne virus. You could drive your car through the front door, or bombard them with water balloons. Anything that gets their attention and causes a fuss.) However, I am more than capable of dealing with this shit, and more to the point, I wanna get through it all and still be smiling. My aunt thinks I should be in the depths of despair, repeatedly reminding me just how bad things have got.

Normally, it would be easy to deal with such a person. You just walk away, and if they keep bothering you, you strike them stone dead, and bury their corpse somewhere deep and full of worms. This is my mother’s sister, though, and I have to just bite my tongue, and find ways to appease her while still getting on with things the way I want to do them. Hard, when faced with a ravenous control freak.

At times, even the simplest question can put me on the back foot, the words dripping with poison, as though from the lips of a serpent. When I’m asked if I want a cup of tea, my mind spirals into a panic, searching for the right answer. Do I want tea? If so, does my aunt really want to make it? Will she be offended if I say know, or feel put out if I accept? Should I make the tea myself? Will she want some? One morning ,I get up out of bed. I meet my aunt outside the bathroom and she asks if I slept well. “Yeah, not too bad”, I say. “Well did you or didn’t you?” is the whip snap of a reply.

This is the kind of menace I am dealing with. There is no room for error. There can be no grey areas. I must calculate and judge, and somehow manage doing what I want to do while also telling my aunt what she needs to hear. The bubbles in my brain flow a little faster, the blood behind my eyes congeals , and each day I wake feeling as though some tiny vicious creature has been gnawing on my skull in the night.
Saturday, 5th of April. I come back into the house after spending the day in Auckland, wandering up and down Queen Street, asking myself how the world became so pretentious and full of itself. This city loves itself, and I can’t think of a single good reason why. It’s around 9pm, and I’ve had a couple of beers. My seventeen year old cousin has some friends around, and they’re preparing to go to a party.

Quickly, I’m surrounded by several young kiwi girls, interested in my Irish ancestry, and when I’m asked if I wanna go to the party, I find myself somehow accepting. Things are pretty fucked up when we arrive, and I immediately reject my decision. After negotiating past some anal security (apparently this is the kind of sick, twisted house party that a person needs a ticket for), I’m thrown into a heaving pack of sweaty teenagers, their skin swimming with hormonal fever.

I get introduced to my cousins’ friends, but every face looks the same, and I completely lose track of who I’ve met and who I haven’t. I’m hugging a six pack and drinking my way through quickly. This isn’t a place you want to be caught sober. It’s like a scene from the TV show Skins - good looking rich young fools, still fresh with the scent of nappies, full of liquor and ego, feeling like the world is theirs, getting it all on a plate and behaving badly because they know they can get away with it. Most people are outside, clustered around a pool, whilst indoors a few older folks hang around in the kitchen, checking out what everyone’s drinking.

I’m walking around, trying to find some common ground and something to latch onto, but everything is in a swirl. A stunning girl in a white dress I met earlier has her arm around me, telling me she thinks I’m great. Three of her friends circle me. If a genie popped out of bottle I’d wish to be young again, but there is something very wrong about a guy on the cusp of thirty mixing it with a bunch of school kids.
A guy rushes over (these fucks do everything at speed whilst I just stutter around) and tells me he likes my beard. I suspect sarcasm, and when he starts to stroke it, I lean forward and tell him not to touch me anymore. He bounces away, and so do the girls, having spotted someone or something in a far corner of the party. “Let me come with you” I start to say, but they’re gone between blinks.

I can’t take a whole lot more. I’m nowhere near drunk enough and nobody here knows who I am. There are fascists on patrol, secret police with powers to interrogate and reprogram. Several times I’m asked who I am, and when I explain I am a guest of my cousin, they look at me like they don’t quite believe it. I wish I had a wing man. Just one other person to hustle through it with. Shit, if the boys from ‘Nam were here, we’d show these little Kiwi fuckers how to have a good time.

Imagine that. These guys think they’re pretty wild, running loose and free, and I know my cousin thinks I’m not cool enough for these cats. If Craig and Gregg bowled up, things would turn nasty. Glass would shatter, ears would bleed, and the howl of young girls screaming would fill the night air. They’d be diving into the pool and drowning just to get away from us. Wait ‘til you’ve done a full tour, bambinos, then puff out your chest and learn how to live.

I walk into the kitchen to get another drink. One of the parents is inside. She asks me the usual questions, and gives me the usual look. Suspicious minds. She asks if the four empty beer bottles on the surface are mine. I say that they are. She asks if I wouldn’t mind taking them and putting them in the recycling bin just outside. That is fucking it - the tipping point from which I can’t recover. This superficial, plastic nonsense has to come to an end. A frenzied party where you have to recycle as you go along? This is a fresh kind of bullshit.

I do as she asks and make for the exit. This place is like the worst kind of safe sex, a Demolition Man type mock up where you attach electrodes to your body and “touch” each other from separate rooms. These kids like to think this is dangerous and exciting, but they’re hemmed in behind a walled complex, their club-wielding parents on patrol, looking for people with beards to beat back from their precious children. Recycle my middle finger as I leave, amigos.

After a couple of days of this, I move into the backpackers hostel to get some space. This is a big, military-looking complex just off Queen Street. The lifts are an adventure in themselves. I generally find I have to travel up and down a few times before I eventually arrive at the specified floor.

By this point, I’m feeling pretty bummed out and depressed. I’m supposed to be getting some kind of work, but the woman from the agency hasn’t come up with anything as yet. The hostel is full of irritating people. If I met them and got to know them, I’m sure they’d mostly be okay, but from a distance, the dark shapes I see are not impressive.

Everyday here is the same. Get up, walk around Queen St, pay high prices for everything. There is nothing to see and nothing to do. Aucklanders walk around with an air of smugness, like they know something you don’t. They dress to impress, prancing around, waiting in clusters at level crossings for the green man, gushing across the road like frantic, precious little things, sitting outside sipping coffees and poking at salads. The rest of New Zealand doesn’t have much time for them, and their often referred to as JAFA’s (Just another fucking Aucklander).

The city reminds me of central London in demographic terms - there is none of the traditional, old charm. In amongst the throng of Jafa’s there walk big, bruising Polynesians, and dishevelled gin heads. Of all the places I’ve been, Auckland is the one I feel least safe walking around in. The mix of very wealthy and very poor is a dangerous one, breeding contempt, anger and filling the air with the gentle hum of simmering violence.

My first week in NZ draws to a close. I feel trapped in a iron bubble, a tiny fortress with no escape. All my money is gone, and I still have over a week to wait until my new bank card arrives. Still, I can’t face another weekend of doing nothing. I decide to get emergency funds from the bank, for which they charge me $25, and I catch a bus to Rotorua.

I spend two days wandering around in the bright sunshine, sucking up the sulphur and volcanic air, making peace with the world once again. Sure, the town exists for the tourists, with long drags of shops and restaurants, cafes and bars, all laid out like trinkets for the buyers to peruse. But out in the country, walking through green, primeval lands is good medicine for the soul. Millions of years ago, the world crawled out of the swamps and the hot springs. If you dive in and swim down deep enough, you’d get to shake hands with the centre of the earth.

I visit the thermal pools and parks, and on the second day, walk 26km to a lake and back, passing through a redwood forest, and across barren, harsh scrub lands. On Sunday, I catch the bus back. As Auckland rears up on the horizon, the sky clouds over and the rain comes down. By the time my aunt picks me up from the bus station, it’s pouring. Once again, the weather knows how to pick the background music. Welcome back to sky city. Welcome to the suck.

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