Duncan Sarkies, the author of Star Gazers, is appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival. Photo / Ebony Lamb
To celebrate the 2025 Auckland Writers Festival, we’ve teamed up with New Zealand publishers to showcase some of the authors who will be on stage over the festival weekend.
This extract is from Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies, a book described by The Spinoff’s Toby Manhire as “like Succession, but with alpacas”.
Sarkies will appear in three events at the festival, The Modern Political Novel, with Brannavan Gnanalingam and Anna Rawhiti-Connell, on Saturday, May 17 at 4pm; and Writers As Explorers on Sunday, May 18, 9am.
Lloyd’s ankle isn’t healing as fast as the doctor promised, although the doctor’s tone seemed a bit blamey. He’s out in his bottom paddock, feeding his male alpacas some hay and delicious VitAl Paca Health Biscuits. A rain is forecast to come in this evening, so he’s taking his best boys, the ones who will compete at the Showcase, out of the paddock. Jethro, his berserk male, tries to follow but Lloyd is quick to close the gate.
“No, not you,” he says.
Jethro glares at him, his overbite making him look like the obstinate troublemaker he is, but his eyes are expressing a different emotion – is it disappointment or separation anxiety?
“What is it you want?” Lloyd is saying to the animal. “I put you in with them, and you get in fights. I let you be by yourself, and you complain.”
Jethro looks at him, not understanding the words but getting the sentiment, an irritable tone he is used to hearing. Lloyd’s heart melts a little, for he knows what it feels like to be ostracised, but he is resolute. “Some time alone will be good for you. You can be the alpha of your own paddock,” he says, words of scant consolation to the animal. “It’s just a few days, and things will be back to normal,” Lloyd says, and the alpaca spits at him. His spit misfires, a bunch of green gunk not making it past Jethro’s mouth, instead forming around his chin a hideous bile-beard.
Lloyd shakes his head. “Honestly, no wonder you don’t have friends. For goodness’ sake.” He shakes his head, throws a hay bale over the fence for the hostile reject to have all to himself.
He’s in a paddock with a leaf blower, aiming it at the alpaca boys to try to remove some of the vegetation that is ruining their good looks. A courier comes up the driveway at a speed that is too fast for the loose shingle.
The courier goes all the way up to the house. Lloyd sees them get out, hears a knock on the door.
“I’ll be there in a second!” he yells.
He hears the courier’s van making a higher-pitched sound, reversing back down the road.
“Wait!” He turns off his leaf blower and hobbles out on to the road, almost gets mowed down by the reversing vehicle. The van finally sees him and stops. The courier lowers his window.
“Are you the chairman of ABONZ?” the courier asks. “Yes, what have you got?”
He is handed a device to sign with his fingers.
“My fingers have mud on them,” Lloyd tells the courier, who looks back at him blankly. “I don’t wanna stain your thing – ”
“Just sign it.”
Lloyd does a signature with his muddy finger. The courier hands him a parcel. He feels the weight of it.
Whatever is in there is bound; it feels official in some way. His thoughts are confirmed when he looks at the sender on the back: Peter Forsyth, King’s Counsel.
Lloyd has washed his hands thoroughly using the good soap, not the stuff he uses in the laundry basin. He vigorously removed all moisture with the handtowel.
He has the report out of its envelope. It has been sent in an encased folder that feels like leather to the touch but is more likely a durable synthetic imitation. Lloyd feels a sense of gravitas as he holds it in his hands. He opens the front cover, averting his eyes a little, for he knows this document is too important for his eyes to read alone. He focuses on the paper – not garishly thick, but a confident solidity – he thinks he can see a grain, or perhaps he is imagining a grain, but it doesn’t matter, he shouldn’t be looking at it, not yet, except maybe it’s okay to look at the front page, as seeing the cover of a book is different from reading a book, so he looks at the heading: “Report on Alpaca Breeding Organisation of New Zealand Election Procedures with Analysis and Recommendations”.
Oh yes, that is a formidable title. This is a serious document indeed, the kind that could give ABONZ real credibility. He flicks a page over, not to read the document, more to study the typeface, which is very formal, the serifs on the letters showing a real seriousness. He knows he shouldn’t sneak a peek at the Contents page but there it is, beautifully laid out: sections, subsections and sub-subsections. The Conclusions page is one he knows he shouldn’t look at, not alone, but he knows that what is written on pages 80–84 contains the meat of this report.
The Analysis and Recommendations section fills him with excitement and fear at the same time. He knows that if his eyes were to cast themselves on that part, it would be like looking directly at an atomic explosion. He would be the first to see the flash-hot magnificence, but for the privilege he would be blinded for life – no, he closes the report very deliberately, placing it on his dining table, taking a napkin to wipe off any accidental fingermarks he might have left on the folder. He steps away from it, watching a glint of sunlight from the window hit it at a pleasing angle, before instinctively closing the curtain, shutting out the light to protect the document from unnecessary sun damage.
When Shona Tisdall answers his phone call he feels a kind of macabre excitement, like the rider he read about in his book on Marco Polo – a man who travelled a hundred miles on a horse to tell Kublai Khan that a Japanese invasion had failed and led to mass casualties.
“It’s here,” he says, leaving the pronoun open to suggest the immensity of the noun it is standing in for.
But Shona isn’t taking in his intended gravitas. “What’s here, Lloyd?”
“The King’s Counsel’s Report on the election,” he says, before quickly adding, “I haven’t looked at it. I knew not to.”
A gap on the other end of the line. “Well, you need to decide what your next action is,” she says, leaving a pregnant pause for him to fill. This pause has him confused. He thought it was he who would be doing the listening.
“Well, ordinarily I’d call a Council meeting, and we’d take a look at it.”
“In ordinary times that would be a good thing to do,” Shona says, leaving more pregnant silence – late-term pregnancy silence, heavy with possibility.
“But these aren’t ordinary times?” Lloyd says. He senses he has pleased Shona.
“Why would you say that, Lloyd?”
“Well, I dunno. I mean, there’s a bit of a divide in the community, and that’s reflected at Council, so ... um ... ”
“If we could trust everyone to keep whatever the report offers in-house, while the Council makes the best decision for ABONZ, that would be great.”
“Someone will leak,” Lloyd says, enjoying having the answers, like he’s a contestant in a cryptic game show. “They’ll leak sensitive information and, um, you know, in a sensational kind of way.”
He hears a sympathetic sigh from the other end of the phone.
“So I still don’t quite get where you’re leading me,” he says.
“I’m not leading you anywhere,” she says. “You have to make the best decisions for ABONZ. God knows we need to be careful. Who knows what is in that report, but if it implicated someone publicly, and then that someone decided to react with lawsuits and counterclaims, I mean – ”
“A lawyer. I get a lawyer to look at it.”
“Hmm,” Shona says, as if the idea has struck her for the first time. “Interesting idea. Who would you go with, hypothetically?”
“Maybe the one we used when we amended the constitution. Your one.”
“The lawyer you refer to isn’t my anything, but, yes, maybe you’re onto something. It’s hard to know if it’s over the top, but we have to be vigilant.”
“What do I ask him to do?” Lloyd asks.
“I don’t know. I suppose that another pair of expert eyes could take a look before anyone else, to stop ABONZ from taking a wrong step.”
“We don’t want to step on a landmine,” Lloyd says.
“You do what you think is right, Lloyd. You have excellent judgment.”
He nods, aware that he is playing a game, aware that he is being asked to do something without it sounding like he has been asked to do it. He feels pleased with himself that he is learning the game, if a little uneasy that he’s being made into the architect of something he doesn’t properly understand.
Now there is a stranger in his sitting room, a middle-aged man with a round face, square glasses with shiny frames, a well-worn suit and expensive shoes. The man is combing over the report, making notes on a jotter pad. Lloyd is in the next room, full of fear and curiosity, like he used to feel before he sat a piano exam back when he was 11 and he was trying to please his mother.
Lloyd can’t stand the waiting, so he goes outside to the boys who will be competing at the Breeders Showcase, inspecting them for deformities, a distraction that is failing to distract him.
Eventually, as he is pulling some thistles from an irritated alpaca’s brisket, he hears footsteps. The lawyer appears, his eyes giving little away.
“You read it?” Lloyd asks.
The lawyer nods, comes over to the alpaca.
“What are you doing?” he asks, and Lloyd says, “Oh, the thistles got away on me and now I’m paying the price. There’s no way this one will win anything. I’m not sure why I bother.”
A little laugh from the lawyer, a minimalist attempt at taking an interest.
“If I may,” the lawyer says, “there is material in the report that, were it to be seen by the wrong eyes, could lead you into vulnerabilities, speaking from a legal perspective.”
“Um, that doesn’t sound good,” Lloyd says.
“My advice is to remove the vulnerabilities.”
“Okay,” Lloyd says, deferring to the lawyer the same way he does to the GP who refuses to check his prostate. “Um, how do we – how do we do that?”
“Either we do it together, or you entrust me to do it. It’s a simple matter of redacting parts that could be legally sensitive.”
“Yes, whatever you think is best,” Lloyd says.
“What do you think is best?” the lawyer asks.
Lloyd thinks of the connotations, what he is being set up to be the fall guy for. Surely self-preservation is the key here, so which option provides the most self-preservation?
“I think maybe you do the redactions and I’ll – I’ll stay out of it.”
“As long as you know you are responsible for the redactions.” “I’m less responsible if I don’t see them, isn’t that right?”
“There are degrees. There are always degrees,” the lawyer says. “I am working on your behalf, though, which means that when it comes down to it, you are responsible for my decisions and my actions. However, if you are not in the room when I make them, it could be possible to argue, on a technical level at least, that neither of us is responsible,” the man says, a little smile warming his face.
Lloyd doesn’t know what he means but senses it’s about as good as he’ll get. Like one of his alpacas lowering its stance and flicking its tail in deference, he submits.
He’s in a nearby room, watching through a gap in the clouded glass door. The lawyer has a thick black marker pen and is going through the document, making thick black marks, big rectangular blocks that imprison the most sensitive information. He sees the lawyer on the phone, and, instinctively, Lloyd phones Shona Tisdall. It clicks to engaged straight away. It’s just a hunch, but when he sees the lawyer finish his call Lloyd phones Shona again, and this time it rings. She does not pick up, but he can tell her phone is ringing.
As he heats up a microwave lasagne for dinner he sneaks a peek at the lawyer: deeper into the document, his thick black marker pen out, its bulbous felt protrusion dripping like a knife removed from a blood vessel. The lawyer is on the phone, so Lloyd tries again, phoning Shona, who, as he suspected would be the case, is very much engaged.
Extract from Star Gazers by Duncan Sarkies. Published by Te Herenga Waka University Press. Duncan Sarkies will be appearing at the Auckland Writers Festival, which runs from May 13-18. For more information and tickets, visit writersfestival.co.nz.
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