“What are they saying?”
“Are you sure you want to know?”
It was a good question. She leaned out of the window, wearing my T-shirt. She was scrolling through her phone, and laughing; sometimes she’s very cheerful when she reports that the internet hates me again, other times she’s as angry with me as everyone else, now and then even angrier. But this time she was in a good mood, and although I dreaded hearing what they were saying about me, I was distracted by her beauty, and said,
“Sure.”
“Okay,” she said, and cheerfully started quoting what they were saying and who was saying it. It was very hurtful. I wondered how things had come to this - I was sensitive, I had fine sensibilities, I often sat in my shed and re-read old copies of Landfall just for fun, but so many of my opinions were regarded as the brute mouthings of just another old white philistine. It was my fault. No one was to blame. But I fought back, and said from a great height,
“Those user names aren’t real names.”
“So?”
“They’re not real people.”
“Yes they are.”
She added, with real affection, “Idiot.”
She continued quoting. I carried on with what I was doing, which I grandly thought of as landscaping, but was really just trying to make the garden and patio in her backyard look nice - weeding, planting lavender and herbs, sweeping and hosing and raking. I bent my back to the task, and asked,
“How do you find all this stuff?”
“What?”
“Well, I look at notifications, where my name has been tagged, but none of this stuff ever shows up there.”
“Why would they tag you in?”
“Cos otherwise I can’t read it?”
“I think that’s the point.”
A Wellington garden is not an Auckland garden. You have to fight your way through an Auckland garden with a machete, stunned by the fructifying heat; you allow for three hours of sunlight a year in a Wellington garden, stunned by winds from the polar wastes. But her garden and patio were taking shape. I had spent all day on it, including scavenging the neighbourhood for cuttings, and finding two abandoned cacti in handsome pots - strange to wander the streets of the city I had lived in for so long, in my tender youth, now returning as an old white philistine. She called out,
“Here’s one. ‘Steve Braunias should jump off the Von Zedlitz building.’”
“But I’d die.”
“I think that’s the point.”
I knew the Von Zedlitz building. I had attended classes there, on the campus at Victoria University; David Norton gave a lecture on D.H. Lawrence’s short story The Man Who Died. It was a good lecture. Norton was a Lawrentian scholar, the co-editor of Lawrence’s Baby Poems: a Practical Criticism Exercise (1979), and the short story he had chosen was a heavy-handed but vibrant little masterpiece. When Lawrence died, novelist Lawrence Durrell wrote, “Dear DHL – So wrong, so right, so great. May his ghost breathe on us all.” I felt the ghost breath of his genius but that was about the sum total of my university career, which lasted six weeks. I was too stupid for education. I had to turn to that great shining refuge for scoundrels of all kinds: journalism. I said to her,
“Where shall we go for dinner?”
“The Beijing?”
