“I will arise and go,” I declared oratorically, and Pinky promptly completed the quote from W. B. Yeats, “I will arise and go now to the Lake Isle at Innesfree.”
“I will arise and go,” I began again, “to the Coromandel Pinnacles.”
“Oh yeah, The Pinnacles. Good idea,” Pinky said. “Blow out the cobwebs. The Pinnacles, eh? You sure you’re up to it? It’s a tough climb for a soft city boy.”
“Speak for yourself you podgy slob. Let’s see if you can keep up.”
“You’re on,” Pinky said. “The Coromandel tomorrow. What’s tomorrow? Saturday. Yeah, the Coromandel tomorrow and the Pinnacles, Sunday.”
“Yeah, up and back in a day,” I said.
With that settled we recharged our glasses. I added a dash of water to my whisky and Pinky used an eyedropper to add a measure of water to his. We were slothing out, couch potatoes, Pinky with his long legs and size thirteen feet on the coffee table. We were listening to music: some jazz Pinky had on his hard drive; getting drunk, talking philosophy and literature, talking rubbish. Jing Jing was clearly bored with our conversation and engaging more with her phone than with us and she was busying herself packing for her flight to China in the morning.
I could only go tramping on the weekend or during school holidays, as I was working as a teacher. Pinky could go virtually any time. I had actually just gone to Pinky’s to pick up a new Gortex parka he’d got for me. Pinky had a business importing outdoor clothing from China and selling it through his Trade Me business account. Jing Jing, Pinky’s business partner, sourced and selected the merchandise from factories in Hangzhou and Ningbo, top quality stuff, often surplus or cancelled export orders. It was a legitimate business but also a cover for his other business. Parcels of parkas came packed with ContacNT, freely available in China, but banned in New Zealand. They were posted to a Private Bag at a mail centre in Auckland with an account under a false name. Pinky earned a steady undeclared income from criminal acquaintances who purchased the cold remedy for the manufacture of methamphetamine. Good returns for moderate risk. Occasional trips to China and other overseas travel.
Pinky didn’t touch P himself and neither did I. Alcohol was our drug of choice. Pinky disdained drugs and druggies but took a pecuniary interest in illicit commodities that command exorbitant prices. He also disdained gambling but would go to Sky City Casino and play a bit of poker. Just going to the laundry, he would say. He buys a stash of chips and exchanges them for a gambler’s cheque. Clean money. Pinky disdained many things but appreciated irony.
Pinky also imported top quality Scotch and Irish whisky, mostly for his own consumption, but I was not averse to helping out with that. He had just received a batch of fifteen-year-old Dalmore Highland whisky and I was staying on to sample the brew, which we were both finding agreeably fruity and spicy. I had recently broken up with my girlfriend and I was at a loose end and feeling sorry for myself. I was lingering and loitering and beginning to see us as Vladimir and Estragon in a scene from Waiting for Godot.
This is no good, I thought. We need to get out, get some fresh air, go bush. “Let ush arise and go now…,” I slurred.
“To the Pinnacles,” Pinky reiterated.
Jing Jing had disappeared into the bedroom but reappeared briefly, wearing a revealing diaphanous nightie and joined us for a one shot nightcap. Her hair, cut in a bob, was so black that it had a blue sheen in the lamp light. She kissed Pinky on the cheek and said, “Don’t forget you’re taking me to the airport in the morning,”
“Oh yeah,” Pinky said, “better get some sleep, eh.”
“I’ll just crash here on the couch if you don’t mind,” I said. “I’m too drunk to drive home.”
So Pinky and Jing Jing went to bed and I went to sleep on the couch. I woke up a little while later to the sound of thumping and slapping coming from Pinky’s bedroom and Jing Jing crying and squealing. In my drunken stupor I thought they were fighting and I wondered if I should intervene. But then I recognised the thudding of ‘the rhythm of the flesh’ and the slap slap slap was Pinky’s soft stomach slapping against Jing Jing’s hard, flat stomach. They were just having sex. So Jing Jing was also Pinky’s conjugal partner, although I was pretty sure he was still seeing that Kiwi girl, Mandy Whatsername, the journalist. Anyway, none of my business.
Pinky and Perky. Perky? She’s perky all right. No, no. Pinky and Jing Jing. An odd couple. Odd names. I suppose it’s inevitable you get called Pinky when your surname is Pinkerton, and Pinky’s childhood nickname had stuck. And what sort of a name is Jing Jing anyway? Jing Jing is a bicycle bell. It’s not even a nickname. It’s her actual given name. It might be quite an ordinary name in China. But Pinky and Jing Jing? They sound like cartoon characters or fluffy muppets. But they’re no muppets. They’re sharp and gangsta, doing business. I heard Pinky on the phone to a client, saying, “Credit? I don’t do credit. I do cash. No, no product as payment. I said cash. Discount? Don’t talk to me about discount or I’ll never talk to you again.” Another time I heard Jing Jing on the phone to a Chinese client and it sounded like she was berating him. I couldn’t understand any of it, but Pinky had been learning Mandarin, with Jing Jing’s help, and he said the gist of the message was, “Go fuck yourself.”
“Really? She’s got a lot to learn about male anatomy,” I joked.
“Actually, she knows quite a lot about male anatomy,” Pinky said.
*
I was all bleary eyed in the morning as I squinted out the window of Pinky’s Viaduct apartment at the sunlight ricocheting off the Waitematā Harbour. When Pinky appeared I asked him if he was still up for climbing the Pinnacles. Just making sure it wasn’t all drunken bravado.
“Of course,” he said. “I’ll pick you up from yours in a couple of hours after I’ve dropped Jing Jing off at the airport.”
I’d got myself well organised by the time Pinky’s Audi Q3 pulled into my drive. It was a leisurely drive to the Coromandel, the fog of hangover dissipating, and I was quietly anticipating the challenge of the climb. We’d done quite a lot of tramping and rock climbing together but hadn’t been on an outing for some time. We’d been to the Coromandel before, to the Kauaeranga Valley, and abseiled down Sleeping God Canyon, but never been right up to the peak of the Pinnacles.
*
As well as the outdoor pursuits and the whisky, Pinky and I shared an interest in literature, Irish literature in particular, which I had studied for my MA. Pinky’s family had emigrated from Ireland when he was thirteen and he still had some of the accent, also an enduring interest in all things Irish and was very fond of Irish writers: James Joyce, Samuel Beckett, and the poets, W. B. Yeats and Seamus Heaney. Pinky also fancied himself as a poet and liked to read his stuff at performance poetry events.
Pinky and I had gone to high school together and I went on to university, but Pinky disdains universities as ‘bastions of prescriptive knowledge’. “I understand you have to pay to get a qualification,” he’d said, “but you don’t have to pay to get an education. Libraries are free and you can find whatever you want on the internet.”
Pinky’s an autodidact and proud of it. He reads voraciously: fiction and nonfiction, and has a retentive memory. He reads Philosophy, especially Existentialism. He’d learnt French so he could read the French existentialists in the original. He particularly likes Albert Camus’ novel L’étranger and he reveres Colin Wilson and that whole Outsider genre. Pinky identifies as an outsider himself, which is fair enough I suppose. But, as I told him, the outsider is a type that includes not just creative geniuses but also all kinds of antisocial misfits, narcissists, paranoiacs, and psychopaths.
“So which do you think I am?” Pinky asked.
“I wouldn’t presume to categorise you,” I said, “but one of your prime characteristics is intellectual pride.”
“Mm, I’ll own that,” he conceded. Or was it a concession? I think he felt he was justifiably proud and that I should feel proud that I was one of the select few who met his intellectual standards. I am also widely read and can hold my own on literary and philosophical subjects and challenge Pinky’s opinions. Pinky has a tendency to pontificate and quote or plagiarise various writers. Like recently he said, “I appreciate living in a relatively enlightened society, and in a time when we enjoy freedom from want, freedom from tyranny and freedom from religion.”
“Been reading Thomas Wolf, have you?” I said. “Well, I agree about the first two but not the freedom from religion. Freedom from theocracy, yes, but freedom to pursue spirituality is a hallmark of an enlightened society.”
“Spirituality is a problematic concept,” Pinky said.
“You’ve just mentioned freedoms from,” I said. “What about freedoms of?”
“Of course,” he said, “freedom of speech, freedom of conscience and perhaps, above all, freedom of thought. A lot of our great writers struggled to free themselves of religion. Joyce, for example. In The Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Stephen Dedalus said that religion was one of the nets he would try to fly by, meaning he had to escape from.”
“Yeah, to escape from stultifying sectarian Catholicism,” I said, “but he threw the baby out with the bath water.”
“I presume you mean the baby Jesus,” Pinky said.
“Why did Joyce call himself Dedalus in The Portrait?” I said. “Dedalus was the craftsman who made the wings for his son, Icarus, to escape Crete but he crashed because he flew too close to the sun and the wax of his wings melted.”
“Well, he was a highflyer.”
“And Joyce was the craftsman who declared he would ‘forge the uncreated consciousness of his race,’” I said. “Why forge? Were his stories forgeries?”
“I’m sure he had in mind the other meanings of forge,” Pinky said. “To forge in the smithy of my soul…” is what he wrote.”
“Maybe so. Still, it’s an interesting word choice. I believe it was Albert Camus who said, “Fiction is the lie through which we tell the truth.””
“Ah yes, Camus.”
“Anyway,” I said, “I know you regard religious faith as intellectual weakness but there are greater minds than yours or mine who profess the Christian faith.”
A greater mind than mine, Pinky would have no problem conceiving, but he would probably struggle with the concept of a greater mind than his own.
*
No such literary or theological discussion this day. Just a quiet appreciation of the scenic Coromandel countryside as we drove through Thames and into the Kauaeranga Valley. I’d booked a night’s accommodation at a camp a short drive from the end of the road to head off at first light along the Pinnacles track. Eighty minutes out of Auckland and we were in a different world. Subtropical rainforest. Kauri forest. At least what was left of it after the giant kauris were felled and milled a hundred years ago.
I got a fire going in the open fire place and Pinky cooked a meal of venison sausages on the gas cooker. As darkness descended on the hut we sat in silence, but for the night life of the bush: the hoot of the morepork, the shrill cry of the kiwi, the rasping, snarling cry of possums. I had deliberately chosen basic accommodation with no electricity, no wifi, no phone signal, no booze, no distractions. It was an opportunity to broach a subject that had been on my mind. I asked Pinky if he’d seen the news about the guy who robbed the dairy in south Auckland and beat the owner to death with a steel bar.
Pinky said he’d heard about it. “Yeah, the guy was off his head on P.”
“Yeah, that one. What do you think about that?”
“What do ya mean, ‘What do I think about it?’” Pinky said. “A regrettable incident. What should I think about it? You implying I should feel somehow responsible?”
“Yeah, I mean the social harm caused by P. One of your guys might’ve sold him the P.”
“One of my guys? I don’t sell P. I supply one ingredient. I supply a demand. If I didn’t someone else would.”
“Better if no one did though, eh.”
“Maybe in a perfect world,” Pinky said, “but this is the real world. People want what they want and they’ll get it one way or another.”
“It’s driven by greed,” I said. “People want money. Money is the root of evil, as it says in the Bible.”
“A common misquote,” Pinky said. “It’s “The love of money is the root of all kinds of evil.” From First Timothy.”
Many people are radically converted and transformed as a result of reading the Bible. But there are also many who are unaffected by reading the scriptures, at least on an emotional or spiritual level. Pinky is definitely of the type who read the Bible on a purely intellectual level. He actually knows the contents of the Bible better than many professing Christians.
“Right,” I said. “The love of money. And you do love money.”
“I admit I’m quite fond of mammon,” he said, using the biblical term.
“But you do all right with your legit business.”
“It’s not a big earner. I do a lot better with the other business,” he said. “You’re getting awfully judgemental here.”
“I hope it pricks your conscience. Just think about it.”
“Think about what?” he said. “Yeah, I know. Don’t be so antisocial. Quit ruining people’s lives. Make an honest living. But I’m happy the way I am.”
“A serial killer might be happy with his lifestyle.”
“Oh come on, you comparing me to a serial killer?”
“No, no. I’m just saying personal happiness is not a reliable criterion or guide or whatever.”
“It could be, if you’re sane and normal and not harming anyone else.”
“Contestable.”
“You doubting my sanity?”
“No, I mean the part about not harming anyone else.”
“Well, we’ll have to agree to differ on that,” Pinky said. “Anyway, you know, people don’t like being told to ‘think about it.’ It’s patronising. Actually, people criticise me for being patronising too. That means I look down on people.”
Typical Pinky. Deflect and evade with humour when things get serious.
“It is anti social behaviour,” I said. “It creates victims.”
“I’m not anti social,” he said. “I like a good party as much as the next man, especially if the next man is you.”
“True, but flippant and beside the point,” I said. “What does Jing Jing think about it – about the ContacNT business?”
“She’s right into it, obviously. She wasn’t that keen to begin with but she’s virtually running it now.”
“So you persuaded her…”
“She’s got a good life here, better than when she was working seven days a week in China anyway. My conscience is all right. I sleep at night just fine, and I’m going to sleep now. Okay? Big day tomorrow,” Pinky said, settling into his bunk.
We woke at first light with the dawn chorus. A cold drizzling rain was falling and I was glad of my flash new parka as we set off with our day packs after breakfast. We drove the short distance to the end of the gravel road and set off along the track following the river. Pinky set a cracking pace with his long, loping strides and we were soon warmed up. His pace slowed, however, as the track veered away from the river and inclined steeply over the hills and up the old loggers’ pack horse tracks. We didn’t see anyone else on the track as we’d left so early, but then a young woman came jogging up behind us, said “Good Morning” as she passed us and disappeared ahead. She sounded American.
The sun climbed above the hills and shoved the clouds aside. The air became steamy and full of the strident chorus of cicadas. After about two hours Pinky said, “How you doing? Need a rest stop?”
“No, I’m good.”
I could tell from Pinky’s laboured breathing he needed a rest but he was too competitive to say so. We were only stopping to drink water from our flasks. Sweating out the alcohol and rehydrating. We pressed on for another hour and were relieved when the Pinnacles Hut came into view and we felt justified in sitting down and taking a decent break. There was a group of kids in the bunk house, probably a school party, and a middle-aged couple sitting outside on deck chairs, speaking German. We fuelled up on trail mix and chocolate for the ascent to the actual Pinnacles and after a short rest we assaulted the steep terrain of the last kilometre with as much gusto as we could muster, clambering over rocks and scaling ladders up vertical rock faces. We met the American woman coming down. “Steep climb ahead,” she said, “but the view’s worth it.” After about forty gut busting minutes we stood together on the jagged peaks of the volcanic plug of the Pinnacles and I dramatised the moment by announcing, “In the immortal words of Sir Edmund Hillary…” and in unison we declared, “We knocked the bastard off.”
We basked in the glory of the feat and the spectacular views of both coasts for a few minutes. “Well, Sherpa Tensing,” said Pinky, naturally adopting the role of the heroic Sir Edmund, “we still have to get down alive.”
The descent was actually relatively easy going, though my legs were feeling tired and bit wobbly.
At the end of the day, on the drive home, Pinky said, “We must do this more often.”
“Yeah,” I agreed. “I was thinking the Tongariro Crossing next time. See if you can get Jing Jing to join us. She’d probably enjoy it. She looks pretty fit.”
“She might be up for it. She said she climbed Yellow Mountain back in China but I think she took the cable car most of the way.”
“When’s she coming back?”
“Two weeks.”
“Okay. I won’t be wanting to tackle any mountains in the next couple of weeks.”
*
I went back to work for a week and then took a flight to Christchurch, as my father had had a sudden heart attack and I had a funeral to attend. I took bereavement leave for a week and then stayed on for the Christmas holidays to give my mother some support. Soon after I returned to my home in Auckland there came a knock on my door. I thought it might be Pinky, but no, it was Jing Jing.
“Sorry to hear about your father,” she said, and gave me a hug. “And I got some other bad news. Pinky was arrested. The police were waiting to see who picked up the packages. China Customs told New Zealand Customs about the ContacNT in the packages. They got agreements with some countries about drugs.”
“That’s bad luck,” I said, “but that’s the risk he was taking. What about you? Did the police…?”
“Police said they will believe I knew nothing about the ContacNT if Pinky will tell them about his customers, the dealers and meth cooks.”
“What will you do now?”
“I’ll keep the importing business going, but just the outdoor clothing.”
“How’s Pinky? How’s he taking it?”
“He’ll go to jail,” she said. “He’s not happy. And I’m not happy. He blames me. Says I was careless.”
“It’s not your fault,” I assured her.
She started crying and I put my arm around her to try to comfort her. She kissed me and I pulled back.
“Don’t you like me?” she said.
“Sure I like you but you’re my friend’s girlfriend.”
“Not anymore. Partnership is finish. He’s gone back to his other girl. I’ll show you.” With that she sent a text message to Pinky and said, “Now wait for reply. Let’s have a drink. You got Scotch?”
Pinky’s influence again. Jing Jing had developed a taste for whisky. I poured two glasses and was just taking a sip when Jing Jing’s phone tinkled. She showed me Pinky’s message: “You have my blessing.” Was it Jing Jing or I who had Pinky’s blessing? Either way it was carte blanche. That was clearly Jing Jing’s interpretation.
She kissed me again, with tongue this time, and then unbuttoned her blouse and said, “You can touch. You can feel my boobs, if you like. I’ve seen you looking at them.”
As I caressed those mounds of honey coloured flesh, that word, perky, came immediately to mind again. I’d had a few lovers before but none so precocious as Jing Jing, not at the start anyway. She was so casually salacious and yet she touched me at a deeper level than just the physical, approaching some uncharted soulish territory.
*
Pinky got a three-year sentence for supplying large quantities of precursor for the manufacture of the Class A drug methamphetamine. The term was discounted to two years for giving police the name of a customer who was cooking meth by the kilo and he would probably be out in eighteen months. I went to see Pinky in prison and he was not looking good. He’d been beaten up by an associate of the meth cook he’d dobbed in. But he’ll be all right now, he said, because he has the protection of a rival gang in the prison. Pinky can be aloof but he can also be very good at connecting with people. He asked after Jing Jing and said he was pleased I was spending time with her.
“She’s always liked you,” he said. “She’s very emotional. She’ll need a bit of support now and you’re just the decent guy for the job.”
And I was, in fact, spending more time with Jing Jing. One evening after dinner at my place I suggested we go for a walk together.
“Sure,” she said. “Where to?”
“Mount Tongariro.”
“Mountain climbing?”
“No, just walking, hiking. Quite a long walk.”
“How long?”
“Nineteen kilometres, one way, and a shuttle bus to pick us up at the end.”
“How long time?”
“About seven hours.”
“Like the walk to the Pinnacles with Pinky.”
“Not so much climbing.”
“Pinky wanted to do this walk with you,” she said.
“Yeah, but he won’t be going anywhere for a while. What do you think?”
“I think I can do it all right.”
“Good. We’ve got a long weekend coming up with Easter. We can go then.”
*
Easter holiday. Quite a busy time. “Look at all the trampers,” I said, as we set out from the Mangetepopo car park.
“This is not busy” Jing Jing laughed. “If this was in China, like if this was Huang Shan, Yellow Mountain, there would be long lines of people, like in town.”
“Are you going to go back to China again?” I asked.
“Yes, just for the business, not to stay. I want to stay in New Zealand.”
We took frequent stops on our traverse of the active volcanoes and sat on a lichen covered rock at the Red Crater summit to rest and admire the view. I asked Jing Jing if she’d seen Lord of the Rings and I said, “That’s Mount Doom over there,” pointing to Ngauruhoe. “And beyond that is Mount Ruapehu. All these North Island volcanoes are characters in Māori legends. Ruapehu was a beautiful maiden, married to Taranaki and she was seduced by Tongariro while Taranaki was away, hunting. Tongariro defeated Taranaki in a battle and Taranaki was exiled to the west coast.”
“Māori tell good stories, like the Chinese,” Jing Jing said.
We talked about many things, but there, in the cold mountain air, overlooking the Alpine park, Jing Jing dropped a bombshell. She was pregnant.
“Oh my God,” I blurted. “You should have told me before. You shouldn’t be up here walking all day.”
“No, I’m fine,” she assured me. “Anyway, I won’t keep the baby.”
“You mean you want to get an abortion? “
“Yes, I already had one before in China and one in New Zealand.”
I had assumed she was using some kind of contraception. I was shocked at this news: the pregnancy, the abortions and Jing Jing’s casual attitude. I was very uncomfortable with the way abortions are a routine procedure in China and New Zealand, (and many other countries, of course.) But suddenly it was not just an issue to oppose on moral grounds. I was faced with the prospect of potentially my own child being aborted.
“I don’t think you should have an abortion,” I said.
This was apparently a surprise to Jing Jing and she quietly considered my illogical objection. “You want to be Daddy?” she said. “Even if it is Pinky’s baby?”
I paused to consider what this meant and she said, “Didn’t think so.”
“Yes, I will be Daddy.” Was I desperately trying to save the life of a child or was I willingly committing to… to what? Supporting the child? Living together? Getting married? Did I love this strange Chinese girl? Certainly I was fond of her and felt protective. But love? I thought I had been in love before. I learned that love was more than just affectionate feeling. It’s also an act of the will. I could simply decide to love Jing Jing.
“Really? Seriously? You will be Daddy?” Jing Jing was looking perplexed.
“Yes,” I assured her. “You can move in with me. And I haven’t told you this before but I’ve always wanted to go to China.”
“Okay, you come with me next time.”
“Yeah, just for a visit.” I got to my feet, helped Jing Jing up, and looked at the track ahead. The Emerald Lake lay a little way ahead. “We’re nearly half way. It’s mostly downhill from here. Shall we keep walking?”
“Yes,” said Jing Jing. “Let’s keep going.”