Terry

Terry befriended me in the kitchen this morning. I was in my PJs and I didn’t have my glasses on - quite the sight as I searched wooden cupboards for a coffee mug. Terry introduced himself. He was making toast. He said I could use his milk if I liked.

When I set out yesterday from Upper Hutt, I had packed badly and made no real plans. I’ve been sick for nearly three months, a glacial recovery from COVID, moving between bed and couch and back again, getting more and more fed up with myself. I decided I needed to get out of town for a bit. Bugger the details. I just wanted to drive.

Hastings was as far as I could manage in a day. I got there about 5 PM. The place I’d thought I might stay - a backpackers - wasn’t where Google said it was. Nor would they pick up the phone. I stood on the main street, looking forlornly through a locked glass door at nothing in particular. I scrolled for something else, something cheap and last-minute. I’d never done Airbnb before. I half-read the description, a room in a place on a street I didn’t know, and I entered my credit card number.

It was dark when I arrived. This was a part of town I’d never been to. The street was almost unlit as I parked up. Dogs barked from sections - the type of dogs I’m mortally afraid of, kept for protection as much as love. I found the address. The landlady, Bronwyn, was warm. She showed me the shower, the loo, and how to lock my bedroom door from the inside. The bedroom was warm and tidy, straight off the kitchen. There were shampoo sachets on folded towels, and I figured out how to use the TV remote. I went to bed almost straight away.

It was the early noise of breakfast-making through the bedroom wall - someone getting ready for work this morning - that made the penny drop. I was in a kind of doss house. Terry explained it to me as we talked in the kitchen. He’d been living there for a while, thought it was pretty good. Bronwyn took care of the place, kept it clean. It was affordable: warm too. The people were friendly.

Terry was retirement age or older. He didn’t say how he’d ended up in the doss house, and of course, I didn’t ask. My guess is that whatever financial security he had was lost through divorce, and he found himself with few options. He was dressed for his part-time job as a bus driver, told me about it, hands in the pockets of his jacket. After we talked, he took his food to his bedroom.

I did my dishes in the sink, and then I took a shower. Now there was another resident in the kitchen. He was younger than Terry, in his fifties maybe. He told me his name was T. Would I like him to make me a coffee? Milk, sugar?

I was packing now, keen to get on the road, but I couldn’t say no. We talked. T liked the doss house too. Terry’s a nice guy, he confided, and the other guy who lives there was OK as well. T asked me where I’m from, and he told me about himself. He was Hawke’s Bay born and bred: his kids and grandkids live just down the road.

T told me he works in the pack house most of the year, but in the off season - about two months - he takes a break. After all, pack house work, with its standing and lifting all day, is tough on the body. In those two months a year, he buys a station wagon and he sleeps in it, so he doesn’t have to pay rent. He just drives around. He goes to the hot pools. He loves the hot pools, at Rotorua especially.

If you go to the hot pools, you can get a massage. You come out of the hot pools, and you feel so relaxed. You can get a massage. Your body is so soft, it just feels so good to get a massage. Yeah. They’ll give you one. Sometimes they’ll give you money too. A dollar maybe. Yeah. You just drive around the hot pools. You’ll feel so good, your body’s so soft, they’ll give you a massage. Mmmm.

I finished the coffee T had made me, and I smiled blankly and said, it was nice to meet you. I need to go now. He said, do you need help with your bag? And he added, it’s a shame you’re not staying - I could give you a massage.

I have thought of this today, in the car, winding through the forest and up the coast. I had to find my way through it with words, ordered and undone and recombined. Because people are not a plot device. They are not the punchline to a gag about a respectable lady who accidentally crosses to the wrong side of the tracks for a night. They are not the occasion for her to reflect a moment, embark on a really brief character arc, and tell LinkedIn she’s hashtag-blessed. They are definitely not a reason for that same lady to think that a life lived differently to hers is somehow lesser.

Here’s what I think I need to say.

We talk about the housing crisis as people in cars and motels and on the streets. All of these things are real. All of them are catastrophic. But crisis is not always spectacular. It can be something all but unnoticed, unrecorded in dramatic statistics, a creeping deprivation, an erosion of citizenship as most of us understand it, a meal eaten in a bedroom because there’s nowhere else for it. An inability to plan, to dream - to figure out how to make things better - because nothing can be built without a foundation.

It’s being told how to lock your bedroom door from the inside, not that you shouldn’t f*cking have to.

I got the hell out. T watched me as I pushed my things into the boot, but I would not meet his gaze.

This was mostly written at a café in Napier, about 9 AM, my undried hair sticking to my face and my neck as I typed. I did what I could, over a pot of tea and then another; until I had to pack up before I could finish, get on the road to Gisborne before the heavy weather set in.

Terry has plans. He told me about them, as I stirred my coffee, and there was light in his voice. It’s not that he doesn’t like where he is: it’s fine. Bronwyn does a good job, and the other residents are OK too. But he wants to move to Phuket. He dreams of it. He’s been there once before and he fell in love. Maybe he’ll be able to own a house there. It’s affordable, warm too, and the people are friendly.

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