The Hole.
A short story inspired by Tāmaki Noir.
Thanks to everyone who made it TĀMAKI NOIR as part of STREETSIDES last night, much aroha and respect to all the readers, our gracious host Emma Gleason, and the Auckland Writers Festival. After a couple of after show bubbles, my friend said I should put this up online, so here we are ;).
Moving through the present, parenthood days, I think back to my youth in the 2010s. Before I considered 8:30am as a ‘sleep in’, my friends and I would stay up late at mildly attended gigs just to spend the rest of the early morning hours walking around the empty streets until we settled on one our flats to continue the night in.
The only obligations we had was to have a shower at midday and show up to our hospo jobs in the late afternoon. I would struggle to be on time.
Life back then was just a game to achieve the perfect balance between being sober and drunk which I’ve now come to realise was blatant alcoholism.
We all get better one day.
Thinking back, I want to share with you a story about a mysterious thing that happened on a particular night in 2011.
THE HOLE
It’s 1:38am and we just scored a box of Carlsburgs from the whole saler at 24/7 bar. You can buy a whole forty ounce of liquor for eighty bucks but I wouldn’t be able to afford it, let alone the hangover.
The boys have left all their gear in the back room of the bar that they just played at.
We have a small rambunctious group trailing along an empty Ponsonby Road. One of the girls procures a bottle of red wine from the back of her dad’s lamp store and we make an itinerary of who has cigs before making our way to the Shell station to buy more.
Just at the top of Williamson Ave, there is a fine misty fog forming and it looks like it is getting thicker as we see the yellow glowing shell sign in the distance. On our left there is a huge fenced off hole that is the size of two blocks across, and goes all the way down about five or six stories.
It was meant to be a new shopping complex called Soho Square, the faded billboard still showed an artist rendering of the finished product: A series of retail shops, a movie theatre and for some reason a cafe called Mocha which would never survive among the snooty coffee lovers in this city, especially Ponsonby/ Grey Lynn.
“Apparently it cost 250 million dollars before they went bankrupt during the recession.” Said one of the guys.
Construction stopped in 2008. The hole had been empty for so long that a stagnant pool of water had settled at the bottom. Tall swamp grasses are now growing from their putrid waters.
Even during economic collapse, nature always finds a way.
The site used to be a thriving yeast and vinegar factory. My childhood mornings in Grey Lynn would smell like marmite which led to never having a taste for the black paste. Once the smell was gone, the housing prices went up and more joggers in active wear started charging around on the footpath.
I miss those marmite mornings.
We peer through the wire fencing at the state of it. We can see massive letters spelling something across the neighbouring wall:
‘I WISH THIS WAS A SWIMMING POOL’.
Whenever graffiti pops up it gives way to certain opportunities never before considered. For city kids traversing our concrete wilderness, It’s like Hansel and Gretel following breadcrumbs. Not to say that trespassing is safer with the presence of graffiti, but it shows us that someone did physically make it to that particular spot.
Without even talking we started looking for openings in the fence line, as we followed along around the corner a potential opening revealed itself at the gate. It was basically wide open, somebody had made it look closed by fastening it with a road cone but you could easily get through.
Now that the entrance had been secured, a couple of the guys went to get a pouch of Port Royal and agreed to meet us back at the hole.
“make sure you bring ingredients!” one of us called after them, that meant, please get some papers and filters.
The fog was much thicker in there as the air became colder. The site had been abandoned but there were signs of a recent past where a lot of people had been working. Big diggers unattended to, forgotten and weathered by the rain. A cursed site office that definitely had someone squatting in there judging by the broken window, which was boarded up with cardboard.
We started moving down a huge clay ramp to the body of water resting on a very expensive foundation layer of long forgotten concrete. It was roughly half the size of a rugby field and totally covered in black glistening swamp water. Rusty iron rods stuck out of the calm, their shadows reflected on the surface under the orange glowing street light. The fog made the shapes look like they were alien skeletons hanging in mid air.
It was a ghastly place, and we loved every inch of it.
At the edge of the water we could hear crickets echo in the night. We took swigs of Merlot and shared the last tailor made cigarette as we took in the space. It felt like we were on the edge of the world, anything was possible.
“How much could I pay you to swim in that?” asked one of the guys, we all crack up.
Out of nowhere, a friendly voice calls out from behind us.
“Kia ora guys, what are you doing here? Where is your safety gear?”
We all spin around and freeze, ready to make a run for it.
From the worksite, a tall, broad shouldered figure in high vis approached calmly from the mist.
He didn’t look like a security guard, he was wearing a t-shirt under a yellow high vis vest, dirty jeans and tan work boots. It looked like he had just arrived for work. He was totally unbothered by the cold morning air.
What a tough guy.
I decided to break the silence “Uh, we were just on our way home and we heard a noise so we wanted to come and investigate. Sorry, it must not have been anything.”
“Oh yeah,” looking out into the distance ”that might have been something around the water.” On cue, we hear a splash in the water “Yes it’s probably best if you go. It is not a good place to be right now”. He was firm but relaxed
The temperature kept dropping.
“Of course, thank you…” We started moving but curiosity was getting the better of me.
“Do you work here?” My friends looked on wide eyed, one of them mouthing ‘shut the fuck up’ behind him.
“Yeah you could say that, I keep an eye on things. I’m from this area and with the recent construction I’ve been asked to come down here for a bit”.
Something seemed off but we bid the man farewell. We quickly and calmly started walking up the clay ramp toward the gate. At about half way, I looked behind my shoulder and he wasn’t there any more. But there was only one way in and out. If he climbed up the tall clay bank we would have noticed, he was gone.
Then out of nowhere one of my friends whispers “Go!”
We bolted for the gate. It felt like it was twice as far because we were going uphill. We didn’t stop when we met the guys who had just made it through the entrance.
“Wow, you guys look like you’ve just seen a ghost”
We run past them and shouted over our shoulder “We need to go! We’ll explain later!” We didn’t bother securing the gate, we all escaped into the orange black mist. The group ran flat out for about two or three blocks. We collapsed on the concrete steps under the big Rhododendron trees on Sussex St. We’d made it home.
Back at the flat on the porch we played music off YouTube videos and recounted what happened to the others but nothing was lining up.
“Did you see he had a full moko?” said one of the girls next to me.
“Nah” I said.
“But you were talking to him!” Her eyes widen, “maybe I just have bad eyesight?”
Another thoughtfully interrupts. “When we were leaving, you see something moving in the water, it looked like something was swimming under the surface”
We all fell silent because none of us were sure what others had seen.
I needed more clarity. “Wait… can you tell me what you could see, like, you said he had a moko, what else was he wearing?” I was hoping something would match up but I was already getting chills.
“It looked like he was dressed up in a costume or something. Like a long cloak… I don’t know, the fog was in the way” one of the girls said.
“I couldn’t really tell because of the fog and we had already started moving away from you guys.” said her drunk boyfriend. “I wasn’t sure where he went eh”
“But he was wearing construction gears…and no one has been working there for years! Plus it’s 2am, what would a construction guy be doing there?” I speculate.
Then one the others ominously call out
“Maybe he never left?”
Everyone groans, someone yells over the group “ghosts aren’t REAL.”
With a wicked smile they keep going, “Well, he said he’s from the area and he got asked to keep an eye on things. Maybe he’s been there for a long time? Like…a taniwha’s assistant or something?”
Everyone was rolling their eyes, but honestly? I felt kind of scared by the prospect of meeting a Taniwha’s assistant.
“Maybe he’s just from the pad down the road?” Everyone cracked up and then moved on to more urban legends like the Rat King at Whammy Bar and the red blip you see before you die.
Shortly after the debrief, the small party was ended by noise control and we all went our separate ways. As I was nursing a hangover the next day, I got served papers whereby I was informed that my flat were in the top 10% loudest residents in Auckland and if we got noise control again the police would confiscate our sound system and any musical equipment in the house.
Seeing that we were all musicians with heaps of gear, I put my old stereo on the grass outside and it was gone before I could make a “Free” sign for it.
Hopefully she made it to a good home and did what she loved the most: Pissing off the neighbours.
In the afternoon, I walked past the gate that we went through and the whole thing was boarded up and chained.
Which is weird… because it looked like it had been like that for a while…
After the recession ended and all the rich developers got bailed out from their own bankruptcy they built a Countdown supermarket over it. In the private parking floor where all the flash cars are secretly stored they kept the massive graffiti piece from all those years ago.
“I WISH THIS WAS A SWIMMING POOL”.
Tino Tino pai, hugely hugely good, great writing! I was quite scared, and then I got more scared! O those days...
It's a real thing when you're around that age, having somewhere odd to hang out, that isn't home, and which feels kind of strange, even creepy, sometimes dangerous.
We used to have a hut down the Waikato River. You had an old derelict building open to the elements, that should've been a swimming pool, but wasn't.
Friends of mine went and created a resort-style pool there, at The Hole, near the end of its days, after one of the Pasifika Festivals.
They had beach towels, beach umbrellas and wore sunglasses etc, and they were all lounging around the actual disgusting water, on the concrete, making out like it was a resort! Doris de uPont told me she was going to swim in it! She insisted they all were up for a dip!
They tried to get me to hang out there too, but I wouldn't go anywhere near that water!
Great piece of writing anyway thanks very much for sending it to me, really enjoyed it!
Hei konei ra arohanui nei xxx