THE LOWER DECK

EPISODE 27

2010-11-09T19:17:00.001+13:00

'What a time to come back from his sojourn in the South Island looking after his aged mother!' I mused sotto voce as I boarded Quickcat on the Monday after the swearing-in of the first Supersilly Board. I was of course thinking of the Fellow Passenger, who had been away from the Beloved Rock for a couple of years, and had returned just in time to be one of the brave 300 who had crammed the Ostend Hall to enjoy what is optimistically called Democracy. He had of course been keeping up with the all the goings-on on The Rock through copies of Gulf News, websites and emails, including lots from yours truly. But to arrive latish the morning of that fateful Saturday, and after a quick bite at Get Stuffed to go straight into the local Supersilly maelstrom was bound to cause a reaction in him today--one of those hearty Fellow-Passenger reactions.

So I was looking forward to arriving very early at the CeeBeeDee--aka the 'heart' (note the optimistic term) of the Horrid Ruin--because I was expecting a lot of help from what might be called the jet-engine principle. Not jet-engines that disintegrate with a bang on Qantas superjumbos and spray Rolls-Royce bits over the grateful natives (because on their incomes they normally couldn't get anything made by Rolls-Royce). No the normal sort of jet engines, the ones that push you along faster the more stuff they chuck out the back. And because I expected the Fellow Passenger to be more than a little ticked off by the Saturday Afternoon Setup in Dodgy City, I expected so much stuff to be exiting at high speed from the back of dear old Quickcat that we would be zapped across to the Foul Smoke in nothing flat instead of yer usual 35 minutes.

So I got myself emotionally and physically prepared--which means I spruced up the greyware in the cranium and fitted the set of mega ear-plugs that had been taking a rest while the FP had been in Mainland parts--then went over and sat beside the great man. He greeted me like a long lost brother, which was very nice of him, considering that we are not related. We couldn't be, because his ancestors came via DNA forged in some superhuman machine designed to withstand nuclear attack and reduce the other lot to rubble with a quiet word or two. Me, I'm just your average Rock-head.

I got meself sitting four-square on me neatly-rounded botty, and waited for IT. I was right. IT came. I was glad the bloke clinging to Quickcat's joystick that morning was one who had had long experience of the FP's little ways, otherwise we might have veered on full power and demolished part of Matiatia on the way out (Te Whetumatarau Point in case you want to be technical--i.e, that sharp bit on the left as you exit to the Supersilly).

'IT', to quote from the previous paragraph, began with a noise that would have put a Saturn V rocket to shame. Which is putting it hyperbollically mildly. So I revise that. Krakatoa and Mount St Helens working together on full puff would have been gasping in astonishment and awe. Even what used to be Mount Taupo before it blew itself at the Moon (and altered the sunsets in China as a passing trifle) would have retired defeated.

'AAAAAAAARRRRRRRRRRRGGGGGGGGGGGGGGHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!!!!!' is how it would be represented in the English tongue. But there's no tongue like the FP's. That flappy chunk of whatever material his Mum used when the great man was in her belly during construction is special. Very special, because it has to withstand close encounters of the third kind with whatever decides to do the lightspeed fantastic out of his larynx. Which is a mild English word for what in his neck is the launch-pad for what physicists would call table-top experiments to copy the Big Bang. Except that in the FP's case the 'table-top' is a tad larger than you might have in your kitchen. Far bigger than that pathetic little wart called Table Mountain in South Africa. Even a table the size of Africa with America tacked on the side would be a tight fit.

'Democracy?' the Great Man asked both us and Alpha Centauri (4.5 light-years away, in case you've forgotten). To the collective astonishment of the Lower Deckers the echo came back immediately, which I know defies the laws of physics, but we were in FP territory, where physics does not dare to tread. Except that in the echo the question mark had been changed by those Alpha Centaurian Little Green Blokes to an exclamation mark. 'Democracy!' they bawled across 4.5 light-years of the known universe, thus causing a sonic tsunami that did for the Galapagos Islands, on the way to giving Quickcat acute angina in its Massey-Fergussons (and upsetting all the worshippers of Darwin, who are now offering reverent sacrifices in a plastic copy near Disneyland).

'DEMOCRACY MEANS THE COMMUNITY, THE WISHES OF THE PEOPLE, WHAT THE PEOPLE WANT!' the Fellow Passenger informed Alpha Centauri at full bawl. 'What the people want?' echoed the AC LGMs, again interfering with the FP's puncturation marks. No, that was not a typo. His punctuation does puncture things. Like the space-time continuum. There was a pause while we digested the meaning of their alteration. Then light dawned, first, of course, in the visage of the FP then doing the Mexican wave thing across the visages of all the Lower Deckers.

'We want Denise!' we bawled. Or, to put it more accurately. We bawled and the Fellow Passenger BAWLED.

'Denise!' echoed the Little Green Alpha Centaurians.

Hands across the island, hands across the galaxy. United across space and time in our exclamatory punctuation. What a warm glow it gave us all! Nice to know that the democratic message had got out that far that fast. Maybe they read Gulf News on-line through some broadband wormhole. I dunno. I'm not a Trekkie so I don't know much about astrophysics.

But then we noticed that the glow was not universal. There were Four Cringers over in the starboard aft seats who were not rejoicing with us. Their glow looked like the glow of a dead cellphone. Or an even deader fish. One that you might have been sleeping with for three weeks after it had met its sad fate. They must have been going over to some meeting in The Empire where they could fine-tune the best of their skill and judgement to deny us our mandate. Odd that they were on the Lower Deck. They are obviously Upper Deckers, and had never before been seen down amongst us plebs. Maybe the seeing-eye dog can't get up those steep steps now that she's on the Golden Labrador Card. (Odd that they didn't swear her in too--after all, she is part of the decision-making nowadays.)

A gleam appeared in the eye of the FP. I knew what that meant. So, from the looks on their faces, did a few of those who remembered some of the FP-EVENTS of a few years back.

It wasn't planned. I swear it wasn't planned. But suddenly every eye swivelled to focus on The Cringing Four, in particular She Who Must Be Obeyed. 'HA!!!' roared the FP.

It was too much. The sudden swivelling of every Lower Decker eye was almost more than they could bear. But that stupendous 'HA!!!' whooshing past the FP tongue at something above light-speed did them in. They leapt to their feet. 'That's a big mistake,' I thought. 'Never leap to your feet at the moment like this, especially when you are so close to the stern!' But not being too aux fait with the telepathy thing, not being tuned in to the thoughts of the plebs, they didn't pick up the warning vibes from my cranial greyware. Otherwise they would have sat down, pronto, and taken firm grip on their table.

They didn't.

Involuntary muscles are funny things. They do to you what you did not want, would not have chosen, would never contemplate or consider. Like, in this case, running four abreast out of the cabin, full tilt. Towards the aft rail. And not remembering that little raised bit that goes across the bottom of the doorway. And therefore catching your eight feet on it. While you are running at full, involuntary, speed. Which is not wise. Because you become airborne.

'HA!!!' bawled the Fellow Passenger again, with perfect timing. Because it caused even that experienced captain to lurch forward on Quickcat's joystick. Which caused Quickcat to lurch forward. Which, if you are Four Bods already airborne, and heading aft at high-speed, leaves you, very suddenly, in mid air about 300 metres behind the boat.

Then gravity kicks in, and you find yourself, all of a sudden, having to start your crawl-stroke through a lot of very wet stuff.

And having to listen to a great long roar of applause from the boat. And a booming warm-glow echo blatting in from Alpha Centauri.

EPISODE 26

2008-03-10T21:47:00.001+13:00

We slid away from the Horrid Ruin against the usual backdrop of islanders taking the first gulps of clean sea air they'd had all day, and I idly watched as the Fellow Passenger went to the counter to get whatever supercharged refreshment keeps him going. Then he came back to his normal seat opposite me and opened our two papers. I watched with acute trepidation.

Yes, I know there used to be three papers, but the third, known to lovers of good reporting as Wicked & Weak and was really nothing but Malicious Merv's genetically modified Kalashnikov-soapbox, met its Waterloo, thus becoming a hiccup in history, after that unfortunate double whammy. First the aforementioned Malice Aforethought was done for taking on an over-the-top skinfull then driving, if you can call what he was doing driving. Perhaps he'd been taking lessons in weaving. Whatever it was it caught the attention of some chaps in blue shirts who kindly wrote him up in their notebooks then went to the trouble of recounting his unusual background to a bloke in a black gown. But that meant he couldn't get about to fill those yellow-peril bins any more, and no one else wanted to touch his Wicked Weakness. They all knew about that incident when a couple of visitors (Aucklanders, fortunately) believed the old line about 'Today's news, tomorrow's fish-and-chip wrapping,' and bundled up their shark and taties in W&W. They died in horrible agony three days later of the strangest case of food-poisoning ever seen by medical science. Then Madam Wrong, also of the scurrilous rag in question, had that brush with something nasty in the woodshed. No one ever found out what but that was the coup de grace. So now the island is back to LizNews and GeorgeNews, which is where it should be.

All that shot through my mind in the time it took for the FP to scoot through the papers more or less simultaneously and arrive at THAT article. The one that I knew would set him off.

'Half a billion dollars!' he howled, in what for him was only a mildly sonic entry into the main event. 'Forty-one consultants! WHO DO THEY THINK THEY ARE!?'

I knew the question was rhetorical. And that he was probably going to tell the waiting universe the answer.

'HUBRIS ON STEROIDS!' he bawled, now pretty well on song, as some violent peturbations in the space-time continuum bore witness. I expect TV reception in Outer Mongolia was having a hard time too. Then in case anyone on the boat hadn't read the Liz-and-George yet and wasn't au fait with the gist, the FP went on air again and let them know all about it. Myriads of Little Green Men were obliged to eavesdrop too.

'They've hired forty-one consultants and are spending half a billion dollars of RATEPAYERS' MONEY to find a symbol for the Horrid Ruin. PAH!'

Quickcat veered (must be a new captain, I thought) towards Whangaparoa, which was just as well. If that unplanned change of course had happened a few minutes earlier it would have been North Head. Which is closer, so the result would have been a ding of the first magnitude. And a mass sinking feeling. And screams and struggling into lifejackets. The sort of thing that wakes everyone up. (Not that you get so much sleep on Quickcat, because its Massey-Fergussons don't have the soporific effect of Superflyte's humming speed.)

'They want something that sums up Auckland's heart and soul!' read the FP, and he broke into such a fusillade of laughter that I feared for his internal bits. Even hyperstrong ones might tear themselves into their component DNA and spread him all over the carpet. But, no, not his. I heaved a sigh of relief overboard. He was still in one piece, and still laughing.

'Auckland doesn't have a heart. It doesn't have a soul,' he shrieked gleefully, much to the discomfiture of Quickcat's welds, and the rivets holding the planet together. I could have sworn I saw one pop out from somewhere behind Rangitoto and head for outer space faster than than SuperKent.
'But that didn't stop them converting a fortune into consultants to tell them they have,' I ventured.

'HAH! HAH! HAH!' bawled the FP, clearly tickled by my interjection. 'But they didn't have to bother. They already have a symbol. Skite Tower!'

Three women behind us started rolling round on the floor. They were obviously amused by the FP's little witticism. If it was one. I personally thought it was just an accurate observation.

Then the captain put the radio news over the blower. Obviously a chap with a healthy sense of the absurd, even if he wasn't yet up to par with the FP's PAHs. So we heard the announcer announce an announcement to the effect that Orc City had come up with its definitive symbol. And because it was radio not television he had to describe it to us: 'A small sphere, about 10mm in diameter, with a thin coating of orange on the outside and brown stuff in the middle.'

'A JAFFA!' screamed four of those females who like to state the obvious.

There were shrieks of laughter, gales of laughter, fits of laughter all over the boat, people were rolling hysterically on the floor, weeping fit to bust themselves with overwrought mirth, they were shaking like jellies and gripping each other helplessly, great convulsing floods of tears were in danger of sinking the boat, and you could tell from the body-language that there were bladders straining at the leash port, starboard and aft.

It was truly a sight to behold, but my attention was on the Fellow Passenger. Something bigger than a mere boatload of hilarity and precarious bladders was welling up inside him, it was about to emerge, it was working up a head of steam that promised to make the Tarawera eruption apologise for being a squib and a downright failure. I fervently hoped they hadn't forgotten to batten down the hatches before they hit their cots on the far side of the universe, because his expression told me what was coming. I was right. He unleashed the biggest GUFFAW ever heard in that space-time thingy. In a perfectly timed echo Quickcat's engines laughed like a drain and we all fell about all over again in paroxysms of joyful hysteria.

It was one of those shared island moments that we will treasure all our days.

EPISODE 25

2007-10-08T18:52:00.000+13:00

'A MEASLY FIFTY DOLLARS!' bawled the Fellow Passenger, at what for him was only a slightly mild example of sonic assault-and-battery.

On the edge of Outer Mongolia the National Guard snapped to attention, thinking it was the start of the Presidential cannonade and wondering if he would notice that they'd got up late that morning and hadn't cleaned their uniforms. You wouldn't want to upset that guy. He'd built his palace above the State Dungeons so that he wouldn't have far to go for amusement when he wasn't watching himself on television. Rather like New Zealand really.

Pretty well the entire Lower Deck got the FP's drift instanter, even though the dear chap had as usual got into the story halfway down. Because we had all endured the involuntary lights out and the heaters off and the chomping of unthawed vittles during that long power-cut, followed by the mass dumping of rotten fodder and the winkling of much candle-soot from our nostrils, and it still rankled in the Beloved Isle's collective bosom. Rankled. Yes, rankled. Especially after a few of us found those pitiful $50 cheques in the mail yesterday, and were therefore suffering the insufferable of the Measly Kind, while the rejected majority, who had had to read Vector's letter of refusal, were suffering it of the Third Kind. So the FP had unerringly reached into some very tender places and, as usual, had expressed them with sufficient rage. We looked forward to the rest of this one. Vector, though, was not going to enjoy it. At least we fervently hoped not. That arrogant outfit deserved to get it in the ribs.

As if reading my mind the FP went into Part II of his cannonade.

'THAT ARROGANT LOT SHOULD BE HAGUED!' he fumed. 'They force us to get down and grovel for their measly "promise" before they can be prised loose from it, and they call the slightest breeze "extreme conditions" so that they can weasel their way out of giving us a single bean. Such nice chaps! So trustworthy and full of integrity and the milk of human kindness.'

I could see instantly that the FP was taking the Disney Rodent again. So did most of the Lower Deck. But there was a bloke of female persuasion in the far aft corner who wasn't grinning. A visitor to the Beloved Isle from the look of her. I made a mental note to keep her on my radar screen. You never know. The FP might have spotted something and be doing a bit more than taking the DR. Perhaps someone was in for a wake, if you get me.

'The blokes who climb up the poles and fix the problems are real human beings.' the FP informed the Yanglebuttian Parliament on the far side of the space-time continuum. You can tell. Anyway, they're Waihekeans. But there are bods in the hierarchy, Aucklanders to the toenails, who wouldn't know honesty if they were married to it.'

I pondered that one. Even Mendel, I decided, would not be able to predict the sort of nippers that would arrive on Planet E via National Womens if such a marriage were possible. My neurons boggled so much at the thought that they all got the hiccups and had to blow into nano paper-bags to get themselves back in sync for the FP's next instalment.

'Who made the network vulnerable to the wind in the first place?' he enquired of the universe. 'They did. But are we getting power-lines put under ground? No, they leave them up there where the wind can blow them flat, and trees can fall across them, and cars can bang into them. They don't seem to know that the wind doesn't blow under the ground, that trees don't fall under ground, and that cars can't drive under ground. Perhaps they went to Tomorrow's Schools and never learnt those things.'

He beamed at us. We beamed back, being au fait with the FP's little digs. But that woman who does national policy at the Ministry of Education, who moved to the island recently, scowled horribly. You must know her. She always sits two rows back from the Mothers' Middle, dressed in grey from head to foot. She reads things. I assume. Perhaps she's only pretending, being one who failed the remedial reading classes because she never had the advantage of Janet and John, who got you reading in nothing flat. I cannot figure out why she lives on the island. Definitely not one of us. Maybe she mistook a sign and ended up here by mistake. It obviously can't last. I expect a for sale sign on her place very soon. We sort out the real homo sapiens from the fakes.

'Their pathetic best is to order the humans in their empire to dismember trees with a manic chainsaw so that there's less chance of one of those 'extreme' breezes knocking the lines down,' continued the FP. 'As if we didn't have enough idiots adding to global overheating by murdering trees.

'Even when the power is on, you can't trust it. It gets the hiccups and your computer goes down, just as you were about to save the novel that was going to make you rich and famous. To get a reliable computer you have to buy an uninterruptible power-supply. Maybe Vector owns shares in the UPS companies.'

I idly wondered if the power had to blow into a large paper-bag when it got the hiccups, but not being an electrical engineer I was not qualified to sort that one out. I suspected that the lack of a mouth might make it a bit difficult. But you never know these days. Some R&D fella beavering away somewhere in China might have figured out how to give it one. I only hope he got it right. The prospect of being eaten alive by Vector's the power-supply was not one to fill you with joy. It would be even worse than being chewed into emotional and financial rags by the size of the bills. Probably.

'Then you get the bills,' thundered the Fellow Passenger, once again showing his remarkable capacity for getting on the telepathic email networks. 'It's enough to make you want to rant and rave.'

Nobody argued with that. Who could? Aha! Someone could, because there was a very black look on the physog of that woman over in the far aft corner. More right-on-the-button telepathic stuff by the FP. Was she from the Vector hierarchy? Quickcat shot past us, heading out to the island, and Superflyte heaved over her wake, which caused the Vector-possible to send a folder into orbit. Even at that distance the logo on the cover was unmistakeable. I wonder how he does it. Hu knows, but he's not letting on.

She leapt to her feet to rescue her precious folder, and at that precise moment the Fellow Passenger went into an awe-inspiring rant-and-rave cadenza, so she copped the full sonic wallop right when she was galvanising her muscular bits. Bad move. She sort of spasmed, and her legs took on a life of their own, emulating errant bee's wings in a very pleasing manner. Her spasm rotated her, her legs wildly propelled her, and the result, as you might have guessed, is that she moved aft at high velocity. Unfortunately, not being in full control of her faculties she tripped over that raised threshold between the cabin and the outer deck, became airborne, then did the screaming-in-the-wake bit in most entertaining fashion. But she made a mess of being fished out. It took the crew three goes. I'm not sure they were trying their hardest. Anyway, it's not easy to get things right when you're laughing uncontrollably.

People said afterwards that it was worth missing out on fifty bucks to see it, and that they'd boast to their grandchildren that they were there. The FP's pockets were soon bulging with tips. It came out later that she was the boddess at Vector who signed those 'No $50 for you--haha!' letters.

That man is a miracle!

EPISODE 24

2007-10-01T23:33:00.000+13:00

Superflyte was making its swift way over a glittering Gulf last week and I was miles away, trying to come up with as many variations as possible on the name of the Beloved Isle. Waiheke Island was your basic no-brainer. So was Waiheke Isle. But Waiheke Is., could be seen two ways--as an abbreviation for 'island', or an exuberant 'IS!' After all, what better place IS there? Then, with an obvious nod to Janet Frame, who had proved that she was not loony by living on it, there is Waiheke Is-land. And with a double nod, to Janet Frame and Tanya Batt, we could have 'Once upon an Is-land.'

My thoughts were suddenly decaptitated by an eruption. 'Lake Taupo has exploded again,' was my dull brain's first approximation. 'Or Tarawera has just annihilated Rotorua.' Then I returned to the real--i.e., the island--world. Because what else could it be? It must be the Fellow Passenger getting vexed and discontented about something. I tuned in, hoping he would repeat the opening words. I'd caught only their sound and fury, which to my far-away neurons signified nothing.

'THERE'S NOBODY THERE!' he bawled again, giving hyper-audible second-level proof to half the universe that there was at least one person there. I glanced round the Lower Deck and did a quick estimate. Perhaps my eyes were operating on a deficient plane compared with the FP's, but it seemed to me that a couple of hundred people were there. But I can be patient. I can wait for the FP to work his way back to the start of the story. On the Lower Deck we all can. It's a skill you pick up.

'EXCEPT THE RECEPTIONIST,' added the Fellow Passenger, still broadcasting at the volume that messes up the Guatemalan telephone system and makes Scotty fear for his engines.

I was beginning to get a glimmer.

'THEY'VE ALL BEEN REPLACED BY RECORDINGS!!!' elucidated the FP, in what for him was extraordinarily quick time. If that really was elucidation. Most of the Lower Deck were still a bit fogged, to judge by the blank looks and a few opaque shrugs. Visitors, obviously.

Scotty, I thought, must by now be yearning for a commercial break so that he can get his engines back on song, in case Captain Kirk wants a bit of Warp 7 in a hurry.

'You call Company X, you explain what you want to the recptionist, who puts you through--she promises--to the bod you want. BUT THERE'S NO ONE THERE! THERE NEVER IS! JUST RECORDINGS!! No one actually works there, except the receptionist. It's all pretence. NO WONDER THE COUNTRY'S IN A MESS. NO WONDER NOTHING WORKS. THERE'S NO ONE DOING ANY WORK ANY MORE!

On the other side of the universe that lot somehow got tangled up with the report from the Captain of the Guard of the Sacred Yanglebuttian Shrub to His Imperial Majesty YB 3095, and the entire Shrubbic Guard was summarily executed for dereliction of duty, because they had sloped off for something called a 'receptionist' and allowed themselves to be replaced by an alien life-form called 'recordings.' Thus, once again, the Law of Unintended Consequences struck the innocent hard.

'And to rub an ocean of insult into your wounded soul,' the FP went on, gazing grimly at something or someone in the middle distance, 'while you're waiting for this Nobody you're forced to listen to the sort of music that people used to hanged, drawn and quartered for, on account of the fact that it was a public nuisance ranking up there with Adolf Hitler and Pol Pot.'

Obviously a few Lower Deckers of the extreme and youthful kind didn't agree with that last bit, judging by the way they adjusted their iPodded ears, prodded meaningfully at their facial rivets and looked blackly back at the FP, but you had to agree with him. It does seem to be a modern law that the musical tastes of the people who chose on-hold music never coincide with yours. No, revise that. The National Bank seems to have taken the most-recorded-music-in-history into account when deciding on its offering. I was about to blurt, 'National Bank', not wanting to see the Great Man err, but he was ahead of me.

'If the National Bank can get it right,' he thundered, 'why can't the rest of them?'

As I have noted on previous occasions, the man must be telepathic. Perhaps a speaking voice capable of addressing the entire universe correlates with telepathy. Or perhaps it's just an artefact of his stupendous volume. If it can mess up intergalactic cellphone traffic, perhaps it can, for him at least, enhance the brain-to-brain stuff in his immediate vicinity. I dunno. Whatever it is, it's uncanny when it happens.

'Akl Quaeda Council,' goes one better, the Fellow Passenger informed the Yanglebuttian Parliament, amongst myriads of pear-shaped bods in far-off galaxies. 'Even when there's someone there, trying to get a meaningful response is worse than trying to win a lottery. It's nothing short of misguided optimism on a death-wish.

'Then there's those outfits that insist on employing new immigrants with little or no English on the frontline of call-centres. I have nothing against immigrants, so long as they pay the wharf-tax, but to put the poor things in those jobs is stupid. I'm not being personal. After all, I'm descended from an immigrunt myself. But we should be practical.'

Privately, I thought he was more of an immi-snort, an immi-howl, an immi-bawl, an immi-thunder, or the over-endowed descendent of an immi-nuclear-attack. A grunt seemed rather on the undernourished side relative to the FP. Although I had to admit I'd never heard what he could do with a grunt. I hastily decided I didn't want to know and expunged the thought, just in case that telepathic thing was working and set him off. Best to let sleeping universes lie. You never know what might happen. A low-frequency burst like that might do nasty things to a boat too. I'd paid good money for my ticket and didn't want to have to swim for it.

'But there's a way of making sure there is somebody there,' the Fellow Passenger informed the universe.

We as its closest representatives sat up and paid attention. This might be important. This might even be earth-shattering. No, delete that. With the FP it might turn out to be true. We had no wish to end this trip to the Horrid Ruin clinging to some fragment of the planet, adrift in the void. So let's stick to 'important.'

'Just look as if you are poor or middle-class and want a resource-consent, or intend doing what you want without one, and there'll be more officials down your neck than you can shake a stick at. All saying 'NO' at you in loud voices. Thus nobody will be replaced by NO-bodies. NO-bodies to the left of you, NO-bodies to the right, of you volleying and thundering. And charging you like the Heavy Brigade.'

The Fellow Passenger drew a huge breath. It was a wonder the planet had any atmosphere left when he stopped and gave tongue with a revised version of his opening line.

'There's NOBODY and NO-BODY there!' he roared.

Even Superflyte sounded impressed by that.

EPISODE 23

2007-09-24T08:47:00.000+12:00

'POLICY!!!' roared the Fellow Passenger, pretty well at the top of his lungs so far as I could judge through my superstrong titamium-kryptonite-concrete earplugs. 'SACRED POLICY!'

Quickcat's engines sort of gulped, there was a rather uncomfortable veering towards Motutapu, then the captain got the thing under control again and we chugged on. A couple of retired cow-cockies across the isle sighed nostalgically at the sound of her engines. They must have been in their prime in the good old Massey-Fergusson era.

'O, hear ye, people of the Beloved Isle,' the FP's mega-announcement went on, 'you are commanded, when you hear the sound of horn, pipe, zither, triangle, dulcimer, music, and singing of every kind, to prostrate yourselves and worship every single great golden policy which the Akl Qaeda Council has set up. Whoever does not prostrate himself and worship shall forthwith be thrown into a Resource Consent application without end and be utterly consumed in its terrible fires.'

We sat, as you might imagine, stunned. This must be something that had escaped the eagle eyes of Gulf News and Marketplace, and Waiheke Week. Why had we not been told? The only silver lining to this was that no one had heard a horn, pipe, zither, triangle, dulcimer either singly or together. Music and singing had been heard, one could venture to say, but the Beloved Isle seemed so far to have escaped that list of instruments. What, I wondered, was a dulcimer anyway?

While the FP took a breather to glare furiously at life the universe and everything, I fished in my bag for my trusty Oxford dictionary. Hmmm. 'Musical instrument with strings of graduated length over sounding board or box struck with hammers, prototype of piano.' I wondered if Whittakers's Music Museum had one. And what was a zither? 'Simple flat many-stringed instrument placed on table or knees and played with fingers of left hand and partly with plectrum in right hand.'

Which settled that, but Oxford was mum on the reason the Akl Qaeda would want sound the get-down-and-worship alarm with that assemblage of instruments. Had they gone mad? Had they slipped the rope to the sanity of life and surged away into the wide-open sea of pathetic insanity? Impossible, surely, to believe!

Then I realised, and could see that the Lower Deck was also realising, that the FP was taking the Disney rodent. He was pulling our collective legs. He was tugging all our liddle pink tootsies. It wasn't true.

Or was it? Could the Akl Qaeda have set up Policy as a god that we must all worship or else suffer some horrible, fiery fate? Could they really be putting policy above the disparate folk of the Beloved Isle, the great weird Waiheke family? Could they really be planning something far worse even than than sending swarms of bureaucratic car-bombs over every day and all day to blow up our pleasant and peaceful lives? Could they really have elevated Policy to the status of the divine, and be forcing us into pagan rituals at the drop of a dulcimer hammer?

'They have elevated Policy to the status of a god!' bellowed the Fellow Passenger, settling that question once and for all. Even the little green chaps on some minor rock whizzing round the most red-shifted star in the universe got it loud and strong. It messed up their celebrations of the centenary of the death of Yanglebut the Fourth, who had shuffled of his mortal coil in spectacular circumstances on his 10,051st birthday. Choked on a pretzel and turned into a large shrub. It was now a fine old tree, and was greatly revered. But when the sound-waves flip to the flipside because some clot on the far side of the universe is raving about dulcimers, every member of the Yanglebuttian Admirers Brigade feels a bit aggrieved. You spend months polishing your abdominal warts and getting your toe-claws arranged according to the Fifth Manual and what was the point? The whole ceremony kaput. It's enough to get you chewing yumbitalian rocks.

Shredded their sacred shrub too.

It's amazing what the feedback echoes from the FP's sonic outbursts tell you. Some sort of warp-factor transmission, I expect. Coupled with a bit of a gift for picking things up, I expect. Whatever it is, it adds to the flavour of ferry trips to the Horrid Ruin. Takes away something of the dread of arriving and finding that it's still there.

'I wish the whole place would be instantly transported to some other universe,' bellowed the FP.

I pondered on that one. A bit unfair to whatever universe it landed in, I thought. What sort of being would want the Akl Qaeda Council dumped on it? Enough to make you warp off to some other space-time continuum instanter. Perhaps the FP meant a hitherto uninhabited universe. I expect so. He's a kind chap. I wondered what sort of life-forms the AQC would evolve into. A terrible shudder convulsed me. I ceased to go down that track. It definitely did not bear thinking about. Just call it horror beyond horror beyond limitless horror and leave it at that.

Just then a strange sound, or more accurately a strange collection of sounds, by some unknown means came over Quickcat's public-address system. A horn was heard, then a pipe chimed in, followed by a zither, then a triangle dinged, then, oh horror! a dulcimer began to play, and suddenly we were hearing music and singing of every kind. But you have to hand it the Lower Deckers. Did they prostrate themselves before the Great Golden Policy that Akl Qaeda Council had set up?

No, they all took a deep breath and blew the biggest collective raspberry ever seen or heard anywhere in the space-time thingy. It even impressed the Yanglebuttian Admirers Brigade. Restored their faith in alien life-forms by untangling every flipside vortex in their atmosphere. It also unshredded their shrub.

Sadly, it didn't even dent the Great Golden Akl Policy--even when the FP added his atomic version. It's obviously made of something so tough that nothing could ever have the slightest effect on it.

EPISODE 22

2007-09-17T11:50:00.000+12:00

I knew I was taking a risk with the universe, but something had to be done--you could sense it seething hopelessly all along the Matiatia queues every morning--so it was with a mixture of extreme trepidation and determination that I came to the boat that day armed with a copy of the Resource Management Act, bookmarked at section 7.

I was to be disappointed. The Fellow Passenger was not on that sailing. But I had an appointment in Orcsville, so I couldn't hang about in the hope that he would be catching a later one. Perhaps he would be on my boat coming back at the end of the day.

He was, so before he had a chance to launch into whatever he might have had in mind for us I opened up the RMA and asked the Great Man if I could read him something then ask a question. He graciously assented.

'Section 7 of the Resource Management Act,' I began nervously, opening the tome in question and smoothing out the relevant page, 'says that, "In achieving the purpose of this Act, all persons exercising functions and powers under it, in relation to managing the use, development, and protection of natural and physical resources, shall have particular regard to," a list of things--such as, "The ethic of stewardship; the efficient use and development of natural and physical resources; and the maintenance and enhancement of the quality of the environment; and the efficiency of the end use of energy"--and this one in 7(c): "The maintenance and enhancement of amenity values".

'Amenity means pleasantness, of course' I said, hoping he would not mind my presumption in explaining such a simple word for the benefit of the Lower Deck. 'We have to keep and make better the Beloved Isle's pleasantness.

'Why, then,' I asked, getting to the point at last, to my great relief, 'was that damnable eyesore allowed--that crude container on the ridgeline above Matiatia? Is it pleasant, in anyone's most wildly perverted imagination?'

I had expected some shattering reaction from the FP. I had lain awake at nights thinking about bringing this section7-and-horrid-box continuum to his attention, worrying about the universe, whether its shocks were in good nick and whether it would survive his reaction. Well it did. Just. But I expect you already know that. Otherwise you wouldn't be reading this. I assume. You can never tell. We might actually have got ourselves tangled up with Schrodinger's cat and got whipped into a quantum-effect that it never thought of. Which all whipped through my neurons in the space it took for the FP to take in half the planet's atmosphere.

'PLEASANT!?' he thundered, setting a record for volume that I imagine will never be broken even by those megaphone-mouthed aliens out in the ninety-first quadrant (down the road from the Big Bang if you are having a bit of trouble with your intergalactic geography).

'PLEASANT! PAH!'

I had hoped we might escape without a PAH! You never know what's going to happen when the Fellow Passenger lets rip with one of those. The sound seems to have some sort of focused effect, so it does strange things. We were sitting on the port side of the boat, so I was staring straight at the Devonport naval base when the first PAH! came hurtling out, followed by a fusillade of them that had every sentient life form anywhere that was anywhere clutching something solid and hanging on for dear life.

Something shot off one of the frigates and headed for some destination mysterious. I hoped nothing untoward was going to happen. I especially hoped that I was not going to be responsible for the end of the universe. People might not like it. You wouldn't want to be the person responsible for such a thing, especially for such a trivial thing as the RMA. Dealing to eyesores on a ridgeline on the Beloved Isle was one thing. Important, yes. But causing the destruction of the universe was quite another. Some might not think it a fair trade-off.

The FP took a deep breath. We braced ourselves. What followed was so fast and furious that I couldn't get it all down verbatim so I'll just have to give you the flavour. You'll have to use your imagination to add enough volume to shatter the Big Bang, make the aforementioned megamouth aliens blush for shame, and crack yer standard V8 cylinder-head, and you'll be getting the picture. He raved. Yes, raved. I cannot tell a lie. He raved. He raved about blockheads who cannot tell the diff between pleasant and unpleasant; he raved at clown planners (I think that was the spelling) who wouldn't know pleasant if it married into the family; he raved about councillors who promised their best then did their worst every time; he raged at the lovers of ugly who had graduated from wrecking bus stops to vandalising hilltops. Even experienced Lower Deckers sat open-mouthed. The FP getting wildly vexed and discontented was a sight and a sound to behold and to hear. I expect no one in the known universe, or beyond, disagreed.

By the time we reached the Motuihe Channel he had wound down sufficiently for normal interstellar broadcasts to resume, then we entered a stunned silence, soon to be underlined by the slowing down of the boat as we entered Matiatia Bay. As we did that pirouette into the wharf I happened to look up. Something, I thought idly, was wrong. Or, more accurately, right. There was something was missing. Then it dawned on me. The suppurating eyesore was gone. How, I wondered, could this miracle have happened? A murmur, a joyous murmur, was spreading through the boat, even to the Upper Deck, and people were surging aft, not just to get off the boat but to get a better look. Word was spreading, there were exchanges between the people on the boat and those waiting on the wharf. And thus all became clear.

Apparently the thing that had shot off one of the frigates at the naval base had been a surface-to-surface missile, unable to take that fusillade of PAHs from the FP. Its works had started to work regardless of what the naval budget might have wanted and it had set course at high speed for the Beloved Isle. What goes up must come down, and down it had come. Smack on the eyesore, and had reduced it to bits so small and vaporised that there was nothing left of it but a big black mark on the hill. Very apt--marking the spot and the score all at once. Thank God for the Navy!

The Fellow Passenger was chaired off the boat. The rejoicing amongst the islanders on the wharf made ecstatic jubilation look like one of those pathetically weak smiles that politicians give voters.

EPISODE 21

2007-09-10T12:56:00.000+12:00

'Naked' bawled the Fellow Passenger, instantly getting the attention of every Lower Decker, along with half the known universe. Odd how a hint of skin always does that. You'd think no one had any they way they go on about it. Or maybe no one has bathroom mirrors. But I veer, and the FP is back on air.

'Naked in the jungle,' he went on at the sort of level that makes a 747 on full throttle sound like a muffled library card. 'That's what you'd be. It's an ineluctable fact of history.'

I idly wondered how many people knew about this 'ineluctable.' After all, I'd known a chap who was a High Court judge who didn't. Had to have it explained that it meant the same as inescapable. But you have to take these unusual words for a walk now and then. They get so lonely and depressed sitting about in a dictionary all day unused, unwanted, unloved. Be kind to lonely words, I say. Do them random acts of kindness. Yay!

But I veer from the FP's nakedness. Of the rhetorical kind, I hasten to add. They don't let people with skin on the boats. Except for that girl with the backless mesh dress, who comes mighty close. Obviously finds it hard to make ends meet on a student allowance. Anyway, as usual, I, and everyone else within range, wondered what the Great Man was on about. What was not usual is that I, his faithful Boswell, was not sitting opposite him. I had tripped over a couple of dog-leashes on my way to my favourite pozzy, and by the time I was closing in on it it was already occupied by a purple-headed, yellow-shirted, red-shod creature, replete with enough oddball jewellery to start another Transfer Station. And enough face-paint to cover the planet to the height of three wheelie-bins. Not to mention the box of assorted rivets puncturing assorted and miscellaneous bits of her anatomy. I suppose that's how she keeps it all together, but if I were her I'd keep well away from that MRSA superbug. If she caught that little nasty in her rivets she'd quick-smart look like one of those flesh-eating diseases on fast-forward. Ebola on steroids. Not a pretty thought, you might say.

As I had come over her horizon I had seen her vehemently pushing some politically-correct point at the FP. How, you may wonder, did I know from afar that it was a politically-correct point? Easy. With what other sort of point would such a person be stabbing the air whilst facing down a bod of male persuasion? Quod est demonstrandum, as they used to say back in the days of the Roman Empire before anyone had had the sense to invent English and they had to make do with Latin.

Perhaps it was such erudite musings that caused me to think that the FP's bellow was not 'Naked in the Jungle', as in some obscure 1930s film classic replete with as much epidermis as the studio thought it could get past the Hays office on a long weekend. No, he must have been set off by something that the PC female had stabbed his way.

I slid into the seat beside him, so that I could gaze with rapturously into the face of the mobile Transfer Station. He nodded briefly at me and returned to the fray. Nice word that. You could imagine things fraying universally every time the FP gave tongue. 'Ravelling sleeves everywhere. But I wondered if he was wise to get drawn into this lot. He was bound to say something so outrageously politically incorrect that even he would be in danger of being forced to walk the plank, hanged from the yardarm, or both.

'As Camilla Paglia, the American feminist, said,' he thundered, 'if women had been in charge from the start, we'd still be living in grass huts. But she was optimistic. We'd be living naked in the jungle.'

Light dawned. The FP was wading into feminist ideology. I trembled, and I don't mean because of the FP's earthquake-inducing sound-levels. Did he really think that he, even he, could make a dent in forty years of all that?

The mobile Transfer Station said something unprintable, but if I report that the air turned bright blue (which rather clashed with the rest of her outfit) you'll get the picture.

'History proves it--' the FP began, only to be interrupted. Now that was new. No one, no one, not a single Lower Decker had ever interrupted the Great Man. You had to give her that. She had managed what we had all thought impossible.

'HER story,' she shrieked.

'History,' thundered the FP, shaking the universe down the last nut and bolt on its most ancient Black Hole. 'History proves it. If you were to wave your magic riveted wand and instantly remove from the world everything discovered and invented by men, you'd find yourself living naked in the jungle. There'd be nothing running on electricity, there'd be no engines, no tools, no nails, no houses, no cars, no tarsealed roads, no nylon, no looms, no cloth--no anatomical rivets even. Nothing that you take for grunted. Just bodies and jungle and a few grass huts.'

That didn't go down well with the Transfer Station. You could see that. She was shaking violently with such fury that it impossible to focus on her. She was a multicoloured blur. I wondered how she could stand having all that metalwork vibrating in her flesh at that speed. Surely it must hurt like the Dickens. I wondered, we all wondered, what her reply would be to the judgement of history. We soon found out.

A scream began. Not too loud at first. Softly, like a 747 starting up. It grew louder and louder and louder till it reached the level the same machine reaches when it lands and goes into full reverse-thrust so as to avoid tipping everyone off the end of the runway. Which was a pretty apt metaphor, because if all you can do is scream you have obviously admitted, but are refusing to admit, defeat of the Fourth Kind. In denial, you might say.

The Fellow Passenger, being able to outclass an entire Boeing factory of 747's without the slightest effort, was unfazed by the Transfer Station screamer. But his reaction was unexpected. He just gazed at her with a strange, sad expression. I would have expected a triumphant air. But no, just that steady gaze and a sadness that was beyond all measure.

I looked around. As I had expected this was one FP diatribe that had not met with universal approval. There were some grim looks amongst the politically correct bods of female persuasion. I wondered if he'd gone a bridge too far and blown his credibility for ever with a fifth of the Lower Deck. I could see no flaw in his logic, but who am I to judge--and it didn't matter a hoot anyway. Where and when, in the history of the entire space-time continuum, has political correctness been logical?

Poor chap. My heart bled for him. All his shaking of a humungous swathe of the universe, and a bunch of PCs were still unmoved. Even a hyper-Snort couldn't have budged them.

But then he began to weep. 'She was wonderful,' he wailed. 'Extraordinary. Brainy, beautiful beyond compare, a pearl beyond price. The most heavenly creature who ever lived and moved and had her being. Oh, oh, oh, how I wish she was still on this side of the eternal divide!' On the last word his voice broke. Only the sobbing remained.

The Lower Deck was very quiet. There was obviously much mulling going on, billions of PC neurons were dying a death, and hearts were weeping with the Fellow Passenger. Superflyte fled on across the shining sea, homeward.

EPISODE 20

2007-09-03T18:46:00.000+12:00

'Local!' bawled the Fellow Passenger, starting as usual with what upmarket cynics might call a mission-statement--to use a bit of corporate jargon, and thereby pretend that this exercise in reportage will be more serious than a survey of public faith in politicians. But seasoned Lower Deckers only saw it as the good ole FP being his normal start-at-the-end self.

'Local as in anaesthetic. And body as in dead!'

I don't know how he does it. A few words and all the ills of local government (to use a common oxymoron) are summarised. Is it brilliance, or the result of some genetic modification done by his Mummy without a legal licence?

'Local bodies!' the great man snorted, obligingly giving us all an encore of the intro. Quickcat did a sudden course-adjustment (must be a new skipper unused to the FP's megasnorts, I thought). 'Local as in anaesthetic and body as in dead.'

Denizens of the Lower Deck massaged both copies through their neurons, chewed the mental cud on them, tipped their heads sagely on one side and pondered in approved fashion; the collective nod announced the poll result. We agreed. The FP had caught it in one. Anaesthetists might consider themselves hard done by, but he'd come up with a bon mot of the Third Kind. We all leaned forward expectantly, wondering how the thing was going to develop. With an opening like that, FP-connoisseurs hoped for a top-end performance and an entertaining trip, albeit not one enjoyed by the Noise Ossifers orbiting Alpha Centauri.

'That's all you can say of them.' opined the Great Man. 'Except for that rare and wonderful breed, those sterling chaps and chapesse, i.e., the true public servant, which the Beloved Isle has been short on since it was taken over by Orcsville, that's all you get. Numbskulls and deadheads.' He wound up the volume and repeated himself just in case the universe had missed it the first time.

'Numbskulls and deadheads,' he bawled. 'That's what we get. The rare-and-wonderful in the empire are buried in the anaesthetic and the corpses and can never do much except spit.'

The Lower Deck nodded as one, so the FP was sitting on a hat-trick. Not, I reflected, getting a bit off the script, that there was a hat, had every been a hat, would ever be a hat to match that magnificent head. I was jerked back to the real world as the owner of the head went back on air, much to the discomfiture of television broadcasts in several South American nations, a swathe of Outer Mongolian romances, assorted ceremonies on far-flung alien rocks and the way someone at a neighbouring table was devouring a Fullers' pie. Got it all over his physog. Sort of mashed up his nostrils, making his eyes protrude in a most entertaining way. Obviously new to the Lower Deck. He'll learn.

'PAH!' bellowed the FP, earning a third nod from the Lower Deck faithful and getting the hat-trick brilliantly. What else, we were all thinking, could be said? Nothing could be more apt at that juncture than a Class One PAH! We weren't clinging to our Mummies for this one. No, we only wanted our PAHs. Muscle not niceties, that was the thing here.

'They keep us anaesthetised with dull despair so that we won't upset the game of Monopoly they're playing with our money all day and every day,' the FP shot out, miraculously managing the whole thing on a single breath. 'They kill the joy of living, they want the whole world to be brain-dead. Only then will they feel at home.

'There are too many of them,' he roared, winding up the fury a galactic notch. 'The City Mangler should blast through his empire and prune. Prune! Hyperbolically! Prune off the dead wood; prune off the sick wood; saw off the crazy branches; dig out the cancered roots; cut off the fungal growth. Get the tree back to being nothing but tree, make it alive again, bearing fruit--not those blighted things that poison the populace.'

Wild applause broke out on the Lower Deck. The sound-level would normally have been described as deafening, but with the FP about 'deafening' had acquired a whole new meaning. We had done our best, we had broken the record for applause-volume-per-head, but we could never match him. But we had done our bit, we had voted, we had approved, we had added our collective Yay! to his PAHs. The Great Man beamed at us. He's never one not to acknowledge good judgement and support. Not to mention that indefinable Waiheke rapport.

Recharged in that interlude, he went back into his rave: 'Akl Qaeda Council is the kind of outfit that says "Don't worry about the fact that we're pumping a bullet into you every month, because we've bought you a nice new pair of socks." And you say, "Yes, but they're full of cooties and they've chewed all me toes off." So they say, 'Don't worry about that, because we've bought you a nice new hat." And you say, "Yes, but it was dyed in depleted uranium and it's given me a head full of tumours." So they say,"Don't worry about that, because we've bought you a nice pair of knickers." And you say, "Yes, but now I have the world record for haemorrhoids. I can hang ten on them." 'And we keep falling for it. We're only a flea on the backside of Tyrannosaurus Rex, but we're petrified at the thought of jumping to a liddle bunny because it might not sit down on us in the same kindly way.'

The FP chortled. I blinked, having never heard that sound from him before. I could have sworn that Quickcat's engines made a sort of chortling echo. Nice old girl. Obviously has the Waihekean sense of humour.

'It's the perfect combination. 'They're the sadists and we're the masochists, saying, 'Please, keep hurting us. Akl Qaeda keeps blowing up our pleasant way of life with political and bureaucratic car-bombs, and we keep asking for more.'

He changed channels and went into a quick English lesson for every alien civilisation on the outermost fringes of the red-shift.

'You may have noticed that there isn't much difference between "rats," "rates" and "rapes," ' he thundered. 'Those rats are serial ratists.'

We couldn't argue with that. The wounds from the latest fusillade of rates notices were still oozing. A Council wallah in the corner, who must have been on the boat by mistake, tried to cringe into the shelter of Rangitoto, which was a bit stupid because he couldn't get through the wall of the boat. But you can't expect logic from a bureaucrat.

My mind wandered off as he busied himself with the impossible the pointless and the useless (creatures of habit, aren't they), and again I mused on the fact that the oldest city in the world is Jericho, founded in 8000BC, and that every New Zealander has to have at least ten years in school. Out of which I had concocted the saying, 'Ten thousand years of civilisation and ten years' education, and this is as far as we've got!? I want a refund.' I wondered what would happen if we applied to the Orcsville Slimy Council for a refund, on the grounds that we weren't getting enough civilisation. I suppose they wouldn't know what we meant. My ponderings ended abruptly as the FP changed channels and went back on air at the sort of volume that gives far-flung galaxies a big kick in their supernovae.

'GOBBLEDYGOOK!' he screamed, sounding like a plenary session of rocket tests. 'All to hide what they're up to till it's too late to change it. Our District Plan should be short and simple, it should be written so that we can all follow it. We shouldn't have to jump all over the place on multiplying trails of cross-references and end up so befogged and angry that all we want to do is reach for the guillotine and lop off a few heads.'

I expect, I thought, its all a horrid plot by those grey people, those lusters for power, to take over our lives and rule them in millimetres.

'It's all a grey-faced plot,' the Great Man bellowed.

Telepathy again, I thought admiringly. I really don't know how he does it.

He finished with the sort of sonic boom that would make the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs ashamed of itself for under-eating on intergalactic spinach and letting down its Mum by turning out such a pathetic squib.

'PAH!!!'

EPISODE 19

2007-08-27T10:50:00.000+12:00

Politics isn't really my beat, so I like to shelter in the magnificent shadow of the Fellow Passenger when it comes to making a noise about all that stuff. But I can't help thinking--to veer at this point in the script while the FP prepares to draw a couple of cubic kilometres of air into his XXXXOS lungs--that if that Nat bloke's a Key I'm a Dutchman. The Beloved Control Freak obviously doesn't think so. To her he's more the sort of 'key' that the Bomb Squad uses on your front door at three in the morning when they're mighty anxious to get in and zap the pile of high explosive that you'd been holding in your living-room till your dear friend Osama comes to town. You know the implement I mean. Boom! and half your frontage disintegrates, leaving you and the missus exposed to the view of all the rubbernecks in the neighbourhood. And that was the night you had chosen to skip the jim-jams on account of global overheating and a slight case of wanting to give the national baby-boom a bit of help. Anyway, he sure isn't the sort of key that could hide under the doormat while you do a quick run down to the supermarket for something to cover your nether-nethers. There's no telling what he'll do once he's in and rifling through your furniture.

Right, that's given the FP time to recharge his nuclears and limber up his vocal chords. Although 'chords' applied to him seems such a pathetic word. Whatever his are they make pohutukawa roots look anorexic. (I do like this stream-of-consciousness stuff. Except with the FP supplying the head-water it's more like a Niagra pouring from my brain-damage.)

But he was a bit slow getting into his stride that day, and I must have fallen asleep. I'm sure you know the swift soporific effect that Superflyte can have on you at the end of a hard day in the Unlovely Ruin. I dreamed. Or did I? I never could tell. But whatever it was, I saw. Yes, I saw... The Akl Qaeda Council, those strange beings hidden from human ken on the farflung borders of Paralysistan, busy planning to blow up real life on the Beloved Isle wherever their nasty little minds could find it (part of me wondered vaguely how they'd recognise it).

'We have a Cunning Plan,' they gloated into their noisome cups of brown water, 'we have a Twenty-year District Plan, so chopped up, partitioned and divided, with so much fine print and cross-references and sub-paragraphs packed into it that no one human will ever untangle the thing before the deadline (don't we just love the FINALITY of that word!), so it will all be cut and dried just the way we want it (OH, SUCH LOVELY TERMS!) before they can say KNIFE! Hah! BLOOD, BLOOD, BLOOD!!! We just love the stuff. As long as it's not ours. Not that we have any. Not red, anyway. We have the real, superior, black stuff. Like all Orcs.'

And they chewed ravenously on the human bones handed out by the tea-lady. If, that is, a being with three green-and-scaly heads could be called a lady.

'Yesssss. Ssssoooo complicated,' they hissed in unison, sounding like Medusa on a bad-hair day and Himmler on steroids, 'so verrry verrry complicated that we're all guaranteeeeed employment for ever and ever and ever.'

'BLAST THEM!' roared the Fellow Passenger, jerking me back to the Lower Deck with such force that my DNA shrieked in alarm. But his outburst fitted my dream or vision or prescient knowledge or whatever it was so exactly that I wondered if he had been seeing the same scene. Uncanny that chap. Underneath his Force 29 exterior there are some extraordinary abilities. Nuances, you might say. Yes, I know, 'nuances' hardly seems to apply to the chap, but I speak truly.

The rest of the Lower Deck, not being privy to the trailer, were taken aback by the sudden introduction of the BLAST THEM! motif on the FP's hyperspace multiplex. Half of them had to pick themselves up from among the scavenging pigeons, who looked a tad put out at the interruption to their repast. Too many humans in the floor-snacks today, you could see them thinking. Pick a peck of pickled Peter...

Superflyte surged on, pretty well unscathed by the blast. Obviously we had that super-captain at the wheel. The grey-haired chap with the rimless specs. You have to admire him. He goes beyond the fast pirouette and knife-edge charge-back. He can handle (and I know I'm sticking my neck out here) whatever explodes past the FP's tonsils. I hope.

The FP paused for a few nanoseconds. Again I nodded off, and the vision came back. You know how things are in dreams. You can get through a century while the clock on the wall only manages a few seconds. Anyway I saw in living colour what an island bus driver had once told me about. He had had to tour some Orcsville boo-rock-rats around the eastern end so they could skite to hordes of ditto wildlife from other empires what a mess they were making of everything by mis-using the Resource Consent Act. When one of the others said something about the cattle on the hillsides, the head Orc gave tongue, saying they hoped to get rid of them all. Upon which the dream cut to island farmers busily milking the moo-moos, and suddenly being invaded by a phalanx of boo-rock-rats in cattle-trucks, come to take them all away because they were making the place look, well, rural. Against rat policy. Only rats allowed. All non-rats must be exterminated.

'WE WANT IT ALL TO BE LIKE REMUERA, QUEENSTOWN AND SURFER'S PARADISE,' they chanted with manic glee as they charged about. 'OR, EVEN BETTER, LIKE DUBAI!!!'

'Why?' enquired a voice.

'BECAUSE THEN WE GET MORE RATES.'

'Why?'

'BECAUSE WE WANT POWER, AND MONEY IS POWER.'

'Oh.'

'When the blah-rot-rats run the world,' howled the Fellow Passenger, somehow chiming in perfectly, 'all you get is blah and rot and rats. Stands to reason. They invade, blasting their way in with rates demands, and next thing they're rifling through the furniture of your life and feeding you whatever cyanide and ammonia they think is best for you. But, being aliens, they only make a big mess. It's like having an elephant with diarrhoea in your living room. Not easy to get out the door and always doing full-throttle on the number two doo-doos.

'They're like drug addicts. But they're addicted to feeling important, and to fund their habit they go out and mug people in the streets. Druggies do it with knives and guns and other weaponry, but the Orcsville boo-rock-rats use rates demands, gerrymandered with over-the-top fraud called valuations.

'BLAST THEM!' the Fellow Passenger thundered--and suddenly my dream was being multiplexed, because everyone found themselves staring at images of nefarious, plotting Orcs being beamed all over the walls and ceilings. Somehow the Great Man had enabled all of us to see into those dastardly Orcsville Slithery minds. Amazing the effect his ultra-sonics can have on human metabolism. I think his blast had acted like one of those keys; it had blown the lid off my brain and turned it into a projector so that the whole Lower Deck could watch the vision-movie. So we were all being taught at speed, and in lurid detail, to keep a very tight grip on our nether undies. Otherwise, as we could see, the boo-rock-addicts would be snitching them off our clothes-lines and exposing us all to their howling gales of frigid rules.

EPISODE 18

2007-08-21T08:31:00.000+12:00

We were only five minutes out of Orcsville, it had been a long hard day, and heads were already beginning to nod as the Superflyte-snooze syndrome began to overwhelm Lower Deckers. I hadn't expected to see the Fellow Passenger on that sailing, so I was sitting a few tables forward of his normal place, and I hadn't spotted him when he came on board because he had arrived in his normal majestic fashion accompanied by that panic of last-minute scurriers, and the high seatbacks had hidden me from his view. Otherwise I'm sure he would have hailed me as usual in a way that would have been shared by at least half the known universe.

So it was a pleasant surprise when I heard that familiar sound, like a 747 at close range, as he began to draw a breath or two in preparation for the day's address. Instantly recognisable, of course. I shoved in a couple of those extra-dense concrete earplugs, the ones that do so well on my stall at the Ostend market, moved back to his table and greeted the Great Man warmly. He was pleased to see his Boswell, and said so, as several billion people can swear to--not to mention the citizenry on of planets throughout the space-time continuum.

He, obviously, was not in snooze mode. I don't think he ever is. I wonder if he sleeps. Somehow I doubt it. Just plugs himself into the national grid and drains every dam in the South Island, I expect. It would take something like that to keep him going. Maybe that's why the spot-price for our electron-juice stays in the stratosphere. And why Transpower wants to vandalise the countryside by running another extension-lead down there. No, impossible! Not the FP's fault. They just love being vandals and giving maximum unhappiness to the greatest number. Bureauc-rats, obviously.

While all that was passing through my single brain-cell, we were listening to the 'In the unlikely event of an emergency...' message from the best-looking members of the crew, and then my theory about the lack of a snooze-mode in the FP was proved violently right.

'SPECULATORS!' he thundered, getting into the swing from the word go for a change and instantly galvanising a whole Lower Deck of black looks, frothings at the mouth and tooth-grinding mutterings. He had our attention to a bod and a boddess (nice pun that).

'They come, they mess up another bit of the Beloved Isle, then off they scurry with their gluttonous sacks of il-gotten gold,' he cried, ramping up the sonic energy a tad--I assume because he considered more volume was needed. 'The furniture van is just the prelude to the For Sale sign. Or they don't even bother to ship in their obese heap of yuppie knick-knacks. Two weekends here with 8000 real human beings and they're on the real-estate hotline wanting out.

'For them Waiheke is not a place to live. The most they can endure, if they don't do the auction thing ASAP, is a couple of weekend parties with a giggle-gaggle of similar non-humans. Living is not on their agenda--here or anywhere. They exist; they have a lifestyle. But live? No! They never heard of that. So being surrounded by islanders gives them nasty itches that scream, "Scratch me with a giant auction cheque." '

I could see Lower Deckers nodding furiously. Definitely no nodding of the snooze kind. Pure agreement, scathing and universal.

'To such people (I use the term loosely),' the FP fumed, 'our place is just megabucks waiting to drop into their already overstuffed wallets.' He cranked up the volume another notch--at which the space-time continuum seriously wondered if it should call it quits and retire. 'So they buy a charming patch of land or bush or a quaint old bach, and they hire an architect with who specialises in UGLY to Develop It. As soon as he's finished putting up the last bit of leaky corrugated iron at some horridly warped angle they hock it off and scurry off with the takings, leaving a hideous eyesore for islanders to suffer stressed-out agonies over for ever. All aided and abetted by the brain-damaged Boo-rock-Rats over at Orcs Slithery Consentsville, who ignore that bit in the Resource Management Act that tells them to keep our amenity values and make 'em better. Of course, they can't read the dictionary, or anything else, so they haven't found out that amenity means pleasantness.'

He broke down, and the next bit came out between earthquake sobs. 'That means beauty, aesthetics, the look of the thing. They say it's too hard, thus proving a lobotomy of taste, a genetic-modification of hyper-blindness, a Class A of stupidity, or all of the above joined, amalgamated and super-glued.'

Every rivet in Superflyte shook and sobbed in sympathy. So did we. We had no choice. About the shaking, I mean. When the FP shakes, everything else does.

But I did reflect, trying to be fair, that it might not be the fault of the Consentsville Boo-rock-Rats. It might be that they got educated after Tomorrow's Schools came in. And tomorrow, as we know, never comes. Then I slapped myself, thus risking prosecution under the anti-smacking law, in the sudden realisation that nothing could excuse bureaucratic incompetence and mental corruption. Not even Tomorrow's Schools could make that much of a mess of a human being. The FP had paused to recover and take on some more of the planet's atmosphere while these musings were passing through my neural zone. Then he went back into his crie de coeur. And ours, to judge by the atmosphere of suppressed fury with which the air was thick. It was a wonder that even the FP could draw any of it into those massive lungs.

'The favourite trick of these creatures is to mess up a ridgeline,' he howled, 'preferably one never touched since the dawn of time, and that no one sane would ever want to touch, being one of the best on the Beloved Isle, all because they want their abysmal lack of taste and lust for gouged earth to be on maximum display. Conspicuous consumption becomes eyesore scrofula on steroids.

'The more money they have the worse their taste in architecture, the more they love bulldozing the countryside into ruin, and the less they care about their neighbours. They have no neighbourhood spirit, no island spirit, no community heart, only spasmodic twitchings where real human-beings have a heartbeat.

'To put it mathematically their architectural taste and their humanity is the inverse cube of their wealth.'

A new FP trait has been revealed, I thought. I didn't know he was a bit of a numbers man. There was obviously more in that giant brain than had been revealed, even after all these years.

'They love living in glass boxes, presumably so that everyone can video their group-sex sessions and sewage-consorts with the batons-blue brigade. And of course they have to drain the national grid to heat them, because every skerrick of heat zooms straight out to the next galaxy.'

I thought I detected a note of bitterness in the Fellow Passenger's voice in that bit about the national grid. I imagine that on nights replete with yuppies he had found he couldn't get enough electron-juice to build up a decent charge of whatever kept him going. I expect he resented inferior competition.

Then I realised I'd made a mistake earlier when I said that every Lower Deckers was gnashing and looking black as the FP had launched his neutron bomb at speculators. There was a group of bods and boddesses in the middle, in those seats round the dance-floor, who were not regulars and very obviously not islanders either (otherwise why would they have pinched the mothers' seats?). Probably heading for a conference.

I expect it was the combination of the FP's unrestrained, free-flow ranting and the peculiar heaving of the swell that afternoon that got to them, because suddenly the whole gang puked all over the floor simultaneously. The pong was terrific, so everyone voted with their feet and got as far away as they could get. Some even broke ranks and went to the Upper Deck, so you can see how bad it was.

Realising therefore that they had become slightly unwelcome, and with the FP's diatribe reaching paroxysms of fury and going into crescendos that threatened the universe (not to mention the microwave oven in the snack-bars), and obviously fearing for their safety, and not understanding that we would never so much as touch them, even with three layers of gloves and long-handled tongs, they leapt to their feet and did a splendid emulation of lemmings. Except there being no Norwegian cliffs handy they had to make do with the stern rail. The whole lot of them hurtled aft, hurdled it, hovered for an entertaining moment above the churning wake, then were seen no more.

Thus they had the wake before the funeral, even before the mass extinction. The number of ridgelines on the Beloved Isle saved that day is beyond calculation. The Fellow Passenger looked smug for months.

EPISODE 17

2007-08-06T15:13:00.000+12:00

'POO!' said the Fellow Passenger, starting at what for him was only about quarter-volume. I wondered, as usual, where this was going, and whether, with an opening like that, if this trip was going to be suitable for kiddies and sensitive old ladies of nineteenth-century persuasion. The Lower Deck waited for the customary elucidation.

'They'll have to apply to the New Zealand Geographic Board to have the place renamed,' he boomed, which elucidated nothing that I could see. 'Matiatia Bay will have to be called Maepoopoo Bowl, or even, quelle horreur, Browns Bay.'

We sat stunned. But we congratulated ourselves that we were so quickly up to speed with this one. We were wrong. Or, more accurately, only partly right. We had divined that this FP diatribe was going to be all about the downstream effects of Plan 201 (what the Orcsville Slimy Council wants to do to Matiatia, in case you've been doing a Rip Van Winkle in an unused pie shop). But that, as it turned out, was just the overture. The FP was going to give us an opera that plumbed the horrid murky depths.

'Beaches all over the island will have to start a new kind of recreation to pull in the tourists,' he continued, winding up the volume a tad, and thus spoiling the romantic doings in Outer Mongolia again. 'No one'll be able to swim at them any more. All they'll be able to do is go through the motions.'

He paused to let that one sink in. Metaphorically speaking, you understand. Those were not motions anyone would want sinking in. Or to be sinking in. Eau de noir is no-one's cup of tea. A few quiet guffaws revealed the sprinkling of Lower Deckers that had caught the FP's antique pun.

'They want to pipe zillions of litres of yuppy excretions from the abominable Plan that they want to whistle up and plonk down at Matiatia.' His voice rose to a scream that vibrated every filling within a twenty-light-year radius. 'ZILLIONS! The Matiatia oxidation-pond is what they are planning. They've even made an arrangement with Fullers to do three pirouettes when berthing instead of one--so that all the poo-stuff gets properly aerated. Of course, being devious boo-rock-rats they didn't tell Fullers why. They just invented some story, backed up by nine consultants, thirteen internal reports, six committee-meetings, one defrocked scientist, and a three-page bylaw, that said it was home to an endangered plankton, and the extra turns would keep it healthy and make it re-seed the Gulf, thus restoring the entire planet. With the usual lying bribery that it would create jobs.'

We stared at him in disbelief. Our faces spoke volumes. How, they agonisingly enquired, could the Council be so devious? How could that be? What was the world coming to? Could there really, really and truly, really, really and truly be even the teensiest morsel of corruption in the state of Orcsville? No!!!

The Fellow Passenger, obviously appreciating the Oscar-winning way in which the Lower Deck was taking the Disney Rodent to such visual extremes, beamed. Then he whipped into a Grade 5 scowl.

'But imagine!' he bawled, depressing the Outer M birthrate still further. 'As the triple pirouette did its thing, we would all be assailed by the ordure-iferous waftings of the Matiatia doo-doos. "Ah!" we would gasp as our communal nostrils flared. "Home smell Home! There's nothing like it." And three hundred rotating heaving souls would puke their innards into the bay, adding to its rich mixture.'

While we wrapped ourselves round that one, the FP paused to wrap himself around another XXXXOS chunk of the atmosphere before going on. And the squadrons of aliens who had been waiting behind the moon for the right moment to take over Planet E decided to call it a day and hived off. Something about the noise-level and the gunge in their instruments caused by some sort of instant generation of whatever was being talked about in the vicinity. And the only thing coming through at that moment, at overwhelming volume, was some rather basic talk of something very niffy. They didn't like it. We weren't over the moon about the subject matter either, but we couldn't warp away at a moment's notice.

'Even worse, they have a dastardly plan to reticulate sewage on the island,' the FP informed the universe. BUT WHY PIPE ALL OUR POO TO ONE PLACE? The landscape on the Beloved Isle is so rugged that they'd need so many pumps, pumping up hill and down dale all day and every day, that it would be just asking for a very nasty failure and hyper-superlative Big Pongy Trouble in a storm, or a power-cut, or both together. Whereupon all our beautiful valleys would fill with excretory substances, macerated loo-paper and an assortment of intimate peripherals. We have trucks that do that. What you might call mobile pipes. Far cheaper. Very discreet. And a very flexible system, because the destination is easily changed. It's not set in boo-rattic concrete.'

The engineer who always sits in one of the middle seats perusing a Herald from end to end (even the adverts, have you noticed?), nodded to confirm that the FP had got the engineering analysis spot on.

'Do they think of power-cuts?' the FP asked the folk on Alpha Centauri, with us as mere eavesdroppers. 'No. Do they think of storms? No. Do they think of the planet at all? No. Otherwise, for example, why would they want to spend hundreds of millions of our dollars turning the Tank Farm into a park, when global-overheating will put the whole thing under water?'

You could see the shock on many faces, genuine this time. They'd started saving up to have a picnic there in 2018, you could tell, and this bit of news had knocked their long-term planning for a six. They were obviously trying to figure out how they could keep their chips and bangers from floating away and getting tangled up in Coutts's keel.

'And the water will be full of floating things you wouldn't want to think about,' roared the Fellow Passenger, thus multiplying the shock in all those shocked looks. You could see that some people were now contemplating asking the crew for paper bags. The FP's choice of subject, and his rather direct presentational style, were interfering with their middle bits in a decidedly queasy way. And a boat is no place to be queasy. All those restful wavy motions can get to your middle motions and cause you, if you are of the sensitive sort and have just been getting bad-and-niffy news sonically hurled into your tender guts, to be in danger of ejecting your wet and odoriferous contents quite suddenly in multitudinous unplanned directions. In short, you'd look like an Orcsville planner in speeded-up action.

'Pah!' shouted the Fellow Passenger, which steadied everyone instantly. Very kind of him to be so aware of the weak stomachs among us and do the sonic quick-fix. A truly sensitive soul.

'Pah! Pah! and Pah! to the lot of them,' he added looking towards Spike City.

That, I thought, was the bowdlerised version.

'They should be forced to dog-paddle about in Council motions every morning,' he concluded, beaming.

Someone on the far side retched. Perfect timing, I thought admiringly. Obviously a true Lower Decker, making the pithy comment on cue and summing up for us all.

EPISODE 16

2007-07-30T16:14:00.000+12:00

Skite Tower was rapidly receding, shrinking to a mere hypodermic symbol of modern civilisation, as Superflyte barrelled smoothly away from Extortion City last Friday--obviously eager to put the Horrid Ruin far behind her and get to the Beloved Isle in half the scheduled. No non-islander could understand what that means. You have to be one.

The Fellow Passenger was silent, and looking very gloomy. Small wonder. A state funeral is meant to be a full stop. It is meant to bring things to an end; it is meant to put a permanent dent in the ambitions of those close to the late lamented; it is meant to release a brave new dawn upon the sunlit uplands of life-the-universe-and-everything...

Oh dear! I must be getting affected by the Fellow Passenger's foggy openings. Not that sunlit uplands are foggy, you understand. It's just that I seem to have left the explanation outside the door. I'll try to find the key and struggle in. Let us begin this episode de novo.

The state funeral in the last episode of this saga well and truly put the frighteners on the opinion polls, as you might imagine. The late Beloved Leader's gang went subterranean and the Other Biggie Gang suddenly discovered more levitation than Mr Spock with his jet-boots on full. Cynical types, obviously not of the BL's persuasion, said the death was a smart career move. Others opined that it was just a political stunt to squeeze votes out of the brainwashed populace. Anything for a headline, said others. Amazing the number of Enzedders nowadays who lack the proper deep and respectful attitude.

Whatever the truth, suddenly she was back at the helm. She looked like death warmed up and rouged to the gills, the image of the corpse that starred in Evelyn Waugh's The Loved One, but that was so normal no one noticed. Sorry, please delete that. 'Normal' is the wrong word to use with the BL. Hmmm, let's mull on it for a minuette. Aha! 'Usual'! That's it. It was so usual that no one noticed...

Regardless of the bon mot the Auditor-General wondered darkly why we had shelled out a couple of million for a state funeral, and someone wrote a letter to the Herald saying that a woman who forged a claim to some fleapit daub was just the type to pretend to be alive when she was actually 100% dead. But the three boddesses who still loved her cheered loudly, did a pointy-hat communal jig, refurbished their tie-dyed dreadlocks and chorused on the telly that she was back to her old self. Oddly, everyone believed them. Someone started a petition to make cremation compulsory for PMs so we could never be imposed upon again (it collected four million signatures in five days flat).

Someone then started a follow-up petition to make it illegal to snort deceased ashes, otherwise (it was asserted) miscellaneous members of the late-lamented's Cabinet might emulate that Rolling Stone bloke (Keith Richards, if you remember) and try to get high on their Ex so as to keep her idiotologies going. There's no telling where that might lead. Image a budget presented by a Mince of Finanz high on the ashes of Helen C.

But all those events sent my ole brain off the island into thinking about national politics (and you can't get any further off the island than that). Ditto the Fellow Passenger, to judge by his gloomy and distracted air as I sat pondering these weighties. It was very obvious that he didn't like the BL's zombie trick. He had managed in his inimitable fashion to see the old bird off the stage permanently, and there she was again, painted for the Waugh-path but without the coffin trimmings and the deep-six cubicle. The effect on the kiddies was worse than being smacked by a hosepipe, a baseball bat and two metres of electrical flex without the option of a Hansard down the britches.

So he mused. But I couldn't see that he could do anything about it. She wasn't going to fall for the naval revue ploy again. Yes, I know it was meant to be a naval review, but the way it turned out was a real twelve-on-the-scale laugh. So you could see that she was keeping her decayed feet on terror firmer. I bet the SIS had spilled her the beans on the FP, and she was staying right away from the Great Man.

Suddenly our musings, ponderings and gloomings were interrupted by someone sitting at the next table, just behind the FP, saying something pertinent to her boyfriend, to the effect that the BL was flying off that very day to open some news-grabber on Great Barrier. She said it had just come through her pod-plugs. A nanosecond later something in the sky caught my eye. No, not Clark Kent. Or a bird. Or a GM frog. A plane. It must, I thought, be the flying Clark, the aerial Dominatricks, the Jasonness who cannot die, the $800,000 Golden Fleecer, etc. Obviously avoiding seawater after what happened last time she ventured out on the gleaming Gulf.

An even brighter gleam instantly appeared in the eye of the Fellow Passenger. I could see that his neurons had clicked the same click as mine. He too had spotted the plane, and had put two and two together. After all, planes were unusual in that part of the sky at that time of day, especially flying lowish (presumably to give the Hon HC a dekko at island reserves of political advantage). So it must be a one-off flight, it must be HER.

'HA!' roared the FP, obviously not one for correct spelling in moments of great emotion, his eyes fixed on that sky-trolley garnished with GM PM.

I fervently hoped that we had an FP-trained captain at the helm because I could see that a bit of an event might be coming up. I wasn't wrong. The Great Man erupted with one of his famous SNORTS, reports of which have appeared in anguished headlines in several galaxies. And this was a beauty. There have been Snorts and Snorts from the FP, but this one must have been like those focused sonic beams that whales use to zap surplus denizens of the deep because they are spoiling the neighbourhood and giving it a bad name. Because the plane instantly did a sort of wobble, an unscripted combination of roll, pitch and yaw that had to be seen to be believed. I dunno how he did it, and we didn't find out all the details till the next day, but the door flew open, and apparently there was some kind of weird vortex just outside the gaping hole that reached in and winkle-picked the PM. And out she tipped.

Although 'tipped' understates it. What all those privileged to be gazing out Superflyte's northern windows saw at that historic moment started as a cross between Icarus and the Descent of the Zombie. In short it rained Undead PM, an event not on the Metservice forecast, and one that really spoilt someone's picnic. I kid you not. Put them right off their saveloys. Imagine. There you are, settling down for an al fresco family nosh on Tiritiri Matangi, when suddenly the Waughbird Screamer hurtles past, becoming the Flailing Black Speck followed by the Inartistic Stick-insect Splashdown in the Green and Wet. Your bile would have curdled too.

Thus fell the Living Dead, and before anyone could press 111 there were denizens galore of the aforesaid deep getting violent indigestion on the soggy remains. You could tell by the way the water churned to a horrid froth that there was a feeding frenzy going on. Probably a bunch of journalists. Even she will never come back from that one, I thought, as the sea was turned black by her eight pints, thus proving what many had long suspected--i.e., that she'd actually been an Orc in disguise (which explains why she'd stood for an Orcsville seat).

Shortly afterwards the captain played the sad newscast over the PA system. But we had to wait till the next day before the never-comeback was confirmed. Apparently you have to have a Resource Consent to turn the Hauraki Gulf black and frothy, and she didn't have one. And no one, as every islander knows, ever escapes alive from an Orcsville Resource Consent. So she'd had it for good. Not even a cremation could do a more final job.

Next time I saw the FP he was beaming and people were giving him awed looks.

EPISODE 15

2007-07-23T15:50:00.000+12:00

'POLITICS!!!' howled the Fellow Passenger. 'POLITICIANS!!!!!!'

I immediately began to worry about the Planet. With an opening like that, and on that subject, the dear old FP was in danger of cracking the thing in half. I hoped there wasn't a tectonic plate getting a bit elderly round the edges and desperately in need of a rebore and attention to its shocks, because what we were obviously in for would send it right off the edge. Like those old sailing ships back when the earth was flat.

I was thankful we were on Superflyte. I'm always a bit nervous about Quickcat's Massey-Fergussons when the FP sounds off. Although, I mused, getting off the immediate topic, 'sounds' seems such an inadequate word when applied to him. English can sometimes fail its most ardent lover. But Superflyte has always seemed to me to have the beefier donks. Not that any beefiness below the level of top-rung aircraft carriers could hope to stand up against more than a picosecond of an enraged Fellow Passenger.

And enraged he was. Incandescent was blushing for being hopelessly below par. I wondered why he had never waxed--no, let me see... umm, hypered? no... nucleared? no... aha!--had never gone Big-Bang-Furious about politics and politicians. I should have thought it was the subject most likely to set him off. But hold these musings, the opening salvo has echoed back from the far side of the universe, and the next Fusillade is on its way.

'POLITICS!!!' howled the Fellow Passenger, this time really putting his back into it, making even the newer tectonics come over all faint. 'POLITICIANS!!!!!!'

I considered, along with the whole of the Lower Deck. Yes, this was a subject that called for a repeat of the opening salvo. Definitely. Applause broke out. Coming this early in proceedings that was another good sign. Expect a bit of a record from the Great Man. If, that is, the planet survived. Us too, for that matter.

'As someone far greater than I has said,' boomed the FP (who? we wondered), ' "POLITICS IS A STRIFE OF INTERESTS MASQUERADING AS A CONTEST OF PRINCIPLES." Just a bunch of EGOS shovelling their OWN MUCK back and forth, PRETENDING THEY CARE WHETHER WE LIVE OR DIE.'

With that off his mighty chest, the Great Man sat back and recharged whatever humungous thingummy powers him.

The FP connoisseurs of the Lower Deck analysed that lot. We could find no flaw. Definitely one of his best ones, albeit borrowed a bit from someone else. We considered. Was he lowering himself to use a quote? No, a good line is always a good line. If you can't top it, use it. Join the best if you can't do better, and thus show your own class. Heads nodded in approval across the boat. Or maybe they were just recharging their eardrums and shaking their concrete earplugs back into place. Hard to tell. The movements are so similar.

'DICTATORS!!! LIARS!!! LIARS!!! LIARS!!! AND DAMNED THIEVES!!!' raged the FP, now really into his stride. Superflyte shuddered. The magnificent old girl was finding things a bit hard on the cylinders, the rivets, the welding, the bolts, the seat-cushions and the dog-seats. Every atom was under strain, no doubt. I was glad we had that grey-haired captain on today. And that the sea was like a millpond. Veering therefore seemed unlikely. But so did the Fellow Passenger. Unlikely, I mean. A real phenomenon of nature. Who could have predicted such a chap to appear on God's earth? Except, perhaps, his mother. Nah... Nah, I couldn't imagine that he ever had a mother. He just materialised one day at Matiatia wharf, fully formed and making exploding galaxies wish they had his oomph. That had to be it. But then I remembered he had admitted to a boyhood, so perhaps I was wrong. Materialised as a kid then. That was it. He surely must have skipped the mother thing. Imagine having a baby Fellow Passenger in your belly. It would be nine months of tectonic eruptions and Shuttle-booster kicks. And the noise! You'd never get a wink, and people would think you were running nuclear tests in there. I could see the headline: Womb of Mass Destruction Slugs It Out With Krakatoa.

'THAT'S WHAT THEY ARE! DAMNED LYING, THIEVING DICTATORS!!! IS THIS A DEMOCRACY??? NO, IT'S AN ELECTED DICTATORSHIP!!! PAH!!! PAH!!!! PAH!!!!!!'

That did it. I knew, as soon as he bawled 'DEMOCRACY!!!', that we were in for a fury of Big Bang PAHs, and that life was therefore going to get a bit interesting. Fraught, you might say, if you liked things understated.

I could see the moon coming over the 11am horizon. But at that first PAH!! she ducked back down behind Great Barrier. Obviously going to have a lie-in and try again later, when things were not so dangerous.

But poor Superflyte! She was a tad closer than the moon. So, for that matter, were we. Not even the grey-haired chap could hold her. Her rudders spasmed and she set off at Warp 12 for parts unknown. Commuters were obviously going to have a numero uno excuse for tardiness this morning.

What we didn't know, but, I suspect, Superflyte did (that telepathic sense that boats have) was that Her Majestic Highness the PM was doing a naval review that day. I'm sure you know the bod I mean--the only one of approximately female persuasion for whom a Bad Hair Day is a State of Being; the only one who thinks that being a baby-boomer means lowering the pitch of your voice so that every syllabubble booms from your toothy-pegs, thus making you sound like a cross between Louis Armstrong and a troglodyte gang of contagious adenoids; the only one with framed pinups of Robert Mugabe and Che Guevara on her bedroom wall that she prays to avidly before kissing herself goodnight. You must know her.

Anyway, regardless of all that, that was the morning she had chosen to do a naval review. You know the sort of thing. She stands looking like only she can look, on the deck of one of our cute Aussie-made frigates, watching all the other naval boats go past in proud procession, flags aflutter and white-clad sailors lined up stem to stern.

Well, that was the plan. But Superflyte was at Warp 12, hurling a wake like a tsunami, and just as the Fellow Passenger fired off the Ultimate SNORT she shot past the review boat, which lurched. Lurched. Although 'lurched' is a tad understated. Flung violently across a most satisfying chunk of the Gulf says it better. Anyway, Her Majesty the PM found that her physical trotters lacked the craft of her political ones. The Law of Gravity just couldn't be spin-doctored, lied to or bought with taxpayer's dosh. She pitched off the review platform. She pitched off the deck. She pitched into the Gulf. (Bad hair downside, in case you were wondering). She came up once. She came up twice. Then she ran out of numbers. They just don't teach enough maths in political science.

There were people who cried at the State Funeral. It must have been the smoky chimney in the crematorium over the road.

EPISODE 14

2007-07-16T12:14:00.000+12:00

'It makes your heart sing,' said the Fellow Passenger. I almost choked on a portion of Fuller's tastier pies. Singing was not something I associated with the FP. And although 'said' in connection with him is usually just a euphemism for his normal speaking tones, which are such that Sydneysiders can eavesdrop on his Lower Deck homilies without having to catch a plane, this time his voice was so soft that only half of us could hear him. The other half was sitting there shocked, puzzled by the unaccustomed silence. Then they realised what had happened and shifted over to our side, not wanting to miss anything. I hoped they were not being hasty, or premature, or whatever the bon mot is--viz., I hoped he was not suddenly going to change up to normal service, which meant to the sonic equivalent of Warp 10, and blow them out the windows.

I wondered what his heart was singing about. Was the FP in love? Had some winsome and tender darling with lilting voice captured our hero? If so, I hoped for her sake and the sake of a long and happy union that she had titanium eardrums. Otherwise having the FP whispering sweet nothings into her shell-likes would be like standing behind an F-16 just before it blasted off one from of those aircraft carriers which are a bit on the short side. That small drawback probably explains why he had spent a lifetime wand'ring lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er vales and hills, to lift a bon mot from Wordsworth. On that realisation I scrubbed the love motif from the list of possibilities and waited, as usual, for the FP to elucidate himself.

'Yes,' he said, in what for him were dulcet tones, but would fill MORRA Hall and reach the Alison Park overflow without the need for a hefty amplifier. 'They make your heart sing.'

Twice. The singing motif. Something serious, and perhaps wonderfully tender, was about to emerge. I could feel it. The whole Lower Deck could feel it. We were having a tender Beloved Isle moment. Truly. No sniggering, please. This was real.

OK, laugh if you must, but with us, please, not at us.

'You get it everywhere,' said the Fellow Passenger.

He might, but we weren't getting it all all. Anywhere. Whatever it was. Our hearts were puzzled. No singing. No nothing. Just a wondering void. All drifting mist, bare hills and empty dales. Not even a stunted shrub.

The FP glanced about. He must have seen universal puzzlement, and it must have occurred to his higher intelligence that to the common clay he had so far been slightly obscure. He drew breath. Experienced Lower Deckers braced themselves and thought commiserating thoughts on behalf of the chaps in Patagonia. Many began to wish they had stayed on the other side of the boat. But there was no need. This trip was going to be all dulcet. Sort of.

'I mean the wonderful service you get all over the island,' the Fellow Passenger said, as if it should have been obvious to the blindest Lower Deck brain. 'Like that sterling manager at Woolworths, who single-handedly kept the Beloved Isle from starvation during the supermarket strike. And the friendly chaps and chappesses at Placemakers. And the superlatively nice chappesses at Kiwibank. Not to mention the ditto ones at the Library (at Oneroa where they belong).'

His voice rose a tad on that bracketed bit, and I thought we were in for a ramping up to Warp Something. But no, he sank back to the tender. This really was going to be dulcet all the way to Orcsville? Amazing!

'And the super people at the Citizens Advice Bureau. And our wonderful fleet of bus drivers: poatinum chaps and chappesses. Plus, last, but most certainly not least, the Fullers' crews.' His voice went up a couple of notches on that last sentence. But we didn't mind; we approved of his desire to broadcast to the whole boat. All the crew looked suitably embarrassed and grateful, and applause broke out. On both decks.

'There are so many, many others I could mention,' finished the Fellow Passenger. 'It makes you proud to belong to the Beloved Isle.' He sighed. I'm sure it was a sigh. It just sounded like a passing jet, flying in another load of tourist dollars. But it was a tender sort of jet. Probably one of those ones doing the new glide-in landing trick to save on bio-diesel and care for the planet.

Superflyte traced its swift and restful path over a shining sea, adding to the mood. Two big tears began to form in the Great Man's eyes. I began to feel misty-eyed myself. I glanced round at the Lower Deckers. There was not a dry eye to be seen. Once again the Fellow Passenger had expressed the collective feeling. The man is a genius, I know, but I have no idea how he manages to do that. No matter whether it's one of his nuclear-fission tirades that hurl far-off planets into new orbits, or this rare display of the depths of an unplumbed heart, which melts us all, he always gets way down to the deep, true places of the Beloved Isle. What a treasure the man is!

There was another mighty sigh from the Fellow Passenger. I could hear sighing all over the Lower Deck. Then someone possessed of a far better voice than mine--which is not hard--began to sing. She must have had a poetic turn of mind too, because she obviously adapted the words on the spot, to the tune that every Kiwi knows, so when she went on to the rousing repeat we could all join in.

God of islands, at thy feet,
In the realms of joy we meet,
Bless Waihekeans, we entreat,
God defend our island.

I hoped the Fellow Passenger was not going to break down and weep, like he did once before when he'd had laryngitis. Much as we love the man, we also know the boat cannot stand those great shaking sobs without something untoward happening and we wanted it sailing smoothly for this precious moment.

But he did not let us down. He just sat there with a faraway look in his eyes and great tears rolling silently down his cheeks. Everyone was clutching tissues. And you could just see them thinking of all the people on the Beloved Isle who constantly gave good, friendly, Waiheke service, and being grateful that it was so.

A final huge sniff from the Fellow Passenger that came all the way from the bottom of his mighty heart spoke for us all.

The Great Man had done it again.

EPISODE 13

2007-07-09T10:40:00.000+12:00

'TELECOM!!!' bawled the Fellow Passenger, for once beginning at the top. Instantly everyone on the Lower Deck was up to speed and on his side. Two rare moments in one. But some wished he had let fly a bit later, because he had hardly given the boat time to clear Matiatia, which is always dicey. The problem is that you don't know which captain is on the tiller. It might be one of the relievers, some chap not au fait with the FP's sonic outbursts, so there's always the risk of a Veer followed by an attempt at sailing through solid rock.

But we were OK. Superflyte didn't deviate a millimetre. We probably had that grey-haired bloke who likes to do the pirouette on a ten-cent coin then barrel back to the tie-up so fast, with only tissue-thin clearance between boat and wharf, that you could be forgiven for thinking that as a liddle fella his favourite stories were about kaimakaze missions. Except he has more skill. Never a crash. No bodies of the late-lamented kind littering the waves and slumped over the piles. Nerves of steel obviously.

Which, by now, after years of the Fellow Passenger, is probably what the entire Lower Deck has too. Except, of course, for the odd newcomer, visitor, or hijacked pigeon. (A full-bowelled sample of the latter was once driven to pulsating insanity by an FP blast. It took months for everyone to get the turds out of hair, clothing, laptops, dummies and other personal peripherals. Lower Deckers carried that unique odour for so long that less diplomatic Upper Deckers began making snide remarks.)

While I was thus musing the Fellow Passenger was working at a hyper-head of steam for Part II of his thunderclap. Everyone hoped it would be a good one. Telecom, fondly known as Telecom Rex, or just T. Rex, is what everyone but Teresa Gatling Gun loves to hate. So we were all hoping he would lay it on thick, strong, stupendous, powerful and over-the-top nuclear.

'TELECOM!!!!!!!!! PAH!!!!!!!!!' bellowed the Great Man.

We considered. We pondered. We weighed. We sighed with satisfaction. He had done it. A tad short of what is required to shatter the planet, but enough. Yes, definitely enough. Our collective outrage was satisfied.

Which was pretty stupid, because we should have known that that was just the overture. There was still the opera. So we were in for a treat. We hoped.

'WHY DOES T. REX HATE WAIHEKE EVEN MORE THAN IT HATES NEW ZEALAND???' bellowed the only man on Planet E who could make the global lust of rockbands apologise for falling short of what Lower Deckers call a loud noise.

We could not answer that. I suspect that not even the FP could. His mighty brain had accomplished wonders in our time, but not even he could answer such a question. I wondered if he was planning to commit T. Rex to the Mental Health Act's Section 8 mincing-machine. No, surely he would never be so kind. I rubbed my hands in anticipation. So, I noticed, did every Lower Decker. Wonderful the rapport we have nowadays.

But I had caught a non-movement out of the corner of my eye. Not every pair of hands had rubbed in anticipatory glee. Someone had spoilt the unison. Then I realised why the Fellow Passenger had chosen that day to explode at Telecom. After all, he'd had years to do it. So why let fly at the old ogre now?

It was that face that had set him off. Yes, you've guessed it. It was HER. The Gatling Gun herself. Why on earth had she been on the Beloved Isle? I know we let anyone in--we need their dollars--and the Matiatia ducks need a varied diet, so the odd undesirable turfed in while we're tying up would be a Good Thing. It would also inject a bit of joy into that wait while the crew does the gangplank routine. But, surely, lines should be drawn.

I saw the Fellow Passenger glance towards Her. I followed suit, because I'd also seen the gleam in his eye. And there she was, about to tuck into a caviar repast. Her usual breakfast, no doubt. I wondered if her stomach was as strong as her love of lawyers, exorbitant price-gouging, treacle-slow 'broadband', vermicelli telephone lines and technology that the entire Third World had abandoned in 1953. I suspected that we were about to find out.

But she had shown considerable thickness of skin so far. FP's preliminary outbursts seemed not to have moved her any more than Superflyte. This, I could see, was going to a toughey. The FP would have his work cut out. They may already be wincing in Patagonia but She was Unmoved.

Then I felt it. There was a huge rolling swell in the Motihue Channel. Aha! Sometimes everything comes together for the Great Man.

Right on cue he erupted--both stupendous barrels. The most powerful SNORT he had ever unleashed followed by a fusillade of PAHs. PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! PAH!!! ....

I lost count at nineteen, mainly because of what happened then. That sterling captain had been unmoved by the first eighteen FP explosions, but at the nineteenth there was the mighty heave of a particularly violent swell, augmented by another even mightier heave on the next one, and he must have been flung sideways. And that magnificent boat did us proud. It went into a tight, high-speed circuit in the middle of the Channel, heaving itself over and through the giant rollers as if it was trying to shake off of Something Nasty. Seasoned chaps and chappesses had grabbed hold of solid things as soon as they had felt the first roller. But, obviously, if hubris is your passion, and you are ostentatiously stuffing your face with a breakfast that would pay off the national debt, you disdain to be one of the plebs. Which was, let me tell you, a mistake. A definite mistake. Because she lost control of her limbs. On a tremendous skyward heave they sort of spasmed up and she found herself wearing a facepack of caviar brekkers. Another huge corkscrewing heave and she was sliding through an assortment of pushchairs, commuter luggage and ejaculating coffee-cups.

Then there was this sort of IRRRRRRRRKKKKKGGGGHHH! sound as her pyloric sphincter gave up the struggle and a flood of partially digested caviar and assorted costly morsels began to press violently at the lips that so loved to tell Parliament and The People to Get Lost. At that point she must have lost control of her mind too. Because she leapt up and set out for the aft railing.

Regular readers will remember that I once had to race off to puke a pie that had been upset by the FP's rhetoric, so I know it's not easy, even on a smooth sailing. But when Superflye is being tossed about like a belly-dancer's navel in a Californian Big One and hurtling round like the Maelstrom set to Panic, you need to have superhuman skill. She did not. Halfway to her target she became airborne. That is not a good idea. Especially if the Fellow Passenger is watching every move. Waiting for The Right Moment.

He erupted a terrifying SNORT followed by a PAH! that shattered every window in Outer Mongolia. Superflyte whipped round and shot off to Orcsville at something above Warp 10, leaving in its wake anything airborne. Sadly, only the Gatling was. Her scream was lost in the gale. So was she. Almost. The helicopter did find her a couple of hours later, and they fished her out. The megapixel blowups that filled the front page of the Herald were real classics. You never saw such a ruin. For a start, pale green skin didn't suit her. Not that it was all green. There was also that array of blue and purple blotches, and a nose like Bean Rock. And her Bad Hair Day would have made Medusa look dishy. Her clothes, what was left of them, had not just stopped being high fashion. They had almost stopped being altogether. The woman who had worn a suit to university 'Because I knew where I was going' had been reduced to acres of variegated skin clutched here and there by shredded morsels of rag. It's a wonder the pix got past the censor. Perhaps he liked the seaweed trimmings.

Was it coincidence? Two weeks later the latest in telephone exhanges replaced the Beloved Isle's decrepit antique, and suddenly we had a broadband that scorched electrons, and Caller ID, and all the other hi-tech goodies of the 21st C. Next day the Lower Deck gave the Fellow Passenger a standing ovation. WE knew.

EPISODE 12

2007-07-02T12:29:00.000+12:00

'Laryngitis!' I couldn't believe it. The Fellow Passenger with laryngitis. Life on the Lower Deck would not be the same. We felt cheated. It was like going out to admire Mount Cook, only to find it had been replaced by an upturned saucepan. No matter how much work you did in Photoshop you could never make an old saucepan look like a majestic peak, and there was your Aunt Maud with her tongue hanging out for the photos you'd promised. You'd want to write to the Commerce Commission and rant on big about misleading advertising.

My thoughts however were of a more sympathetic kind. I wondered if there was anything I could do for the Great Man. In the old days I would have offered him a magnum of Ribena, on account of all that vitamin C, but a couple of enterprising schoolgirls had proved it had less of the stuff than weasel pee, so that was a no-goer.

I hoped the FP's malady would not linger. Surely the Lower Deck would not have to go back to the old days, when people had to fill in the 35 minutes by reading the fine print on their tickets, shaping their nails with their teeth and front-door keys, vacuuming the fluff from their navels, scraping the dried gunk out of the cracks in their babies' dummies, fighting over laptop power-points, or filling in planning questionnaires from the Orc Slithery Council.

I wondered why he had laryngitis. Was it a natural phenomenon? Or had he been got at by the Dark Powers who wanted to take the Beloved Isle and turn it into Queenstown-Surfers-Manhattan on steroids and exterminate every sentient human? Was this disease like the one that bumped off that Russian ex-KGB agent--something murky, sinister and underhand? Radioactivity in yer Choysa? I felt like Watson. All enthusiasm but lacking the genius of the great sleuth. I peered into the crystal ball of possibilities but could not make head nor tail of a blind thing. My neural mush stayed mushier than mushy peas.

The look on the poor man's face chewed me up inside. It reminded me of a two-year-old nephew who wanted to express himself about life the universe and everything, but had not yet got up to talking so had to resort to pointing and grunting. You felt for the kid. Bursting to chatter whole encyclopaedias but without a single word in his vocab. The Fellow Passenger looked like that. He was the image of the Great Repression. No, that was not a typo for Great Depression. I know the diff between the 1930s and today. Today is when the Behave tells everyone what to think and precisely how to beat up their kids.

I decided to try and cheer him up. So I launched into a joke of my own devisal. I asked him if he knew about the Rt Hoff Clark. He looked darkly at me, as if I should be committed. Hastily I assured him that of course he knew about her. What I had meant was had he heard my discovery? He shook his magnificent head.

'Well,' I said, 'she is a Clark because her Daddy is a Clark and her Mummy is a Clark. So she is obviously a massive clerical error.'

I was rewarded by a silent guffaw. It brought a lump to my throat. The Fellow Passenger making soundless guffaws! Communicating in monk-like silence. It was incredible. It was heart-rending. A great institution of the Beloved Isle struck down by a pestiferous microbe. The temerity of those little blighters! Attacking the most powerful throat since the crater of Krakatoa. What could they hope to gain? Or was there the equivalent, even down at that level, of the Munificent Property Act, so they would somehow get half his throat if they could prove some kind of intimate union of the deep-and-meaningful kind?

The chap who makes the PA announcements--'In the unlikely event etc., etc...'--came past. He had noticed a strange silence on the Lower Deck. I explained. He went off upstairs and the next thing Quickcat veered and did an unsolicited circuit of Emu Bay Rock. The PA chap came on line and explained that the captain had done it in honour of the Fellow Passenger. Warm-hearted cheers erupted. Even the Upper Deck joined in. It made you even gladder to be a partisan of the Beloved Isle. The poor old FP was quite overcome. That great head suddenly rested on those mighty arms and sniffles were heard as his shoulders heaved. Heads all over the Lower Deck perked up at that--something could be heard from the FP. Only a sort of wheezing, true, but even that had the decibel level of a 747 trundling out to do its take-off roll.

Thirty-two battery-powered vacuum-cleaners stopped taking an interest in navel fluff and their owners leaned FP-ward. Habit, obviously. The slightest defeaning sound and they looked expectantly his way. But today there was to be nothing. That mighty throat was bugged to the gills.

Someone started to sing 'For he's a jolly good fellow', and the whole Lower Deck took up the song. They produced a pretty good volume, but suddenly over the top of it, leaving it far behind, came that 747 sound, ramped up. The shoulders were heaving at about 6.3 on the Richter Scale. Quickcat began to wobble. Her course was now resembling that big snake in Snakes & Ladders. The poor old captain was obviously having a struggle to keep a straight line.

We were seeing a new FP phenomenon. The grateful-sobbing earthquake. Except it was on a boat. So Quickcat was becoming Quakecat. I expect the captain was beginning to regret his salute to Our Hero.The singing trailed into silence. People looked nervous and began to fumble for lifejackets. Could the rivets and the welding hold in the face of this? Had we unleashed, out of the warmth of our love for the Great Man, something that might send us into Davey Jones' locker?

But the Old Girl was made of sterner stuff. All those years of sonic pummelling from the Fellow Passenger had obviously had the effect of peening* every inch of her metalwork, thus making it tougher than those ancient Spanish swords. The violent trembling continued, every seat turned into a massage machine and kinks in muscles were ironed out all over the boat. Smiles returned. On the Lower Deck admiring looks replaced nervous ones.

Even with laryngitis the Fellow Passenger was a force to be reckoned with.

* Peening is a process, pioneered a thousand years ago by the swordsmiths of Toledo, in which metal is considerably strengthened against metal fatigue by being hammered with the peen, the small end of the metal-worker's hammer. The same effect can be gained by firing ball-bearings at it. Or, obviously, warp-speed sonics from the FP.

EPISODE 11

2007-06-25T09:20:00.000+12:00

'Kumara pits--' said the Fellow Passenger, 'that's what we need to keep them out.'

That must, I thought, take the prize for the foggiest opening the FP had ever come up with. I was certainly fogged. It was pretty foggy out the window too, but only a mild mist compared with my internal state, and I did not have the captain's radar or GPS to navigate me into port.

Actually my record has erred a bit. I said 'said the FP', knowing that those in the know will have interpreted 'said' as a notch or two below the proverbial roar. Not everyone, though, is in that happy state of knowledge, so perhaps a bit of a glossary is needed. What I should have written, for strict accuracy, was ' "Kumara pits," boomed the Fellow Passenger.' Because the dear old FP is famous, as dwellers on the Blissful Rock well know, for the monumental power of his lungs. His normal speaking voice has caused ructions in the boardrooms of TV companies in far-off countries, who forever complain to the international authorities of a mysterious interference to their signal. Some bloke raving on about rats, weasels, dark doings, alien runts and other incomprehensible topics in, they said, a species of English, so he must be from one of those relics of the Empire on which the sun never set. And when he hoicks himself up from speaking to bellowing, bawling, roaring and other variations of sonic activity at the extremes of possibility in the lung department, the complaints come in from afar afield as Alpha Centauri and the planets in Orion. Pretty impressive. We are all very proud of him, even if the earplug budget is a bit of a hardship at times.

But I veered. That happens frequently when recording the episodic life of the Fellow Passenger. There is lots of veering. Ask the ferry captains. Only massive sums spent by Fullers on retraining have saved them from madness and constant shipwreck. If you are steering Quickcat or Superflyte or even one of the relative dinghies such as Starflyte, and the FP lets rip in his normal tornado-like tones as well as tossing off a few snorts and pahs, it becomes a tad difficult to keep to the ferry lane. Recreational fishermen have been known to take up dog-paddling at short notice and abandon ship in favour of rapid progress to drier and firmer parts of Planet E. All because they suddenly found a ferry about to dismember itself after being frightened off strict GPS by an outburst from the FP.

And lovers murmuring tenderly to each other on Mongolian lakesides have written to the UN complaining of interruptions to their programme. It messes up a romance something awful when a hectic roar suddenly tangles itself in your canoodling.

Another veer. See what I mean? You try to be the faithful Boswell, keeping to the story and making the plot crisp and taut, and what happens? A Veer.

In this case I can be forgiven, because while all this was running through my chromium, or skull, the FP was pausing--no doubt ruminating on kumaras. At least that is what I assumed, so I was stunned when he roared 'RATS! IT'S THE ONLY WAY TO KEEP THEM OUT.' I could not see how we had got from kumaras to rats, nor could I see how that esteemed, steamed, roasted or fried vegetable could keep out the blasted rodents. Surely they like a munch too. After all they're only human (I assume the logic of 'A lot of humans are rats' works both ways; but logic is not my forte so please don't quote me).

The Fellow Passenger must have spotted my fogged expression because he suddenly said--sorry, boomed--as if that would explain everything: 'It was the bracken.'

I mean to say! I admire the man; I am a faithful recorder; I am a humble disciple of his genius. But that little lot was enough to make anyone worry that he was past it. Kumaras, rats, and bracken. Please, I silently wished, please connect the dots. I'm going looney here. I could see that the Lower Deck was switching off too. The Great Man was over the hill, you could see them thinking. Embarrassment was setting in. Some former friends were turning cold. Fickle lot!

But then the Fellow Passenger went back on air, disregarding international TV regulations, Mongolian lovers, Patagonian breakdowns, lemming revivals and other victims of his broadcasts (which have given a whole new meaning to 'wireless'), and elucidated. Lower Deck admiration was restored. Agogness ditto.

'I was talking to the beloved Maori Elder,' he boomed, 'who was telling me how his ancestors used to keep the rats from getting into their kumara pits and eating up their winter tucker. He said they had to think like a rat. You, who have only known the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and have suffered at the hands of the nasty Boo-Rock-Rats, will no doubt think that wouldn't be hard. But in those far-off days, before we invented the Orcsville Slimy Council, rat-finks were unknown, except for the genuine rodent sort. So learning to think like one took a while. But they got it in the end. They noticed that rats don't chew through bracken, so they lined their kumara pits with it. Then along came the rats, chewed into the pit, hit the bracken, stopped and went away to find a fridge-full somewhere, on account of them being easier pickings.'

He paused, to let the majestic wisdom of his words sink in, then gave tongue again.

'WHAT WE NEED IS THE EQUIVALENT OF BRACKEN,' he bellowed.

I could see why the Mongolian lovers were getting a tad vexed and discontented. I could imagine the Lover of the First Part about to whisper sweet nothings into the shell-like ear of the Lover of the Second Part when all of a sudden the bracken motif would be introduced at volume. All that moonlight and fermented yak's milk wasted. You'd just want to go sulk in your yurt then dash off another complaint to the Secretary-General.

I wondered what 'the equivalent of bracken' might be. I waited for the Fellow Passenger to enlighten us. He beamed at all the Lower Deckers. We waited.

'Section 8,' bellowed the FP. 'We chuck Section 8 at them.'

Fogginess again. And I don't mean the state of the Gulf. I mean Lower Deck minds.

But the Fellow Passenger was going to be kind to us dimwits. 'The Boo-Rock-Rats,' he explained at about seven on the sonic scale, 'are obviously looney. No one could keep doing to us what they do and not be. So we use the Mental Health Act. We get a doctor on the Beloved Isle to sign the Section 8 committal for the dastardly BRR's who act evilly against us. Then they'll be whisked off by the Blueshirts-&-Batons to Te Whetu Tawera--the mental health ward over at Orcsville--and minced through the process. From which they will never emerge in a state fit to bug us again.'

His voice began to rise towards the inevitable crescendo; the global citizenry winced and reached for earplugs and wads of cement. 'In short, we treat loonies as loonies. Life's kumaras will be safe. The Rat Loonies will never get their teeth into them. THEY WILL BE STOPPED AT THE SECTION 8 BRACKEN!'

He beamed at us in triumph. We sat stunned. Awed. The Great Man had done it again. Seen the perfect weapon against our tormentors. Just treat them as what they are. Simple really.

EPISODE 10

2007-06-18T12:45:00.000+12:00

It was inevitable, I suppose, given the enormity of the latest attack on the Beloved Isle. When the Fellow Passenger goes all quiet and moody, when he wears what Shakespeare might have called a glowering air, when he sinks into deep-withdrawn silence for days on end, you know, if you are a seasoned watcher of his magnificent outbursts, that something Big is Coming.

But you have to feel sorry for the poor woman who set him off. She was obviously a visitor, a day-tripper, judging by the over-loaded push-chair, the trail of juvenile peripherals and the glum husband looking as if he'd rather be watching Enzed hammer the Aussies. She was just chatting to him in a frazzled way, and her spiel happened to touch, I assume, on house prices. Maybe they'd been hunting for a new abode, and she chose that moment to resume the topic. Whatever it was, she uttered the fatal number: 'It's only two hundred and one,' she said. Hubby grunted.

The Fellow Passenger was at the next table, with his back to her, so he caught it clear as a bell. I was sitting opposite him, being his leading accolyte and the Boswell to his Johnson. I caught it too, although being a bit engrossed right then in a mixture of pie and the island's oldest newspaper, I failed to catch the full import. But a microsec later, as I saw the Fellow Passenger's head emerge from its sunken depths like a Trident missile high on Speed and GM spinach, I knew we were for it. Briefly, I wondered why. Then what that poor woman had done whanged across my neural mush.

'She shouldn't have said that,' I mused sotto voce. 'Not that number. And not in the FP's hearing. Reminding him of Plan 201, the greedy mess Orcsville wants to dump on Matiatia, makes danger look like sweetness and dimples. Anything could happen.'

My musings, written out like that, take a while to work their way into the intellect, but they actually blitzed through in that microsecond. Which, as I said, is how long it took for that great head to shoot up, for the glowering air to become incandescent, and for quiet-and-moody to whizz to the other end of the sonic universe.

'TWO HUNDRED AND ONE!!!' bawled the FP, at a volume that almost split the planet.
Even I, Accolyte Numero Uno, had never heard anything like it. So I cannot blame the captain for what happened next. Poor man. He has had lots of extra training, like the Queen's horses, who get the cannon to the left of them cannon to the right of them in their formative years, so that whatever goes off 2mm from their lugs doesn't cause them to tip HM botty over scone into a roadside portion of her admiring public at high velocity. But not even Fullers' finest training could prepare anyone for that sixteen-letter WMD, especially when it came thrice, spawning fusillades of exclamation marks.

'TWO HUNDRED AND ONE!!!!!!'

'TWO HUNDRED AND ONE!!!!!!!!!'

The captains had had training in FP Snorts, in FP 'Pahs,' and in associated verbal nuclears from the most powerful pair of lungs ever wrapped in human ribs, but no one had thought to include numbers, and that one, bawled three times at that volume, was Too Much. In far-off Patagonia nervous breakdowns bred like lemmings.

The timing was bad too. If the tide had not been dead low and if Quickcat had been anywhere else on the run we might have got off lightly. But that close to terra firma was asking for it. The only thing that saved us from going down the gurgler was that the old girl is a catamaran. Two hulls. Which means that if you sail at Very High Speed straight for Emu Bay Rock and its steel marker-tower, on account of having shied like a royal horse that has just lost interest in protecting Elizabeth Regina and wants excitement to the MAXX, you might, just might, manage to straddle the thing. So you don't sink. No one has to be stitched together by the nearest DHB. But the boat is not going to be quite the same.

The other thing that saved the DHB's budget was that everyone was over by the windows, because there had been a pod of dolphins round us a few minutes earlier. So no one was in the middle of the boat. Where the rock and the steel came through.

It is very odd to be sailing along in a catamaran, then suddenly find it replaced by two monohulls in close formation. The captain obviously did not know quite what to do. Steering two boats at once, even on that new wireless control thingy, was not in his manual. I expect he panicked a bit. Anyway, Quickcat A whizzed starboard, Quickcat B chose port. Both at speeds, to judge by their screaming Massey-Fergs, that no doubt filled the bosom of the engineer with manic pride to the same extent as it filled every passenger, bar the FP, with pale and trembling dread. You could see them all wondering if their wills were in order.

But the Fellow Passenger was still winding up. What the Awful Septic Dungheap wanted to dump on the porch of the Beloved Isle had obviously cut him to his most profound quick.

'PLAN 201!!!' he bawled from Quickcat B. 'PLAN 201 IS THE MOST INFERNAL NOTION EVER DREAMED UP BY SOCIOPATHIC DICTATORS!!!

I was impressed. I didn't know the FP knew words like sociopathic. He'll be saying 'political ponerology' next, I thought.

'IT'S POLITICAL EVIL!!!' bawled the FP, right on cue.

Pretty close, I thought admiringly.

'POLITICAL EVIL!!!!!!!!!' The increase in volume was too much. There was, I swear, a puff of smoke from Rangitoto, and the sea round us boiled. There was also a violent course-adjustment on Quickcat A. And Quickcat B. Both headed in the same direction. Aiming at the same point in the space-time continuum. The pale-and-trembling multiplied. Whereupon the Fellow Passenger produced his greatest display of pure genius.

With impeccable timing he let loose a HYPERBOLIC SNORT. Coming on top of everything else, it caused both Quickcats to hurtle forward at Warp 9, just as they touched. The result was the neatest welding job you ever saw. The old girl was back in one piece. People cheered. The Fellow Passenger bowed. I wondered why. He was usually a humble chap. Then I saw him look towards a middle seat. My brain raced backward. I gasped. There HAD been someone in the middle of the boat. Now there was no one. And the Fellow Passenger was looking very smug. My brain raced forward, collected my eyes, raced backward again, then projected an image on to my reeling realisation. I recognised the chap who had been in the middle! It was Him, the Nasty Socioprat Councillor, the one who had ordered up that brain-damaged, Plan 201, make-a-profit orgy.

He was never seen again. But the fish in the area must have eaten something pretty ghastly because they all turned a horrid colour and went belly-up. So did Plan 201. Then Don's forest was extended over the valley and round the carparks, the tatty villas were replaced with ones in good shape, and the Islanders celebrated ecstatically.

Nine months later the population topped 10,000 and the Local Government Commission made the Beloved Isle independent from the Awful Septic Dungheap. So there is a destiny that shapes our ends, rough hew them how we may. But I never could work out whether the Fellow Passenger's crowning outburst had been coincidental or deliberate--although even he couldn't have made things turn out that well. I think he just fanned the opportunistic fuse and hoped for the best. Hu knows. But he's not telling.

EPISODE 9

2007-06-11T10:51:00.000+12:00

'When Cave Creek paranoia,' boomed the Fellow Passenger, 'fornicates with yer common-or-garden bureaucracy, it's like mutant lemmings high on Viagra, hormone therapy and the DPB--you get hideous monstrosities breeding all over the place. Now they're spreading all over the Beloved Isle.'

It was one of those rare occasions where I was partly up to speed with FP at the outset, because I had recently had two experiences of the hideous kind when wandering lonely as a cloud that floats on high o'er hill and dale, to quote the poet. But I waited. Who am I to say 'Aha! I know about that' when in the presence of a master. I wait for the subject to unfold as only the Fellow Passenger can unfold it. Besides, I did not want to spoil the process for the other denizens of the Lower Deck, especially those for whom the FP was a new experience. Let them savour every minute, say I.

'They are so terrified witless of another Cave Creek,' the FP further unfolded, in what for him was only a moderate bellow, 'that they bend over backwards to make the world so safe that every square millimetre of every wild place and every two-metre drop will be a doddle for the weakest little old lady cripple who ever lived in a wheelchair and manifested galloping hypochondria.

'They even have a secret plan to drain the Pacific so that no liddle kiddies can drown in it, but the project has been put on hold till they find somewhere to put the water. Another lot wants to chop down all the pohutukawas because liddle boys and girls might climb them and fall down. A few years back, one lot actually started to level the Southern Alps because they attract bods who hurt themselves. But they only got as far as lopping a bit off Mt Cook, because, sadly, they didn't have enough brain-cells to know that standing on the aforesaid bit during the lopping was not a good idea. So they became late-lamenteds in a way that restores faith in truth and justice and the good ole Kiwi way.

'But, denied, frustrated, stymied and hampered in their Grand Plans, they have cunningly resorted to filling Enzed with tracks, handrails, steps, ramps and boardwalks of the violently hideous kind--they shun the beautiful, the unobtrusive--what blends with nature. So all our perfectly wonderful walks and views become convocations of eyesores so foul that lovers of beauty yearn for matching cataracts and a frontal lobotomy. The uglifiers are not happy till every hillside is a mass of steel stakes, slipshod concrete, and handrails so humungously strong that they could even stop Banks from making an idiot of himself.'

I nodded vigorously. Then, I admit, I got carried away. Because I uttered; I disturbed the unfolding; I presumed. 'Pohutukawa Point!' I exclaimed. Too late I realised that disturbing the Fellow Passenger's unfolding was probably not wise. Or safe. I was right.

A dull roar erupted from deep in his inner regions. Residents on the Third Rock orbiting Alpha Centauri, who had only just put up a sky-dish to search for Extra-Centaurian Intelligence, immediately got excited and shouted 'Xgkjidfg!', which means, more or less, 'Wow! A signal! Already! Start building the spaceship. Stock up on cyanide tasties. We're going interstellar tripping. Yay!' (Centaurian doubters who muttered darkly about a spaceship said to have crashed on some far-off island in the same galactic quadrant, losing all but the runt of its crew, were shouted down and ruled out of order--mob psychology rules everywhere.)

The dull roar grew in volume. Something was going to give. Again I regretted speeding up the FP's unfolding. I should have just let the thing happen in his own good time. But now the fury was coming early, so it was building too quick and strong. I wished we were on Superflyte. I have always thought it more robust than Quickcat. Newer, bigger, more beautiful, so it must be. Stands to reason.

Judging from the accelerated power of the roar, the Fellow Passenger knew about the mess at Pohutukawa Point. I waited for him to go verbal and tell us. When that moment came it was a deafening silence. Deafening because the FP was giving tongue in fury. Silence because Quickcat was dead in the water. Both engines had conked out under the strain of that FP super-roar, so when he finally changed up to rabid raving no one missed a syllable. Every drinker of water or cyanide this side of the Galaxy got the whole unminced lot.

'The purblind, paranoid, pusillaninous lovers of Ugly Ruin and Hyperbolic Safety,' bellowed the Fellow Passenger. 'They should be Hagued!'

I considered. I pondered the FP's words from every angle. I weighed, measured, reflected. But I had to hand it to him. He had put the nub of that matter well. Yes, well.

'That was one of my favourite adventures when I was a little boy,' the Fellow Passenger howled. 'It was magic. You went under the low pohutukawa, you went along the short, narrow track on the edge above the rocks a couple of metres below, you went swiftly down the natural steps of rocks and roots, then you were alone on the rocky point, marooned. It was like nowhere else on earth.

'But now the Cave Creek Viagrans have struck with their shocking eyesores. So you are hemmed in by handrails, hounded by bungled concrete, harassed by ill-made steps that are as far from natural as yer cyanide-boozers on Alpha Centauri--steps not made for humans. And when prissy bods get to the point after being molly-coddled that far, what do they find? Rocks. ROCKS. GLORIOUS ROCKS! GLORIOUS, RUGGED ROCKS! Rocks that no cloven prissy hoof would ever walk on. Could ever walk on. Would go anywhere near. SO WHAT WAS THE POINT OF MAKING A PRISSY, SISSY WALK OUT THERE?'

On the Third Rock round Alpha Centauri, plans for a fast trip to our quadrant were hastily cancelled. The noise-level was obviously dangerous to cyanic health. It was also pretty hard to take on Planet E. Especially down at the bottom Enz. More especially on a certain drifting boat. The engineer went past, wearing ear-muffs and a black scowl. The FP might be an institution, a favourite with the crew, a drawcard for tourists and a recent Royal Honour for having destroyed Alinghi Challenge, but a man's engines were a man's engines. Not to be messed with.

But the Fellow Passenger had a point. What was the point of building a paranoidally safe track out to a point that could never be anything but an adventure? The Fellow Passenger went back on air.

'Next,' he roared, 'they'll build prissy, sissy, pink-concrete paths round the rocks, so that all the liddle high-heeled diddums can ponce round them without laddering their tights. PAH!'

At that 'PAH!' the tugboats coming out to save us went on strike and turned back. Probably going out in sympathy with all the cyaniders from Alpha Centauri. We finally did make it to port, but only after the Fellow Passenger had subsided into mumbling sobs about the destruction of the magic of wild places and the loss of glorious boyhoods.

It was heart-rending to listen to, but at least the drop in volume let a fishing-boat get close enough to chuck us a rope. The whole of the Lower Deck sobbed along with him--the FP's sobs get right into your soul--so by the time we tied up every bin was overflowing with soggy tissues and some people were having to resort to company reports, rates notices, Heralds, loo paper and miscellaneous outer garments. Some of the more desperate were even wondering darkly about the absorption quotient of the pigeons hoovering the carpet.

EPISODE 8

2007-06-04T12:36:00.000+12:00

'The Hague,' said the Fellow Passenger, in what I immediately noted were his most acidic tones. Obviously, whoever was about to be associated with the place was not on the FP's list of preferred chaps and chappesses.

'The Hague,' he repeated, louder, in case anyone on the Lower Deck had not heard him the first time, which was highly unlikely whenever he gave tongue at anything above a breathless whisper.

'The Hague! That is where they should be sent and TRIED for crimes against humanity.'

As always, the Fellow Passenger had launched into his diatribe somewhere in the late-middle chapters. We all waited for the revelation. Experienced ones knew it would come. The rest looked suitably befogged. The FP soon sorts out the regular Lower Deckers from the fly-bys.

'MODERN ARCHITECTS!' roared the FP at what admirers like me judged one of his loudest introductory outbursts. And it may have been one of life's coincidences, but Quickcat limped the rest of the way to the Horrid City on only one engine. We later learned that she had, at that precise moment, blown every cylinder-head in the other one. Personally, I do not think it was coincidence. I know the Old Girl's Massey-Fergussons are no longer young, and aging cylinder-heads can blow at any time, but Lower Deckers have had long experience of what can happen when the FP's irresistible super-vibes whizz out at the three times the speed of light and collide with machinery (people at a far distance have also been known to come unglued from normal functioning).

'MODERN ARCHITECTS!' he roared again. I think it was only a recent refurb that saved the other Massey-F.

'They passionately HATE everything human and beautiful, and the Beloved Isle in particular,' he bellowed, 'otherwise why would they inflict such hideous abominations upon us, and pack every ridge and hillside with the worst of their work? Although telling their best from their worst is like having to choose between hanging, drawing and quartering and a lonely walk with Jack the Ripper.'

I considered the choice carefully. I like to know what I think. No haste, no wrong judgements is one of my mottos. But I could see no flaw in the FP's reasoning. I nodded, as did all but one of the present-and-paid denizens of the Lower Deck--he sort of cringed into his Herald and looked nervous. It flashed through my mind that he was an architect. A man with such a prissy moustache could be nothing else. If that is what he did to his upper lip then the environment, the city, the planet and aesthetics were in for a lonely walk with the aforementioned cutter, slitter and disembowler.

'I, if I had a free hand with one--' bellowed the Fellow Passenger, in tones that would freeze the marrow if you were the object of his address, 'I would take him apart, piece by piece. First, prize out each toenail with a pair of strong pliers, making sure that I got a good hold by first locking his feet in a vice. Firmly, you understand. You can tell by the crunching sounds when to stop winding the handle. Then I would move to the hands, ditto. After that I would slice his legs and arms off, slice by slice. Carefully. Artistically. Slo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-o-wly.'

He paused to salivate, chortle, and generally exult. And I noticed what many might have missed--a lightning glance at the prissy moustache. Aha! The good old FP had spotted what I had spotted. So this generous description of how to do good to a modern architect was therefore what some might call a bit of a wind-up, what others would call pulling the ole chain, and others would say was taking the Disney rodent. Whatever you call it, the owner of the moustache was definitely not looking his best. Nervous had progressed to fearful then gone on to abject panic loosely associated with a greenish colour that bespoke Extreme Nausea. Also known as Violently Heaving Belly.

'Then,' crooned the Fellow Passenger at full volume, 'I would make a long, deep cut from navel to sternum, draw out his guts, nice and slow, and burn them over a slow fire, making sure that that cooking-smell wafted generously up his criminal nostrils--'

At that point in the candid description of his fate, delivered in the Fellow Passenger's dulcet roar laced generously with acid, the prissy moustache leapt to his feet and ran for the aft railing. He obviously needed a good puke. Sadly, he tripped over a dog as he zeroed in on his target, and became airborne. Becoming airborne when you are travelling at a considerable rate of knots towards the aft railing is not a good idea. Something to do with the fact that there is no more boat behind the aforesaid railing, and with the relative velocities of flying bod and fast-moving ferry. My maths is not good enough to explain it. Suffice it to say that the prissy moustache found himself suspended over Quickcat's churning wake like one of those cartoon characters that run off the edge of cliffs and mark time in mid air for a while before plunging to an awful doom.

Prissy Moustache did that. Next he suddenly learnt to swim. If you can call that pathetic exhibition of flailing arms and legs swimming. It was worse than his architecture. But, sadly for those who were hoping for a long and enjoyable show, and even more sadly for the Aft Decker who had yearned for years for an opportunity to fling someone a lifesaver (and had been enduring the dogs, the cold, the fumes and the used newspapers just so that he could), one of the Splinters of Deodar had chosen that point in the space-time continuum to cruise behind Quickcat's slipstream, obviously trying to cut down on fuel-consumption and save a bit on the police budget (short of batons, perhaps).

Anyway, they got all the excitement, because it was them that fished Mr Prissy out of the drink. But that frigid plunge and near-death experience must have sobered him up and put him in touch with what was left of his human self. Because next time I saw him the moustache was gone, and he was no longer taking any notice of his beloved Psychological Whip--the Caterwauling Wife of his Bosom.

But, as the Fellow Passenger observed when I pointed out those joyous facts, for every architect who becomes halfway human, three more pop up sprouting delusions in corrugated iron, schizophrenia in concrete, and bilious hallucinations in paint..

What true Lower Decker could disagree?

EPISODE 7

2007-05-28T10:07:00.000+12:00

We had cleared Matiatia Bay without hearing from the Fellow Passenger, which is always a relief. There is a legend that he had once let fly with one of his famous snorts just as Quickcat came up to the northern point under the hand of a rookie captain. He had, it seemed, not had Snorts in his training. As the legend went, Fullers had invented a cover-story about extending the boat so as to prevent a plunge in consumer-confidence, as the marketers say. But the real reason for the long holiday in dry-dock and the 'extension' was the need to restore the old girl to the length she was before the Incident. So they said, but I had been away at the time so cannot comment with first-hand certainty.

But there's Vera's teeth. Before I had gone away she had had a perfect set of chompers. When I came back she was all gums. The perfect chompers had gone into the drink at the sudden shock. True, that is only circumstantial evidence, but would Vera's teeth lie? I doubt it.

I was chewing the cud of these old matters when the Fellow Passenger went on air.

'Teeth,' he said, uncannily chiming in with both Vera and my cud. 'Teeth. The whole world can be summed up by teeth. "Big fleas have smaller fleas upon their legs to bite them, and smaller fleas have smaller fleas, and so ad infinitum." '

I was not well acquainted with fleas, but I was sure they were not equipped with teeth. I was about to wax Scientific when the Fellow Passenger saved me the bother.

'Not,' he said, 'that fleas have teeth. Just liddle pink gums. But the point is that there's always someone trying to bite yer leg. The trick is to keep away from the Big Teeth. Our Beloved Isle is getting teeth sunk into it from all directions. Idiots who want to chew it into fragments, grind them up and make Big Banknotes. With which they then buy up unchewed bits and do the same. And so ad infinitum.'

I was not sure that I liked this fleas analogy. Call me a purist but I had always thought of the Banknotes Brigade as Rats. I declined to give that up. I like my traditions.

'Rats,' I observed to the Hero of the Lower Deck, hoping he would take the hint, 'have teeth that keep growing, so they have to keep gnawing things, otherwise their teeth end up down their own throats and they chew themselves into ribbons.'

There was a pause. I hoped he was not upset. I know I had presumed. But one has to stick to one's traditions. On teeth I have three opinions. Mine, Vera's and the Rats'. Fleas were arrant little impostors.

But the Fellow Passenger was generous--the wide imagination. He considered.

'Rats,' he crowed. 'Rats. RATS! Teeth that have to gnaw and gnaw and gnaw because if they don't they get stabbed to death by their own molars. So they chew everything and anything. HAH!!!'

For a moment I regretted sticking to principles. That 'HAH!!!' topped the Fellow Passenger's famous 'PAH!!' by the volume of a couple of Space Shuttles with loose shocks. But it was a hitherto unknown sound. The Lower Deck hovered between pained winces and stares of admiration. The Fellow Passenger, ever the original thinker, had come out with a new shout that would be heard round the world.

'HAH!!! HAH!!! HAH!!! HAAAAAA-AH!!!' bawled the Fellow Passenger, evidently rejoicing in the age-old thrill of discovery first popularised by Archimedes at bath-time. I hoped the FP was not thinking of emulating him. Dashing outside naked and hurtling down the road crying 'Eureka!' was not the sort of thing you should try on a boat. No roads, that was the problem. You open your mouth to bellow the great E and it fills up. Not a good way to go. Suddenly you are sharing the secrets of the Pacific with Alinghi's heavier flotsam and jetsam, and toothy denizens of the deep are taking a keen interest in your tastier parts.

With the benefit of hindsight I wonder how I managed to ponder such things in the midst of the FP's new-minted hullabaloo. Perhaps it's a gift. Not, sadly, a gift shared by the captain on that run. As I indicated we were crossing the Motihue Channel at the time, which meant we were approaching Motutapu. Which means, or should have meant, that we were about to pass it. But although this captain probably knew about PAHs!, and Snorts, he was obviously not acquainted with, or equipped for, a fusillade of HAHs!.

Because Quickcat veered. North. The Lower Deckers turned pale. All of them. Simultaneously. Weaker ones grabbed under their seats for lifejackets. Some donned them. Everyone hung on for dear life.

But the Fellow Passenger was obviously deep in his fury at the rats. Because he was oblivious to what was going on round him--the terror, the lifejackets, the northward veer, the imminent collision with Motutapu. He must have been. Because he let fly with one of his Snorts. Or perhaps I should say A Snort. Because it was a beauty. Even a captain who had been specially trained could not hope to cope with that one. Quickcat's Massey-Fergussons screamed like banshees being chewed by rats and it veered again. In fact it veered so much it did a full-speed circuit of those rocks south of Emu Bay. We missed Motutapu, we missed the rocks, we rotated thrice round them at something above warp speed (doubters should ask the fishermen who picked boiled fish out of the water for the next couple of hours). No Fullers' engineer could have imagined in his wildest dreams that the old girl could go that Fast. Then the captain got the thing under control, and we set course again, albeit a little shakily, for the Horrid City.

At the time I thought that was that. But unbeknown to me there was a Rats Convention making its way back from plotting the Ruin of the Beloved Isle (something about clusters of 100-rat condominiums as the centre-piece of every village and an artificial ski-run on every significant ridge-line). Anyway, they were all on the Upper Deck hogging the bar. They found the HAHs! unnerving. They found the Snort shattering. But Quickcat's faster-than-a-speeding-bullet gyrations a rat's whisker from Motutapu reduced in nanoseconds all their rodent ganglions to a turgid neural sphaghetti.

After they had finished with the paper-bags, they reconvened the meeting and decided that Waiheke was not good Investment Territory. Too wild, someone told me, was the collective opinion.

There are times when I wonder if the Fellow Passenger has some kind of seventh sense. His timing is uncanny. I concede that Vera's underwater chompers might not agree, but no one is perfect.

EPISODE 6

2007-05-21T20:54:00.000+12:00

It was one of those wild and wonderful crossings. The true dark and stormy night, with Superflyte barrelling along, sweeping behind Motuihe, then coming full throttle straight at the huge green mountains that had been building up all the way across the Pacific and were now making Rangitoto look like a shaved wart. We were into the Glorious Roller-coaster that I had once complained to Fullers about, because when I pay good money I expect to get a longer ride. Five minutes is nothing. Go round a couple of times at least, say I. A couple of dozen would be better. But Fullers said it had to maintain a Schedule, and a Service. Well, I said, live a bit. Add excitement. But they said the crew don't like having to clean up afterwards. It seems some people have not yet acquired the strong stomachs that sooner or later evolve in every Islander.

They were very nice about it. Nice chaps and chappesses. But, really! to put schedule and service above the unimaginable thrill of twenty times round Motuihe and heaving, pitching and tossing all over the ocean in the black night for an hour or two.

'The wild and wonderful is so little appreciated,' boomed the familiar tones of the Fellow Passenger in my ear, under the delusion that I might not be able to hear him above the storm if he didn't lean across and raise his voice. Fortunately for my ear-bones a particularly wild heave hurled him backwards a microsecond after he began, so I was spared the loss of hearing, sanity and a clean record on skull-fractures.

But I had to agree. I nodded, although with the amount of violent movement in all directions of every part of every body it was doubtful whether a mere nod would be noticeable. But habit is habit. Why give it up for a change in circumstance? That is the human way, and who am I to break a Great Tradition. So to firmly affirm my Right more firmly I nodded again.

'MacAdam would be turning over in his grave if he knew,' the Fellow Passenger snarled. The suddenness of the change in subject left me all at sea, so to speak, even if was only the dark and hyperbolically corrugated Motuihe Channel. Who, I wondered, was this MacAdam? I knew of no MacAdam on the Beloved Isle.

'The Scottish chap who invented the tarsealed road,' explained the Fellow Passenger abruptly, thus flummoxing me because he normally never explained anything, just worked back to the start of his story from the middle in a tsunami sort of way oblivious of anyone's flummox. I am not sure he really saw mine. I think he was only musing quietly to himself--it just sounded like an all-island announcement from the Ostend trig station.

'Preserving potholes,' thundered the FP as we hurtled towards the stratosphere then plunged into what seemed an endless trough in a manoeuvre that thrilled me to my boyish core and made forty-five people scream in unison. At least I think forty-five screamed. When the Fellow Passenger is thundering, accuracy in minor events like mass screams hardly registers in your neural mush.

'Preserving potholes,' he thundered again, 'is inhuman. Except in the Third World where they need to do it to get the attention of the IMF. So why is the Little Alien doing it on the Beloved Isle, by not giving us the funds to turn them back into roads? The answer is obvious. He's trying to unsettle our brains by rattling them to bits, to soften us up for the Mass Invasion. His kind, the green and monstrous ones from a Galaxy Far Away are waiting to take over. But the node they reset their navigational thingies on--the Beloved Isle--has too many intelligent beings on it who are too likely to notice them and RESIST. So they are trying to make loonies of us; then we won't even notice them, let alone do anything. Then he and and all the clones will take over. Life will become intolerable. Every lot will be Re-Developed into Alien Territory.'

I don't think the Fellow Passenger really believes in Aliens, or that The Worshipful Banks is a midget one. I think he just likes taking the Disney Rodent in an over-the-top way. But it doesn't matter. His points get across so well that no one on the Lower Deck would want to change how he does it. Anyway, he's a tradition on the Beloved Isle. And we don't mess them up. We leave that to the City Rats.

We hurtled skyward then dived deep into the green faster than a vomited pie. I could see how the Fellow Passenger's thoughts had veered suddenly into potholes. There might also be an evolutionary aspect to it. We on the Beloved Isle might be starting to turn into a sub-species that could not help veering into potholes. We had to. It was now part of life. It was like Amex. You couldn't leave home without it. So we now did it unconsciously. Another heave, a pitch, a toss, and another glorious wall of green enveloped the boat. This, I could see, was going to be the best ride yet. I closed my eyes so as to savour every picosecond. These hurricance nor-easters were rare, and I was not often enough on Superflyte at night, so getting both at once was a rarity heaped on a rarity. Yay!

We barrelled through another sizeable portion of the Pacific that had taken up a vertical existence, and portions of chundered chips suddenly ornamented the table of an obvious visitor, thus putting on display her failure to listen to her mother and chew everything seven times before swallowing it. The Fellow Passenger was inspired by the sight to give tongue again.

'It makes you sick,' he said, eyeing the visitor's half-completed experiment in recycling the ferry grub. 'It makes you sick. We are being turned into an island of chipped teeth, mushed brains, and broken shocks. All because of the Aliens and the runt of their litter.'

Satisfied that the visitor was not going scoop up the soggy remnants and try again, he turned back to me and picked up his thread.

'Damned little Alien runt,' he said vehemently.

I hoped he was not working up to one of his famous Snorts. A wild ride was one thing. But an FP Snort in this stuff might flip us, or send us into orbit. I was too young for that. Or was it too old? Life can be so confusing.

'They should force him to drive round the Beloved Isle for a couple of weeks,' he said, a wicked gleam in his eye. 'Continuously. Twenty-four hours a day, seven a week, with no time off even to pee. If they do. Aliens, I mean. At the end of that his false skin would drop off and everyone would KNOW what he was.'

EPISODE 5

2007-05-14T11:16:00.000+12:00

'She'd be superb,' observed the Fellow Passenger at his normal volume--which easily carried to the entire Lower Deck--as usual getting into his Theme of the Day at about chapter nineteen. 'We should ditch them and get her. And she's beautiful. Brains and beauty, and she knows how to pull the Levers of Power. What more could you ask?'

Inwardly, I thought we could ask what on earth he was talking about, but I knew from long experience that that would emerge in its own time from a hidden recess in the Fellow Passenger's arcane brain-folds. Patience was needed. But ferry-trips teach you patience. So does the Beloved Isle. With everything, that is, except the Rats from Queen Street that keep swimming over and trying to turn us into more Queen Street on steroids. I looked darkly out at the Motuihe Channel, eyes peeled for rodents.

'Sandra,' said the Fellow Passenger reverently, rewarding the patient wait that I had used for the above cogitations. 'She's what we need. I remember her from those wonderful snorkelling days when I was a boy. A bushy-haired Maori kid from Rocky Bay, the only one except me who understood the Enclosure lagoon all the way down. A sweet and magical soul.'

On the Beloved Isle, there could only be one Sandra with the qualifications listed by the FP in his opening address. I began to wonder if she was the great unsung love of his boyhood... but the Fellow Passenger was back on air.

'Mayor,' he said, putting the entire case in two glowing syllables. 'Not like the one that came off the UFO that crashed in Matiatia Bay. Nothing like him. She's human. And sane.

'We never should have voted to be part of the Horrid City, the Queen Streeters, the Other Side,' he bellowed. 'We are the Beloved Isle, we are the Anti-Queen Streeters, we are This Side. THIS SIDE! THIS SIDE!!!'

I could imagine the anguished cries of protest in Patagonia. It was loud enough here. The captain eased us back on course. The Lower Deck returned to normal breathing. But they nodded vigorously. The Fellow Passenger had a point. He always did. Not one of your brainless ravers; always worth listening to. Not that we ever had a choice. The Fellow Passenger had the DNA of the bloke who bellowed the commands above the din back in the Trojan Wars. Stentor was the name. The FP's lungs are stentorian. Even one lung could do the muster from the farmhouse kitchen. No need to get on the trailbike and slog miles out to the back paddocks. Just mention quietly over your cuppa brown water that they ought to be here--NOW. That would have been the Fellow Passenger‘s style. I wondered if that had ever been part of his existence. We knew so little.

The Fellow Passenger had been musing while I was cogitating. It was often the way. He let fly; he paused; you pondered various matters and waited; then he went back on air. We were used to it. But visitors were often slightly taken aback by the on-air bits. So were their ears. Often, after one of the Fellow Passenger's little outbursts, you would see them glance back on the floor and surreptitiously reach up to tug each lobe just to make sure. Regulars, the real Lower Deckers, took him in their stride--as you might with regular nuclear tests in your living-room. Practice. That's all it took.

'I reckon,' he said, 'we should have another vote. Soon. Next month. Get the Horrid City out of the Beloved Isle. Run it ourselves. With Our Beloved Sandra as the first mayor--the First Mayor.' His reverent tones over the last stretch betrayed, to my perceptive eye, a Secret Admirer. If, that is, anything uttered by the Fellow Passenger could be called secret.

'Sandra for Mayor,' he bellowed. 'Dump the Horrid City off the Beloved Isle. Spontaneous applause erupted across the Lower Deck.

'And you for Deputy,' someone called from the far side.

We would certainly save on petrol and postage, I thought. Every meeting of the Waiheke Council would be audible all over the island. No need to go and sit in the public gallery, or wait for the newsletter. Just close the doors and windows so as to get the volume down below the threshold of pain.

'No,' called the Fellow Passenger, under the illusion that he had to raise his voice for it to carry to his supporter. 'I am not worthy. Not to serve with Her. I'm just a humble ferry-traveller. But my idea is not humble. It is Right, it is True, it is Grand and Good and GREAT. It should be done. It must be done. It shall be done. Spread the word!'

That, I thought, has just been done. In Patagonia they are wondering why the TV keeps talking in English about something not mentioned in the programme guide. So everyone on the Beloved Isle had just got the point all the way down to their vibrating toenails.

The Lower Deck was looking awestruck. It was obviously one of those ideas whose time had come. Or, more accurately, had been there for ever. All it had needed was articulation. It had just been ARTICULATED. It was so simple. Get rid of the pain by getting rid of the pain-makers. Vote them out. Democracy! No taxation without representation! The British are coming! Ride, Paul Revere! Vive La Revolution! Break out the knitting-needles, hone the guillotine, basket the heads and hurl them into the Hauraki moat for Jaws.

Bods were pouring in the doors. The Upper Deck was joining us. I could see that this was catching on. The flame had been lit. The Fellow Passenger had started the unstoppable. The applause, whistles and cheers were emulating FP's lungs. In the far background you could hear everyone on the Beloved Isle joining our chorus. Someone with a laptop at the next table was already designing the referendum form and the ballot-papers. Personally, I thought it was slightly over the top to design a tick into the Yes box and not have a No box, but I kept mum.

The Fellow Passenger rose to his feet. That was unusual. I looked out the windows to make sure we were not near anything fixed. Like a rock, or a passing island. Or moving objects bigger than us. Because if the FP was on his feet his lungs would not be cramped. We were going to feel the sea-mountains tremble.

'THE REVOLUTION HAS BEGUN,' the Fellow Passenger bawled. 'INDEPENDENCE FOR THE BELOVED ISLAND! AND SANDRA FOR MAYOR!'

Only the height of Superflyte's ceilings prevented him from being carried off shoulder high when we docked at Rat City. Some enthusiastic types tried it, but the damage to the boat was considered bad taste by the majority so they gave it up. There never was a chap with such a powerful head.

EPISODE 4

2007-05-07T11:08:00.000+12:00

I could tell as soon as we settled down and flicked open our newspapers that it was going to be one of Those Sailings. The Fellow Passenger's teeth were grinding like a convocation of concrete-mixers stuffed with boulders. The Lower Deck was hushed with anticipation. They could hear the sound. They knew. They waited.

'Sea-horses,' scowled the Fellow Passenger.

I looked out the window. The Motihue Channel was as calm as a mill-pond. The FP must be referring to something else.

'Such beautiful creatures,' said the Fellow Passenger, abruptly changing down from scowling grind to sentimental sniffle.

Were we, I wondered, going to see FP's gentle side? Had we begun with the storm and now were being swept into the sunlit uplands of quiet joy where we would dwell for ever?

'But now,' roared the Fellow Passenger, shattering my illusions and causing the simultaneous upset of seventy-nine assorted cups of brown water, 'but now what do they get in their daily tucker? Silt! Silt!! Silt!!! Silt flavoured with great dollops of Blackwater Sauce. So it's little rotting corpses everywhere!'

At that I was glad I had decided against a snack. The memory of a wasted pie heaved at my tonsils, sharing my gratitude.

'When I was a boy,' sighed the Fellow Passenger. 'When I was a boy. When I was a boy.'

I was getting the drift. The FP was probably going to take us back to when he was boy. It was a shock. I had never thought of him as ever being, well, young. I thought he had been a fixture on the boats for ever and Yonks, like the life-jackets and the pie-warmers.

'When I was a boy,' the Fellow Passenger intoned for the fourth time. Someone at a nearby table began to sob quietly. And there was a certain je ne sais quoit of the deep and stirring kind in that majestic, heartfelt intone. 'When I was a boy I used to go snorkelling in Enclosure Bay. It was pure magic. Water like crystal. And the colour, the wildlife, the countless fish, the overwhelming poetry of undersea life!' He heaved a deep sigh.

This was illuminating. The wistful tenderness, the romance, the poetry, the tears in the hushed audience. From the Fellow Passenger! It was a marvel to behold. But I wondered where it would all end. I hoped Andrew would nip up and warn the captain to keep a firm grip on the wheel.

'There was no place like it in all the Beloved Isle,' sighed the Fellow Passenger. 'I reckon there was no place like it all the world. It was a Chalice of the Sea. Something precious. Something rare. Something of such infinite wonder that sometimes I would not speak for days after going there. Used to worry Mum into fits. She thought I was going down with something rare and incurable.'

There was a long pause, broken only by the soft sound of seventy-nine sighs and not a few suppressed sobs. Then I saw a tell-tale wrinkle at the corner of the Fellow Passenger's mouth. I gripped the table and braced myself. Something was coming. That wrinkle was like the Biblical small cloud on the horizon. Hitch up your robes chaps, and run, the howling unstoppable is coming.

'BUT NOW,' bellowed the Fellow Passenger, changing up a couple of dozen cogs from his former roar. 'NOW we have Developers! Pah! Chaps who live nowhere and buy and sell everywhere. Pah! They buy 2000 square metres above the Bay and use Skullduggery and Tap-yer-nose to make it two 1000s. Pah! Then they invite all the bulldozers in the country to a party, which gouges out the hillside thirty minutes before El Nino chucks down half the Pacific Ocean. But they are city lawyers: they don't know about rain. They are city lawyers: they don't know water flows down hill. Pah! Pah! Pah! So the Bay turns brown, fills brown and the fish and the sea-horses eat brown and die brown. Then their flash new pooh-plants overflow a zillion litres of blackwater. A pooh-pourri slurries down, and the once-glorious Bay ends up a potty. PAH!!!'

I wished the captain was not taking us quite so close to Emu Point--the southern tip of Motutapu.

With the Fellow Passenger in this mood, it was downright dangerous. I felt about under the seat. Yes, there was a life-jacket there. Because those PAH's, as every Lower-Decker knew, were the fuses to the Fellow Passenger's hypermegaton SNORTS. Then anything could happen. Ask Russell Coutts, who had suffered a nervous breakdown, taken to calling himself Bill and now sold black socks from a stall in the Otara fleamarket after the Snort of Snorts had precipitated that little contretemps between Quickcat and the Alinghi Challenge.

I worried too about Rangitoto. We were not really SURE it was extinct. You never know what might set it off. The Fellow Traveller was obviously stirred all the way to the base of his being and all the way back to his formative years. A Snort coming from that far down and that far back would get up such a head of uranium that it might lift the lid off every tectonic crack this side of Alice Springs.

Suddenly a strange wild sound began. I was concentrating so hard on keeping a firm grip, hoping the captain was, looking out for Emu Point, checking my life-jacket and trying to shoot looks of encouragement and warning to the Lower-Deckers that I did not at first fathom what was happening.

The Fellow Passenger had laid his great head on his arms and was weeping. Great, tearing sobs. Then the whole of the Lower Deck began to sob in sympathy. Tears poured down my own cheeks. We wept for Enclosure Bay. We wept for the all the spoilt places on the Beloved Isle. We wept for each other. We wept tender tears. We wept enraged tears. We wept all the tears we could weep, led by the terrible, wonderful, heart-rending sound of the Fellow-Passenger weeping his mighty soul out on a Quickcat table.

Sometimes you just cannot do anything but rejoice at what can happen on the Lower Deck. Island people being island people together. Makes your heart sing.

The Fellow Passenger's tender side, I thought, was more devastating than one of his Snorts. I felt more chewed up than the Alinghi Challenge, and I knew that I too would never be the same again. I fervently wished that we could somehow reverse Quickcat through every Q Street developer. But not even the Fellow Passenger could do a Snort big enough for that.

EPISODE 3

2007-05-02T11:39:00.001+12:00

We were halfway across the gap between Rangitoto and North Head and I was straining into the murk to see if Dennis was being a good honorary Kiwi by knocking a 5-metre chunk off Alinghi and sending it to the bottom, when the Fellow Passenger broke into my thoughts.

'It will be like life, really,' he said, starting his story, as usual, somewhere in the middle chapters.

I played for time and murmured something non-committal, knowing that what life was like would be revealed before we had turned in past the Hilton.

'The Cup,' said the Fellow Passenger getting close to the point with unaccustomed speed. 'It's like life. Two boats. One filled with good chaps, the other filled with chaps that used to be good chaps but ERRED. The ERRERS trying to do down the Good Ones for nothing but Filthy Lucre.'

'Some,' I ventured, 'might use stronger words than ERRERS.'

'Traitors,' the Fellow Passenger ground out through clenched teeth, nodding vigorously. 'Yes. I was working up to that. I like to take a run at it so that it comes out good and hot. Traitors! TRAITORS! TRAITORS!! Damned and blasted TRAITORS!!!'

I saw what he meant by taking a run at it. By the end of that triple exclamation-mark he had the attention of the entire Lower Deck, had topped 185 decibels, and was making rocket motors blush for being on the quiet side. He ended with one of the climactic Snorts for which he is famous--this time coming out with one so powerful that if Richter had heard it he would have wished he had put more numbers in his earthquake scale. But the captain got us back on course fairly quickly this time. He must have had some extra training since the time when the FP let fly aboard Superflyte and we had veered so badly that we almost wiped out Bean Rock.

I murmured the gratitude of the entire nation for putting it so well and so aptly, which encouraged the Fellow Passenger to even greater heights. He drew admiration from the Lower Deck for somehow managing to grind his teeth in passionate fury and let fly with an FP Snort simultaneously. It was a stunning one-man imitation of Hell, a major earthquake, a Class A typhoon and the Big Bang. The Lower-Deckers applauded. The boat failed to deviate a millimetre this time, so the captain obviously had protected himself and the shipping by flicking us over to auto-pilot for a few minutes till the Fellow Passenger calmed down.

The FP bowed to his admirers. Quite a following he was getting nowadays. I hoped it would never go to his head. There was quite enough up there without adding pride. What great fall could follow, I wondered. Morosely fossicking through the rubbish-bins for cast-off newspapers? Sitting out in the cold in the dog seats? That famous SNORT silenced for ever? I cut off the stream of thought before it went too far. The Fellow Passenger was back on air.

'I sometimes wish,' he said with a dangerous look in his eye, 'that we had not given up hanging, drawing and quartering. But once we invented television that was obviously too tame. It could not draw the crowds. So it had to go. But when you see that Black-hearted Boat you yearn. Yes, you yearn. You truly yearn.'

A dreamy look came into his eye. You could almost see him projecting 3D images of chaps hanging from the rigging. They jerked, struggled and died on the table in front of him. He picked them up and dumped them into his cup along with other assorted rubbish. I added more, doing my bit for Symbolism. The chap in the cabin crew chose that moment to come past and toss the cup into his rubbish-bag. A real sense of drama he has. You can hear it in the way he comes over the PA.

The combined effect of all this had a sobering effect on the Lower-Deckers. It was one of those moments you long treasure. A convocation of travellers sharing a time of deep emotion and national pride. Someone sniffed and reached for a tissue.

That did it.

There was a sound like the approach of a Gi-mungous Comet. Then everything erupted. Even the auto-pilot was not going to be able to handle this one. The Fellow Passenger had excelled himself. Richter was left far behind. The Event that Wiped out the Dinosaurs was left far behind. The Big Bang was left far behind. The boat veered towards Devonport, pushing a tsunami ahead of it. Everyone clutched something or someone. The captain must have clutched the throttles as he fell, to wrench them backwards, obviously trying to stop us dead before we wiped out the historic tug and half the wharf. But he wrenched too far. We shot backwards.

I looked back. I had been wrong about Alinghi. Dennis was not racing them. They must have had an off-day; for they were at that moment being towed out to do some practice. Quickcat's Massey-Fergusons roared. We must have broken the record for the speed of a reverse. And the captain must have lost his presence of mind--he failed to give the warning toots that signal going astern. Not that Alinghi would have had time to do anything. The crew, we found out later, dived off like so many lemmings on Speed.

We went straight through the middle of the Black-Hearted boat. The Lower Deckers cheered. There was no applause because they were clutching things, hanging on for dear life. But they cheered fit to burst.

Sadly, Alinghi had chosen to use both boats that day, and to tow them side by side. So we took out both. Reduced them to a kind of macedoine of fibreglass and nautical bits.

The broad grin on the Fellow Passenger's face lasted for weeks afterwards. The Lower-Deck crowd, even the Upper-Deckers, treated him with special reverence. Fullers gave him free monthly passes for a whole year. Someone wrote to Rt Hon. Clark and recommended him for an ONZ. We are waiting to see if he gets it. He should. I think he has very probably, single handedly (single-nosedly?), made sure that we'll win the Ole Mug again.

EPISODE 2

2007-04-25T10:26:00.001+12:00

'Weasels!' exclaimed the Fellow Passenger with a passion. 'First rats, then rabbits and a possum, then alien spacecraft crashing on every hillside. Now weasels!'

I was savouring a very good Fullers pie and idly contemplating the shrapnel that a student a couple of tables away had chosen to embed in her face, so the sudden introduction of the alien-wildlife motif had my hundred billion neurons a tad flummoxed.

'Weasels?' I said, playing for time.

'Yes, weasels,' said the Fellow Passenger bitterly. 'You come to live on the Beloved Isle, you put 21k of water between you and the smoggy ruin, and what happens?' He stabbed a large forefinger at a pile of paper in front of him. 'Proposed Plan Change 38, that's what.'

I thought I saw a Resource Management Act dissertation coming, and tried to head it off by pretending that I was thinking deep and meaningfuls, when all I was really doing was contemplating the shrapnel again. Anything to see off a boring 35 minutes.

'Some people think it's all boring rubbish,' said the Fellow Passenger, as if reading my thoughts. 'No. It's Machinations. It's Dark Doings. It's Secret Deals between the Council and the Rich & Powerful. It's Political Pressure for Corporate Greed. It's the triumph over democracy of the JUGGERNAUT WIL.'

The knotted veins on his forehead stood out like his capital letters. They bulged and throbbed. I hoped Fuller's First Aid kit could handle sudden apoplexy.

'And they want us to drink filtered Weasel Pooh!' the Fellow Passenger raged.

My pie lost some of its savour. The embedded facial shrapnel lost my undivided attention.

'Drink what!?' I choked.

The Fellow Passenger considerately waited till a portion of pie found the right pipe and I had dried my eyes.

'Filtered weasel pooh,' he repeated. 'It's true. Owhanake Pure. Bottled and sold over the counter. That's what they are talking about. Don't you take any notice of what goes on in the world? They want us to recycle our wastewater. And Willy the Weasel's Matiatia Horror, that Clump of Condominiums--a hundred apartments all in a heap--will make more of the stuff than you can shake a stick at. They want to triple the absolute maximum output--thirty times what goes through now. So that's what'll be on the menu for me and you. Filtered weasel pooh.'

I was getting the drift. The Fellow Passenger liked to start his story in the middle and work back. My pie lost even more of its savour. Even the facial shrapnel was beginning to look better than the combined onslaught of District Plan Change 38 and weasels.

'Weasel-words,' said the Fellow Passenger, aiming another powerful stab at the RMA paperwork.

I nodded sagely, determined not to be thought a dimwit. 'The old Roman saying had that one right,' I quoth, "'When men cannot change things they change words.'"

'He beamed at me. 'Good one.' he nodded. 'They must have had the same guys back in those days. Have you seen Willy the Weasel's Website?'

I pleaded ignorance, hoping to get off lightly.

'They say Waiheke Island is "economically challenged",' he stormed. ' "Economically challenged"! Then they say we get half a million visitors a year. Does Howick get half a million visitors? Does Birkenhead? Does Kohimarama? And they call us "economically challenged". Pah!'

I shielded my pie from a furious spray of FP spittle. I could see my attempt at a tasty meal ending badly. I murmured encouragement. After all, my heart was on the Beloved Isle. I would not let the side down.

'And they think they can bribe us by burying the carpark,' he went on, the veins back to their knotted throbbing. 'Pah! But they'll take a zillion cubic metres of dirt out; and they'll charge like It's Our Job to Be Fair, so we'll still be bumper-to-bumper on the dotted yellows? Pah! And they say we'll get lots of jobs. Pah! Think of the extra traffic that will make. And they say our kids will have something to do at night--Pah! Think of the extra traffic that will make--Pah! And they say the visitors will stop off for a quick booze so we won't get clumps of traffic coming up the road--Pah! And it will be easier to turn round--Pah! And we won't have to go over the water to do any shopping--Pah!!!'

The moisture-content of my remnant of pie was growing fast.

'Sounds reasonable.' I ventured.

At that the throbbing veins threatened to burst and turn me, my pie and half the Lower Deck bloody red.

'Weasel words,' roared the Fellow Passenger. 'Weasel words! What they're really saying is that they want to build a great big money-box for themselves, and they think we're so thick that if they chuck a few useless crumbs at us we'll roll over and say Yay and Thanks and Take a Knighthood. Pah! Don't you be thick too.'

I ignored the slur and went back to contemplating the metallic student. He turned to follow my gaze.

'You've got it,' he said, relieved to see that I was on the right wavelength after all. 'That's a face that was ruined by a close encounter with Mike's Junkyard. She used to be beautiful. Now look at her! That's what we're going to get if Willy the Weasel pushes 38 through. The face of Waiheke ruined with gross chunks of condominium. All to make that lot filthy rich.

'First we get a crashed UFO on one side of Matiatia, painted with Alien Pus. Next it's Willy the Weasel's shrapnel in our face on the other side. Then we look forward to our daily dose of Filtered Weasel Pooh. It's enough to turn your stomach.'I legged it to the aft railing and puked a perfectly good pie into the Gulf.

EPISODE 1

2007-04-16T18:33:00.000+12:00

'You can tell by the way the hairs on their necks bristle,' boomed the Fellow Passenger in my ear.

I jerked my neurons out of the depths of the week's real-estate adverts and followed the wave of his hand.

Frozen horror was written on every face on the Lower Deck, except for the ones still being stuffed with chips and bottled fluids. Quickcat had just changed down a cog on its Massey-Fergussons and was cruising into Matiatia Bay.

The Fellow Passenger beamed ferociously at me. 'And why not?' he demanded, 'It's enough to set any human hairs bristlng.'

I was still struggling out of the depths of the real-estate smorgasbord, and was not quite au fait with the drift of the FP's diatribe.

'That,' he said, noting my confusion. 'That! That's what's causing all the bristling horror.'

I followed his gaze out the windows and over to the left of the bay. My own neck hairs started quivering, and my hundred billion neurons clicked into a higher plane as light dawned. My eyes stood out like hairs upon the fretful porpentine as they became fixed upon the Sprawling Horror on the Hill.

It's an alien spaceship that crashed,' the Fellow Passenger said, beaming at my now obvious comprehension and noting with approval my horizontal neck-hairs and organ-stop peepers. 'It's one of them things that warp through the space-time continuum full of giant and hideous beings that drink ammonia and cyanide and beam you up to steal yer body-parts for unspeakable experiments, before exhibiting you in some intergalactic museum stuffed like pickles in a preserving jar.'

I digested all that, inwardly observed that his encounters with pickling were not of the Third Kind, and prepared to give him some of the Scientific Method.

'I admit,' I began, 'that that thing is one of the most hideous eyesores ever to be constructed upon the Beloved Isle, but--'

'That's it,' intoned the Fellow Passenger, 'that's the first layer of the proof. No one truly human would do something like that deliberate. It has to be alien. And it's obviously a crash. Anyone with half an eye can see that.'

I thought it was time to call in the law to back up the Scientific Method. 'But there's the Resource Management Act,' I pretended to protest. 'It must just be a house that went through the process.'

A black scowl crossed the face of the Fellow Passenger, and a few of the Frozen Faced within earshot began to look as if I should walk a plank ASAP. Outside a couple of dozen ducks licked their lips in anticipation.

'Not even the worst, most criminal excesses ever committed under the RMA could explain that sprawling disaster,' he said. 'It must be alien. Just the colour should be enough to tell you that. Alien pus. Obvious.'

I saw his point. Science and the Law collapsed and died in acquiescent silence.

'And this is not the first one, or the only one,' crowed the Fellow Passenger, surveying with glee the Dead Corpses of Reason. 'They're all over the place. Our island is being picked on. Picked On.' His voice rose to a scream as the Massey-Fergusson's revved to begin the pirouette into the wharf and we began to fumble in the wallets for the Wharf Tax.

'Picked on!'

Three times always proves the point. But this needed no proof. I was with him now. 'That semi-circle disguised as concrete half-buried in the hill above Palm Beach--'

'Exactly,' bellowed the Fellow Passenger. 'You've got it, mate. You've got it. They're everywhere. This island is obviously the node of some intergalactic power-grid. They reset their navigational thingies here. But when we get one of them mysterious power-blips on the National Grid (you know what I mean) and the lights flick off for a quick sec it sends them right off and they crash. It's obvious.'

I pretended a return to Science. 'Could just be bad earthworks,' I said, nodding at the ruin that surrounds the Hillside Horror.

The snort delivered by the Fellow Passenger nearly blew all the windows out. Quickcat staggered and the captain did a quick course-adjustment to avoid wiping out the waiting queue.

'Earthworks!' he shouted. 'Earthworks! Those are not human. Those are where the alien bodies were buried, quick, to cover up the evidence and prevent mass panic. That's why nothing will grow there.'

'And I suppose the giant deckchair is some kind of Alien Signal or Ritual,' I said, slightly nettled by the Snort that Upset the Massey-Fergussons. Even I have limits.

He beamed. 'Yeah,' he said. 'You got it in one. Why else would such a weird thing be there? How many humans do you know who have bodies that big? Giant hideous beings, that's what.'

He paused to create a perfectly timed effect.

But the clincher,' he said, 'the clincher, is that one of them wasn't killed in the crash. The runt of the crew survived. And is now in A Position of Power.'

I gasped. The neurons staggered like the National Grid in a Louis Vuitton gale. 'You mean--'

He nodded. 'Yeah,' he crowed, as the Absolute Proof simultaneously dawned on me and half the Lower Deck, now agog around us. 'How else do you think he won the election? Why else would he try to bump off the pensioners by starving them out of house and home? It's all Dark Doings by an Alien Mind. Bank on it, mates, bank on it.'