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The Waiting Space

April 19th, 2010 by admin
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Willow hadn’t minced words about her flat when she offered it to Winona. “It’s the kind of place that you live when you’re saving up for something.”

“If everything works out, we’ll just be there for six months, maybe  a year,” Winona admits. “I’m sure it’s fine for us.”

It is, just barely. This abode is at the less attractive end of Scarborough Terrace, part of a wooden villa with shabby paint. They ascend 20 concrete steps, then go up a cracked concrete path to the side of the house.

Unfortunately the villa was converted into three flats during one of the less comfortable moments in New Zealand architecture, the long years between claw-foot tubs and glossy glass shower units. The kitchen is a narrow corridor with stainless steel counters, and the bathroom, too, has a metal-floored shower. There are no closets. More worrying to Winona, she can count the electrical outlets outside of the kitchen on one hand. The warm wood doors, and a leadlight window, give the place a fraction of charm.

“They advertised it as one and a half rooms, which is true, and people showed up expecting two bedrooms,” Willow explains, showing off a curious meter-and-a-half study. “ So I think they’ll be OK if you take it over, instead of them having to advertise it again. The landlords used to live in the front flat but they decided it was too cold and moved to Tauranga. They still own the house…”

Based on the study, the easy walk to downtown, and the way the place looked filled with Willow’s vivid, cheerful belongings, Winona had taken the place for her and Will.

On a chilly autumn morning, left there by herself, she is having second thoughts. Mount Victoria rears up directly behind the small yard. She guesses that the house will “lose the sun” around 2 P.M. Bundling herself up, she sits down to do more job applications.

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Wellington Men III: The Export

April 16th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Will has started his new job, at a private software development juggernaut. Out for drinks with the new crew, he meets someone else who’s recently come to Wellington. Woodrow has a knot of people around him, enjoying his happy, shouty vibe. He can’t believe his luck. He’s down here on contract for Weta Digital, working for Peter Jackson! Dude!

Woodrow is another Wellington Cad, except he doesn’t know it.

He seems innocent enough. But lanky Yankee Woodrow breaks women’s hearts on a regular basis. After moving to New Zealand to work in Miramar, he started out dating women in his own mid-thirties bracket. Quickly, he became terrified by the Kiwi tendency to settle down and have kids without getting married. It wasn’t long before he realized his pulling power and switched to 25-year-old design graduates.

At first, these girls are all delighted to be romanced American-style, having dinners paid for, their hands held, being told how much nicer they are than the women in Los Angeles. Woodrow is engagingly verbal, talking endlessly about his life-changing trip to Vietnam, happily displaying his Celtic armband tattoo. But then he gets distracted and neglectful. His last girlfriend said it best. “I could compete with another woman. But not with Peter Jackson.”

After putting in hard time making Avatar effects happen, Woodrow has just been put on contract for The Hobbit. This makes him even more of a catch, while exacerbating the problem. He’s pretty sure he doesn’t want to stay in New Zealand after that, but it’s going to be a long contract, and he doesn’t want to put his life on hold, at the same time he’s not sure if he wants kids, and –

Despite his waffling, he really thinks he’s looking for Ms. Right. This makes him all the more heartbreaking.

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Wellington Men II: The Cad

April 14th, 2010 by admin
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Set up in the new flat, there’s only so much online job hunting and waiting for the phone that Winona can stand. She fabricates errands. She is lingering through the New World Metro grocery store when she runs into an old acquaintance. In his rough, warm voice, he murmurs, “Choice to have you back. You haven’t changed a bit, Win. Will’s a lucky bloke. You’re job hunting? I’ve got some contacts. Here, have my card. We should do coffee sometime.”

Winona pockets the card politely, making a note that she’ll mention this to Will.  She recalls, from the tears of her smitten friends, that this man, Wayland, is a Wellington Cad.

The Wellington Cad (W.C.)  is as successful a predator as a weasel on a bird-reserve island. W.C.s have been known to have multiple women on a string at once, deceiving all of them; or, once a woman is hooked, exerting their charisma and ask for a small loan, a place to stay, a co-ownership of a business. Whatever passive-aggressive deceptions he deploys, the W.C. is too insidious to be a persecutable abuser. He never raises his hand or his voice to any of his conquests. But watch out for your credit cards, your sister, and your sanity.

Those who have suffered at a Wellington Cad’s indifferent hand wonder how he gets away with it. In Auckland, the secret of his success would be picking off women from different far-flung social circles. In Christchurch, with its small-town social tightness, he’d have lost his clients and had his car keyed in a year. Wellington is a little more loosely knit. It also has the most well-educated single women. Because of their shame at being so bright yet being treated so badly, they tend to hold their tongues, except to their best friends.

Trim, handsome Wayland cuts a swathe through the CBD’s many single women. He’s a graphic designer – W.C.s always have careers that sound good and provide an excellent cover for impecunious laziness. Once entangled with him, his would-be mates learn about his selective memory,financial fecklessness, and narcisissm.

Two hours later, Winona still hasn’t thrown his card away and is, against her better judgement, preening a bit.

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Wellington Men I: The Best Mate

April 12th, 2010 by the_lifer
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Will is deeply relieved that Wayne is still his best mate. The big O.E. has broken up mateships of longer duration than theirs, hatched at university. But Wayne is as reliable as ever.

On moving day, he’s the one helping haul a king-sized bed out of a TradeMe seller’s home (“Must Pick Up”) into Will’s new flat. Wayne’s wife Henny hovers, watching over the truck being unloaded, their baby in one arm. The baby is in an adorable AC/DC onesie.

Born in Upper Hutt, now living in a classic Johnsonville starter home, Wayne is smart, savvy, and retains his ponytail and taste for heavy metal. He and Will have developed software, taken off in a ramshackle car to snowboard and fish on the cheap, and gotten food poisoning in Melbourne, all together. Late at night, separated by sleeping bags or bunk beds, they’ve talked about their dysfunctional families. They never said much about these talks the next day. But it was good to know that another bloke was trying to do better than had been done to them.

Stuck behind Wayne on the stairs, Winona has the chance to scrutinize him. She has always been somewhat cool towards Wayne, that inciter of long absences and much beer drinking. Still, she can’t deny that he’s improved with age. He’s taken up bicycle racing due to some team challenge at work, and his new fit trimness has its charm. Winona is also realizing that what came across as stodgy about Wayne at 25 seems together and smart (even manly) on the other side of 30. He still, she notes, never looks at a girl besides Henny.

Once the bed is wedged into the bedroom, Wayne and Will yarn for a while. They ramble through Wayne’s renovations, a new online game, and politics. Then Wayne tells Will what their old acquaintance Wayland has been up to, so that Will knows enough to stay out of it, mate.

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My Welly Valentine

April 7th, 2010 by the_lifer
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When Aucklanders get romantic, they seek out their local views. They want to show off to the significant other, as well as see and be seen. So Auckland canoodlers herd at the Viaduct Basin harbor, the bayside promenades that look out over Rangitoto, the parks on the edges of volcano hillsides.

Romance is different in Wellington, where love seeks shelter. Courting couples nestle into the many small restaurants, drift into corners at parties, blend seamlessly into circles of friends. The romantic apotheosis is living together and the resulting freedom from needing to go out in harsh weather to have a social life.

So,  Will and Winona are at a mediocre Italian restaurant,  soothed by the dim red walls and the well-spaced tables for two. The other tables are filled by couples who, despite ordering the dishes marked as “for sharing”, are so used to each other that they take conversational refuge in critiquing the antipasto platters.  The restaurant hostess knows her clientele and, noting a certain freshness in Will and Winona, has given them a central table, so their good spirits can light up the room. They are evidently celebrating something.

Will, in a rare moment, says, “Thanks for being great about all this, Win.”

Smiling into her wineglass, Winona murmurs, “No, you’re the one who’s been great.”

“You got the flat. Which is pretty brilliant. I bloody hate flat hunting.”

“You got the job! Now I need one, too.” Before Will can say anything, she adds,
“However things work out, we’ll need the money.”

“True, true,” he replies. Then, “I’ll call you when we’re having work drinks. You can come network with us.”

As Winona beams, a waiter arrives. “Your antipasto!”

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Fun After All

April 5th, 2010 by admin
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Getting the second round of drinks, Will mentioned to the bartender that he and Winona were freshly returned from London.

“London! Choice! I wanna go there just to see. The early closing for the bars sounds mad, eh? I wouldn’t go to work, I hear work’s shot there with the recession – izzat true? I’m Wazzer, mate,” she says, holding out her hand for a shake. She offers him a free shot if he’ll tell her about London.

Will beckons Winona up to the bar. Together, without the sugar-coating they’ve given it for family and potential employers, they spill about the good and bad of London town. Will’s long work hours and Winona’s recession redundancy, chavs and Sloanes, the ghastly, sodden winters, the way “your world just shrinks to your Tube stops.”

Soon Wazzer takes over, chatting a mile a minute over the clash of her heavy silver jewelry as she doles out beers and White Russians and orders around the junior staff.  “Everyone says I should go to Ozzie, make money working the mining towns, but I don’t want to get tanned to biltong. Besides, when you stick around this town, you get a name, folks know you, you work your way up, am I right?” Cast as the Greek chorus, Will and Winona agree. “I’m bogan as, I’ve tended bar from Russel to Wanaka, but I’m all about Wellywood, I like the culture, going out for the arts. I like to do something when I’m done.” Will, unusually for him, starts to tell her about his bogan best mate.

By the end of the evening, our travelers have remembered why they’ve moved back here, heard the stories behind all of Wazzer’s tattoos, and had a toast to the evening ending at 4 A.M. instead of at midnight. Winona and Wazzer swap cellphone numbers.

The next day, Winona isn’t sure that taking pole dancing classes with Wazzer is quite as good an idea as it seemed last night. But she sends Wazzer a friendly text anyway.

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But We Just Got Here

April 2nd, 2010 by the_lifer
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The idea had been for Winona and Will take an evening off from being Returned Prodigal Daughter and Partner. They’d gone downtown with drinks in mind.  Packs of people were roaming around, also escaping, the party atmosphere turned up a notch by the transgression of patronizing businesses on A Public Holiday. When they’d run into an old friend right away, it should have been the opening to a rollicking evening. So typically Wellington! they declared. It’s so small! People you know everywhere! You go away and it hasn’t changed!

Their old friend agreed. They were absolutely right. “Which is why I’m moving to Australia next week!”

Twenty minutes after this encounter, Winona and Will are drinking, but in a more subdued fashion than they’d planned. Winona is biting her lips, stabbing into her cocktail with its stirrer. “Should we have gone to Australia instead? We go to all this trouble, and then…”

“Isn’t why he’s going away what we came back for?” Will shrugs. “Be the same there, eh? Grass is always greener on the other side. Provided you’re allowed to water the lawn.”

He adds, “I don’t have to accept the offer they made.”

“You said you’d let them know Tuesday.”

“I did. I dunno. Let’s give it the weekend, see if Wellington’s still, I dunno, fun. ‘Nother drink?”

Winona parts her lips, bites back a hundred rebuttals, sits up straight.  “Yes. Please.”

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The Good Day

March 31st, 2010 by the_lifer
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“You can’t beat Wellington on a good day.” And today is one of them.

Clear silvery sunshine beats down on the jackets everyone is wearing, just in case. The autumn freshness means they’re still comfortable. The harbor’s waters retain summer’s friendly turquoise, only a hint of darker cold currents in the deeper spots. Even the wind is resting in the unbroken sun, circulating as the lightest breeze.

All through downtown, the espresso machines haven’t stopped hissing since 7 A.M. Winona is perched on a metal chair by the waterfront, sipping a perfect latte. In an hour, she has a meeting with an employment agency. Will, meanwhile, is having a formal interview today (as formal as it’s going to get for the edgy IT group that’s been talking to him).

She is wondering how early to be for her meeting. Everyone’s fabricating reasons to schedule their meetings in cafes, followed by long lunch hours. The shops are pulsing, and the waterfront has turned into a passegiata. With a cool eye, she notes how much the waterfront has been groomed since she left, how many of the people ambling along the waterfront are pretty women, and what they are wearing. Privately, she sighs with relief. Her London clothes will carry her for a while. She hopes that the six-month gap in her work history will lose some of its stigma in transit.

The sun is still a gentle caress. The coffee, after all the indifferent British cups, isn’t just good, it’s right. Looking at the sparkling harbor, who wouldn’t want to live here? It’s going to get better, she thinks, it’s going to work out.

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