Having lost the Land-Rover in the hills west of Hanmer (see ‘One Lost Land Rover’) and having shamefacedly returned to Christchurch Dr. Roger Nicoll, Robin Smith and I licked our wounds at Robin’s photographic studio in Cashel Street. It was two floors above Tisdall’s (as the management of that sports shop was well aware, having been flooded out on more than one occasion when prints, left overnight, had blocked the overflow outlet from the dark room’s washing tank).
Robin and Roger were waiting for Roger’s wife, Anne, to pick them up. My car had been parked in Cashel Street all day outside Mrs Pope’s knitting establishment. Sharing the studio was a well-known freelance journo., Mr John Drew. John was something of an inquiline at times and if his filing cabinet ever unexpectedly turned up in your office you knew he’d not only vacated his previous quarters but would stick to yours like a rock oyster. This afternoon he got a scoop, the story of our ill-fated Hanmer hills expedition which he duly wrote up for the ‘Press’.
Over a week later he was to write another story in the Press’s ‘Random Reminder’ column under the heading ‘Stinking Fish’ but because of the people involved it had to be cloaked in fable. I shall now re-tell it naming names. Surely I shan’t be sued for libel? (In any case, the greater the truth, the greater the libel!)
Anne Nicoll duly collected Roger and Robin and we parted company, I to drive home to Governor’s Bay while they headed toward Fendalton. As they turned into Cathedral Square they were astonished to see a cyclist ahead of them carrying a large eel on his parcel tray. As they watched, the eel slowly slid off the tray and fell on to the road in front of the Post Office. They did a complete circuit of the square and came back to where the fish still lay. So, almost without stopping, they scooped it up and took it to Robin’s temporary flat near Victoria Street.
The first I knew of the eel was when a slightly malodorous cardboard package arrived on the desk in my office in the Mercantile Gazette Building in Madras Street. As I worked my way through layers of newspaper the smell increased until the ghastly, coiled, one metre long, silvery-yellowy thing was revealed. It is, perhaps, indicative of my relationship with Nicoll and Smith that I had no doubt where it had come from and by the next morning I had quietly installed the re-wrapped anguilla in Dr. Nicoll’s surgery waiting room in Worcester Street.
I had a lunch date with him that same day at which although there was a certain archness between us nothing eely was discussed; in any event, the conversation was adequately dominated by our recent Hanmer experience. However, leaving the ‘Copper Kettle’ early, I discovered that the stinking fish was once again in my possession, in my car. Anxious to rid myself of its pestilence and keen to expand the circle of sufferers I took it, without unwrapping it, to Euan Sarginson’s sandwich bar which was a shop annexe to his cousin Bill’s Apex Tyre Company premises, where Euan employed, as slave labourers, his mother Sheila and aunty Mona, to mass produce mountains of ham and cheese sandwiches to feed the local workers.
God knows how long it was before either Euan or the ladies discovered the source of the stench but I had Euan on the phone to me next day, he having no doubt that I was the perpetrator. He was furious! ‘This is a food establishment,’ he screamed, ‘I could be shut down by the health department. How irresponsible could you be?’
I realized I’d gone too far so immediately went to apologize and to explain that while I had done him evil I was not the principal culprit and that although I had no actual proof, I was certain that Nicoll and Smith were at the root of it.
Mollified, Euan agreed to join me in raising the stakes. Robin Smith was only in New Zealand for a short time until he was due to leave for another in a series of overseas photographic expeditions. From Australia he had brought a Holden station wagon into the country which he intended to sell at a profit just as soon as a panel beater off Bealey Avenue had cleaned out the red dust of Ayers Rock and restored it to ‘showroom condition’. We took the eel, now extra wrapped in a plastic bag positively bulging with gasses, to the panel beaters’ and, unobserved, slid it into the open back hatch of the Holden.
Shortly thereafter Robin received a telephone call in which he was politely asked to remove his vehicle from the panel beaters’ premises as something extremely offensive was nauseating the valet cleaners to such an extent that they were refusing to work on it.
Things were getting serious, a bigger game was afoot, a new chapter was about to be written.
I, innocent in my office, had need to see a client and so walked out to where my VW beetle was parked in Madras Street. I started the engine and was immediately overwhelmed by a disgusting, noisome odour emanating from the primitive air supply system. I opened doors and windows and fled the car, my gorge rising. I sat on a low wall for some time, gathering myself, and then opened the engine compartment at the rear of the beetle to discover the eel, wrapped serpentinely around the horizontally opposed air-cooled cylinders, its skin now ruptured obscenely while a colony of unspeakable larvae undulated over its surface. A note was attached which read, ‘One needs water, the other one doesn’t’. Can you imagine what it took for me to remove that vile thing and re-package it?
One week after the eel had slid from the fisherman’s bicycle tray Robin Smith found a box on the doorstep of his flat. It was accompanied by several squadrons of blowflies thinking that all their Saturdays had come at once. Sometime later I dropped in at his place - just a courtesy call such as Pooh might have made upon Christopher Robin. (You must remember, dear reader, that up to this point Nicoll and Smith had neither revealed to me any involvement in this revolting saga, nor I to them). From the garden at the back of his flat I could see black smoke rising. Pushing open the garden gate, saw him in the process of having a big burn-up in one of those oil drum incinerators.
‘Good morning, Robin’ I greeted him cheerily.
He acknowledged me with what I thought was a less than ebullient response.
All small boys enjoy a good fire and so, silently, we watched as the sparks, smoke and flames emerged from the drum and flew into the still morning air. Then, as if to promise to haunt us until the end of our days, the eel, or what remained of it, sinuated slowly out of the air vent at the bottom of the incinerator to lie at our feet, slimy, bloated and half charred. The game, at last, was over.
But it has haunted us. Here we are, old men, over forty years on, and we still remind each other of the eel story.
© DON DONOVAN
