Dominion Post:
FLAT PARTY OUT OF CONTROL; SIX ARRESTS MADE
Police were called to a Kilbirnie address when a student party raged out of control last night. Angry neighbours reported bottles being thrown, street fights and loud music. One woman, who wanted to remain anonymous, said that it was usually a quiet neighbourhood but the beginning of the academic year saw a rise in obnoxious behaviour. All six people taken into custody were released this morning and no further charges have been laid.
When Anna woke, her face was squashed against a couch cushion that felt like it hadn’t been washed since the seventies. There was a small pool of drool under her cheek. She could smell an unpleasant mix of slow-drying dog, ramen noodles and feet. Her stomach churned and her head pulsed inside her skull. Somewhere someone moaned and then a door banged loudly against a wall.
“Are you the mum?” a voice above her asked. She turned her head slightly, cracked open an eye. A skinny young guy with ripped jeans and a man bun hovered over her.
“Baz asked me to give you the keys,” he said. “The van’s out front.”
He put a set of keys down beside her, the keyring a faded red casino chip. She closed her eyes and when she opened them again, he was gone. Her brain swirled slowly, bile creeping up the back of her parched throat. A matted strand of hair was stuck like hardened porridge against the side of her face. She shut her eyes.
“Far out, where are we?” someone croaked. There was a rustling sound beside her, then clattering glass and a bottle rolled across the floor, spilling out brown sludge and a bent cigarette butt onto the worn rug.
“Whose flat is this? And where are my shoes?” The voice wasn’t familiar. Outside, someone started up a car with a very bad muffler. Anna forced herself to sit up. Acid burned up her throat.
A woman sat across from her on an old mustard-coloured La-Z-Boy. Her dark hair was sticking up on one side of her head like a bad attempt at a Princess Leia bun. She wore a pair of mum jeans and a slightly crumpled floral print shirt with an oversized pink knit cardigan. She looked familiar, but Anna struggled to remember who she was.
“I feel a bit sick,” the woman announced, standing up shakily and moving towards the kitchen where she paused to look at the stack of dishes piled haphazardly in the sink.
Anna took a minute to look around. She had come down to Wellington to help Ben shift into his flat. This was not it. Her son’s flat was no palace, but this was more like a squat. Mould grew up the corner of one wall where a shelf made of bricks and old pallets housed a dead cactus and several old takeaway boxes. A road cone sat beside the hallway door, a pair of black boxers draped across the top. On the coffee table and across the floor were empty cans and liquor bottles. There was a suspicious dark patch of something on the rug that Anna avoided identifying. She tried not to breathe in.
The woman returned, sipping from a filmy-looking jar filled with water.
“This is embarrassing, but I can’t remember your name,” she said. “Sorry.”
“Anna,” Anna said. Her voice was raspy.
“I’m Faith, Rachel’s mum.”
Ah, this made sense. Rachel was one of Ben’s new flatmates. She had a vague recollection of meeting Faith the day before when she helped them with Ben’s mattress.
“How on the earth did we end up here?” Faith asked. “All I remember is going with Keiley to get more tonic and snacks.”
Anna tried to picture Keiley. Was she the other flatmate? She thought perhaps she was the one with the lip piercing and the streaks of green in her hair, but there seemed to be a lot of uni girls with K names.
They had helped the kids move in. She remembered that now. Remembered ordering pizzas and a few of the kids’ friends had turned up with some drinks. She and Faith had been reluctantly invited to join them. They played ‘Never have I ever’. That was where things got hazy.
Anna rubbed her hand across her face, peeling the concreted hair away and then looked around for her phone. She looked again at the keys next to her on the stained couch.
“Do you have a van?” she asked Faith.
“Oh no, the van,” Faith said, putting her hand across her mouth. “Surely that wasn’t for real?” She had a horrified sort of look on her face. Anna’s stomach was clenching with a weird sense of dread. Something was prickling at the back of her mind.
Faith took off for the front door, flinging it open onto the street. Fresh air and sunlight welcomed them. Anna stood to follow her. There was a pair of ballet flats half hidden under the sofa, Faith’s missing shoes, she assumed. She was still wearing her heels.
“No!” Faith said loudly. Then, “No,” very quietly.
Out on the street, parked at a weird angle across the driveway, sat a badly painted bubblegum-pink Hiace van. ‘Rick’s Plumbing’ was written on the side. Underneath it; ‘All cisterns go since 1998’.
“Don’t you remember? Last night,” Faith said. “We bought a van. Together.”
They wandered warily down the steps and approached the van. Anna tested the key and found it fitted the creaky passenger door. It would seem they were indeed in possession of a pink, Scooby-Doo-style vehicle, only with more rust.
She slid open the side door. Inside, it smelt vaguely of mouse and burnt rope. The back had been shoddily renovated and there were two skinny beds down the length, fitted sheets and duvets with Disney characters on them covering the mattresses. A small set of drawers was wedged at the top between them. Navy curtains were attached to the grimy windows and under one bed was a plastic storage box containing kitchen necessities, a rather threadbare towel, a few cans of baked beans and a roll of toilet paper. A box of corroded tools and a bag of rusted washers wedged into a side panel were perhaps left over from the van’s plumbing heyday.
Anna closed the door and turned to Faith.
“I’m sorry, I just can’t process this right now. I need coffee and a Berocca and a minute to think.”
Faith laughed, sounding nervous. “I agree. Well, a tea anyway. Shall we find a cafe and get our bearings?”
They looked around the street, as if a cafe might magically appear a few houses down.
“Shit. I don’t even know what suburb we’re in,” Anna confessed.
“I need to find my purse and have a wee,” Faith said.
“Shall we go back inside and see if anyone can tell us where we are?”
They headed back into the flat. The smell seemed worse after the fresh air. Anna went down the hall, opening doors to find someone awake or a bathroom.
The bathroom had starry lino and a peach sink clogged with regurgitated pizza. The toilet door was blocked by a ripe body, snoring loudly. Something scuttled away against the skirting boards as she opened doors.
When she returned, Faith was pulling her phone out from under the couch.
“Trust me when I say you want to wait to use a loo,” she told her. “And according to the trio I found in the end bedroom, there’s a cafe two streets over that does good cheese scones.”
“Sounds like a plan. I could murder a cheese scone and I can hold on for the bathroom if it’s that bad. Shoot, my phone’s dead,” Faith said with a frown.
“You can use mine if you want,” Anna told her.
“Thanks, after I’ve had a wee will be fine. I kind of want to get out of here.”
They found the cafe easily enough, a short walk from the flat, and nabbed a table outside, happy for the fresh air, despite the cold. Anna sat and fished her phone out of her bag while Faith used the ladies. There were eight missed calls, most from her husband Greg, and a lot of texts all from Ben wondering where she was. She rang him first.
“Mum. Where are you? Dad’s been ringing me all morning.”
“Sorry, hun, I’ll ring him soon. I’m in a cafe with Rachel’s mum.”
“Where did you guys go? Oh man, you guys were a crackup last night. You never came back with the tonic though? Are you all sweet?”
“Ahh, yes, we ahh …” Anna’s phone buzzed with another call. Greg. “That’s your dad ringing, I’d better talk to him.”
“Yeah, okay, talk to you later.” Ben hung up and Anna accepted the waiting call.
“Where the fuck are you?” Greg yelled down the phone just as Faith returned to the table. “I was waiting at the god-damn airport for almost an hour and you weren’t even on the bloody flight. What the hell, Anna?”
“Sorry,” Anna mouthed to Faith, as she sat down with a carafe of water and two glasses. She knew Faith could hear him and her face was burning with embarrassment. She looked at her watch. It was already after eleven. Her flight back to Auckland had been at nine.
“I’m so sorry, I missed my flight,” she said.
“No shit, Sherlock,” Greg bellowed. “What the hell is going on? We were supposed to be at the appointment at eleven.”
Bugger. The marriage counsellor. Anna tried to think what to tell him. How was she going to explain that she’d had far too much to drink at a uni flat party and somehow ended up in some scody dive of a flat, now the owner of a shit-heap van. Before she could get a word out though, Greg was yelling again.
“I don’t have the bloody time for this shit. Some of us have work to do. Just get on another flight and get your own bloody way back from the airport.” Then he hung up. Arsehole, Anna thought. Even if it was technically her fault.
She held out the phone to Faith as the waitress arrived with their scones and hot drinks.
“Did you want to make some calls?
“Actually, I think maybe I need to get my head on straight before I ring Daniel,” Faith said, tipping a sachet of sugar into her cup.
“Yeah, that’s a good point. I have to confess, I have no memory of us buying the van. Or much else to be honest.” Anna grimaced.
“Yeah, the van. It seemed like such a good idea at the time. Mind you, he never said it was so … pink.” She sipped her coffee. “So, as I recall, we were talking about how I’m going to see my brother in the South Island, and you were saying you wanted to go down to see your … boys … in Christchurch?”
“Boy and girl,” Anna said. “Twins. Cameron and Niamh.”
“Right, and we’d been saying how the reason we were so drunk after playing ‘Never have I ever’ was because we hadn’t lived enough, and that led to how we should do a road trip together.” That did sound a bit familiar actually, Anna thought. “Then that nice guy with the mullet said he was selling his van, and we could have it for eight hundred and I hadn’t booked any flights yet, and so, yeah, we did it.” Faith drained the rest of her coffee and poured more water into their glasses.
“Good grief. Okay, so what do we do with it now?” Anna asked, scrummaging in her bag and finding a sheet of Panadol. “Want some?”
“Yes, please.” They downed the painkillers and then sat in silence.
“My issue is, I really do need to get to Invercargill,” Faith said, “and that van money was all I had to use for the flights.”
“Do you think this guy will buy it back?” Anna asked doubtfully. “Do we even know his name?”
“I think maybe Barry? Or Barney? Benny? It started with a B.”
“Shit.”
They both looked at each other and then laughed.
“We’re worse than the kids,” Faith said.
“I think we need more caffeine.”
Eventually they decided to walk back to the flat and see if anyone knew Barry/Benny/Barney.
No one was home, the door locked.
“Where are you staying?” Anna asked.
“Oh gosh, I’m at the Travelodge and I’m supposed to be checked out by now.”
“Yeah, me too. I’m at the James Cook. I think we should go grab our bags and then we can go back to the kids’ flat and work out what to do.”
“Okay. Maybe someone there will want a van?” They looked over at said van. It now had what looked like a parking ticket but was hopefully a flyer on its front windscreen. It seemed very pink and patchy in the midday sun.
“Who’s driving?” Anna asked.
“Well, if you don’t mind?” Faith said. “I’m not a very confident driver, and I hate driving in cities.”
They climbed in and looked around. Apart from a Post Malone air freshener hanging from the rearview mirror it was pretty sparse. Anna put the key in the ignition and turned it, half expecting it not to turn over. But it roared to life, along with the stereo, which was belting out some Australian rap artist singing about good pussy. Anna quickly pushed the power button, cutting him off mid-sentence.
“Right, here we go.” It had been a while since she’d driven a manual and they lurched down the road, bunny-hopping a few times before they swung out into the Wellington traffic.