I left university with a good degree, but at a time of mild economic recession. I found a job as a vegetable packer at Foley’s market, and a south-facing room in a backstreet boarding house in Sydenham. This might seem an introduction to a period of angst and sordid experience, but two things prevented such an outcome. The first was the spontaneous optimism of youth itself, the second was a fellow boarder called Hodge.
Hodge must have been middle-aged, but seemed old to me. He had the room at the end of the hall, and was a run-of-the-mill failure, exceptional only in his infallible bad luck. Hodge was a sort of lightning rod that deflected misfortune from the rest of us. Who knows what it is that makes a man lucky, or the reverse, or why such illogicality exists in a world of just deserts. Maybe it is a proof of karma, and we experience reward for past lives, or must live out expiation. Hodge was a tall man, though incomplete. He had lost his hair naturally, his right big toe in a wood-chopping accident at the Te Awamutu A & P show, and an ear was bitten off some years later by an alpaca that had been eating fermented plums in a paddock next to the Rai Valley store where Hodge stopped to ask directions to some second cousins on his mother’s side. His hearing suffered a good deal, and his head tilted towards his remaining ear as if his equilibrium was affected by the loss.
Hodge was surprisingly popular with all of us at the boarding house, for the same reason perhaps that average-looking girls often have a plain friend. No matter how badly things went with us, Hodge was always a consoling comparison. I remember a spring day smoking tinnies among the marram dunes at New Brighton when he was shat on twice by seagulls: now what must be the chances of that, I ask you.
Hodge received only one letter that I know of, a jury summons, and he was delighted at the prospect of being paid to sit in a warm place for several days with free meals, and just send someone to jail. At the selection session, however, not only was Hodge eliminated by challenge of counsel, but a woman present recognised him as the person who came to her neighbourhood the afternoon before the official Salvation Army donation day and collected many of the envelopes.
Even Mrs Thrall, the landlady, took satisfaction in pointing him out as an example of how the male sex ended up. ‘There’s your own future for you,’ she’d say triumphantly to me, or Helmut, or Dylan. ‘God won’t be mocked, you know.’
Sometimes on a sunny afternoon, when I wasn’t at Foley’s, Hodge and I would take pillows onto the fire-escape and have a beer and a yarn there. Once his false teeth fell and smashed on the concrete step; another time his heel got wedged between the bars, and Mrs Thrall had to use cooking oil and a mallet to free it. But we had some good hours in the sun. Hodge realised he was sport for the gods, but said that he wasn’t as unlucky as most of his family. He told me that his father went right through the war as an infantryman with only shrapnel wounds, shingles and lower rib damage from an encounter with an Italian woman in Tagliacozzo, but then when the returning troopship was in sight of Wellington Harbour, he choked to death on a small bat (Batis glottum batis), which escaped from its container and flew into his mouth when he was about to have a beer.
Hodge said his elder brother had seemed the lucky one of the family: a handsome man of prodigious sexual prowess who finally married a stylish Bulgarian woman with substantial investments in natural gas, truffles and Egyptian third dynasty funerary curios. Unfortunately there was a freakish and random accident in which the Bulgarian wife happened to lose control of her Audi, and smash through the side of a suburban house to reveal her husband in bed with a Samoan meter maid. The wife ditched him without a cent, and two of the meter maid’s uncles hunted him down to a DOC mangrove swamp reserve in the Hokianga, and castrated him with a boning knife.
Hodge’s other brother went to Australia looking for a more propitious citizenship, but after twenty-seven years of unavailing struggle against drought on his outback property, he had to sell it for peanuts, and when leaving the station for the last time was drowned in a flash flood which overturned his Holden ute in the boundary creek. They found him entangled with his faithful kelpie dogs, which had prevented him from opening the door and swimming out. When they buried him on the property, the grave diggers discovered a vein of opal that made the new owners one of the richest families in Australia.
There was one sister in the family. Her name was Prudence, but Hodge said she was always called Guppy. She got all the brains evidently, and was awarded a PhD in computer science by the time she was twenty-two. Unfortunately on the morning of her graduation, while shaving her legs in the bath, she dropped the electric razor in and stopped her heart. The Peeping Tom from next door broke down the door in time to give her the kiss of life, and she was rushed towards the hospital, but the ambulance was hijacked by a stoned whitebaiter from the Coast while slowing at the Colombo Street lights. The whitebaiter — who years later won a category award in the Gore Country Music Festival — left the vehicle outside a cactus and succulent nursery on the outskirts of the city, and Guppy was recovered no worse than before and taken to hospital. She made a complete recovery from electrocution except for a forked scar on her hip, but the Peeping Tom carried a mutated lowland gorilla virus picked up when he was helping tribespeople in Zaire with livestock breeding advice, and he passed it on to Guppy while saving her life. She lost the motor sensory control of all her limbs and spends her time bedridden, constructing highly successful virtual reality games by blowing into a tube connected to computers. ‘She’s worth buckets of dough, lucky Guppy,’ said Hodge, ‘but she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me because I’d never give her the top bunk in our bedroom when we were kids.’
Mrs Thrall had a cancer scare the last year I boarded there. She never let on to us just what part of her was under threat, but when the day came for the final outcome of the tests to be announced, she wanted me to persuade Hodge to go with her as a talisman. She promised that she’d cook a big dish of toad-in-the-hole for the night meal if we’d agree. I remember the three of us driving into the city on a summer afternoon. As we left the parking lot, Hodge was nearly run over by a pimpled hoon in a rusted-out Falcon coming at him on his alpaca side, and so almost inaudible. Hodge stumbled back to safety, but did receive a nasty ankle gash from a skateboarder careering past at the time.
The specialist had the best of news for Mrs Thrall, and as far as I know she’s still running that two-storeyed boarding house, happily bitching about the male race and fining guys for taking the house pillows out onto the fire-escape, or leaving syringes in the hydrangeas. It was Hodge, of course, who found it a bad day. When reading an old newspaper in the waiting room he discovered that his ninety-three-year-old mum, the last of his relatives, had been par-boiled and sucked under terra firma by a geyser in Rotorua which opened up without warning beneath an inaugural group waiting for the unveiling of a kinetic sculpture in brass, ceramic and poly resin to represent the benevolence of the universal life force.
Hodge told me that after this news he was particularly looking forward to his evening toad-in-the-hole as some sort of counterbalance for the vicissitudes of the day, but it wasn’t to be. As we passed the last tall building before the carpark, an eighteen-stone woman cast herself from the window of the Weight No Longer Clinic. She had failed to meet her monthly loss target, but she was spot on as far as Hodge was concerned. The autopsy showed eighty-nine per cent of his bones shattered, but the eighteen-stone woman had a miraculous escape, became a born-again Christian trauma consultant, and is now a much-loved panellist on early evening television. Sometimes in my dreams I have this one freeze frame with Hodge giving a rare smile as he anticipates his toad dinner, and just above his head this vast, pink mass descending.
I miss Hodge, most of all because now he’s gone there is nothing to deflect malicious fortune from the rest of us.