The Failed Species

(Novel length: 93,000 words)

After a treble heart bypass, New Zealander 62-year-old Leech, realises he is mortal and starts to appreciate that he's been lied to and cheated all his life. The social injustices continue unabated and he defensively allows his imagination to take over and lead him to a fantasy world of honesty. One day the fantasy turns into reality and he is contacted by a weird bird (Power Dip) who eventually offers him eternal life plus three days, in exchange for the job of administrator to all universes. He teaches him time travel and Galaxy Gazing (GG), eg, moving from one place to another at the rhyme of a poem.

Using telepathy he has talked to Bonnie and Clyde and young Adolf for a couple of years, but now meets the very much alive but allegedly extinct Moa that live above his house in bush-covered NZ. His Maori thirty year lover, Lyndia, is kept in the dark as to his aspirations and although she time travels with him, he has trained her to forget their out of world adventures at the snap of a finger.

After learning he has been infertile all his life, despite being the alleged father of four children and Lyndia complaining bitterly that he is a pencil without lead. Leech heroically decides to drink himself to death in his front garden in the longest suicide attempt ever recorded, as cited by the Guinness Book of Records.

In the meantime Lyndia studies ancient Maori culture aided by numerous bottles of sherry and her much loved Nana, an old Maori Quia (wise old lady).

Power Dip explains that Leech's commonsense; honesty, decency, imagination, sense of humour and ability to play with words, are the perfect qualifications for the job of controlling the futuristic future one could ever imagine for the forthcoming hereafter. He also points out that mankind is a failed species and will survive another 200 years at the most. There is however, another equally qualified candidate for Power Dip's consideration.

Naturally Leech hesitates as to the implications of living forever plus three days without his Lyndia, or being permanently dead within ten years without the three days, as advised by his Dr Zivargo from Saint Petersburg. The updated misery of his life causes him to mentally switch from one outrageous conceptual mood to another at a sip of his red wine (Omega 3) health tonic.

Regarded by all as a complete nutcase Leech and his suicide attempt become world famous after television's alleged David Frost becomes involved.

At Power Dip's suggestion, Leech takes Lyndia to a conference on the planet Bondage that ties them up for a few months, and wins the homage of 2,000 extraterrestrials in plastic bubbles as their future leader. He is assisted by Lyndia's ampleness.

Back on Earth, crunch time arrives and Leech is advised of Power Dip's decision.

Here is an extract:

Introduction

Not many people on planet Earth will have realised that man is the unsurpassable failed species. Even fewer will realise he has failed purely because of his capricious behaviour. To move from A to Z, man needs to realise the difference between the two and the reason why they exist in the first place. However, in today’s whimsical world, honesty, unmeasurable time and space are beyond conception. Sadly, man has assumed that he is the most intelligent species that has ever in existed.

It Started at the Beginning

My eyes flicked open but all could see were large white squares filled with holes the size of nostrils. It didn’t make sense, so I shut my eyes to give my nose time to comprehend what the hell was happening. Normally I would feel my chest aching but now there was nothing. There was no sense of physical awareness. It was if my body no longer existed. 

“He’s awake.”A quiet voice murmured from God knows where. 

Ah ahh, I thought . It’s an audio mirage upsetting my vision. To save energy, I opened my right eye to a world of misconceptions. Things were shadowy so I opened my left eye to provide balance. Slowly I realised the white squares of holes were plaster ceiling tiles and I was lying flat on my back surrounded by strangers dressed in white. Maybe I had, but I honestly couldn’t remember ever joining the Klu Klux Klan. Nothing made sense, but I’m the philosophical sort and well used to unfathomable contradictions.

“The check’s in the post.” I said illogically, knowing full well that I paid all the bills online and hadn’t written a check in years.

“Do you know where you are?” A male voice asked from afar.

“Ahh. Not really. Can I order a glass of wine?”

Several people laughed. “You’re in the recovery room. You’ve just had a treble heart bypass.” The male voice intoned from even further afar.

“That’s impossible, I don’t have three hearts. How can I possibly have a treble bypass?” I’d always known that male voices from afar were natural born liars. 

My mind was dithering. The sooner things started make sense, the better. Sadly, I was lost in a world of unconceivable fantasy. I guess the only way to solve the problem was to go back to sleep.

Five days later they kicked me out of the Intensive Care Unit in Wellington Hospital in New Zealand. They’d ripped a length of tubing from my right leg and glued it somewhere inside my chest. This apparently constituted a treble bypass. I couldn’t figure out that if they were able to bypass my heart with a leg tube, why did I have a heart in the first place? But I guess Mother Nature’s decisions are unquestionable. I would Google her when I got home for some serious answers.

They say home is where the heart is. They had bypassed my heart but home was still in the same place. Lyndia and I climbed out of our red Holden Barina and there it was. Up three concrete steps and the green door opened with the same key I’d used before all this bypass nonsense. After thirteen days gazing spellbound at plaster ceiling tiles full of boring nostril holes, I sat in my armchair and bored my self silly watching the Days of Our Lives. The storyline hadn’t changed in twenty years. I had to be honest, nostril holes were far more stimulating. 

Logical thinking has always been my forte and it was obvious that a treble heart bypass would make me as good as new again. After all, what would be the point in having the damn thing if it didn’t fix the problem? I concluded that I would fit as a fiddle by the following weekend and I could get on with living life. To celebrate my homecoming I decided to spend half an hour sitting on the loo to get my bowels working properly, as time stops while nostril gazing in hospital. Behind the loo the small window of opaque glass was slightly open and I sat down and shut the door to enjoy the privacy. I could enjoy my own thoughts and contemplate my navel to avoid boredom.

A good shit would relax my churned up thoughts and contemplating my navel would be a new experience. I’d never really given much thought to my navel cum belly button. It had always been there, so why should I worry about? But perhaps after my apparent life saving operation, physically examining myself might be more than appropriate? I might find something else that needed re-plumbing. I gritted my teeth and pushed down hard. I shoved my thumb in my belly button and cocked my ears for a muffled plop in the water below. After several long breaths and much determination I felt the terrible hospital food depart and drown itself in the toilet bowl. Even my double layer toilet paper was far superior to the huge rolls of recycled newspaper the hospital supplied. 

Satisfied with my progress, I tried to stand to flush the toilet. But something was wrong. My legs wouldn’t oblige. Even using both hands on the seat to push myself up, I didn’t have the strength to lift my body. Oh my God! I could be trapped forever and die of old age sitting on the loo. I relaxed to think things though. I didn’t have any problems with the hospital toilets, they had stainless steel handrails on both sides to lever oneself up. But home where the heart is, doesn’t possess such luxuries. The only possible lever was the toilet brush sitting in a wallpapered plastic Jayes disinfectant bottle my long dead mother had handcrafted about thirty years ago. She had attended some arty-crafty course at the local church hall and set out to conquer the world with designer toilet brush holders. But the brush was only about a foot long and besides, it couldn’t possibly hold my weight. There was only one answer.

“Lyndia. Help. I’m stuck on the loo.”

After several minutes, Lyndia arrived and opened the door. “You stink. Open the window.”

“I don’t stink. I can’t smell anything. I haven’t got the strength to get up. Do something!”

“What do you suggest, Ponghead? I’m not coming in there just to choke to death. Besides, ‘Mash’ is on TV. Give me a yell when you’ve stopped stinking.” She stopped her nose with her finger and thumb and disappeared to watch Radar argue with Colonel Potter.

My old defence of logical thinking was in order. Thinks! I’ll give up women and take up sex instead. One must keep in practise in case one forgets which way is up. Shrewdly I reached over my shoulder with the toilet brush and managed to push the window open as far as possible. The breeze was most refreshing. Contemplating my navel belly button, I waited for ‘Mash’ to finish.

Lyndia had me standing in no time. She’s a nicely shaped handrail. She grabbed me under the arms and I used her shoulders as levers. In the lounge I sat in my armchair and pondered my future toilet habits. My armchair had high arms as handrails and getting up was not a problem. Maybe if I sat on the loo back to front, I could use the window sill as a handrail?  I wondered how long would it take to recover my strength? 

But in all honesty, my chest hurt and I felt worse than I did before the operation. But at least the scars on my chest and leg were starting to heal. I’ve always healed quite fast but I’ve never had surgery before and the unknown was a little disturbing in our over regulated world of do’s and do-nots. I just wish the medical people would explain things more clearly. I still didn’t know what was involved in a bypass operation. What they’d done and why was still a mystery. How come I had a spare tube in my right leg? Did my left leg have the same? Where had my strength gone and why? How long before I was a 100 percent? I looked at Lyndia and wondered if it would still work? But I guess it was Doris Day’s choice, Que Sera Sera. What will be, will be. At the moment I didn’t have the strength to stand up, let alone be counted. But one has to be philosophical about the inevitable. I stiffened myself to the unknown future.

We didn’t have any kids because after Lyndia had three with her husband, she had an operation to stop excessive bleeding in the plumbing department and the end result was no husband. In reality he was a bit on the short side and used his fists to articulate his opinions. So he wasn’t really missed in the scheme of things. When she eventually hooked up with me, her inability to conceive didn’t worry me in the slightest, because as far as I was concerned, kids were too damn noisy anyway. I’d had four sprogs many years ago to a woman that traded me in for the live-in border. Besides, they cost a fortune to raise and educate to a standard that meant they were dumb enough to get meaningless jobs with government departments, banks or insurance companies. Most service jobs in today’s New Zealand are meaningless and produce nothing tangible for your emotional economy. My current career as a security guard was a classic example. With a little thought and planning ahead, 95 percent of security deployments are completely unnecessary. 

My earlier career as a hotel publican was far more stimulating because you were dealing with humans of all descriptions and opinions. The much dreaded booze side of things was only a small part of handling people of different races and political aptitudes. One learns to be forcibly tactfully and to get ones message across with a smiling face, laughter and a friendly pat on the shoulder. If that didn’t work, you simply knocked their lights out. Pubs have always been run by violence or the threat of violence. It’s the same the world over. Why do you think pubs have bouncers? Political correctness? Yeah Right!

I first met Lyndia in the Cantabrian pub in Christchurch. I was filling a short term management hole and suddenly there she was. Sunlit from the side, her dark brown body with two delightfully large appendages was attracting visual attacks from the eyes have it brigade in the public bar. There were a couple of things about her that appealed to me and she must have felt the same in reverse. Four bed ridden days later she had surrendered her size 44.5 inch bra, moved in and returned with me to my home in Upper Hutt. I’ve never been able to get a word in sideways ever since. For a Maori, she’s well educated and can actually do the daily crossword. She has a sense of honesty and loyalty that doesn’t exist in today’s generations. Sex is one thing but enjoying your mate’s company is far more rewarding than bouncing up and down. And those big brown things stopping her tummy from getting sunburnt are still so damn titillating. I haven’t needed an electric blanket for thirty years and despite endless nibbling, I still have my own teeth. Whenever I looked at my Lyndia, I don’t see her brown skin or the massive size of her breasts. She’s my God given mate and that’s all there is to it. Her inch and a half nipples are a horny side issue. Thank God I had my tonsils out when I was kid, otherwise I might have choked to death. Mind you, both left and right are still good friends of mine. I don’t play favourites when it comes to uplifting attributes.

Going to bed the first night home was frightening. I felt as if I was a mixture of heroic bravery and philosophic death warmed up. In hospital, a nurse would wake me every hour to give me a sleeping pill and enough anti this and that pills to keep an army on permanent alert. But now I was home and in my own bed, there was nobody to wake me up every hour to see if I was still alive. Lyndia started work at the Fergusson Rest Home at eleven o’clock and worked until seven in the morning caring for the elderly residents. So she wouldn’t be available to check on my ability to watch the BBC when Channel One switched over sometime after midnight. Somehow I managed to convince myself that I would wake up dead as Jack the Ripper. Then I realised than he had never been identified and might still be alive and watching the BBC news. I resolved to wake up every half hour to see if he had hacked me to pieces. If he had, I would quietly pass away and not bother anyone again. I had already arranged with Lyndia that if I were to conk out, I was to be wrapped in newspaper and delivered to the Silverstream Rubbish Tip. The price funeral directors charged for doing basically the same thing was astronomical and a dead ripoff.

Trouble was, as I was so scared of not waking up alive, I couldn’t get to sleep. Come four o’clock in the morning I was still watching the BBC news. It was three days before Christmas 2006 and Santa didn’t deliver presents to sixty two years old bypass patients, so obviously I had nothing to live for. So a little after four I dozed off to conserve my lack of physical strength. My last conscious thought was to take up toilet training and learn how to stand up after a decent shit. That would be tomorrows lesson. If I woke up at all.

This trying to predict the future is all very well, but I’m happy to report that I woke up a little before Lyndia came home and locked myself in the bog with a metal crutch. The damn thing had been sitting the corner for yonks. About ten years previously, a Dunkirk Veteran Irishman had fallen over in a drunken stupor on a visit to an Auckland RSA (Returned Service Association). His hip was damaged and the hospital gave him a crutch to allow him to limp around the local Upper Hutt RSA when he returned. He was a mate of Lyndia’s and she inherited his crutch when he carked it in 1999. 

Using Paddy’s crutch as a lever, I was able to initiate the rise of and fall of the Leech bog lifting empire with a little practice. The battle of the toilet bowl was over. I claimed victory over hospital food and awarded myself a glass of red wine instead of a Victoria Cross. 

“It’s only eight in the morning and you’re drinking already.” Lyndia exclaimed, shaking her head in disgust.

“I’m not drinking. It’s medicine. The surgeon said red wine is good for the heart. So there.” In vino veritas (in wine there is truth). Wives can be beautiful beasts of burden if they disagree with you.

Lyndia patted my head and said. “You haven’t a cigarette since you got home. Is that intentional?”

“Indefinitely definite. I have decided to save money by ensuring you and I give up smoking.”

Lyndia sniffed. “You can if you want to. But count me out. The last time I gave up, I put on so much weight, I couldn’t get a bra big enough.”

In recent years the government had barred smoking in bars and restaurants claiming smoking caused everything from broken legs to heart disease. They backed it up with propaganda supplied by people paid to supply the type information government wanted. People describing themselves as policy consultants will say absolutely anything for a handout of public money. Herr Goebbels would have been proud of the endless lies bandied about. 

When it was suggested that politics and religion had killed more people in the last hundred years than a million years of smoking ever would, the honesty of such commonsense was deemed politically incorrect and ignored. The current Labour Government was on its last legs but lacked the gumption to realise the people have had enough lies and dopey legislation to last ten lifetimes. Everybody has their limits about how much crap they’ll put up with. 

 Owning or running a bar today is a waste of time when 80 percent of your would be regulars are smokers. They rarely go near a bar now. They buy their booze cheaply at the supermarket and drink and smoke at home. The problem is with no behaviour restrictions that bars provide, excessive drinking is increasing and the sales of cigarettes is going up. The consultants aren’t interested in truth because it doesn’t pay a fee.

In Wellington today, new bars and restaurants last an average of nineteen months before going broke. And that’s official. Thank God my days of running pubs are well and truly over. Mind you, many countries around the world are bringing in anti smoking laws, you have literally thousands of publicans with hundreds of years of experience controlling human nature living on the bread line, just to keep some gormless bureaucrat employed checking ashtrays. All that’s needed to avoid excessive smoke, is suitable extractor fans. New Zealand is sliding backwards so fast it won’t take long to catch up with the Roman Empire. Then watch the sparks fly.

Lyndia duly trotted off to bed and I was left with a feeling of underachievement. I’d paid the price of inheriting my father’s faulty heart genes, and survived the re-plumbing of my whatever they were called, but what did I have to look forward to? How long would I last? I knew instinctively that smoking had little to with my problem. Even the quacks at the hospital admitted that my faulty genes were the biggest problem, and smoking only sometimes acted as a genetic trigger. But what was done, was done. The experts would never admit the obvious.

I know, I thought, I’ll check the news on my computer. I opened the back door and stepped down into our small backyard. Directly opposite was the thirty-year-old caravan I’d paid an hundred dollars for not long after we moved into the house. Lyndia had kept the back door garden weeded and the buckets of vegetables well-watered while I was in hospital getting the only financial return I was ever likely to receive after nearly fifty years of paying taxes.

I hooked back the door and gasped at the hot temperature. I sat in my stolen red office chair, pushed the button and smiled as Star Trek whined into gear. “May the force be with you.” I whispered encouragingly. “Don’t you dare clap out on me now.”

Having built Star Trek from scratch, I knew that a few forceful words wouldn’t go amiss. I wasn’t an expert with computers but following the instructions was simple enough. My first computer had been a Commodore Plus Four. No hard drive or much in the way of memory and those huge floppy disks seemed somewhat old fashioned. The Commodore still lived in the wardrobe of the spare room and one day would be worth a fortune as an antique.

I clicked on Wellington’s DominionPost website. “Hmmm,” I thought. “At least they’ve updated the damn thing.” As today’s news was yesterdays updated, I didn’t bother reading the updates. What would be the point? I mean what could they tell that was important to me? Was the internet going to keep me informed as to how my healing was progressing? Or how long it would take me to regain my mobility. I abstractly touched between my legs. My God, it twitched. Maybe life was worth living after all? I felt a little better and clicked on Blue Water Radio, Hanover, Ontaria in Canada.About thirty seconds later the music started. The station played the old style noise I enjoyed and the DJ’s all has funny accents compared with NZ.

“My fellow Americans . . . whoops, I mean my fellow Canadians.” The DJ laughed. Turning up the volume I scrapped back my chair, went outside and walked into our front garden. On the left was the 44-gallon drum incinerator and the large black plastic compost bin I purchased while it was on special at The Upper Hutt Warehouse. I didn’t buy anything if it’s not on special. With unflawed logic I wondered if the Warehouse sold recycled hearts? To the right of the old path was Lyndia’s herb garden and to the right again was my special vegetable garden. In the far-right hand corner was my red grape vine. One day I hoped to be able to brew enough wine medicine to keep me alive.

At the front left there was a triangle of top class soil. We’d used this corner to dump grass clippings and over the years approximately 1.5 square yards of semi compost produced all the potatoes we needed. We also three piles of cars tyres filled with dirt that grew whatever we fancied. My philosophy was if you can’t eat it, don’t plant it. Naturally Lyndia knew better and had a number of plastic buckets filled with green stalks that didn’t seem to do anything except use up vital food growing resources. But you can’t talk sense to Lyndia Greenstalk. She’s a female, for God’s sake.

The entire front yard was surrounded by my pride and joy, the red fence. It was mine. I’d spent weeks building the bloody thing and I assembled the gate on the lounge carpet. I didn’t have a builders tape measure but a piece of string was all I needed. Because it took so bloody long to build, and blood being red, I intentionally painted the bloody thing red. Hence The Red Fence. One day Lyndia helped and I let her nail on a couple of palings. Henceforth and from then on as well, Lyndia told world that she had built the entire fence while I was sitting on the loo reading the newspaper. Therefore it was Lyndia’s red fence. Typical bloody Maori! Us heroic Pakeha invades Maoridom and educated them with booze, drugs and prostitution and Lyndia claims she built my red fence all on her own. Where’s the justice in that? It’s no wonder I sometimes call her naughty names.

Frank Sinatra was singing, “My kind off town, Chicago is . . .” I sat in my white plastic chair I’d got on special from the Warehouse and admired my home made barbecue table. Well, I didn’t actually make it. It was a big wooden drum or reel used to store long lengths of underground power cable. I grabbed it from a security job at some vacant industrial land at Gracefield, at the northeast end of Wellington Harbour. It was sitting the middle of what had been the Peter Jackson New York city set in the movie King Kong. I sneaked it home and painted it with the same red paint I’d used to paint the Red Fence. The hole in the middle was ideal for the huge beach umbrella I purchase from Bunnings in Nae Nae, a suburb of Lower Hutt. The Upper Hutt Warehouse said it was the wrong time of the year for beach umbrellas, so they missed out on the $97 (on special) it cost me.

Just to right of the table was another of my inventions. Two different sized wooden reels I’d ‘found’ somewhere and painted red. Effectively it had three circular shelves and we decorated then with pot plants, sea shells and driftwood Lyndia had imaginatively gathered from Paraparaumu Beach on the Kapiti Coast while I was boring myself to death playing security guard at a building site on the sea front. In the middle of the top shelf lived a terracotta pot that provided strawberries for about eight months of the year. May peace be with the strawberries of the future. 

I sat and gazed through the Red Fence at the white car parked over the road. It has fancy chrome wheels. We lived in a Grove which is polite name for a dead end street. We seemed to be morbidly surrounded by things dead or their derivatives. Midnight, our twenty-one-year pure black cat was buried in the back garden and provided large grey pumpkins every year. Tweety, our canary that Midnight had frightened death in her cage, which Lyndia now uses to keep her stuffed toys safe from earthquakes and tidal surges, had rotted away about six years ago. But she still helps with the spring onions to a small extent. And Freddy, our goldfish that drowned in air when Midnight upset his fish bowl. Then there was my potential death from lack of cigarettes and rotting leg tubes. Even Lyndia’s, shall we say, double shielded chest weapons appeared to have died a little. Compared with when they first attacked me, they seemed to have softened their resolve a little. I think the only original part of us, was our teeth. Then I remembered that Lyndia had false teeth and looked like an old hag on overproof brandy without them. With Lyndia being younger, my teeth had outlived all of her and most of me. Maybe there was hope for me yet? But just in case I resolved to give myself a weeks notice when I was going to keel over and turn myself into plant food. If I folded myself in half, I might just about fit in the compost bin. I could possibly grow the world’s biggest tomato?

We lived in the Upper Hutt suburb of Parkdale. It was first built about thirty years ago and officially named Birchville. But Birchville is harder to spell than Parkdale which has one less letter and being an old codger I called it Parkdale, just to annoy hell out of the council’s computer system.

I enjoyed sitting behind my red fence. I felt safe and secure and passerby’s never knew I was there. Our little Close was surrounded by bush and backed on to a hillside reserve. It was intriguing watching the branches and leaves bending in the wind. The local bird life was improving. We had the normal sparrows, starlings, blackbirds and the tiny little yellow and red things. I didn’t know their name. Then we had the NZ native Tui. A large blackbird with a large piece of white fluff on its chest. A very strong looking bird. But best of all was the Kereru. A large native bird the size of a duck but ten times fatter. Its multi colouring was beautiful. It was the NZ native version of the English pigeon. Very rare in NZ except near my red fence. I’m sure they were attracted by the colour.

I managed to survive the first week home from the hospital without dying or upsetting the neighbours. Sometimes I had trouble getting out of bed, but other times I leapt out without thinking and made it to the loo before I realised I’d run out of energy. But the one good thing was that I never needed Lyndia’s help to get off the loo. I had Paddy’s clutch down to fine art, although Lyndia stuck it in the toilet bowl just to annoy me. Have you ever tried to pee in toilet with a crutch sticking out of it? It’s a bit like eating a birthday cake without blowing out the candles.

The second week of freedom was even more interesting than the first. I did nothing at all and guess what? It only took me half the time of the first week. I must be getting healthier, or so it seemed. 

I couldn’t attend the hospital exercise sessions because they were too far away and apparently I wasn’t allowed to drive for at least a month after my leg was installed in my chest. I hadn’t known this until I drove to the garage to fill up with gas and the attendant solemnly cited my legal obligations. Like most interfering busybody’s he insisted that he was acting in the public’s interest. I nodded my Boy Scouts agreement and promptly drove home prepared for more stupid injustices that I would simply ignore. Come to think of it, how had he known about my operation? They used to have Court News in the local Leader newspaper but I don’t remember a Hospital News section. But what the hell, it would all come out in the wash.

The third week was a disaster. I discreetly hinted to Lyndia that perhaps it was time to take up cave climbing again but she shook her head and said that she didn’t want me to suffer her excesses as I might fall asleep half way through and leave her dangling on a tightrope. Her being a long-winded gymnast I could understand her concerns. Curses, and all that. So I decided to get fit by walking to the corner and back. The next day I went a few paces further and the same the next day. Within a week I declared myself as fit as a fiddle but her Ladyship declared as the corner was only fifty yards away, my walking a quarter of a mile in a week didn’t qualify me for the Olympics. There was no justice in the world. I’d got my five minute rest periods down to every twenty-five yards, what on earth did she want from me? I desperately needed a bit of lying down standing up exercise to prove my worth in a society that demanded imperfection as of right. How could I prove I could or couldn’t, if she wouldn’t let me do or not do it? Life could be a little confusing at times. I had another glass of red wine to compensate for my lack of cave climbing. Luckily the weather was too terrible for anymore time wasting physical exercise. A man has his pride.

Lyndia came home from work and sat me down. “You remember you told me about the man in the heart ward they sent home because he wasn’t sick enough?” She tilted her head questionably.

 “Of course. Seemed like a nice chap. Why, what’s wrong? 

“Well, he’s proved his point. He was in our hospital ward at Fergusons, and carked it last night. Had to wash him down this morning. Heart failure.”

I frowned. The chap was from Upper Hutt but I’d never met him before. He’d been in hospital four times in the last six months with serious heart problems but the paper shufflers decided he didn’t qualify for surgery. They had deliberately cut him from their five hundred year waiting list so their employer, the Ministry of Health, could boast that the number of patients waiting for surgery was virtually nothing. Our anti hero was a bit of a stirrer and had an exercise book of newspaper cuttings demonstrating the health system was not providing appropriate care when required. He argued that the billion or so extra funding was being spent on management, ten million reams of A4 paper and four tonnes of ballpoint pens and not the desperately needed health professionals. But as in all bureaucracies, the small mind incorporations overruled commonsense. 

Only five weeks ago we both needed heart surgery. I had mine and lived. Our anti hero died because his was denied. He’d proved himself right and so-called experts wrong. And they call it justice? I wondered how much the Ministry of Health would dish out for his funeral? Yeah Right.

Lyndia and I attended the funeral at the Anglican Church, South of Upper Hutt on Ferguson Drive. The best part of the church was the ancient graveyard in front and down the side. This was old Upper Hutt before the official trivial pursuit of injustices. High beams, dark varnish, candlesticks and coloured tablecloths etc. Boring organ music written many generations ago to humble the peasants into believing what they were told and then hymn singing to praise their self-appointed masters. Ye Gods and all that. Sounds like the tax department telling the people their only aim was to be fair.

Snacks were provided afterwards and in the middle of the table surrounded by tiny triangles of ham sandwiches, lay the exercise book of newspaper clippings. The man sacrificed in the name of public relations was fifty-seven years old. Praise the Lord and pass the collection plate. Justice must be paid for.