Free Kokopu Dreams by Chris Baker

were tangled masses of long grass and the lawns he passed weren’t any better. Already hedges grew out over footpaths, betraying cars parked neatly in drives and at the roadside, most of them with tyres deflating. He felt ill with the stench and a rollie burning between his lips didn’t help much. It certainly didn’t seem like an auspicious start to their journey. Bojay ambled down the centre of the road, his hooves rhythmic on the tarseal, already cracking and sprouting grass and weeds.
    From the top of the Ngahere Hill — a notorious piece of road on which the local hoons had traditionally wiped themselves out, failing to negotiate its steep curves on drunken Saturday nights — Sean saw smoke from a dozen fires right across the city. Kensington Park with its rugby and hockey fields and netball courts was no longer geared for weekend sport. Now it was fenced and grazed and smoke rose from a kitchen built onto a hall once used for A&P shows. No more ‘Best of Breed’ or champion sword-dancer, Sean thought. No more rep sport or racing either, proud parents and team followers barracking from the sidelines, freezing in the driving winter rain, and punters agonising over their bets during the regular race meetings. It looked like people had occupied three of the local schools. Smoke rose from the tavern near Kensington Park where a kitchen had been constructed in the car park, and from Whangarei’s one urban marae, a home to folk from all over the north.
    A lone yacht, with a gentle breeze barely stiffening its stays’l, glided towards its berth. Sean imagined people fishing the harbour and gathering shellfish, scallops and giant Pacific oysters. The Pioneer Inn, a motel block near the yacht harbour, was occupied, its barbecue facilities under cover of clearlite and canvas. While he watched, tiny people moved back and forth from gardens behind the motel units. He pictured the ornamental cacti and palms replaced with fruit trees, taro growing in the stream trickling down the hillside in a series of swampy pools, its ponderous tubers and glossy leaves a dietary revelation to people accustomed to potatoes and peas.
    But, from where he sat on Bojay, the place might as well have been deserted. Almost as strong as the stink was the silence. No cars.
    They moved towards the town centre and the main road south. There were more signs of new life, but the evidence of disaster was right in Sean’s face, everywhere he looked. He thought of visiting the communities he’d seen from the hill, but decided he didn’t want to take the chance of running into the men Ralph had confronted. He’d spent the past few weeks wrestling with the prospect of much strangeness and difficulty and he didn’t need to invite trouble, he decided.
    In the town’s former commercial heart, wind-blown paper and seagulls were everywhere, shop windows broken and merchandise spilling out onto the footpaths. He saw a rat scuttling into a pile of rubbish. Cockroaches and other insects were feasting on the rotted remains of meat on display in butchers’ shops and delicatessens. Brightly coloured umbrellas, which had kept the sun and rain off shoppers sipping their lattes at wrought-iron tables, hung in tatters, shredded by the winter winds. The sun shone in a clear sky, but the desolation felt far worse than the suburban emptiness they’d almost come to accept in Ngahere.
    Sean rode on, away from the town centre, past the deserted banks and office blocks, past the local newspaper office. The photos on display in their special window box were yellowing in the sunlight, the word EASE all that remained of a banner in front of a box of newspapers, full of a special edition pulped and congealed after four months out in the weather. He rode past the municipal rose gardens. The wishing well was about to vanish under climbing rose shoots that threaded their way across the untended mesh cover. Ducks splashed where