BooksSeptember 29, 2015

Books: How to Survive an Armed Robbery with a Gun Pointed at Your Head

Guest writer

How many bottles of red wine does it take to get over an armed robbery? I’ll let you know when I’ve finished drinking them.

On a September morning six years ago, I was at work in my antique shop on Dominion Road when a well-spoken young man entered the store, lifted the corner of his T-shirt, and took out a black pistol from the waistband of his trousers. He pointed it at my head, and ordered me to the ground. I was holding a handful of wristwatches in various states of repair. A customer was looking around down the back of the shop.

I said to the gunman, “You’ve got to be joking.”

He wasn’t joking.

When the police asked me how long the gunman and his accomplice were in the shop, I estimated four to five minutes. CCTV told a different story: 50 seconds. I’d had a gun pointed at my head for 50 seconds while another man helped himself to our antique jewellery, stuffing trays of gold rings into a bubblegum pink sports bag. I recall screaming at him not to take the men’s rings. Men’s rings were always so hard to get.

The last words the gunman spoke to me were, “You’re okay now.” Then he ran out of the shop. I ran out behind him, calling the police, the wristwatches still in one hand.

My memory is a little hazy after that. The neighbouring shopkeepers, undoubtedly alerted by my screaming, came out to help. It’d be interesting to hear the recording of my 111 call. I remember asking the woman from the Vodafone shop to check that the customer I’d left in the shop wasn’t stealing anything.

Hours later – after I’d relived the robbery second by second with the police – I was delivered home into the waiting arms of my first bottle of red wine. Victim Support rang to offer their assistance, but I had my mother, my husband, and my wine. I was fine.

Fine apart from the fact that after the robbery I never – and I mean never – sat down at work anymore. I was constantly on edge every time a customer entered the shop. I was always up and about, hovering by the newly installed panic button, calculating the intentions of everyone entering the shop.

I never watched the CCTV footage of the robbery. I didn’t need to. It played in technicolor glory over and over in my mind.

After my youngest daughter started school, I decided to write a book. They say write what you know, so I did. I wrote Fifteen Postcards, a novel about a girl who works in an antique shop. You could almost describe it as the back story behind the antiques in the shop – the journey those antiques had been on before languishing on the shelves. Before I knew it, without planning it, my protagonist was looking up the barrel of a gun.

I knew guns. I’d had a fair bit to do with rifles through the Air Training Corps – the Lee Enfield No 8 to be precise – and then the much lesser quality Norincos. I’d even passed my range safety officers course through the New Zealand Defence Force, and I’d qualified for my marksman badge. I used to seize the things when I worked for the New Zealand Customs Service. When I looked at the end of the gun pointing at me, I wondered whether it was real or a replica. But regardless of how familiar you are with weapons, when your whole world shrinks to the size of the barrel of a gun, you’re simply not in any position to make a rational judgement.

Writing about a traumatic experience can go two ways. It can act as a trigger to something similar to post-traumatic stress disorder. Or – and this was my experience – it can be cathartic. By writing about the robbery, it’s mostly ceased to be the big scary bogeyman that I’d allowed it to become since it happened. I allowed my protagonist to escape from the hold-up when I wrote about it in Fifteen Postcards, and it was as if I’d escaped too.

Trust me, though, when I say I much prefer my fictional ending. It remains the single most traumatic experience I’ve ever had.

As a tribute to my Welsh father, who started Antique Alley in 1971, Fifteen Postcards was published by Accent Press, based in Wales. Having the book published has done more for my recovery than the New Zealand Pinot Noir industry – although credit where credit’s due, their grape also helped immensely.

Kirsten McKenzie has worked in her family’s antique store Antique Alley in Dominion Road since she was a toddler. Fifteen Postcards is her first novel, and is available at Unity Books.

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BooksSeptember 28, 2015

Books: The Guiding Unseen Hand of Granta Books editor Max Porter Helped Shape Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries. He’s also a Brilliant Novelist Himself

Max Porter

Guest writer

London writer Max Porter – best known in New Zealand as the editor of Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries – has published his first novel. He writes exclusively for The Spinoff Review of Books.

Grief is the Thing with Feathers is the story of a man whose wife dies. He is left to care for their two sons. One evening there is a knock on the door and it is Crow. Crow moves in and becomes a babysitter, a mischievous antagonist, a counsellor and eventually – across the three sections of the book – a friend. He has a lot to say about how human beings behave in times of trauma, some of it helpful, some of it hopeless.

The story is assembled in small sections alternating between three voices, sometimes prose, sometimes a play script, sometimes short fables. I spent a long time wondering how best to tell this story. My day job is working with writers and I didn’t want any overlap with or distraction from that work, but I also have young children so I don’t have a lot of writing time, hence the form. It’s more an act of collage than a sustained piece of novel writing. Reading it now I realise it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever done, in all sorts of ways, and that it sounds like the inside of my head. Whether that’s a good thing I don’t know.

Crow enjoys the fact that he’s been in a famous poem by Ted Hughes, but he also mercilessly takes the piss out of it. He rolls various identities around in his mouth, the rock star, the fairytale device, the actual bird, the imaginary friend, the accredited caregiver. The added (and admittedly fairly juicy) extra baggage of Hughes’ life story is only there as another strain to be jeered at, poked at, recycled and re-purposed. There are in-jokes for people who have read the poem or know a bit about Hughes, but I hope they don’t distract or outweigh the more important thing, the simple story of a family dealing with pain.

Crow is one part of the triptych in my book, and only functions in relation to the other two. One voice is ‘Dad’, the grieving father. The other voice is ‘Boys’, two children who swap memories, play with misremembrance and swap sentimental versions of their childhood. The Boys are an attempt to create a character out of a relationship; the sibling relationship given a voice.

The book is not about Hughes but it does portray a man who has a deep and private love for poetry and that love rescues him. There is a lovely passage in Winter Pollen where Hughes is discussing experience and language. He describes a crow: “the barefaced, bandit thing, the tattered beggarly gipsy thing, the caressing and shaping yet slightly clumsy gesture of the down-stroke.. the macabre pantomime ghoulishness and the undertaker sleekness”. This is beautiful stuff, and crows worldwide are presumably honoured to be described with such exactitude, with such poetic swagger. Hughes goes on though; “And a bookload of such descriptions is immediately rubbish when you look up and see the crow flying.”

This is the generosity of spirit, humility about the poetic self, and ecstatic love of the natural world that emerges throughout Hughes’ poems and make him enduringly relevant. It is also an attitude I would hope to read back onto Crow and some of its darker notes. For example, grief. We are learning to grieve as we are learning to read or think. In the dark moment when all becomes rubbish in the face of great pain, true art can briefly unlock or clarify, as Hughes has it “something of the almighty importance of it and something of the utter meaninglessness.” That is good writing. The real bird at the back of the empty church, beak-down in the garbage looking for scraps.