His shirt was crisper than an April apple, his fringe floppier than jandals in January. He was an artful artifice of a manboy, stuck fast to the priority seat of a Waiheke Island bus.
He was not alone. Six of them had jostled onboard somewhere between Onetangi and Oneroa. It was a very hot and steamy Sunday. They’d perhaps been to a vineyard or a brewery. One sauntered down the back and fell asleep against a window; the remainders positioned themselves upfront, taking photographs of each other and their good teeth.
All of their legs were painted on, in the sense of the way my mother would use that phrase when I was a child. It indicates rude and lazy behaviour – legs that do not move to fetch things for themselves or contribute to a functioning society.
An elderly woman caught the bus one stop after those young men. She stood, holding tight to a handrail, lurching on the first corner. My husband (61) gave her his seat and the manboys (exact ages unknown) did not bat an eyelid. (Perhaps they did. It was hard to tell under their expensive haircuts).
I was annoyed but not shocked. I catch the bus to work most days and when all the seats are full, the first person to stand for the less robust is never young and male and white.
The manboys wear less paint on their jeans in the city. Slim pants with no socks and brown leather lace-ups; loud conversations about the vegan burger they ordered to impress the hot vegan chick (their overheard words, not mine).
I imagine them in a bar, congratulating themselves on their ability to stand on their own two feet – to hold down jobs, iron their own shirts and procure perfectly proportioned backpacks while holidaying in Japan.
It begs the question: why don’t they ever stand on those two feet when the bus is full?
The day before our Waiheke bus ride, we’d gone to the Ostend market.
“A fun, friendly, vibrant, diverse and interesting place for young and old,” says the descriptor on its website.
I was talking to a man about a DIY eco-printing kit when my husband arrived with a $4 jar of rhubarb and apple compote and flabbergastion on his face.
“They only take cash. I was about to head to the ATM, but the woman next to me had a $50 and she said she’d pay for mine too … she said, ‘that’s Waiheke’.”
I purchased a second-hand copy of a vintage Film Show Annual (“curvaceous Jayne Mansfield is a gal with a lively sense of fun” etc) and an extraordinarily large and well-priced mezze platter. It took a moment to snaffle shared picnic table real estate, but eventually we found space for ourselves and several tonnes of hummus.
And then we watched a grown man heckle a children’s storyteller because she was singing in te reo Māori.
While it was potentially obvious that “pukapuka” meant book and that “Aotearoa” was another word for New Zealand, I admired the entertainer’s calm demeanour and refusal to be riled.
“We’ve got a dinosaur here,” she said lightly, before suggesting the crowd ignore him even as he shouted at her from his seat (of course!) just a metre or so away.
The woman kept singing, the guitarist kept playing and a bunch of small children literally leapt on the opportunity to dance in circles pretending to be suns.
“This is NEW ZEALAND,” said the man as he stormed off and I was reminded of something else my mother used to say: the world doesn’t revolve around you.
