Pigs in the dark

Like Mr Plod or Inspector Lestrade or any number of fictional policemen, the real policeman standing on the dark street wrote Anthony’s details in a small notebook – but, today, the 1980s are almost fictional anyway.

Had he been out breaking into houses in order to inflict ‘grievous bodily harm’ upon terrorised citizens? No, he had been at the university library reading for his dissertation on the ideas of Titus Lucretius Carus in the first-century BC text, De Rerum Natura: ‘On the Nature of Things’.

Fortunately the policeman didn’t ask about his employment. Anthony works in a grocery store?

Once dismissed as innocent by the police, he cycled on through the dark, moonless night to his lonely flat in the back of Fran Barcham’s garage.

But, even for the most law biding, reading is a dangerous business.

Anthony never did move out to the country, he moved to the big smoke and by the time thirty years had passed, the nature of things was no clearer to him.

It was listening to the Chris Ryan PhD podcast that Anthony heard about Edward Abbey. He ordered three of Abbey’s books online.

He was a little disappointed in them but then Edward Abbey was not just an author, was not to be judged on literary qualities alone: Edward Abbey was the father of eco-terrorism.

Anthony thought of himself as an honest citizen – he stopped at red lights on empty streets, returned his library books on time, never bent down the corners of the pages – but Fletcher Building Limited was going to build 480 houses for rich immigrants on the last wilderness; to bulldoze the graves of the tupuna of the tangata whenua; drive the gentle, lunatic hares from their dancing fields; crush the fledgling plovers in their grassy nests …

That night, Anthony put on his black t-shirt – inside out so that the white line-drawing of an orang-utan wouldn’t show – finalised his intentions and techniques, planned his route, waited impatiently for hours and then set out in his car.

It was very dark. Moonless. Cloudy. Late.

Standing by the gate, Anthony paused, wide-eyed and terrified, listening to a sound for quite some time before he realised it was the sound of his own heart thumping. Then he was over the gate and crawling through the long grass.

Twice a car passed on the road, its light sweeping the field, but Anthony lay still. A frog called to the west.

He was crawling back towards the gate when he heard the approaching siren.

Barnaby McBryde