Leaving Las Zealand

www.mahala.co.za - http://www.mahala.co.za/culture/no-ticket-from-new-zealand/

TELFORD VICE, Auckland

TAXI from Canberra hotel to nearest, bestest caffeination point; five minutes. Taxi from cafe to Canberra airport; 20 minutes. Canberra to Sydney; 40 minutes. Bus from Sydney domestic airport to international; 15 minutes. Mad queue at immigration. Too many minutes. Stupidly mad queue at security. Tick ... tick ... tick ...

“Don’t panic,” some fake police officer says to someone else. Panic? It’s too late to panic.

Somehow, the front of the damn fool security queue looms. Remove laptop from backpack (I ask you with tears in my typing fingers, why?). Chuck backpack/laptop/phone/money-clip/coins/belt into whatever that grey plastic rectangular thing is. Walk through the beam-me-up-Scotty doorway. Get dressed. Trudge. Survive the expensive stink of duty free. Trudge. Hit the corridor of no return, where skin pales to a pasty deadness and feet fall like snot on a hot tin roof.

Somehow, gate 56 appears. And, of course, there is nothing like panic in the departure lounge. Just a bunch of people like me sitting around waiting forever to board flight NZ 718 to Auckland.

Time? Time is a magazine. Or something your father used to sing about wanting to save in a bottle. Whatever else it is, time is not at all of the essence.

Tick ... tick ... tick ...

There is time enough, in fact, to take a slash and find some food and wonder for long hard minutes why the bloody hell airports are such godawful places.

Tick ... tick ... tick ...

Finally, we get the call and shamble into something like a queue. Ah, yes. A queue. We know their ilk well. And we wait ...

The front of this queue, the last one for a good three hours on this already too long day, is eventually here. A glorious nothingness looms as I proffer my precious boarding pass to the bespectacled, pinched-lipped, tightly-hairbunned, intensely focused gatekeeper of that part of my soul that will spend the next two-and-a-half hours scrunched into seat B11 trying to find elbow room enough to get a fingertip to a keyboard. But, hey, there will be no queue and that bastard thing, time, will not matter

And then she says it: “You can’t board the flight.”

“What? Why?”

“Because you don’t have a flight to leave New Zealand.”

I blink in the realisation of this unimpeachable fact: I do not have a flight to leave New Zealand. This is, indeed, true. Good God! I don’t have a flight to leave New Zealand!

“Of course I don’t have a flight to leave New Zealand, you stupid git. What’s wrong with you - do you not know how a tournament works? Of course your don’t - you probably wouldn’t know what to do with a ball if it got stuck in your stupid, fat throat. In fact, you’ve never seen a ball in your life, have you? Do you even know the difference between runs and wickets? OK. Shut up and listen and be educated. First, you play the group stages. Then you play the knockout stages. Thing is, you don’t know who you are going to play against in the knockout stages, or even where or when, until the end - or sometimes near the end - of the group stage. So, seeing as some of the knockout games are in Australia and some of them are in New Zealand, and seeing as no-one except the matchfixers knows who South Africa - the team I am covering as a journalist, in case your miserable little mind has not worked that out, which of course it has not - are going to end up playing against or where or when, I have no clue where I am going to need to be on which day. I am going to have to make those arrangements when I know who and when and where. That is why I do not have a ticket to leave New Zealand. Get that through your pathetic hairbun, and your disgusting glasses, and your horribly pinched little life. And, while you’re at it, get the fuck out of my way so I can get my tired, irritated ass and on that plane and sit there and do nothing.”

Not that I say anything of the kind. Instead, I say, “Oh ...”

“Hang on,” she says perkily, ”I’ll just call immigration ...

Which she does.

“Hello immigration. Got a reporter here. He’s accredited to cover the World Cup. But, of course, he doesn’t have a ticket to leave New Zealand because, well, obviously, he doesn’t know when the team he is covering will play their last game in New Zealand because they’re still busy with the group stage. I mean, they’ll get to the quarter-finals easily enough. But then who knows because, well, it’s South Africa and you know what they’re like - did anyone say choke? Yes, exactly. AB de Villiers looks like he could hit an atom to friggin’ Mars, but they are probably going to bring back Vernon Philander when they should stick with Kyle Abbott. And what’s up with Dale Steyn? Geez, can someone tell him to get over himself already? And that Fairhead Bedridden bloke - yeah, him: Farhaan Behardien - can anyone tell us who and what the hell he is exactly? Damn straight. Anyway, what note do I make next to Mr Vice here’s name to explain why he doesn’t have a ticket to leave New Zealand? Uh-huh. And that’s it? Thanks. Bye.”

Whereupon she clacks at a keyboard, waits for the computer to burp its approval, hands me back my boarding pass - sideways like without looking up from her screen - and says: “Thank you. Enjoy the flight.”

Thus rudely educated, I take back my boarding pass, wobble on my way, sit down, buckle up, sit there stunned for a while, fire up my laptop, bang out some or other story, pack it all away, and unwind another few rolls of red tape in Auckland.

Then I step outside, take a breath of New Zealand’s clean air, and hear my voice crack as I yell, “Taxi!”