Hanging with the suits
22nd August 2009

In the movie Apollo 13 there is a moment when Tom Hanks’ companions, their ruptured sardine can disintegrating around them, urge him to turn for earth. “No,” declares Hanks with authority, “the only way back is to go forward, to encircle the moon, use its gravity to slingshot us back to earth.”

Whether or not this idea is scientific it is a beautiful image: the crippled spacecraft spiralling like a cue ball towards the vortex, only to ricochet off the cushion.

Other large objects demonstrate the same astrophysical properties as the moon. Like Wellington for example. Wellington is a crouching black hole at the centre of our small kiwiverse. On any day of the working week it drags hundreds nay, thousands, of small black objects into its maw, swirls them through the gravitational field and slingshots them back to their points of origin. These small objects are suits – men and women of business and public service - the penitents and lackeys, the voluptuaries and petitioners, flung like fistfuls of stardust down the gullet of the great cosmos.

Lately I find myself in the company of the suits – suit myself, in fact. A professional entanglement has me travelling regularly to Wellington; rising in darkness, driving in darkness, flying in darkness to arrive over Wellington’s shiny surfaces about the same time as dawn.

Like any neophyte striving to assimilate I am a keen observer of the ways of the suits. I have learned to take a complementary newspaper in the departure lounge to create a small cone of silence around myself while awaiting the boarding call. I have discovered how to detach from the indignity of security checks to the point where the time and space from ticketing to gangway are a small repressed memory.

I notice how a day in Wellington affects the demeanour and appearance of the suits. At dawn, as we disgorge from the Boeing into Wellington airport’s carpeted thoroughfare, we are crisp and purposeful. Conversation, such as may be, is pitched to the purpose of the day. Our minds move forward. We are tall and steely-eyed.

Returning to the airport at 5.00pm we are crumpled, darkened and diminished. We have been cut down to size by Wellington’s unrelentingly vertical landscapes, starved of natural light and oxygen in a thousand windowless offices, over-starched on catered lunches and a million cardboard coffee cups.

We gather like Peter Jackson’s Ringwraiths around the airport bar. We are almost all men here, black and flapping. Our armpits reek, shoulders sag. If anybody has clinched a deal today or saved the planet they’re not letting on. There is fatigue, but also nervous, repressed energy, fuelled by happy hour, strip lighting and an edgy PA announcer ticking off latecomers.

Into this scene walk a pair of young women, red and blond splashes of colour among the monochrome suits. They buy drinks and perch like birds of paradise at a high riser. The blonde raises her Corona to her lips, baring her throat. Thirty men pretend not to notice. Tension rises like a wave.

The man opposite me really does not notice. He is a big fat slob, spilling out of his chair. He has an open book in one hand while the other wrestles with a plastic-wrapped sandwich the size of a fire log, one of those industrial nourishments that is impossible to tell where the packaging ends and the food begins. He fidgets, twitches, jaws his sandwich, sprays food, adjusts his spectacles – filthy spectacles.

I flee for the departure lounge. In the concourse I have a celebrity moment. Coming towards me is somebody who used to be famous, and whom I knew before that. I seize his hand. “Michael Cullen! It’s Peter Verstappen. I was in your history class at Otago in 1978.”

He recoils. “I am not Michael Cullen.”

Oops! I think quickly, people are staring. “Actually, I’m not Peter Verstappen either, but golly don’t we look like them.”

Down the glide towards the koru club I see another familiar face, Mid-Canterbury’s own Don McLeod. At least I think it is, but I’m wary now. The Don catches my eye, grins and greets me. Phew! It seems I am Peter Verstappen after all.

I edge my way into my seat on the Boeing, the undesirable middle seat. A very large suit hulks by the window but the aisle seat is free. I adopt the pose of maximum privacy, elbows close, head in a book. Other suits settle around me like crows to their perches. At the last moment the big fat slob pours himself into the aisle seat, spraying mayonnaise and dandruff. It dawns on me that the 737 is so named for its seating configuration. I am a very small 3 between two large 7s.

We rumble down the tarmac and Wellington’s slingshot projects us into the darkness. The sea rolls below.