Frack

By Morris Leyland

An amazing discovery on a farm in the Far North of New Zealand is the catalyst for international intrigue.

• Language: English
• Publisher: BookBaby
• Release date: Aug 12, 2012
• ISBN: 9780473218133

Book preview

Plymouth

CHAPTER ONE

WHAT THE.......

Gregory James threw the sheet off himself. It was the same sheet he had been throwing off himself for the last six months and probably a few months before that. The yellowed and stained sheets had the imprint of his body on them, the area of his knees and feet were particularly filthy. Gregory had the beginnings of his own Turin Shroud.

Rolling his legs out of bed, he proceeded to dress himself while sitting on the bed, pulling the plaid shirt over his stained and sweaty once white singlet that had done a fortnight’s service and just may get changed when he made his next trip to town for groceries. Still sitting, he reached down and pulled the stiff and oily shorts up as far he could then put on the woollen socks, which were sufficiently dirty to retain most of the shape of his feet and in time would probably be able to stand on their own. Gregory was oblivious to the smell that emanated from them. Standing, he pulled the shorts fully up; zipped and buttoned the top of them. They did not fit him as snugly as they once had. He proceeded to scrub his face with the palms of his grubby and oil stained hands enjoying the rasping sound it made, being covered with two weeks of facial hair. He stretched himself and his arms to their full height while yawning and groaning. It had not been a great night’s sleep. Twice he had been woken by the thunderous late summer rain on the corrugated iron roof of the old farmhouse and on both occasions had struggled to get back to sleep in the clammy heat. He washed both eyes with the back of his index fingers and looked out through the dusty mesh curtains. There was a gash in them where he had slashed at a mosquito three weeks earlier with a rolled up newspaper. But, the news for the curtain and Gregory was not all bad, as the tear was well under repair by an industrious spider. Gregory smiled to himself and thought ‘great repair and mosquito net’.

Outside he could see the cloud and misty rain were coming out of the northeast and he knew that in this part of the north of New Zealand that there was surely more rain to come, possibly some very heavy falls, judging by the clammy heat this early in the morning. The room had a peculiar smell of rancidity and mushrooms about it and this smell moved with Gregory as he trundled off to the toilet. He was clearly the King of this mobile fungal colony. Down the hall of the large house, passing the bathroom on the way, the towels were laying on the floor where he had hung them after his preparation for his last trip to town. They would be ready for the next trip.

After a long and satisfying piss, punctuated with much satisfied groaning, Gregory got onto his breakfast. The surface of the dish covered sink, was no longer visible and had been that way since his wife had left - ‘THE BITCH’. He took a large pot that was soaking in the sink, swished it twice around with a dish brush and tipped the remains of yesterday’s porridge out. He half filled it with water, a teaspoon of salt, two cups of rolled oats and twelve minutes later he had breakfast and lunch done. Supper was always a greater problem and always rankled with him. Probably the sole thing he missed most about his wife was roast meals in the evening after working out on the farm ‘THE BITCH’. Pouring the porridge straight from the pot into a large bowl, he used his forearm and the bowl to bulldoze a space among the accounts, newspapers and various condiments left on the dining table. After the sweet bowl of porridge, that was only slightly spoiled by the fortnight-old cream he had put on it with the milk, he was off.

Grabbing his floppy once-blue hat, which had stained handprints around the outer rim, black thumb prints on the inner rim and faded whitening sweat tide-lines around the seam that connected the rim to the circular peak.

Out the front door, he was greeted by that great green-washed smell that followed summer rain in the country. From the verandah he looked out over the lawn. The kikuyu grass had already been at a length that put it beyond the scope of the lawn mower, which was pushed under the trees that formed a shelter belt around the house. The warm rain overnight had made it grow another two inches. Bugger, he thought. That will mean getting the tractor with a large slasher on it in here to knock it back to a manageable length and that usually meant something was going to get broken. Manoeuvering a large machine around the house was a right pain in the arse. His wife had always taken care of the lawn and garden ‘THE BITCH’. Fuck it, he thought, there won’t be any garden tour coming this way any time soon. It can wait. He slipped on the oversize gumboots which came up to the matching black lines that they left just below the knees of his unwashed legs.

There were going to be enough breaks between rain for him to finish the task he had been working on for some time now - putting shale out of his small shale pit onto a roadway to the back of his farm.

As Gregory got to the small gate at the front of the house section, he was greeted by the whining of his two dogs - a large black and tan Huntaway good for chasing cattle with near continuous barking, and a black and white Border Collie which was the brains of the team and acted as a multipurpose cattle, sheep and watch dog, also occasionally and sometimes annoyingly, as a hunter of possum which usually meant a lot of frantic sleep-breaking barking at night.

In a large shed behind the dog kennels which sat on the edge of the road into the house, Gregory kept most of the gear and equipment he used for the operation of the farm, most of which was stacked in Dr. Seuss fashion, in precarious piles some of which had slumped over into total disarray. Bags of fertilizer, tools, machinery, sacks of grass seed, etc and everything covered in a thick layer of dust. Gregory hurried into the large double doors as the first shower of misty rain swirled in from the north. He could tell by the sun shining down behind the shower that it was going to be gone in minutes and not amount to much.

To his left, inside the shed was a large chest freezer that he kept the dog meat in. Cattle or sheep that died on the farm were crudely chopped up with an axe and freezer stored for the dogs. By the time Gregory had retrieved a couple of large pieces of frozen meat and a dish of dog biscuits, the rain was gone. He vigorously patted and scratched the ears of both dogs as he fed and gave them water from a hose. There would be work shifting stock later in the day for them.

He began the one hundred and twenty metre walk to the shale pit, and as he cleared the shed he looked south over the farm. In stark contrast to the house, the farm was in good condition. Given to him seven years ago in his parents’ estate, he had grasped the opportunity to put his mark on it.

Dividing up the large paddocks for faster more intense grazing, reduced the number of sheep to decrease the amount of work for him and lessen the cost of shearing. He increased the cattle numbers as they were, at that time, the best earners. Up until the last eight months, prices for stock had meandered steadily downward, but global recession had changed people’s focus. Attention was more on where the next feed was coming from and less on speculation. So commodity prices were on the rise and beef and sheep farming looked like it may have a future after all. Any financial boon would not be shared with his wife as she had left with the agent of the stock buying company that he previously dealt with. That bastard of an agent, romancing his wife while he was out working on the farm.

Truth be told, there wasn’t much romance in it for his wife. She had jumped at the suggestion of an escape from a marriage that was stagnant and his continual parsimony. His continual nagging over spending, even over the purchase of the most essential items such as groceries involved him going through the store receipt item by item, querying every purchase including on one occasion, her tampons. This had drawn from her such a savage and prolonged response he hadn’t gone there again, but everything else got the third degree. She had stayed with the stock agent only as long as it had taken her to get a job and independence. Gregory had kept up with her movements on the ever efficient rural gossip grapevine and when he heard she had left the agent, he thought maybe ‘THE BITCH’ is having second thoughts. Nothing could have been further from the truth. Married straight out of school she was now like a flightless bird that had suddenly grown wings. Even performing the menial job, she had seemed like - deliverance. Once again the thought crossed Gregory’s mind, I had better get the lawyer to work on that divorce. If I drop dead tomorrow, she will get all of this or at least half of it. Besides, there were other women in the world. His only realistic chance of meeting one was on his fortnightly trips to Kaitaia to shop. It seemed unlikely that he would stumble upon a woman with poor eyesight, no sense of smell and a yen for a life of monetary deprivation and his tight fistedness was well known. Still, stranger things had happened and logic is seldom the basis for personal relationships, even successful ones.

He opened the gate into the shale pit and looked up at the ridge above it. The medium sized tree that had been teetering on the rim of the pit had been dislodged by the heavy rain during the night. I won’t have to worry about that landing on me, he mused. The oil shale pit on Gregory James’ farm was the only visible manifestation of a massive subterranean ridge of sedimentary oil shale that ran seven kilometers inland and thirty kilometers out to sea. Three kilometers at its widest and reaching 4.8 kilometers deep, the bulk of this seam lay north east of the James’ farm, under the picturesque tidal Aurere River and out beneath the stunningly beautiful Doubtless Bay to the open Pacific Ocean beyond. As a result of the small oil seepages from the pit, the surrounding areas had been drilled for oil during the seventies when oil was in short supply and expensive following OPEC’s quadrupling of the crude oil price in 1973. This had set off a wave of government oil conservation tactics around the globe. Most, like New Zealand’s allocation of carless days for private motorists were completely ineffective. At one stage in the U.S, reserves had run out as panicked motorists had rushed to fill up vehicles. The underground in-tank reserves were pumped into what became mobile in-vehicle storage.

The Aurere drilling had also proved useless, as only small amounts of available oil had been found beneath the land, the bulk of it being locked up in the shale.

The oil shale had been a considerable part of the farm’s income, as the local council used it for a virtually dust free road surface material. Everyone thought it a great base material for back roads. Even at 60 cents per cubic metre, it was still a good earner. Following a very hard to extinguish fire of unknown origin burning persistently in the shale pit, a tree hugging bureaucrat in the local council had noticed a miniscule amount of oil seepage and closed the pit down. That was the pit facing the main road, Highway 10. Gregory James was excavating the exact opposite side of the ridge, well out of sight of prying eyes.

The shale had a mixture of a multitude of forms. Close to the surface, some strata were running vertically, others consisted of honey comb patterned crumbly rock intermingled with oily soft sandstone. Mostly, it was easy to excavate. By charging the bank with his old Yale loader and lifting the hydraulic bucket he was able to get enough to load the tipping trailer on which he towed it up the farm by tractor. In the lower level of the pit, the strata was horizontal and hard, and Gregory had noticed fossils in this layer of swirled almost marble like patterning. What looked like shells, coral and crustaceans, which were probably valuable. He had told no one as he was all too aware of the result should some conservation minded person see them.

As he stepped onto the base layer, he immediately adopted a skiing like walk as the rubber gumboots on the rain-washed oil shale was slippery. As he liked to put it ‘Eels mating in a barrel of snot’. He skied his way over to the old Yale loader, which was thirty years past its use by date, but still miraculously continued to work despite the lack of any real maintenance. Gregory sniggered to himself as he looked at the rainbow colours stretching away from the loader on the ground. The Detroit diesel engine was leaking more damn oil than the other pit ever had and he reckoned he had seen plenty of farm tractors the same. He climbed up the indented steps to the operating seat, removed the old raincoat covering, turned that over and stepped in and plonked himself down. The loader had no safety frame just an open cockpit, so was only suitable for flat ground service operation and even then it was dangerous if the bucket was lifted too high. Debris could easily roll out the back of it and onto the driver. Gregory turned on the ignition, pressed the heater plug to warm up the engine, then getting an aerosol can of ether from the tool recess beside him, he reached forward to the air intake and filter and gave it a hearty dose of ether. It would be even more reluctant to start than usual after the heavy, humid rain. He pressed the heater plug switch again and then after perhaps 30 seconds, turned the ignition key. Fuck! he said loudly when all he heard was a dull click and a hissing sound from the battery terminals behind him. He rummaged in the tool recess

Reviews for Frack

[GemmaAusten · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

I found the book to be a great read. It has such a great and current story line and very well developed characters. I felt like i knew them all personally and had been all the places they had been. This would make one hell of a movie!! A MUST read for anyone avid reader.