Every time I entered my room at Malcolm’s the smell of mould hit me: an overpoweringly damp, fetid, vinegary odour that seemed to infect everything it touched. It was a good match for the room itself, a sad amalgam of dirty mould-spotted walls, filthy carpet and decrepit furniture. It made me feel beaten, broken down, already depressed – even though, unlike anyone else in the boarding house, I had an escape route. I was, thankfully, there for just three winter weeks researching a book on New Zealand’s rich-poor divide, trying to understand something about the places where the unfortunate fetch up and, in doing so, get stuck.
Malcolm’s, in the inner-city Wellington suburb of Brooklyn, had been recommended to me as a typical boarding house. To ensure I fitted in, I had stopped shaving for a week beforehand and had pulled out my worst clothes: a shapeless old padded coat, some ripped jeans and a pair of trainers coming apart at the seams. Thus prepared, I walked up to Malcolm’s, a large and – outwardly – rather handsome three-storey 1930s villa. I knocked on the front door and it was opened by Malcolm, an immensely tall fellow, stiff, upright and rather faded, like an old British colonel fallen on hard times. His long face was bruised looking, with sunken, bleached-white eye sockets. He had one room available, at $150 a week. After I’d
