Wanaka

By Jesse O'Reilly-Conlin

Hound has a particularly strong sense of smell. He can smell the memories of people and can smell them so strongly in fact that they appear before him as if something real and touchable. In these memories, Hound can walk and talk with the ghosts of people’s past, and—this is the important part—he can make changes, both big and small, wherever he wishes. He may direct someone left instead of right, say something that had not been said before, or even remove a person or event that had bothered the memory keeper.

Men pay Hound to kill their ghosts—to destroy some of their most burdensome memories. They pay him handsomely for his services.

Recently, though, Hound has grown tired of murdering the ghosts of rich, well-to-do men. The violence has taken its toll. He is tired and wants nothing more than to settle down. He wants a simple life, freed from men’s violent histories.

He is tired of being alone with his smells. He needs a friend, someone he can talk to and confine in.

And then one day, he meets Jesse, a man with many ghosts, and together, they form a lasting, and unique, friendship in beautiful Wanaka, New Zealand.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Austin Macauley Publishers
• Release date: Oct 13, 2023
• ISBN: 9781035812196

Jesse O'Reilly-Conlin

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin’s writing has appeared in Cargo Lit Mag, Cold Noon: International Journal of Travel Writing and Travelling Cultures, Folio Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Open Minds Quarterly. His travel memoir, Visiting Africa, was published in November 2021, by Demeter Press. His second memoir, Go: A Memoir of Movement, was published by Iguana Books in April 2023. This is his first novel.

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About the Author

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin’s writing has appeared in Cargo Lit Mag, Cold Noon: International Journal of Travel Writing and Travelling Cultures, Folio Magazine, Lowestoft Chronicle, and Open Minds Quarterly. His travel memoir, Visiting Africa, was published in November 2021, by Demeter Press. His second memoir, Go: A Memoir of Movement, was published by Iguana Books in April 2023. This is his first novel.

Dedication

To the pterodactyl

and

To my parents for always encouraging me to write

Copyright Information ©

Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin 2023

The right of Jesse O’Reilly-Conlin to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by the author in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publishers.

Any person who commits any unauthorised act in relation to this publication may be liable to criminal prosecution and civil claims for damages.

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, places, events, locales, and incidents are either the products of the author’s imagination or used in a fictitious manner. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, or actual events is purely coincidental.

A CIP catalogue record for this title is available from the British Library.

ISBN 9781035812189 (Paperback)

ISBN 9781035812196 (ePub e-book)

www.austinmacauley.com

First Published 2023

Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd®

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E14 5AA

Part One

Hound

My name is Hound. I am thirty-five. And I hunt ghosts.

This is my story.

Memories are little reminders from God of what you’ve done. And if they float around in the nether regions of your mind long enough without being granted resolution, without being acknowledged for their potency, they bite and claw for your attention. They transform into pests and then into ghosts.

I kill the ghosts who haunt their masters. I track them through their smell, which often lingers like grief or wasted love. I smell ghosts everywhere. I am a dog racing through a forest, nose to the ground, hot on their trail. Their scent beckons me to follow. They pull me hard. I see them through their smell. I see their memories. I see their shape and colour. I see what they did and what they became.

Men pay me to kill their ghosts. Not women. They don’t ask me. They never come knocking at my door. I don’t know why. Maybe they have fewer ghosts.

I kill ghosts for the money. It is a job. Nothing more. I am not an altruistic man. Whether or not my abilities help the men who come to me is of no real importance. They pay. I take their money. Most, but not all, are animals, brutes, who want to be released from the burden of their past. In a sense, I work as their defence lawyer. Their guilt does not matter. What matters is that I defend them. It is my job. Nothing more.

Whether you believe me or not does not concern me in the least. I’ve met thousands of men in my time who initially scoffed at my stated abilities, who laughed directly in my face when I told them that I could kill whatever memory bothered them, whatever ghost that disturbed their sleep. But only hours later, all these men, most of whom were big and tough looking, eventually broke down in tears thanking me for saving them from the sins of their past. They wept on their knees. They kissed my hand. They would have kissed my foot if I had asked. But their money was sufficient thanks. So, disbelieve me if you wish, but do know that all secrets are eventually found, and their owners judged for them.

I took a writing course once, a rather boring affair that I wish not to recount in any detail, except to say that the instructor said that readers must be able to visualise the protagonist, must be able to see him while he goes through his adventures or even misadventures. If readers can see your characters, the instructor said, then they can better empathise with him, with his purposes and goals, even with his shortcomings. Before sitting down to write this account, whose exact purpose, I should warn, still eludes me, I jotted down a few words I thought best described my appearance. I am a man, and I am white. As much as I dislike emphasising these attributes about myself, after all, judge a man by his deeds and not by his appearance, they remain inseparable from my story, since, for whatever reason, my narrative centres around the transgressions of white men. But I get ahead of myself. My appearance is average. My body is average. I am neither fat nor thin, neither in shape nor out of shape. I look ordinary. If you were in a room with thirty white men, your eyes would rush past my somewhat oblong face, my brownish-green eyes, my thin lips, and settle on the more attractive or unique features of the more handsome and dashing men. I am an extra in the film of life. To be fair to myself, though, I do have one spectacular feature – one thing that does make me superior to all those other men – yet the problem is that it looks ordinary from afar, and a stranger in the street would never be able to gauge its greatness or mine for that matter, simply by glancing at it. I have a nose that can do extraordinary things. But, again, I get ahead of myself.

One thing I would like to make clear from the outset, though, is that this piece of writing is not a confession. Men of purpose do not feel guilt. They simply do, which is what makes them great, and I am great. I should not be judged for being special, nor should I be punished for doing things other men wouldn’t dare.

I live in Wanaka, New Zealand; well, I have been for the last six months or so. I am a nomad. I go wherever I please, whenever I want. Money is no longer a concern of mine. I am retired. But a man with my abilities is never really retired. I work with the mind, and it pays well. Very well. It tires, though. The work of memory is hard, grinding work. And I do less of it now.

An old client, but a new friend, Jesse, recommended Wanaka to me. He had visited the town at eighteen during his first international trip outside of Canada. I, too, am Canadian, a fact, perhaps, I should have mentioned from the outset. But its relevance is of no great import to me. I was born in what has become known internationally as Canada. But I have never felt Canadian. I have felt the sun on my face, snow landing on my skin, cold water covering my feet, and raindrops falling on my tongue. But I have never felt any sort of allegiance with people who happen to share my nationality. To say you feel a nationality is rather silly. Like kissing the air. I have felt like a man but never like a Canadian. But I digress.

Jesse instantly liked Wanaka’s tranquillity, the mountains and lakes. He liked the stillness. He visited in fall, so the weather had already turned cooler and greyer, which suited him fine. He took walks alone around the lake and loved how rays of sunshine would briefly pierce the shield of clouds. The sun would eventually fight through and cover the lake in light, and everything was for a moment okay. He said he had hoped to move there one day with his significant other. It was the dream, he said, that kept them together even when they were drifting apart. He used to want her gone, but now he waits for her return. Such is the rollercoaster of life. I will return to Jesse later, for, in many ways, his story is also mine. He is the reason I am in Wanaka, and he may be the best friend I’ve ever had.

I had been to New Zealand before, many times. In fact, no country has escaped my footprint. I have visited every single one. But I had never given Wanaka much attention on my first and subsequent passes through New Zealand’s gorgeous South Island. I hiked the Milford, Routeburn, and Abel Tasman, each one giving generously the solitude and movement I so craved and, honestly, needed. I am not being hyperbolic. People distract me, especially their smells. They pull me into their orbits and internal worlds without my consent, and soon I am drowning in their pasts, their longings and regrets, and even their crimes, which, as I hinted, take the form of ghosts, which look and speak exactly like you and me. And if it weren’t for their malicious intentions, their desire to make a man remember things he would rather have buried and forgotten, you would think ghosts are rather average looking.

Life is a series of moments that unfurl with no real reason or purpose. Most moments are of little salience, making up the minutia of everyday life, yet there are always those three or four big moments that largely define a life, or at least in the opinion of the person they happened to, and whether good or bad, they infect and spread throughout the body, influencing behaviour and personality, until what rises from those memories are ghosts that haunt the landscape of a person’s internal country. Each has a unique smell that wafts from the pores of the host and that, if I am not careful, will draw lurid worlds for me to get lost in, and when I am not working, there is nothing I want more than to avoid accidentally falling into such a world and meet the ghosts of a cruel man – a man that has done unspeakable things.

As a result, for the last ten years, I have worn a nose plug, the kind swimmers wear, whenever I am around other people for an extended period. Some swimmers, novice ones admittingly, have trouble breathing through their noses under water. The feeling is unpleasant, even unnatural. Water should not flow through that orifice. Although these swimmers might have looked silly with their plugs fitted tightly around their noses and might have provoked laughter among their more experienced swimmer peers, they nonetheless wore it because it made them feel better. My nose plug saved me from countless bouts of anxiety and unease. I could savour the sights and sounds of a new city without the annoyance of suddenly being transported into the memory of a man beating the face of an ex-lover. Walking among the beech forests and humble town lanes of Wanaka, I had no need for a nose plug. The world and its ghosts did not impede my step. I could breathe the cool country air without molestation, without the hands of white men desperately begging me to rid them of their past crimes – to kill those ghosts that would not let them sleep. But, again, I am jumping ahead.

It’s difficult to know where to begin a story such as mine, just as it’s difficult to identify the exact purpose of my words. I suppose it’s about what finally forced a self-described nomad to settle down in the south of New Zealand. I suppose it’s about how I got from A to B. It’s certainly not a confession, as I have already stated. I seek neither absolution nor redemption. I do not feel guilty for the things I’ve done or haven’t done, or for the men I have helped, for all the horror I’ve helped them erase. There was a time when I was younger when I did think hell awaited me for all the ghosts I had killed, for all the consciences I helped clean. Was I an accessory to all violence? We are all guilty of something. Innocence belongs to the world of fiction. Our first breaths are already stained with the blood and sacrifice of others. If you are alive, someone has suffered to make it so. I have realised that the world is an imperfect place, and man must do what he needs to survive. All sorts of men sell products of violence and death. The tobacco man. The gunman. The alcohol man. The big pharma man. The oil man. The butcher man. I am just responding to a hole in the market, and when the market pays this well for the service I provide, well, you wouldn’t be much of a businessman if you turned your nose up at it.

I suppose I should explain my name, which, unfortunately, requires a few words about my childhood. Hound, of course, is not my real name, and I wish not to bore you with my birth name, suffice it to say it was a perfunctory name for a rather perfunctory existence. Twenty years ago, my father started calling me Hound because of my acute sense of smell. I could smell everything. All I had to was put my nose to the sky and take a big whiff, and my smell receptors would go to work. I was like one of those dogs you sometimes see at airports sniffing out the contraband smuggled in the suitcase of some unscrupulous traveller. At school, sitting at my desk doing algebra, I could smell the coffee brewing from the teacher’s staffroom. While playing hockey at the local arena, I could smell the gasoline being pumped at our town’s local gas station. And I could smell the beer on my father’s breath even after he had sworn he had given up drinking for the sake of his family, for he himself had finally realised that stumbling home in a fit of rage every Sunday morning did not too much to endear himself to me and mom, especially when it left a wake of broken dishes and deep bruises, which were difficult to conceal. And I could smell the cigarette smoke on my mom’s sweaters when she placed plates of food in front of us night after night, year after year, even though I had never seen her smoke a cigarette in her life. To this day, the smell of a cigarette still fills me with feelings of such intense sadness that I sometimes find it hard not to break down on the spot. In any event, my abilities became the talk of our small town, and both acquaintances and complete strangers enjoyed testing my skills, usually by hiding some unidentified object behind their backs and asking me to identify it. I was never wrong, and my fame grew even more. My nose even more bewildered the townsfolk because for the first fifteen years of my life I couldn’t smell a thing.

The doctors called it congenital anosmia – the complete inability to detect odours – and they were baffled by its occurrence, since the condition did not appear in the family history of either my mother or father. My mother visited specialists, and they said my anosmia likely resulted from the abnormal development of my olfactory system in the womb. They talked about the possible defectiveness of my naval cavity, the possible blockage of the pathway between my nose and brain, or the malformation of my brain’s olfactory bulb or piriform cortex. My mother did not understand much of what they said except that my smell was likely never to return and that the problem happened while I was growing in her womb, about which she felt inconsolably guilty.

I certainly never felt I had missed some irreplaceable slice of life because of my anosmia, but my mother felt I had, which she never failed to recount. Babies recognise their mother by scent before sight, she would say, so I often worried whether you did not think of me as your mother but rather some stranger who sometimes fed you and who sometimes held you.

Early on, your condition – she never did bother to learn the scientific name – affected your taste, so whenever I fed you a spoonful of apple puree, you would always stare at me this blank, cold expression, as if you had no idea whether you were supposed to like it or not. Nightly, I would pray to God, she said, that you would develop in sound health and mind and despite your limitations be accepted in the community of men and that whatever I did to so displease you, my lord, you will reveal to me in all your glory and beauty and lead me further from the darkness and into the light.

We lived in a small hamlet, far from any semblance of urbanity. The forests around us were thick with mosquitos and horseflies in the summer and snow and ice in the winter. One lonesome road ran through our community, which had nothing really to show for it except for an outdoor skating rink, a grocery store selling overpriced white bread, spaghetti, and fruit that always looked well past its expiry date, a post office – the only real evidence that a world existed outside our little town buried deep inside the wilderness – a liquor store, from which men would buy spirits and dream of an easier life, and two churches, one Protestant and one Catholic. There was also an old-timey gas station, whose pumps had not yet graduated to the digital kind and revealed both the number of litres consumed and the number of dollars in a slow and rhythmic fashion. Out-of-towners were always amazed, and thankful, that such a gas station existed because they were running on fumes and were convinced they would be stranded in the middle of nowhere and were afraid of what would happen if night came and they had no means of exiting it.

My school was in the next town over, an hour’s drive each way on the school bus, which specialised in retrieving kids who lived at the end of dirt roads, seemingly hidden within an impenetrable bush. I loved the long bus rides. My best childhood memories happened on the bus driving along lonely Highway 11, over knolls, around bends, past lakes and rocky outcrops. I loved looking out the window at the passing world emblazed with colours so rich and vibrant that I sometimes rubbed my eyes to ensure I wasn’t dreaming. On early winter mornings, I would watch the sun struggle to lighten the forests, whose pine and spruce trees had branches so heavy with snow, and watch the dawn give way to a sky so blue, so clear and sharp, that I sometimes wondered if I looked at it too intently it would crack. After every snowfall, the snowbanks would creep further and further onto the highway, with the ploughs running out of places to deposit the snow, and I would worry that one morning, the snow would overtake the highway, blanketing in an immoveable white, and abandoning us children in towns far from the watchful eyes of civilisation. In the spring, the snow would melt, and the maple and oaks trees would reveal their buds and the loons would return and serenade the entire town with their wild and bizarre cries. From the bus, I saw a world reborn amid the overflowing rives and rainy afternoons, which soon birthed a green so vibrant and lush that I thought there was nothing on this fair earth that would not find that soil a suitable home in which to grow. In the summer, the sun was more active, staying with me from early in the morning until late at night, and our school bus, on those June mornings we hadn’t yet been released back into the care of our families, would pass lakes so still that they would reflect back to me the towering trees, and there were moments I swore that I was looking at two massive forests, until, of course, a largemouth bass broke the water to eagerly devour a water bug that had been skirting along the surface so peacefully. In the fall, the world outside my window transformed into an art gallery, as the forests exploded into different shades of yellow, orange, and red, and I could identify each tree by the colour of its leaves, even to the point of differentiating types of maples by the sharpness of the colour, and whenever we would crest a knoll, I would gaze up from my seat, towards the driver, and watch as the horizon filled with colour, and I would imagine those reds and oranges as the flames of an immense and devastating fire that destroyed our community and displaced our residents, but I did not care because it was the most beautiful sight I had ever seen.

Until I regained my smell, I possessed no discernible skills, at least none that would win me the favour of my family and peers. I had rudimentary hockey skills – my skating was laboured and cumbersome, and I could never seem to settle the puck on my stick – which is why, I suppose, I was always picked last for games at the local arena, when I was picked at all. The outdoors presented challenges well beyond my capabilities. I couldn’t start a fire to save my life, nor could I find my way through a forest. Compasses were Greek to me, and my tracking abilities once caused my father to say, You wouldn’t last a week in the bush. My father prided himself on his survival skills, how he could name each and every berry and mushroom he happened across, instinctively knowing which to eat and which to let alone, how he could fashion a makeshift shelter for himself out of nothing but what the woods provided, plus his own ingenuity, how he could look at the forest and feel not fear or uncertainty but opportunity, adventure, a place where, as he often said without a shred of irony, A boy can become a man.

I must have disappointed him because until my smell returned, I stayed indisputably a boy. What particularly irked and embarrassed him about me, his son, was my abhorrence of violence, particularly towards animals. He’s just sensitive, my mother would say to my father as he would rail against one of my tantrums protesting his desire to take me fishing or hunting. I had loved fishing, not so