Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘Cod, haddock, plaice, herring and redfish, Mrs Hartley,’ she sang.

  Holy shit, what was this?

  ‘Thank you, Karen. Those, Royce Rowland, are the commercial fish caught in the Bering Sea.’

  ‘Please, Mrs Hartley,’ gasped Karen Phibbs, ‘I also know the commercial fish caught in the seas off Japan.’ Her face was sort of bulging, like in ‘when you gotta go you gotta go’, and she burst into another list of fish without being able to stop herself: ‘Anchovy, cod, flounder, hake, halibut, herring, mackerel, sardine, salmon, saury, sea bream, sea trout, smelt and tuna, Mrs Hartley.’

  Royce’s head was ringing with esses.

  ‘… and in the inland waters, carp, eel and ugui minnow are harvested,’ she added, like those few drips you squeeze out at the end.

  ‘Thank you, Karen,’ said Beatrice Ellen Ann with a warning firmness. She was either reeling from esses too or was queasy at the thought of all that fish. How could one brain hold so many fish? And why? How many times in her life was someone going to stop her and say, ‘Excuse me, miss, do you happen to know the commercial fish harvested in the inland waters of Japan?’ ‘Why, yes, sir, as a matter of fact I do. There’s your ugui minnow, your …’

  Royce had forgotten the rest.

  ‘Do you happen to know the commercial fish caught off the eastern coast of North America, Royce?’

  ‘Not off hand, Mrs Hartley. Um … Not crayfish, anyway, because they get all our ones.’ Until about age eleven, Royce had thought crayfish were red thorny things with a big hole at the back like the afterburner of a MIG fighter. Then he’d found out the hole was where a tail used to be, which had been pulled off and sent to America.

  ‘What about the commercial fish of Iceland?’

  ‘I think I’ve got a mental block about fish, Mrs Hartley.’

  ‘You have four weeks, Royce, till your third attempt at School Cert. I happen to think you can pass this exam, and thus boost your employment prospects hugely. But you must work!’

  ‘I just wasn’t feeling studious last night, Mrs Hartley.’ He pronounced it as in ‘stud’.

  ‘Studious, Royce, stooodious,’ she corrected wearily. ‘I’m afraid I’m rapidly losing patience with your attempts to reinvent the English language.’

  Old Jack Styles had told them in English that words were pronounced by ‘common usage’; if everyone pronounced it that way, that’s how the dictionary said it was said. So Royce had turned 5B into a social laboratory. They now all said ‘studious’ as in ‘stud’, and when it had caught on, Royce was going to write to the dictionary people and tell them to change their pronunciation.

  ‘I’ll have a look at those commercial fish tonight, Mrs Hartley, promise.’

  ‘Thank you, that’s most magnanimous of you, Royce,’ gritted Mrs Hartley.

  ‘He wouldn’t even know the commercial fish in the sea off Westport, Mrs Hartley,’ snickered Billy Mosley.

  ‘I would so!’

  ‘Good,’ said Beatrice Ellen Ann suddenly. ‘Yes, a good idea, Billy.’ Her lips were pressed, the headlock fixed. ‘Then let’s hear them, Royce. The commercial fish in the sea off Westport.’

  Shit. Bloody Billy Mosley. ‘Whitebait.’

  ‘Well … that’s more a river fish.’

  ‘No, Mrs Hartley, Billy Mosley’s father catches them at sea in his fishing boat. Ask him.’

  ‘He bloody does not!’

  ‘Billy! No language in here, thank you!’

  ‘He’s calling my dad a crook, Mrs Hartley.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s not. Now, that will do on the matter. Carry on, Royce.’

  I’ll get you, Rowland.’

  ‘Just try it, Mosley.’

  ‘Royce!’

  ‘Sorry, Mrs Hartley.’

  ‘There’s twenty of them, Mrs Hartley, and I know them all. I bet this dumb bugger doesn’t know half.’

  ‘Billy!’

  ‘I bet I bloody do.’

  ‘Boys!’

  ‘Go on then, thicko.’

  ‘You be up the back of the grandstand after school.’

  ‘You’ll be in detention.’

  ‘After that.’

  ‘Boys! You’ll both be in detention if this keeps up.’

  ‘I’ll be at the back of the grandstand if you can name ten fish in the sea off Westport.’

  ‘Squid.’

  ‘One.’

  ‘Snapper. Flounders …’

  ‘Three.’

  ‘Keep quiet, Billy, let him concentrate.’

  Eels? Do people sell eels? No, who’d buy eels? Ling? Yuk. Shark? Better not say that – shark was a secret Angelo at the fishnchip shop wouldn’t want spread around the School Cert circuit. Kahawai? Nah, you don’t eat bait. But hang on, Angelo’d told him they use kahawai for canned … ‘Tuna!’

  Well, the whole bloody class went up at that faux pas, didn’t they? Mrs Hartley had closed her eyes. ‘I should have known it was tempting fate,’ she sighed. ‘Karen, can you enlighten Royce?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Hartley:

  Since 1970 nearly one hundred Japanese distant-water longliners have operated in the New Zealand zone each year. They fish for bigeye in the northern areas of the zone during summer, and for southern bluefin tuna off the east coast of both islands during winter …

  ‘Thank you, Karen.’

  …The Japanese longliners begin fishing in February off the east coast of the South Island and move progressively north to East Cape in June. Approximately …

  ‘Thank you, Karen, that is very … compendious. The east coast, you will notice, Royce Rowland. Not, I am afraid, in the seas off Westport, which happen to be to the west – as you possibly already knew?’

  And she put her eyebrows up into her wrinkles and put her mouth into an angled pout. This was her standard sarcastic expression. The rest of them were laughing like drains, of course.

  ‘Yeah, I think I knew that, Mrs Hartley,’ he muttered. ‘West is best.’

  ‘Concentration is best, Royce, especially for you, and especially right now. I warn you, time is getting on. You must make a commitment to learning!’ And her really kind old eyes went sort of yellow with worry and emphasis. Then she said, ‘Thank you, Karen. Now, class, if you’ll all open your books at page 163: Leading Fishing Industry Countries. Linda, I wonder if you would mind reading first?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Hartley,’ said Linda Harvey. ‘Along the west coast of South America are the world’s newest fishing grounds …’

  LINDA HARVEY. SHE was his ‘creation’. Like Roger Vadim had created Brigitte Bardot and some other French sex symbols, Royce had created Linda Harvey. She’d come here from England with pigtails and a Pommie accent years ago when they were all in Standard Four and most of the others had called her a freak. But he had seen the potential. He’d been the one who showed her around – where to put your bike, where to collect your school milk, how to order your pie from the dairy. The sorts of things that girls usually taught girls, but he did it. They’d turned into friends, and he’d known that she was going to blossom into a great beauty one day, which would piss all the others off.

  Well, she had. And here she was: a great beauty, created by him. But none of the others noticed, and it pissed him off.

  ‘Why do you never dance with Linda Harvey at socials?’ he asked them, down at the Gren one night.

  ‘Outa my class, mate,’ said Clive.

  ‘Bullshit, she’s friendly and nice.’

  ‘Yeah, but you’re not at socials to be with friendly nice people, are you? You’re jacking yourself up for later.’

  ‘But look at her! She’s beautiful. It’s like dancing with someone from Hollywood.’

  ‘Yeah, you’re right, Royce,’ said Gilbert. ‘She’s got a great face, great tits, great legs – so why haven’t you shagged her?’

  That had flabbergasted him a bit.

  In the pause he was making while he thought, Gilbert went on, ‘Know what we call her?’

  ‘No.’
r />   ‘Your sister.’

  And that’s more or less where the matter rested. His creation was a bit incomplete. He’d created a one-B BB: beautiful but not sexy.

  And it was true. You could think dirty about her, but you’d never dream of letting her know. She was just so unhelpfully friggin’ virginal that there was no way of making the first step.

  She did athletics like he did – they used to train together down at the Square. But legs never became more than ‘hamstrings’ and ‘Achilles tendons’, and breasts were never more than ‘upper body’ – and in the middle was just a goddamn ‘pelvis’ that you ‘rotate around for extension’ in the long-jump.

  She was a sprinter and long-jumper. She had this amazing thoughtful sway to her hips as she walked up to her mark, then she’d skim down the track like dandelion, her blonde hair in a ponytail that streamed out behind her. She didn’t seem to put any effort into the jump, but it was usually huge – she sort of sneaked past gravity without it noticing. Her hair would arc over her head and nearly touch the sand in front of her as she landed.

  She was beautiful to watch.

  Yet when it got dark and she was packing up her training gear, he’d sometimes say, ‘I’ll just do a few more laps.’ He’d wait for her to bike off, then sneak up to the back of the grandstand and meet Colleen O’Reagan.

  Consolation.

  Cripes, talk about a world of difference. Colleen O’Reagan turned all those hamstrings and whatnots back into legs, the upper body into breasts and the pelvis … well, she rotated that for maximum extension.

  Not a care in the world, Colleen O’Reagan – told him she wiped it all out at Confession by saying ‘Since my last Confession, Father, I have disobeyed my parents five times.’ She didn’t go on to say that what she’d disobeyed them about was their rules about not doing the facts of life with boys.

  … and vast catches of anchovetta have made Peru a leading fishing nation.

  LINDA HARVEY WAS still blatting on about Peru’s fish. She had her head down while she read and the book was hidden by this amazing waterfall of yellow hair. He’d built up a dirty memory of her from the glimpses he got from time to time – you know, when her shorts fell open at the end of a jump, or when you could see down her bra as she practised sprint starts. He’d seen a bit of pubic hair once, too, and knew it was black. So by putting all these glimpses together he’d built up this erotic picture of her and he practised with it. It was starting to work, too – he’d think of it, and all the friendship bit would disappear and he’d get a hard on.

  Peru, like many nations, has laws to protect waters off her shores from fishing crews of other countries …

  He’d best take his fish book around to Gilbert’s. Gilbert must know all this fish shit anyway – he got School Cert geography first shot. Eighty percent or something like that. Bloody intellectual – head full of fish, but no regard for the fundamentals of life. Like when Bernie McKenzie had leaned over the Albion bar at Royce the other night and said, ‘Listen, Royce, tell bloody Gilbert not to come into this bloody bar wearing his bloody school uniform! From now on it’s them black singlets I gave yers, or I’ll arsehole the bloody lot of yer!’

  DANA GLOVER WAS slumped back, staring at her book about fish. Her blouse had slumped, too, so there was a little beak-shaped gap you could look through, at her bra. Wonderland. He’d been in there, he’d seen the detail on that bra and what was inside it – on about five percent of the times he’d tried. Well, maybe the odds would change a bit in his favour by his act of bravery. Royce was pretty sure he’d made a shrewd tactical move – he’d let her know he wasn’t at her beck and call. Let her know there were plenty more commercial fish in the sea. Shrewd. But bloody dangerous.

  He looked up and she was looking at him. She knew where he’d been looking and she smiled dirtily. There was a pimple by the left side of her mouth; you could just see it because the pimple cream didn’t quite match her skin. He’d avoid that on Saturday night. She’d come to the footie in the afternoon, watch him score a couple of tries – it was only United they were playing, after all – then down to the clubrooms; him, the hero. Then …

  Christ! This was the bloody weekend his Periodic Detention kicked in! Weekend cutting sodding blackberry at the golf links. Shit! Periodic De-friggin’-tention!

  ‘Don’t get ideas,’ whispered Dana Glover from behind Fishing Around the World. ‘I start my period on Saturday.’

  ‘Join the goddamn club,’ murmured Royce.

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE ONLY WAY for a boat to get in and out from the sea off Westport is down the Buller River and over the bar. Bob Dodds has done it many, many times.

  The danger – if you’re coming in – is not being able to make headway against the river-run. Generally a north to westerly swell will affect the bar the most, but a heavy sou’west swell refracting around Cape Foulwind can have five-yard waves breaking onto the bar.

  Which means you’re stacked up against steep, short (close together) breaking waves that can whack you backwards for a couple of miles back out to sea.

  With heavy nor’west swells or strong sou’west to west winds, the current – called the set – across the bar can reach eight knots. If the set’s between four and six knots, forget the crossing – stay out there: you could be dead meat otherwise.

  The most dangerous thing about re-entering the bar is being pushed into breaking shallows to the east. What people invariably do then – though they all know it’s a trap for young players – is try to counteract the set, which means having to present your beam to the swell. And that introduces the very real risk of going arse over tip, also known by the technical term ‘broaching’.

  Which means you’re wrapped up in curled water and spun like a cocoon.

  And you generally die.

  Because fishermen can’t generally swim.

  Bob Dodds can’t, for a start.

  ON THE OTHER hand, if the river is low and the dredge is on strike, vessels risk running aground on the bar. See, the river is pushing gunk into the sea at the same rate as the sea is pushing gunk into the river, and the stalemate results in a semi-sunken gunken alp called the bar of the Buller River.

  In either case, the clashing waters are unnaturally squeezed up and contorted at the bar. They heave into each other like scrums, leaving a frothy, bank-to-bank scar of maelstrom.

  Once past the bar you are free to chug on to the horizon – which is thirteen nautical miles from the bar – and then turn either left down to the hoki fields of the Hokitika Trench, or right to the inland trawling grounds off Mohikinui.

  WHAT YOU GENERALLY didn’t do was go much further out than the horizon, because after that you were in the Wild West of the squid fleet.

  The Okai Maru fleet was legally supposed to be 200 miles out – there’d been an Exclusive Economic Zone set up in April that very year. Yeah, well, and pigs’d bloody fly! thought Bob. The Japs were still there, just over the horizon – no further out than before this Exclusive Zone thing started. There wasn’t a fisherman in the district didn’t know that, but you kept your trap shut. Bastards were too close for comfort – and you weren’t really sure whose side your own bloody government was on.

  You’d see them at night, making this single blaze of vast electricity, like the aurora. Squid lights: hundreds of them. And you’d know there was no way in hell they were 200 miles out.

  They were supposed to get heavy fines and have their boats confiscated and all that, but they didn’t, because they were ‘foreign investment’. Wisdom was, the Japs’d already come down heavy on the government since this new 200-mile zone came in – said there would be ‘dire consequences if it resulted in a shortfall of their New Zealand catch’. Arrogant bastards – they could catch as much New Zealand fish as they liked, without giving a toss about their effect on the local fishermen, but when New Zealand tried to get fish into Japan it got hit by a fifty-foot trade barrier.

  And there was another reason why nobody
did anything about them: nobody could. Because the Royal friggin’ New Zealand Navy didn’t have a single vessel that could outspeed the stinking old, ink-blackened hulks of the Okai Maru.

  God knew how many thousands of little sons of Nippon there were out there – probably more than there were Kiwis on the Coast. A great foreign wall, blockading the sea. Hell, blockading the whole country, more like – surrounding it; laying siege. It was a bloody outrage – what country had ever let itself be hemmed in by thousands of foreign ships and not even known what the hell was on them? They could be full of friggin’ H-bombs for all anyone in New Zealand knew! Bob frowned.

  And you didn’t tangle with them, either. Barry Mason on the Cheryl Anne G got caught up in the middle of them one night. Said that suddenly he was bombarded by a billion ohms of scalding light. They’d aimed the friggin’ squid lights at him. Probably to show him what Tokyo had been like in the firestorm of 1944 … And that’s as far as Barry’s story went. Would he tell you how far offshore they’d been? Like hell he would. They’d put the shits up him good and proper.

  NADINE’S CAR WAS outside the Silver Grill. A Hillman Hunter, it was, but everyone in the district called it ‘The Counter’. They’d called it that since the day she’d got home from Macromart, looked over to the back seat and found no groceries. Turned around, headed straight back to the store, rushed in: ‘Did I leave me groceries on the counter, Pam?’

  Nope, no groceries. Christ, crisis: where the hell were they? Rushed out again, just in time to see Royce Rowland picking them up off her car roof. ‘… seen you go in, Miss Beyer,’ he said, caught red-handed, ‘so I was just gonna bring these in to you so you’d know to stop worrying.’ Lying little shite.