Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘Tea’s not bad,’ said Bob. ‘Better than that last deckhand of mine. Bastard shakes the bag three times – maiden’s water – then throws cow at it.’

  Royce’s little heart sang at the fulsome compliment.

  A LINE OF quivering moonlight confronted them just beyond the twitching red and green lights. It was a moving wall, seemingly no lower than the walls of the Tip Head on either side of them. It looked like that scene in The Ten Commandments with the waters of the Red Sea stacked up and something technically wrong about it. Eerie. Ominous.

  ‘That’s the bar,’ said Bob quietly. Royce was beside him, staring through a front window of the wheelhouse. ‘I’ve crossed that mother 400 times and I’ve nearly shit myself every time.’

  They sailed quietly towards it. The moonlight glimmered on it like teeth in a phosphorescent smile.

  Then they hit it. The boat shuddered, stalled, groaned and seemed to skid backwards: ‘Oh Gordon!’ thought Royce’s mind. His legs sagged as if gravity had doubled under him and – worse – was dragging at his bowels. So powerful was the suction of gravity that he clanged his bumhole shut in desperation, and just in time.

  The moment passed; they popped unnaturally forward, like something spat out. They were over the bar.

  Royce had nearly shit himself for the first time. He gave a sigh. Which he heard echoed gently by Bob Dodds. The Aurora was now in swell, and seemed to be nodding its head up and down in delight: Yeeha! Beat the fucker yet again!

  ‘Congratulations,’ said Bob.

  ‘Thanks,’ said Royce.

  Somehow, something had just changed. He would never be the same again.

  They turned right (starboard) and headed (there it was, gyrating on the illuminated compass drum beside him) nor’ nor’east.

  ONION SKINS OF darkness were plucked from the sky until the morning started to glow through the thinness. There was redness in it before Bob Dodds spoke again:

  ‘You play good rugby. I’ve seen you. You’re fast.’

  ‘I’ve done eleven point four for the hundred metres.’

  ‘Ever had knee problems?’

  ‘No. Not really.’

  ‘Not lost any cartilage?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You need good legs on a boat. Good knees.’

  ‘Mine are all right.’

  ‘You drive a boat by the soles of your feet, the arse of your pants, and the strength of your knees.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘This boat does seven knots. It travels seven miles in an hour. How fast is that?’

  ‘Oh … that’s seven miles an hour.’

  ‘Brilliant. We’ve going eighteen miles out; how long will that take us?’

  ‘Oh … bit over two and a half hours.’

  ‘Brilliant. Go to bed for two and a half hours. Then be back up here for shooting the gear.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘What does shooting the gear mean?’

  ‘Um … I don’t know.’

  ‘It means putting the net out, you ignorant prick! If you don’t know something, ask. When you’re told, don’t ask again.’

  ‘Right.’ Christ.

  ‘Now piss off and get some kip.’

  Royce headed down into the lightless depths that contained Sticky Moody.

  ‘Don’t forget, port’s your left,’ called Bob.

  Royce looked up from the depths of the narrow ladder. Above him Bob’s smile glowed a dreadful electro-Cheshire-cat green in the light of the navigational instruments. ‘Thought I’d better tell you that,’ snorted Bob. ‘Dunno what Sticky’s habits are these days. Funny he never married, eh? Ha ha.’

  The bunks were on the same slant as the ‘prow’. You were the prow. Your head and Sticky’s – six inches apart – were pointing nor’ nor’east, the width of the hull from the sea. Sticky’s feet, to your starboard, were pointing south-east. Yours were pointing due south. Together you formed an arrow, heading out into the sea.

  WHEN HE GOT UP, so had the sun. Westport had gone. So had Mount Rochfort – so had New Zealand. The world was made of big hunchbacked waves like diving whales. He’d seen such waves before – they had travelled through his eyes in the survival suit – and for a moment he quailed at the horror of it.

  Bob was outside, up the front of the boat, which was steering itself. He was standing by a winch looking down to the back. ‘There’s a bag of stew in the fridge,’ he called. ‘Pans under the bench. Put it on.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘And get your friggin’ head outa the way – you’re blocking my view.’

  As Royce turned back to the galley he could see what Bob was seeing. He was looking through the wheelhouse windows, down to Sticky, at the ‘stern’.

  Royce felt a hum. The big black wire that stretched from the winch beside Bob to the back of the boat, was moving. So was the one on the other side. This was a pretty shrewd observation, really, because you could only tell this movement by the faint, oily noise that came from within it.

  The wires came to a point in the sea about twenty yards behind them.

  Then Sticky hooked a chain to a big tabletop of metal that stuck out from the side of the boat. He wrenched it somehow and it fell into the sea. He went to the other side and wrenched another tabletop.

  These tabletops sank. The black wires spread; the point they had formed now turned into a V.

  ‘We’ll be shooting the gear three times today,’ said Bob. ‘Three-and-a-half-hour drags. Tomorrow you’ll be doing what Sticky’s doing.’

  ‘What are those things Sticky just biffed over?’

  ‘Doors. They spread the net. We’ve got a 230-foot spread.’

  ‘Without sounding dumb, where’s the net?’

  Bob Dodds’s face puffed up with redness: ‘You can’t not sound dumb saying things like that, you dopey prick. The net’s already out – eighty yards behind us. See those birds? They’re catching bits of junk that’s floating up from the last drag.’

  Sticky was walking back up the deck towards them. He stopped and watched the black wire, as if reading it, then leaned on the rail beside Royce.

  It wasn’t that there was anything spooky about Sticky, or that he made you nervous or anything, but there was this tension humming inside him, going as fast as a bee’s wing. You could feel it.

  Up close you could see he wasn’t as young as his expression made him look. His always-surprised look tightened his skin so he didn’t have as many wrinkles as he should for his age. His neck hadn’t been stretched, though, and was full of the right amount of wrinkles. The surprised look was because his eyebrows were higher up than most – same as his hair, starting further back. It was as if his whole face had been winched towards his crown by an inch or so. Weird.

  He did this big gooby into the sea.

  Fishermen spit quite a lot. Maybe it’s to show their affinity with water.

  Royce had been watching these amazing birds when Sticky hauled in beside him, which scudded across the water so low they sometimes dipped their beaks into it, scribbling lines on the top of the sea. Then they’d swoop upwards, stall, and dive straight down into the water. He supposed they were catching fish, though they never seemed to have one in their beaks when they came up. Maybe they ate them underwater? They stayed under long enough.

  ‘Gannets,’ said Sticky.

  ‘Know how you catch a gannet?’ calls Bob.

  ‘No.’

  ‘Nail a herring to a piece of plywood. Throw it into the sea.’

  CHAPTER THIRTEEN

  SOMETHING THAT STICKY would never admit in a million years was that he felt sorry for the fish. All those years since he’d left the dredge and gone fishing and he still hated to see people like Bob booting the poor bastards around the deck, letting the little ones pant to death when they could have been biffed back in time to live.

  Well, it was all about to happen again. The warps were in, doors secured to the bulwark. Birds had turned up in their millions as usual – they reckoned th
ey knew from the gear change of the boat’s engine when a haul was coming up. He unclipped the lazy wire from the second door, lowered the scuppers so the fish couldn’t defect back into the sea from the deck, and clipped the net-roller rope on with a C link.

  Took off the backstrop, then the swivel. The bridles came up …

  ‘What’s that big netting for, Sticky? That’s huge wide mesh. Anything but a whale would get through that.’

  It was the kid, the bright-faced kid – Laura’s issue – standing out of the way in the semi-built new toilet unit.

  ‘It’s called the sweep,’ called Sticky, in reply. ‘Acts like a sheep dog. Sort of herds the fish into the net. Mesh’ll get smaller soon – they call that part the bunt.’

  ‘Bunts the fish into the net?’

  ‘You got it.’

  The floats appeared, and then behind them surfaced the net, lolling like a massive red whale.

  That’s probably what the kid thought it was at first. He was gawping at it with eyes as big as Dooley’s.

  Bob cut the engine; the boat wallowed and the kid was jerked out of the dunny unit by the new gravity.

  That toilet had been semi built for nigh on ten years now, by Sticky’s recollection. Either Bob’d run outa money or he didn’t want Nadine getting ideas about becoming the crew. You still shat over the side till you had an on-board toilet unit. And sheilas couldn’t cope with that.

  Mollyhawks were hoeing into the fish through the netting but luckily there were no seals around. Sea maggots. Sticky had no sympathy for seals: bit the tails off fish and left them. More wasteful and vicious even than fishermen. He’d shot a few in his time. One or two people could do with shooting too.

  He turned away from the kid and unshackled the wing chains.

  Bob had stopped the forward winch and came down to the stern. He grappled the net with the lifting hook and wound the rope around the surge drum. The warp wires slackened as the big net-roller on the gantry took over. The net began to come aboard.

  ‘This is the bunt here,’ Sticky called to the kid as the mesh narrowed. He whacked tangled dogfish from the webbing. They plummeted towards the cod-end.

  The floats bobbled out of the sea and up to the net-roller like a giant’s balls passing overhead. The floats were soon covered by winding layers of net. Water crashed out of the crushed net like Niagara Falls.

  ‘You’ve missed some,’ called the kid. He was pointing up to the net-roller where a dozen or so small flounder were being wound into the winch and carved up by mesh.

  Bob, peppered by net water, glared at the kid with malevolent disbelief. ‘Christ, now he’s a friggin’ Greenie!’ He shook his head to show how amazed he was.

  ‘Stickers,’ Sticky called back. ‘Can’t be helped.’

  The cod-end came up, hissing with water. It looked like a huge, pulsing heart with cut-off arteries made by the mouths of a thousand dismayed fish.

  Talk was useless over the manic screams of the scrabbling gulls.

  The cod-end – the bulgy bit with all the fish in – swung aboard. Bob pulled the cod-end rope – the ‘Jesus knot’ some called it. The fish avalanched onto the deck.

  Not a bad catch: mostly flats, a good selection of rounds. A twenty-five-pound conger eel burst out of the maul and swam across the deck on its own slime.

  YOU GOT THE net back out as fast as you could. You stood up to your knees in fish, tending to the gear.

  Sticky waited for Bob to re-tie the Jesus knot. No one touched that knot but the skipper. So if it was left untied, or came undone, there was no question of who was to blame. Captain goes down with his own slip, so to speak.

  There was a cord fastened to the knot that you could pull if you wanted to window the net – i.e. let all the fish out. Bob’d done it the day he saved the kid’s arse, evidently. Sticky himself had never had to window a net – last thing on earth a fisherman wants to do. But sometimes, when you looked down at those poor, gasping sea creatures, you wished to hell you had.

  The net peeled off the roller and slithered back into the sea. Birds went crazy as the sun-fried stickers fell up to the surface and the avian decibel level went a notch higher.

  Ten minutes later you were trawling again.

  THE FISH LAY in a spreading heap, slowly skidding across a lava of desperate slime.

  Unnatural. Species that never went near one another were lying there, cheek by jowl on the labouring deck. Just lying there, panting, writhing, squirting out that slime that was their only cure for contagious diseases like airlessness. Soon they’d be ‘split’ – reduced to bony blueprints and thrown away as ‘frames’.

  Gurnard were grunting pathetic warnings; embolised puff-fish had blown up into spikey balloons in protection against a force they’d never dreamed of. They rolled uselessly across the wallowing deck.

  All these fish. These embers of fish. They looked unnatural; out of place, thought Sticky. It was like accidentally seeing someone with their clothes off. The clothes of these fish was the sea, and now they were naked. This whole thing was out of place, this whole process – this boat, these fish: they were all in the wrong place. No hunter on this planet so brutally disturbed the nature of things as a fisherman.

  Meanwhile the poor bloody fish just lay there, puffing, dying the politest deaths we know. Eyes wide in nightmare, every one of them right now seeing a ghost.

  THEY DIDN’T SEEM triumphant with this amazing big catch of fish, Royce noticed. Hardly talked at all. He wanted to creep a bit closer but that friggin’ giant conger had disappeared under the winches somewhere, and might be lying in wait. Apparently they don’t die until sundown.

  Bob stood up, rooted around under the winch with a gaff, hooked out the eel and beheaded it with one shot of his knife. So much for that theory. Head was consigned to the deep – body lay on the deck like an inner tube from a Kenworth tyre.

  Bob came past him and hauled out a pile of plastic boxes with STOLEN FROM SCULLEY’S on the side. He biffed them up the deck near the fish.

  ‘Come and learn the fish,’ he snapped to Royce.

  Royce was boldly stepping down the deck when – Christ! – another conger, nearly as big, thrashed itself out of the pile.

  Just keep it in view.

  The wallowing of the boat made the eel slide across the deck to Bob. Without even thinking about it, it bit the heel of Bob’s gumboot and wound itself around his leg. Jesus, this was anaconda stuff. Bob didn’t even look down, as he flicked it off his calf and then back-heeled it into letting go, against the steel side of the boat. Off came the head in the now standard manner. The instantaneous brutality on both sides was a bit breath-taking, really.

  Holy shit! A skate hurled towards Royce, flapping its wings through the air like it did underwater. It crashed into a plastic box behind him, thrown by Sticky. Another, much bigger, was inexplicably thrown back over the side by Bob.

  More skates filled the box. On top they were black, with intelligent, Oriental eyes. Underneath they were white with short square mouths and perfectly even fangs. Now and then an upside-down skate in the box mimed a cry of agony, forming a huge perfect O with its once-square mouth.

  Sticky and Bob were kneeling beside the pile, sorting the documents of fish into boxes. They wore aprons and rubber gloves and worked with great speed. Big skates, little flounders and ‘rubbish’ fish were flung back into the sea. Most of all there seemed to be flounders. TWO STOLEN FROM SCULLEY’S had been filled with them, and Bob went for more.

  ‘Five types of flounder,’ he said when he got back. ‘That’s an English flounder – very white underneath. That’s a turbot, spots on the belly. That’s a brill, yellow.’

  ‘And that’s a witch,’ said Sticky, holding up a slightly smaller flounder that didn’t seem to have done anything to deserve the unkind name. ‘It’s got right-hand guts – all other flounders have left-hand guts. And it’s full of little bones – impossible to eat.’ He threw it over the side.

  ‘When someone you don�
��t like pesters you for flounders,’ said Bob, ‘you give them a sack of witches.’

  Water from the net above them fell onto some of the fish, giving them a false lease of life. A new flapping frenzy broke out – for about a minute.

  The birds had moved out to sea, diving for the thrown rejects, so the noise had abated. A little red octopus extracted itself from the heap and set off down the deck. It found a tiny slit in the scuppers and slid through. Sticky had seen it too.

  ‘No bones, see? They can get through anything you can pour water through.’

  ‘Clever, too,’ added Bob. ‘Bigger IQ than most of the grommets I’ve had on this friggin’ boat.’

  The fish were all categorised into boxes of species.

  Sticky was already gutting flounders: a little crescent slit in the side and a two-fingered scoop of the creamy insides.

  Royce thought of Dana Glover.

  It took Sticky about ten seconds a fish. Bob was chopping fins off sharks and throwing them in another box. When it was full he beheaded them and gutted them in one motion: in behind the little under-fins and one slash down to the bum-hole. The birds’ noise reached pandemonium levels when the shark guts arrived in the sea: maybe they were looking for rellies.

  Sticky was still working as he said: ‘There’s mercury in the sea now. It gets into plankton. Little fish eat the plankton, bigger fish eat them … And so on up the chain to the big sharks. Mercury poisoning. One of the saddest things I know is that all those great big makos is as mad as hatters.’

  ‘Well, stone me, another friggin’ Greenie,’ grunted Bob.

  ‘HOW MUCH WORTH of fish is there here?’ the kid had asked, as it all lay there on the deck, still shiny, before the slime started.

  ‘About as much as you cost me last time,’ Bob had snapped and the kid’s face had fallen like a spooked sharemarket.

  Funny why you say what you said, Bob reflected later. A lot of the time it was because the answer fitted the question – not because it answered it, but because the question had been really asking for it … if you see what he meant. Like an Eric Morecambe answer to an Ernie Wise question: the answer was funny because the question made it that way.