Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  The doctor didn’t say anything, just pursed his lips as he took a pad of forms out of his case and started writing.

  He signed the top form, folded it and handed it to Betty. ‘And how long has the patient been smelling like a rotting fish?’ he asked murmurously, with the wisp of a smile.

  JEEPERS, ARE THESE people paranoid or what? He and Stan had got into a taxi and driven to this quite tall building in a busy street. There, of course, was the photographer, and then he’d gone into this boring foyer with a sort of private post office on the left and grey lift doors straight ahead. There was a list beside the door of what was on different floors. The first floor didn’t say anything, the second said Passports and the third said Information, but didn’t say about what. Anyway, they logically went to the second floor.

  There was a counter and two doors in one corner. Both doors said PRIVATE.

  Stan pressed a buzzer. There was the eventual sound of a door unlocking. A woman with stooped shoulders came out. She locked the door behind her and mooched over to stand behind the counter between them, looking amazingly sad. ‘Mr Rowland?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do you have photos and birth certificate?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Have you signed the back of the photos?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have to sign the back of the photos.’

  ‘You won’t see it when it’s stuck on.’

  ‘You have to sign the back of the photos. Now, you have authorisation from a registered doctor?’

  ‘Yes.’

  She took the bits and pieces, unlocked her PRIVATE door and disappeared through. They hear the sound of more locking from the other side. They dangled there like the Pope’s balls until unlocking started again, about ten minutes later.

  She came out with a form. ‘Please fill this out in the presence of your witness – you have known Mr Rowland for more than twelve months?’ she said to Stan.

  ‘Oh yes,’ said Stan.

  ‘Please fill in the form.’

  She unlocked and departed.

  ‘They should invest in a portcullis for her,’ murmured Stan.

  Royce didn’t look up from the form – he was not quite sure what a portcullis was.

  It was all easy, boring stuff, but when he’d finished she didn’t re-emerge. They knocked on the door for ages and nothing happened. In fact nothing happened until one o’clock!

  Unlockings. She took the form. ‘Do you have the urgent fee?’

  He took out the $NZ120. Didn’t deserve a bribe, this one. Anyway, she’d probably have called the police.

  She looked him piercingly in the eye. ‘I’ll get your receipt.’

  She handed it to him. ‘The passport will be ready by 5.30.’

  ‘Oh. I thought we’d get it now.’

  ‘It will be ready at 5.30. Processing and lamination.’

  ‘Right.’

  They descended in the grey lift.

  ‘You know what she was doing in there?’ said Stan. ‘She was having her lunch.’

  LATE AFTERNOON THEY sailed, and you got a good view of one side of Wellington from his porthole, then some more big towns down the harbour and across the other side. After half an hour or so they ran out of land, turned to port and there were these big high mountains running down the east coast of the South Island. That was the island he lived in. He had a sudden spasm of nostalgia and fear; he was being abducted. And long-distance abduction it was too – he had the passport to prove it.

  It didn’t last long because a rational bit of his brain told him there was bugger-all he could do about it – and anyway the scenery was very interesting. Big mountains of salt beside emerald lakes, a huge bay, distant towns, the Sounds – the West Coast! Cripes, you could just about see Westport! Maybe you could have, but the sun was low and blasting out the view with light. Then they turned again and there was just the horizon. He lay back on his bunk and read his new passport for a while until Stan came in.

  ‘They’re still loading up the engine: it’ll be another quarter hour till they’re at Full Ahead. Then the captain’ll come down here for his tea. Come and look at this – you’ve got five minutes.’

  They crossed the corridor to the porthole in the telly room. There was a big structure on the sea, like the Eiffel Tower, just stuck there on the dead flat sea. ‘Oil rig,’ said Stan. ‘Maui. What can you see behind it? Look up a bit.’

  There were mashed potato clouds, faintly pink in the low sun, and over to the right a flat headland that sort of swooped up in a perfect curve, into the cloud. A twenty-mile swoop it must have been, at least. And jeepers, look at that! There was a mountain in that cloud! Half the cloud was mountain when you looked again. This’d be Mount Egmont. Hell, he’d learnt about it at school. ‘Intense!’ whispered Royce. The land around the mountain was very neat and you got the feeling the locals might have neatened the mountain too. Sort of trimmed its bumps and hollows into perfect curves, to go with the scenery. Or else they’d felt obliged to keep things as neat as the mountain. He stared until Stan grunted, ‘Okay, cabin.’ The last thing Royce saw was the Maui oil rig.

  WHAT DID HE know about his father? Not a hell of a lot – not directly, anyway. He knew it wasn’t him holding his hand when he saw the bear – that’d been Sticky, all right. There was another scene that passed the window of his mind when he thought about Sticky, but it had never stopped long enough for him to get a good look at it. It was something dreadful, something violent. And Sticky had been doing it to his mother. He’d thought about it, wondered whether Sticky had beaten her, then he’d looked at it from a grown-up perspective and realised he’d seen Sticky humping his mother.

  Of his father he remembered – what? Well, whenever his name got mentioned the reaction would always be – ‘God, old Tommy, eh? I could tell you a tale or two about Tommy!’ But they always laughed when they said it. He was a man who cheered people up – in death, anyway. That was good, but it wasn’t a memory of course – it was an impression and didn’t really count. Think of a memory.

  Whitebaiting. Sitting on the little wooden seat his father had built on the bar of his bike. Wobbling down the brown gravel road to the Orowaiti, down by the sawpit. The clearest part of the memory was the long smooth pole of the whitebait net, sticking out ahead of them as his father carried it on his shoulder. And the coarse rise and fall of his breath right behind him.

  Behind him. Behind him on the bike.

  In his best and clearest memory of his father, Royce was looking away from him. How strange.

  THE SUN SET, but didn’t do a Jupiter’s Needle.

  The captain had gone off watch and would spend the night in his cabin, Stan said. Royce could come out to play.

  Ships at night are dark. You’d expect them to be lit up like sparklers but they aren’t. The bridge is in total, instrument-spangled darkness. He’d noted this the night before, but then they had been in port and he’d assumed the lack of light was due to inactivity. No. It was no brighter at sea. Lights were simply the dim emanations of the corridors, or the unsatisfactory wattage of cabins and dining room. Ships are driven in darkness. That’s how they can pass each other in the night.

  Crews are equally eerie. They disappear. The dining room, the telly room, the bar – empty. From his cabin across the corridor from the dining room and bar Royce would hear hour-long bursts and yelps of fellowship, and then long distances of profound silence. Where had everyone gone? He never knew. A big ship is, for at least half its time, a ghost ship.

  Food. Food was immense unsophisticated steaks with mushrooms, tomatoes and chips. Or fat-fronded, mincy hotdogs on sticks, with cauliflower and mashed potatoes. Followed by bananas in jelly with whipped cream. Food on a big ship was any young kid’s dream.

  The Buller Lion was super modern, so Stan had said. It was the first cement ship with an unattended engineroom. The Portland Carrier, the ship on this run before it, had had four engineers on duty all the time. The Buller Lion could
do fourteen knots, which meant it could get from Westport to Manukau in just two tides. The old Portland Carrier had only done eleven knots and that meant an extra tide – because you could only go over the Manukau Heads in daylight. So that meant a thirty-six-hour trip against a twenty-six-hour one. ‘Yep, the old Portland was hard work,’ said Stan. ‘This one: solid state technology.’ He paused and leaned back on the sofa in Royce’s cabin. ‘Mind you, Lloyds will only register technology that’s been tested for ten years, so this ship’s driven by equipment made in 1965.’

  That was thirteen years ago. Sheesh, you had to be quite old to be modern in the shipping world.

  Stan was all right. Just as long as he knew Royce was keeping out of the captain’s way, he more or less left him alone. He’d come in to invite him to watch telly. ‘Captain’s asleep, ship’s on Iron Mike – that’s automatic pilot.’ Driving a boat, Stan told him, was what you’d describe as ‘alert tedium’, there was bugger-all to do until you started sinking.

  They’d gone into the telly room to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Absolute crap.

  Stan’d told him some amazingly interesting things. Like about how he’d used to work in oil tankers and how in oil tankers you don’t have to worry about holes in the bottom of the hull, but holes in the top. See, oil floats, so if water comes in, it pushes the oil up, away from the hole. Then you just seal off the compartment with the hole in the bottom. But get a hole above the waterline and you’ve got trouble.

  And he told him about the time they got water in the hold of the Buller Lion. A duct to the ballast had sprung a leak and sent out a jet of water that ran down the sides of the cement in the hold and made this pyramid-shaped sculpture of concrete that they called The Eiger. Well, they sucked all the dry stuff out as they sailed around to Lyttelton and put her in dock. That left about 2000 tons solid. Now the hold is sealed, because you blow the cement in, see? So there’s no decent access to it. They had to crank the ship up above the dry dock and cut big holes in the hull – only decent way to get at the concrete. Jackhammered it out from the bottom. Thirty-six days, twenty-four hours a day – cost a million dollars.

  Not a bad bloke, Stan – for an abductor.

  BETTY BUSTLED INTO the cabin and began talking before she’d even shut the door. Royce had a hunch she did this to set the tempo of the meeting, so that there wasn’t space for other things to intrude – like embarrassment or guilt. She had a bit of both, he reckoned.

  ‘Okay, I’ll bring you up to speed. I’ve just checked the fish. No white dots on the flesh. As far as I can tell I got the parasites when I cleaned the gills, though there’s a slight risk of eggs in the meat. We won’t know for sure till the fish is cut in Tokyo, but I’m pretty confident. There are no scars, and it’d fed well, so there’s plenty of fat in the meat and no danger of konnyaku – when the flesh dries out and splits. You can also split the flesh by bending the fish – and as you know, we’ve done zero of that. So,’ she smiled and looked quickly around the room – Royce got the impression she was a reformed smoker, ‘that was more or less the final audit. I had to make sure it was worth the time and money of getting it to Tsukiji – and, goddamn it – it is.’

  There was an awkward little pause where the shared joy and congratulations should have gone. Mind you, behind his poker face he was pretty chuffed – he was going to Japan! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Karen Phibbs! You might know the names of the fish, smarty, but I’m gonna meet them personally!

  ‘I’ll get Stan onto the tickets. The Big Seven give you eight days to get chilled fish to market, because that’s how long it’ll stay in Phase One order. There’s four phases – Phrase One fresh, Phase Two freshing and smoking, Phase Three smoking and salting, and Phase Four condemned. After Phase One you’re getting hypoxanthine in the meat and it starts tasting like ammonia. Middle management know to the minute how long a fish has been outa the water, believe you me. They’ll do a tetrazolium test on it as soon as it gets there – put a paper impregnated with tetra compounds on it, and if it changes colour you’re in shitter’s ditch. Your fish is outa Phase One on the spoilage chart. After that it drops outa A-grade and you don’t get enough to pay the airfare home.’

  ‘It’s had three days so far.’

  ‘Yeah. No sweat. We get into Onehunga 8am tomorrow; we can be on a flight that night. Now, our only problem could be residual shin-yake. There’s still some lactic acid in there and the pH of the flesh is down around five or six. We’ll lose probably $20,000 for every degree that body warms. If it goes up more than three degrees it starts coming out of rigor – arrives at Tsukiji as catfood. But keep your hair on – the flight stops at either Sydney or Nadi before Hong Kong. We can get it re-iced during the stopover.’

  HE AWOKE. ‘AS idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’ The poem from William Coleridge came back into his mind. Motionless. There were portholes and fiddles and lifejackets to indicate he was at sea, but no movement to confirm it. Not a shimmer. He crawled down the bunk to kneel at the porthole. Yes, there was water out there, of a placidity he had not imagined. He opened the porthole and the slightest of breezes – created only by the passage of the ship – touched his face. There was a softness to the nature of the sea he had never known before. The sound it made was no more than the tearing of tissue paper.

  Beyond the sea were hills, low brown hills, made of sand. Sandhills. He watched them, waiting to be amazed. Nothing happened. He went to the dunny for a torrential morning pee. He thought of the oil rig, and also, strangely, of his father …

  CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE

  THE SAND DUNES had steepened and hardened into cliffs. There was a wide break in the cliffs and they were steering for it. This’d be the Manukau Heads Stan had told him about. Stan’d come in and said, ‘Give us your underpants and socks. I’ll put them in with the shore wash.’

  The captain would be in charge, now they’d come to the dangerous part, so it was safe for Royce to go anywhere but on the bridge. He went up to the little deck behind the funnel so he could see both sides of the ship. Could have been a bit nippy up there without daks on, but it was balmy and windless. Perfect.

  The cliffs came to a jagged stop on the port side; the land was flatter and made of black sand on the other. There was one crag of black rock with a lighthouse on the top. Stan had told him how this navy ship – about a hundred years back – had run aground here. The crew had climbed into the rigging, and there they stayed for the rest of their lives. Which was about five minutes. All drowned – hundreds of them. After that a lighthouse got built.

  There were shark-toothed waves to the right, under the cliffs, and flashing lines of foam across the bar, but it didn’t give him a rectal tingle like the Buller bar did.

  ‘We hit the Manukau bar one day, coming out,’ Stan had said, ‘and a wave pushed us so high in the air the propellor came out the water. Then the wave disappeared from under us and down we came – falling off the wave, you call it. The noise was unbelievable when we hit. Once we got out to sea, a few of us were sent down to the bilge to check for damage. It’s something, I’ll tell you, to see a billiard-table-sized dent in half-inch hull-plate steel.’

  He was all right, was Stan. Big, strong – about Bob’s age by the looks.

  ‘You married, Stan?’ Royce’d asked.

  ‘I was, but now I’m in a long-lasting affair. I met this woman who said she was looking for a husband and I said, well, I’m a husband – which was entirely true. She found that quite witty and as she was an extremely good-looking girl at the time, one thing led to another. Then my wife found out and left me. I haven’t told the mistress about that – the situation suits me quite fine as it is.’

  They were inside the heads now and steaming east, down the bright pewter stripe of morning sun, shining on the water. Strangely enough, now they were off the open sea, the ship began to roll for the first time on the voyage.

  They’d been sailing straight down the middle of the harbour for about fifteen minu
tes then suddenly took a steep turn to the starboard, heading almost directly into the cliffs. The turn gradually eased until they were sailing around a headland and into a bay that curved a full half circle to where you could just see lots of houses that were probably Onehunga. Behind it was a hill with one bad tree and a thin silo. That’d be One Tree Hill.

  They were now only twenty yards from shore with a goddamn ocean of bay on the other side. Stan said there were three channels down the Manukau, the rest was dangerously shallow. They’d taken the Wairopa Channel to starboard, carefully winding around the Motukaraka Bank through an alleyway of buoys. ‘If we’d taken the Papakura Channel,’ said Stan, ‘we could have dropped your fish off at the airport. Trouble is, captain doesn’t know a thing about it, so it was never an option.’

  Your fish.

  ‘Why are you helping Betty steal my fish, Stan?’ Royce asked suddenly, startling even himself.

  But not startling Stan, who just twinkled those friendly little eyes and gave a shrug of his alp-like shoulders. ‘Argh, pays the bills, dunnit? Entirely commercial transaction – we do this sort of thing from time to time. Informal stevedoring, I suppose you could call it. Quite a lot of it about. I remember a few years back when we found out the wharfies were pinching three percent of every cargo. Well, we seamen went to the ship owners and said, “Listen, you told us they only got two percent, same as us; so you up us to three percent as well or we’ll go to government and tell them this deal exists.” Quite ironic situation, really.’