by Peter Hawes
He signed on.
‘There’s a Notam, Captain,’ said Tabbs;
Baines moved quickly to the noticeboard – notices to airmen are extremely important.
‘It seems we’re going fishing,’ said Tabbs behind him, taking some of the importance out of the note.
A fish! A 700-pound tuna. On the main deck! That’d be the damn day!
‘No way. We need maximum fuel on this flight and I’m not having my plane skidding across the sky because of rogue cabin weight!’
Rogue cabin weight was a phrase Baines used often. He’d come by it from a friend flying jets out of America. One day, Cyrus Taite had said, he’d found acceleration along the runway was slow, the take-off was sluggish and the plane needed frightening amounts of gas to keep it at cruise height and speed. He’d landed with well under a safe amount of fuel remaining. At customs many of the passengers were found to have hand luggage filled with coins. They were numismatists, off to a coin convention. A ton and a half of unreported weight.
‘We are not taking that damn fish.’
‘There shouldn’t actually be a problem, Captain – we’re only three-quarters full so the payload on the operating empty weight should give us an AUW well within safety range.’
‘You sound a little – supplicatory, Tabbs. Is there something I don’t know?’
‘There was an item on local TV news, Captain. Earlier tonight. The CEO promised a boy he could take his fish in the cabin. He made the promise on air.’
‘Great.’ He knew Tabbs was smiling behind his back. Baines looked around the room to ensure there was no one else present. ‘So, old Benjamin’s talked himself back into the shit, has he? Hmm. Well, if this damn fish is coming with us, it’s coming under my strict supervision.’
He walked from the operations room, down the stairs and corridors and into the coolish night. Across the tarmac to the floodlit hissing hulk of NZ 207.
He was early, of course; there was still an hour to scheduled take-off. The fuel tankers still awaited his calculations before beginning to fill the wings; the hold was empty and the Honeycart was still at work servicing the toilets.
The refueller had seen him arrive and was hurrying across the tarmac.
‘It’s okay, Terry, no rush. I just wanted to check on something before I did the figures. I’ll be with you shortly.’
The refueller returned at a run to the depot – and probably his card game.
The ground engineer had also been bamboozled by Greg’s early arrival.
‘I’m not on my walk-round yet, Dick – just checking on a bit of cargo.’
The first wagon train of LD-3 containers was snaking towards the front cargo door. ‘Where’s this fish?’ called Baines into the headlights.
‘Yeah, on its way, Captain Baines,’ said Bo Unasa. ‘We reckon to get it on first. Bring it in through the fore cargo door, down to the service lift, upstairs to the cabin.’
‘Wouldn’t it be easier to load it straight through the back door into the galley, Bo?’
‘Never get it around the bloody corner, Captain.’
‘Holy mackerel, how big is this thing?’
‘Holy mackerel, yeah, good one, Captain. Well, I reckon this coffin could hold the King of Tonga.’
‘Coffin!’
Right on cue an orange cargo loader whined across the tarmac into range of the floodlights drenching the DC-10. On its low deck was a massive golden coffin. Greg Baines clenched his lips. Okay, this thing was travelling with the blessings of the company, but it may well not have the blessings of the passengers if they saw it! It would have to be curtained off.
It was nudged onto the platform of the loader. ‘I’ll go up with it,’ said Baines to the operator. He leapt on the deck and crouched beside the silver-handled box as it was hydraulically elevated the short distance to the cargo door. Silver handles – for a fish!
Baines helped to heave it forward on the lateral traverse assembly, then handlers trundled it off down the forty yards of the hold, on Track No. 2 roller conveyor.
Bo was right: it was bigger than the galley trolleys – which only just got around the aft corner themselves. This thing would have got stuck in the doorway. It just fitted, crosswise, in the service lift; Baines insinuated himself into the wedge of remaining space.
Seats are easily moved in a DC-10 because the craft was designed for conversion from passenger to full cargo in less than six hours. The engineers had already adjusted some seats and hearty Polynesians were lifting the coffin into place. Even for them, it wasn’t easy.
‘Jeez, tunas made of lead these days?’
Handlers were fitting straps to the tie-down points. Baines stopped them. ‘May as well see what we’ve caught,’ he said briskly.
They were keen. They were connoisseurs of fish. They lifted the lid.
There was a momentary glow, as if luminescence was escaping. The thing was a study of magnificence writ large – it smacked of Michelangelo. It somehow made him smile – with a pride at being on the same planet.
‘By gee, a few feeds in there, eh, Captain?’ Good old Bo Unasa brought the moment back to earth with a thump.
‘A thing of beauty is a joy for ever, Bo.’
‘Yeah? Don’t think it’d last for ever without that ice, Captain.’
They lidded the thing of beauty and Greg Baines knew he would think of it with joy for ever.
ROYCE WAS IN his element.
Hey, spooky! You go down this tunnel with hundreds of other people and you come out the other end on an aeroplane. There’s these really nice-looking air hostesses in blue and white blouses and skirts and silly plop-on hats, being friendly at the door, and smiling so much you can see their gums. Aeroplanes wobble a bit under the influence of 200 people, and that makes you think a bit. And there’s the odd creak that gets to you, too.
Anyway, you go in through the big wide door, and wham, straight away there’s your seat – 38C – because the door was down the back, and so’s your seat. You’re in an aisle seat and on the other side is this curtained-off area that goes for three rows of seats. You have a moment’s panic cos you can’t see the fish – which they’d said was going to go on early – and then you realise it’s probably behind those curtains. You can’t get to check this out, though, because there’s a stream of people bumping down the aisle between you.
An aeroplane, eh? His first aeroplane, and it turned out to be the second-biggest in the world. Jumbos were bigger, but not by much and no faster. And these DC-10s were supposed to have more bits of electronics. So that square-faced berk in the TV studio had told him, anyway.
People stuffing bags into overhead racks – which looked a bit like plastic breadbins – made him think about his domestic situation. He had yesterday’s socks and undies on, a shirt he’d been in for three days, and jeans that … well, jeans were immortal. There’d been toothpaste with the soap in the shower on the ship and he’d swilled with that, but hadn’t actually scrubbed his teeth for days. He’d need to do an intimate commodity buy-up when he got to Toyko. First thing he’d do with the $200,000 cheque for the fish was buy a toothbrush. And a razor – state of his bumfluff, he was gonna need a razor any day now. Then he remembered he had $US200 in his pocket. Hey, he was flush. He was as flush as Frank O’Higgins on the second day of the Westport Trots!
There’d been a bit of celebrity stuff when he first came on. The best-looking air hostess, with a name-badge called Sandra, had looked at his boarding pass and said, ‘Oh, so you’re the Young-Man-and-the-Sea guy!’ And two other air hostesses – both nice as well – had brightened up and widened their smiles even beyond their gums. He wondered if he should tell them that ringbolts on ships were also called ‘coastal hostesses’. And decided not – their smiles were so wide and friendly there wasn’t an ounce of sex in them at all.
‘Well, we’ll come and see you when you’re settled in, Mr Rowland,’ said Sandra. ‘We’re all dying to know all about what you’re trying to do.’ That’s
how he’d known the fish was on here somewhere.
His plane trundled out in the dark, bumping over uneven surfaces on the tarmac, which made him think – what happens if we hit a pothole when we’re trying to get lift-off? The lights were low and eerie and the ‘Chief Purser’ and his ‘staff’ – the air hostesses – showed all about what to do when you crash, and pulled at bits of demonstration string and blew into demonstration nozzles and whistles. From the drawing in the pamphlet it all looked like a doddle – everyone goes politely down this inflatable slide, holding their shoes and smiling like drains. Where were the skid marks on the bottom of the slide was what Royce wanted to know.
HE COULD FEEL the urgency, the desperation, of the thing to get up into the air. There were cymbal crashes of wing-stress from the poor, labouring plane while he was blatted back in his seat by big sheets of impassable gravity. Hunchings, lurchings, swervings – hell, it was just a maxi version of hooning down Fairdown Strait to dry the washing!
Then it was gone … The earth, that is.
Eeha! They’d left the bumpy, pitted surface of the world and were up amidst the peerless fluidity of the sky. Within a minute he realised the sodding sky was as lumpy as a frayed cardigan. Jesus! Royce hung onto his seat – and his bowels – for the five minutes of the ascent, after which the plane levelled out and he heaved the same sigh as Bob Dodds gave when he was over the bar.
CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
WELL, THEY’D DONE DONE it. Whether deliberately or not, they had kept her off the plane. They’d found her fatal flaw, her soft underbelly. They’d asked her questions – Where was she from? How had she got here? – and she’d answered them, and sent them off into the charmed dreamland she just couldn’t help creating.
She sat bleakly in one of a honeycomb of bleak, cream-coloured offices. Through opaque glass she could see her two officious captors, in different offices, muttering into different telephones. Hell, she shoulda just walked out: they didn’t have a gun between them.
Too late: that bellow of engines overhead would be the kid and the fish. He was off to Tokyo. And she was stuck in New Zealand. She vaguely hoped New Zealand didn’t follow Japanese law – they could keep you in detention there for three weeks.
So, New Zealand. Great. Home of the sheep … And the weta.
Yeah, the weta. She thought about wetas – hell, she had the time. She settled into the plastic upholstery of the office bench. One of her captors had hung up and was now filling in a form. He held the pen like a first-time chopstick.
She’d met this guy once, who’d told her about wetas. A movie-maker en route to his home in London, via Tokyo. He’d been down in New Zealand for some reason or other – ‘They have a Prime Minister down there, a toxic dwarf with the sense of humour of the devil. The prostitutes’ collective wanted to be unionised so he said, “Yeah, I’ll put you in a union, ladies,” – and he put them in the Meatworkers Union.’
Anyway, he saw a weta.
‘It was an epiphany. I’d had this great sci-fi horror script given to me and I needed a monster. And there it was – a nightmare on six legs. An insect from hell; proof that God was sick. All I did was enlarge it a few thousand times. Mind you, in real life it was quite big enough to scare the holy habdabs out of you.’
They’d met by chance. Betty had been working a trick in Kabukicho and had left a downtown shoe department manager dangling from a rope, with silver chains clipped to his scrotum. The standard time for a bout of autoerotic asphyxiation was forty minutes, so she’d wandered down to Burnt Chicken Street on the outskirts, for a coffee.
There was this smooth-faced forty-year-old round-eye sitting at the next ricketty little table to her and they soon got talking. He was English – beautiful, mellifluous English. In conversational confrontations you quickly gauge the talk/listen status, and for once she was the listener. What she heard was wild. Or wise.
‘Gadaffi often goes to the US, you know. I believe he’s been through the White House. When he came to power his mother was concerned that his elder brother should have some limelight too. “Muamar, for the sake of the family you must give some fame to your brother. Otherwise people will say we are un-traditional.” So he did – Arab friends of mine swear that the handsome photos we have of Gadaffi are all his brother, and the West hasn’t a clue what he looks like.’
They ordered bowls of seaweed and buckwheat noodles. There was still plenty of time for the shoeshop man, and anyway, she’d left a chair he could rescue himself with.
‘It looks so successful here,’ he said. ‘The traffic jams are made of Rolls-Royces. They say Tokyo could buy the US but the US couldn’t buy Tokyo. And no wonder! The prices! I went into a boutique in Shinjuku yesterday – underwear crisis. There were some very smart Brookes Brothers striped boxers … $US200! I said to the man, how on earth can you charge that much? And he smiled and said, “We so good at copying, price is only way to prove difference between copy and original.”’
He took what was probably an original Brookes Brothers handkerchief from his pocket, hooted into it loudly, glimpsed in, then returned it to his pocket.
‘It’s mad. And it won’t last. You see, the whole economy is underpinned by an old-fashioned gangster base. In the States the Mafia is updating. Here, the Yakusa is dragging the chain on technology. Look at the fish market – I went there the other morning. A billion dollars of tuna changed hands in ten minutes, and it was all done on abacus! And in cash. They don’t want credit cards taking over; they don’t want cheques: they want cash – nameless, untraceable cash. They are forcing the world’s second largest economy to remain the last member of the chequeless society. And they’re so antiquated – they drive Cadillacs, for God’s sake! They wear crewcuts! Do you know the last person to wear a crewcut? Jerry Lewis!’
‘She smiled. ‘Samurai in crewcuts, eh?’
‘It’s a serious business, my dear. The traditions of the Samurai were busted to bits a hundred years ago – the Yakusa is trying to clamp Japan down to values that are dead as a dodo. Do you know, the only step the Yakusa has made towards the global market is to smash up the annual shareholder meetings of companies that won’t pay for protection? Mark my words, Betty, if organised crime here doesn’t modernise, Japan will fall to bits in twenty years.’
He leaned back – inducing a dangerous clacking from his wooden chair – and gazed with appalled affection down Burnt Chicken Street towards Kabukicho. Beyond the squalid noodle houses of the steep little street were the glistening, neon-charged wonders of depravity.
‘And the Yakusa bosses still keep mistresses when everyone else is going to Kabukicho. Buying them a little shop when they get sick of them – it’s all so quaint. Crime in Japan is run by dinkily old-fashioned thugs, while down there is the future. There must be 500 brothels down there.’
‘More,’ she said, proudly.
‘Are you a prostitute, Betty?’
‘Well, I’m more sea-based, but it amounts to the same thing. In fact I have a client I’d better untie fairly shortly.’
‘Do you do perversions?’
‘Yeah.’
‘How many?’
‘Well, all of them.’
‘And how many’s that?’
‘Hell, I never thought to keep an inventory.’
‘Not many, is it? Even down there, in the most populous red light district in the world, there’s not a great deal of variety, is there? That district down there – where everything goes – is an illustration of how little there is to go. What a perfect setting for a movie, the symbol of surfeited aridity – brimming emptiness, unlimited limitations. The ultimate existential oxymoron. Yes. I’ll keep it in mind – I’ve got another idea after my space horror movie.’
As she rose to go rescue the shoeshop man he said, ‘Betty, do you think robots dream about electric sheep?’
THE RUDE MECHANICALS had come back into the room and were about to snow her with forms to sign.
‘Hey, I’m allowed a phone call, rig
ht, guys?’
‘Well,’ waxed the Maori guy, ‘it’s not really that sort of situation …’
‘Am I in custody or not?’
‘Well, you’re not arrested but you are legally detained.’
‘Then in any country I know, I’m entitled to a phone call.’
‘… Okay. A phone call. It’s in there. Do you need a phone book?’
‘No, I know the number.’ She went into a sweat-smelling office, closed the glass door and dialled a Tokyo number. She spoke for several minutes, then said, ‘Oh, and Mikio, it’ll need icing as soon as it arrives.’
‘TOKYO! THAT ALIEN we had in here made a call to Tokyo! Don’t we have a toll-bar in this office?’
‘Well, no, Hone. We don’t.’
‘Since when haven’t we?’
‘Ever since that pilot told us how to ring the Hollywood sex line.’
CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
‘TAKE THIS,’ SAID Rachel, the second-prettiest air hostess. She gave him a screwtop plastic bottle of Fanta. Amazing. Fanta was usually glass, with a bottle-open top. She didn’t give one to anyone else; this was a personal gift. He preferred Rachel by now – Sandra had a small mouth that sat under her nose like a wee red moustache.
The excitement of flying lasts about ten minutes, then you realise that nothing is going to change for the next nine hours. Unless you crash – so you’re opting for tedium. Sandra and Rachel came out with a trolley and gave people beers or little wines or softdrinks. Royce had another Fanta.
There was a heavy glossy magazine next to the sick-bag in the pocket in front of him and he read about how Air New Zealand and NAC had just merged and how much better it was going to be for Kiwi flyers. There was another article about how Think Big was going to make methanol from Maui gas, with a photo of the oil rig he’d seen a couple of days ago.
