Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  HE SAT MOODILY through the movie, unplugging his headphones during the screechier songs, but quite liking the dancing. Afterwards Rachel came and sat on her fold-down seat and tried to make him laugh with stories about her friend – another air hostess – who was a hard case. She’d gone up to this really good-looking bloke and asked him if he’d like to join the mile-high club – (Rachel’d told him what that meant, by now). Well, the good-looking bloke stuttered and stammered at this bald invitation and then she’d said: ‘By the way, I’m not asking for me, I’m asking on behalf of my colleague, Brian.’

  Royce’d laughed.

  She laughed with him for a while, then stopped. ‘Mind you, life’s a little more complex than you know – Sharon thinks he agreed in the end.’

  Most of the lights over people’s seats were out now and he was left in a deep twilight. It was like the movie 2001, with all these people in suspended animation in confined spaces. There was the odd cough and sneeze – but no farts. You fart on ships but not on planes. You re-absorbed farts in polite company – sometimes at the cost of acute anal indigestion, but you did. Amazing, there were 200 people up here re-absorbing farts.

  This was the sort of dumb thing you thought about as the strange, five-miles-up motion drove you – not into sleep, but into a numb trance. Sometimes you were heading towards Hong Kong, sometimes you were going exactly the other way. Sometimes you thought about the fish – am I taking him to Japan, or is he taking me? Is he mine or am I his? The fish was behind its curtain, lashed to the bulkhead; Royce was in his seat, strapped in by his seatbelt. They were travelling together, lashed side by side. ‘I am not better than the fish,’ he thought. ‘He was caught by voodoo trickery. He meant me no harm.’ They would never have caught him without Betty. He was better than them all except Betty, and she used witchcraft.

  Was it a sin to have killed the fish? No. Since when had he avoided sins, anyway? He thought of Linda Harvey and the thought came with a pang. To his surprise, the pang was not for the missed night of love, it was because she had never got to see the fish. The two people in all the world … the two things in all the … shit, you can either call fish people or people things – that was just the order of the universe. The fish got born a fish and Linda Harvey got born a girl. He thought about the fish and he thought about Linda Harvey – and somewhere in between, he came as close to the nature of love as he had ever been.

  HE WAS AWOKEN in the dark by a kiss on the lips and a flick of a tongue. ‘God, you’re gorgeous,’ whispered Rachel. ‘Come on. We’re landing in Hong Kong in an hour and your fish is in need of its nappy change.’

  By the time he opened his eyes she was standing over him in the aisle. ‘You smell amazing,’ he whispered back.

  ‘Compulsory vaginal deodorant.’

  She made no attempt to keep quiet, even though most of the plane was still asleep. ‘We always find an excuse to wake them up for breakfast,’ she said. ‘This’ll do today.’ She briskly snapped the clasps on the coffin’s straps. ‘It could be a bit tricky getting the lid off from here, because you can’t get around the other side. We could slide it out from the bulkhead, but if it’s mostly water in there it could slosh and we’d get a flood.’

  ‘No way we could slide it, anyway. You’d need either Superman or everyone in this cabin.’

  By doing stretching gymnastics, with one foot on the side of the plane and the other this side of the coffin – and at the expense of one of his goddamn fingernails – they got the lid off. The fish lay serene in a limpid lake of ex-ice.

  ‘It’s beautiful,’ said Rachel. ‘God, it’s one of the most beautiful things I’ve ever seen.’ She looked up and smiled at him with a sort of inspired transparency.

  Sandra and the other nice one called Irene had collected ice from the galleys in a clean black bin-liner that they wheeled up in a trolley. ‘There’s an awful lot of water,’ murmured Irene, peering at the lake in the coffin. ‘It’s going to make an awful mess getting it to the sink.’

  ‘No it isn’t,’ said Rachel, ‘because we’re going to use science.’

  She fossicked in an overhead locker in the galley and hauled down a spaghetti of clear plastic tubing. She handed it to Royce. ‘You must have syphoned the odd petrol tank in your time?’

  ‘Um – no. I’ve only driven three times. I’m not up to syphoning yet.’

  ‘Well!’ she scoffed. ‘You’ve certainly gone down in my estimation – how are you going to get me to Lovers’ Lane – on your bike? Come here.’

  She led him into the galley. Amidst metal cupboards was a panel with two big black buttons.

  ‘An aeroplane is like a submarine, backwards,’ she said. ‘Subs burst inwards, planes burst outwards. Everything is pressurised except the holding tank for the toilet. No need, because it’s got a pressurised compartment around it.’ She had been holding down the left-hand button while she spoke. Royce felt his ears pop quietly. ‘The pressure’s usually at about 6000 feet. You reduce it as you land. Except in Mexico City – you increase the pressure as you land there, because it’s so high up. Anyway,’ she released the button, ‘that’s enough.’

  ‘What were you doing?’

  ‘You’ll see. Well, I hope you won’t see. Give that to Sandra.’ She held out an end of plastic tubing. ‘Tell her to put it right at the bottom of the water. Then come back here.’

  By the time he’d returned from the short journey she was at the toilet door. ‘Hold the door open – you can do that much, can’t you?’

  He held the door while she threaded tubing into the toilet bowl. ‘The holding tank is under the loo – massive thing. Now watch this. Okay, Sandra?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Hang on tight – the hose’ll jump around a bit. Keep the nozzle near the bottom of the box.’

  ‘Yep, all right, let her rip.’

  ‘Hope we don’t get a blow-back, eh?’ chortled Rachel to Royce, then added, ‘Hell, just joking,’ in response to his stricken face. ‘The nozzle’s way above the … um … contents – which are about ninety percent disinfectant anyway. Here goes.’ She pressed FLUSH. The stainless steel flap in the bowl opened with a roar and she thrust the nozzle through. With the roaring came a wind from the cabin, which fanned his hair. The tubing bucked and straightened; bubbles scorched down its length towards the bowl. It was working brilliantly.

  There was a patter of clacking sounds down the length of the cabin. Little parachutes were bursting out from the ceiling above seats. Dozens – hundreds of them, dangling above sleeping heads like things that had just been born.

  ‘Shit, Rachel,’ he muttered, ‘you’d better have a look at this out here.’ He felt rather like Chicken Licken reporting that the sky was falling down. Irene was already stuffing parachutes back into their holders in the ceiling; Sandra was flapping her non-tube-holding hand about agitatedly and muttering about the captain finding out.

  ‘What? Here, you hold the tube.’

  They changed places. Rachel stuck her head out the door. ‘Shit,’ she said. She disappeared into the galley. Shortly he felt another pop, somewhere in his ears.

  Shortly after that he heard the captain’s voice over the radio thingy. ‘There is no cause for alarm, folks, we are just testing the oxygen masks. A hostess will shortly attend you to show you how to re-stow your mask.’

  Rachel was back. ‘Oh dear,’ she said. ‘That’s a bollocking for me. We sucked a little bit too much cabin air out but it’s back to normal now.’

  The tube slackened in Royce’s hand. ‘I think it’s finished,’ he said.

  ‘Thank God. I’d better go and help get those masks up. Oh, just before I go …’ She hauled Royce into the loo by the shirt, slammed the door, had her leg around his hips, and in a second had clamped him onto a mighty kiss. Twenty seconds later she pushed him away, wiped her mouth and said, ‘Be five years older by this time next year, and fly Air New Zealand. I’ll meet you in here.’ Then she manoeuvred around him and out the door. ‘Put that
hose back before you start packing the ice,’ she said over her shoulder.

  The coffin was all but empty of water – it had been hauled down the tube, by semi-vacuum, in not much more time than a Rachel kiss. All up, about forty seconds of intense suction.

  Rachel was on tiptoe, pushing an oxygen mask back into a hole in the ceiling. Her calves were stretched, her dress was quite high. He felt tinglings and put it down to oxygen deprivation.

  THE COFFIN WAS packed with crisp, sharp new ice.

  Mission accomplished. There would be a one hour stopover in Hong Kong, then a three-and-a-half-hour flight into Tokyo. The next re-icing would be by the officials of Tsukiji Market.

  He was about to jigger the lid back on the coffin when Sandra stopped him.

  ‘I’d leave that a minute or two if I were you,’ she said softly. She nodded to the far side of the blue curtain and he looked out. There was Professor Sparrowglass. And behind him was a queue that stretched beyond view into the frontal cabin.

  ‘Come in,’ said Royce. He was talking to the the professor, but that sort of emboldened him, and he raised his voice to everyone else: ‘I just wish you could have seen the lights that shone from it when it first lay on the deck. And I’m sorry about his tail. It was beautiful – made from feathers. Or the fronds of a mermaid’s hair.’

  They filed past the fish like it was Lenin’s tomb.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-SEVEN

  IT WAS DARK when they landed in Hong Kong but Rachel had told him what to expect. ‘I’d hate you to miss the joys of the Kai Tak shuffle,’ she whispered. ‘People have screamed coming into Hong Kong. What we’ll do is fly down the verge of the harbour with the runway on our right. We come to Checkerboard Hill, and it really is in checkerboard colours – red and white. So you don’t fly into it, I suppose. Then you make a hard forty-degree turn right, over Kowloon. You’ve got to get below cloud height – 500 feet – at this stage because you’re flying manually; you’re following these sodium lights down there, aiming straight at every one of them. Which is when the shuffle comes in because you’re weaving from one light to the next – it’s illegal to have flashing neon lights in Hong Kong, in case pilots start following them and drive you into a department store. You go past one every twenty seconds, then you’re into the canyon. There’ll be some lights on in the canyon, but not many, so you won’t get the full effect this time of the morning. Anyway, you’ll see lighted windows below you. Then – wait for it – you’ll see lighted windows above you! Then the buildings stop and you’ve got two miles to dump this crate onto the shortest international runway in the world – the universe, probably.’

  He’d watched in hypnotised horror as all this came to pass. Would Linda Harvey cry this time? Maybe she was so pissed off with him for running away that she’d be pleased he was dead? He spent the tingling minutes of the landing in alternating visions of Linda Harvey weeping on his empty bunk on the Aurora and mountains of red tuna flesh lying like Welsh football jerseys at the crash-site on Runway 13.

  He hadn’t known the cabin crew would change at Hong Kong – Rachel sure as hell hadn’t told him. She vanished goodbyelessly from his life for ever. Women. Life, since the catching of the fish, had been lived in a climate of high treason.

  The nice fish professor was leaving the flight at Hong Kong and caught up with Royce on a horizontal elevator trip to what turned out to be a holding bay for transit passengers. ‘Hope you got your problems resolved with the vegetarians. By the way, just to clear a slight misunderstanding, there’s thirty species of tunny and they all – including bluefin – operate in shoals. They herd fish like sheepdogs, swimming round and round them in formation, spinning them, turning them into a kind of tornado of fish. Then they attack. Wham, smack into the middle of the tornado. Appalling – controlled carnage. The speed and precision with which they snatch fish is astonishing. Either your fish was a hermit, or you’re soon gonna have a new industry off Westport. Congratulations.’

  He stepped off the elevator at ARRIVALS. Royce kept on for IN TRANSIT.

  NIKKI WAS ONE of the new crew of air hostesses. She was pretty but uninteresting. He’d gone off air hostesses anyway.

  ‘The fish is checked through to the market and will go with one of the accredited transporters,’ she said – with just a hint of that ess whistle that Karen Phibbs had. ‘We send a lot of stuff to Tsukiji – usually from the cargo hold, mind you! Anyway, they’ll take you as well – have to get the exporter to market with his export, eh?’ She smiled. ‘And it will save you an absolute fortune in fares, believe you me. Where are you staying in Tokyo?’

  Good question. ‘At the market,’ he said. ‘I’ll stay at the market till the deal is done, then I’ll come back here.’

  ‘Not going to look around? If you want to see the night-life go to Roppongi – there’s a bar there called the Quest. It’s run by an Aussie but lots of Kiwis go there.’

  ‘Thanks, I might. I’m not thinking any further ahead than the market at the moment.’

  ‘Right. Well, good luck. When we land at Narita, you’ll have to get off with everyone else. You can’t go through Freight with the fish but there are established procedures for dealing with it, so it’ll be quite safe. All you have to do is get to Customs and show them your documentation and they’ll do the rest. The trip to market takes over an hour, but fortunately it’s on this side of town, so you won’t have to go right through Tokyo. You’ll be in Tsukiji by … Are you all right?’

  White electricity had blasted through his mind, dizzying him. No, he wasn’t all right. He was as unright as humans get. Documentation. He didn’t have documentation! Betty had the bloody documentation! ‘I’ve just remembered,’ he gasped in a whisper, ‘I haven’t got all the papers I need. Jesus wept, I’ve spent the whole trip forgetting the papers were still in New Zealand!’

  ‘Oh dear. Well, can you get them?’

  ‘No,’ he said with miserable certainty. Betty passing over the papers? Fat chance! He was shivering; the world was falling apart. ‘I’ve got one copy of a Fish Landing Document in my name – do you think that’s enough?’ God he must look pathetic.

  ‘Goodness, I’ve no idea. I’m certainly no expert in fish, but I know you’ve got to have export papers for most things coming in through Narita.’ There was a whiteness of pessimism on her face. She didn’t think he had a show in hell. It was very good and brave of her not to retreat from a stranger’s crisis. ‘Look, in emergencies we can get radio messages through. But whether the captain would consider this an emergency I don’t know. Frequencies are gold up here.’

  A thought came into Royce’s mind – not so much a thought as a mood. That mood of calm amidst chaos he’d felt in the Doo Duk Inn when he’d told Linda Harvey he didn’t have a girlfriend. ‘Well, I don’t know if the captain thinks it’s an emergency either,’ he said slowly, ‘but I think Mr Ross would.’

  ‘Benjamin Ross?’

  ‘Yes. It’s because of him I’m here. After all the trouble and expense this airline’s gone to, I think he’d be pretty cheesed off if the fish didn’t get to market in the end.’

  Nikki stared thoughtfully, then nodded. ‘That’s a very good thought, actually,’ she said. ‘A pretty damn cheeky one, but right on the button. I’ll put it to the captain.’ She stood up. ‘Wish me luck.’

  HIS WHOLE ROW of newspaper readers, nuns and sour women had been replaced, since Hong Kong, by Oriental people: a man, a woman and a girl of about eleven. Japanese, heading home. He was heading with them – to their place. For the first time in his life he was going to be a foreigner.

  Nikki was smiling from way down the aisle as she returned so there were no surprises about good news.

  ‘I had no idea – the captain’s your fish’s number one fan,’ she said. ‘He saw it during loading. He says we can have a go at making HF R/T contact with our company frequency. I hope it works – when you get a frequency you’re usually sharing it with a dozen other voices. But HF communications to New Zeala
nd are good – and we’ve got SSB, so that helps. Now, we can leave a message with Ops to contact someone who can send the documents on. If they’re in Auckland they could come up on the next flight.’

  ‘Hey, yes they are. In fact the people with the documents are only about ten minutes from the airport!’

  ‘Great, now, let me write this down.’

  ‘Okay, it’s MAF International in Onehunga … Um … Miami Drive.’ Great, what a memory! Shit – what was the guy’s name? ‘Ask for Kevin. Kevin – I don’t know his other name, but anyway, they’ll have it on their records. Tell them to say it was the big bluefin tuna that was nearly too big for his instruments. He’ll remember. And there was a woman called Betty Rodriguez there, who gave him a hard time. And we just need another copy of the export certificate. If he puts it in a taxi I’ll pay him when …’

  ‘No, no, we have our own couriers, don’t worry about that.’

  ‘Oh God – what time is it in Auckland? It’s probably the middle of the night?’

  Nikki shook her head – she sure was beautiful. ‘No, it’s eight in the morning in Tokyo so it won’t even be midday at home – about ten past eleven. Anyway, I’ll get on to this.’

  Fifteen minutes later, after dazing him with more initials, Nikki reported that Kevin had been at lunch but that the woman in the office had said don’t worry, she’d tell him soon as he got back, and he’d get straight on to it. The woman knew all about Royce and the fish because she’d seen the item on TV.

  Air New Zealand would pick up the certificate and make sure it was on the plane. It would be here this time tomorrow.

  Another day. That made five. Three left in Phase One. Plenty of time. Air New Zealand had access to a coolstore in Tokyo airport, so storage was no problem. Only problem left was that he might have to bunk down in the goddamn coolstore with the fish – right now he had nowhere else to go.