Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘Where do you stay when you’re in Tokyo?’ he asked Nikki.

  ‘With my boyfriend,’ she answered crisply.

  HE GAVE HER a really deep hug of gratitude at the door. She had her little hat on, but he tried hard not to find it silly.

  ‘Best of luck!’ she called.

  And one of the others said: ‘From all of us.’

  Passport control was no problem: he soon had a big blue foreign stamp in his book. He was a ‘temporary visitor’ for ‘duration 90 days’. Ironically, Customs wasn’t going to be a problem either, because the fish wasn’t going anywhere.

  He headed down to Baggage Claim. There were these big treadmills with millions of cases on them. How the hell did you know which one was yours? … Oh yes, the treadmills had the flight numbers above them.

  NZ 207, and there were the people he recognised from the flight. He nodded to the unforeign family he’d sat next to; they nodded back. To a foreigner.

  Problem was, there weren’t any officials. And there weren’t any doors into the back where the baggage was coming from. He waited. A small man in white shirt and black pants came along: an official.

  ‘I need to get in there,’ said Royce.

  ‘You wait.’

  Damn it, couldn’t this guy see he was waiting? He waited some more. Until there was no one else at the treadmill.

  A little flutter on the number board and ‘NZ 207’ disappeared. His flight, and all its people and packages, no longer existed. Time for action. He walked to the hole through which the treadmill disappeared and shouted: ‘Hello in there?’ There were clatters behind, but no response. He stuck his head through the little plastic strips like the ones at the Doo Duk Inn – and nearly into the face of a bloke in white overalls who was just going to respond.

  ‘No come in here. Off limit.’

  ‘Were you working on the Air New Zealand plane just now? NZ 207?’

  ‘NZ 207, yes. You lose baggage?’

  ‘No, not lost. It’s in the coolstore. A big coffin. I need to get at it to change the ice. See, you can’t freeze it … jeepers, I hope it’s not in a freezer, is it?’

  ‘Coffin? You want coffin?’

  ‘Yes, it’s got a bluefin tuna in it. It’s got to stay here an extra day and I’ll need to change the ice at some stage. I just wanted permission to get at it.’

  ‘Ah, tuna coffin. Okay, we change ice. When arrive?’

  ‘Today. Just now. On NZ 207.’

  ‘No.’

  ‘No? How do you mean no?’

  ‘No tuna.’

  ‘Yes, there is. It wasn’t in the cargo hold, you see. It was in the cabin.’

  ‘Cabin? No. Onry cargo. No tuna. Tuna not come from New Zealand this time of year.’

  ‘Yes, it did.’

  ‘Tuna from Sri Lanka, Vermont, Madagascar. Sometime. Today no tuna any place.’

  ‘A bluefin tuna arrived here from Auckland just now! I was with it.’

  ‘No tuna today.’

  ‘Where is it, fuck it?’ hissed Royce. He sort of dived through the opening in a western roll, skidded on his shoulder along the treadmill, then righted himself to his feet. The guy in white overalls was terrifyingly small. ‘I want my fish. It came in on the plane all this stuff was on, so where is it?’

  ‘No place for you – irregal for you here.’

  ‘Where’s my fish?’

  ‘Okay, okay. You want fish – find. You look. Here cooler, here freezer, here what you see. You look. No tuna.’

  He stood at angrily discomfited attention while Royce scoured the joint. The fish was nowhere. And there was nowhere else out here it could be. It had gone.

  Royce marched up to the little guy, rage rolling over him in judders. ‘So where’s it gone? If you were working on unloading that plane you must have seen it.’

  ‘No, I not unroad all time here,’ said Mikio. ‘Most time stacking container in coorer. Not see here velly often.’

  Nothing moved on his face. This must be what inscrutable means.

  The fish wasn’t here, he knew that. So being here himself was a waste of time. He had to be where the fish was. He had to get there. He tried to be calm in chaos again. It didn’t work. He felt lonely, scared, sick, angry, sad, lost and overwhelmingly tired. At a time like this you can either speed up or stop completely. Be manic or be crushed.

  If it wasn’t here, there was only one other place it could be.

  He burst out through the apperture and down the corridor towards the terminal entrance.

  Fuck it! Fuck it! Customs! Two men and a woman. They were surprised. All other passengers had been processed and they’d relaxed out of officialness, believing themselves alone at the end of the zig-zags of blue rope. The two men disappeared while the woman wasn’t looking. Big joke – they’d lumbered her with Royce.

  ‘What flight?’ said the woman.

  ‘Air New Zealand. I was held up.’

  ‘Have you lost your luggage?’

  ‘Yes. No. I don’t have any luggage.’

  ‘You came from New Zealand without luggage?’

  ‘Yes. I thought I’d buy some here.’

  Her eyes were changeless hazelnut, her lips were firmly poised in nothing. She wanted to arrest him for something – she wanted to rummage through his bags, check his rectum for toothbrushes. This was beyond her experience, he could see it in her silence. Not only was she confronted with her first tourist without luggage, but he seemed legally to be without luggage. There was nothing unpleasant she could do.

  ‘THERE’S AN IMPORTANT message for you, Kevin,’ said Alice.

  Kevin scrabbled for a loose peppermint in his pocket. He’d had two beers with his pie and chips at the Manukau and Alice didn’t like staff drinking at lunch. She was only a secretary but the sort of secretary that tells the boss. Why couldn’t she just have an affair with him like real secretaries did? Alice was a bitch.

  ‘Aw, yeah? What’s that, then?’

  ‘Air New Zealand want another copy of an OCE you made out for that bluefin tuna. The one on the TV the other night.’

  ‘I didn’t see it. I heard about it. Mention us?’

  ‘Get off the grass. The girl from Air New Zealand said the plane had got in touch with them – from over Tokyo. Far out, eh?’

  ‘Bloody far out. What happened, they lose the OCE?’

  ‘Must of. They want to pick one up this afternoon.’

  ‘Right.’

  Hey, hang on – this was the fat-arsed black woman’s fish. The one that’d come in with Stan. The one that had made a dick out of him with her big Japanese words. Well, stuff her. Yeah, but what if Stan finds out? – Stan might well be his stepfather one day. Nah, Stan’s got his cut – what was that about a dishwasher? Stan wouldn’t buy his mother a dishwasher out of his own salary – tight as a salmon’s arse was Stan. He’s got his cut and she’s in Tokyo. So, lost the OCE, has she? Well, she’s in shitter’s ditch without it.

  He held his boozy breath as he went into the office, sidling innocently past Alice the bloodhound and plucking an Official Certificate for Export from the tray.

  ‘Well, we’re in the big-time aren’t we?’ said Alice. ‘Messages from aeroplanes about fish that have been on the telly.’

  He nodded, straining in his lungs. He went back to the workroom, gushed out spent air and filled out the form, precisely as before … except for his signature.

  They’ll be very lucky to get this form back to him – ‘Christ, forgot to sign it, did I? Christ, sorry, how stupid!’ – before TCU 001 went into Phase Two.

  CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT

  THERE WERE ELEVATORS to climb, blind alleys to blunder down, acres of people to circumnavigate before he found the terminal doors. Everywhere, unfamiliar little squiggly boxes of language – with English translations, telling him he was foreign.

  Outside was a curved half mile of terminal entrance with NARITA INTERNATIONAL AIRPORT in letters as tall as footy posts. People, people, people. Rows of wire luggag
e trolleys like lobster pots; beyond them, bus stops; beyond that, a yellowness of taxis. The footpath was fringed by a line of orange buses that stretched to the horizon, each bus with FRIENDLY LIMOUSINE on the side. He ran down the gutter between the buses and the beginning of the queues, asking drivers, ‘Do you go to Tsukiji?’

  ‘No,’ they said if they understood, ‘Shinjuku.’

  If they didn’t understand they stared at him and said, with silence, Foreigner.

  He was a dozen buses down, when: ‘Do you go to Tsukiji?’

  ‘Yes, Tsukiji, yes.’

  ‘The fish market?’

  ‘Fish market, yes.’

  He leapt aboard, floundering for money and producing $US200.

  ‘No, buy ticket inside.’ The driver pointed back to the immense glass door of the terminal entrance.

  ‘Don’t go away,’ yelled Royce.

  Inside the door a ticket office for FRIENDLY LIMOUSINE BUS: ALL TICKETS 1500 yen.

  ‘One ticket, please.’

  ‘No US dollar, must change. Bureau, there.’

  HE WAS FRIENDLY limousining to the market. Dully he glared at Tokyo through the porthole-sized window of the bus. It was mostly agriculture, with lots of trees – and houses that came in dribs and drabs and never congealed into suburbs. Strings of blown tyres lay thick along the roadside like shoals of twenty-five-pound conger eels.

  Jeepers! In the middle of a field, a great big concrete-sided swimming pool with bright green water – and men hunched along the sides, fishing. He unglazed his eyes and focused on the view. At least it keeps your mind off the horrors of reality.

  Just as he focused, it got boring again. More agriculture. So far he’d seen only one house with upturned corners of the spouting, like Japanese houses were supposed to have. The rest of them looked like they could have been in Romily Street.

  Then odd bits of industry started – still among fields and trees. Then tunnels, then high-sided walls that blocked the view for miles. The sky started to darken into puce, and when the view came back, it was made of one horrible, terrifying mass of factories. It was like a million Cement Works all joined together, stretching to the horizon! He stared, never having seen so much of anything ever before, except sea.

  The air had been changed by the factories. Not just by the soot and steam that darkened it; its texture seemed to have been thickened by the millions of workers breathing it. And then there was nothing left of nature at all. The whole view – as wide as the Canterbury Plains – had been made by people.

  The sea came into view. They were heading for a bay, with estuaries. When they went over bridges the water was purply brown and hemmed completely in by man-made structures. No beaches or banks – the bay went where people sent it, and had no will left of its own.

  Houses started, between factories – apartment blocks, big as aircraft carriers. In the distance were skyscrapers, tiny from here and with flats and factories stretching unbrokenly to them for so far that you knew they were gigantic up close.

  The highway now had left the ground and wound between twenty-storey buildings, round and about, past bedroom windows and balconies with vegetables growing on them. Even the roads – man-made though they were – had been changed by buildings. They’d had to adapt to the city, like Nature had.

  The funny thing was, among all this man-madedness, you didn’t see many people. Just the cars they were in and the washing they’d hung out on the balconies. Amazing – people living twenty storeys up, way off the ground like possums.

  The traffic took up the whole road, three lanes of it, as far as you could see. There were other roads now – just as thick – below him, and sometimes above as well. The roads of Tokyo, like the washing, were up in the trees with the possums.

  The whole surface of the planet, in any direction he looked, was made of city. It was scary now; he was in a concrete and metal landscape as wide and deep as the sea off Westport.

  They went over a church, with a cemetery around it. The headstones were touching and you just knew the people under them had been buried standing up. That’s what this dreadful place would do to him: it would bury him standing up. He couldn’t rely on the view to take his mind off the horrors of reality any more – the view had become the horrors of reality.

  Then the bus stopped. It didn’t matter where they were, because it was as dense, monstrous and unfathomable as anywhere else. He had been swallowed by a fish called Tokyo and was somewhere in its belly.

  ‘Tsukiji?’ he said to the old man next to him.

  ‘Shinjuku. Good day.’ He nodded, got up, and in a nimble crouch, headed for the door.

  The passengers subsided, every one. Royce followed the last one down the aisle.

  ‘You go to Tsukiji now?’ he said to the driver.

  ‘No, bus end here, Shinjuku. Half hour, to Narita, return.’

  ‘… But you said you went to Tsukiji.’

  ‘Yes, yes, Tsukiji. Son have restaurant in Roppongi, go with son to Tsukiji every week: fish and vegetable.’

  NOW HE SAW people again. He saw people in unimaginable quantities. He saw people in such density that they took on the characteristics of the shoal, surging en masse around obstacles, undulating up and down steps. This is what it was to be foreign – to be in the intimate company of a million strangers. As they passed him they were heading somewhere, they all had destinations. Only he had nowhere to go. He stood brokenly in the middle of a wide, roaring footpath and the shoal poured around him.

  What do you do? Probably you get a taxi and ask for Tsukiji. There were no taxi stands. Out in the mainstream there were hundreds of taxis but nowhere to queue for them. How do you catch them; where do they stop? He watched them the way a cat watches goldfish in a bowl – so close and yet unobtainable.

  One of the shoal had stopped. He was a tall man with an amazingly small head. He was shiny black with pink palms and tongue.

  ‘Hey man,’ he said, ‘you got drugs?’

  Royce gawped – life was getting even further from reality. ‘No,’ he said weakly.

  ‘Then I’m your man. What you want? PCP? Tolly? Wisdom Weed? Or mabbe ye ole Peruvian marching powder, huh, friend?’

  ‘I don’t want drugs.’

  ‘Man, nobody stands outside Shinjuku Station and don’t want drugs.’

  ‘Well, I don’t. I mean I do – stand here.’

  ‘Well, then, if you don’t, this is not the place for you to be standing.’

  ‘You mean everyone that stands here wants drugs?’

  ‘Well, when they’re standing the way you’re standing, yeah.’

  ‘How am I standing?’ He genuinely wanted to know. To know how he was standing would be a start towards getting himself back together.

  ‘Well, sorta slouched and desperate. Where you from, friend?’

  ‘New Zealand.’

  ‘I heard of it. Paradise. I’m from Kenya.’

  ‘It’s great to hear real English again.’

  ‘Same here.’ He dropped into a whisper of pure Queen’s English. ‘I actually speak like this, but there’s no street cred in it.’ He was immediately back into hip-hop, hi-cred speak: ‘Came here on a scholarship from my country to study parasitology. There’s a lot of it about in my country. Did you know Tokyo’s got the world’s only museum of parasites?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Well, it has. Wanna go see?’

  ‘No, I’ve got to find my fish.’

  ‘You lost a fish in Tokyo? Hey, friend, there must be some real pissed off pickpocket around here somewhere.’

  ‘It got stolen from the airport this morning. A massive tuna. I’ve got to get to Tsukiji.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Well, it’s the fish market, where else?’

  ‘Ota. Adachi.’

  ‘I beg your pardon?’

  ‘That’s where else. There’s three fish markets in Tokyo, man.’

  ‘Oh God.’ He gave a long gasp, emptying his lungs until they no longer held up his s
houlders and he slumped into misery.

  ‘Listen, friend – what’s your name?’

  ‘Royce.’

  ‘Pleased to meet you, Royce, Amos. Come and let me buy you a beer – I’ve had a good day.’

  ‘No, I’ve got to find it!’

  ‘Best thing you can do right now, friend, is shake off some of that desperation in your face. I know this place, Royce; I know its ways. I think you’ll find you’re barking up the wrong tree. Come on, I’ll tell you a thing.’

  He conducted Royce about ten yards down the seething footpath to steps leading to a place called Metro. There, he sat down and pulled two cans of Heineken from his coat pocket. He handed one to Royce; it was warm. ‘Government ran out of money and left me high and dry in Tokyo. So I set out to buy my ticket home by one means or another and by the time I had the money I had such a sweet little deal going I never bought the ticket.’ He clacked the top of the beer can; there was a whoosh of foam. ‘Shee-it, why they put so much spray in these things?’ He gingerly sipped into the subsiding suds. ‘Now, I’m gonna tell you a thing and you’re gonna have to believe it, otherwise you are not gonna see jack shit of your fish ever again. Okay, Royce? Now, I’m self-employed, but now and then I do a little sub-contract work for some people. Know what I mean? Now, these people follow the principles of Robin Hood. And they have – shall we say – very deep and personal financial interests in the fish markets of Tokyo. And they can find your fish. In fact only they can find your fish, Royce; you haven’t got a snowball’s of finding it yourself. The thing is, as long as they haven’t stolen it themselves, they get red-hot pissed off – to an awesome degree – with people bringing their markets into disrepute. If they believe your story, Royce – and that’s up to you – they’ll find your fish, because all fish in this town go through them. So what I’m telling you, Royce, is if you want your fish back, you gotta get your arse, not to Tsukiji, but to Fujinomiya.’

  ‘Where’s that? What is it?’

  ‘It’s a very pretty town on the flanks of Mount Fuji. See, the people you need to meet don’t live here. They prefer to live out there where it’s – quieter.’