Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  He looked as if he was bowing in some sort of secret Samurai manner but he wasn’t – he was retracting something from an inner pocket.

  ‘Father of Minikui give me this for you, Royce-san.’ He handed Royce a wide, light envelope (too light for money). He smiled a really gentle fond old smile – a bit like the ones Beatrice Ellen Ann smiled between frowns. ‘Go through that door, walk to very end of market. Your fish there.’

  He bowed with a nod, and you knew it was the last bow.

  Royce opened the car door and stept unsteadily into the night. He bent back into the dark interior of the limo. ‘Goodbye, Miyamoto-san, you’re a good man. They were all good people, please give them my regards. And thank you, thank you, thank you.’

  He found it an emotional moment.

  Miyamoto found it a humorous one. ‘Hai, Royce-san, you bad, bad boy! You use Yakusa for import, eh? He he he.’

  Royce set off.

  Suddenly Miyamoto was beside him, having crept through the first layers of riotious activity around the rim of the market in the limo. His electric window was down.

  ‘Royce-san,’ he said quietly, ‘one day we may ask a favour of you in return.’ For some reason the hairs on Royce’s neck bristled.

  The window was rising as the sleek great white car purred off.

  And that was three times in a row he’d called him Royce-san.

  CHAPTER FORTY-THREE

  IT WAS IMPOSSIBLE that there could any fish left in the sea. They were all in here. He was walking past turbot on one side and cockles on the other, and if he had broken into a sprint and run as far as he had that day on Victoria Park for his greatest try, he would still be running past turbot on one side and cockles on the other. You had to turn a right-angled corner to change the variety of fish – and then, say, eels on one side of you and crabs on the other would stretch just as far.

  But he didn’t change lanes. He walked on, towards the far end of the market.

  Alleyways – lined sometimes with two-storey glass tanks of shellfish, turtles and lobsters, sometimes with garfish or ling or snapper or anglerfish, but always with overbrimming something – curved away from him in such a sweep they seemed to be following the curvature of the earth.

  Then suddenly there was a super-alleyway so wide it could only be called a street. Up and down surged forklifts bearing pallets, bicycle trolleys pushing bins of slime-slopping produce – and nightmarish, three-wheeled shovel cars (which he later learnt were called kogurumas) clattering by at insane speed with manic noise. Pedestrians crossed this street at their peril – but did so in their hundreds. Royce followed, ensuring he was surrounded deeply enough by people to withstand the initial impact of a charging vehicle.

  In all there were to be seven of these perilous streets and by the third he had come to see them as currents of the sea; he and his fellow pedestrians the defenceless shoals of whitefish upon which tunny-herds of forklifts preyed. Barracudas of trolley and cart could take out the odd unwary individual and all other denizens of this frantic sea looked fearfully about for the thunderous predations of the shark-like koguruma.

  Down the alleyways he was swept in his shoal, sometimes needing to break into a run to keep up with its progress, sometimes becalmed as fearful bodies built up, ready for a dash across a carnivorous street.

  Sometimes he was swept by eddies into little side streets and down one such he saw vast white square blocks of meat – or blubber. Not ten paces had he taken, however, towards them, than twenty innocent little sons of Nippon were standing immovably between him and that mysterious meat. He turned back into the shoal and on towards the distant end of the market.

  You could name the alleyways by the product – perhaps they did: Bi-valve Lane, Cod Row, Squid City …

  Funny thing was, there was no smell of fish. And no flies.

  He could see now a back wall. In front of it, beyond an intersection and the widest street of all, he could see great shiny torpedoes of flesh.

  His view of them, even as he reached the intersection, was blurred into momentariness by dense koguruma traffic. For long minutes he stood, not trusting his ability – in his advanced sake-state – to brave this last and most dangerous current. He walked along its seething bank, hoping, improbably enough, for a bridge, or at least a pedestrian crossing. There were stalls here, lining the street. But empty. Huge cleavers of perfect stainless steel hung above chopping boards of great size. But no fish. Fish-butchers – what else can you call them? – slouched on the chopping blocks of the stalls, gazing, like him, in frustrated impatience at the other side of the street. Where the tuna lay.

  At last Royce burst forward into the traffic, impelled by urges greater than any felt by any driver of any machine in his way – urges including love, desperation, protectiveness, patriotism and hopelessness: urges probably defined as kamikaze.

  He made it, with scrambling inelegance, drawing shouts of rage.

  HE WAS HERE: at the source, the font, the end.

  He had seen scenes like this in war movies – specially ones about the First World War. A field hospital, with dozens of men in coats tending the wounded who lay on slats of wood above a concrete floor.

  Tuna.

  Not wounded, but dead. All bearing the wounds of war.

  Some were headless – all were tailless. Some had their own tails sticking from their gill flaps, others – even more unspeakable – had beautiful feathered tail fins protruding from their mouths. At the back of each fish was a cut of tail, laid down beside it on the slats like a cross-section of tree. The back half of each fish was cut through and folded back to form a flap.

  He soon found his fish. He had seen it, perhaps a mile back, from the moment he entered the market. Maybe seen it only in his mind, but seen it he had. It was no longer the biggest – there were some nearly half as big again. But it was the most beautiful. Or had been – pieces of paper were stuck to its body like labels on an old suitcase and it had some Japanese characters daubed on it in red paint. A pang of pride burst into his grief as he realised he was looking at the words ‘New Zealand’. He felt a pride and a grief such as you must get as you stand over a comrade who has died for your country.

  He knelt beside his fish and stayed there, with his head down, until he could trust himself to look at the world again. His arm was across the dry, firm roundness of its bright, dead girth.

  Men in jackets, rubber boots and baseball caps stalked between the resting places of the great fish; each man with a gaff, a torch and an urgent notebook. The men prodded the plump blue bodies, hauled open the stomach flaps with their gaffs and shone their torches into the pink-iced interiors. They hauled at the back flaps of red flesh, they rubbed their fingers over the biscuits of red body beside the tail.

  And they swore at Royce as he slumped beside his fish, ordering him aside, shaking fists, waving gaffs and glaring with eyes goggled with rage and early morning red.

  Eventually he stood away – the alternative was to be thrown out of the market. And anyway, the ground was unbearably cold. So, he realised for the first time, was the air. He stumbled past the ranks of felled tuna to a tiny wooden grandstand nearby, and there he sat, numbed by remorse and cold.

  Men prodded at his fish, groped it, felt it, had lawful unsexual connection with it, then wrote feverishly in their notebooks. They worked alone, and furtively. They spoke little, they avoided eyes. The hermits of Tsukiji.

  Behind the great chilled tunas were acres of frozen ones – in the main, much smaller. Men waded amidst them also. Poor frozen tuna – at least the chilled ones were spared the barbarities inflicted on their frozen kin. The hermits hacked at them with their gaffs, wrenched them over, drilled holes in them with augers – professionally mutilated them. The frozen tunas made the knocking sound of falling ten pins as they were spun and hit each other. Wide-eyed, they stiffly endured it all, their anguish hidden beneath a veil of frost.

  Newly arriving buyers signed in with officials – yes, white-coated –
who gave them baseball caps, each with a plastic Japanese number.

  Holy cow, look at that – the latest newcomer – a man with purple hair. Not young, not trendy, not pretty – tallish and long-faced. With purple hair. Serious, non-confrontational purple hair – worn only as born hair. He put on his baseball cap, which pushed his hair outwards in a hem. He moved towards the chilled fish with his gaff and notebook and began his post mortems. But he did not jab or whack – he was curiously gentle, decorous. His ways were those of an earlier time. The Old Way.

  He was three fish away from Royce’s. Then two … Royce waited, breath held. Perhaps his fish would go to a good home.

  The man with purple hair walked past. Past the fish from the sea off Westport to the next fish, a much smaller one. Here he sensitively prodded and kneaded. He was a yellowfin man; the bluefins were beyond his range.

  Another man in a baseball cap sat down beside Royce. He was round-faced and with eyes drawn almost closed by Japaneseness.

  He lit a cigarette, offering one to Royce, who declined.

  ‘You strange?’

  He probably meant stranger. It fitted either way. ‘Yes,’ he said. Strangeness reeled in his head like the sea.

  ‘Come see market?’

  ‘Come sell.’

  ‘Sell?’ The eye-slits flared with shock. ‘You strange – sell?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘No! Strange no sell. Japanese market.’

  ‘Please yourself,’ says Royce.

  ‘Thank you.’

  Jesus, what was this? ‘Everyone has a hat, why?’

  ‘Hat?’

  Royce points to the stupid cap.

  ‘Ah, must have. Buy must have. Have, to buy. Official.’ He pointed to the four squares of Japanese number on the plastic label. ‘Number. Must have orso.’

  ‘And these little grandstands?’ Royce slapped the seat, made general inclusory hand movements.

  ‘Auction. Here auction Toichi, here’ – pointing to the next grandstand – ‘auction Dai Ichi, here …’ And so on. All the Big Seven had their own auction.

  So Royce’s fish was a Toichi fish. He pointed to it. ‘How much?’

  The round-faced man put his head on one side as he thought – he probably did that in lieu of screwing up his eyes, which would have been impossible. ‘Ah – san hyaku sen.’

  What the hell did that mean? How much was that? The only thing to do was go for relativity. Royce pointed to a monstrous bluefin from Sri Lanka, biggest of them all. ‘How much?’

  The same act: ‘Ah, yon hyaku sen.’

  Presumably therefore, yon was more than san. So he had a san fish.

  The man finished his smoke and wandered off.

  Royce looked at his fish. It lay with elemental stillness, shiny as a DC-10. The fullness of its eye shone with the anxious puzzlement he sometimes saw in his mother’s face.

  This was unbearable. He lurched to his feet, passed by his fish without looking down, negotiated the roadway and buried himself in alleyways.

  There was a throbbing between his eyes. He was in that worst of all possible states – drunk and hung over. Well, he was in tune with the world at large – President Carter had recently announced that America was in a state of stagflation – stagnation and inflation at the same time. There was no opposite to bad any more.

  He was seeing in alcoholic flashes now, then found himself watching the flashes rather than looking through them. They had become the flashes of the fish as it swam to its death. The fish was coming in on his circle now, calm and beautiful-looking and only his great tail moving. It was a sentence, he blearily acknowledged, from the Old Man book.

  He warmed himself by a brazier because he was becoming seriously chilled. Bits of himself that he could hold up to the light were turning blue. He bought noodles with the astonishingly large amount of money he still had in his pocket. And couldn’t eat a one. The infusion of them became an eel-like slither that threatened to turn back upon itself into vomit.

  He stumbled upon a cavern of vegetables nearly as big as the area of fish: ‘Fish and vegetable,’ sang a mad bus driver in his mind.

  Football fields of cabbage, lakes of onion, bright, endless hedges of banana. He stared, and a laugh blasted through his misery. Fish en masse are impressive; vegetables en masse are ludicrous.

  He stayed in the vege market for half an hour because it was a warmth above death.

  WHEN HE RETURNED there were men in caps beginning to fill some of the grandstands. The one next to his, was almost full – his own one had a smattering of about a dozen.

  The man with the purple hair was in his grandstand.

  A man in blue overalls walked to a little platform facing the filled grandstand. He held a bell – an old-fashioned bell like they’d had a primary school when Royce’d bothered going.

  Royce walked past the fish from the sea off Westport, on his way to the grandstand. He glanced down. Its eye was clear and brilliant blue. Royce knew it was looking at him because he filled the fish’s sight. He could see the convex image of his own face in the glassy clearness.

  The eye spoke much. A warm blooded creature on ice, it said. An ocean-dweller on wooden slats. A free spirit now worth san hyaku sen …

  The fish professor on the plane had told him that fish have only three mental states – hunger, libido and fear. No, no, Prof – they have four.

  They also have sorrow.

  Royce moved on and sat beside the man with purple hair.

  The man in the blue overalls rang his bell. The auction in the grandstand next to Royce’s had begun.

  Silence, broken suddenly by a wild, one-note keening that – after moments – dipthonged itself into a jabber of insane sounds, each one repeated at least twenty times a second. The men packed into the grandstand barked single-note yells back into the yammer, and waved hands filled with crazedly bent fingers – like Yakusa toasts. In thirty fervid seconds of orgasmic gibberish a lovely big fish of the sea was sold to the maddest of a nest of fanatics.

  Three officials in blue overalls approached the sold fish. A koguruma swerved from the violent street and clattered over concrete, sacks and slats towards it. The officials gaffed it barbarously – hauled it from its bed to a ramp on a wagon at the back of the vile koguruma. The fish was hauled judderingly away into slavery.

  The auctioneer had moved his pointing hand to the next fish and the litany began again. Shrieks and jabbers – hand signs that even to the Japanese were foreign – spoke of numbers, unimaginably large.

  A koguruma crashed and cackled towards the newly sold fish. The fish was flung – without dignity – onto the wagon and borne away. To a stall on the other side of the road. Royce could see the first victim, lying on a chopping block he had passed not long before. The big cleavers were now in the hands of the white-coated fish butchers. Two of them, like dueting pianists, stood behind the tuna’s tight silver flanks. They raised their cleavers and dealt to the pristine wholeness of the fish.

  In about ten minutes the auctioneer had sold thirty fish, one by one. Now they lay on blocks in stalls across the street, yielding up their bright red flesh in culinary post mortem. The auctioneer stepped down from his platform. Many of the men in that grandstand surged to the seats around Royce. In seconds his stand was full.

  Another man in blue overalls, another bell.

  Royce’s auctioneer was small-faced and squat, with a pyramid of muscle from his shoulders to his ears. To Royce’s horror, the auctioneer’s voice was coarse and pushed ugly grunts into the cold market air. His harsh repetitions came out in puke-like barks that left puffs of sinking mist.

  The jab of a fat finger at a fish five down from Royce’s. The ugly keening of commerce: with greedy sleight-of-hand a beautiful creature is magic’d away.

  Frenzy. It’s frenzy he is seeing. Kogurumas wheel and clatter around poor dead fish. A slowly rotating dizziness brings the scene to Royce’s brain in a carousel. ‘Ay,’ the old man said. ‘Galanos. Come on, galanos.
’

  The kogurumas were galanos – wide, flattened, shovel-headed sharks; hateful sharks, bad-smelling, scavengers as well as killers. They had the scent and were excited and in the stupidity of their great hunger they were losing and finding the scent in their excitement. But they were closing all the time.

  The old man had lost his harpoon, the blade of his knife, his tiller. The spurs of bone ached in his hands. The kogurumas hit again at sunset. They were not even quartering the scent. They were headed straight for the fish, swimming side by side. Behind them, across the roaring current of the street, sharp steel weapons hacked and slashed. Form was obliterated, colour was turned inside out.

  The orisons of his fish were about to be spat and grunted – in a language far removed from that used by the loving locals of Westport. Here, in the frosty carnage of Tsukiji it lay – at sale. Alone in a commercial morgue, betrayed and dead.

  He could not talk to the fish any more because the fish had been ruined too badly. Then something came into his head. ‘Half-fish,’ he said. ‘Fish that you were. I am sorry … I have ruined us both.’

  A drop of something fell on his knee. To his surprise Royce found it was moisture from his eye. The man in the purple hair glanced at him. He must have sniffled.

  The auctioneer was pointing at his fish – not even deigning to look down at it – just jabbing an imperious finger towards it. It was money, it was numbers – it was food, IT WAS FOOD! The blather began, bringing wet blindness to Royce. He was dizzy with distress, he was rocking, he was holding his head. Big comforting foghorn noises were coming from somewhere, perhaps from him.

  He felt a warmth of cloth on the back of his hand; he saw a cap. The man in the purple hair was holding him his cap and nodding. Royce in slow motion grabbed the cap, dumped it on his head, leapt upwards and bellowed ‘Yon hyaku sen!’