Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  When you thought about it, everyone could be divided into how they answered questions, really. Some people, like him, he supposed, looked to see if there was an Eric Morecambe answer first, while other people – like Sticky – just answered the friggin’ question. In other words Sticky had got no sense of humour.

  Mind you, no sense of humour was a bloody sight better than half a sense of one. Like Toby Phibbs the bank manager, who was always making these half jokes that you have to respond to because he was the friggin’ bank manager, and that made you keep your gums bared in a smile and doing laughter-shorthand till your face nearly fell off its bones.

  Truth to tell, Bob regretted what he’d said to the kid. His face had been as shiny as the fish – then it had gone as slimy as they would. He was a good-looking kid, and, like it or not, that always helped: good-looking was trustworthy; ugly was not. Want proof? Just put the kid beside him, Bob, and ask some stranger to point to the bad bastard and you knew exactly where that finger would go. Straight at ugly ole Bob Dodds. You saw it everywhere: looks give you a fifty percent advantage every time. He knew this because he’d studied it – from fifty friggin’ percent behind the eight-ball, of course.

  But there was another thing. This was a pretty radical theory, but Bob reckoned the kid would have turned out much worse if he hadn’t been good-looking. Like, let’s face it, he was going to be bad anyway – what with a ratbag father and hopeless mother – but the nature of his badness was somehow … good. Christ, what was he saying?

  Look, Bob saw the bad bastards, the real bad bastards, the ones that were getting into drugs now, and were getting hooked up with the gangs over the hill. Bob kept a bit of an eye on the kids around the town – knew who was what, who was coming down on who. He did a bit of informal policing now and then – a back-hander here, taking an off-her-face schoolkid home to her mum there.

  Now the bad bastards, they were the shifty-faced ones who sort of sneaked into crime. This kid Royce, looking like bloody Adonis, walked smack into it, face first. I mean, he floats down the river in a stolen psychedelic yellow survival suit, for crissake! He’s caught in a car with the bare-arsed secretary of the headmaster! There’s nothing furtive here – if there’s such a thing as public crimes, he commits them.

  He’s worth saving. Bob sure as hell wouldn’t have saved any of those bloody McKenzie Gang lot, from down the Esplanade: they were past redemption, lost boys. Couple of lost girls among them too.

  ‘HERE,’ SAID BOB to the kid, who was gawping at him from the new toilet unit, ‘come and do these skate. Put these on.’ He hauled off his gloves, handed them to a dubious Royce. ‘You grab them by the head, top upwards, you get a grip on the gristle of their skin – watch your fingers aren’t too far down the mouth side or you’ll lose them. Then you hold it up, make an incision here, by the gill, then slash downwards.’

  The kid was tentative at first, then enthusiastic, then a world expert and overall, friggin’ useless. He cost Bob about a hundred and fifty bucks in rejected skate wings.

  ‘You’re a totally bloody hopeless case for treatment,’ said Bob when Royce had finished. He was taking the gloves off, smiling, pleased as punch and not believing a word Bob had said. Thought he’d just graduated to friggin’ brain surgeon.

  ‘Next retrieve, you can gut the eels,’ said Bob, chuckling inside – he’d seen the kid’s face when that big bastard had burst out. ‘Now go and check the stew.’

  ‘Oh Christ,’ said Royce, and belted into the galley.

  YOU PUT BAKING soda in it, and lots of salt. It wasn’t too bad – you took a mouthful of stew and then two bites of fresh bread to soak up the taste. Not the first time it’d happened, by a long chalk.

  ‘And instead of burning stew, next retrieve, you’ll be down in the friggin’ freezer, where you belong,’ said Bob, with his mouth full. He watched the kid duck his head down to his burnt stew as if he was gonna snorkel it up with his nose.

  ‘Not a bad wee catch, actually,’ said Sticky. ‘That about usual, Bob?’

  ‘Nah, quite large, really, Sticky. Probably biggest we’ll get.’

  It was a necessary lie. Bob had got a sneaking feeling, since they’d set off, that Sticky was sussing out the inshore situation. Could well be thinking of changing to trawling. Up until now he’d fished ling, but that business was stuffed. No way Bob’d’ve taken him on as crew if he’d known Sticky had a hidden agenda. Probably why he signed on – to pick Bob’s brains. Well, Bob didn’t really need more competition. Had a nice little earner here; no need to share.

  ‘There used to be eighteen boats July through to October on ling,’ Sticky was saying. ‘Now it’s down to six. Individual catches down fifty percent on last year.’

  ‘Yeah, it’s tough,’ said Bob. ‘Trawling’s no better, mind you.’ They swapped a glance – Sticky was checking the pupils of Bob’s eyes, to see if he was bullshitting. ‘Jeez, you know well as I do, Sticky, two co-op trawlers spent the season tied up. Inshore catches weren’t sustaining expenses.’

  ‘Yeah, but skipper of one’s in jail and the other’s the Calliope,’ answered Sticky.

  No flies on Sticky. He wasn’t having a bar of that one – Calliope would probably have been tied up anyway. Run by Don Marchant, laziest fisherman in Westport. They called Calliope ‘The Paua’ because it was always stuck to the wharf.

  ‘You go out to the Hokitika Trench or the Cook Canyon,’ said Sticky. ‘Just acres and acres of foreign ling frames floating around. Those Jap and Russian longliners are going home with 350 tons of ling: they’ve just hoovered the bloody lot. And they’re getting that as “by” catch! It’s not even the bloody stock they came down here to fish! Plus 900 ton of “mixed” catch – and I bet a hell of a lot of that is unreported ling, too.’

  ‘Yeah, but funny thing is, Sticky, I was thinking of converting to ling myself.’

  ‘You’ve got to be joking, Bob! It’s dead!’

  ‘Nah, it’s about the only thing I can do, Sticky. Look, you take my boat here. I trawl at 3.1 knots. I have to – the doors of my net have a warp pull of 1000 pounds. That’s about 200 pounds too much for the 180 brake I get out of the engine. If I could get down to 2.1 knots – like I could do, hand-lining – I’d halve my fuel cost – halve it, Sticky – I’m using 48,000 litres a season! But while I’m trawling I can’t economise, see? I need that speed to get a decent net-spread, see? Boat my size is much better adapted to long-line. Same as yours, I’d think; what’s your engine – straight-eight Gardner?’

  ‘Yeah.’

  ‘Just like mine,’ said Bob heavily.

  ‘Really?’ said Sticky, just as heavily. Bastard wasn’t falling for it.

  ‘Yep. If you take my advice, Sticky, you’ll stick where you are. Sea’s always greener on the other side, eh? Ha ha. You know that’s bullshit as much as I do.’

  ‘Oh, we fishermen know all about bullshit, Bob.’ He turned to Royce. ‘You know about fishermen and their yarns, eh? The one that got away and all that.’

  THEY HAD A reasonable haul with the second retrieve; fortunately Bob’s own bullshit was holding up and the catch was indeed a bit smaller than the first. The kid had gutted the four moderate-sized congers they got, and did all right. ‘Aargh!’ he’d shouted at one stage. ‘It’s dead but I can feel its muscles rippling under my hand!’

  Then the stupid bastard boxed himself into a corner of the freezer while stacking bins of flats. Come to think of it, Bob recalled, so had he, first time out.

  After that he’d slipped on a little flounder that’d fallen out of the net-roller and went arse over tip on the deck. Christ they’d laughed.

  While they were deck-hosing down the carnage a big red boat come over the horizon and headed for the bar.

  ‘Sapun Gora, Russian longliner,’ said Bob. ‘It’ll stop two miles out – outside the harbourmaster’s jurisdiction – and then Tommy Tyler will be out to collect a $500 passenger.’

  ‘Might be Molly Pollock and her daughter,’ said
Sticky and they both laughed.

  ‘The Orange Roughy, eh?’ said Bob. That’s what they called Molly’s daughter.

  He told the kid the story of how Molly Pollock and her red-haired daughter had spent a night on the Sapun Gora, slinging their arses for about half the crew each, and being paid millions in Russian banknotes. When they got them to the bank they found their roubles came to $17.50. Ahahaha!

  KID HAD MADE a reasonable cup of tea and then he said: ‘Speaking of ones that got away, you blokes ever see a giant squid?

  Bob hated all that giant squid stuff. ‘Oh, great, that’s all we bloody need – Captain Nemo stories,’ he snapped. ‘There’s enough in the sea to give you the shits without needing friggin’ freaks as well.’

  ‘That’s why fishermen can’t swim,’ said Sticky. ‘Once you know what’s in that sea, there’s no way you’re gonna get back in.’

  Bob frowned. Sticky shouldn’t have said that – takes away a bit of your mana. True, though.

  ‘Jeepers, so you guys can’t swim?’

  ‘I can,’ said Sticky, and you could hear the smugness in his voice. ‘But then I worked on the dredge, so I didn’t see the things Bob saw.’

  ‘Right,’ said Bob, feeling a bit angry and hemmed in. ‘So if we sink, you clever buggers are gonna swim thirteen miles to shore, are you?’

  ‘Well … people come and pick you up,’ said Royce. There was a sort of brave terror in his eyes, from sailing so close to the wind.

  ‘Not every friggin’ time, they don’t,’ growled Bob, irritated by the bravery but admiring its presence next to the terror. ‘And they’re not usually in bright yellow Michelin-man suits, either.’

  ‘So what do you do, Bob?’

  ‘I’ll tell you what I do, smart-arse. If I fall overboard, I get my gumboots off and I stick them upside down under my armpits, and I float on them. If we’re sinking, I toss something that floats over the side, jump in and hang on to it.’

  ‘Ah, so that’s why you wear gumboots – you can float on them?’

  ‘Yeah, but more often they keep conger eels from taking your foot off – like you saw today. So keep your boots on. And make another friggin’ cuppa tea.’

  The kid was making tea, the sea was flat, the boat was pulling well. Sitting here at the wheel in the La-z-boy, one elbow out the open window, was like driving a ute across the sea. Not bad for a winter’s afternoon. Bob felt mellow.

  ‘We got taught at school that the giant squid comes into the sea off Westport this time of year,’ Royce ventured. ‘We got showed pictures: they trawled one up on the Chathams – it weighed a ton and was only three years old. They reckon …’

  Jesus! Kid was like a dog at a bone. ‘Giant squid, my arse,’ said Bob. ‘I’ve seen an ordinary one eighteen feet long – that’ll do me, thanks.’

  ‘Yeah, but come on, Bob, you must have seen that tentacle that got washed up at Cape Foulwind?’ said Sticky.

  ‘One got washed up here?’ squawked the kid.

  ‘Yeah. Years ago,’ said Sticky. ‘Before your time. Matter of fact I think I went out and seen it with your dad.’

  ‘You knew my dad, Sticky?’

  ‘Used to work with him on the Rubi Seddon. I’s with him the day he nearly sunk the bugger. Remember that day, Bob?’

  ‘Yeah, I remember,’ said Bob.

  ‘Old Jud Goodger was master then – he’d be dead now, I suppose?’

  ‘Fuckin’ better be,’ grunted Bob. ‘We buried the bugger.’

  Sticky went off into his Tommy Rowland stories.

  Bob had seen that tentacle. It was thicker than that twenty-five pound conger eel this morning. This tentacle had been ripped off at one end and eaten off at the other – probably by sharks as it floated ashore. It had gone dry like seaweed and stunk about the same, but it had given him the heebee jeebees all right. Forget your ‘up to 100 feet’, textbook crap: this thing was far longer than that. There was something way way down there, beyond the imagination of your wildest madman. And your orange roughy fishermen and your Patagonian toothfish fishermen were just starting to get down to its depth – and just starting to piss it off.

  ‘Yeah, I saw it, all right,’ he said when the subject came back to the tentacle. And then – to allay all the complicated feelings it had stirred up in him at the time – he added: ‘I saw it but I don’t friggin’ believe it.’

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  SLEEPING WAS IMPOSSIBLE. You slid down the bunk as the boat climbed a wave and up it as it went down the other side. It was like lying on a goddamn seesaw that rolled as well. The bunks had edges so you didn’t fall out – like the table in the galley did – strips of wood called fiddles to stop plates falling off. Hemmed you in. Royce hadn’t got seasick so far, but his guts at night reminded him it was still possible. The waves also clunked at the steel hull beside your ear as they went past.

  Bob snored like a motor, as Royce knew he would. In his bunk, sideways across the boat, he just rocked gently side to side: the perfect motion to get you to sleep. He slept on his back so the first thing he’d see whenever he woke up was the semi-leather-clad shape of Raquel Welch on the ceiling above him.

  He looked amazing in his sleep, did Bob. Before snores pushed his mouth open, his little eyes and his toothless mouth turned into slits so narrow you could hardly see them at all. He just became a ball with a nose and chin. When he snored, his mouth became a skate’s, a big round O, screaming for help.

  Next day they did three more trawls – ‘shot the gear’ three times, that is. Bob didn’t get Royce to do Sticky’s job after all, but the day after that Bob said they’d do one trawl, then go home; the weather was packing up.

  ‘You’re on the net, kid,’ said Bob. ‘Don’t get nervous, but if you fuck up you’re over the side.’

  So he was retrieving the net while Sticky looked on from the new toilet unit.

  He did all the moves: lowered the scuppers so the fish couldn’t get out, clipped on the net-roller rope, secured the doors (with a bit of help from Sticky), unclipped the lazy wires, steered in the sweep to the bridle while Bob came down, put on the lifting hook and flicked on the surge drum. Up came the wings and the big red floats and then the net. Jesus! There was a monster in it!

  ‘Fuck!’ said Bob. ‘You’re still a bloody Jonah!’

  The big black monster had unbalanced the net and it swung out to one side of the stern. There was a danger – so it seemed to Royce – that they would lose the catch and maybe the net. Sticky had run down and grabbed it, hauling it onto the deck. Bob winched it down with a crash before it could swing back over the side with the boat’s wallow.

  Bob stumped to the net with a knife and slashed it open. Hell, he’d cut his own expensive net to ribbons! Fish tumbled out like water but they missed Bob because he’d jumped shrewdly out of the way.

  All that was left in the net was a huge black mass.

  ‘Friggin’ log,’ snarled Bob. ‘Give us a hand, boy. Jesus, why I bother I don’t know.’

  The three of them hauled out this jet-black log that seemed made of steel it was so hard and heavy. They biffed it over the side. It sank immediately.

  Bob had hauled in the deck-hose – which squirts continuously over the side – and was dashing away the mud left from the log.

  Fish were rising on the eruption of hose water under them. Inevitable eels dashed out and a big John Dory cleverly flapped itself across the deck like a windblown newspaper.

  Royce was pushed out of the way, new bins were brought down to the fish and soon skates were flying through the air like kites. Bob was under the cascade from the net-roller and didn’t give a damn about the water thudding on his back. Three bins of flats, two of gurnard, one of ‘salad’ – a mixture of snapper, rig and trevally, two of skates and shark. The john dory for some reason went in with the sharks. It took a long time to die, poor bugger, staring up out of one sideways eye that had never seen the other and making little Mexican waves with its continuous fins.

&n
bsp; Royce helped Sticky gut flounders. ‘Make sure you get the liver: it’s furthest in. Leave it in and they’ll rot before we get ashore.’ Royce did about one to Sticky’s eight or nine. ‘Turn them on their backs, the way they get served in restaurants. Water drains out of them better.’

  ON THE WAY home he steers.

  The wheel seems to have a mind of its own until Bob goes ha ha and tells him what a silly bugger he is because the boat’s on automatic pilot.

  After that it’s not, and he’s steering for real. You set the direction you want on the compass, then look up and find a landmark behind it, and you steer towards that. At first you’re using clouds on the horizon or the smoke of the Cement Works until Westport comes up out of the sea and you use bits of landscape.

  As they approach the Tip Head, Bob comes to sit on the La-z-boy. ‘I want sixty-five,’ he says. Royce hauls the boat this way and that until the compass points towards about seventy. ‘Sixty-five, I said!’

  Compasses will not keep still and you’re for ever chasing them. ‘Steer the boat, not the friggin’ compass!’ roars Bob.

  You start to get a feel for it; you realise that to steer to a direction you’re always steering past it, going from one side of it to the other, so as soon as the boat is heading towards your compass point you start turning the wheel in the other direction, because you just know the goddamn prow is gonna go right past it. In that zig-zaggy way you aim yourself towards the bar.

  ‘See those two red lights down the river? Steer at them.’

  Royce never takes his eyes from them again. His sight aches. He learns much: ‘The average speed over ground of a swell is about twenty knots.’ Okay. ‘High- and low-frequency waves can combine to produce three or four larger waves – and ultimately the killer wave.’ Okay. ‘A swell can suddenly turn into a breaking wave and broach the boat.’ Yeah. ‘Westport has a strong set across the entrance and due to the leeway created, this can affect the compass course being steered, and the relative angle.’