Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  Royce had started with Moby Dick. Holy shit, spare me! What if you were reading Moby Dick and got lulled off to sleep by the swell and dropped it into your lap? He realised he’d brought a factor on board far more dangerous than banana sandwiches – Moby Dick could damage you beyond repair. Perhaps that’s where the name came from – people dropping it onto their bollocks and getting moby dick?

  He put it away and ensured it couldn’t break free in foul weather.

  But the other book was different. It was short, for a start. And clear. Amazingly clear: He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days without taking a fish.

  Hey, that’s how it should be said. If Fishing Around the World had said it like that, he would have got as much in School Cert as Gilbert. He read on. It was quite good. In an ulullating lull on the sea off Westport, Royce read The Old Man and the Sea.

  FOUR AND A half hours later they were hauling the net in. It was nearly sunset and there was a nippy little wind from the north-west.

  ‘Colder than a nun’s tit,’ said Royce, using one of the more fashionable new phrases in the district.

  ‘Twenty years back you wouldn’t be standing there watching machinery pull the net in, boy,’ said Bob. ‘You’d be down there on the stern, kneeing it in yourself. Pull, hold it in your knees, pull, hold, pull hold … three, four yards at a time. Big slop comes in, bang, you lose ten yards, and you start all over again.’

  ‘Least it’d keep you warm with the effort.’

  ‘Yeah? Hands purple with cold. So cold that it’s only when you get back to the wheelhouse you find you’ve got a broken finger. Black tape it up and get out for the next retrieve.’ He held up his left hand. The top of the middle finger was missing. ‘Chopped it off in the winch, got it under the warp wire – bam, gone. Was still floating around the deck while I got on with the retrieve.’

  ‘I heard they used it as bait, Bob,’ said Sticky, ‘and caught a hagfish.’

  First joke Royce’d ever heard Sticky make.

  The fish flopped into the usual heap in the stern, but one side of the pile kept jumping, well after the other side had stopped.

  ‘Bet I know what that is,’ said Sticky. He rooted through the pile with his rubber gloves and hauled up a middle-sized black skate-looking thing. ‘Electric ray,’ he said. ‘Been putting a few volts through the other poor buggers around it.’ He threw it over the side.

  They did the sorting by the light of the deck lamps. Royce helped, only once getting a clip over the ear for mistaking a snapper for a trevally. Then he did some flounder gutting.

  You gut the flats, you behead and gut the eels, you de-wing the skates – the wings are marketed by dishonest capitalists as ‘scallop bites’ – but most of your ‘rounds’ – gurnard, hake, trevally and so on – stay ‘green’, which means ungutted. It’s all got to do with a complicated equation of which sorts of fish are more valuable heavy than with perfect flesh.

  Royce hosed down the deck. They re-shot the net in the dark, then had a casserole that Royce had cooked. (‘Here kid,’ Bob had said, ‘get this casserole on.’ Royce had looked at it. It was identical to the stews Bob brought aboard, in plastic bags, prepared by Nadine. ‘What’s the difference between a stew and a casserole, Bob? he’d said. ‘You burn stews,’ Bob had said.)

  After tea they talked about Dooley’s latest run-in with the harbourmaster. Dooley and Lew Hughes didn’t get on. Up till Lew Hughes took over the job, Dooley used to do the temperatures for the Westport News. It was a fairly open secret that he used to knock a couple of degrees off the hottest summer days: ‘Don’t want those bloody tourists coming over here and clogging up the first tee,’ he used to say. Well, Lew Hughes had taken over and put the real temps in. ‘Polluted the place with bloody outa-towners,’ Dooley used to mutter.

  Anyway, Lew Hughes had just told Dooley he couldn’t park his car on the wharf any more, so Dooley’d put a row of scows across the wharf with the forklift and blocked the harbour master’s car in – then gone home for lunch. When he came back the harbourmaster was ropable, so Dooley threw him the keys to the forklift and went inside to make a cup of tea. Thing is, harbourmaster hadn’t got a clue how to drive a forklift, had he? Ha ha.

  Then Bob had scratched the bristles on his head (he kept it really short so you couldn’t tell if it was cut or bald) and said he was turning in. ‘Yeah, same here,’ said Sticky.

  ‘Think I’ll stay up and finish this chapter,’ said Royce.

  ‘Bloody intellectuals. Waste of good eyesight, is reading books, if you ask me,’ grumbled Bob.

  He checked the automatic pilot and headed off to his bunk. ‘Wake me in three hours with a cuppa tea, kid. G’night.’

  Royce read on, not really being able to concentrate, listening to the farts and coughs, and, at last, the snores. He put down The Old Man and the Sea and slipped tremulously outside.

  He took the line from its hiding-place under the tarpaulin in the new toilet unit. Five hundred yards of 350 nylon. Given that old Inky Staines reckoned he’d caught a six-pound trout on a one-pound line, this line’d hold a 2100-pound squid.

  Holy … the consequences of actually hooking such a beast had not dawned on him until this moment – this dark moment floating on a small boat above the black frozen depths, conjuring tentacled nightmares from the deep. That was a bit melodramatic, but more or less true. He hesitated, line in hand. What he was doing was sort of like calling up the devil. He was playing with forces too huge to be fiddled with …

  Nah! Soft-cock! as Bob would say.

  Royce shook the doubt from his mind and threaded the stolen half snapper onto the hook. He’d decided on snapper – at the risk of being biffed over the side if Bob found out. According to the Arthur Mee’s Encyclopaedia in his mother’s front room it was supposed to be mackerel. But New Zealand didn’t seem to have mackerel – well, Bob ’n’ Sticky had never mentioned mackerel. So, stuff the encyclopaedia, snapper was the tastiest fish around and no giant squid with its wits about it was gonna pass that up.

  At the very end of the line he tied on an iron bolt he’d found in the railway workshops and had wrapped in cloth to take off the sharp edges that may cut the line. He lowered the whole contraption quietly over the side.

  It scuffled over the top of the water, unable to make downward progress through the boat speed and thick water. Shit. He needed something heavier.

  Beside the tarpaulin under which he’d hidden his fishing gear was the toolbox: a big, red, oily treasure chest. ‘Heart of a boat is its toolbox,’ said Bob, quite often.

  Royce lifted the lid – not a sound from its well-kept hinges. Inside, the implements lay as neatly arrayed as Sultana Pasties in a packet. He took out the second-biggest crescent – ‘Made in China’ – and tied it to the line. If he caught nothing, the crescent would be safely restored; if he caught what he hoped for – well, even Bob would concede that it was worth a crescent or two.

  Down through the dark, shiny water, this time, went the bait. Down to the realm of monsters and the unimaginable. Down to the interminable depths of the giant squid.

  He tied the ends around the bulwark between two scuppers then he went to bed. Royce Rowland, first fisherman to try to haul a giant squid from the depths of the sea off Westport.

  CHAPTER SEVENTEEN

  HE WAS WHANGED on the head by a blunt metal object. Probably the crescent.

  Unfelt tentacles had picked him up and biffed him from his bunk to the floor. The monster was frisbying him across confined spaces, making mad, eerie wails all around, ringing with metal.

  The boat shook; perhaps it was being taken from the rear by a sodomistic friend of the squid that was attacking him.

  He tried to stand and was hauled sideways by gravity. Which must have meant the boat was on its side, because gravity is downwards. Holy shit, they were sideways to nature … He had to crawl to the ladder.

  Why? Why did he want to see the horrifying forces t
hat were doing this?

  He wasn’t sure. It’s just that instinct and death make you curious. You need to get a grip on the situation – no matter how horrible it is – to work out what to do next.

  His head throbbed. He’d obviously bashed it against the hull while in his bunk.

  He stuck his aching head up into the wheelhouse.

  Overall it was a scene well worth not being part of.

  BOB WAS AT the wheel, hauling at it with one of his huge Popeye forearms, holding the RT in the other. Outside was just blackness and greyness, and flashes of brilliant whiteness that you knew were the spilled guts of burst waves.

  For an insanely irrelevant moment Royce glanced down the galley to see if he’d clamped the kettle. He had.

  Bob was arguing into the RT, roaring over the roars of the storm. The window behind his head went insurvivably black with nature, as a wave rushed past it. Royce and the boat were hauled down with that same helpless, sphincter-plying heaviness you felt as you crossed the bar, but much stronger.

  ‘You friggin’ useless stinking wanker!’ Bob was explaining to someone on the RT. ‘It’s your fuckin’ job to find these things out and tell us. I get flung outa my cot by a twelve-foot wave and find the glass is 960 and falling! I went to bed in a fifteen-knot nor’wester and wake up in a fifty-knot westerly, without being told anything! Will you kindly friggin’ explain that to me? Eh? Yeah, obviously I did, otherwise I’d be calling you from the top of an upside-down fish bin, wouldn’t I? Luckily, and by dint of forty friggin’ years of skill, I got around without broaching. With no friggin’ thanks at all to you! I am now charging out to sea at a rate I haven’t set this old tub at since it was young – towards who-fuckin’-knows where! Do you know how much diesel this hard-arsed fuckin’ storm is costing me?’

  There was a clanging outside and in lightning flashes Royce could see Sticky, belting at the bulwark beside the scuppers with a sledge-hammer, trying to make them bigger, to let out more of the seawater that swarmed in big whirlpools around the deck. He gave up and came in. ‘Come on, Bob, we gotta do it now or we might lose the boat as well as the net.’

  Bob’s face had slit itself into facelessness. ‘You hear that, you arsehole!’ he bawled into the RT. ‘I’m now going out to window my net. Because I wasn’t warned that a westerly friggin’ storm was gonna whack into my beam when I’m on a nor’westerly run, and try and blow my vessel arse over tip. I’ll see you in court, you land-lubbing wanker!’

  He slammed the RT home, muttered ‘Friggin’ Lew Hughes’, jammed down a switch, let go of the wheel and sort of pinwheeled across the galley to the door. There he stopped. ‘Royce!’ he shouted – in the first indication that he’d known Royce was there – ‘Stand beside that wheel. If a rogue comes at us, get the automatic pilot off and aim straight at it.’

  Jesus. ‘What’s a rogue, Bob?’

  ‘A rogue wave, you dopey prick!’ He stood, lurching at the doorway like Frank O’Higgins at closing time. ‘Here we go again,’ he roared. ‘The second time in my short acquaintance with you that I’m opening the window on my friggin’ net!’

  Then he was gone, to release all his hard-won fishies back into the sea.

  THE IRONIC THING about a storm is there’s bugger-all to do while it’s on. The net’s up, the hatches are battened (they really were: you chain the handles tightly together) and there’s one person at the wheel, who wants as much room and as little distraction as he can get. So the rest of you just may as well bugger off to bed and hang on.

  He read The Old Man and the Sea again. He’d had another go at the other one – Moby Dick – but holy shit, the guy just went on and on. But the Old Man one was quite interesting. It was written really easy, like a kids’ book, but you got the feeling you were being told more than just what the words were. It was like when Bob told you to do something and would add ‘or you know what you’ll friggin’ get!’ And you got all these pictures of fists coming at you and teeth flying and cartilage tearing without him even saying them. Yeah, it was like that – deeper than the words in it.

  Bob would steer for two hours, then Sticky would take over for two hours and so on. Now and then Royce would go up and make whoever was steering some toast and jam. ‘Shall I try a cuppa tea?’ he yelled to Bob at one stage. He was quite keen to try his nautical juggling skills, actually, but Bob said no. ‘There comes a stage when it’s so rough the tea comes out before the cup tips – “rolls the milk outa yer tea” they call it.’ Bob gave a bit of a smile. ‘I don’t really wanna find out if we’ve reached that stage.’

  The storm got worse. Black waves would fill the vision of the front windows, then disappear – upwards. They seemed to have climbed into the sky. And then you crashed. Sometimes, at the bottom, you could look along the trough for miles. You knew it was miles, even in the darkness, because at the other end, far away, lightning was falling out of the sky like waterfalls.

  An hour later Bob called out to Royce. ‘Royce, you awake?’

  ‘Yeah, Bob.’

  ‘Get your arse up here.’

  Royce put down his book, rolled onto the floor, crawled towards the ladder, got caught, hauled back and bashed into Sticky’s bunk. ‘Sorry, Sticky,’ he said.

  ‘Piss off,’ replied Sticky.

  He got up the ladder. It was morning and this unpleasant purple light – so unnatural that it could only mean something was really, really wrong – was bathing Bob. And the world. Which consisted at this moment of a dimpling great avalanche of grey water out front, purple air out the sides and white foam out the back. The windows were running with a sort of sea-blown snot.

  ‘Scared, kid?’

  Royce thought about it, and then to his surprise replied honestly; ‘No. No I’m not, actually.’

  ‘Pleased to hear it.’

  ‘Why’s that?’

  ‘Because it’s not a logical response to the situation. You always know when you should be scared, but you just register it as a bloody sensible time to shit yourself, then get on with it.’

  ‘Is this a good time?’

  ‘A friggin’ good time, mate.’

  ‘We’ll be right. You’re the best, Bob.’

  ‘No. The sea’s the best, kid. How am I supposed to be better than that?’ He gave a faint dip of his head. Royce looked out the wheelhouse window at a horrible Southern Alp of moiling water bearing down on them. It dived under the prow at the last second. They bucked and shuddered in its tow, then it came up hissing and spitting behind them. His ears had wanted to pop in the worst seconds. Probably because the boat’s body had been so far under that the air had been squeezed flat.

  Do boats burst?

  ‘I’m the best, huh?’ muttered Bob, glaring ahead through the mucus-covered windscreen. ‘So where do I practise for seas like this? In the friggin’ bath?’

  Royce was not impressed by this information. He was still not scared – his organs of scaredness, wherever they were, had dived for cover – but he didn’t need quite so much information about Bob’s sudden frailties.

  ‘They reckon you can get out of anything, Bob.’

  ‘Don’t be pathetic, kid. They’re bullshitters. Now, I want to ask you something.’

  ‘Shoot, Bob, anything.’

  ‘What was it like, screwing Penny Turton?’

  The sea and the wind howled, filling in Royce’s shocked silence.

  ‘Well?’

  ‘… How do you mean, Bob?’

  ‘What do you mean, how do I mean? What was it like, screwing friggin’ Penny Turton?’

  ‘Jesus, Bob. Hell. I think that’s sort of … I dunno … sub judice.’

  ‘Don’t come your prison talk with me, boy! Let me put the situation in front of you, okay? I’m looking out this friggin’ window at one of the biggest seas I’ve ever seen out here, and I’ve got to get us through it. I need inspiration, okay? Because I’m tired and stuffed and starting to believe it can’t be done. So what I want is hope, see? I want to hear things that make
the effort worthwhile, right? Penny Turton’s one of the middle-aged fantasy objects around this town and she gets knocked off by a randy fifth former who can do 11.4 and probably has a dick the size of a salami. Right? Well, that’s life-affirming, and I want to know all about it. It makes me want to fight this mother-fuckin’, god-awful storm and kick it in the arse. So I want you to go through it, blow by blow, while you stand there and I steer this flat-footed old tub through one of the worst seas I’ve ever seen. Now get on with it! What colour were her knickers?’

  A wave exploded against their prow and disintegrated into writhing white fragments.

  ‘Jesus, they’re starting to break,’ muttered Bob. ‘This swell’s starting to get tops. That’s as bad as it gets, kid – what you don’t want, twenty miles off shore, is breakers. Now come on. What colour were they?’

  ‘Well, it was dark, Bob. They felt sort of satiny for a while …’

  ‘Until they were gone, eh? Kid? Until you’d whisked them down? Eh?’

  ‘Yeah. But we never actually got to …’

  ‘No. She said you didn’t,’ said Sticky behind them. ‘And now I believe her. Didn’t stop her going, but. Didn’t stop you stuffing up my bloody life, again, did it, you stinking little no-good arse-wipe?’

  He was looking red-eyed and scrawny from sleep.

  ‘What the fuck you on about, Sticky?’ snapped Bob. ‘You in the middle of a wet dream or something?’

  Sticky sort of uncoiled himself up the rest of the ladder, grey shirt out and over his lank jeans. He stared at Royce for most of his conversation: ‘We’d had a nice steady little thing going, for three years, Bob. Oh, she’d been pretty wayward before that, been spreading herself around since Reg got Tb. But we’d got it all together and she’d really settled down. For three years the only one she’d been with, apart from Reggie, was me. Totally faithful she’d been to the two of us, till this little bastard wags his dick in her ear.’