Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘You couldn’t get any possessions away with you, then, Betty?’ said Bob – a little crisply – over his tea.

  She was getting out of the sou’wester, revealing a thin, big-bummed body with bee-sting breasts, clothed in a lank brown woollen jersey. She dipped into a pocket of her shapeless blue strides and pulled out a flat plastic bag. Inside was a cliff of green money and a battered blue passport. ‘Nah, just me and six grand.’

  Royce stared at it. Greenbacks: US money, just like in the movies. It was an odd sensation to look at something you knew so well, for the first time.

  ‘You didn’t pinch it from them?’ snapped Bob.

  ‘Nah, I earned it from them, Bob.’

  But Bob had already gone down to the gears and pushed the handle into full steam ahead.

  Seems you got paid about a thousand US a month to be a sex slave.

  WELL, HERE THEY were in the middle of a high-seas rescue, streaking away – at seven knots – from distress, with the fair damsel. Royce was staring at her, though trying not to make it obvious, when Bob asked the very question that was in the front of Royce’s mind.

  ‘So … how’d you get to be a sex slave, then Betty?’

  ‘I answered an outcall down to Kurihama in South Tokyo Bay, Bob. Got kidnapped from there.’

  ‘Outcall from a …?’

  ‘Love hotel.’ She said it matter-of-factly and didn’t elaborate.

  Bob nodded to put an end to a growing pause: ‘They … must have been pretty keen to get you …’ Bob’s voice politely trailed away before it could add ‘why the hell would they?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s all a matter of perception,’ she answered.

  Perception? Jesus, they should’ve left perception to their guide dog.

  ‘Very proud little buggers, the Japs, very vain; under all the humble kowtowing and so on, they think they’re superior. So, apart from being the best at – you name it – they also reckon they’re the world’s great lovers. I found out they’d heard that I’d done a stint at the Club Sekitei, a love hotel in Meguro. I get my food and accommodation paid for there, when I’m in Tokyo. In return I cater for the Kenyans.’

  ‘You get Kenyans in Tokyo?’

  ‘You get everyone in Tokyo, Bob. Thing is, the Kenyans are famous for going all night. Most of the girls at the Meguro avoid them like the plague – when your client is paying by the ejaculation, an all-nighter is financially disastrous. So I’d help out in that way. And word got out to the squiddies, who were looking for someone durable. And big status, see – they spread the word around the rest of the fleet that they need a woman who can absorb all-nighters.’

  ‘And … are they all-nighters, then, Betty?’

  ‘The Japs? Haw! Gimme a break, Bob. They go like Honda pistons for about three minutes then get off and wash their diddles. Clean little guys, I’ll give them that. Wash hands and glands before and after.’

  Bob sorta looked like he’d heard more than he wanted to know, and mumbled about how they’d best shoot the gear.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand,’ said Betty, and she was amazingly expert. Less than eight minutes later they were back in the galley for a cup of tea.

  Sticky came up from below during their third cuppa, bringing a stink of stale air that must have been caught in his clothes. His face was green and his eyes were bad red. He looked sick. He flopped into the La-z-boy on the bridge and glared without interest at Betty.

  ‘This is Betty, refugee from the Japs,’ growled Bob, watchful but not moving. ‘This is Sticky, leading deckhand. He’ll be signing off, end of this trip.’

  BETTY WAS AN amazingly interesting person. Royce thought it would be really useful if he could introduce her to the people who make up the School Cert geography questions, and say to them, ‘Why can’t we have questions about places like Betty’s been to?’ With all due respect to Beatrice Ellen Ann, he’d learnt more geography from Betty in a cuppa tea’s worth of time, than he’d learnt in two and a half years’ worth of trying to get School friggin’ C. He’d learnt about Pago Pago, Amsterdam, Curaçao, Panama, the Reeperbahn, Montevideo, Nantucket, the Britannia Hotel in Lyttelton, Vladivostok … It beat the crap out of the Green sodding Revolution in south-west India, that’s for sure.

  She’d been born in this part of Santo Domingo called Barahona – down at the Haitian end of Santo Domingo. Her father was a Sri Lankan burgher who’d run the aluminium cracker on the Barahona Peninsula until he was killed by mosquitos. Her mother was a Hispaniolan ex-slave of part-Venezuelan Arawak descent.

  ‘The Arawaks were exterminated by Christopher Columbus,’ Betty had said. And she’d taught Royce to high-five after she’d proudly added: ‘We were the very first European genocide.’

  This was really interesting stuff. Hell, this was history as well as geography but it was stories – you know? He suddenly realised history had people in it. He could pass this Betty stuff – with bigger marks than Gilbert’s.

  Then she went on to tell them that Columbus is buried in Santo Domingo, and also in Genoa and – she was pretty sure – in Portugal too.

  He couldn’t help thinking that Columbus wasn’t the only one who seemed to be in parts. Because Betty was sort of compartmentalised herself – as if the genetic bits of her various nationalities wouldn’t have a bar of one another. Body parts stuck on her in completely non-homogenised ways: her plump little double chin was from Sri Lanka, her bum was from the Caribbean and her hook nose was ancient Amerindian on a brown Slavonic face.

  When her father died, Betty’s mother had moved the family down to a shack on the beach at Cabo Beata and taken up fishing.

  ‘She got pretty damn good at it, too,’ said Betty. ‘So did I. We specialised in sailfish and, without knowing it, we stumbled on what’s now the latest method, called “fishing the change”. Any sort of change. Sailfish are incredibly nosy and any change – temperature, current, water colour, scent, birds, other fish, oxygen, salinity – is where they’re gonna be. I used to go out with my mother; my job was to find the change. No whiskey to go with the tea, is there, Bob?’

  ‘Dry boat,’ replied Bob. ‘We can be in the pub by sundown.’

  ‘Fair enough. I respect that.’ She hauled at her tea to lubricate her vocal cords. ‘My fishing tapered off when I got into higher schooling because it turned out I was an official genius with an IQ of 174. I got a government grant to go to the University of Santo Domingo and boarded in the capital, hundreds of miles from home. I’d go back in the holidays and scout the change for my mother, but one day I got home and saw her boat pulled up on the beach with the skeleton of this humungous fish tied to the side. She was inside the hut, five empties of rum and a green-painted wooden Buddha beside her. Dead.

  ‘No one ever knew what happened, but there was word of voodoo, and I know she’d dabbled with it a bit. She’d gotten me to take a packet of salt down to an old guy who’d turned up to fish our beach one day. He died a week later. You put spells in salt to keep them neutral till it’s opened, see? Anyway, I put her and the Buddha in the boat and pushed it out to sea – seemed somehow the thing to do.’

  Royce was loath to miss any of this amazing information but the pressure of three cups of tea was building and he went out to empty it into the sea. The pee came out dark – sort of stained with tea leaves – and made a dark green mark on the sea. Probably about the colour a green Buddha would make. Her mother might have turned into a zombie and rowed ashore again …

  When he got back she was talking about fishing boats – well, so he thought at first … ‘So, you’re on a seventy-footer, pulling in five ton of bluefin a day, but you soon learn there’s a periferal industry out there. Crew of five – a month at sea with nothing but a centrefold and a strong right hand. A woman can come in mighty handy in a situation like that, and within a trip or two I was into secondary employment. Fifty bucks a head in the bunkroom or a hundred a night solo in the captain’s cabin. Been my occupation ever since.’

  Bob and Royce swappe
d a startled glance – was this an invitation? Sticky just sat there glaring, trying to join boredom and hostility together.

  ‘You ever get a degree, Betty?’ murmured Bob, probably to divert the conversation.

  ‘Nah. I was two years into a business degree and was in line for honours, but I was earning too much to study business, Bob. Later on I did a two-semester diploma in post-Kierkegaardian existentialism.’

  Holy shite. ‘What the hell you do with a thing like that?’

  ‘Well, it gives you an alternative to lying back and thinking of England, Bob, I’ll tell you. Trying to work out whether freedom is worth the anxiety kinda takes your mind off the snorting little Japanese squiddie machine-gunning into you.’

  BOB SAID HE had to plywood up the window that’d got blown out in the storm last night. Got up, washed his mug at the sink and put it in its right place. Went outside, and Royce could see him fossicking around in the new toilet unit. Sticky sidled off back down into the fo’c’sle.

  ‘You ever see a giant squid when you were with the fleet, then, Betty?’

  ‘Nah. Saw a billion little ones, though. Lot of irony in the squid, you know, Royce. Voracious little bastards – absolute arseholes of the sea. Got these vicious suckers in two rows of rasping teeth. Rip things like flying fish to shreds. Then there’s that beak. They’re the mini nightmares of the sea, I’ll tell you – but the irony is, just about every big fish loves them. You name it – dolphins, tuna, marlin, kingfish, snapper, groper – they all just love eating squid. I reckon that accounts for the squid’s bad attitude.’

  ‘You reckon there are giant squid, Betty?’ said Royce.

  ‘Nah. No such thing.’

  ‘But they’ve found …’

  ‘Listen Royce, I’ve lived in Japan. I know those people; I’ve been on the bullet trains from Nishda into Tokyo each morning – the non-tourist ones where the guys take their pants off so they won’t get creased for work. I’ve watched them dine out on blowfish – almost tasteless but flavoured by the fact that one in fifty people die from eating them. I’ve watched them picking through the bones at a cremation, looking for a nice one to put on the mantelpiece. I know these people; I know them to death. If they thought there was a giant squid down there they’d be after it. They’d have got it by now, and eaten the poor schmuck into extinction. They don’t believe in it. To them there’s just two kinds of squid, arrow and broad, and they’ll catch them by the billions till they’re all gone. They don’t believe in giant varieties and I sure as hell ain’t gonna disabuse them. There’s no such thing. For its own sake.’

  Bob’s face was at the galley door. It was bright with rage. ‘Sticky!’ he hollered. ‘Sticky! Get up here; I wanna talk to you.’

  Bob stood blazing at the doorway for a long time, in which nothing happened.

  At last Sticky squirted up from the fo’c’sle, moving with sulky slowness. He drooped down the wheelhouse and out the door.

  Royce and Betty sat at the table, silenced by the powerful tension.

  Bob then gave a demonstration of his powers of knowing where everything was on the boat. The demonstration caused a sphincter-tingle of horror in Royce that the storm hadn’t come near matching.

  ‘Sticky,’ said Bob, low, ‘there’s a monkey wrench missing from the tool kit. A monkey wrench. The sort of thing a gutless psychopath with a chip on his shoulder might just use to bash someone on the head when they weren’t looking. You know? You know where it is, Sticky?’

  Sticky was shifty and contemptuous. His voice was like a hoik before you spit: ‘Not a bloody clue.’

  Bob clenched his fists and varicose sort of veins popped out on his forearms. He still wasn’t shouting but his voice was coming out like steam. ‘You tell me where that wrench is, Sticky, or it’s you or me, mate. And I mean now, here, on this deck, before you can sidle up behind me with that wrench and hole my brains.’

  Sticky glared at him, deliberately making his face ugly to create fear. ‘I haven’t got a clue what you’re talking about, you mad bastard.’

  Bob approached him, hunching into form. Sticky moved out to the deck, away from the confines of the wheelhouse. They started to circle. The scariest bit was that Sticky wasn’t scared.

  ‘I can’t let this ride, Sticky,’ rumbled Bob. ‘You’re a loose unit. “For the safety of the boat” – you remember that one, Sticky? Well, for the safety of the boat, you tell me where my wrench is, or on my mother’s grave, I’ll take you out.’

  It was horrible. It was caveman stuff. Both of their faces were stained white with tension. This must have been what it was like when the conger eel and the octopus found they were in Billy Mosley’s father’s craypot together. Royce felt seasick for the first time.

  He stood up, walked past Betty to the door.

  ‘I took it, Bob,’ he said.

  His confession left Bob stranded in no-man’s-land. Made him look like a friggin’ dickhead in fact.

  Bob straightened up, fists still lightly bunched, still flicking glances at Sticky while he glared in disbelief at Royce.

  ‘Go on,’ he purred.

  ‘It’s quite safe,’ said Royce brightly. Holy shit – what made him sure of that? There’d been a goddamn hurricane since he put that bloody line down! The odds on it still being there …

  ‘Ah. And where is it “quite safe”?’

  There was a dangerous calm. Royce could see Bob struggling with the elimination of all that adrenaline you sort of naturally engender when you’re about to kill someone. Bob had cranked it up to deal to Sticky; now it was on hold, and available. He was trying really hard not to spook his feelings into action. He was remaining very, very calm. They all knew – including Bob – that if his feelings joined up with the pumped-up forces in his body, there could be a murderous rampage.

  ‘Look, Bob,’ wheedled Royce, ‘why don’t you go in, sit down, and I’ll bring you the wrench in a few minutes?’

  ‘Where is my wrench?’

  ‘It’s – it’s on the end of my line. Over there.’

  He’d given up all hope of staying alive. He’d indicated direction simply in the hope of getting Bob’s blazing eyes off him, at least for a second.

  It worked. Bob swung his head to the bulwark, then back. There was now some genuine amazement in his face, along with the other things.

  ‘You put my wrench on a line and threw it over the side?’

  ‘Yeah. That’s more or less what I did, Bob. The thing is, I wanted to catch a giant squid.’

  ‘Ha!’

  It was a sharp laugh from Sticky. It sounded like a rifle shot.

  The two fishermen looked at each other, bonded for a second in disbelief.

  Bob swivelled back to Royce. How your outlook can change. A minute or so ago, Royce could have contemplated a steady old age, hopefully in the company of Linda Harvey. Now, he feverishly added each second in which he didn’t die, to the sum of his existence.

  ‘You thought you’d catch a deep-sea fish in eighteen fathoms of water, did you?’ growled Bob with vicious reasonableness. ‘Haul it up off the continental shelf, like?’

  ‘Well, yes. But I hadn’t thought about the eighteen fathoms thing.’

  ‘No. You hadn’t. Well, why don’t you pop over there, and pull up your giant squid, then? We’ll put it in a polybin and and send it to MAF for scientific purposes, shall we?’ Bob was standing with one hand pointing to the bulwark. ‘Go on, then.’

  Royce moved towards the line. Maybe his instinctive flinch triggered Bob; maybe the flinch was in reaction to an already triggered Bob. Whichever, the upshot was that Royce took a belt across the ear that put a million volts through his brain and sounded like the hull being hit by a nuclear submarine.

  ‘Get me my friggin’ wrench!’ he thought he heard through the din.

  THE LINE WAS heavy. Thank God for that. The wrench was still there. He began hauling. Then that unpleasant part of your brain that won’t let you alone said, ‘What say it’s actually a fis
h making the line heavy and the wrench has gone?’ As if to confirm this unpopular thought, a seagull turned up from nowhere and hunched over him on the wind, watching.

  Despite the weight of the wrench, the line had stretched out behind the boat, dragged by their speed and the easterly set. Holy shit, what if it’d got tangled up in the net?

  He hauled on, his hands stiffening with the chillness of the line. There were a couple of dodgy moments as the line cut dangerously close to the warp lines of the net, but he got past them without incident. There was a hedge of dripping red nylon beside him on the deck: there couldn’t be a hell of a lot left to retrieve. The wrench – or the drowned fish – must be near. The seagull looked on with interest.

  The angle of the line was now quite steep and cut the water just beyond the stern. From the corner of his eye he could see that Bob hadn’t moved.

  A torpedo went by, in the sea just in front of him, travelling at supersonic speed down the hull towards the stern. It was made of aluminium – no, titanium – dark blue at the top, white underneath, with a yellow stripe down the middle. It flashed; it glowed; it somehow crackled with light. It was gone and he was blinking in dazzlement and the remains of the blow on the ear when the line was ripped from his hand. It hissed back into the sea with venomous speed. Through the dirty glass of the next wave he saw a spectrous shape of unimaginable size.

  He turned away from the sight, gagging, tears hot in his eyes, palms stretched in total surrender. ‘Christ, Bob, I’ve caught one. I’m sorry about your wrench.’

  Bob had pushed past him. ‘Friggin’ blindstrike! Get a windy buoy!’ Then he was at the new toilet unit, crashing gloves onto his hands. Beside him the red line was writhing and leaping like mad spaghetti as it was torn from the deck into the sea.

  Sticky was scrambling towards the bow. Bob grabbed the line, letting it hiss through his leathered fingers. His face was full now of resolution and thought. He was acting on the fisherman’s reaction to the moment – consequences later. Royce was safe as long as that fish was on the line.