Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  ‘The bastard’s doing about seventy miles an hour,’ muttered Bob, really impressed. ‘How much line is there?’

  ‘Five hundred yards, Bob.’

  ‘Not a shit show. Thing’s gone through most of that. Jeez, I’ve never seen anything like it. What the hell is it? We foul-hooked a dolphin?’

  ‘Bigger’n that,’ put in Sticky, a bit disdainfully.

  ‘If you follow the line with the boat we can find out,’ said Betty. She’d reached in front of Bob and taken the line ahead of him. Just like that. ‘Less line the better: reduces the drag. But if you don’t start using this boat it’ll have the lot and we’ll never know what it was.’

  She had instantaneously taken charge. ‘Go on, get the wheel. Follow the line, not the fish.’

  Bob stood with bunched leather fists for a moment – clenched not to hit Betty with, but in a failed attempt to grip the authority that had somehow whisked through his hands.

  ‘Move it, Bob,’ she roared, ‘or we’ve lost this mother for ever!’

  ‘Lost my bloody wrench you mean,’ he muttered. But no one really believed him. He was a fisherman, with the sea in his blood. He’d fight hammer and tongs to boat that fish. Hammer, tongs and monkey wrench, actually. The size and speed and sheer interestingness of that fish had saved Royce’s bacon.

  ‘That thing well hooked?’ he snapped to Betty. She paused and nodded.

  ‘Yeah, we got him. We lose him it ain’t gonna be because of the hook.’

  Bob thoughtfully sucked in his lips. It was such a thoughtful suck it looked like he was going to swallow his own face. ‘Yeah, well it’s not gonna be because of the net, either.’

  And would you believe it, he marched down the front of the boat and turned on the winches. He was going to sacrifice a trawl to catch this fish. Then he went into the wheelhouse and took the boat off auto.

  The warp wires started rolling in from the sea, dripping earrings of salt water. On cue the seabirds arrived out of nowhere. How did they know?

  What she did next was mad: it had never been seen before. She draped the line around her, holding it in her right hand, across her back, through her left hand and around her left leg. Yeah, around her left leg. For all the story of the next half hour she held it like that, fishing off three limbs.

  ‘Follow where the line enters the water!’ she called to Bob as he first took the wheel. ‘If it turns and puts a belly in the line, we’re in trouble.’

  Sticky arrived back with a bright orange balloon. Betty – gloveless – was hauling on the line, leaning on it backwards, slowing it, without trying to stop it. Sticky, also with ungloved hands, threaded a safety pin-like thing onto the wavering line. Bob, at the wheel, was steering in gloves. Bizarre; mad; insanely hilarious.

  Under Sticky’s right arm was a double beachball-sized balloon – a windy buoy. His left arm was jerking out and in like a guitarist’s in a mad riff, as he battled to get the pin (Royce later learnt it was called a lobster snap) on the spastic line. He clicked it; Betty let the line run around her leg and down her back. The balloon grunted and blobbed over the side. It was immediately halfway underwater, but there it stayed, swaying across the sea but getting no deeper.

  ‘What’s the breaking strain?’ said Betty.

  ‘Three hundred and fifty pounds,’ said Royce.

  ‘How long’s it been out?’

  ‘Two days.’

  ‘Shit.’

  ‘Why?’

  ‘Nylon absorbs water. This line’s twenty percent down in strength.’

  ‘What is it?’ said Royce.

  ‘Mako,’ said Sticky. ‘Was it fast?’

  ‘Very,’ said Royce.

  ‘Yeah. Be a mako, they can do eighty mph.’

  ‘Faster than that,’ said Royce, resolute, though having no idea why.

  ‘Faster?’

  ‘Yeah. And it was white.’

  ‘Great, that’s all we need,’ yelled Bob from the wheel. ‘We’ve hooked Moby fuckin’ Dick.’

  All eyes were fixed on the bobbling, swerving orange balloon. Through it, the thing they had entrapped was communicating its rage.

  ‘What colour are these giant squids, then?’ murmured Sticky.

  ‘I don’t care what colour they are, and I don’t care if it’s a squid or a whale,’ bellowed Bob. ‘I want my friggin’ wrench back!’ But his eyes, even from here, were mad with the chase, and nobody believed him again.

  Even Sticky’s face had lightened from its sulky green, and his eyes were flicking across the water to where the line must end, with excitement and fisherman’s joy.

  There was the cluck of passing waves and the hum of the warps as they wound in the net.

  CHAPTER NINETEEN

  WHAT THE HELL is going on here? Have they stepped through Alice’s bloody looking-glass or something? The world’s gone nuts. First, steady old Sticky turns out to be a sly-rooter from way back with a psychopathic streak who wants to kill the kid that rogered his mistress. Then some Caribbean freakshow with a till on her fanny rows over from a Jap squiddie and is now bare-handedly hauling in some bloody great monster of the deep. What is this? What’s happened to the good old world of Bob Dodds where you catch a fair day’s fish, down a few quiets in McManus’s and go home to tup the missus?

  Sunspots. That could be it. They reckon sunspots was what broke the Beatles up. Whole world has gone nuts lately: riots over raising Lake Manapouri; Kaimai tunnel caves in. Weird. Unnatural things happening. We’ve seen the best of our friggin’ times.

  WHATEVER WAS ON that hook had run nigh-on the length of the line and God knew if it would hold – 350-pound breaking strain or not – if it came down to the knot on the bulwark. But she – Betty – stayed calm. She was good: you do nothing on the first run; you just use it to get organised. She’d known that, like all the best ones do. She’d organised him down here to the wheel, for one thing; they were working as a team now. For maybe the first time in his career Bob wondered who the weak link of the team was.

  But she was probably asking herself the same question because he was working well: expertly tipping the boat towards the run so that fish couldn’t take all the line. Yeah, he was doing good – she and that fish would learn at the same time that Bob Dodds doesn’t lose a friggin’ fish, no matter how big. Mind you, might lose whatever had had time to get caught in the net.

  Then it stopped. Just before it was going to test the breaking strain, the damn fish stopped. The windy buoy had slowed it down. Or maybe Betty’d organised that too? Stopped it somehow? She sure as shit was doing some pretty weird manoeuvrings out there, with the line twisted around her body. She was using the muscles of her back and of her big strong bum as well as her arms. Amazing – he’d never seen anything like it. She’d sort of spun a cocoon of nylon around herself and on the inside of it she danced! Well, it sure as hell looked like a dance as she rocked her body, flexed her shoulders and raised and lowered her leg. She was tapping and thrumming with her bare fingers at the same time. Jesus, she must be using some voodoo information her mother had taught her and she’d zombied whatever was on the line into stopping.

  Anyway, the thing’s first run was over and there were still a few yards of line to play with. The fish had stopped for a think. The windy buoy lay on the sea like one of the boobs in the kid’s new picture over his bunk.

  The air was mad with the noise of birds waiting for the net; the warps jiggled with the effort of hauling it in. Out to port lay the fish – what in God’s name was it doing?

  IT WAS A bit like the phoney war. Everyone all hepped up ready for action stations, and nothing’s happening. It was a spooky time, because you don’t really like to visualise monsters of the deep lying out there, 400 yards off the seaward beam – thinking.

  Then the shit hit the fan. The thing started making runs – dozens of them in great big mile-wide ‘S’ shapes. The line ran across Betty – in that weird stance of hers – with unceasing torque. She still had no gloves on but her hands we
ren’t cut at all: the strain was going through her body not her hands. But her fingers were always moving fast across the line as if she was playing it like a harp and Bob realised she was only touching it about a tenth as much as he would have done – or an ordinary fisherman.

  Then the fish changed tactics.

  ‘It’s turning downwind,’ she called to Bob. ‘Get hard inside it.’

  He wrenched to starboard; the boat turtle-speeded into the turn, unwieldy with the weight of the net. From over his shoulder he watched Betty’s movements through the galley window. Her hooked nose was like a wind gauge into the faint northerly; her thin body was counter-balanced in her stoop over the line by her huge backside. Prostitutional shock-absorbers, those buttocks must have been.

  ‘Now move away from it; turn it, turn it!’

  She’d spun around once and wrapped the line around her chest. If the goddamn monster ran again, she’d go in with it. They’d end up with a water-logged corpse still tied to her friggin’ fish, like Captain Ahab, stuck to his bloody big white whale. It was flattering and alarming at the same time – she completely trusted him to get inside the run of the fish.

  Bob hauled further to starboard; the fish was going like quicksilver through the sea. The strain on the line was spinning her slowly, and hauling her towards the fish. She was teetering on the fulcrum of her own heavy bum.

  Then the fish followed the bow. He’d turned it.

  ‘Keep moving forward! Keep downwind of it!’ she shrieked ungratefully.

  ‘I’m trying!’

  ‘Don’t try; just do it.’

  ‘Keep the damn thing away from my net. It could go through it like a friggin’ torpedo!’

  ‘Okay. Just don’t let the boat cross over the line.’

  Orders were screeched up and down the deck like seagull-speak. If the fish crossed under the net, the line would probably snap. Betty knew this, but she was calm, She’d soon craftily manoeuvred it to the offshore corner of the stern and was holding it there – by voodoo and harp magic – while they ran parallel with it. Fish against Ford. Best way to tire a fish. She didn’t have that fish on a line – she had it on a friggin’ leash.

  THE BIGNESS OF fish, the unseenness of them, the deepness and dangerousness of their world did things to Bob that he never talked about. He saw again, in his mind, the windy buoy-sized eye that had unflickeringly glared up at him from a glassy sea one day. Just here; no deeper out. Not out where they reckoned the giant squid lurked, but here, in eighteen fathoms, where he knew – deep in his personal water – they sometimes were.

  The sight of that massive eye had inspired a rectal clench equivalent to about fifty bar-crossings, and it was on that day that Bob Dodds had realised he was – and probably always had been – scared of the sea.

  He’d worked them out, these giant squids – chewed the fat about them with blokes that knew. Those that’d seen them. And really seen them – level-headed blokes like Crowbar Crowley, not yer friggin’ TV whizz-bangs like Jacques Cousteau and David Attenborough.

  Wisdom was, they didn’t live here. Came down from up Sri Lanka way, and around the Philippines. Headed south in the mating season, just cruising down the warm Tasman Front that starts at thirty degrees latitude in late July. The front reaches New Zealand and splits at Cape Reinga, with most of the flow heading south-east down the continental shelf as the East Auckland current.

  So they reckoned most of the squid went that way – east, feeding in the sudden deeps of Kaikoura.

  But some of the buggers must turn west at Cape Reinga – slide down the hard sands of the coast to mate in the gentle slopes of the sea off Westport. Friggin’ things were just like that other half million thieving bloody outa-towners – came down here just for the bloody whitebait season.

  The bits and pieces scientists sometimes found of them would be from old, spent grannies, past their prime and not up to the journey home. The young ones fed on whitebait jelly – bastards – then set off for the Mindanao Deeps and other such places. That’s the real reason you didn’t get birds over sea whitebait – they knew the squids weren’t far away. That was Bob’s secret theory, anyway.

  And for all he knew, there was one real pissed-off, Queen Mary-sized mother stuck on the sharp end of young Royce Rowland’s hook right now. This very minute.

  That unhairy-arsed bastard seemed able to catch females at will.

  BETTY WAS ROCKINGLY dancing with the line, feeding and retrieving it precisely in tune with the surge of the waves, never letting its direction vary. A good fisherman like Bob could tell that an amazing fisherman like her was never allowing the hook to change position in that thing’s mouth. Or beak.

  At the same time she was varying her swing, causing the thing to swim at max the whole time, tiring it; never letting the line go slack, never letting it rest. ‘The fish gains more from rest than the fisherman’ – old saying from the sea. And now, as she danced her weird voodoo fishing dance in that windward stern quarter, she was calling, ‘Get in a circle!’ At first Bob thought it was a new order for him but he realised she was talking to the fish. ‘Circle, circle, go on, circle,’ she was calling.

  Then it dived. He saw her lurch forward and the windy buoy suck from sight. He moved to the gears.

  ‘Don’t slow down!’ she called. ‘Keep driving away from it. Keep my line at forty-five degrees!’

  He swung away: any fish under the boat is a lost fish.

  She was leaning back on the line, pulsing her thighs, pumping the line, hauling the thing’s head around towards the boat. The difference between her body movements and what Nadine did in bed on a good night was minimal.

  The net doors reared out of the sea, hauling the juddering sweeps. The net was twisted, and twisting more, by the sharpness of the turn of the boat. This was the most unprofessional drag of his life. Any of the other fishing skippers saw this, he could be socially ruined for life.

  The kid was hunkered in the new toilet unit out of the way, jaw slack like the dumb prick he was. He’d get an arse kicking for this secret fishing. This was actions imperilling the safety of the boat. What if that fish pushed the net into the propellor? What were they gonna do if it was a twenty-foot mako? What the hell were they gonna do if it was a 100-foot friggin’ squid? Last bugger to get one of those on board was Captain Nemo – and look at the fuss it caused him.

  Sweat burst like vomit from inside Bob, to his forehead. He saw the eye again: it was yellow, square-pupilled, big as the face on the town clock. It was a mad, unblinking eye, an eye as seeing and as unseeing as a goat’s.

  Fear gave Bob a blazing common sense – what the hell were they trying to do? The insanity of it struck home again as he looked aft, through the galley windows, at a big-bummed Creole dancing voodoo at the short end of a line holding a friggin’ sea monster. Jesus! He’d been through the bloody looking-glass all right! This was lunacy of the first order. You fuck with nature at your peril. If you lure something from the deeps to the surface, then you friggin’ well face the consequences, mate! How were they gonna deal with 800 feet of squirming tentacle?

  Bob’s sight was coming in surges of black and red as he opened his mouth to bellow: Cut that friggin’ line!

  ‘It’s a tuna!’ he heard her cry. ‘Yeah, I knew it.’

  Bob never made his bellow. His dignity was saved.

  ‘Bluefin,’ she was saying. ‘It’s gone into a circle; only bluefin circle.’

  Several moments passed, in which Bob was not steering the wheel but leaning on it. Then as fear passed, logic set in. A what? A tuna?

  Bullshit.

  ‘Bullshit! Tuna’s an American fish. You don’t get them here.’

  He was disappointed. What the hell do you do with a tuna? Tuna was an all right tasting fish you bought in a can when the salmon ran out at the dairy. They were about the size of kingfish and you got them off Tauranga now and then. Not popular fish in the industry because they hung out with dolphins and scared everything else away. Never ca
tch them in a net – too fast, just swum out against the drag.

  So they’d all been dreaming. That bloody unhairy-arse young Jonah of a kid had hooked into a fairly big fighting fish that had got their pulses racing but that was gonna cause all sorts of distracting ructions till they’d got it in. Fun while it lasted, but suddenly, a bloody waste of time. And yet another trawl down the dunny because of this friggin’ kid!

  He slammed the boat into auto and went to the wheelhouse door. The orange onion bag of the net crackled and lurched in the wake behind the stern; in front of it, Betty danced and voodooed on.

  ‘Listen, this boat has got a living to make,’ he said, his voice made harsh by the secret embarrassment of the fear this thing had cranked up in him. ‘I’ve been in bloody dreamland. You’ve had your fun but we’re shooting this net out again right now!’

  ‘Now, just a cotton-picking minute, Bob,’ yapped Betty. ‘I’ve bin busting arse here half an hour for a fish you wanted caught …’

  ‘Well, I just changed my mind,’ boomed Bob. ‘I’ve got hand-to-mouth priorities. I just remembered, when I trawl out here I’m trawling for me and for my crew, but most of all I’m trawling for my friggin’ bank manager. And he don’t want no freak-sized kahawai that’ll probably end up in Jackie Mosley’s craypots.’

  The sweeps were hauling the net from the water. Bob made a step towards the winch.

  ‘Jeepers, Bob.’ It was the kid. ‘If you’d seen it … It’s massive. It’s shiny like fire, it’s …’

  ‘I don’t go with this tuna bullshit,’ put in Sticky, trying to stay leaden, but with a bit of emphasis leaking through, ‘but I reckon it could be a marlin with a broken sword. It’s big.’

  ‘We land this fish, Bob,’ said Betty, ‘this boat’ll take more records than you can sling a cat at.’

  Bob’s hunting instincts flared anew, though he stayed cool as he said, ‘So how big is it?’