Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  The fish came out of the water upright, then flopped onto one side to get the big muscles down its body really going. You could see them rippling and its scales – big as matchboxes – were crackling with light and clacking like marbles. Sometimes you could see under the scale edges – like the uplifted armour of gladiators.

  Betty unhooked her gaff and crouched beside the fish, seeming to get into its rhythm, moving in time with its struggles. If she slipped under it she’d be crushed to death. Didn’t stop her, though. As it flipped into the air once, she put her hand on its pectoral fin underneath, and pushed it flat against its body. It seemed a kind thing to do – as if to stop it landing on it and breaking it in its fight against drowning.

  Everyone had got totally drenched within one second of the fish bursting out of the sea, and God knows how high it’d flicked water, but it was still coming down ages later. The boat was shuddering with the thuds, even when they got the fish onto the mattresses. Those thuds were enormous. You got the feeling that some of the force from yesterday’s storm was now raging on the deck.

  It was amazing and near and real and … its colours were so clean and shining; it sparkled so bright it dazzled you. An electric rainbow, that’s how you’d best describe it. He was already regretting his attitude, and what happened next brought tears to his eyes.

  Betty wacked it with the mallet, fair between the eyes.

  It curled its body into a huge, eight-foot smile – head and tail high off the deck – then flopped into jitters on the mattresses. And with its upward blue eye it was watching him all the time.

  ‘Get it upright,’ snapped Betty.

  They hauled it onto its belly. It sank, under its own weight, into the white folds of its underneath – which now bulged like a beer pot.

  Betty straddled the fish, standing over it like the Grim Reaper, mallet in one hand, screwdriver in the other.

  She bent down and was running her hand up and down the top of its head as if massaging it. Then she dug her thumb into a little dent on its head. She turned the screwdriver around, laid the point on the dent and banged it into its poor head with the mallet, right up to the handle.

  Then, worse, she started grinding the screwdriver, round and round. The fish gave an earthquake of shudder and went stiff. Its mouth fell open as if in astonishment at such unfair play. The front one of its dorsal fins went up, stiff and hard, and brushed Betty’s big bum as she bent over the murder scene.

  Now the fish was trembling in massive shivers as if it was in the electric chair.

  ‘Gimme that line!’ Betty bawled, and jolted Royce out of his thoughts. Christ! he’d forgotten to cut the piece of line …

  He did it while she cursed him without swearing, and handed her five yards of the thick nylon.

  She took it, wrenched the screwdriver from the brain of the fish and started threading the nylon down the hole it’d left.

  The fish gave a splashed-quicksilver, scale-hissing shiver that shook out the last of its life. Then it flopped, and never moved again. It lay there, towering above the still, dulling heap of little lost fishes from the net.

  It was too dreadful. People aren’t adapted to cope with such demolition of beauty. Part of our humanness is knowing that doing this is really, really unnatural; it does things to your psychology that you probably never recover from. Once you’ve seen this happen, you are never the same again. Things that made Royce never the same again had been happening quite a lot lately.

  Betty kept pushing the blunt-faced red nylon line down the tuna’s spinal column, mulching it.

  ‘Jesus, Betty, you have to do that?’

  Royce was in a dream and had a feeling he’d said these words himself, but to his surprise he found it was Sticky.

  ‘Haven’t you done enough to that poor bloody thing?’

  His voice was croaky, his eyes were soft.

  ‘Pithing – Taniguchi method,’ she replied matter-of-factly. ‘You gotta destroy the brain and you gotta destroy the spinal cord before the fish dies naturally. Only way to stop fibrillation in the muscles. Let it fibrillate and you’ve got what the Japs call yake niku – burnt meat. Hang it up for the big trophy photo and the flesh’ll fall off the bone. Now we got a lot to do, so I don’t want no more goddamn conservationist crap. You wanted a fish, you got a fish. We got two minutes of heartbeat left to get this thing pumped outa blood. Keep it on its belly and hand me that knife.’

  She made a little stab cut just behind the pectoral fins on both sides of the silent fish. Blood came throbbing out, some of it jetting onto the deck a yard from the fish; other bits of it gushing down its side and staining the pure whiteness of its belly. It was still alive in there. Its brain had gone, but its staunch little heart was pumping on from memory, trying to do the right thing. Jesus, that was just so ironic: the heart didn’t realise it was helping cause death all over again by draining all its own blood out.

  ‘Get me the deck hose,’ said Betty. All three of them jumped up to do it – Royce realised then that the other two guys were as spooked by her butchery as he was – but he got there first.

  When he brought the big black hose back, she had lain the fish on its side and was cutting the poor thing’s bum out – you know that little hole underneath a fish? She’d neatly cut towards it (it gets jagged cutting the other way – Royce knew this from trevally and snapper) starting about six inches out, then around it, in a neat little circle.

  Then with a chucking sound of her hand she reached into the cut and pulled out the beginning of its intestinal system – little bum-hole still on the end, the whole important tube following after, in a big bright mangrove of guts.

  Then she shoved the hose into the little cavity the guts had excavated. Stained water started spurting from the belly. Then, up its head end the heavy, silver gill-slit opened like a flap – big as a dustbin lid – and at first you thought the movement was a bit of life left in the fish doing it. Then water burst out – and you knew there was deck hose water infiltrating that fish’s whole system now. Even the blood – still piddling out of Betty’s cuts behind the pec fins – was softer now, diluted by seawater.

  That unknowingly stolid tuna heart was – for the first and fatal time – tasting the seawater it had always lived in.

  ‘Ole Sweeney Todd, here,’ snarled Betty, hostile with defensiveness, ‘has just set about stopping the rate of metmyoglobin production in the body. So, now, on ice, your fish should last for weeks. Any objections?’

  ‘Cripes, don’t take this the wrong way, Betty,’ murmured Bob. ‘We’re really grateful; Christ, we woudn’t have known how to start treating this thing. Just that none of us …’

  And holy kermoley, even Bob’s voice started quivering! There was some serious grief going on over this fish. ‘It’s all so quick, you know?’ quavered Bob.

  ‘Yeah, well, it stays quick,’ she replied brutally. ‘We got about ten minutes left. We got to get those gill covers away from the body – but I’ll do it – everyone else is blinded by tears and may cut too deep.’ She leaned down, hauled a silver gill flap back, reached inside and made a couple of short, smart cuts. She leaned over and did the same on the other side. She looked a bit like a shearer when you thought about it. The likeness stopped, though, when she reached in and started hauling guts out through the gill-window of the fish. When she’d emptied it she cut that sort of mushroomy gill membrane out, pushed the gill back into place and you’d never know.

  ‘Seems to me it’s just heavy work left, Betty,’ said Bob, getting some manliness back. ‘We can take over with the donkey work.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she stood up, resting for the first time since the fish had come aboard. ‘Why not? Leave the donkey work to the donkeys, eh?’ She handed Bob the knife. ‘He’s all yours.’

  Bob took up a stance then gave a shrug and a dopey grin. ‘Dunno if I can get up to your dressing standard, Betty. That was a class act, all right.’

  Betty was hosing her arms down. ‘You haven’t been eat
ing with chopsticks for the last ten years, have you? Tell you what: you ever need an operation, make sure it’s a Jap or a Chow – someone who’s got chopstick skills.’

  Soon Bob was hauling out guts like nobody’s business.

  ‘My God, it’s hot in there,’ he said. ‘I could burn me hand on this fish!’

  ‘Yeah, well, if we don’t get it in the slurry soon, it’ll start cooking.’

  Bob worked on, yelping sometimes as he touched a really hot bit.

  ‘Now you’re gonna have to really scrub that backbone,’ said Betty as Bob stood up and booted away the ankle-deep guts that had accumulated around him.

  ‘Yeah, we’re up with you on that one, Betty,’ said Bob cheerfully, ‘and just so happens I hired a scrubber for this trip.’ He glared happily at Royce.

  ‘What do you call pot-mitts in this country?’ asked Betty.

  ‘Pot-mitts,’ said Royce. ‘But we haven’t got any. We’ve got brushes.’

  He retrieved a stiff nylon brush from the cupboard where the rubber gloves had been.

  When he got back the fish had been turned upside down on the mattresses and its sides pulled open. Inside was – nothing. Just a cavity where its guts – its engine – had been. There was soft purple gunk along the backbone and between the ribs, and this was evidently what he had to get rid of. He set to work, the deck hose nearby to wash out the results of his scrubbing.

  Under the gunk were pearl-coloured bones and a pure white lining before the bright red flesh started.

  The head-down nature of the scrubbing and the hard work must have made him a bit blood-to-the-brain dizzy because at one stage he had a vision. He wasn’t looking down, into the cavity, he was looking up, into the arches of an amazingly white church. Christ, this is what a church in heaven must look like – white and pearly and beautiful.

  It was about the first Presbyterian thought he’d had since Sunday School, when he was eight.

  When Betty announced that the fish was ready for chilling, Royce realised it was only fifteen minutes ago it had been hauled from the sea.

  ‘So where’s my wrench?’ purred Bob.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE

  STICKY HAD UNLOADED three ton of ling at the co-op that Thursday, then headed his boat straight across the Floating Basin to the slipway on the high tide.

  The Normandy wasn’t in the best of health and wouldn’t pass her survey – needed new spintles, sea-cocks and a bearing shaft. There was no chance of getting her down before the next full-moon tide, which meant a five-week lay-up, so he’d decided on a repaint as well. He’d look around for a bit of crewing work in the meantime.

  He left his vessel in dry dock and walked back down the wharf to the co-op office. Luminous winter day, windless and blue. He’d spooked a duck out of the swamp beside the slipway. It was swimming out across the perfect water of the Floating Basin, leaving a wake that spread from one side of the lagoon to the other. Such a huge wake for one small duck.

  Sticky walked past the weigh-shed in the hope of seeing Marjorie’s bum but she was sitting down and he could just see her breasts instead. They weren’t Marjorie’s best feature.

  They were among Penny’s better features, though. He’d be home soon. She’d be there. He’d told her Thursday.

  When he got back from the slip, Dooley was biffing big bits of ice out of the scowfuls of ling he was about to put on the company scales.

  ‘We give you this ice free,’ growled Dooley. ‘No way we’re gonna let you bastards sell it back to us.’

  ‘Don’t talk bullshit to me, Dooley,’ smiled Sticky. ‘You’re fossicking for scampi.’

  Ling forage on this delicious scampi that theoretically you only get in Aussie. Where it lived, around here, was a profound mystery, because no fisherman had ever found it locally. Yet ling were not a long-range fish. Someone was gonna make a fortune one day when they tracked down that scampi bed.

  Anyway, if it wasn’t too digested, you could pull it out of ling’s guts and cook it.

  ‘Clench yer sphincter, Sticky,’ said Dooley. ‘There’s something you gotta be told.’ He looked up for a moment, through his usual cigarette smoke.

  ‘Yeah? What’s that then, Dooley?’

  Dooley threw out another bit of ice. It was stained pink from the gunk off the ling and looked like fudge. ‘You bastards think money grows on seas,’ he said, which Sticky thought was pretty humorous.

  ‘Okay, Dooley,’ he said. ‘I’m clenched; shoot.’

  ‘Yeah, well, some bugger’s gotta tell you. May as well be me. Shit.’

  He’d pulled his fag out of his mouth with the hand he’d plucked the ice with, and it had turned the tissue transparent. Whether his ‘shit’ was because of his dead cigarette or the toughness of the telling he was about to do, you wouldn’t know. Maybe alarm bells should have started ringing when he didn’t immediately get his baccy-pouch out.

  ‘Things been happening while you were away, Sticky. No beating around the bush – Penny got caught with a schoolkid. Turning it up for Tommy Rowland’s boy, on Scotty Ames’ lawn two nights ago.’

  It wasn’t the horror of the situation or the sickness it made him feel; it was Dooley calling her Penny that started him off. He’d never known that Dooley knew, or that anyone knew, but just by him calling her Penny, it made it sound – caring. It let you know that Dooley knew how much it hurt. Sticky felt this welling up of something out of his belly, and he thought he was going to be sick, but it came out as a wail of grief and his head just burst open with tears.

  Funny things happen in your mind at a time like that, and he was thinking that crying was sort of a way of thanking Dooley for his concern.

  ‘Jesus, Sticky, you soft-cock bastard,’ Dooley had said, gruff and gentle. Then he’d put his arm around him and steered him over to his office and given him a Johnnie Walker.

  HE’D WALKED UP the drive and rung the bell, knowing every friggin’ curtain on both sides of Romilly Street right now was being twitched. Reggie answered, white-faced and shaking his head. ‘It’s shit, Sticky, it’s all just shit. There’s nothing but shit. The whole town knows. We’re the talk of the district. It’s just shit, shit, shit.’ His head-shakes were getting wild and he was just muttering sentences with ‘shit’ in them.

  Sticky pushed past him, down the bright modern passage to the kitchen. ‘Why didn’t you look after her, you pathetic bastard?’ he screamed. ‘I would’ve taken her away from you if I thought you weren’t gonna look after her!’

  ‘It all just turned to shit, Sticky. There’s nothing I could do. She’s a devil; she can’t help herself.’

  ‘Shuddup or I’ll slam you! If you’d had more guts …’ and the conversation ended there. Because how could logic explain that Sticky expected her husband to stand aside for him, yet keep her from everyone else? There were whole huge explanations between Reg and Sticky that had never been made, and were now redundant.

  ‘Where is she?’

  ‘Gone, Sticky. I kicked the bitch out.’ He said it with enthusiasm, as if he expected to be congratulated.

  ‘Where?’

  ‘Dunno. Who cares? Good riddance to bad rubbish to the stinking bitch …’

  Then he broke down in inconsolable tears.

  Holy shit. Holy conundrumous shit. There are situations that are totally beyond human capacity. Sticky put a hand on the pathetic bastard’s trembling shoulder. ‘There, there, Reg,’ he said, to the bloke he’d been cuckolding for three years.

  SHE WAS IN Papanui with a sister.

  ‘Are you him?’ the sister had said at the door.

  ‘Yeah,’ he’d answered, his jaw big and his heart soaring, ‘I’m him.’

  Proof! She loved him. She was contrite, reformed, reaffirmed. And desperate – desperate that she’d be rejected by ‘him’ for ever.

  Well, she wouldn’t. He was a bigger man than that. Time would heal the wounds. They would start life anew – over here. He’d fish out of Lyttelton, and grotty little Reg was behind
them for ever. He felt pure and replete and forgiving.

  ‘Come in.’

  He went into this mean little kitchen where you could see a stupid great swimming pool out the back that obviously nobody used. Penny was by the mantelpiece of this boarded-up wetback, smoking and looking thin and impossibly distant. Truth be told, she looked bloody awful. And bewilderingly hostile.

  ‘I don’t know why you’ve come,’ she spat. ‘I told you on the phone not to come. It’s a stupid waste of time and isn’t going to do anyone any good. I can’t stop you being here but I just wish you’d say your piece and get out.’

  His piece never got said.

  Love just won’t let you ask the question: ‘Why did you do it?’

  What’s she sanely supposed to answer? Because I’m a nymphomaniac? Because I hate you? Because I wanted to be humiliated, fired and driven from my home town?

  Raw, unbreachable inevitability stared out of her stained, impenetrable eyes. He turned from it, and walked away.

  The big old clock on the mantelpiece banged three as he retreated down the passage towards the frosted door.

  HE HAD RACED the dreary 300 miles home from Christchurch to Westport in the red Triumph Vitesse he had bought – new – two years ago, to impress her; cursing, as he blindly sped, every bracket, rivet and joint of its fabrication.

  He made toast in his miserable kitchen – the third miserable bloody kitchen he’d been in over the last few days – and daubed it with peanut butter that somehow scalded his palate with clammy density. He drank half a bottle of Wood’s Navy Rum and lurched blitheringly into his bedroom and the high, slightly damp three-quarter bed that had been theirs for three years.

  He slept badly, and dreamed of her coming to him in a room – not this one – and shedding white clothes until she shone with slightly imperfect nudity. He could see the faint creases on her skin left by the tightness of her undergarments and when she stood beside him at the bedside, light shone through the gap at the very top of her thighs like the light of the star of Bethlehem leading the way.