Royce, Royce, the People's Choice

by Peter Hawes

  She slid her right hand under the blankets of the bed in the room, down his flank and over his thigh into his groin. His balls were heavy and hot and he felt a blessed coolness as she unstuck them from his body.

  She had got into the bed beside him and her right leg was over his, although she was not entirely straddling him. She was kneading his groin in a way that inspired feelings he had not known before.

  She leaned down to his face, her breast touching his with a familiar softness that made him gasp. Then she was kissing him.

  The kiss increased, becoming demanding, driving – until he was in danger of suffocation. The leg across his thighs had become a bar, the hand at his groin a vice and the tongue in his mouth a gag. He shuddered her away from him with a grunt of puzzled anger. He realised he was in a nightmare and struggled to the surface of wakefulness.

  There he found he was in another dream, from which he woke to find she was Laura Rowland.

  Then he awoke.

  THERE HAD BEEN no plan to kill Royce Rowland. Ordinary people don’t do murder – murderers are special and Sticky had no illusions about himself. He just wanted to know what he’d feel when he was next to him.

  Not much. Not a hell of a lot. Sticky had stared at Royce as he came into the council chamber that day, and waited for his feelings to start. All that happened was he got this memory, and realised the bed Penny had entered in his dream the other night was in his flat in Lyttelton. Laura – she who was standing at the council chamber door right now with the kid – was lying in it, still breathing heavily from the enormous energy of the orgasm she’d just had. Her eyes were closed and she was on her back. Then she’d opened them and looked up at him and they were clear, somehow, as if one layer of skin had been peeled off them and she was seeing clearly for the first time. She was just breaking into a radiant smile of clarity, sanity and love when a voice had said, ‘Mummy, I don’t like it when you do that.’

  There’d still been no plan when he got the job on the Aurora with the kid. It was paid work, preferable to having to take a stand-down; it was common sense. He’d have done it whether the kid was on board or not. Oh, you took note of the fact that Bob Dodds was really pissed off about being leaned on to take the kid, and you knew he had no reason to feel fondly towards the little bastard, but you still weren’t making plans or anything.

  And he made absolutely no plans while they were at sea. He could say this confidently because he’d been watching himself, spying on his own moods and opinions, waiting to see if they were ever going to turn bad. You’d lie there at night in that fart-filled fo’c’sle, your head six inches from the kid’s, listening to his angelic breathing. Things got mighty ambivalent, truth to tell: you’d be waiting for an opinion of the kid to form – and that would put you in mind of Penny, and that generally led to masturbation until you realised you were wanking off on a memory that had started with the kid next to you, which raised profound questions about yourself, which was bloody ridiculous because you knew the answer precisely and it had nothing to do with pillow-biting.

  But even more complicated was the fact that this wank would move from him shagging Penny to watching the kid doing it to her! He was watching them do it, and his days at sea were spent overcoming the intense desire to ask the little arse-wipe what it was like. He wanted to know. Just like Bob had wanted to know.

  In fact the first murderous urges he’d felt were in those seconds when the kid was telling Bob, up there in the wheelhouse during the storm, what it was like. To his own amazement, as he spied on himself, he found he was overwhelmed with disappointment when the kid confessed that he hadn’t done it – even though it cobororated … collaborated … confirmed what Penny had said. Somehow, the kid’s not doing it made Sticky lose her all over again. That’s when he’d gone mad – when he’d got solid proof that the act that had brought an end to three years of perfect happiness had been a failure. He’d lost Penny, and the kid hadn’t even got a shag.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO

  DEEP, WELL ROUNDED, huge, hunched shoulders. Sublime. There was an ineffable beauty about these fish that dazed her every time. She’d watched, entranced as the great fish surfaced.

  Later, as she gutted it, Betty learnt that it was a male. She’d hauled its little gonads out the gill-slit. There had been no parasites around the gills and that had surprised her at first. Big, mature twenty-year-old southern bluefin should have had at least a few bugs. Then she’d noticed how thick-skinned it was. The number of scales on a fish is constant and so, as the fish gets fatter, the scales have to cover a bigger area. Right now this guy’s scales were overlappingly stacked like casino chips. In other words this was a young fish. It wasn’t a huge southern bluefin at all – it was a baby northern bluefin! This fish had another six feet of growing to do.

  What the hell was a northern bluefin doing down here? In all her time with Japanese fleets – any fleets – she’d never heard the like. If there were northern bluefin in these waters the Japs would have known, sure as God made little apples. They’d been secretly testing for every known variety of fish down here since 1972; as far as they were concerned you got striped tuna above New Plymouth and the occasional southern bluefin down below Hokitika. In between, nothing. Overall the Japs didn’t regard New Zealand as a bluefin country. They didn’t even bother fishing tuna on the West Coast, and just sent a few boats to the east coast – especially in El Niño years when there were good westerly air flows.

  Weather-wise, this year had been different. It had been a puzzle: it wasn’t El Niño, and it wasn’t non-El Niño. There’d been talk of an El Niño opposite, which the wits were calling – what else? – La Nina. Whatever: new weather had brought with it a new fish – it was the only explanation she had for why she was now processing a northern bluefin tuna, caught in the sea off Westport.

  Just don’t stuff up now.

  They are wonderful. They are amazing. They are sprinters and the biggest, strongest, smartest bony fish in the sea. Smart – yet this beautiful young male had taken a bait meant for a giant squid and weighed down by a monkey wrench! Praise be. Talk about weird: first northern bluefin to travel down from the Caribbean or the Baltic to the sea off Westport gets fooled by some wacko kid and ends up on the deck of a fleabag trawler, ten miles away from a fleet of the most voracious fishermen on the sea.

  Bluefin tuna cruise along, powered by the big dark muscles on either side of their body, which are adapted for long, continuous swimming and can get their owner across the Pacific in fifty days. These dark muscles operate only when oxygen is available.

  In emergencies the huge, deeper, bright red muscle blocks come into play; they supply massive energy but quickly exceed the oxygen supply. Then the muscles start burning – and produce acid. If the tuna dies in that state, you’ve got PSE and end up with yake niku – mush.

  Well, they’d got it aboard pretty smartly and she had done the iki – the spike – pretty smartly too. Gutting had gone fine; now it was get down to some solid chilling.

  She got the kid to wipe the fish gently down with a damp cloth. While he did this she checked out the fish’s physical credentials. Left was its best side, she decided.

  ‘Okay, guys, we gotta get it into the slurry,’ she said. ‘Left side up. Don’t let it bend – don’t move it by the tail. Let’s do it.’

  She swirled the cold brine for a last time to get rid of warm spots.

  With lots of wheezing, snorts and omnipresent Kiwi cursing, the guys transferred it from the mattresses to the bath. Oaths there may have been in abundance, but goddamn, they’re a sentimental lot these New Zealanders – every one of them looked like a tremble-lipped pall-bearer as he laid his cargo down.

  Slurry is the best way of chilling. Water gets in deeper than ice can, and you’ve gotta get the temperature down as low as you can before rigor mortis starts. A well-chilled fish takes longer to go into rigor. A warm fish this size will take, say, half an hour, whereas a good chill will hold it off for six hours
or more.

  Anyway, the fish was down, and it would lie there for at least the next half day to ensure it was chilled to the core. After that they would move it to the ice, before the meat started to fade and the eyes went white.

  They stood over it, the blokes still looking like mourners. The big fish lay in its bed, rocking with the swell and looking up at the sky. The situation must have been a bit more familiar to it now: it was seeing the sky through water again.

  The seabirds were going insane with impatience.

  ‘Well, now,’ said Bob sweetly, with this enamel-free smile on his big square face, ‘maybe now I can get on with my occupation?’

  LEAST SHE COULD do was help with cleaning the catch. Pretty lean pickings by the look of it – there’d been more in the belly of the bluefin than in the goddamn net. Few flats, a couple of skate, a conger eel. Mind you, the net had hardly been down. They’d lost a lot of deck bins in the storm last night, evidentally, and Bob’d sent the kid down into the hold to repack and make room. Bob wasn’t going down there himself – and nor was the tall shifty one, Sticky. They were watching each other like gun-slingers.

  There was a lot of tension on this boat. Betty had noticed during the cleaning that neither man would go within a mile of the other’s knife. There was bad blood over something. Could be spilt blood, too – could well be a mutilated body down in the fo’c’sle for all she knew; often was. Murder was standard reaction to cabin fever, though it was rarer among inshore trawlers. The Japs’d lost three on the squid fleet so far this year, that she knew of. But then who gave a tinker’s? Quiet massacre among friends – she’d seen it all. She got on with hosing down the deck.

  There was a Pago Pago skein line crewman she’d known once, who’d trod on a few local corns in Hong Kong and ended up in the harbour with his throat cut.

  Known twice, now she came to think of it.

  Anyway, then, would you believe it, a local trawler off Macau caught a tiger shark a day later with the guy’s arm in it – identified by his tattoo. The whole crew were arrested, then got off when their lawyer – a New Zealand guy it was, too, by coincidence – pointed out that a single arm didn’t qualify as habeus corpus.

  She’d noticed the tension as soon as Sticky’d arrived up from the fo’c’sle during their first cup of tea that morning. They’d been introduced – with mutual lack of interest – then Sticky had moved his glare from her to Bob and left it there. Bob looked pretty indestructible – heavy built, 200 pounds, fifty-fivish but fit enough. But this Sticky was the febrile type who could run amok and cause major loss of life in a short time. Seemed reasonably close to doing it, too. The kid was one of those angelic types that causes most of the stoush in the world, by being fought over. Laurel and Hardy here were probably fighting over the kid’s virginity. Poor kid: two of the ugliest suitors he’d encounter in his lifetime.

  They were three hours out, Bob said. The net was out for a two-hour drag so there was nothing to do but chew the fat. Oh, one other thing.

  ‘You got ship to shore, Bob?’

  ‘Of course,’ replied Bob, stiffly. ‘You’re not in hillbilly territory now.’

  ‘Right. What we gotta do now,’ she said, ‘is we gotta get a coffin made.’

  Bob had looked startled, but not alarmed; probably wasn’t a body in the fo’c’sle after all.

  THEY WERE ALL but back. It was 6.35pm in a surgingly untroubled sea. High, uniform grey cloud that created the sort of refracted, pewter sunlight that pissed your eyeballs off no end. A low line of mashed potato cumulus on the horizon that would light up as the sun set.

  Net was in – average catch – cleaned and stored. They weren’t quite within the one-mile zone, when you had to switch to Port Frequency, and Bob wasn’t sure he was going to anyway. It was against Maritime Safety Authority regulations not to, of course, and all hell would break loose if he didn’t – but fuck it, he wasn’t in the mood to be under the jurisdiction of dick-headed Lew Hughes after the storm balls-up.

  He still hadn’t quite made up his mind who was gonna take the Aurora over the bar. He’d been checking the surface off the bar for how strong the set was gonna be after the storm. River water floats on the top of salt, and the meeting of the two makes a line you can gauge the strength from. The further to the east it bends, the stronger the cross current.

  It didn’t look too bad from here: seemed to be running a long way out, and to the north-east. Strong to moderate, not lethal. The run in the river usually peaked twelve to eighteen hours after a storm, which was about now. But the swell was nothing great – obviously they’d been in the guts of the storm out there, and it hadn’t got inshore into the mountains and pumped the river up.

  Wind was a flukey northerly and doing bugger-all to the swell, so overall, conditions were a hell of a lot better than they could have been after a storm like that.

  But still probably too much for the kid to take the wheel.

  Ideally Bob would have had Sticky there, occupying all his time and attention on the crossing, but in his present frame of mind that mad bastard might run them into the friggin’ Eastern Breakwater.

  Trouble was, for that precise reason – Sticky’s state of mind – Bob didn’t want to steer her in himself. Didn’t want to turn his back on the bastard for that long. Sticky was suffering a serious bout of fucked-in-the-headedness, and you couldn’t take your eye off him.

  All a bit of a conundrum, actually. And a great shame in a way, too – they’d been reasonable mates for years, him and Sticky, and if Sticky’d been a physically weaker sort of feller, Bob could even start feeling sorry for him. I mean, Christ, his sex life had taken a real mauling from the rooting Rowlands all right! But, thing was, at a critical time like this you needed all your hostility on muster, in case he had a go at you.

  Of course there was always Betty. Probably turn out to be a better navigator than any of them. Yeah, that might be the answer. Shit. Americans drive on the other side of the road. Do they navigate on the other side, too? Don’t be daft, Bobby Dodds.

  ‘You wanna take her in, Betty?’ he called, over his shoulder and down the wheelhouse.

  ‘Sure, Bob,’ she called back, from over at the slurrybed where she’d sort of all but pitched tent.

  She came in, took the wheel in a firm, confident grasp. ‘What’s the rules?’

  ‘Main local rule is clench your sphincter. Otherwise keep a mile off the entrance before you make your approach, be ready for heavy drag to the east, and watch that the river run might hold you up a bit at the bar.’

  ‘Aye aye, cap’n. What are the leading lines?’

  ‘I’ll point them out when we turn the corner. Oh, and let me answer the RT if it goes. Now, what do we do with this damn fish, then?’

  ‘It’ll need to go on ice in a few hours, I’ll tend to that. Coffin’ll be on the wharf when we tie up; I’ve got that organised with Downie’s.’

  ‘Yeah,’ replied Bob with a slight shudder. ‘Coffin: funny one, that.’

  CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE

  BIG, WIDE, RAW river bisected by a training wall. Buller River. Black bridge in the distance – and beyond, ugly puce mountains that reared like slabs of ox liver. To port, a mile-long frieze of ancient timber wharfage. Cranes, pyramids of coal and a white, high-rise cement silo glowing in the evening sun. Starboard, 200 yards of brown river-width then psychedelically green farmland and blue swamp. A bucket dredge called the Mawhera was gouging up gravel and mud beside a big black three-storey crane. The dredge’s deck was awash with water and eels. There was only one vessel moored at a wharf that could have held twenty ships – the Buller Lion, a high, red cement boat of a few thou’ tons.

  Betty turned port at the green light on the jetty and into a lagoon. A Sargasso Sea of decaying fishing boats. Rainbows of oil sparkled on the sunset water. Seagulls shared the water with ducks – a strange combination. Ahead of them a shed with a blue roof. ‘WELCOME TO MERLORDS’ said the roof, in white. A good-looking brunette with long
legs in jeans strolled out of the shed and stood over them on the wharf above, legs apart like the Colossus of Rhodes. The three guys stared up into the seam of her jeans.

  Bob took over the wheel and jemmied them into a berth. Moored behind them was a quaint little sixteen-footer with an old guy aboard that someone hailed as ‘Captain Calmwater’. Droll.

  The tall, flat-arsed deckhand called Sticky had been below and only came up as they moored. He had a bulgier shore bag than you’d expect if he was coming back. Obviously he was signing off. As the motor closed down he looked at Bob, and Bob looked back and you could just about see the sparks where their hates collided.

  ‘I’ll pick up me pay tomorrow,’ said Sticky as he turned away to climb the ladder to the wharf-top. ‘Have it ready.’

  ‘Fifteen percent,’ said Bob, ‘including on the tuna.’

  ‘Fucking waste of time. You got shit-fer-brains, Bob.’ And Sticky stumped up the wide, steep ladder with an energy made of anger.

  The kid was unbattening the hold.

  Bob walked past her, putting the engine keys in his pocket. ‘There’s usually a cop up there,’ he muttered, ‘you got any reason not to see him?’

  ‘Nothing illegal, but I’ll take some explaining, I suppose. You want that?’

  ‘Nah. He’s only here to bludge anyway. Stay outa sight.’

  From inside the cabin she heard a voice booming down from the wharf above, of a timbre that would have carried through a storm: ‘Cocaine run’s not till Tuesday, Alf, you dozy bugger,’ it said. Then a goggled freak appeared at the yellow crane on the wharf-top in a nebula of cigarette smoke. She lurched back from the cabin window in case it was the cop. If it was, he could only have been recruited to frighten crims to death. He was one pug-ugly human being.