Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Page 12

  Right. Holy shit.

  Every last ounce of yesterday’s stew is piling up at the back door of his sphincter; his mind reels with the memory of losses on the bar: drownings, overturnings, strandings … four deaths a year …

  ‘I can’t do this, Bob,’ he whimpers. ‘You’ve got to take it in over the bar.’

  ‘We crossed the bar three minutes ago, you friggin’ soft-cock,’ growls Bob.

  Royce looks around: on either side are the strong homely walls of the Tip Head. ‘I drove across the friggin’ bar!’ he laughs, and Bob laughs toothlessly with him.

  THE AURORA ALWAYS tied up on the port side because it had an off-centre hatch. Bob had taken over for the docking and steered past the co-op loading wharf, then sharply turned to bring her under the Sculley’s crane, prow once more facing north.

  He was back: Royce, the fisherman, home from the sea.

  Then there was a half-hour butt-freeze getting the bins of fish onto the wharf with Dooley Morgan’s crane. Dooley toppled the craneloads of fish into the scow with one finger.

  Sticky drove the scows to the weigh-shed on a forklift. Bob packed them into the co-op freezer with another.

  It was 3.50 in the afternoon. Time to call up Gilbert and Jimmy and head down the Gren to tell fishing yarns.

  ‘Right, we’ll fix that net,’ said Bob.

  ‘… Jeez, Bob, I was gonna whip home and see my mother.’

  Bob screwed up his eyes and pursed his lips; his face disappeared into slits again. ‘Listen, kid,’ he said mildly, ‘this boat isn’t a prison. But I want you to treat it as one. For the foreseeable future, you live here – on board, in your little port bunk. The boat is in your care while it’s moored, right? While aboard you do not drink; while in port, you do the little chores I will assign you. If you go out, it is in my company, or under the supervision of someone I trust. Later we may stroll down for a few quiet beers, and if we do so, we’ll go to McManus’s. You don’t drink at the Gren any more, because fishermen drink at McManus’s or the Albion. If we drink, I will pay: then take it out of your wages. In this way I render you helplessly dependent, a privilege used by captains since time immemorial. Tomorrow, when you go to get the stores – with the chit I will give you – you may visit your mother. Now, we’ll get on with the net. The reason I cut the net today is because I am a net-maker, one of the two in the district. And I’m the best one. Let’s go.’

  THEY DID GO for a drink later, and it was to McManus’s. The pub was owned by Squeak Harrington. His barman was Brendan Mosley, Billy’s older brother. Between them, Squeak and Brendan weighed about forty stone. They couldn’t get past each other behind the bar so you could only drink what was down their end, or take yourself down the other. ‘Dark’s this end, draught’s Brendan’s,’ said Squeak. Royce had dark, because he was too tired to walk down the bar – and he preferred it anyway.

  Sticky had buggered off somewhere and Royce and Bob didn’t seem to have a lot to say for the first half pint. And then Dooley Morgan arrived and that was the end of the silence.

  ‘Just got back from a cultural trip to Christchurch, Bob,’ he said as he sat down beside them. ‘Shouted Annette a trip over to this Swan Lake show, done by some commie outfit. Then stone me, at the last minute her sister comes down with hives and I have to go to the bloody thing myself. Hoist on me own bloody petard, Bob. I thought about you during the show, actually. “Fuck me,” I said to meself in the third act, “this fuckin’ show’s exactly the same length as a Bob Dodds drag.” Tell you what though, Bob: legs. That jumping around on tiptoe sure shapes them pins. You’ve never seen anything like them. No tits – but arse, thighs, calves … Jesus. We were up the front, and it was just like looking up at a skyful of twats. Fisherman’s element, Bob: a shoal of coozer.’

  Royce felt contented and overwhelmingly weary.

  ‘So how was the trip, kid?’ asked Dooley.

  ‘Great, Mr … Dooley, yeah, really interesting.’

  ‘Less said about it the better,’ growled Bob darkly. ‘Kid’s the usual no-hoping, unhairy-arsed Jonah. Know what he puts in his friggin’ sandwiches? Bananas!’

  ‘Made a bit of a slip there, kid, eh?’ chortled Dooley. ‘Here, don’t hang around the engine too much either, otherwise you won’t get me sitting next to you again. Engines flatten your beer. Take old Flag – if he’s not tinkering with his friggin’ engine he’s tinkering with someone else’s. Pour him a beer and it’s dead flat first sip. Diesel, see? Flattens every beer in a radius of three yards.’

  They finished their beers. ‘Get ’em in, boy,’ said Bob and slid him a twenty dollar note. Royce collected the glasses stood up … and sat down.

  ‘Go on,’ ordered Bob. ‘You’ve been on your arse for three days, now you can do some work. Get up to the bar.’

  ‘I can’t,’ said Royce. ‘I’m pissed.’

  ‘On one beer?’ Bob’s eyes were closed, his mouth tight in a smile; in other words his face had gone AWOL again. ‘Get away – go on, on your feet.’

  ‘The floor’s on a slope. It’s rolling.’

  Bob and Dooley laughed fit to bust. Seems he’d just got his sea legs. That means you lose your land legs and every footpath and floor becomes a deck.

  LYING ON HIS bunk that night was the first time the world stopped moving. His inner body rhythms were in sync with the rolling of the boat at its berth and he slept like a baby.

  Next day his orders were to water-blast the deck, then refill the ice-chests. ‘Not too heavy on the blasting,’ said Bob as he left. ‘Blows the caulking outa the deck. Oh, by the way’ – he’d stopped at the bottom of the ladder, his face creased up into disappearance – ‘about sea legs: it’s not that the land starts rolling – it’s that it doesn’t. Think about that next time it happens, it might help.’

  Royce spent an hour on water-blasting, then went to find Dooley for the ice. There was this big drum on the first floor inside Dooley’s ice-shed, which froze the layer of thin water that trickled down the inside of it. You just knocked it off by belting the drum and the ice tinkled off like a broken window. Dooley had had a two-storey shed built, then had the ice-maker installed on the top storey. That way he just had to drive a scow under it with a forklift, open the overflowing ice-room, and let the product fall into it. Not an inch of muscle required – apart from opening the door.

  Cripes, you should see the difference over at the Merlord ice-shed. The Buller team forwards came down here to do weight-training by shifting ice at Merlord!

  ‘Right, let’s see what you’ve learned about tea-making,’ Dooley had said on opening the door to his office, after turning up two hours late.

  THEY’D HAD ABOUT five or six cups so far, and Dooley didn’t seem in the slightest inclined to get on with the heavy chore of moving ice. He just sat in his big comfortable office armchair by the heater and ashtray, and told yarns about his life.

  Like the time he’d gone to Singapore a coupla years back on company business and had been hailed by this fabric seller who says, ‘Look at the quality of my cloth, good sir,’ and invites him in for a beer. In the shop he shows Dooley all these bolts of cloth which were very nice but Dooley wasn’t here for cloth. Mind you, he was here for the beer and they came thick and fast. Then the guy says he comes to New Zealand quite often and it was always handy to have contacts so could they swap cards? Well, as it happens, the company had just made Dooley a wad of business cards that he was quite proud of – probably the first business card in the district – so he hands one over. Coupla minutes later the guy says he just has to duck out the back for a moment. And he does, while Dooley has another beer. ‘Well, fuck me,’ says Dooley, ‘when he comes back he says, “I have just been talking to your wife on the phone, and she would like three dresses: one in the light blue, one red and one in suede.” I spent over 200 bloody dollars in that shop! Now that’s selling, boy.’

  Royce laughed. He was all right, was old Dooley: it was good to yarn with him.

  Well, he
could now, this was his life. He felt warm, even though he was on the other side of the heater from Dooley.

  The phone rang.

  ‘Sculley’s co-op, Dooley speaking, whadder yer fuckin’ want?’ Then he frowned. ‘Who? I might do, who wants to know? Linda who? Yeah, all right, Linda, I’ll put him on.’ He held out the phone to Royce. ‘Linda Harvey. Now, you tell her you can’t go out anywhere: you’re grounded, mate, until you hear otherwise.’

  Royce took the phone, put it gently to his ear as if he didn’t want to hurt her voice. ‘Hey, gidday, Linda, how’d you know I was here? How are you?’

  ‘The whole school knows you’re back. I want to talk to you.’

  ‘Gosh, Linda, I want to talk to you too, but I’m sort …’ he looked across at Dooley, who glared back through a gap in his tobacco smoke.

  ‘Can’t come down here,’ said Dooley. ‘Girls are off-limits down here. Unless they’re authorised ringbolts.’

  ‘I suppose you mean at the Doo Duk Inn, do you?’ he asked her.

  ‘Yes,’ she said.

  ‘Well, look, I’ve got work to do till about mid-afternoon, but if you were to head down there after school, say four (it went without saying Linda Harvey wouldn’t have a detention) I might just be able to meet you.’

  Dooley was already shaking his head by the time Royce said his goodbyes and hung up. ‘I don’t think you realise how serious this is, boy. You’re under strict supervision – that’s the deal or you could face charges. Don’t think you’re gonna get any favours out of me just because I’m not a hard-arsed bastard like Bob Dodds.’

  ‘I’m not looking for favours, Dooley,’ said Royce, holding up his hands in a sort of double fend, to show innocence. ‘It’s just that I’d like you or Bob to ring anyone in my class and ask them about Linda Harvey. She doesn’t smoke, she doesn’t drink, she goes home early, she won’t turn it up for anyone – won’t even let them kiss her. She’s as square as they come, Dooley; hell, she’s the last person I really want to meet right now, but at least she’s somebody.’

  ‘Jesus, boy, you know the rules. So do I: I made them.’

  ‘Well, what about the one that Bob said: “only with me or someone I can trust.” Just give us a break, Dooley. Get Bob to check her out: she’s so angelic it makes you sick. Of all the people at school, she’s the one you can trust the most.’

  Dooley blew out a sort of thought bubble of smoke, shrugged and made a call.

  ‘Right, let’s get that ice in,’ he said as he hung up.

  Royce worked his guts out down in the hold while Dooley leaned over his crane, watching. He would have made a direct hit with his friggin’ cigarette ash if there hadn’t been a slight southerly blowing it past the deck.

  An hour or so later Royce heard the outside bell of Dooley’s office phone blaring. Dooley disappeared and returned. ‘Okay, yer little girlfriend Linda’s clean,’ he called down. ‘You can get spruced up and go at four. Don’t be late home.’

  Royce’s little heart sang.

  Dooley’s head reappeared beside the stubby green crane on the wharf above him. ‘Oh, by the way, unscrew the shower nozzle and take out the barley sugar. Don’t tell Bob I told you.’

  ‘Barley sugar?’

  ‘Yeah, melts in the heat of the water and covers you in sweet elephant glue. Takes a week to peel it off your skin and get your hair to stop behaving like wood.’

  CHAPTER FIFTEEN

  HE HALF SPRINTED down Palmerston Street so he wouldn’t be late, but he was there before her. He sat down by the window. Big Mavis Hutton, who had been at school with him until last year when she left to work here in her mum’s shop, came out from behind those dangling lines of plastic in the doorway that keep flies out. She stood behind the cake cabinet guarding her mother’s lamingtons, which looked like giant pink speckled bits of Lego. The two of them stayed in stand-off until Linda arrived on her bike. He watched her get off but didn’t see anything.

  She wore her navy school uniform, which suddenly seemed incredibly old-fashioned. He had that same belly-swoop of long-ago schooldays as she came in.

  She didn’t smile, and sat down like you see wives doing in prison visiting rooms in TV dramas.

  ‘Did you order?’ she said.

  Order? ‘Well, I was going to buy a lemonade. What would you like?’ Damn! He had no money. ‘A white coffee?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I … um … don’t get paid till end of the month.’

  ‘It’s all right.’

  She took a $10 note out of her blouse pocket to check it, then put it back in. He kept watching the pocket for a few moments because it was over her right breast. He looked up. She was frowning.

  ‘Right is starboard,’ he said. ‘I know quite a lot of nautical information now.’

  ‘How could you do that, Royce?’ she said, in a small voice. Christ, she looked like she was gonna cry.

  ‘Do what?’ Stare at her pocket?

  ‘That. What you did with that damn Mrs Turton.’

  Oh God, this was serious. He’d never heard her swear before. ‘Look, Linda, it didn’t mean anything …’ What the hell did that mean? He’d heard it in movies and thought it was pathetic. Now he realised it’s what you do say when you’re in a situation like this. In other words you say three parts of fuck-all.

  Her incredible blue eyes had a little line of water at the bottom. The left one spilled. Port. Shut up!

  ‘I thought we were …’

  He leaned forward, a bit amazed. ‘What?’

  ‘When I heard what you’d been caught doing I was just so …’

  ‘What?’ Christ, did he really want to know?

  ‘Disgusted!’

  He flicked a glance at the cake cabinet. Bloody Mavis Hutton was still there, ears flapping. ‘Could we have a white coffee and a lemonade, please, Mavis?’

  ‘Look, Linda.’ He reached over the table and put his hand on top of hers, which were lying there. Put his hand on top of hers! And she didn’t move. It was the most intimate thing he’d ever done with her and it was in the middle of a bollocking about someone else! Christ, life’s a funny thing.

  Then she took one hand out from under to wipe her eye and he realised she was so upset she probably hadn’t even noticed his hand.

  It seemed a good tactic to get in first with something, steer the conversation. Anything she was going to say was going to be pretty grim. ‘What did you think we were?’

  ‘I just started crying in front of Dana Glover when she told me. I couldn’t help it. She said Mrs Turton had no clothes on and you were with her.’

  She scrunched her eyes up and sort of pulled her mouth down in this incredibly ugly way.

  ‘Jeez, Linda, don’t do this to yourself. Look, I’m really sorry. Really, really sorry. Hell, if I’d known it was going to hurt you like this …’ And he stopped, shook his head. He’d stopped because his throat was gummed up with pre-crying. A sudden, shocking, out-of-nowhere wave of remorse engulfed him and paralysed his words. He stared at her and she stared at him, head-shaking and speechless and both out of focus with tears. ‘I wouldn’t have, I wouldn’t have. Honest,’ he rasped, and then wet himself. With tears. For the first time that he could remember, his eyes made tears. He was looking at this dreadful pain that was making the face of the most beautiful girl he’d ever seen go ugly. He’d done that, and he felt so bad he wanted to die. All he wanted to do was help her.

  What he did next was powered by pure emotion: it had no thought or plans in it at all. He skidded his chair around beside her and put his arms around her. It’s what human nature wanted him to do. She did some sobs into his shoulder and he rocked her and said, ‘There, there.’ She lay there, not sobbing any more, for about a minute.

  The trouble with waves of remorse is that they’re waves. So they keep going. The remorse-wave washed over him, and away, and left him holding a weeping girl and staring into the little piggy eyes of Mavis Hutton.

  He patted Linda’s shoulder. �
��I’ll get your coffee. You’ll feel better.’

  She sat up, nodded and got stuck into some hanky-work.

  He went to the counter.

  ‘That’ll be $3.70,’ said Mavis Hutton.

  ‘Look, we’ll pay later, Mavis, all right?’

  Mavis Hutton stared at him like a full moon.

  ‘Come on, Mavis,’ he whispered wheedlingly. ‘I’ve got a crisis here.’

  ‘Have you ever!’ Her pale, cracked lips moved like a dying skate’s. ‘Whole town knows that.’

  But then, in an act of morose charity, she turned and swished through the plastic strips.

  He sat down with the drinks, resolved to say nothing. Although the big wave that had made him cry at his own hurtfulness had gone, he still felt stink about himself and really, really sorry about Linda. Best thing to do was go with the flow – let her get it out of her system and just take it on the chin.

  She sniffed – a great big hearty haul-back that was amazingly impolite and yet so innocent, somehow. Perhaps it was the most intimate thing that had happened between them. Her nose was red at the tip and she was still rubbing at it with her little hanky.

  ‘Have there been others?’ she said, not stopping the rubbing.

  Holy kermoley: this was gonna be rough. He stared at her, waiting for the pandemonium of advice from his brain to settle down. Suddenly he felt a great calm. ‘Linda,’ he said quietly, ‘you haven’t really got the right to ask me that.’

  He saw her pupils flare and her mouth fall open in a gasp. Jesus, he was distressing her all over again, in a different way. And perhaps an even worse way because he was sort of pulling rank – putting a distance between them she hadn’t known was there. But he still felt calm. ‘See, what I did was pretty gnarly, and it stuffed up Mrs Turton’s life, and the whole town’s pretty disgusted with me. But I haven’t betrayed anyone, Linda. I haven’t been unfaithful to a girlfriend or anything, because I haven’t got a girlfriend.’