Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Read online

  ‘And in mine, dear lady – to the last resting place.’

  ‘Yeah, snap,’ she murmured. She slapped the young coffin as if it was a yearling’s flanks. ‘It’s good workmanship. How much?’

  And with a look of dismay, Bernie Downie began to talk prices.

  THEY’D LINED THE coffin with three layers of black plastic, fluffed the ice to the consistency of boiled rice and scooped out a hollow. Over it they’d placed a layer of black plastic in which they punched holes for drainage. But still Betty wouldn’t allow the fish to be lifted into its new home. ‘We need greaseproof paper. Too much contact with fresh water can bleach the flesh.’ Dooley had stormed off by this time and no one really wanted to approach him so they’d waited in Merlord’s shed while Bob drove – not quite cheerfully – down to Megamart.

  It was just a bit uncomfortable for Royce, in the opposition headquarters, but Betty and Marjorie hit it off immediately. Royce looked at the wall of photos of boats coming over the bar and lying at mooring in the lagoon – all presumably taken with the camera that now contained their fish portraits.

  ‘Pity it has to go through Dooley’s hands,’ said Betty. ‘He seems to have an attitude that fits the foulness of his mouth.’

  ‘Yeah, that surprised me, that photo thing,’ replied Marjorie. ‘He’s usually a good sort. Overall we get on very well.’

  ‘Is that your cool store over there?’

  ‘Yeah,’ said Marjorie.

  ‘Where’s Dooley’s?’

  ‘The co-op hires space from us.’

  The slightly pissed-off Bob arrived back, and then, can you believe it, so did Bernie Downie. He had a camera too. ‘I just couldn’t resist getting a shot of the fish in our coffin,’ he waxed. ‘I think I’ll put it on my office wall – although I don’t think I’d better let the clients see it, eh? Ha ha.’

  As it happened he came in useful, because without the sulking Dooley, who’d never re-appeared, they needed another pair of hands to get the fish into the box.

  Then there it was – as snugly at home in its coffin as Dracula. Its belly and gill cavity were packed, the coffin was brimmed with powdery snow. The lid was lowered and lay secured by the snugness of its perfect fit.

  Bernie Downie had taken photos of every process. ‘Very well prepared,’ he enthused as the lid was lowered. ‘A very nice job indeed. I congratulate you. I myself take a great deal of care over the preparation, even though the extra work will never be seen – at least not by mortal eyes, ha ha. It seems worth it; people deserve it. I hate an unfinished cadaver.’

  A few minutes earlier he had nearly created a crisis when he’d said: ‘Very well bled, I see. We inject liquid vaseline into the veins after bleeding – to prevent decay. I could fetch you some if you wished?’

  Betty had stood up from over the cadaver of the tuna. Bob was watching. ‘No, it discolours the flesh. Got to keep it as natural looking as we can.’

  Thankfully Bernie had nodded. ‘Yes, I concede it does, a little. Fortunately people expect a certain amount of – pallor in their loved ones.’

  Then, borne by its mock silver handles, the big fish was carried by the pall-bearing Bob, Bernie, Marjorie, Royce and Betty to the co-op side of the big concrete block coolstore.

  A STARLING FLEW to the top of the nearest black crane, whose shadow was now striping the wharf and waters of the lagoon beyond. A tiny shape it was, against the H.G. Wellsian bulk of the crane – yet when it landed on the top, it altered the shadow in the water. Beneath it, the white funnel of the Buller Lion glowed in the last light, as if haemorrhaging.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR

  THEY ALL WENT to the pub after that – except Dooley, who still had his knickers in a knot about something.

  It’s amazing how quickly you can get munted sometimes. Mind you, just about everything gets amazing when you’re munted.

  Terry Ohern was in the bar when they arrived and he was still here, hours later. He’d got on pretty well with Betty and was now telling her some stupid thing about how he couldn’t work out how his sister had two brothers and a sister, but he only had one brother and one sister.

  Bob had made a phone call early on, and then bugger me if bloody Nadine Beyer didn’t walk into the bar! Royce had a go at doing the old shit-house fade, but Bob grabbed him and said: ‘More responsibilities to face up to, kid. You buy Nadine a double rum and coke and apologise to her for trying to pinch her groceries.’ Well, he had and that had cleared the air. They got on quite well after that, him and Nadine, and had a good talk. She was a nurse who’d seen an awful lot of really interesting illness and he asked her about notifiable diseases because there was a poster about them in the Men’s. Cripes, they sounded disgusting.

  ‘And when you’ve got a notifiable disease, do you notify them or do they notify you?’ he’d asked, and Nadine had laughed like a bloody drain.

  She was very tall but her bones didn’t seem quite solid and she sort of drooped down to your level when she talked to you. And she had this big, diamond-shaped face, with sharp points at the chin and the ends of her cheeks. Talking to her was like sitting in the front seat of the movies, her face was so big.

  Now she and Betty and Marjorie were leaning on the bar, talking ninety to the dozen. Marjorie and Nadine were in jeans, with Betty and her great big Caribbean bum in the middle. Without going too much into particulars, looking at them spelt out the word wOw. Fact of the matter was, Royce’s eyes – in lieu of finding anything more interesting in the bar – were generally on Marjorie’s bum.

  And that’s where they were, actually, when they got attracted to Dooley’s face by the sound of his voice. ‘Don’t get up,’ Dooley said to Royce and Bob, who were sitting by the fruit machines.

  Cheeky bastard: they’d had no friggin’ intention of getting up!

  But he wasn’t being cheeky – he hadn’t got his humour back since the photo thing, and his face was made of stone-like skin.

  ‘Here, this is for you,’ he said to Royce and shoved a docket at him.

  Royce took it.

  Under SKIPPER’S NAME it said: ITA, STN, 325.45kg Number 38874/ Royce Rowland.

  Holy kermoley – that made it official! Dooley’d given him an ITA for the fish – Individual Transferable Allocation, Southern Bluefin, number 38 … It was going in the books as his fish!

  The rest of the Fish Landing Docket had all the other standard stuff that Bob had showed him about FLDs – boat name, port, factory docket number, area, date – all that shit. ‘Chilled gut,’ it said in the ‘State’ box. At the bottom of it all was Dooley’s signature, then a bit more writing about him being agent for something or other that Royce couldn’t read too well. But knickers to it. Most important – up there at the top: ‘Royce Rowland’, eh?

  Dooley had watched him read it, but didn’t smile back into Royce’s smile.

  ‘Cripes, thanks Dooley, I mean, I didn’t really catch it, I just …’

  ‘Don’t friggin’ remind me what you “just did”,’ rumbled Bob ominously.

  ‘Don’t crinkle it or get it wet,’ said Dooley, and you could see, in the light, the uncleanness of his big specs. ‘That’s the two top copies; I keep the other one. Okay?’ Then he turned and headed for the bar.

  ‘It’d be your shout, I reckon,’ murmured Bob to Royce.

  ‘Jeepers, I reckon, Bob! Hey, Dooley, my shout, eh?’

  Dooley turned back. ‘Another day,’ he called through the bit of crowd between them.

  Then he went up to where the three women were leaning on the bar.

  And within about five seconds they were arguing.

  ‘I’M LOCKING IT because we’ve got a rare fish here that needs protecting.’

  ‘Only thieves use locks, Dooley, you know the old saying.’

  ‘Fuck off, Marjorie. I’m not stealing anything.’

  ‘So what’s with the new lock?’

  ‘We got a special fish in there …’

  ‘Yeah, right. But the fact of the matt
er is the coolstore already has a lock, Dooley. What’re you doing putting another one on it for, then? Who’re you locking out?’

  ‘We got an important fish here, Marjorie, and from what I’ve heard, bloody Bernie Downie’s told every bugger that’s ever had a death in the friggin’ family about it.’

  ‘You rent your side of the coolstore Dooley, and you rent it from my company. That means the door of the coolstore belongs to my company and we say what locks are put on it.’

  Marjorie was standing so upright – hands on hips, goggling down on Dooley – she was almost curving backwards. Nadine was curled the other way, looming over Dooley like a big question mark. Betty was still leaning casually on the bar, looking like an upside-down lightbulb.

  ‘So, are you gonna leave Merlord property alone, or are you gonna find a new coolstore?’ snapped Marjorie. Cripes, she sure was getting utu for the photo fuss.

  Dooley did his trudge on the spot that he used when he was embarrassed. ‘All right,’ he muttered. ‘What the hell do I care anyway?’ And he strode out of the bar and into the waiting darkness.

  ‘I dunno,’ sighed Marjorie, slumping back into an interesting lean on the bar. ‘He’s just gone nuts today. He’s a worry.’

  ‘His time of the month, doll,’ drawled Betty and they laughed a bit.

  MARJORIE WOULD BE very interesting as an amorous assignation – a fact Royce had happened to mention to her earlier. ‘Huh,’ she’d said; ‘ring me in ten years, junior. We’re not all Penny Turtons, you know.’

  S’funny how tastes differ. I mean she wasn’t really better-looking than Penny Turton and both were old, and yet one wouldn’t have a bar of him, and the other would. Would have. Weird; inexplicable. A lotta bits of being alive were inexplicable.

  What’d happened to old Sticky? He’d sloped off straight away, soon as they tied up. Got his shore clothes outa Dooley’s office and walked off into the sunset. Well, out of the sunset – it was behind him as he slouched off down Palmerston Street.

  Jeez, he’d learned a lot about Sticky this trip. He’d been his mother’s boyfriend way back in the olden days! Whole things happen, over your head, somehow. There’s another whole tangle of life going on all around you that you may never find out about. He wouldn’t have found out about Sticky if it hadn’t been for Penny; his mother had never told him – though now he understood a bit more of her strange witterings.

  THERE WAS A bear: a tall, scraggy black bear, standing by a pole near a tent. It had a muzzle on. All around was a bad smell and other people, though he couldn’t see faces in this memory. Someone was holding his hand – Royce’s hand, that is, not the bear’s. He knew it was a man, though he couldn’t remember looking at the man and didn’t know what he looked like. He wasn’t saying the man was Sticky, but when he thought of the bear, he thought of Sticky. In a coupla days time he’d do a test. He’d think of the bear again, and then see if a thought of Sticky turned up, too. He had an idea the memory was about him when he was very young – and Sticky.

  He felt really bad about Sticky and Penny Turton. He hadn’t known a thing about that. Hell, if he’d known, he would never have … Bullshit. Course he would’ve. Don’t start getting noble just cos you’re feeling guilty. But the Penny Turton thing had been awful and had hurt people real bad – Sticky, Linda. And all for nothing!

  He’d thought about the ‘all for nothing’ aspect. In a way, that was the worst part. It wouldn’t have been so bad if at least someone had got something out of it … and damnit, he got a goddamn bloody erection, right then, on behalf of the ghosts of what might have been. He’d talk the matter over with Penny next time he saw her, he decided – while his erection thudded away – she might feel like he did about it. Looking at it rationally and reasonably – throb throb went his knob – they more or less had a moral duty to go ahead and finish the thing off, just to give it a positive side.

  In the meantime, maybe he should try again with Marjorie. This memory-erection about Penny Turton was in urgent need of a cure.

  Just then Linda walked in.

  KNOW WHY TUNA’S valuable? Not because of the taste – Japs much prefer whale – but because of the bright red colour. And the firmness – which makes it possible to sculpt it, and the Japanese love sculpted food. You get your sashimi in thin, bite-sized slices of raw fish, arranged in an artful way on the plate. You’ll get, say, a plate of little raw roses, in different shades of red because the colour varies from the outer toro muscles to the inner akami ones. Or if it’s sushi you might get a little herd of tuna deer on rice. Or tuna butterflies or Sumo wrestlers.

  For top-grade sashimi meat you’ll get more money than for anything else. But if it’s not spiked right – if there ain’t a lead of monofilament sticking out its forehead to show you’ve done a Taniguchi on the neural column, if it’s not bled properly, if it hasn’t been cooled correctly, if it’s bruised – why then, you end up with yake niku and won’t get jack shit for it. They’ll just politely refer you to the catfood section of the market.

  Don’t stuff up! Let’s get this fish up to the Tsukiji market and transformed into platefuls of translucent red roses for the bosses of Toyota and Minimoto.

  Betty had thought, at first, she was gonna have to deal through Dooley. Dangerous. He was the only person in port with a brain – the only one who had any inkling of what she was up to. Then she’d heard the leggy broad say, ‘Want an FLD from me, Bob?’

  And Betty’d flashed a sunny smile at her that would have fried a snowball.

  CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE

  AT THE AGE of two Linda’s brother Julian had become an alcoholic – addicted to Watney’s Red Barrel. At four he became teetotal – a state he advertised by spewing up whenever fond uncles at family gatherings gave him the customary tipple that had earlier been so entertaining.

  She, at the same time, though four years his senior, had become a nymphomaniac, constantly rubbing herself against smooth, unyielding objects. The rubbing created an itch that more rubbing did not cure. Her favourite was the round green stem of the revolving clothesline in their backyard in Hove. She would straddle it, and spin around it, holding on to the firm cold trunk.

  A year later she spent her summer lying in the lupins of her father’s allotment, knickers down, being looked at for a penny, touched for tuppence and licked for fourpence. There were innumerable looks, twelve touches – exterior only – and five fourpences.

  At more or less the time of her brother’s conversion to temperance she renounced sex and remained celibate – with one exception – for almost a decade. She later realised the pleasure had not expired, simply re-invested itself in the almost neurotic care of dolls, then gymnastic exercise, then the wide-legged riding of horses.

  These were solitary exertions of sexuality. The first time – since lupin days – that she re-invited the participation of a partner ended in distress. A few days before she left Hove for New Zealand she had allowed Garth Jarndyce – one of those who had paid fourpence in the olden days – to do it again for nothing, as a farewell gesture. He had gone down, baulked, dry-retched and fled. It was the pubic hairs, he later explained by mail. She replied, but their correspondence petered.

  In New Zealand she slept, as always, with her thighs clenched around her hand. The feeling gave her a point of reference with herself; the pleasurable contact affirmed her identity as she drifted off to those realms, beyond her control, of the dreamworld. Only at fifteen and a half did her fingers stray, for the first time, through the hot, hirsute dryness to the damp depths beyond. She had entered herself. At sixteen she took her own technical virginity with an immature marrow from her father’s garden – two years before these young vegetables were known as either zucchini or courgettes.

  There had been no great pleasure involved – in fact she had done it partly from a fear of discovery. God, it seemed, from Bible Class wisdom, had a particular fondness for virgins and she was worried that she may be raptured to heaven at any moment to sit, in imperi
shable virginity, at His side.

  Although now safe from heaven, there were other perils. She was ‘open’. The admittedly fragile protection of the hymen was gone and there was no obstacle between the world and her interior. She was assailed by the non-virgin’s fear of mice.

  She applied herself – and a variety of ingenious implements – to herself with almost nightly devotion, creating feelings of pleasure, dissatisfaction, anxiety and resignation. Openness, she knew, was another word for availability. She had rendered herself nubile – ready for procreation. On occasion she found her situation hateful: a blind, dumb unfeeling Nature had turned her into a pod, on earth simply to ensure its own continued existence. She felt alienated from that most intimate part of herself; it was no longer hers – it belonged to Nature, Evolution, Mankind … Its very presence was proof that she was incomplete; her destiny, her raison d’etre, could not be fulfilled by herself alone. She had been born with a conduit between her legs, for other people. Every male she ever met knew this – knew that part of her could very well belong to him. She was a slave, publicly humiliated by every appreciative male glance.

  She now knew that original sin had nothing to do with eating apples. The sin was the act of sex. Eve had let the snake inside her. God had given her the capacity, the desire and the need to let Him in, then had forbidden entrance. Why? Perhaps to invent forgiveness, and thus prove His divinity – after all, isn’t to forgive divine?

  She read the Old Testament for the last time, and found God an enormous and terrifying puzzle: a being whose means of creation involved mud and ribs. At sixteen and a half she quietly turned away from Him.

  Sixteen and a half. That was only months ago.

  Occasionally, during her nightly ministrations, there was an electric flash of rapture that could not be located, no matter how deeply she probed. At last she isolated the source of these ecstatic spasms – the little mushroom dome at the top of the cleft. Thus she discovered her clitoris, and was astounded at her own stupidity in not finding it earlier. But find it she had, and she was soon addicted to its remorseless imperatives. Eve, once, many generations ago, had been at this very stage of discovery. From here, nearly every woman since, had sinned themselves into membership of the human race.