Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Read online

  There and back they’d gone, on the car roof, those groceries: The Counter, ha ha. Must have been the cans of beans and catfood that anchored them down.

  Old Nadine, eh? Be good to see her. You can only take so much Raquel Welch drooling down at you from the bulkhead.

  Bob parked his Bedford behind Nadine’s car and headed across the main street into the blue and white tiled, divinely reeking fishnchip shop.

  Mrs Angelo, who’d put on about seven stone in the three years she’d been married to Angelo, said, ‘She’s in, Bob,’ nodding to the swing doors with the frosted glass portholes as she whacked hot fat from a steel basket, up-ended a gold pyramid of fish and chips onto nice white paper (newspaper was illegal now) and hissed about half a cellar of Cerebos on top of them.

  A dozen or so locals lounged against portraits of lemonfish and john dory around the walls. Bob said, ‘How’s things?’ and they all said ‘How’s things?’ back.

  ‘You get trevally, Bob?’ called Angelo, who was flouring fish behind the tubs.

  ‘Christ, Angelo, what do you want trevally for? I got flounder and skate. If I’d got bloody trevally I’d’ve biffed it back.’

  ‘No – is good, the trevally.’

  ‘Bullshit. It’s crap fish, you know that. You can’t eat trevally.’

  ‘No, no; not good for eating, good for selling.’

  Bloody Angelo: first Lebanese Jew born in Sparta. Cooked anything that came out of the sea. That’s why Bob always had a steak here … Jesus! Was that why the bugger was always asking about the leopard seals that got caught in the net?

  Bob imploded the swing doors between the takeaway section and the restaurant. Nadine was at a back table, plugged into a Rothmans. Stoopingly tall – of a slimness that exaggerates moderate breasts into quite bigness, blue eyes, white skin, red lipstick – someone had once called her a good-looking Union Jack. Well, a Union Jack, anyway. But she was good-looking to him.

  They had met at the Granity Highland Pipers Ball and fallen in love at first dance. It wasn’t the first dance of the night, as it happened – in fact it was probably getting on for the last. She’d been on the rum and cokes, which had increased her sinuousness – or decreased her rigidity, depending upon how you looked at it. Whatever, she’d started the dance at least a foot taller than him, then gradually drooped over him until – they said – it looked like he was effecting a fireman’s rescue. Well, stuff ’em; it was the beginning of his first night of true love.

  He’d taken her back to his bungalow in Bentham Street and within twenty minutes he was introduced to the last part of the human body to leave the sea. He was at the centre of what Porsches, tattoos, wars, cigarettes, caviar, padlocks, diamonds, paperbacks, Hollywood, wages and tweezers are all about. He was making love. For the first time in his life.

  She hadn’t known it was his first time then, and didn’t know it now. She had been stunned by his enthusiasm and gratitude. She had glowed up at him as if sunburnt on the inside.

  The fact was, in their two-year relationship since, he probably hadn’t quite recreated the enchantment of that night, but she was hooked. (She’d dumped a boyfriend.) She was in the nature of the heroin junkie who wistfully hangs in there for a repeat of that first magic hit. He loved her for her patience.

  ‘HOW’S MY LOVE goddess, then?’ he said gruffly as he swung a leg over the back of the wooden chair and sat.

  ‘You better watch it, Stumpy,’ she said, stubbing her fag out in the brown plastic ashtray that matched the top of the salt, pepper, Worcestershire and vinegar dispensers. ‘Do yourself a nasty accident like that. I ordered you a steak, well done, two eggs …’

  ‘Oysters?’

  ‘And half a dozen raw oysters.’

  ‘Can’t do without me oysters, Nadine.’

  ‘No, you better bloody not.’

  An adoringly complicit smile was exchanged.

  ‘What are you having?’

  ‘Sole. You know me, love: all sole. How was the trip?’

  ‘Fair. And you?’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘Good.’

  The buttered bread arrived, borne by an anxious new waitress with short wide lips and rainbows of violent pimples across the arc of her cheekbones.

  ‘And open this, will ya, love?’ Bob handed her a bottle-shaped paper bag.

  She rustled inside it and looked up, wide-eyed. ‘Wine?’

  ‘Nothing but the best for my girl, love. Glenvale Burgundy. And two glasses.’

  ‘I’ve never done wine.’

  ‘Well, better late than never.’

  She carried it away, holding it like an undetonated bomb. ‘Where does he get them?’ breathed Bob.

  ‘One of Gerry Owen’s girls.’

  ‘Well, she should know about booze.’

  From habit Bob held a piece of thin white bread up to the light. The buttered side was shiny. It sometimes arrived upside-down. It paid to check.

  They talked of many things:

  HER: ‘Another three bottles of your bloody home brew went off last night. Scared the shit out of me; like being in bloody Vietnam.’

  HIM: ‘Jackie Mosley was talking about them orange roughy they’re catching down south. Too deep for anything out of Westport, but there’s buggers down there is six-month millionaires, he reckons.’

  The wine arrived. Bob cruelly looked on as the girl of Owen tremulously steered it into glasses. A tiny accident: a drop of redness on her pouring palm. A high yelp; she hurried off to wash her hand under a tap before the acid began to burn and destroyed her hand completely.

  The steak stared up at him through the mad eyes of his two fried eggs. Onions curled pubically around the edges of the long white plate. Spattered throughout were protoplasmic blobs of oyster.

  Bob sighed with joy then looked up, smiling. ‘Go on, then, love.’

  ‘Bob!’ She looked, with furtive impatience around the empty dining room. ‘I can’t!’

  ‘There’s no one here. It’s just us. Go on.’

  ‘You always make me do this!’

  ‘You always do it.’ He felt stirrings of profound intimacy.

  ‘I don’t know why you don’t bloody well get your own! You can afford it.’

  ‘Go on.’

  She sighed briskly, reached to her mouth and pulled out her teeth.

  She handed them to him across the table. He put them in. They fit with almost sexual precision.

  ‘Just till I soften it up, love. You can’t get through an Angelo steak without teeth.’

  CHAPTER FOUR

  ROYCE’S MOTHER’S HOUSE on Brougham Street was number 74. It was square and old and set back a long way from the street, with a massive bloody lawn in front that he had to do with a push mower. Sometimes, but not very often, old Scotty Ames would come over from next door with his Flymo and do it. Then Royce would have to walk in front and check for stones. One stone and old Scotty was off – he was very proud of his Flymo. And his lawn.

  He was proud of Royce’s lawn, too, if truth be told, because of how quickly it dried out after rain – just like his. Usually, ten minutes after the rain stopped, Scotty’d be out there, droning over his lawn with his Flymo. ‘Good publicity for the district, this,’ he’d shout over the roar. ‘Can’t mow your lawns ten minutes after a storm in Christchurch, you know.’

  He’d told Royce the technical side of mowing after rain. ‘Limestone, see? Water goes through it like through whitebait netting.’

  Seems there was a limestone outcrop that lay under just his place and Royce’s. An isolated outcrop it must have been, because water lay on the Roberts’ lawn next door for ages. And same for Perce Kidder’s lawn on the other side of Royce. They weren’t on the limestone outcrop, poor buggers, explained Scotty.

  It was this limestone that made Scotty reckon the Maori land claims that had started up again recently had nothing to do with his place. ‘The ground at my place is made of limestone that was there long before the Treaty of Waitangi! They’ve go
t no claim on my land.’

  One day Royce had been a bit bold and said, ‘I don’t reckon it’s anything to do with limestone, Mr Ames, I reckon it’s just that the Flymo floats over the wet ground.’

  ‘You watch your lip, boy! It’s because of pre-Treaty limestone! And don’t you go telling the Maoris about my bloody Flymo, neither.’

  NUMBER 74 BROUGHAM Street had belonged to Royce’s father’s father. He hadn’t built it – although he could have, because he’d been a carpenter. When Royce was little, his grandfather had moved out into a pensioner’s flat and sold the house to Royce’s parents. Then he died.

  The funny thing is, they kept paying for it. Why? What was the use of paying money to a dead person? Where did it go? These were big questions that weren’t answered until Royce got to Tech and found out about banks and mortgages.

  Recently he’d become seriously interested in banks. In particular the Bank of New South Wales. Its manager was Karen Phibbs’ father: little bloke with bulgy blue eyes and a laugh like a tap dripping. Mrs Phibbs was taller altogether, and quite good-looking – which is where Karen got her quite good looks from. But she had the ess lisp too, so she’d had to make do with a little dork like Mr Phibbs.

  Mr Phibbs played golf and so did Mrs Phibbs. On Sunday afternoons they’d go out to the golf links, and Grant Franklin from 6B would sneak into the front room of the bank house and he and Karen Phibbs would ‘pash’ – according to Grant.

  Yeah, you can imagine what that’d be like: ‘Oh Grant, darling, not there, not my elbow; you know I can’t control myself when you touch my elbow.’ Be like a hot night down at the Darby and Joan Club would that particular pash session.

  Grant lived out country. He used to come in for his Sunday pash in a car. His own car. It was a white Anglia that his father had bought him because Grant was ‘so responsible’. It was the only pupil’s car in the district, but then fuddy-duddy Grant Franklin was probably the only pupil whose parents thought he was ‘so responsible’.

  He didn’t like to park it outside the bank in case people started to notice it, but neither did he want it out of his sight in case some jealous bastard let his tyres down or something. Now, 74 Brougham Street was only two blocks away from the bank, and old Grant wasn’t such a bad guy really – played on the other wing for the First Fifteen, though he couldn’t tackle for nuts – and the upshot was, Royce’d said to him why didn’t he leave his car at his place, where it’d be safe? So he did. You’d generally hear it swishing up the wet concrete side-road behind Perce Kidder’s at about 1.30 on a Sunday.

  Sometimes Royce used to race to the front door and bellow: ‘Got your rubbers, have you, Grant?’ as the poor mortified bastard headed up the street to the bank.

  The only interesting thing about all this was that the back of the bank safe stuck out into the front room that Grant and Karen did their pashing in. You couldn’t get into the bank itself from the house, because of steel doors and whatnot, but there, facing the sofa, said Grant, was the back of the safe. About six feet by six feet, sticking into the room. ‘Made in Kalamazoo’, said a label on it.

  ‘You’d think they’d wallpaper it or something,’ said Grant, ‘or at least paint it. It’s just a big ugly grey square in the wall.’

  ‘Does it move?’ asked Royce.

  ‘Come on, it’s probably bolted into concrete inside the bank.’

  ‘How thick’s the metal?’

  ‘Well, you can see a join if you look sideways, along the wall. I’d say about two-thirds of an inch. Plate steel.’

  Royce used to daydream about that safe. Thousands and thousands of dollars – millions, maybe! – just two-thirds of an inch away. One night he had a real dream about it. He was with Karen Phibbs on the sofa of the bank house – God knows where Grant was; he’d been locked out of the dream – and she’d said, ‘Do you know what stops you just walking into that safe?’

  ‘No,’ he’d replied, in his dream.

  ‘Clothes. All you have to do is take your clothes off and you can walk straight through that steel wall. Watch.’

  Well, it became an erotic dream after that and all but turned into a wet dream. He’d looked at Karen Phibbs in a different light for the next few weeks, and made some quite revolutionary plans. Until the esses drove him mad again and he went back to just day-dreaming about the safe.

  In metalwork he practised drilling through plate steel. He’d stuffed God knows how many drills and got into all sorts of trouble with Inky before bloody Grant Franklin told him it was probably made of hardened steel that school drills wouldn’t get through anyway.

  His boldest scheme was to talk to Terry Ohern about explosives. Well, to start to talk about explosives. Terry was in the fourth form – he was fifteen but they’d kept him back a year. (Sheesh! You had to be dumb to be dumb around here.) Well, talking of dumb, Terry was great mates with Feefi Fyfe. Feefi was a bit of a giant who lived with his mum out the Fairdown Straight. He was only fifteen too, but was about as big as you can get without turning into something else. Apparently he’d been born with a bit too much Darwinism in him. He was a great kid and everyone loved him, but he was a bit dangerous at times so they didn’t let him come to Tech. In fact they’d sent him up to the mines to sort of work off his energy. Can you imagine that? At fifteen, down the mines, shovelling for Jimmy Prince?

  ‘Do you reckon Feefi could get us some gelignite, Terry?’ Royce’d asked one night, down at the Albion. ‘Bank job, you know?’

  Having a kid two years younger than you look up at you with contempt in his eye puts quite a dampener on things. ‘Jesus, Royce, are you nuts? Your hat’s on too tight, man.’

  That had more or less been the end of the bank job. It had certainly been the end of the conversation, because not long after that Terry’s dad Brian came into the pub and whispered: ‘What the fuck are you doing here? You’re not old enough!’ ‘Well, you should have had me sooner,’ said Terry, which was a pretty good answer, but the mood was spoilt. He slunk out not long after, not able to look his father in the eye across the bar.

  Anyway, Royce’d put robbing the BNSW on the back-burner – although never quite forgetting about it entirely. Meanwhile Grant Franklin continued to turn up most Sundays to go down to the bank for his pash with Karen Phibbs, leaving his car on the cracked concrete back yard under the clothesline at number 74 …

  HOLY KERMOLEY! CLOTHESLINE! He had no shirt, no socks, no smalls! They were all on that line, soaking wet, and he had a 4.30 date. Linda Harvey at the Doo Duk Inn.

  She wouldn’t go near the Gren, of course, though he’d told her time and again that half of 5bloodyB went down there of a Sunday afternoon – hell, you could hear the strains of Debbie Boone and ‘You Light Up My Life’ from half a block away. But no, not a pub; not yet.

  ‘Not yet’ was a phrase that had taken on immense importance recently. Just out of the blue the other night, down at the Square when they were doing laps – too cold for training – Linda had said, ‘I’ve a feeling things are going to be different when I’m seventeen.’

  November 30th, he knew that. ‘Yeah? How?’ A hard had come on, without him even thinking of his memory of her.

  ‘Oh, just the way I see things.’

  ‘Don’t feel like changing now, do you?’

  ‘No,’ and she’d given him a little punch, ‘not yet!’

  So, for all he knew, he’d just had his first dirty conversation with Linda Harvey. But then again, he might not have, too. Might just as easily have meant she was gonna do the high-jump instead of the long.

  Annoying thing was, you couldn’t risk it. If she wanted to go to the five o’clock pictures you had to go, in case this was the day ‘not yet’ became ‘now’. So he’d have an impatient lemonade at the Doo Duk, while she sipped her ‘white coffee’, then they’d go off and watch Bambi or some other socially ruinous friggin’ thing, and wouldn’t even sit in the back row.

  She was so dumbly nice she didn’t have a clue that it was his p
opularity – in a way – that kept her in the social picture. Her reputation was being added to by being with him, while his was being subtracted from, by being with her. By cripes he’d be pissed off if it wasn’t him she turned to when the facts of life kicked in.

  They were actually going to Annie Hall, which was evidently pretty boring except the shorts had a Pathe report on Leon Spinks beating Mohammed Ali. She’d rung him and asked if he’d like to go, and he’d said (oh God) of course, so here he was, having to fork out $3 each for a film that Gilbert said had only two people in it. Hell, compare that with Star Wars!

  The major issue right now, however, was getting dressed. He didn’t have a thing to wear. It was wash day. His mother had put his shirts, socks and smalls into the washing machine before she went out to change her Mills and Boons at the library, then plugged them all onto the line. Clean and wet.

  Royce went out to the clothesline: ‘She hangs a good line of washing,’ he’d once heard old Mrs Ames say about his mother. The line visible between the clothes was shiny with constant use. He looked up into the sky. It was only a few metres above his head. He wet his finger and held it up. No wind. The day was grey, still and misty – you could see the damp ingredients of colourless rainbows hovering above the limestone lawn. It was not, as his mother would say, ‘good drying weather’.

  ROYCE HUNCHES OVER the wheel, holding it into his chest like a ball at the bottom of a ruck. Speed is exhilarating but not relaxing. Not yet anyway. Not to someone who’s driven only twice before.

  The flax strobes past both side windows like bent picket fences; the white lines down the middle of the road are tracer bullets aimed just past his right wing mirror. Christ: eighty miles an hour! The Fairdown Straight seems to have come to life. It snakes towards him, gyrating and bobbing like the edge of a hula dancer’s hip.

  The railway crossing sign at the end of the straight is suddenly a pneumatic windmill that’s being pumped up: bigger, bigger, bigger … Shit!