Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Read online

  Brakes. Aaargh! Whoops. Not too many brakes. Speed likes time to slow down in. Sort of a democracy of speed: all the speeds between eighty and nought like to be recognised.

  Now, a change down. Shit. Hope those cogs are strong.

  Don’t take the S bend, just roll up the little dirt road into Woggy Watson’s cow paddock.

  There, turn her around, don’t go in the ditch. Great. Return run. Now, WE HAVE LIFT-OFF! Eeeehaaa!

  Royce, Royce, the people’s choice

  Off down Fairdown Straight rolls Royce …

  ‘THIS YOUR CAR, is it, sir?’

  Course it wasn’t his car, Harry Reynolds knew that. Knew exactly whose friggin’ car it was. Knew whose every car in the bloody district was.

  ‘Could I see your licence, sir?’

  Could he shit. He knew that too.

  ‘Do you know what speed you were travelling at, sir?’

  Christ, why do traffic cops always pretend you’re a complete idiot who’s been knighted?

  There’d been a famous time when Harry Reynolds had stopped Bob Dodds:

  ‘You been drinking, sir?’ they said Harry said.

  ‘Yep.’

  ‘What have you imbibed, sir?’

  ‘Oh, a dozen pints of Miner’s, five or six whiskey chasers – had a bit of wine with lunch, too.’

  ‘Would you mind blowing into the bag, sir?’

  ‘Why?’ says Bob, ‘don’t you believe me?’

  ‘COULD YOU EXPLAIN the material hanging from the car, sir?’

  And so Royce explained to Officer Harry Reynolds how he’d had this brilliant idea for drying his clothes by hanging them out the windows of Grant Franklin’s Anglia and haring off down the Fairdown Straight.

  He told it to his mother later that day, and to Grant Franklin, and then over the phone to a pissed-off Linda Harvey. And then next day to Doddy Wold, who was going to be his lawyer, and a couple of weeks later to the judge who charged him with car conversion, excessive speed, dangerous driving and driving without a licence. All which got diverted into fifteen days’ Periodic Detention, starting the day he’d been going to score two tries against United and take Dana Glover to the clubrooms.

  He’d walked to her place when they dropped him off the bus from the golf links. Her mother said she’d gone out with friends to the Doo Duk Inn, so he’d gone straight to the Gren and there she was, of course.

  She’d been in a bit of a bad mood and told him he should have gone home and changed first, and that a prickle in his jersey had stabbed her in the arm. They’d had a desultory pash in the shed behind the Backpackers part of the pub, but then she said, ‘I’ve got my period, remember,’ and didn’t do a single ‘Oh Gordon’.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  ‘WHO PUT THE bloody butter in the fridge?’ bawled Dooley Morgan.

  ‘I did,’ said Bob.

  ‘Christ, it’s hard as the hobs of hell.’

  ‘There were flies all over it.’

  ‘Christ, Bob, flies don’t eat much.’

  Dooley stumped past him and back into his office.

  Bob Dodds made himself a cup of tea from Dooley’s Zip. Well, it wasn’t really Dooley’s Zip, in that it belonged to Sculley’s Fisheries, but in that the whole bloody wharf belonged to Dooley Morgan, you may as well say it’s his.

  ‘Where’s the spoons?’

  ‘None there? Shit. Bloody George will have pinched them for lures. Use a biro.’ Dooley’s voice was muffled with holding up his cigarette.

  ‘Bloody nunnery in here,’ grunted Bob. ‘None of this, none of that. Where’s Flag?’

  ‘Took the Typhoon out. Just to pump the bilge.’

  ‘Bloody needs it, too, when you see what comes out of that tub.’ Bob stretched the ache in his shoulders. ‘Christ, I’m tired. Something woke me up at five this morning.’

  ‘What was that then, Bob – Nadine?’

  There was a bray of sound from the RT. ‘Shit, that’s Morrie,’ said Dooley. ‘What’s he doing out there?’

  ‘What’s the problem?’

  ‘Jackie Mosley’s out. If he sees Morrie he’ll probably ram him.’

  ‘Raid his pots again, did he?’

  ‘Yeah, came in last night with seven big crays, laughing like a drain.’

  ‘At least he’s the one bloody thief that rebaits them,’ growled Bob. He sat down in one of the big, bum-eroded dents in the sofa. Snow shone on the Paparoas through the window. Keeps the sea flat, does snow on the hills: and you need flat to catch flats. Three good days probably. ‘There’d be a ten-twenny high coming up, I reckon.’

  ‘Yeah, only a skinny bugger though. Might get two, maybe three days out of it.’

  Then a northerly: snow goes, sea turns to shit.

  The sea off Westport was no place to make a living, as far as Bob was concerned. Couldn’t get out often enough. And bugger-all there when you did get out anyway. His boat was not big or strong enough to get down to the Hokitika Trench for the hoki – just good for inshore trawling. Then if decent schools turned up, bloody Merlord sent a couple of big trawlers down from Nelson and scooped the lot. Had echo-sounders: could see the fish like they were in an aquarium – he didn’t have a shit show.

  Used to be a man’s life; now it was a friggin’ accountant’s life. Fishing nowadays was just a sea of levies, deemed value fees, transaction fees, permit charges, lease prices …

  GEORGE WENT PAST the window on the Zephyr, standing on the little open wheelhouse of his sixteen-footer like he was Horatio Nelson on the Titanic … or something. Captain Calmwater they called him: he went no further than the half-mile training wall and put down little nets for kahawai. Jackie Mosley used them for baiting his crayfish pots; Morrie used them for re-baiting Jackie’s crayfish pots. Ha ha.

  Interesting story, was the Zephyr. Mine manager, back in the early 1900s, wanted to build a boat. Had the carpenters take off the side of a coal bin – pure kauri – and replace it with beech. Built the Zephyr from the kauri. Coal-powered, of course. George had replaced the boiler with a four-cylinder seventy-five-horsepower Ford. Nice wee craft, the Zephyr, but no good on the open sea. Whenever he came in from his few forays George would jigger over the bar like he was pissed. ‘Captain Calmwater’s been done for DIC on the bar again,’ they’d all say.

  The Cheryl Anne G was in: big red sixty-five-footer lying against the loading wharf. You could just see the interesting shape of Marjorie Shaw moving around in the weigh-shed beside the boat. Legs up to her ears and wore the jeans to prove it.

  ‘Unload the Cheryl Angie last night, Dooley, did you?’

  ‘Yeah. Hands so sore this morning I could hardly hold me dick.’

  ‘Get much?’

  ‘Thirty-three ton.’

  They used to get sixty. The Cheryl Anne G was the only big hoki boat that came into Westport. All the others went into Greymouth, but she was a ‘cased’ ship – all the others were ‘binned’. You could get a thousand cases in the hold, whereas – because of the pointyness of its shape – you could only get three-quarters as many fish in polybins. You could case up on the ten-hour trip back from the Hokitika Trench so you were ready for unloading as you came into Westport. You unloaded at about ten ton an hour. If Dooley was on, you might get up to eleven.

  He was a wonder to watch, was Dooley. He was so lazy that he’d re-invented work. If there was a way to make work physical-free, Dooley had found it: he was the most efficient bastard on the wharf. You watched others hauling and straining as they tipped the bins of fish – you watched Dooley and he was doing it with one finger, fag in mouth while he was non-stop talking to someone, maybe you. All the while there were forklifts coming back from the weigh-shed and screaming numbers at him: ‘1143’, ‘621’, ‘794’ … and he wouldn’t even stop talking, just nod. When he’d collected about a dozen of these weights in his head he wandered over to his office and wrote them down. He’d never got a weight wrong yet – though when you thought about it, how would you have known? Nah, the bosse
s would have known at the other end – they didn’t let anything get past them.

  Dooley was ‘ships’ husband’ for Sculley’s, which was a fishermen’s co-op. Bob was part of it. They competed with the big guys – Merlord, Everest … the companies that dominated the fish industry and squeezed the raw prawn outa the little guy. Well – elsewhere, maybe. But in Westport the big guys didn’t have a shit show. Dooley pinched just about every boat that came over that bar.

  He’d wander over, as a boat docked at Merlord wharf, find the skipper and say, ‘Merlord giving you four-fifty, are they?’

  ‘Yeah,’ the skipper’d say.

  ‘I’ll give you four-ten,’ Dooley would say.

  ‘Eh?’ the skipper’d say, staring at Dooley as if he hadn’t got both oars in the water.

  ‘Yeah, four-ten. (Pause.) And I’ll give it to you tomorrow.’

  And that was the hook, see? Big companies had so many boats you often didn’t get your money for weeks. And fishermen were always broke. Ten minutes later that Merlord boat was docking at Sculley’s wharf.

  The companies knew about Dooley but they reckon they were scared to try to arse-end him because he always had the oil on every illegal or unfaithful thing they’d lately done.

  And he was keeping men in business, too. The big companies would fork out if a skipper was short for diesel for a trip, or they’d give them food chits to stock up for a big three-weeker. But then they had you. Zap. You owed money to Everest, then unloaded at Sculley’s, and they’d impound your boat.

  So if any Westport boat-owner needed a loan they went straight to Dooley. He must have had something on the bank manager, too, because that loan always came through. Bugger-all other ones in the district did.

  And so you busted your gut to pay old Dooley back.

  ‘HEARD A GOOD story the other day,’ chirruped Dooley, settling back in his chair, feet on the heater. ‘Not even dirty.’ Eyes as wide as pickled onions behind his specs as he set off: ‘See, this river in Canada had hooering big salmon – fat, juicy, tasty. But white. White bloody salmon – can you believe that? People’d open a can and say, “Fuck off, I’m not eating white salmon; salmon’s pink.” Serious case: they couldn’t sell the bloody stuff for love nor money. Tried dying it pink: no good. In the end they got in this famous ad man – “Million bucks if you can make this product saleable.” Well, he put his mind to the case – day in, day out – thinking about how to sell white salmon. Then he got it. He told them to put a certain slogan on each can, and after that, that white salmon sold like hotcakes. Know what the slogan said?’

  ‘Nah, wadd’d it say, Dools?’ slurred Bob fondly. (There was Johnnie Walker in Dooley’s cupboard under the tea bags.)

  ‘Said: “GUARANTEED NOT TO TURN PINK IN THE CAN”. Haw haw haw!’

  GOOD OLD DOOLEY. He’d been born in Greymouth – though you never mentioned that. Left the district – left the country – and drifted around the world on boats. Spent a couple of years on purse seiners in Hawaii – only local ever to have done that. Bit of a legend because of that.

  Bob found it interesting listening to him talking about how you did purse seining. You found the big shoals of tuna and got ahead of them, then lowered the aft launch, with net attached. It did a circle of the shoal, then joined the net up at the front of the boat. So there was a big mesh fence dangling around the shoal. Then you pulled the bottom ends of the fence together like a big purse. Hence the name.

  Of course that left a big hole the fish could escape through under the boat, because the net was attached fore and aft, with nothing in between.

  So you had these things called tuna bombs – little hand grenades. And some of the crew sat on the net side of the boat, with Cuban cigars, lighting tuna bombs and scaring the fish away from the gap under the boat. Great days. Sitting there smoking and bombing …

  Dooley told the story of one of his purse seining mates who was staying in the penthouse of a flash hotel in Honolulu and lit a tuna bomb, biffed it down the dunny and flushed. Was about halfway down the pipes when it went off, and blew out every crapper in the building. Haw haw!

  Great story, but you never quite knew with Dooley.

  HE WAS A great guy, Dooley, and they’d been going to put his name forward for one of those New Year’s OBEs, or DSMs, or something – for services to Westport fishing – until someone had pointed out that half what Dooley did was against the law and he’d probably end up wearing his friggin’ gong in jail.

  So they didn’t nominate him. And the gongs kept going to the people who broke the other half of the law.

  But it was true: without Dooley, the sea off Westport wouldn’t have earned you a pauper’s wage.

  CHAPTER SIX

  MRS TURTON. ROYCE had been watching her and was pretty sure she’d been watching him back. She’d been here when he came in an hour or so ago, sitting at the bar with Mrs Martin, who was the Buller Rep netball coach, and whose father, Norrie Shrives, was going a bit funny in the head. They reckon he’d tottered up to the ticket booth at the railway station one day and said, ‘Return ticket, please.’ ‘Where to, Mr Shrives?’ ‘Back here, you silly bugger,’ Norrie’d said. But it got sadder than that, too. Norrie’d lean over to you when, say, you were sitting beside him and his wife at the footy, and say in a loud clear voice: ‘Who’s this big ugly bitch next to me? She’s been following me everywhere.’ And poor old Mrs Shrives looked after him day and night.

  Anyway, Mrs Turton was sitting side on to the bar with her legs crossed outside this short blue dress. She was sitting upright with her left arm on the bar and her top foot arched back so the shoe sort of hung away from it with gravity.

  They were amazingly good legs, all right – and about eighty-five percent of them were on show. Only perspective stopped you seeing where they joined.

  From side on you realised her breasts were the same shape as her nose. Sort of Bob Hope breasts. Up-tilted.

  She’d drunk four double bourbon and cokes, and you couldn’t help but notice the bald patches starting in the glisten of her lips as bits of lipstick got eroded onto the edge of the glass she was drinking from. By an hour later there was more of her smile on the glass than on her lips. Still good lips, but.

  Then the phone went, right beside Royce. The barman wandered over, stood upright and said, ‘Grenadier Hotel, how can I help you? Yeah, hang on.’ He laid the phone on the phone book. ‘It’s for you, Penny,’ he said to her.

  What she said when she answered was supposed to tell the person on the other end that she was very disappointed about what she was hearing, but the fact was, her face didn’t hold all that much disappointment. Seems someone was going somewhere on the tide tonight instead of tomorrow and they’d not be back until Thursday. She said, well, that was just too bad, but that’s just life and you can’t tell the weather what to do and she’d look forward to Thursday.

  She walked back towards Mrs Martin and as she went past she said, ‘Oh, Royce, there’s something I must ask you later,’ then carried on.

  What she was saying was, ‘Don’t go away.’

  Mrs Martin got up about twenty minutes later and asked Mrs Turton if she was going too, but she said no, she might just have one more. ‘Just to make sure Reg’s asleep by the time I get home,’ she added, and they both laughed.

  The laugh had sort of subsided into a smile as she dug into her black bag for her Pall Malls. Then she lifted one up and aimed it at him.

  ‘Up past your bedtime, aren’t you, Royce Rowland?’ she said, all loud and cheery.

  A bit too loud, actually; it wasn’t good form to make suggestions of youthfulness in a public bar. He gave a quick glance down to see if the barman was eyeing him. He wasn’t; he didn’t give a shit, obviously.

  Royce was feeling – not nervous – tingly.

  She must have been watching him all right, because she then said, ‘You haven’t drunk much, have you? Saving yourself for something, are you?’

  Fact was, he’d drunk quite
a lot – but not here. In his bedroom, with Gilbert, Jimmy and Clive. It’d been the launch of his new batch of home brew. They’d had a few marmite jars of this warm, grey stuff, then come down here to the Gren. To drink to the new brew, they all said – but really to wash away the bloody awful taste.

  The others had gone off home after a couple of Miner’s Darks – looking a bit bilious, frankly.

  He’d stayed on after they’d left. He’d had a feeling. Just the glimmer of a feeling that his project was working and that chickens might be coming home to roost. His Penny Turton Project. He’d been waiting for a moment like this for ages, and now here they were, alone and talking, and she’d started it. That was why he was feeling tingly.

  ‘Just looking after me health, Mrs Turton,’ he replied. ‘Big game coming up on Saturday – Ngakawau.’ He headed past her to the Gents.

  HE’D BEEN WORKING on the Project for a while now – months. He’d learnt it from those adverts for the Rosicrucians. You stare at the back of someone’s head until they turn and look at you. You can put thoughts into people’s heads. Thought Transference. Well he’d TT’d her, he reckoned.

  Until a few months ago she’d just been another old person in the headmaster’s office called Mrs Turton (though they all knew she was Penny) until the day he’d seen her slyly looking at him. He’d looked back – not in the eye, but at her body and face – for the first real time, and suddenly there was this very attractive woman. Long, curly brown hair, nice big brown eyes, volcanic breasts. She wore ‘eye-shadow’ – that stuff that made you look like you had bags under your eyes – but at the top. She was the first woman in the district he’d ever seen who’d got the hang of it. She looked good.

  And she’d been giving him the shifty once-over. So what he did was put his knowledge from the Rosicrucian ads into action. ‘I want you to take away the impossibility,’ he told her through Thought Transference. ‘You’re looking at me and wondering what it would be like with a kid. And I’m telling you to keep thinking it, but take out the impossible bit.’