Royce, Royce, the People's Choice Read online

  By the Carboniferous Age we had Coelacanths with limb-like fins, and lungfishes with – well – lungs. We had, therefore, the equipment required for the emergence of the first amphibious ‘tetrapod’ – four-legged thing. And it came one day, probably in the form of the Eusthenopteron which has lung, legs – and a feature common to all creatures of the land, a passage linking nostrils to the roof of the mouth.

  As animals came ashore they brought part of the sea with them, a salty stream of elements: sodium, potassium and calcium in the same proportions as the sea – a reminder of the days when the circulatory system of life on earth was merely the water of the Archaean ocean. We call it blood.

  And as life colonised the land it colonised also the deeps, for life began in the shallows and only later headed downwards into the glacial darkness and crushing pressures, as cautiously as it crept landward.

  Do not despise the lowly lamprey. Once it was the monarch of the pre-Devonian sea. But it wasn’t yet a fish for it had no mouth and no bones. Instead it had armour – first to assist in the expulsion of salts, and second, to protect it from the predations of the horrible scorpion. Slits in the side of its head became gills; flaps of skin at the sides became fins. Bony rods with hinged muscle grew in its face and it had a jaw. Then teeth. And with these teeth it ungratefully ate its humble ancestors into extinction. By the late Carboniferous, the first ray-finned Chondrosteans appeared in the sea – from which ninety-five percent of all fishes now stem.

  With the first true fish came, of course, the first untrue fish – the shark. Nightmarish enough as they are in modern form, those Devonian specimens were even more terrible. One bore a cartilaginous tower on its back – encrusted with teeth. Blessedly it died out. Perhaps it fought to the mutual death with giant scorpions – for they at last clanked off to extinction at this time. Not, however, before small relatives had scuttled ashore … And something else had scuttled out with them – that noisome critter that will one day inherit the earth: the cockroach.

  As the Carboniferous ended, an astounding thing happened. All the planet’s land masses had somehow been shuffled together by the deep, creeping tides at the centre of the earth. A mighty island called Pangaea came into being. Surrounding it was an even mightier ocean, which has now vanished without trace. And we never ever gave it a name.

  The climate of this vast world island was vile. Where the Carboniferous had been Eden, Pangaea was hell. Rich Carboniferous swamps were crackle-glazed into desert where almost nothing could live but … scorpions and cockroaches. In the centre of this all-encompassing continent was the present Antarctica: locked in, far from the moderating influences of heat and sea. Thus began the growth of its mile-high ice.

  Pangaea was a temporary thing. Two hundred million years ago it split in two – Laurasia in the north, Gondwanaland to the south. These two new islands then slowly unfurled also. Some 65 million years later the massive jigsaw of Africa and South America had wrenched itself apart. Australia – shunting New Guinea and New Zealand ahead of it – drifted north-east across the Pacific. Eurasia and North America parted – perhaps for ever, perhaps not. Only Antarctica stayed put, as subterranean Titans grabbed the undersides of the other continents and hauled them away. To where they are today.

  Perhaps – with New Zealand in place, and Australia off its port beam – we can at last begin to talk of the watered gap between them as ‘the sea off Westport’? Not quite. For the land that would one day become Westport had temporarily disappeared. During the Cretaceous, 100 million years ago, great New Zealand mountains were crushed upwards – then weathered down again, almost to the sea. So the sea off Westport was there – but the land of Westport was not.

  In this Westportless sea swam the Teleosts – semi-modern fish that had lost the medieval armour of their predecessors. In lagoons on its shores, the chemicals of the sea were hydrated out of solution. The first of these was sulphate of gypsum – much later to become the basis of Guardian Cement, which would be carried from Westport to Onehunga by the Buller Lion.

  The first spiny fish appeared. And so did the sexiest creatures ever to exist, for the Cretaceous, with the Jurassic, was the age of the dinosaur.

  As if in some sort of affinity with tyrannosaurus and allosaurus on land, the world of the deep also adopted attitudes of predatory violence. Even snails went on the hunt, with vicious new methods of drilling through shells; starfish learnt how to do what they now do to the Great Barrier Reef and some of the more viciously disposed bony fish realised their latent ability to become barracuda and conger eels. It was another period of enhanced Darwinism – scallops learned to flee for cover by clapping their shells like castanets; toheroa learnt to burrow; hermit crabs learnt to hide.

  And in the wide seas, streamlined, muscular fish were revelling in their freedom from platings of fusty bone. They could swish to thrilling speeds – surge across whole oceans in a matter of weeks. Their day, it seemed, had come …

  THEN CAME THE most famous event in history. A nine-kilometre meteorite thudded into Chicxulub in the Yucatan Peninsula of Mexico. Poisonous iridium scattered across the world; dust deadened the sun. The planktons of the ocean died of malnutrition in the darkness. The reptiles on land froze into motionless stupor. The skies rained sulphuric acid. Great tidal waves lashed the plains and great bonfires razed the forests.

  The dinosaurs died. So did most of the life of the planet – helplessly pole-axed like the residents of Pompeii. Without plankton the very base of the foodchain was destroyed: nothing in the sea could survive …

  But it did. And we don’t know why. And so did warm-blooded mammals on the land. And birds. And scorpions.

  And the goddamn cockroach.

  Fish thrived. Great big, bonny, bony fish were now ready to swim into the sea off Westport.

  And at last, two million years ago, there were big alps ready to be called ‘Southern’, a river ready to be called ‘the Buller’, a comfortably swampy terrain upon which to situate ‘Westport’ and a recognisable coastline for the sea off it, to lap.

  So, after 460 million years, fish were ready to enter

  the sea off Westport.

  And – two million years later – so was Royce.

  And a week after him?

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  ROYCE HEARD THE alarm go off in his mother’s room – because he’d been waiting for it, all friggin’ night. He knew it was 4.15 because she’d gone on about it all evening. ‘Shall I set it for 4.15, then? Do you think that’s about right?’ ‘Yes.’ ‘Right. So I’ll set it for 4.15, shall I?’

  He lay there, hunching himself into the warmth of his bed. These were the most delicious moments – tinged with future horror – when your deep body knew it was gonna be in the bare-arsed cold any minute now and its pores were gulping like goldfish to get that warmness in.

  ‘Ooo, are you awake?’

  ‘Yeah, Mum.’

  ‘Oh, you’re awake are you? Well, it’s time to get up; I’ve run the bath.’

  In the kitchen she’d made him toast and tea. On the table was a greaseproof parcel of sandwiches and two books.

  ‘I got you some books from the library yesterday. There’s quite a lot of time at sea, so I got you some books to read. I got them from the maritime section. I think they’ll be quite good for reading at sea.’

  One was called Moby Dick and loomed higher than the parcel of sandwiches. The other was called The Old Man and the Sea and was nice and thin. Probably no thicker than just one of the sandwiches in the parcel.

  Podge Reynolds’ taxi arrived cautiously up the drive at five o’clock and drove Royce to the wharf.

  BOB DODDS HAD bright red eyes that probably came from waking up too quickly, but when you put them with his glowering face, they could quite possibly be red with anger. He’d arrived twenty minutes late, after warning Royce the night before: ‘Turn up 5.15, boy, and we’ll have gone. You’re never late at sea.’

  Royce had waited, huddled in the shelter of a de
serted Marine Department all-night surveillance post, hearing monstrous eels in the purple waters of the lagoon. They clucked under the piles of the wharf with the same sound as his grandfather made drinking tea.

  He’d stood there, freezing his arse off and wondering if he’d dreamt that he was supposed to be here, until Bob Dodds turned up in a Bedford van with four hot loaves of dripping white bread and a big plastic bag that he thrust at Royce. ‘Maggot packs. Put them in the fridge when we get on board.’

  Frozen pies, hard as dominoes.

  They climbed down this incredibly steep ladder that seemed to go on for ever. You only knew you were getting somewhere by this big slab of blackness above you that blocked out more and more stars until, by the time he felt the deck of a boat under him, half the sky was gone. It was the wharf, towering above him.

  From the deck he could see little moonlit waves licking at the big weedy piles and making the noise he’d thought was eels.

  Bob Dodds did a fart that lasted about as long as the national anthem as he unlocked a door in this sort of shed sort of cabin on the deck of the boat. He went in and put on a light that only just singed the darkness.

  Royce followed, put the pies in the fridge, then hung around inside while Bob did irritably silent, purposeful houseworky things for ages.

  The other crewman on Royce’s new boat turned up about now. Royce later learnt that his name was Sticky Moody. Sticky was a tall, skinny, surprised-looking bloke, with curly brownish hair that started a couple of inches further back on his head than you’d expect. It sort of went straight up, an inch or so, like a wee cliff of bristle. And funny teeth: brown and swept to one side like the ti-tree scrub at the top of Cape Foulwind.

  He nodded sourly, then went down this tight little ladder at the front of the shed on the deck and disappeared. A vapour trail of stagnant booze followed him down the wooden ladder.

  ‘WE HAVE FOUR deaths a year in the sea off Westport,’ said Bob.

  Social chit chat had begun.

  Royce’d met Bob Dodds a few times – the last time was the rescue from the survival suit. Bob had given him a back-hander under the left eye, glared down at him and said, ‘This is your lucky day, kid; I’m only gonna belt you one more time.’

  But Royce had never really sat down and chewed the fat with Bob. Never actually said a word to him, actually, though Bob’d said a few to him, like ‘Get out of my friggin’ way, kid,’ etc on his way to the dunny or the bar.

  But even that was enough for you to say to your mates: ‘I was jus’ chatting to Bob Dodds at the Albion the other night …’

  Bob was a legend in the district.

  One thing he was famous for was the day Buller played Canterbury on the Square, and Bob marked Alister Hopkinson the All Black. Hopkinson was a lock, while Bob was only a prop, but he’d stood beside him anyway, and when Hoppy jumped for the ball in the first line-out, POW! By halfway through the second half they had to take Hoppy off; Bob had rendered him to pulp.

  It was inspirational for the district, what Bob achieved that day – a minor union showing those up-themselves Canterbury buggers what it could bloody well do.

  Mind you, the score was seventy-six nil to Canterbury.

  ‘WHAT’S THAT?’ SAID Bob, nodding at the greaseproof parcel Royce had brought from home.

  ‘Sandwiches. My mum made them. They’re for all of us.’

  ‘What’s in them?’

  ‘Some are egg, some are banana.’

  ‘Christ!’ Bob ripped the parcel from him, went to the door and biffed it into the black cavern of the under-wharf. It landed with a thwack that made an echo.

  ‘I should’ve known,’ he snarled when he got back. ‘You’re a bloody Jonah already, boy, you know that? You don’t bring bananas on a boat! Bananas are bad luck, okay?’ Bob Dodds was glaring at him, from almost exactly Royce’s own height. ‘Now,’ he purred, ‘the grommet’s job is to look after the skipper. You’re the grommet; I’m the skipper. The first thing you do is you make the skipper a cuppa tea. There’s the stove – get on with it.’

  Then Bob marched off to the front of the shed and fiddled with electronic things. Some dials began glowing electric green.

  FROM WHERE ROYCE was standing, the cabin-shed-thing was a kitchen.

  Behind him was the back door. Just before you went out it, the kitchen turned into a bathroom, because there was a shower sticking out the side of the wall.

  Where Bob was working was probably the bridge. He jabbed a switch down, pushed a button – and suddenly the boat was throbbing. That, it would seem, was all it took to make a fishing boat go.

  ‘What sort of stove is it?’ asked Royce.

  ‘Diesel,’ said Bob. ‘And you don’t know how to work it, do you?’

  ‘No.’

  You’d expect him to come jack-booting down the shed, glowing with bad temper – after all, not knowing diesel must be as bad as on-board bananas – but he just distractedly arrived, twiddled with knobs and said, ‘You do that. And notice there’s a clamp across the top of the stove. You push it tight up against the kettle, right?’ The kettle was clattering to the movement of the engine.

  ‘Yeah. I think so.’

  ‘Do it.’

  Royce did it. The clattering stopped.

  ‘That’s how you cook at sea.’

  Bob Dodds went back out into the darkness beyond the bathroom and door and threw ropes around.

  When he came back inside he walked past Royce to the steering wheel saying, ‘When you pick something up in a boat, you put it down exactly where it was, right? To the inch. You get so that you can put your hand on anything you want, blindfolded, right? So while you’re waiting for that friggin’ water to boil, get memorising everything in the galley.’

  ‘Galley?’

  ‘Kitchen.’

  ‘What do you call this … space we’re in?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You know, everything under this roof.’

  ‘You call it the wheelhouse, you dopey prick.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Because that’s what it friggin’ well is.’

  HE HADN’T NOTICED that they were moving away from the wharf. He did now. He could see the spill of the moon on the black water. Diamond on velvet like in the displays at Glover’s Horology. Dana Glover came into his mind for a moment, and he expected a dirty thought to follow. Christ – all he got was a wimpish grieving for the end of his school days!

  So. He was off to sea – with a madman who hated him and a drunk, sleeping it off downstairs.

  ‘What do you call the bit down there that Sticky is in?’

  ‘You call it the fo’c’sle. And you don’t go “down there” you go “below”.’

  ‘Below. Right.’

  ‘The beds below are called bunks. Yours is on the port side. Left.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘We’re going nor’ nor’east this trip, so that’s the side the seas will hit.’

  ‘Right.’

  ‘Right what?’

  ‘… Right what you said.’

  ‘Jesus wept! Let me spell it out for you, kid: the on seas are gonna smash into the port side of this vessel all the way out, so Sticky will logically have taken the other side, thereby making your nights a misery, see?’ Bob made a grimace-type smile that left his gums exactly as far apart as they would have been with teeth.

  ‘Right,’ said Royce.

  ‘Right what?’

  ‘Um, that means the waves’ll hit Sticky’s side on the way home?’

  ‘No. The waves skid off the side when you’re heading south-east.’

  ‘Right.’

  Bob made another gapped smile, then he said, ‘The one across the boat, at this end, is called the athwart bunk. That’s mine. Raquel Welch, above the bunk, belongs to me and you don’t even look at her.’

  Bob was standing at the steering wheel, in a sort of ‘pissing behind a tree’ stance. He was looking out the window at … nothing. The morning was still
black as hell out there. No, there were two little red lights, one on top of the other, hiccuping on and off. Bob was steering straight towards them.

  ‘The Buller River is due north,’ he said. ‘You thought it was west, didn’t you?’

  ‘… Yeah, I did, actually.’

  ‘Well, you’ve been wrong all your life; so have most people. It’s north. Mount Rochfort is east. You thought it was nor’east, didn’t you?’

  ‘… Well, I thought it was north something.’

  ‘When we come back, you’ll steer this boat over the bar. Everyone on my crew can steer this boat. That way if I break my leg and Sticky’s lost overboard, you can get me home. Start learning the compass as soon as you can.’

  The kettle boiled. Royce took a semi-clean metal cup from a clever little cupholder in the wall and put it on the table. Bob Dodds’s next words were in response to the clatter he was making with the tea things – he didn’t look around from staring downriver in the dark: ‘When you pour the tea, don’t put the cup down. When you pour the milk, keep the cup and the bottle in your hands. One milk, two sugars. Have one yourself.’

  THEY’D TURNED OUT of the Floating Basin into the main river. Royce now realised the red lights were on the left-hand wall of the Tip Head, a mile or so ahead, and that there were two green lights, blipping on and off also, on the right-hand wall. Between them was the bar.

  Beyond it was the sea.

  He gave Bob his tea, took up his own and slunk out the back door.

  The moon was still bright as tin, in the shape of a big sliver of toenail. A billion stars. A shooting one! That was supposed to be good luck. Yeah, and pull the other one.

  Diesel smoke from the funnel drifted against the stars like nimbus cloud. At least he knew his clouds. He’d give Bob Dodds a demonstration of his cloud knowledge, first chance he got. Prick. He went inside.