BETTY WAS EMBARRASSED. Theft was supposed to be an anonymous act. Now she was sharing a ship with the sucker she’d stolen the fish from. Bad form, bad form all round. Well, the kid was here and presumably she’d have to face him. Damn. Betty hated victims. They were just so pathetic.

She was sharing a bed with big Stan – as in, she slept in it when he didn’t. His idea. He was a quartermaster – what he said they called a ‘mud pilot’: he steered the ship under the instruction of the captain. But evidently there was a newly qualified mud pilot who was doing the honours on the way up, so Stan had nothing really to do. Still, he just happened to have a ‘watch’ to keep – which started when she mentioned bedtime. Oh well, maybe he was gay.

She’d given Stan the money and told him to spread it around however many men it would take to get the job done; up to him how much of it he gave them. There’d been four of them to get the fish on board and all seemed happy enough with the deal. There were more than that in the know, because several others saw them bringing it aboard, but evidently smuggling was not unheard of – nor were what Stan had called ‘ringbolts’. She was a ringbolt right now. An unemployed one.

She had a fair idea of the system they’d encounter up in Onehunga and she’d have Stan with her anyway. He knew an export guy who owed him one and they’d been in touch. As it happened, quartermasters were in charge of the loading and unloading of the ship as well, so getting the fish off at the other end without the captain knowing would be no problem. The only problem was the kid. Well, she’d sleep on it.

‘KIDS, WHO’D HAVE them?’ she muttered next morning as she cautiously opened the door, checked for captains – zero – and made her way the two doors down the corridor to Royce’s cabin.

Royce was staring out the porthole watching Wellington happen. He knew she was there – course he did; she’d accidentally slammed the DO NOT SLAM door.

‘Okay, Royce, I’ll be straight with you …’ Jesus wept – not an altogether clever opening gambit under the circumstances. ‘Look, let’s talk a little human nature here, okay? Let’s just have a look at a couple of common human qualities – morality and greed. Now, we all get taught morality and that’s good, cos it’s a damn fine quality to have. We read books about it, we have the Bible and church and socially concerned people spending their time pumping that morality into us, to make us better people. Most movies have a moral – at least American ones do; famous novels, all that type of thing – all about morality. Now, let’s just move our focus to greed, huh? You know anyone who teaches greed? You know where to go to learn the finer points of being greedy? I don’t. But there’s as much of it around as there is morality. Cos you see, Royce, greed is natural, it’s part of human nature, while morality has to be taught, see? We’re all fulla greed and none of us can do anything about it. We get born with greed like we get born with original sin. Hell, greed probably is original sin.

‘The only individuality in greed is what triggers it off. Well, in my case, it was that fish. It’s one of the best I’ve ever seen, Royce, and I’ve seen plenty. And we got it ashore in superb condition – it’s a credit to us all, the condition of that fish.’ He had turned and was about to speak, but she hurried on. ‘And it was caught at the perfect time. In Japan this year there are three double lucky days in November – that’s when a Dai-an falls on a holiday. Everyone gets married on a Dai-an and especially on a double lucky. And at weddings you eat tuna. Now, my instincts, my human nature, were taking all these factors into account when I saw that fish, Royce, and I went for it. Cos what my instinct told me was – ‘getting hold of that fish ain’t greed, Betty my girl, that’s just goddamn common sense.’

‘I think you’re not being serious,’ he said seriously. She was thinking of a reply when he said, ‘Did you know about Captain Calmwater’s boat?’

‘No. What?’

‘It got sunk at its moorings the night you pinched the fish and they all think I did it. Or you did.’

‘Shit.’

‘Did you?’

‘No. What happened?’

‘They don’t know. All I know is that old George reckoned it wasn’t me, and on account of that I’m gonna get the $30,000 back for him.’

‘What $30,000?’

‘That’s owed on his boat. Old bugger hasn’t got that sort of money and it’s not insured.’

Damn, damn, damn! These were the worst situations of all – guilt compounded by compassion. She could feel herself droop (greed), while he straightened (morality). Always life conspired to turn itself into the most banal of fairy stories.

‘Look, Royce, I’m sorry. I’ll send you the thirty grand, okay?’

‘Why are you doing this, Betty? I thought …’

God, this was purgatory – being stared at by a wet-eyed angel. ‘Look, kid, I’ve got every excuse in the world for doing what I did. You name it: impoverished upbringing, two years at Harvard Business School, prostitution …’

‘Be serious!’

She cracked. She cracked right down the flaw in her personality. ‘Okay! I’m serious! You want serious, this is serious, you arsehole! Get off my back! Get outa my morality closet! There was this $200,000-bluefin being pissed around with by a school of pathetic amateurs and I took over. I took it under my control. Under reasonable circumstances, in any decent fishing place in the world, on any non-joke fishing boat, I woulda had a stainless steel tuna missile to send down the line to clamp onto that fish’s face and haul it up. And a fife-forge, four-sided gold anodised gaff to hook it aboard and decent gear – Shime Shime blood sliming knives, narrow boners, parers, stiff boners, breaking knives, cimeters and cleavers. Absolutely none of which you had on your ragged little goddamn boat! Jesus, you amateurs. You realise what you would have done to a quarter-million-dollar fish? Nothing! Ruined it! You’d have sold it for fish and chips! Well, I’m taking it to Tsukiji market to sell it properly. You’re the bad guys here, wasting that goddamn fish; I’m the good guy – I’m restoring its market potential. End of serious story.’

‘… How much did you say?’

‘Two hundred grand – perhaps slightly under.’

He plumped down on the bed like a dropped acorn.

‘That’s my best guess and it’s the best guess you’ll get outside Tsukiji …’

‘Half,’ he said.

It sort of snuck up on her – her rhetorical sights had been set in another direction at the time. ‘What?’

‘Half.’ He stood, reached into the top pocket of his checked woollen shirt and took out an FLD: double copy. He held up the top docket so she could read it, but ready, on the balls of his feet, to spring away if she tried to touch it. It was a landing docket for the bluefin, in his name. The rest of the form was standard. Until the end. It was signed ‘D. Morgan, NZ agent for Toto Suisan (Tosui)’.

Agent for Toto Suisan!

‘How’d that foul-mouthed incinerator know about Toto Suisan?’

‘Dooley? Dunno. But he’s their agent.’

This was serious. That chain-smoking goofball could have been in touch with Tsukiji already. One thing you don’t do: you don’t mess with the Big Seven. She turns up with a Toto Suisan fish and tries to sell it freelance, she’s in schtuk. She had her loyalties, in her way. For five years she’d been giving succour and solace, so to speak, to the brave fishermen of the Daito Gyorui fleet. She’d intended to deal through them – Daito was another of the Seven. She knew several of the board and they’d have dealt with her. But not if it was a Tosui fish, no way. That sort of behaviour leads to discrete inquiries from the Yakusa …

‘Royce,’ she said, smiling a snowball burner smile, ‘I’ll give you $30,000 for that piece of paper.’

‘Half,’ said the angelic little arsewipe.

She then said, ‘Can I sit down?’ and when he’d nodded she sat on the floor in front of the not very comfortable sofa. Funny, that. He sat on the floor in front of sofas too. So had President Kennedy, they say. Maybe he’d been assassinated by sofa makers.

‘You’re in good shape,’ she said from the floor. ‘Athlete?’

‘Yeah.’

‘What – rugby, football, hockey?’

‘… Athletics.’

‘Huh?’

‘Athletics – sprinting, long-jump.’

‘Oh, track and field. Right. Not a prodigy, are you – world record-holder?’

‘Give over.’

‘Ever represented your country at an under-age event?’

‘No.’

She’d looked mournful. So did he – hell, there were international kids out there doing 10.4!

‘Never been abroad, then?’

‘Abroad?’

‘Outa the country.’

‘Oh. Shit, no. Only to the horizon.’

‘So,’ she sighed, ‘you haven’t got a passport, have you?’

‘No.’

BY CRIPES SHE was organised when she wanted to be. She called Stan in, sat at the desk at the end of the bed and started writing out lists and orders.

‘Before we start, Stan, I don’t suppose your union does passports?’

‘Christ, no, we’re not that sophisticated, Betty. We’re not the bloody Boilermakers’ Union, you know.’

‘Birth certificates?’ (She made it rhyme with gates.)

‘Oh, yeah, we can run to a BC. Sometimes have disputes over compulsory retirements and so on.’

‘Right. Royce, work out how old you wanna be and where you wanna be born and tell Stan. Now, union got a tame pox doctor?’

‘In Wellington? Hmm. I’ll have to make a couple of calls. We don’t come in here that often, I’m not quite up with the Wellington system.’

Ten minutes later he was back to say they had a GP who was hooked on speed and generally did what he was told.

‘Good. Did you make an appointment?’

‘He’s coming aboard. Says there’s always a coupla three jokers on a ship that need tending. I said I’d do him a breakfast and show him around.’

‘Right. Royce, on your way into Internal Affairs, go into the passport photo agency next door …’

Stan was impressed. ‘Hell, how you know that, Betty? You’ve never been to Wellington before.’

She sighed; didn’t even look up from her notes. ‘There’s always a passport agency outside Internal Affairs, just like there’s always a pawnshop next door to a casino – it’s a law of nature.’

By the time they’d docked she’d been on the phone twice to this place called Internal Affairs, told them what an urgent case of life and death he was and jacked up an interview for him. ‘He hasn’t applied for a passport before, so you can check out if I’m lying or not before he comes in – speed up the process.’ She hung up. ‘Eleven-thirty. I asked for it specifically – they’ll go like the clappers to get it done before lunch break. The urgent fee is $120. I deliberately said, “That’s American dollars, of course?” and there was a long pause. So, take that in that pocket ($US120) and that in that pocket ($NZ120). And give me back the one you don’t use, arsewipe.’

THE DOCTOR WAS a tall guy with a splendid head of grey hair. Had a lot of ex-dignity about him and eyes as dull as schoolbooks. He sure didn’t seem like he was hooked on anything to do with speediness.

‘Kid has to be in Tokyo day after tomorrow, Doc,’ Betty said from her office at the end of Royce’s bed. ‘Terrible build-up of trimethylamine oxide – progressively rising TMA count. It’s gone from a natural level of three MG to over fourteen. Above thirty could kill him. Only one hospital in the world deals with TMA cases, Doc, and it’s in Tokyo.’

The doctor didn’t say anything, just pursed his lips as he took a pad of forms out of his case and started writing.

He signed the top form, folded it and handed it to Betty. ‘And how long has the patient been smelling like a rotting fish?’ he asked murmurously, with the wisp of a smile.

JEEPERS, ARE THESE people paranoid or what? He and Stan had got into a taxi and driven to this quite tall building in a busy street. There, of course, was the photographer, and then he’d gone into this boring foyer with a sort of private post office on the left and grey lift doors straight ahead. There was a list beside the door of what was on different floors. The first floor didn’t say anything, the second said Passports and the third said Information, but didn’t say about what. Anyway, they logically went to the second floor.

There was a counter and two doors in one corner. Both doors said PRIVATE.

Stan pressed a buzzer. There was the eventual sound of a door unlocking. A woman with stooped shoulders came out. She locked the door behind her and mooched over to stand behind the counter between them, looking amazingly sad. ‘Mr Rowland?’

‘Yes.’

‘Do you have photos and birth certificate?’

‘Yes.’

‘Have you signed the back of the photos?’

‘No.’

‘You have to sign the back of the photos.’

‘You won’t see it when it’s stuck on.’

‘You have to sign the back of the photos. Now, you have authorisation from a registered doctor?’

‘Yes.’

She took the bits and pieces, unlocked her PRIVATE door and disappeared through. They hear the sound of more locking from the other side. They dangled there like the Pope’s balls until unlocking started again, about ten minutes later.

She came out with a form. ‘Please fill this out in the presence of your witness – you have known Mr Rowland for more than twelve months?’ she said to Stan.

‘Oh yes,’ said Stan.

‘Please fill in the form.’

She unlocked and departed.

‘They should invest in a portcullis for her,’ murmured Stan.

Royce didn’t look up from the form – he was not quite sure what a portcullis was.

It was all easy, boring stuff, but when he’d finished she didn’t re-emerge. They knocked on the door for ages and nothing happened. In fact nothing happened until one o’clock!

Unlockings. She took the form. ‘Do you have the urgent fee?’

He took out the $NZ120. Didn’t deserve a bribe, this one. Anyway, she’d probably have called the police.

She looked him piercingly in the eye. ‘I’ll get your receipt.’

She handed it to him. ‘The passport will be ready by 5.30.’

‘Oh. I thought we’d get it now.’

‘It will be ready at 5.30. Processing and lamination.’

‘Right.’

They descended in the grey lift.

‘You know what she was doing in there?’ said Stan. ‘She was having her lunch.’

LATE AFTERNOON THEY sailed, and you got a good view of one side of Wellington from his porthole, then some more big towns down the harbour and across the other side. After half an hour or so they ran out of land, turned to port and there were these big high mountains running down the east coast of the South Island. That was the island he lived in. He had a sudden spasm of nostalgia and fear; he was being abducted. And long-distance abduction it was too – he had the passport to prove it.

It didn’t last long because a rational bit of his brain told him there was bugger-all he could do about it – and anyway the scenery was very interesting. Big mountains of salt beside emerald lakes, a huge bay, distant towns, the Sounds – the West Coast! Cripes, you could just about see Westport! Maybe you could have, but the sun was low and blasting out the view with light. Then they turned again and there was just the horizon. He lay back on his bunk and read his new passport for a while until Stan came in.

‘They’re still loading up the engine: it’ll be another quarter hour till they’re at Full Ahead. Then the captain’ll come down here for his tea. Come and look at this – you’ve got five minutes.’

They crossed the corridor to the porthole in the telly room. There was a big structure on the sea, like the Eiffel Tower, just stuck there on the dead flat sea. ‘Oil rig,’ said Stan. ‘Maui. What can you see behind it? Look up a bit.’

There were mashed potato clouds, faintly pink in the low sun, and over to the right a flat headland that sort of swooped up in a perfect curve, into the cloud. A twenty-mile swoop it must have been, at least. And jeepers, look at that! There was a mountain in that cloud! Half the cloud was mountain when you looked again. This’d be Mount Egmont. Hell, he’d learnt about it at school. ‘Intense!’ whispered Royce. The land around the mountain was very neat and you got the feeling the locals might have neatened the mountain too. Sort of trimmed its bumps and hollows into perfect curves, to go with the scenery. Or else they’d felt obliged to keep things as neat as the mountain. He stared until Stan grunted, ‘Okay, cabin.’ The last thing Royce saw was the Maui oil rig.

WHAT DID HE know about his father? Not a hell of a lot – not directly, anyway. He knew it wasn’t him holding his hand when he saw the bear – that’d been Sticky, all right. There was another scene that passed the window of his mind when he thought about Sticky, but it had never stopped long enough for him to get a good look at it. It was something dreadful, something violent. And Sticky had been doing it to his mother. He’d thought about it, wondered whether Sticky had beaten her, then he’d looked at it from a grown-up perspective and realised he’d seen Sticky humping his mother.

Of his father he remembered – what? Well, whenever his name got mentioned the reaction would always be – ‘God, old Tommy, eh? I could tell you a tale or two about Tommy!’ But they always laughed when they said it. He was a man who cheered people up – in death, anyway. That was good, but it wasn’t a memory of course – it was an impression and didn’t really count. Think of a memory.

Whitebaiting. Sitting on the little wooden seat his father had built on the bar of his bike. Wobbling down the brown gravel road to the Orowaiti, down by the sawpit. The clearest part of the memory was the long smooth pole of the whitebait net, sticking out ahead of them as his father carried it on his shoulder. And the coarse rise and fall of his breath right behind him.

Behind him. Behind him on the bike.

In his best and clearest memory of his father, Royce was looking away from him. How strange.

THE SUN SET, but didn’t do a Jupiter’s Needle.

The captain had gone off watch and would spend the night in his cabin, Stan said. Royce could come out to play.

Ships at night are dark. You’d expect them to be lit up like sparklers but they aren’t. The bridge is in total, instrument-spangled darkness. He’d noted this the night before, but then they had been in port and he’d assumed the lack of light was due to inactivity. No. It was no brighter at sea. Lights were simply the dim emanations of the corridors, or the unsatisfactory wattage of cabins and dining room. Ships are driven in darkness. That’s how they can pass each other in the night.

Crews are equally eerie. They disappear. The dining room, the telly room, the bar – empty. From his cabin across the corridor from the dining room and bar Royce would hear hour-long bursts and yelps of fellowship, and then long distances of profound silence. Where had everyone gone? He never knew. A big ship is, for at least half its time, a ghost ship.

Food. Food was immense unsophisticated steaks with mushrooms, tomatoes and chips. Or fat-fronded, mincy hotdogs on sticks, with cauliflower and mashed potatoes. Followed by bananas in jelly with whipped cream. Food on a big ship was any young kid’s dream.

The Buller Lion was super modern, so Stan had said. It was the first cement ship with an unattended engineroom. The Portland Carrier, the ship on this run before it, had had four engineers on duty all the time. The Buller Lion could do fourteen knots, which meant it could get from Westport to Manukau in just two tides. The old Portland Carrier had only done eleven knots and that meant an extra tide – because you could only go over the Manukau Heads in daylight. So that meant a thirty-six-hour trip against a twenty-six-hour one. ‘Yep, the old Portland was hard work,’ said Stan. ‘This one: solid state technology.’ He paused and leaned back on the sofa in Royce’s cabin. ‘Mind you, Lloyds will only register technology that’s been tested for ten years, so this ship’s driven by equipment made in 1965.’

That was thirteen years ago. Sheesh, you had to be quite old to be modern in the shipping world.

Stan was all right. Just as long as he knew Royce was keeping out of the captain’s way, he more or less left him alone. He’d come in to invite him to watch telly. ‘Captain’s asleep, ship’s on Iron Mike – that’s automatic pilot.’ Driving a boat, Stan told him, was what you’d describe as ‘alert tedium’, there was bugger-all to do until you started sinking.

They’d gone into the telly room to watch Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Absolute crap.

Stan’d told him some amazingly interesting things. Like about how he’d used to work in oil tankers and how in oil tankers you don’t have to worry about holes in the bottom of the hull, but holes in the top. See, oil floats, so if water comes in, it pushes the oil up, away from the hole. Then you just seal off the compartment with the hole in the bottom. But get a hole above the waterline and you’ve got trouble.

And he told him about the time they got water in the hold of the Buller Lion. A duct to the ballast had sprung a leak and sent out a jet of water that ran down the sides of the cement in the hold and made this pyramid-shaped sculpture of concrete that they called The Eiger. Well, they sucked all the dry stuff out as they sailed around to Lyttelton and put her in dock. That left about 2000 tons solid. Now the hold is sealed, because you blow the cement in, see? So there’s no decent access to it. They had to crank the ship up above the dry dock and cut big holes in the hull – only decent way to get at the concrete. Jackhammered it out from the bottom. Thirty-six days, twenty-four hours a day – cost a million dollars.

Not a bad bloke, Stan – for an abductor.

BETTY BUSTLED INTO the cabin and began talking before she’d even shut the door. Royce had a hunch she did this to set the tempo of the meeting, so that there wasn’t space for other things to intrude – like embarrassment or guilt. She had a bit of both, he reckoned.

‘Okay, I’ll bring you up to speed. I’ve just checked the fish. No white dots on the flesh. As far as I can tell I got the parasites when I cleaned the gills, though there’s a slight risk of eggs in the meat. We won’t know for sure till the fish is cut in Tokyo, but I’m pretty confident. There are no scars, and it’d fed well, so there’s plenty of fat in the meat and no danger of konnyaku – when the flesh dries out and splits. You can also split the flesh by bending the fish – and as you know, we’ve done zero of that. So,’ she smiled and looked quickly around the room – Royce got the impression she was a reformed smoker, ‘that was more or less the final audit. I had to make sure it was worth the time and money of getting it to Tsukiji – and, goddamn it – it is.’

There was an awkward little pause where the shared joy and congratulations should have gone. Mind you, behind his poker face he was pretty chuffed – he was going to Japan! Stick that in your pipe and smoke it, Karen Phibbs! You might know the names of the fish, smarty, but I’m gonna meet them personally!

‘I’ll get Stan onto the tickets. The Big Seven give you eight days to get chilled fish to market, because that’s how long it’ll stay in Phase One order. There’s four phases – Phrase One fresh, Phase Two freshing and smoking, Phase Three smoking and salting, and Phase Four condemned. After Phase One you’re getting hypoxanthine in the meat and it starts tasting like ammonia. Middle management know to the minute how long a fish has been outa the water, believe you me. They’ll do a tetrazolium test on it as soon as it gets there – put a paper impregnated with tetra compounds on it, and if it changes colour you’re in shitter’s ditch. Your fish is outa Phase One on the spoilage chart. After that it drops outa A-grade and you don’t get enough to pay the airfare home.’

‘It’s had three days so far.’

‘Yeah. No sweat. We get into Onehunga 8am tomorrow; we can be on a flight that night. Now, our only problem could be residual shin-yake. There’s still some lactic acid in there and the pH of the flesh is down around five or six. We’ll lose probably $20,000 for every degree that body warms. If it goes up more than three degrees it starts coming out of rigor – arrives at Tsukiji as catfood. But keep your hair on – the flight stops at either Sydney or Nadi before Hong Kong. We can get it re-iced during the stopover.’

HE AWOKE. ‘AS idle as a painted ship upon a painted ocean.’ The poem from William Coleridge came back into his mind. Motionless. There were portholes and fiddles and lifejackets to indicate he was at sea, but no movement to confirm it. Not a shimmer. He crawled down the bunk to kneel at the porthole. Yes, there was water out there, of a placidity he had not imagined. He opened the porthole and the slightest of breezes – created only by the passage of the ship – touched his face. There was a softness to the nature of the sea he had never known before. The sound it made was no more than the tearing of tissue paper.

Beyond the sea were hills, low brown hills, made of sand. Sandhills. He watched them, waiting to be amazed. Nothing happened. He went to the dunny for a torrential morning pee. He thought of the oil rig, and also, strangely, of his father …