BENJAMIN ROSS DIDN’T like Qantas. So this problem downstairs he was hearing about on the phone was the best thing’d happened to him today. ‘An’ they kicked the kid out, huh? Har har har. Right. I’ll take it from here, Angela, thanks.’
Benjamin manoeuvred around his mighty desk, across his wide carpet to the door. ‘Back in five, Brenda,’ he said to his secretary, and strolled from the plush side of the terminal, down modern stairs to the old side of the terminal. The Qantas side. Up the battered wooden stairs to the office of Tom Liner. He didn’t like Tom Liner.
Tom was in. In his dingy office, a third the size of Benjamin’s. No view, no panelling – and sure as hell no on-site TV studio.
‘Hi, Tom, thanks for your time. I’m hearing you’re having a passenger problem downstairs.’
Tom raised the eyes in his big bloodhound face without raising the rest of it. ‘I’ve got about seventy staff to deal with passenger problems, Benjamin. You yourself have about two hundred.’
‘This kid, they tell me, comes hustling up to our counter saying, “Follow that plane! It’s pinched my fish.” Har har har. You’re priceless, you Qantas people – pinching a kid’s fish. Har har. What next, eh, Tom?’
Tom raised his whole face now. Hauled it upright and sat back in his non-ergonomic chair. ‘Jesus, Benjamin, is this the sort of tit-arsed issue the CEO of a major airline involves himself in?’
Benjamin turns his back to look at framed photos of Qantas aeroplanes in the sky. Jumbos. (So why we got DC-10s? The prescient philosophers of Air New Zealand rush out an’ buy this ‘monarch of the skies’ – along with Sabena, Air Afrique an’ a coupla half-arsed banana republics. Rest of the bloody world buys Jumbos.) He turns back to Tom, his spleen enlivened. ‘Haven’t used my studio in a week or two, Tom.’
‘Holy cow!’ spurted Tom Liner. ‘I can’t believe this! Look, you go use your TV studio, Benjamin, and get your pathetic, vile, blackmailing arse out of my office!’
Benjamin turned. ‘Yeah, might just do that, Tom.’
‘You know,’ growled Tom Liner from under his brow furrows, ‘when I’m watching you making your puke-making, irrelevent, dicky-licking little plugs for your airline on TV, Benjamin, I often wonder why you don’t just franchise the Mickey Mouse Club?’
‘Har har, good one, Tom, that sure stung; that smarted, all right. Yeah, I think I might just arrange to have a little on-air muse about unattended baggage and its attendant dangers. Whadda ya think, Tom? In the light of increasing international terrorism, we at Air New Zealand have developed a stringent set of rules on unaccompanied baggage – we wouldn’t dream of letting anything in our holds go unattended. So you’ll understand my astonishment to find that our friendly rival has no such consideration for the safety of its passengers …’
‘You always were a below-the-belt semi-gangster, Ross, and you always bloody will be. Okay, the kid can have a seat. Now get out!’
‘Oh, no no no, Tom, that’s not it at all.’ Benjamin approached the fuming Qantas boss. ‘The kid is highly disillusioned with Qantas, Tom. He doesn’t want a seat with you any more. He just wants his fish. He wants his fish to go where it’s gotta go with a decent airline. Now, why don’t you get your freight people to drop it over to my freight people, pronto pronto, eh?’
Benjamin Ross strolled from the old side of the terminal to the new. His day broadened into pleasurable brightness. ‘Get me Seb Mooney, will you, Brenda?’ he said as he re-entered his cavernous office.
Benjamin Ross didn’t like Seb Mooney.
‘Hi, Seb, how’s it going, buddy? Good, good. Listen, Seb, gotta little item that’ll brighten up your show tonight … Full programme? What you got on, then, Seb? Helen Reddy, right. Richard Hadlee. A dog that saved a baby. What sorta dog, Seb? Newfoundland, I see. You sure the baby wanted saving? Har har har. Now listen, Seb, I think no more than three minutes live. That can’t be too much to fit in, with a bit of tweaking? Eh? … Eh?!’ Benjamin can’t believe his ears. He thumps his massive totara desk. ‘Now, listen here, Seb Mooney. In front of me on my desk here is a $60,000 rental car bill, racked up by lazy, self-important TV employees, which from the kindness of my heart I might just pay, cos you can’t. Now I think sixty grand for three minutes on-air time is a pretty competitive deal, don’t you, Seb? Yeah. And tell the crew to bring a toothbrush and passport. They’re going to Tokyo tonight.’
HE STILL GOT a bit nervous, but you could use it – push out, don’t get imploded by nerves. The young boy, um … he glanced at his notes, Royce Rowland, looked a bit edgy. But that was all right; Benjamin would do a bit of the fatherly thing – that always looked good. Good-looking kid, too. The girls’d be squealing when they saw him.
Bars and tone, countdown, now: ‘Well, hello again, folks, from Air New Zealand, with a little story I’m sure you’ll enjoy. This is Royce Rowland, a young man all the way from Westport. Ever been on TV before, Royce?’
Shook his head; curls bobbled, squeals in the living rooms of the land.
‘No, I bet not; not too many cameras down there on the Coast, eh? Har har. Well, folks, Royce has caught a record-breaking fish: a tuna – a fish so big you just won’t believe. Now, Royce is not a mercenary boy by any means, but if he can get this fish to the market in Tokyo – what was it called again, Royce?’
‘Tsukiji.’
‘Right, Soo – yeah, that’s the place – he can raise the money to replace a fishing boat that got damaged recently. Royce wants to help out an old fisherman who hasn’t got the money to cover the costs of repair to his boat. Now, like you, I reckon Royce deserves all the help he can get, and Air New Zealand is certainly going to do that. Isn’t that right, Royce?’
Nods, curls, squeals in living rooms.
‘Well, there’ll be no difficulties here, Royce. I have here for you a return economy class ticket on a DC-10 flight tonight, via Hong Kong to Tokyo! Whaddaya say to that?’
The little shitbag didn’t say anything. Just sat there, looking like Shirley Temple, gawping at him.
‘Lost for words, eh, Royce? Har har. I don’t blame you, son. Look, you just have a nice flight, Royce – Air New Zealand will look after you every inch of the way. And your fish, of course, har har. And good luck with your sale in Tokyo …’
‘What about Sydney, Nadi?’
‘Aha! No worries there, Royce. The Air NZ DC-10, flying at eighty-four percent of the speed of sound, gets you direct to Hong Kong. Our new flight schedule, Royce, is the first in the world to get you to Tokyo with just one short stopover!’
‘Is Hong Kong more than eight hours?’
‘Well, it’s nine hours if I remember’ – where was this little shit’s gratitude? – ‘but total stopover time has been cut down, on Air New Zealand, by over six hours!’
‘Can I go in the cargo hold?’
What? What the fuck was going on here? Who was this bloody kid? What was he trying to do? ‘What’s that, there, Royce? Har har. Um – I beg your pardon? Cargo hold. Ooh, no, Royce. Har har – Air New Zealand’s far too conscious of your safety and comfort to let you travel in the cargo hold!’
‘You’ve got to put more ice in after eight hours, otherwise the fish will warm up and get flesh burn.’
‘Oh, I see, I see. Look, there’s no way we’ll let your fish get burned, Royce. I’m sure it’ll be completely unharmed on arrival. If anyone can get your fish to Tokyo without burning it … Hell – I mean gee – we spent $270 million to make sure you’d get to Tokyo six hours faster than anyone else, har har har …’
‘Can it come in the cabin?’
Benjamin Ross could see black waves strobing in front of his eyes. He knew he was sweating. He could see himself sweating in the monitor over there – sweating on live, prime-time television. Was this kid from hell or something? Was he being paid by Qantas to do this? The item had gone on way longer than three minutes – where was the bloody wind-up call? ‘In the cabin? The fish? Gosh, Royce, that’s a … a big thing to ask.’
The tinkly voice of Sally Arthur came over the airwaves – they’d cut back to the presenters in the studio. There she was, smiling so sweetly it made you sick. ‘Well, Mr Ross? What’s it to be?’ she gushed. ‘Are you going to grant Royce his wish or shatter his dreams?’
He put a smile on his lips that from the inside tasted of bile: ‘Well, Sally, you, like everyone else, know Air New Zealand’s not in the business of shattering dreams. And by hokey we’ve never stepped back from a challenge, either! … Okay, Royce, we’ll arrange for your fish to be stored down the back of the plane out of the way so you can get it safely to market. If anyone can get it to market, Air New Zealand can, eh? Har har.’
HE’D KICKED THE little shit out of the studio. Now he faced the crew. ‘Okay, stand away from those cameras, this is off the record. You arseholes listening?’ The pale but defiant faces of the presenters filled the studio monitors. They nodded. ‘Right, now hear this. Don’t you ever mess with me again. I don’t want any mention of this – and forget the trip, this topic is embargoed. There will be not a pixel more coverage of this fiasco. If one adverse word of this situation appears on TV – or in any form of media for that matter, you’re all dead meat!’