Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  We’d perform at most of the island events but were considered to be the star music turn at the Fish Co-op picnic and at the annual Masonic dance where, before the dance band came on (a bunch of badly rehearsed and not very talented island musicians assembled for the occasion), we’d play all the old favourites and some of the new hit tunes from the wireless.

  I recall how one year at the Fish Co-op picnic, to Alf’s total chagrin, Gloria decided we’d blacken our faces and hands and perform what we’d bill as ‘A Tribute to Al Jolson’.

  We didn’t know about greasepaint so we used Kiwi boot polish, which was our first big mistake.

  ‘A man’s gunna be the bloody laughing stock!’ Alf protested vehemently.

  Gloria had seen The Jazz Singer, the first talking movie starring Al Jolson, at the island’s outdoor cinema in 1929 just before the New York stock exchange crashed and threw the world into the Great Depression. She was not to see another movie until 1936 and so Al Jolson singing on the celluloid was forever emblazoned onto her memory. While we had precious little of what you might call luxuries, we did have an old HMV wind-up gramophone she regarded as part of our professional equipment. We’d play records and then learn the music, translating it into a mouth-organ version for the sextet. In fact, the only birthday and Christmas presents any of us ever received were 78-rpm records suitable for adaptation to the harmonica – usually second-hand from an op shop Gloria corresponded with in Launceston and never of our own choosing.

  We had all the Al Jolson hits, I can still recite them today. ‘You Made Me Love You’, ‘My Mammy’, ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘Hallelujah I’m a Bum’, we did a real good job of that one on the mouth organ, ‘Go into Your Dance’, ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie!’, ‘April Showers’, and the crowd’s all-time American favourite, ‘Swanee’. I think they loved it especially because they could sing along to some of the Australian songs we played, ‘Click Go the Shears’, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Road to Gundagai’.

  So when Mum came up with her black-face idea there was no talking her out of it. ‘What’s good enough for Mr Jolson is good enough for us McKenzies,’ she’d insisted, and Alf knew he was beaten beak and crop.

  I must say I didn’t like the idea much myself. A man felt a bit of a galah standing there in the hot sun on the makeshift boxing ring where later some of the likely lads, full of piss and vinegar, would pull on the dreaded twelve-ounce gloves and, with Father Crosby acting as referee, belt the tripe out of each other. I could see several of my schoolmates huddled together in the crowd pointing at us and pissing themselves. But, as it turned out, Mum was right, the island folk gave us a better-than-usual applause as we entered the ring. I don’t know whether this was because they enjoyed the bit of extra theatre thrown in, or the fact that black boot polish combined with flaming red hair was not a real good look. All I know, at school the next Monday and for several weeks afterwards, we McKenzie kids copped a heap.

  Anyway, one good thing happened out of the experience: halfway through one of the numbers Alf’s black boot polish started to melt from his sweat and was running in streaks down his neck and staining his starched white shirt. When someone in the audience yelled, ‘Alf, yer nigger paint’s comin’ orf!’ that was finally it. Alf could take no more and he stopped playing mid-note and jumped down out of the ring. We all thought he was going to job the bloke who’d shouted out, but instead he headed straight for the pub. Gloria couldn’t yell at him to come back as we were in the middle of a bracket and to stop would have been unprofessional. A crisis suddenly loomed, there was a solo bit coming next which my dad, as the lead mouth, always performed. Next thing I felt Mum give me a dig in the ribs, then with her eyes she indicated that I was to step forward for my solo debut.

  I was the one in the family thought most likely to inherit ‘the gift’ and here was the unexpected confirmation. Feeling more than a bit of a fool I took two steps forward from the safety of the family lineup certain that my Kiwi-polished blackened face was streaked like a zebra’s bum. Nevertheless, with knees trembling, I managed to grasp the moment and give it my best shot. To my surprise, the audience responded at the end of my solo with spontaneous applause.

  Funny how these things work out. It was the first time in my life that I felt a bit more than dead ordinary. I’d managed to overcome my fear and do something on my own and it felt good. Even if as a family we weren’t ‘worth a pinch of the proverbial’, I’d succeeded in front of my peers and I liked the feeling a lot. Perhaps I didn’t have to be a fisherman after all? Perhaps I could be something else? I even had the temerity to hope, if I got a decent pass in my final exams, maybe I could be a trainee clerk in the bank. Though, as it turned out, this thought came to nothing. The following year, at the age of fourteen, I was yanked out of school and sent to work on a fishing boat.

  My mum cried her heart out when this happened. She’d called me into the kitchen after school and made me a cup of tea with milk and three sugars, a special treat, then sat me down at the kitchen table. I knew there must be something wrong, because we boys were only allowed in the kitchen at mealtimes. At any other time the area embracing the sink, black wood stove and scrubbed pine table and the space covered by yellow and green patterned lino, the pattern long since worn through on the most stepped-on parts to show black patches, was secret women’s business. While my sister Sue could come and go as she pleased, even Alf would ask politely to enter when he was home. Mum sat down in the chair beside mine and lit a cigarette, and then got up and fetched an ashtray, sat down again and sighed, then this big tear started to run down her cheek.

  ‘Alf’s crook,’ she said at last.

  ‘What’s wrong with him?’ I replied, thinking it was just some passing thing – sometimes he’d get the gout and have to stay home for two or three days with his leg resting on a chair. ‘He got the gout again?’

  She shook her head and then started to really cry. ‘He’s coughing real bad and Dr Light sent a blood sample to the big island and he’s got cancer, they think it’s of the lung!’

  It had never occurred to me that Gloria loved Alf. He was just our dad and someone she had to put up with on Sunday mornings. Now I was surprised to see she cared greatly about him. ‘What’s gunna happen?’ I asked, meaning what was going to happen to Alf. But that’s not how she understood me.

  ‘You’re going to have to leave school, Jacko, go on the boats.’

  I was stunned. I was good at school, with my memory I always topped the class. Mind you this wasn’t hard and was largely because the rest of the kids only attended school because it was compulsory. Gloria had always insisted that I was going to be the one McKenzie who would complete high school, a glorious first among our numerous island relations. ‘But Mum, you said . . .’ I was choked and the lump in my throat wouldn’t let me complete the sentence.

  ‘I know, Jacko!’ she wept. ‘I know, I know!’ I could see she was terribly distraught – I’d never before seen her blubbering like this. If Gloria did any crying it was in the privacy of her bedroom where we weren’t supposed to hear her. ‘I’ve let you down, mate,’ she wailed, ‘but I can’t make up Alf’s pay just with extra washing and ironing from the hospital!’ She looked up at me and said in what began as almost a whisper and ended in a cry of despair, ‘We need the money, son!’ I was back in the proverbial, the stink of fish-wallop suddenly filling my nostrils.

  In the year following my debut as a black-faced soloist I’d been increasingly called upon to do the solo parts in our performances as Alf had developed this persistent cough. We’d been embarrassed on several occasions when halfway through a solo he’d be overtaken with a fit of coughing and I’d have to cut in to complete as the mouth. This usually got applause as the audience liked the quick uptake I’d manage, sometimes even to catching the end of the note he hadn’t completed so that some of them even thought it was a part of the act. We’d been worried, thinking Alf had the smoker’s cough, which is not good if you play the mouth organ, and Mum said he
had to cut down. It never occurred to us that because he’d smoked since the age of ten and was seldom to be found without a roll-yer-own dangling from his lips that it could be any more than this. In those days nobody told you smoking was dangerous. Eventually, against his protests, Gloria dragged him into Dr Light’s surgery. Now here was the result: at the age of fourteen any future I may have imagined was dashed before it had begun.

  I am ashamed to say that this was my reaction, rather than concern for my old man being on the way out. I can’t think of an adequate excuse for thinking this way. It was just that Alf hadn’t played a real big part in the lives of us kids. He’d be out to sea on a trawler all week and then he’d write off Saturday night and most of Sunday, so had very little time to get to know his children other than when we played the mouth organ together, always practising late on Sunday afternoons when his hangover was halfway settled down.

  The sextet was Gloria’s way of trying to keep us all together as a family. Unfortunately Alf, hangover notwithstanding, was a bit of a musical martinet and, with his head still hurting and him grouchy as a bear to boot, the practice sessions were seldom joyous occasions. When she was younger Sue was often reduced to tears and us three boys would try to remain stoic, but we’d secretly wish we could jack the whole thing in.

  Gloria would let Alf carry on ranting and raving – I guess she thought it was really the only time he could assert any authority over us. After a while we came to understand that Alf McKenzie the music maker was the only thing that separated him from the other fishermen.

  It was something he was recognised and respected for among his peers, consequently his family group had to be perfect or we’d show him up, shame him in front of his mates and their wives. It made for a very good mouth-organ sextet but it didn’t bring him any closer to us kids.

  In his defence, we were no different from the other fishing families. The sea stole our fathers from us in more ways than one and, as I mentioned before, at least Alf didn’t beat us up or have a go at creeping into his daughter’s knickers. Those were hard times and you couldn’t fault him as a provider, but whereas Mum was the centre of our lives, Alf was never a dad in the traditional sense, he simply did the best he could under the prevailing circumstances.

  Getting through high school isn’t a big deal these days, but at the time it was a major achievement. In fact, it became a social demarcation: pass your final high-school exams and you were a somebody; fail them, or fail to get to this point in your education, and you were regarded as a nobody forever onwards. My passing the last year at high school would have been seen as an educational milestone for a fisherman’s family. Now I was condemned to be just like every other McKenzie. Even at fourteen, having grown up with an illiterate father, I knew that without an education I was destined to be yet another of the long line of no-hopers and failures my family inherently produced. I hadn’t the nous at the time to know, just by realising this, that I had sown the seeds of my emancipation. At least I could read, and so the gate was half open – I had somewhere for my mind to go.

  From the age of eight I’d been an avid reader and much to the consternation of the other kids had inadvertently formed an association with the dreaded Miss Lenoir-Jourdan, justice of the peace, piano teacher and town librarian. I say inadvertently, because I felt myself dragooned, powerless to resist the authority that being a justice of the peace gave her. I also knew that she always had to be fierce and must never let her guard down, because being severe was what her job was all about.

  Our association had begun when I was eight years old and in my third year of primary school. My sentence began when my class made its first excursion to the town library. Miss Lenoir-Jourdan made us sit cross-legged on the polished Tassie oak floor where, in turn, each one of us was required to shout out our names which, to our dismay, she entered in a big ledger-type book. We hadn’t even done anything wrong and already we were being tagged and identified for future criminal reference. When it came my turn I called out, ‘Jacko McKenzie, miss!’

  Her head jerked up from the book and, removing her glasses slowly, she glared at me. ‘Jacko? Jacko is not a name, boy!’

  ‘Yes it is, miss. It’s what I got being christened.’

  ‘No, that’s not correct. You are Jack, plain Jack. Now you will say your name again, this time correctly.’

  ‘Jack McKenzie, miss,’ I mumbled, my eyes fixed on my knees. It didn’t sound right, it was as if suddenly I’d been transformed into someone else.

  ‘So, I see we have a McKenzie,’ she said. ‘The seed that’s widely and carelessly scattered on this godforsaken island.’

  ‘No, miss,’ I corrected her, ‘we’re not farmers, me dad’s a fisherman.’

  A hint of a smile appeared on her lips. ‘My goodness! Could it be possible that we’ve spawned an intelligent McKenzie at long last?’

  She was wrong again. Being from a fishing family I knew what the word ‘spawned’ meant, but I also knew that Mum had frequently and clearly stated our position on the island. ‘No, miss, four generations of McKenzies and Kellys and we still haven’t produced anyone worth a pinch of the proverbial!’ I said, repeating Mum’s oft-spoken words.

  ‘The proverbial? I say, what a big word from a small boy!’

  ‘It means shit, miss,’ I explained.

  All the kids laughed and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan suddenly appeared to have sucked on a slice of very sour lemon. ‘Silence!’ she shouted. ‘That’s quite enough!’ Then she added, ‘Jack McKenzie, I shall be calling your teacher!’

  Throughout the next day at school I waited in fear for the wrath to come. Here I was only eight and the justice of the peace already had me marked down for sentencing. When the final bell went, our teacher, Mrs Reilly, called as usual ‘Class dismissed!’ But then she added, ‘Jacko, wait back a moment, please.’ This was it, the beginning of the end. I wasn’t sure what I’d done other than be forced to change into a different person, but whatever it was there was going to be no escape. ‘Jacko, you have to report to the town library,’ she instructed.

  ‘When, miss?’ I asked anxiously.

  ‘Why right now on your way home, of course. Miss Lenoir-Jourdan is expecting you. I hope it’s a nice surprise.’

  ‘Surprise, my arse!’ I thought. She’s wrote all our names in that big book and I’m the first to be dealt with by the fierce justice of the peace. When I’d returned home from school the previous day I’d confirmed with my mother that my name really was Jack. If Miss Lenoir-Jourdan knew stuff about me I didn’t know myself, then what else did she know?

  ‘Ah, Jack McKenzie,’ she said, looking up from her desk as I knocked on the open door to her office. ‘You’ve come.’

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘Sit!’ she commanded, indicating the chair in front of her desk. I did as I was told, sitting with my head bowed grimly, clutching the arms of the chair. She continued writing but eventually looked up and removed her glasses, a gesture that looked real scary, like a judge about to pronounce sentence. ‘Can you read?’ she demanded.

  ‘Yes, miss.’

  ‘How well do you read, Jack?’

  It was a dumb question. I ask you, how’s a kid to know how well he reads? But I kept the thought to myself. Everyone knew she was probably the cleverest person on the island having read all them books in the library shelves and being the justice of the peace and also a piano teacher. ‘I’m okay,’ I mumbled, not looking up from my lap.

  ‘Hmm, we’ll soon see about that.’ She replaced her glasses and out of the corner of my eye I saw her reach out for a book on the desk and place it down in front of her. She opened it and appeared to be scanning the contents, turning several pages after dabbing her forefinger onto the tip of her tongue. At last she came to the bit she must have been looking for. ‘You’ll read this aloud, slowly, pronouncing each word clearly and making sure to pause at the commas. You do know what a comma is, don’t you, Jack?’

  I didn’t, but she’d just told me. ‘
It’s where you pause, miss.’

  ‘Quite right.’

  The book was called The Wind in the Willows, the bit where Ratty and Mole go rowing on the river. Though this book was new to me and somewhat more difficult than the primers we’d been given to read at school, I read on and on, stumbling over a big word every once in a while but getting through to the end of the chapter at an increasingly confident pace.

  ‘That will be sufficient for now,’ Miss Lenoir-Jourdan announced at last, then she added, ‘Your reading is monotonal, much too fast, you swallow your words and your accent is simply atrocious!’ She leaned back in her chair and glared at me through the bottom of her glasses. ‘However, Jack McKenzie, you’re better clay to work with than most.’ She reached over, closing and then lifting the book, and offered it to me. ‘Now take this home and report back here after school on Friday, by which time you will have completed it.’ She gave me a stern look. ‘There will be a comprehensive test where questions will be asked. Now hop along, Jack McKenzie.’

  When I reached home I went out into the back garden and did some weeding in the vegie patch, which Mum said to do, and then started to read the book. After a couple of pages, first making sure nobody was looking, I put the tip of my forefinger onto my tongue and then turned the page. It worked a treat with the page flipping back easy as anything but leaving a great dirty mark on the corner where my finger had been. So there it was, three pages into the new book and already I was in the shit, too late to wash my hands now. Later I tried to get rid of it with my school eraser but it seemed only to make it worse.

  Thus began a long association with the librarian, the only person who ever called me Jack. Though I can’t say the relationship ever developed into a warm one, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan remained imperious, didactic and aloof in all things other than when discussing books. She had a long neck and a chin that seemed always to be raised at a forty-five-degree angle so that she was forced to look at you through the bottom of her glasses, an effect that made her appear as if she didn’t much like what she saw. She would question me constantly, explaining concepts and ideas we might come across in the books she selected for me to read, sighing impatiently if I didn’t catch on quickly enough for her liking. ‘Snails are slow because they can’t read,’ she’d say, when I was stumped for an answer. I never quite knew what she meant by that, but never dared to ask.