Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  John Lazarou, ‘Lazy’, my frustrating but loyal weapon-pit partner, was Greek, and turned out to be a natural-born fisherman. He too ended up captaining one of our factory ships. He’d always managed to create a fair bit of chaos on land and I still don’t know how he hadn’t got himself killed in the war, but he was different as the skipper of a fishing boat. I think Greeks are a bit like that – give them something they love to do and you’ll find no one does it better. Lazy’s heart had never been in soldiering. He’d only joined the army because he hadn’t wanted to work in the family cafe in Gympie and he thought going to Korea with K Force was the lesser of two evils.

  Even Ivan the Terrible ended up manager of our first fish-canning factory, and later, when we moved into Asia, he supervised building canning plants in Thailand, Indonesia and Singapore and travelled extensively, acting as our international production coordinator.

  I found Ian Ferrier, the D Company radio operator with whom I had shared that first night on Hill 504 in the Battle of Kapyong, panelling for a country radio station. I hauled him out of there quick smart to run the radio operation for both our fishing fleet and Munday Aviation. He’d married and had four kids, whom Ogoya put through university.

  Best of all I found Dave McCombe, the bravest of the brave, who had carried one end of my stretcher across the icy paths in the mountains of North Korea when we’d been taken prisoner. He had cradled my bootless feet within his army jacket and in the warmth of his armpits to save them from certain frostbite and amputation. I still remember his last words to me, as I was dragged from the prison cage we shared with the South Koreans: ‘Jacko, don’t die, don’t let the fuckers win!’

  I’d discovered through the War Memorial archives in Canberra that Dave had survived captivity in Korea, and I knew more or less where to look for him. He’d taken over the family wheat farm in the Mallee, in north-western Victoria, but in 1968 he’d been wiped out by the long drought and been forced to put the property on the market. Dave had no aspirations to be a fisherman – he’s the sort of bloke who needs a lot of space and dust under his big RM Williams boots. Anyway, with a bit of a loan and what with one thing and another, he was able to remain on the land. He’s a proud man and he paid every cent back to me. So we bought another 5000 acres adjoining his own property and one of his three sons now runs it for us. It’s good wheat country and has been another good investment. Christmas last year, Wendy flew me over in the company helicopter and we visited the McCombes, staying with them for a week in the old family homestead.

  I fear I digress, my mind jumping around like a jack rabbit. Where was I? That’s right, we’re twelve years in, and suddenly abalone was the next big thing in the fishing industry. We had a bit of space booked on Qantas for a shipment of tuna to Japan when two of the tuna boats broke down three days out to sea and it looked as though we’d miss the flight. One of the other boats had brought in a load of scallops and a ton or so of abalone to feed the cray we kept in a harbour tank to top up supplies. We didn’t want to waste the Qantas cargo space so, purely on a whim, Jimmy tossed in the abalone and the scallops. Well, the Japanese went crazy and cabled back to say they could take all they could get of both, but especially the abalone.

  And so the abalone ‘gold rush’ began. The price of abalone soared and kept going up. In 1968 we were getting one dollar per pound exporting to Japan using our own licences and those of the fishermen we employed, who got the going rate of ten cents a pound for their abalone. It doesn’t sound like much, but a good diver could make 300 dollars a day, and fishermen who’d always done it tough didn’t know what to do with all the money they were making. If only all this had happened in Alf’s time.

  The metric system had arrived but the fish wholesalers were slow learners and fishermen hate change, so cray and abalone were still paid for by the pound. Every fisherman with a five-dollar fishing licence from Tasmania to Eden hocked everything he had to buy a Briggs & Stratton motor, used to drive a twin-cylinder Clisby compressor hooked up to Nylex premier garden hose, a twenty-foot boat with an outboard motor, and a regulator, weight belt, wet suit and flippers. He was then fully equipped to go into abalone diving. In 1969 the Tasmanian Government was forced to restrict the number of licences to 120 so that abalone fishing didn’t get totally out of hand.

  In 1970 Japan discovered the superior green-lip abalone, which proved to be a bonanza for Ogoya Seafood Company as the east coast of Queen Island – our very own backyard – possessed an absolute abundance of green-lip, and we were getting three dollars a pound in Japan. The demand for abalone in Japan increased and the price doubled, so that a good abalone diver on the west coast could bring in 3000 pounds of black-lip abalone a day, and make up to 600 dollars a day.

  By 1974 licences became transferable and came with twenty-eight quota units. One unit enabled the diver to fish for 600 kilos of abalone a year. A single licence plus full quota units sold for 20 000 dollars. We owned our own licences and over the years bought all the quota units we could, for whatever the going price. We were soon running, and continue to run, a very big diving operation. Today, in 1986, a licence with twenty-eight quota units is worth four million dollars, and is still rising – heaven knows where it will end. The large and useless shellfish with the beautiful mother-of-pearl interior Alf had fed to his cray catch to keep it healthy before sale is now worth a king’s ransom.

  It was at about this time, 1974, that we decided to trial abalone on the Chinese market. As China itself was closed to westerners, this meant going to Hong Kong. This wasn’t something we’d previously planned – in fact, it was a move we’d avoided, for Nicole’s sake. After all, Hong Kong contained for her only bitter memories she wouldn’t want to revisit.

  It had all happened in the small town of Bermagui, on the far south coast of New South Wales, in 1974. It was unusual for Jimmy and me to be in the same place at the same time. He’d been spending a lot of time in Japan and I wanted to catch up with him. A local fisherman was selling his abalone licence and I was going up to put in a bid for it and suggested Jimmy come along for the ride. Wendy flew us up in the Cessna and arranged to pick us up again the following day, her last words being, ‘Enjoy your boys’ night out!’ Anyone who’s ever been to Bermagui won’t fault it for being a nice little village, but it has a snoring problem – ‘sleepy hollow’ would be an exaggeration. So the Horseshoe Bay Hotel where we were staying wasn’t exactly jumping.

  As we were having a beer or three on the pub’s verandah we’d watched the sky change colour as the sun set and then the moon rise, a thin melon slice that did nothing for the dark. I was feeling restless, I don’t know why – perhaps a bout of ‘Jacko’s sadness’ was coming on, though I dismissed the thought immediately. Jimmy was with me, and we were two mates with a few, all-too-rare, precious hours to spend together. But I no longer wanted to remain drinking at the pub. There was something about the sound of the surf rolling in, crashing every minute or so on the rocks at the end of the beach with an explosion, that was getting on my nerves. Earlier I’d glanced at the chalkboard menu behind the main bar and there’d been nothing I particularly fancied. ‘Let’s find a greasy spoon in town,’ I suggested to Jimmy, hoping the walk would settle me down.

  We set off down a dark street behind the hotel, the exploding surf roaring in my ears. In the distance a car’s headlights coming over a rise flashed suddenly and disappeared, momentarily lighting up the streetscape. Then I lost it. Something snapped and I was back on Hill 504, looking down at the battle below with grenade and mortar explosions momentarily lighting the grim scene. The sound of a lone bugle floated up from Kapyong Valley like a funeral wail. So many dead, so many dying below. Then a series of horrific images flashed before me: Ted Shearer slumped in the weapon pit beside me, his heart sliced by shrapnel; Johnny Gordon lying lifeless, his dark hand resting on a patch of moonlit snow; Doug Waterman, the Irishman in the POW camp, turned to the wall dying of shame; the Chinese soldier with his arm hacked off at the shoul
der rolling two cigarettes with his good hand, then lighting them and handing one to me before dying quietly, his sputtering cigarette stuck to his bottom lip. Everywhere the dead lay around me. I could feel myself beginning to shiver and wondered if I was dying. A song filled the air.

  ‘Some of these days you’re gonna miss me, honey

  Some of these days you’re gonna feel so lonely . . .’

  ‘Hey, Brother Fish, yoh okay?’ Jimmy’s hand was on my shoulder.

  ‘Yeah, yeah – fine, mate,’ I answered, trying to snap into the present.

  ‘Dat a black woman, man!’

  ‘Huh?’

  ‘Singin’. Ain’t no white woman can sing like dat.’

  We were standing outside Le Marlin Café. A large, free-standing sign at the door announced: ‘MADAM AND THE RAGTAG JAZZ BAND’. The amplified voice coming from inside hit me like a smack in the mouth. There was only one person in the world who sounded like that, a voice that was etched into my brain forever. ‘That’s no black lady, mate – that’s the immortal Pat Brand!’

  It was hard to believe the hallucination of a few moments back wasn’t continuing. She was in full flight belting out the song, pushed along by a band pounding out a rhythm like an oncoming steam train and adding to the excitement with lines of four-part harmony. We eased our way inside just as the pianist finished his solo and raised his bowler hat to the cheers of the crowd packing the room.

  At the end of the set we attempted to squeeze our way to the front. Jimmy, a head taller than anyone in the place, said in his deepest voice, ‘Excuse me, sir; excuse me, ma’am’, while I followed directly behind him. Pat Brand stood signing cassette tapes as we approached.

  ‘Ma’am, God he done make a big mistake. How come yoh ain’t been born’d black?’ Jimmy asked, laying on the accent thick as peanut butter.

  Pat Brand looked up, clearly delighted. She stood on tiptoe and grabbed Jimmy around the neck, who obligingly lowered his head sufficiently for her to give him a big kiss. ‘That’s got to be the greatest compliment I’ve ever had!’ she said, gushing at the bastard.

  ‘I’ve waited nearly thirty years to do that!’ I exclaimed.

  ‘Ma’am, allow me da pleasure of intro-du-cing Brother Fish,’ Jimmy said, laughing.

  ‘Brother Fish?’

  ‘Jack McKenzie. I fell in love with you in 1945 at Puckapunyal,’ I explained.

  ‘Dat God’s truth, ma’am. Brother Fish, he done tol’ me ’bout yoh in da POW camp in North Korea.’

  That really got us all going. She was now Pat Thompson, had married some lucky bugger after the war – kids, the whole works. She was only just making a comeback, playing small gigs like this to break herself back in for the big city venues, she said. We talked for a while but then the band started coming back and she excused herself. ‘Better get back to work. Will I see you afterwards?’

  She sang a couple of numbers, and as far as I was concerned she’d lost none of her former glorious voice. She was in the middle of a song when I could contain myself no longer, and out came the harmonica.

  ‘Frankie and Johnny were lovers

  Oh Lordy how they could love

  Swore they’d be true to each other

  Just as true as stars above . . .’

  Pat invited me to sit in with the band, and over the next hour I swapped solos with the beautifully inventive trumpet player. I could see the band didn’t mind – in fact, from their looks of appreciation from time to time I reckon they quite liked the addition to the music. I wasn’t trying to show off – I was just another muso, adding my small contribution to the jazz. Afterwards the bass player, who also had a heart-melting voice, asked me if I’d like to join the band. Nice compliment.

  After the gig we had a few drinks and talked for an hour. When the time came for Pat to leave I wasn’t game to kiss her. Stupid, I know, but for nearly thirty years of my life too much anticipation and imagination had gone into the very thought of kissing her, thoughts that often extended well beyond the kissing stage. Furthermore, I felt, if only in my mind, that I’d be being unfaithful to Wendy. But she came over, put her arms around me and planted a kiss on my lips. ‘Thanks for hanging in, Jacko,’ she whispered. I didn’t know if she meant playing with the band or if she was referring to the years I’d spent dreaming about her. It wasn’t a passionate kiss, but it completed something – put something inside me to rest. What’s more, I reckoned she’d blown away any hint of ‘Jacko’s sadness’.

  Back at the pub we sat on the verandah until well after the bar had closed. The place was silent, and the surf rolling in no longer worried me. Even the pale sliver of moon that now hung overhead seemed to be appropriate, as if something old had ended to make way for something new. I know I’m sounding mawkish, and God knows I love Wendy with every bone in my body, but Pat Brand’s name had been invisibly tattooed upon my heart for so long that a single chaste but lovely kiss was, somehow, the perfect resolution.

  Jimmy, reading my thoughts, said, ‘Dat’s good, Brother Fish. What happen tonight, it good.’ Jimmy’s ‘dis and dat’ vernacular had softened over the years, but he slipped right back into it when he was relaxed, or when he was fooling around or courting some lady.

  ‘Yeah. Who’d have thought, after all these years?’ I replied.

  Jimmy was silent for a while, then he said, ‘The Countess’s daughter, she forty-two years old.’

  ‘What made you suddenly think of that?’ I asked.

  ‘It ain’t suddenly, Brother Fish. Sometimes I think of that little girl, she don’t know who is her mama, or her daddy – she jus’ like me. She don’t have no love when she been growing up. What happen to her?

  Is she alive? Has she evah had good joss? Did Big Boss Yu, he listen to da great shaman an’ done treat her right? Man, sometimes I lay in mah bed an’ it done drive me crazy. I only know’d about it twenty years – Countess, she been concerning herself crazy foh forty-three years, man!’

  ‘Well then, let’s go and find her,’ I announced, as if it was somehow the simplest thing in the world to do. I don’t know how such a bloody stupid notion came to me, or why – perhaps it had something to do with meeting Pat Brand after so long, which was ridiculous, of course. If I’d wanted to meet her desperately enough, it wouldn’t have been that difficult to have done so years ago. Whereas finding Nicole’s daughter didn’t fall within the realms of possibility. How many people in Hong Kong? A million? More? In Taiwan? Four million? It was one of those things you say but later would give anything to take back.

  There was a silence and I desperately wanted to say, ‘Stupid idea, of course’, but the words didn’t come.

  Instead, Jimmy said, ‘Thank you, Brother Fish.’ So that was that. I knew from long experience that once Jimmy had decided to do something there was no turning back. We went to bed soon after and it took a fair while for me to fall asleep, my mind racing over how we were going to tell Nicole.

  In the morning we had a leisurely breakfast before seeing the local lawyer named Don Pertano, who was handling the silent auction for the abalone licence. He was grossly overweight and of a rubicund complexion with a black pencil moustache that seemed at odds with his large frame. He kept us waiting half an hour despite the fact that we had an appointment and there appeared to be no one in his office. Even then the Ogoya Seafood Company was big time in the fishing industry, and I guess the chip on his shoulder had been exposed. When we were finally ushered into his office it wasn’t hard to tell what he was thinking from the way he looked at Jimmy. It also wasn’t hard for Jimmy to tell what I was thinking, either: We don’t do business with this bloke. He told us what the last bid was, which was way over the top, and I asked for the name of the bidder, the usual practice to ensure that we were not being gazumped. He refused to answer. ‘Private bidder – bloke doesn’t want his name mentioned.’

  ‘We’ll be off, then,’ I said, not arguing, and Jimmy and I both rose to leave. Normally I’d have given him a serve, but the trip to sec
ure the licence suddenly wasn’t important any longer.

  ‘Wait a mo!’ he called, plainly surprised. But as far as I was concerned it was all over red rover. We had lunch at Le Marlin Café, where they played a cassette tape of Pat Brand singing, and we had a salad and cold roast beef, cray being the specialty of the day.

  Halfway through lunch a bloke who looked to be in his mid-fifties walked into the restaurant. It only took a second to know he was a fisherman: Sunday best, light-coloured sports jacket with his yellow shirt turned over the lapel, chocolate-brown pants, slightly scuffed cheap brown shoes, hair cut short and combed in a fifties quiff stuck down with Brylcreem, skin the usual mottled patchwork of sun spots. We had a hundred deadset replicas of him on the island and he could have been Alf. If I hadn’t learned how to pull things together a bit with the right haircut and gear, I’d be in the same parade.

  He came over to our table and introduced himself. ‘Doug Twentyman. Mr McKenzie, could I have a word?’

  ‘It’s Jacko,’ I said, extending my hand. I indicated Jimmy. ‘And this is my partner, Jimmy.’

  ‘How yoh been?’ Jimmy said, standing up to shake his hand.

  ‘Take a seat.’ I gestured to a vacant chair. ‘Twentyman – that’s an old fishing family round these parts, isn’t it?’

  ‘Four generations, man and boy. Me grandson’ll be the fifth.’ He grinned. ‘If he turns out to be as big a mug as his dad and his grandpa.’

  ‘Beer, or a glass of wine, Doug?’

  ‘Yeah, beer’d be nice,’ he replied.