Brother Fish Page 7

  She also spent a lot of her time correcting my spoken grammar and taught me what I came to think of as ‘library talk’. It was still English, sort of, but not the kind of language you could use at school or at home when you were talking to real people. Also, she never fully trusted me to choose my own books from the shelves. ‘You’ll only read like a boy!’ she’d say disparagingly, whatever that was supposed to mean. But after a session, if she thought I’d answered her questions well, something that didn’t happen very often, she would allow me to select a book of my own choice. She’d sniff dismissively when I showed her the title I’d selected, Just William by Richmal Crompton or some such book, the sniff sufficient to tell me once again I’d got it dead wrong and was reading rubbish.

  When Mum was forced to take me out of school to work on the boats I trudged over to the library with a heavy heart and not a little trepidation. When I entered Miss Lenoir-Jourdan’s office, after politely knocking and hearing the familiar command, ‘Sit!’, she continued, as she usually did, to work until finally looking up or rather down through the bottom of her glasses.

  ‘I don’t recall that we have an appointment, Jack?’

  ‘No, miss. I need to see you, miss.’

  ‘Oh? Pray tell?’

  I proceeded to tell her that Mum said I had to go on the boats and wouldn’t be able to attend any more of our reading discussions. It was the first time I’d ever seen emotion other than impatience from Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan.

  ‘She’s done what?’ she shouted, leaping up from her chair then leaning forward, both her hands grasping the edge of the desk, her knuckles turning white. She glared at me. ‘No!’ she spat. Then shaking her head furiously, ‘No! No! No!’

  I was unprepared for her reaction and, shocked by her obvious fury, I forgot my ‘library talk’ completely. ‘Me dad’s real crook, he’s got cancer, it’s of the lung,’ I blurted out.

  ‘How dreadful, dreadful! How could your mother possibly do this to you!’ she shouted.

  ‘It’s my father, miss. He’s dying,’ I repeated. ‘We need the money.’

  But she wasn’t listening. ‘You people! You ignorant people! How dare she!’ She brought her hands up to her mouth, her eyes wide and panicky. ‘The perfidious, stupid, stupid woman!’ There were tears in her eyes and her long neck wobbled like a turkey hen’s. Turning away from me suddenly she snatched at the pink cardigan hanging from the back of her chair and rushed from her office into the library beyond.

  Now, completely taken aback, I didn’t know how to react. ‘It’s not her fault, miss. Her washing don’t pay enough!’ I called after her, afraid to move.

  After a while I plucked up sufficient courage and walked into the library proper. She was nowhere to be seen and after searching every corridor separating the bookshelves, I saw the back door was open. It led into a small dusty yard where the male and female toilets and the library dustbins stood. At first I hesitated, but then entered the yard. The door to the ladies’ toilet was closed and then I heard the sobbing. The fiercest justice of the peace in the world was crying, crying over me, Jacko McKenzie, whose family’s ignorance and stupidity, and therefore my own, she’d just confirmed for me.

  It was only later in life that I was to realise how much Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had come to care about the little boy whose mind and intellect she was training. How she suddenly saw all her efforts come to nothing. But the poor in those days didn’t get a chance to choose. I was the eldest child and Alf was dying, there was nothing anyone could do. I would have liked to have explained this to the justice of the peace but, at fourteen, I simply lacked the courage to stand outside the door of the ladies’ dunny and tell her how things were for us McKenzies. Anyway, what was the use, explaining wouldn’t change things. So I turned and tiptoed back out of the library, then walked slowly home and didn’t read another book for a year.

  I admit to being bitter at the turn of events in my life. If I was condemned to be a fisherman then what was the point of filling my mind with stuff I didn’t need? Books don’t teach you how to catch fish. Besides, what right did I have to suppose I was better than anyone else? The justice of the peace was wrong. I should have known better than to have listened to her spouting on about using my mind and intellect to learn to think. Reading books and learning to think would only make working on a fishing boat worse – shit is shit and doesn’t turn into chocolate pudding just because it’s a similar colour. It was the pinch of the proverbial and nothing could ever change that.

  My pay as a boy on a fishing boat wasn’t much and couldn’t compare with Alf’s as a winch operator on the trawlers. I could have worked on a trawler and earned a little more but it meant being away from home all week and Gloria wouldn’t hear of it. ‘I want you home at night, Jacko. We can make some savings, as for the rest, we’ll make ends meet somehow.’ What she was saying was that the ten bob Alf spent at the pub of a Saturday would be saved as well as the couple of shillings for the shag he smoked and there’d be no more gramophone records for birthdays and Christmas.

  The one advantage of going out daily in a fishing boat was I’d usually manage to bring home something for our tea. We had chooks that gave us eggs, a vegie garden and potato patch going in the backyard and Sue, preparing and yeasting the dough at night, baked our bread before she left for school. So, apart from Cory and Steve appearing a bit ragged and Sue’s gym frock as well, with bits let into the waist and a few more inches added round the hem, things hardly changed for us.

  When at eighteen I’d joined the military to catch the arse end of the Second World War, Sue was sixteen and doing her first-year nurse’s training at the cottage hospital and both Steve and Cory, who’d also left school at fourteen, were on fishing boats, so we were doing okay. The army pay was slightly better than my wage on a fishing boat and I’d keep a bit back for toothpaste, boot polish and beer and then send the rest home by postal order. We were the same old failures going nowhere fast, though collectively doing enough to keep the wolf from the door and also to allow Mum to stop taking in washing except for Father Crosby’s surplices and shirts. Sue told me she didn’t do his vests or long johns because she didn’t think, him being a priest, it would be right.

  After the war I returned to the island but found it difficult to settle down. I’d seen a bit of the mainland, mostly Melbourne and the country area around Puckapunyal army base and, of course, New Guinea, and I knew I didn’t want to go back to sea. I got several jobs, though none of them made me happy: driving a bulldozer on a road construction crew, working as a labourer on one of the new dairy farms, planting trees in the government experimental pine forest and working as a tally clerk at the new cheese factory. I was back to being a McKenzie and going nowhere as usual, but this time doing it ashore.

  In the army I’d made the mistake of taking up reading again, and on my return to the island I rekindled my association with Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. She’d retired as the librarian, justice of the peace and music teacher, and to everyone’s surprise and the consternation of some, started the island’s first newspaper, the Queen Island Weekly Gazette. There was much speculation about where she got the kind of money to buy a small second-hand letterpress printer from the Government Printing Works in Launceston, but nobody was game to ask her. She once confided in me that it was a legacy but explained no further. She had never in anyone’s recall mentioned any kinfolk and while it was assumed, with her double-barrelled name and plummy accent, she came from England, she never confirmed this or ever spoke of her childhood.

  She invited me to train to become her compositor but I turned her down. With my poor education I lacked the confidence in my spelling and grammar. Furthermore, while I enjoyed our now voluntary reading discussions, she was still the same old fire-eating dragon. The emotional breakdown in the dunny behind the library proved to be strictly a one-off; she hadn’t grown any softer or less impatient, and while she was generous in rebuke she was a miser on praise. Working for her would begin the second half o
f the sentence that I’d commenced at the age of eight. So when the government had called for volunteers to go to Korea I’d jumped at the chance to get away from the island again.

  Now I couldn’t wait to get back. I knew we were managing pretty well and bringing Jimmy Oldcorn home wouldn’t be a hassle for Gloria. There was now even shop-bought food on the table and a spare bed in the sleep-out and we’d long since graduated to proper bathroom towels and an indoor hot-water shower I’d built onto the back of the house when I’d returned from service in New Guinea.

  As there had never been any Aborigines on the island, as long as anyone could remember, I doubt if Gloria had seen a black man in the flesh. I was confident this wouldn’t make any difference to my mum. Despite our ignorance, as a family we weren’t against anything, except authority. She would, I knew, accept Jimmy as somewhat of a curiosity, though nevertheless a welcome guest. She’d probably regard him as a status symbol and drag him around to all the rellos to show him off. When all was said and done, we were a pretty easygoing mob and Jimmy Oldcorn wasn’t exactly coming to the Hilton in Paradise.

  Maybe, I thought, our lives being so different to what he’d told me about his own, time spent on the island would help Jimmy to scrub out the memory of his past. Not just Korea but also the orphanage where the poor bugger had spent his early childhood. Or, for that matter, the Elmira Reformatory where he’d spent eighteen months and from which, at the age of eighteen, he’d been summarily ushered out of the front gates and onto the streets of the Bronx where he’d lived in an abandoned tenement as the leader of a gang of feral coloured kids known as the Red Socks.

  At the age of twenty Jimmy had been charged and indicted for a stabbing using a flick-knife. The fight was with a rival Puerto Rican gang known as the San Cristos Boys. The Puerto Ricans were the newly arrived, the latest influx of migrants into New York, and the stoush was over a couple of hundred yards of Hunts Point sidewalk populated by mostly Polish Jews, earlier migrants who’d fled from the Nazis but hadn’t yet fled from Hunts Point and Morrisania when the blacks and the Puerto Ricans, displaced by the slum-clearing in Manhattan, had moved in. It was a territory prized by both gangs where the shopkeepers, accustomed to stand-over tactics, shrugged philosophically and paid up for protection, but only to one gang, with the terms clearly established and not too onerous.

  ‘Brother Fish, it was war!’ Jimmy once explained. ‘There ain’t no respect on da street, man. Da cops dey ask you about something bad happen in da ’hood, you point out da deed done by a dirty Spic from da other gang an’ if you see a Spic kid standing on da corner, if he look like he fourteen or more you look surprised, then you wide-eye da cop an’ point, “Dat him, officer! Da Spic on da corner, he done da deed, he da gangster!”’ Jimmy would throw back his head and laugh and mimic the Irish cop. ‘“You’d be sure now, Jimmy?” he asked me. “Sure, officer! I swear on my mama’s grave!”’ Jimmy grinned, recalling. ‘Dem bad days, Brother Fish. You don’t carry no blade you a dead man, dat for sure, you in a box wid no cross to mark yo’ grave. Jesus ain’t gonna find no nigger wid no cross to mark da spot.’

  The judge had been generous, and had given Jimmy the option of enlisting in the US Army to fight in the Korean War or, alternatively, receiving three years for causing grievous bodily harm by using a flick-knife with a larger than three-inch blade.

  ‘Dat judge he told me, “Jimmy, you join the army, we gonna tear up your juvenile record and drop all dem charges against you.” The judge he say I could be a cleanskin if I vol-lun-teer me for the US of A Army to fight in some place he name Koo-ree-a! He don’t tell me it da other side da fuckin’ world, man!’ Jimmy chuckled, shaking his head. ‘Dat judge he’s got me good, man. I already know from some of my buddies who left Elmira for a higher order of in-car-sir-ration what I can expect in Newark State Penitentiary. I has got myself a choice between a sore ass from bending over in da prison washroom at da pol-lite request of some big nigger who’s da king, or havin’ my black ass kicked by some big ol’ drill sergeant while I is learning to take pride in da uniform of da United States of A-merica!’

  I well recall his grin as he added with a shrug of his shoulders, ‘Man, what can I say? I’s protecting my virgin ass and so I put my des-tin-ee in da hands of Uncle Sam, who ab-sol-lu-telly guarantee, as a member of a coloured play-toon in the infantry, I’m gonna have me some self-esteem of which, at dat time, I had none whatsoever.’ He’d paused as he slowly shook his head, ‘Oh Brother Fish, I is sent to the 25th Infantry Division, 24th Reg-gee-ment. Dey call da “Deuce Four” and we’s all niggers. Now dat ain’t so bad, ’cept we got us a white officer! How’s about dat? Dey telling us, ain’t no coloured man can be a leader. ’Magine da e-ffect dat gonna have on us, man! Dat no way for a man to get no self-esteem! “Well fuck you, Uncle Sam!” I says. “Dat orphanage it ain’t took my self-esteem, da reform-a-tory ain’t took my self-esteem, da pol-ees dey ain’t took my self-esteem, yo’all ain’t gonna take it also, man!”’

  As with me, success and the boardrooms of the world have greatly changed the way Jimmy Oldcorn speaks and today he’s more likely to use the vernacular of a middle-class Australian or American, depending on where he is, though always with a Yank accent. As he’s grown older, and, if he’s to be believed, as a result of a pack and a half of cigarettes every day since the age of fifteen, his voice sounds as if he’s mixing gravel and cement approximately halfway down his throat. It’s the kind of voice to which men give their full attention, while women are seen to cling adoringly to his every word. He laughs when the latter are mentioned, and playfully changes his intonation and grammar back to when we were younger, ‘I got me a preacher-quality voice, Brother Fish. Louis “Satchmo” Armstrong and me.’ He shrugs, ‘So what can I say, eh? Wimmen come to me for dey salvation and it’s my born-again duty to oblige them any ways I can!’

  It all seems so long ago when, at my suggestion, we’d made our way from Essendon Airport to take a quick look at Flinders Street and then straight to Webb Dock to catch the Taroona where we bought tickets to Launceston.

  We’d arrived the following morning, docking at Beauty Point on the Tamar River, and made straight for the Anzac Hotel for no other reason than it happened to be the nearest one we could reach conveniently on our crutches. In a sentimental gesture that we both still take seriously we’ve met here, rain or shine, on the 9th of August every year to celebrate our release from POW camp. Two old mates who have spent much of their subsequent lives together, but who still come here on this one day of the year to celebrate their friendship over a quiet beer or two. Though I had only to fly the company helicopter the short hop across from Queen Island, Jimmy was coming overnight from Shanghai via Hong Kong.

  The Anzac Hotel begs a short description, for it brilliantly illustrates the anodyne grog has always been for Australians from the time the first whimpering, rum-fortified convict was rowed onto the fatal shore. It is simply a place designed for drinking. A launching pad for child abuse, wife-beating and all the consequential horrors inherently brought home from the pub. In the crudest terms, it was and I expect still is a place where men go to get pissed, motherless, stonkered, loaded, blind, paralytic, legless or any of the other euphemistic expressions for being drunk or mean-spirited that abound in the Australian vernacular.

  The Anzac is one of those unprepossessing red-brick pubs built immediately after the Great War, with rounded shoulders and small, dark, beady-eyed, leaded stained-glass windows that make no attempt to appear inviting. It butts belligerently up against the dockside where you take two wooden steps up from the planked boardwalk and arrive on a steel grid in place of a top step where the dark glint of the river water below can be seen through its bars. You are presented with a pair of scuffed swing doors fixed with dirty brass kick plates with the injunction ‘Push’ painted on the left-hand door. You push your way into a room about fifty feet in width and perhaps twenty-five in depth. The bar facing the door is fifteen or so paces from the entrance and
stretches the entire fifty feet of the room except for two small openings at either end, one that leads to the ‘males only’ toilet and the other to the rear of the bar.

  While age may have wearied the Anzac, it has done nothing to make it respectable. It has always been a bloodhouse, and to this day remains faithful to its roots. It comes as no surprise therefore when you notice the sign painted on the wall behind the bar which announces, ‘Females should not feel they are welcome’. This is a fairly recent addition and its careful, almost polite phrasing is at odds with the remainder of the establishment. I can only assume it is designed to technically overcome the fairly recent anti-discrimination laws. In fact, the original sign ‘No women allowed’ in larger-than-necessary black lettering immediately to its left, has been so lightly overpainted that it can still be clearly read as a warning to any errant university student brave enough to assert her feminist rights.

  The walls of the bar room are tiled to shoulder height in six-inch highly glazed bottle-green tiles, as is the facing wall of the bar with the exception of fifteen tiles halfway up, at its centre each containing a large glazed and raised yellow capital letter that collectively spell out:

  ‘THE GALLIPOLI BAR’

  The walls above the tiles and the ceiling, striped with fluorescent tubes, are painted a high-gloss enamel of pale green, while the floor is constructed of red building bricks with the three feet or so nearest the bar worn distinctly concave from the effect of eighty years of the dockside workers’ hobnailed boots. The fact that the floor isn’t covered in sawdust, as it was when Jimmy and I first came here in ’53 and for a great many years thereafter, has nothing to do with adding ambience but may have something to do with today’s health regulations.