Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘Sick, mon. He didna want to come – said he’d be holdin’ us up,’ Don Bradman replied.

  Jimmy’s face drained and went the grey colour folk of his race turn when they’re deeply shocked, but there was nothing he could say or do about it. My only hope was that the bloke was genuinely sick.

  We moved straight off, following the river and making good time. Then, late in the afternoon, when we’d almost decided to settle in for the night, we rounded a bend in the river and were suddenly surrounded by North Korean security police.

  Jimmy, who was standing beside me, shrugged and turned to Don Bradman. ‘Hey, dat one informer yoh don’t know about, comrade.’

  Don Bradman blushed furiously. ‘Sorry, Jimmy, we coom from the same village – Sheriff Hutton. We went t’same fooking school.’

  ‘These are gooks, mate,’ I said quietly to Jimmy, as the North Koreans, yabbering excitedly, surrounded us. ‘Let’s hope to Christ they take us back to the chink camp and don’t handle this themselves.’ The likelihood of coming out alive after the North Koreans had manifested their charming little ways to make us talk was close to zero.

  Fortunately they took us back to our previous captors and I found myself back in the cells, where the Chinese frequently bashed us and subjected us to endless interrogation. Dinh, in particular, was furious, as I guess he’d lost enormous face. In fact, he had recently been promoted to captain but the second day back we noted that he’d been stripped of his promotion and was back to lieutenant, which did nothing to improve his mood.

  The bashing and interrogation continued for several weeks, with Jimmy copping far the worst of it. In the cells they gave us no covering against the still cold nights. Then before the morning sun could warm us, they thrashed our bodies while we were still shivering, which, of course, was much more painful. I deeply dreaded that the rafter treatment might follow and that I’d be put in the Kennel Club. But to our surprise we were released and, of course, each of us was required to deliver a public confession. Which, by the way, we’d done with a degree of mock repentance that completely escaped the Chinese but set the congregated prisoners to clapping. The applause was again misunderstood by our captors, who took it for a general show of approval for our deeply soulful repentance.

  As it subsequently turned out, the reason why we’d escaped the truly horrific torture was because the parties at the peace talks had exchanged lists of the names of all the prisoners held and their current physical condition – which, according to the Chinese, in our case was excellent. At the same time they were accusing the Americans of mistreating the Chinese and North Koreans held in United Nations POW camps. I guess they couldn’t afford to risk any further deaths such as Doug Waterman’s. Of course, we were unaware that the peace talks were so advanced – otherwise, perhaps Jimmy may have taken the chance of being discovered and may not have escaped.

  There followed several months of waiting, with our spirits rising on rumours that a cease-fire was close and falling on news of new disagreements emerging.

  The 27th of July 1953 began as just another day – same lousy bowl of millet, same morning routine – but by mid-morning there was a buzz around the camp, although no one seemed to know quite why. Then, to our surprise, Lieutenant Dinh approached Jimmy and told him the Korean Armistice had been signed. He shook his hand, and then mine. ‘I’m glad you make it to the end,’ he said to our surprise, then added, ‘You good men, good soldier.’

  ‘Yeah, mate, thanks for not shooting us,’ I said, grinning. Talk about the inscrutable Chinese! Who would have thought this final gesture was possible from such a determined enemy. We talked a little further and he told us he was leaving the army after nineteen years and was returning to his fishing village in Guangdong Province. I told him we were doing the same, and he laughed. Jimmy then said, ‘Yoh catch communist fish, we gonna catch us some capitalist fish!’

  If the war wasn’t technically over, and the armistice was simply a way of everyone saving face, it was over for us. We’d made it through to the end and were going home – that is, I was, and Jimmy was hopefully accompanying me. The almost two years in captivity had steeled us into accepting constantly bad outcomes, so when a good one came along we simply couldn’t quite grasp it. There was excitement in the camp, certainly, but we hadn’t the energy to rush around whooping for joy like schoolboys. We were weary and sick beyond celebration, and hope had to be rekindled in our spirits. Some of us even thought news of the armistice may have been another Chinese trick to further reduce our resistance. But Jimmy and I felt we could trust Lieutenant Dinh, who, despite everything, was a man of some honour.

  ‘You know what I’s gonna do first thing, Brother Fish?’ Jimmy asked.

  ‘What, mate?’

  ‘Straw-berry malted.’ He parted his hands to indicate about twelve inches. ‘This fuckin’ big!’

  I’d dreamed of chocolate and Jimmy of a strawberry milkshake, and I was reminded that freedom is about the little things. We were free at last to do the little things. It was a glorious feeling.

  One of the first things I was going to do was write to Gloria, my mum. We’d been allowed to write home every month, but I hadn’t heard from her since I’d been taken prisoner. I didn’t even know if the Chinese had posted my letters. Not sending letters was one of the threats used on reactionaries, and conversely, a promise to send them was a bribe to become a progressive. Until the prisoner list came out, Gloria may well have assumed I was dead.

  We travelled by truck, train and finally by foot to a holding camp at Kaesong. What an irony – Kaesong was where 3RAR had waited eagerly to start the pursuit north. I had been a virgin soldier at the time and couldn’t wait to be blooded, to go into battle, to prove I was worthy of the rifle slung across my shoulder and the ribbons not yet on my chest. I recalled the rhyme we’d chanted with such glee at school.

  Ching Chong Chinaman, born in a bath,

  Christened in a teacup . . . ha, ha, ha!

  Ching Chong Chinaman went to war,

  First-class Dutchman shot him in the jaw.

  ‘Oh,’ said chinky, ‘that’s not fair!’

  ‘Oh,’ said the Dutchman, ‘I don’t care!’

  I would never take the Chinese for granted again. I am certain that, in the end, they would have beaten us. They could have hung on indefinitely while we were clinging on for dear life. They were good soldiers and fought with courage and enormous tenacity, and while some of us fought valiantly and some did not, we’d all lost our taste for war. In the end we knew we were fighting for something pretty meaningless to us, something called ‘the Cold War’, where one great power was huffing and puffing at another great power in a global game of one-upmanship. I’d seen all I ever wanted to see of war and killing and was anxious to get to the handing-over point at Panmunjom and from there to be shipped out of Korea forever.

  I decided I never wanted to return to any part of the world where people’s eyes were shaped differently from my own. The South Koreans clearly didn’t want democracy enough to fight for it. The North Koreans were already committed communists, with their Chinese allies prepared to fight alongside them and to die defending what they believed to be a superior system, so it was bloody difficult to believe in what we were doing and why we were there in the first place.

  Yet I have remained intrigued by the two great Cold War ideologies, democracy and communism. Years after my experience in Korea I read a haunting quote by Mao Zedong.

  If the US monopoly capitalist groups persist in pushing their policies of aggression and war, the day is bound to come when they will be hanged by the people of the whole world. The same fate awaits the accomplices of the United States.

  Back in the early 1950s I would have accepted Mao’s statement as Chinese posturing – merely communist propaganda. As prisoners of war Jimmy and I, and many other good men, had suffered greatly to defend our belief system. I guess I still believe in democracy – and besides, we are unashamedly capitalist. God knows, both the i
deology and the mercantile system have been very good to us. Nevertheless, after Australia’s involvement with the Americans in Vietnam, Mao’s quote has an uncomfortable ring to it. While alliances are important, the right to question them is also essential. Asking why rather than following blindly isn’t being disloyal, it is simply being intelligent. America is not always the most convincing ideological friend to have beside you in your weapon pit.

  BOOK TWO

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  The Homecoming

  After we’d had a deep-cleansing ale at the Anzac Hotel I phoned the airport, only to be told that the Douglas DC3 was in for servicing and there wouldn’t be any flights to the island for three days. This meant staying in Launceston or taking the bus the 100 miles or so to Stanley, then catching the Queen Islander to Livingston. If I’d known the Douglas DC3 was on the blink we’d have caught the old tub from Melbourne in the first place. We made our way to the post office and I sent a telegram to Gloria telling her we’d be coming in by boat, and would therefore be a few days late. Jimmy didn’t seem to mind – he couldn’t get over the weather. ‘It December, man! It ain’t cold. I never seen dat before, Brother Fish!’

  Just before we were due to catch the bus I asked Jimmy if he’d brought along a supply of frenchies. I’d written to him in Japan and told him to stock up at his PX where they were issued to the American troops free. He shook his head. ‘I ain’t done like yoh said, Brother Fish – ain’t right.’

  I looked at him, astonished. ‘Jimmy, do you have any idea of the effect you’re going to have on the sheilas when we get to the island?’

  He shook his head again. ‘T’ain’t right – I’s a coloured person, Brother Fish.’

  ‘So?’

  He shrugged. ‘T’ain’t right,’ he repeated, suddenly looking miserable.

  ‘What do you mean? Coloured blokes don’t screw girls? It’s against their religion?’

  ‘Nah, it da other way – white girls, dey don’t like to do it wid Negro men.’

  I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. ‘Jimmy, mate, on the island they’re going to be scratching and kicking and elbowing each other out of the way to be the first to get to your body!’

  Jimmy looked generally surprised, and even a little frightened, and I realised that he may never have been in a situation – amorous or otherwise – where he’d been in the presence of a white woman other than Frau Kraus and, of course, the Lutheran Church congregation, where the Negro worshippers sat at the back of the church. ‘What about . . . Frau Kraus?’ I asked, somewhat mischievously.

  ‘Dat different, dat ain’t da same. Gobblin’ Spider don’t need no rubbers, man,’ he protested.

  Of course we’d talked about sex in the past – all men do, no matter what the circumstances. In the POW camp, with all of us starving and sick, if you’d presented Carmen Miranda to us with the platter of fruit on her head for a hat, our libidos were so shot we couldn’t have raised the necessary equipment and we would have opted for the fruit. But we still talked, and some of the more experienced coves in the camp even bragged about doing it. I’d personally done very little of it. In fact, the sum total of my sexual life was a going-away-to-the-Korean-War present from Angela Kelly, the wife of my cousin Percy, while he was away for the night at sea on a cray boat, and a visit to a St Kilda brothel the weekend I’d been to Melbourne with Jason Matthews.

  On both occasions it had happened in the dark, so that while I could claim to have entered it I’d never seen it face to face, so to speak. Women, and the various methods of stimulating their interesting parts, were still a complete mystery to me, and when coves talked details I was all ears, hoping to learn enough so that at my next encounter (if that should ever happen) I would seem experienced.

  By my mid-twenties I should have had a heap of experience, but I’d somehow missed out. When I got back home after New Guinea I still had the chanteuse Pat Brand on my mind as the only one for me, and I told myself the island girls simply couldn’t compete and that I wasn’t prepared to settle for anything less – which was a whole heap of crap, of course. I would have happily dropped my daks at a moment’s notice had any young female offered to make love to me – I simply lacked the courage to proposition any of the island girls. Moreover, I’d not much enjoyed going to the brothel in St Kilda, and besides, there wasn’t one on the island. I couldn’t get my precious little head around bonking anyone who was doing it for money. My head was full of stuff like this, and I decided the island girls wouldn’t have understood me – that I desired more than just an occasional quick naughty to get the water off my chest. In other words, I was a thoroughgoing prick, if that isn’t the wrong name to use in this context. I remained a virgin until Angela Kelly put the hard word on me at my farewell party.

  I’d asked Jimmy several anatomical questions about women, and he’d answered them with a vagueness not typical of him. I knew he wasn’t inexperienced, as he’d told me one or two stories about life on the streets of New York, which he always referred to as ‘When I been gettin’ myself street-poisoned’. He’d explained how it was every black street kid’s dream to grow up to be a flash pimp with a stable of girls, a purple Cadillac with whitewall Firestone tyres, a big flashy pad with a bar and a barman serving anything you wanted, and the constant coming and going of honey-sweet pussy for hire to the chump johns.

  Then one day he’d passed a shoeshine stand with a rheumy-eyed old man calling out for customers, his hand too gnarled and his arm too frail to pop his shoeshine rag. ‘One dem whores standin’ der, she say to me, “See dat old man, Jimmy, dat Sugar John Cassidy – he once da king of all da pimps, he got da biggest pussy stable in New York. He done offer dem chump johns every trick in da book so long dey got da bread. Now he can’t hardly make ’nough dough for a bottle o’whisky to cool down his hot sorrows.” Den she say, “Don’t go der, Jimmy – old whores, dat bad, but old pimps, dat da end da whole worl’.”’

  From all this I gathered that Jimmy knew a fair bit about sex, but I now realised that, improbable as it seemed, he may have thought white women were somehow different from black ones. It had never occurred to me that Jimmy may never have slept with a white woman, or that he might be afraid of being rejected simply on the basis of skin colour.

  On one occasion I’d told him the story of the loss of my virginity to Angela Kelly, who’d attended the bit of a party Gloria had thrown as my send-off. Angela had cornered me in the back garden where I’d gone out for a quick slash, as the outside dunny was occupied and I was busting for a leak. I’d barely done up my fly when out of the dark I heard her say, ‘Come for dinner termorra night, Jacko.’ Then she added, ‘Percy Pig is out on the big cray boat all night.’ She giggled. ‘Bit of a soldier’s farewell present, eh?’ My heart started to thump thirteen to the dozen. Angela Kelly was a real good-looking sort with lovely breasts, and from Wagga Wagga on the mainland. Everyone wondered how a no-hoper like Percy Kelly could have scored her, as she hadn’t even been up the duff when they’d married.

  ‘Percy Pig’ was what we’d all called him from childhood, though I was surprised to see that Angela did so as well. Percy’s father, Les – Gloria’s brother – was a drunk who beat up his kids, and Percy had been bashed on the nose so many times as a child that it was almost flat against his face and he’d sniff and snuffle all the time because his sinuses were blocked. He also looked a lot like a prime porker, with small, pointy ears and tiny, mean, pink-rimmed eyes that never looked directly at you. He couldn’t dive for cray because of his sinuses, so he worked as a deckhand. Normally you’d feel sorry for a bloke like him but he was a liar and a cheat, as well as following in his father’s footsteps as a dedicated piss-pot. He was also a strong argument, this time on Gloria’s side, to add to our combined family not being worth a pinch of the proverbial. Him and Angela didn’t have any kids and Gloria kept saying it couldn’t last – the marriage, that is – but it was going nigh on three years they’d been together. ‘Miracles will never cease,�
�� was how Mum described their improbable marriage, then she’d add, ‘she must have committed a murder or something and only Percy Pig knows she done it, or else a pretty girl like her would have scarpered long ago.’

  When I got back into the house I glanced over at Angela, who was sitting on the old chesterfield with the broken springs and the holes in the upholstery that Gloria refused to throw out when I bought her a new one, but maintained it wasn’t worth the cost of re-covering. Angela looked up, and directly at me, but her expression gave nothing away – except I could see she’d probably had one too many sherries from the Orlando flagon Gloria had turned on for the ladies.

  The whole of the next day I kept panicking. Thinking that when she woke up she’d be sober and change her mind, or she might have a hangover and would have forgotten and I’d turn up all bright-eyed and bushytailed to find myself rejected or severely mocked. I panicked again for the umpteenth time during the day at the thought that even if we ended up doing it, she might find out I was a virgin and didn’t know how. I bought a box of Cadbury’s Roses and blushed when Mrs Dunne at the local shop asked who the lucky girl was. I mumbled something about ‘Me mum’, then, realising the stupid old stickybeak would mention it to Gloria the next time she saw her – ‘What a nice boy to buy his mum

  chocolates . . .’ – I hastily added, ‘Er . . . for a friend of hers.’

  I turned up at Angela Kelly’s house with the chocolates concealed within my shirt just in case she gave me the bum’s rush while I was standing at the door holding them. But she was all smiles and I could see she was pleased to see me, and she asked me in and sat me down at the kitchen table and opened a bottle of beer. She was frying onions, so I said, ‘Something smells good.’

  ‘Sausages and mash with onions’n’gravy,’ she said.

  ‘Hey! How’d you know that’s my favourite?’ I said, trying to sound sort of casual and worldly.