Brother Fish

by Bryce Courtenay

  ‘It was the house custom to leave an empty wineglass in the centre of the table as a not-very-subtle reminder that a gratuity was expected.

  Mr Yu now produced his thick wallet. “I have a great personal favour to ask, Little Countess?”

  ‘I immediately stiffened. “I am not a hostess, loh yeh,” I said, unable to hide my anxiety.

  ‘Mr Yu laughed. “And I am not a seducer of schoolgirls.” He held out a one-hundred-dollar note, and with the thumb and forefinger of his free hand indicated about four inches. “Please. A lock of your hair.”

  ‘I sighed with relief. A hundred dollars for a small lock of hair was a generous offer. My long blonde plaits fell down to my waist and there was certainly more than enough to spare. I signalled to Yuri and asked him for a pair of scissors. When he returned I undid the end of one of my plaits, separated the hair carefully and cut the required length. Then I carefully bunched the small lock of hair, clipped the top with a hairpin and handed it to Mr Yu, re-plaiting the loose hair back in place. Whereupon he placed the one-hundred-dollar note into the wineglass in the centre of the table. Then he looked pointedly at Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang. “For the privilege of naming her,” he said, indicating the wineglass. Smallpox “Million Dollar” Yang grinned and placed the equivalent amount in the glass. Not wishing to lose face, the other two gangsters promptly followed suit.

  Four hundred dollars was more – much more – than I could earn in six months, but I somehow knew that I shouldn’t take it, even though the urge to grab it greedily and offer my profuse thanks almost overwhelmed me. Seeing the four hundred-dollar notes resting in the glass set my heart racing and I could feel a great thumping in my chest. I was taking a ridiculous risk and stood to lose a fortune. I told myself I would never see the four men again, so why was I being so obviously, almost insanely, stupid? If I walked away without their tip I took the risk of offending them, so they might return the money to their pockets. I had no right to the “face” that leaving the money implied. I was a nobody. Even to the Chinese rickshaw boys, the Russian refugees were deracinated and well beneath other Europeans in China – we were pariahs, poor and thought to be competing with the women in the sing-song houses. If I took the money these four men could think no less of me than they already did. Yet I resisted and walked away, holding my back as straight as I possibly could, feeling quite weak at the knees and inwardly cursing my own stubborn stupidity.

  ‘I returned to the Steinway and played another bracket, which included two more Chinese folk songs. Shortly afterwards I saw the four of them leave, and a minute or so latter Yuri arrived with the glass containing the money and I almost cried from relief.

  ‘“You were magnificent, darling,” he said admiringly.

  ‘One of the hundred-dollar notes was missing. “And you are a thief, Yuri Petrof!” I replied.

  ‘He shrugged, not attempting to lie. “Pay-back time, darling,” he replied tartly. He pointed to the Steinway. “If I hadn’t entered Madam Olga’s office at precisely the right moment you wouldn’t have this cushy job.” I guess he had a point – I was learning that in China, everyone takes a cut.

  ‘I was overjoyed, practically jumping out of my skin as I scrubbed the make-up from my face that night. I kept hugging myself, not quite able to believe my good fortune as the rickshaw boy drove me home in the early hours of the morning. Father and I would be able to leave our shared accommodation and I’d make him a comfortable home with our own bathroom and kitchen. I would also be able to afford hospital treatment for him. The “Little Countess” was learning how to survive, and I must say I felt rather pleased with myself as I climbed the rickety stairs to our rooms. I well recall the cacophony of the several hundreds – nay thousands – of roosters in the Chinese city that heralded the approaching dawn, rending the smoky, acrid air and turning it into avian mayhem. As I reached the top of the stairs I felt under my skirt to reassure myself, for the umpteenth time, that the four hundred-dollar notes (three presented to me in the wineglass, less Yuri’s cut, and one presented to me earlier, at the piano) and the other tips I’d earned were safely tucked inside my bloomers.

  ‘I inserted my key into the lock in the door of the rooms where we were staying, turning it ever so slowly, thinking to open it quietly so as not to disturb my father. But the door resisted. Then, as I pushed harder, it opened a tiny crack and seemed to bang against a heavy object. I was forced to put my shoulder to the door until it opened sufficiently for me to see a table had been placed against it. I pushed again, grunting with the effort, finally forcing the table far enough away from the door for me to squeeze through the gap. I could see the square-cut ends of the legs of an overturned chair that lay on the table and then, hanging from above, my father’s pale, un-stockinged feet, one leg slightly longer than the other. I need not have been concerned about disturbing his sleep – his body was suspended from the neck by a piece of rope that hung from a wooden beam that ran across the ceiling.’

  CHAPTER EIGHTEEN

  The Strawberry Milkshake Love Affair

  The story that led to Count Lenoir’s suicide left me stunned. Holy shit, what now? What do I say in a situation like this?

  I looked at Jimmy, who sat with his chin resting on his chest, eyes downcast, but as usual he was the first to recover. He looked up at Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan and, shaking his head slowly, said, ‘Dat too sad, Countess. Dat jus’ too very sad, ma’am,’ his mellifluous voice striking exactly the right tone.

  ‘Yes,’ was all I could think to say. ‘Yes, I agree.’ What a lame response.

  ‘Thank you both,’ she replied, smiling. ‘It all happened another lifetime ago, and I was terribly distraught at the time. But knowing myself to be absolutely alone in the world I was able to see my life more clearly, and staying where I was held little attraction for me. I decided that I must leave Harbin and travel to Shanghai. Perhaps this was a foolish impulse – I had no reasons beyond my recent sad memories to leave Manchuria. I continued to attract patrons to the club and Madam Olga was anxious that I remain, even to the point of offering to give me a small salary. But I was still a child, and children do not see things in such terms. When I insisted that I must go the general lost his temper and said I was nothing but a little . . .’ she hesitated, and then said haltingly, ‘cockteaser.’

  Jimmy laughed, and clapped his hands. ‘Ahee! Yoh bet yo’ sweet ass, Countess. Ain’t no shame in dat word, dat time a girl gotta hustle. Yoh done good!’ Then he added, ‘Yoh got dat classy red piano an’ yoh da best in da music an’ singin’ hustlin’ bizee-ness!’

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan smiled and looked fondly at Jimmy. ‘What a blessed relief. It’s taken me thirty-two years to repeat that cruel little word.’ She then added brightly, ‘And now I have a newspaper to get out at the end of the week. I’m afraid we’ll have to leave it there for the moment, as I have a great deal to do. Perhaps you’ll both have dinner with me on Saturday night and I’ll cook Chinese, and then we really have to start thinking about buying a boat.’

  ‘But you will tell us the rest of the story?’ I asked anxiously. ‘You can’t just leave it there.’

  ‘It all happened so very long ago,’ she sighed. ‘It’s history now.’

  ‘It da his-tory we gotta know, Countess. It da beginning o’ our partnership his-tory.’

  ‘Very well – although I must say I’m surprised you both have the patience to listen, after what you have been through yourselves.’

  I looked up to see if she was being serious, and she obviously was. What’s more, the invitation to dinner was something else again. I couldn’t remember if anyone on the island, with perhaps the exception of Reverend Daintree, had ever entered her cottage, much less had dinner with her. We had come a long way in our new relationship.

  But the promised Saturday-night dinner wasn’t to be. Later that week Jimmy received a notification from the American Consulate in Melbourne to come in immediately to see them. Included in the letter was an air-travel ti
cket that indicated he was to leave the island in forty-eight hours with the instruction to wear civilian clothes but to pack his kit because he was going back to America to be demobbed. They also included a postal order for twenty pounds. Jimmy cashed it and gave Gloria ten pounds, saying ten was plenty to get him to Melbourne and America.

  It was obvious that the Australian Government had lost no time telling their Yank counterparts that they had located their man, explaining that they’d finally found him on a remote island in the middle of Bass Strait. Come to think of it, in a curious way the Certificate of Exemption had not only allowed our government to save face, but also helped the Americans. Though several weeks overdue for demobbing, Jimmy was still officially in the US Army and, of course, remained an American citizen. So he could be used for propaganda purposes by their government while still being in uniform. He had just about everything going for him. He was the token black and the model soldier who had frequently risked his life while in captivity, resisted the communists and behaved in a wholly honourable way. Jimmy was the example they were looking for – a warrior who had honoured his flag and his nation.

  Ironically the black boy, the nigger who, until recently, had been considered by much of the American brass as fit only to carry a pick and shovel, was to be paraded by his military superiors as a shining example of the triumph of the American spirit over adversity. Jimmy was proof of the integrity of the American soldier when confronted by the forces of evil. The coloured orphan, delinquent street kid, sent to Korea by the American courts as an alternative to sentencing him to prison, had proved to be the American soldier the nation was preparing to award one of its highest decorations for heroism.

  By any standards Jimmy was a hero. He hadn’t won his medal with a sudden rush of blood to the head or, as I had done, with adrenaline pumping through his veins in the heat of battle. He’d been awarded this high national honour for being a human being of exceptional character and courage. I was ashamed to think that this hadn’t been enough for us. Australia had rejected a man of his calibre, permitting him to remain only while he proved useful and profitable to the country. We would never accept him as a citizen because we based our values on the colour of a man’s skin, rather than his character and integrity.

  Who were we to judge America? We were certainly no less racist. ‘Sorry, mate, you failed the language test. Didn’t you know, fluent Gaelic is a basic requirement for immigration to Australia?’ Then, when we’d been faced with the possibility of a huge international scandal, we’d made Jimmy bare his black arse so that we could judge it more than seventy-five per cent white, just to save face. And if Jimmy had endured a difficult, race-tainted childhood in America, then what about our own Johnny Gordon, the Aboriginal forward scout in our platoon? He’d led the way on every patrol knowing he would be the first to die in an ambush, and had done so in my arms on the night I was captured. Johnny could have bared his arse till the cows came home and we wouldn’t have given him the right to vote or even move his place of residence from one town to another without permission from a bureaucrat like Clarence Cuffe. This, in a country his ancestors had inhabited for 35 000 years. He didn’t have the right in the town in which he was born to enter the local pub through the front door, or to have a quiet beer in the RSL Club as a soldier member who had fought with great distinction for his country in World War II. I could hardly boast that Jimmy was coming to a country where his character and not his skin would be the deciding factor on how he was welcomed and treated.

  I am ashamed to say Australians had never marched in the streets for Johnny’s rights, as Americans were to do. We’d all rejoiced at Jimmy’s temporary acceptance, hailing it as a victory for justice. Justice, my arse! In fact, the very existence of the policy was proof of the defeat of fundamental justice. Furthermore, the White Australia Policy was only possible because of a tacit permission by Australian citizens, myself included, that allowed it to remain on our statute books. I had no right to point a finger at America or South Africa or anywhere that practised racism – we were very much tarred with the same brush.

  With all the brouhaha going on in the American press about the collaboration with the communist enemy by prisoners of war in Korea, on their return to America every serviceman who’d been in a POW camp was thoroughly investigated and some were finally prosecuted. I am happy to say that Corporal Steve O’Rourke, ‘da man’ who’d attacked Jimmy and murdered those two gravely weakened soldiers suffering from dysentery by tossing them out of the barracks at night where they froze to death, got twenty years imprisonment.

  We were later to learn that Jimmy’s name had come up so frequently during the interrogation that he’d been listed for heroism long before the final prisoners-of-war interrogation was completed. The US had initially decided to award Jimmy the medal for what had happened in the North Korean hospital cave, but there had been so many subsequent incidents reported that involved heroism and personal risk to life that he was to receive a silver oak-leaf cluster to signify that he had won the Soldier’s Medal on five separate occasions.

  I was later told my own name had come up fairly frequently during the interrogations, and the Americans had recommended that our military might want to do something. Well, we didn’t have anything like the Soldier’s Medal, only the George Cross, the civilian equivalent of the Victoria Cross, and the George Medal, only slightly less valorous. They certainly weren’t going to give either of these to some wanker who played ‘Chattanoogie Shoe Shine Boy’ on the harmonica! Though a year or so later I was mentioned in dispatches, signified by a bronze oak-leaf emblem attached to the campaign ribbon, adding to the bit of chest fruit salad I’d acquired. Once again I was the dubious recipient of an honour I wouldn’t have earned had I been left to my own devices.

  We had a bit of an impromptu party at home for Jimmy’s leaving the island. At least that’s how it began – a few quiet ales with the family, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan and some of the girls who’d been especially generous to Jimmy. The amazing thing about Jimmy’s affairs of the heart – or perhaps of a somewhat lower part of his anatomy – was that the island girls seemed to regard him as a special treat to be shared around. Of course tongues were wagging everywhere, but the gossip, for the most part, was more generous than bitchy – which Gloria contended was a miracle, as the island hadn’t yet stopped gossiping about our grandfather’s amorous generosity to lonely fishermen’s wives. Some of the girls, Jimmy later told me, would beg him not to use a condom. I guess a six-foot nine-inch black bloke didn’t come along that often in a girl’s life. By contrast, before I met Wendy my puny five foot five inches of freckles and gingerness had largely kept me sex-deprived for most of my post-pubescent life. Predictably, news of the farewell party spread and eventually a couple of hundred people turned up to say goodbye to Jimmy, all laden with grog and supplies. It went all night and would have continued into the morning if Jimmy hadn’t had to catch the plane.

  Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan drove Jimmy and me to the airport. I sat in the back hugging his army kit and Jimmy sat in the front, the passenger seat pushed back as far as it would go and still his knees seeming to almost touch the roof. On the way we discussed registering a company with the three of us nominated as the directors and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan as company secretary. ‘What shall we call it?’ she asked.

  Quick as a shot Jimmy, who can’t have had a hangover as bad as my own, said, ‘Ogoya – dat da name.’

  ‘O’Goya? Goya was a Spanish painter, but I’ve never heard of an Irishman with that name,’ she replied.

  ‘It mean “Operation Get Off Yo’ Ass”,’ Jimmy said.

  ‘Oh, I don’t think any of us can be accused of being lazy,’ she laughed. ‘If we must have an acronym, what about QIFE – the Queen Island Fishing Enterprises?’

  ‘Nah, it gotta be Ogoya. Yoh ask Brother Fish why dat so, Countess.’

  ‘Yes, Jimmy’s right – but please don’t ask me to explain it right now,’ I said. ‘It’s because of something tha
t happened when we were prisoners of war in the hospital cave.’

  ‘I shall await your explanation with interest, Jack,’ she said. ‘By the way, if you should get the chance, James, I’ve taken the opportunity to consult with the Tasmanian Fisheries Act and Regulations Department and several experts they recommended I write to. Between them I’ve written the specifications for a fishing boat. It occurred to me that it might be cheaper to buy one in America than to have one built here. Perhaps you can make some inquiries while you’re there?’

  At first I couldn’t quite believe what I’d heard. I began to flush deeply, and the sudden rush of blood to my face caused my head to practically lift off my shoulders. Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had gone ahead and written the specifications for our boat without even consulting us – me in particular, for while Jimmy didn’t know a lot about fishing boats, I’d been around them all my life. It was a slap in the face and I could only think it must be deliberate – she didn’t trust me, didn’t think I knew enough to participate. As my anger rose I told myself this was the beginning of the takeover I’d feared all along. What the fuck does she know about fishing, anyway? Better end it right now, no more partnership. Sure, it would be tough without her money, but I wasn’t going to live the remainder of my life as the little boy sitting meekly on the library floor.

  ‘Hey, yoh and Brother Fish – yoh been discussin’ dis boat behine mah back, Countess?’ I knew immediately this was a ploy – Jimmy on a white charger riding to the rescue. Thank Christ for my hangover, or I might have let fly at Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan before he could get another word in, had I the courage. Jimmy laughed. ‘I don’t mine dat yoh gone talk together. Boats ain’t nothin’ I knows nothin’ ’bout. I gone told Brother Fish jus’ one spe-si-fication he gotta know, dis dat da bunk it big enough foh me. Brother Fish, he done discuss dat wid yoh yet, Countess?’