I decided to come clean after all. ‘It’s not like that – we’re looking for something decent.’
Gloria would have had a fair idea of what a decent rig would cost. ‘Where’s her money comin’ from, that’s what I’d like to know.’
‘I dunno, Mum. She lives on her own – maybe she’s saved her salary all these years?’
‘Oh yeah? Then how did she buy that printing press? That would’ve cost a pretty penny.’
‘I don’t know,’ I sighed. ‘I guess it’s none of our business.’
‘Is if yer goin’ to be partners an’ all!’
‘Leave it go, will’ya, Mum,’ I answered, walking away.
‘Much too much ya don’t know about that one, Jack,’ she called after me.
The ad appeared in the Gazette that Saturday and I waited for someone in the family to mention it at dinner that night. Nobody did. ‘Anything unusual in the Gazette this week?’ I asked after a while, trying to sound casual.
‘No,’ Gloria replied. ‘Bit about more and more families getting the telephone, and they’re putting a switchboard into the post office. Ma Gutherie’s goin’ to need a girl to operate it. I thought Dora might apply.’
‘Anything else? You know, unusual?’ I cut in hastily, trying to get the conversation back onto the Gazette. But they all looked at me, mystified.
‘What is it, Jacko?’ Sue asked.
‘Well, as a matter of fact, only my whole future.’
‘What are you on about, Jacko?’ Gloria said. ‘Nothin’ about us in the paper.’
I gave up. ‘The advertisement,’ I sighed. ‘The boat we’re looking for.’
‘Huh?’ Gloria said, rather rudely. ‘What advertisement?’
‘Wait on,’ Sue said. ‘Where’d you put the paper, Mum?’
‘Over there on the shelf, love.’
Sue left the table to retrieve the Gazette, turning the pages as she sat down. Finally, she discovered the ad. ‘“Cray-zy a-boat you!”’ she read out aloud. I must confess, it didn’t sound all that great the way she read it out.
‘Oh, that!’ Gloria exclaimed. ‘Bloody stupid.’
‘Stupid?’
‘I think it’s quite clever,’ Sue said hurriedly. ‘It’s a pun.’
‘What’s a pun?’ Cory asked.
‘No bloke’s gunna read that,’ Steve said dismissively.
‘Don’t make no sense,’ Gloria said again.
‘Why not? Bloody good headline!’ I defended, raising my voice somewhat.
‘Jacko, they’re fishermen!’ she cried.
‘That’s a poofter headline,’ Cory added, picking up on the word ‘headline’.
‘What the fuck would you know?’ I shouted back.
‘Eh! You mind your bloody language, Jacko! This is still my house! You’re not too old to have your mouth washed out with soap!’
‘Well, I still think it’s clever,’ Sue, ever the peacemaker, said, while Steve grunted and went on eating his dinner.
The ad ran for two weeks and didn’t get a single bite – not one bloody reply. I was forced to accept that either there were no fishing boats for sale or the ad was a bummer. It was time to bite the bullet and, weary of clutching a dead baby to my chest, admit I’d been wrong.
Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan was pretty good about it. ‘I’ve prepared another,’ she said quietly. ‘Perhaps you’ll tell me if you approve, Jack?’
Wanted
45ft + cray boat
(will pay cash)
All inquiries to:
Queen Island Weekly Gazette
Tel. Queen Is. 27
‘What can I say? It’s perfect, and all in a two-inch single.’
‘Thank you,’ she said, without any fuss. But I knew she knew I’d got the message in one. She’d made a boo-boo jumping the gun on the specifications for the boat and I’d done the same, thinking I could write an advertisement. We’d intruded into each other’s territory and thereby each learned a valuable lesson. The partnership was beginning to take shape.
A week later Busta Gut knocked on the front door and handed Gloria a letter. ‘It’s from America. Reckon it’s from Jimmy, eh?’
‘Thank you, Busta,’ Gloria said, not bothering to ask him why he hadn’t simply dropped it in the letterbox at the gate.
‘He comin’ back an’ all?’
Gloria sighed. ‘How do I bloody know!’
‘Probably tell yer in that letter, Mrs McKenzie.’
‘Maybe,’ Gloria said, turning to shut the door.
‘Well, ain’t yer gunna read it?’
Gloria turned back to face him. ‘Firstly, it’s addressed to Jacko, and secondly, why don’t you mind yer own bloody business, Busta Gutherie? Bugger off!’
‘Could be a long time waitin’ for the next letter,’ Busta Gut said, sighing. ‘Mailbag’s got them tricky corners – letters get stuck.’
‘Then I’ll just have to complain to the postmaster, won’t I?’
‘Ain’t no postmaster – only Mum.’
‘The one in Launceston!’
Busta Gut seemed unfazed by this. ‘Ya’ll have to write to the queen.’
The letter from Jimmy was dated ten days previously and was written in the elegant copperplate he’d been taught at the orphanage. ‘Brother Fish, dey don’t teach much dat place, but dey done teach yoh to write nothin’ real good,’ he had said. The letter was written in more or less grammatical English with only an occasional ‘Jimmyesque’ expression and his way of taking the shortest cut he could find for each sentence. Jimmy’s unique expression was essentially a spoken language and didn’t carry over onto paper, which, if anything, like the language of people who don’t do a lot of writing, was rather formal. He himself would refer to the business of formal writing as, ‘I got to chew da pen.’
Private Richard Oldcorn
Fort Myer
Washington DC
4th May, 1954
Dear Brother Fish,
I arrived fit and well but Australia, it a long way to go from. I got a sore ass in that airplane! Over here they treat me like some hero. They sent a full colonel to meet me at the airport and a military police escort. When I first see the provost I think to myself, O’oh, they gone trapped me, man! I under arrest for being AWOL.
Ain’t no such thing happen. I been treated real special all along. They sent in this tailor man and he make me two dress uniforms fit like a glove.
The debrief go all week. I suppose to say this, I not suppose to say that. The man who come from the Pentagon, he reckon the press they going to bombard yours truly. I got to have my wits about me. I know what these mothers want. I know that drill from way back, man. They want a nice polite nigger don’t give them no trouble, don’t sound too dumb, don’t dish no dirt on the white comrades, show he modest and intelligent a natural-born leader. Also, I got to be, the officer from the Pentagon he say, ‘circumspect’. ‘Do you know what that means, Jimmy?’ he ask me.
‘Yes, sir – cautious, and taking everything into account,’ I say. Nicole ma’am use that word once and I done looked it up. Also, I must never lose my temper. Even if the press, they difficult. ‘Yes, sir’, ‘Yes ma’am’, all that stuff I learn 1000 years ago when I just a chile. Press don’t bother me none. It the protocol for the presentation. It ain’t like Government House – they got a whole lot more crapola I got to know on that day.
Next week they going to tell the press I arrive here in America. They want me to say that after the POW camp, I found me a remote desert island near the South Pole so I can forget them communist atrocities. They gave me this map and I suppose to show it to the press. I got to point this tiny dot the bottom of Australia and near the South Pole. Only trouble, Tasmania gone get in the way. No problem, they get a new one and, presto! No more Tasmania and an arrow point south that say, ‘To South Pole’. I told them, American people, the press, they ain’t that stupid. They say, ‘Don’t you worry – they don’t know where Australia is, never mine Tasmania.’
/> They also got me on the Ed Murrow show on the TV called ‘See It Now’ next week. I big time, baby! ‘Hello America – Jimmy Oldcorn, he back from the communist indoctrination – the unshakeable all-American fighting man.’ All that crap. I hope the folk from the Colored Orphanage, they watching – and Elmira Reformatory. Maybe the Kraus twins and Frau Kraus? Also on Ed Murrow I going to meet that judge who sent me to Korea. That going to be a big joke. My head going to be swelled the size of the Alabama moon! They shitting themselves that I going to get it wrong. They also teaching me to speak honky English, so I don’t sound like some watermelon-pip-spittin’ nigger. I don’t tell them I can do it any time I want. Don’t tell nobody nothing, then they think, ‘Hey man, this dude, he a real quick learner.’
Man, already I weary of this bullshit! I wish I back on the beautiful island for some peace and quiet.
We doing special drill for the presentation at the White House next week so I’m going to write to you about that and meeting with the president. I got to practise hypothetical questions that maybe he going to ask. ‘Yes, sir, Mr President, the winters in Korea, they very cold.’
The man from the Pentagon, he ask, ‘Jimmy, how you get that scar on your face?’
‘Sir, I got this scar ’cos two white American sonofabitch marines throw me out a travellin’ truck – ha, ha, ha!’
‘No, Jimmy, that’s not how you got it.’
‘It ain’t, sir?’
‘Jimmy, you got that knife scar from that fight with Corporal Steve O’Rourke, the man who murdered the two American soldiers. The story of the murder has already been in the press. He came at you with the knife in the POW camp.’
‘Yes, sir! That true, sir.’
‘You remember that good, son – that’s what we call colour.
That’s one of the questions Mr Murrow is going to ask.’
‘What about the plate, sir?’
‘What plate?’
‘The tin plate that broke the knife blade, sir.’
‘That didn’t happen.’ He point to the scar. ‘You got stabbed in the face! That’s what happened, soldier. Now you remember, don’t you, son?’
‘Yes, sir! What happened then, sir?’
‘You grab him by the throat until he passes out, just the way it happened with the soldier in the hospital cave. You do remember now, don’t you, soldier?’
‘Yes, sir!’
‘Don’t let America down, son.’
‘No, sir! Yes, sir!’
My love to all the family and to Wendy and to Nicole ma’am. Tell Gloria I going to need, soon as I get back, her cray stew – that big black pot all for myself!
I must stop now, Brother Fish – this the longest I ever chewed the pen, man.
Hoping to see you all real soon.
Yours truly, my brother,
Jimmy XXXX
PS: X – one for each of the girls – Gloria, Sue, Wendy and Nicole ma’am.
I noted that Jimmy, ever circumspect, hadn’t addressed Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan as ‘Countess’ and had remembered to keep it between the three of us. I was having tea with her on Sunday afternoon and as it was Friday I decided I’d save the letter until then – a nice surprise to go with the tea and scones. Anyway, Gloria wanted to show it to every man and his dog, and she positively preened over the bit about her cray stew. The letter, I knew, would eventually end up in her latest scrapbook together with the envelope plastered with American stamps – one of the American flag, and the others featuring Abraham Lincoln in profile. Sunday afternoon duly arrived and I had to practically prise Jimmy’s letter from Gloria’s white-knuckled hands. ‘You make sure you bring it back, Jacko. It’s private and to us – the family!’
‘Well, she is mentioned in it,’ I suggested.
‘Not like my cray stew!’ Whatever that was supposed to mean.
We had afternoon tea in the garden, which overlooked the cliff. It was a glorious late-autumn day and Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan had set everything out on a small wicker table with two rather worn wicker chairs. Thankfully Vowelfowl’s squawking self was nowhere to be seen. After a while we settled down to talk. That is, she talked while I drank tea, ate scones and listened.
‘Well, Lawrence, that is, Mr Smithson, seemed to like my repertoire except that he cringed when, as the very last thing, I sang a Cantonese lullaby. When I finished he said, pout held for several moments, “No, darling, I don’t think so. Not the heathen language.”
‘There was a moment’s silence before Sir Victor Sassoon suggested, “Are you sure, Poppy? We always have more than a few wealthy Chinese attend the cabaret.”
‘Lawrence looked momentarily confused, then said, “Ah! The Shanghailanders will think it’s hilarious, and the Chinese will think it’s patronising. But if you insist, Sir Victor.”
‘“No, Poppy, you run the show. I’ll leave it up to you. When do you think Nicole will be ready to start?”
‘“Two or three weeks. She needs to learn to work a bigger audience, and she’s not pitching all the numbers correctly.”
‘“How shall we bill her?” Sir Victor asked.
‘“Hmm, difficult. You are a real countess, aren’t you, darling?”
‘I wasn’t quite sure how to answer him – Russian aristocracy was of so little consequence in Shanghai. “I’m a Russian countess, Mr Smithson.”
‘“You will call me Lawrence, please! In that case we must never let that be known.” He turned to Sir Victor. “Perhaps ‘The Little Debutante’?”
‘Sir Victor thought for a moment. “And when she grows up? No, that won’t do at all – it’s quite obvious the girl has talent. ‘The Little Debutante’ is much too precious – she can’t be stuck with a stage name she’ll grow out of in a season. Besides, all the snobs will be asking when she was presented to the queen. Much too complicated.” He turned to me and asked, “What would you like to be known as, Nicole?”
‘I’d always loathed the way I’d been billed at the nightclub – “Little Countess, the Schoolgirl Maestro”. Anyway, at sixteen I felt myself quite grown-up. “I’d like to be myself, sir,” then added, “if that’s not too much trouble?”
‘He seemed to be thinking, then said, “Hmm, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan. It has a certain cachet – sounds French, and that’s not altogether a bad thing.” He looked up, and asked, “Why are you Russian and yet have a French name?”
‘“My great-great-grandfather was a French instructor at the military academy in St Petersburg, and when Napoleon invaded Russia he elected to fight for the tsar. He was a general in the Imperial Russian Army and after Napoleon was defeated he was given the title. My mother was French and from a titled family, so the two names became hyphenated.”
‘“Quite a splendid pedigree, my dear – nothing to be ashamed of.” He turned to Lawrence Smithson. “Poppy, I think we should let her have her own way.”
‘It was said without equivocation, and Lawrence must have known the decision was final. “Bit of a mouthful,” was all he said.
‘“I don’t know, Poppy – double-barrelled names are all the rage these days.”
‘“Please, may I change my mind?”
‘Lawrence looked relieved. “So? What’s it to be, darling?”
‘“Lily No Gin.”
‘“Are you sure?” Sir Victor asked, looking quite startled.
‘“Sounds like you’re refusing a drink, darling,” Lawrence sniffed. I could see he wasn’t impressed. “Lily? Very common. I once had an Aunt Lily – her nose was perpetually running and she smelled of cat’s wee. Suffocated when the cat slept on her face.”
‘We were forced to laugh, but I’d made up my mind. “No Gin is my Chinese name – two words, ‘No’ and ‘Gin’, so it’s easy to remember both by the Chinese and the Europeans. Lily is the name of my mother.”
‘“Lily No Gin? Hmm . . . it certainly isn’t a difficult name to remember,” said Sir Victor, “but if you must be Lily I shall personally call you Shanghai Lil – it sounds much more show bi
z.”
‘Poppy clapped his hands, bringing them up so that his fingers touched the underside of his chin. “Oh, I say – what an inspiration, Sir Victor!” He turned to me. “Yes, oh dearie me – yes! I do so like that, darling. Shanghai Lil – we could do something with that.”
‘“It sounds like a prostitute,” I said softly. I knew I was overstepping the mark, but one only gets one chance to name oneself and I, not they, had to live with it – hopefully for a long time. “Big Boss Yu will like No Gin. It was he who named me, gave me my Chinese name.”
‘That seemed to settle the matter on the spot. I was beginning to realise just how powerful my Chinese protector was in Shanghai.
‘I’m bound to say that while Lawrence Smithson was of the same persuasion as Noël Coward – that is, homosexual and in show biz – he didn’t sulk or grow petulant for long. He accepted my name, and after ten days of solid piano and singing practice from two to five every weekday afternoon, finally one afternoon he said, “You’ve done well, darling. You may call me Poppy.”
‘“Yes, quite – bravo!” chimed in Sir Victor.
‘“We open in ten days and . . . ” Poppy fell into “the pose”, which I had learned happened when he was thinking or upset, although “upset” included a raised eyebrow with one eye shut. This time his right eyebrow was at rest and his eyes were both looking directly at me. “We’ll need photographs for posters – and I do think the hair must go, darling. After all, we don’t want any of the gym frock and ‘Little Countess, the Schoolgirl Maestro’ remaining, do we, darling? That would be too ghastly – too outré for words.”
‘I needed time to think. “I’ll have to ask Big Boss Yu,” I replied, remembering the incident in the nightclub. My comment received the full pose plus arch.
‘“Oh dear – oh dearie me. First he names you, now he arranges your hair. How very sweet.”
‘“Careful, Poppy,” Sir Victor warned. “You have to live here – I don’t.”
‘My hair fell almost to my waist and, as many of the songs required me to toss my head about, I mostly wore it in plaits so that it didn’t get in the way of the piano keys. If I was going to be a grown-up and lose the schoolgirl tag, then Poppy’s request wasn’t unreasonable. It was just that it came as rather a shock.
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