Read Brother Fish Online

Authors: Bryce Courtenay

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Brother Fish (9 page)

BOOK: Brother Fish
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Throughout the next day at school I waited in fear for the wrath to come. Here I was only eight and the justice of the peace already had me marked down for sentencing. When the final bell went, our teacher, Mrs Reilly, called as usual ‘Class dismissed!' But then she added, ‘Jacko, wait back a moment, please.' This was it, the beginning of the end. I wasn't sure what I'd done other than be forced to change into a different person, but whatever it was there was going to be no escape. ‘Jacko, you have to report to the town library,' she instructed.

‘When, miss?' I asked anxiously.

‘Why right now on your way home, of course. Miss Lenoir-Jourdan is expecting you. I hope it's a nice surprise.'

‘Surprise, my arse!'
I thought. She's wrote all our names in that big book and I'm the first to be dealt with by the fierce justice of the peace. When I'd returned home from school the previous day I'd confirmed with my mother that my name really was Jack. If Miss Lenoir-Jourdan knew stuff about me I didn't know myself, then what else did she know?

‘Ah, Jack McKenzie,' she said, looking up from her desk as I knocked on the open door to her office. ‘You've come.'

‘Yes, miss.'

‘Sit!' she commanded, indicating the chair in front of her desk. I did as I was told, sitting with my head bowed grimly, clutching the arms of the chair. She continued writing but eventually looked up and removed her glasses, a gesture that looked real scary, like a judge about to pronounce sentence. ‘Can you read?' she demanded.

‘Yes, miss.'

‘How well do you read, Jack?'

It was a dumb question. I ask you, how's a kid to know how well he reads? But I kept the thought to myself. Everyone knew she was probably the cleverest person on the island having read all them books in the library shelves and being the justice of the peace and also a piano teacher. ‘I'm okay,' I mumbled, not looking up from my lap.

‘Hmm, we'll soon see about that.' She replaced her glasses and out of the corner of my eye I saw her reach out for a book on the desk and place it down in front of her. She opened it and appeared to be scanning the contents, turning several pages after dabbing her forefinger onto the tip of her tongue. At last she came to the bit she must have been looking for. ‘You'll read this aloud,
slowly
, pronouncing each word
clearly
and making sure to
pause
at the commas. You do know what a comma is, don't you, Jack?'

I didn't, but she'd just told me. ‘It's where you pause, miss.'

‘Quite right.'

The book was called
The Wind in the Willows
, the bit where Ratty and Mole go rowing on the river. Though this book was new to me and somewhat more difficult than the primers we'd been given to read at school, I read on and on, stumbling over a big word every once in a while but getting through to the end of the chapter at an increasingly confident pace.

‘That will be sufficient for now,' Miss Lenoir-Jourdan announced at last, then she added, ‘Your reading is monotonal, much too fast, you swallow your words and your accent is simply atrocious!' She leaned back in her chair and glared at me through the bottom of her glasses. ‘However, Jack McKenzie, you're better clay to work with than most.' She reached over, closing and then lifting the book, and offered it to me. ‘Now take this home and report back here after school on Friday, by which time you will have completed it.' She gave me a stern look. ‘There will be a comprehensive test where questions will be asked. Now hop along, Jack McKenzie.'

When I reached home I went out into the back garden and did some weeding in the vegie patch, which Mum said to do, and then started to read the book. After a couple of pages, first making sure nobody was looking, I put the tip of my forefinger onto my tongue and then turned the page. It worked a treat with the page flipping back easy as anything but leaving a great dirty mark on the corner where my finger had been. So there it was, three pages into the new book and already I was in the shit, too late to wash my hands now. Later I tried to get rid of it with my school eraser but it seemed only to make it worse.

Thus began a long association with the librarian, the only person who ever called me Jack. Though I can't say the relationship ever developed into a warm one, Nicole Lenoir-Jourdan remained imperious, didactic and aloof in all things other than when discussing books. She had a long neck and a chin that seemed always to be raised at a forty-five-degree angle so that she was forced to look at you through the bottom of her glasses, an effect that made her appear as if she didn't much like what she saw. She would question me constantly, explaining concepts and ideas we might come across in the books she selected for me to read, sighing impatiently if I didn't catch on quickly enough for her liking. ‘Snails are slow because they can't read,' she'd say, when I was stumped for an answer. I never quite knew what she meant by that, but never dared to ask.

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 of 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.

BOOK: Brother Fish
8.9Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
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