Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay Page A

pound he was a half-decent fighter, but his stubborn refusal to take on anyone around his own weight made his contribution to the evening’s fisticuffs the curtain-raiser with all bets off. If he looked like getting the tripe knocked out of him a fellow fisherman would step in and pull him away from his opponent, always to Alf’s loud protests that he should be allowed to finish the mongrel off.
    If he wasn’t a contender in the brawls behind the pub, nevertheless, as a drunk, Alf was the scourge of Baldwin. After closing time, when everyone had stumbled home to beat their wives and children or to sleep it off, his caterwauling would keep half the women in town awake. He’d be banging dustbin lids together, serenading the female population at three a.m. on his harmonica and generally making a bloody nuisance of himself. As the husbands of the wives he took to serenading had long since passed out from the grog, he had the women of the town to himself. The odd bucket of water or the amber contents of the occasional chamber pot seemed only to freshen him up for further mayhem. If he wasn’t a good drunk, you couldn’t fault him as a stayer.
    He’d come home at dawn usually with one ear torn and wearing a shiner or evidence of an earlier bloodied nose or all three, buttons missing off his shirt and his person cut and bruised from falling on his arse, still pissed as a newt as well as toothless. His missing teeth were by way of precaution. He’d leave them in a tin mug on the mantelpiece above the kitchen stove prior to departing for the pub, his real teeth having been singly and collectively knocked out, the last three on the night of his twenty-first birthday party. When you’re forced to be a fish-eater all your life teeth don’t assume the same importance as they do to the carnivores in society.
    You could hear him coming a mile off and my little mum would be standing on the front verandah in her pink chenille dressing-gown, felt slippers with the left big toe sticking out, the barrel shapes of her hair curlers visible through a matching pink chiffon scarf. She’d be standing grim-faced with her arms crossed, cigarette hanging from the corner of her mouth, squinting through the half-light waiting for his shambling, stumbling, falling-down self to appear through the early Sunday-morning mist, shouting, ‘Gloria, I’m coming, lovey! I ain’t deserted yiz!’
    â€˜No such bloody luck,’ she’d sigh, as she waited to grab him by the scruff of the neck and lead him into the washhouse in the backyard where, clothes and all, winter and summer, she’d shove him under a cold shower, requiring him to stay put until he’d shown some semblance of sobriety. When she judged the time right she’d chuck him a well-washed sugar bag to dry himself off and then put him to bed to snore away the rest of the day until he rose in the late afternoon to a plate of fried eggs and toast and a cup of scalding sweet black Bushells tea. Later in life, after she’d embraced the Catholic faith, she’d put him under the shower and haul him out when she returned from mass, usually some two hours later.
    As the children of Alf and Gloria McKenzie, we were the fourth generation from convict stock on both sides of my family. Today that passes for some sort of status. When we were kids and had done something we ought not have, my mum, who usually got things in perspective, would sigh and say, ‘Four generations of McKenzies and Kellys and we still haven’t produced anyone worth a pinch of the proverbial!’ Though, in a thousand years, she would never have admitted to it, we all knew what the substituted word was. We were crap, a family at the bottom end of the social heap, and that was that, there was no point having tabs on ourselves. Sometimes though, by way of conciliation she’d add, ‘Although one thing: God, in His infinite mercy, gave us a good ear on