Free Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay

end of my solo with spontaneous applause.
    Funny how these things work out. It was the first time in my life that I felt a bit more than dead ordinary. I’d managed to overcome my fear and do something on my own and it felt good. Even if as a family we weren’t ‘worth a pinch of the proverbial’, I’d succeeded in front of my peers and I liked the feeling a lot. Perhaps I didn’t have to be a fisherman after all? Perhaps I could be something else? I even had the temerity to hope, if I got a decent pass in my final exams, maybe I could be a trainee clerk in the bank. Though, as it turned out, this thought came to nothing. The following year, at the age of fourteen, I was yanked out of school and sent to work on a fishing boat.
    My mum cried her heart out when this happened. She’d called me into the kitchen after school and made me a cup of tea with milk and three sugars, a special treat, then sat me down at the kitchen table. I knew there must be something wrong, because we boys were only allowed in the kitchen at mealtimes. At any other time the area embracing the sink, black wood stove and scrubbed pine table and the space covered by yellow and green patterned lino, the pattern long since worn through on the most stepped-on parts to show black patches, was secret women’s business. While my sister Sue could come and go as she pleased, even Alf would ask politely to enter when he was home. Mum sat down in the chair beside mine and lit a cigarette, and then got up and fetched an ashtray, sat down again and sighed, then this big tear started to run down her cheek.
    â€˜Alf’s crook,’ she said at last.
    â€˜What’s wrong with him?’ I replied, thinking it was just some passing thing – sometimes he’d get the gout and have to stay home for two or three days with his leg resting on a chair. ‘He got the gout again?’
    She shook her head and then started to really cry. ‘He’s coughing real bad and Dr Light sent a blood sample to the big island and he’s got cancer, they think it’s of the lung!’
    It had never occurred to me that Gloria loved Alf. He was just our dad and someone she had to put up with on Sunday mornings. Now I was surprised to see she cared greatly about him. ‘What’s gunna happen?’ I asked, meaning what was going to happen to Alf. But that’s not how she understood me.
    â€˜You’re going to have to leave school, Jacko, go on the boats.’
    I was stunned. I was good at school, with my memory I always topped the class. Mind you this wasn’t hard and was largely because the rest of the kids only attended school because it was compulsory. Gloria had always insisted that I was going to be the one McKenzie who would complete high school, a glorious first among our numerous island relations. ‘But Mum, you said . . .’ I was choked and the lump in my throat wouldn’t let me complete the sentence.
    â€˜I know, Jacko!’ she wept. ‘I know, I know!’ I could see she was terribly distraught – I’d never before seen her blubbering like this. If Gloria did any crying it was in the privacy of her bedroom where we weren’t supposed to hear her. ‘I’ve let you down, mate,’ she wailed, ‘but I can’t make up Alf’s pay just with extra washing and ironing from the hospital!’ She looked up at me and said in what began as almost a whisper and ended in a cry of despair, ‘We need the money, son!’ I was back in the proverbial, the stink of fish-wallop suddenly filling my nostrils.
    In the year following my debut as a black-faced soloist I’d been increasingly called upon to do the solo parts in our performances as Alf had developed this persistent cough. We’d been embarrassed on several occasions when halfway through a solo he’d be overtaken with a fit of coughing and I’d have to cut in to complete as the mouth. This