Free Jack of Diamonds by Bryce Courtenay

it?’
    It was true. I seemed to be growing so fast that nothing was the right size for long. But the stick was the least of my concerns. Skates were always the biggest problem. My feet kept on getting bigger each year, and somehow every winter my mom would find the money to get me a second-hand pair.
    ‘Can you hang on a minute, Jack? I might have just the thing.’ He turned and hurried back into the house and returned a couple of minutes later holding a nice-looking hockey stick that was definitely bigger than my own. ‘Here, Jack, try this,’ he said, handing it to me.
    Now, Mac was definitely not the ice-hockey type; he’d never even brought the subject up and I’d never mentioned playing pond hockey either. ‘Jeez, thanks, Mac, it’s a beauty!’ I exclaimed. It was, too: almost new and made from maple wood, like a proper professional ice-hockey stick. ‘Where’d you get it?’
    Mac grinned. ‘I’ve had it for a few years now. It’s a strange story. I was re-covering an old chesterfield for someone, and I’d lifted the three big cushions to get to the springs underneath to realign them when I saw that someone had slit the lining and pushed that hockey stick down between two rows of springs.’
    ‘What for?’ It was a silly question.
    Mac shrugged. ‘Damned if I know. It wouldn’t have helped stabilise the chesterfield any. Someone must have been hiding it. It’s not unusual to find the odd thing hidden in a couch or lounge chair. I once found a gold brooch . . . then, on another job, I found a silver cigarette case. Anyhow, I’m glad I hung onto it. It’s yours now, Jack.’
    The new maple stick really helped my game. Soon I was among the first to be chosen in a pick-up shinny side. Sometimes, walking back from the pond, I’d make up different stories about why the hockey stick had been hidden in the lining of the couch. Then my mind would drift to the precious gold brooch and silver cigarette case, although the reason why these had been hidden was pretty obvious – probably to stop someone from taking them to the pawnbroker. But a kid-sized used hockey stick wasn’t pawnbroker material. Some of the stories I made up went on for ages and got very complicated. In one, a father used it to beat his son and so his mom hid it, but there was much more to the story than that. The imagined boy’s name was Tom. I can tell you, life wasn’t easy for him. The only fun he ever had was playing shinny.
    Anyhow, back to hitting the steps at the Jazz Warehouse. In the three weeks since my first visit with Mac, we’d been eleven times. It should have been twelve but on one of the days there was a blizzard coming through, so I was forced to stay home. Then came Christmas and the Jazz Warehouse closed for a week. The downtown offices closed for four days, so my mom was home and I couldn’t practise my jazz. She would have immediately noticed the difference in the music and asked about it.
    But the good thing was that I was beginning to get the hang of it. After about three sessions, I’d worked out the button on the end of the harmonica, which up till then had been a bit of a mystery. Playing is only a question of sucking and blowing. On a chromatic harmonica, there are four notes in each individual hole. Two notes are played either by sucking or blowing with the button pressed in; the other two with the button pulled out. This means you can play all the notes in the scale across three or four octaves, depending on the size of the harmonica. This gives you almost unlimited musical possibilities. Not that I could have explained that at the time, of course; I just gradually worked it out for myself.
    When I couldn’t practise jazz because my mom was home, I’d play other music. Right from the start, I’d played for her while she worked in the kitchen. She had to endure all the ‘them upstairs’ music, and sometimes, just to break it up, I’d sing Daisy’s reply from ‘A Bicycle Built for Two’ in my