Brother Fish (61 page)

When Les came looking for his bike the next day he found it bent beyond repair from the initial smash, but mysteriously without its engine. He couldn't remember a thing and had even forgotten that Alf had been on the spot to see if he was okay. Alf would laugh, and say, ‘Next time I was in the pub I waited until he was pissed and skint and starting to bludge drinks, and I bought him a beer and asked him what he was going to do with the smashed BSA.'

‘Can't do nothin', mate – some dirty bastard stole the fuckin' engine!' he'd replied.

‘Nah, mate, I removed it,' Alf admitted. ‘Wouldn't want someone to nick it, would ya?'

‘
You've
got it? Well I'll be buggered!' Les said, a little unsteady on his feet. He pointed a finger at Alf, having to take a step back to keep his balance and squinting at him through one eye. ‘Me sister, she was always too bloody good fer ya, Alf McKenzie.' Les then turned to address the other members at the bar. ‘Lissshin to thish – me fuckin' brother-in-law nicked me beeza motorbike engine!'

Alf cleared his throat, preparing for his pitch. ‘Les, mate, the flamin' BSA's a write-off! How fast were ya goin' when ya hit that telegraph pole?'

‘Bloody mongrel shouldn't have been there. Weren't there last month, were it?' Les said accusingly.

‘Modern progress, mate. We're gunna have street lights an' all – you'll be able to see where yer goin' next time!' This caused general laughter.

‘Where's me fuckin' beeza engine?' Les said drunkenly.

‘Les, yer not thinking of repairing it, are ya?'

‘I might,' Les replied. ‘Bloody good mo . . . bike, that.'

‘Not any more it ain't,' Alf retaliated. ‘Flamin' frame's bent real bad, both wheels gorn – ya couldn't hope to straighten 'em – handlebars are history, light's ratshit, the tyres were smooth as a baby's backside, thread showin' through the rubber an' all.' Alf paused to let all this sink in, then he made his offer. ‘I tell ya what, Les, I'll buy ya another beer and give ya five bob for the engine, which ain't in such good shape neither. Whatcha say, mate?'

‘Five bob! Yer mad, ya bastard! S'worth two quid
attheverylease
.'

‘Okay, me last offer. Two beers and seven'n'sixpence, take it or leave it – no further negotiations will be entered into.'

‘Go t'buggery!' Les Kelly said, and turned to Greg Woon, the barman, and asked if he could chalk up a beer.

Greg pointed to the slate at the back of the bar, and shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate – you've already chalked up five bob, and you know that's the house limit. Anyway, you've had a skinful.'

Les turned to Alf. ‘Two beers and eight bob? No nego . . . shins will be . . . ' he said, losing track of the sentence.

Alf shook his head. ‘Sorry, mate – seven'n'six, that's me best offer.' Alf took the money out of his pocket and slapped five shillings on the counter in front of Greg Woon. ‘That's to wipe Les's slate clean, mate.' He put down an extra shilling. ‘That's for two beers for Les.' Then he gave Les one and sixpence, enough for three beers.

Les sniffed and accepted the money, grumbling that he'd been rooked by his own brother-in-law.

‘I've gotta go, mate,' Alf said. ‘Plenty to do.'

‘What? Yiz not gunna buy us a beer after I let ya have th'fuckin' engine?' Les accused.

Alf grinned, recalling the story. ‘I just did when I come in,' he'd pointed out. ‘Greggie says ya had enough.'

‘Yeah, but ya got th' fuckin' beeza engine cheap!' Les protested.

Les was right – tradition dictated that Alf buy him a beer to consummate the deal. Greg would have poured him another beer under the circumstances. It was the right thing to do.

‘I was dead broke,' Alf explained. ‘I'd hoped to get the BSA engine for five bob and the extra two'n'six was for a packet of shag and goin' to the pub on Saturday night. It was gunna be a long week, I can tell ya. I said to him, “Sorry, mate, buy ya a beer next time. Ya cleaned me out. Tell ya what, though, you've got a clean slate and one'n'six in yer pocket. Why don't ya buy me one?”

‘“Get fucked!” Les shouted. “I ain't buyin' no fuckin' beer fer no mongrel wants them street lights jus' so's I can break me fuckin' neck on one them fuckin' poles so's he can nick me fuckin' beeza engine!”'

Alf would laugh as he told the story – though, of course, when he told it to the family, he left out Uncle Les's worst expletives. I only heard them replaced where they belonged when he was telling the story to a group of men on the beach while repairing craypots and didn't know I'd come up behind him. I recall how Uncle Les's reason for not buying Alf a beer got a big laugh from the men listening. They all knew Les Kelly for what he was, but also would have reckoned Alf had taken advantage of him while he was drunk and so deserved the opprobrious dismissal. Alf knew it too, although, in truth, Les Kelly was always either drunk or had a bad hangover so he was never really in a position to think straight.

The little BSA engine was cooled by a fan that Alf fitted so it didn't overheat when pulling a much bigger load than it was originally designed for. Alf claimed it almost never let him down, and never in a crisis.

He begged and borrowed some disused craypots and bought some new cane and tea-tree. Sue and I would repair the craypots with the cane and tea-tree after school and on the weekend. By this time Alf's borrowed capital was about used up. He'd load the boat with craypots and a coff, which is a square box made from wooden slats an inch wide and spaced an inch apart, with a hinged lid at the top. It's roughly six feet long and wide, and four feet high, and is weighted down in sufficient water to cover it even when the tide goes out. A coff could hold up to 1000 crays, fed every day with mutton-fish – that is, abalone – so that they maintained their prime condition.

Alf would go out for up to a week at a time, camping on shore at night, and set up his craypots behind offshore reefs in protected lagoons of smooth water. He'd bait crayfish in a dead simple but nevertheless ingenious way. On the island no jam tin ever had its lid opened more than three quarters, because once it was empty it could be used as a ‘bait saver'. You'd knock a few holes in the bottom of the tin, then place your bait inside and push down the lid to close it sufficiently to keep the bait inside and anything else out. With the tin placed inside a craypot the cray would smell the bait through the holes in the tin and enter the pot and be caught. Cray after cray would be attracted to the bait without it ever being used up.

Alf would harvest the full pots every day and put them into the coff, where the crays could enjoy a good feed of mutton-fish. At the end of the trip he'd empty them all into wet hessian spud bags and head for home.

It was bloody hard work, and Alf said he'd boil the billy and have a brew first thing in the morning and by sundown he'd be that starving he could have eaten a baby's bum through a wicker chair! On his first trip, Gloria had packed him a feast fit for a king – a roast leg of mutton, corned beef, sausages, flour for damper, lard for frying, a jar of jam for his sweet tooth, spuds and a hessian sack full of vegies from the garden. He'd trapped sufficient crays to cover his expenses and pay back his first fortnightly instalment to the bank, but it soon became obvious that he couldn't afford to keep eating like a king. So he'd set off with the basic essentials and take the old .22 rifle. Alf used to amuse us, particularly Cory and Steve, by telling how he got by on the tucker front.

‘When the food is gone, ya have to look out for yourself,' he'd said to them. ‘I'd take the gun just in case I got attacked by a killer kangaroo.
Pow!
I'd fire in self-defence – and just in time, too, or the monster would've ripped me to pieces, took out me guts with its big claws!' The twins' eyes were wide as they imagined the scene. ‘After this narrow escape,' Alf said, ‘ . . . well, you couldn't leave a perfectly good killer kangaroo there to rot, could ya?'

‘No!' the twins would chorus. ‘Serves the killer kangaroo right!'

‘Too right!' Alf agreed. ‘It was him or me, and this time I won. Can't waste fresh meat, though, can you?'

‘Was the killer kangaroo tough?' Cory asked.

‘How do you mean? Tough like being a killer, or to eat?'

‘To eat,' came the reply.

‘Nah, this particular roo was good eating, 'cept for his heart.'

‘What was wrong with his heart?' Steve asked, falling into the trap.

‘Mate, he was a real hard-hearted kangaroo!' Alf laughed.

He'd tell them how in the season he'd known mutton-birds to mysteriously commit harakiri by flying into the boat and breaking their necks as they plopped straight into a sizzling frying pan. How the odd swan would have a nasty accident by swimming into the boat in the dark and die of fright thinking it must be a killer whale or something.

‘What about the feathers?' Steve, ever the practical twin, asked.

‘What feathers?' Alf replied.

‘If them mutton-birds plopped into the frying pan they'd have feathers on them,' Steve correctly pointed out.

‘Oh,
those
feathers! I see what you mean,' Alf said, scratching his head at a momentary loss for an explanation, but soon recovering. ‘Have you heard of people being frightened out of their skin?' The twins nodded their heads. ‘Well, with mutton-birds it's the same – they're frightened out of their skin, only with them it's their feathers because they've only got feathers for skin. Well, with the terrible fright they get, all them feathers fly into the air and they're blown away in the wind and there they are ready for frying, lying on their backs with their toes in the air, lard sizzling in the ole frying pan.'

‘Oh yeah? So what about the guts?' Steve asked.

‘Delicious! When you're hungry, mate, that's all part of the meal.'

‘Even the poop bag?' Steve persisted, while Cory giggled.

‘Delicious! It's filled with these little prawns and baby crabs all mashed up somethin' beautiful – fried in the lard pan, you couldn't eat better,' Alf said, licking his chops in an exaggerated manner.

‘Yuk!' the twins would chorus joyfully.

But cray fishing in a small boat was anything but fun. Alf would be out for a week, with no radio on board to tell anyone where he was. Bass Strait is treacherous water, and it was hell on the family. Often a sudden gale would blow up, the wind howling over the island and the rain hitting the corrugated-iron roof like lead sinkers striking down. If you put your ear to the bedroom door you'd hear Gloria sobbing, not knowing if she'd ever see Alf again.

But this venture didn't last long – the dinghy was too small, and Alf couldn't place sufficient pots to bring in the catch and make a decent living. There was no mother ship to unload his catch onto on a daily basis, so he had to keep the crays in the coff all week and bring them all in at the same time so they got to the co-op still alive.

In just over a year Alf had paid the bank all but ten pounds of the original loan, but after the fortnightly repayments there was precious little left and we were worse off than when he'd worked on one of the big boats. Alf had his pride, and even during the Great Depression he'd been a good provider and wasn't someone who gave up. He probably secretly knew it couldn't last, but couldn't bear to be seen to fail. Just bringing in enough cray to survive was a credit to his seamanship and skill as a fisherman. The dinghy was in reality no more than something you'd use for a bit of weekend cray fishing and couldn't hope to cope with a week or more out at sea or to bring in enough to support a family and repay the bank.

Then Alf only just survived a bad storm and had to walk two days through the bush to get home. The dinghy ended up on the rocks badly damaged, and he lost most of his pots and fixed-gear flag line, so Gloria finally put her foot down. No more cray fishing, or she was taking the kids and moving out. It wasn't just that she was having difficulty making ends meet – she'd have washed more sheets and scrubbed floors until she dropped if she could've fitted more hours into the day – but she was scared she was going to lose Alf. She was afraid that he'd become just another memorial plaque on the wall of the Anglican church. Although, even though Alf was Anglican, she would probably have opted for the Catholic church, which had its fair share of plaques as well, because Father Crosby would have done a better oration than the Reverend John Daintree. The Anglican minister was known as ‘His slowly dying, never retiring misery', and even then was older than Methuselah.

Reverend Daintree had taken to rambling disconnected sermons and had long since lost the plot, so that only the old people who were profoundly deaf turned up of a Sunday morning. Sometimes you'd hear the church bell going on a Tuesday or a Friday morning. If you were foolish enough not to know any better and, thinking something might have happened, went around to have a look, what you'd see would be the silly old bugger delivering his rambling, confused sermon to an empty church, having mistaken the day for a Sunday.

Nobody complained, as he could still do a passable christening and funeral, though he'd usually forget somewhere along the line who he was burying, even to the point of changing the gender of the deceased. Both christenings and funerals often attracted a bigger crowd than they might normally, there to see how he would manage to screw things up. For instance, when he buried old Murtle Barnes, who'd been one of his parishioners for fifty years, halfway through the funeral service he turned her into a turtle that had died in a barn. He assured everyone present that God loved all creatures great and small as much as He loved all of us – that he felt privileged to be burying one of His slower-moving creations, as he was having trouble getting about himself. He then admonished everyone for keeping turtles in barns when it was as plain as the nose on your face that the order Chelonia had webbed feet and belonged in ponds, where the dear creature wasn't slow-moving at all. Then he commended Murtle, the supposed turtle, to the grave: ‘Dust to dust, ashes to ashes and turtles to water.'