Read Online Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay - Free Book Online Page B

which was our first big mistake.
    â€˜A man’s gunna be the bloody laughing stock!’ Alf protested vehemently.
    Gloria had seen The Jazz Singer , the first talking movie starring Al Jolson, at the island’s outdoor cinema in 1929 just before the New York stock exchange crashed and threw the world into the Great Depression. She was not to see another movie until 1936 and so Al Jolson singing on the celluloid was forever emblazoned onto her memory. While we had precious little of what you might call luxuries, we did have an old HMV wind-up gramophone she regarded as part of our professional equipment. We’d play records and then learn the music, translating it into a mouth-organ version for the sextet. In fact, the only birthday and Christmas presents any of us ever received were 78-rpm records suitable for adaptation to the harmonica – usually second-hand from an op shop Gloria corresponded with in Launceston and never of our own choosing.
    We had all the Al Jolson hits, I can still recite them today. ‘You Made Me Love You’, ‘My Mammy’, ‘Sonny Boy’, ‘Hallelujah I’m a Bum’, we did a real good job of that one on the mouth organ, ‘Go into Your Dance’, ‘Toot, Toot, Tootsie!’, ‘April Showers’, and the crowd’s all-time American favourite, ‘Swanee’. I think they loved it especially because they could sing along to some of the Australian songs we played, ‘Click Go the Shears’, ‘Waltzing Matilda’ and ‘The Road to Gundagai’.
    So when Mum came up with her black-face idea there was no talking her out of it. ‘What’s good enough for Mr Jolson is good enough for us McKenzies,’ she’d insisted, and Alf knew he was beaten beak and crop.
    I must say I didn’t like the idea much myself. A man felt a bit of a galah standing there in the hot sun on the makeshift boxing ring where later some of the likely lads, full of piss and vinegar, would pull on the dreaded twelve-ounce gloves and, with Father Crosby acting as referee, belt the tripe out of each other. I could see several of my schoolmates huddled together in the crowd pointing at us and pissing themselves. But, as it turned out, Mum was right, the island folk gave us a better-than-usual applause as we entered the ring. I don’t know whether this was because they enjoyed the bit of extra theatre thrown in, or the fact that black boot polish combined with flaming red hair was not a real good look. All I know, at school the next Monday and for several weeks afterwards, we McKenzie kids copped a heap.
    Anyway, one good thing happened out of the experience: halfway through one of the numbers Alf’s black boot polish started to melt from his sweat and was running in streaks down his neck and staining his starched white shirt. When someone in the audience yelled, ‘Alf, yer nigger paint’s comin’ orf!’ that was finally it. Alf could take no more and he stopped playing mid-note and jumped down out of the ring. We all thought he was going to job the bloke who’d shouted out, but instead he headed straight for the pub. Gloria couldn’t yell at him to come back as we were in the middle of a bracket and to stop would have been unprofessional. A crisis suddenly loomed, there was a solo bit coming next which my dad, as the lead mouth, always performed. Next thing I felt Mum give me a dig in the ribs, then with her eyes she indicated that I was to step forward for my solo debut.
    I was the one in the family thought most likely to inherit ‘the gift’ and here was the unexpected confirmation. Feeling more than a bit of a fool I took two steps forward from the safety of the family lineup certain that my Kiwi-polished blackened face was streaked like a zebra’s bum. Nevertheless, with knees trembling, I managed to grasp the moment and give it my best shot. To my surprise, the audience responded at the