Brother Fish (37 page)

The meal was followed by strudel and cream, and Jimmy accepted a second helping, still not quite believing what was happening and expecting the worst to occur at any moment. Despite the warmth of the kitchen, the splendid meal and, except for the laughter, an otherwise benign Frau Kraus, Jimmy couldn't wait to make his escape into the howling snowstorm outside. He couldn't possibly explain Frau Kraus's complete change of attitude towards him, and could only think she must have gone mad – that the death of Herr Otto had been too much for her senses. While she seemed happy enough, calmly smiling at him as he ate, this only served to confirm Jimmy's suspicion that something had gone terribly wrong in her head. This was the same spider woman who'd spat at his approach. The meal drew to a conclusion and his heart started to pound as Frau Kraus rose from the table and stretched out her hand to him, again smiling, inviting him to take it.

Jimmy, suddenly panic-stricken at this unexpected gesture, jumped up fearfully, kicking at the bench behind him, tripping and falling, then propelling himself backwards on all fours until he bumped against the wall, and finally scrambling frantically to his feet. He found himself standing between the stove and the refrigerator with the large shape of Frau Kraus, hand still outstretched, advancing inexorably towards him, a benign smile on her plain German face.

‘
Komm, Liebling,'
she said gently, reaching him and taking his dark, almost paralysed hand in her own and leading him from the kitchen. Frau Kraus led Jimmy through the house, down a hallway and through a door at the end, which turned out to be a large bathroom. It contained a spacious shower recess and no bath, and Jimmy guessed it was probably the bathroom the twins had customarily used.

Frau Kraus locked the door behind her and, instructing Jimmy to stand on the bathroom mat, she commenced to undress him. Jimmy stood mesmerised, reduced to being a small boy again when his house mother at the orphanage would make him stand naked in the shower room while she examined him for bed-bug bites, scabies and lice. The bathroom was cold and he began to shiver, and when she pulled his dungarees down he quickly covered his genitals and closed his eyes tightly while she removed his brown cardigan. Then he felt her exerting pressure on his right ankle. ‘Up' she said, as she raised his foot and removed what remained of his filthy orphanage socks, then she did the same to the left foot. With his eyes still tightly shut Jimmy now stood naked. He heard the sudden hiss as the shower was turned on and after a few moments he felt her hand in the small of his back and the words, ‘
Komm, Liebling
, we
wasche
now,' as he was pushed gently under the shower rose.

Jimmy immediately opened his eyes to locate the taps in the wall and turned to face them, his back to the opening of the recess, in this way hiding his abused private parts from Frau Kraus's scrutiny. Despite his anxiety, the hot water tumbling over him felt glorious and he simply stood, eyes tightly shut again, relishing the hundreds of warm spikes from the shower rose beating against his skin.

He felt a hand begin to travel across his back, tenderly soaping him, caressing him. Jimmy couldn't remember another human hand touching him, though it must have happened at some time when he'd been a child. The hand slipped down to his waist, the bar of soap within it sensuous as it glided smoothly across the surface of his skin. Now it slipped in between his buttocks. He stiffened, waiting for it to grasp at his genitals, but it glided away, returning to soap his buttocks and slipping down the back of his legs right down to his calves and ankles and then he felt the fingers working the lather between his toes. Jimmy was afraid to open his eyes, afraid of what he might see. So he kept them shut.

Now the hand grasped his elbow and pulled him slightly backwards so that the shower beat against the front of his thighs and, as suddenly, he felt himself being turned. His hands clutched at his privates, concealing them from view. The shower fell against his back and the hand, which seemed to possess a will of its own, started to soap and caress his stomach in the area immediately above his cupped hands.

Almost immediately Jimmy felt his penis begin to stiffen under his protective grasp. The remorseless soapy hand kept moving in slow circles, the fingers dancing across his stomach moving ever closer to his own hands until he felt his fingers being slowly, almost casually, prised apart. He seemed unable to resist, and the soapy hand now contained its rigid prize and began to work up and down its length, stopping just as Jimmy, gasping, thought he could contain himself no longer. The hand now pushed him gently backwards so that the shower splashed down his chest and stomach rinsing the suds from his crotch and erection. Jimmy gasped as he felt himself once again encompassed, though this time it was different, soft and urgent, not unlike the soapy hand that had preceded it, but even more sensuous. He could contain himself no longer and climaxed, shuddering, the joy of it far in excess of his own attempts at masturbation. He opened his eyes at last to see he was being engorged by what appeared to be an enormous spider, its hairy striped body glistening, its long white legs only just visible as they disappeared into the steam-clouded atmosphere of the shower recess.

Thus began Jimmy's halcyon days in the care of Frau Kraus, who made no other demands on his body than the pleasure she obtained from performing fellatio. This always occurred in the shower recess, where her hands created movements that became agonisingly sensual. Frau Kraus was the grand mistress of touch, and her oral seduction became a performance with its own developed rituals involving elaborate sequences of soaping that brought Jimmy slowly to the point when she would take him in her mouth, the gobbling spider becoming the gift of pleasure she generously brought him as she found someone she was permitted to love at last.

Jimmy took up residence in the room the twins had shared even as adults and wore freshly laundered clothes each day, selected from the combined wardrobes of the dead Otto and the twins away fighting the Japs in the Pacific. He ate at the dining-room table, freshly showered and changed, his feet encased in a pair of red leather slippers that had belonged to Otto and now had the heel uppers cut out and neatly stitched so as to accommodate his larger foot. He would enter the dining room ravenously hungry to find a stein of foaming lager, which he'd grown to enjoy, placed to the side of a steaming plate piled high with a delicious dinner.

Frau Kraus and Jimmy formed a good working partnership and the farm began to prosper under their combined care. At night, seated happily at the dinner table, she would discuss the day's work with him and her English improved out of sight, although her Bavarian accent spiked with Jimmy's peculiar vernacular required an accustomed ear. To her great delight he never failed to admire the pretty embroidery contained in each of the ceremonial pinafores she carefully selected to present her strudel.

He even rose and kissed her tenderly on the cheek when one evening she wore the pinny with the embroidered words, ‘Today is my birthday'. It was the first time Jimmy had kissed a female person, even in such a circumspect way. It was also the first time since the twins were born that Frau Kraus had received a kiss from an adult male. In that instance it had been Otto, who, overcome with the news of twin boys, had planted a wet, hairy kiss on her cheek. For she no longer regarded Jimmy as a child. He did a man's work and stood nearly six feet, with more than sufficient tackle between his legs to qualify him as an adult male.

For Jimmy's fourteenth birthday she presented him with a Timex watch complete with a gold band and with his name inscribed on the back – the same watch he bartered with the North Korean guard for the two planks that were to form my splints. Only, of course, that's not what he'd told me at the time, claiming he'd bought it from a pawnbroker and that it meant little or nothing to him, which was quite untrue. It was the first gift he had ever received, and he must have greatly treasured it.

There was only one small ritual between the two of them that left him somewhat bemused. At the commencement of every evening meal as she entered the dining room from the kitchen Frau Kraus required him to lift his stein and say, ‘
Danke, meine saubere Frau.
' When Jimmy eventually learned the meaning of the phrase he laughingly pointed out that she was not his wife.

‘It a salute – you have to say it, uzzerwise yo' beer it gonna turn sour, man,' she replied, laughing.

‘Brother Fish, I ain't to know it dat time, but mah beer it gonna turn sour soon 'nough and dis nigger he 'bout to fall upon hard, hard times,' Jimmy said to me in the prison camp on the day he concluded the story of Frau Kraus and the gobbling spider.

CHAPTER NINE

The Fish Man

As I recall, I left off to talk about the early stages of Jimmy's life at the point when he swapped the Timex watch Frau Kraus had given him for two planks to be used as a splint for my leg, torn from the stockade fence at the entrance of the cave. Shortly after the gruel of rice and millet arrived, Jimmy took his leave. ‘I gotta do da busi-ness, Brother Jacko,' he said. ‘Ogoya busi-ness.'

With my broken leg now in a splint, I tried all morning to get to my feet, and finally managed to do so by around noon. While not yet game to attempt to hobble a few steps around the crowded cave, it felt glorious to be vertical again. Viewing the world from a horizontal position, as I had done for two weeks, somehow made everything seem hopeless – now I felt the beginnings of hope returning.

As soon as I stood, the shouts began. ‘Give us “In the Mood”, buddy.' I had no idea how they'd picked me out from the crowd – after all, on the previous occasion I'd played lying on my back and I'm not exactly a big bloke. But they knew who I was and wanted more of the same, though I can't say I was in much of a performance mood. The pain in my broken leg was pretty bad, and my jaw was still swollen with several teeth cracked or broken from the blow I had taken on the two separate occasions I'd copped the end of a nog rifle butt. Still and all, I'd certainly been in worse shape in the past few days and there were others here a lot worse off than me. I took out the harmonica and played the Glenn Miller classic, and followed this with ‘Harbor Lights' . . .

I saw the harbor lights,
They only told me we were parting . . .

All these years later I forget the lyrics . . . something, something, something . . . oh yes . . .

. . . I long to hold you near and kiss you just once more,
But you were on the ship and I was on the shore.

I continued with ‘We'll Meet Again', ‘I'm in the Mood for Love', ‘Stardust' and, for the southerners, ‘Stars Fell on Alabama'. Then, because Jimmy wasn't there to roll his eyes, I concluded with his all-time big hate singer, Nat King Cole, and his saccharine-sweet melody, ‘Too Young' . . .

They try to tell us we're too young,
Too young to really be in love.

In my mind I could hear Jimmy raving,
‘Dat not a voice for a black guy, man! Dat a cockamamie white-man voice, dat a voice to shame a black man! Dat a faggot voice. Jesus done punish him special.
' Nevertheless it went down a treat, and throughout the various numbers there had been several dozen voices joining in, supplying the lyrics.

But after about twenty minutes I had to stop. I was completely buggered, with the blood running from the corners of my mouth. The effect of the harmonica on the prisoners was the same as the previous time I'd played, with some openly weeping. It should be remembered these were just kids, some of them not yet twenty, and the tunes that brought with them memories of a happier time and place had been too much for them. But, all in all, the general mood in the cave seemed to have lifted a good deal and there was quite a lot of clapping and whistling. ‘What's your name?' someone shouted. Then another added, ‘Where you from?'

‘Jacko McKenzie, Queen Island,' I said, not thinking.

‘Queen Island?' someone close by said. ‘What state is that in?'

‘No, no, I'm Australian,' I corrected. I was wearing my Yank parka, which approached my knees, and the boots Jimmy had saved for me, and they must have taken me for a Yank.

Just then Jimmy arrived back. He must have been listening somewhere near the front of the cave and heard the questions, though he didn't mention the Nat King Cole number at the end of the bracket. He came limping along, upright this time, walking with the aid of two sticks, using them to balance as he swung his broken leg forward. ‘Listen up!' he said in his big voice. ‘Dis Brother Jacko from Down-under – dat da other side da fuckin' world, man! It named Or-stralia. 'Case you cats don't hear o' dat place, it like da Wild West, only it bigger den Texas, almost bigger den da whole United States o' America, man! It truly awesome! Yoh drive three, four days yoh don't see nothin', just dem kangaroos and dem wild men Aborigines, dey's chasin' yoh wid der deadly didgeridoo, dey catch yoh dey point da bone, dey ain't touched yoh and yo' a dead man.'

In the process of giving Jimmy some of the facts about Australia I'd talked about the outback and the size of Australia. He'd interrupted me and asked if it was bigger than Texas and I'd replied, in land mass, it's almost bigger than America, but with a predominance of desert. I told him about the Aborigines and the fact that they could kill a man by pointing the bone, and somewhere I must also have mentioned that they played the digeridoo. Now I was hearing his interpretation, although the Wild West analogy was entirely of his own invention.