Bryce Courtenay by Brother Fish

Author:Brother Fish [Fish, Brother]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2011-01-30T22:00:00+00:00

was taking

422 BRYCE COURTENAY

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 slowermoving 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

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at all. Then he commended Murtle, the supposed turtle, to the grave: `Dust to dust, ashes to ashes and turtles to water.'

With the dinghy wrecked, Alf had the opportunity to quit with honour and take back his old job on one of the bigger boats. It took him another three months to pay the last instalment to the bank, which charged him interest because he was six weeks late with the final three payments.

Of course things were a bit different now that Jimmy and I were contemplating going into the cray business. All the boats had transceivers, which were usually army-disposal radios from World War II and weren't all that crash hot, although a damn sight better than nothing at all.

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