Brother Fish by Bryce Courtenay

caroused, fallen about, thrown up into the sawdust and generally misbehaved until closing time. This process is clearly designed to employ the liberal use of a garden hose, as the tap to which it is attached can be seen to the left of the doorway with the brass handle temporarily removed in case some inebriant attempts to play silly buggers. The efficiency of the cleaning process is further aided by the absence of tables, chairs or bar stools. The Gallipoli Bar is standing room only, based on the premise that you stand up until you fall down whereupon you are dragged out onto the wharf by your mates. At closing time, the publican sweeps up the broken glass and hoses the human detritus out of the front door and down the guttering grille acting as a welcome mat, and into the harbour below.
    But there is something about the Gallipoli Bar and the Anzac Hotel that could never have been anticipated by its misanthropic designer, a single touch of spontaneous humanity that changes everything.
    Perhaps I may digress for a moment.
    It has been my observation that men feel compelled to leave their mark wherever they go. By this I don’t mean castles and ramparts, ruined buildings and ancient walls. Instead, I mean the small marks that individuals make to ensure that their passing has been noted. It may be a heart with the initials of a girlfriend carved into the smooth green bark of a gum tree, or a name scratched in the dark onto the wall of a solitary-confinement cell adding another mute presence and obdurate defiance to the hundreds of names and initials of those who had gone through the same humiliation. Today, young blokes leave their mark like dogs pissing on a post, their spray-can graffiti vandalising the outside of carriages of commuter trains or corrupting a vacant wall on a city building by turning it into a giant doodling pad containing a series of multicoloured angular and arcane names. Lacking even this talent to doodle with spray paint, some simply destroy an anonymous surface with a hurriedly swished obscenity in red or black. Names or announcements, ‘Jack loves Jenny’, are written under bridges or on the sides of overpasses, even chipped into the stone of great pyramids and temples, or they deface the walls containing cave paintings, themselves ancient graffiti that overpaint the marks made by the passing of a hundred generations.
    And now here, in these anonymous tiled and sterile drinking premises, humans have once again wrested the initiative from the cynical brewer who, thinking his working-class patrons deserved no better, caused the Anzac Hotel to be designed to be little more than a pig swill. As a rite of passage, crudely carved along the full length of the dark polished surface of the wooden bar are the initials of every local lad and returning veteran who left the Launceston dockyards to fight a war. When a young bloke failed to return or a veteran passes on, a highly polished brass nail is hammered into the surface next to his initials, so that today the bar fair twinkles, a night sky of the dead. At the end of the bar stands a small box on the facing side of which is written in gold lettering, ‘Lest We Forget’. Each morning and evening a fresh beer with a good, clean head is stood upon the box to remember fallen comrades who once stood, fresh-faced with elbows touching, at the Gallipoli Bar.
    Ten years ago the story of our annual appointment in the Anzac Hotel on the same day each year became the subject of a newspaper article in the Launceston Examiner . The following year the proprietor approached us.
    â€˜You guys are veterans from the Korean War, aren’t you?’ We both nodded. ‘Yeah, righto, we put it to the blokes, the regulars like . . . and they reckon after twenty-four years you’re entitled.’
    â€˜Entitled?’ Jimmy asked with mock surprise. ‘Don’t tell me we’re getting a drink on the house!’
    The barman gave him a sort of