The Fern Tattoo

by David Brooks

  Although David Brooks was born in Canberra, spent his earliest childhood in Greece and Yugoslavia, and was subsequently educated in Australia, the United States and Canada, a significant portion of his life has been spent on the south coast of New South Wales, where much of The Fern Tattoo is set. His poetry and fiction have been translated into several languages. He currently teaches Australian Literature at the University of Sydney.

  Other Books by David Brooks

  Poetry

  The Cold Front, 1983

  Walking to Point Clear, 2005

  Urban Elegies, 2007

  Novel

  The House of Balthus, 1995

  Short Fiction

  The Book of Sei, 1985

  Sheep and the Diva, 1990

  Black Sea, 1997

  Essays

  The Necessary Jungle, 1990

  DeScription: A Balthus Notebook, 2000

  Editor

  Poetry and Gender (with Brenda Walker), 1989

  A.D. Hope: Selected Poems, 1992

  Suddenly Evening: Selected Poems of R.F. Brissenden, 1993

  A.D. Hope: Selected Poetry and Prose, 2000

  The Double Looking Glass: New and Classic Essays on the Poetry of A.D. Hope, 2000

  Contents

  Cover

  Author bio

  Other Books by David Brooks

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Epigraph

  Proem

  Part 1

  1 – The Lighthouse (1887–1896)

  2 – Diamond Beach (1985–1997)

  3 – ‘She Told Stories…’ (1985–1997)

  4 – Lies (2000)

  Part 2

  5 – Hoburn (1915)

  6 – Fryer (1915–1918)

  7 – Library (1918–)

  8 – Valerie’s First (1932)

  Part 3

  9 – The Mountains and the Plain (1895–1902)

  10 – Shadows (1902–1905)

  11 – Mothers and Daughters (1914–1919)

  12 – The Pit and the Moonlight (2000 [1919])

  Part 4

  13 – The Other Side of the World (1924–1927)

  14 – Lilian Grey (1928)

  15 – Ghosts (1929–1957)

  16 – The Garden (1951–1973)

  Part 5

  17 – Shoals (1971–1973)

  18 – The Valley (1953)

  Part 6

  19 – The White Heart (2000 [1972–1974])

  20 – Café Society (1915–1997)

  Postscript – The Southern Cross

  Acknowledgements

  Imprint Page

  To my daughter Jessica

  Yes, man is broad, too broad indeed. I’d have him narrower.

  Dmitri Fyodorovitch Karamazov: The Brothers Karamazov,

  Fyodor Dostoevsky

  proem

  Adam and Eve

  (1914, 1924)

  There should be a frontispiece, ‘Noon in the Australian Forest’, though not the noon of the Australian poets, not the noon of Charles Harpur or Henry Kendall. In the scene I envision, the scene nobody has told me about, the scene I have had to dig very deeply to conjure from the unspoken memories of others, a woman is watching something that only she can see. A young woman, somewhere around her mid-twenties. She is on her way back from speaking with Mrs Goodleigh at the Crossroads and, her mind reeling from all that she has just heard, has asked the young man from the Three Ways Hotel, who is driving her, to stop for a while and wait. She has got down from the buggy and walked a short distance away, and is now standing still and silently, in the wider silence that is never quite silence. As far as the young man can tell as he fingers the tobacco-pouch in his pocket, wondering if he has time for a cigarette, she is staring out at nothing – just the giant, dusty trees by the roadside, the tangled undergrowth motionless in the midday shadow. But in her mind’s eye it is different. In her mind’s eye, as they move among the tall trees and low, thick undergrowth, now masked by leaves, trunks, branches, leaf-shadow, lit here and there by weak rays of the sun that higher up blazes onto the forest canopy, the two figures she knows so much about – the two figures she has seen here so often, in her mind’s eye, far away from this place – are suddenly reminiscent – this is something she has only learnt since – of Adam and Eve, from one of the great triptychs by Albrecht Dürer or Lucas Cranach the Elder. Except that the Eve in her mind’s eye is so much younger than her dusky Adam. Except that, unlike those biblical counterparts, these two are partly clothed, as if what has overtaken them has been urgent, unexpected by each. Except that Adam, the first one, never wore tattoos.

  Part 1

  1

  The Lighthouse

  (1887–1896)

  In almost the beginning there was the lighthouse – the lighthouse, and the houses beside it. As if all along, without knowing it, they had been waiting for the world to commence and at last it had. One day on the point there were only the scrub and the rock and the almost constant wind, and sometimes – once, but she imagined them other times – a small group of half-naked aborigines, one of them with a red cloth around his neck, and a woman with a sky-blue skirt, looking silently out over the sea far below, as if they were waiting for something to appear, or fearing that it would; and the next day there were bullock-drays from Paradise labouring slowly up the slope behind the Settlement, broadening the rough track as they went, loaded with wood and tools and bags of cement, with the bearded, bespectacled man Mr Talbot, and the workmen, and all that was needed to set up camp.

  She had been watching a large, blue-black bird under the spiky bush that had just, in the last few days, burst open at the centre with its tumble of huge red seeds, hard and shiny as sea pebbles. But the bird was not interested in red things, only blue, and had been collecting them all morning to arrange about the floor of the elaborate nest it had made between bushes in the flat space near where the gully gave out. Blue flower petals, pieces of blue glass from a broken medicine bottle, a bit of blue cloth, a blue bead that must have been washed up by the tide, all as if the bird wanted to make for its mate, on the forest floor, an imitation of the sky above, that it could otherwise only see bits of through the high canopy of the trees. She knew it was for its mate because a speckled green bird of almost exactly the same size showed great interest, but only when the other was not around, or was pretending not to be. And anyway, you can’t help but know these things, living amongst the bush animals. She had even, when they were not drinking or fighting, seen her father and Mary, when they didn’t know, and that was alright.

  She had made a scavenger-hunt for the bird out of bits of an old violet-blue envelope she had found under the bedroom cupboard, so covered with dust and grime it was clear that nobody wanted it. But that was days ago and so far the bird had only found three pieces, and already the green one had come when it wasn’t looking and inspected the work and, one time when the blue-black bird was far off on the ridge somewhere, stood in the middle of the nest amidst the pieces of blue and sung a sudden, loud, bright song, as if it was bursting with approval. One day she would learn that these were called bower birds, and the sudden new name for something so familiar would momentarily astonish her, but she did not know this now. There were so many things that she did not yet know. Perhaps her father knew, and might have told her if she had asked, not that he was a man who taught, but if you do not know that there are names then it is unlikely that you will know to ask what those names are. And, of course, not knowing the name for something need not mean that you do not know that thing very well indeed.

  She was, in any case, watching it fussing with a piece of shell that was not very blue at all – wondering, along with the bird, whether the blue would do – when she caught the f
irst faint edge of the shouting, not from the lagoon, where shouting most often came from, but from somewhere way off in the bush on the other side of her, a different kind of shouting altogether. And as she knelt there on all fours listening, every hair on her scalp bristling at its root and her heart thumping blindly in her chest, the shouting got louder, began to intermingle with sounds of wood and metal and leather straining, until it was not very far away at all and she had worked out where it would be and there was just enough time to find Warden and take him there with her because it was safer with two and anyway, since her father was up in the valley, he might never believe her if she saw it alone, for the men were now making chiacking sounds and shouting to one another and swearing as her father did when they were pulling a log and it was evident that something important was going on. And the blue-black bird had by now fled, leaving only the traces of blue to show that it had ever been.

  So it was that Alice and her four-year-old brother first saw the team of bullocks and the laden dray, the frothing tongues of the huge animals lolling and their eyes bulging as they strained to drag their small mountain of cargo up the rise. Those names, at least – bullocks, dray – their father did tell them when he returned, although he seemed far from pleased to hear of their coming, and went off almost immediately to the Jebbs’ shack to tell the brothers about it, leaving Mary as always to get Alice and Warden something to eat and not returning, as almost always, until he could barely stand.

  The following morning, having walked up to the point to see what it was that was going on there, he seemed a little more reconciled. ‘A lighthouse!’ he announced, with a mixture of pleasure and awe, and even offered to take them all there, off his own bat, Mary too, at some indefinite time in the future, to show them the workings.

  Alice did not wait. The next day, the second after they had first appeared, the bullocks and the empty dray came back down the track they had just widened, with only the one man driving this time, and less than a week later appeared again, fully re-laden, labouring up the same way. This time there were other men with them, leading horses. It was one of these, a young man, clean-shaven, with yellow hair and his trousers tucked into muddy, high black boots, who saw her where she was half-hiding with Warden, and dismounted and called out to them to come and walk alongside. He called her Ginger and thought she was a boy at first, until she told him, and he explained what she already partly knew – that they were building a lighthouse up on the point, high over the sea, where the light could tell sailors at night where they were (‘Near the circle of stones?’ ‘Yes, almost on top of it, since that is the highest point’). The cement that was loaded on the dray, he said, was to make big concrete blocks, since there was no quarry close by, and cut stone would be too hard to carry. Would they like to see them making the blocks? he asked, and – just as they were turning away, since Warden was not keeping up and was already complaining and wanting to go back – why didn’t she come up to the point sometime soon, to see what was happening?

  Three days later – her father not remembering and having now gone back up the valley to the timbercutting, and Warden having apparently forgotten, so she could tell him that she was going to look for oysters on the lagoon without fear that he would want to follow – she started out early and took herself to the point, not by the bullock track but by the cliff path, only now and again stopping to drop stones or watch the waves crashing on the rocks way below, or the shifting patterns the breeze made on the deep blue water, or the tiny, rocking dots of the fishing boats from the Settlement or Paradise Bay far out, half-way between one head and the other.

  When she got up to where the men were working she stayed back at the edge of the scrub to watch, taking care to be only partly invisible, in the hope that the young man who had talked to them earlier would turn and see her and be friendly again. But in the end, although no one had shown any signs of seeing, it was the older man with the beard and spectacles who came over, saying in a kind and gentle voice from a fair way away so that she didn’t think to run off, ‘Hello, Missy. Don’t be afraid. Have you come to see us working? No point trying to hide with hair as bright as that. Why don’t you come closer, so you can see better? We’ll be having some tea in a little while. Perhaps you would like to join us. There’s damper, too, and jam.’

  In a cleared space between the tents on the other side of the workings a smokeless fire was burning in a circle of stones, its flames almost invisible in the mid-morning sun. Even as the bespectacled man spoke to her one of the others was hanging a quart pot on an iron frame and another man had stopped and was stuffing a pipe as if he had decided that work was over for the time. Before he took her over to join them, however, the bespectacled man showed her the wooden boxes that they poured the concrete into, and how the frames could be undone after the blocks had set, to be used again and again. Each of the blocks took all of the four men there to lift it, he said, but already they had made a good many – twenty a day, he said – and dug, as deeply they could in the place they had chosen, the foundations of a circular wall with what looked like the shape of a two-roomed house projecting from the side of it.

  ‘Is that where the lighthouse man will live?’

  ‘The keeper? No, Missy. I hope not.’ The man smiled: ‘I am going to be the lighthouse keeper, if all goes well, and I have a family of four to think about, one of them a young woman of almost exactly your age, as I guess it. And I will need an assistant keeper, and he will need a house of his own too. No. These will be storerooms for the kerosene and such like. There will be a house over there for my family and me’ – he pointed to a broad clear space a little below them on the bay-side of the point, out of the wind – ‘and a smaller house beside it.’

  ‘You will be the lighthouse keeper?’

  ‘Yes, my little lady. While it seems an unusual procedure even for these colonies, it appears as if I am to be the builder as well as the keeper of this place. … Mr John Talbot,’ he said, bowing slightly in friendly mock-formality. ‘And what is your name, if I may be so bold?’

  ‘Alice’, she said, and then, nervously, as if he might not want to hear the rest, ‘Alice Hawk.’

  ‘Alice’, he said, as if the name pleased him somehow. ‘Alice. Well. And my own daughter’s name is Julia. Please, come have some tea.’

  So it began. But there are many things in a child’s life, even in the life of a motherless girl left most of the time alone with her younger brother and her father’s part-aboriginal drinking-mate mistress in an isolated settlement on the mid-south coast of New South Wales. It had been left up to that child to fill her life with being where she was, and she had done well enough. Although she now and again wondered about the lighthouse over the weeks that followed, it was over a month until, climbing a high tree near the lagoon, she looked up to see a low white tower where there had been nothing before but the wide circle of stones, and realised that it was happening quickly, and went up to see.

  The bespectacled man was not there but the young man was, and recognised her, and came over to the rock she was sitting on. He told her that the building of the lighthouse was going well, but that they now had to turn their attention to the house where the keeper and his family would live – he pointed to where some low walls were already beginning – and that Mr Talbot had gone back to Sydney to report on progress and see his family and pick up some special tools and parts for the circular staircase that would go up inside the lighthouse. Then, he said, they could put up the platform, then put up the light itself.

  Again several weeks went by, and again, although the drays were frequent enough, the lighthouse came and went in the child’s consciousness. The young man himself went back to Sydney with another of the workmen, and they were replaced by two others. The parts for the tower staircase arrived, but Mr Talbot stayed away. The walls of the house rose and a wooden frame for the roof was made. There were several comings and goings on the track, but they were all either the workmen going to or returning from Paradise, wher
e there were shops and a pub, or people coming by land directly to the Settlement. Until one day – she had heard nothing herself – Warden came running to tell her that the bullocks were coming again, and that the man with the spectacles was with them.

  It was true, Mr Talbot was there, and although he was busy and distracted, since it had been raining most of the week and the track was in some places deep with mud, he did look up for a moment and smile a broad smile at her, and told her, expressly, that she must come again very soon, that he had something special to show her.

  She was, of course, there the next day, and Warden with her, for he had heard the same words and was adamant they were meant for him, and would not be shaken. Mr Talbot saw them at once, and motioned them over to him. He was doing an inspection of sorts and they followed him as he moved about the half-completed house, approving many details, concerned about others, turning now and again to point something out to the children, even once to ask them how they liked one of the rooms, which he was thinking might be his own children’s room, almost as if they were his surrogate family.

  The inspection finished, he walked them over to a new tent, just beside his own, where he said the surprise was, explaining to them as he went that what he was about to show them would not normally have been here at this stage – he’d hoped the lighthouse would be much more advanced before it arrived, but the rain had thrown the schedule out a little, and a shortage of men. As the boxes had already come from England, however, he thought it might save a later delay if he were to bring them down from Sydney with him. Raising the flap of the tent, he ushered them inside and, lifting the lid from one of the boxes, scooping away the padding of wood-shavings, stooping under the weight and awkwardness of the content as he took it out and placed it – gleaming in the light from the tent-flap, shimmering with uncountable rainbows – on another of the boxes, he showed them the jewel.