by David Brooks
The war came. Edith joined the Women’s Army Corps. Joe Doyle was arrested for race fixing and had to close up the business. Sim was left suddenly high and dry, since the army would not have her because of her stooped back. And Joan stepped in, insisting that she come to live with her and learn dressmaking. Fashion, she said, would never go out of fashion, war or not.
They were together for nine years. The older and the younger. The duckling and the swan. Sister and sister. Lovers. Joan took hold of Sim and made her over. That was the way she described it. To get rid of the person Sim had been running from, and introduce her to the runner. She made her a pinstripe suit and bought her a wide-brimmed, pinch-crowned, white panama hat and an ebony cane with a silver handle and tip. She bought her a long, matching cigarette holder, and took her at last to The Club, and watched, visit by visit, while the strange magic happened and the Other Person emerged, confident and dashing, ironic, competent, sought after, with a new way of walking and talking, carrying her bent back like a mystery only the luckiest, only Joan, could ever know, so perfectly was the cloth chosen and tailored, so well did it sit. And at last the Other Person came to stay, lost her Otherness, did not disappear when the suit was taken off. There were other clubs, parties, celebrations, a world within a world. When the war finished, and Edith came back to Sydney from the north with Stephen Fletcher, her shining soldier, there was even, although they kept it very much to themselves, a wedding within a wedding.
It was a wave, and they were on the crest of it. Sim had become a Darlinghurst character, on Friday nights almost a celebrity, and Joan along with her, and with them the business rose also. By the time the war ended they had more work than they could do together, and with the resurgence, the more easy spending, business continued to improve. They employed first one person, and then another, and soon found themselves too crowded in the Crown Street house to conduct business and home-life together. With the money that had somehow mounted slowly behind them, despite their freedom with it, they decided to open a shop elsewhere.
After a month’s searching, Joan settled upon a place in Elizabeth Bay, on a side street amongst some of the same grand hotels that Sim had once washed the sheets and towels for. That is how the accident happened. On the day that the lease was signed, in her excitement to tell Sim, Joan ran for a bus in Macleay Street, in the rain, and slipped as it moved off. She was caught by the rear wheels, then hit by the car behind it, her pelvis crushed and her organs so damaged that she never recovered. She was in and out of hospital for a year. Hope came and went, struggled back, went again. Sim nursed her at home and sat with her as long as possible every day she was in hospital. Since one person alone could not handle the business, let alone supervise it from beside a sickbed, the money they had saved leached away. The last of it was spent on the funeral. On the morning Joan died – in the hours afterward – Sim felt herself drowning in a cold winter sunlight so bleak and absurdly bright it drained the world of colour, blurred the edges of everything, took all of her strength and balance from her.
Edith and Stephen took her home and kept her there, to tide her through, but she kept wandering back to Crown Street, where they would find her sitting in the dark house, staring at nothing, almost impossible to rouse. A month passed, and then half of the next. Although they managed, at last, to move her few things into their own back room and close up Joan’s house, for fear the place itself was damaging Sim, they could do nothing to relieve the emptiness that seemed to have inhabited her. She had no desire to do anything, see anyone, on some mornings not even to rise from her bed. In desperation Edith wrote to Sister Processus, and two days later received a reply asking her to bring Sim to her.
It was the right thing to do. Sim stiffened at the very thought of it, and swore that she would not go, but when the time came, protesting still, went nonetheless. Sister Processus had been waiting for them, and came herself to the door. She held out her arms when she saw Sim, and Sim fell into them. The old nun, bent herself now, and scarcely taller than the woman she held, nodded to Edith over Sim’s shoulder, gently signalling her to go, and then, when the weeping had quietened, took Sim out to the garden. They sat there a long time in silence, as if each were drawing a kind of strength from the sunlight, then Sim told her everything – found, in the telling, things she had not known were in her to say – and when she had finished, and the afternoon was well advanced, and they had sat again a short while in silence, turned to look at her listener, and was awed, suddenly, to find that they were not nun and child, but two women, looking each other in the face.
‘Listen,’ the nun said quietly, as if what she were about to say had been long in the making, ‘I have something to tell you.
‘Your mother has been to see us. Not for the first time. She has come three times in all, that I know of, and at other times she has written letters. This has been happening over a long while now. The first time was almost fifteen years ago, just after you first left us. We told her then that we couldn’t help her and that she shouldn’t come back, but it seems there have been times when she couldn’t help herself, even though she knew it was impossible. Each time she has wanted to know where you were, and each time we have had to refuse her, just as I have had to refuse you any knowledge of her. It’s now a government regulation. There’s nothing we can do about it.
‘She came again only weeks ago, in great distress. I felt then that I might at last let her know, but thought better of it. Now I think I was wrong. Now, God forgive me, for I am not supposed to do this, I think you might need each other, and I am going to give you her address.’
At this point in her story Sim stopped and sat a long while without speaking, as if rehearsing the next events before putting words to them, or perhaps lost in something there weren’t words for. I could see how exhausted she was – she could barely hold her head up – and waited only for an appropriate moment to suggest she go to bed. I could see, too, how one death had dragged up another, again, and why she had had to tell me what she had. Although I knew by this time that there was a great deal more she might have told me, I thought at the same time that there would be occasions enough, and expected little more that night. I was wrong, of course. On the subjects that mattered most to me, I was only ever to hear her say one thing more, and that was just a few seconds in coming.
‘That’s how I ended up at Hardigan’s,’ she said at last, and then, nodding toward the empty sleep-out where, only two hours before, the body of Val Darling had lain, ‘That’s how I found her. My mother. My mother and my sister in one.’
Val Darling, Mrs Valerie Darling, my grandmother on my mother’s side. Val Darling, who was Val Hardigan, who was Valerie Wu, who was Val Tryde before that. Whether because Joe was her father, which he was, or her first husband, which in a sad sense he was also, hardly matters now. And Val Darling couldn’t tell me the truth outright – no wonder she burned all her documents – but found her own circuitous way, was her own document, leaving the key to last, hoping that Sim, her first daughter, my mother’s abandoned, stoop-backed half-sister might show it to me – Sim who had grown up in the convent; Sim of Café Society, who tracked her mother down at The White Hart and lived with her fifty years more. Sim who closed Mrs Darling’s eyes.
‘I wanted you to see something,’ she had said. She had met me, in the shaft of light from the open door, and said this straight away. No formalities, no welcome, as if before anything else this one thing had to be done. She led me down the dark hall, past the musty front room with the pianola and the ancient bibles, past the smells of old cooking, to the sleep-out at the back where the old lady had been more comfortable in the hot weather. And where she was now, lying in the cot bed opposite the back door that, from where she lay, would have been neatly framing the lemon tree.
At first I thought I had been taken there to see the old woman herself, how peaceful she was, lying under the sheet and the single blanket, how strangely beautiful her face in the reflected light, with so many of the yea
rs seeming to have fallen so suddenly from it. And then I thought, quite logically, that it was the moonstone locket that Sim then took from the drawer in the bedside table – ‘your great-great-grandmother’s,’ she told me, though I didn’t at that point understand what on earth she was talking about: ‘One of the things she’ – and here she gestured toward Mrs Darling with a slight tilt of her head – ‘was always going to give you but never seemed able to. The things she’d said were your mother’s.’ The moonstone locket, and a battered copy of Crime and Punishment, falling from its faded blue binding. But it was so much more. Quickly, before I could stop her, as, instinctively, I think anyone might have tried to do, she pulled the bedclothes back to expose, as I thought, the old woman’s nakedness – a bizarre thing to do, and cruel, and I did not want to see. And I grimaced, in readiness, for the shock of it. But it was not that. Mrs Darling was naked, yes, if that’s what one had been looking at. But it was not. From her right elbow to her left, from her collarbone to the middle of her thigh, on her front and, as Sim, rolling her gently, was careful to show me (she was so light now), her back also; on her breasts, her belly, and even in the most intimate of places, she was covered in story. Not completely – there were spaces like the clouds in a Chinese floating-world screen, separating one part of the scene from another – but extensively, employing the features of the body as contours of a secret landscape. And not with the sad wateriness of old tattoos, but as if some master of the art had so designed it that the aging of the skin and the shrinkage of the flesh would only refine and clarify the lines, sharpen their focus, strengthen their resemblance to porcelain. Vines, ferns, forest animals, a cave, a stream, a lyre-bird’s nest, an aboriginal boy holding a book; a lighthouse at the heart of it, burning on a distant cape; a beach with a man sleeping by rocks near the headland; a young girl, in the slight hollow below the belly, just above the thin, still reddish hair of the pubis, lying with an older, similarly tattooed man under the giant trees; and elsewhere, at the hip’s edge, as if it were the edge of a cliff, the same young girl, running.
Postscript
The Southern Cross
One scene remains, out of time and sequence. Or perhaps it would be better to say that of all the numerous scenes that remain there is one that insists too strongly to be denied. Not an answer, not a resolution, merely a scene. It is old Martin Freeman, though in this scene he is not old at all, barely forty. He is with his son, in the corner of a large field of long, dry grass – it is like an ocean in the moonlight – beside a grove of coolibah and a dark, derelict house, almost a ruin. They have pitched a tent, set a fire, and are moving about the small campsite, unpacking things, beginning to prepare a meal. The fire, just lit but already blazing brightly, is casting their shadows up into the branches and far out over the cleared land. Nearby are an open cart and, hitched under the trees, two horses, necks bent in the growing dark, pulling at the spinifex. It is late January 1914. The land about them once belonged to Martin’s father, but was sold almost twenty years before. Now the property is up for sale again and Martin has been thinking of buying it back. They have been travelling almost a week now, he and Daniel, by train, truck, hired cart, progressively westward from the mountains, out over the great plain that extends, so Martin says, right to the heart of the continent. They can only spend a day or two here. The boy is due back at boarding school in ten days’ time. If the truth be known – and Martin has already thought this to himself – he has brought his son out here as much to have time with him as to see a place he would be much better off leaving to people who could manage it properly. But they have talked, that is the point, awkwardly at first, but more and more easily the closer they have come to Jerilgong, about the boy’s mother, about how Martin met her, about her dying, about Martin’s own childhood, his own father and mother, boarding school, work, beer, swimming, girls, about the things they had seen in the hotel, about things they perhaps should not have seen: if not what life is about – for who knows what that is? – then what it can sometimes seem to be about.
But in truth that scene is only preparatory. The real scene – the scene which remains, which is insisting so strongly upon its inclusion – takes place an hour or two later. Martin, tired from the day’s travel, has gone into the tent and is lying on his unrolled bed, thinking. Daniel, still wide awake, has continued to sit by the fire, staring into its depths until the city that he saw there has become only a few last embers, winking at him, and is now gazing in wonder at the vast sky with its thousands of stars. He is pleased with himself. For the first time, just now, unaided, he has picked out the Southern Cross, Aldebaran, Canopus, and the great belt of Orion, that huge man.
Acknowledgments
Although some of the names in this work are the names of people I know or have known, where they are the names of characters of any significance, and where it was possible to do so, I have sought the permission of their bearers and hereby thank them, most sincerely, for their kindness in granting the same. In all other respects this is a work of pure fiction: as far as I am aware, no correspondence exists between living persons and events and characters or events within its pages. The South Coast Line has never extended as far as Eden, and I’m sure no lighthouse has ever been built in quite the way the Cape William lighthouse was.
I wish to thank Tim Curnow for his long faith in this work, and a hundred suggestions he has made as it has ripened. I wish to thank, too, Alan and Eva Gold, Lyn Hard, Helen Sharwood, Steve and Karen Dahl-Darling, Emiliano, Maria and Ana Pribac, Rosemary Brissenden, and numerous others who at different times have read portions or early drafts of the manuscript, or have offered me accommodation while I composed them.
This book has been much delayed and its composition is a saga in its own right. Over the years so many have helped me with my questions that I dare not now attempt to list them for fear that I will leave some of them out, or get names and details wrong. Two debts, however, are so strong I must register them: to the late Maria Trefely-Deutch for her stories of Café Society, and to Mark Sherriff, once caretaker of the Point Perpendicular lighthouse, for a remarkable afternoon there, and the story of the Cape St. George Light.
In its last stages it has been much supported by Teja Pribac, and much polished through the timely editing of Judith Lukin-Amundsen.
First published 2007 by University of Queensland Press
PO Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
www.uqp.com.au
© David Brooks
This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any foram or by any means without prior written permission. Enquiries should be made to the publisher.
Typeset by Post Pre-Press Group, Brisbane
This project has been assisted by the Commonwealth Government through the Australia Council, its arts funding and advisory body.
Cataloguing in Publication Data
National Library of Australia
Brooks, David
The Fern Tattoo
I. Title.
A823.3
ISBN 978 0 7022 3626 6 (pbk)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5760 5 (pdf)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5761 2 (epub)
ISBN 978 0 7022 5762 9 (kindle)
