The Fern Tattoo

by David Brooks

  There were all kinds of fish around the basin, bream and blackfish, kingfish, mullet, leatherjacket, whiting, rock cod, parrotfish, flathead, and lobster, octopus, shark, sting-ray, mussels, oysters for a change, though you did get tired of seafood, however wide the variety. But unless one of the bullocks themselves had just died, the only meat to be had from the draymen from Paradise had long been salted down, and it was logical to turn to the bush, for the occasional wallaby or kangaroo or fat wonga pigeon. Alice’s father had always done it, with an ancient and temperamental rifle, and when he was away for work with the timbergetters, or too drunk or lazy to provide, it was logical that Mary and Alice should fend for themselves. Mary was a better shot than Alice’s father, and for that very reason – as also, perhaps, out of fear she might turn it on him during one of their rows – he would rarely let her have the gun. But when he was not there what did it matter? He would take it with him sometimes, if there was a point to be made, but as often as not would leave it propped in the corner where it usually stood. So that Mary had taught Alice, Warden being too young, and it being Mary’s own habit to disappear for days at a time while her erstwhile husband was away, it had come down to Alice to provide. From the time she was ten or eleven – the age she had been, so Mrs Talbot had calculated, at the time the Talbots came – she had gone out, periodically, for a small wallaby, a possum, a quoll or prized pigeon, always careful to shoot nothing that she could not drag back by herself, or get Warden to help her with. And would gut and skin and quarter them, the way she had seen Mary or her father do. To cover her traces, before someone else told, she had badgered her father to teach her to shoot. He was astonished, when at last he relented, at how quickly she learned.

  Early morning or late afternoon were the best times for hunting, since most of the animals were nocturnal; you could find wallabies easily in the half-light, nibbling at new grass shoots in open spaces they would rarely stray into in the full light of day. She fell into the habit, when she had had a good morning’s hunting, of taking the surplus to the lighthouse. And the Talbots, after some initial qualms and surprise – the blood, that first time, had been dripping through the hessian, and was all over her legs, and Mrs Talbot had been frightened and upset – fell soon enough into the habit of accepting it. The smell of meat cooking, whether pork chop or wallaby, can be irresistible to an isolated family of meat eaters used to a steady city supply.

  So that it came to be understood, even by the Talbots, who tried to know as little as possible about it, that Alice was a hunter. If this caused some jealousy on the part of Patrick and Joseph in particular, this was allayed by the reminder that it was, after all, Alice’s father’s gun, and that Warden himself had not been taught yet, and that they could in any case learn to shoot too, when it was time, if they still wanted to and Alice was willing.

  But Julia was Alice’s friend, and it could have been expected that she would learn first, surreptitiously or otherwise, particularly once Warden had gone, and Alice’s father had died, and the gun was Alice’s for the taking. Indeed, although they did make some attempt to disguise their project, Mr Talbot had suspected it even before it began and, strangely even to himself, acquiesced as he would never in the city, having long ago accepted that bush ways were different. It was only surprising that they had waited until Alice had come to stay. And when, after two or three unsuccessful expeditions, Julia at last brought back a dark swamp wallaby – hard enough to find at the best of times, let alone shoot, in the thick scrub where you saw them – her pride and excitement, and the relief at having the matter out of the way and an excuse to celebrate rather than condemn, meant that what should perhaps never have been became very quickly an accepted fact.

  It was inevitable, then, that when the fox appeared – when they had become at last convinced that that was what it was – a search should be planned, with Alice and Julia as the hunters. They had not believed it at first, when Convict Taylor told them that he had seen one. Perhaps all his stories of fox hunting when he was a young man had gone at last to his head. But he seemed to have anticipated their suspicions, even to have shared them himself. ‘It may be forty years’, he said, ‘and I may have gone oyster-crazy in the meantime, but I’ve seen the real thing right enough plenty of times before, dead and alive, let alone the evidence of them in the wood, and there’s no doubt of it,’ and he took them to what he had found that morning – a wide scattering of lyrebird feathers in a small clearing at the bottom of a rainforest gully, about a quarter of a mile inland from the creek, with a clear trail of blood into the undergrowth.

  ‘What else is going to have done that?’ he asked, looking at the two girls intently.

  ‘One of the big owls?’ Alice suggested, ‘or a large goanna?’

  ‘No. If it was one of those big owls I would’ve heard it, but there’s been none around for weeks now, and it wouldn’t have left the blood like that. Whatever it was has dragged the bird along the ground. And a goanna wouldn’t’ve left it either, but swallowed her whole, and probably choked, she’d have been so big, providing he was so ungoannery as to take such a bird in the first place. Look at those feathers!’ – paradoxically pointing out one of the large tail plumes of what had obviously been a fair-sized male.

  ‘No. When you consider that I saw him and all, redder than the hair on your own head, and sleek and sharp-nosed, with the springy walk nothing else has.’

  ‘But where could it have come from?’ Julia asked. ‘There aren’t any foxes here.’

  ‘There’s idiots enough have brought them out especially, so they can hunt like back in England. And if they let it out in the bush and don’t catch it, as most of them wouldn’t, and someone loses a male and someone else loses a female, and they find each other, there’s foxes sure enough – probably have been for years, making their way down here from Campbelltown or wherever there’s people stupid and rich enough – eating up lyrebirds and bandicoots and bush rats all the way.’

  The girls remained skeptical. The old convict had some wonderful stories to tell, but it wouldn’t have been the first time one of them had strayed into reality. Walking back that day they decided that, uncommon as they were in the area, a dingo or some native cat had been to blame – or the strange, stiff-backed dog they called a Tiger, that some said had once been in the district. The matter slipped from their minds amidst a prism-cleaning, and the arrival – attended by a new and much younger drayman, named Joe Tryde, with much-tattooed arms and a melodious whistle that Alice at first mistook for some new bird, who couldn’t take his eyes off her and whose shadowy presence troubled her dreams for a week or more – of fresh supplies and a wagon of kerosene. Then came a rumour of Warden in a place called St Mary’s; the wild storms of August and September, and Mr Dominic Hyde, during one of them, slipping on the wrought-iron stairway and breaking his leg. They had set it themselves, the leg, following instructions from a book, and then sat him up before the fire in the main house, to his own secret pleasure, for he now had no means of escaping, and had to allow them to minister to him. But they had also to take his shifts themselves, and so could do very little walking out at all, let alone hunting, had the weather even permitted it.

  It was nearly November, with the spring storms abated, the weather warming rapidly and Dominic Hyde’s leg improved enough for him to clamber slowly up the iron staircase, before either Alice or Julia had time to themselves, let alone to spend together. In celebration they went rock fishing on the other side of the Settlement and, intending to return by the cliff path, stopped on their way back to see the bower birds, only to find the bower collapsed where a small branch had fallen on it, and the fragments of blue glass and shell partly covered by blown leaves. Looking around to see if there were another, newer bower nearby, because they would sometimes move house like that, or some other evidence as to where the birds had gone, Alice found a scant scattering of dark blue-black feathers, and remembered the fox.

  The feathers themselves were not positive proof,
and she still hoped otherwise: birds die all the time in the bush; but with the bigger birds one is far more likely to find their bodies with plumage intact, lying partly eaten by ants and maggots on the forest floor, than to find only their feathers, and in such a scattering, as if there’d been a struggle involved. It was decided they would go hunting, for fresh meat that they badly needed after the late winter’s salt beef and fish and potatoes, and that they would go in the convict’s direction, keeping an eye out for the fox as they went.

  It was early when they rose. Alice could hear the slow, hooked whistle of the whipbird somewhere in the thin bush at the edge of the clearing, and the last of the raucous chorus of the kookaburras in the tall trees on the rise by the sea cliff. She and Julia restarted the fire from the last embers of the night before, and made a large pot of tea which they shared with Mr Talbot when he came from his shift: he would wait until the boys woke, make sure they ate something, tell them where the girls had gone, then go to bed in his darkened back room, to sleep until noon or later.

  As they walked out over the stone shelf toward the hill path the tall masts of a wool clipper heading empty towards Sydney could just be seen on the horizon, outlined by the rising sun. A little closer, perhaps twelve miles away, they could make out the shape of what was probably a whaler making for Boydtown. Almost immediately, where the rockshelf gave way to a broad, grassy space, they encountered a small mob of grey kangaroos grazing on the fresh green shoots, but to kill something so quickly would defeat their other purpose, and they were superstitious, anyway, of hunting so close to home, believing that it would only make the hunting harder next time. They intended instead to get past the Settlement as soon as possible, and to comb the ridge on the west side of the lagoon, perhaps as far as the old convict’s camp if the weather held and they made good time, and then double back a little higher up. In the first of the rising light, overcast and still, it looked as if the morning would be perfect.

  Before the first half hour had gone they had passed the Settlement and were making their way slowly through the scrub on the inland side of the long lagoon. Within the hour they had reached the end of it and struck out in a landward arc toward the convict’s, seeing a swamp wallaby, a wonga pigeon, a wombat returning late to its burrow, a number of smaller birds arguably still worth the taking – for their own clear but unspoken reason not shooting at anything, taking these only as signs that there would be chances enough on the way home, provided they turned back before the morning warmed. Climbing the ridge above and just before the convict’s, they entered steeper, more thickly wooded ground and began to double back. The going was much slower here. Sometimes they would find a path of sorts, made by some animal or another, but as often as not they would have to pick and push their way through the thick scrub and low, brittle branches of the taller trees, trying to make as little noise as possible, hats firmly wedged on their heads, sleeves rolled down to avoid ticks and scratches.

  Some ten or fifteen minutes later, on a patch of open, loose ground above the lagoon, Julia, a few feet ahead, stopped abruptly and stiffened. Then, without speaking, she motioned Alice to give her the gun. Fearing the ground too unsteady, Alice shook her head. Arriving beside her, seeing what Julia had seen, she braced her left foot in the slip and, cocking the rifle, held it ready. In the thinner scrub below them on a level strip at the edge of the water, obviously upwind from them in whatever stirring of air there was, something was moving – not another swamp wallaby but lower, longer, a different colour, with a swifter, more even trajectory through the ti-tree. Alice took aim and began to squeeze the trigger, but lost the sight, began to lower the rifle, then caught sight of the animal again, had a clearer sense of direction, movement, pace, and was almost prepared for the sudden flash of deep red-brown as the fox – there was no doubt of it now, the spring of its gait, the thick tail – broke cover at the edge of the clearing.

  It must be hard, very hard, to try compulsively to relive, for the rest of your life, a moment you know almost nothing about – to have to relive it because you know so little about it, because it is a hole, a gap in time, about which everything turns. Julia clipped her shoulder; that was all she could ever remember: Julia clipped her shoulder, but whether in falling already or to stay the shot she could never know. And both of them fell, in the loose gravel, and the gun discharged. How it could have done so in the direction that it did and not into the air or ground or bush or fox Alice would spend the rest of her life rehearsing, hoping always that her mind, now, might go that extra inch, might remember what it had never remembered before, but always encountering the gap, which she would do anything not to leap across – which she would wrench herself awake not to cross – because on the other side were only Julia’s wide, motionless astonishment and the bright blood spilling so quickly through her hair.

  She ran, leaving the gun where it was, leaving everything. She realised later that she should not have, perhaps even that she need not have, but she ran, and that was an end to it. If time began with the coming of the lighthouse, it ended with the fox, and thereafter reverted, or became something else. If the event was ever reported in the newspapers she did not read of it. If Julia did not die, as Alice sometimes dreamt she might not have, she did not hear of it. If a search was ever made for her, for Alice Hawk, it did not find her. If Convict Taylor had seen her, or if anyone else had, for that matter – the young drayman, Joe Tryde, let’s say, passing later that morning on the Nara road, or Dominic, coming down the circular stairs toward the end of his morning’s shift – they were not saying anything at all.

  2

  Diamond Beach

  (1985–1997)

  I hate the Hume Highway. All through my childhood there were fatal accidents there. Grim pictures in the newspaper of cars crumpled against trees, trucks jackknifed and burning, their contents strewn over the road. For almost thirty years I’ve been driving it now and still the thought of doing so puts me on edge – the bodies of wombats, wallabies, kangaroos, foxes dotting the shoulder like mile posts, the small blackening piles on the asphalt, the blown-out tyres and cast retreads, the long, agonising skid marks ending in shattered glass and bloodstains. For a while people were putting wreaths and bunches of flowers at the crash-sites – simply laying them out beside the road or taping them, covered with cellophane, to the guard-rail posts or the trunks of the trees the cars had ploughed into. One for each body. And maybe it’s me, too, for various reasons. There’s a story I was always told – it happened too early in my life for me to remember – that I was thrown from the car, late at night, when I was three years old: that my mother skidded on a dirt road on the way down to my grandparents’ farm, and hit a tree, side-on. She was knocked out by the impact, and when she came to found me singing contentedly to myself out in the dark, lying a few yards from the car, staring at the stars. But that’s another story, a story within a story, and there will be so many of these.

  For decades now a succession of state governments has tried to improve the situation on the Hume by turning as much of the road as they can into dual carriageway to avoid the sickening head-on collisions. They’ve almost finished and the number of accidents has been reduced, but it’s only made drivers all the more complacent. They don’t realise it’s the road itself that is the problem, that there’s something about the land it goes over, the places it passes, the things that were done there, maybe, long before the highway was thought of. The Department of Main Roads, as it was called then, once brought a man out from Germany to advise it on making the highway safer. His wife and children came out to see him for a holiday. They were killed on the highway, just south of Mittagong, on their way down to where he was waiting. I hate the Hume Highway. It’s a cursed highway. I think one of the reasons I left Canberra at last was so as not to have to drive it so often.

  My mother was killed on the Hume. It is hard to know quite what happened. Her car was found against a tree on what came to be called the Hell section, between Yass and Goulburn, late
one night in the middle of summer, almost exactly thirty years ago. It was dark. A storm had just passed, one of the dense, drenching rains that can hit you as you enter the Monaro, suddenly blinding you. She must have skidded in the downpour on a surface slicked by oil from the thousands of road trains that still barrel along the highway every day. The wheels of the car had stopped spinning but her body was still warm, though the truck driver who found her couldn’t get a pulse. He’d pulled up immediately, he said, as soon as he saw the wreck in his headlights, but it was a minute or two before he discovered her, thrown clear across the road by the way the car had slewed after clipping the tree. History repeating itself, with disastrous consequences. The coroner said she must have fallen asleep at the wheel; people do that all the time at night on that stretch of the highway; or been blinded by the rain, or swerved instinctively to avoid some animal on the road. Though in fact, as he also said, she seemed to have driven straight into the tree. Her aim couldn’t have been more deadly if she had tried.