The Fern Tattoo

by David Brooks

  But it wasn’t only the beer and the stories. You can drink beer anywhere, and although I might feel differently now I’m not sure the stories by themselves would have been enough to keep me coming back, though there can be little doubt that she had a gift for them, was so much a mistress of the art she might have been a novelist manqué. We got to be friends, if the truth be known, and I was surprised by that. And I was intrigued, too, by each of them, and by the relationship between them. I know that you’re supposed to remember your own distant past far better as you get older, but Mrs Darling’s authority and memory were extraordinary, and the stories so interesting you had to wonder how she came by them. But it was hard to find out, most of the time impossible. Once or twice, if you got the right hook, she would give ground a little, but she had a way of deflecting almost every attempt. When you asked her a question that was in any way personal you were as likely as not to find yourself answering something very like it a few moments later, or listening to something else so engrossing it would only be some time afterward that you realised she had dodged you yet again.

  Sim didn’t help. Short, mouse-like, clearly years younger but an old woman herself nonetheless, with sharp features and soft, pale, reddish-white hair so thin she seemed in some lights to be almost bald, almost always smiling, her head always tilted slightly to the left as if perpetually bemused, her crossed hands resting always just above her waist, she was just another part of the enigma. I couldn’t tell what the relationship between them was or had been if it wasn’t merely that of two elderly ladies seeing out their last years together. And yet it did seem more. Sometimes I thought I knew, but there were no clear signs, no confirmations that I could see. Friendship, consideration, even a touch of servility on Sim’s part. And a sense of a deep, open knowledge of one another, that went a very long way back. You’d think sometimes they knew the inside of each other’s head like you’d know the streets and back lanes of a country town you’d lived in all your life. But who knows? People can talk and talk, about themselves as often as not, detail upon detail, and in the end, when it counts, you find you know almost nothing about them.

  One time, one time only, I seemed to get through, and even then it was as if Mrs Darling herself had engineered my doing so. It was a summer visit, four or five years after I’d first come to their door, and the end of a very hot afternoon. She had been drinking, or rather they had – not much, perhaps, but when I arrived there was already an empty beer-bottle on the cluttered coffee-table and a couple of empty glasses beside it with slices of lemon in them as if they had begun with something stronger. She and Sim were both more relaxed, even easier with me than I was used to them being, and seemed inclined to draw me in quickly so as not to dampen their mood. They had been talking for some reason about Sydney and the Harbour Bridge and she mentioned someone named Ces as if I should know who he was, as if she had told me about him already. Perhaps she had, but I didn’t recall him. ‘Was he your husband?’ I asked her, ‘Mr Darling?’ and she was very emphatic in response:

  ‘Ces? Ces Hardigan? No. They were chalk and cheese. He was my husband, yes, and so was Jack Darling, but I didn’t marry Jack until I moved up here. No, Ces was in Sydney,’ and then paused, as if deciding whether to go on or change the subject. It was a long pause, and a strange one, as I remember it, not at all like her others, a kind of sudden gap, or emptiness, a white space. But evidently I had triggered something and the pressure behind it was such that she couldn’t or wouldn’t hold back.

  ‘Ces was my husband. The world’s biggest bastard, or one of them. A huge Irish thug-publican, eyes and hair dark as pitch. One of the black Irish, part Romany, with his fingers in every one and every thing … but also beautiful … ’ and here she paused again, looked away slightly as if something, a stray unwanted memory, had just scuttled across the carpet: ‘Beautiful, when not on show, puckering his judicious fat mouth over the bar for his mates or some new young tart as if he knew something. He was always trying to look as if he knew something, Ces Hardigan. Maybe at last he did, but for years there was bugger-all to show for it.

  ‘When I married him all he had between Hardigan’s Pub and the receivers was a smokescreen of lies. All he’d ever had. He’d pull it back from the brink and then let it slip away again while he propped up the bar. The pub was called The White Hart, on Duer Street in the Rocks, just under the Sydney end of the Bridge. The White Hart, though most people just called it Hardigan’s. It’d had some good years in the twenties while the Bridge was being built, but after it was opened the Depression hit hard. When he first gave me a job there, in thirty-five or thirty-six, he’d already nearly lost the place once, and it’d happen again every few years right up until I took it over. Three times he nearly lost it – three bloody times …

  ‘We married in thirty-nine, at the start of the war, and things looked better for a while with all the servicemen about, but after a few years I’d pulled out, didn’t have so much to do with the place. There was a bit there when I wasn’t so well … ’ and again there was a pause, but by now she seemed as concerned to talk for her own sake, to get something right, and the pause was for memory, not out of reluctance or struggle as before.

  ‘Things weren’t too good between us, for a long time. I hardly set foot in the pub for four years. I didn’t want to know about it. Left it to others, and eventually wished I hadn’t. But then, in 1947, he had a stroke and was no good for anything much. I got hit by a mass of debts, ten times bigger than he’d ever let on. Although I didn’t want to I had to step in and pull the place out of it, whether I liked it or not – there was no one else; the help would have robbed us stupid – and had to deal with him at the same time. I thought that he was going to get better. That’s what the doctors kept saying. By the time I realised he wasn’t going to I’d begun to like the work.

  ‘I suppose I didn’t want him to get better anyway. I used to say we never really had a relationship – a real one – until he went gaga.’ But here she caught herself, as if conscious that she had just transgressed, or at least let her own sense of herself down somehow.

  ‘No. Not gaga. It wasn’t that. But he had a different mind, no violence anymore … He used to beat us, you know … ’ and there was a strange stumbling here, as if she had immediately regretted the admission, but then decided to go on with it: ‘… – me – and that stopped, and the lying stopped, and other things, of course … all that …

  ‘He turned white. Totally white. His hair, his beard. He never had a beard before, but I didn’t have time to shave him, and just let it grow. And I clothed him in white, all in white. It started at the hospital, with the hospital clothes. I realised they made sense, with all the mess he’d make at first. You can boil them, bleach them, hang them in the sun and forget them. And he looked so good in them, so gentle, that I kept it up. White shirts, white trousers, white hat, white hair. I would wheel him into the sunshine outside the pub and leave him there, like a big white buddha, with a long black cane for emphasis, so that he could lean forward when he needed to – he spoke so softly, after his stroke, you could barely hear him – and he’d be there for hours with his mates. I’ll give them that; they stuck with him, most of them. And when it was quiet one or another of us would go out and just sit, not talking much – at least, not him – but it got so you could tell him things, talk things over, like you never had before. And he would listen, and nod, or shake his head – he didn’t ever try to talk much – and as often as not things would start to make sense …

  ‘Sim and I. It was Sim and I who used to look after him, mainly Sim. That’s when she came, to help me after the stroke. Hardly her first job, I guess, but maybe her best. You wouldn’t credit it, but Sim was quite famous then. She was a great barmaid – the most popular barmaid in the Rocks, during the fifties …’

  And that was that, the conversation turned away, leaving Ces Hardigan out in the sunshine at the City end of the Bridge, batting down a small squadron of open-ended insinuations. Sim
was denying her popularity but clearly relishing the recollection. Someone had proposed to her – in fact more than one, she sought to correct, but there had been one in particular – and her head came out of its shell with nothing less than a radiance as the old woman pretended to have to force her to remember, though, again, whether it was a radiance at the thought of an old flame or at something else, a joke between them that I never quite got, was impossible to tell.

  We drifted on to other things, and I stayed for another hour. Ces Hardigan didn’t come up again until the end, just as I was leaving.

  But then, as I have realised just now, writing about it, all along I have been presuming that it was Hardigan she was talking about. It may not have been him at all. Mrs Darling had gone quiet – she would tire herself out, with all the talk – and I took it as my cue to leave. I was standing up, about to say goodbye, when, out of the blue, and less to us than to some other side of herself she’d been deep in a silent conversation with, she came out with the most extraordinary final statement, seemingly contradicting much of what she’d said before, or perhaps only indicating how complicated the whole relationship had been:

  ‘He was a beast, an animal … ’

  That was all. And then, pulling herself back from wherever that had come from, there were goodbyes, promises on my part to return as soon as I could, and on her part to be less sentimental the next time around, not that it had occurred to me that that was what she had been; and lemons, there was always a bag of lemons.

  She needn’t have worried. I would never again get past the stories to what might have lain behind them – at least, not while she was alive, not into the more personal territory we’d strayed into that day – and our relationship petered out before I’d had many more chances to try. As the children got older and had more of their own lives to lead it got harder to find the time to go away together, and in any case we had found, in time, a coast house at Durras Beach, far nearer Canberra. They might have written to me, perhaps, Sim and the old lady, but they didn’t, and I have always been a poor correspondent, so we lost touch. I often thought about them, in the years that followed, but did nothing about it, and it gets harder and harder to renew such things as the time goes on. So much slips into the past.

  Then, four years ago, Sim called me. It had never even occurred to me that they might have a telephone, but perhaps it was a later acquisition. Mrs Darling was dying. She would not last long, perhaps not even long enough for me to get there, but she was asking for me, urgently, and Sim had promised her she’d try to contact me. Would I come? I tried to press Sim for something further – why was it that Mrs Darling was asking for me? what was the connection? why was it so important to see me, of all people? – but she avoided the question, couldn’t or wouldn’t say, and I could hear her distress and so didn’t persist. Dita encouraged me, said if Sim had called me after all this time she must have had reason, or been desperate, not known whom else to call. There seemed nothing to do but go. It felt, uncannily, like a moral responsibility, like fate.

  It took almost ten hours to get there, when with luck and a better choice of departure time it could be as little as six. Everything seemed stacked up against it: roadwork on the Federal Highway, an accident on the Hume, the weather, bumper-to-bumper traffic-jams in rush hour on the Newcastle expressway, another accident blocking the Woy Woy bypass. I arrived well after dark – eight p.m., I suppose, or nine. Sim had obviously been watching for me, and met me on the verandah as she’d always done, silhouetted in the shaft of light from the open fly-wire door, looking, when I got to her, so much older than I’d remembered. I was too late, but this didn’t seem to be troubling her much. Mrs Darling had died a little more than an hour ago, she said, having drifted into a sort of coma not long after she’d been told I was coming – as if, knowing that I would soon be there, she could finally let go.

  ‘I haven’t called anyone yet, since I knew you were on the way. I didn’t want you to arrive and find the ambulance or the doctor here, and so have no time.’

  She led me down the dark hall, past the musty front room with the pianola and the huge inlaid bible, past the smells of old cooking, to the sleep-out in the back where the old lady had been more comfortable in the hot weather. She was lying in the cot bed, opposite the fly-wire door that, from where she lay, was so neatly framing the lemon tree. The yellow globes of the fruit shone like lanterns in the spilt light. There was almost nothing else there.

  ‘I want you to see something,’ Sim said then, and motioned me almost impatiently to the bedside: ‘I think she wanted you to see it too, but never knew how to show you. And how could she?’

  4

  Lies

  (2000)

  There are lies and lies. There are some lies that are not really lies, at least not in a culpable, moral sense, but more a sort of necessary fiction, to mask or deflect the truth, for any number of reasons. And there are borrowings, things that might have been true for somebody you know, just not true for yourself. And then, I suppose, there are lies proper, though the distinction isn’t always clear. Often the first kinds are told to protect the ones who have asked the questions in the first place, or to protect those about whom our ideas might change if we knew the truth – especially if we knew only part of it, and I doubt if we can ever know the whole. And the truth can be so brutal. But most often, of course, they’re told to protect the tellers themselves, even from the knowledge of their own complicities.

  Old people seem to outgrow them somehow, though it may be more the idea of lying in the first place, the desire or need for it that they outgrow, than the lying itself. They outlive the people they once lied to protect, maybe, or maybe the needs of the living come to seem greater than the needs of the dead, though I’m not sure that altruism runs that far. Maybe it’s just that they get tired, or don’t care any more, or need to unload the weight of all the unsaid things before they can float free. Or maybe it’s wickedness, now that they can speak without much consequence to themselves. I sometimes think it’s that. But I don’t know. It can’t be that easy. When you’ve told a story about something often enough, the story can take the place of the thing itself. You can honestly forget what the truth was, or mistake for the truth a part of an old lie that has gone hard over the top of it, like a callus, an ancient scar. Tell it as often as you can, it may be that you can’t get the lies out of it, even when you think you have.

  My father’s name was Michael Waters. He was one of the last Australians killed in the Korean War. If you go to the War Memorial in Canberra you can see his name on one of those huge bronze plates listing the dead. He was part of the United Nations force. It was just outside of Pyongyang. Later on I’ll give you a different name, a different story. Michael Waters never had the chance to lay eyes on me. My mother didn’t even know if he got her letters after he left Sydney, telling him about my birth. She never saw him after that. He loved us though: he hadn’t left us, not in that sense. He knew that she was pregnant; he knew that I was coming. There was a war on, that was all. And that is the kind of thing that happened. At least he had left us my grandparents and my uncle on the farm outside Braidwood. Whenever I asked my mother about her own parents – it was a kind of taboo subject, and I didn’t do so very often, I guess because I always thought I’d have plenty of time later – she said she never knew anything about them. She was an orphan and grew up with the nuns in Arncliffe. She borrowed that. There were lots of girls like her, orphaned one way or another, or abandoned during the Depression. When they weren’t praying or doing lessons, the girls in the convent used to do the washing for some of the big Sydney hotels – the towels, the bedsheets, the pillowslips, the tablecloths. You felt that there hadn’t been much joy in her childhood and she didn’t like to remember it. I always sensed there were things she wasn’t telling me. I thought it was because I was too young, and that she’d get round to them eventually, when I was old enough. But of course she never did.

  We were a lonely family, she
used to tell me: that was just the way of it. She couldn’t say why. Some families are big, healthy trees; others are scraggly little bushes, side-shoots that never really get going. A failure to thrive. Never enough light, or too much. Never enough water. Never enough truth. Sometimes she would wake up in the middle of the night and I would hear her crying, though she’d try to hide it from me. If I ever asked her what was wrong she’d say she had been dreaming of my father. But sometimes we were happy anyway. Every year she would take me on a holiday. In my earliest years she would pack the back seat of the Austin A50 until it was like a large, soft bed that I could move about in and we would drive up through the foothills of the Great Dividing Range to see my grandparents at the farm. They were my father’s parents, and the lounge room was full of pictures of him as a child, then as a young man in uniform. Sometimes, when she couldn’t get the time off work, my mother would leave me there for a week or two. The farm became a kind of second home. Even at seven or eight I was helping to milk the cows, learning to cook, learning the life on the property. And then at some point we stopped going. I went elsewhere for one of the May holidays, to a school camp at Moss Vale, and enjoyed it so much that I went again in August, and somehow the next visit to my grandparents got deferred. The next I knew – maybe it was a year later – they had decided they were too old for the farm, and were moving north to a retirement village on a beach somewhere outside Gosford. We stayed there for a week to help them pack. Some other people were moving onto the farm. It was all very sad. My grandparents seemed to have got much older. My uncle travelled out west to work and moved around a lot, it was hard to keep track of him. We visited Gosford once, then my mother would leave me with friends and go up to the north coast by herself. I was in one of those places in childhood when you don’t take much notice of anything other than your friends. We got a letter from Grandfather saying that Grandmother was very ill, and then, before we could go up to see her – it seemed to all happen so quickly – a telegram to say that she had died.