The Fern Tattoo Read online

  It was the prism, he said, or rather a part of it. The prism was the heart, the secret of the lighthouse. In fact it was not so much a prism as a great set of them, or parts of them, large slabs of crystal cut in arcs that when bolted together made great concentric circular prisms. It was made of lead crystal, he said, precious lead crystal, the same kind that rich people had their wine and water glasses made from, or the great chandeliers which they hung in their ballrooms. It had come all the way from England on a ship, and had cost the government thousands of pounds. All of these boxes, he said, gesturing around them, contained pieces just like this one, and when the lighthouse was ready, as it nearly was, they would all be put together like a huge puzzle, to make a great diamond that held the light inside it and had the power to turn a small flame barely as big as a child’s palm into something thousands of times more powerful, that could be seen from twenty miles out to sea, guiding ships safely to harbour or warning them about reefs and rocks, and saving the lives of sailors. It was one of two wonders he had to show them, he said as if suddenly inspired: the other – or at least a part of it – was even heavier, more difficult and delicate to handle. It was not here yet, since there had been problems getting it, but hopefully it would arrive soon, and he would tell them the moment it did.

  Alice went to sleep that night listening to the wind rising and the slow sound of waves breaking on the beach a quarter of a mile away across the sandbar and over the lagoon. The only jewel she had ever seen before was a small, heart-shaped, translucent piece of what her father had told her was moonstone, set into a silver locket that had once been her mother’s and that her father had then put away in a place she had never been able to find. When Mr Talbot had shown her the prism and urged her to touch it, it had been as if she had touched, for just a moment, a piece of the real moon.

  As it happened, the rains set in and all work was soon suspended. The men sat it out for several days under canvas that sprang a leak everywhere they touched it, and then retreated at first to the pub in Paradise and then, as if they thought the deluge might last forever, to a place called Nara, further up the coast, where the beer was better and there was another job they could work on. The track up the hill from the Settlement became impassable. If sometimes the skies cleared and the wind began to dry the mud, no sooner would the last puddles disappear than the rainclouds would gather again and the first sprinkle would turn into a downpour that as likely as not would turn then into steady rain, further dispelling any thought that the men might soon return. Once, when it had not rained for two days and the ground had dried a little in a few weak intervals of clearer light, Alice walked up to the point, thinking that someone might at last have come, but there was only the half-completed tower and the still roofless houses, a number of the large concrete blocks sitting forlornly near where the tents had been, and a sole kangaroo, on the far side of the clearing, that sat and watched her, trying to decide whether to bound off or not.

  One day, when it had not rained since the evening before, and the morning looked as if it might pass without another shower, she had gone over to the beach to fish, to get out of the shack mainly, and to get away from Warden, but also, in a fit of grown-upness, to see if she couldn’t catch something to relieve the diet of dried fish and meat and sprouting potatoes the weather had condemned them to.

  The tide was low and the water strangely calm, after all the wild surfs that had been, and she could go out to the very furthest of the rocks, where the fishing was best. Over and over she cast her hand line out as far as she could, and wound it slowly back in, trying for bream. There were bites aplenty, and several times a long, sharp tugging, but nothing stayed on the line and as often as not the hook came back with the bait still intact. It didn’t matter. The weather, though overcast, was calm and windless and almost warm, and the soft washing of the water on the rocks was much better company than Warden had been. At last, though, there was another sharp tug, and the line cut the water for several seconds, and she thought she had something big. Just as suddenly, however, the line went slack. In exasperation, assuming the fish had gone and her bait with it, she began to wind the line in quickly, only to find it suddenly taut again, this time with a weight that would not budge. A snag, evidently, and with the water this deep there was nothing to be done but wind firmly in the hope that the hook would free itself and the line not break. But now the line came, slowly and reluctantly, as if there was something very heavy on it that resisted sometimes more and sometimes less. A large clump of weed, probably, dragging over the uneven bottom. Then at last she could see it, in the clear close water, drifting in slowly over the rocks, not a clump of weed but a sleepy Woebegone shark, some three or four feet long.

  She knew, from some of the smaller things she had caught, that although a fish might not seem to resist as it was being pulled in, it would thrash as soon as it broke the surface of the water, so, winding the line in gradually and carefully still, she climbed down to the very edge of the water, three feet below, and braced herself on the slippery weeds with her knife at the ready, and at just the moment the head was about to rise stabbed it quickly three times, surprised at how easy it was, as if the shark were still sleeping or had decided, for some strange reason of its own, to give itself to her.

  Her father and Mary were delighted – the Wobbegong was good eating, they said, when you could get one – and that night they had shark steaks, crisped at the edges in the bacon fat, with pepper and salt and onions, and she was a kind of hero in the family, and went to sleep thinking of light glinting on water, all kinds of things coming to her line.

  Another time, when it seemed the rains had at last gone for good, and the world had turned suddenly into a steaming, sweltering place as if the sun were wreaking a kind of vengeance for being banished so long, she ventured farther past the end of the lagoon than she had ever gone before, and came across a creek she had not known about, and met Convict Taylor, who had lived there for more years than he could say, and gathered wild oysters to sell from the wharf in Paradise Bay. She had almost missed him at first, because he looked so much like one of his own oyster rocks, so old and almost bare as he was, in his ragged trousers and matted grey hair and beard, and wrinkled skin covered in mud from his searching. And he told her stories when she went back again, and gave her the best oysters he had found that day – just as he would for years, each time she came back to talk to him and listen to his ramblings.

  It was another two months before work on the lighthouse recommenced, but then it proceeded all the faster for the delay that had been, and accelerated as the spring winds dried the ground and warmer weather set in for good. Finally the tower was surmounted by a high metal platform and a ribbed steel cage, into which were set a hundred plates of glass, sea-green at the edges, almost half an inch thick. Alice now came up every third or fourth day to watch and to wait for news. The second surprise Mr Talbot had told her about was all that was needed to complete the lighthouse, but it had still not arrived – it was probably sitting on a dock in Colombo, he said, or had been sent to Paraguay by mistake – and since there was no point in assembling the prism without it, attention shifted to the houses, which had their roofs on now, and ceilings done, and windows all glazed – none of the windows in the Settlement had glass, or were made of any such things – and were at last being plastered and painted, so that now, whenever she came, Alice was absorbed by speculations as to what room would be for what, and who it might be who would sooner or later be walking through them, and what the furniture might be like, and whether she herself would ever be welcome there.

  Mr Talbot again went away to Sydney, but this time quite suddenly, and since she had only found out after he had gone she had not had the chance to ask him why. But while he was gone, because he was gone, she became increasingly restless with anticipation. She stopped going up to the lighthouse, but for the next two weeks had some part of her attention always attuned to the track, waiting for particular, unknown voices. For it had nev
er, after all, been really or only the lighthouse.

  She was disappointed. When next the bullock dray lumbered up the track, and Mr Talbot with it, it was not with his two sons and daughter but a great load of furniture and, in boxes and strange, obnoxious-smelling barrels, the remaining items and provisions for the lighthouse itself. Mr Talbot seemed buoyant, however, and told her as he passed – hailing her as if he truly liked to see her now – that she and her brother should come up to visit him after a day or two, when he had had a chance to sort things out, since some other treasures had arrived.

  Perhaps he was not really so surprised as he made out to see them late the next afternoon. They had waited an hour already while the men finished their smoko outside his tent, where they gathered to discuss the day’s progress and their plans for the next. He seemed at first not to see them at all, but instead, once he had been left alone, sat at his makeshift desk part-way between the tent and the campfire, making an entry in his journal, looking up only when, their patience deserting them, they had started to inch closer, and Warden sneezed.

  ‘My goodness!’ he exclaimed in mock consternation, ‘you here already? I’ve hardly had time to find the right boxes, let alone open them,’ though it seemed he had, for in the storage tent beside his own, in front of the carefully numbered and ranked boxes of the prism (now sitting there so long their fresh yellow wood had begun to turn grey), was a gleaming golden contraption – in fact he said it was brass – standing alongside the box it had come from. A second, silver-and-tar-paper-lined box stood there too, much larger and sturdier than the rest, and wedged inside it was a short, squat barrel with a lid that bolted down.

  ‘Have you ever seen a grandfather clock?’ he asked them, and then, seeing that they hadn’t, ‘Well, it is a kind of clock in a tall cabinet, that you have to wind up every day, and this is a little like it – that is to say, it is not a clock exactly, for it doesn’t tell time, but it does work by clock-work, in just the same way, and you do have to wind it every day, to keep the light turning, as one day very soon you are going to see it do.

  ‘I am not going to wind it up now to show you, much as I’d like to, for the mechanism has nothing to work as yet, and to wind it up without having anything to do with its energy would not be very kind to it. But,’ – seeing not a great deal as yet dawning on their faces – ‘the marvel is, how does such a small engine – for it is, as you can see,’ and here he motioned them to bend in to look at it, ‘a very small, if also very precise engine – turn something so large and so extraordinarily heavy as a huge prism of English lead crystal?

  ‘It’s a very interesting and difficult question, in fact,’ by now struggling to hold their attention until the moment that he himself was waiting for, perhaps even more than they: ‘Simply greasing a base so the pedestal will turn around in it won’t do, because the pedestal would very quickly grind to bits whatever was below it, and in my opinion the most obvious alternative – the use of a circle of large steel ball-bearings – is flawed for the very same reason: the ball-bearings must inevitably disintegrate under the pressure, however beautiful the principle may be.

  ‘No,’ he continued, having for the last minute or two been unscrewing, with a very large screwdriver, the thick lid on the mysterious barrel, ‘the answer is so simple and unexpected that it’s really rather miraculous –’

  ‘What are ball-bearings?’ she had to ask, more than a little relieved that she had found a question to ask him at last.

  ‘Ball-bearings? Well, little balls made of steel,’ he said, ‘that run in a groove that something else is also set into, to give that thing free play. Very interesting in their own right. But never mind about them now.

  ‘Hold out your hands.’ And with this in itself simple and unexpected instruction he lifted, carefully and with some difficulty, the heavy, tight-fitting lid of the barrel to reveal a pool of shining, liquid silver, so bright that even he seemed in his mind to step back a moment in awe of it. Then, rather than plunging his own hands in, as Alice half expected him to do, and ladling the silver into theirs – something which might well have overwhelmed them – he turned to pick up a teaspoon from his makeshift desk and, dipping it into the pool of bright, impossible water, placed very carefully, as befitted a mystery, half of its contents into the cupped hand of each of them.

  It was water, but not, and heavier than any water could possibly be. When you placed your finger in it, as he encouraged them to do, at the same time cautioning them to be very careful not to spill it, since it was extremely valuable, it did not wet the finger as water would, but slipped quickly and cunningly from beneath it, so that you did not even feel yourself touching it, or else it broke into separate droplets that re-formed instantaneously when the finger was lifted, into the same tiny, gleaming pool they had just been. In his excitement Warden, who had been holding his hand out over the desk, spilt part of his portion onto the flat white page Mr Talbot had just been writing on, and it broke into so many droplets that then scattered so quickly, in so many directions, like mice disturbed under an old sheet of tin, that there was no counting or saving them.

  ‘See how quickly it moves?’ asked Mr Talbot excitedly, coaxing what droplets he could back together with the edge of his hand, and bending the paper, and tilting it, not getting angry at all as she had been certain that he must. ‘That is why it is called quicksilver, though its true name is mercury, like the planet that is next to Venus in the sky.

  ‘It moves so quickly because it appears to experience no friction. And the principle that interests me, and that is so useful to lighthouses,’ – again speaking more or less to himself, so utterly absorbed were the children now in the gleaming substance – ‘is that if it experiences so little friction when it runs over the surface of something, then something running over quicksilver will experience very little friction also. So what will enable the light to turn –’ and with a flourish he regained the children’s attention – ‘will not be grease, or a ring of fragile ball-bearings, but a basin of mercury upon which the pedestal will sit and over which it will move so easily, and this little clockwork machine with a few cogs to make the work easier, since there will be so little friction that the merest clockspring will do it.’

  So these were the miracles. And for days after, when she looked at dew on a leaf or grass-blade, or rain on the window, or the meniscus on a glass of water, she would imagine she could see the water’s desire to become quicksilver. Or when she looked up at the sky, wondering where Venus or Mercury were and what she should be looking for, would settle instead on the high circle of the midsummer moon, like the eye of a pool of silver lighting the night, and imagine that that was where the silver pool under the tent-flap had drawn its magic from – as the lighthouse in its turn would, to send out its own beam to sailors who had been searching for it on the pitch dark sea.

  The third and perhaps greatest miracle – the one Mr Talbot never thought to speak of as such – arrived shortly afterward, though not on a bullock dray but in a loose, open, horse-drawn wagon, which is perhaps why Alice missed the event and was shocked, when next she went up to the lighthouse with the very purpose of asking Mr Talbot, as she always did, when his children might arrive, to find them already in residence – indeed amidst and in some cases sitting upon unpacked boxes, in the middle of a Sunday meal. She had seen smoke from the chimney of the main house as she came over the rise and, no men in sight – all but one of them had left two days before, so early that she had not seen – had gone over to look cautiously through the window, only to find a young boy, very nearly Warden’s age, staring directly at her, and almost immediately crying out, with his mouth half-full, and pointing with a fork.

  She ducked and would have run around the corner of the building, but within seconds Mr Talbot was at the open door laughing and inviting her in, calling back to his family that it was Alice at last, whom he had told them about, and just in time for the celebration lunch, and that she had probably planned to be so all along.
And she was introduced, in a confusing flurry, to the boy who had pointed, whose name was Joseph, and to his twin named Patrick, and then to Julia, who unlike the boys had said nothing so far, and made no move but just stared at her – a girl with a pale face and long dark hair and eyes that were very probably, at this moment in time, as wide and round as her own. And to add to the confusion, and a feeling of what was not but was very like terror, a tall, smiling woman coming in from the hot kitchen, with long skirts and an apron and long hair rolled back in a bun, and such a kindness and welcome in her face and voice that Alice seemed to know her already and to have lived this moment, in every detail, over and over before.

  Time begins slowly, perhaps because you are not yet used to it, but then accelerates. Years that had once seemed endless soon mount up behind one, with their edges blurring, or end almost as soon as they have gotten under way. One year the lighthouse was completed and Mr Talbot’s family arrived, and they had a small ceremony when they put up a brass plate, which Mr Talbot said was the crowning touch, with ‘Cape William Lighthouse 1889’ on it, and the light, amidst kerosene fumes and excitement and the first cleaning of the prism, began to shine out over the sea. One year she and Mrs Talbot were teaching Julia how to bake, and Mrs Talbot was setting up a school in the empty Assistant Keeper’s house, so that she and Warden and Jamie Dooley and his sister Lizzie from the Settlement could learn alongside the young Talbots, and in response, because her father had shot a large kangaroo and didn’t need all the meat, she had taken two large chunks of it to the Talbots in a hessian sack. One year a ship, the Lord Jervis, sank in the Shoals, and nobody could explain it, and there was an investigation, and Mr Newcombe, the new assistant lighthouse-keeper, a strange and nervous man, hung himself in his cold house, leaving behind him a book of strange writings that Mr Talbot would not let anyone see. One year she took Julia to meet Convict Taylor and he told them more stories and Mr Talbot forbade them to go there again but it did not matter, they had become so wild, wearing boys’ clothes and cutting their hair short like their brothers so it did not bother them in the bush or the surf. One year Mrs Talbot died giving birth to her dead baby, and Warden ran away on a strange adventure all his own and no one could find him or trace him anywhere, though Alice in her heart knew that he could – would – survive, and the new Assistant Keeper Mr Dominic Hyde saw Alice and Julia swimming naked at the beach at the bottom of the cliff and fell in love with one or both of them – he seemed not to know which – and became so shy he would back away whenever they came near him, but if they could corner him, would do almost anything they asked. One year – the next year – Alice’s father beat Mary so badly that she left on a dray with a carrier from Nara and Alice’s father drank himself into a stupor and fell from the cliff path onto the flat rocks at low tide, and died four days later, and when she and Julia were clearing the shack after the funeral they found her mother’s moonstone locket wedged in the back of a drawer, and the Talbots asked her to come to live with them, and be a second Daughter of the Lighthouse, which, Mr Talbot said, she had surely been meant to be all along.