An Innocent Masquerade

Still and all Fred helped her to clear away again, and would have done more except that Sam said, ‘No, Fred. Leave that to Big Sister. It’s time you started work. Pay for all the good grub you’ve eaten, eh?’

Geordie examined Fred’s hands carefully before shrugging resignedly. It was apparent to him that, although Fred’s nails were broken and his hands bore recent scars on the backs, palms and wrists, he had done very little manual work. His palms were soft and the calluses on them were new. His hands were beautiful and shapely, and Geordie thought that they had been cared for until not too long ago. All the marks of neglect on him were recent.

His body had been cared for, as well, and he had done very little physical labour. He was not unfit, but his muscles were not those of a man given to using them. For all his size—and his potential for strength—digging would, at first, be a hard task for him.

This soon proved to be true. Fred began enthusiastically enough in order to show his thanks to them, but he soon grew weary. His hands blistered and bled and he used his spade and swung his pick ever more slowly. He looked dismally at Sam, but Sam said, not unkindly, ‘You’ve got to persevere, chum. We all went through this at the start, didn’t we, Geordie?’

Geordie agreed, but he kept watch over Fred without saying anything or showing his concern overmuch. It was obvious that Fred was strong-willed behind all his artless charm—charm which even Big Sister grudgingly conceded he possessed. Once he grasped that they wanted him to go on, he bent to his task again, whispering to himself, ‘This hurts,’ but he still continued to dig, if slowly.

He had dug quite a hole when they stopped for a rest, a drink and more grub. Sam had hit a small pocket of gold-bearing quartz and Big Sister, Pat and Allie went down to the creek to wash it out. It wasn’t a big strike, but with what they had already found between them it would make a fair profit on the week and would enable them to keep and pay Fred, and feed well themselves.

It was surprising how deft the women and children were at washing out and sorting the grains of gold. Sam showed it to Fred and told him that that was what they were looking for, and how he would know it when he struck it.

Geordie dressed Fred’s hands and they started work again. The piles of muck around Fred’s diggings grew, but he slowed down more and more when his aching shoulders and back began to add to the pain of his hands.

By the time the gun went off to signal the end of the day’s work, Fred was so exhausted that he had to be lifted out of his hole by Sam and Bart. They laid him down on the ground and he only recovered a little when Big Sister brought him tea and grub, and said approvingly, ‘Well done, Fred.’

Her voice was so kind that it nearly brought tears to poor Fred’s eyes. So few people had been kind to him lately.

Sam agreed. ‘Kept at it, Fred, didn’t you? Many wouldn’t.’

It was nice to hear them say it, but it didn’t ease his bleeding and swollen hands much, nor his aching back and shoulders. Geordie dressed his hands again, and he too said, ‘Well done, Fred,’ and then, ‘Are you all right, mate? Your head’s not hurting you too much?’

‘No,’ said Fred. ‘It’s not my head today. It’s my hands and my back,’ and he made an almost comic face when he said it.

‘You’ll get used to it in time, and so will your hands.’

Fred was more than ready for his grub that evening and Big Sister was kind to him because he had worked so hard. Before supper Geordie treated his hands with spirits, which hurt, but Geordie said it would harden them sooner. He still wouldn’t let Fred drink, which saddened Fred, but he tried not to mind too much.

Funnily enough, although Fred was so sad, he didn’t feel able to disobey Geordie. Geordie told him that the more he worked the more he would be able to work, and the sooner his body would become work-hardened.

‘Drinking won’t help that,’ Geordie told him. ‘Quite the contrary.’

Although talk of the past was taboo round the diggings it was inevitable that a certain amount of harmless enquiry went on.

Bart said idly, ‘How’d you get to Ballarat, Fred?’

Fred looked up from the damper he was eating with great enthusiasm. ‘Don’t know,’ he said. ‘Corny brought me.’

‘Clerk, were you?’ asked Sam, who, like Geordie, had noticed that Fred’s hands were not those of a labourer.

Fred looked puzzled. ‘Can’t remember,’ he said, after a minute’s thought. ‘Don’t know.’

It became increasingly plain that Fred had, or claimed to have, little memory of a life before he had arrived in Ballarat. He had apparently worked on a road gang. He disliked the few police he saw, and was inclined to hide from them, crouching in his hole if they appeared when he was working.

Mac came along to watch him throwing muck about, and said, ‘Congratulations, Geordie, think it’ll last?’

Geordie shrugged his shoulders and said, ‘Time will tell.’

Fred didn’t object to Mac. He couldn’t remember him as unkind, but the hard-faced man caused him obvious distress when he appeared one day.

Fred told Geordie that he thought that the police had been very unkind to him before he came to Ballarat, but careful and quiet questioning of him when the others were not about, continued to show that Fred’s memories were all very recent.

Big Sister bawled at him once when he annoyed her by refusing to hand over a particularly dirty shirt to be washed. ‘Brought up in a pigsty, were you?’

Great hilarity greeted his solemn answer, ‘Don’t know, Big Sister. Perhaps?’

‘Can it be true?’ Kirstie said to Geordie later, ‘Can he really not remember anything? Or is it that, like some, he’s quiet about the past because he’s got a dreadful secret in it which he doesn’t want to reveal to us?’

Like me, thought Geordie, but said aloud, ‘I don’t know why, Kirsteen. I thought that it was because he’d had a head injury that he couldn’t remember anything, but I’m not sure that the injury was bad enough for that. I think that perhaps he doesn’t want to remember. Don’t question him. It makes him unhappy. Perhaps, one day…’ and he shrugged. ‘I think that he’s already beginning to change a little, which is a good sign.’

Kirstie thought it all very odd. She continued to be kind to Fred that evening which made Fred very happy. Indeed, what surprised Kirstie the most was how contented Fred usually was—unless he was questioned about his past.

She remarked to Geordie that perhaps it was because Fred could remember so little that he was happy—which was not the first time that she surprised Geordie by her perception. She had already grasped that it was her memories which made her miserable, whether they were of the loss of her mother, or her dead older sister, Kathleen, or the farm, or her brother Jem, who had deserted them after his marriage to a wealthy farmer’s daughter.

In the noisy press of their active life she and the others gradually forgot Fred’s strange loss of his past, particularly since living with their little group began to educate him, to make him more responsible and a little less artless. It was not only Geordie who noticed that, when Fred stopped referring to himself as ‘Fred’ so often and began to use ‘I’ instead, much of his oddity disappeared.

He helped Kirstie in many little ways from that very first evening onwards. He also liked to tease her, as though she were his little sister, but he would always give over if he thought that it made her unhappy. As for his drinking, that had stopped altogether, and even though Geordie had hoped that his attempt to cure Fred might work, he was a little puzzled by how effective it had been. He had never seen a case like this since the days when…well, those days, anyway—he tried not to remember them.

What Fred did not tell Geordie, or anyone else, for they might think him mad, was that when he thought of having a drink a cold, hard voice in his head told him he was to do no such thing. ‘You’ve had quite enough of that, Fred Waring,’ it said. ‘You don’t need any more.’

Fred wondered who the voice belonged to. It wasn’t Geordie’s, that was for sure. Geordie’s voice to Fred was always kind. This was a nasty voice. It belonged to a right nasty and arrogant bastard, the sort of person Fred disliked most. It reminded him of the magistrate in Melbourne, or the Commissioner and the police who rode about the diggings being unpleasant to people.

It was so harsh that Fred was frightened into obeying it. Who knew what might happen if he didn’t do as he was told? Perhaps it was a pity that he didn’t tell Geordie about the voice, for it would have confirmed Geordie’s growing belief about what was really wrong with Fred.

Fred puzzled for a long time about who the voice might belong to, and then gave up the struggle. Life was too interesting, and there was so much fun to be had, that it would be a pity to waste it worrying about voices. After a time this one began to fade, but Fred was still careful never to take a drink—he didn’t want it back again.

Fred discovered fun with women quite early on, and like everything to do with Fred, it came about in the oddest manner. Geordie Farquhar was one of the few clean-shaven men in the diggings; most could not be troubled to take the time, or make the effort, to shave off their beards and moustaches once they had reached Ballarat. Thus Big Sister’s dismissal of men as large hairy monsters seemed particularly apt.

Geordie, however, always kept himself trim—he tried not to become too dirt-encrusted, even if, like everyone else, he fought a losing battle with mud and/or dust.

Fred, however, once he emerged from his liquor-induced semi-coma began to see the world—and himself—quite clearly. Consequently he started to chafe at his enforced dirtiness and to grieve over his damaged hands, but he had to accept that there was nothing he could do about them, committed to digging as he was. He also disliked intensely his unkempt and unruly black hair and beard. He was vaguely sure that there had been a time when he hadn’t possessed them.

One day, watching Geordie shave, he came to the conclusion that he, too, would like to rid himself of his beard and shorten his long hair.

‘Could you show me how to do that?’ he asked Geordie plaintively.

‘Surely,’ said Geordie. ‘Let me do it for you first, Fred, and then you’ll know how to keep in trim yourself.’

It was a lengthy and painful business, Fred discovered, losing his whiskers, but Geordie’s handiwork transformed him completely. Kirstie was not the only person to stare at the new handsome Fred it revealed to the world. That his teeth were good had always been plain, but that the rest of him was so personable was a surprise.

Beards could be grown to hide weak, lumpy, and ugly faces, and Big Sister often thought that some men were happy to grow them in order to disguise their facial shortcomings. Trimmed, Fred’s hair fell into loose black curls, which added to the attractiveness of a strong and handsome face.

‘Looks a different man, doesn’t he?’ said Sam to Bart. Both of them had ‘run wild’ as Kirstie disparagingly put it, and had luxuriant hairy growths.

‘You could say so,’ agreed Bart sadly.

It had been easy to patronise Fred when he was so vague and looked so wild, but the new man who had emerged from Geordie’s ministrations—like a handsome butterfly breaking out of a cocoon—was not someone you could easily look down on.

Women turned to stare at Fred when he walked through the diggings, and Kirstie thought that this was what started Fred on his road to ruin with them. Not that Fred was vain. He seemed in some mysterious way innocent of most of the minor sins, vanity included. Perhaps what principally distinguished him was his happiness—it was difficult to upset him other than by being naughty with his food which Kirstie sometimes was in order to punish him for anything she thought was a misdemeanour. Kirstie considered all those in her care, from Sam, Bart and Geordie downwards, to be little more than her children to be kept in order for their own good.

Fred liked to eat and, whilst not over-fastidious, he always looked glum if he was given the least attractive portions or didn’t get what he considered to be enough. He was big, worked hard and loved his grub. He was always ready for it, and was always the first to hold out his plate for seconds.

‘You’re greedy, Fred Waring,’ Kirstie snapped at him once.

‘Now, now, Big Sister,’ said Sam mildly. ‘Fred’s a big fellow. He needs his grub and he works hard. Don’t grudge it to him, girl.’

She half-flung more damper at Fred which he took thankfully. Damper wasn’t exciting, but it was better than nothing. He decided that Big Sister for all her grudging manner deserved a smile, so he gave her one. The effect was dazzling, but didn’t mollify her.

‘You needn’t grin at me, Fred Waring! You’ll get your share, no more.’

‘I don’t want any more,’ said Fred, who was feeling restless. He didn’t know why, but somehow it was connected with the sheep’s eyes which several women had made at him that day. He rose, and instead of helping Big Sister he decided to take a stroll around the diggings and see life. He might be able to walk the strange feeling off.

Geordie watched him go, and then joined Sam and Bart in a card game around the fire. Big Sister finished the washing up, put the children to bed and began to mend shirts. Emmie Jackson, more lethargic than ever, sat beside her, making no effort to help.

Fred looked around him on his walk until he reached the section where Hyde’s saloon and gaming den was flanked by Fat Lil’s Place. He had never visited either of them, although he had heard Sam and Bart chatting about them.

He stopped there—and caught the eye of Fat Lil herself.

It was the Yankees at the diggings who had christened the Madam at The Golden Horseshoe Fat Lil, and had changed its name to Fat Lil’s Place. Not that Lil was really fat, just big all over. Junoesque, as Geordie had once described her to Bart.

‘You know who?’ Bart had said, puzzled. ‘She’s Fat Lil, isn’t she?’

Fat Lil was very much the Madam. She kept the girls in order, and the place respectable, if a whorehouse could ever be called respectable. She often stood, or sat, outside, gathering custom, magnificent in her satins, with feathers in her hair, her face as highly painted as an Old Master, Geordie said, confusing Bart all over again.

Although Lil had once been on the game herself she rarely practised it now. Occasionally, if someone took her fancy when she sat outside, she invited him into her bed. ‘Lucky for some,’ laughed the diggers, since she never asked for payment—but this happened rarely.

Fred’s restless mood had grown with every step he had taken. Lately he had found that looking at women, other than Big Sister, that was, made him feel—well—strange. He had a dim memory that doing something with women was very nice, but like many other aspects of Fred’s life, his memory of exactly what that something was, was rather patchy.

Fat Lil watched him approaching. Everything about his handsome face and his beautiful body attracted her. When he drew level she returned his innocent stare with her knowing one.

‘Hello! New chum, aren’t you?’ Then she realised that he was The Wreck, sobered off, and without all the hair. A proper Apollo, as someone had once called a handsome man she had known, long ago when she had been Thinner Lil.

‘Yes,’ he said. ‘Not all that new now, though.’

‘No,’ said Fat Lil, running her eyes up and down him. ‘Like a bit of fun, would you? Free, too.’

Fred was immediately attracted by the prospect of a bit of fun.

‘Yes,’ he said, adding, ‘my name’s Fred.’ He gave her his swooning smile, even more attractive now that he had lost his beard. ‘A bit of fun sounds nice.’

‘Right, then,’ she said, taking him by the hand, for he seemed a little unsure of what to do next. She led him to her own quarters which were unexpectedly comfortable and pleasant, in contrast to the stark appointments of the girls’ rooms.

Fred thoroughly enjoyed having fun with Fat Lil. Once in her bed he found, much to his surprise, that he knew exactly what to do, and that he was rather skilful at it, judging by Fat Lil’s pleased reactions.

Fat Lil was surprised as well as pleased. She thought that although it was some time since Fred had enjoyed a bit of fun—and she was right about that—he was still very considerate of his partner, both before and after the fun. She thought this was a little surprising, too. Great hulking diggers were not usually so thoughtful in her experience.

‘Nice, wasn’t it?’ said Fred dreamily, afterwards, thinking that he had been missing a lot in life by not remembering what fun was before. He sometimes wondered why he had such difficulty in recalling things. Whenever Geordie asked him questions about the past to test whether his memory was returning, his usual reply was, ‘I can’t remember, Geordie.’

Geordie, indeed, was curious to know why it was that Fred had lost some things completely, and yet remembered others quite well. It had been obvious to him for some time that sex had flown out of Fred’s universe, and he had sometimes wondered what would happen when—and if—it flew back, and why it had disappeared at all.

That first night Fat Lil was so pleased with Fred that she allowed him, nay, encouraged him, to pleasure her for longer than usual, so it was quite late when he finally trotted off to the only home he could remember. Not that Fred had much idea of time and its importance—that was something else which he had mislaid.

Big Sister was still up when Fred rolled home, a look of stunned happiness on his face. Sam and Bart had abandoned the card game and had gone to Hyde’s for a quick drink—which always seemed to turn into a slow one, Kirstie noticed sardonically.

Geordie was teaching her to play chess. He had tried to interest Fred, but Fred had said distressfully, ‘It makes my head hurt,’ when Geordie had begun to explain some of its basics to him. The chessboard lay on a mat between them, and Fred’s arrival came at a crucial point in the game.

‘Remembered you had a home to come back to, did you, Fred?’ Kirstie said sharply to him. The sharpness was partly because Geordie had her Queen pinned down again.

Her sarcasm flew over Fred’s head. He was still in such a state of delight that nothing could disturb him.

‘Oh, yes,’ he said simply. ‘I don’t forget that.’

‘As a matter of interest,’ Kirstie asked, more to delay the fatal moment when her next move—whatever it was—would result in her losing the game than real curiosity about Fred’s doings, ‘where have you been and what have you been doing?’

Fred, who had sat down in front of the chessboard, opened his mouth to tell her about his adventure with Fat Lil—and then closed it again. He was not so far gone that he did not remember that fun with women like Fat Lil was not something which you talked about to a pure and innocent young girl like Big Sister.

Not that she didn’t know about them—you couldn’t live in the diggings and be unaware of their presence, but there was a pretence that somehow young virgins never saw them and knew nothing about them and their activities.

He desperately tried to invent some explanation of where he had spent the last three hours, and began to sweat with worry that he might come out with something wrong.

‘I…’ he began, and then, water running down his face, he pulled his handkerchief out of his pocket and tried to mop it up. He looked at the chessboard as though it might give him inspiration. Not that it did, but what it did do was drag a memory from the distant recesses of his mind.

‘If you’re playing with white, Big Sister,’ he said judiciously, ‘you could mate Geordie instead of him mating you, if you let him have your Queen, and then you moved your rook to the square opposite his King—seeing that his taking your Queen leaves your Bishop covering his King as well, and so his King has nowhere to go and you’ve won the game.’

There was an intense and stunned silence. Both players stared at the board. Geordie, an old chess hand who was certain that he had won the game, saw immediately that Fred had spotted a major weakness in his attack—probably because he had not been concentrating very hard against a novice.

He looked across at Fred. ‘Now, how the devil did you know that, Fred?’

Fred had spoken without thinking. He looked at the board and tried to think but nothing happened. The game of chess was once more as mysterious to him as it had been when Geordie had tried to teach him.

‘I don’t know,’ he said, mopping his sweating forehead with his handkerchief again. ‘Why did I say that, Geordie? Does it mean anything?’

‘Yes,’ said Geordie, ‘It means that you were once a better player than I am, and I’m a good one. Are you sure that you can’t remember anything more?”

Kirstie, who had been watching Fred and his handkerchief closely, gave a short scornful laugh. ‘I think that Fred has remembered another game,’ she said. ‘Lend me your handkerchief, Fred, I’m hot, too.’

Fred obediently handed it over to Big Sister. He invariably tried to oblige her. Too late, he remembered that Fat Lil had given it to him as a memento of their highly successful encounter, and that Lil was embroidered in one corner. It reeked of powerful perfume, too.

Kirstie saw the name and smelled the perfume.

‘Well, well, Fred Waring,’ she said softly. ‘So you ended up at Fat Lil’s Place, did you? Were you there all the time you were gone?’

Fred sighed and said stiffly, ‘A gentleman never talks of such things, Big Sister. Particularly to a good woman.’

I wonder where he dredged that piece of etiquette from, thought Geordie who was watching Big Sister’s stricken face.

‘If it is Fat Lil’s I certainly don’t want it, Fred Waring, and you can have it back,’ and she tossed it into his lap.

Fred said anxiously, ‘If you want a nice clean one which isn’t Fat Lil’s, Big Sister, I have one in my other pocket.’

Geordie didn’t know whether to laugh or to cry at this artless answer. Big Sister’s response was to snap, ‘No, thank you, Fred. I’ll take your advice about the chess game, and then leave you to talk to Geordie about those things which a gentleman never talks about to good women but can, apparently, discuss with good men.’

She rose agilely to her feet and stalked to the door of her hut where she turned to bid them both a haughty goodnight.

Fred said anxiously to Geordie, ‘Why is Big Sister so cross with me? I tried not to tell her about Fat Lil, but she insisted.’

Geordie hesitated a moment before saying, ‘I can’t explain to you now why she’s so cross with you, Fred. I don’t think that you would understand. But I’m sure that one day, perhaps soon, you might be able to work it out for yourself.’

Fred nodded. He wasn’t sure that he understood what Geordie was telling him, but said in an earnest voice, ‘I do try to be good, you know, Geordie.’

‘Yes, I do know, Fred. Don’t worry about it. Go to bed yourself. Tomorrow is another day.’

Fred nodded his head and did as he was bid, leaving Geordie to wonder what the future held for Fred and the Moore party now that Fred had remembered one of the reasons why women had been put on earth.

Chapter Three

The immediate future for Fred was a happy one. Women were attracted to him, as Fat Lil had been, and Fred Waring soon gained a name for himself as a man for the ladies, particularly since he was always gentle and courteous when with them. He never pestered them if they weren’t interested in him, but when they were, proved to be a joyful and happy lover.

In short, he took to women as he had taken to the bottle—‘As though,’ Geordie said once to Sam, ‘he’s making up for lost time.’

He also thought that, one day, Fred’s desire for women might go the same way as his desire for drink and disappear. He was still not sure how much his treatment of Fred had stopped him from drinking and how much it was due to Fred himself. Could it be that the man he had once been before he had lost his memory occasionally took him over—which he had done on the night of the chess game?