An Innocent Masquerade

Sam decided that the new chum was to be put to work at once, and Fred, who had heard him tell Big Sister to feed him, was anxious to oblige him, never mind that Sam and Bart had thrown him into the water.

Fred had suffered from cramps in the night, and had begun to shout wildly in his sleep. Geordie, who shared a tent with Sam and Bart—Emmie and Kirstie slept in the hut for safety—heard him, and went outside to look after him.

He was thrashing blindly about. Geordie put a gentle hand on his shoulder and asked, ‘What is it, Fred?’

Fred opened his eyes, clutched at Geordie’s wrist and gasped, ‘It’s the tiger, Geordie! The tiger’s after Fred. Don’t let it catch him.’

‘Don’t worry, Fred. Sam, Bart and I will keep the tiger away. I’ll fetch you a drink of water and then you must try to sleep.’

‘Thank you, Geordie. Don’t let it catch you.’

‘It won’t, Fred.’

Fred drank the water down obediently and went back to sleep. The tiger was to run through his dreams for months but he never woke up shouting about it again, as though Geordie’s reassurance had made it toothless.

He enjoyed his breakfast. His head had cleared even more, and while he sat eating and drinking he really saw them all for the first time.

Sam was fair, well built and powerful, both in mind and body, the true leader of the party. Bart was dark and ox-like. He depended on Sam and Geordie for leadership and advice, but he was a tireless worker—and reliable. He always did what he said he would. All three of them were dressed in guernseys and moleskins, and Sam and Bart were heavily whiskered.

Geordie was small and sallow and, Fred came to understand later, somewhat sardonic. He was one of the few men in the diggings who was clean-shaven. His eyes were watchful, occasionally moving over Fred, assessing him slightly. Fred didn’t mind this. Geordie was his friend. He hadn’t thrown Fred about as the other two had. Geordie had given him these nice warm clothes, and had been kind: the tiger had been chasing Fred in the night but Geordie had made it go away.

The diggings were alive with noise and movement while Big Sister and Emmie Jackson handed round the grub. Big Sister, Fred thought, was a puzzle. She was nasty-nice. True, she gave Fred his grub, but she wasn’t pleased with him, Fred knew.

On the other hand, Fred could see how well she looked after everybody, even though she snapped at them, and cuffed large Pat and small Herbie when they were naughty. She had nice, fair hair even if it was screwed up. Her eyes were nice, too, bluey-green. They reminded Fred of someone, but every time he tried to remember who that someone was, he felt so sad and ill that he gave up trying to remember. He thought that he didn’t really want to know if knowing made his head hurt.

Big Sister looked after baby Rod, giving him his food, tying him up to the kitchen-table leg with his reins so that he couldn’t stray and get lost or hurt. In his new awareness he also saw that she looked after Emmie Jackson and her baby as well. It was a pity that Big Sister was so cross at times, particularly with Fred.

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.’