Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  The celebrated journalist peered without enthusiasm at the place where fate had brought him: that is the banks of the great Hawkesbury River. He had been delivered there by a burly young woman whose dusty white Corolla smelled of her children’s throw-up. She had not apologised for this, even when he wound down the window, and neither of them had spoken any word in the twelve hours they had travelled north from Melbourne. Only as they arrived at the little hamlet of Brooklyn, having suffered a lifetime’s worth of seatbelts slapping in the wind, did she speak to him.

  Good on you, mate, she said.

  He had time to register the high emotion, but he was already anxiously searching for what awaited him in the concrete shadow of the bridge: a pencil-thin pontoon leading to a human figure, and an aluminium dinghy, known locally as a tinny. The Corolla drove away and the traveller understood that the next stage of his trip, across deep waters, would be navigated by a youth who was now securing his fragile craft with nothing more substantial than his hairy suntanned leg.

  Up Shit Creek, he thought, without a paddle.

  The hamlet of Brooklyn had seen this before, sedentary fathers who have been bullied into taking teenage sons fishing for the day. These sons could be sulky, or bored, or Game Boy addicts, or just generally embarrassed by the ancient party’s lack of sea legs, nous, bait, tackle; they could also be, as in this particular case, solicitous.

  Come on Dad, the boy called.

  An observer watching from an unmarked car would have seen the son was a different sort entirely from the father. He was a river rat, from Broken Bay or Dangar Island possibly. You could see the story straight away. The mother had left the father years ago. She had gone to live with some careless barefooted potter or painter or dole bludger who had, to his credit, managed to raise the son to be at home on the water. That is how our doubtful hero would have liked his present situation to be understood because he was, as he shuffled towards this unknown youth, a criminal. He had never stood in this spot before and he was unaware of his destination, unaware also, of the exact nature of these tapes he had been dumped with. They had clearly been thrown together in a panic, loose pages and some batteries and two types of tape recorder to accommodate both the micro and compact cassettes. He felt no enthusiasm for this bloodless “access,” nor those notebooks, the spiral-bound kind you buy at newsagents, evidence that these so-called “informants” imagined, in their innocence, might be useful to you, mate.

  He reached the aluminium dinghy and passed his belongings into the care of the boy who would have been embarrassed to be told that he had the grace and balance of a dancer. He was perhaps sixteen, in any case legally a minor, tall and tanned with his fair curling hair lifting in the south-easterly wind which was, just now, raising the white tops of the cold bright water. The north-easterly had already travelled across the Pacific Ocean, past the old crouching beast of Lion Island and was now barrelling and bluffing up across what is called Pittwater, up to Brooklyn, under and over the bridge, seeking all those wooded bays along the way, swallowing the long wide stretch and then rushing into Berowra Waters and Pumpkin Point. Who knows where the wind doth blow? There would be very few waterways or mangrove swamps where an observer (if there was such a malevolent entity) would not see the water lift as it rushed across a shallow inlet of rippled sand.

  The boy had a harder face than the curls might suggest, a little slit of a mouth that twisted in a sort of grin. Dad, he said.

  The man hesitated. He was a most unlikely outlaw. Indeed, one might pity him his ineptitude, his nervousness around the water.

  The boy had the box of tapes and papers in the boat and now, with his dinghy still untethered, took hold of his passenger by the arm and shoulder and the man then knew himself with the boy’s hand, and was aware of his own age, frailty, softness. He sat heavily and the boy passed him an old hat and he immediately pulled it over his head and hunched down as the motor came to life and they headed out under the low bridge, Highway 1 in fact, which carried car loads of free citizens up the North Coast or south to Sydney where, presumably, people still sat in the Wentworth Hotel and drank champagne and ate nibbles and talked about all the crap and krill caught in the Murdoch filters. It was unlikely his photograph would be in The Australian just yet but they had some beauties in their files, Felix the rat, Felix the mole, Felix the pervert with his dirty raincoat.

  “Feels, Feels,” the Murdoch guy had shouted. “Look this way. Felix.”

  Fuck you, he thought.

  The wind at this hour was cold and the passenger wrapped his op-shop wardrobe tight around him, the old grey trousers, red checked work shirt, green tweed jacket, not nearly thick enough to keep him warm. There was a light chop and the boat rose and slammed and he was frightened that it would become rougher. Truth be told, he would have preferred the smell of throw-up to this fresh clean river air which promised nothing but discomfort and loneliness. It was of course beautiful, with stern khaki bush slashed with verticals in pink and white and grey and now and then the impasto yellow sandstone glowing ecstatically in the morning sun. It was like a picture postcard but it was not a picture postcard. The boat rose and slammed and the water was as hard as concrete and it was a great inhuman river and it opened its wide throat to him, and somewhere down to the left was Berowra Waters where he had once lunched at a famous restaurant of the same name. He had been ferried there by his sybaritic old mate who had been returning a certain favour. He had worked his way from the oysters to the quenelles to the soft chocolate pudding with the golden Château Climens which he had raised to the darkening afternoon and said what he had always said on such occasions: I wouldn’t be dead for quids which, translated roughly, meant there was no money he could be offered that would persuade him to be deceased. It had taken a single envelope of cash from Woody Townes to prove him wrong.

  He observed, with something of a start, that there was no wine in the dinghy, nothing but him, the boy, and the box which was now getting wet. Fuck you, he thought. Would he really be expected to continue writing, not only without a human source, but without resources of the liquid kind? Also, it was unlikely he would get any more money. Why would he continue with a book which was legally owned by Woody Townes?

  Yet he did as Gaby’s anonymous “supporters” arranged for him to do. Because he had a fragile ego and they seemed to hold him in esteem. Because he had harboured a fugitive and was now a criminal and frightened of arrest. It seemed they would prevent that. More particularly, and knowledgeably, he understood that his own Australian government would never protect him from extradition and whatever variety of torture the Americans might decide was now due to him. Was he hysterical? Most likely. He was certainly not a brave or even good man. Indeed, he thought, he was a rat, a pathetic cringing thing being ferried across a wide expanse of water that would as soon rush down his panicking throat and flood his lungs. He sat too far forward and was drenched, and the journey seemed to continue a great time, and he entered a nightmare zone in which there was, for all the engine noise, no movement through space, the type of sensation that might, in other circumstances, have had him reaching for a Xanax, but there was no Xanax here, nor would there be.

  By the time it occurred to him that he should pay attention to the formation of these little bays and islands, they had already entered a tributary and he realised he had no clue how to return to Brooklyn or Highway 1. A city of five million lay just an hour away. Who would ever guess it? They were now chugging along what might be the southern bank of a creek, or perhaps it was the eastern bank. Everything was in deep shadow and the water was very still and translucent green, and the boy throttled back the engine and drifted very slowly into a mangrove swamp.

  High tide, observed the boy. He would understand that later, but at the moment it seemed like a mistake.

  The boy, most likely, could already imagine mud crabs and flatheads to be caught and eaten but the writer saw mosquitoes and wondered how he could bribe the boy to bring him wine. The water was n
ow shallow and coppery and they slid beneath the mangroves, ducking very low, until Felix could see, ahead, a bare shelf of yellow clay. The boy gunned the engine and the boat rose, stopped fast in the sand.

  The boy removed the outboard and carried it up the path together with what was presumably its fuel tank. Then he returned and gripped the boat by its bow and, with his passenger still seated like a grand poobah, managed to drag it up onto the shore.

  There glowering Felix alighted and clutched at his cardboard box. With the load thus lightened the boy was able to pull the tinny so it slithered rapidly across the swampy grasses where, finally, he turned it upside down. Then the pair of them set off up a narrow path, the boy carrying the outboard and the fuel and Felix’s heart lifting as he thought, perhaps he will take pity and stay with me a day or two.

  THE PATH LED the pair of them up along the contour of a ridge to the foot of a weathered wooden staircase with open treads. Even as his companion stood to one side and encouraged the fugitive to go ahead, the latter had no sense that he had in fact “arrived.” The steps were for the most part overgrown with wild lantana, and if he noticed, in the deep shadow, a set of sturdy posts such as you might use to support a rainwater tank, he was too alarmed by the jungly tangle to pay attention. He believed the pretty red flowers with yellow hearts to be the habitat of shellback ticks.

  Beside the banister grew a large rough-barked tree, close enough for him to touch and to note, without enthusiasm, the line of ants streaming upwards in the twisted valleys. This was an ironbark tree he decided. If it had not been an ironbark it would have had to be a ghost gum or manna gum. He acknowledged no other species.

  He was tired and hot and his heavy lids and fleshy nose shone with perspiration, yet when he arrived on the threshold he was not particularly giddy. This one-room hut, which would later shake and shudder in the westerly winds (rippling in the gusts like a sailing boat), was on that sunny morning open to the benign south-easterly, and when the dishevelled fugitive arrived at the top of the steps he was surprised to find his quarters hospitable. Of the many things his eyes might alight upon, he did see a garden spade, hanging from a hook inside the door but he overlooked the words “Shit, Horse” burned into its wooden shaft. There was so much else to look at. The glass-less “window” above the old porcelain sink was occupied by a huge elephant-skinned angophora (ghost gum, he thought). The smooth pink and grey bark was luminous in the sun and the characteristic rusty blemish on the trunk harmonised so well with the stained sink that the latter seemed artfully intentional.

  He kept his box clutched against his soft stomach, staring at the tree which he would later know in quite another way.

  I’ll take that, the boy said. Meaning the visitor’s possessions.

  But the man’s belligerent attention had now shifted to some half-dozen shelves that had been fixed in place beside the window. On one of the lower shelves, abutting an assortment of canned beans and Campbell’s soups, stood a number of four-litre casks labelled “Hunter Valley Red,” a description that gave no assurance that the wine inside had not been oaked with a shovel full of chips, stirred with a garden rake, and strained to reach its present “market niche.” The visitor made a dove sound. His cheeks hollowed (briefly) and his mouth puckered (privately). He placed his box on the rough counter top beside the sink and, being unconscious of his own sigh, plunged his hand deep in his pocket.

  Don’t wash the eggs, the boy said, not until you want to use them.

  What?

  Eggs.

  Felix then saw, beside his box of evidence, a dark blue plastic ice-cream tub containing a motley collection of eggs—small, large, brown, white, not one of which was untouched by shit. He stared at his guide solemnly. He nodded, to register his understanding, as he would soon nod in response to fresh apples, pumpkins.

  Typewriter, the boy said, scratching at his calf and leaving contrails of white across the brown skin.

  How had he not seen it? Whoever had prepared the accommodation had positioned the machine thoughtfully in the middle of a folding table of the type once available for $10 at any army disposals. Had they known it was for him? Had the “supporters” read his books? What did any of them really think about what they were doing?

  An Olivetti fucking Valentine identical to the one he had destroyed in 1975.

  It was of course a bright red little portable. Now he removed it from its sturdy plastic case and gently touched the spools of ribbon there revealed.

  He turned to the boy who grinned.

  Of course, thought the fugitive, there is no electricity. He sat in the awful canvas chair and selected a single type bar, the letter L, raising it from its nest, examining it so closely that the boy might have been reminded of a naturalist tenderly banding the thin legs and long, agile toes of a white-faced heron.

  Having, in the course of his hard-typing years, broken the fonts from the type bars of so many Olivetti portables, the fugitive was at once astonished that such a thing might still exist and touched by its frailty and appalled by its clear inability to withstand what he must now do to it.

  While turning his wide bookish back to the curious boy, he plunged his right hand in his pocket and removed a sheaf of that distinctively slippery Australian currency, clearly designed for sneaky business.

  The boy, meanwhile, had placed reams of paper on the table, found the mosquito coils, had picked up an orange pumpkin from a pile in the corner of the room. Clearly it had been feasted on by possums so he did what anyone else would have done i.e. he threw it out the window. As there was no glass or screen to impede its progress the pumpkin crashed like a tumbling wombat through the bush.

  Of course the fugitive was alarmed, but only very briefly. His greatest concern was that he would be compelled to drink inferior wine. So as the pumpkin exploded on the rocks he revealed his hand.

  The boy saw the slippery money and was suddenly in a frantic hurry to get away. She’ll be right, mate, he said. Fridge, cooker, matches, gas, he continued. The old man came at him with his legal tender, red and orange like a bird-of-paradise flower.

  Water, the boy cried, and turned the tap on and off.

  You could do me a favour, the fugitive said, perhaps too desperately.

  The boy held up his hands and pushed at the air between them. I’m fine, mate.

  Could you get me a case of McLaren Vale shiraz, and drop it back.

  I’m sorry.

  I’ll make it worth your while.

  I’m only sixteen.

  Get your brother, anyone.

  Mate, no, I can’t come back.

  I’m not going to see you again?

  That’s the idea, mate.

  But someone else is going to come?

  I couldn’t say.

  Why not for Chrissake?

  Couldn’t say.

  Couldn’t bloody say?

  Kero for the lamps, he said. My ride is here. I got to go.

  Take a twenty anyway.

  Good on you. Mate. Good luck and that.

  And with that he was out and gone, tripping lightly down the stairs, leaping like a goat down the path, bounding so fast that the new resident, following him, bravely if not elegantly, arrived in time to see a tinny was in the process of nosing out of the mangroves.

  Help, he called.

  The sun glinted on the aluminium and broke into the shade. He removed his shoes and dropped his trousers and with his long jacket flapping in such a way as to make his sturdy white legs, his point of greatest physical insecurity, appear even shorter than normal, he set off beneath the mangroves, mud squelching obscenely around his urban toes.

  And so it was that the “most controversial journalist of his generation” was abandoned, untrousered, like some creature in a Sidney Nolan painting (The old man who was up bathing himself in the dam) and he soon saw, through the light-netted mangrove leaves, another aluminium dinghy and a woman with long blonde hair, like Julie Christie, he imagined, or at least Celine as she set o
ff to lead the revolution from the front ranks of the 1972 Melbourne Moratorium. Squatting he could see her, the tanned skin, the hair flying behind.

  Fuck fuck fuck. He proceeded up the narrow track carrying his trousers, socks, his shoes, suddenly aware of how soft he had become, a frail old fellow pricked by sticks, stones, and those little stabbing bindi-eyes which he had thought existed only in suburban lawns.

  Finally, standing at the open window, with his trousers still flung across his shoulder, he stretched his legs sufficiently to wash his feet in the sink. He managed to find a tumbler, open a wine cask, and pull out its wrinkled concertinaed genitalia. Shuddering, he poured a purple glassful and then found, in the small gas refrigerator, a lump of cheddar the size of a house brick. He cut himself a slice, and was about to taste it when, with a great rush of winds, a fucking kookaburra arrived from nowhere, took his cheese in its bucket beak, and flew out the door.

  He remained then at the sink, for a long time, looking balefully out through the foliage to the blue glint of the water. He accustomed himself to the wine. He was a highly specialised creature, he thought, sometimes, on a good day, capable of a single function, not much more.

  He dried his feet with his trousers and laid them carefully in a parallelogram of sunshine beside the desk. He then wound a single sheet of paper into the Valentine and found it far from blank.

  To Mr. Felix Moore, posing as a radical, it read, and continued thus: We know exactly what you did and did not do in 1975. Wouldn’t your fans and readers be shocked to discover their great radical didn’t have the balls. You were just like our parents: down on the ground crying how unfair it was.

  The roller of the Olivetti turned, thus revealing:

  It won’t help us to reveal your sad moral failure, but it would help you to honour the gift you have here been given. This woman is a human being and it will be your honour to celebrate her real life without hysteria.