Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  Mrs. Matovic resigned from Mario Bros. She took up Wizard’s Crown and hogged it so much Peli, direct from work at six o’clock, had to play it with her. Meg was way too flirty for her age. Groan. She never knew a black person in her life. Scream. She absolutely loved them. She got poetic about the Samoans’ size and colour and their frizzy hair. She wanted to live in the tropics, and always had. She and Frederic were going to run away to Nimbin and live off papaya and “be really healthy like Samoans.”

  Peli had been back to Samoa only once. He had been pissed off beyond endurance by houses with no windows.

  Gaby noted Meg laid her hand on Peli’s knee so when Solosolo stormed outside and slammed the door, well, of course she knew the problem i.e. Meg was a hundred. Peli was nineteen. She followed her best friend across The Avenue to the place where she had once had rabies.

  She’s awful, she said. I’m sorry.

  Solosolo spun around and her face was bunched up like a fist.

  Don’t you shit on my brother, she said.

  I didn’t shit on anyone.

  Telescum. Teleprofit. You never bloody stop.

  So?

  Didn’t you notice but? My brother bloody works for Telecom.

  He’s Peli. He’s not Telecom.

  Don’t make me hit you, bitch.

  Soley, I’m your friend. Please don’t call me that.

  Well, you get Frederic to show him some respect.

  We do.

  You’re going to put 240 volts down the phone line? That’s your plan. You’re going to kill Telecom workers.

  That was a joke.

  Why do you think our father brought us to this awful palagi country?

  Gaby saw the point of view. But she also knew how much her Samoan friends didn’t like Samoa. Didn’t like it here. Couldn’t stand it there. Women had to spend their whole life making food, all day, every damn day, hot rocks, fire, how many Samoans does it take to get a pizza?

  OK, I’ll be the bunny: why did your father bring you here?

  Shut up. Peli did what was asked of him. He got the education. He got the job. So when you call it Telescum you piss on my whole family.

  No.

  And then you make him go and rob Telecom.

  I make him?

  You think he likes Frederic? You’re joking. Frederic’s just your pimp. You sit beside Peli in the van. And then you piss on him. You’re lucky I’m a Christian. Soley’s eyes were black, unknowable. You’re lucky I’m a Christian or I would bite your pretty face.

  Gaby thought, she has a temper. It will pass. But when she came back into the sleepout she saw all the bullshit in Peli’s eyes. Before she went outside she had been sitting on the floor beside him, but now she moved away. He looked at her all mulish with his heavy chin and fluttery eyes. What had she ever said or done to make him act like that?

  So now she stopped sitting in the front seat and then, without a word being spoken, they were at war. Why? What right? He drove stop and start, went too fast, scraping along a tram on Swanston Street.

  They had all—everyone agreed—retired from trashing so what then happened should never have happened. Dad went direct to Peli. If Peli did it, he did it for himself, but then Frederic could not let him run it on his own. Then Gaby had to go. Then Solosolo came too, acting as if it was all Gaby’s fault. Well, hello. Who was paying Peli?

  Frederic rode in the front. Solo and Gaby were not talking but they had to ride together, alone, between the racks of cabling equipment, wrapping themselves in mover’s quilts and straps. Peli made the ride as nasty as he could, taking them through seasick curves. At the end of the journey they hit a speed bump and they were in the lane behind the East Kew exchange. Gaby had big black yard bags. When Frederic popped the lock Peli’s face was imprisoned by the Tetris glow.

  The trashing at East Kew was fast and easy except, as was made clear later, something happened to Peli while the others were inside. The police had cruised past the lane, seen the van, seen the illuminated black face, and come to have a “chat.” They were polite, allegedly they “made inquiries.” They were informed that Peli was “waiting to drive his boss home.” It was three in the morning but Peli was a Telecom employee in a Telecom uniform and a Telecom van. The police did not regard this as “suspicious activity.” If they parked their car in the street, it was only so they could buy some Cokes and Chiko Rolls. They were eating them when they heard the van engine and saw the “vehicle” emerge from the back lane faster than they would have expected, given the size of the speed bump. The “black gentleman,” spotting the police car, waved his hand in greeting.

  He had no-one in the passenger seat. To the police this meant the boss was bullshit. They observed the van “proceed in a southerly direction,” at an estimated sixty kilometres per hour, and they were wondering, they later said, what to make of the absence of the boss, when the van made a right-hand turn and, as it vanished from sight, the driver accelerated so hard the squealing tyres could be heard from blocks away.

  They turned on all the bells and whistles and set off in pursuit which had the comic effect of making the Telecom van accelerate even more. Clearly it was not rational for the driver to expect that his Japanese bread box might outrun a Holden Commodore VN SS, but that is what he seemed intent on, heading along Studley Park Road then left onto Walmer Street where it became clear he was unstable, for he chose, he actually selected, the Yarra Boulevard, a serpentine progression of loops that had already, two weeks ago, brought a Porsche unstuck.

  The magistrate asked if they had considered slowing.

  No, they had wished to apprehend the suspects.

  Suspect, the magistrate corrected.

  Yes, Your Honour.

  Inside the dark van, Gaby could feel the fury, see the flashing lights, as they began to tip. She accepted a blanket and wrapped herself head to toe. Then they lay together, the three of them, clinging onto the wire-mesh door of the equipment cage.

  Frederic said, Here it is.

  Then they felt, very briefly, their stomachs float, and then their bodies became hostile to each other, on and on, then stillness and a loud hissing.

  And it was Solosolo who was on her feet first, who kicked the back door open to confront a bright-lit stage.

  Solosolo twisted her ankle. Gaby knew she would be blamed. Frederic saw Peli, his eyes closed against the quartz-white glare, by the riverbank. He was holding his hands in the air, slowly turning around as if to show that he had no weapon. He did 360 degrees then kept on going. Then, with his broad beautiful back to the police, he jogged twenty paces to the Yarra River and dived in.

  Frederic, whose high forehead revealed a single trickle of bright red blood, grasped his glittery fingers behind his vampire back and slowly followed to the bank where, not having yet become “the prisoner,” he was free to stare at the water, black as anthracite, the lethal current no more visible than electricity beneath its gleaming skin.

  THE HAWKESBURY RIVER writer-in-residence had made himself at home, which is not to say that he appeared physically comfortable, but that he had a folding chair, and had become familiar with a domestic situation that required him, while clad in unflattering boxer shorts and a matted sweater with unravelling sleeves, to lay his trousers on a rock to dry. His beard had filled in somewhat, and his hair had reached a stage where an undergarment was required to keep it out of his watery eyes. Also, he had a dog, which was in itself sufficient to make him appear (if he was ever unfortunate enough to be observed) a local. The dog was the right sort, a short-legged blue-heeler bitch. Of course she was not his dog at all. She was an opportunist who had the manners to remain and doze a while after she had eaten. He called her Lizzie.

  It had long been the fugitive’s “character” to eschew all vanity, and yet he would have admitted, had he been caught in the act, that he was indeed keen to tan his city legs. This was not vanity, but part of blending in, and with time his knees acquired a certain smooth brown texture such as might be expe
cted of a river rat.

  On the other hand, of course, he had the larger of his two cassette players in his lap and he was zipping back and forth through what had once been eighty-five metres of screeching tape searching for a few centimetres where Celine was not talking about her marriage. The tape had been accidentally exposed on a sunny windowsill, so the length to which it had been stretched was anybody’s guess. But somewhere (fast forward, pause, rewind, play) he expected to find an account of the death by drowning of a young Samoan. In his mind’s eye he could already see the police car with its blue disco lights flashing in the dark black skin of the Yarra River. He listened with his head cocked, at the same time keeping a windblown eye on the Hawkesbury River, the ultramarine sky, the hard blue water, the tiny chop, numerous anonymous craft, any one of which might contain his enemies. Also, the water police were out today and there was a single Tupperware cruiser put-putting out beyond the mangroves.

  None of this was as he would have imagined, for the terrifying truth (it seemed) was that he was so unsuited to solitude that he would have almost welcomed a visitor. Now, at the sight of a heavy-set dark-haired man crossing the deck of the Tupperware cruiser, seeing the bright orange heels of his sneakers, he felt such a wild surge of dangerous hope that this might be Woody Townes.

  Celine was talking about her marriage and Gaby’s difficulties at school and he could choose to look at that as narcissistic, or consider that she was being a better human being than he was. What had he done, once, to acknowledge his missing wife and children? Was this because he was an arsehole? Or was it beyond the habits of reportage? Or was it that when his family threw him out he just closed the door and sealed it? He had no tolerance for pain.

  A light aircraft passed over, too high to interest him. Meanwhile Celine was talking about acting in commercials, and what a relief that was for her.

  The man on the cruiser was a dead ringer for Woody Townes.

  Was he waiting for Woody to rescue him, even when he knew Woody was his enemy? Felix Moore assumed he was now known to the government of the United States and although it seemed hysterical, it might not be fantastical to discover that he could be rendered and imprisoned until he betrayed Gaby, even if he had been unable to find any sign of her expected animus against that nation, which had suffered, so to speak, collateral damage. It was not fanciful to think that paid mercenaries might strip him naked, put him on suicide watch so he could not even kill himself. Not so many days previously he had tried to catch a fish with a handline. He was, as always, inexpert, and the sight of the worm’s response to the hook filled him with fear of pain. He tortured the worm and drowned it and didn’t catch a thing.

  Now he hoped the Duracells would run out so he would have an excuse to wave for help, or Woody would save him, as he saved him before, rescued him from his own reckless pursuit of principle, helped him avoid his own destruction, pulled him back from a situation his conscience had demanded he embrace.

  Fast forward. Play. Where else (the voice groaned basso)? Where else but Carlton would it be a big scandale to be cast in a commercial? Fast forward. Her tribe had sat in a circle on the dusty floor and excommunicated her from the collective. Only the junkie would not raise his hand in condemnation. Stop. Fast forward. Play. In the straight world, meanwhile, the commercial was a big success. Forward (squawking). Play. She had secretly (seeeeee-creeet-ly) deposited half the money from the commercial in her own savings account. How else would she ever be able to afford to run away? Fast forward. Play. Sandy had caught her. Henceforth he was good. She was bad. She was marooned in Coburg. Fuck. Fast forward. Play. She had to act the wifey with the branch members who could never seem to meet at the electoral office but must come back to the house. Woody was on the finance committee. Arsehole, she knew he had engineered the move to Coburg.

  Without pausing the machine, the fugitive rose from his seat. When he turned to pay attention to his drying laundry, he revealed the back of his brown legs to be pale as the belly of a flounder. He turned the damp side of his trousers to the afternoon sun.

  Peli was about to drown. He had found that spot before then lost it.

  Matrimonial difficulty had caused Celine to double her sleeping pills which made her groggy all day but wide awake at 2 a.m. when the police called. How come Sando didn’t stir? she would have liked to know. The voice on the phone asked her was she Celine Baillieux. Yes she was. This was Sergeant someone of the Victoria Police. Did she know where her daughter was right now?

  She thought rape. She could not say the word. Her throat closed over. She was drugged, and confused, also angry that Sando could lie naked like that, chaste and naked with a pillow across his head. She said she would come to the station straight away. Later he would blame her for leaving him to sleep. It was an aggressive act, he would say.

  She rushed from the front gate, thinking she had failed to make her daughter sufficiently afraid of life. She drove along Moreland Road and headed south on High Street then into wide empty Hoddle Street where the railway line ran parallel beneath its lethal web of wire. The grass in the median strip was mangy as a worn-out dog. She remembered passing Ramsden Street where she recognised the site of the Hoddle Street Massacre: that banal suburban railway crossing, that dreary low billboard from which hiding place the assassin had shot thirty people, one by one. She was spooked by the low dark roofs beneath the poison sky, the plain unlovely park, all these somehow melded with her daughter’s fate.

  In the twenty minutes it took to arrive at Gaby’s side, her head swam with images of evil things. She relived the night Dominick Swayne was murdered, stabbed to death in the backseat of a parked car. She had not known him, but she knew the poor pregnant girl who did it, and when the girl was arrested Celine was taken to Russell Street police headquarters, and that hospital in Commercial Road where they injected 10 ml of Valium in her bottom. That had happened just up the road, two kilometres from this police station, slick and modern as a bank, with blue and white checks like the band on a police hat.

  Her commercials had cursed her, made her famous. Now she fretted someone at the station would identify her. MP’s wife. MP’s daughter. She was both relieved and disappointed to be a nobody and be made to wait on those long rows of vinyl chairs backed against the untidy noticeboard with its twenty missing persons, three of whom were Aboriginal, she had counted, and remembered, a chaos of bright-coloured violence, alcohol, police recruiting, all in contradiction of the bleak corporate order of the waiting room. There was a front desk and five tall dark wooden doors, all locked. In another situation they might have suggested farce. From these portals there now surged bright-eyed graffiti rats, accompanied by their pissed-off parents. Celine’s name was called as “Baily.” She was escorted through a locked door by a female officer or constable with a flustered red appearance. The actress observed that she had a particular way of doing “cop face,” speaking very slowly, very deep. Here, in the ashy air of the inner corridors, the policewoman was not prepared to answer her questions. The sergeant would inform her of the facts directly. Celine passed the statuesque Samoan girl standing behind a glass pane, looking out as at a distant ocean view. Her handsome face betrayed not even a flicker of recognition.

  The interview room, so called, smelled of tomato sauce like the Caulfield races. Mrs. Baily was to wait for the sergeant there. She had noted that there was no desk and that the chairs were chaotically arranged. She managed to observe the Big Mac box lying on the floor before she saw, like a discarded blanket thrown into a chair, the child she had brought into the world. Gaby’s face was burnished, closed. There was a scratch below her eye.

  What happened, darling?

  Where is Frederic?

  Has someone hurt you, darling?

  What have they told you?

  Gabrielle, has anybody harmed you?

  Harmed me? she said indignantly. You haven’t got a clue. They’ve taken Frederic.

  Very well, darling, I’ll get someone.

  Gaby
wound herself in her blanket and let her mother discover the door was locked.

  We had an accident. OK? We rolled the van.

  What van?

  Solosolo’s brother ran away.

  Who has a van?

  I think he might be dead, she said.

  Pause. Rewind. Play. I think he might be dead.

  No-one told Celine that the dead boy loved her daughter.

  She must not try to hold her child. She offered a small pack of tissues and was pleased it was accepted. She told her that she loved her, which was like throwing wet potato into boiling oil.

  It’s not about you. Leave me alone.

  The sergeant would later be tabloid-famous, but on the night of Peli’s death he did not look like a candidate for jail. He was a handsome sort of man, whose greying close-barbered looks would have suited the pilot of an Ansett flight, or one of those ship’s captains they had once used to promote Ardath cigarettes. He did not like Celine Baillieux.

  It’s dangerous out here, Mum.

  I know.

  You know do you? Is that a fact?

  He did not require an answer. He lectured Celine about all the kids he knew who never had much of a chance, Mum. Their parents were poor and ignorant and alcoholic. But what about this little girl of hers? She has been an accessory to Break and Enter. Or hasn’t she had a chance to tell you that part? He bet Celine would know a terrific lawyer. Frank Galbally was probably a mate of hers? Was Frank her mate?

  Celine had not been thinking of a lawyer. She had imagined she was there to witness him interview her daughter. This was apparently not the right thing to say.

  Anything else I should do for you, Mum? Interview? Park your car perhaps?

  She said she hadn’t meant it like that.