Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  OK, she said, I’ll think. You better go home for now.

  Back home the rooms were dark and empty and loud with rain. I did not know what I would do. I was angry, and I was frightened I had shown her Frederic’s secrets. There was cask wine on the fridge and I filled a tumbler. It was red and bitter and I didn’t like it but afterwards I slept and dreamed. I was writing in some amazing language which was also, somehow, music and a kind of graph. The object was to make the graph go high. I was actually programming and playing the game as well and suddenly I understood it was all so easy and the graph started to go high, then it went higher and higher and I felt something so maximum, elegance, perfection, perhaps I gasmed, it was like that. The graph went off of the top of the screen and a voice said, You have broken through!! And I thought, I have got him back again, I have found my hedgehog boy. And I woke up, so sad and disappointed to learn I had killed Peli and it was all crock, crap, disgustitude inside the empty house.

  MY LIPS in the bathroom mirror were dry and scuzzy with red wine. I splashed my puffy eyes then air-conditioned them with the open fridge. It was eight o’clock at night but I left the blinds as they had been all day, drawn against the heat. The phone had been ringing through my sleep and now it began again. As before, there was no message, not from my mother who was shooting at Mount Macedon, not from the Great Sando who was at a conference called Socialism in Shorts. I suppose that was meant to be lighthearted, in any case he would not be home tonight. I collected the coins from his office floor, enough for pizza.

  Then bam bam bam on the front door and Miss Aisen called my mother’s name and I was Gregor Samsa in the dark, peering through the chink below the blinds. There she was: sodium-yellow in the electric light, sun dress, wiry legs, homemade hair. She left the porch, and passed through the squeaky side gate. Then bang bang on the back door.

  Gaby, she called. I know you’re there, she said. The door rattled in its frame.

  When she finally gave up and walked away I knew I was in more trouble than before. She would tell my parents I was a criminal.

  So I stole Dad’s parliamentary envelopes. I locked myself in the bathroom and used the toilet lid to write snail mail to Frederic Matovic c/o post offices in Nimbin, Uki, Murwillumbah, Byron Bay, Bangalow, needles in haystacks, all the hippie towns I knew in northern New South Wales. I begged him to come back. I had one more glass of wine and imagined I was doing stuff with him.

  So I slept.

  Next morning, my mouth an old carpet, my stomach acid, fuck my life, I kept the blinds down and windows closed against Miss Aisen. I cooked eggs they made me retch. I went back to my room and smoothed out the envelopes which had got all crinkled in the night. Then came three sharp knocks on the bedroom window. Thank God, Troy. He would go to the post office for me.

  I lifted the blind and it was Aisen. Perhaps I should have cried or charmed her but I fled to the bathroom and locked the door and finally she went away.

  Later I looked in Sandy’s drawer for stamps. I had a glass of wine and cleaned the crud off my teeth. All I thought was, Undertoad, where are you? I tore out the best pictures from my Macworlds. I collected wine cartons in the kitchen and a Stanley knife and a Sharpie and a roll of silver gaffer tape. By lunchtime—this will sound insane—I had made a life-size model of the Mac IIx. This was desperate, but it was how my dad and I spoke when we loved each other, sitting on the floor, eating pizza, drinking Coke, making stuff all Saturday afternoon. It was what they call a cry for help. Ha-ha.

  I was starving and vomitous but I constructed a cardboard monitor, a keyboard, twin drives with Apple logos. I made three realistic floppy disks. I had it completed, on his desk by midafternoon when he walked through the door in his socialist shorts and thongs. I was hiding in the corner behind the sofa so I saw him smile. I jumped him and he laughed and hugged me and I thought, yes! He will definitely buy me a computer now. He ordered pizza and Coke and then I unplugged the phone so Aisen could not tell him I had broken the laws of the Commonwealth of Australia.

  But then he washed my dirty eggy plates and pans which I understood to mean he would not buy me what I required.

  You need to get out in the sunshine more, he said, and that was the same thing said another way. Why bother being surprised? We were always broke, but I was also a wilful little cow, so I persisted. When the Turkish pizza arrived I transferred my votive object to the kitchen table. When Sando laughed, I hoped. And I kept on hoping, even while he was saying no in various different ways e.g. wibbling at me about how pale I was. You need to get out in the sunshine, etc. as if getting skin cancer was good for my future. I should go to the Coburg pool, he said. I did not tell him the Samoan girls were waiting there to bash me up.

  I asked could I have a glass of wine. He said just one. He had two or three himself. He called me darls. He was upset my mother could not get a day off the shoot to appear with him at an event. The greenies were being unreasonable. He had to demonstrate to them, again, that he was publicly opposing MetWat’s plan to concrete the Merri Creek. If it had been Greeks or Turks inviting him, he would have been there like a shot, but these were “environmentalists” which was code for white people. Of course they were his constituents, and if they wanted him and his wife to come and plant some trees, then he better bloody go.

  I was a treacherous jealous little thing, so I laughed at the idea of my mother planting trees. He told me not to, but he couldn’t stop smiling. So I was into it. I laughed so violently I blew Coca-Cola out my nose. He said that was enough but I invited him to picture my mother planting trees, in a fury with everything which would not submit to her, not just the spade, the earth, the soil itself would play an evil force.

  He thought I was hilarious. His upper lip lengthened. His nostrils contracted. Celine loved the country, I told him, but her love involved a lot of glass, one to hold the wine, the other to make a window that would keep all the nasty bugs outside.

  No, he said. You must not speak about your mother in this way.

  How could I not love him? He was like this with everything in life. You should have seen how he was with his electorate, shy smile, nasal Arabic, lumpy Greek. He was tall and strong. He looked great in shorts and when he listened he crossed his arms and hunched himself down and folded himself into the other person’s life.

  So I said I would go tree planting instead of Celine. Looking back now I see this was the beginning of my life, at the stage when he was still my hero, where I would do anything for him, even let him kill me in a car accident. Early next morning we were in the Volvo dodging the murderous trucks and semitrailers on Carr Street, speeding to meet the volunteers. He was an awful driver. He should have watched the road. Instead he pointed out the highlights of the mullocky landscape, backhoes and cranes intent on turning the unloved stream into a proper drain. It was just after dawn. Scavenging seagulls rode high in the thermals above the rotten-smelling dumps.

  We found the white people were all gathered, in all their daggy glory, beside the degraded stinky creek which was to lead me on my path. I only pretended to be excited to carry a tray of poa tussocks. A boy with unfortunate hippie hair was trying to balance three mattocks and a crowbar.

  I was not even paying real attention. The embankment was not a real riverbank, but a mess made by bulldozed mud and ancient garbage. From here you could look down to see the poor fucked Merri Creek threading through the body of Coburg like the vein in the dead body of a prawn. The descent was steep, shoulder-high with fennel. There was a spewy smell. Factories occupied the high ground above the creek, below the power pylons. The actual watercourse was marked by abandoned cars and broken industrial equipment including a sabotaged dragline crane with its long steel boom twisted like a swan’s neck.

  The heat was already murderous and although the sky was dirty grey I could feel it burning through my long-sleeved shirt.

  As I came down to the level of the watercourse, to the natural bank, I saw sheets of burlap, all neatly pegged to the
ground. Here, amongst the smell and the squalling seagulls, a man and woman were working neatly and swiftly, with the confident rhythm of gardeners deadheading perennials. They were cutting holes where my poa grass would go. Today I was a good girl, eager to help my daddy help them.

  Gaby, Miss Aisen cried.

  I was so ashamed I could not even look at them. But they were rushing me, laying down their tools, relieving me of my grasses, leading me off the mulch sheet to a tiny tartan rug. Here Miss Aisen laid her hand against my cheek and sort of patted me like she had earlier patted my head.

  Have a choccy bickie, she said.

  I said I just had breakfast. My saintly father stood dangerously close, along from us, on the bank. He had no idea what I was like.

  Mervyn had a flask of tea. I accepted a mug and sat on the rug. The Aisens were so very nice, which completely creeped me out. I took that chocolate biscuit after all. Why were they keen to talk with me? I didn’t understand this at all. Of course the dear people liked me, loved me even. I didn’t see that yet.

  Mervyn told me that every injury to Coburg went back to Pentridge Prison. The bosses build the prisons, he said, and I thought, he is telling me I am going to end up in jail myself.

  To build the prisons they needed stone, he told me, and that leaves a lot of quarries and then the council makes a dump and throws in everything that no-one wants.

  Miss Aisen stared at me in such a way that I knew to pretend to listen to her father.

  Mervyn had grown up across the road from a Coburg council tip, he said, you learned not to smell it. The creek was running through it.

  The seagulls loved it didn’t they? Miss Aisen encouraged him. At night they would go down to the sea to roost.

  As for me, said Gaby, I was still waiting for them to get to the point. I didn’t know this was the point, the talking. The Coburg Times photographer had arrived and my father was digging with a crowbar in the rusty graveyard soil.

  Once this happens to a piece of land, Mervyn said, everyone wants to hurt it more. Once you’ve done this devastation you’ve got a perfect place to put the sewage works, and then you straighten the creek and make a drain, and you can run ring roads through it and degrade it any way you want.

  Miss Aisen was patting the rug and I sat a little closer to her. I was realising her computer might not be out of bounds.

  MetWat has decided to make the creek a bloody drain, Mervyn said, and I looked at him like I was really interested.

  They already straightened up one stretch, he said. What they pulled out of the creek, he said, they didn’t cart away, they just left it in big smelly muddy heaps. They brought in that dragline crane. They dredged out the bottom and dumped the toxic mud and then it got washed back in. The holes I swam in when I was a kid are only twenty-five centimetres deep. That’s the thing that done it, that mongrel of a thing. He meant the dragline with the broken neck.

  My dad and the photographer were waving at me.

  That’s Mr. Quinn, said Mervyn. He’s our local member.

  He’s my dad, I said.

  Quinn? Mervyn said. He looked completely gobsmacked. You’re not Quinn.

  Pause micro. Play compact C120.

  The Aisens always knew who I was married to, Celine said. Always. From the first time I met Aisen she knew my name was Baillieux and Gaby’s father was Sandy Quinn. Then they pretended they didn’t have any idea of the connection. They were cunning as a pair of cockatoos.

  GABY WAS a Labor Party child. Even as her family fell apart she continued to hand out campaign literature, answer the phone in the electoral office, and act as Sando’s human handbag when Celine stopped communicating with the local branch. But Merri Creek marked a turning point.

  She came to parliament to hear her father speak, not for the first time but the first time of her own volition. She saw him announce the Green Front Coalition, an alliance between MetWat, three local councils and all the local interest groups. She was smart. She paid attention. Sando’s pride in seeing her politically engaged was only dampened by his fears about Mervyn Aisen’s influence.

  He would do nothing to discourage her activism but as time went on, and as she went off regularly to work beside the Aisens, first at the creek, then later at the VINC tree nursery, he was not quite jealous, but certainly disturbed. He revealed none of this to her. What he showed her was his happiness. He was always awake to kiss her as she left the house just after dawn. He welcomed her at dusk when she was red-faced, sweaty, scratched and dusty. She lost weight and he was smart enough to never mention it. Her brown skin suited her.

  Celine was away again, filming. That was fine. They were similar, father and daughter. Together they were both voluble and silent, generous and withholding. For instance Gaby did not tell her father that she was spending ten minutes a day at Darlington Grove where she was permitted to log on to Altos. She did not say she had found Frederic. Sando did not reveal any of the horse-trading and treachery of political life, or divulge that classic line he shared with everyone else: “I don’t know why he shafted me, I never done him no favours.” He did not learn that his dinner was cooked by “Fallen Angel.” They both argued frankly about the Merri Creek and its ancient enemies, town planning, ring roads, MetWat and the State Electricity Commission. Sando did not risk telling her that the Aisens were the loopy left, a tiny ratbag faction in the Coburg branch, enemies of any Labor prime minister who could actually win elections. It would be safer to ask her to shave her armpits and he was not brave enough for that.

  Clearly it was the Aisens who lent her that battered copy of Felix bloody Moore’s While We Were Sleeping. He did not ask, he did not have to, but his pride in his daughter was clouded by a sort of dread as, in this, and other ways, he prepared to lose her.

  She told him: Capitalism is a bull charging a chook house shouting it’s every man for himself.

  He knew exactly who that came from.

  He saw Mervyn’s other mad opinions introduced into his house. For instance: Jim Cairns was only interested in the capitalists making profits. And: Bob Hawke had used his moral authority to prevent the general strike in 1975. “Hawkie was always at the US embassy. Don’t tell me the Americans did not tell him call your dogs off, mate.” Sando thought this was insane, but Mervyn thought it was “outrageous” that Gaby could grow up not knowing a thing about the Coup of 1975. She brought this back home as well, in the same bag as her sudden environmentalism. You could have called a general strike, she said.

  Me?

  The Labor Party.

  Who told you that?

  Can’t I have my own ideas? she asked. What else would you do if your government was stolen? It was illegal. It was unconstitutional. Don’t sigh, Dad. I’m not an idiot.

  I actually was there, you know.

  Yes. So don’t you agree there should have been a general strike? Do you agree or not?

  He told you it was the CIA?

  You mean Mervyn? Say his name. It doesn’t matter who it was, Dad. Once it was done it was done: the people’s government was taken from them. So what about the unions?

  What do you know about the unions?

  Don’t patronise me. I know a lot about the unions.

  A general strike would have been a step towards armed conflict.

  So?

  Did your friend Mervyn tell you that the governor-general had the armed forces on stand-by? Did he tell you that? The Queen’s toady was actually Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force.

  Kerr, I know who you mean. He was the governor-general.

  Kerr called in the defence chiefs. He conferred with the American embassy. He briefed intelligence agencies. He had the armed forces on a “red alert.” You want to send the unions out to face that?

  You were afraid?

  Of course.

  What about Mum?

  She was on red alert too.

  Ha-ha, what did she want to do?

  No, she was not in favour of a strike.

&n
bsp; Why have you never talked about this with me?

  She looked hostile, spoiled, superior and he couldn’t bear she would regurgitate this stuff.

  Is it shame? she asked.

  Shame?

  That you were cowards.

  That was when he told her what he really thought about the Aisens. That their so-called ecological activism was an attempt to return to some fantasy of white Australia populated by good blokes and mates and everything was dinky-di and the blackfellows fed themselves unhindered on the creeks of Coburg. It was territorial, Sando said. Did you see any Turks or Lebanese amongst their planting party? No, of course not. The Aisens were using the language of socialism to reassert white privilege.

  Listen to you, she shouted. Listen to yourself. You sound insane. They’re fighting these polluting bastards and so are you.

  But Sando was sick of talkback-radio racists ranting and arguing about who they would permit to be called a “real Australian.” Doesn’t even smell like Australia anymore, you know what I mean, mate? No you listen, he said.

  His daughter then told him that her new friends were “real radicals.”

  Real? he asked. In what way?

  Well, she said, do you know who sabotaged the dragline?

  He cringed on her behalf, that she should so carelessly give away this information.

  Mervyn did that?

  She returned his stare and he thought she looked smug. Someone did it, she said.

  No-one wants to support vandals, he said.

  But who is the vandal? cried his musky daughter. Are you blaming the people? Shouldn’t you be calling out MetWat about this shit? Are they under your “purview”? she said, twisting the word like a weapon.

  What sort of word is purview?

  She would not answer him but she knew he knew where purview came from.

  No, he said, they are under the purview of the minister, and this was surely the moment Sando decided he would rip his daughter out of Bell Street High. Certainly he had made up his mind before Celine returned. He consulted no-one. Gabrielle Baillieux went to bed that night not knowing she was about to be removed from Miss Aisen’s classroom and established five kilometres further south, as a student at the R. F. Mackenzie Community School.