Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  CELINE HAD JUST FINISHED shooting Mrs. Fischer which would later cause such controversy at Cannes. She returned to Patterson Street refreshed, invigorated by a brief uncomplicated affair. She was carrying thousands of dollars in cash. She was finally ready to leave and start again.

  They had both ganged up on me again, she told the author Felix Moore. I had deserved it all, OK, but they were so hurtful and I would have loved to hurt them just as much. But when I realised how wounded and angry they were with each other, I knew I had to fix it. I was the one who had got us entangled with the Aisens.

  I had thought I was using her with her computer lessons which cost less than buying my daughter the computer she wanted. I was so cheap. Sando was cheap too. But the first day I was back from shooting I drove into the city and bought the Mac IIx. It put a big hole in my runaway money. Don’t get psychological on me, Celine said. It was as straightforward as I say: no need to visit Aisen anymore.

  I came back from down the creek, Gaby said, and there was a big white box on the dining table. I saw the Apple logo and felt sick with what I’d done. I had gotten everything I wanted and I knew exactly what it cost and I knew my parents could not afford it. Money was what they fought about, the house, the repairs, the advertising gigs, even the computer lessons and now, of course, Celine had done the thing she had been so against, and she had not bothered to discuss it with my dad so then he went bananas about how selfish she was with her money.

  I lugged the box to my room and locked the door behind me. I tried to be happy, because I should have been happy. I smelled the brand-new Mac IIx, all clean and Appley. I heard that startup tone, that single note descending. I saw the happy Mac icon, the real thing. I acted out my happiness, with no-one to see me do it. I was a psycho and a fake. I wrote some stuff in BASIC because what else was I to do? I had no phone line and no modem and I could not ask them to spend more money now and so, of course, I was deceitful and made up stories so I could sneak out to Darlington Grove and go online to hook up with Undertoad. Undertoad and I made a private back room on Altos. He told me his mum was returning to Melbourne “for treatment” but she had moved him to a different school.

  I thought Frederic extremely dangerous, Celine told me, but I hid all that from Gaby. I acted very sympathetic. I suggested that the poor boy must hate his life without electricity. (Gaby answered that he did.) I then supposed the New South Wales education system did not even know he existed. (My daughter did not disabuse me.) I supposed Meg must have taken her business with her. (Gaby didn’t know.) I said northern New South Wales was beautiful. (No, no, Frederic was continually the victim of the groundsel bush which left his eyes streaming and his sinuses blocked and swollen. He owed his life to eucalyptus oil. Even when people were so nice to them and let them crash and fed them free, night after night, on baked vegetables from hippie gardens, endless pumpkin, he always knew his noisy breathing made him an unwanted guest.) From all this, Celine said, I concluded that Frederic was eight hundred kilometres away from my child, whereas Meg’s van was already heading south towards me.

  My parents began spying, Gaby said, so naturally I lied. Somehow they found out I was still visiting Darlington Grove. Celine took Sando’s side. Mervyn was “your father’s enemy.” He was a shit-stirrer and ratbag, she said. He used the word comrade constantly, but had I noticed he had no comrades? He could not work with other people. His real specialty was embarrassment, direct attacks. Also, she went on about how much she had spent on the computer.

  But Mervyn had already taken me to visit what he called “the jewel of Merri Creek,” a dull yellow-brick building on McBryde Street in Fawkner. It was next to some dreary paddocks with starving horses and across the road from some small suburban houses like you might see in any of the poorer northern suburbs.

  There was a wooden sign by the road that had been hand-carved in a folksy sort of way. It said “Agrikem.” The factory had a gravel car park like a hardware store and nothing to suggest that it was dangerous in any way.

  It was after five o’clock when we arrived and all the workers’ cars had gone and there was no-one to see us climb through the fence into the paddock, a girl and an old man going to talk to lonely horses. Mervyn was carrying an iron bar but he often carried one tool or another and there was always a reason, in this case the bar was to lift a concrete inspection cap with two U-shaped loops. Really it was an inspection plate for a sewer, but as I walked towards it I thought it must be a well for water.

  I watched him fit the bar into the loops, and saw the tendons in his neck go tight as he lifted.

  He asked, You hear that?

  Is it water?

  Have a look.

  It smells bad.

  In the beam of his flashlight I saw a small pipe draining murky liquid into the sewer.

  What’s that? he asked.

  Drain water.

  Where does it end up?

  I don’t know.

  Did you ever hear of dioxin?

  No.

  How about Agent Orange?

  At school.

  OK, he said.

  And that was it.

  He took my hand as we walked home. This was the first and possibly the last time he ever did that. If we talked I don’t recall it. Nor did it seem strange that we did not. What struck me was not the sewer or the smell but the confusing emotions generated by that big dry hand, the comfort that I took from it, my queasy guilty feeling of betrayal.

  THAT NIGHT the fugitive writer would find himself carried like a baby through the dark bush, as if he were, in his own words, a sacred slug or silkworm protected by the empress’s guard. But now, as day broke on the Hawkesbury, those noble guards were presumably still resting in their Manly barracks. At this hour, upriver, the fugitive was attending to his toilette, carrying his spade up the rocky hill where he made a bad-tempered search for a place to do his business. He scraped a small depression in the resistant earth, removed his lower garments and laid them on a tuft of grass. Then he squatted, glaring bleakly at the river. No-one saw him. No-one knew his aching knees. He was Felix Moore and he was aware of his position in his country’s history and thus saw himself from a slightly elevated perspective, deriving some dour satisfaction from his similarity to Dürer’s portrait of the hermit Saint Jerome.

  For breakfast he had a bruised apple, after which there was nothing to do but return to punishing the Olivetti. For lunch he took cheese and a single glass of wine. As the hours passed, the pages accumulated and he secured them with a knobbly stone. When this day was ended, he would add these to the treasure already hidden in the black garbage bag at his feet. He was offline, strictly analog. There were various other black bags-in-waiting, all moist and ready to be disposed of, but the bag beneath his feet was dry and clean as a prayer in the wilderness.

  Thus had his days passed, like writers’ days have always passed, in solitary labour, and just as housemaids, nuns, priests and religious devotees of all kinds are known to form their bodies to the shape of their trade, producing lasting physical distortions once recognised as distinct surgical conditions, Felix Moore hunched his wide shoulders around his machine. As he typed he waved his hands and sometimes muttered but his ear was always pitched beyond his own inner tumult, alert for the voices of the river, not only the shouted conversations of fishermen, but the fucking jet-skis, the regular beat of the mail boat, the lonely thud of distant tinnies hammering against the hard unbending river. There were also “gin palaces” and “Tupperware boats” and “hot water tubs” of different varieties and he would abandon his chair from time to time, simply to confirm that he had identified them correctly. What he feared was confused and ever-changing, but on this occasion it was silence, the sudden absence, the cessation of an outboard motor, which caused him to jump upright, then to climb, like Ben Gunn himself, up onto the top of the hut, where he peered down, uncertain as to whether the aluminium craft now gliding silently beneath the mangroves was bringing him supplies or was, finally, t
he expected assassin.

  Ow, he heard. It was a boy’s voice, sharp with indignation. Then a man’s voice.

  Quit it, the boy cried.

  The hermit scampered down the ladder from the roof. He re-entered his dwelling and rushed to and fro, his long arms sweeping floor and desk. He discarded a malodorous black plastic bag and picked up the treasure from beneath his chair. Into this he thrust all his morning’s work and then, sitting, grunting, he collected the tapes, batteries, notebooks, pens, posters and other archival matter, hurling them into the bag as if they were no more important than potato peelings.

  Don’t, he heard.

  And then a man’s voice, singing tunelessly.

  He tied the bag and encased it within a second bag, tied that too, did the same a third time, then ascended, in bare bunioned feet up to the roof where, finally, he hurled the bag towards the river far below. If he expected a splash, there was none. He waited but could wait no longer. The visitors were already on the path, the man singing in a voice so flat, so blithe, so confident that it raised the hair on the listener’s neck.

  You better watch out

  You better not cry

  Felix Moore returned to the hut nursing a freshly injured elbow, crossed to the doorway, pausing to scoop up a stray Duracell and to select an apple from the bottom of a cardboard box.

  Let me go, cried the boy.

  The hermit leaned, “nonchalantly,” against the doorframe.

  Making a list … checking it twice

  Looking to see who’s naughty and nice

  And then his pink-cheeked red-lipped patron emerged, dragging a protesting boy by the ear.

  Hello mate, said Woody Townes.

  Mate, said Felix, and bit into his putrid apple.

  As the visitors paused at the midway landing the man sought his prisoner’s attention.

  Ow.

  You ever see this bloke before?

  No. Ow.

  As Woody tugged the boy onwards he reached to take the hermit’s apple. In this moment of distraction the prisoner pulled free, and fell, then rolled, protesting loudly all the way to the bottom of the stairs.

  Give me the fucking apple.

  Fat bastard, cried the boy, and had already turned as the apple hit his shoulder and burst apart.

  Stupid cunt, said Woody Townes, simultaneously embracing his writer, crushing his hairy face against his canvas shoulder, crooning tenderly into his single naked ear.

  They see you when you’re sleeping

  They know when you’re awake

  They know if you’ve been bad or good

  So be good for goodness sake

  At the sound of an outboard motor roaring to life, the property developer, without releasing the hermit, produced a telephone from his clever canvas waistcoat. His thumbs were distressingly large, but he dialled precisely. Mate, he said to the slender phone, let the kid go.

  The hermit tugged free. You see me when I’m sleeping? he cried. What the fuck is that meant to mean? He had already seen the cruiser with satellite dishes on its cabin. Who told you where I was?

  Woody Townes did not bother answering. He took the single chair and shook his head in a style that might be “rueful.” He had lost weight. The stomach staples had evidently worked, or he had been at the gym. When he returned his telephone to his waistcoat holster, new biceps stretched his shirt.

  Pull up a pew, he said, and placed a liquor flask and a peculiar revolver on the desk.

  The hermit showed no reaction to this ugly weapon. Instead he fetched two smudgy glasses from the sink and dragged a plastic crate to serve as a chair.

  You always liked that bit, Feels.

  What bit?

  Come on, this is for you. Your all-time favourite interview. Murray Sayle snares Kim Philby in Moscow. Intrepid Aussie journalist tracks down Pommy traitor at the Moscow post office. The spy agrees to the interview. When the journo arrives the spy is waiting with a bottle of vodka and a revolver on the table. You didn’t get the reference?

  What are you doing, Woody?

  The literal answer would have been, I am now raising the revolver and pointing it over your shoulder. Woody Townes, however, did not reply directly: I always thought Philby must have been a drama queen, he said.

  The hermit’s hand may have been less steady than his friend’s but he displayed a modicum of courage. That is, he unscrewed the flask and poured. As he raised the glass (formerly a receptacle for peanut butter) the most colossal explosion occurred.

  Shit, the hermit cried. His body jerked. He stood. He sat. He turned towards the sound of running water, a trickling garden hose which turned out to be red wine spurting from a punctured box. He stared at the wine morosely. It was the visitor who spoke:

  So give me my fucking pages.

  The hermit reflected that it had been awful wine in any case.

  Give me my fucking pages.

  How can I have pages? I haven’t got a source.

  So why are you here?

  To get some fucking peace.

  Woody Townes laid his weapon down, and dragged the Olivetti Valentine across the table. He unscrewed the pair of orange knobs which secured the spools of ribbon. Having removed these, he affected to read the ribbon like a strip of film.

  Were there people somewhere like San Antonio, Texas at, say, a former Sony computer-chip factory, who could really decode a typewriter ribbon? Of course there were. Whatever weird shit you could imagine, they could do it. The spools flew like yoyos across the room and Woody Townes tilted back to ask: Tell me this, why am I the one who always has to get you out of the shit?

  You’re not.

  Shut up. This is not the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party you’re trying to fuck with.

  I wrote two hundred pages. They sent a kid to pick them up. Not that kid, another one. He said he was from you.

  Bullshit. You won’t want to be here when I send someone.

  There’s nothing here. You can look for yourself.

  You’ve got the hots for her, fine. So now’s your chance to be a hero. Give us a chance to defend her. We need info-fucking-mation, mate.

  I’m not sure I should be trusting you Woody.

  You’re not?

  Nothing personal.

  Talking of personal. I was chatting to Donno at the Telegraph the other day. Donovan? Yeah I know. I was sort of hinting there might be an interesting Felix story. He was saying, We know everything there is to know about the grandstanding little cunt, you know how he talks. But of course that’s not true, is it? We’ve got all sorts of shit on you.

  The fugitive became still.

  Do you remember, Feels, when you thought you could take on Hawkie? People don’t know about that. Felix Moore vs. the future Prime Minister of the nation.

  This is what you told Celine, isn’t it?

  Woody shrugged. There were a mob of you, as I recall. No-one had more moral authority with the unions than the head of their collective body. Hawke used all that clout to stop the general strike? Right. He was a mate of the US ambassador. Etc. etc.

  He was. You know he was.

  And then you, my nervy little mate, do you remember? You were auditioning for Drivetime Radio. Someone was on holiday. Matt Cocker? No, not him. They gave you three weeks to try out Drivetime Radio with Felix Moore. It went to your head, no? Just a teensy bit? Somehow you thought you could call a general strike from the fucking ABC. You were worried, as I recall, how you would fit eighteen left-wing union leaders into a little studio on William Street. Eighteen. That was optimistic.

  You weren’t against it, mate. As I recall, you sort of egged me on.

  Let’s just say, I was very interested in everything you had to say. You were born in a country that never had a war. You were blessed, but you thought we should suffer like the Bosnians, the Rwandans, the Palestinians, everyone. I never heard anything so fucking stupid. You really wanted civil war.

  Whatever. You were on my side.

  Oh, m
ate, he said and he cocked his head and the expression on his face was almost fond.

  What?

  What do you think?

  You weren’t playing on the other side?

  Other side of what? Other side of bloodshed? You bet. Fortunately you didn’t have the balls for it. You were shitting yourself, I remember that, looking for any chance not to follow through.

  You told Celine this?

  You were frightened of where your imagination was leading you. Remember we sat up half the night before? You got so pissed you couldn’t walk. You slept at my place in Neutral Bay. Do you remember the morning?

  We drank all your tequila.

  No, not that, mate. Your car caught fire.

  Of course I remember. You were with me. You’re the one who dragged me out the passenger side. It was not my fault the car caught fire.

  No, it was my fault.

  Bullshit.

  Yes, me. I fucking saved you from yourself. You should be grateful I gave you your excuse. Although you could have still got to the studio if you’d really wanted to.

  We had to wait for the police.

  Ah, look at you, said Woody Townes, delighted. The boy who cried pig. You’ve spent a lifetime screaming at everyone for being so gutless in ’75. To the barricades, and all that shit. If there was any credible opposition you had them, every available pinko and ratbag, waiting to go on Drivetime Radio. What will your little girls think of their daddy when they hear all this?

  The wine was dripping, but only very slowly. The hermit turned his attention to the visitor’s flask from which he slowly refilled two large glasses, one of which he drank.

  Why? he asked his biggest fan.

  Woody leaned back, as if to give the writer a sporting chance to grab the gun. Mate, you know me.

  He slid the second glass across the table. Felix Moore did not reject the gift.