Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  So you’ve got nothing to give me, Feels? Not a single page?

  Sorry mate. Wish I did.

  Woody stood. He kicked irritably at the tangled typewriter ribbon as he slid the gun back inside what was, clearly, a highly specialised garment.

  You’re not up to this game, he said. You’d like to play at this level, but you never could. Here, take my phone. When you realise what shit you’re in, call me on my landline. It might not be too late.

  It was an iPhone, the latest model, but Woody left it without regret.

  The hermit remained in his doorway as the visitor continued down the path. When he heard the gunfire he felt no particular alarm. Woody, he understood, wished to use his weapon, and firing the last fifteen rounds at an aluminium dinghy was the best he was going to do today.

  THE QUEEN HAD locked the saint in a tower room filled with straw and ordered him to spin the straw into gold, on pain of death. And how he worked. He slammed at the spinning wheel, night and day until, one morning, it was necessary to shove the gold into a plastic bag and hurl it from the tower.

  Cleverly done. Well saved. But when peace returned it was no simple matter to retrieve the treasure. The saint lay down on his stomach and stretched himself full-length on the edge of the outcrop, peering down through the undergrowth and scrub where he could see, in nets of light produced by slapping wavelets, the aerial roots of mangroves poking up like nails from yellow sand.

  The so-called “outcrop” was host to a jungle of wattles, wild lantana and various bits of prickly stuff. Here, just a hand’s span below his fleshy nose, grew a knotted little eucalypt with a trunk no thicker than an axe handle.

  Further down, a man’s length he calculated, there was a convenient ridge in the rock where he might gain purchase with his toes. Below that, he could not really see.

  As a schoolboy he had achieved serious status as a hundred-kph spin bowler, in spite of which he had been, sporadically, unpredictably followed by boys swinging their arms and making “chee-chee” monkey cries. That is, duh, his arms were long. But, as his mother once said when answering a query re his testicles, God put everything there for a purpose and now the time had come when his arms would prove their Darwinian value. He grasped that twisted eucalypt and, completely forgetting his age, lowered himself in the direction of the ridge.

  His arm was yanked like a bone from a rotisserie chicken. He kicked at the rock and gained no purchase. He swung with his feet twitching and shuddering like a hanged man. As always, part of his mind was administered by a cartoonist and he was encouraged to believe he might somehow slither down the remaining inches to the ridge.

  Instead, he fell, scratching, scraping, slipping past whatever ridge or ledge he had imagined. Death awaited him. He awaited death. He landed in a twisted eagle’s nest of wattle and lantana where the black plastic bag was pushed like a horse’s arse against his face. All three bags had been partly inflated with accidental air, so it was this, not the sand, which cushioned the final fall.

  His face stung. He loudly fucked and shat. A fierce pain assailed his shoulder as he splashed along the waterline. He wrapped his arms around his treasure, binding it to his chest, like a spider with a sac of eggs. Cautiously, he made his way under the gloomy mangroves, amidst the forest of aerial roots, until he arrived at the place where he had beached so long before.

  He showed not the least interest in his bullet-riddled dinghy but hurried along the track, breathing through his open mouth, squelching up the protesting stairs. When he entered his former refuge the air was cold and sour with wine. Typewriter ribbon adhered to his sodden shoes and he did nothing to untangle it. He sat in the gloom, gingerly, embracing the bag, mindful that it might hold evidence that would prove Gaby Baillieux innocent. What would Woody do with that? What would he do himself? He did not wish her to be innocent. He wanted her fearless, guilty of courage, of principle. If his writing would get his name on the so-called “Disposition Matrix,” he wished her to be worthy of the pain.

  Now he lifted the remaining vodka and touched it to his stinging lips. For once he did not drink. He examined the abandoned iPhone, turned it on, then failed in his attempt to throw it out the window. The screen glowed briefly then went dark. There was no illumination but that provided by the deep charcoal-blue of the Hawkesbury River.

  Felix?

  The voice was close, in the doorway, but there was insufficient light to distinguish the doorframe from the space it might have defined. He held the plastic bag like a child with a pillow.

  Felix, right? Mr. Moore?

  The voice that of a young man. He was perhaps tall, with fair hair.

  Who are you?

  We’re the pros from Dover.

  He was slow to register the “we” and slower still to understand that these friendly wraiths who had appeared at his door were a subset of a caste of Sydney surf lifesavers, once known locally for eating live canaries in bread rolls and sticking their naked backsides out car windows during late night shopping. These anarchic characters would now exhibit towards the hermit an intoxicating sort of reverence and he found himself wishing that his daughters could witness this moment of redemption or, at least, prestige.

  What’s your name? he asked.

  Mate, the publicly available tools for making yourself free from surveillance are ineffective against a nation state.

  I don’t understand a word you’re saying.

  Time to go.

  Now?

  The visitor explained that there was no longer a safe way out by water. So they must walk back up the ridge. The moon was good.

  The fugitive did not resist or argue although he insisted, from the start, that he carry his own bag. This he managed well enough, but his sodden deck shoes rubbed his delicate heels and they were not even at the fire trail before he was limping. The track was a pale yellow, and there could be no better conditions for walking in the night, except that his calves were soon cramping and his blisters were bleeding and then, when it was clear he could not keep up the pace, when it became obvious he must be unmanned and suffer the indignity and pleasure of being carried, he was moved by their tenderness towards him. A fireman’s lift, of course, is not the most comfortable way to travel and Felix Moore passed through the Marramarra National Park from the Hawkesbury to Forest Glen with his head down, filled with blood, dropping pencils and paperclips and Duracell batteries along the way.

  He was a stick-case moth enveloped in silk, finally redeemed, the treasure of his nation.

  The night seemed endless. He saw no “spectacular ridge-top colours of iconic Hawkesbury sandstone” or “gullies of bright red waratahs and Gymea lily.” His escort would not permit him to walk, but merely shifted his load between them, until the lights of a four-wheel drive could be seen bumping below, snaking up the switchbacks.

  Time for your pill, mate, said the first man who had spoken to him.

  For what?

  Travel sickness.

  I’ll be fine.

  Take my word.

  The hermit held out his hand and took the pill.

  What is it?

  Men in Black, they said.

  Whatever chemical that was, he would never discover, but it was sufficient to ensure that it would be eight hours before he awoke in what was clearly, on the evidence of the shiny bedspreads and pastel-pink art, a motel. His wet shoes were on the floor, stuffed with newspaper. There were bandaids on his heels. He drew the curtains aside and saw a concrete paved courtyard, almost empty, and beyond this a two-lane road and mountainous bush.

  On the desk there were two bottles of McLaren Vale shiraz, a large washed rind cheese, a Triumph-Adler Twen T180 electric typewriter. There also, God help him, were tapes, new tapes, and enough batteries to play them for a year.

  As to where on earth he was, there was no newspaper or television to solve the problem. One door led to the bathroom. He tried the other, and although it was, unsurprisingly, locked, he could hear the murmur of voices on the oth
er side. He wrenched out the wine cork in the grim knowledge that he had, for the first time in his professional life, been worthy of a suite.

  THE EIGHTEEN-WHEELER SEMITRAILERS roared past the motel all night. You could hear them from miles away, descending through eight gears, then a screaming ninth, air brakes exploding so loud you might imagine the glass-walled reception area shorn away and frosted donuts liberated, rolling down the middle of the road.

  Meanwhile the tapes continued at 7/8 of a centimetre/second, more or less, as Gaby made her didactic “confession,” explaining, for instance, why it was thought there could be no female hackers. She would not even discuss rule 37 (devised by adolescent boys) which asserted there are no girls on the internet. Google it, she told her listener, as if that were something you could do on a Triumph-Adler electric typewriter. Search, she said. Look for “teenage-male voyeur-thrill power-trip activity.” Look for this actual sentence or, same difference, “don’t find female computer intruders, any more than you find female voyeurs who are obsessed with catching glimpses of men’s underwear.” This will take you to Cornelia Sollfrank in Rotterdam in 1999. Full credit please. “Women are very, very rarely arrested for sneaking around in the dark of night, peering through bedroom windows. Teenage males are arrested for this all the time.”

  This is so morally satisfying, but it is just total crap and cruditude, she said. Not even the sisterhood could imagine me, she said. I could not exist. I must be doomed to rage and skin rash. But what if? What if you wished to obliterate, eliminate the corporatists? What if your Bonnie found your Clyde, if your Sid found your Nancy, then you would be blessed from your clitoris to your earlobe to your small pink toes, no shit, to find a boy who would allow you to become wwb, a world-wide boy yourself, to become Fallen Angel or even Fnu (first name unknown) Lnu (Last name unknown), to be a boy, a girl, a silver shark. We can be anything we wish, Gaby said, unaware she was addressing a captive with bandaged heels.

  My bourgie parents, she said, tried to remove me from every good influence I had discovered. My mother only bought me the Apple to get me free of the Aisens, and my father dragged me out of Bell Street High for the same reason. Frederic was safely exiled, or so they thought, but The Superior Person waits for wisdom and clarity (as the fat book says).

  R. F. Mackenzie Community School, she said, was a ten-minute bike ride from B. S. High, but it was another universe. I scowled and would not say my name. I walked into the so-called “home room” a very bad girl and there he was, a pop-up, my laughing boy, girl-boy, returned from Nimbin a man-boy now.

  So guess what my mother said when she finally saw him? He was “strapping.” He had such shoulders. Celine was a sex maniac but she would always hate what Frederic was, even if he had been a manly man fixing roofs with Claude Poulos, Meg’s Northern Rivers lover. Claude finally did do time for carding, but he was not, primarily, a criminal. He was a grey-haired cyber-hippie with a motto: “If you engage in behaviour that carries the risk of negative consequences from an adversary you must be invisible.” Claude existed on no database. He did not fit the pigeonhole. He appeared to be a plumber surfie with bleached hair and earrings. In real life he was a cryptographer, author of an elaborate banking system so private that not even the bank would know how much you had. So while Frederic’s mum was getting on heroin and screaming and shrieking her way off it, Frederic not only learned to surf, he became an apprentice plumber and cryptographer whose aim was to live beyond the reach of any “nation state.” When he came back to me at R. F. Mackenzie Community School he was a total wave of possibility, far beyond the world of Zork.

  Celine could have used a little I Ching, her daughter thought i.e. Because you are the foreigner in this setting, you have no history to acquit you. Watch, listen, study, contemplate, then step lightly but decisively on.

  In the motel, Celine’s tapes never touched Gaby’s tapes. They stood in different piles, each had its own machine. The trucks roared down the hill. A note came beneath the door to tell the occupant to stay away from the window. Return this page, it said. His meals would be delivered to the shared bathroom. Slide this note back to its sender. The connecting door is always locked. We will unlock it when required. On her stretchy tape Celine said, My daughter thinks I am a homophobe. How can she be so dumb? My one true father was a faggot. He nursed me. Like a wasp burying its eggs in a corpse, he left his baby’s education waiting in his will. When he died Doris found tons of gelignite stored above the hallway ceiling. It was not a symbol, but a fact. Not a bad symbol just the same. She said, I wish I had been conceived like Tristram Shandy. How sweet and innocent to wind the clock. Now I can see the semen and the crime. I wish I never knew. I wish I had been nice to Doris in those years. I was such a cow. Can this ever be repaired? I should kiss the damage, bless the glove, forgive me.

  I wanted to do better with Gaby, she said. The situation was not unredeemable. She liked the new school after all. She brought her projects home to me. Would you believe it? Cardboard boxes, an alternative education built on supermarket leftovers, projects on the history, geography, biology, chemistry, ecology of Coburg, Pentridge, Merri Creek. She was happy, even when she was drawing cancer maps. They were so pretty, pink and yellow empires, like pâté en croûte, with delicate black lines and annotations. Then Frederic came back to Melbourne.

  When he turned up at Patterson Street, Sando greeted him, apparently not knowing who he was.

  Hello mate, the young man had said.

  Hello mate, said the local member of parliament.

  Mind if I come in, mate?

  When Celine got home from rehearsals the visitor was well ensconced, his long legs stretched out in front of him. She did not recognise him any more than her husband had. The buzz cut tricked her, the lack of makeup. Only the lashes finally alerted her: they almost, but not quite, obscured his bright insistent eyes. It was that single glimmer (that living being inside the burrow) which would always be, for her, the most disturbing feature of his face.

  Celine dropped her heavy groceries on the counter top. She poured herself a glass of wine and observed her strangely tranquil daughter, sitting on one end of the long sofa facing the young man, her lovely strong brown legs folded beneath her skirt.

  The visitor tilted his head and Celine saw him hiding there, the fey prancey child who had preferred old fur coats and eye shadow. He wore a checked flannel shirt from Kmart like a working man. Dear Jesus, she said. (Deeeer Jaysssus, said the tape.) He had come to destroy my girl.

  Gaby sipped a beer. (Since when was she allowed to drink?)

  Frederic? Celine asked.

  He grinned. She offered her hand and found his rough and dry.

  Hello, Celine.

  He had never called me by my name before, she said. (Dear God he expected to be hugged.)

  Sit, Celine cried. What have you been doing? she cried. My God, how old are you? she asked, shocked by the man’s body she had felt against her own. The creature began to tell her what he had been doing and of course he knew she did not want him here, unravelling all her good results.

  You’ve both been through so much, Celine said (waiting to see if he even knew what had happened to Gaby because of him, but nothing, not a thing).

  She asked what school he was going to. How he answered she could not remember, except he didn’t tell the truth. As a result, she could not understand the triumph on her daughter’s face. She thought, don’t you, don’t you, don’t you dare throw your life away, my girl.

  If it’s not one thing it’s another. Soon they went off to her room and they must be having sex, but no: Celine heard that Apple noise and was not smart enough to be afraid. The computer had been a waste of money. Gaby never used it. As far as Celine knew she had transferred all her cybermania to the reclamation of Merri Creek. The new school encouraged this from the first day. Her study group planted trees and hunted carp on Saturday afternoons. They used the school PC to make charts of invasive species and native birds. That was enough.
Who would have alerted her to Agrikem? Frederic? How would he know?

  No, Celine said, Mervyn Aisen introduced Gaby to Agrikem. This was pure malice. He “proved” to her that MetWat had issued Agrikem a secret licence to release “limited quantities” of dioxin. Gaby was Gaby. She was immediately outraged. Mervyn wound her up and she rushed off to attack her daddy.

  Sando had to be the good guy, Celine said. It was what his life was for. He could not bear it that his daughter would think otherwise. Of course Gaby knew that, and she was totally relentless. She took him to visit dying gardens in the little houses on McBryde Street. She nagged at him until he actually raised the issue in parliament. This did nothing to calm his daughter and he was mocked by the minister who was the one, presumably, who arranged for a “reliable source” to leak him a chemical analysis of Agrikem’s effluent which showed no trace of dioxin at all.

  He was a politician, Celine said, as the semitrailers shrieked, so therefore he must be corrupt. But the poor darling could be completely unworldly and when he was fed bad information from the left faction, he believed it utterly. He sat Gaby down at the kitchen table and went through the printout with her. He gave his solemn word that there was no dioxin in the Agrikem effluent.

  I wasn’t there, Celine said. I can imagine: how it must have hurt to confront his daughter’s grey and hostile eyes.

  Pause. Rewind. Play.

  What if you wished to obliterate the corporatists? the Angel said.

  WHEN TWO HEADLIGHTS ARRIVED directly outside his window Felix snapped awake and stumbled towards the white-quartz glare, naked arm held across his red-rimmed eyes, but nothing else to ensure his modesty.

  There came a violent thumping on the connecting door behind him.

  He drew one of the curtains and saw, through the mountain fog, a tall windowless van with a high old-fashioned radiator which he would later learn had the singular virtue of being unburdened by computer operating systems. For now, however, the thumping on the door took precedence.