Amnesia

by Peter Carey

  She watched two American officers enter the street from the front door of the restaurant.

  The first was knocked to the ground. She saw. The second was lifted into the air, his napkin or handkerchief still in his hand as he was passed like a side of butchered beef, over the heads of the crowd and thrown on the footpath on the other side. The Aussies made a circle around him then kicked his face.

  There were now three, four, five circles in the crowd. An American would come walking down the street, the Aussies would grab his arms and legs and throw him up in the air to get him to a clear space to bash him more. Throughout there was a loud hammering, like blows on bone. Doris finally understood it was a mob hammering on the restaurant door.

  “We can’t stay here,” she said.

  Hank sat down. He did not seem to realise that the Aussies were coming in to get the Yanks and kill their whores, to break them limb by limb.

  “They’ll murder us.” She took his hand and pulled him up. He looked furious but he did allow her to lead him past the coat rack where she had the nous to grab an Aussie slouch hat. She pulled him down the stairs and through the stinking kitchen and out into a slippery laneway where the air was rank with fat and blood.

  Beyond the alley was Queen Street and a howling mob.

  “Come on,” she said, but now he had his arms around her and was pushing her stomach with his thing.

  “Songbird,” he said. “Sing to me.”

  “Jeez,” she said, “lay off, will you?”

  She got the slouch hat onto his head and his situation seemed to dawn on him. He set the hat, tipping it back in the style favoured by the Aussies.

  They were saved by the brownout and the happy coincidence that the northbound tram was tipped over just as they left the lane. There was such confusion. The American military police brought out their shotguns. All she could think was they had to get home, south Brissy, somewhere safe. She heard the first blast, then the second. She would have settled for a pillbox but it seemed every pillbox was occupied by men and women doing what she had never done, and would not do, no matter what she drank. She knew girls who had a “bit of a pash” in a pillbox but she had never anticipated the stink.

  “They’ll kill you,” she said, but he wanted to pash into her there and then. He was strong and persistent, persuading her down into a lane, still very gentle with his mouth—soft little puffy kisses all around her neck. “Sing to me,” he said, his hard arms around her, those mad kisses on her throat. She sang “Danny Boy” for fear. “Don’t stop,” he said, “don’t stop.”

  He was doing what she did not know.

  “Don’t stop. Keep singing.”

  He had to let her go to fiddle with her bra and she slipped free and ran, unhooked, with her shoes in her hand, down Queen Street, thinking God Jesus let there not be broken glass. The tram for south Brissy was already rolling when she leapt aboard, and he was right behind her, she heard him, laughing like a drain.

  The man and girl plonked down together on the bench, she in disarray, he laughing hopelessly, and the whole tram went silent on her and judged her for a tart. She folded her hands in her lap, covering her ring finger, pretending to herself they were engaged, going to live in Deetroit, no longer Doris Crook, something better, safer, clearer, richer, thank the Lord he behaved himself. He put his arm around her shoulder and that is how it happened, when they arrived in Stanley Street and she saw, a cricket-pitch length from the tram’s running board, the thirteen front steps of her home, that she was still holding Hank Willenski’s hand.

  OUR SOLE RESPONSIBILITY to our ancestors, I had written, is to give birth to them as they gave birth to us. The houses in south Brissy were wrapped with skirts of lattice, as secret as a veil. Doris’s mother had her bedroom up there overlooking Stanley Street. Yes, it was the noisy side, but she could be out of bed in a jiffy when the front gate clicked. You could rely on her being up there, waiting, the electric flex already wrapped round her hand.

  The house was twelve feet off the ground and all the underneath was latticed too. If it had not been for the brownout the street would have looked so lovely—sky deep, black blue, and the latticed houses glowing like golden lanterns in the honeysuckle air, and if you shut your eyes and hid the trams and the pub and the shunting train and the drunk peeing by the lamppost you could almost think Woolloongabba was beautiful.

  She brought Hank Willenski home, not knowing what else to do. When she jumped off the moving tram, she knew she would get caught. She did not doubt she’d get roared up. She wished for nothing better than the flex across the legs. The American was right behind her as the tram rolled on, its wheels screaming worse than nails on a blackboard.

  She was for it now. Thank God.

  “Home,” she said, quite loudly. She could make out his teeth. “My dad will have waited up,” she said.

  She put her finger to his lip to show he must not kiss her.

  He bit her finger, hard.

  “That wasn’t funny.” Why was she whispering? She wanted to get caught.

  “Sing me a song.”

  He got her around the waist and lifted her up in the air and she grabbed at the fence and felt the splinter drive into her injured finger. Why did she not scream? He had her over his shoulder. He was passing through the gate. Her mother would hear the latch.

  But then she was out of sight, dragged underneath the house. There was stuff lying everywhere, snakes in bottles, axes, preserved quince, dead marines. She thought, he’ll trip and fall.

  “Let me down,” she said, “I’ll help you do it, honest.”

  He set her down very slowly but then he was at it again, kissing her on the neck, holding her hands together tight, pushing his thing against her.

  “I’ll show you,” she said. Show what? Show where? She was embarrassed by the smell of her home. Nightsoil and honeysuckle, dirt and gas. He kicked the preserves and she heard a bottle crack and the smell of sugary peach juice making witch’s pudding with the dirt.

  “No, I’ll show you,” he said.

  And then he pushed her down so hard she fell. No glass. No cuts. Thank God, she thought. He had shoved her head onto the chopping block without knowing what it was. She felt the cold air between her legs. He was pushing and breaking and her tummy was filled with hurt but she dared not scream. His hands around her neck. He said, “You better sing.” He was kneeling behind her, evil thing.

  She could no longer breathe but she did “Danny Boy.” The air came through the words and the air was ripped-up rags. His hands were large and very strong and she finally understood, without a doubt, he would kill her when he’d finished.

  He clamped her windpipe. He shivered like a horse. The thing inside her was in spasms, like a cat dying from a hammer blow. And then he screamed, right in her ear.

  Later she would know he had driven a broken preserve bottle into his knee and leg. But she was free. He was off her. She fled.

  For once in all its history, Stanley Street was quiet.

  “Mum,” she cried from the front gate. She heard a slamming door upstairs, thank God.

  “Ma’am?”

  In the street, against the lamppost she saw them, a black man with a hire-girl. Even at this voltage it was clear. The soldier left the girl. He crossed the tracks, his hand held out towards Doris. He looked drunk.

  “Mum,” she wailed.

  It was the very same GI who had arrived so sweetly at her door. He stood before her, swaying.

  “Miss, what happened?”

  “Are you going to do her or me?” said the hire-girl. It was Glennys Craig who had been the fastest runner in the grade.

  “He’s in there,” Doris said. “Under the house.” The black soldier looked at Glennys Craig and then at Doris. Then, as the front door of the house yawned open, the soldier opened his wallet and gave the prostitute some bills.

  “You’re a mug,” said Glennys Craig, and teetered off into the dark. The lights behind the lattice came on, one by one, and
suddenly, in the midst of the brownout, the whole of 825 Stanley Street was a wooden lantern and the pansy window-dresser was sprinting—him at his age—turning on the lights as he passed each switch and Doris’s mother was behind turning them all off.

  “Now all the world can see,” the mother said when she arrived out in the street. She flashed her Eveready torch over the stunned black face and then across the parachute-silk dress which was marked with blood and spunk and woodchips from the past.

  As the girl began to vomit on her shoes, Doris’s mother confronted the American soldier who, drunk or not, was clearly the same fellow she had already turned away. He stood the same, shoulders back, squared off, his cap in one hand, explaining.

  “Just go,” said Celine’s grandmother. “Before you get your balls cut off.”

  CELINE ROSE FROM the battered leather club chair. She returned my pages to the floor without saying what she’d read. She was not finished, that was clear. I watched as she chose a poker and, like a blacksmith, brought down a rain of blows upon a log already sheathed in glowing red and orange scales. How far had she got? Sparks glinted in her eyes.

  I had done an extraordinarily professional job, but clearly she was not considering that. She blew the ash from her fingertips and pulled the kimono tight around herself and retreated to the hallway. Then I heard her retching in the bathroom, vomiting.

  So she had reached that part. I was so sorry. But I would seem to be a hypocrite to say so. I returned to my seat and waited to be abused but I certainly did not expect her to return with a rifle at her hip.

  “My father gave me this,” she said, “my real father.”

  Fire was dancing along the gun metal.

  “He was the most decent man you could ever know. Strictly speaking, he was a criminal, but he changed my nappies when my mother couldn’t. He left enough money for me to go to university. He cut my hair. He taught me how to shoot. How many rabbits do you think I’ve killed?”

  “I am not wrong about Willenski. It doesn’t make me happy, but it’s true.”

  “I brought you out here to get you out of Woody’s clutches, you shit. But I had no idea of what you’d done.” She jerked the rifle violently, like a pitchfork. “Can’t you learn your lesson in a courtroom? Lying is not socially acceptable. Do I have to punish you as well?”

  “It’s not made up.”

  “You’re a convicted slanderer.”

  “No.”

  “My father is a rapist? You can’t possibly know that.”

  “Why do you think I didn’t tell you at Monash?”

  “You kept it from me, all my life?”

  “Don’t you remember the state you were in? You stayed with what’s-his-name, the poet. Then Sando took you in. His landlady threw you both out and you slept in his car. You were too busy burning down the house.”

  Sandy had taken her pain and held her and never let her go until he married her. I did not tell her how I had mourned her.

  “How could you know shit about any of this?”

  “There was only one American soldier who’d been photographed in Brisbane. The rest were Melbourne. The dates work too. Willenski was front page of the Courier-Mail.”

  “And that’s it? On the basis of this you write this? Anyone who knows you can see what you’re doing. America rapes Australia. It’s pathetic. Do you know how many Americans were here during the war? You want this psycho to represent them all.”

  “I confirmed it again. Last week.”

  “How could you?”

  “I let my fingers do the walking for me, as the ad says.”

  “You phoned my mother?”

  “She’s in the White Pages.”

  “Why would she want to talk about this to a stranger?”

  “People with secrets. It’s what they do.”

  “But why you?”

  “It’s a talent.”

  “She would never talk to me.”

  “As I understand it, Celine, really darling, you have been particularly unforgiving of your mother. She says you never took Gaby to meet her?”

  “No. She met her.”

  I raised an eyebrow.

  “Don’t get prissy with me, Titch. Who does all this muckraking serve? Not Gaby, that’s for sure.”

  “You came to me.”

  Celine returned to her armchair and laid the rifle on the side away from me. “No, you were Woody’s contribution,” she said. “He could not have expected to be so lucky.”

  DORIS’S MOTHER LOCKED the verandah door in silence, I had written. Only when both women reached the kitchen did the elder woman unwrap her naked wrath. “Filth,” she cried.

  Crouching, wet rag in hand, she attacked her daughter’s hem and thighs.

  “Mum, please. You’re making it worse.”

  “Worse,” she cried, and tugged at the silk dress, ripping to reveal a raw abrasion.

  “Jeez. Leave off. No-one saw.”

  “No-one saw. God save me.” Her eyes were frightening but frightened too, clearly searching for an instrument to thrash the legs, the arms, the neck. “I’ll learn you, girlie. No-one saw.”

  The girl made a break, upstairs, towards the safety of the bathroom but her mother was a scrapper, knees and elbows, in the bathroom first.

  “Save the hot water for the boarders.”

  “Please, Mum.”

  And they were collapsed, crying, wringing their hands, grabbing for understanding, pushing violently away, and then the mother turned on the cold tap and threw a fist of salt into the claw-legged tub.

  “Clothes off.” The girl might as well be six years old the way she was forcibly undressed. It was pull out your hair, rip off your nose.

  “You smell of him,” the mother said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. If you thought that meant sympathy, you were mistaken. “Come on. Give me. Scanties.”

  “Don’t leave me naked.”

  “You’ve got your bra. Use a towel.”

  What occupied the mother was not disease or pregnancy. The issue was—who knew? Who saw?

  “You could have picked a white boy but.”

  Who was going to write her husband poison letters? She would burn the parachute silk and she wished she had the strength to destroy the house entirely. He was going to kill her. He would kill them both and who would blame him? Where there’s smoke there’s more smoke. His wife was not Miss Pearly Pureheart either.

  The daughter locked the bathroom door and cried. She felt the sting of salt kill her germs and babies. It destroyed the lather so her body got coated with a grey scum which she would still smell in the morning, on the tram. The damaged part was not where you expected.

  At secretarial school she was lucky or unlucky—her classmates could see nothing but the size of the stones in Maisie’s engagement ring. Maisie’s fiancé was an American called Captain Baillieux. Doris had her write it down. No-one cared or noticed that she kept the scrap of paper.

  Of course Doris had not yet decided to become Baillieux, but she would not have told them if she had. She could not trust her girlfriends with anything important. She waited for her period alone and was relieved to see the blood. Next day she got blisters “down there.” She used the salt twice a day and the blisters went away, thank heavens, but it wasn’t over yet. The bank teller in the western room paid his rent on time but he was a pigpen. He liked his Courier-Mail and left it everywhere, including on the kitchen table where she saw the news, December 2nd, 1942. THE BROWNOUT STRANGLER. And there he was, the American, his perfect smile, his awful handsome face, his cowlick hair. He had raped six girls and strangled them and mutilated them in ways particular. After that she could hardly eat at all. Her period stopped. Her hair went dull and lifeless. If she had managed to eat a little custard, say, she would puke in the middle of her sleep.

  Yet even as her appearance changed she found herself the beneficiary of unexpected acts of kindness. Late at night, after ten o’clock, she and the window-dresser listened to the wirel
ess and the little chap was nice enough to brush her hair. Once he tucked her in. Her mother made a rabbit pie. You could taste the butter—although she had no ration coupons left. The girl resisted the awful need to read her stolen Courier-Mail. Finally, they had a lovely Christmas with the boarders and the window-dresser played piano. He was a strange kind creature with a white soft hairless neck below his wig, and the mother was happy and did not think what Black and White Rag might really be, thank God for that.

  Then it was a different year. The rains arrived. The Allies took Buna in New Guinea. Then it was Sanananda. In Guadalcanal, the Japs had their tails between their yellow legs. In March they were blown to screaming pieces in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. It was still mango season then. The bank teller loved mangoes so much he ate them in the bath. The girl ate them too. Her appetite returned. Then a letter came from Dad—he was back in Perth and coming home. Then Tom was in Aden waiting for a ship. And it was only then, when she knew they could all recover from everything, that her mother barged into the bathroom.

  She was in the nuddy when the door slammed hard against the wall.

  “You idiot. Why didn’t you tell me?”

  “I put the pounds back on.”

  “Pounds. Dear Jesus help me, look at yourself.”

  “It’s been since Christmas.”

  “It’s four bloody months. No wonder you’ve been throwing up. You’ll have to leave before your dad gets home. Don’t cry. You should have thought about this. You can’t be giving him a little piccaninny.”

  Without another word, the mother went downstairs, soft as a ghost, an angel of the annunciation.

  The girl found her kneeling at the front door polishing the knob.

  “Mum.”

  The mother’s head was tiny as a coconut, the hair lank, eyes leached. “You’re an idiot,” she said, “I could have helped you.”

  “Mum, it wasn’t the black chap. It was a white chap, Mum. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry for what you said.”

  The mother’s mouth was just a little line, a scar, a screwed-up sewed-up wound. “Dear Mouse,” she said, and the girl shivered to receive the tenderness. “We’ve got no choice, my titchy mouse. You’ll have to be gone when he arrives.”