Amnesia Page 14

  Celebrate her real life without hysteria. Celine Baillieux had used these words in Moroni’s.

  All you need is to be humble, the note continued. If you can manage this we, her friends, have the ability to publish you digitally around the world. We are legion. Ten million readers are now within your reach.

  Yes, right. He twisted the corner of his wine-stained lips and began to bash the keys. His fingers hurt like hell but he would not dishonour her by being her hagiographer. He would write or overwrite until he bled. Go celebrate your arse, he thought. Ten million readers. Bullshit.

  MANY HAWKESBURY MORNINGS had now passed. As this new one began, a grey lizard, aka a skink, a member of the family Scincidae, a nervous neckless creature with tiny legs, made its cautious way up the pitted trunk of the angophora and stopped, still half in the night. A butcherbird sang like Ornette Coleman, fluffed out its untidy chest, and shat. The windows were filled with smudgy dawn but the voices of two women could be heard, sometimes in unison, sometimes in discord, then in lone confession, and this variation was emphasised or diminished by the man in puffy overalls, who sat on the edge of his desk or kitchen table, using a large discoloured toe to raise and lower the volumes of two quite different tape recorders.

  The river was opaque, a greenish grey. The crack of a whipbird cut through the human voices. The magpies and lorikeets and king parrots added their calls and the pink early sun, finally, revealed the awful hairy glory of the fugitive.

  The “most controversial journalist of his age” would have thought it pathetic to grow a beard deliberately, but the razor had been left on the top of the beam above his bed and now he had discovered it … well, too late. He had a “sort of” beard and it had shocked him to see its reflection in a spoon, his sensual mouth all hidden, leaving just the fleshy nose and his creased and pitted bark. He looked a hundred.

  The women were still speaking, as they had done for days, and he let them go together, waiting for … he did not know. Of 1975, not one single word, no rage, no pity, no word about revenge. He no longer cared. He had received so many different instructions on how to tell the story, the only sane thing was to let it show itself, to wait until it crept out of its hole. Sometimes he was very patient. Sometimes he hated the women, sometimes he was amused by how often they agreed with the person they complained of. If they had been butcherbirds they might have almost qualified, in spite of all their acknowledged opposition, as a “bonded pair.”

  Sometimes he reported their comments. Almost always he “fixed them up” and oftentimes he distilled Gaby’s slang into something more worthy of the ideas she was expressing. Would you trust a woman who spoke of “lossitude”?

  In the Supreme Court of New South Wales the judge had asked him did he make up quotes.

  He admitted freely that he not only made up quotes but had also been accused of making up quotes, “but never of the quotes I actually made up.”

  When they did not laugh, he attempted a quick lesson in the nature of dialogue, explaining how the actual words themselves were far less important than was generally thought by laymen. It was more accurate, he said, to understand the spoken word as the product of the tectonic forces working below the surface of the human drama. It was these forces (none other than the insistence of a character’s greed, love, ambition, etc.) which were important. It was these forces which the writer had to know. It was as a result of them banging against each other that the dialogue emerged.

  The prosecutor asked him if he could report an entire conversation which he had not witnessed. He said he never claimed that ability.

  Then what ability do you have?

  He compared himself to a forensic palaeontologist which caused unfriendly laughter. But he insisted on it. His job was to dig up the bones, piece them together, and from all the known information about diet and habitat, be able to construct the creature itself.

  You mean, said the prosecutor, a whippy figure with an enormous high-ridged beak, you made up words and put them in my client’s mouth.

  He said he would have been happy to quote his client exactly if the client had not, in spite of his Christian Brothers education, the unfortunate tendency to switch tenses, inject “ummm” or “ah” into sentences and use “gonna” instead of “going to.”

  If your client’s subjects agreed with his verbs, said Felix Moore, then there wouldn’t be the temptation—or necessity—to ever clean up his quotes.

  This is what he did above the Hawkesbury River: cleaned up quotes and lined them up in readiness like fresh-caught flathead in a killbox.

  As he worked, a dinghy thumped and whined its way towards Wisemans Ferry while, just below the hut, he could hear the first slap of water from its wake. God, it was lonely. If there had been a safe place to go he would have found a way there.

  The tapes aside, he had not unpacked the cardboard carton until the fifth long day when, in spite of his depression and his fear of being controlled or imprisoned, he had laid out his forensic evidence across the floor and began, as follows:

  SHE WAS Gabrielle Angela Quinn Baillieux on her birth certificate. She was born in the Royal Melbourne Hospital on November 11th, 1975. We can pin down the exact minute of birth from the parliamentary broadcast which was, on Celine’s evidence, playing in the delivery room. As the baby slithered into the midwife’s brown hands, both parents heard the governor-general’s secretary: “God save the Queen,” he said, the creep.

  It was 4:40 p.m.

  The baby wailed. The pulsing squiddy cord was cut. The insistent force of life was now brought to the mother’s attention and her naked child was laid against her chest. It is a moment when new parents often weep, but when this pair wept it was not at the miracle of life, but because the legally elected government of Australia had been overthrown.

  Fuck them, Celine cried. God fuck the governor-general.

  Shush, said the obstetrician. There’s no politics today. You have a child.

  Celine cupped her daughter’s universe inside her hand and inhaled the musty rutty sex-smell of her hair. There are politics every day, she said. Only a fool would forget it.

  It would be the child’s likeness to the beautiful mother which everyone would emphasise. The daughter would later insist that this was artificially emphasised, the result of her mother’s vanity, but who can rely on these agitated witnesses? The nature of the resemblance—the cheekbones and distinctive lips, the thick, almost wiry, yellow hair—was real enough. Likewise the electric pale grey eyes, identical to those of the reckless parent, and that mischievous muscle you can see today, joining the pert nose to the mobile upper lip. These uncanny similarities made strangers smile. Even those who had become disenchanted with Celine were smitten. It took the theatre director Betty Burstall to be “puzzled” by the way the mother’s hair just happened to match the four-year-old’s urchin curls.

  Gabrielle Baillieux was born into bohemian comfort in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton and thereafter grew up around actors and writers and radicals and became precocious in the way you might expect. Betty Burstall was her godmother at a time there was no God. “I had a very happy childhood,” Gaby said on tape, which made Felix Moore wish he had been trapped with her in her stinky dugout, quietly noting how, say, she used her lip chapstick obsessively. Stuff like that.

  The alleged terrorist was born golden. She grew up knowing prime ministers and junkies and barristers and alcoholics and had regularly fallen asleep in a fug of marijuana, but for twelve long years she was reliably loved, safely handed from one pair of hands to another, at home, and in the Footlights Collective, and at the Women’s Action Theatre in Nicholson Street, and there were, through her childhood, perhaps twenty houses which she could walk into without knocking and find adults who would feed her or admire the artwork in her schoolbag. She attended Carlton Primary and had Greek and Italian and Lebanese friends who petted her blonde hair and never called her Skip.

  These were the years when the conservatives once more ran
Australia, when Woody Townes, who always had his nose or dick in everything, was buying up the old Carlton terrace houses and painting the exterior walls ultramarine, the window frames maroon, like Persian rugs, and no-one ever dreamed they would look as shitty as they do today. It would later turn out that Woody Townes owned the company that owned Gaby’s childhood house in Macarthur Place. It was the narrowest house in Carlton, as wide as a suburban driveway, dove-grey, salmon-pink, with a high cast-iron verandah where you could have seen, at any moment, the tight press of Australian art and politics. Gough Whitlam stood there. Clifton Pugh. Felix Moore Esquire. This was the house where Australia’s tallest playwright famously walked from the front door to the kitchen fridge in just two strides. It was a small house much envied, much derided, for how could two bohemians afford this, the cutest house in Carlton with its windows opening onto the park?

  This was what Celine called “my Carlton” which is less nauseating than it might seem. She really managed to own Carlton for a year or two—not only by being a beautiful young woman with great legs and a Nepalese kaftan with tiny mirrors sewn into the embroidery. In those days, before she made the soup commercial, Celine Baillieux was an activist actress of note. If she was sometimes mocked she also had a following and she used it, not always to her husband’s advantage. God knows what Sando felt when he opened up the newspaper each day, and if his wife was never photographed with Yasser Arafat it was only because she never had the chance. Celine was liked because she was both beautiful and not “up herself.” She put herself at risk. She was beaten, more than once. She stood in the rain outside King & Godfree selling Direct Action with the actor Matty Matovic, who was not yet a prisoner of the state. She was fearless, always in the front row of everything.

  She bicycled from household to household, from play-reading to rehearsal, past the Italian greengrocers, the group houses with windows open to the street playing Van Morrison throwing pennies on the bridges down below, up to the Brunswick baths, down to the Victoria markets for fresh puntarelle with her string bag suspended between the handles and Gaby dripping gelato on the seat.

  And of course she did love Carlton (as she understood it) for its unlocked doors and open windows, for Macarthur Place, for Lygon Street, for its Lebanese hashish in Johnny’s Green Room, its sly-grog shop in Chummie Place, the welcoming Italian families, the intense and clannish Greeks, the intellectual pubs and radical politics and fabulous cappuccinos and Readings books and Professor Longhair’s record store of loving memory.

  The hard men from the party’s King Street headquarters filed into her doll’s house and sat in the small front room with cold beers held daintily between thumb and forefinger. Sandy was their up and coming man. They had watched him since he left his storeman’s job at Dunlop to get a degree at Monash University. They observed him in the Monash Labor Club. In 1970 they shoehorned him into the Vietnam Moratorium Committee where he began his association with Sam Goldbloom and Jim Cairns. They were very happy when he became a family man, and if Celine was not exactly what they would have wished, she managed, when she was in their presence, to make them forget it. Did she flirt with them? Lay her hand upon their arms? Did they permit this? There is no evidence, none at all, none on a tape, none in a notebook or scribbled on the typing paper, but of course she flirted. What else should she have done?

  Sandy had strong support from the socialist left and, unusually for Melbourne, the right as well. For the men in King Street he was a natural for the state seat of Coburg, and it did not hurt that he was promoted by Woody Townes. The Coburg branch, however, was a local branch i.e. parochial and bloody-minded. They agreed that Sandy Quinn was working-class, dinky-di, ridgy-didge, from Williamstown. They said nothing about Mrs. Quinn (not her name) but she was probably what they were thinking about when they said Sando was not local, that they did not want an outsider “parachuted in.”

  Celine never would understand that she was only bullied into living in Coburg so, in the branch’s opinion, she would get to know “real working people.” Real? The party did not really know shit about Celine. And if Sando thought she could be forced to live in Coburg, he did not know her either. She would rather die than have a backyard, or a Hills Hoist or a barbecue or a privet hedge all of which arrived in her life when Mr. Neville died and Doris “liquidated” the home her daughter loved. Within a day of the auction Doris had bought a taxi business on the other side of Melbourne, in Springvale. She began to drag out photos of “Dad” and no longer mentioned Mr. Neville.

  Celine understood the madness later. At the time she smelled it like a gas leak, the loneliness, the nothing of Springvale. There had been nowhere to escape the fear. There was not a bookshop in Springvale, certainly no Bach or Botticelli, only the culture-hating xenophobic mediocrity.

  To live in Springvale, Celine said, was to endure long hot afternoons and airless nights alone and a five-kilometre walk to a chlorinated swimming pool and burning concrete and stupid boys peering through the walls of the changing shed.

  I would die in Coburg, she told her husband. He told her Coburg was not Springvale.

  He did not understand. The streets of Springvale had been empty but for some poor lonely “housewife” trudging up to the shops, past blind and empty houses in one of which Celine was reading “Howl.” Doris did not have to live in Springvale. She could have afforded Carlton. This very house, this lovely slice of terrace house on Macarthur Square. To Doris it would have been a slum.

  Celine was not leaving this for Coburg. Coburg was a hot basalt plain. Coburg was the road to Sydney. Coburg was where they manufactured hats and shirts, Kodak film, Agent Orange. Coburg was the poor fucked-up Merri Creek seeping through the council tip past Pentridge Prison to the quarry.

  It would be no bad thing, just the same, said a certain George Papadopoulos of the Coburg branch, to get your missus to understand: in Coburg there is space to have a proper clothes line.

  Sando laughed when he passed this on to his wife. He kissed her. He made her laugh about the clothes line. He told her that he could not have loved a wife with a clothes line. He would not ask her to modify her views, to dress more carefully, wear a bra, or consider the party platform before she made pronouncements about the Middle East. He said he was the one who would be elected, not his wife. She was an actress. She should act, he said.

  Sando was the only “good” person Celine had ever met. He set up an office in a cupboard just off Sydney Road in Coburg, and she was proud of him. There, each night, after his day teaching school, and on weekends, and on holidays, he filled out forms and wrote letters for all factions of the immigrant community, mostly Greek and Italian at first, but then the Lebanese from Denbo, who needed more assistance than the Turks.

  Each night he returned to her in Carlton, to the black trunks of the elms and the birds quarrelling in the branches of Macarthur Square. There, on the top floor of his skinny house, Celine watched him breathe their daughter’s shampooed hair and listened while he read her The Midnight Cat. She was jealous sometimes, not for long. Every child should be loved like that.

  “ALL HAPPY FAMILIES are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

  Is there a more famous line in all of literature? Is there a greater writer than Tolstoy? Only in some lost corner of the earth, in a shack above the Hawkesbury for instance, might you find a wine-caked fool thinking to himself—hang on, Tolstoy, not so slick: it may not be a case of either/or.

  This family of Quinn’s and Baillieux’ had definitely been happy. For ages they had story-reading, beaches, opening nights, election-night parties. They cuddled up in bed on Sunday mornings. All happy families are alike in that no-one gives a shit about them. This sort of language, Felix Moore had been warned by powerful friends, did nothing for his credibility.

  Being now employed to explain a life using nothing more than over-oaked wine and tape recordings, he did not argue with Tolstoy. Instead he thought, this is a family that will be unhappy. Even during the ha
ppy years there must be “storm clouds gathering.” These clouds would make the happy years more interesting. As luck would have it, there was a real actual storm cloud: i.e. a dreadful lie: that the grandma was allegedly dead and unavailable. When in fact she had been alive in Springvale all this time, this trauma victim abandoned by her daughter.

  Then she turned up, alive, at Macarthur Place.

  Gaby remembered it exactly: she had been in the front room, standing, reading at a music stand. The book was Wolf Children by Lucien Malson. (There’s another first line for you: “The idea that man has no nature is now beyond dispute.”)

  Looking up to reflect on this happy Marxist fantasy, Gaby saw her grandmother in the window.

  She took the old lady to be a wino, from the Salvation Army hostel. She was sixty years of age, more or less. She wore a fox fur. Her hairdo made Gaby think of Edo Japan, although the effect was not artistic or refined. A huge tortoiseshell comb kept the structure in its place and the woman’s face was very white and her lips very red. If her face was fabulously wrinkly, she had lovely bones beneath.

  When the old lady tapped on the glass, the hair on the girl’s neck stood on end.

  She had nothing to give but her jelly beans. She had them lined up on the music stand. She held up the black one and the crone nodded enthusiastically and pointed towards the door which the girl reached at the same moment as the visitor.

  Black one, she said, very chirpy. Thank you.

  She was not a wino obviously. She was dressed in a long worn black coat with sleeves rolled back and silver bangles.

  I’m sorry, the girl said, confused by the jewellery. It is all I have. And was then taken by the sight of the stranger unwrapping an oblong object, cosseted in white tissue paper. She feared it would be an heirloom offered for sale. I haven’t any money, she said. Truly.