Amnesia Read online

  “I have to go to the hostel?”

  “I’ll say you got a job in Sydney.”

  “Wouldn’t he like a nice white baby?” she asked, but she was already bilious at the thought of the mouse-sized Hank Willenski growing in her womb.

  The mother’s eyes were brimming, and she stroked her daughter’s tiny ears.

  “Do you even know his name?”

  “Baillieux,” she said, and spelled it.

  “Is he French?”

  “I don’t know, Mum. He didn’t say.”

  “Is he in New Guinea, love?”

  “Yes Mum, he is.”

  “God save him then,” her mother said.

  “God save him, Mum.” She did not say the brownout strangler was dead already, murdered by the Aussies in his cell on Boggo Road.

  “DID YOU EVER IMAGINE how it might feel for me to read this?”

  I smelled Celine’s acrid breath. I observed her blackened eye, the hard contusion on the cheekbone, the awful puce in the soft cave of the orbit. I reached towards her tenderly. She thrust my hand away.

  I said I was not her enemy. I would never wish to hurt her. I was startled she couldn’t see that I had been a time traveller on her behalf, that I had given her what she could have never known. Her life was a miracle to me. From Stanley Street to all those nights of mad applause on stage.

  “Everything you’ve written is reprehensible,” she declared, and of course, the truth is ugly and often frightening. We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.

  “What you have written hurts everyone.”

  I never wanted to hurt a soul, but a laboratory rat would have learned by now that I was doomed to repeat my action like some automaton in a Disney underworld. I felt ineffably sad. I stared at the monster log until it had burned through and collapsed onto a sparky bed of fine white ash. Celine gathered my pages to her breast. Her fingernails were delicate and uncorrupted, swimmer’s nails, I thought, the colour of cuttlefish shells. I watched her turn my pages. A single A4 sheet slipped free and glided towards the hearth. I snatched at it.

  “Liar,” she cried. She launched a flock of paper. Two hundred and twenty-one pages struck my head, beat my ear, landed in the fire, white wings curling into black.

  I had sworn this was the last copy on the earth and as I was being a good man I could not be a liar. I had no choice but to plunge my hands into the flames.

  Then Celine was at my side, raking pages to the floor, stamping on their carmine skirts. The paper was like stinging nettles. I had expected it would have hurt much more than this.

  “Stop it,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”

  In the kitchen I permitted her to plunge my sacrificial hands beneath the tap. She emptied trays of ice into a bowl and I watched my injuries: red and black palms, bloating like dead fish.

  “This is bullshit,” she said softly and I could once more smell her acrid breath. “This cannot be the only copy.”

  “I know that.”

  “Then why did you do this?”

  I shrugged.

  “Did no-one ever love you Felix?”

  “I’m an awful person.”

  “You wanted to hurt me, you should be happy. You’ve shown that my father is American.”

  “So?”

  “It gives them a claim on Gaby.”

  “No it doesn’t.”

  “You’re sloppy and careless. You don’t know where you are. You told Woody I could not deliver Gaby. He believed you. He thought I had tricked him into paying bail. You just wandered off to bed and locked your door. I heard you.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  It was not Celine’s character to have a first-aid kit, but there it was, a black backpack with a white cross in house paint. From this she produced a roll of white surgical bandage which she wound delicately around my injuries.

  “Woody is your admirer, God help you. He’ll kill us both.”

  I should not have let her say this.

  “Felix, did you ever ask yourself, why is Woody paying me so much money?”

  “He’s always been like that.”

  “Yeah, right.” Even as she was sarcastic, she was also kind, tidying up both hands and securing them with small elastic clips. “Gaby was not even arraigned,” she said, “and I had Woody on the phone offering to pay her bail and legal support. Whatever he wants you to do, it’s not for me. And now he will use this dirt you’ve dug up for him.”

  “He offered bail. You said you asked him.”

  The firelight caught the colours of her bruised and shiny cheekbone. Her fingers felt like feathers as she snipped away the loose threads of my bandage. “I knew Woody when he was a Maoist with a red cashmere sweater.”

  “Everyone trusts Woody.”

  “I certainly trusted he would help me now.”

  “Jim Cairns trusted him. Woody loved Jim Cairns, early, before he was the Treasurer, before he was Deputy Prime Minister.”

  Celine poured me a glass of wine and held it to my lips. I sipped.

  “Exactly.”

  “You’re being sarcastic?”

  “Think about it, Felix. The Americans thought Jim was the enemy. Dr. Cairns, the Deputy Prime Minister of their ally, was a communist. Gough talked about it—the ‘American Terror’ that Jim would be briefed on Pine Gap. Imagine: a communist had got access to all that shared security.”

  “And?”

  “Don’t you imagine they would have recruited someone close to Cairns?”

  “So Wodonga is an American spy? Jesus, Celine. You never mentioned this before.”

  “Calm down. I never thought of it before. Remember the photos on Woody’s office walls. How does a Melbourne property developer get to play golf with the US Secretary of State?”

  “I don’t know, but he loved Jim. He’d do anything for him.”

  “I worked in Jim’s office when he was Treasurer. I do believe I remember you there too. Don’t you recall how embarrassing Woody was? Cleaning Jim’s shoes at the party conference at Terrigal? In public. And in the office, what a dogsbody. Woody is a sort of thug but there he was standing by his desk turning pages for Jim to sign.”

  I picked up the glass and held it with both wrists and drank. She watched, as if waiting for me to fail. “Jim had that effect,” I said and in the sad silence that followed me setting down the wine, I thought about those great men in that government which was overthrown in 1975. Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister, was a patrician. But Jim Cairns was from the basalt plain, from Sunbury. He had been a policeman, a champion runner, a working-class intellectual. It was Jim who had the moral authority to lead a hundred thousand of us up Bourke Street in 1970. My most intoxicating night as a young writer was spent staying up with Jim, composing captions for the pictures in his book on Vietnam. I admired him just as much as Woody did.

  When Jim was brutally beaten by the Painters and Dockers, it was because he always had an open house. He was Treasurer of the nation and you could walk in off the street and meet Junie Morosi (Jim’s lover and office coordinator), me, Woody Townes his millionaire intern, Celine with a kaftan and no bra. There were Nimbin hippies, confusion, awful instant coffee. Those were heady days to be so young and close to government. Australia had withdrawn from Vietnam, and recognised China. If Woody was a spy he was in a perfect place, except that he loved Jim Cairns.

  “He is very loyal,” I said, and Celine picked up her rifle and ejected a single shell.

  “Catch.”

  I grabbed and missed. I heard the bullet bounce and roll. Then she was in the bathroom with her face creams and I was in the dark, alone with the smell of ashes.

  SO: CLEARLY: the armchair was to be my bed. No-one brought a blanket and I slept like a reporter on the red-eye and woke to find a pale thing standing over me.

  “What?” I asked of the pale thing standing over me.

  “I
keep hearing things,” she said.

  Was this like me, to retreat from a woman’s touch when it was offered?

  “I’m scared,” she said. “Would you come in with me, just for company?”

  If I hesitated it was not because I was still a married man, but because I was nervous to go with her, and nervous to refuse. She was unusually fragile, even needy and I also remembered how she had been Medea, Antigone, Hedda Gabler, all these dangerous women.

  I was an old man, but I was still a man. I had never been to bed with a woman without at least the possibility of sex and as the eucalypts of Smiths Gully tossed restlessly in the night, I lay very very still, too aware of that musky scent inside the tent. Celine went straight to sleep, snoring intermittently. Her frame was slight and birdlike. Her chest rose and fell. Broken sticks fell on the corrugated roof. Honey myrtles scrubbed themselves against the naked window glass.

  Who doth murder sleep?

  My father could not sleep, not ever. I would find him in the middle of the night, in striped pyjamas, looking down at the car yard and all the unsold Fords gleaming on their gravel bed of quartz, like fish on ice. He hoarded pills. I forget so much about my childhood, but I can still recite his pharmacopoeia which included legal codeine and Valium which last he eked out because it was hard to get. He was awake and worried he paid too much to trade in Henry Wilmot’s Holden Ute. I was now worried that my present sleeping partner was unstable and that my supporter was a deeper and darker character than I could bear to think about.

  I turned and discovered her staring patchy eye, a small and touching night creature.

  “What might happen to us now?” she whispered, and lifted an arm, a motion as smudgy as a flying-fox wing in the dark.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Come here.”

  I laid my head upon her shoulder and she stroked my hair with such sad consoling familiarity we might have been lovers after all.

  “I can’t believe you,” she said. In the cloud-scudding light, her lips appeared to be deep blue. I inhaled her toothpaste together with her pheromones. I did not doubt she was afraid. Somewhere far off, a car door slammed. Her body stiffened, but then a soft rain began, and there were no more noises and the corrugated iron played that song of safe childhoods, and Celine lay still and I thought of the house in Rozelle with our daughters beneath a sudden Sydney storm. It was unthinkable that I had abandoned them. It had been the only thing I knew I would never do.

  The rain was louder and through the din there was a heavy thumping.

  “Kangaroo,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

  “What did you say to him? Woody.”

  She propped herself on her elbow. “Their own citizens don’t count anymore.”

  “Is that what you told him?”

  “They murder their own people on the basis of suspicion. There are no boundaries of any sort. They break their own laws all the time. Half of them are locked in jail. And my daughter thought she could fuck them over. Say something.”

  “What?”

  “They say she infected their base at Pine Gap. Do you think that’s credible? Is it possible? Is that her crime?”

  “Did you accuse Woody of being a spy? Is that why he hit you?”

  “That would make it all OK?”

  It was not at all OK but it made a sort of sense. Woody was an emotional man. Loyalty was a big deal with him.

  The rain had stopped and there was no sound but the occasional flurry of drips from the big gum tree overhead. Clouds had covered the moon and it was unclear as to whether I could see the shed roof or if I only thought I could.

  “I was sitting in the sunshine yesterday,” Celine said, her inflection upwards in that mild hippie fashion she sometimes adopted.

  “Yes.”

  “I saw a tiny bird, like those spotted things, they live in New South Wales.”

  “You mean a spotted pardalote?”

  “They don’t live here, Felix.”

  “I think they might.”

  “No, they don’t. If you’re in Pakistan, what are you to think if you see a little pretty bird that shouldn’t be where it is?”

  “This is not Pakistan.”

  “Would I be mad to think it was a drone that could destroy me?”

  “Sweet Celine.”

  “Don’t maul me, Felix. Turn on the light.”

  “You don’t mind people looking in?”

  “Whoever comes to get me will walk straight in. Turn on the light. Open the cupboard door. Pick up that box.”

  “This?”

  “Open it.”

  She was sitting on the bed with haystack hair and her legs crossed and a clay-coloured blanket pulled around her like a shawl.

  “Do it, please.”

  I opened the box and discovered, lying on a bed of discoloured cottonwool, the bloody remains of what I took, from the evidence of the colourful feathers, to be what she possibly thought it was. It had been mostly blown apart.

  How extraordinary this was: the accuracy, the physical stability in the midst of turmoil.

  “You shot this?” I asked. It was too late to argue about the habitat of the spotted pardalote.

  “You know I did. I killed this lovely thing.” She began laughing, her big bruised lips crumpling and her eyes screwed up like paper in a bin, this miracle that began its journey underneath a Queensland house.

  Who can foretell us? Who can limit what we’ll be? Her marksmanship, I soon realised, was a natural gift, one recognised and encouraged by the rifle’s previous owner, the man she sometimes called “my father.” That is, Mr. Neville.

  Mr. Neville was a most unlikely chap, a dear friend of that same window-dresser who had drawn the seams on her mother’s gravy-coloured legs and, later, when Doris was thrown out of home, carried her cardboard suitcase to the tram. He had bestowed on her two envelopes. One was addressed to “My Good Friend, Mr. Neville Peterson.” The other contained thirty-three pounds and ten shillings.

  “Be a brave girl,” he said, and kissed her on both cheeks. Did Celine not want this information? She herself had travelled the thousand miles in utero, unable to know anything except, presumably, that the waters of the world were full of fright and shame as her mother braved the Melbourne streets knowing that her cotton dress could not hide the curve of her belly to her bush, her thighs, bare legs. There was no-one to forgive her. She lugged her cardboard “port” which is what they called a suitcase in Brissy, from the French portmanteau. In Melbourne “port” meant cheap fortified wine which was sold, together with other necessaries, from Mr. Neville’s back gate and on occasions from his Bedford van. It was hard to credit the number of cigarettes and chocolate bars and nylon stockings stored inside that tiny space.

  His house was in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, which was working-class and industrial in 1943. It is still there, a single-story late Victorian twenty-two feet wide with a curbed corrugated-iron verandah and an ornate pediment on which the word “Balmoral” stands in bold relief. It is on a deep block, almost two hundred feet, with access from the wide rear lane.

  In 1943 the backyard held a trove of lumber, lead, copper, and various other valuables best traded after dark. The daylight merchandise lay on racks or stacked against the shed like sticks around a bonfire. Nearer to the gate stood the aforementioned van in which the terrifying driver, the left lens of his specs pasted with brown paper, made his expeditions to collect windfall coal or bunny jumpkins or mushies or cackleberries and there were many farms from the Dandenongs to Ballarat where the tall dry man with the cinched-in belt and no bum in his trousers was known and welcomed for no better reason than his nod, his tight-rolled cigarettes, his reassuring companionable way of saying “yairs” (a spelling which misrepresents him in this age where such a thing looks comic). It is said authoritatively that there was no black market in the war.

  Doris found her future half hidden by a bamboo thicket, behind Mr. Neville’s cast-iron gate.

  As it was now n
oon the master of the house had just risen. He appeared at the front door with his first hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his slitted eyes peering through the smoke. He had a high nose, a long chin. His hollow cheeks were shining from the razor.

  He accepted the crumpled envelope without a word. Having no sight in one eye, he read the two pages lopsidedly. Then he considered the subject of the letter.

  “You don’t drive I suppose?”

  “Does it say I do?”

  “No.” He folded the envelope once and then twice, making it much smaller than was needed to accommodate it in the pocket of his khaki shirt. “Not exactly, no.”

  “Why do you ask?”

  He paused. “Is he happy then, your Mr. Clive?”

  “Does he say?”

  “Is he lonely?”

  “I wouldn’t know about that.”

  “But he must have friends. Doris?”

  “Yes, I’m Doris. What does he say about me?”

  “He’s a silly bugger our Clive. He has nothing to audition for except a role he is too nervous to accept.”

  “He said you were a nice man.”

  “Did he, darls?”

  “Yes, he did.”

  “Are you in trouble, love?”

  “I must be the consolation prize,” she said.

  Mr. Neville pursed his lips and she saw that she had somehow hurt him.

  “My, look at you,” he said. “Is that a baby boy?”

  “I don’t know yet.”

  “Can I eat him when he’s cooked?”

  He said that to pay her back. Why not? She was a cast-out tart with her stomach and her bosoms growing tight inside her dress. “I’m so sorry.”

  “Come in, come in by all means,” said Mr. Neville, backing down into the darkness.

  “I’m so sorry,” she said, inside the hall of Balmoral, with tears washing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

  “Here you are, love, first door on the left, here.”

  Doris felt all the cold of Melbourne autumn in the walls.