by Peter Carey
“She can confess all she likes.”
“She bragged she was going destroy twelve corporations. She named them. The Koch brothers are on her to-do list.”
“Actually, her mad supporters did that for her. They go on chat rooms and make up all sorts of shit. They project. They invent. They write her lesbian love letters. They’re nuts, and God help you if you speak out against them. They’ll destroy you.”
“Felix’s role,” Woody began again and this time Celine let him finish. “His role will be to properly educate the Australian public who are naturally inclined to believe the Americans are over-reaching again. Once Felix writes the story, she’ll be Gaby from Coburg. She won’t lose any points for pissing off the Yanks. No-one will want to hand her over.”
“She didn’t mean to hurt them,” Celine said.
“Australianise her, mate,” Woody said. “Gaby from Coburg. Fair dinkum. Blood is thicker than water.”
“Please fire me,” I asked Celine. “You know I’ll do this because I need the money.”
“Why on earth would we fire you?”
To be true, I thought. To be decent. Because clearly I’m being used. Because I know things about you, Celine, I would have to reveal. I couldn’t help myself.
“They could just grab her,” she said, “off the street. Like they grabbed what’s-his-name in Rome.”
“In Milan. Please take your deposit back,” I said to Woody. “Put it in your legal fund. I’m a journalist. I can’t do PR. What are you sniggering about?”
“What sort of mug would ask you to do publicity?”
“We have to try everything,” Celine said. “We have to celebrate her real life without hysteria.”
“Your job is to save an extraordinary human being,” Woody said. “I want to impress that on you, mate.”
His little elephant eyes had become so moist and sentimental that I had to look away. “I’m not the right person,” I told Celine. But at the same time I ordered a grappa, and even while Woody tried to catch my eye, I continued to insist that I was not the man to do the job. I then learned that, legally speaking, I had accepted the deal when I accepted the envelope of cash. I also accepted a second grappa. I negotiated a prescription for Dexedrine, a MacBook Pro, a Cabcharge account and, finally, a place to live until my wife forgave me for being myself.
NEITHER CELINE NOR WOODY had said I was to live in Eureka Tower and yet their silence as we entered Melbourne’s tallest building seemed to confirm that this would be my home. Passing the fiftieth floor, my ears popped. As we continued skywards, I experienced a pleasurable murmuring in my neck, a very particular excitement which arrives, inevitably, when one is cast into a decadent situation without it being in any way one’s fault.
The lift door opened on giddy walls of glass.
“You’re scared of heights.” The bastard laughed. He was my friend, yes, but he would not let me grab his forearm for support.
The lift door closed and I was imprisoned.
“You know I get vertigo.”
Celine certainly did. There had been an episode at Monash when she had me climbing the scaffolding of the Menzies Building. She put great store in courage in those days. Now I was unmanned again she would not even catch my eye.
Woody strolled to the windows from where he observed me as I stabilised myself on the kitchen counter. “Don’t be a girl,” he said. “Come on out here.”
Celine had now disappeared and I understood that she was intimately acquainted with this apartment. I once more had that feeling, common back in those Monash days, of being outside the sexual inner circle, of not knowing what was going on.
“Kitty, kitty,” Woody called me, tapping his keys against the glass.
“Bathroom,” I demanded.
Only when the dunny door slammed behind me did I see I was locked up with the very view I was seeking to avoid.
Who would ever dream of such a thing? A toilet with a wall of glass.
“You can shit all over Melbourne,” he called. “That should suit you, mate. You’ve been doing that for years.”
“Let me out.”
“Door’s not locked.”
I flushed then emerged to find him by a grand piano, leaning back against the plate glass, ankles crossed, a vaudeville joke that would only pay off when he plummeted to his death. Of course he had a bottle and the corkscrew. He took the Vosne-Romanée between the wool press of his thighs and slowly withdrew its long French cork. “Cellar Pro constant-temperature wine cellar,” he said. “Valet service. Cleaner comes twice a week—just throw your undies in the basket. The devil took Jesus into a high place,” he said. “Get used to it.”
Claire would be in heaven here, seated at this Steinway. I locked the thought away.
The great Wodonga had splashed some wine as he filled the glasses, and he now attended to the spill with a large white handkerchief.
“Château Valium,” he offered.
I accepted the gift and sunk to the piano stool. Celine called. Then Woody seemed to be discussing my bed sheets with her. By the third glass I was able to raise my eyes. Then, of course, we were to leave.
“Here’s your key mate. When you lose it, the concierge will let you in.”
Then we were all safely back in the elevator and a moment later on the earth where I was introduced to Bruce the concierge who had “read your book.” Bruce gave Woody a package which Woody handed on to me. It was my new iPhone and MacBook, all set up, he claimed. I was not at all suspicious.
Celine kissed both my cheeks. Was she leaving? Woody punched me on the arm and shepherded me to the lift and then, once more, I was alone, being sent back to the place of terror.
If you have never had vertigo it is likely you will have no sympathy for me and I will only make the situation worse by confessing what I did. By day’s end, however, I was piss-faced drunk, sitting cross-legged by the windows. The sun was low over the water-bound fingers of container terminals behind which, somewhere in the drowning dark, lay those drear volcanic plains and my childhood home in Bacchus Marsh. The east, in comparison was a vault of gold, threaded by the Yarra River. My wineglass was a murder scene, besmirched with the brutal sediment of Château Valium. I pressed my nose against the window.
Out there eastwards, not too far, seventeen kilometres perhaps, lying dead and buried like a gangster beneath the Monash Freeway, was the place where I had once planned to kiss Celine.
Her father was American. He died. In her distress she had chosen me from all the others to walk her to the bus. I honestly tried to ask about her father but we were, as she reminded me, walking to the bus not going to confession. What then? We crossed the car park and started up the gravel road. I asked her if she had heard of Ornette Coleman.
“Oh Felix, don’t be boring.”
But of course I was boring. I was a wet-feathered thing just fallen from his nest. What grade are you in? Have you heard of this? Have you heard of that? “Do you have a record player?” I asked.
She considered me, smiling so frankly that I knew my virginity was naked in the light.
“Do you like me Felix?”
I had been aroused beyond hope by the occasional brush from her pleated skirt. Now I found a stone and threw it further up the road. “I don’t know you yet.”
She held her thick fair hair up from her eyes and studied me so insistently that my cheeks took fire. “Why did I ask you to walk me to the bus? What did you think? That I wanted to cry on your shoulder? What went through your head?”
Sex went through my head. I had thought I would play her side two, track three, Una Muy Bonita. For days I had had the album in my bag. All I needed was a stereo. I would tell her she was Una Muy Bonita. I would kiss her if I could.
“I don’t know.”
“Obviously,” she said, “it’s the Battle of Brisbane.”
Then it seemed I was following her inside a pub. That’s what being eighteen was like, learning that walking to the bus meant going to the Notting Hill Hotel, also
called the Vicarage or Nott.
I have known famous Monash graduates, all men, get dewy-eyed about the Nott and its licensee, Kath Byer, but on that day I noticed only that Celine’s skirt had a dangerous flounce to it and she chose an isolated table where she carefully arranged her Ronson lighter and a pack of black Sobranies, as exotic in their way as women’s underwear. She bit the cellophane with her straight white teeth. The black cigarettes had gold tips. I had not known such things existed in the world.
“I was conceived in Brisbane,” she said as she placed a Sobranie in her mouth. “You’re blushing.”
“I’m not.”
“You’re very sweet, Felix. Would you please loan me a whisky lime and soda? I really will pay you back.”
I had intended to show her Ornette Coleman when I returned, but it took a good while to clear up the misunderstanding about my age, and by the time I had the drinks in hand she had spread an untidy collection of photographs and clippings across the table. What these were she did not explain. She took her drink and pushed her chair back so I might easily examine her display: a small Kodak print showing a white and willowy American soldier standing beside a palm tree. There was one clipping that had been pressed and folded as flat as a violet in a scrapbook. There were bigger prints, all soldiers, clearly Americans. The Melbourne Herald had stamped a number on the back of some of the larger glossy prints but the biggest had been cut from Life magazine, leaving scalloped nail-scissor marks along one side. Two of the subjects wore bib and braces, three uniforms, and the entire tribe had fair hair and good teeth. All but the grey-haired matriarch enthroned in a bentwood chair with an exceptionally long-barrelled rifle across her knees.
“He wasn’t a hero. He didn’t die in New Guinea,” she said. “That was the bullshit she raised me on. Now she says it was the Battle of Brisbane. Why would she say that to me now, like she has saved it up all my life, and used it to punish me the first time I stay out all night?”
She had stayed out all night with who?
“Did you hear me?”
“What?”
“My father died in a bar-room brawl.”
“It was a battle,” I said. “Two Americans did get killed.”
“Then my father was one of them.”
“Then he was the victim of a crime. The military police killed them.”
“Yes, but she’s a liar. Why would she tell me New Guinea all those years. I never needed a hero, just a father of some kind, but the more you look at it the more he vanishes.” She crumpled her Sobranie. “I can’t tell Sandy any of this.”
I thought, she slept with him.
“Never,” she said. “It would ruin my life.” She spat on her hand and held it out.
Her nails were bright vermilion. There was a gold bangle around her slender suntanned wrist. It did not take a lot to arouse me. Our hands slid together, skin and spit on skin.
“Who’d want to marry the daughter of a madwoman?”
“The right man will understand,” I said, but she did not see the point that I was making.
“You think I’m exaggerating. Look at these photographs.”
“I looked already.”
She moved her chair closer. “Look again.”
“For what?”
“Don’t play silly buggers.” Her hair brushed my cheek.
“One of them’s your father, right?” I said, but all these men had in common was fair hair and American uniforms.
“What if I told you I was raised to believe they were the same man?” She held my eyes. It was unbearable. “All my life. What do you say to that?”
“I don’t know.”
Whatever pheromones were in the air she did not seem to notice. “Thank you Felix, that’s very diplomatic of you, but if you’re brought up to see a thing a certain way you just see it. It wasn’t until she came out with that Battle of Brisbane I took the frames off the wall to look at them. I had an awful hangover. I was in no shape to see anything very much, but when she saw what I was doing she went really nuts. I saw her face. Then I understood how terrified she was. So I carried the whole lot into my room and locked her out and I took them all out of their frames, and found pictures hidden behind pictures. She was crying and knocking on my door.”
“What did she say?”
“I don’t care. I’m never going to talk to her again.”
Did she mean that literally? I didn’t take it to be so, but then, as we both agreed, I did not know Celine. I never would.
“Can you imagine what my mother’s done to her only child? Why would she punish me like that?”
Well, I also had a missing parent whose absence from my life was a source of constant pain. My mother had gone, that’s all I knew. My father could not speak of her without crying. I did not think he was mad or we were strange but I kept my secret folded tight and locked away and I had no intention of revealing it to Celine Baillieux.
But I finally listened to her with authentic interest. I learned to see the house in Springvale from whose backyard her peculiar mother ran a taxi service. The house was like its neighbours, cream brick, triple-fronted, the sort of place we saw in our Melbourne minds when we heard Pete Seeger sing about little boxes made of ticky tacky. Who would have known that it contained, in its plastic-wrapped front room, its dark passages, its neon kitchen and dining room, an obsessive memorial to a fallen American who was known as “Dad”? There were, besides the seven framed photographs, odd artifacts like cowry shells and a faded pink tram ticket and a Purple Heart, framed and hung beside the certificate that declared the kitchen the registered offices of the taxi company.
The pretty girl needed me, not handsome Sandy Quinn whose heart was clearly not big enough to hold her pain. Of course Sandy’s life business would be to hold the pain of others, but in my ignorance I thought myself the better man. Celine stroked my arm. She touched my hair. I judged it would be OK to kiss her just behind the ear.
“Quit it,” she cried suddenly.
I reached to touch her cheek but she slapped my hand away.
“You’re a baby. I can’t believe I’ve chosen you to tell,” and suddenly there were fat tears and eyeliner and mascara everywhere and two gents were curious to know if I was “bothering the lady.”
“No,” the lady said, “go away you bloody oicks.”
“It’s all right, mate,” I told them both.
“Yes mate,” she sneered at me when her rescuers retreated. “It’s all right, mate, baby.” She pushed her untouched drink towards me, and then she began to sob.
“I’m pretty screwed up,” she said.
She rocked forward in her chair and then she leaned a little further, with her face all wet, kissed me, softly, all ash and whisky, with mascara cheeks, she kissed me very slowly on the lips.
“You’ve a lovely kind face,” she said. “I’m pleased I chose you to tell.”
I thought, I will solve this puzzle for her. I lifted her chin—smeared blue eyeliner, iridescent like abalone shell—and I kissed her, at last, not understanding the role I had been cast in.
HOW WAS GABY going to reach me? If she encrypted her email how in the hell would I decrypt it? Forget what I said about Wired magazine. I had no preparation for this modern world.
As the days passed my vertigo gave way to a general unease, something worse than the fatty biliousness caused by takeaway food. I was queasy. I was impatient. I abused the delicate MacBook as I had once hammered my Olivetti Valentine (until I snapped a character straight off the type bar.) Already, in Eureka Tower, my keyboard had developed bright white stress marks on the “f” and “t.”
I peered and pecked on Google and LexisNexis where my subject was a teenager of interest to the police, a schoolgirl, totally enclosed in a yellow Hazchem suit, arrested for interfering with chemical effluent.
I traced one of her former teachers at R. F. Mackenzie Community School. Her name was Crystal, for God’s sake. She was an activist. A progressive. We spent a lot of time on the
telephone while she explained that R. F. Mackenzie had been an almost perfect place for a clever radical to go to school. It was hard to divert her. She talked mournfully about a whole chain of inner-city schools, East Brunswick through to Bell Street High School, to Moreland, where progressive teachers had once been able to make a difference. She remembered Gaby Baillieux had a boyfriend but she forgot his name. She knew Gaby had Samoan friends but then decided this was “private information.” She was more informative about all the smart left-wing teachers who had been sucked out of classrooms and swallowed up by the Education Department once Labor came back to power.
Through the Samoan Methodist Church in Coburg, I tracked down Gaby’s friend Solosolo. Solosolo was now living out in Sunshine where her sister, a big girl, had been stabbed, just before I called. Yes, Solosolo played with Gaby in the Bell Street High girls’ soccer team. She prayed for her. She had to go.
Gabrielle Baillieux disappeared from my screen until I found her in a fossilised blog: she was twenty-two, a technical solutions engineer at IBM. Three years later a Gaby Baillieux was charged with trespass and causing wilful damage to a government facility near Alice Springs.
Of course IBM fired her. They must have. Two years ago a Gaby Baillieux had been appointed as a project engineer at a game startup in South Melbourne. The company still existed, but they refused to talk to me. I found her credit rating: Fair. She had not married. She had owned no property and had not given birth.
I found no evidence of hacking or any other criminal or political activity. I began to wonder if her mother might be correct, that she was innocent. Perhaps it just meant that she was very, very skilled. I really hoped so. I wanted her to exist.
I called Sando at his electoral office in Coburg and he told me to go and fuck myself. Fair enough. I belly-flopped into the shallow end of computer crime, an online world of Tor and bitcoins. I made many notes, understood nothing, and stopped short, thank God, of entering the dark web without protection.
I studied the extradition treaty between Australia and the US and learned that everything Woody had said was true, but, really, so what? Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was.