Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  I saw Sando on CNN, poor bugger, his looks gone, his hair worn down with worry and divorce. Due to his strange mustard-coloured coat the Labor MP had an unfortunate Eastern European appearance. The Washington Post had already written that Gaby was a product of the “Culture of Envy,” which was their nod to the Socialist Left faction of the Australian Labor Party.

  Sando told CNN he hadn’t seen his daughter in many years, he could not remember when.

  Still, Mr. Quinn, if you had to choose between betraying your country or your daughter?

  It was clear Sando wished to cry. I turned away from him and put my nose against the window and realised that it had become my comfort, the cool glass in the middle of the night.

  I slept badly.

  I would lie in bed imagining the apartment was full of people only to discover that it was nothing but the television where, at any hour, one could see the same old footage of the Angel and hear, again, the American politicians who did not seem to understand she was not their citizen and therefore could not be their traitor any more than she could be their patriot. The House Majority Leader found it politically necessary to call for her execution.

  It was in the midst of this swelling hysteria, with dawn breaking over the Dandenong Ranges, that I learned that her pompous barrister had obtained his first adjournment. There had been a late night news conference outside the court where Gaby hesitated and glanced timidly at her bewigged QC who patted her familiarly, the creep.

  Now, I thought, my wait is over. This woman needs me. Then a day passed, then another, then one more. I woke to discover bottles and pizza cartons and cold French fries littered over my quilt.

  My first thought was that Woody had got legless and trashed his own apartment. This was not a rash conclusion. I had been drunk with him many times and had witnessed a whole spectrum of behaviour that went from hiding raw prawns inside a motel’s hollow curtain rods to sharing the logic of a real estate development that would cost him $30 million. He could be rude, crude and sentimental, but throughout it all he had been my protector, never embarrassed to be an admirer or a servant to a higher cause.

  I had been pleased but not at all surprised when he came to sit with me in court each day. I cannot describe the comfort. That was how we had been together all our lives. He was, he said so often, “a fan.” It was only when my attention moved beyond the shocking debris on my bed, when I read the notes sellotaped around the bedroom wall, that I understood there had been a tectonic shift in our relationship. My fan was now my boss.

  YOU ARE PAID TO WRITE, NOT EAT YOURSELF TO DEATH.

  He awaited me at breakfast, dressed like a patron Pope in a carmine jogging suit, twin white stripes down each side. My computer was on his generous lap and he was opening my files which contained all sorts of shit he had no business reading. The secrets of Celine’s mad mother and the imaginary father were not the worst of it.

  “It’s only notes, mate.”

  “I can’t publish your fucking notes,” he cried. “I want whole pages with proper spelling and punctuation. Australianise her, for Christ’s sake. Please, Feels. Be a sport.”

  I said I would prefer him not to read my files.

  For reply he slammed the MacBook shut and threw it on the table top.

  “Do you think we control the duration of the discovery process? How long will it take? Five months? A year? If there is going to be an extradition request we need your book in the stores by the time it happens. You saw her on TV? You think she’s cute, right? You got a hard-on just watching her. But listen to me, she’s on the spectrum. She’s scary. She does not respond normally.”

  “I need background. That’s what you’ve been reading on my laptop. Background notes.”

  “My laptop,” he corrected. “It’s foreground I’m paying for, mate. That’s what we need. Do what you always do. Did you really go to the war in Bougainville? No. Was the piece impeccable? Absolutely. You’re a genius. Make it up, and most of all make the bitch loveable, all right?”

  “She won’t be like that, Woody. Remarkable people never are.”

  “Come on, Feels. Who’s the big sook who sat with you in court and smelled your socks all day? Who applauded when you told the court that there was no such thing as objective journalism?”

  “That was not a defence of making things up.”

  “Extrapolate, isn’t that how you explained it? Be intuitive. You want some useful advice? Don’t make this story all about yourself. That’s what pisses people off. That’s why they don’t like you. That is why you are always in the shit. No offence.”

  This was hurtful, and yet the very peculiar thing about the history of patrons is how often the most ignorant and barbaric amongst them have shaped great works of art. Only because of this offensive speech did I finally glimpse what my book might really be.

  “And for Chrissakes go and buy some clothes.”

  “I am waiting for her to make contact.”

  “You think you can dress like this for your interviews? What if you end up on TV? Get decent. Buy clean socks too. Go. I’ll wait here until you come back.”

  So it was, strolling across the Swanston Street bridge for the first time in forty years, I found myself swimming in the giddiness of time, knowing exactly where I was and having no idea at all. I chose to go to Henry Bucks by way of Flinders Street, in order that I might pass the embalmed corpse of The Herald building (where I had once been so firmly edited). The bitter wind drove lolly papers past its shuttered doors.

  I sometimes dream of the Herald as it was so long ago: the marble and terrazzo, oak panels, the whistling thumping vacuum tubes above your head. There are always bizarre copy boys and copy girls with carbon-paper smudges on their cheeks. People come and go in pursuit of unimaginable business. Some walk directly to the banks of clunking lifts. Men in hats rush past the front desk and through a swinging door.

  The first time I entered this holy place I was carrying all Celine’s putative fathers in a manila envelope. It was my strongly held conviction that one of them would turn out to be real. I explained my general purpose to the receptionist who clearly did not take me seriously.

  I waited. I missed my physics lecture. Then physical chemistry. As the clock struck eleven, an hour when Professor R. D. Brown could be relied upon to wipe the blackboard clear of his gnomic equations, I saw a snazzy-suited fellow with a ramrod back charge through the swinging door. This, although I did not yet know his name or rank, was Captain Stackpole. Captain Stackpole thought he knew me. Clearly, I answered a description. He pointed a finger at me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

  “Thomas Ryder?”

  I stood. It was enough.

  “Follow me,” he said, returning through the swinging door with me at his heels. I was afraid. I followed him deeper, down stairs, up stairs, along corridors, into the office where I saw his name written very clearly on his door.

  What could he do to me?

  Captain Stackpole was a short man, very trim, and brisk. He had a dimpled chin and a military moustache and an RSL badge in his brown lapel. He indicated a chair but I could not waste a moment and displayed the photographs of Celine’s various fathers.

  “What’s this?”

  “I need to see the photo editor.”

  “The librarian?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t know?” He whacked his pipe against his ashtray. “You’re Thomas Ryder.”

  “I’m Felix Moore, sir.”

  “You said you were Thomas Ryder.”

  “No.”

  “No?”

  “No, Captain Stackpole.”

  He stared at me belligerently. He reached for the telephone. I thought, oh shit. He changed his mind. “This place is a bloody circus,” he said and shoved my pictures back at me and grabbed my arm and marched me down some stairs and along a hallway to a door with a tacked-on paper sign that read ABBOT.

  Inside was a large room like my dad’s spare-parts department: grey st
eel with regularly drilled holes stretching from floor to ceiling, deep shelves about a metre apart stacked with what I would now call archival boxes, patchy brown or straw colour, each corner protected by metal tips.

  Captain Stackpole led me down different aisles or avenues, bawling out Miss Abbot’s name.

  I turned a corner and there she was, the librarian of The Herald, riding on the top rung of a wheeled loft ladder, propelling herself forward with her white-gloved hands. Even perched so high, it was clear she had a lot of waist and long straight legs.

  “Herr Steckenpoo,” she cried, descending.

  In the year of the bouffant her black hair was radical, not just for being short and shaped, but in anticipating the fashions of the years to come. She was handsome, with high cheekbones and the jawline of a heroine. All this was eroticised by her narrowed eyes, which, in their present puffy state, suggested very bad behaviour.

  “Cobber,” she said to me, holding out her hand which revealed, beneath the curatorial white glove, the inflexibility of a prosthetic.

  “Miss Abbot, might you assist this young fellow?”

  “Captain Steckopopo, your servant.”

  “You are asking for it, Miss Abbot.”

  “Yes, but not from you. What can I do for you, cobber?” asked Miss Abbot and left Captain Stackpole to make his own arrangements.

  “Let’s have a deck at what you’ve got.” She had a lovely reckless coordinated walk and if her bum was not small it was not corseted and therefore lovely to behold.

  She settled herself at a long high work bench. Her thighs were generous and her ankles nicely turned.

  I turned over the manila envelope and she briskly emptied the contents onto her desk. “Give me a squiz.” With her left hand (which, being ungloved, was slender and long-fingered) she began to sort the images into different categories.

  “One of these men is my dad,” I said. “I don’t know which one.”

  “You couldn’t just ask your dad himself?”

  I did not lie, but she clearly saw my grief.

  “Ah, so.” Miss Abbot had an active bright intelligence which was not contradicted by her puffy eyes.

  “Can you help me?”

  She lightly touched my upper arm.

  “No-one better, cobber. I’m your man.”

  Celine’s pictures were in five piles. The first consisted of the prints I judged to have been already purchased from The Herald. Miss Abbot recorded the pencilled numbers on their verso sides.

  “Stand by,” she said and I listened to the ladder wheels moving amongst the stacks. Then silence. Then she was back with the names of all the four soldiers and the date and place where they had been photographed.

  I thought, I am a genius. I am going to win. I am going to ask Celine to the Purple Eye Jazz Club next Friday night.

  Miss Abbot took a blank sheet of paper and drew a grid. She made notes of all of the photos but one, a yellowed cutting, which she slid back in the envelope.

  “What about that one?”

  “It’s not your dad.”

  “Why?”

  “The Yanks were mostly lovely,” she said. “You can’t say that in Melbourne without being called a tart, but they were gentlemen. You had a very handsome daddy whichever one he is.”

  This father, here, had appeared in The Argus between 1942 and 1946. That one was in The Age after 1943. This here was definitely Life magazine and the Melbourne public library had bound volumes so I must go there straight away. As the Yanks were in the war so bloody late, there were only two hundred issues to check.

  I was looking at a cheeky GI offering an apple to a grinning girl. I was wondering if they did “it.” Miss Abbott rested her left hand on my wrist. “Don’t be hard on your mum,” she said.

  “OK.”

  “Cobber, you’re not listening. We all thought we were going to die. Everyone did a lot of stupid things. If your mum slipped up, you must forgive her. She doesn’t know you’re doing this, does she? Your mum.”

  “Not really.”

  She searched my face and I did not know how to respond. She removed a large white envelope from her lower drawer and extracted a 10″x8″ glossy black and white print. It was the sort of picture I had seen before: the liberation of a European city, an American tank, crowded with soldiers and a very pretty girl with tangled jet-black hair. The girl was a photographer. She had two big cameras slung around her neck. She waved both arms in triumph. Beside her was a handsome GI with a wolfish grin who, I realised with a shock, had both his hands upon her breasts.

  “You get it.”

  “Yes,” I said, but only as she slipped the photograph away did I understand that this stunning girl photographer had become Miss Abbot.

  “Be nice to your mum,” she said. “It was a different time.”

  When she had finished with her sheet of paper she tucked it back with all Celine’s photographs.

  “Do you know where the public library is? Of course you don’t.”

  So she led me out and up the stairs and through the newsroom and into the foyer past the receptionist with the hairsprayed bouffant and then she walked with me two blocks to the corner of Swanston Street.

  “Walk that way,” she said. “The library is on the corner of La Trobe Street, on the right. You can go and see Phar Lap when you’re finished. You know who Phar Lap was?”

  “A horse that died.”

  “Yes, a horse that died. Do you smoke, cobber?”

  I said I did and she gave me a Craven “A” and lit it for me.

  “Come back and see me,” she told me as I tried hard not to cough. “Come and tell me which hunk is which.”

  She kissed me then, rather strangely, directly on the lips.

  I should have been in lectures, but there was no contest in my mind. So I walked up towards the library carrying the burning Craven “A.” There was a hot north wind, and you could smell the smoke of bushfires amongst the traffic.

  I was high and happy, triumphant in my quest, and then quite suddenly, as I crossed Bourke Street, unspeakably sad.

  It was a puzzle then, but I know what caused it now: the tears in my eyes were precipitated by the flavour of lipstick on my mouth, the taste of my mother perfectly preserved. Gone, empty, then as now as I go to Henry Bucks to buy my suit.

  I RETURNED WITH my gorgeous silk and cashmere suit still not understanding that I had signed a contract with a property developer and not a publisher. I was not yet accustomed to thinking of Woody as my boss. I had told him to wait for me, and he had completely failed to follow my instructions. I pinged him off a pissy email.

  It took only a minute for me to discover that he had locked his temperature-controlled wine cellar and left nothing but a can of Foster’s in the fridge.

  When I discovered he had been into my computer again I wrote him another email. I said this was not on. If I had been his surgeon would he expect to help me wield the knife?

  He still had not answered my first communication but I could not work like this. I opened an account on Dropbox and hid the icon and transferred all my files where he couldn’t read them anymore. That’s how naive I was. Are you sure you wish to delete the file named Angel from your hard drive? Yes, yes, yes again. Cop that, young Harry, as my father would have said.

  My source was too important to talk to me just yet? I forgave her. There was plenty to get on with. Woody’s Dexedrine was past its use-by date and therefore tasted like Fruit Tingles on my tongue. He wants me to write intuitively, I thought. I can do much better than that. I already had parts of the story that no-one else could know. This book would be truer than my patron could have dreamed.

  By the time dusk settled on Marvellous Melbourne, Wodonga had still not replied to my emails and I did not give a shit. I was buzzed. I worked all that night, all the next day. When it was dark again I thought it sensible to stop before I had a heart attack. Coming off speed is awful. I already felt the tears in my throat. All my buried past turned sticky, cl
oying like spoiled velvet, dead roses. I took one Valium and two Temazepam and lay down on the bed with my laptop held like an X-ray machine against my chest.

  Just two hours later I woke to find hail driving against the windows at ninety kilometres an hour. The Age archive will tell you about that morning, people all over Melbourne were woken by a roar of ice, but behind the laminations of Eureka Tower, it was so quiet I could easily hear the voices in the other room.

  It was almost three o’clock in the morning. In the open kitchen I found Celine barefoot, smoking, sipping whisky, making a mess with files and papers on the countertop. She had dumped two cardboard boxes on the stove and it was surprising to see such a fit, pared-down person carried her accumulated life like a bag lady—sun-bleached papers, cartons with sides collapsed, guts naked to the air.

  “Hello,” I said.

  She frowned.

  Was she cool towards me or simply tired? Why were her feet bare?

  The Great Wodonga was settled at my desk, fleshy enough for Lucian Freud, his huge thighs pressing against the limits of his tailor, hunched over the laptop which had obviously been removed from my embrace like a teddy bear from a sleeping child.

  “The scribe,” he said sarcastically. So they were reading my work again, and of course they had suffered the fate of all snoops—they were upset by what they had discovered.

  “So where’s my source?” I demanded. “Is it true you can’t deliver her?” This was what you might call a tactical diversion and I was pleased to see how it changed the mood.

  Woody returned the computer. Celine said no, no, no, but I must understand the difficulties. We were all on the same side. I must rest. I must sleep. I must wait until Monday, although that was Easter Monday, so it would probably be a few more days before I got face time.

  Woody yawned and stood. I thought, he’s going home to his photogenic new family, but instead he stretched himself out on his four-metre-long “designer” sofa. Then Celine joined him and there they were, not touching, but close enough for electricity. They had “stayed in touch” all right. Was she fucking the brute? Was this why Wodonga had taken on the cause? His big head was like a mallee root and his feet were ugly, even in his socks. But her feet—dear Jesus, they were just as astonishing as they had been, so many years ago, on a blue candlewick bedspread in Springvale. And of course she was one of those beauties who age like precious fabric, rubbed and rinsed, day after day, year after year so the reds become pink and the blues turn almost white.