Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  “Here we go, here we go. Just as his nibs left it.”

  And he rushed ahead into a room such as she would never have expected. It was the window-dresser’s bedroom, with pink silk bed and pink pillows and bows tied in the padded bedhead. Mr. Neville laid her poor old port directly on the lovely quilt.

  “He must have expected you,” he said, and squinted over his fragrant rollie and shoved his big dry hands in his back pockets so his shoulders bent towards her.

  Which was, she understood immediately, his way of making peace.

  She said: “I haven’t got a job or nothing.”

  “That’s all right.”

  “You don’t want a little baby crying all the night.”

  “Can I be frank, darls?”

  “It’s your house, isn’t it?”

  “I’m a deaf old poofter.”

  There was nothing in his appearance to show her how to take this—he was like a stick insect, 100 percent camouflage, all dry and wiry, with one brown-papered eye and smoke closing down the other.

  “All right,” she said.

  “You understand?”

  “I suppose so,” she said. Then the old bugger winked at her.

  “Don’t let me worry you, Doris.”

  “All right.” She guessed he wouldn’t either. He winked again.

  “It’ll be nice to have such pretty company. Do you drive?” he asked.

  “No,” she said.

  He left her then and if he came back she did not hear him. It was hours before she discovered the pot of tea outside her door.

  If Doris had been a bag of spuds it would have been the same to Mr. Neville, and her relief at his lack of interest in her body temporarily obscured the quality she would soon learn to treasure—Mr. Neville was a highly effective person.

  He ran sixteen hot-dog stands. He did business with those American soldiers who had arrived in Australia months before only to be refused admittance to Port Melbourne because, although they had arrived to save our country, their black skin was not permitted by the White Australia Policy. Once this snafu was sorted out, the negroes turned out to be a big plus. Mr. Neville was soon in partnership with a tailor reproducing their box-backed drape jackets, pants tight at the cuffs but loose along the legs. His “threads” were made to a price and the fabric was what we used to call bodgie, that is, no good. That is how the bodgie gangs got their name.

  Mr. Neville resold V-Discs which included sets by Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, Benny Carter and Fats Waller dreaming about a reefer five feet long. He had a secret source of butter at Bacchus Marsh which he maintained until 1945 when bodgie rivals burned the dairy to the ground. He had a “working relationship” with the American 4th General Hospital, particularly but not exclusively its quartermasters. And by the second night, after Doris had met an obstetrician (an American captain) and gynaecologist (an American major), she understood that he could save her life.

  Inside the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which the Yanks had stolen from the locals, her unborn child was pronounced healthy.

  “Would you like to learn to drive?”

  She would like it just as much as flying, maybe more.

  Mr. Neville shouted her the first Coca-Cola of her life. Then (“quick as a wink,” Doris told me) her name became Baillieux, legally, spelled exactly like she wanted it. A week later she had her driving licence and it read: Mrs. Doris Baillieux. He bought her one black suit and one black dress and she became his driver straight away.

  It was not difficult for a man like this to lay hands on almost anything, say a Remington rifle manufactured in 1939. The weapon would later play a part in the bodgie wars but until then it travelled in the back of the van, sufficiently accessible for shooting rabbits or jam tins lined up along a fence.

  After Celine was born, and named to match Baillieux, the boss observed how Doris wore gloves to touch her baby. He asked no questions but he made himself the master of the bottle feed and the sixty-second nappy change. He nursed Celine while the mother drove.

  Celine grew up with driving, with campfires along the Lerderderg River, rabbit shooting above the warrens at Coimadai, jam-tin targets by the Darley road. She knew the high potato country up by Bungaree and the goldmines of Anakie. All these scenes are free on postcards but you must add the tall stringy man with the baby in his arms and his attendant driver: a woman in a black frock with violent red lips.

  Would Celine ever understand how her mother brought distinction to Mr. Neville? She not only drove “without jerkiness,” she could wait for hours on end and never need to sleep or hum or read the Sporting Globe. She was always there, waiting, bright as a button. She was always calm, whether he was in a great hurry or a slightly drunken stumble or, on the occasion that the wars with the bodgie gangs reached their final stage, a little bit of both.

  It was a very particular childhood for Celine, providing intense nurture but of a most distinctive kind. As for nature, Celine’s body would turn out to possess an astounding stillness very like her mother’s, and this would one day prove to be one of her most interesting qualities as an actress. This was what made her, Doris told me, a “deadeye Dick. You know what that is?”

  “An expert marksman.”

  “Don’t print that,” she said. “She’s a real dingbat. She’s got a shocking temper.”

  I SLEPT WITH HER, Celine Baillieux, good grief, of course it wasn’t what it sounds like. I couldn’t sleep at all.

  Fifteen mg of Temazepam did nothing except dry my mouth so I set off, bare feet on ashy brick, seeking the solace of the vine. She had hidden the Jacob’s Creek but the refrigerator motor drew itself to my attention, and Jesus Christ, there it lay, sweet sleep, Veuve Clicquot, glowing golden from beneath a plastic drawer. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Never steal champagne. I found a tumbler. Seeking privacy, I slipped outside and the damp cold Victorian air washed over me. An owl cried, a mopoke. There was a possum thrashing carelessly around the branches of a blackwood.

  As gentle as a safe-cracker, I closed the door. My hands were injured, the pain intense as I levered out the cork, a sweet and sneaky fart.

  My feet were ice. I didn’t care. I filled the glass and felt the bubbles bathe the desert of my throat. If I could do this I could do anything. A huge hand clamped itself upon my shoulder.

  Celine was later nice enough to say she did not hear me scream. Supposedly she woke to white lights as thin as needles raking the trees and dirty bedroom windows. She thought to herself, I am on their kill list, this moment has been waiting for me all my life. She drew a blanket across her head and slid across the freezing floor and lay hidden, heart pounding. There was a distant motor running, then it died. She crawled into the dark hallway. The air was cold and ashen and she could see through the living-room windows and out to the bush where men with flashlights slashed the dark. Two human figures stood at her open door. One of these was Wodonga Townes.

  “Don’t do that again,” he said, and he put his arm around me and pressed me like a lover to his chest. “Jesus, mate. There are people who care about you. Don’t ever disappear like that again.”

  “Sorry.”

  Woody borrowed my Veuve Clicquot and took a swig. “Christ, Felix. I thought you were a goner.”

  Behind him were men with the word POLICE in reflective letters thirty centimetres high. They were thumping around the bush as loud as wombats.

  “What in the fuck are you doing here, Felix?” A possibly affectionate mass of flesh collapsed around my shoulder.

  “Looking for my source.”

  “But that’s my job. I bailed her. You’re the bloody writer. This wastes everybody’s time.”

  “You could have just phoned me,” I said. “I would have answered.”

  “Yes, yes,” he said, suddenly, typically, distracted by another thought. “You’ve got red wine?”

  “Sorry.”

  He released me from his lock.
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  “Dobbo,” he called. “Go back and see our mate, the licensee.”

  As he gave orders to the policeman his voice was clear as ice. I observed the flash of paper money as he peeled it off a roll. I was confused, but not at all ungrateful.

  “Buy a case of Château Nasty,” said Woody Townes. “That should wake the bugger up. See if he’ll sell you some steak. I’m hungry.”

  I attempted to get back into the house but found my way blocked.

  “Get those people off my land,” Celine said, not to me, to Woody who was hard behind me. “Do they have a warrant?”

  “My pretty Celine.” His tone was wheedling, creepy in conjunction with her injured eye. “They’re police, my love.”

  Celine tugged her blanket hard around her. “Put my champagne back where you found it.”

  “I was worried something bad had happened to you.” The Big Fella handed me the bottle and took her hand. “God knows who might have grabbed you.”

  Celine folded her arms across her chest.

  “Sweetheart,” Woody said, “you are in a vulnerable position.”

  “So you explained last night.”

  There was a silence. What was going on between them? Celine stared right at him, fierce in her injury.

  “Good,” he said at last. “Then we’re clear on that.”

  Another silence, then she blinked and looked away. “I’m sorry, Woody.” Only then did it occur to me: her daughter was very close nearby. “Come in,” she said.

  In the generous kitchen Woody peeled himself a banana, drank water from the tap, wiped his red mouth with paper towelling which he left crumpled on the draining board. From inside a cocoon of blanket, Celine watched.

  “Darling, you’ve got a public road grown over. You must know that.”

  She dropped his garbage in a tidy. “I’m at the end of the road,” she said carefully. “No-one comes here but me.”

  “This is fire country. There is no direct access to the house.”

  “They shouldn’t be here,” she said.

  “Why would you be pissy about them? They’re here because I was worried about your personal safety.”

  Celine snatched her champagne back from me. “You’re pathetic,” she told me, en passant. I watched with interest as she attempted, and failed, to stand the bottle inside the fridge door. Woody winked at me. “You inherited this mansion from Lionel Patrick?” he asked.

  “It’s not a mansion,” she said and I understood that she had got involved with the long forgotten Lionel Patrick, a conservative attorney-general. She had been one of Lionel’s girls.

  Woody began shining his flashlight on her artworks, edging his way along the walls, around the corner. “Lionel was a bit of a collector,” he said and I heard a door open and then close behind him.

  Celine glared at me: “Don’t say a bloody word.”

  Woody returned, holding a small canvas.

  “Cliff Pugh,” he said. “Cliff Pugh painted this.”

  “For Christ’s sake.” Celine poured her champagne down the drain. “Will the pair of you stop touching my things.”

  “Great artist, Cliff, bit far left for Lionel though. Didn’t Cliff live up the road at Cottles Bridge?”

  “Yes, he did. In a moment you’ll reveal that you own his work yourself. It’s a portrait of Jim Cairns isn’t it?”

  “Cliff was a big fan of the Deputy Prime Minister. Mate,” Woody said to me, “will you rehang this painting for me. Sorry.”

  By the time I returned, Celine was nowhere to be seen and Woody was affecting to read a book. I took my shoes to the dining table where I could sit and lace them.

  “You know she isn’t stable,” he said.

  Was he explaining why he punched her? I stared at him. “I don’t blame you getting all shitty and sarcastic,” he said, not looking up.

  “I wasn’t.”

  “Yes, that’s what you’re like. But you’ve never known her like I have.”

  “How exactly would that be, mate?”

  His book made a good loud thwack as it hit the slate.

  “Don’t fuck with me, Felix. You wouldn’t be that stupid would you?”

  “I’m a coward, you know that Woody.”

  He brought his crocodile eyes to bear on me. Then he sighed and picked up a copy of the Melbourne Age. “I wish to Christ you were that simple.”

  I waited as he rolled up the pages, tying them in what I know as “granny knots.” I watched as he heaped these on the ashes and assembled the remnants of the old fire and threw in some kindling. I was standing in front of it, warming the back of my legs, when the cops returned with a case of wine and a small soft parcel which would turn out to contain butcher’s sausages.

  Woody was now immediately active and you would have thought he was Rupert Murdoch who always liked to cook breakfast for his “boys” down at his farm at Yass. He was jovial, generous, benign. He set the snags to cook and cracked a lot of eggs into a bowl and addressed the gas cooker with one hand on his fleshy hip. When Celine did appear, in jeans and plaid shirt, she was not pleased to see this alien food invade her table. She stood before it, arms folded across her chest.

  “Jeez, cut me some slack,” said Woody.

  “You can’t say the words?”

  “You want me to apologise?”

  “Take your fucking plates outside,” she said.

  “These men have been up all night on your account,” said Woody.

  “On your account, I think.”

  I felt him stiffen, the whole weight of his body inclining towards her. Then he snorted, and picked up his sausages and scrambled eggs and led his men out of the house.

  The magpies were carolling and the sky was cold and yellow. The intruders gathered on the terrace juggling plates and drinks like footballers at a barbecue.

  I finally got some red wine only to have Celine grab it back. “Later,” she said. “You’re meant to be a good guy. Please be a good guy. Please don’t fuck up.”

  “What can I do? I don’t know anything.” I thought, what had she done with Woody? How had she inherited a house from Lionel bloody Patrick? “You shouldn’t piss off the cops. You know that.”

  “OK, OK, go and eat with them. Tell them what a bitch I am. If they start poking around, just keep them away from the east.”

  “Where’s that?”

  She closed her eyes, and squeezed them shut. It is a credit to her character that she was smiling as she opened them.

  “Where the sun comes up,” she said. “Boofhead.”

  DET. SGT DOBBO CLUTCHED a handful of plastic bags, for what reason no-one said, ditto the matt-black equipment the others strung around their necks. Woody Townes carried a flashlight and a fresh-peeled stick, still slippery with sap, which he swung enthusiastically as he headed towards a slab-sided corrugated shed. His heels glowed fluorescent orange in the rising sun.

  “I’m worried about her, Felix.” He whacked at a prickly Moses, slicing it in half. “If you want to think about it, she was never good with stress.” He came upon a pale blue Cootamundra wattle, twenty-five centimetres high, planted just last spring. He whacked that too.

  “Jesus. Don’t do that.”

  “You think she should grow more bloody trees? People get burned to death out here,” he said. “I thought I knew Celine, very intimately, mate. But she has always had the great capacity to surprise. Did you know she had been bonking Lionel Patrick?”

  “No.”

  “But how does she seem to you? What’s her state of mind?”

  “Anxious, obviously.”

  “She hasn’t pulled any carving knives on you?”

  “She did you? When?”

  He paused, considering. “When we were all young she was fucking amazing, the stunts she’d pull. But now … Is she OK, really? She looks shaky.”

  “Anxious, I’d say.”

  “But isn’t this a very fucking strange place for an anxious woman to have a house? She’s got professional c
ar thieves as neighbours up the road. Did you see that? The used cars scattered through the scrub. That’s what we used to call a hide-out. Her road’s all grown over. I had to leave the Merc at the bottom of the hill.”

  “I’m sure it will be fine.”

  “A Mercedes-Benz S500. Do you have any idea what that is?”

  The Mercedes-Benz S500 is the four-door sedan preferred by Chinese businessmen, wealthy Americans and Third World dictators. “No,” I said. “What is it?”

  “You don’t drive? This one will drive for you. It’s got three computers. This is the Merc for you, mate. It’s got ‘Lane Keeping Assist.’ You could use that, for sure.”

  He rested his hand on my shoulder and we walked a way together and it was difficult to resist the old habits of mockery and affection. “It’s got bluetooth,” he said, “and Sirius and HD radio, USB and SD ports, you’re not listening. All right, I understand. We’ll save her idiot daughter if we can. I’m more concerned about mumsy. Has she compromised herself, Felix? Has she placed herself in any danger that you know of?”

  “She does have a black eye, mate.”

  Of course that gave him pause and his mouth entered one of those unstable states, never predictable in their conclusion, which resolved, on this occasion, when he took my hand companionably. “We need her cooperation, you get it don’t you? Harbouring is a crime.”

  “I’m confused.”

  He blinked as if considering my “confusion” from different angles. Then, suddenly, he was off walking earnestly towards the east, head down, thrashing passionately at the dogwood bushes. I had no way to turn him. “How does she get her food?” he demanded. “You never noticed that mailbox up on the road?” He blew his nose. “Why is it so big? And when a great mad bushfire comes exploding across the tree tops, what does she do then? Why would she live somewhere so extreme?”

  Then, certainly without me planning it—I did not even know it existed—we arrived at a forestry dugout. You cannot get a better fire defence than a dugout. This one had been driven directly into a hill like a mineshaft, with heavy wood framing around the entrance, tons of earth supported by a rough-adzed tree trunk. A dirty canvas curtain was set back a few feet from the doorway.