by Peter Carey
Gaby had first met Frederic at socialist youth camp in Healesville when he had given a report on child labour in Third World countries. Gaby found him afterwards, totally alone, throwing stones into the bush. Not long after that, his father got kicked out of the party. Then his parents split up and you would sometimes see him standing with the handsome rock-jawed dad selling the Trot paper. The dad was not charming: “Do you or do you not agree there is a crisis in capitalism?” He was one of Celine’s “tribe.” Sandy said he was a crim.
When Frederic’s mother got her shop together she could afford to also rent this jerry-built addition for her son. At first she worried he would be murdered or mestered and she was mad as a watchdog, running down the stairs in the middle of the night, barefoot on the concrete path. With this one disadvantage the bedroom/shed was the best thing that ever happened in Frederic’s life. That, and the Mac IIx his father had delivered late one night together with some “white goods.” The computer came bundled with its disadvantage too: his mother might go to jail for “receiving.”
It was too hot in the sleepout. The sun brought out the hidden smells which had lain like mosquitoes sleeping amongst the hanging dresses, deep in the carpet with the dust. Gaby put on her gluey socks.
Thank you, she said.
For the first time he smiled, a nice smile.
Anytime, he said. It’s been a considerable pleasure (he talked like that).
And he gave her something, a coin, not a real coin, a heavy medal. On its face was a hurricane lamp, bronze relief against the silver. She asked what it was.
Look, he said.
It is pitch dark. And you cannot see a thing.
Where is it from? She meant from what country.
He closed her fist around the medal. It is from the past, he said.
And with that he raised her hand and gently kissed it, not like a boy at all, and in her fright and joy she would have rushed straight out the door again except he had to unlock the padlock before she could be released.
ROYAL PARK IS a significant site in Australian history. It is from there that Burke and Wills set off to lose themselves and die. It is where General MacArthur’s forces camped. The trees had grown since 1942, but Royal Park was still as flat as a parade ground. It was across the road from Frederic’s daggy back fence. Here Gaby removed her blood-pink socks and discovered she smelled of dead rabbit or day-old butcher’s paper. She kneeled on the dying grass and twisted uncomfortably to examine her injuries, two U-shapes overlapping, brown and pink and now raising red around the edges. Did rabies look like this?
The yellow children’s hospital was visible through the trees, waiting to tattoo her with the name of her disease. Car loads of super-normal families headed north along The Avenue. She imagined their intimate fug, lost Minties, old travel sickness, the boring safe comfort of a Saturday. She touched the tooth stabs with her forefinger, pressing to see how much they hurt. Looking up she was startled to discover Frederic—now dressed in retro drainpipe trousers, brothel creepers, Hawaiian shirt—as he closed his corrugated gate behind him. Then he was sloping off along The Avenue towards the city moving in his famous Frederic way, his tall body very straight, his head on one side, hair flopping, an entirely distinctive, very cool style of tiptoe walking that she would finally understand (not for years and years) as the expression of his gorgeous shyness.
She had left her soccer ball behind. She had not meant to. She certainly wanted to be let into that magic room again but she was too proud to have played a cheap trick to get there. Like, I left my comb behind. Pathetic.
She made her way back across Royal Parade and then around the cemetery. As she emerged on the Carlton side she felt herself being looked at. She had wished them to think that she was dead and all their fault, but by the time she was walking along the grassy strip in the middle of Keppel Street, she felt stupid and ashamed. When Katie Humis and Eve and Robo and the others erupted from the front door of a bright white terrace house, five screaming girls dressed in black like crows, it took everything in her not to run away.
Oh my God.
Ring your mother.
Use our phone.
Katie and Eve had wide leather belts at their hips. They would have been surprised to know they were severely judged for it. Gaby would have been incredulous to know she would ever want to be their friends again.
Your mum was freaking out.
It was the first time that she properly understood she was not one of them.
Who were you with?
No-one.
You did it?
What?
She did it.
What did I do?
You shagged him. Eve said that and was clearly shocked by the ugly thing she’d said.
Who would I do it with?
Their faces were red and overheated. Martin Boosey, they said, together, idiots, clones in black.
They did not know how to look at anything. They had not even noticed her bites and when she left them she made a fuss about walking backwards, waving, making it sort of funny, although she was disgusted they would think she was shagging.
She had wrecked her life much worse than that.
She turned down Cardigan Street, jogging, pretending she was coming back from soccer. Looking down the wide straight flat road towards the city she saw him, Frederic, now crossing at Elgin Street. He was dodging traffic, carrying a very large cardboard box.
At the Rathdowne Street traffic lights she stopped to examine the medal he had given her, the bronze hurricane lamp on its silver ground. It is pitch dark.
Her life had just changed in some serious way but there was, as yet, no external sign of it. Entering Macarthur Place she walked close to the buildings on the north side, then slipped into the lane beside her kitchen. What had happened? What had changed? All the empty beer bottles had been taken away leaving a single line of sickly yellow grass between the asphalt and the wall.
Her radical mother was in the kitchen wearing makeup.
Are you all right? the mother asked, staring at her. Celine looked so weird, like the enemy, someone from South Yarra. She was wearing pressed embroidered jeans and when, on tape, Gaby tried to evoke the cocktail of emotion that had caused her to cry, she mentioned the jeans more than once. Celine had dressed in a bourgie black linen jacket with padded shoulders. Her daughter had been missing a few hours and now she was dressed up for the police and social workers. She had pressed her jeans to make it not her fault.
Gaby had not known that she wanted comfort until she saw her mother’s frightened stare and knew there wasn’t any comfort to be had.
Are you all right?
Yes, the girl cried, I’m fabulous. She pushed past and ran up to the shower. Not for a moment did she consider what a shower might mean to her mother. Gaby wished only to wash the rabies germs away, and she locked the bathroom door, which you were not allowed to do. She washed her legs and rubbed her skin too hard. The bite began to bleed and she thought that must be good. When she was dry she used her father’s aftershave which stung just as much as she had wished. She placed a bandaid on every tooth mark. Then she dressed as if for soccer, with new clean shorts and long white socks still smelling of the laundry. She slipped her shin guards into place.
And then she presented herself again in the kitchen where she apologised. By way of acceptance her mother made a chocolate egg flip, one of those indulgence foods supposed to give you strength and comfort.
Are you OK, sweetie?
Don’t let me disturb your hangover.
Oh baby, Celine said, please let me brush your hair. And she had the hairbrush waiting, her instrument of love, and Gaby sat on the kitchen stool and stretched her neck, bending forward beneath the weight of the brush, not showing how much she enjoyed the tug, the pain, the battle with the knots and curls.
You shouldn’t yell at each other, she said. I can’t deal with it.
I know.
But it was not until Sandy returned that the
y actually hugged and she knew how thirsty she was for the tender sorry way he touched the skin on the back of her hand.
We’ve been awful, he said. I am ashamed.
Celine should have been ashamed but instead she had pressed her jeans with a crease right down the centre of the legs.
I got bitten by a dog, Gaby told her father not her mother. What if I’ve got rabies?
She would never forgive Celine for the relief that then illuminated her puffy eyes i.e. she was reassured by the possibility of rabies. Even though everyone knew what happened if you had rabies—they pushed a huge needle, a centimetre thick, straight into your stomach, thirty-three times.
Better than shagging, was what Celine had clearly thought. She was just so thankful, obviously.
FELIX MOORE’S PRESENT RESIDENCE had been built on a sandstone outcrop which, in the shadow of lantana, and in secret places beneath the floor, looked like a fine-ground concave lens. It showed silky sedimentary lines in mustard and ochre, but when he wanted some pretty rocks to secure his papers against the wind, there was no sandstone of a useful size.
The rocks that finally held his fluttering papers were dark reddish-brown, volcanic and blobby, or quartzy, sometimes white, streaked with black veins. They did the job, holding his information fast through two lashing storms, although nothing could be done about the rain which had, during the second “weather event,” blown straight through the hut, causing him to flee up the ladder to the bed where he sought the comfort of the previous tenant’s padded overalls.
Now he was confronting the resistant nature of the information in the carton. This was not, in any sense, a “source.” It was the sort of shit schoolgirls left in their abandoned bedrooms, old projects, medals, ribbons, school reports, VHS tapes, CDs, lipsticks, thirty types of cassette tapes of bands they were ashamed to say they ever liked. These tapes were not music. He knew that from the start. The microcassettes were Gaby’s, the motley lot Celine’s. On and on they talked, on and fucking on, invisible to the reporter, without an editor to rein them in. Other presumably vital evidence was provided by spiral-bound books with pasted photographs and scraps of art, larger books with brown paper pages not unlike those “guard books” they used to keep in the advertising departments of newspapers, awful old ads for dreary suits held in place by so-called “milliner’s solution.” A flat airless soccer ball might have lifted his spirits, but instead there were enigmas beyond all understanding e.g. a book with a hand-lettered title in Flintstone block capitals. WANK, it said. This caused the pathologist to play unhappily with the scraggly edges of his moustache. What would it serve to open this unsavoury door?
In “The World of Wank” (as it was subtitled) each of the pages had another glued on top of it. Their distinctive fold marks suggested they had been through the mail.
(LOC ROOMS)
(DESC “Small Room”)
(EAST TO LIVING-ROOM)
(DOWN PER TRAP-DOOR-EXIT)
(ACTION ANTECHAMBER-F)
(FLAGS RLANDBIT LOCKEDBIT)
(GLOBAL STAIRS)>
RLANDBIT, he thought, LOCKEDBIT, he thought. AGENBITE OF INWIT. U.P.:UP. FUCK YOU.
Time passed. There remained just two casks of Hunter Valley red to deal with. He had found a single stick of pale blue chalk inside his overalls and with this he drew a circle on the floor and placed the book inside it.
The water slapped against the shore. Ah hate this place. All ah hear all day is them damn waves, floppin’ down. What garbage he carried in his head. There seemed no order or meaning in the contents of the box, but this was all he had been given, like his too long arms and too short legs. He turned off the mother and increased the volume on the daughter, and took the “Shit, Horse” shovel off the wall and picked up the dunny paper and set off up the back stairs which led to the high ground above the roof. He managed to dig a hole in shallow soil. He could hear the pedagogical daughter briefing him on tape, so much he had to learn, she lectured. His knees hurt. He watched a pelican as it changed its landing plans and plunged, untidy feet down, head first, into the river. He shat, in spite of all the cheese, and afterwards he filled the hole as best he could and ignored the white ribbons waving from their grave.
He had a tinny, an outboard, a tank of fuel. What to do with them was something else. If his wife had been here she might have had a sensible plan to save his neck again, but he was dead to her and he must cauterise his memory of her and so he returned to the hut and sat on his desk. He restarted the tapes and was amused to hear that—here, once again—the two voices were disagreeing, but dwelling obsessively on the same concerns. They both circled the purchase of the house in Coburg. Fucking real estate, he thought. This is how you change the world?
Next he listened irritably to Gaby’s detailed explication of “Frederic’s mental processes.” She thought this should be the basis of his book. The style should be “experimental.” He fast-forwarded, paused, rewound. It was “important” that he understood. “Truly remarkable Frederic” had a continual silent conversation in his head, in words and symbols, not only when seated at his Mac IIx—which was both his true and his secret life—but even walking along the streets of Carlton where his compass-point orientation and the actions of his limbs were expressed, by him to him, in Zork Implementation Language, aka ZIL, a computer language related to LISP, now obsolete. Felix Moore MUST take notes, he was instructed. Frederic was not autistic. His skin smelled of coriander. This was said, unprompted, three times. But whether going to school or delivering “seriously discounted” electronics for his father, he was secretly a machine, conversing privately like this:
>go north.
>go east.
When Frederic picked up Gaby’s soccer ball he allegedly thought >Pick up soccer ball. Then he held it in front of him, his burnt-sienna nail polish hidden in the dark. He carried the soccer ball as an act of love, under sodium streetlights and into the seaweed shadow of the park, coming down the central axis of Macarthur Square he would make the world he entered “SUBTITLE GABY’S HOUSE.” Stuff like that:
And also:
In there is a small window which is
[“SMALL” “TRANSPARENT”] ;adjectives for window
< + OVISON, OPENBIT, BREAKBIT> ;things you can do with object
[ODESC1 “There is a small window with 4 panes”]
[ODESC0 “A window is here”]
BILLS-OBJECT ()>
<>) ;“Prints sarcasm but doesn’t handle the command
(
>>
Who talks like this?
Machine. Plus, also, Frederic Matovic stood outside the railings of what would soon be the lost house in Macarthur Place. He looked in through the dark front room into the kitchen where he could see the three of them at table. He remembered, he would tell Gaby often, a scene of mythic beauty, golden, the father wide-shouldered and narrow-hipped like a surfer, you could almost see the sand, his short tousled hair, the mother sexy like an actress which of course she was and Gaby, ethereal with dirty nails he would bring home to touch his keyboard.
He thought in many languages but ZIL was from the world of Zork. >Put soccer ball on doormat. He placed the soccer ball on the mat, knocked on the door and ran away, into the park, “raindrops glued onto his shiny back,” wrote Felix Moore-or-less-correct, slamming the keyboard of the Olivetti.
King parrots feasted, dropping seed-casings on the noisy roof.
Felix Moore rewound, played, rocked the tape back and forth across magnetic heads. He finished one A4 sheet and placed it beneath a rock. He wound in a new sheet, already swollen by the damp.
Coo-ee.
It was a human voice, and it caus
ed the great journalist to tug shoes onto his bunioned feet. With laces still untied, he fled up the dangerous back stairs pushing through the wild lantana where a lorikeet, as pretty as a Persian miniature, was moulding itself into the flowers, and then he was above the roof of his hut looking out across the empty river and down at a rainwater tank half covered in dry leaves. He could see nothing near the shore but mangrove leaves.
Coo-ee.
His eyes were dark and hollowed.
Coo-ee.
What would happen to him now? He climbed back down the stairs, walked through the hut then down towards the water.
Hello? he inquired. An outboard sprang to dirty life.
Coo-ee, he bawled. His knees hurt and he was an arthritic dog jumping through swordgrass, arriving at the shore, out of breath, one shoe in his hand. The visitor had departed, was beyond the mangroves now, and the throttle of the outboard opened wide. He was slow to see what had been left behind, there, on the edge of the mudflat, two gleaming gutted fish and three bottles of clear rum.
His creased eyes filled and he smiled and stamped his foot and if he was laughing with relief, or disappointment, he did not know himself. Must go on, can’t go on, he uncorked the rum, drank, and coughed. To be continued.
FREDERIC MATOVIC HAD LEFT Gaby’s ball outside her door, thus removing any excuse for her to ever visit him at home. When he passed her in the hallway at school he would not even look at her. It was rainy and windy all that week, and on Tuesday his vintage brothel creepers got soaked which meant she could always hear him, even when she didn’t see him, squelching, please shut up. She wished she had rabies. She would go mad and bite them all. On Wednesday he charged out of Miss Hanson’s special maths class and shoved his pointy books into her chest. She chose this moment to insist: her ball had been left at his place by total accident.