Amnesia: A Novel

by Peter Carey

  The after party was in East Kew. I had lived in Melbourne all my life and never saw a house with gates like these, four-metre-high spears tipped with gold fleurs-de-lis, like the owners were waiting for the revolution. A bright yellow Porsche was parked inside. The punk revival drummer lived here with his mum and dad and little brothers. His left ear was rolled and pierced like a weird piece of pasta, but he was very well mannered. He carried my bike from the van and showed me where to leave it. Damn, I thought, fuck it. Have to ride it home.

  The parents were away. There were frantic kids in every direction, speed, molly, coke, hash oil. They were so private-school, and I was the freakiest thing they ever saw, those silly little girls with white powder still clinging to the philtrum of their Botticelli lips.

  I thought, I will have a pee and try and find my way back home.

  But the loos were locked and filled with idiots. I went downstairs and found, amidst the chaos, the moronic thumping bass, shrieking, vomiting, not a loo but a brand-new Mac IIci. It turned out to be upgraded with a 50 MHz Daystar 68030 board, and it connected to a Hayes Smartmodem 96 and it was surrounded by silent kids some maybe as young as twelve. At the keyboard, like the most perverted seminarian or Sunday-school teacher, was Frederic Matovic.

  The little boys hung on him, on his shoulder, pressing in on him as he did his fluttery feathering Frederic typing, and I knew it absolutely was not sexual, but just the same my stomach tightened. It was, to me at least, so completely intimate. Those rhythms were his rhythms, created by commands and responses, by pauses, by almost violent returns, when he shifted in his seat, the way he did, and nodded his head as he had first done when he had a fringe to flick away. I knew that he was breaking into something good. When one of the munchkins hooked him up to a brand-new snail’s-pace StyleWriter it was clear he had a shitload of treasure to take home. I had meant to run away, but I barged in and tapped him on the shoulder and he was like, Hi.

  He pushed a skanky skateboard child away and I, just, took my place.

  What had he got into? A few years later it would have been email. That year it was a CSIRONET account. Holy Shit. He was inside MetWat’s Secretum secretorum where correspondence was still headed Memo and RDM as in Restricted Distribution Memo. He made a Frederic noise, indeterminate, a sort of moo, and left me with his mullety crew while he relieved the StyleWriter of its burden, reading as he stacked the pages.

  We should go, he said. He flicked the fringe that was not there.

  I stood. (I should have reacted how else exactly?)

  OK, guys, he said. The water is on me.

  I was staggered he would do this. Leave these little anklebiters running like mice inside MetWat, but perhaps that was the fee he had negotiated with them, or perhaps he was safely pissing on the Federal Police, or engaging in class warfare by getting the Computer Crime Squad to hit East Kew. His normal procedure would be to not interfere with any site he had entered, to build a nice back door perhaps, but to tidy up after himself and do no damage to the system.

  Not tonight. IDIOTS. YOU NEED BETTER PASSWORDS. WE ARE TWELVE YEARS OLD AND WE OWN YOU.

  I found him a plastic bag in the kitchen and he filled it with his heavy printout and we left the house together, and walked out into the hot night air.

  And there, in the front of the palace, behind the high iron gates, beside the Porsche and the BMW, we kissed and kissed and kissed, the softest widest lips. I kissed his secret feathery eyes. He smelled my neck. He said, Happy birthday baby, in my ear and I was so busy crying, I did not understand exactly what was in his zorky little mind.

  THE FUGITIVE, it can now be reported in this edition (fifth digital, first paper), had been moved from place to place at night, for instance on the pillion of an ailing Honda 750, along a hundred and thirty kilometres of winding mountain road, from the Golden Wattle Motel to the Koala Lodge in Katoomba, a town famous for its touristic virtues including the steepest railway incline in the world, the steepest aerial cable car in the Southern Hemisphere, the vertiginous Scenic Walkway, with its sublime scenery so precipitous and perilous that a perfectly sane man might be tempted to cast himself screaming into the abyss.

  The pillion passenger’s character would not be tested by the great sublime. On the contrary: he was accommodated with a view of the Koala Lodge’s inevitable concrete forecourt, and all the extra advantages of generous self-catered accommodation with editors “en suite.” He had a cooktop in his room so he could have spaghetti and grill sausages and lamb chops and, at this particular moment, launder his underwear which ballooned from the boiling saucepan in shivering dome-like tents suggestive of soap bubbles and the Sydney Opera House.

  In his new location, he sat, as he had sat while covering the war in Bougainville, the events of 1975, the first hunger strike at Villawood, day after day for almost fifty years, in front of a typewriter. Tapes were supplied. Pages were taken by arrangement. There was continual loud dripping from the bathroom which he ignored. He wore a grubby bath towel around his hips. On his wide bare shoulders he revealed a hard hairy saddle of flesh, a dense pad reminiscent of that rounded structure on the dolphin’s forehead, the so-called melon which produces sounds for “communication and echolocation.”

  It was night, as usual, and the headlights from the nearby road washed across the ceiling and the voice of Celine Baillieux was without relent. Likewise the dripping, which finally caused the fugitive to leap from his seat as if he were a character in an early Pram Factory production, as if he were, say Archbishop Mannix half mad with paranoia, imagining himself the actor in a drama being observed by all the world. His trousers would not dry but he was the son of an ingenious mechanic. He fetched the wire hanger from the back of the bathroom door and made a hoop about twenty centimetres in diameter. This he sprung into one trouser leg to keep it fully open. He then threaded a belt and cinched closed the waist. He laid the wet garment on the floor and positioned the motel hair dryer in the tunnel entrance to the left leg. As he turned on the dryer, hot air rushed up the trousers and the apparatus filled its sails.

  Cop that young Harry. He said. Out loud.

  The newest tapes were seldom free of irritating comment. Really, really, said Celine Baillieux, most of what you have submitted is untrue.

  But Felix Moore did not submit. To anybody. He turned the cassette off. He stood and approached the connecting door, only to be interrupted by a blue police light washing across the steamy ceiling. He thrust tapes and paper beneath his mattress. He moved typewriter and tape recorders into the cupboard and dragged his towel in after himself as he closed the sliding door behind.

  The underpants continued bubbling. The blue light strobed through the steam. The cupboard remained closed. By the time he slid the door open the blue light had changed to red.

  He arranged his towel, turned off the lights, and peered around the blinds where he was much relieved to see a young man strapped to a gurney being urgently propelled towards an ambulance.

  Celine said, You quote my daughter to make it seem we were alienated. You know that isn’t true. We were close then. We’re close now. If you were honest you’d make it clear that everything I am doing is because there is no-one in the world I love more. Love does not make you perfect, as far as I recall. It does not wash your sins away, but when I drove back to Coburg, late at night, it was not to talk about my life with Lionel, as you suggest, but because her father would be out of the way. He was enraged by her Agrikem film. He was furious that she had tried to damage him. He was snoring in what had been our bedroom, and I came to give her comfort.

  Yes I was “going out” with Lionel Patrick, so what? He gave me a nice place to live. What was I meant to do? Of course Sando thought I had chosen a conservative to hurt him. He hadn’t even met Lionel. Maybe once to shake his hand. But you want to discuss Gramsci? Lionel could do that. Or Terry bloody Eagleton. Lionel has been to performances I would have killed to see, even if I’d had to work as an usher for the privilege. Paul Scofie
ld, Gielgud, Olivier, and he had an astonishing memory of every one. I was quiet and contented at his place, a house in Caroline Street which he had filled with such lovely things, nothing that was not beautiful, but nothing preening either. I loved his soft leather slippers, the pyjamas he wore around the house with their thin white piping.

  Sando never understood the theatre in the least, except he loved to watch me on the stage. It filled him with adulterous passion to know he would soon be schtupping Hedda Gabler.

  Lionel was far more refined in every department. It was a pleasure to go with him into the bush, up to his house at Smiths Gully, filled with paintings by these people he had known, the Boyds particularly, and Percival, but also Clifton Pugh and Peter Glass. He tried to teach me the names of trees, but it was so far beyond my own upbringing. With Mr. Neville the world was divided into gum trees, wattles and scrub, and that was it.

  So two or three times a week I drove across the river and snuck into my own house to talk with my daughter. Perhaps I had had a glass or two. I wouldn’t say that I was ever drunk. She was overweight and isolated and depressed and that boy had dumped her, the creep. He was the guilty party then. He always has been. Of course I spoke badly of him. Jesus. Then they were back together, so I had to be punished.

  Does she remember how she slagged Lionel? I do. She thought it was “gross” he was so old. It made her sick to think of it, whatever “it” was. She repeated things she got from Sando, who seemed to think that Lionel had invented capitalism. Meanwhile the Labor Party were trying to out-capitalist the capitalists. Sando was already becoming bitter. He had been in parliament so short a time but he was being run by bureaucrats and technocrats. This would be his failure, not because he was weak or bad, but he was up against things he could not control and he had, unbelievably, not expected it.

  He persuaded Gaby that my relationship with a former attorney-general would be scandal that would hurt not only him but the party. What a joke. Malcolm Fraser lost his pants in Memphis. He was the damn Prime Minister and even this did not hurt him politically. I could have walked behind Lionel carrying his trousers, and no-one would have reported it. I could live with him for weeks on end, be seen at the theatre and the opera and Moroni’s and what the hell.

  But I was destructive and narcissistic, I heard.

  So why then, you may well ask, why did Gaby choose to consult with me about the “Water Leaks” memoranda? Wouldn’t a destructive narcissist be the worst person to confide in? Yet it was to her mother she revealed the contents of a David Jones shopping bag. Two hundred pages, easily.

  I suggested she just give them to her father.

  He’ll burn it, she said.

  When I properly understood what she had got hold of, I was frightened for her. MetWat were indeed issuing secret waste-disposal licences and worse. I was also appalled by that fucking R. F. Mackenzie school which hadn’t bothered to teach its students that there would be consequences for their pure and lovely actions.

  Of course I wouldn’t dream of telling Lionel, but he had been the attorney-general and he was a very experienced lawyer. So it was not at all weird to talk about the law, in general, hypothetically. Forget the conversations. I don’t recall them anyway, but what I concluded was that this printed evidence would never see the light of day. The memoranda were stolen property, the product of a crime. In this case the criminal would be my daughter. This is what I told her. She would be punished and not get what she wished. She shouted at me, of course. I was a defeatist. I was bourgeois. She would get the story in the media. I told her that our news had become driven by press releases and managed events. PR flacks outnumbered journalists at the rate of four to one.

  She almost spat at me. You think I don’t know this? What do you think our film was there to do? She said, I am making history. You haven’t got a clue.

  If I was such crap, why was she bothering to tell me?

  Because you are my mother, she said.

  And her chin went rubbery, and I cried and so I completely failed to notice what she was clearly telling me: she would manage an event which would force the government to act.

  I drove back to Lionel dewy-eyed. I was her mother, said Celine Baillieux, speaking with that strange flatness of affect that marks all varieties of Australian speech, whether it be Lebanese from Denbo or Samoan or the descendant of a man who expected to live in the Lake District all his life. The fugitive imagined he detected a deep historic grief in the voice of Celine Baillieux, as familiar to him as the sound of wind in lonely European pine windbreaks planted in L-shapes in the paddocks, the denuded land from Balliang East up to Morrisons and Bullengarook and Maryborough. That was our fate, he thought, to love that abused landscape, in spite of the evidence before our wind-wet eyes.

  The writer turned off the burning gas below his underpants and rescued his scorched trousers from the bathroom floor. He inserted another cassette, a young woman’s voice which would whisper in his sleep.

  NOW FREDERIC AND I were back together I had thought that Cosmo would disappear. Next Monday morning we had “Monday remarks” as per usual. Frederic had previously considered this a waste of time. Now he wanted to raise the issue of “Cosmo’s gun.”

  I could not be embarrassed by Freddo but this was pretty close. Cosmo’s gun was an infantile steampunk gun he had constructed from antiqued copper and brass tubing and several eccentrically shaped “steam chambers.” He had made it with Doug in shop, which was OK. But when he brought it to home room and acted like it was “significant” he got completely pissed on. No-one knew what steampunk was and didn’t care. It was guns they voted against. This was why Crystal failed to recognise the R. F. Mackenzie teaching moment. Cosmo the loser had raided Palermo Plumbing and found totally new uses for flexible copper tubing, hose clamps, thermocouples, heating elements, copper and brass fittings, all sorts of crazy Jules Verne shit that his father would never let him work with in real life. I did not speak against him. Even when he said Macs were for girls. I was just sad, because he was so big and damaged.

  Frederic had generally exhibited disdain for the class’s good opinion. Now they were outraged by his nerve, amazed to find themselves the subject of his sexylove.

  And Cosmo with his staring eyes and long chin and great Sicilian schnozzle, huge Cosmo, pressed rigidly into his desk, mustn’t he have thought, why is this happening to me? Did it occur to him there would be a price? Had he decided it would be worth anything, to get a social upgrade in this unexpected way?

  I thought it was about Cosmo. I was so pissed off, I didn’t see it was for me. Frederic was always a sort of bowerbird, building astonishing displays to court me, and he did this again and again over many years. Just when I thought he was bored with me, he would perform his mating dance. How would I guess this was one of those? He was so sly and devious and funny, and he forced the home room to admire Cosmo in a totally Freddo way. He gave them a talk about steampunk, in whole sentences, with punctuation: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky blah blah blah. Steampunk was an alternative history of Victorian England, the Wild West too, separately, together. It was a variety of science fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic future. Steampunk featured anachronistic technologies like Cosmo’s gun which as anyone could see (apparently) harnessed steam and gas for its propellant force.

  Crystal had her mouth open. I thought, she is hypnotised. I thought, she loves Frederic in spite of everything. He was so perfectly 100 percent R. F. Mackenzie, showing the teacher what a syllabus she could have built from steampunk: literature, physics, the study of naval vessels. Steampunk brought you slam-bam against Charles Babbage who designed the world’s first computer in 1822. And so on. Frederic was an actor’s son. He walked between the desks. He was deft and sibilant while the apparent object of his speech sat locked inside his big stiff body, blushing, glowing, his black curly hair erupting from his red bandana.

  The class had never seen Frederic in this way. (I’m not sure I ha
d myself.) Certainly they did not understand where this creature came from, and they were indignant to be charmed, to be asked, by him, to tell him what steampunk music might be like. They had no fucking idea. They looked to Crystal who did not help at all.

  Cosmo never spoke in class, but Fred asked him anyway: what might steampunk music sound like.

  Cosmo beamed, as if he could hear a private orchestra: synth, brass bells and bagpipes and he wasn’t going to share. He was so happy, me too, weirdly happy, proud and astonished and in love beyond salvation.

  Frederic’s mother was back in rehab so after school Frederic and I crawled into the back of her van and when I was all relaxed and dozy he listed every obstacle to exposing MetWat, and how he would personally overcome them one by one. I can do this, he said. He described it like a quest game, with different levels.

  First problem: the toxic dishwater was flowing through the dark, buried in the ground. We will raise it up, he said, or something sort of biblical. This was like stoner talk. I was slow to realise he planned this for real life. Freddo could not draw for nuts, but he drew the sad overgrazed paddock beside the Agrikem car park, all the time talking about plumbing, PVC pipes, Bostik plumber’s weld. He drew a sort of cobra which turned out to be a giant garden tap rising from the sewer.

  You don’t know how to do that, I said.

  Don’t worry. He could fix it. As we publicised the true effluent analysis we would also raise up the actual poison, see it, smell it as it descended back into the public sewer. Then we would turn off the tap, on television.

  We would need Hazchem suits for a start, he said.

  I thought this would look cool and scary on TV, but where would we get a Hazchem suit? How much would it cost?

  Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.