by Peter Carey
“Felix Moore,” I said. I heard Woody groan. He could not believe I didn’t recognise the famous face.
“Felix,” she said. “It’s Celine.”
I began to speak but could not end the sentence. The traitor’s mother leaned across and kissed me on both burning cheeks.
IT WAS NOT simply a famous face I failed to recognise. We had known each other for years and years. Celine and I had been two of 347 freshmen at Monash University. There had been no second- or third- or fourth-year students. Indeed there had not been a Monash University the year before. The so-called “campus” was a raw construction site twenty kilometres east of Moroni’s. There were acres of hot shadeless car park across which a young woman walked in stiletto heels.
This Celine was a vision, like the redhead on the Redhead matches box. She was in no way like the woman at the table in Moroni’s. She was much taller, fuller breasted. She had flouncing skirts, gorgeous bouncing fair hair.
The woman at Moroni’s was famous. Her lips were full but also pale, carved in soapstone. The nineteen-year-old had a violently red mouth and was dramatically “accessorised” by what we might now call her “posse,” a very dangerous-looking collection of young men who I immediately decided would have to be my friends. There was a beatnik, a poet, a queeny boy, a sort of Hell’s Angel, and finally her lover, Sandy Quinn, an older man in a linen jacket who certainly had not come from high school. It would be years before I learned a trade union was paying him to go to university. I did not notice any sadness in his eyes. I saw his beard, sun-bleached, trim and sculpted to his jaw. I took his silence to be both powerful and judgemental.
“I was a total dork,” I told her, and this was true.
“He was very cute,” she said to Woody.
“So he was a randy little dog,” said Woody. “Cop a feels.”
This caused a silence. I thought of my tumescent adventure with her father’s photograph. Abramo filled my glass.
I had been short and scruffy with the nasal vowels I had learned in Bacchus Marsh. My hair was short and less clean than it might have been. I did not have the requisite sloppy sweater. Celine’s gang had been at first amused, then appalled, then made completely rat-faced by my presumption—that I was fit to be their friend. They said things which would have made a lesser person run away and cry.
But I was the son of a man who would stand in a muddy potato paddock all afternoon if that was what it took to sell a Ford. Those were my genetics.
Celine never thought me cute. But she saw my will, which was well in advance of my other attractions and was therefore dazzling. One afternoon in Springvale she told me I would be the only one of all of them who would make something of my life. Now she was about to make her own prediction come true. She would give me sole access to her outlaw daughter. So watch me, I thought, watch me do the rest.
The waiters had surely seen my recent humiliation on television and I was pleased they would now be witnesses to this redemption, those tall private men with white aprons and elegant grey moustaches. Now they saw the queen of stage and screen kiss me on my raddled cheek.
“To Felix,” she said and clinked my glass.
“I am in disgrace,” I said, referring of course to PANTS ON FIRE, but also, in my own way, underlining my outcast character which could never really be acceptable. I did not reveal that I had information about her life that she herself was unaware of, but I most definitely hinted, in my subtle way, that an honourable writer needs to be a scorpion as well. A writer serves the story. He dare not weigh the private consequences.
“It is not you who are in disgrace,” she said. “You shamed them, as usual.” And I recalled that very particular fire in her grey eyes, her characteristic arousal at the prospect of a little danger.
“You might have lost the case but you made them look as corrupt and venal as they are.”
Yes, I had fought the good fight all my life but I had also become an awful creature along the way.
THE BEGINNING OF the academic year had been stinking hot. The rain fell in buckets and the steam rose off the lawn where I had recently stood beside my father while the Chancellor of Monash University delivered his opening address. I was the first member of my family to get past the lower reaches of high school. I had no conscious knowledge of why I had chosen a university with no cloisters, no quadrangles, no suck-up colleges, no private school boys with their Triumph TR3s. Instead I had chosen the sea of mud that had been a market garden, where the footpaths were not yet paved, where the campus was surrounded by light industry and the cream brick homes of those who worked beneath those sawtoothed roofs. My choice was not political. I had no politics I was aware of.
This was three years before the Gulf of Tonkin, three years before conscription for Vietnam, seven years before the Monash Labor Club invented revolution, which would involve—I was given this message personally—being put against a wall and shot.
We students walked on narrow paths, single file like cows on their way to milking. We returned to landladies whose husbands were fitters and turners but were introduced as engineers. We were barbarians to our hosts to whom we delivered our Monash mud (PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES) and splashing urine (PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT).
I am not sure that Celine’s high heels were muddy as she later claimed, but there is no doubt she had peed standing at the urinal. Everybody mentioned it. I was impressed by Sando’s crumpled linen jacket and did not know enough to buy my own clothes second-hand. I tried too hard, most likely. I listened to everything they said. As a result I got the train from Clayton into Flinders Street and found, not without some difficulty, both Ulysses and The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I carried these heavy volumes back to the suburban bedroom I shared with a chemistry student from Wonthaggi. There was just one desk. When that was occupied I read lying down or wrote whilst kneeling at my bed. I shoplifted an expensive commentary on Ulysses and made margin notes on the significance of “Agenbite of inwit,” for instance. “Inwit” should have been “inwyt.” Did Sandy know James Joyce couldn’t spell? Did he understand that “U.P.:up” was meant to suggest urination and erection? I kneeled. I annotated. I stored away my ammunition. Beyond the sad lace curtains, parallel with my bed, was a grey wood-paling fence. One kilometre away, the electric train line was also parallel. In a long black cape, Barry Humphries stalked the streets.
It should have been obvious that I was not suited to engineering, but my father’s ambition was to see me established as Shire Engineer of Bacchus Marsh. He bought me an expensive slide rule which I never learned to use. I faked my physics experiments, working back from the correct value of g which I still recall as 980 cm per sec per sec.
I had no idea that I was on the path to catastrophic failure. Indeed, anything seemed possible. Celine’s friends were drama majors, psychologists, political philosophers and poets. They discussed Description, Narration, Exposition, Argumentation. Had I been capable, I would have faked this too, but all I had to offer them were some controversial facts: Agenbite of inwit. U.P.:up.
My clever father never had a need to develop a treatise or present an abstract. Nor had this skill been required of me at high school up in Ballarat. I had sat my matriculation confident I was a whiz at chemistry and mathematics, but I arrived in Celine’s magic circle with four plain passes and no clue as to how to play their game. They were reading Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Jarry. Any radical thought I might offer—that there might be no God for instance—was tedious to them, and they seemed embarrassed I should mention it. I was staggered that, while they had not known each other previously, they seemed to be continuing a conversation which they had started years before. They all knew rhinoceros was a play.
More than once they told me to piss off, but I had chosen them, and I would stay until they saw my worth.
The motorcyclist rarely spoke to me. Sandy Quinn had the habit of smiling while I talked. Years later he would tell me he had been anxious on my behalf and had only smiled to give me som
e support.
Celine’s body could not have been at all as I imagined it but she would always be a physical actor who could make you believe her waist was smaller and her legs longer than in real life. She was not as clever as I thought she was. Sometimes she was cold to me, other times quite tender. Once she mussed up my hair in public, and perhaps she was as much on my side as she later claimed, but she was always, unfailingly, relentlessly amused to see me run to fetch the balls thrown by the poet. The poet had a long square-shouldered body and a freckled face that might have been bland if you could not see that he was, in his very quiet brown-eyed way, capable of absolutely anything.
“Catcher in the Rye,” the poet said mildly. “You said you read it, but you didn’t, did you? Not really.” His manner was so agreeable. It was hard to believe he was tormenting me.
The leather boy had his head down rolling cigarettes, one after the other, lining them up on the table edge then tucking in their hairy ends.
“Not really, no.”
The poet had a smile like someone sucking on a match. “Too American I suppose?”
“Stop it Andrew,” said Sandy. “Enough.”
“So Felix,” Andrew persisted, “it’s Patrick White for you and Salinger Go Home?”
I had not read Patrick White either. “Sometimes that’s necessary,” I said.
“So, with literature, you are Australia first.”
It was time to take this idea and run with it.
“For me it’s the Battle of Brisbane,” I said, “every bloody day, mate.”
The leather boy snorted through his nose, but of course not even Sandy had heard of the Battle of Brisbane.
“There was no battle of Brisbane,” he said. “You must mean the Brisbane Line. We were ready to give the Japs everything north of Brisbane.”
“No, Sandra.”
Even now I am ashamed I spoke to him like that. I was too defended to even glimpse his extraordinary capacity for empathy. I called him Sandra and it was as if a starling spat at him. He smiled wanly. “I think you’ll find the Japs bombed Darwin and Broome in 1942,” he said.
I was a scrappy little fellow and I thought I was being condescended to. “It was not a battle with the Japs,” I said. “The Americans were in Brisbane,” I said. “Brisbane was MacArthur’s headquarters. So you tell me, Sandy, what was the other garrison in Brisbane in 1942?”
“Australian obviously,” he said, and cocked his head at me. Fuck you, I thought. You’re wrong.
“Australian soldiers fought the Americans in the streets of Brisbane,” I said. “It is known as the Battle of Brisbane.”
It took a lot of nerve for me to let the silence last.
“OK,” he said.
“No. It was censored. The only reason I know is that my old man lost half his hand to an American shotgun.”
Celine caught my eye and I didn’t know if I should be pleased or nervous. It was my uncle not my father who had the flipper hand. I waited. She poured sugar from the glass dispenser and pushed it into a heap. In this action, as in so many, she managed to generate a certain heat, an expectation that she would do something wild and dangerous and we would be condemned to simply sit and watch. She emptied the ashtray on top of the sugar and planted matches there. Then she glared at me and I understood I had offended her, and all this compressed and coded malice was for me.
“What would you know about the bloody Battle of Brisbane?”
“I think I answered that already, love.”
“Love bullshit. What crap.”
I knew my cheeks were burning.
“Stop smirking you big baby,” she said. “You can’t even find it in a book.”
“I think Mr. Moore may be thinking about the Brisbane Line,” said Sandy.
Celine snatched away her lover’s cigarette and threw it on the floor.
“No, pom-pom, he is not confused.”
Seeing how the poet enjoyed this revelation of a secret name, I recognised one more competitor. He helped himself to one of the motorcyclist’s beautiful hand-tailored cigarettes. “So what was the Battle of Brisbane?” he asked me.
“It was about sex,” Celine answered. “The stupid Australians were jealous of the Yanks. The only people in the world who want to help us, and so they shoot them because they like Australian girls.”
“A brawl.”
“No, a bloody battle. It lasted two days, with guns. And it was really stupid because those Americans were the ones who went off to New Guinea to fight the Japanese there.”
“There were no Yanks in New Guinea,” said the motorcyclist. “None, baby, none.”
“Bullshit, baby,” said Celine. “My father was there, baby, baby.”
“I meant Americans.”
“My father was American, baby. He bloody died there,” and she was crying, standing, turning away from the group. “Come on Titch,” she said to me, and took my arm.
She was crying, and I was callow enough to be overjoyed. She was sobbing, but I had won. I had stood my ground. Thus the previously unthinkable circumstance developed where Sandy and his car were banished and I was invited to walk Celine Baillieux to the bus on Ferntree Gully Road.
CONTEMPLATING THE CRACKED blackened portraits of colonial no-ones on Moroni’s gloomy walls, I recalled that Sir Robert Menzies was one of two prime ministers who “owned” this corner table. Paul Keating was the other. Of course Keating was NOT A MELBOURNE PERSON, but he always looked at home in Moroni’s, his strangely delicate pale face peering out of the same chiaroscuro which soaked up his dark tailored suits. It was here, at this corner table where I now sat with Celine and Woody Townes, that the Prime Minister’s wife—I mean Annita Keating—had spoken so passionately about the “thread counts” of her sheets. This was probably a safe conversation in New York or Washington or even Sydney, but in our puritanical socialist certainties we were offended by thread counts. Or perhaps we did not know what thread counts were.
The menu in Moroni’s had not changed since 1970, the year of the Vietnam Moratorium, when we marched outside the windows, behind the great Jim Cairns (“The responsibility for violence will rest squarely with him”—The Age). There were a hundred thousand of us including me with my celebrated banner FUCK THE RICH. Four months later I was first taken to Moroni’s and disturbed the genteel weather with my exploding hair.
Veal chop.
Osso bucco.
Rum baba.
Same then. Same now. There could be no other only half-serious Italian restaurant in the world that served such plastic bread.
While Abramo filled my glass assiduously I watched, in the high tilted mirror on the western side, a certain “hard man” from the Trades Hall Council being entertained by a class enemy. He would not catch my shit-stirring eye.
Woody offered San Pellegrino but those bleak bleached paddocks where my dad sold Fords, the loveless rock-and-rabbit farms of Anakie, now produced this flinty straw-coloured Chenin Blanc as complex as a Vouvray. Who would have dreamed it possible?
“I’m fine with the wine,” I said. “Talk to me.”
Celine had one of those faces we adore on screen—thoughts and feelings passing like shadows, leaving one not wiser, but drawn in. She looked at my wine longer than was polite.
Forty-nine years ago she and I had set off up to Ferntree Gully Road and finished at her mother’s home in Springvale. Later we found ourselves working together in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office, but the last time I had seen her was at a Christmas party, breastfeeding her baby girl.
Now she produced a yellow legal pad and with this simple action made herself a lawyer.
As always, I declined to take notes. Silence fell while my glass was filled again.
“I need unlimited access.”
Celine glanced at Woody. Woody turned to me. “All you want mate, she’s yours. That’s why you’ve got the moolah.”
“Do you call her Gaby or Gabrielle?”
“Both.”
“She is in
Melbourne?”
“Need-to-know basis, mate.”
Woody. What a prat!
“She has agreed to all this?” I asked Celine. “To speak to me at length and on the record?”
“Mate,” said Woody, “don’t make problems where there are none.”
Moroni’s famous whiting arrived, but Celine did not touch her cutlery. “Before we rush ahead so merrily,” she said, “can we deal with this crap about extradition? She’s an Australian citizen for Christ’s sake. Why do the Americans think everything’s to do with them?”
“She opened hundreds of their jails.”
“She didn’t mean to, obviously. And we cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty,” Celine told me. “You have daughters,” she insisted. “Surely you can imagine how I feel.”
“Felix’s job,” Woody said, and Celine cut him off.
“What did your great barrister say to you? You told me. They cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty.”
Woody laid his meaty hand upon her slender wrist. “If she actually intended to attack America, that’s a political act. That’s a good thing. Once we prove it was a political act she cannot be extradited. Felix is the man to pitch that story. He can do it standing on his head.”
“Will you listen to what I’ve told you? She is a gutsy kid, but she could not have done what she is charged with. I love her, but she isn’t all that bright.”
“Sando is her father,” I said. “She’s got two very brainy parents.”
“Actually, I got B’s and C’s. And Gaby never finished high school which is why she had such shitty jobs at IBM. She is incapable of doing what the charge sheet says she did. That is how we should be fighting this,” she said to Woody. “Let them give her exams. She’ll fail them. She’s got the B-C gene. She’s innocent.”
“Fair enough,” I said. “But I do believe she has confessed?”
“She can confess all she likes.”