Peter Carey - Amnesia

I found no evidence of hacking or any other criminal or political activity. I began to wonder if her mother might be correct, that she was innocent. Perhaps it just meant that she was very, very skilled. I really hoped so. I wanted her to exist.

I called Sando at his electoral office in Coburg and he told me to go and fuck myself. Fair enough. I belly-flopped into the shallow end of computer crime, an online world of Tor and bitcoins. I made many notes, understood nothing, and stopped short, thank God, of entering the dark web without protection.

I studied the extradition treaty between Australia and the US and learned that everything Woody had said was true, but, really, so what? Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was.

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.