Peter Carey - Amnesia

What could he do to me?

Captain Stackpole was a short man, very trim, and brisk. He had a dimpled chin and a military moustache and an RSL badge in his brown lapel. He indicated a chair but I could not waste a moment and displayed the photographs of Celine’s various fathers.

“What’s this?”

“I need to see the photo editor.”

“The librarian?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” He whacked his pipe against his ashtray. “You’re Thomas Ryder.”

“I’m Felix Moore, sir.”

“You said you were Thomas Ryder.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Captain Stackpole.”

He stared at me belligerently. He reached for the telephone. I thought, oh shit. He changed his mind. “This place is a bloody circus,” he said and shoved my pictures back at me and grabbed my arm and marched me down some stairs and along a hallway to a door with a tacked-on paper sign that read ABBOT.

Inside was a large room like my dad’s spare-parts department: grey steel with regularly drilled holes stretching from floor to ceiling, deep shelves about a metre apart stacked with what I would now call archival boxes, patchy brown or straw colour, each corner protected by metal tips.

Captain Stackpole led me down different aisles or avenues, bawling out Miss Abbot’s name.

I turned a corner and there she was, the librarian of The Herald , riding on the top rung of a wheeled loft ladder, propelling herself forward with her white-gloved hands. Even perched so high, it was clear she had a lot of waist and long straight legs.

“Herr Steckenpoo,” she cried, descending.

In the year of the bouffant her black hair was radical, not just for being short and shaped, but in anticipating the fashions of the years to come. She was handsome, with high cheekbones and the jawline of a heroine. All this was eroticised by her narrowed eyes, which, in their present puffy state, suggested very bad behaviour.

“Cobber,” she said to me, holding out her hand which revealed, beneath the curatorial white glove, the inflexibility of a prosthetic.

“Miss Abbot, might you assist this young fellow?”

“Captain Steckopopo, your servant.”

“You are asking for it, Miss Abbot.”

“Yes, but not from you. What can I do for you, cobber?” asked Miss Abbot and left Captain Stackpole to make his own arrangements.

“Let’s have a deck at what you’ve got.” She had a lovely reckless coordinated walk and if her bum was not small it was not corseted and therefore lovely to behold.

She settled herself at a long high work bench. Her thighs were generous and her ankles nicely turned.

I turned over the manila envelope and she briskly emptied the contents onto her desk. “Give me a squiz.” With her left hand (which, being ungloved, was slender and long-fingered) she began to sort the images into different categories.

“One of these men is my dad,” I said. “I don’t know which one.”

“You couldn’t just ask your dad himself?”

I did not lie, but she clearly saw my grief.

“Ah, so.” Miss Abbot had an active bright intelligence which was not contradicted by her puffy eyes.

“Can you help me?”

She lightly touched my upper arm.

“No-one better, cobber. I’m your man.”

Celine’s pictures were in five piles. The first consisted of the prints I judged to have been already purchased from The Herald . Miss Abbot recorded the pencilled numbers on their verso sides.

“Stand by,” she said and I listened to the ladder wheels moving amongst the stacks. Then silence. Then she was back with the names of all the four soldiers and the date and place where they had been photographed.

I thought, I am a genius. I am going to win. I am going to ask Celine to the Purple Eye Jazz Club next Friday night.

Miss Abbot took a blank sheet of paper and drew a grid. She made notes of all of the photos but one, a yellowed cutting, which she slid back in the envelope.

“What about that one?”

“It’s not your dad.”

“Why?”

“The Yanks were mostly lovely,” she said. “You can’t say that in Melbourne without being called a tart, but they were gentlemen. You had a very handsome daddy whichever one he is.”

This father, here, had appeared in The Argus between 1942 and 1946. That one was in The Age after 1943. This here was definitely Life magazine and the Melbourne public library had bound volumes so I must go there straight away. As the Yanks were in the war so bloody late, there were only two hundred issues to check.

I was looking at a cheeky GI offering an apple to a grinning girl. I was wondering if they did “it.” Miss Abbott rested her left hand on my wrist. “Don’t be hard on your mum,” she said.

“OK.”

“Cobber, you’re not listening. We all thought we were going to die. Everyone did a lot of stupid things. If your mum slipped up, you must forgive her. She doesn’t know you’re doing this, does she? Your mum.”

“Not really.”

She searched my face and I did not know how to respond. She removed a large white envelope from her lower drawer and extracted a 10″x8″ glossy black and white print. It was the sort of picture I had seen before: the liberation of a European city, an American tank, crowded with soldiers and a very pretty girl with tangled jet-black hair. The girl was a photographer. She had two big cameras slung around her neck. She waved both arms in triumph. Beside her was a handsome GI with a wolfish grin who, I realised with a shock, had both his hands upon her breasts.

“You get it.”

“Yes,” I said, but only as she slipped the photograph away did I understand that this stunning girl photographer had become Miss Abbot.

“Be nice to your mum,” she said. “It was a different time.”

When she had finished with her sheet of paper she tucked it back with all Celine’s photographs.

“Do you know where the public library is? Of course you don’t.”

So she led me out and up the stairs and through the newsroom and into the foyer past the receptionist with the hairsprayed bouffant and then she walked with me two blocks to the corner of Swanston Street.

“Walk that way,” she said. “The library is on the corner of La Trobe Street, on the right. You can go and see Phar Lap when you’re finished. You know who Phar Lap was?”

“A horse that died.”

“Yes, a horse that died. Do you smoke, cobber?”

I said I did and she gave me a Craven “A” and lit it for me.

“Come back and see me,” she told me as I tried hard not to cough. “Come and tell me which hunk is which.”

She kissed me then, rather strangely, directly on the lips.

I should have been in lectures, but there was no contest in my mind. So I walked up towards the library carrying the burning Craven “A.” There was a hot north wind, and you could smell the smoke of bushfires amongst the traffic.

I was high and happy, triumphant in my quest, and then quite suddenly, as I crossed Bourke Street, unspeakably sad.

It was a puzzle then, but I know what caused it now: the tears in my eyes were precipitated by the flavour of lipstick on my mouth, the taste of my mother perfectly preserved. Gone, empty, then as now as I go to Henry Bucks to buy my suit.

I RETURNED WITH my gorgeous silk and cashmere suit still not understanding that I had signed a contract with a property developer and not a publisher. I was not yet accustomed to thinking of Woody as my boss. I had told him to wait for me, and he had completely failed to follow my instructions. I pinged him off a pissy email.