Peter Carey - Amnesia

It was a cold-skied Melbourne day and the blackwood wattles were blooming in the hills. As Flinders Street station turned to gold, I composed a careful email to Wodonga Townes wherein I regretted any distress I may have caused him, or Celine. I didn’t know what I had done, but I was sorry. I did not hold back. I confessed to being both blind and careless. I had no idea how true that was. I could only assume, I wrote, that they had stumbled on my last few weeks’ work, which would seem less grotesque when it was understood I had written it off my face on his Dexedrine. I crawled. I admitted to an ugly excess of ambition, the desire to make the story “rich” and “complex.” My own good sense, I explained, had already led me to conclude that much of the information was too personal. As for my overexcited interpretation of the daughter’s relationship with the mother, I had been out of line.

This was the general sort of abject letter I have had reason to compose many times before. I grovelled in my usual style. Once again I said I was an awful creature.

I sent the email and showered. Then I dressed in my new clothes which I expected to amuse my old fan on his return. It was a ludicrously expensive shirt and I was struggling with the unexpected cufflinks when I heard the knocking. I had not known there was a door to rap on, but I found it finally, in an unused laundry. If there was a light switch, I could not see it. There was not even a spy hole.

“Who’s that?”

“Felix?” It was a male voice, breathless.

“Who’s that?”

“Jesus Felix, it’s George. I’m knackered.”

What George? I knew no George. Whoever it was, he could walk back down and see the concierge. But then, of course, I wondered, was this what I was waiting for? The door had one of those brass security latches and I placed the hasp firmly over the hook and cracked the door.

I saw an unpleasant green shirt and, for a moment, a hairy arm. A gilt-edged card slid into the narrow crack. I thought, wedding invitation. Indeed I may have been correct, but the invitation’s purpose, in this context, was to flip the latch. Then all hell broke loose. I was rushed by a wide fellow with thinning hair and sweaty beard.

“No,” I shrieked.

I dropped my cufflinks. I took a mop and poked his gut. He ripped my weapon from me and broke it across his big bare knee and came at me with its lethal end. I stood on the cufflink and cut my foot.

“Don’t hurt me.”

“You stupid cunt, no-one’s going to hurt you.”

I had retreated to the living room. There were sharp knives in the kitchen, but of course he would have taken them away from me.

DISGRACED JOURNALIST STABBED TO DEATH.

“For fuck’s sake. Calm down. I’m here to take you to her. Don’t you have a notebook or something?”

I pulled the cufflink from my foot. I took a pen and chequebook and shoved them in my pocket. I backed towards the Steinway. “Her?”

“Nice place,” he said. “Does he really have eight parking spaces?”

I asked him who he was working for but he had different matters on his mind.

“I’m not going to walk down ninety flights,” he said. “Can we get into the car park directly from the lift?”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“I told you, I’m George. I’d have thought you’d remember me. George Olson. From Cottles Bridge.”

“It’s thirty years since I was in Cottles Bridge.”

“I’m not here to have a natter, mate. Give me the fucking key to the fucking lift.”

But you did not need a key to leave, and I soon found myself riding down with the intruder who smelled like old cleaning rags, BO, cigarettes, depression. This was not the sort of contact I had expected.

“Are you taking me to meet a certain young lady?”

“That’s right, mate. I’m going to have to hide you on the way out, OK mate?”

“At a secure location, let’s say.”

“That’s right.”

I had no choice but trust him. I listened as he explained that he must put a blanket over me, “like a budgie in its cage.” I was more excited than afraid. I would meet the Angel without her mother’s help. I would shake her hand. The blanket had a certain logic. That is, we were just five minutes from the CIA’s great bum boys, ASIO, the Australian secret service on St. Kilda Road. That was only one of about six state and corporate “entities” I could imagine watching me. When we entered the car park I was relieved to see, waiting right outside the lift, a thirty-year-old Holden sedan with powdery paintwork.

“Are you a potter?” I asked him but he was busy opening the boot, sorting through an unappetising tangle of crocheted rugs and quilts. He selected an unsavoury lemon-coloured blanket and held it up as if for size.

“OK?” he asked. I had no time to answer because he wrapped the blanket round my head.

“Don’t panic.”

I was mainly worried about my suit. “How long do I need to keep it on?”

“Just till we get going.”

And with that the bastard picked me up. It was then, in his fierce embrace, I knew I had been kidnapped. I screamed with fright.

“Shut up,” he cried and dumped me in the boot.

You work for property developers this is what they do to you.

I WAS a complete idiot. I would die now, because I could not acknowledge what was clearly true, which I had always known, that my greatest admirer was capable of anything.

How pathetic that I had got myself entangled in his love affairs. I did not even know what my offence was, or why Celine should be so afraid, but I would die without my decent law-abiding daughters knowing I was something better than a drunken arsonist. They would never see me in a decent suit. They would not imagine how I loved them or what I had suffered, nor imagine these smells inside this airless coffin, wet burlap and mould, the odour of real Melbourne crime. My father once traded in a Holden and discovered £10,000 hidden in its doors. Being a Holden, the door had filled with water and all the money turned to pulp which smelled like this exactly. I could not breathe. I found a tyre lever and began to beat the boot lid. The car slowed, accelerated violently, then pulled off the road. I heard the driver’s door open and slam shut.

A key entered the lock. The lid cracked open. I saw a slice of my kidnapper’s bright red lips.

“I can’t breathe.”

“If you hit my car again,” he spoke with chilling deliberation, “I’ll tear your fucking throat out. Do you understand that? Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck got into you? Are you mad?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Here.” He pushed a paper bag through the gap.

“What’s this?”

By the time I understood what was in the bag, we were on a freeway and I knew I was a dead man. Vodka, to help me through my execution. It would be a western suburbs murder but committed in the east, a nail gun, probably, on sale at Mitre 10 at Thomastown, six-inch nails inside my skull.

What would you have done? I had Woody’s number on speed dial but when I called he had his phone turned off. We all used to laugh about Woody. We used to say that the Big Fella knew where the bodies were buried. Now I drank his vodka and prayed the exhaust fumes might have me dead before we reached my destination. Then I dialled again.

My kidnapper drove on and on and I must have called Woody’s number twenty times. Then we left the freeway and then—an hour from Moroni’s—we were off the sealed road and were bumping along one of those dirt tracks which had once allowed me to pretend that I had escaped suburbia. I should have called my daughters but I would have cried. They could never know what a dirt road used to signify. They had grown up city kids. They would laugh to think of their father even chopping wood.