Peter Carey - Amnesia

I wondered if he would stop to buy the nail gun or if he already had it. The road was so rough I wished it would knock me out. I phoned Woody one more time.

“Hi Felix, where are you?”

“In a car.”

He laughed, sadistic bastard.

“Woody, I didn’t mean to be hurtful about Celine.”

Long silence.

“That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”

Another pause before he spoke. “Didn’t sound like that last night.”

“I am an appalling creature.”

“Felix, don’t say another word. You’ve been making that grovelling speech for thirty years.”

“You’re right, mate.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might go public with that Drivetime Radio event?”

“What part?”

“The chickenshit part.”

“Oh, mate, you wouldn’t.”

He would though, the bastard. He had my moral cowardice in the bank and he would be a hard man if he had to. He could destroy my left-wing reputation in a heartbeat.

“I’m thinking I’m not suited to this project, Woody.”

“You’re not trying to renege are you?”

“I can give you the money back.”

“Feels, you signed the fucking contract.”

Jesus. “You still want me to write it?”

“Why would I put up with you otherwise?”

I could not ask him, why am I still in a car boot? “I’m up for it, mate,” I said. So long as you want to continue, mate. I really wanted to continue in every sense.

Was he laughing? It wasn’t clear. “That’s good,” he said. “We don’t want misunderstandings.”

“Just one thing.”

“Got to go, mate. We’re taking off.”

“Woody, is there something you need to cancel?”

But he was gone, and when I called Celine I got her voicemail. I had never used a GPS before but this was a brand-new iPhone and it told me we were just past Eltham where Claire and I began our family. Long weekends of planting tiny trees, station wagons all coated with yellow dust, the smell of wattle, and that pungent blackcurrant smell from the deep gullies of the bush, all the rural beatniks from Eltham and Cottles Bridge sniffing at each other’s bums. In those years I worked the police beat in the city and came back home to this non-suburbia, mudbrick houses, slate floors. You got an excessive amount of adultery in the so-called “extended community” but not a lot of murdered men. Eltham was rutting ground but not much worse.

I dialled Woody. He was gone. I was sweating in private places. The car was pulling to a stop. I drained the awful vodka and took the tyre lever in my hand so, when the lid was lifted, I was crouched inside, my back in agony, my calves both cramped.

“Oh Felix!” The kidnapper relieved me of the lever as he helped me out one hand beneath my arm. He threw the lever back into the boot.

“You remember a piece of arse named Skye Olson?”

“You’re her husband.”

“I’m her son you twat.”

He spat at my feet and climbed back behind the wheel. I remembered a little boy with a curled lip and big black accusing eyes.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m off home mate.”

“What about me?”

It was an open invitation for him to tell me I could fuck myself. Instead he pointed up the hill where two pale tyre tracks were interrupted by the evidence of a vigorous four-wheel drive engagement.

FORTY-FIVE KILOMETRES FROM the Melbourne GPO, I crossed a narrow creek and came upon a burned-out jeep with wild blackberries growing through its broken eyes and imagined every possibility at once, not only Woody’s enforcers but also Angel’s angry “supporters” waiting to grill a reporter from “the mainstream media.”

I was not a brave man. I never said I was. Two rutted wheel tracks had once continued up the hill but now they were swallowed by wattles and all the regrowth that follows fire. It looked like Eltham in the 1950s when tracks like these led to the homes of communists and free lovers and artists and bullshitters of all varieties. Beyond the fallen fence there was a stand of peeling paperbarks, no path other than that indicated by a piece of blue rope that might mean something if you knew. Children had left dirty drawings on the tattered white bark, broken crayons on the ground. Why did this seem sinister? Beyond these melaleucas was a rise on which stood a stand of slender white-barked eucalypts. From here one looked down on a sea of creeper which had colonised a long flat tin roof and a cedar pergola. Sensing a surprise might be dangerous to my health I called, “Coo-ee.”

A woman said hello. And I saw what I expected although, honestly, who could have anticipated the gorgeous white pyjamas or Monet’s broken light. My suit was like nothing I had ever owned. It had the faintest hint of indigo hidden in its charcoal, like a crow’s feather reflecting the sky. As I descended the rocky steps I was alive to every sense and colour. My hair thrilled on my neck.

“Felix Moore,” I called.

“I know who you are,” said Celine Baillieux.

I thought, fuck you. “It was you who kidnapped me? You locked me in a fucking coffin.”

“That was not the plan,” she said and she was monstrous in her injury, the whole of her lower left eyelid both black and purple, swollen, shocking, inflamed and ugly like baboon sex. She slid open a slick glass door and I followed her. She paused. She turned. And slapped me, twice. I saw sparks. My ear went dull. “You cunt,” she said.

For what? I had already been punished, tortured even. I realised my lovely suit jacket was torn, revealing stuffing like a sofa at an auction. Onward I tottered, entering a baronial room with a brick floor and heavy beams and long dark refectory table whose surface was awash with that pearl-white manuscript. My assailant walked to the big slate-floored kitchen and filled a glass with water, then again, then again. Her back was to me, but as the tap turned on and off I could hear mad rage knocking in the pipes.

“If I’d got into your manuscript before I came up here, I would have left you to deal with your psycho mate.”

She thrust her ruined face at me.

“You’re a dreadful person,” she said.

“No.”

“Have you always been like this?”

I was innocent. I had not laid a hand on her. But what came to my mind was the helicopter that had clipped the top of Sydney’s Westpac building and killed the pilot who I knew. I was sent down to Bondi Junction to ask the widow for a photograph of the dead man. I was twenty-one years old. The journos at the gate laughed at me for even trying. The widow wasn’t speaking, but I was already Felix Moore. I had my will. I knocked on the front door. A boy opened it, almost my age. I said I knew how he felt. I had lost my own father last week. I said the Sun-Herald made me come and do it and I needed the job to support my mum. For this I got asked inside. I was given a photograph. His mother kissed me. Yes I was a dreadful person. It had been my trade for years. But this—that I had discovered the trauma of Celine’s birth and not revealed it to her? Honestly, that did not seem as bad, although I certainly did not say that now. Instead, I apologised. I confessed that I had been infatuated with her. She had run away from home. She had been so frail. I could not bear to hurt her anymore. This, and other stuff, was true.

“You’re a fantasist.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re a creep.”

I wasn’t really a creep. I was a good person. I had been secretly in love with her. I had lost her to another man. Now was not the time for that discussion. “You’ve got the only copy in the universe,” I said. “Tell Woody to check the Mac. I deleted everything.”