Peter Carey - Amnesia

“No, I’ll show you,” he said.

And then he pushed her down so hard she fell. No glass. No cuts. Thank God, she thought. He had shoved her head onto the chopping block without knowing what it was. She felt the cold air between her legs. He was pushing and breaking and her tummy was filled with hurt but she dared not scream. His hands around her neck. He said, “You better sing.” He was kneeling behind her, evil thing.

She could no longer breathe but she did “Danny Boy.” The air came through the words and the air was ripped-up rags. His hands were large and very strong and she finally understood, without a doubt, he would kill her when he’d finished.

He clamped her windpipe. He shivered like a horse. The thing inside her was in spasms, like a cat dying from a hammer blow. And then he screamed, right in her ear.

Later she would know he had driven a broken preserve bottle into his knee and leg. But she was free. He was off her. She fled.

For once in all its history, Stanley Street was quiet.

“Mum,” she cried from the front gate. She heard a slamming door upstairs, thank God.

“Ma’am?”

In the street, against the lamppost she saw them, a black man with a hire-girl. Even at this voltage it was clear. The soldier left the girl. He crossed the tracks, his hand held out towards Doris. He looked drunk.

“Mum,” she wailed.

It was the very same GI who had arrived so sweetly at her door. He stood before her, swaying.

“Miss, what happened?”

“Are you going to do her or me?” said the hire-girl. It was Glennys Craig who had been the fastest runner in the grade.

“He’s in there,” Doris said. “Under the house.” The black soldier looked at Glennys Craig and then at Doris. Then, as the front door of the house yawned open, the soldier opened his wallet and gave the prostitute some bills.

“You’re a mug,” said Glennys Craig, and teetered off into the dark. The lights behind the lattice came on, one by one, and suddenly, in the midst of the brownout, the whole of 825 Stanley Street was a wooden lantern and the pansy window-dresser was sprinting—him at his age—turning on the lights as he passed each switch and Doris’s mother was behind turning them all off.

“Now all the world can see,” the mother said when she arrived out in the street. She flashed her Eveready torch over the stunned black face and then across the parachute-silk dress which was marked with blood and spunk and woodchips from the past.

As the girl began to vomit on her shoes, Doris’s mother confronted the American soldier who, drunk or not, was clearly the same fellow she had already turned away. He stood the same, shoulders back, squared off, his cap in one hand, explaining.

“Just go,” said Celine’s grandmother. “Before you get your balls cut off.”

CELINE ROSE FROM the battered leather club chair. She returned my pages to the floor without saying what she’d read. She was not finished, that was clear. I watched as she chose a poker and, like a blacksmith, brought down a rain of blows upon a log already sheathed in glowing red and orange scales. How far had she got? Sparks glinted in her eyes.

I had done an extraordinarily professional job, but clearly she was not considering that. She blew the ash from her fingertips and pulled the kimono tight around herself and retreated to the hallway. Then I heard her retching in the bathroom, vomiting.

So she had reached that part. I was so sorry. But I would seem to be a hypocrite to say so. I returned to my seat and waited to be abused but I certainly did not expect her to return with a rifle at her hip.

“My father gave me this,” she said, “my real father.”

Fire was dancing along the gun metal.

“He was the most decent man you could ever know. Strictly speaking, he was a criminal, but he changed my nappies when my mother couldn’t. He left enough money for me to go to university. He cut my hair. He taught me how to shoot. How many rabbits do you think I’ve killed?”

“I am not wrong about Willenski. It doesn’t make me happy, but it’s true.”

“I brought you out here to get you out of Woody’s clutches, you shit. But I had no idea of what you’d done.” She jerked the rifle violently, like a pitchfork. “Can’t you learn your lesson in a courtroom? Lying is not socially acceptable. Do I have to punish you as well?”

“It’s not made up.”

“You’re a convicted slanderer.”

“No.”

“My father is a rapist? You can’t possibly know that.”

“Why do you think I didn’t tell you at Monash?”

“You kept it from me, all my life?”

“Don’t you remember the state you were in? You stayed with what’s-his-name, the poet. Then Sando took you in. His landlady threw you both out and you slept in his car. You were too busy burning down the house.”

Sandy had taken her pain and held her and never let her go until he married her. I did not tell her how I had mourned her.

“How could you know shit about any of this?”

“There was only one American soldier who’d been photographed in Brisbane. The rest were Melbourne. The dates work too. Willenski was front page of the Courier-Mail .”

“And that’s it? On the basis of this you write this? Anyone who knows you can see what you’re doing. America rapes Australia. It’s pathetic. Do you know how many Americans were here during the war? You want this psycho to represent them all.”

“I confirmed it again. Last week.”

“How could you?”

“I let my fingers do the walking for me, as the ad says.”

“You phoned my mother?”

“She’s in the White Pages.”

“Why would she want to talk about this to a stranger?”

“People with secrets. It’s what they do.”

“But why you?”

“It’s a talent.”

“She would never talk to me.”

“As I understand it, Celine, really darling, you have been particularly unforgiving of your mother. She says you never took Gaby to meet her?”

“No. She met her.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t get prissy with me, Titch. Who does all this muckraking serve? Not Gaby, that’s for sure.”

“You came to me.”

Celine returned to her armchair and laid the rifle on the side away from me. “No, you were Woody’s contribution,” she said. “He could not have expected to be so lucky.”

DORIS’S MOTHER LOCKED the verandah door in silence, I had written. Only when both women reached the kitchen did the elder woman unwrap her naked wrath. “Filth,” she cried.

Crouching, wet rag in hand, she attacked her daughter’s hem and thighs.

“Mum, please. You’re making it worse.”

“Worse,” she cried, and tugged at the silk dress, ripping to reveal a raw abrasion.

“Jeez. Leave off. No-one saw.”

“No-one saw. God save me.” Her eyes were frightening but frightened too, clearly searching for an instrument to thrash the legs, the arms, the neck. “I’ll learn you, girlie. No-one saw.”

The girl made a break, upstairs, towards the safety of the bathroom but her mother was a scrapper, knees and elbows, in the bathroom first.

“Save the hot water for the boarders.”

“Please, Mum.”

And they were collapsed, crying, wringing their hands, grabbing for understanding, pushing violently away, and then the mother turned on the cold tap and threw a fist of salt into the claw-legged tub.