Peter Carey - Amnesia

“Clothes off.” The girl might as well be six years old the way she was forcibly undressed. It was pull out your hair, rip off your nose.

“You smell of him,” the mother said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. If you thought that meant sympathy, you were mistaken. “Come on. Give me. Scanties.”

“Don’t leave me naked.”

“You’ve got your bra. Use a towel.”

What occupied the mother was not disease or pregnancy. The issue was—who knew? Who saw?

“You could have picked a white boy but.”

Who was going to write her husband poison letters? She would burn the parachute silk and she wished she had the strength to destroy the house entirely. He was going to kill her. He would kill them both and who would blame him? Where there’s smoke there’s more smoke. His wife was not Miss Pearly Pureheart either.

The daughter locked the bathroom door and cried. She felt the sting of salt kill her germs and babies. It destroyed the lather so her body got coated with a grey scum which she would still smell in the morning, on the tram. The damaged part was not where you expected.

At secretarial school she was lucky or unlucky—her classmates could see nothing but the size of the stones in Maisie’s engagement ring. Maisie’s fiancé was an American called Captain Baillieux. Doris had her write it down. No-one cared or noticed that she kept the scrap of paper.

Of course Doris had not yet decided to become Baillieux, but she would not have told them if she had. She could not trust her girlfriends with anything important. She waited for her period alone and was relieved to see the blood. Next day she got blisters “down there.” She used the salt twice a day and the blisters went away, thank heavens, but it wasn’t over yet. The bank teller in the western room paid his rent on time but he was a pigpen. He liked his Courier-Mail and left it everywhere, including on the kitchen table where she saw the news, December 2nd, 1942. THE BROWNOUT STRANGLER. And there he was, the American, his perfect smile, his awful handsome face, his cowlick hair. He had raped six girls and strangled them and mutilated them in ways particular. After that she could hardly eat at all. Her period stopped. Her hair went dull and lifeless. If she had managed to eat a little custard, say, she would puke in the middle of her sleep.

Yet even as her appearance changed she found herself the beneficiary of unexpected acts of kindness. Late at night, after ten o’clock, she and the window-dresser listened to the wireless and the little chap was nice enough to brush her hair. Once he tucked her in. Her mother made a rabbit pie. You could taste the butter—although she had no ration coupons left. The girl resisted the awful need to read her stolen Courier-Mail . Finally, they had a lovely Christmas with the boarders and the window-dresser played piano. He was a strange kind creature with a white soft hairless neck below his wig, and the mother was happy and did not think what Black and White Rag might really be, thank God for that.

Then it was a different year. The rains arrived. The Allies took Buna in New Guinea. Then it was Sanananda. In Guadalcanal, the Japs had their tails between their yellow legs. In March they were blown to screaming pieces in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. It was still mango season then. The bank teller loved mangoes so much he ate them in the bath. The girl ate them too. Her appetite returned. Then a letter came from Dad—he was back in Perth and coming home. Then Tom was in Aden waiting for a ship. And it was only then, when she knew they could all recover from everything, that her mother barged into the bathroom.

She was in the nuddy when the door slammed hard against the wall.

“You idiot. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I put the pounds back on.”

“Pounds. Dear Jesus help me, look at yourself.”

“It’s been since Christmas.”

“It’s four bloody months. No wonder you’ve been throwing up. You’ll have to leave before your dad gets home. Don’t cry. You should have thought about this. You can’t be giving him a little piccaninny.”

Without another word, the mother went downstairs, soft as a ghost, an angel of the annunciation.

The girl found her kneeling at the front door polishing the knob.

“Mum.”

The mother’s head was tiny as a coconut, the hair lank, eyes leached. “You’re an idiot,” she said, “I could have helped you.”

“Mum, it wasn’t the black chap. It was a white chap, Mum. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry for what you said.”

The mother’s mouth was just a little line, a scar, a screwed-up sewed-up wound. “Dear Mouse,” she said, and the girl shivered to receive the tenderness. “We’ve got no choice, my titchy mouse. You’ll have to be gone when he arrives.”

“I have to go to the hostel?”

“I’ll say you got a job in Sydney.”

“Wouldn’t he like a nice white baby?” she asked, but she was already bilious at the thought of the mouse-sized Hank Willenski growing in her womb.

The mother’s eyes were brimming, and she stroked her daughter’s tiny ears.

“Do you even know his name?”

“Baillieux,” she said, and spelled it.

“Is he French?”

“I don’t know, Mum. He didn’t say.”

“Is he in New Guinea, love?”

“Yes Mum, he is.”

“God save him then,” her mother said.

“God save him, Mum.” She did not say the brownout strangler was dead already, murdered by the Aussies in his cell on Boggo Road.

“DID YOU EVER IMAGINE how it might feel for me to read this?”

I smelled Celine’s acrid breath. I observed her blackened eye, the hard contusion on the cheekbone, the awful puce in the soft cave of the orbit. I reached towards her tenderly. She thrust my hand away.

I said I was not her enemy. I would never wish to hurt her. I was startled she couldn’t see that I had been a time traveller on her behalf, that I had given her what she could have never known. Her life was a miracle to me. From Stanley Street to all those nights of mad applause on stage.

“Everything you’ve written is reprehensible,” she declared, and of course, the truth is ugly and often frightening. We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.

“What you have written hurts everyone.”

I never wanted to hurt a soul, but a laboratory rat would have learned by now that I was doomed to repeat my action like some automaton in a Disney underworld. I felt ineffably sad. I stared at the monster log until it had burned through and collapsed onto a sparky bed of fine white ash. Celine gathered my pages to her breast. Her fingernails were delicate and uncorrupted, swimmer’s nails, I thought, the colour of cuttlefish shells. I watched her turn my pages. A single A4 sheet slipped free and glided towards the hearth. I snatched at it.

“Liar,” she cried. She launched a flock of paper. Two hundred and twenty-one pages struck my head, beat my ear, landed in the fire, white wings curling into black.

I had sworn this was the last copy on the earth and as I was being a good man I could not be a liar. I had no choice but to plunge my hands into the flames.

Then Celine was at my side, raking pages to the floor, stamping on their carmine skirts. The paper was like stinging nettles. I had expected it would have hurt much more than this.

“Stop it,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”

In the kitchen I permitted her to plunge my sacrificial hands beneath the tap. She emptied trays of ice into a bowl and I watched my injuries: red and black palms, bloating like dead fish.