Peter Carey - Amnesia

“This is bullshit,” she said softly and I could once more smell her acrid breath. “This cannot be the only copy.”

“I know that.”

“Then why did you do this?”

I shrugged.

“Did no-one ever love you Felix?”

“I’m an awful person.”

“You wanted to hurt me, you should be happy. You’ve shown that my father is American.”

“So?”

“It gives them a claim on Gaby.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“You’re sloppy and careless. You don’t know where you are. You told Woody I could not deliver Gaby. He believed you. He thought I had tricked him into paying bail. You just wandered off to bed and locked your door. I heard you.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was not Celine’s character to have a first-aid kit, but there it was, a black backpack with a white cross in house paint. From this she produced a roll of white surgical bandage which she wound delicately around my injuries.

“Woody is your admirer, God help you. He’ll kill us both.”

I should not have let her say this.

“Felix, did you ever ask yourself, why is Woody paying me so much money?”

“He’s always been like that.”

“Yeah, right.” Even as she was sarcastic, she was also kind, tidying up both hands and securing them with small elastic clips. “Gaby was not even arraigned,” she said, “and I had Woody on the phone offering to pay her bail and legal support. Whatever he wants you to do, it’s not for me. And now he will use this dirt you’ve dug up for him.”

“He offered bail. You said you asked him.”

The firelight caught the colours of her bruised and shiny cheekbone. Her fingers felt like feathers as she snipped away the loose threads of my bandage. “I knew Woody when he was a Maoist with a red cashmere sweater.”

“Everyone trusts Woody.”

“I certainly trusted he would help me now.”

“Jim Cairns trusted him. Woody loved Jim Cairns, early, before he was the Treasurer, before he was Deputy Prime Minister.”

Celine poured me a glass of wine and held it to my lips. I sipped.

“Exactly.”

“You’re being sarcastic?”

“Think about it, Felix. The Americans thought Jim was the enemy. Dr. Cairns, the Deputy Prime Minister of their ally, was a communist. Gough talked about it—the ‘American Terror’ that Jim would be briefed on Pine Gap. Imagine: a communist had got access to all that shared security.”

“And?”

“Don’t you imagine they would have recruited someone close to Cairns?”

“So Wodonga is an American spy? Jesus, Celine. You never mentioned this before.”

“Calm down. I never thought of it before. Remember the photos on Woody’s office walls. How does a Melbourne property developer get to play golf with the US Secretary of State?”

“I don’t know, but he loved Jim. He’d do anything for him.”

“I worked in Jim’s office when he was Treasurer. I do believe I remember you there too. Don’t you recall how embarrassing Woody was? Cleaning Jim’s shoes at the party conference at Terrigal? In public. And in the office, what a dogsbody. Woody is a sort of thug but there he was standing by his desk turning pages for Jim to sign.”

I picked up the glass and held it with both wrists and drank. She watched, as if waiting for me to fail. “Jim had that effect,” I said and in the sad silence that followed me setting down the wine, I thought about those great men in that government which was overthrown in 1975. Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister, was a patrician. But Jim Cairns was from the basalt plain, from Sunbury. He had been a policeman, a champion runner, a working-class intellectual. It was Jim who had the moral authority to lead a hundred thousand of us up Bourke Street in 1970. My most intoxicating night as a young writer was spent staying up with Jim, composing captions for the pictures in his book on Vietnam. I admired him just as much as Woody did.

When Jim was brutally beaten by the Painters and Dockers, it was because he always had an open house. He was Treasurer of the nation and you could walk in off the street and meet Junie Morosi (Jim’s lover and office coordinator), me, Woody Townes his millionaire intern, Celine with a kaftan and no bra. There were Nimbin hippies, confusion, awful instant coffee. Those were heady days to be so young and close to government. Australia had withdrawn from Vietnam, and recognised China. If Woody was a spy he was in a perfect place, except that he loved Jim Cairns.

“He is very loyal,” I said, and Celine picked up her rifle and ejected a single shell.

“Catch.”

I grabbed and missed. I heard the bullet bounce and roll. Then she was in the bathroom with her face creams and I was in the dark, alone with the smell of ashes.

SO: CLEARLY: the armchair was to be my bed. No-one brought a blanket and I slept like a reporter on the red-eye and woke to find a pale thing standing over me.

“What?” I asked of the pale thing standing over me.

“I keep hearing things,” she said.

Was this like me, to retreat from a woman’s touch when it was offered?

“I’m scared,” she said. “Would you come in with me, just for company?”

If I hesitated it was not because I was still a married man, but because I was nervous to go with her, and nervous to refuse. She was unusually fragile, even needy and I also remembered how she had been Medea, Antigone, Hedda Gabler, all these dangerous women.

I was an old man, but I was still a man. I had never been to bed with a woman without at least the possibility of sex and as the eucalypts of Smiths Gully tossed restlessly in the night, I lay very very still, too aware of that musky scent inside the tent. Celine went straight to sleep, snoring intermittently. Her frame was slight and birdlike. Her chest rose and fell. Broken sticks fell on the corrugated roof. Honey myrtles scrubbed themselves against the naked window glass.

Who doth murder sleep?

My father could not sleep, not ever. I would find him in the middle of the night, in striped pyjamas, looking down at the car yard and all the unsold Fords gleaming on their gravel bed of quartz, like fish on ice. He hoarded pills. I forget so much about my childhood, but I can still recite his pharmacopoeia which included legal codeine and Valium which last he eked out because it was hard to get. He was awake and worried he paid too much to trade in Henry Wilmot’s Holden Ute. I was now worried that my present sleeping partner was unstable and that my supporter was a deeper and darker character than I could bear to think about.

I turned and discovered her staring patchy eye, a small and touching night creature.

“What might happen to us now?” she whispered, and lifted an arm, a motion as smudgy as a flying-fox wing in the dark.

“What?” I asked.

“Come here.”

I laid my head upon her shoulder and she stroked my hair with such sad consoling familiarity we might have been lovers after all.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. In the cloud-scudding light, her lips appeared to be deep blue. I inhaled her toothpaste together with her pheromones. I did not doubt she was afraid. Somewhere far off, a car door slammed. Her body stiffened, but then a soft rain began, and there were no more noises and the corrugated iron played that song of safe childhoods, and Celine lay still and I thought of the house in Rozelle with our daughters beneath a sudden Sydney storm. It was unthinkable that I had abandoned them. It had been the only thing I knew I would never do.

The rain was louder and through the din there was a heavy thumping.