Peter Carey - Amnesia

“Kangaroo,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

“What did you say to him? Woody.”

She propped herself on her elbow. “Their own citizens don’t count anymore.”

“Is that what you told him?”

“They murder their own people on the basis of suspicion. There are no boundaries of any sort. They break their own laws all the time. Half of them are locked in jail. And my daughter thought she could fuck them over. Say something.”

“What?”

“They say she infected their base at Pine Gap. Do you think that’s credible? Is it possible? Is that her crime?”

“Did you accuse Woody of being a spy? Is that why he hit you?”

“That would make it all OK?”

It was not at all OK but it made a sort of sense. Woody was an emotional man. Loyalty was a big deal with him.

The rain had stopped and there was no sound but the occasional flurry of drips from the big gum tree overhead. Clouds had covered the moon and it was unclear as to whether I could see the shed roof or if I only thought I could.

“I was sitting in the sunshine yesterday,” Celine said, her inflection upwards in that mild hippie fashion she sometimes adopted.

“Yes.”

“I saw a tiny bird, like those spotted things, they live in New South Wales.”

“You mean a spotted pardalote?”

“They don’t live here, Felix.”

“I think they might.”

“No, they don’t. If you’re in Pakistan, what are you to think if you see a little pretty bird that shouldn’t be where it is?”

“This is not Pakistan.”

“Would I be mad to think it was a drone that could destroy me?”

“Sweet Celine.”

“Don’t maul me, Felix. Turn on the light.”

“You don’t mind people looking in?”

“Whoever comes to get me will walk straight in. Turn on the light. Open the cupboard door. Pick up that box.”

“This?”

“Open it.”

She was sitting on the bed with haystack hair and her legs crossed and a clay-coloured blanket pulled around her like a shawl.

“Do it, please.”

I opened the box and discovered, lying on a bed of discoloured cottonwool, the bloody remains of what I took, from the evidence of the colourful feathers, to be what she possibly thought it was. It had been mostly blown apart.

How extraordinary this was: the accuracy, the physical stability in the midst of turmoil.

“You shot this?” I asked. It was too late to argue about the habitat of the spotted pardalote.

“You know I did. I killed this lovely thing.” She began laughing, her big bruised lips crumpling and her eyes screwed up like paper in a bin, this miracle that began its journey underneath a Queensland house.

Who can foretell us? Who can limit what we’ll be? Her marksmanship, I soon realised, was a natural gift, one recognised and encouraged by the rifle’s previous owner, the man she sometimes called “my father.” That is, Mr. Neville.

Mr. Neville was a most unlikely chap, a dear friend of that same window-dresser who had drawn the seams on her mother’s gravy-coloured legs and, later, when Doris was thrown out of home, carried her cardboard suitcase to the tram. He had bestowed on her two envelopes. One was addressed to “My Good Friend, Mr. Neville Peterson.” The other contained thirty-three pounds and ten shillings.

“Be a brave girl,” he said, and kissed her on both cheeks. Did Celine not want this information? She herself had travelled the thousand miles in utero, unable to know anything except, presumably, that the waters of the world were full of fright and shame as her mother braved the Melbourne streets knowing that her cotton dress could not hide the curve of her belly to her bush, her thighs, bare legs. There was no-one to forgive her. She lugged her cardboard “port” which is what they called a suitcase in Brissy, from the French portmanteau . In Melbourne “port” meant cheap fortified wine which was sold, together with other necessaries, from Mr. Neville’s back gate and on occasions from his Bedford van. It was hard to credit the number of cigarettes and chocolate bars and nylon stockings stored inside that tiny space.

His house was in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, which was working-class and industrial in 1943. It is still there, a single-story late Victorian twenty-two feet wide with a curbed corrugated-iron verandah and an ornate pediment on which the word “Balmoral” stands in bold relief. It is on a deep block, almost two hundred feet, with access from the wide rear lane.

In 1943 the backyard held a trove of lumber, lead, copper, and various other valuables best traded after dark. The daylight merchandise lay on racks or stacked against the shed like sticks around a bonfire. Nearer to the gate stood the aforementioned van in which the terrifying driver, the left lens of his specs pasted with brown paper, made his expeditions to collect windfall coal or bunny jumpkins or mushies or cackleberries and there were many farms from the Dandenongs to Ballarat where the tall dry man with the cinched-in belt and no bum in his trousers was known and welcomed for no better reason than his nod, his tight-rolled cigarettes, his reassuring companionable way of saying “yairs” (a spelling which misrepresents him in this age where such a thing looks comic). It is said authoritatively that there was no black market in the war.

Doris found her future half hidden by a bamboo thicket, behind Mr. Neville’s cast-iron gate.

As it was now noon the master of the house had just risen. He appeared at the front door with his first hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his slitted eyes peering through the smoke. He had a high nose, a long chin. His hollow cheeks were shining from the razor.

He accepted the crumpled envelope without a word. Having no sight in one eye, he read the two pages lopsidedly. Then he considered the subject of the letter.

“You don’t drive I suppose?”

“Does it say I do?”

“No.” He folded the envelope once and then twice, making it much smaller than was needed to accommodate it in the pocket of his khaki shirt. “Not exactly, no.”

“Why do you ask?”

He paused. “Is he happy then, your Mr. Clive?”

“Does he say?”

“Is he lonely?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“But he must have friends. Doris?”

“Yes, I’m Doris. What does he say about me?”

“He’s a silly bugger our Clive. He has nothing to audition for except a role he is too nervous to accept.”

“He said you were a nice man.”

“Did he, darls?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Are you in trouble, love?”

“I must be the consolation prize,” she said.

Mr. Neville pursed his lips and she saw that she had somehow hurt him.

“My, look at you,” he said. “Is that a baby boy?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Can I eat him when he’s cooked?”

He said that to pay her back. Why not? She was a cast-out tart with her stomach and her bosoms growing tight inside her dress. “I’m so sorry.”

“Come in, come in by all means,” said Mr. Neville, backing down into the darkness.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, inside the hall of Balmoral, with tears washing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“Here you are, love, first door on the left, here.”

Doris felt all the cold of Melbourne autumn in the walls.

“Here we go, here we go. Just as his nibs left it.”

And he rushed ahead into a room such as she would never have expected. It was the window-dresser’s bedroom, with pink silk bed and pink pillows and bows tied in the padded bedhead. Mr. Neville laid her poor old port directly on the lovely quilt.

“He must have expected you,” he said, and squinted over his fragrant rollie and shoved his big dry hands in his back pockets so his shoulders bent towards her.