Peter Carey - Amnesia

“What exactly have you been hired to write?”

“Gabrielle, you agreed to this already. That’s why I’m here.”

She shrugged.

“My job is to make you likeable,” I said. “They want me to make the case for your good character.”

She almost smiled.

“Your mother is trying to save you from extradition. I can help with that.”

“Fear is not helpful to anyone.”

“You think I’m afraid?”

“Celine is shitting herself.”

“What if I simply wrote the truth?”

“People wouldn’t like my equation. You won’t either.”

I thought, she’s a nightmare. No-one can control her. I have a contract, but not with her.

“You think you’ll like me, but you won’t.” She smiled and for a moment I didn’t understand that this sweetness was for the idiot who had the unmanned aerial magpie hovering above his desk. The machine rose vertically like no magpie ever born. I thought, you’re a waste of hope and time.

“My mother is a bad introduction to our situation,” she said. “She’s defeated by them before she even starts. It does not occur to her that we might possibly defeat them.” I thought she sounded paranoid and grandiose but she clearly did not give a rat’s arse about what I thought. She was smiling at the curly-haired man-child as he elevated the drone almost to the ceiling. I heard the high-pitched whine of an engine but when I felt my hair lift in the breeze I would not look.

“Them?” I asked her. “Who is them?”

The machine dropped, like a catastrophic phone book, on my head. Maybe I cried out. Who wouldn’t? Whatever I did, they fell around laughing like a pair of clowns. It was not my own fright that pissed me off, but their carelessness of who they were. I had a higher opinion of them than they did themselves.

“It was just a joke.”

There are many journalists, most journalists, who could be auditioned and mocked and still do a more than decent job. This juvenile behaviour would be a gift to them, not me. My head hurt. My hands throbbed. Fuck it. I stood. “This won’t work if you want to fight against me.”

“Oh, take a joke,” she said, but I was truly pissed off. This was what our great historian would call the flaw in my human clay.

“You’ve got plenty of enemies,” I told her. “Go fight with them. Or find out who I am and get in touch with me.” And that was my character, how I normally fucked my life.

She smiled at me then, and touched my arm. I had heard she was casual with her hygiene. No-one had mentioned she was charming.

“Mr. Moore, I am not nice, but I do know exactly who you are. Really I do. I first read you when I was still in high school.”

I tried very hard to disguise my pleasure, but knew that my smirky little mouth would be a traitor to my cause. “Sleep on it,” I said.

“OK but I don’t need to.” She put her small warm hand in mine and I shook it and thought, dear Jesus Christ, she reads books. I’m saved. I said goodbye. I had done a good day’s work. I emerged from the dugout as king parrots sliced the bush with their low trajectory, flashing their pretty sunlit colours above the darkness of the ridge tops. I filled my lungs with clean fresh air. I stretched my spine. I finally noticed, above the dugout entrance, in the tossing umbrellas of the gum trees, dozens of tiny whirling fans, each one camouflaged with mottled paint and strapped in place. Were there power cables? Yes, there, travelling towards the earth like careful lizards, down the dark side of the trunks into the exclusive story by Felix Moore.

I HAD NOT, previously, been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character loveable. My most notable work of fiction, Barbie and the Deadheads , had been a satire. As a journalist it was my talent to be a shit-stirrer, a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks amongst the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career but the story of this young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay.

If I had been Tolstoy himself, I could not have been granted more than this, my almost vascular connection to the drama and its actors, a privileged role where I might be both a witness and participant in a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states. I was a failed novelist but I saw I had the novelistic smells I needed (from shit to solder), the pixelated light, the women with related cheekbones, the great Australian bush rolling on out past Kinglake, ranges like ancient animals asleep, slender upper branches turned pretty pink by afternoon.

I had a lifetime of hard-won technical ability, but was my heart sufficient? Could I transcend my own beginnings as that stinging little creature who had been the object of Sando Quinn’s pity? Did I have the courage for something more than a five-column smash and grab? Did I, along the way, truly wish to make myself a conduit for the corrosive hurts and betrayals of a guilty mother and an angry child? My own daughters would judge I had a better chance of chopping down a tree.

As I came to the top of Celine’s steps I saw, high on the ridge tops, a magpie glide exactly like a hawk, New hatched to the woeful time , or words to that effect.

Then I sat at Celine’s long table, drinking Jacob’s Creek through a straw while she very kindly re-dressed my throbbing hands.

There was a large blister on one palm and a vicious lesion on the other. My fingers were scarlet and my nurse observed that I would not be typing for a while. I did not comment. She cooked, early. At an hour when Melbourne’s office workers crossed the Swanston Street bridge on their way home, we ate. And then we sat before a mellow bed of coals, toasting bread and slathering it with jam and butter.

Celine still did not mention her daughter, except tangentially, to say it was a shitty time to be young.

It was always a shitty time. I said so.

But Celine seemed to have become romantic about our past. I was gently “reminded” that we had one hundred thousand people on the streets of Melbourne for the Vietnam Moratorium. In her view we had “won.” Then we voted in a Labor government. One moment Jim Cairns was the evil man who led the moratorium. Then he was Deputy Prime Minister. Soon he would be Treasurer. We had learned that we could change the world.

She was completely correct, if only in the short term.

Change was what we wanted. Our new Prime Minister didn’t keep us waiting. In the first two weeks, without a cabinet, Gough Whitlam brought home Australian soldiers from the US war in Vietnam. Was it then that Washington decided we were all communists? This was a big joke if you knew Gough Whitlam.

The party was elected on Gough’s platform and, by Jesus, he was going to honour it. He abolished conscription. He let the draft resisters out of jail, made university free, gave land rights to Aboriginal peoples wherever the federal government had the power. He, the Prime Minister of what had previously been a reliable American client state, denounced the Nixon bombing of North Vietnam. This outraged our ally, but that’s what we had elected him to do. After almost two centuries of grovelling, we grew some balls. At the UN we spoke up for Palestinian rights. We welcomed Chileans fleeing the CIA coup. We condemned nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

To Celine this list was proof that we had won.

I said our victory was built on the mad idea we would not be punished. For it was exactly these “proofs” that caused Nixon to order the CIA review of US policy towards Australia. In our beginning was our end. Our victory triggered an ever-escalating covert operation which would finally remove the elected government from power.