Peter Carey - Amnesia

“Calm down.”

I do not like being told to calm down. We all know what that means.

“Check out the box.”

It was not wine, which was what I had hoped, but a mess of papers and a huge number of objects, the smaller ones like mahjong tiles, that crutch of lazy reporters: the microcassette. Plus, also, larger cassettes, C120s as it later turned out.

“I need access,” I said.

We crossed a culvert and I banged my head. Between my disappointment and my claustrophobia, I could have wept.

“This is access,” she said. “You’ve got hours and hours of access in this box. Forget Woody,” she said. “Woody will never hear these tapes. You can write this book to please yourself.”

HE WAS an unlovely old scoundrel with his wide hunched shoulders and his long arms, carrying a cardboard box down onto the dock that morning. His hair was thick, wiry, not quite grey, in the style of forty years before, and if this contributed, to a small degree, to his furtive air the latter was not, it must be stressed, the consequence of his present situation. He had already, before this recent turn of events, been known as “Wink” Moore and Felix “Moore-or-less-correct.”

The celebrated journalist peered without enthusiasm at the place where fate had brought him: that is the banks of the great Hawkesbury River. He had been delivered there by a burly young woman whose dusty white Corolla smelled of her children’s throw-up. She had not apologised for this, even when he wound down the window, and neither of them had spoken any word in the twelve hours they had travelled north from Melbourne. Only as they arrived at the little hamlet of Brooklyn, having suffered a lifetime’s worth of seatbelts slapping in the wind, did she speak to him.

Good on you, mate, she said.

He had time to register the high emotion, but he was already anxiously searching for what awaited him in the concrete shadow of the bridge: a pencil-thin pontoon leading to a human figure, and an aluminium dinghy, known locally as a tinny. The Corolla drove away and the traveller understood that the next stage of his trip, across deep waters, would be navigated by a youth who was now securing his fragile craft with nothing more substantial than his hairy suntanned leg.

Up Shit Creek, he thought, without a paddle.

The hamlet of Brooklyn had seen this before, sedentary fathers who have been bullied into taking teenage sons fishing for the day. These sons could be sulky, or bored, or Game Boy addicts, or just generally embarrassed by the ancient party’s lack of sea legs, nous, bait, tackle; they could also be, as in this particular case, solicitous.

Come on Dad, the boy called.

An observer watching from an unmarked car would have seen the son was a different sort entirely from the father. He was a river rat, from Broken Bay or Dangar Island possibly. You could see the story straight away. The mother had left the father years ago. She had gone to live with some careless barefooted potter or painter or dole bludger who had, to his credit, managed to raise the son to be at home on the water. That is how our doubtful hero would have liked his present situation to be understood because he was, as he shuffled towards this unknown youth, a criminal. He had never stood in this spot before and he was unaware of his destination, unaware also, of the exact nature of these tapes he had been dumped with. They had clearly been thrown together in a panic, loose pages and some batteries and two types of tape recorder to accommodate both the micro and compact cassettes. He felt no enthusiasm for this bloodless “access,” nor those notebooks, the spiral-bound kind you buy at newsagents, evidence that these so-called “informants” imagined, in their innocence, might be useful to you, mate.

He reached the aluminium dinghy and passed his belongings into the care of the boy who would have been embarrassed to be told that he had the grace and balance of a dancer. He was perhaps sixteen, in any case legally a minor, tall and tanned with his fair curling hair lifting in the south-easterly wind which was, just now, raising the white tops of the cold bright water. The north-easterly had already travelled across the Pacific Ocean, past the old crouching beast of Lion Island and was now barrelling and bluffing up across what is called Pittwater, up to Brooklyn, under and over the bridge, seeking all those wooded bays along the way, swallowing the long wide stretch and then rushing into Berowra Waters and Pumpkin Point. Who knows where the wind doth blow? There would be very few waterways or mangrove swamps where an observer (if there was such a malevolent entity) would not see the water lift as it rushed across a shallow inlet of rippled sand.

The boy had a harder face than the curls might suggest, a little slit of a mouth that twisted in a sort of grin. Dad, he said.

The man hesitated. He was a most unlikely outlaw. Indeed, one might pity him his ineptitude, his nervousness around the water.

The boy had the box of tapes and papers in the boat and now, with his dinghy still untethered, took hold of his passenger by the arm and shoulder and the man then knew himself with the boy’s hand, and was aware of his own age, frailty, softness. He sat heavily and the boy passed him an old hat and he immediately pulled it over his head and hunched down as the motor came to life and they headed out under the low bridge, Highway 1 in fact, which carried car loads of free citizens up the North Coast or south to Sydney where, presumably, people still sat in the Wentworth Hotel and drank champagne and ate nibbles and talked about all the crap and krill caught in the Murdoch filters. It was unlikely his photograph would be in The Australian just yet but they had some beauties in their files, Felix the rat, Felix the mole, Felix the pervert with his dirty raincoat.

“Feels, Feels,” the Murdoch guy had shouted. “Look this way. Felix.”

Fuck you, he thought.

The wind at this hour was cold and the passenger wrapped his op-shop wardrobe tight around him, the old grey trousers, red checked work shirt, green tweed jacket, not nearly thick enough to keep him warm. There was a light chop and the boat rose and slammed and he was frightened that it would become rougher. Truth be told, he would have preferred the smell of throw-up to this fresh clean river air which promised nothing but discomfort and loneliness. It was of course beautiful, with stern khaki bush slashed with verticals in pink and white and grey and now and then the impasto yellow sandstone glowing ecstatically in the morning sun. It was like a picture postcard but it was not a picture postcard. The boat rose and slammed and the water was as hard as concrete and it was a great inhuman river and it opened its wide throat to him, and somewhere down to the left was Berowra Waters where he had once lunched at a famous restaurant of the same name. He had been ferried there by his sybaritic old mate who had been returning a certain favour. He had worked his way from the oysters to the quenelles to the soft chocolate pudding with the golden Château Climens which he had raised to the darkening afternoon and said what he had always said on such occasions: I wouldn’t be dead for quids which, translated roughly, meant there was no money he could be offered that would persuade him to be deceased. It had taken a single envelope of cash from Woody Townes to prove him wrong.

He observed, with something of a start, that there was no wine in the dinghy, nothing but him, the boy, and the box which was now getting wet. Fuck you, he thought. Would he really be expected to continue writing, not only without a human source, but without resources of the liquid kind? Also, it was unlikely he would get any more money. Why would he continue with a book which was legally owned by Woody Townes?