Peter Carey: Amnesia

Some people are good at debt. We were bad at it, and only discovered it in the way people who get seasick learn of their weakness when the ship has left the shore. We were a journalist and a potter thinking they could send their kids to an expensive private school. You get the joke.

Earlier I described how I abandoned these children on the footpath. Abandoned? For God’s sake, they were almost at the end of their investment curve. To listen to their conversation you would never dream that their parents were both third-generation socialists. Did they even remember their father toasting crumpets in the smoky fire? Can they hear their mother’s lovely voice sing “Moreton Bay”?

I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie

At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains

At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbie

At all those settlements I’ve worked in chains

But of all places of condemnation

And penal stations of New South Wales

Of Moreton Bay I have found no equal

Excessive tyranny each day prevails

She sang that to our little girls? You bet she did.

We had made the awful mistake of sending the girls to school with the children of our enemies. We thought we were saving Fiona from dyslexia. In fact we were wrecking her family by putting it under a financial strain it could not withstand. I would never once, not for a second, have thought to call Claire timid. How could I know that debt would make her so afraid? We got a line of credit for $50,000 and every time I acted like myself she hated it. She had loved me for those qualities before: I mean, my almost genetic need to take risk, to stand on principle, to poke the bully in the eye. I could not compromise, even when I was—so often—physically afraid. A sword hung over the marriage bed and I did not see it. I refused compromises she privately thought a father was morally obliged to make.

And of course the girls had not the least idea of what was at stake. If they paid attention to a newspaper it was only the Life and Style section. I doubt they had read a single one of my words, and had no notion of my work and life. They had never seen the evidence that might have justified my absences. If I allowed Claire’s bond to be the strongest it was because I saw how much she wanted them to be “my daughters.” Only once I bought them clothing (T-shirts, that’s all). Then I learned that this was not my job and I should never try again.

Before this final defamation suit, Claire had been the pillion passenger who closed her eyes and hung on tight but the Supreme Court’s finding was the final straw. When she heard the size of the damages, she quite collapsed.

As a child she had seen the family farm taken by the bank. Was it that? Was it something else? In any case, she did not believe my assurance that “everything will be OK” because Woody had flown up from Melbourne for the court case. He had promised nothing. She was correct to say this, but she could not grasp that this was exactly the sort of situation when you could rely on Woody. Claire could not grasp his influence. She did not care that he had saved me from my burning car. All she could see was that his father had been a slumlord and a thug.

Nor did she trust Nigel QC because she believed, correctly, that he was the prosecutor’s friend. I told her that did not matter. I was right. If only she had trusted me, I would have got back on the bike and taken her hurtling through the bends at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. I would have won the appeal. I would have sorted out the legal costs, and we would have celebrated as we had celebrated many times before.

“Everything will be OK,” I said, and it was dreadful to see the fury in her eyes.

I WAS FROM a small town in Victoria, but I had thought of gorgeous wicked Sydney as my home for fifteen years. Yet once I was cast out of Denison Street, Rozelle, I saw I had no home at all. I was pushed up into the heartless traffic of Victoria Road and across the vertiginous Anzac Bridge. I had to admit my mates had all abandoned me. Darling Harbour was below. All of that bright chaotic city lay before me. I had no mobile phone. I had no bed. I was reduced to ringing doorbells in the eastern suburbs. I cannot go into the details of my reception, but so reluctantly was I given refuge that I felt compelled to refuse my host’s coffee in the morning. I certainly would not crawl on my belly to ask to use his phone.

I spent the day at Martin Place, at the post office, searching the Sydney phone books and getting change at the counter.

“Do I know you? You were on TV last night?”

“That’s me, mate.”

This clerk was a pale red-headed fellow with no bum and his sleeves rolled up to show his biceps. He slowly counted out my phone money.

“Felix,” he said.

“Yes, mate.”

“You’re a wanker, mate.”

I took my money down the far end and crouched in the gloom, trying to find someone to take my call. I had expected my colleagues might enjoy a gossip, but they were clearly nervous of what I was going to ask of them. So many people “stepped away” from their desks at the same time, they must have made a conga line, from Pyrmont to Ultimo, from Fairfax to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

I left Martin Place and walked under the gloomy Moreton Bay figs in Hyde Park, down along William Street, past Westfield Tower, an ugly building once occupied by the most exhilarating mix of power, almost forgotten figures such as Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran, Harry Miller before and after his spell in Cessnock jail.

Dusk came early and I really had no heart to test another friendship so I ended up at the inevitable: the Bourbon and Beefsteak in King’s Cross. Why did we always love the B&B? It was an awful place, owned by an American called Bernie Houghton. We all knew that Houghton was an arms dealer with an uncontested CIA affiliation. That never stopped us going to eat there late at night, and even when we discovered Bernie was a partner in Nugan Hand, the same CIA bank that helped finance the events of 1975, we continued to go to drink at the Bourbon and Beefsteak.

My wife said I was a romantic, that the B&B was my idea of noir, with prostitutes and tourists, bludgers and transvestites, well-connected criminals and murdering policemen. She may not have been completely wrong.

It was not dark yet and I got a breezy table near the street from which vantage point I soon saw—approximately forty-five minutes after my arrival—our dinged-up Subaru rise from the street and mount the footpath. Did I cower? Oh probably. But I did not dive under the table no matter what your friends have told you. In fact my wife was carrying nothing more frightening than a plastic bag which would later turn out to contain a mobile phone, a charger, a framed photo of my daughters, and my complete signed set, all six volumes, of Manning Clark’s much loved History of Australia .

The photograph was on the top. It gave me hope. If I had seen my treasured Manning Clarks I would have known this was the coup de grâce, but in my foolish optimism I thought, sweet girl, she knows my life is built upon my family. She came straight at my table. I thought, thank God, I would have died to lose her.

“They cut the jacaranda down this morning.”

She had such a pretty face but her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth was straight as a knife. What was I to say? Sit down?

“Call Woody,” she said, attempting to hand over the carry bag.

I grabbed at her. She said not to touch her. The charger fell to the floor. By the time I had discovered the Manning Clarks, she was gone.