Peter Carey - Amnesia

Yet he did as Gaby’s anonymous “supporters” arranged for him to do. Because he had a fragile ego and they seemed to hold him in esteem. Because he had harboured a fugitive and was now a criminal and frightened of arrest. It seemed they would prevent that. More particularly, and knowledgeably, he understood that his own Australian government would never protect him from extradition and whatever variety of torture the Americans might decide was now due to him. Was he hysterical? Most likely. He was certainly not a brave or even good man. Indeed, he thought, he was a rat, a pathetic cringing thing being ferried across a wide expanse of water that would as soon rush down his panicking throat and flood his lungs. He sat too far forward and was drenched, and the journey seemed to continue a great time, and he entered a nightmare zone in which there was, for all the engine noise, no movement through space, the type of sensation that might, in other circumstances, have had him reaching for a Xanax, but there was no Xanax here, nor would there be.

By the time it occurred to him that he should pay attention to the formation of these little bays and islands, they had already entered a tributary and he realised he had no clue how to return to Brooklyn or Highway 1. A city of five million lay just an hour away. Who would ever guess it? They were now chugging along what might be the southern bank of a creek, or perhaps it was the eastern bank. Everything was in deep shadow and the water was very still and translucent green, and the boy throttled back the engine and drifted very slowly into a mangrove swamp.

High tide, observed the boy. He would understand that later, but at the moment it seemed like a mistake.

The boy, most likely, could already imagine mud crabs and flatheads to be caught and eaten but the writer saw mosquitoes and wondered how he could bribe the boy to bring him wine. The water was now shallow and coppery and they slid beneath the mangroves, ducking very low, until Felix could see, ahead, a bare shelf of yellow clay. The boy gunned the engine and the boat rose, stopped fast in the sand.

The boy removed the outboard and carried it up the path together with what was presumably its fuel tank. Then he returned and gripped the boat by its bow and, with his passenger still seated like a grand poobah, managed to drag it up onto the shore.

There glowering Felix alighted and clutched at his cardboard box. With the load thus lightened the boy was able to pull the tinny so it slithered rapidly across the swampy grasses where, finally, he turned it upside down. Then the pair of them set off up a narrow path, the boy carrying the outboard and the fuel and Felix’s heart lifting as he thought, perhaps he will take pity and stay with me a day or two.

THE PATH LED the pair of them up along the contour of a ridge to the foot of a weathered wooden staircase with open treads. Even as his companion stood to one side and encouraged the fugitive to go ahead, the latter had no sense that he had in fact “arrived.” The steps were for the most part overgrown with wild lantana, and if he noticed, in the deep shadow, a set of sturdy posts such as you might use to support a rainwater tank, he was too alarmed by the jungly tangle to pay attention. He believed the pretty red flowers with yellow hearts to be the habitat of shellback ticks.

Beside the banister grew a large rough-barked tree, close enough for him to touch and to note, without enthusiasm, the line of ants streaming upwards in the twisted valleys. This was an ironbark tree he decided. If it had not been an ironbark it would have had to be a ghost gum or manna gum. He acknowledged no other species.

He was tired and hot and his heavy lids and fleshy nose shone with perspiration, yet when he arrived on the threshold he was not particularly giddy. This one-room hut, which would later shake and shudder in the westerly winds (rippling in the gusts like a sailing boat), was on that sunny morning open to the benign south-easterly, and when the dishevelled fugitive arrived at the top of the steps he was surprised to find his quarters hospitable. Of the many things his eyes might alight upon, he did see a garden spade, hanging from a hook inside the door but he overlooked the words “Shit, Horse” burned into its wooden shaft. There was so much else to look at. The glass-less “window” above the old porcelain sink was occupied by a huge elephant-skinned angophora (ghost gum, he thought). The smooth pink and grey bark was luminous in the sun and the characteristic rusty blemish on the trunk harmonised so well with the stained sink that the latter seemed artfully intentional.

He kept his box clutched against his soft stomach, staring at the tree which he would later know in quite another way.

I’ll take that, the boy said. Meaning the visitor’s possessions.

But the man’s belligerent attention had now shifted to some half-dozen shelves that had been fixed in place beside the window. On one of the lower shelves, abutting an assortment of canned beans and Campbell’s soups, stood a number of four-litre casks labelled “Hunter Valley Red,” a description that gave no assurance that the wine inside had not been oaked with a shovel full of chips, stirred with a garden rake, and strained to reach its present “market niche.” The visitor made a dove sound. His cheeks hollowed (briefly) and his mouth puckered (privately). He placed his box on the rough counter top beside the sink and, being unconscious of his own sigh, plunged his hand deep in his pocket.

Don’t wash the eggs, the boy said, not until you want to use them.

What?

Eggs.

Felix then saw, beside his box of evidence, a dark blue plastic ice-cream tub containing a motley collection of eggs—small, large, brown, white, not one of which was untouched by shit. He stared at his guide solemnly. He nodded, to register his understanding, as he would soon nod in response to fresh apples, pumpkins.

Typewriter, the boy said, scratching at his calf and leaving contrails of white across the brown skin.

How had he not seen it? Whoever had prepared the accommodation had positioned the machine thoughtfully in the middle of a folding table of the type once available for $10 at any army disposals. Had they known it was for him? Had the “supporters” read his books? What did any of them really think about what they were doing?

An Olivetti fucking Valentine identical to the one he had destroyed in 1975.

It was of course a bright red little portable. Now he removed it from its sturdy plastic case and gently touched the spools of ribbon there revealed.

He turned to the boy who grinned.

Of course, thought the fugitive, there is no electricity. He sat in the awful canvas chair and selected a single type bar, the letter L, raising it from its nest, examining it so closely that the boy might have been reminded of a naturalist tenderly banding the thin legs and long, agile toes of a white-faced heron.

Having, in the course of his hard-typing years, broken the fonts from the type bars of so many Olivetti portables, the fugitive was at once astonished that such a thing might still exist and touched by its frailty and appalled by its clear inability to withstand what he must now do to it.

While turning his wide bookish back to the curious boy, he plunged his right hand in his pocket and removed a sheaf of that distinctively slippery Australian currency, clearly designed for sneaky business.

The boy, meanwhile, had placed reams of paper on the table, found the mosquito coils, had picked up an orange pumpkin from a pile in the corner of the room. Clearly it had been feasted on by possums so he did what anyone else would have done i.e. he threw it out the window. As there was no glass or screen to impede its progress the pumpkin crashed like a tumbling wombat through the bush.