Peter Carey - Amnesia

The prosecutor asked him if he could report an entire conversation which he had not witnessed. He said he never claimed that ability.

Then what ability do you have?

He compared himself to a forensic palaeontologist which caused unfriendly laughter. But he insisted on it. His job was to dig up the bones, piece them together, and from all the known information about diet and habitat, be able to construct the creature itself.

You mean, said the prosecutor, a whippy figure with an enormous high-ridged beak, you made up words and put them in my client’s mouth.

He said he would have been happy to quote his client exactly if the client had not, in spite of his Christian Brothers education, the unfortunate tendency to switch tenses, inject “ummm” or “ah” into sentences and use “gonna” instead of “going to.”

If your client’s subjects agreed with his verbs, said Felix Moore, then there wouldn’t be the temptation—or necessity—to ever clean up his quotes.

This is what he did above the Hawkesbury River: cleaned up quotes and lined them up in readiness like fresh-caught flathead in a killbox.

As he worked, a dinghy thumped and whined its way towards Wisemans Ferry while, just below the hut, he could hear the first slap of water from its wake. God, it was lonely. If there had been a safe place to go he would have found a way there.

The tapes aside, he had not unpacked the cardboard carton until the fifth long day when, in spite of his depression and his fear of being controlled or imprisoned, he had laid out his forensic evidence across the floor and began, as follows:

SHE WAS Gabrielle Angela Quinn Baillieux on her birth certificate. She was born in the Royal Melbourne Hospital on November 11th, 1975. We can pin down the exact minute of birth from the parliamentary broadcast which was, on Celine’s evidence, playing in the delivery room. As the baby slithered into the midwife’s brown hands, both parents heard the governor-general’s secretary: “God save the Queen,” he said, the creep.

It was 4:40 p.m.

The baby wailed. The pulsing squiddy cord was cut. The insistent force of life was now brought to the mother’s attention and her naked child was laid against her chest. It is a moment when new parents often weep, but when this pair wept it was not at the miracle of life, but because the legally elected government of Australia had been overthrown.

Fuck them, Celine cried. God fuck the governor-general.

Shush, said the obstetrician. There’s no politics today. You have a child.

Celine cupped her daughter’s universe inside her hand and inhaled the musty rutty sex-smell of her hair. There are politics every day, she said. Only a fool would forget it.

It would be the child’s likeness to the beautiful mother which everyone would emphasise. The daughter would later insist that this was artificially emphasised, the result of her mother’s vanity, but who can rely on these agitated witnesses? The nature of the resemblance—the cheekbones and distinctive lips, the thick, almost wiry, yellow hair—was real enough. Likewise the electric pale grey eyes, identical to those of the reckless parent, and that mischievous muscle you can see today, joining the pert nose to the mobile upper lip. These uncanny similarities made strangers smile. Even those who had become disenchanted with Celine were smitten. It took the theatre director Betty Burstall to be “puzzled” by the way the mother’s hair just happened to match the four-year-old’s urchin curls.

Gabrielle Baillieux was born into bohemian comfort in the inner Melbourne suburb of Carlton and thereafter grew up around actors and writers and radicals and became precocious in the way you might expect. Betty Burstall was her godmother at a time there was no God. “I had a very happy childhood,” Gaby said on tape, which made Felix Moore wish he had been trapped with her in her stinky dugout, quietly noting how, say, she used her lip chapstick obsessively. Stuff like that.

The alleged terrorist was born golden. She grew up knowing prime ministers and junkies and barristers and alcoholics and had regularly fallen asleep in a fug of marijuana, but for twelve long years she was reliably loved, safely handed from one pair of hands to another, at home, and in the Footlights Collective, and at the Women’s Action Theatre in Nicholson Street, and there were, through her childhood, perhaps twenty houses which she could walk into without knocking and find adults who would feed her or admire the artwork in her schoolbag. She attended Carlton Primary and had Greek and Italian and Lebanese friends who petted her blonde hair and never called her Skip.

These were the years when the conservatives once more ran Australia, when Woody Townes, who always had his nose or dick in everything, was buying up the old Carlton terrace houses and painting the exterior walls ultramarine, the window frames maroon, like Persian rugs, and no-one ever dreamed they would look as shitty as they do today. It would later turn out that Woody Townes owned the company that owned Gaby’s childhood house in Macarthur Place. It was the narrowest house in Carlton, as wide as a suburban driveway, dove-grey, salmon-pink, with a high cast-iron verandah where you could have seen, at any moment, the tight press of Australian art and politics. Gough Whitlam stood there. Clifton Pugh. Felix Moore Esquire. This was the house where Australia’s tallest playwright famously walked from the front door to the kitchen fridge in just two strides. It was a small house much envied, much derided, for how could two bohemians afford this, the cutest house in Carlton with its windows opening onto the park?

This was what Celine called “my Carlton” which is less nauseating than it might seem. She really managed to own Carlton for a year or two—not only by being a beautiful young woman with great legs and a Nepalese kaftan with tiny mirrors sewn into the embroidery. In those days, before she made the soup commercial, Celine Baillieux was an activist actress of note. If she was sometimes mocked she also had a following and she used it, not always to her husband’s advantage. God knows what Sando felt when he opened up the newspaper each day, and if his wife was never photographed with Yasser Arafat it was only because she never had the chance. Celine was liked because she was both beautiful and not “up herself.” She put herself at risk. She was beaten, more than once. She stood in the rain outside King & Godfree selling Direct Action with the actor Matty Matovic, who was not yet a prisoner of the state. She was fearless, always in the front row of everything.

She bicycled from household to household, from play-reading to rehearsal, past the Italian greengrocers, the group houses with windows open to the street playing Van Morrison throwing pennies on the bridges down below, up to the Brunswick baths, down to the Victoria markets for fresh puntarelle with her string bag suspended between the handles and Gaby dripping gelato on the seat.

And of course she did love Carlton (as she understood it) for its unlocked doors and open windows, for Macarthur Place, for Lygon Street, for its Lebanese hashish in Johnny’s Green Room, its sly-grog shop in Chummie Place, the welcoming Italian families, the intense and clannish Greeks, the intellectual pubs and radical politics and fabulous cappuccinos and Readings books and Professor Longhair’s record store of loving memory.

The hard men from the party’s King Street headquarters filed into her doll’s house and sat in the small front room with cold beers held daintily between thumb and forefinger. Sandy was their up and coming man. They had watched him since he left his storeman’s job at Dunlop to get a degree at Monash University. They observed him in the Monash Labor Club. In 1970 they shoehorned him into the Vietnam Moratorium Committee where he began his association with Sam Goldbloom and Jim Cairns. They were very happy when he became a family man, and if Celine was not exactly what they would have wished, she managed, when she was in their presence, to make them forget it. Did she flirt with them? Lay her hand upon their arms? Did they permit this? There is no evidence, none at all, none on a tape, none in a notebook or scribbled on the typing paper, but of course she flirted. What else should she have done?