Peter Carey - Amnesia

Sandy had strong support from the socialist left and, unusually for Melbourne, the right as well. For the men in King Street he was a natural for the state seat of Coburg, and it did not hurt that he was promoted by Woody Townes. The Coburg branch, however, was a local branch i.e. parochial and bloody-minded. They agreed that Sandy Quinn was working-class, dinky-di, ridgy-didge, from Williamstown. They said nothing about Mrs. Quinn (not her name) but she was probably what they were thinking about when they said Sando was not local, that they did not want an outsider “parachuted in.”

Celine never would understand that she was only bullied into living in Coburg so, in the branch’s opinion, she would get to know “real working people.” Real? The party did not really know shit about Celine. And if Sando thought she could be forced to live in Coburg, he did not know her either. She would rather die than have a backyard, or a Hills Hoist or a barbecue or a privet hedge all of which arrived in her life when Mr. Neville died and Doris “liquidated” the home her daughter loved. Within a day of the auction Doris had bought a taxi business on the other side of Melbourne, in Springvale. She began to drag out photos of “Dad” and no longer mentioned Mr. Neville.

Celine understood the madness later. At the time she smelled it like a gas leak, the loneliness, the nothing of Springvale. There had been nowhere to escape the fear. There was not a bookshop in Springvale, certainly no Bach or Botticelli, only the culture-hating xenophobic mediocrity.

To live in Springvale, Celine said, was to endure long hot afternoons and airless nights alone and a five-kilometre walk to a chlorinated swimming pool and burning concrete and stupid boys peering through the walls of the changing shed.

I would die in Coburg, she told her husband. He told her Coburg was not Springvale.

He did not understand. The streets of Springvale had been empty but for some poor lonely “housewife” trudging up to the shops, past blind and empty houses in one of which Celine was reading “Howl.” Doris did not have to live in Springvale. She could have afforded Carlton. This very house, this lovely slice of terrace house on Macarthur Square. To Doris it would have been a slum.

Celine was not leaving this for Coburg. Coburg was a hot basalt plain. Coburg was the road to Sydney. Coburg was where they manufactured hats and shirts, Kodak film, Agent Orange. Coburg was the poor fucked-up Merri Creek seeping through the council tip past Pentridge Prison to the quarry.

It would be no bad thing, just the same, said a certain George Papadopoulos of the Coburg branch, to get your missus to understand: in Coburg there is space to have a proper clothes line.

Sando laughed when he passed this on to his wife. He kissed her. He made her laugh about the clothes line. He told her that he could not have loved a wife with a clothes line. He would not ask her to modify her views, to dress more carefully, wear a bra, or consider the party platform before she made pronouncements about the Middle East. He said he was the one who would be elected, not his wife. She was an actress. She should act, he said.

Sando was the only “good” person Celine had ever met. He set up an office in a cupboard just off Sydney Road in Coburg, and she was proud of him. There, each night, after his day teaching school, and on weekends, and on holidays, he filled out forms and wrote letters for all factions of the immigrant community, mostly Greek and Italian at first, but then the Lebanese from Denbo, who needed more assistance than the Turks.

Each night he returned to her in Carlton, to the black trunks of the elms and the birds quarrelling in the branches of Macarthur Square. There, on the top floor of his skinny house, Celine watched him breathe their daughter’s shampooed hair and listened while he read her The Midnight Cat . She was jealous sometimes, not for long. Every child should be loved like that.

“ALL HAPPY FAMILIES are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

Is there a more famous line in all of literature? Is there a greater writer than Tolstoy? Only in some lost corner of the earth, in a shack above the Hawkesbury for instance, might you find a wine-caked fool thinking to himself—hang on, Tolstoy, not so slick: it may not be a case of either/or.

This family of Quinn’s and Baillieux’ had definitely been happy. For ages they had story-reading, beaches, opening nights, election-night parties. They cuddled up in bed on Sunday mornings. All happy families are alike in that no-one gives a shit about them. This sort of language, Felix Moore had been warned by powerful friends, did nothing for his credibility.

Being now employed to explain a life using nothing more than over-oaked wine and tape recordings, he did not argue with Tolstoy. Instead he thought, this is a family that will be unhappy. Even during the happy years there must be “storm clouds gathering.” These clouds would make the happy years more interesting. As luck would have it, there was a real actual storm cloud: i.e. a dreadful lie: that the grandma was allegedly dead and unavailable. When in fact she had been alive in Springvale all this time, this trauma victim abandoned by her daughter.

Then she turned up, alive, at Macarthur Place.

Gaby remembered it exactly: she had been in the front room, standing, reading at a music stand. The book was Wolf Children by Lucien Malson. (There’s another first line for you: “The idea that man has no nature is now beyond dispute.”)

Looking up to reflect on this happy Marxist fantasy, Gaby saw her grandmother in the window.

She took the old lady to be a wino, from the Salvation Army hostel. She was sixty years of age, more or less. She wore a fox fur. Her hairdo made Gaby think of Edo Japan, although the effect was not artistic or refined. A huge tortoiseshell comb kept the structure in its place and the woman’s face was very white and her lips very red. If her face was fabulously wrinkly, she had lovely bones beneath.

When the old lady tapped on the glass, the hair on the girl’s neck stood on end.

She had nothing to give but her jelly beans. She had them lined up on the music stand. She held up the black one and the crone nodded enthusiastically and pointed towards the door which the girl reached at the same moment as the visitor.

Black one, she said, very chirpy. Thank you.

She was not a wino obviously. She was dressed in a long worn black coat with sleeves rolled back and silver bangles.

I’m sorry, the girl said, confused by the jewellery. It is all I have. And was then taken by the sight of the stranger unwrapping an oblong object, cosseted in white tissue paper. She feared it would be an heirloom offered for sale. I haven’t any money, she said. Truly.

Yes, yes, lovey. She smelt of fish, like a cat. Just look.

She saw a tiny snapshot framed in silver. The glass was splintered and the old dame’s finger had been cut and was smearing blood across the tissue.

You’re bleeding.

Look.

The photo showed a woman and a little girl, taken long ago. There was a black van in the background although to call it a van was to make it sound far larger than it was. Although the subject in the photograph was much younger than the woman at the door, she shared the strong lipstick and penchant for black. She was eccentric, Gaby understood, but quite artistic and very beautiful. Somehow she assumed the little girl had died.

Macarthur Place was a very “come in” sort of house and she led the injured visitor to the kitchen where she found the bandaids and sat her at the table and took some pleasure in cleaning the wound with Dettol and securing the bandaid.