Peter Carey - Amnesia

Mind your own business.

The bed smells nice.

It’s lavender.

Your mum will go nuts when she gets the phone bill.

Go to sleep. You’re so completely wrong.

Won’t she though?

Go to sleep.

You’re very clever, aren’t you?

If you can’t stop annoying me you’ll have to leave.

She lay on her back and closed her eyes. He was in Germany somehow. She was leaking blood. Everything smelled funny, borrowed, stolen, used, former weirdnesses and misery, old men drinking port from flagons, country girls, nurses, matrons, cats comforting their chilblain toes. On the wall it was handwritten: IT IS AGAINST THE LAW IN MELBOURNE #1 TO WEAR PINK PANTS AFTER LUNCH ON SUNDAYS.

It was too hot for him to wear that coat. He had scrubbed his face so hard there were scratch marks on his burning cheeks. There was a big chart pinned onto the wall above the desk, a web of tunnels and caves with tiny spider writing dense as lace. She did not guess that this was where she was going to live. She read: “East Temple Room.” Later, he stood and added to the writing then returned to the keyboard, his fluttery butterfly fingers dancing, his cuticles like the wing cases of black Christmas beetles that lived inside the walls.

The sun got higher and the hot corrugated iron made loud explosions as it pulled on its nails like Jesus Christ and it was too hot to lie in bed fully dressed and she could not leave and could not sleep. She would never have thought of Frederic like this before. He never spoke in class except when the homework meant he had no choice but read aloud. He stood apart, always, alone, tall, straight, too big to be teased or threatened. He would have been bored to be a goth but his skin stayed very white and his hair fell on his shoulders like a raven’s wing, and he walked rather carefully with his head tilted to one side, so the hair, she guessed, did not obscure his view. He was already over six foot and he had to shave once a week, but he had a very soft sibilant way of speaking which, now she knew his place, exactly matched the room.

Gaby had first met Frederic at socialist youth camp in Healesville when he had given a report on child labour in Third World countries. Gaby found him afterwards, totally alone, throwing stones into the bush. Not long after that, his father got kicked out of the party. Then his parents split up and you would sometimes see him standing with the handsome rock-jawed dad selling the Trot paper. The dad was not charming: “Do you or do you not agree there is a crisis in capitalism?” He was one of Celine’s “tribe.” Sandy said he was a crim.

When Frederic’s mother got her shop together she could afford to also rent this jerry-built addition for her son. At first she worried he would be murdered or mestered and she was mad as a watchdog, running down the stairs in the middle of the night, barefoot on the concrete path. With this one disadvantage the bedroom/shed was the best thing that ever happened in Frederic’s life. That, and the Mac IIx his father had delivered late one night together with some “white goods.” The computer came bundled with its disadvantage too: his mother might go to jail for “receiving.”

It was too hot in the sleepout. The sun brought out the hidden smells which had lain like mosquitoes sleeping amongst the hanging dresses, deep in the carpet with the dust. Gaby put on her gluey socks.

Thank you, she said.

For the first time he smiled, a nice smile.

Anytime, he said. It’s been a considerable pleasure (he talked like that).

And he gave her something, a coin, not a real coin, a heavy medal. On its face was a hurricane lamp, bronze relief against the silver. She asked what it was.

Look, he said.

It is pitch dark. And you cannot see a thing .

Where is it from? She meant from what country.

He closed her fist around the medal. It is from the past, he said.

And with that he raised her hand and gently kissed it, not like a boy at all, and in her fright and joy she would have rushed straight out the door again except he had to unlock the padlock before she could be released.

ROYAL PARK IS a significant site in Australian history. It is from there that Burke and Wills set off to lose themselves and die. It is where General MacArthur’s forces camped. The trees had grown since 1942, but Royal Park was still as flat as a parade ground. It was across the road from Frederic’s daggy back fence. Here Gaby removed her blood-pink socks and discovered she smelled of dead rabbit or day-old butcher’s paper. She kneeled on the dying grass and twisted uncomfortably to examine her injuries, two U-shapes overlapping, brown and pink and now raising red around the edges. Did rabies look like this?

The yellow children’s hospital was visible through the trees, waiting to tattoo her with the name of her disease. Car loads of super-normal families headed north along The Avenue. She imagined their intimate fug, lost Minties, old travel sickness, the boring safe comfort of a Saturday. She touched the tooth stabs with her forefinger, pressing to see how much they hurt. Looking up she was startled to discover Frederic—now dressed in retro drainpipe trousers, brothel creepers, Hawaiian shirt—as he closed his corrugated gate behind him. Then he was sloping off along The Avenue towards the city moving in his famous Frederic way, his tall body very straight, his head on one side, hair flopping, an entirely distinctive, very cool style of tiptoe walking that she would finally understand (not for years and years) as the expression of his gorgeous shyness.

She had left her soccer ball behind. She had not meant to. She certainly wanted to be let into that magic room again but she was too proud to have played a cheap trick to get there. Like, I left my comb behind. Pathetic.

She made her way back across Royal Parade and then around the cemetery. As she emerged on the Carlton side she felt herself being looked at. She had wished them to think that she was dead and all their fault, but by the time she was walking along the grassy strip in the middle of Keppel Street, she felt stupid and ashamed. When Katie Humis and Eve and Robo and the others erupted from the front door of a bright white terrace house, five screaming girls dressed in black like crows, it took everything in her not to run away.

Oh my God.

Ring your mother.

Use our phone.

Katie and Eve had wide leather belts at their hips. They would have been surprised to know they were severely judged for it. Gaby would have been incredulous to know she would ever want to be their friends again.

Your mum was freaking out.

It was the first time that she properly understood she was not one of them.

Who were you with?

No-one.

You did it?

What?

She did it.

What did I do?

You shagged him. Eve said that and was clearly shocked by the ugly thing she’d said.

Who would I do it with?

Their faces were red and overheated. Martin Boosey, they said, together, idiots, clones in black.

They did not know how to look at anything. They had not even noticed her bites and when she left them she made a fuss about walking backwards, waving, making it sort of funny, although she was disgusted they would think she was shagging.

She had wrecked her life much worse than that.

She turned down Cardigan Street, jogging, pretending she was coming back from soccer. Looking down the wide straight flat road towards the city she saw him, Frederic, now crossing at Elgin Street. He was dodging traffic, carrying a very large cardboard box.