Peter Carey - Amnesia

At the Rathdowne Street traffic lights she stopped to examine the medal he had given her, the bronze hurricane lamp on its silver ground. It is pitch dark .

Her life had just changed in some serious way but there was, as yet, no external sign of it. Entering Macarthur Place she walked close to the buildings on the north side, then slipped into the lane beside her kitchen. What had happened? What had changed? All the empty beer bottles had been taken away leaving a single line of sickly yellow grass between the asphalt and the wall.

Her radical mother was in the kitchen wearing makeup.

Are you all right? the mother asked, staring at her. Celine looked so weird, like the enemy, someone from South Yarra. She was wearing pressed embroidered jeans and when, on tape, Gaby tried to evoke the cocktail of emotion that had caused her to cry, she mentioned the jeans more than once. Celine had dressed in a bourgie black linen jacket with padded shoulders. Her daughter had been missing a few hours and now she was dressed up for the police and social workers. She had pressed her jeans to make it not her fault.

Gaby had not known that she wanted comfort until she saw her mother’s frightened stare and knew there wasn’t any comfort to be had.

Are you all right?

Yes, the girl cried, I’m fabulous. She pushed past and ran up to the shower. Not for a moment did she consider what a shower might mean to her mother. Gaby wished only to wash the rabies germs away, and she locked the bathroom door, which you were not allowed to do. She washed her legs and rubbed her skin too hard. The bite began to bleed and she thought that must be good. When she was dry she used her father’s aftershave which stung just as much as she had wished. She placed a bandaid on every tooth mark. Then she dressed as if for soccer, with new clean shorts and long white socks still smelling of the laundry. She slipped her shin guards into place.

And then she presented herself again in the kitchen where she apologised. By way of acceptance her mother made a chocolate egg flip, one of those indulgence foods supposed to give you strength and comfort.

Are you OK, sweetie?

Don’t let me disturb your hangover.

Oh baby, Celine said, please let me brush your hair. And she had the hairbrush waiting, her instrument of love, and Gaby sat on the kitchen stool and stretched her neck, bending forward beneath the weight of the brush, not showing how much she enjoyed the tug, the pain, the battle with the knots and curls.

You shouldn’t yell at each other, she said. I can’t deal with it.

I know.

But it was not until Sandy returned that they actually hugged and she knew how thirsty she was for the tender sorry way he touched the skin on the back of her hand.

We’ve been awful, he said. I am ashamed.

Celine should have been ashamed but instead she had pressed her jeans with a crease right down the centre of the legs.

I got bitten by a dog, Gaby told her father not her mother. What if I’ve got rabies?

She would never forgive Celine for the relief that then illuminated her puffy eyes i.e. she was reassured by the possibility of rabies. Even though everyone knew what happened if you had rabies—they pushed a huge needle, a centimetre thick, straight into your stomach, thirty-three times.

Better than shagging, was what Celine had clearly thought. She was just so thankful, obviously.

FELIX MOORE’S PRESENT RESIDENCE had been built on a sandstone outcrop which, in the shadow of lantana, and in secret places beneath the floor, looked like a fine-ground concave lens. It showed silky sedimentary lines in mustard and ochre, but when he wanted some pretty rocks to secure his papers against the wind, there was no sandstone of a useful size.

The rocks that finally held his fluttering papers were dark reddish-brown, volcanic and blobby, or quartzy, sometimes white, streaked with black veins. They did the job, holding his information fast through two lashing storms, although nothing could be done about the rain which had, during the second “weather event,” blown straight through the hut, causing him to flee up the ladder to the bed where he sought the comfort of the previous tenant’s padded overalls.

Now he was confronting the resistant nature of the information in the carton. This was not, in any sense, a “source.” It was the sort of shit schoolgirls left in their abandoned bedrooms, old projects, medals, ribbons, school reports, VHS tapes, CDs, lipsticks, thirty types of cassette tapes of bands they were ashamed to say they ever liked. These tapes were not music. He knew that from the start. The microcassettes were Gaby’s, the motley lot Celine’s. On and on they talked, on and fucking on, invisible to the reporter, without an editor to rein them in. Other presumably vital evidence was provided by spiral-bound books with pasted photographs and scraps of art, larger books with brown paper pages not unlike those “guard books” they used to keep in the advertising departments of newspapers, awful old ads for dreary suits held in place by so-called “milliner’s solution.” A flat airless soccer ball might have lifted his spirits, but instead there were enigmas beyond all understanding e.g. a book with a hand-lettered title in Flintstone block capitals. WANK, it said. This caused the pathologist to play unhappily with the scraggly edges of his moustache. What would it serve to open this unsavoury door?

In “The World of Wank” (as it was subtitled) each of the pages had another glued on top of it. Their distinctive fold marks suggested they had been through the mail.

(LOC ROOMS)

(DESC “Small Room”)

(EAST TO LIVING-ROOM)

(DOWN PER TRAP-DOOR-EXIT)

(ACTION ANTECHAMBER-F)

(FLAGS RLANDBIT LOCKEDBIT)

(GLOBAL STAIRS)>

RLANDBIT, he thought, LOCKEDBIT, he thought. AGENBITE OF INWIT. U.P.:UP. FUCK YOU.

Time passed. There remained just two casks of Hunter Valley red to deal with. He had found a single stick of pale blue chalk inside his overalls and with this he drew a circle on the floor and placed the book inside it.

The water slapped against the shore. Ah hate this place. All ah hear all day is them damn waves, floppin’ down . What garbage he carried in his head. There seemed no order or meaning in the contents of the box, but this was all he had been given, like his too long arms and too short legs. He turned off the mother and increased the volume on the daughter, and took the “Shit, Horse” shovel off the wall and picked up the dunny paper and set off up the back stairs which led to the high ground above the roof. He managed to dig a hole in shallow soil. He could hear the pedagogical daughter briefing him on tape, so much he had to learn, she lectured. His knees hurt. He watched a pelican as it changed its landing plans and plunged, untidy feet down, head first, into the river. He shat, in spite of all the cheese, and afterwards he filled the hole as best he could and ignored the white ribbons waving from their grave.

He had a tinny, an outboard, a tank of fuel. What to do with them was something else. If his wife had been here she might have had a sensible plan to save his neck again, but he was dead to her and he must cauterise his memory of her and so he returned to the hut and sat on his desk. He restarted the tapes and was amused to hear that—here, once again—the two voices were disagreeing, but dwelling obsessively on the same concerns. They both circled the purchase of the house in Coburg. Fucking real estate, he thought. This is how you change the world?