Peter Carey - Amnesia

We don’t have to go anywhere, baby.

Yes, to Coburg.

Do you really want to go without your mum?

Yes, I do.

He swung his big legs off the bed. He dragged her to him and he smelled like someone else, like dirty laundry and uncleaned teeth. She was squished and smashed and scared and she understood that she had, finally, done what she would never do i.e. she was on his side.

Is it really come to that? he asked and she could not be certain he meant what she thought he meant.

And Frederic, she said.

Of course.

I can cook you breakfast.

I’ll go to Johnny’s Green Room.

I’ll get Frederic.

The girl in the bathroom mirror had swollen eyes and a broken smile. She set out to brush her hair then flung the hairbrush from her. She showered and washed her hair and piled on the conditioner. She scrunched up her towel-dried hair with Protein+ and gel, and she used a T-shirt so it scrunched up really good, and then she let the gel dry and then she put on even more gel and then scrunched it again and listened to Tracy Chapman when her fair hair was like a dandelion in seed and it did not matter that her smile was hurt and bruised. She outlined her eyes with kohl.

Sando had already left for Johnny’s Green Room. She visited her mother’s wardrobe which was hanging from the ceiling. She chose an old blue Marimekko shirt dress with a Mao collar. Celine never wore it and anyway, so what? There were spotted bleach marks on the sleeve.

It was too big, but cool that way, and she put it together with daggy white socks and dirty sneakers. She tied on a red hair band but it was dumb and then she tried the old man’s hat she had bought at the Footscray market, and it was dumb too, because it would ruin the hair, but it would not be dumb if she never took the hat off.

The wind blew all the way to Parkville so she kept the hat in her hand until she was at the back gate at Frederic’s. She had never dressed like this in all her life, but she would not arrive at Frederic’s door looking like a high-school clone.

She had closed the corrugated-iron gate and was heading past a pile of huge sodden cardboard cartons and blocks of styrofoam, across the broken concrete to Frederic’s locked door when she was intercepted by a slender black-haired woman in a pink kimono.

Mrs. Matovic wrapped her arms beneath her breasts and the pale circles printed on her sleeves were very beautiful and strange like suckers on an octopus. She wore no shoes or slippers and her feet were remarkable with no veins, perfect straight white toes.

She was staring at the Marimekko dress, as if it were someone she knew or might like to meet.

Can I help you? she said, not friendly in the least.

I was looking for Frederic.

Why would that be?

I’m Celine’s daughter. You know me. I go to school with Frederic.

Mrs. Matovic lit a Marlboro, tapping her finger against the white cylinder, not to loosen any ash. At last she said, We’re a private family.

I thought other people lived here.

Yes, we don’t like people sneaking in behind our backs. Celine’s daughter should come to the front door and knock.

Can I talk to him now I’m here?

Just knock on the front door.

You mean now?

Sorry, darling, yes I do.

Walk out to The Avenue and come round the front on Royal Parade?

That’s it, she said.

Gaby had imagined she liked Meg Matovic and her interesting artful choices and her brave distinctive son but in fact she was a creepy thing that would squirt ink into your eye.

Thank you, Gaby said and walked to the back gate, holding her hat on her head like a girl at Sunday school. She closed the gate very carefully and checked the latch. She walked slowly along The Avenue, for as far as Frederic’s mother could see her, and then with all the dread of a bad girl being sent to see the principal, turned into Royal Parade. She did not know Frederic’s street number but only one of the houses had not been yuppied up. That one had peeling paint on its front door and this was where she knocked.

Frederic answered in white Indian garments, pyjama pants and a sort of shirt. He was like a waxwork dummy.

You better not come here, he said.

She smelled cigarette smoke and knew the squid mother was lurking back there in the dark. Sorry?

He could at least have made a funny face, but no. You have to call first, he said. Telephone ahead.

I didn’t have the number.

My mum will give it to you if she wants you to call. We’re pretty private.

Gaby mimed her outrage but he would make no sign to her, and he remained there like a great big pudding.

It’s all right, she said, I don’t want it anyway.

She returned to Royal Parade with her face already wet and her nose running. She got snot marks on her perfect hat. The stupid magpies went on carolling and the stupid sky was a cloudless blue and the stupid Sydney Road continued to carry its trucks and cars north across the dreary bluestone plains made in the days when volcanoes vomited across the future suburbs, and streams of lava ran like toffee, pooling in the hollows up to sixty metres deep. Liquid basalt spewed from her chest and rolled down the Merri Creek, boiling eels, and sending blazing wallabies to spread fire through bush.

At Macarthur Place she threw herself so hard upon the bed it broke. When the doorbell rang her eyes were bleeding black across her cheeks and she did not care to hide the damage.

There was Frederic: cruel, in stovepipes. She threw her fists to break his chest.

I had to say that, he said, finally grabbing for her wrist.

Let go. Your mother is just rude.

He released her and she hit him in the stomach.

Jeez, lay off.

She will decide to grant me her phone number? Jeez.

Quit it. Don’t hit me.

What if I knocked on the front door? How would you even hear me out the back?

Frederic could have said my father is a thief, mother is a fence. But he said nothing and she began to cry.

He lifted her wet hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles.

What did I do wrong? she asked. Just tell me what I did.

His dark eyes were unnaturally still, more like a nurse’s than a teenage boy’s.

I’ll get you your own key, he said and, with his index finger drew a line through the wet kohl on her cheek. That frightened her, the key. It was Saturday morning, not yet ten o’clock.

ON A RED OLIVETTI VALENTINE, the man known as Moore-or-less-correct reported that Gaby Sando and Frederic were on a Melbourne tram, travelling north along Lygon Street to Brunswick, past clothing factories, cyclone fences, faded signs for English lessons. They entered familiar Holmes Street. They felt the tram shake itself and do a dogleg dance and Gaby tumbled into Frederic who smelled of leatherwood honey.

Everything was fine and sunny: clouds the size of little farts. The tram rattled north, passed all the cast-iron verandahs that, at that date, had survived the council’s planned destruction of all memory. They got off at what was meant to be a posh street but the footpath was in Coburg and therefore narrow. Sando was bristly and bloodshot as if he had been playing pool all night.

The street had a snotty name but the trees were weedy, starved of love, survivors with hessian bandages. Gaby was shocked by the cracks in the concrete, the lonely quiet, the little houses shrunk inside their borders, alone, disconnected. They saw a malevolent cluster of boys like rats with mullets, operating on a Datsun 240Z, roaring, revving, sending oily smoke across the intersection. One lay on the mudguard, deep into the engine, his plumber’s crack shining at the sky.