Peter Carey - Amnesia

Frederic smiled excessively and annoyed the boys with mullets who thought he was a poofter cunt. He was blatantly some unknown quantity who would get her father bashed. They escaped into the dead end of a suburban street, unscathed, and she understood that the liver-brick shitheap right in front of them would be, forever, That Coburg Place.

Broken pickets. Weird old flowers. Red-hot pokers. Cactus with shark’s teeth growing along the edges of its flesh. The house was one hundred years old, at least, dying in deep shadow, with a wide low slate roof and verandah tiles like a mansion you pay to visit on a boring Sunday, blues and terracotta which turned out, in this case, to be smeared with illegal skid marks. The garden smelled of gas and cat’s piss and there was a tall palm tree with a dead frond. Complete and utter lossitude. She could have cried.

Wow, said Frederic. Oh wow. Mr. Quinn, do you have a key?

Sando kicked the front door and it swung into the gloom. The previous inhabitants had lit a fire in the middle of the living room and burned a hole to the centre of the earth. The injured floorboards were wide and waxy and marked with motorcycle skid marks.

This was their clubhouse, right? Frederic asked. The White Knights? This can be so good.

Sando took Gaby’s hand in both of his and led her, in this ungainly way, from one room to the next, through violent debris of a type you might not expect to see unless you were, for some unexpected reason, on the run, frightened for your life.

There’s a lot of room, she said.

So cool, said Frederic and she did not know what to think of him.

Plaster hung in shards held by ancient horsehair, moving gently in the breeze.

Sando held his hands out: Will it be OK? he asked his daughter.

She saw it in his eyes: someone had been murdered here but he had bought it because it was so cheap. Celine would have a shit fit. It would be Gaby’s job to make it all OK. And it would be Frederic’s talent to know all this without being told. He understood the role. He was Matty Matovic’s son and therefore knew the cost of lead and copper. He had attended auctions all over Melbourne. He knew the value of these internal stone walls. He knew the squiddy underbelly inner-city pubs and midnight runs, and he would, for his reward, have her beside him in the tunnels of the world of Zork.

He perched fearlessly on the corner post of the front fence and saw what no-one else could see, that the leak in the bedroom corresponded with one broken slate, that “this must be Gaby’s room.”

“Gaby’s room” had a narrow window with a view of an empty laneway. It’s quiet, he said and his voice made her tailbone hum and he was being the power, the generator.

We can get kids from school to help, he said.

No, she said sharply.

Why not?

It’s not your house.

But I’m helping you.

Gaby, honey, said her father.

He’s not helping me, she said. He’s creeping me out. I don’t even know him.

And she saw Frederic’s hurt face through the hot blur of tears. Her father was restraining her, holding her, squeezing all her breath out. She wished to be back in her own home which was being taken from her, mother gone, father crumpling like paper in a bin.

FREDERIC REFUSED to be offended, no matter what she said to him. He already knew what she was like. He said that. He may have even been correct. But then he told her he would teach her to code, and assumed that was just so attractive. How totally up himself. She was a girl so she must want him.

On Monday, after everything she had said to him in Coburg, he tried to catch her eye. Even while she ignored him she wrote “Frederic” in her notebook and scribbled over it, obliterating him forever. She went into the loo and ripped him out and tore him up so small no-one would ever know what she had done.

She got back home and a telegram arrived—the first telegram she had seen that was not in a movie. She signed for it and left it on the table for her father who threw it in the trash when he was finished with it. Soon it was covered with spaghetti bolognaise, so obviously it was from Celine.

Is it Frederic? her father asked. Is that why you’re so sad?

That was him ? Saying she was sad? What had been in the telegram?

I’m studying Cicero if you want to know.

Gaby, I’m not sure Frederic likes girls.

Oh aren’t you? she shouted, without warning, even to herself. Really? she yelled at him. She threw her book on the floor. Who was he to talk? What a mope. Letting Celine get away with all that shit.

He patted his big hands before his chest. He said, it was just my feeling.

And what are you, a homophobe?

It was as if she had slapped his face. Oh God, she thought, please Daddy, don’t be drunk.

Why don’t you just go and get her back? she said. Just get her and bring her home.

Then he was offended and shook his head at her, like some awful TV actor trying to convey disappointment. Then he stormed out of the house. Up to the Albion, of course.

And this was just one of many incidents that occurred in the two weeks when Celine was sending telegrams from Moggs Creek. On another night: Gaby had been looking through the cardboard box of Dylan Neil Young Jefferson Airplane Beatles. There was Rickie Lee Jones doing “Chuck E’s in Love.” She had danced to this track with her mother when she was a little girl, Celine crooning. He learn all of the lines, and every time he/don’t stutter when he talk .

On this night, Gaby thought, Frederic! ( And it’s true! It’s true! ) And then, the needle scraped across the vinyl and her father was home and the vinyl was flying through the open doorway out onto the dirty street, and all her insides were cold spaghetti. Her father was insane. Why would anyone do a thing like that?

Because—duh—it was a song about an actor. Celine was with an actor. Shagging. It made her sick. He was not even a Christian so was he putting up with Celine’s bullshit to make a happy family? Was he turning the other cheek? If so, don’t do it on her account. She stood on a kitchen chair and pulled the hems of Celine’s dresses, tugging, dragging until clothes pegs popped and clattered against the wall. She twisted clothes hangers beyond their useful shapes and the room got lighter and brighter until finally the ceiling was all bare and she didn’t know who she was cross with but she fetched the black rubbish bags from the kitchen and stuffed them full of Celine, five full bags of them and tied them up with yellow ties. She was a cat running screeching over lily pads, nothing to support her, each pad sinking as it took her weight. She waited and waited but her father stayed upstairs. Finally she locked the front and back doors and the window to the lane.

At her father’s door she called to him. Are you OK?

The streetlight illuminated his blue shoes protruding from the murky blankets. She found a place beside him in the musty tangle.

Will Mummy come back?

Yes my love. He tucked a quilt around her and she did not wake until the middle of the night when he carried her back to her bed. In the morning she found him in the kitchen drinking instant coffee. The black rubbish bags were now lined neatly against the wall and Gaby saw that the attack on Celine’s clothes would not be undone now. Those body bags would still be there, lined up in evidence against her, when her mother finally came home.

After school the four girls, the Keppel Street Quartet, as they called themselves, were walking north along Rathdowne Street. They were not really a quartet at all. They were Gaby and Katie and Nina, but they always had to include Katie’s little sister. Her name was Jenna and she needed a good whacking.