Peter Carey - Amnesia

Crossing Elgin Street they all saw Frederic carrying another cardboard box entirely on his lovely head. It was a shock, Gaby said, to see his beauty displayed in public and to recall how she had bled onto his sheets and listened to his feathering clicking nails, black as beetles.

Jenna said, Hello Frederic. In a cheeky tone of voice.

Frederic lowered his burden to the footpath. As anyone could see, the box contained a brand new Knoll office chair, but Jenna asked: What’s in the box, Frederic? The lurker loser, it was not her place to speak at all.

Frederic said it was a chair. He was being funny. They did not get it. He was a hundred times brighter than the lot of them.

That’s nice, Jenna said. Did it fall off the back of a truck?

Gaby said, Shut up Jenna. She gave Frederic a quick nod.

Hubba-dubba, said Jenna and the other girls stayed silent. Katie lifted her finger at Jenna who stuck her tongue out. Frederic picked up his heavy box and continued up Elgin Street without any sign of strain, walking with that beautiful bounce, presumably towards his home.

He’s strong, said Nina, as he walked away. He has endurance.

At which Katie and Jenna both burst into laughter.

You’re really rude. Gaby spoke to Jenna but she included Katie, obviously.

I’m what?

Your little sister told him his father was a thief.

Get real, Gaby, said Katie. His father is a thief. Everyone knows that.

His father is an anarchist, said Gaby. Did you know that?

Gaby, darling, Katie said, selling left-wing newspapers doesn’t stop him being a thief.

Have you ever heard of Proudhon, Katie? No, you haven’t. Don’t smirk at me, Jenna. You couldn’t even spell it. Just look it up, Katie. See what Proudhon said. And leave Frederic alone.

Hubba-dubba.

Babe, you’ll only get your heart broken, Nina said. I had a friend who fell for one of those. It destroyed her life.

Well, I don’t have that sort of problem, said Gaby who was amazed with herself for making up the story about Proudhon.

Well, you have some sort of problem.

No, you do.

What sort of problem do I have?

This, cried Gaby, swinging her bag by its straps so it whizzed past Katie’s freckled button nose. And that was how they temporarily resolved their problem shrieking all the way to Keppel Street. Ob-la-di, ob-la-da in vinyl talk.

CELINE DROVE HOME through a hurricane, along the Great Ocean Road with her eardrum broken, buzzing, throbbing. The driver-side windscreen wiper stopped working as she passed the little church at Mount Duneed. She was one-eyed through Geelong in a hailstorm, and up the endless, awful Melbourne road.

It was and would remain, she told the tape recorder, the stupidest thing she had done in all her life—no, not running away to Moggs Creek with Fergus, no, she meant letting Sandy put her in the wrong.

So she committed adultery. OK. But Sandy bought the house without her, and left her name off the deed. So who was the biggest liar and cheat? She did not even like Fergus, but he was there, waiting, ready, able, unemployed. Also he was intellectual and working-class and would beat the shit out of Sandy soon as look at him.

Sandy was like some Labor Party saint. He would turn the other cheek. He would not cry out when tortured. Fergus was the un-Sandy, with unapologetic calculating eyes, a million miles from all those smooth-faced creatures who made up the Footlights Collective, actors who were still having to relearn the Australian accents they had lost while auditioning in London, artists who could only impersonate what Fergus really was. He argued as he acted as he fought, dance like a butterfly, sting like a bee, from Nietzsche to Solon and back to the dangerous edges of Douglas Credit. By the time you had assembled your rebuttal he had moved on elsewhere. Žižek before we even heard of Žižek, Celine said on the tape playing on the floor a thousand kilometres away, twenty-five years later. It was perfect casting: the fucked-up energy, the rawness of his speech. He was mad in bed, wide and barrel-chested and covered with fine curling hair like a beast and his penis had a distinct upward curve to it as you might imagine on a satyr or a pig.

Celine had always been inflammable, easily intoxicated by her burning bridges. She wasn’t nice, she knew, but how do you compare that to leaving your wife’s name off the title deed?

Based on all available evidence, Sandy had cheated her. Fergus had wanted her, had flattered her, had listened to every single word she said. She knew what he was doing, as she always knew when men did that nodding thing. She was not at all surprised that when he finally had her in Moggs Creek he never agreed with her again. She had not come for conversation anyway. Once he had fucked her she could not get away with anything, and she was in the mood for that as well. It was dangerous. You could not bluff him. There was no dare he would refuse. Celine would have to go out further, beyond the Moggs Creek surf, if she was to be with Fergus, which was what she had done for all those weeks.

Then they drank whisky and he told her she was a yuppie bitch.

She was high as a kite, reckless, off the map. She told him he was feral. She said some other things, quite personal.

And the bastard nearly killed her for it.

The rain stopped at Werribee and she drove back into Melbourne along Dynon Road where her mother had learned to dodge the Yankee trucks, up past the hospital where she was born, and into Carlton. She blew her nose and heard the air whistling out her broken ear. She came home incorrectly labelled with disgrace. She parked, badly, at Macarthur Place. She was no more in the wrong than he was.

It’s her, Gaby cried, but stayed where she was, halfway down the stairs.

Celine heard the stairs creak and then saw her husband’s legs and then his face peering down from the upper floor. He did not speak.

She noticed all her clothes were gone. She did not connect this absence with the bright black bags.

She closed the door quietly and sat on the sofa as if it were the middle of a set. The audience knew exactly who she was.

OK, she said, and put her hands up in surrender.

How stupid.

Gaby retreated up the stairs as Sando descended and Celine knew, as they passed each other, that an upsetting intimacy had developed in her absence. As he emerged from the shadow Sando was older, with two stark new creases from his nose to the corners of his beautiful mouth. So he had suffered too. She thought it was fifty-fifty and he would join her on the sofa, but he stood over her, towered above her, with an expression she took to be a sneer. Then, as he shook his head, the light caught an actual teardrop. She was appalled then pleased. She moved to one side and he surrendered. She gave him a tissue and held his hand. It was not yet clear to her what she had done.

COCKATOOS WERE RIPPING the bark off the angophora while the oily-haired fugitive inserted four new Duracell batteries and played a cassette he had labelled “Celine 4.” His eyes were dark and hollowed and he stared at the machine with his head cocked.

Is this what got you boys so hot? she said.

Pause. Rewind. Sip. Play.

Is this what got you boys so hot? That I would blow myself up? That I would do anything? You knew I had fired my mother. That must have looked like something but when Doris did not come chasing after me, when I ended up sleeping in Sando’s car, I cried myself to sleep each night.