Peter Carey - Amnesia

She snatched off her ridiculous cloche hat and I saw her dirty pinned-down hair. We are very private people, she shouted at Mrs. Messite who retreated down the lane.

It’s just a game, Gaby said. Please, Mrs. Matovic. It’s really just a game.

Where do you think she sleeps? Where? You’re her mother. Do you know?

I had no choice but get her inside, seated at my table. I told her Gaby stayed with her girlfriends on Keppel Street.

Do you know the parents?

Don’t insult me, Meg.

Her eyes were roaming the dining room. I thought she was coveting my Clarice Cliff vase.

Call them, said Meg Matovic, handing me my own telephone. Ask them if your little angel has been sleeping in their house.

Gaby sat with arms folded, refusing to engage with either of us.

I dialled the number. It was answered.

Gaby’s lost her homework, I said. I wonder if she left it at your place.

Meg Matovic smiled sarcastically as I heard the answer she expected.

So, she instructed, ask this woman when she last saw your daughter.

Had I not called that very number three or four times a week? Had I not always found my daughter on the phone? Confidently I asked the question.

Gaby returned my gaze. She knew what I was hearing and she showed no fear.

He phreaked you, Meg Matovic said as I hung up.

Gaby rolled her eyes. It was, apparently a huge offence to use “phreak” as a verb. As for me, I heard “freaked,” I did not understand that her disturbing son had been able to divert my call from Keppel Street to Parkville. Gaby always picked up, and I always saw her, in my mind, in a nicely furnished renovated terrace house in Keppel Street. Why would I possibly think she was in bed with a boy in Royal Parade?

You understand?

I understood like you understand you have fainted in the street.

So, said Meg in a nasty singsong voice, I had to take away his phone line. They won’t be pulling this one again.

Yes.

Good, said Meg Matovic, and your little grass will stop snooping in my house.

I did not see her out. I stayed at the table looking at my girl. Her lips were swollen and her eyes puffy which I recognised from occasional symptoms of my own. So my daughter was sleeping with a boy. I was not stupid enough to think that I could stop her now.

Frederic must be very clever, I said.

He’s a genius.

I did not see that would be the problem. All I recognised was the urgent need to get her on the pill. I did not say this right away. I made tea and put some biscuits on a plate. I tried to use the notion of Frederic’s alleged “cleverness” to get around to contraception but when she understood what I was doing she was outraged.

You’re pitiful, she said. All you can think about is sex.

You sleep with him, don’t you?

You are such hippies.

Gaby, do you sleep with him or not?

We’re not dogs if that’s what you think.

I was thinking, he is bisexual, of course. They all are now.

That’s so stupid, and disgusting. Frederic has a computer. You couldn’t imagine what we do.

No-one I knew had a computer so I imagined some huge mainframe thing. Men in white coats. 2001: A Space Odyssey .

What is it you do, darling?

Don’t even ask. It’s called Zork, Mum. She pushed away the biscuits and took my hand. Really truly, you wouldn’t understand.

It’s called what?

That’s only part of it.

Of course I did not understand, nor did I try to. I thought, at least she touched my hand.

Rewind. Pause. Play.

FREDERIC LOST his phone line and he did not once blame Gaby. What that tells you is: he loved her. Meg had also hidden his coupler modem. Gaby explained exactly what a coupler modem was i.e. the thingo that connected your computer to the phone line. Without a phone line and a modem Freddo was completely cut off from the secret online world that had previously filled his whole existence.

All Gaby knew was you did not need a modem to explore Zork which was contained within the computer. Zork was enough for her and, almost unbelievably, it was for Frederic, for a while at least.

It was as if they were the only people in their world, the first explorers to map its tunnels. At this stage the maps were everything. Without a map you could easily waste an entire weekend searching for locations you had found already. Just one glitch: Frederic’s writing was awful, like the trail of an ink-dipped spider.

This was Gaby’s opening. She became the cartographer. Zork maps were what she dreamed about. When she read “sacred pleasure dome” she immediately saw the world of Zork. She did not care that the game was so pre-Nintendo, almost prehistoric. She liked it better than anywhere else she had ever been.

At the high point of THE ERA OF MAP DEMENTIA there were over twenty poster boards in Frederic’s room. Most were pinned on the Caneite walls, but there was a huge one on the ceiling. These were not simple maps, but lists of clues and cheats, for instance: how to short-circuit the restriction on how many objects you could carry. (You inflated the raft and put all your stuff inside it and then deflated the raft.)

There was an epic RIP card behind the door. Meg Matovic had to look at this every time she finished her inspection. It memorialised the time Gaby had landed in an oubliette which she could only escape by dying. She would bash herself unconscious, then wake up and have to start again. It took five hours to die, but she would not be kept away from Zork.

Then Frederic cracked the code of Zork. Now they could invade and rule it, write new tunnels and new caves. They could introduce new characters and rename existing ones. This was the first time they experienced total ownership. You have just entered Twisted Zork.

Gaby stole a drill and keyhole saw from Patterson Street and removed four floorboards under Frederic’s bed and whenever Meg rattled on the chain she crawled beneath the floor and lay on the stinky gas and cat-piss dirt until she left.

Of course she lived part-time at Bell Street High School where she became mates with the black giantess Solosolo and through her, the brothers. Aleki and Peli introduced her to a better “recreational facility” than she could ever have in Carlton i.e. the wasteland of rocks and thistles past the old Kodak factory, between Newlands Road and Elizabeth Street where a gang of stringy bogans ran a scrap yard and would sell you a “shit-bucket,” e.g. an unroadworthy Datsun, for twenty bucks. Peli was Solosolo’s eldest brother, nineteen years old. Her younger brother—Aleki—drove the clapped-out Datsun around the paddocks across the creek from the Agrikem factory. Peli lay on the bonnet pouring petrol straight into the carburettor, flame erupting, burning hair and eyebrows while massive Aleki made 3D figure eights, sneezing and bouncing amongst the pitted brown rocks and boxthorns and purple flowering thistles.

This was fucked-up Samoa, not Fa’a Samoa, the “Samoan way of life.” They left the Datsun’s bonnet lying in the paddocks so the girls took possession and floated and dragged it down Merri Creek, between wattles ripe with crops of plastic bags, until they reached the rusty F J Holden stripped and abandoned in the water. Solosolo was the six-foot centre-back of Bell Street girls’ soccer team, but she was afraid of spiders. She sat with the little white girl on the slimy bench seat of the Holden, shrieking at the cold water on her backside.

Frederic waited for Gaby in solitude, rewriting Zork. He was the tapeworm. He crawled into its belly and became its god.