Peter Carey - Amnesia

I pressed myself against the wall, in the shadow of a pier, listening to splashing feet.

You are in the cavern of cockroaches .

When the light rushed at my face I screamed and tore it free. I was mad, not nice, screaming keep out, stay away from me. Then I woke up, sort of, and there was my mother, bleeding where I hurt her arm. She was shivering, quivering. I put my arm around her and we limped towards the light like sewer rats. Outside on Elm Grove, beside the primary school, we were both embarrassed by ourselves. At home I ran a bath for her and made her bread and butter and sugar and drenched it in warm milk. What did I want? I watched her eat her baby food and I told her I was not cutting and then she told me Frederic’s mother had taken him up to northern New South Wales. At least I knew he had not dumped me.

Celine asked would I be happier back at school in Carlton. I said I had to learn programming. This was maybe not a total lie, but what I really wanted was to hook up online. I imagined Frederic’s fingers flying like moth wings all night long. Even now, when I cried myself to sleep, I knew he must be messing with root, account passwords, building back doors. My parents had to get me a computer and a modem. Then I would find Frederic on Altos. We would build a s3kr4t back room i.e. with just two members where we could invent, imagine, talk soft and dirty to each other.

I told my mother I must learn to program I didn’t care how hard it was. I would be the biggest swot she ever met. I stared at her with such bright mad attention I knew I could draw her from the water like a yabby, put her in the pot and eat her up for dinner. I was a selfish little cow.

Celine made me take off all my clothes and checked I wasn’t cutting. If this was creepy, WTF. I stood on my bed and she shone a flashlight on my not quite virgin thighs. To compensate me for this humiliation she would pay for private computer lessons with Miss Aisen. I was guilty about the money, so I gave her something in return, not much—I showed her the bottle of brown ink the idiots had thought was blood. She swore she had not read the letters, which was a lie. She apologised for believing stupid social workers. I could have asked for my own computer then, but I had no clue of how easy it would be. Miss Aisen had already told my astonished parents that it would be a “crime” if I was hindered in my desire to learn.

GABY DELIVERED the first ten dollars to Miss Aisen. Thirty minutes later she was back home, sweaty, out of breath, holding a tiger snake in a jar against her little breasts. It would have freaked you, Celine said, to see the poisonous creature with its head squashed like a garlic clove. My daughter was glowing like she had just been kissed.

What about the lesson?

I have to get something.

You have to get something? What do you have to get?

The girl grinned and placed the viper on the shelf between the kidney beans and lentils.

What do you need for your lesson?

Don’t worry about it, Gaby said. She’ll make up the time tomorrow.

Pause.

Start.

A worker’s cottage in Darlington Grove, Gaby told me, a block over from Patterson Street, with a super-loamy vegie garden. Aisen had been born there, in her mum’s bed. It had been her mum who had improved the soil with chicken manure and lake weed. Her father had also been born in Coburg. He was Mervyn. He had grown up when it was all “rock and rabbit farms,” paddocks wild with boxthorn bushes and Cape broom. Some moron would always “drop a match” and burn everything from McMahons Road right through to the lake, millions of sparrows and starlings rising in the air, blocking out the sun.

Miss Aisen had been taught at St. Bernard’s and Bell Street High then studied to be a secretary, then to be a bookkeeper and worked with IBM accounting machines which were already dinosaurs. Then she taught bookkeeping at Bell Street. She never married. She was careful with her money. When the Mac IIx arrived she could afford to buy one and thus became “the oldest hacker in Melbourne.” Fast forward. Play. She was not a criminal. Stop. Fast forward. Play. She had seen Celine and Gaby emerge into the steamy drizzle from beneath the Pentridge Prison walls. That lovely actress, she had thought, all her talent, and there is her angry ugly daughter living in a drain. But that was what Miss Aisen was put on earth to fix. From each, to each etc. Fast forward. When Gaby arrived that first Saturday morning, she found her living in an island of white people. One neighbour was Mr. Howard who trained the apprentices at the Government Aircraft Factory. Alice and Bob McNaughton were on the other side. He was “with” a timber yard on Gaffney Street. He raced pigeons, you get used to them, according to Miss Aisen’s dad. Melbourne’s oldest hacker had once had a front garden but now it had a wheelbarrow, a rusty Subaru and a motor scooter with a fruit crate strapped onto the back.

Gaby arrived in shorts and bare feet. She edged sideways through a nest of bicycles and reached the front verandah where the boards were nice and cool. It was Miss Aisen’s dad who answered her knock. Mervyn was short and wiry, in a working man’s navy singlet, shorts and plastic thongs. He was what we might call “a bit of a character,” a pensioner yes, but also a frisky dog who wants to play. He carried a white tea towel across his brown shoulder and a dead tiger snake in his right hand.

Gaby had grown up with Labor Party “characters.” She was also on familiar terms with the snakes of Merri Creek: browns, tigers, red-bellied black snakes too. They swam with their heads held high around the car wreck where Gaby had smoked with Solosolo.

You got a Tigger, she said.

That’s correct, a Tigger. He had a walnut face and all sorts of knocks and blemishes on his pate. He grinned and showed a bright gold tooth.

I’m here to see Miss Aisen, she said. (The snake’s head had been bashed.)

Did you meet him down the creek?

He was looking for a tête-à-tête. He asked, You know what that means?

Yes.

Of course you do.

He had comic eyebrows and bandy legs, sun-brown on both sides.

I got bitten by a taipan once, he said, opening the door for her.

I bet you did. (She had learned to talk like this by listening to her dad.)

Mervyn’s thongs slapped against the morning light. The girl could smell burned toast, fresh-cut grass, water sprinkling on hot soil.

I thought that would be a bit fatal, a taipan.

Old wives’ tail.

Did you use a tourniquet?

Beer and a Valium.

By the time she arrived in the kitchen she was smiling. It was a small room, painted a wild bright yellow, filled with sunshine, hanging herbs and garlic, high stacks of newspapers along the walls, a blackboard with rosters of names and dates, a laminex kitchen table with three odd chairs.

Mervyn continued out the back, through the flywire.

Your visitor is here.

The familiar computer was in front of her, the IIx that she knew from school.

Take it down the creek, Miss Aisen called, before it starts to pong.

Next to the computer was a modem, a bright red cradle. This was probably the only surviving coupler modem in Melbourne, but I didn’t have a clue. I understood that you took Miss Aisen’s normal everyday phone off the hook and placed it here, and I could, if I ever dared, if I ever got a sneaky chance, get onto Altos.

Miss Aisen wore short shorts and a sleeveless T-shirt and gardening gloves. She had a shiny sweaty face.

So, she said, you want to learn to code.