Peter Carey - Amnesia

I was a treacherous jealous little thing, so I laughed at the idea of my mother planting trees. He told me not to, but he couldn’t stop smiling. So I was into it. I laughed so violently I blew Coca-Cola out my nose. He said that was enough but I invited him to picture my mother planting trees, in a fury with everything which would not submit to her, not just the spade, the earth, the soil itself would play an evil force.

He thought I was hilarious. His upper lip lengthened. His nostrils contracted. Celine loved the country, I told him, but her love involved a lot of glass, one to hold the wine, the other to make a window that would keep all the nasty bugs outside.

No, he said. You must not speak about your mother in this way.

How could I not love him? He was like this with everything in life. You should have seen how he was with his electorate, shy smile, nasal Arabic, lumpy Greek. He was tall and strong. He looked great in shorts and when he listened he crossed his arms and hunched himself down and folded himself into the other person’s life.

So I said I would go tree planting instead of Celine. Looking back now I see this was the beginning of my life, at the stage when he was still my hero, where I would do anything for him, even let him kill me in a car accident. Early next morning we were in the Volvo dodging the murderous trucks and semitrailers on Carr Street, speeding to meet the volunteers. He was an awful driver. He should have watched the road. Instead he pointed out the highlights of the mullocky landscape, backhoes and cranes intent on turning the unloved stream into a proper drain. It was just after dawn. Scavenging seagulls rode high in the thermals above the rotten-smelling dumps.

We found the white people were all gathered, in all their daggy glory, beside the degraded stinky creek which was to lead me on my path. I only pretended to be excited to carry a tray of poa tussocks. A boy with unfortunate hippie hair was trying to balance three mattocks and a crowbar.

I was not even paying real attention. The embankment was not a real riverbank, but a mess made by bulldozed mud and ancient garbage. From here you could look down to see the poor fucked Merri Creek threading through the body of Coburg like the vein in the dead body of a prawn. The descent was steep, shoulder-high with fennel. There was a spewy smell. Factories occupied the high ground above the creek, below the power pylons. The actual watercourse was marked by abandoned cars and broken industrial equipment including a sabotaged dragline crane with its long steel boom twisted like a swan’s neck.

The heat was already murderous and although the sky was dirty grey I could feel it burning through my long-sleeved shirt.

As I came down to the level of the watercourse, to the natural bank, I saw sheets of burlap, all neatly pegged to the ground. Here, amongst the smell and the squalling seagulls, a man and woman were working neatly and swiftly, with the confident rhythm of gardeners deadheading perennials. They were cutting holes where my poa grass would go. Today I was a good girl, eager to help my daddy help them.

Gaby, Miss Aisen cried.

I was so ashamed I could not even look at them. But they were rushing me, laying down their tools, relieving me of my grasses, leading me off the mulch sheet to a tiny tartan rug. Here Miss Aisen laid her hand against my cheek and sort of patted me like she had earlier patted my head.

Have a choccy bickie, she said.

I said I just had breakfast. My saintly father stood dangerously close, along from us, on the bank. He had no idea what I was like.

Mervyn had a flask of tea. I accepted a mug and sat on the rug. The Aisens were so very nice, which completely creeped me out. I took that chocolate biscuit after all. Why were they keen to talk with me? I didn’t understand this at all. Of course the dear people liked me, loved me even. I didn’t see that yet.

Mervyn told me that every injury to Coburg went back to Pentridge Prison. The bosses build the prisons, he said, and I thought, he is telling me I am going to end up in jail myself.

To build the prisons they needed stone, he told me, and that leaves a lot of quarries and then the council makes a dump and throws in everything that no-one wants.

Miss Aisen stared at me in such a way that I knew to pretend to listen to her father.

Mervyn had grown up across the road from a Coburg council tip, he said, you learned not to smell it. The creek was running through it.

The seagulls loved it didn’t they? Miss Aisen encouraged him. At night they would go down to the sea to roost.

As for me, said Gaby, I was still waiting for them to get to the point. I didn’t know this was the point, the talking. The Coburg Times photographer had arrived and my father was digging with a crowbar in the rusty graveyard soil.

Once this happens to a piece of land, Mervyn said, everyone wants to hurt it more. Once you’ve done this devastation you’ve got a perfect place to put the sewage works, and then you straighten the creek and make a drain, and you can run ring roads through it and degrade it any way you want.

Miss Aisen was patting the rug and I sat a little closer to her. I was realising her computer might not be out of bounds.

MetWat has decided to make the creek a bloody drain, Mervyn said, and I looked at him like I was really interested.

They already straightened up one stretch, he said. What they pulled out of the creek, he said, they didn’t cart away, they just left it in big smelly muddy heaps. They brought in that dragline crane. They dredged out the bottom and dumped the toxic mud and then it got washed back in. The holes I swam in when I was a kid are only twenty-five centimetres deep. That’s the thing that done it, that mongrel of a thing. He meant the dragline with the broken neck.

My dad and the photographer were waving at me.

That’s Mr. Quinn, said Mervyn. He’s our local member.

He’s my dad, I said.

Quinn? Mervyn said. He looked completely gobsmacked. You’re not Quinn.

Pause micro. Play compact C120.

The Aisens always knew who I was married to, Celine said. Always. From the first time I met Aisen she knew my name was Baillieux and Gaby’s father was Sandy Quinn. Then they pretended they didn’t have any idea of the connection. They were cunning as a pair of cockatoos.

GABY WAS a Labor Party child. Even as her family fell apart she continued to hand out campaign literature, answer the phone in the electoral office, and act as Sando’s human handbag when Celine stopped communicating with the local branch. But Merri Creek marked a turning point.

She came to parliament to hear her father speak, not for the first time but the first time of her own volition. She saw him announce the Green Front Coalition, an alliance between MetWat, three local councils and all the local interest groups. She was smart. She paid attention. Sando’s pride in seeing her politically engaged was only dampened by his fears about Mervyn Aisen’s influence.

He would do nothing to discourage her activism but as time went on, and as she went off regularly to work beside the Aisens, first at the creek, then later at the VINC tree nursery, he was not quite jealous, but certainly disturbed. He revealed none of this to her. What he showed her was his happiness. He was always awake to kiss her as she left the house just after dawn. He welcomed her at dusk when she was red-faced, sweaty, scratched and dusty. She lost weight and he was smart enough to never mention it. Her brown skin suited her.

Celine was away again, filming. That was fine. They were similar, father and daughter. Together they were both voluble and silent, generous and withholding. For instance Gaby did not tell her father that she was spending ten minutes a day at Darlington Grove where she was permitted to log on to Altos. She did not say she had found Frederic. Sando did not reveal any of the horse-trading and treachery of political life, or divulge that classic line he shared with everyone else: “I don’t know why he shafted me, I never done him no favours.” He did not learn that his dinner was cooked by “Fallen Angel.” They both argued frankly about the Merri Creek and its ancient enemies, town planning, ring roads, MetWat and the State Electricity Commission. Sando did not risk telling her that the Aisens were the loopy left, a tiny ratbag faction in the Coburg branch, enemies of any Labor prime minister who could actually win elections. It would be safer to ask her to shave her armpits and he was not brave enough for that.