Peter Carey - Amnesia

My parents began spying, Gaby said, so naturally I lied. Somehow they found out I was still visiting Darlington Grove. Celine took Sando’s side. Mervyn was “your father’s enemy.” He was a shit-stirrer and ratbag, she said. He used the word comrade constantly, but had I noticed he had no comrades? He could not work with other people. His real specialty was embarrassment, direct attacks. Also, she went on about how much she had spent on the computer.

But Mervyn had already taken me to visit what he called “the jewel of Merri Creek,” a dull yellow-brick building on McBryde Street in Fawkner. It was next to some dreary paddocks with starving horses and across the road from some small suburban houses like you might see in any of the poorer northern suburbs.

There was a wooden sign by the road that had been hand-carved in a folksy sort of way. It said “Agrikem.” The factory had a gravel car park like a hardware store and nothing to suggest that it was dangerous in any way.

It was after five o’clock when we arrived and all the workers’ cars had gone and there was no-one to see us climb through the fence into the paddock, a girl and an old man going to talk to lonely horses. Mervyn was carrying an iron bar but he often carried one tool or another and there was always a reason, in this case the bar was to lift a concrete inspection cap with two U-shaped loops. Really it was an inspection plate for a sewer, but as I walked towards it I thought it must be a well for water.

I watched him fit the bar into the loops, and saw the tendons in his neck go tight as he lifted.

He asked, You hear that?

Is it water?

Have a look.

It smells bad.

In the beam of his flashlight I saw a small pipe draining murky liquid into the sewer.

What’s that? he asked.

Drain water.

Where does it end up?

I don’t know.

Did you ever hear of dioxin?

No.

How about Agent Orange?

At school.

OK, he said.

And that was it.

He took my hand as we walked home. This was the first and possibly the last time he ever did that. If we talked I don’t recall it. Nor did it seem strange that we did not. What struck me was not the sewer or the smell but the confusing emotions generated by that big dry hand, the comfort that I took from it, my queasy guilty feeling of betrayal.

THAT NIGHT the fugitive writer would find himself carried like a baby through the dark bush, as if he were, in his own words, a sacred slug or silkworm protected by the empress’s guard. But now, as day broke on the Hawkesbury, those noble guards were presumably still resting in their Manly barracks. At this hour, upriver, the fugitive was attending to his toilette, carrying his spade up the rocky hill where he made a bad-tempered search for a place to do his business. He scraped a small depression in the resistant earth, removed his lower garments and laid them on a tuft of grass. Then he squatted, glaring bleakly at the river. No-one saw him. No-one knew his aching knees. He was Felix Moore and he was aware of his position in his country’s history and thus saw himself from a slightly elevated perspective, deriving some dour satisfaction from his similarity to Dürer’s portrait of the hermit Saint Jerome.

For breakfast he had a bruised apple, after which there was nothing to do but return to punishing the Olivetti. For lunch he took cheese and a single glass of wine. As the hours passed, the pages accumulated and he secured them with a knobbly stone. When this day was ended, he would add these to the treasure already hidden in the black garbage bag at his feet. He was offline, strictly analog. There were various other black bags-in-waiting, all moist and ready to be disposed of, but the bag beneath his feet was dry and clean as a prayer in the wilderness.

Thus had his days passed, like writers’ days have always passed, in solitary labour, and just as housemaids, nuns, priests and religious devotees of all kinds are known to form their bodies to the shape of their trade, producing lasting physical distortions once recognised as distinct surgical conditions, Felix Moore hunched his wide shoulders around his machine. As he typed he waved his hands and sometimes muttered but his ear was always pitched beyond his own inner tumult, alert for the voices of the river, not only the shouted conversations of fishermen, but the fucking jet-skis, the regular beat of the mail boat, the lonely thud of distant tinnies hammering against the hard unbending river. There were also “gin palaces” and “Tupperware boats” and “hot water tubs” of different varieties and he would abandon his chair from time to time, simply to confirm that he had identified them correctly. What he feared was confused and ever-changing, but on this occasion it was silence, the sudden absence, the cessation of an outboard motor, which caused him to jump upright, then to climb, like Ben Gunn himself, up onto the top of the hut, where he peered down, uncertain as to whether the aluminium craft now gliding silently beneath the mangroves was bringing him supplies or was, finally, the expected assassin.

Ow, he heard. It was a boy’s voice, sharp with indignation. Then a man’s voice.

Quit it, the boy cried.

The hermit scampered down the ladder from the roof. He re-entered his dwelling and rushed to and fro, his long arms sweeping floor and desk. He discarded a malodorous black plastic bag and picked up the treasure from beneath his chair. Into this he thrust all his morning’s work and then, sitting, grunting, he collected the tapes, batteries, notebooks, pens, posters and other archival matter, hurling them into the bag as if they were no more important than potato peelings.

Don’t, he heard.

And then a man’s voice, singing tunelessly.

He tied the bag and encased it within a second bag, tied that too, did the same a third time, then ascended, in bare bunioned feet up to the roof where, finally, he hurled the bag towards the river far below. If he expected a splash, there was none. He waited but could wait no longer. The visitors were already on the path, the man singing in a voice so flat, so blithe, so confident that it raised the hair on the listener’s neck.

You better watch out

You better not cry

Felix Moore returned to the hut nursing a freshly injured elbow, crossed to the doorway, pausing to scoop up a stray Duracell and to select an apple from the bottom of a cardboard box.

Let me go, cried the boy.

The hermit leaned, “nonchalantly,” against the doorframe.

Making a list … checking it twice

Looking to see who’s naughty and nice

And then his pink-cheeked red-lipped patron emerged, dragging a protesting boy by the ear.

Hello mate, said Woody Townes.

Mate, said Felix, and bit into his putrid apple.

As the visitors paused at the midway landing the man sought his prisoner’s attention.

Ow.

You ever see this bloke before?

No. Ow.

As Woody tugged the boy onwards he reached to take the hermit’s apple. In this moment of distraction the prisoner pulled free, and fell, then rolled, protesting loudly all the way to the bottom of the stairs.

Give me the fucking apple.

Fat bastard, cried the boy, and had already turned as the apple hit his shoulder and burst apart.

Stupid cunt, said Woody Townes, simultaneously embracing his writer, crushing his hairy face against his canvas shoulder, crooning tenderly into his single naked ear.

They see you when you’re sleeping

They know when you’re awake