Peter Carey: Amnesia

We students walked on narrow paths, single file like cows on their way to milking. We returned to landladies whose husbands were fitters and turners but were introduced as engineers. We were barbarians to our hosts to whom we delivered our Monash mud (PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES) and splashing urine (PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT).

I am not sure that Celine’s high heels were muddy as she later claimed, but there is no doubt she had peed standing at the urinal. Everybody mentioned it. I was impressed by Sando’s crumpled linen jacket and did not know enough to buy my own clothes second-hand. I tried too hard, most likely. I listened to everything they said. As a result I got the train from Clayton into Flinders Street and found, not without some difficulty, both Ulysses and The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I carried these heavy volumes back to the suburban bedroom I shared with a chemistry student from Wonthaggi. There was just one desk. When that was occupied I read lying down or wrote whilst kneeling at my bed. I shoplifted an expensive commentary on Ulysses and made margin notes on the significance of “Agenbite of inwit,” for instance. “Inwit” should have been “inwyt.” Did Sandy know James Joyce couldn’t spell? Did he understand that “U.P.:up” was meant to suggest urination and erection? I kneeled. I annotated. I stored away my ammunition. Beyond the sad lace curtains, parallel with my bed, was a grey wood-paling fence. One kilometre away, the electric train line was also parallel. In a long black cape, Barry Humphries stalked the streets.

It should have been obvious that I was not suited to engineering, but my father’s ambition was to see me established as Shire Engineer of Bacchus Marsh. He bought me an expensive slide rule which I never learned to use. I faked my physics experiments, working back from the correct value of g which I still recall as 980 cm per sec per sec.

I had no idea that I was on the path to catastrophic failure. Indeed, anything seemed possible. Celine’s friends were drama majors, psychologists, political philosophers and poets. They discussed Description, Narration, Exposition, Argumentation. Had I been capable, I would have faked this too, but all I had to offer them were some controversial facts: Agenbite of inwit. U.P.:up.

My clever father never had a need to develop a treatise or present an abstract. Nor had this skill been required of me at high school up in Ballarat. I had sat my matriculation confident I was a whiz at chemistry and mathematics, but I arrived in Celine’s magic circle with four plain passes and no clue as to how to play their game. They were reading Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Jarry. Any radical thought I might offer—that there might be no God for instance—was tedious to them, and they seemed embarrassed I should mention it. I was staggered that, while they had not known each other previously, they seemed to be continuing a conversation which they had started years before. They all knew rhinoceros was a play.

More than once they told me to piss off, but I had chosen them, and I would stay until they saw my worth.

The motorcyclist rarely spoke to me. Sandy Quinn had the habit of smiling while I talked. Years later he would tell me he had been anxious on my behalf and had only smiled to give me some support.

Celine’s body could not have been at all as I imagined it but she would always be a physical actor who could make you believe her waist was smaller and her legs longer than in real life. She was not as clever as I thought she was. Sometimes she was cold to me, other times quite tender. Once she mussed up my hair in public, and perhaps she was as much on my side as she later claimed, but she was always, unfailingly, relentlessly amused to see me run to fetch the balls thrown by the poet. The poet had a long square-shouldered body and a freckled face that might have been bland if you could not see that he was, in his very quiet brown-eyed way, capable of absolutely anything.

“Catcher in the Rye,” the poet said mildly. “You said you read it, but you didn’t, did you? Not really.” His manner was so agreeable. It was hard to believe he was tormenting me.

The leather boy had his head down rolling cigarettes, one after the other, lining them up on the table edge then tucking in their hairy ends.

“Not really, no.”

The poet had a smile like someone sucking on a match. “Too American I suppose?”

“Stop it Andrew,” said Sandy. “Enough.”

“So Felix,” Andrew persisted, “it’s Patrick White for you and Salinger Go Home?”

I had not read Patrick White either. “Sometimes that’s necessary,” I said.

“So, with literature, you are Australia first.”

It was time to take this idea and run with it.

“For me it’s the Battle of Brisbane,” I said, “every bloody day, mate.”

The leather boy snorted through his nose, but of course not even Sandy had heard of the Battle of Brisbane.

“There was no battle of Brisbane,” he said. “You must mean the Brisbane Line . We were ready to give the Japs everything north of Brisbane.”

“No, Sandra.”

Even now I am ashamed I spoke to him like that. I was too defended to even glimpse his extraordinary capacity for empathy. I called him Sandra and it was as if a starling spat at him. He smiled wanly. “I think you’ll find the Japs bombed Darwin and Broome in 1942,” he said.

I was a scrappy little fellow and I thought I was being condescended to. “It was not a battle with the Japs,” I said. “The Americans were in Brisbane,” I said. “Brisbane was MacArthur’s headquarters. So you tell me, Sandy, what was the other garrison in Brisbane in 1942?”

“Australian obviously,” he said, and cocked his head at me. Fuck you, I thought. You’re wrong.

“Australian soldiers fought the Americans in the streets of Brisbane,” I said. “It is known as the Battle of Brisbane.”

It took a lot of nerve for me to let the silence last.

“OK,” he said.

“No. It was censored. The only reason I know is that my old man lost half his hand to an American shotgun.”

Celine caught my eye and I didn’t know if I should be pleased or nervous. It was my uncle not my father who had the flipper hand. I waited. She poured sugar from the glass dispenser and pushed it into a heap. In this action, as in so many, she managed to generate a certain heat, an expectation that she would do something wild and dangerous and we would be condemned to simply sit and watch. She emptied the ashtray on top of the sugar and planted matches there. Then she glared at me and I understood I had offended her, and all this compressed and coded malice was for me.

“What would you know about the bloody Battle of Brisbane?”

“I think I answered that already, love.”

“Love bullshit. What crap.”

I knew my cheeks were burning.

“Stop smirking you big baby,” she said. “You can’t even find it in a book.”

“I think Mr. Moore may be thinking about the Brisbane Line ,” said Sandy.

Celine snatched away her lover’s cigarette and threw it on the floor.

“No, pom-pom, he is not confused.”

Seeing how the poet enjoyed this revelation of a secret name, I recognised one more competitor. He helped himself to one of the motorcyclist’s beautiful hand-tailored cigarettes. “So what was the Battle of Brisbane?” he asked me.

“It was about sex,” Celine answered. “The stupid Australians were jealous of the Yanks. The only people in the world who want to help us, and so they shoot them because they like Australian girls.”

“A brawl.”

“No, a bloody battle . It lasted two days, with guns. And it was really stupid because those Americans were the ones who went off to New Guinea to fight the Japanese there.”