Peter Carey - Amnesia

The hermit remained in his doorway as the visitor continued down the path. When he heard the gunfire he felt no particular alarm. Woody, he understood, wished to use his weapon, and firing the last fifteen rounds at an aluminium dinghy was the best he was going to do today.

THE QUEEN HAD locked the saint in a tower room filled with straw and ordered him to spin the straw into gold, on pain of death. And how he worked. He slammed at the spinning wheel, night and day until, one morning, it was necessary to shove the gold into a plastic bag and hurl it from the tower.

Cleverly done. Well saved. But when peace returned it was no simple matter to retrieve the treasure. The saint lay down on his stomach and stretched himself full-length on the edge of the outcrop, peering down through the undergrowth and scrub where he could see, in nets of light produced by slapping wavelets, the aerial roots of mangroves poking up like nails from yellow sand.

The so-called “outcrop” was host to a jungle of wattles, wild lantana and various bits of prickly stuff. Here, just a hand’s span below his fleshy nose, grew a knotted little eucalypt with a trunk no thicker than an axe handle.

Further down, a man’s length he calculated, there was a convenient ridge in the rock where he might gain purchase with his toes. Below that, he could not really see.

As a schoolboy he had achieved serious status as a hundred-kph spin bowler, in spite of which he had been, sporadically, unpredictably followed by boys swinging their arms and making “chee-chee” monkey cries. That is, duh, his arms were long. But, as his mother once said when answering a query re his testicles, God put everything there for a purpose and now the time had come when his arms would prove their Darwinian value. He grasped that twisted eucalypt and, completely forgetting his age, lowered himself in the direction of the ridge.

His arm was yanked like a bone from a rotisserie chicken. He kicked at the rock and gained no purchase. He swung with his feet twitching and shuddering like a hanged man. As always, part of his mind was administered by a cartoonist and he was encouraged to believe he might somehow slither down the remaining inches to the ridge.

Instead, he fell, scratching, scraping, slipping past whatever ridge or ledge he had imagined. Death awaited him. He awaited death. He landed in a twisted eagle’s nest of wattle and lantana where the black plastic bag was pushed like a horse’s arse against his face. All three bags had been partly inflated with accidental air, so it was this, not the sand, which cushioned the final fall.

His face stung. He loudly fucked and shat. A fierce pain assailed his shoulder as he splashed along the waterline. He wrapped his arms around his treasure, binding it to his chest, like a spider with a sac of eggs. Cautiously, he made his way under the gloomy mangroves, amidst the forest of aerial roots, until he arrived at the place where he had beached so long before.

He showed not the least interest in his bullet-riddled dinghy but hurried along the track, breathing through his open mouth, squelching up the protesting stairs. When he entered his former refuge the air was cold and sour with wine. Typewriter ribbon adhered to his sodden shoes and he did nothing to untangle it. He sat in the gloom, gingerly, embracing the bag, mindful that it might hold evidence that would prove Gaby Baillieux innocent. What would Woody do with that? What would he do himself? He did not wish her to be innocent. He wanted her fearless, guilty of courage, of principle. If his writing would get his name on the so-called “Disposition Matrix,” he wished her to be worthy of the pain.

Now he lifted the remaining vodka and touched it to his stinging lips. For once he did not drink. He examined the abandoned iPhone, turned it on, then failed in his attempt to throw it out the window. The screen glowed briefly then went dark. There was no illumination but that provided by the deep charcoal-blue of the Hawkesbury River.

Felix?

The voice was close, in the doorway, but there was insufficient light to distinguish the doorframe from the space it might have defined. He held the plastic bag like a child with a pillow.

Felix, right? Mr. Moore?

The voice that of a young man. He was perhaps tall, with fair hair.

Who are you?

We’re the pros from Dover.

He was slow to register the “we” and slower still to understand that these friendly wraiths who had appeared at his door were a subset of a caste of Sydney surf lifesavers, once known locally for eating live canaries in bread rolls and sticking their naked backsides out car windows during late night shopping. These anarchic characters would now exhibit towards the hermit an intoxicating sort of reverence and he found himself wishing that his daughters could witness this moment of redemption or, at least, prestige.

What’s your name? he asked.

Mate, the publicly available tools for making yourself free from surveillance are ineffective against a nation state.

I don’t understand a word you’re saying.

Time to go.

Now?

The visitor explained that there was no longer a safe way out by water. So they must walk back up the ridge. The moon was good.

The fugitive did not resist or argue although he insisted, from the start, that he carry his own bag. This he managed well enough, but his sodden deck shoes rubbed his delicate heels and they were not even at the fire trail before he was limping. The track was a pale yellow, and there could be no better conditions for walking in the night, except that his calves were soon cramping and his blisters were bleeding and then, when it was clear he could not keep up the pace, when it became obvious he must be unmanned and suffer the indignity and pleasure of being carried, he was moved by their tenderness towards him. A fireman’s lift, of course, is not the most comfortable way to travel and Felix Moore passed through the Marramarra National Park from the Hawkesbury to Forest Glen with his head down, filled with blood, dropping pencils and paperclips and Duracell batteries along the way.

He was a stick-case moth enveloped in silk, finally redeemed, the treasure of his nation.

The night seemed endless. He saw no “spectacular ridge-top colours of iconic Hawkesbury sandstone” or “gullies of bright red waratahs and Gymea lily.” His escort would not permit him to walk, but merely shifted his load between them, until the lights of a four-wheel drive could be seen bumping below, snaking up the switchbacks.

Time for your pill, mate, said the first man who had spoken to him.

For what?

Travel sickness.

I’ll be fine.

Take my word.

The hermit held out his hand and took the pill.

What is it?

Men in Black , they said.

Whatever chemical that was, he would never discover, but it was sufficient to ensure that it would be eight hours before he awoke in what was clearly, on the evidence of the shiny bedspreads and pastel-pink art, a motel. His wet shoes were on the floor, stuffed with newspaper. There were bandaids on his heels. He drew the curtains aside and saw a concrete paved courtyard, almost empty, and beyond this a two-lane road and mountainous bush.

On the desk there were two bottles of McLaren Vale shiraz, a large washed rind cheese, a Triumph-Adler Twen T180 electric typewriter. There also, God help him, were tapes, new tapes, and enough batteries to play them for a year.

As to where on earth he was, there was no newspaper or television to solve the problem. One door led to the bathroom. He tried the other, and although it was, unsurprisingly, locked, he could hear the murmur of voices on the other side. He wrenched out the wine cork in the grim knowledge that he had, for the first time in his professional life, been worthy of a suite.