Peter Carey - Amnesia

But he wouldn’t or couldn’t. He crunched across the glass. I told him he was drunk, although he wasn’t. I said he was abusive. I stuffed clothes in my schoolbag and bicycled around Brunswick and Royal Parade looking for Frederic’s mother’s van.

I HURT my father and so he changed. After that I was always innocent or stupid. If I learned or questioned something, it was because of someone else. If I criticised him, I had been influenced . This way he could keep on loving me no matter what I did.

He discovered the floppy disk “Find Gaby’s Pussy.”

He would have had no clue about how to access it. He just blamed the school for what he feared it was and he visited my home-room teacher. He didn’t like that she was a “girl” with torn jeans and spiked-up hair. Her boyfriend was in Cosmic Psychos or The Hairballs, one of those. Crystal was a punk revival feminist. She dealt with my father and calmed him down. When he left she played the game. Of course she got the joke, that Frederic was my pussycat. Then she went through the code afterwards, learning from us, line by line.

There were teachers who were always stressed by the lack of structure. They thought they were radicals because they walked off the job when an Education Department inspector arrived. But not all of them were suited to real life in a democracy. Crystal was born to be our teacher. She encouraged us to take votes. She smoked with us in the “man hole.” She taught us by learning alongside us. I had become obsessed with the Merri Creek, so that was very cool with her. She had known nothing about the soil, the history, the politics, the birds and trees, so we all started to do the work together.

When my dad chickened out on presenting the dioxin numbers in parliament it was just natural that I took the BIT analysis to Crystal. This was what she was on earth to do. She added Agrikem to my Merri Creek map. She got us studying herbicides, which led us to dioxin, which led us to Agent Orange, to Australia’s part in the Vietnam War which had finished before we were born.

She went to MetWat’s head office in Flinders Lane, down near Spencer Street station, and returned with an annual report. We were righteous and outraged by what we found in it, pictures of the men to whom we had given custody of the most precious commodity on earth, our water. They were “corporate advisors specialising in debt, performance improvement.” They were on the boards of Genteck, BankWest, National Australia Bank and Bank of New Zealand, CSIRO. They were Civil Engineering, M. Engineering, FAIM, FIE (Aust.), B. Science and Engineering. They had backgrounds in the manufacturing industry. They had worked for mining companies and multinational accountants. We were not persuaded they could be trusted with the common good.

Am I ranting? Alone in a room. Talking to the wall. Will anybody ever hear me?

In class Freddo and I wrote a very buggy “Active Agent Puppet” game in BASIC. Dioxin was the active agent and the puppets were the shiny-faced men on the MetWat board. Crystal was a published writer. She helped us to imagine individual characters, pathetic, fretful, boastful, or falsely innocent like the amoral Harold Skimpole in Bleak House (which we had to read). Skimpole said he was innocent as a child. So we put him on the board as well. Not even Frederic could resolve the code issues, but our fire spread throughout the school.

The mad beaky-nosed art teacher projected images of the board members on wet cartridge paper and we painted over them, making bleeding, fuzzy portraits of men with shadow eyes, and vast gold buttons on their creepy suits. The shop guy was Doug the Organic Mechanic. He taught mitre cuts in fifth-year shop. Then his class made real frames so we could have an art show and an opening. Our portraits hung round the edge of the upstairs gallery where mad Methodists had once studied scripture in compartments shaped like segments of a pie.

Are there schools like this today? Probably not. We all thought we were inventing the future which we imagined would be better than the past.

We had a class visitor I recognised from Lygon Street: a punkish older guy with thin red hair and rings and screws and safety pins like medals on his face. He used to set up a folding table some Saturdays. He displayed awful pictures of deformities and bubbling flesh. He had red sunglasses. I had always thought he must be nuts.

In our home room, Eddy Margolis asked him what band he was in. He said shut up, don’t be a smart-arse. He had been a sergeant in the Australian army handling herbicides. They had made him ill.

I smiled at him in sympathy. He stared right through me.

After his gruesome talk he said he was not there to encourage us to break the law but he himself was going to pay a personal visit to the sewer on the map we had made. He had not known about it previously, but he would confirm or deny the analysis on the spot. Me and Undertoad went on our bikes. When we arrived we could see Crystal’s beat-up van and some figures in the smudgy gloom beyond the barbed-wire fence. It was damp and cold on McBryde Street and the wind was blowing from the east and we squeezed under the bottom strand and found our teacher and our class all huddled at the stink hole. Our expert was still wearing his red-coloured dark glasses. He lifted the plate without any iron bar, just with thumb and forefingers. He did not even set it on the ground.

OK, he said. What do you smell?

Chemicals.

Like what?

Like manure, like cow shit.

Yes. Nitrogen-rich. What else?

Like plastic?

Like plastic yes. Does anyone know what silicone caulking smells like?

No-one did.

It smells like manure and plastic and silicone caulking. There is no smell like it. Whose eyes are running?

Everyone’s.

So, said Crystal, what would you say if MetWat swore there was no dioxin?

Stay away from here.

What can we do?

Nothing. Stay away.

We crossed the sodden overgrazed grass and slipped through the chained front gate. It was all so ordinary. The streets, the little houses, the bad smell, a plumber’s van reversing from a driveway. Crystal gave me a sort of hug and said, Promise you will stay away now. She did not know me very well. I hardly knew myself.

Freddo and I went up to the musty ceiling above the school and he took off my clothes and drew his finger down the middle of my chest and told me I was beautiful and I said I was going to take off all my clothes and roll in the dirt at Agrikem.

He didn’t say anything, just looked at me with his secret glittery eyes and I felt a hot patch right above the bottom of my spine. He never tried to stop me. He knew I wouldn’t like him if he did. He kissed me all over, in all the crazy places like the back of my knees. We had an electrical connection. We were doing “pair programming” before we heard the term or learned it was uncool. Pair programming has a gripping immediacy: you live with your partner inches from your side. You feel his heat, his brain, and each half of you must understand the code, there, then, as it is being born. Pairing may be invasive, but so is sex.

No-one but us knew what we planned or what we thought. We annoyed people. We locked the others out. We got deeper and deeper into our own shit. The school had an old super 8 camera which no-one bothered with. A Canon 512XL. While our classmates were running round making arty videos, while Cosmic Cosmo was making a wine rack from plumbing parts, we took the Canon apart and put it back together like soldiers with a weapon.