Peter Carey - Amnesia

I deserved nothing from her, but she was going to the Mechanics Club in Brunswick that night, where her boyfriend’s band was playing. He was a drummer in a punk revival band called Snot, something like that. He had the early gig and they would meet me out in front, OK.

Really?

Are you joking? I miss you.

I had spent so much time being Gaby-and-Frederic I no longer knew what I should wear to listen to a bloody band. I knew those girls, they would arrive so cool and cute and I made myself totally vomitous attempting to “get a look together.” Finally I smoked a joint and dressed in all the second-hand stuff I normally wore. When I arrived at the club my old friends were all waiting, hooing and cheering that they loved my look, they loved me. I was original to them. There was no-one like me, although of course they would have rather died than look like me. Their clothes were all clearly expensive (not to boys, but to girls it was completely obvious).

The Mechanics Club was a ratfuck, the band itself was crap. The boyfriend was handsome but too pleased with himself. WTF. I jumped around and had some drinks. Katie shared a bump of coke with me. There was what they called an “after party” and the drummer boyfriend put my bike in the van and I was so pleased to be included in the normal world. Katie sat in the front seat next to her drummer. He drove with his arm around her shoulder, serpent scales in blue ink from his sleeveless top down to his fingernails. Katie kept on flopping her hand over the back of the seat. Then: duh: she had a condom. My friends had become babies while I had been gone.

The after party was in East Kew. I had lived in Melbourne all my life and never saw a house with gates like these, four-metre-high spears tipped with gold fleurs-de-lis, like the owners were waiting for the revolution. A bright yellow Porsche was parked inside. The punk revival drummer lived here with his mum and dad and little brothers. His left ear was rolled and pierced like a weird piece of pasta, but he was very well mannered. He carried my bike from the van and showed me where to leave it. Damn, I thought, fuck it. Have to ride it home.

The parents were away. There were frantic kids in every direction, speed, molly, coke, hash oil. They were so private-school, and I was the freakiest thing they ever saw, those silly little girls with white powder still clinging to the philtrum of their Botticelli lips.

I thought, I will have a pee and try and find my way back home.

But the loos were locked and filled with idiots. I went downstairs and found, amidst the chaos, the moronic thumping bass, shrieking, vomiting, not a loo but a brand-new Mac IIci. It turned out to be upgraded with a 50 MHz Daystar 68030 board, and it connected to a Hayes Smartmodem 96 and it was surrounded by silent kids some maybe as young as twelve. At the keyboard, like the most perverted seminarian or Sunday-school teacher, was Frederic Matovic.

The little boys hung on him, on his shoulder, pressing in on him as he did his fluttery feathering Frederic typing, and I knew it absolutely was not sexual, but just the same my stomach tightened. It was, to me at least, so completely intimate. Those rhythms were his rhythms, created by commands and responses, by pauses, by almost violent returns, when he shifted in his seat, the way he did, and nodded his head as he had first done when he had a fringe to flick away. I knew that he was breaking into something good. When one of the munchkins hooked him up to a brand-new snail’s-pace StyleWriter it was clear he had a shitload of treasure to take home. I had meant to run away, but I barged in and tapped him on the shoulder and he was like, Hi.

He pushed a skanky skateboard child away and I, just, took my place.

What had he got into? A few years later it would have been email. That year it was a CSIRONET account. Holy Shit. He was inside MetWat’s Secretum secretorum where correspondence was still headed Memo and RDM as in Restricted Distribution Memo. He made a Frederic noise, indeterminate, a sort of moo, and left me with his mullety crew while he relieved the StyleWriter of its burden, reading as he stacked the pages.

We should go, he said. He flicked the fringe that was not there.

I stood. (I should have reacted how else exactly?)

OK, guys, he said. The water is on me.

I was staggered he would do this. Leave these little anklebiters running like mice inside MetWat, but perhaps that was the fee he had negotiated with them, or perhaps he was safely pissing on the Federal Police, or engaging in class warfare by getting the Computer Crime Squad to hit East Kew. His normal procedure would be to not interfere with any site he had entered, to build a nice back door perhaps, but to tidy up after himself and do no damage to the system.

Not tonight. IDIOTS. YOU NEED BETTER PASSWORDS. WE ARE TWELVE YEARS OLD AND WE OWN YOU.

I found him a plastic bag in the kitchen and he filled it with his heavy printout and we left the house together, and walked out into the hot night air.

And there, in the front of the palace, behind the high iron gates, beside the Porsche and the BMW, we kissed and kissed and kissed, the softest widest lips. I kissed his secret feathery eyes. He smelled my neck. He said, Happy birthday baby, in my ear and I was so busy crying, I did not understand exactly what was in his zorky little mind.

THE FUGITIVE, it can now be reported in this edition (fifth digital, first paper), had been moved from place to place at night, for instance on the pillion of an ailing Honda 750, along a hundred and thirty kilometres of winding mountain road, from the Golden Wattle Motel to the Koala Lodge in Katoomba, a town famous for its touristic virtues including the steepest railway incline in the world, the steepest aerial cable car in the Southern Hemisphere, the vertiginous Scenic Walkway, with its sublime scenery so precipitous and perilous that a perfectly sane man might be tempted to cast himself screaming into the abyss.

The pillion passenger’s character would not be tested by the great sublime. On the contrary: he was accommodated with a view of the Koala Lodge’s inevitable concrete forecourt, and all the extra advantages of generous self-catered accommodation with editors “en suite.” He had a cooktop in his room so he could have spaghetti and grill sausages and lamb chops and, at this particular moment, launder his underwear which ballooned from the boiling saucepan in shivering dome-like tents suggestive of soap bubbles and the Sydney Opera House.

In his new location, he sat, as he had sat while covering the war in Bougainville, the events of 1975, the first hunger strike at Villawood, day after day for almost fifty years, in front of a typewriter. Tapes were supplied. Pages were taken by arrangement. There was continual loud dripping from the bathroom which he ignored. He wore a grubby bath towel around his hips. On his wide bare shoulders he revealed a hard hairy saddle of flesh, a dense pad reminiscent of that rounded structure on the dolphin’s forehead, the so-called melon which produces sounds for “communication and echolocation.”

It was night, as usual, and the headlights from the nearby road washed across the ceiling and the voice of Celine Baillieux was without relent. Likewise the dripping, which finally caused the fugitive to leap from his seat as if he were a character in an early Pram Factory production, as if he were, say Archbishop Mannix half mad with paranoia, imagining himself the actor in a drama being observed by all the world. His trousers would not dry but he was the son of an ingenious mechanic. He fetched the wire hanger from the back of the bathroom door and made a hoop about twenty centimetres in diameter. This he sprung into one trouser leg to keep it fully open. He then threaded a belt and cinched closed the waist. He laid the wet garment on the floor and positioned the motel hair dryer in the tunnel entrance to the left leg. As he turned on the dryer, hot air rushed up the trousers and the apparatus filled its sails.