Peter Carey: Amnesia

“There were no Yanks in New Guinea,” said the motorcyclist. “None, baby, none.”

“Bullshit, baby,” said Celine. “My father was there, baby, baby.”

“I meant Americans.”

“My father was American, baby. He bloody died there,” and she was crying, standing, turning away from the group. “Come on Titch,” she said to me, and took my arm.

She was crying, and I was callow enough to be overjoyed. She was sobbing, but I had won. I had stood my ground. Thus the previously unthinkable circumstance developed where Sandy and his car were banished and I was invited to walk Celine Baillieux to the bus on Ferntree Gully Road.

CONTEMPLATING THE CRACKED blackened portraits of colonial no-ones on Moroni’s gloomy walls, I recalled that Sir Robert Menzies was one of two prime ministers who “owned” this corner table. Paul Keating was the other. Of course Keating was NOT A MELBOURNE PERSON, but he always looked at home in Moroni’s, his strangely delicate pale face peering out of the same chiaroscuro which soaked up his dark tailored suits. It was here, at this corner table where I now sat with Celine and Woody Townes, that the Prime Minister’s wife—I mean Annita Keating—had spoken so passionately about the “thread counts” of her sheets. This was probably a safe conversation in New York or Washington or even Sydney, but in our puritanical socialist certainties we were offended by thread counts. Or perhaps we did not know what thread counts were.

The menu in Moroni’s had not changed since 1970, the year of the Vietnam Moratorium, when we marched outside the windows, behind the great Jim Cairns (“The responsibility for violence will rest squarely with him” —The Age ). There were a hundred thousand of us including me with my celebrated banner FUCK THE RICH. Four months later I was first taken to Moroni’s and disturbed the genteel weather with my exploding hair.

Veal chop.

Osso bucco.

Rum baba.

Same then. Same now. There could be no other only half-serious Italian restaurant in the world that served such plastic bread.

While Abramo filled my glass assiduously I watched, in the high tilted mirror on the western side, a certain “hard man” from the Trades Hall Council being entertained by a class enemy. He would not catch my shit-stirring eye.

Woody offered San Pellegrino but those bleak bleached paddocks where my dad sold Fords, the loveless rock-and-rabbit farms of Anakie, now produced this flinty straw-coloured Chenin Blanc as complex as a Vouvray. Who would have dreamed it possible?

“I’m fine with the wine,” I said. “Talk to me.”

Celine had one of those faces we adore on screen—thoughts and feelings passing like shadows, leaving one not wiser, but drawn in. She looked at my wine longer than was polite.

Forty-nine years ago she and I had set off up to Ferntree Gully Road and finished at her mother’s home in Springvale. Later we found ourselves working together in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office, but the last time I had seen her was at a Christmas party, breastfeeding her baby girl.

Now she produced a yellow legal pad and with this simple action made herself a lawyer.

As always, I declined to take notes. Silence fell while my glass was filled again.

“I need unlimited access.”

Celine glanced at Woody. Woody turned to me. “All you want mate, she’s yours. That’s why you’ve got the moolah.”

“Do you call her Gaby or Gabrielle?”

“Both.”

“She is in Melbourne?”

“Need-to-know basis, mate.”

Woody. What a prat!

“She has agreed to all this?” I asked Celine. “To speak to me at length and on the record?”

“Mate,” said Woody, “don’t make problems where there are none.”

Moroni’s famous whiting arrived, but Celine did not touch her cutlery. “Before we rush ahead so merrily,” she said, “can we deal with this crap about extradition? She’s an Australian citizen for Christ’s sake. Why do the Americans think everything’s to do with them?”

“She opened hundreds of their jails.”

“She didn’t mean to, obviously. And we cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty,” Celine told me. “You have daughters,” she insisted. “Surely you can imagine how I feel.”

“Felix’s job,” Woody said, and Celine cut him off.

“What did your great barrister say to you? You told me. They cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty.”

Woody laid his meaty hand upon her slender wrist. “If she actually intended to attack America, that’s a political act. That’s a good thing. Once we prove it was a political act she cannot be extradited. Felix is the man to pitch that story. He can do it standing on his head.”

“Will you listen to what I’ve told you? She is a gutsy kid, but she could not have done what she is charged with. I love her, but she isn’t all that bright.”

“Sando is her father,” I said. “She’s got two very brainy parents.”

“Actually, I got B’s and C’s. And Gaby never finished high school which is why she had such shitty jobs at IBM. She is incapable of doing what the charge sheet says she did. That is how we should be fighting this,” she said to Woody. “Let them give her exams. She’ll fail them. She’s got the B-C gene. She’s innocent.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But I do believe she has confessed?”

“She can confess all she likes.”

“She bragged she was going destroy twelve corporations. She named them. The Koch brothers are on her to-do list.”

“Actually, her mad supporters did that for her. They go on chat rooms and make up all sorts of shit. They project. They invent. They write her lesbian love letters. They’re nuts, and God help you if you speak out against them. They’ll destroy you.”

“Felix’s role,” Woody began again and this time Celine let him finish. “His role will be to properly educate the Australian public who are naturally inclined to believe the Americans are over-reaching again. Once Felix writes the story, she’ll be Gaby from Coburg. She won’t lose any points for pissing off the Yanks. No-one will want to hand her over.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt them,” Celine said.

“Australianise her, mate,” Woody said. “Gaby from Coburg. Fair dinkum. Blood is thicker than water.”

“Please fire me,” I asked Celine. “You know I’ll do this because I need the money.”

“Why on earth would we fire you?”

To be true, I thought. To be decent. Because clearly I’m being used. Because I know things about you, Celine, I would have to reveal. I couldn’t help myself.

“They could just grab her,” she said, “off the street. Like they grabbed what’s-his-name in Rome.”

“In Milan. Please take your deposit back,” I said to Woody. “Put it in your legal fund. I’m a journalist. I can’t do PR. What are you sniggering about?”

“What sort of mug would ask you to do publicity?”

“We have to try everything,” Celine said. “We have to celebrate her real life without hysteria.”

“Your job is to save an extraordinary human being,” Woody said. “I want to impress that on you, mate.”

His little elephant eyes had become so moist and sentimental that I had to look away. “I’m not the right person,” I told Celine. But at the same time I ordered a grappa, and even while Woody tried to catch my eye, I continued to insist that I was not the man to do the job. I then learned that, legally speaking, I had accepted the deal when I accepted the envelope of cash. I also accepted a second grappa. I negotiated a prescription for Dexedrine, a MacBook Pro, a Cabcharge account and, finally, a place to live until my wife forgave me for being myself.