Peter Carey - Amnesia

SO, FREDDO GAVE Cosmo the chance to build a PVC drain system with a plunger that would induce a suction action to expose Agrikem’s toxic dioxin effluent to the public eye. Cosmo became scarily excited. He began to make dumb jokes so often, he was a liability. I took him up to the Ferguson Plarre and bought him a neenish tart and said he must not even say our names. He could not even tell Doug what he was doing.

What should he say to Doug?

Say it’s steampunk, I said and Cosmo looked so winded that I bought him a malted milk and then, quite clearly, the great wilful dork went back to Doug the Organic Mechanic and spilled the beans.

Doug was like one of those whiskery barkless dogs with a traumatic stare. Whatever dog that was, Gaby did not know, only that his most prosaic shop instruction was whispered. Draw a line all round and cut it off square . Doug had lived in Japan. He taught woodwork with Japanese handsaws. He was also a furtive sci-fi fan and manga otaku and Cosmo’s sole supporter amongst the staff.

Now, suddenly, Doug began publicly distancing himself from Cosmo. He used his loud voice so everyone would hear he would no longer let Cosmo Palermo drag “all your crap” into the classroom. Go find somewhere else, not here. We’re not a plumbing business, mate.

But it was Doug who found us a safe place where we could assemble the pipes: an abandoned building site just near the school on David Street. Under the awning was a rough workbench. Below the bench were a few empty beer bottles and a lot of fag ends sort of composting themselves.

Doug was fulltime engaged with his own innocence. He said Cosmo better take more time with his English literature he would end up an unemployable moron.

Go to my office. I’m sick of you, Palermo.

Then they spent about an hour compiling the list of stuff that Cosmo would need to make his pump.

We were not worth a plumber’s bootlace, but somehow we managed to assemble the basic structure of his pump with not much more than a hacksaw and a tub of Bostik PVC Weld. We had it done in one weekend and it stayed there unprotected for five more days until Mervyn brought his mate the Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker had some very complimentary things to say about how Cosmo had attached the brass spigot to the PVC. Being an activist himself, he understood we must have a steel cage to protect us from the cops.

The cops never did arrive but that cage, chained to that sewer manhole, is what most people remember of the action: a steel-mesh cube imprisoning two operators in Hazchem suits. One of these operators was Mervyn and the other was his Catholic Worker mate.

It was later said I was the innocent tool of left-wing unions, but in fact the opposite was true: it was my will that drove our war machine. I was the one who “borrowed” the Hazchem suits. I was the one who would reveal her face to the cameras when I removed my hood. I wanted to be responsible. Look at this young girl. If she can do it, why can’t we?

There were many people who I represented. I would have given credit if they wanted it, not just to Mervyn, but about fifty people we never even spoke to, not least the now famous band who supplied a van and driver to take the unassembled pieces to McBryde Street. This is how it would be all my life. I would be the one who everyone could love or hate. But you cannot be a solo artist and release asylum seekers from their corporate jails. I was, always, in every single action of my life, spoon-fed by others. It is hard for my mother to accept this, but it is my job to take the heat and do the time.

It was frosty again on the day of the action. Even before I got off my bike, the two men inside the cage were waiting for the PVC weld to set. No-one in this part of Fawkner was awake. There was no traffic. Frederic and I dressed in our Hazchem suits in the middle of McBryde Street.

The so-called steampunk pump was already rising from the earth. Now Mervyn withdrew the steel rod with its plywood circle and there was a thrilling sound of liquid passing up the PVC tube, a lovely slowly elevating slurp. Driven by the forces of cohesion and adhesion, the toxins travelled vertically, then turned horizontal, then emerged from the brass spigot, like bathwater heading down towards the sewer. Suddenly the air was filled with the vaporous horseshit poison. We let it run, but it was in our public power to turn it off, poor Daddy, now I am sorry for the hurt I had to cause.

THERE ARE WRITERS who will thank their editors, bow and brownnose and then enjoy the blue pencils driven through their wrists. The author Felix Moore was never one of them. Trapped in the Koala Lodge, with editors next door, he has been turned into a mill puppy, a poor bitch locked up for breeding purposes, who must forever have her children removed. The hammered sentences, the deeply imprinted pages, are delivered to others with no guarantees of what parts will be excised, what calumnies inserted. This was not what he had expected when he accepted that fat brown envelope from Woody Townes.

There is no direct exit from this room, one door to a shared bathroom and the other to what one might call “the editorial suite.” It is from this grimy bathroom that he collects his gruel and frozen peas. Here also, on the closed toilet seat, he leaves his daily pages to be removed and edited without his approval or involvement. It has been said that this is for his own safety. He is a national treasure, too important to be a witness to a felony, to face the dangers of the front. Yet in spite of this cosseting it seems likely to him, now, as he writes, that he will soon be shot and killed. Stet. His wife will read his last words, he loves her [ sic ]. Leave tenses as is or are. He treasures her, regrets more than he can say. Nothing is lost to memory, the nest of sheets, smells, baby throw-up on his shoulder, in the middle of an interview, in the midst of history. He has not forgotten, even near the end of his wasted days, the nights spent worrying about the dyslexic daughter, her too-pretty sister who was just too confident to survive another day.

As he writes he is bilious, sick with memory and uncertainty, fear that the end will come before the end is told, that there will be no end. He had wanted Gaby Baillieux to do what he had failed to do on Drivetime Radio . He wanted more than that. How pathetic his ambition now seems, how small his own imagination. He had been a journalist with one story, one cause, one effect. He had been born in the previous geologic age while she was born into the Anthropocene age and easily saw that the enemy was not one nation state but a cloud of companies, corporations, contractors, statutory bodies whose survival meant the degradation of water, air, soil, life itself.

She, Gaby Baillieux, was once a schoolgirl. She stood on the crispy cold grass, in the middle of the Agrikem paddock just after dawn, in the company of blowflies, sad horses, amidst the perfume of dioxin. She wore a yellow Hazchem suit. The poison flowed from fresh white plumbing, as dull as ditchwater.

Disguised humans clustered around the sewer inspection hole, blue and yellow figures like cartoon gnomes in Hazchem suits. All Melbourne’s TV channels were there, their OB vans parked in McBryde Street, their satellite dishes turned towards the rising sun. Inside the barbed-wire perimeter, shivering crews crowded around the cage.

Inside the yellow suit, sweaty, blinkered, the girl was afraid of someone sneaking up beside. There were sixteen blue and three yellow-suited figures. She no longer knew which one was Frederic.