Peter Carey - Amnesia

NEITHER CELINE NOR WOODY had said I was to live in Eureka Tower and yet their silence as we entered Melbourne’s tallest building seemed to confirm that this would be my home. Passing the fiftieth floor, my ears popped. As we continued skywards, I experienced a pleasurable murmuring in my neck, a very particular excitement which arrives, inevitably, when one is cast into a decadent situation without it being in any way one’s fault.

The lift door opened on giddy walls of glass.

“You’re scared of heights.” The bastard laughed. He was my friend, yes, but he would not let me grab his forearm for support.

The lift door closed and I was imprisoned.

“You know I get vertigo.”

Celine certainly did. There had been an episode at Monash when she had me climbing the scaffolding of the Menzies Building. She put great store in courage in those days. Now I was unmanned again she would not even catch my eye.

Woody strolled to the windows from where he observed me as I stabilised myself on the kitchen counter. “Don’t be a girl,” he said. “Come on out here.”

Celine had now disappeared and I understood that she was intimately acquainted with this apartment. I once more had that feeling, common back in those Monash days, of being outside the sexual inner circle, of not knowing what was going on.

“Kitty, kitty,” Woody called me, tapping his keys against the glass.

“Bathroom,” I demanded.

Only when the dunny door slammed behind me did I see I was locked up with the very view I was seeking to avoid.

Who would ever dream of such a thing? A toilet with a wall of glass.

“You can shit all over Melbourne,” he called. “That should suit you, mate. You’ve been doing that for years.”

“Let me out.”

“Door’s not locked.”

I flushed then emerged to find him by a grand piano, leaning back against the plate glass, ankles crossed, a vaudeville joke that would only pay off when he plummeted to his death. Of course he had a bottle and the corkscrew. He took the Vosne-Romanée between the wool press of his thighs and slowly withdrew its long French cork. “Cellar Pro constant-temperature wine cellar,” he said. “Valet service. Cleaner comes twice a week—just throw your undies in the basket. The devil took Jesus into a high place,” he said. “Get used to it.”

Claire would be in heaven here, seated at this Steinway. I locked the thought away.

The great Wodonga had splashed some wine as he filled the glasses, and he now attended to the spill with a large white handkerchief.

“Château Valium,” he offered.

I accepted the gift and sunk to the piano stool. Celine called. Then Woody seemed to be discussing my bed sheets with her. By the third glass I was able to raise my eyes. Then, of course, we were to leave.

“Here’s your key mate. When you lose it, the concierge will let you in.”

Then we were all safely back in the elevator and a moment later on the earth where I was introduced to Bruce the concierge who had “read your book.” Bruce gave Woody a package which Woody handed on to me. It was my new iPhone and MacBook, all set up, he claimed. I was not at all suspicious.

Celine kissed both my cheeks. Was she leaving? Woody punched me on the arm and shepherded me to the lift and then, once more, I was alone, being sent back to the place of terror.

If you have never had vertigo it is likely you will have no sympathy for me and I will only make the situation worse by confessing what I did. By day’s end, however, I was piss-faced drunk, sitting cross-legged by the windows. The sun was low over the water-bound fingers of container terminals behind which, somewhere in the drowning dark, lay those drear volcanic plains and my childhood home in Bacchus Marsh. The east, in comparison was a vault of gold, threaded by the Yarra River. My wineglass was a murder scene, besmirched with the brutal sediment of Château Valium. I pressed my nose against the window.

Out there eastwards, not too far, seventeen kilometres perhaps, lying dead and buried like a gangster beneath the Monash Freeway, was the place where I had once planned to kiss Celine.

Her father was American. He died. In her distress she had chosen me from all the others to walk her to the bus. I honestly tried to ask about her father but we were, as she reminded me, walking to the bus not going to confession. What then? We crossed the car park and started up the gravel road. I asked her if she had heard of Ornette Coleman.

“Oh Felix, don’t be boring.”

But of course I was boring. I was a wet-feathered thing just fallen from his nest. What grade are you in? Have you heard of this? Have you heard of that? “Do you have a record player?” I asked.

She considered me, smiling so frankly that I knew my virginity was naked in the light.

“Do you like me Felix?”

I had been aroused beyond hope by the occasional brush from her pleated skirt. Now I found a stone and threw it further up the road. “I don’t know you yet.”

She held her thick fair hair up from her eyes and studied me so insistently that my cheeks took fire. “Why did I ask you to walk me to the bus? What did you think? That I wanted to cry on your shoulder? What went through your head?”

Sex went through my head. I had thought I would play her side two, track three, Una Muy Bonita . For days I had had the album in my bag. All I needed was a stereo. I would tell her she was Una Muy Bonita. I would kiss her if I could.

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously,” she said, “it’s the Battle of Brisbane.”

Then it seemed I was following her inside a pub. That’s what being eighteen was like, learning that walking to the bus meant going to the Notting Hill Hotel, also called the Vicarage or Nott.

I have known famous Monash graduates, all men, get dewy-eyed about the Nott and its licensee, Kath Byer, but on that day I noticed only that Celine’s skirt had a dangerous flounce to it and she chose an isolated table where she carefully arranged her Ronson lighter and a pack of black Sobranies, as exotic in their way as women’s underwear. She bit the cellophane with her straight white teeth. The black cigarettes had gold tips. I had not known such things existed in the world.

“I was conceived in Brisbane,” she said as she placed a Sobranie in her mouth. “You’re blushing.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re very sweet, Felix. Would you please loan me a whisky lime and soda? I really will pay you back.”

I had intended to show her Ornette Coleman when I returned, but it took a good while to clear up the misunderstanding about my age, and by the time I had the drinks in hand she had spread an untidy collection of photographs and clippings across the table. What these were she did not explain. She took her drink and pushed her chair back so I might easily examine her display: a small Kodak print showing a white and willowy American soldier standing beside a palm tree. There was one clipping that had been pressed and folded as flat as a violet in a scrapbook. There were bigger prints, all soldiers, clearly Americans. The Melbourne Herald had stamped a number on the back of some of the larger glossy prints but the biggest had been cut from Life magazine, leaving scalloped nail-scissor marks along one side. Two of the subjects wore bib and braces, three uniforms, and the entire tribe had fair hair and good teeth. All but the grey-haired matriarch enthroned in a bentwood chair with an exceptionally long-barrelled rifle across her knees.

“He wasn’t a hero. He didn’t die in New Guinea,” she said. “That was the bullshit she raised me on. Now she says it was the Battle of Brisbane. Why would she say that to me now, like she has saved it up all my life, and used it to punish me the first time I stay out all night?”