Peter Carey - Amnesia

She had stayed out all night with who?

“Did you hear me?”

“What?”

“My father died in a bar-room brawl.”

“It was a battle,” I said. “Two Americans did get killed.”

“Then my father was one of them.”

“Then he was the victim of a crime. The military police killed them.”

“Yes, but she’s a liar. Why would she tell me New Guinea all those years. I never needed a hero, just a father of some kind, but the more you look at it the more he vanishes.” She crumpled her Sobranie. “I can’t tell Sandy any of this.”

I thought, she slept with him.

“Never,” she said. “It would ruin my life.” She spat on her hand and held it out.

Her nails were bright vermilion. There was a gold bangle around her slender suntanned wrist. It did not take a lot to arouse me. Our hands slid together, skin and spit on skin.

“Who’d want to marry the daughter of a madwoman?”

“The right man will understand,” I said, but she did not see the point that I was making.

“You think I’m exaggerating. Look at these photographs.”

“I looked already.”

She moved her chair closer. “Look again.”

“For what?”

“Don’t play silly buggers.” Her hair brushed my cheek.

“One of them’s your father, right?” I said, but all these men had in common was fair hair and American uniforms.

“What if I told you I was raised to believe they were the same man?” She held my eyes. It was unbearable. “All my life. What do you say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

Whatever pheromones were in the air she did not seem to notice. “Thank you Felix, that’s very diplomatic of you, but if you’re brought up to see a thing a certain way you just see it. It wasn’t until she came out with that Battle of Brisbane I took the frames off the wall to look at them. I had an awful hangover. I was in no shape to see anything very much, but when she saw what I was doing she went really nuts. I saw her face. Then I understood how terrified she was. So I carried the whole lot into my room and locked her out and I took them all out of their frames, and found pictures hidden behind pictures. She was crying and knocking on my door.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t care. I’m never going to talk to her again.”

Did she mean that literally? I didn’t take it to be so, but then, as we both agreed, I did not know Celine. I never would.

“Can you imagine what my mother’s done to her only child? Why would she punish me like that?”

Well, I also had a missing parent whose absence from my life was a source of constant pain. My mother had gone, that’s all I knew. My father could not speak of her without crying. I did not think he was mad or we were strange but I kept my secret folded tight and locked away and I had no intention of revealing it to Celine Baillieux.

But I finally listened to her with authentic interest. I learned to see the house in Springvale from whose backyard her peculiar mother ran a taxi service. The house was like its neighbours, cream brick, triple-fronted, the sort of place we saw in our Melbourne minds when we heard Pete Seeger sing about little boxes made of ticky tacky. Who would have known that it contained, in its plastic-wrapped front room, its dark passages, its neon kitchen and dining room, an obsessive memorial to a fallen American who was known as “Dad”? There were, besides the seven framed photographs, odd artifacts like cowry shells and a faded pink tram ticket and a Purple Heart, framed and hung beside the certificate that declared the kitchen the registered offices of the taxi company.

The pretty girl needed me, not handsome Sandy Quinn whose heart was clearly not big enough to hold her pain. Of course Sandy’s life business would be to hold the pain of others, but in my ignorance I thought myself the better man. Celine stroked my arm. She touched my hair. I judged it would be OK to kiss her just behind the ear.

“Quit it,” she cried suddenly.

I reached to touch her cheek but she slapped my hand away.

“You’re a baby. I can’t believe I’ve chosen you to tell,” and suddenly there were fat tears and eyeliner and mascara everywhere and two gents were curious to know if I was “bothering the lady.”

“No,” the lady said, “go away you bloody oicks.”

“It’s all right, mate,” I told them both.

“Yes mate,” she sneered at me when her rescuers retreated. “It’s all right, mate, baby.” She pushed her untouched drink towards me, and then she began to sob.

“I’m pretty screwed up,” she said.

She rocked forward in her chair and then she leaned a little further, with her face all wet, kissed me, softly, all ash and whisky, with mascara cheeks, she kissed me very slowly on the lips.

“You’ve a lovely kind face,” she said. “I’m pleased I chose you to tell.”

I thought, I will solve this puzzle for her. I lifted her chin—smeared blue eyeliner, iridescent like abalone shell—and I kissed her, at last, not understanding the role I had been cast in.

HOW WAS GABY going to reach me? If she encrypted her email how in the hell would I decrypt it? Forget what I said about Wired magazine. I had no preparation for this modern world.

As the days passed my vertigo gave way to a general unease, something worse than the fatty biliousness caused by takeaway food. I was queasy. I was impatient. I abused the delicate MacBook as I had once hammered my Olivetti Valentine (until I snapped a character straight off the type bar.) Already, in Eureka Tower, my keyboard had developed bright white stress marks on the “f” and “t.”

I peered and pecked on Google and LexisNexis where my subject was a teenager of interest to the police, a schoolgirl, totally enclosed in a yellow Hazchem suit, arrested for interfering with chemical effluent.

I traced one of her former teachers at R. F. Mackenzie Community School. Her name was Crystal, for God’s sake. She was an activist. A progressive. We spent a lot of time on the telephone while she explained that R. F. Mackenzie had been an almost perfect place for a clever radical to go to school. It was hard to divert her. She talked mournfully about a whole chain of inner-city schools, East Brunswick through to Bell Street High School, to Moreland, where progressive teachers had once been able to make a difference. She remembered Gaby Baillieux had a boyfriend but she forgot his name. She knew Gaby had Samoan friends but then decided this was “private information.” She was more informative about all the smart left-wing teachers who had been sucked out of classrooms and swallowed up by the Education Department once Labor came back to power.

Through the Samoan Methodist Church in Coburg, I tracked down Gaby’s friend Solosolo. Solosolo was now living out in Sunshine where her sister, a big girl, had been stabbed, just before I called. Yes, Solosolo played with Gaby in the Bell Street High girls’ soccer team. She prayed for her. She had to go.

Gabrielle Baillieux disappeared from my screen until I found her in a fossilised blog: she was twenty-two, a technical solutions engineer at IBM. Three years later a Gaby Baillieux was charged with trespass and causing wilful damage to a government facility near Alice Springs.

Of course IBM fired her. They must have. Two years ago a Gaby Baillieux had been appointed as a project engineer at a game startup in South Melbourne. The company still existed, but they refused to talk to me. I found her credit rating: Fair. She had not married. She had owned no property and had not given birth.