Amnesia (12 page)

“My father gave me this,” she said, “my real father.”

Fire was dancing along the gun metal.

“He was the most decent man you could ever know. Strictly speaking, he was a criminal, but he changed my nappies when my mother couldn’t. He left enough money for me to go to university. He cut my hair. He taught me how to shoot. How many rabbits do you think I’ve killed?”

“I am not wrong about Willenski. It doesn’t make me happy, but it’s true.”

“I brought you out here to get you out of Woody’s clutches, you shit. But I had no idea of what you’d done.” She jerked the rifle violently, like
a pitchfork. “Can’t you learn your lesson in a courtroom? Lying is not socially acceptable. Do I have to punish you as well?”

“It’s not made up.”

“You’re a convicted slanderer.”

“No.”

“My father is a rapist? You can’t possibly know that.”

“Why do you think I didn’t tell you at Monash?”

“You kept it from me, all my life?”

“Don’t you remember the state you were in? You stayed with what’s-his-name, the poet. Then Sando took you in. His landlady threw you both out and you slept in his car. You were too busy burning down the house.”

Sandy had taken her pain and held her and never let her go until he married her. I did not tell her how I had mourned her.

“How could you know shit about any of this?”

“There was only one American soldier who’d been photographed in Brisbane. The rest were Melbourne. The dates work too. Willenski was front page of the
Courier-Mail
.”

“And that’s it? On the basis of this you write this? Anyone who knows you can see what you’re doing. America rapes Australia. It’s pathetic. Do you know how many Americans were here during the war? You want this psycho to represent them all.”

“I confirmed it again. Last week.”

“How could you?”

“I let my fingers do the walking for me, as the ad says.”

“You phoned my mother?”

“She’s in the White Pages.”

“Why would she want to talk about this to a stranger?”

“People with secrets. It’s what they do.”

“But why you?”

“It’s a talent.”

“She would never talk to me.”

“As I understand it, Celine, really darling, you have been particularly unforgiving of your mother. She says you never took Gaby to meet her?”

“No. She met her.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t get prissy with me, Titch. Who does all this muckraking serve? Not Gaby, that’s for sure.”

“You came to me.”

Celine returned to her armchair and laid the rifle on the side away from me. “No, you were Woody’s contribution,” she said. “He could not have expected to be so lucky.”

DORIS’S MOTHER LOCKED
the verandah door in silence, I had written. Only when both women reached the kitchen did the elder woman unwrap her naked wrath. “Filth,” she cried.

Crouching, wet rag in hand, she attacked her daughter’s hem and thighs.

“Mum, please. You’re making it worse.”

“Worse,” she cried, and tugged at the silk dress, ripping to reveal a raw abrasion.

“Jeez. Leave off. No-one saw.”

“No-one saw. God save me.” Her eyes were frightening but frightened too, clearly searching for an instrument to thrash the legs, the arms, the neck. “I’ll learn you, girlie. No-one saw.”

The girl made a break, upstairs, towards the safety of the bathroom but her mother was a scrapper, knees and elbows, in the bathroom first.

“Save the hot water for the boarders.”

“Please, Mum.”

And they were collapsed, crying, wringing their hands, grabbing for understanding, pushing violently away, and then the mother turned on the cold tap and threw a fist of salt into the claw-legged tub.

“Clothes off.” The girl might as well be six years old the way she was forcibly undressed. It was pull out your hair, rip off your nose.

“You smell of him,” the mother said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. If you thought that meant sympathy, you were mistaken. “Come on. Give me. Scanties.”

“Don’t leave me naked.”

“You’ve got your bra. Use a towel.”

What occupied the mother was not disease or pregnancy. The issue was—who knew? Who saw?

“You could have picked a white boy but.”

Who was going to write her husband poison letters? She would burn the parachute silk and she wished she had the strength to destroy the house entirely. He was going to kill her. He would kill them both and who would blame him? Where there’s smoke there’s more smoke. His wife was not Miss Pearly Pureheart either.

The daughter locked the bathroom door and cried. She felt the sting of salt kill her germs and babies. It destroyed the lather so her body got coated with a grey scum which she would still smell in the morning, on the tram. The damaged part was not where you expected.

At secretarial school she was lucky or unlucky—her classmates could see nothing but the size of the stones in Maisie’s engagement ring. Maisie’s fiancé was an American called Captain Baillieux. Doris had her write it down. No-one cared or noticed that she kept the scrap of paper.

Of course Doris had not yet decided to become Baillieux, but she would not have told them if she had. She could not trust her girlfriends with anything important. She waited for her period alone and was relieved to see the blood. Next day she got blisters “down there.” She used the salt twice a day and the blisters went away, thank heavens, but it wasn’t over yet. The bank teller in the western room paid his rent on time but he was a pigpen. He liked his
Courier-Mail
and left it everywhere, including on the kitchen table where she saw the news, December 2nd, 1942. THE BROWNOUT STRANGLER. And there he was, the American, his perfect smile, his awful handsome face, his cowlick hair. He had raped six girls and strangled them and mutilated them in ways particular. After that she could hardly eat at all. Her period stopped. Her hair went dull and lifeless. If she had managed to eat a little custard, say, she would puke in the middle of her sleep.

Yet even as her appearance changed she found herself the beneficiary of unexpected acts of kindness. Late at night, after ten o’clock, she and the window-dresser listened to the wireless and the little chap was nice enough to brush her hair. Once he tucked her in. Her mother made a rabbit pie. You could taste the butter—although she had no ration coupons
left. The girl resisted the awful need to read her stolen
Courier-Mail
. Finally, they had a lovely Christmas with the boarders and the window-dresser played piano. He was a strange kind creature with a white soft hairless neck below his wig, and the mother was happy and did not think what Black and White Rag might really be, thank God for that.

Then it was a different year. The rains arrived. The Allies took Buna in New Guinea. Then it was Sanananda. In Guadalcanal, the Japs had their tails between their yellow legs. In March they were blown to screaming pieces in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. It was still mango season then. The bank teller loved mangoes so much he ate them in the bath. The girl ate them too. Her appetite returned. Then a letter came from Dad—he was back in Perth and coming home. Then Tom was in Aden waiting for a ship. And it was only then, when she knew they could all recover from everything, that her mother barged into the bathroom.

She was in the nuddy when the door slammed hard against the wall.

“You idiot. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I put the pounds back on.”

“Pounds. Dear Jesus help me, look at yourself.”

“It’s been since Christmas.”

“It’s four bloody months. No wonder you’ve been throwing up. You’ll have to leave before your dad gets home. Don’t cry. You should have thought about this. You can’t be giving him a little piccaninny.”

Without another word, the mother went downstairs, soft as a ghost, an angel of the annunciation.

The girl found her kneeling at the front door polishing the knob.

“Mum.”

The mother’s head was tiny as a coconut, the hair lank, eyes leached. “You’re an idiot,” she said, “I could have helped you.”

“Mum, it wasn’t the black chap. It was a white chap, Mum. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry for what you said.”

The mother’s mouth was just a little line, a scar, a screwed-up sewed-up wound. “Dear Mouse,” she said, and the girl shivered to receive the tenderness. “We’ve got no choice, my titchy mouse. You’ll have to be gone when he arrives.”

“I have to go to the hostel?”

“I’ll say you got a job in Sydney.”

“Wouldn’t he like a nice white baby?” she asked, but she was already
bilious at the thought of the mouse-sized Hank Willenski growing in her womb.

The mother’s eyes were brimming, and she stroked her daughter’s tiny ears.

“Do you even know his name?”

“Baillieux,” she said, and spelled it.

“Is he French?”

“I don’t know, Mum. He didn’t say.”

“Is he in New Guinea, love?”

“Yes Mum, he is.”

“God save him then,” her mother said.

“God save him, Mum.” She did not say the brownout strangler was dead already, murdered by the Aussies in his cell on Boggo Road.

“DID YOU EVER IMAGINE
how it might feel for me to read this?”

I smelled Celine’s acrid breath. I observed her blackened eye, the hard contusion on the cheekbone, the awful puce in the soft cave of the orbit. I reached towards her tenderly. She thrust my hand away.

I said I was not her enemy. I would never wish to hurt her. I was startled she couldn’t see that I had been a time traveller on her behalf, that I had given her what she could have never known. Her life was a miracle to me. From Stanley Street to all those nights of mad applause on stage.

“Everything you’ve written is reprehensible,” she declared, and of course, the truth is ugly and often frightening. We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.

“What you have written hurts everyone.”

I never wanted to hurt a soul, but a laboratory rat would have learned by now that I was doomed to repeat my action like some automaton in a Disney underworld. I felt ineffably sad. I stared at the monster log until it had burned through and collapsed onto a sparky bed of fine white ash. Celine gathered my pages to her breast. Her fingernails were delicate and uncorrupted, swimmer’s nails, I thought, the colour of cuttlefish shells. I watched her turn my pages. A single A4 sheet slipped free and glided towards the hearth. I snatched at it.

“Liar,” she cried. She launched a flock of paper. Two hundred and twenty-one pages struck my head, beat my ear, landed in the fire, white wings curling into black.

I had sworn this was the last copy on the earth and as I was being a good man I could not be a liar. I had no choice but to plunge my hands into the flames.

Then Celine was at my side, raking pages to the floor, stamping on their carmine skirts. The paper was like stinging nettles. I had expected it would have hurt much more than this.

“Stop it,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”

In the kitchen I permitted her to plunge my sacrificial hands beneath the tap. She emptied trays of ice into a bowl and I watched my injuries: red and black palms, bloating like dead fish.

“This is bullshit,” she said softly and I could once more smell her acrid breath. “This cannot be the only copy.”

“I know that.”

“Then why did you do this?”

I shrugged.

“Did no-one ever love you Felix?”

“I’m an awful person.”

“You wanted to hurt me, you should be happy. You’ve shown that my father is American.”

“So?”

“It gives them a claim on Gaby.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“You’re sloppy and careless. You don’t know where you are. You told Woody I could not deliver Gaby. He believed you. He thought I had tricked him into paying bail. You just wandered off to bed and locked your door. I heard you.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was not Celine’s character to have a first-aid kit, but there it was, a black backpack with a white cross in house paint. From this she produced a roll of white surgical bandage which she wound delicately around my injuries.