Amnesia (35 page)

Clearly it was the Aisens who lent her that battered copy of Felix bloody Moore’s
While We Were Sleeping
. He did not ask, he did not have to, but his pride in his daughter was clouded by a sort of dread as, in this, and other ways, he prepared to lose her.

She told him: Capitalism is a bull charging a chook house shouting it’s every man for himself.

He knew exactly who that came from.

He saw Mervyn’s other mad opinions introduced into his house. For instance: Jim Cairns was only interested in the capitalists making profits. And: Bob Hawke had used his moral authority to prevent the general strike in 1975. “Hawkie was always at the US embassy. Don’t tell me the Americans did not tell him call your dogs off, mate.” Sando thought this was insane, but Mervyn thought it was “outrageous” that Gaby could grow up not knowing a thing about the Coup of 1975. She brought this back home as well, in the same bag as her sudden environmentalism. You could have called a general strike, she said.

Me?

The Labor Party.

Who told you that?

Can’t I have my own ideas? she asked. What else would you do if your government was stolen? It was illegal. It was unconstitutional. Don’t sigh, Dad. I’m not an idiot.

I actually was there, you know.

Yes. So don’t you agree there should have been a general strike? Do you agree or not?

He told you it was the CIA?

You mean Mervyn? Say his name. It doesn’t matter who it was, Dad. Once it was done it was done: the people’s government was taken from them. So what about the unions?

What do you know about the unions?

Don’t patronise me. I know a lot about the unions.

A general strike would have been a step towards armed conflict.

So?

Did your friend Mervyn tell you that the governor-general had the armed forces on stand-by? Did he tell you that? The Queen’s toady was actually Commander-in-Chief of the Australian Defence Force.

Kerr, I know who you mean. He was the governor-general.

Kerr called in the defence chiefs. He conferred with the American embassy. He briefed intelligence agencies. He had the armed forces on a “red alert.” You want to send the unions out to face that?

You were afraid?

Of course.

What about Mum?

She was on red alert too.

Ha-ha, what did she want to do?

No, she was not in favour of a strike.

Why have you never talked about this with me?

She looked hostile, spoiled, superior and he couldn’t bear she would regurgitate this stuff.

Is it shame? she asked.

Shame?

That you were cowards.

That was when he told her what he really thought about the Aisens. That their so-called ecological activism was an attempt to return to some fantasy of white Australia populated by good blokes and mates and everything was dinky-di and the blackfellows fed themselves unhindered on the creeks of Coburg. It was territorial, Sando said. Did you see any Turks or Lebanese amongst their planting party? No, of course not. The Aisens were using the language of socialism to reassert white privilege.

Listen to you, she shouted. Listen to yourself. You sound insane. They’re fighting these polluting bastards and so are you.

But Sando was sick of talkback-radio racists ranting and arguing about who they would permit to be called a “real Australian.” Doesn’t even smell like Australia anymore, you know what I mean, mate? No you listen, he said.

His daughter then told him that her new friends were “real radicals.”

Real? he asked. In what way?

Well, she said, do you know who sabotaged the dragline?

He cringed on her behalf, that she should so carelessly give away this information.

Mervyn did that?

She returned his stare and he thought she looked smug. Someone did it, she said.

No-one wants to support vandals, he said.

But who is the vandal? cried his musky daughter. Are you blaming the people? Shouldn’t you be calling out MetWat about this shit? Are they under your “purview”? she said, twisting the word like a weapon.

What sort of word is purview?

She would not answer him but she knew he knew where purview came from.

No, he said, they are under the purview of the minister, and this was surely the moment Sando decided he would rip his daughter out of Bell Street High. Certainly he had made up his mind before Celine returned. He consulted no-one. Gabrielle Baillieux went to bed that night not knowing she was about to be removed from Miss Aisen’s classroom and established five kilometres further south, as a student at the R. F. Mackenzie Community School.

CELINE HAD JUST FINISHED
shooting
Mrs. Fischer
which would later cause such controversy at Cannes. She returned to Patterson Street refreshed, invigorated by a brief uncomplicated affair. She was carrying thousands of dollars in cash. She was finally ready to leave and start again.

They had both ganged up on me again, she told the author Felix Moore. I had deserved it all, OK, but they were so hurtful and I would have loved to hurt them just as much. But when I realised how wounded and angry they were with
each other
, I knew I had to fix it. I was the one who had got us entangled with the Aisens.

I had thought I was using her with her computer lessons which cost less than buying my daughter the computer she wanted. I was so cheap. Sando was cheap too. But the first day I was back from shooting I drove into the city and bought the Mac IIx. It put a big hole in my runaway money. Don’t get psychological on me, Celine said. It was as straightforward as I say: no need to visit Aisen anymore.

I came back from down the creek, Gaby said, and there was a big white box on the dining table. I saw the Apple logo and felt sick with what I’d done. I had gotten everything I wanted and I knew exactly what it cost and I knew my parents could not afford it. Money was what they fought about, the house, the repairs, the advertising gigs, even the computer lessons and now, of course, Celine had done the thing she had been so against, and she had not bothered to discuss it with my dad so then he went bananas about how selfish she was with her money.

I lugged the box to my room and locked the door behind me. I tried
to be happy, because I should have been happy. I smelled the brand-new Mac IIx, all clean and Appley. I heard that startup tone, that single note descending. I saw the happy Mac icon, the real thing. I acted out my happiness, with no-one to see me do it. I was a psycho and a fake. I wrote some stuff in BASIC because what else was I to do? I had no phone line and no modem and I could not ask them to spend more money now and so, of course, I was deceitful and made up stories so I could sneak out to Darlington Grove and go online to hook up with Undertoad. Undertoad and I made a private back room on Altos. He told me his mum was returning to Melbourne “for treatment” but she had moved him to a different school.

I thought Frederic extremely dangerous, Celine told me, but I hid all that from Gaby. I acted very sympathetic. I suggested that the poor boy must hate his life without electricity. (Gaby answered that he did.) I then supposed the New South Wales education system did not even know he existed. (My daughter did not disabuse me.) I supposed Meg must have taken her business with her. (Gaby didn’t know.) I said northern New South Wales was beautiful. (No, no, Frederic was continually the victim of the groundsel bush which left his eyes streaming and his sinuses blocked and swollen. He owed his life to eucalyptus oil. Even when people were so nice to them and let them crash and fed them free, night after night, on baked vegetables from hippie gardens, endless pumpkin, he always knew his noisy breathing made him an unwanted guest.) From all this, Celine said, I concluded that Frederic was eight hundred kilometres away from my child, whereas Meg’s van was already heading south towards me.

My parents began spying, Gaby said, so naturally I lied. Somehow they found out I was still visiting Darlington Grove. Celine took Sando’s side. Mervyn was “your father’s enemy.” He was a shit-stirrer and ratbag, she said. He used the word comrade constantly, but had I noticed he had no comrades? He could not work with other people. His real specialty was embarrassment, direct attacks. Also, she went on about how much she had spent on the computer.

But Mervyn had already taken me to visit what he called “the jewel of Merri Creek,” a dull yellow-brick building on McBryde Street in Fawkner. It was next to some dreary paddocks with starving horses and across the road from some small suburban houses like you might see in any of the poorer northern suburbs.

There was a wooden sign by the road that had been hand-carved in a folksy sort of way. It said “Agrikem.” The factory had a gravel car park like a hardware store and nothing to suggest that it was dangerous in any way.

It was after five o’clock when we arrived and all the workers’ cars had gone and there was no-one to see us climb through the fence into the paddock, a girl and an old man going to talk to lonely horses. Mervyn was carrying an iron bar but he often carried one tool or another and there was always a reason, in this case the bar was to lift a concrete inspection cap with two U-shaped loops. Really it was an inspection plate for a sewer, but as I walked towards it I thought it must be a well for water.

I watched him fit the bar into the loops, and saw the tendons in his neck go tight as he lifted.

He asked, You hear that?

Is it water?

Have a look.

It smells bad.

In the beam of his flashlight I saw a small pipe draining murky liquid into the sewer.

What’s that? he asked.

Drain water.

Where does it end up?

I don’t know.

Did you ever hear of dioxin?

No.

How about Agent Orange?

At school.

OK, he said.

And that was it.

He took my hand as we walked home. This was the first and possibly the last time he ever did that. If we talked I don’t recall it. Nor did it seem strange that we did not. What struck me was not the sewer or the smell but the confusing emotions generated by that big dry hand, the comfort that I took from it, my queasy guilty feeling of betrayal.

THAT NIGHT
the fugitive writer would find himself carried like a baby through the dark bush, as if he were, in his own words, a sacred slug or silkworm protected by the empress’s guard. But now, as day broke on the Hawkesbury, those noble guards were presumably still resting in their Manly barracks. At this hour, upriver, the fugitive was attending to his toilette, carrying his spade up the rocky hill where he made a bad-tempered search for a place to do his business. He scraped a small depression in the resistant earth, removed his lower garments and laid them on a tuft of grass. Then he squatted, glaring bleakly at the river. No-one saw him. No-one knew his aching knees. He was Felix Moore and he was aware of his position in his country’s history and thus saw himself from a slightly elevated perspective, deriving some dour satisfaction from his similarity to Dürer’s portrait of the hermit Saint Jerome.

For breakfast he had a bruised apple, after which there was nothing to do but return to punishing the Olivetti. For lunch he took cheese and a single glass of wine. As the hours passed, the pages accumulated and he secured them with a knobbly stone. When this day was ended, he would add these to the treasure already hidden in the black garbage bag at his feet. He was offline, strictly analog. There were various other black bags-in-waiting, all moist and ready to be disposed of, but the bag beneath his feet was dry and clean as a prayer in the wilderness.

Thus had his days passed, like writers’ days have always passed, in solitary labour, and just as housemaids, nuns, priests and religious devotees of all kinds are known to form their bodies to the shape of their
trade, producing lasting physical distortions once recognised as distinct surgical conditions, Felix Moore hunched his wide shoulders around his machine. As he typed he waved his hands and sometimes muttered but his ear was always pitched beyond his own inner tumult, alert for the voices of the river, not only the shouted conversations of fishermen, but the fucking jet-skis, the regular beat of the mail boat, the lonely thud of distant tinnies hammering against the hard unbending river. There were also “gin palaces” and “Tupperware boats” and “hot water tubs” of different varieties and he would abandon his chair from time to time, simply to confirm that he had identified them correctly. What he feared was confused and ever-changing, but on this occasion it was silence, the sudden absence, the cessation of an outboard motor, which caused him to jump upright, then to climb, like Ben Gunn himself, up onto the top of the hut, where he peered down, uncertain as to whether the aluminium craft now gliding silently beneath the mangroves was bringing him supplies or was, finally, the expected assassin.