Amnesia (4 page)

“You’re going to write about a traitor,” he said, watching me stuff the envelope into my jacket. “Being the mug you are, you will fall in love with her. The only problem is: she will most likely be put to death.”
I was about to remind him that Australia had no death penalty but he retreated to a private bathroom in the office and peed so long and loud I knew he was showing off his prostate operation.

“I’ve got the table at Moroni’s,” he said when he emerged. “Do you need a comb?”

“Certainly not.”

I did not need a comb to gain admittance to Moroni’s. I had eaten there a hundred times, with Gough Whitlam, John Cain—that is, a Prime Minister and a State Premier whose speech I had once rewritten in that very restaurant, assisted, it might be added, by Moroni’s lethal grappa.

The maître d’ was named Abramo. He was always the same, like a benign James Joyce with perfect vision. Abramo had good reasons to be fond of me as he shortly demonstrated by ignoring Wodonga and warmly welcoming my slovenly self. He showed me to a corner table where there sat an unusual individual. First, she was a woman, the only one in all the hushed besuited room. She was wearing a charcoal silk Shanghai Tang jacket with a brick-red lining and her haircut was a million-dollar job, by which I mean short and simple and sustained by strong, almost springy, silver hair. I was wrong about her age, and so would you have been. She had all those looks that come from great cheekbones, the sort of structured beauty a hundred years of Gauloises could not corrode.

As I approached she stood to shake my hand. She said her name but I did not catch it. I assumed she was the publisher.

“Felix Moore,” I said. I heard Woody groan. He could not believe I didn’t recognise the famous face.

“Felix,” she said. “It’s Celine.”

I began to speak but could not end the sentence. The traitor’s mother leaned across and kissed me on both burning cheeks.

IT WAS NOT
simply a famous face I failed to recognise. We had known each other for years and years. Celine and I had been two of 347 freshmen at Monash University. There had been no second- or third- or fourth-year students. Indeed there had not been a Monash University the year before. The so-called “campus” was a raw construction site twenty kilometres east of Moroni’s. There were acres of hot shadeless car park across which a young woman walked in stiletto heels.

This Celine was a vision, like the redhead on the Redhead matches box. She was in no way like the woman at the table in Moroni’s. She was much taller, fuller breasted. She had flouncing skirts, gorgeous bouncing fair hair.

The woman at Moroni’s was famous. Her lips were full but also pale, carved in soapstone. The nineteen-year-old had a violently red mouth and was dramatically “accessorised” by what we might now call her “posse,” a very dangerous-looking collection of young men who I immediately decided would have to be my friends. There was a beatnik, a poet, a queeny boy, a sort of Hell’s Angel, and finally her lover, Sandy Quinn, an older man in a linen jacket who certainly had not come from high school. It would be years before I learned a trade union was paying him to go to university. I did not notice any sadness in his eyes. I saw his beard, sun-bleached, trim and sculpted to his jaw. I took his silence to be both powerful and judgemental.

“I was a total dork,” I told her, and this was true.

“He was very cute,” she said to Woody.

“So he was a randy little dog,” said Woody. “Cop a feels.”

This caused a silence. I thought of my tumescent adventure with her father’s photograph. Abramo filled my glass.

I had been short and scruffy with the nasal vowels I had learned in Bacchus Marsh. My hair was short and less clean than it might have been. I did not have the requisite sloppy sweater. Celine’s gang had been at first amused, then appalled, then made completely rat-faced by my presumption—that I was fit to be their friend. They said things which would have made a lesser person run away and cry.

But I was the son of a man who would stand in a muddy potato paddock all afternoon if that was what it took to sell a Ford. Those were my genetics.

Celine never thought me cute. But she saw my will, which was well in advance of my other attractions and was therefore dazzling. One afternoon in Springvale she told me I would be the only one of all of them who would make something of my life. Now she was about to make her own prediction come true. She would give me sole access to her outlaw daughter. So watch me, I thought, watch me do the rest.

The waiters had surely seen my recent humiliation on television and I was pleased they would now be witnesses to this redemption, those tall private men with white aprons and elegant grey moustaches. Now they saw the queen of stage and screen kiss me on my raddled cheek.

“To Felix,” she said and clinked my glass.

“I am in disgrace,” I said, referring of course to PANTS ON FIRE, but also, in my own way, underlining my outcast character which could never really be acceptable. I did not reveal that I had information about her life that she herself was unaware of, but I most definitely hinted, in my subtle way, that an honourable writer needs to be a scorpion as well. A writer serves the story. He dare not weigh the private consequences.

“It is not you who are in disgrace,” she said. “You shamed them, as usual.” And I recalled that very particular fire in her grey eyes, her characteristic arousal at the prospect of a little danger.

“You might have lost the case but you made them look as corrupt and venal as they are.”

Yes, I had fought the good fight all my life but I had also become an awful creature along the way.

THE BEGINNING OF
the academic year had been stinking hot. The rain fell in buckets and the steam rose off the lawn where I had recently stood beside my father while the Chancellor of Monash University delivered his opening address. I was the first member of my family to get past the lower reaches of high school. I had no conscious knowledge of why I had chosen a university with no cloisters, no quadrangles, no suck-up colleges, no private school boys with their Triumph TR3s. Instead I had chosen the sea of mud that had been a market garden, where the footpaths were not yet paved, where the campus was surrounded by light industry and the cream brick homes of those who worked beneath those sawtoothed roofs. My choice was not political. I had no politics I was aware of.

This was three years before the Gulf of Tonkin, three years before conscription for Vietnam, seven years before the Monash Labor Club invented revolution, which would involve—I was given this message personally—being put against a wall and shot.

We students walked on narrow paths, single file like cows on their way to milking. We returned to landladies whose husbands were fitters and turners but were introduced as engineers. We were barbarians to our hosts to whom we delivered our Monash mud (PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES) and splashing urine (PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT).

I am not sure that Celine’s high heels were muddy as she later claimed, but there is no doubt she had peed standing at the urinal. Everybody mentioned it. I was impressed by Sando’s crumpled linen
jacket and did not know enough to buy my own clothes second-hand. I tried too hard, most likely. I listened to everything they said. As a result I got the train from Clayton into Flinders Street and found, not without some difficulty, both
Ulysses
and
The Cantos
of Ezra Pound. I carried these heavy volumes back to the suburban bedroom I shared with a chemistry student from Wonthaggi. There was just one desk. When that was occupied I read lying down or wrote whilst kneeling at my bed. I shoplifted an expensive commentary on
Ulysses
and made margin notes on the significance of “Agenbite of inwit,” for instance. “Inwit” should have been “inwyt.” Did Sandy know James Joyce couldn’t spell? Did he understand that “U.P.:up” was meant to suggest urination and erection? I kneeled. I annotated. I stored away my ammunition. Beyond the sad lace curtains, parallel with my bed, was a grey wood-paling fence. One kilometre away, the electric train line was also parallel. In a long black cape, Barry Humphries stalked the streets.

It should have been obvious that I was not suited to engineering, but my father’s ambition was to see me established as Shire Engineer of Bacchus Marsh. He bought me an expensive slide rule which I never learned to use. I faked my physics experiments, working back from the correct value of
g
which I still recall as 980 cm per sec per sec.

I had no idea that I was on the path to catastrophic failure. Indeed, anything seemed possible. Celine’s friends were drama majors, psychologists, political philosophers and poets. They discussed Description, Narration, Exposition, Argumentation. Had I been capable, I would have faked this too, but all I had to offer them were some controversial facts: Agenbite of inwit. U.P.:up.

My clever father never had a need to develop a treatise or present an abstract. Nor had this skill been required of me at high school up in Ballarat. I had sat my matriculation confident I was a whiz at chemistry and mathematics, but I arrived in Celine’s magic circle with four plain passes and no clue as to how to play their game. They were reading Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Jarry. Any radical thought I might offer—that there might be no God for instance—was tedious to them, and they seemed embarrassed I should mention it. I was staggered that, while they had not known each other previously, they seemed to be continuing a conversation which they had started years before. They all knew rhinoceros was a play.

More than once they told me to piss off, but I had chosen them, and I would stay until they saw my worth.

The motorcyclist rarely spoke to me. Sandy Quinn had the habit of smiling while I talked. Years later he would tell me he had been anxious on my behalf and had only smiled to give me some support.

Celine’s body could not have been at all as I imagined it but she would always be a physical actor who could make you believe her waist was smaller and her legs longer than in real life. She was not as clever as I thought she was. Sometimes she was cold to me, other times quite tender. Once she mussed up my hair in public, and perhaps she was as much on my side as she later claimed, but she was always, unfailingly, relentlessly amused to see me run to fetch the balls thrown by the poet. The poet had a long square-shouldered body and a freckled face that might have been bland if you could not see that he was, in his very quiet brown-eyed way, capable of absolutely anything.

“Catcher in the Rye,”
the poet said mildly. “You said you read it, but you didn’t, did you? Not really.” His manner was so agreeable. It was hard to believe he was tormenting me.

The leather boy had his head down rolling cigarettes, one after the other, lining them up on the table edge then tucking in their hairy ends.

“Not really, no.”

The poet had a smile like someone sucking on a match. “Too American I suppose?”

“Stop it Andrew,” said Sandy. “Enough.”

“So Felix,” Andrew persisted, “it’s Patrick White for you and Salinger Go Home?”

I had not read Patrick White either. “Sometimes that’s necessary,” I said.

“So, with literature, you are Australia first.”

It was time to take this idea and run with it.

“For me it’s the Battle of Brisbane,” I said, “every bloody day, mate.”

The leather boy snorted through his nose, but of course not even Sandy had heard of the Battle of Brisbane.

“There was no
battle
of Brisbane,” he said. “You must mean the Brisbane
Line
. We were ready to give the Japs everything north of Brisbane.”

“No, Sandra.”

Even now I am ashamed I spoke to him like that. I was too defended to even glimpse his extraordinary capacity for empathy. I called him
Sandra and it was as if a starling spat at him. He smiled wanly. “I think you’ll find the Japs bombed Darwin and Broome in 1942,” he said.

I was a scrappy little fellow and I thought I was being condescended to. “It was not a battle
with
the Japs,” I said. “The Americans were in Brisbane,” I said. “Brisbane was MacArthur’s headquarters. So you tell me, Sandy, what was the other garrison in Brisbane in 1942?”