Amnesia (19 page)

THE PATH LED
the pair of them up along the contour of a ridge to the foot of a weathered wooden staircase with open treads. Even as his companion stood to one side and encouraged the fugitive to go ahead, the latter had no sense that he had in fact “arrived.” The steps were for the most part overgrown with wild lantana, and if he noticed, in the deep shadow, a set of sturdy posts such as you might use to support a rainwater tank, he was too alarmed by the jungly tangle to pay attention. He believed the pretty red flowers with yellow hearts to be the habitat of shellback ticks.

Beside the banister grew a large rough-barked tree, close enough for him to touch and to note, without enthusiasm, the line of ants streaming upwards in the twisted valleys. This was an ironbark tree he decided. If it had not been an ironbark it would have had to be a ghost gum or manna gum. He acknowledged no other species.

He was tired and hot and his heavy lids and fleshy nose shone with perspiration, yet when he arrived on the threshold he was not particularly giddy. This one-room hut, which would later shake and shudder in the westerly winds (rippling in the gusts like a sailing boat), was on that sunny morning open to the benign south-easterly, and when the dishevelled fugitive arrived at the top of the steps he was surprised to find his quarters hospitable. Of the many things his eyes might alight upon, he did see a garden spade, hanging from a hook inside the door but he overlooked the words “Shit, Horse” burned into its wooden shaft. There was so much else to look at. The glass-less “window” above the old porcelain
sink was occupied by a huge elephant-skinned angophora (ghost gum, he thought). The smooth pink and grey bark was luminous in the sun and the characteristic rusty blemish on the trunk harmonised so well with the stained sink that the latter seemed artfully intentional.

He kept his box clutched against his soft stomach, staring at the tree which he would later know in quite another way.

I’ll take that, the boy said. Meaning the visitor’s possessions.

But the man’s belligerent attention had now shifted to some half-dozen shelves that had been fixed in place beside the window. On one of the lower shelves, abutting an assortment of canned beans and Campbell’s soups, stood a number of four-litre casks labelled “Hunter Valley Red,” a description that gave no assurance that the wine inside had not been oaked with a shovel full of chips, stirred with a garden rake, and strained to reach its present “market niche.” The visitor made a dove sound. His cheeks hollowed (briefly) and his mouth puckered (privately). He placed his box on the rough counter top beside the sink and, being unconscious of his own sigh, plunged his hand deep in his pocket.

Don’t wash the eggs, the boy said, not until you want to use them.

What?

Eggs.

Felix then saw, beside his box of evidence, a dark blue plastic ice-cream tub containing a motley collection of eggs—small, large, brown, white, not one of which was untouched by shit. He stared at his guide solemnly. He nodded, to register his understanding, as he would soon nod in response to fresh apples, pumpkins.

Typewriter, the boy said, scratching at his calf and leaving contrails of white across the brown skin.

How had he not seen it? Whoever had prepared the accommodation had positioned the machine thoughtfully in the middle of a folding table of the type once available for $10 at any army disposals. Had they known it was for him? Had the “supporters” read his books? What did any of them really think about what they were doing?

An Olivetti fucking Valentine identical to the one he had destroyed in 1975.

It was of course a bright red little portable. Now he removed it from its sturdy plastic case and gently touched the spools of ribbon there revealed.

He turned to the boy who grinned.

Of course, thought the fugitive, there is no electricity. He sat in the awful canvas chair and selected a single type bar, the letter L, raising it from its nest, examining it so closely that the boy might have been reminded of a naturalist tenderly banding the thin legs and long, agile toes of a white-faced heron.

Having, in the course of his hard-typing years, broken the fonts from the type bars of so many Olivetti portables, the fugitive was at once astonished that such a thing might still exist and touched by its frailty and appalled by its clear inability to withstand what he must now do to it.

While turning his wide bookish back to the curious boy, he plunged his right hand in his pocket and removed a sheaf of that distinctively slippery Australian currency, clearly designed for sneaky business.

The boy, meanwhile, had placed reams of paper on the table, found the mosquito coils, had picked up an orange pumpkin from a pile in the corner of the room. Clearly it had been feasted on by possums so he did what anyone else would have done i.e. he threw it out the window. As there was no glass or screen to impede its progress the pumpkin crashed like a tumbling wombat through the bush.

Of course the fugitive was alarmed, but only very briefly. His greatest concern was that he would be compelled to drink inferior wine. So as the pumpkin exploded on the rocks he revealed his hand.

The boy saw the slippery money and was suddenly in a frantic hurry to get away. She’ll be right, mate, he said. Fridge, cooker, matches, gas, he continued. The old man came at him with his legal tender, red and orange like a bird-of-paradise flower.

Water, the boy cried, and turned the tap on and off.

You could do me a favour, the fugitive said, perhaps too desperately.

The boy held up his hands and pushed at the air between them. I’m fine, mate.

Could you get me a case of McLaren Vale shiraz, and drop it back.

I’m sorry.

I’ll make it worth your while.

I’m only sixteen.

Get your brother, anyone.

Mate, no, I can’t come back.

I’m not going to see you again?

That’s the idea, mate.

But someone else is going to come?

I couldn’t say.

Why not for Chrissake?

Couldn’t say.

Couldn’t bloody say?

Kero for the lamps, he said. My ride is here. I got to go.

Take a twenty anyway.

Good on you. Mate. Good luck and that.

And with that he was out and gone, tripping lightly down the stairs, leaping like a goat down the path, bounding so fast that the new resident, following him, bravely if not elegantly, arrived in time to see a tinny was in the process of nosing out of the mangroves.

Help, he called.

The sun glinted on the aluminium and broke into the shade. He removed his shoes and dropped his trousers and with his long jacket flapping in such a way as to make his sturdy white legs, his point of greatest physical insecurity, appear even shorter than normal, he set off beneath the mangroves, mud squelching obscenely around his urban toes.

And so it was that the “most controversial journalist of his generation” was abandoned, untrousered, like some creature in a Sidney Nolan painting (
The old man who was up bathing himself in the dam
) and he soon saw, through the light-netted mangrove leaves, another aluminium dinghy and a woman with long blonde hair, like Julie Christie, he imagined, or at least Celine as she set off to lead the revolution from the front ranks of the 1972 Melbourne Moratorium. Squatting he could see her, the tanned skin, the hair flying behind.

Fuck fuck fuck. He proceeded up the narrow track carrying his trousers, socks, his shoes, suddenly aware of how soft he had become, a frail old fellow pricked by sticks, stones, and those little stabbing bindi-eyes which he had thought existed only in suburban lawns.

Finally, standing at the open window, with his trousers still flung across his shoulder, he stretched his legs sufficiently to wash his feet in the sink. He managed to find a tumbler, open a wine cask, and pull out its wrinkled concertinaed genitalia. Shuddering, he poured a purple glassful and then found, in the small gas refrigerator, a lump of cheddar
the size of a house brick. He cut himself a slice, and was about to taste it when, with a great rush of winds, a fucking kookaburra arrived from nowhere, took his cheese in its bucket beak, and flew out the door.

He remained then at the sink, for a long time, looking balefully out through the foliage to the blue glint of the water. He accustomed himself to the wine. He was a highly specialised creature, he thought, sometimes, on a good day, capable of a single function, not much more.

He dried his feet with his trousers and laid them carefully in a parallelogram of sunshine beside the desk. He then wound a single sheet of paper into the Valentine and found it far from blank.

To Mr. Felix Moore, posing as a radical, it read, and continued thus: We know exactly what you did and did not do in 1975. Wouldn’t your fans and readers be shocked to discover their great radical didn’t have the balls. You were just like our parents: down on the ground crying how unfair it was.

The roller of the Olivetti turned, thus revealing:

It won’t help us to reveal your sad moral failure, but it would help you to honour the gift you have here been given. This woman is a human being and it will be your honour to celebrate her real life without hysteria.

Celebrate her real life without hysteria
. Celine Baillieux had used these words in Moroni’s.

All you need is to be humble, the note continued. If you can manage this we, her friends, have the ability to publish you digitally around the world. We are legion. Ten million readers are now within your reach.

Yes, right. He twisted the corner of his wine-stained lips and began to bash the keys. His fingers hurt like hell but he would not dishonour her by being her hagiographer. He would write or overwrite until he bled. Go celebrate your arse, he thought. Ten million readers. Bullshit.

MANY HAWKESBURY MORNINGS
had now passed. As this new one began, a grey lizard, aka a skink, a member of the family Scincidae, a nervous neckless creature with tiny legs, made its cautious way up the pitted trunk of the angophora and stopped, still half in the night. A butcherbird sang like Ornette Coleman, fluffed out its untidy chest, and shat. The windows were filled with smudgy dawn but the voices of two women could be heard, sometimes in unison, sometimes in discord, then in lone confession, and this variation was emphasised or diminished by the man in puffy overalls, who sat on the edge of his desk or kitchen table, using a large discoloured toe to raise and lower the volumes of two quite different tape recorders.

The river was opaque, a greenish grey. The crack of a whipbird cut through the human voices. The magpies and lorikeets and king parrots added their calls and the pink early sun, finally, revealed the awful hairy glory of the fugitive.

The “most controversial journalist of his age” would have thought it pathetic to grow a beard deliberately, but the razor had been left on the top of the beam above his bed and now he had discovered it … well, too late. He had a “sort of” beard and it had shocked him to see its reflection in a spoon, his sensual mouth all hidden, leaving just the fleshy nose and his creased and pitted bark. He looked a hundred.

The women were still speaking, as they had done for days, and he let them go together, waiting for … he did not know. Of 1975, not one single word, no rage, no pity, no word about revenge. He no longer cared.
He had received so many different instructions on how to tell the story, the only sane thing was to let it show itself, to wait until it crept out of its hole. Sometimes he was very patient. Sometimes he hated the women, sometimes he was amused by how often they agreed with the person they complained of. If they had been butcherbirds they might have almost qualified, in spite of all their acknowledged opposition, as a “bonded pair.”

Sometimes he reported their comments. Almost always he “fixed them up” and oftentimes he distilled Gaby’s slang into something more worthy of the ideas she was expressing. Would you trust a woman who spoke of “lossitude”?

In the Supreme Court of New South Wales the judge had asked him did he make up quotes.

He admitted freely that he not only made up quotes but had also been accused of making up quotes, “but never of the quotes I actually made up.”

When they did not laugh, he attempted a quick lesson in the nature of dialogue, explaining how the actual words themselves were far less important than was generally thought by laymen. It was more accurate, he said, to understand the spoken word as the product of the tectonic forces working below the surface of the human drama. It was these forces (none other than the insistence of a character’s greed, love, ambition, etc.) which were important. It was these forces which the writer had to know. It was as a result of them banging against each other that the dialogue emerged.

The prosecutor asked him if he could report an entire conversation which he had not witnessed. He said he never claimed that ability.

Then what ability do you have?

He compared himself to a forensic palaeontologist which caused unfriendly laughter. But he insisted on it. His job was to dig up the bones, piece them together, and from all the known information about diet and habitat, be able to construct the creature itself.