Amnesia (25 page)

Mrs. Matovic wrapped her arms beneath her breasts and the pale circles printed on her sleeves were very beautiful and strange like suckers on an octopus. She wore no shoes or slippers and her feet were remarkable with no veins, perfect straight white toes.

She was staring at the Marimekko dress, as if it were someone she knew or might like to meet.

Can I help you? she said, not friendly in the least.

I was looking for Frederic.

Why would that be?

I’m Celine’s daughter. You know me. I go to school with Frederic.

Mrs. Matovic lit a Marlboro, tapping her finger against the white cylinder, not to loosen any ash. At last she said, We’re a private family.

I thought other people lived here.

Yes, we don’t like people sneaking in behind our backs. Celine’s daughter should come to the front door and knock.

Can I talk to him now I’m here?

Just knock on the front door.

You mean now?

Sorry, darling, yes I do.

Walk out to The Avenue and come round the front on Royal Parade?

That’s it, she said.

Gaby had imagined she liked Meg Matovic and her interesting artful choices and her brave distinctive son but in fact she was a creepy thing that would squirt ink into your eye.

Thank you, Gaby said and walked to the back gate, holding her hat on her head like a girl at Sunday school. She closed the gate very carefully and checked the latch. She walked slowly along The Avenue, for as far as Frederic’s mother could see her, and then with all the dread of a bad girl being sent to see the principal, turned into Royal Parade. She did not know Frederic’s street number but only one of the houses had not been yuppied up. That one had peeling paint on its front door and this was where she knocked.

Frederic answered in white Indian garments, pyjama pants and a sort of shirt. He was like a waxwork dummy.

You better not come here, he said.

She smelled cigarette smoke and knew the squid mother was lurking back there in the dark. Sorry?

He could at least have made a funny face, but no. You have to call first, he said. Telephone ahead.

I didn’t have the number.

My mum will give it to you if she wants you to call. We’re pretty private.

Gaby mimed her outrage but he would make no sign to her, and he remained there like a great big pudding.

It’s all right, she said, I don’t want it anyway.

She returned to Royal Parade with her face already wet and her nose running. She got snot marks on her perfect hat. The stupid magpies went on carolling and the stupid sky was a cloudless blue and the stupid Sydney Road continued to carry its trucks and cars north across the dreary bluestone plains made in the days when volcanoes vomited across the future suburbs, and streams of lava ran like toffee, pooling in the hollows up to sixty metres deep. Liquid basalt spewed from her chest and rolled down the Merri Creek, boiling eels, and sending blazing wallabies to spread fire through bush.

At Macarthur Place she threw herself so hard upon the bed it broke. When the doorbell rang her eyes were bleeding black across her cheeks and she did not care to hide the damage.

There was Frederic: cruel, in stovepipes. She threw her fists to break his chest.

I had to say that, he said, finally grabbing for her wrist.

Let go. Your mother is just rude.

He released her and she hit him in the stomach.

Jeez, lay off.

She will decide to grant me her phone number? Jeez.

Quit it. Don’t hit me.

What if I knocked on the front door? How would you even hear me out the back?

Frederic could have said my father is a thief, mother is a fence. But he said nothing and she began to cry.

He lifted her wet hand and brushed his lips across her knuckles.

What did I do wrong? she asked. Just tell me what I did.

His dark eyes were unnaturally still, more like a nurse’s than a teenage boy’s.

I’ll get you your own key, he said and, with his index finger drew a line through the wet kohl on her cheek. That frightened her, the key. It was Saturday morning, not yet ten o’clock.

ON A RED OLIVETTI VALENTINE,
the man known as Moore-or-less-correct reported that Gaby Sando and Frederic were on a Melbourne tram, travelling north along Lygon Street to Brunswick, past clothing factories, cyclone fences, faded signs for English lessons. They entered familiar Holmes Street. They felt the tram shake itself and do a dogleg dance and Gaby tumbled into Frederic who smelled of leatherwood honey.

Everything was fine and sunny: clouds the size of little farts. The tram rattled north, passed all the cast-iron verandahs that, at that date, had survived the council’s planned destruction of all memory. They got off at what was meant to be a posh street but the footpath was in Coburg and therefore narrow. Sando was bristly and bloodshot as if he had been playing pool all night.

The street had a snotty name but the trees were weedy, starved of love, survivors with hessian bandages. Gaby was shocked by the cracks in the concrete, the lonely quiet, the little houses shrunk inside their borders, alone, disconnected. They saw a malevolent cluster of boys like rats with mullets, operating on a Datsun 240Z, roaring, revving, sending oily smoke across the intersection. One lay on the mudguard, deep into the engine, his plumber’s crack shining at the sky.

Frederic smiled excessively and annoyed the boys with mullets who thought he was a poofter cunt. He was blatantly some unknown quantity who would get her father bashed. They escaped into the dead end of a suburban street, unscathed, and she understood that the liver-brick shitheap right in front of them would be, forever, That Coburg Place.

Broken pickets. Weird old flowers. Red-hot pokers. Cactus with shark’s teeth growing along the edges of its flesh. The house was one hundred years old, at least, dying in deep shadow, with a wide low slate roof and verandah tiles like a mansion you pay to visit on a boring Sunday, blues and terracotta which turned out, in this case, to be smeared with illegal skid marks. The garden smelled of gas and cat’s piss and there was a tall palm tree with a dead frond. Complete and utter lossitude. She could have cried.

Wow, said Frederic. Oh wow. Mr. Quinn, do you have a key?

Sando kicked the front door and it swung into the gloom. The previous inhabitants had lit a fire in the middle of the living room and burned a hole to the centre of the earth. The injured floorboards were wide and waxy and marked with motorcycle skid marks.

This was their clubhouse, right? Frederic asked. The White Knights? This can be so good.

Sando took Gaby’s hand in both of his and led her, in this ungainly way, from one room to the next, through violent debris of a type you might not expect to see unless you were, for some unexpected reason, on the run, frightened for your life.

There’s a lot of room, she said.

So cool, said Frederic and she did not know what to think of him.

Plaster hung in shards held by ancient horsehair, moving gently in the breeze.

Sando held his hands out: Will it be OK? he asked his daughter.

She saw it in his eyes: someone had been murdered here but he had bought it because it was so cheap. Celine would have a shit fit. It would be Gaby’s job to make it all OK. And it would be Frederic’s talent to know all this without being told. He understood the role. He was Matty Matovic’s son and therefore knew the cost of lead and copper. He had attended auctions all over Melbourne. He knew the value of these internal stone walls. He knew the squiddy underbelly inner-city pubs and midnight runs, and he would, for his reward, have her beside him in the tunnels of the world of Zork.

He perched fearlessly on the corner post of the front fence and saw what no-one else could see, that the leak in the bedroom corresponded with one broken slate, that “this must be Gaby’s room.”

“Gaby’s room” had a narrow window with a view of an empty laneway.
It’s quiet, he said and his voice made her tailbone hum and he was being the power, the generator.

We can get kids from school to help, he said.

No, she said sharply.

Why not?

It’s not your house.

But I’m helping you.

Gaby, honey, said her father.

He’s not helping me, she said. He’s creeping me out. I don’t even know him.

And she saw Frederic’s hurt face through the hot blur of tears. Her father was restraining her, holding her, squeezing all her breath out. She wished to be back in her own home which was being taken from her, mother gone, father crumpling like paper in a bin.

FREDERIC REFUSED
to be offended, no matter what she said to him. He already knew what she was like. He said that. He may have even been correct. But then he told her he would teach her to code, and assumed that was just so attractive. How totally up himself. She was a girl so she must want him.

On Monday, after everything she had said to him in Coburg, he tried to catch her eye. Even while she ignored him she wrote “Frederic” in her notebook and scribbled over it, obliterating him forever. She went into the loo and ripped him out and tore him up so small no-one would ever know what she had done.

She got back home and a telegram arrived—the first telegram she had seen that was not in a movie. She signed for it and left it on the table for her father who threw it in the trash when he was finished with it. Soon it was covered with spaghetti bolognaise, so obviously it was from Celine.

Is it Frederic? her father asked. Is that why you’re so sad?

That was
him
? Saying
she
was sad? What had been in the telegram?

I’m studying Cicero if you want to know.

Gaby, I’m not sure Frederic likes girls.

Oh aren’t you? she shouted, without warning, even to herself. Really? she yelled at him. She threw her book on the floor. Who was he to talk? What a mope. Letting Celine get away with all that shit.

He patted his big hands before his chest. He said, it was just my feeling.

And what are you, a homophobe?

It was as if she had slapped his face. Oh God, she thought, please Daddy, don’t be drunk.

Why don’t you just go and get her back? she said. Just get her and bring her home.

Then he was
offended
and shook his head at her, like some awful TV actor trying to convey disappointment. Then he stormed out of the house. Up to the Albion, of course.

And this was just one of many incidents that occurred in the two weeks when Celine was sending telegrams from Moggs Creek. On another night: Gaby had been looking through the cardboard box of Dylan Neil Young Jefferson Airplane Beatles. There was Rickie Lee Jones doing “Chuck E’s in Love.” She had danced to this track with her mother when she was a little girl, Celine crooning.
He learn all of the lines, and every time he/don’t stutter when he talk
.

On this night, Gaby thought, Frederic! (
And it’s true! It’s true!
) And then, the needle scraped across the vinyl and her father was home and the vinyl was flying through the open doorway out onto the dirty street, and all her insides were cold spaghetti. Her father was insane. Why would anyone do a thing like that?

Because—duh—it was a song about an actor. Celine was with an actor. Shagging. It made her sick. He was not even a Christian so was he putting up with Celine’s bullshit to make a happy family? Was he turning the other cheek? If so, don’t do it on her account. She stood on a kitchen chair and pulled the hems of Celine’s dresses, tugging, dragging until clothes pegs popped and clattered against the wall. She twisted clothes hangers beyond their useful shapes and the room got lighter and brighter until finally the ceiling was all bare and she didn’t know who she was cross with but she fetched the black rubbish bags from the kitchen and stuffed them full of Celine, five full bags of them and tied them up with yellow ties. She was a cat running screeching over lily pads, nothing to support her, each pad sinking as it took her weight. She waited and waited but her father stayed upstairs. Finally she locked the front and back doors and the window to the lane.

At her father’s door she called to him. Are you OK?