Amnesia (8 page)

I RETURNED WITH
my gorgeous silk and cashmere suit still not understanding that I had signed a contract with a property developer and not a publisher. I was not yet accustomed to thinking of Woody as my boss. I had told him to wait for me, and he had completely failed to follow my instructions. I pinged him off a pissy email.

It took only a minute for me to discover that he had locked his temperature-controlled wine cellar and left nothing but a can of Foster’s in the fridge.

When I discovered he had been into my computer again I wrote him another email. I said this was not on. If I had been his surgeon would he expect to help me wield the knife?

He still had not answered my first communication but I could not work like this. I opened an account on Dropbox and hid the icon and transferred all my files where he couldn’t read them anymore. That’s how naive I was. Are you sure you wish to delete the file named Angel from your hard drive? Yes, yes, yes again. Cop that, young Harry, as my father would have said.

My source was too important to talk to me just yet? I forgave her. There was plenty to get on with. Woody’s Dexedrine was past its use-by date and therefore tasted like Fruit Tingles on my tongue. He wants me to write intuitively, I thought. I can do much better than that. I already had parts of the story that no-one else could know. This book would be truer than my patron could have dreamed.

By the time dusk settled on Marvellous Melbourne, Wodonga had
still not replied to my emails and I did not give a shit. I was buzzed. I worked all that night, all the next day. When it was dark again I thought it sensible to stop before I had a heart attack. Coming off speed is awful. I already felt the tears in my throat. All my buried past turned sticky, cloying like spoiled velvet, dead roses. I took one Valium and two Temazepam and lay down on the bed with my laptop held like an X-ray machine against my chest.

Just two hours later I woke to find hail driving against the windows at ninety kilometres an hour. The
Age
archive will tell you about that morning, people all over Melbourne were woken by a roar of ice, but behind the laminations of Eureka Tower, it was so quiet I could easily hear the voices in the other room.

It was almost three o’clock in the morning. In the open kitchen I found Celine barefoot, smoking, sipping whisky, making a mess with files and papers on the countertop. She had dumped two cardboard boxes on the stove and it was surprising to see such a fit, pared-down person carried her accumulated life like a bag lady—sun-bleached papers, cartons with sides collapsed, guts naked to the air.

“Hello,” I said.

She frowned.

Was she cool towards me or simply tired? Why were her feet bare?

The Great Wodonga was settled at my desk, fleshy enough for Lucian Freud, his huge thighs pressing against the limits of his tailor, hunched over the laptop which had obviously been removed from my embrace like a teddy bear from a sleeping child.

“The scribe,” he said sarcastically. So they were reading my work again, and of course they had suffered the fate of all snoops—they were upset by what they had discovered.

“So where’s my source?” I demanded. “Is it true you can’t deliver her?” This was what you might call a tactical diversion and I was pleased to see how it changed the mood.

Woody returned the computer. Celine said no, no, no, but I must understand the difficulties. We were all on the same side. I must rest. I must sleep. I must wait until Monday, although that was Easter Monday, so it would probably be a few more days before I got face time.

Woody yawned and stood. I thought, he’s going home to his photogenic new family, but instead he stretched himself out on his four-metre-long
“designer” sofa. Then Celine joined him and there they were, not touching, but close enough for electricity. They had “stayed in touch” all right. Was she fucking the brute? Was this why Wodonga had taken on the cause? His big head was like a mallee root and his feet were ugly, even in his socks. But her feet—dear Jesus, they were just as astonishing as they had been, so many years ago, on a blue candlewick bedspread in Springvale. And of course she was one of those beauties who age like precious fabric, rubbed and rinsed, day after day, year after year so the reds become pink and the blues turn almost white.

Out in the dark world the hail was surely melting, and the hulls of massive clouds were sailing eastwards from the plains, presumably passing over the “secure location” where Gabrielle Baillieux wore a tracker anklet.

What would be a secure location? I wondered, imagining a slender ankle not so far away.

Woody sighed. His eyes were dull and clouded. I thought, he is really pissed off with something I have written. When he spoke he sounded nasty. “Can I give you some advice, mate?”

“We all have to wait for Gaby,” Celine interrupted anxiously. “Even me. The supporters need to approve of us.”

“So Gaby won’t see
you
?”

“Lay off, Felix,” Woody snarled.

But it was not him I was addressing: “Your daughter won’t see
you
,” I said. “That’s it, isn’t it, Celine? Woody’s paid for her and now she won’t even talk to you.”

Woody narrowed his eyes but I was still too high for caution. “If you guys can’t deliver Gaby, there is nothing here for me to do.”

Why did I lie like that? I don’t know. To stir him up? To take control? In any case, it had been a bad idea. He shivered like a horse. I recognised the symptoms. In a minute he would stamp his foot. This would be a bad event, I knew already. Even before he made a firearm of his hand, I understood.

Then here it was, the five-fingered pistol, pointed directly at my head. It was clearly time for Felix Moore to say goodnight.

IN THE MORNING
there was no sign of Woody but I found Celine standing over the busy printer, pale as a corpse, dressed as she had been the night before. Her hair was like dry grass where wild animals have slept. She wearily considered me from behind large dark glasses.

Anyone else would have known that these sunglasses hid a blackened eye. Not me. “Are we going to the beach?” I reached for them and she slapped my hand away.

Anyone with half a brain would have known he had hit her. What I noticed was that she was intent on stealing my pages. “Then just give me back that bag,” I said.

“I need to read what you’ve done.”

I kept my temper. I stayed silent as she carried my writing to the bathroom. I waited for the shower but heard only the lock and then the hair dryer. I made coffee and calmly set out bowls, milk and cornflakes and a very short time later a freshly coiffed Celine was standing at the counter studying my offering from behind her shades. She had been sleeping with him, I was almost certain. He had always been a brute with women.

“Felix,” she said at last. “You were far sweeter than you remember. You were eighteen years old. You were so full of life. Why would you betray me now?”

So I had revealed her mad mother in a draft. Could she have read that? I would fix it. There was no cause for this hysteria. “Don’t go, Celine. I won’t betray you.”

“You won’t mean to. Stay clear of Woody.”

“You’re upset. Give me back my pages.”

“Yes I’m fucking UPSET. You’ve no idea what you’ve got yourself involved with. Don’t you get it: he’s playing the other side.”

But that was the one thing you could not say about Woody. He had been at my side during the dark nights of November 1975. He had coached me in my role for
Drivetime Radio
and when disaster struck he carried me to safety. He was incapable of playing for the other side.

“I dragged you into this,” she said. “Now the game has changed.”

I planned to rescue my pages but somehow she tricked me. “I’ll just be a moment,” she said. A second later the lift pinged and my pages were gone. As they descended in the dark, the rising sun raked the banks of the Yarra and made a mirror of the yellow office tower. It was then I remembered how Woody had pointed his imaginary pistol. I had glimpsed that private passionate creature, the son of the murdered man. My friend’s neck, his lips, his big sloping shoulders suggested a sexual underworld I had always chosen not to see, but this morning I recalled his first wife’s testimony in the divorce court. It was the first time it occurred to me that she might have told the truth.

It was a cold-skied Melbourne day and the blackwood wattles were blooming in the hills. As Flinders Street station turned to gold, I composed a careful email to Wodonga Townes wherein I regretted any distress I may have caused him, or Celine. I didn’t know what I had done, but I was sorry. I did not hold back. I confessed to being both blind and careless. I had no idea how true that was. I could only assume, I wrote, that they had stumbled on my last few weeks’ work, which would seem less grotesque when it was understood I had written it off my face on his Dexedrine. I crawled. I admitted to an ugly excess of ambition, the desire to make the story “rich” and “complex.” My own good sense, I explained, had already led me to conclude that much of the information was too personal. As for my overexcited interpretation of the daughter’s relationship with the mother, I had been out of line.

This was the general sort of abject letter I have had reason to compose many times before. I grovelled in my usual style. Once again I said I was an awful creature.

I sent the email and showered. Then I dressed in my new clothes which I expected to amuse my old fan on his return. It was a ludicrously
expensive shirt and I was struggling with the unexpected cufflinks when I heard the knocking. I had not known there was a door to rap on, but I found it finally, in an unused laundry. If there was a light switch, I could not see it. There was not even a spy hole.

“Who’s that?”

“Felix?” It was a male voice, breathless.

“Who’s that?”

“Jesus Felix, it’s George. I’m knackered.”

What George? I knew no George. Whoever it was, he could walk back down and see the concierge. But then, of course, I wondered, was this what I was waiting for? The door had one of those brass security latches and I placed the hasp firmly over the hook and cracked the door.

I saw an unpleasant green shirt and, for a moment, a hairy arm. A gilt-edged card slid into the narrow crack. I thought, wedding invitation. Indeed I may have been correct, but the invitation’s purpose, in this context, was to flip the latch. Then all hell broke loose. I was rushed by a wide fellow with thinning hair and sweaty beard.

“No,” I shrieked.

I dropped my cufflinks. I took a mop and poked his gut. He ripped my weapon from me and broke it across his big bare knee and came at me with its lethal end. I stood on the cufflink and cut my foot.

“Don’t hurt me.”

“You stupid cunt, no-one’s going to hurt you.”

I had retreated to the living room. There were sharp knives in the kitchen, but of course he would have taken them away from me.

DISGRACED JOURNALIST STABBED TO DEATH.

“For fuck’s sake. Calm down. I’m here to take you to her. Don’t you have a notebook or something?”

I pulled the cufflink from my foot. I took a pen and chequebook and shoved them in my pocket. I backed towards the Steinway. “Her?”

“Nice place,” he said. “Does he really have eight parking spaces?”

I asked him who he was working for but he had different matters on his mind.

“I’m not going to walk down ninety flights,” he said. “Can we get into the car park directly from the lift?”

“I don’t know who you are.”

“I told you, I’m George. I’d have thought you’d remember me. George Olson. From Cottles Bridge.”

“It’s thirty years since I was in Cottles Bridge.”

“I’m not here to have a natter, mate. Give me the fucking key to the fucking lift.”

But you did not need a key to leave, and I soon found myself riding down with the intruder who smelled like old cleaning rags, BO, cigarettes, depression. This was not the sort of contact I had expected.

“Are you taking me to meet a certain young lady?”

“That’s right, mate. I’m going to have to hide you on the way out, OK mate?”

“At a secure location, let’s say.”