Amnesia (29 page)

GABY SAID,
We had to deal with Dad aka the Thief aka Matty Matovic. He was snake-eyed, slim with a pool-hall hunch, always stalking around some imaginary table. He was drop-dead handsome until you saw his missing teeth. Also: he was bitter. He favoured white T-shirts and lamb’s-wool sweaters, even on a rainy night. Like when we were summoned, Gaby said, to his back corner of Toto’s with his unsold copies of
Direct Action
, grey and sodden, on the table. He looked more like a betting man, but he really was a fence, Gaby said: I thought, I have seen a gun. I have seen a fence. My life was turning out quite well.

Frederic’s father wouldn’t look at me, but I could not help looking at him, so creepy but also graceful, rolling a cigarette with his long yellow fingers. He felt me watching and he twisted his body sarcastically—which he could really do—and tossed the menu at his son.

Saw your mate Peli, he said to Frederic. We waited. His eyes were in that state we then called OWTH (offended-waiting-to-happen). Frederic hid behind his fringe, studying the menu.

Hey. Dad rapped the table.

I could have slapped his face.

Frederic said he would like lasagna and a can of Coke.

Hey.

Frederic flicked his hair back. What?

You, he said, having no clue he was addressing a genius.

Your mate, the Thief said. Peli. You never told me he worked for Telecom. He helped me shift some stuff to Melton Self Storage in his van.

I’m hungry, Frederic said.

I knew the Thief would never pay for me so I said I was on a diet.

He put his stained hand across his mouth, just like a girl whispering in class. You know what trashing is? he hissed. Of course we knew. Like trashing a hotel room? I suggested just to watch him curl his lip. No, sweetheart, like picking up the trash from Telecom.

I told him I didn’t think that would be his sort of thing. He looked at me. Up and down, as if he were astonished I could speak. He said, Girlie, you wouldn’t know “my thing” if it bit you on the bum.

I knew what Break and Enter was. I said that sounded like what he had in mind, but he wasn’t interested in me.

You’d only be taking waste paper from the bloody government, he told Frederic. If they wanted it they wouldn’t throw it out.

Frederic said he wasn’t sure.

What if I talked Mum into reinstating your phone line?

She won’t, Frederic said, but he looked my way, signalling: we wanted this.

Not interested, son?

Frederic licked his lips. I thought, oh shit, is this going where I think it is?

You and Peli. He’s got the wheels. And you’ll know what’s worth snaffling.

He tried and failed to tousle his son’s hair. Then he called the waitress and considered her body and ordered one lasagna and a glass of water.

He told us that his mate had told him that they had some interesting devices in those Telecom exchanges. He knew they were devices that should be studied. His mate could use the hardware, but he reckoned the waste paper was where the money was, thousands of Saudi credit card numbers, people who think nothing of putting a BMW on their Amex.

Dad, your mate’s a wanker.

But all Dad wanted, he said, was for Frederic and Peli to pick up the recycling. He didn’t need them to hang around reading it. They could pick it up and piss off home. Study it at their leisure there. If they found anything interesting, they could copy it down. They could have it. It was theirs. They could even share it with Miss Uptight here. Then Peli could bring the bag to him in Brunny.

You’ll get ripped off, Dad. You won’t know what you’re selling.

So you don’t want your own telephone line?

Apparently Gaby and Frederic wanted a telephone line more than anything that I, Felix Moore, could ever imagine. So when Frederic stood up, when it was clear he intended to walk away, when Gaby should have been relieved, she was, she admitted to me, disappointed.

Frederic said he didn’t want the lasagna. He would think about the offer.

Bullshit, said Matty Matovic. Is that fucking mascara running down your face?

Gaby had to rush to catch him at the door and then, in the spotlights of the cars turning right from Queensberry Street, he kissed her and she held him and he told her how he loved her and that was all that mattered in his life. He said he wanted to marry me, she said. I think I cried. We walked back to Park-o-tight together, and I was in love, and I do believe it was then, on that night, I learned that deep in the maze of Telecom the techs scrawled user names and passwords, restricted 800 numbers, “secure” information that they then threw in the bin, scraps of paper, cigarette packs, the backs of envelopes, on yellow dockets. There the honey massed, in thick black plastic bags, in dumpsters, a harvest worthy of a dungeon and a poison moat. Pick up key.

In the “twisty little passages” of the computer underground, Gaby said, there was a species dedicated to the collection of discarded information, furtive scholars, jesters, fools, hackers, phreakers, practitioners of the black art of recycling who picked the locks of Telecom exchanges and, like dung beetles busy with their ancient occupation, rolled their holy shit into the night. The passwords and user names would be useful in so many ways e.g. when you got an actual phone line you could go online free of charge, and clicky clacky there you would be: lying in bed with your BFF, jumping off the Hamburg springboard, shooting the shit, hanging out on the bridge where no-one knew the girl was a girl.

Dad was a thief, but for Fallen Angel and Undertoad (as they would be known) the highest value of this information was best appreciated in terms of the culture of the gift.

If you were us, Gaby said on tape, above the noise of running water, you gave the info to other hackers in a BBS. One hard-to-get 800 number got us invited into a private BBS, then past the rope of a restricted BBS we never guessed existed. Fallen Angel and Undertoad were quickly
cool. They talked to Justum. They met Quark. They got higher up the pecking order.

Peli was never a thief. No-one ever asked him to be one either. Even Frederic had never picked a lock before but when the first one popped, Gaby said, he was so completely hacktified. We were IN. Running, white bright neon light. Flinders Lane exchange, 3 a.m. Sunday morning, oh man, you cannot know, IN IN IN, black trash bags, bat wings, unimaginable, to ourselves I mean. We were so swift, so cool, and back outside before Peli got to the second level on Tetris. Who knew he had Tetris syndrome? Go, go, I screamed. Go, go, go. And he was stuck to the screen like a fly to flypaper, illuminated, and the bloody cops cruised past. But nothing happened, because nothing ever happened, and the only consequence was: Meg finally placed an order to reinstall a phone line. Then we would have everything we needed to fly around the world, like they say Satan does, all night. We would enter through the weak front doors of systems, build our own backdoors to guarantee return even when the admin dopes got off their arses and fixed the hole. You’ve got no idea how easy it was back then, she told me. People would use their own names for passwords. We would wipe away our meece tracks, return through that back door to read pissed-off messages from admins who we roasted, toasted, flamed to fucking death. We abandoned Zork forever.

Undertoad and Fallen Angel both had school of course. There was Ritalin involved in consequence, and this was the giddy, high, overstimulated time, the night-before-Christmas sort of thing, when they were innocent but not at all, when they lay naked together and did things they thought they had invented and knew the possibilities of life were about to become wilder and weirder than anything their hippie parents dreamed. They were bound together, grown together, wrapped like strangler figs around each other’s trunk, inseparable, waiting for a dial tone.

FREDERIC’S MOTHER HAD
her temperament upgraded with a huge TV, a VCR, a refrigerator, two air conditioners. Then everyone was perfectly sedated, playing Mario Bros. Suddenly Meg liked me, Gaby said. It was an unexpected side effect.

Stringy Meg Matovic folded her black balletic legs beneath her and snuggled up beside the Blondie child. She flicked ash onto the floor and begged the child to teach her Mario Bros. Technically, she was unteachable, the most awful player you ever saw, yelling, screaming, falling into blackness, hitting the invisible block, being killed by the Firebar, missing all the Bloobers, a giggling fool, happy to die at the hands of Goombas and Koopas and Buzzy Beetles, shouting like a soccer mum. Meg was possibly bipolar. She was certainly the first parent Gaby met who was a blatant stoner. She crashed her van on the Eastern Freeway. She stayed at home on school days, getting high, waiting for Telecom to show up.

Teleprofit, Telescum, Frederic called it, hissing and narrowing his kohl-lined mystery eyes. Hackers hated Telecom, he said. Telecom were morons who could not even use their own technology. The line noise was so bad you got logged off continually and the faster your modem the worse the problem was. Soon they’d have a modem with error correction, but not that year, not yet. Telecom were jackboots. They could raid your house, tap your phone line and seize your equipment any time they wished. Service? They could not even give you a phone line when you asked for one. Oh no, you must wait three fucking weeks.

Mrs. Matovic resigned from Mario Bros. She took up Wizard’s Crown and hogged it so much Peli, direct from work at six o’clock, had
to play it with her. Meg was way too flirty for her age. Groan. She never knew a black person in her life. Scream. She absolutely loved them. She got poetic about the Samoans’ size and colour and their frizzy hair. She wanted to live in the tropics, and always had. She and Frederic were going to run away to Nimbin and live off papaya and “be really healthy like Samoans.”

Peli had been back to Samoa only once. He had been pissed off beyond endurance by houses with no windows.

Gaby noted Meg laid her hand on Peli’s knee so when Solosolo stormed outside and slammed the door, well, of course she knew the problem i.e. Meg was a hundred. Peli was nineteen. She followed her best friend across The Avenue to the place where she had once had rabies.

She’s awful, she said. I’m sorry.

Solosolo spun around and her face was bunched up like a fist.

Don’t you shit on my brother, she said.

I didn’t shit on anyone.

Telescum. Teleprofit. You never bloody stop.

So?

Didn’t you notice but? My brother bloody works for Telecom.

He’s Peli. He’s not Telecom.

Don’t make me hit you, bitch.

Soley, I’m your friend. Please don’t call me that.

Well, you get Frederic to show him some respect.

We do.

You’re going to put 240 volts down the phone line? That’s your plan. You’re going to kill Telecom workers.

That was a joke.

Why do you think our father brought us to this awful
palagi
country?

Gaby saw the point of view. But she also knew how much her Samoan friends didn’t like Samoa. Didn’t like it here. Couldn’t stand it there. Women had to spend their whole life making food, all day, every damn day, hot rocks, fire, how many Samoans does it take to get a pizza?

OK, I’ll be the bunny: why did your father bring you here?

Shut up. Peli did what was asked of him. He got the education. He got the job. So when you call it Telescum you piss on my whole family.

No.

And then you make him go and rob Telecom.

I make him?

You think he likes Frederic? You’re joking. Frederic’s just your pimp. You sit beside Peli in the van. And then you piss on him. You’re lucky I’m a Christian. Soley’s eyes were black, unknowable. You’re lucky I’m a Christian or I would bite your pretty face.

Gaby thought, she has a temper. It will pass. But when she came back into the sleepout she saw all the bullshit in Peli’s eyes. Before she went outside she had been sitting on the floor beside him, but now she moved away. He looked at her all mulish with his heavy chin and fluttery eyes. What had she ever said or done to make him act like that?

So now she stopped sitting in the front seat and then, without a word being spoken, they were at war. Why? What right? He drove stop and start, went too fast, scraping along a tram on Swanston Street.