Amnesia (36 page)

Ow, he heard. It was a boy’s voice, sharp with indignation. Then a man’s voice.

Quit it, the boy cried.

The hermit scampered down the ladder from the roof. He re-entered his dwelling and rushed to and fro, his long arms sweeping floor and desk. He discarded a malodorous black plastic bag and picked up the treasure from beneath his chair. Into this he thrust all his morning’s work and then, sitting, grunting, he collected the tapes, batteries, notebooks, pens, posters and other archival matter, hurling them into the bag as if they were no more important than potato peelings.

Don’t, he heard.

And then a man’s voice, singing tunelessly.

He tied the bag and encased it within a second bag, tied that too, did the same a third time, then ascended, in bare bunioned feet up to the roof where, finally, he hurled the bag towards the river far below. If he expected a splash, there was none. He waited but could wait no longer. The visitors were already on the path, the man singing in a voice so flat, so blithe, so confident that it raised the hair on the listener’s neck.

You better watch out

You better not cry

Felix Moore returned to the hut nursing a freshly injured elbow,
crossed to the doorway, pausing to scoop up a stray Duracell and to select an apple from the bottom of a cardboard box.

Let me go, cried the boy.

The hermit leaned, “nonchalantly,” against the doorframe.

Making a list … checking it twice

Looking to see who’s naughty and nice

And then his pink-cheeked red-lipped patron emerged, dragging a protesting boy by the ear.

Hello mate, said Woody Townes.

Mate, said Felix, and bit into his putrid apple.

As the visitors paused at the midway landing the man sought his prisoner’s attention.

Ow.

You ever see this bloke before?

No. Ow.

As Woody tugged the boy onwards he reached to take the hermit’s apple. In this moment of distraction the prisoner pulled free, and fell, then rolled, protesting loudly all the way to the bottom of the stairs.

Give me the fucking apple.

Fat bastard, cried the boy, and had already turned as the apple hit his shoulder and burst apart.

Stupid cunt, said Woody Townes, simultaneously embracing his writer, crushing his hairy face against his canvas shoulder, crooning tenderly into his single naked ear.

They see you when you’re sleeping

They know when you’re awake

They know if you’ve been bad or good

So be good for goodness sake

At the sound of an outboard motor roaring to life, the property developer, without releasing the hermit, produced a telephone from his clever canvas waistcoat. His thumbs were distressingly large, but he dialled precisely. Mate, he said to the slender phone, let the kid go.

The hermit tugged free. You see me when I’m sleeping? he cried. What the fuck is that meant to mean? He had already seen the cruiser with satellite dishes on its cabin. Who told you where I was?

Woody Townes did not bother answering. He took the single chair and shook his head in a style that might be “rueful.” He had lost weight. The stomach staples had evidently worked, or he had been at the gym.
When he returned his telephone to his waistcoat holster, new biceps stretched his shirt.

Pull up a pew, he said, and placed a liquor flask and a peculiar revolver on the desk.

The hermit showed no reaction to this ugly weapon. Instead he fetched two smudgy glasses from the sink and dragged a plastic crate to serve as a chair.

You always liked that bit, Feels.

What bit?

Come on, this is for you. Your all-time favourite interview. Murray Sayle snares Kim Philby in Moscow. Intrepid Aussie journalist tracks down Pommy traitor at the Moscow post office. The spy agrees to the interview. When the journo arrives the spy is waiting with a bottle of vodka and a revolver on the table. You didn’t get the reference?

What are you doing, Woody?

The literal answer would have been, I am now raising the revolver and pointing it over your shoulder. Woody Townes, however, did not reply directly: I always thought Philby must have been a drama queen, he said.

The hermit’s hand may have been less steady than his friend’s but he displayed a modicum of courage. That is, he unscrewed the flask and poured. As he raised the glass (formerly a receptacle for peanut butter) the most colossal explosion occurred.

Shit, the hermit cried. His body jerked. He stood. He sat. He turned towards the sound of running water, a trickling garden hose which turned out to be red wine spurting from a punctured box. He stared at the wine morosely. It was the visitor who spoke:

So give me my fucking pages.

The hermit reflected that it had been awful wine in any case.

Give me my fucking pages.

How can I have pages? I haven’t got a source.

So why are you here?

To get some fucking peace.

Woody Townes laid his weapon down, and dragged the Olivetti Valentine across the table. He unscrewed the pair of orange knobs which secured the spools of ribbon. Having removed these, he affected to read the ribbon like a strip of film.

Were there people somewhere like San Antonio, Texas at, say, a former
Sony computer-chip factory, who could really decode a typewriter ribbon? Of course there were. Whatever weird shit you could imagine, they could do it. The spools flew like yoyos across the room and Woody Townes tilted back to ask: Tell me this, why am I the one who always has to get you out of the shit?

You’re not.

Shut up. This is not the New South Wales branch of the Labor Party you’re trying to fuck with.

I wrote two hundred pages. They sent a kid to pick them up. Not that kid, another one. He said he was from you.

Bullshit. You won’t want to be here when I send someone.

There’s nothing here. You can look for yourself.

You’ve got the hots for her, fine. So now’s your chance to be a hero. Give us a chance to defend her. We need info-fucking-mation, mate.

I’m not sure I should be trusting you Woody.

You’re not?

Nothing personal.

Talking of personal. I was chatting to Donno at the
Telegraph
the other day. Donovan? Yeah I know. I was sort of hinting there might be an interesting Felix story. He was saying, We know everything there is to know about the grandstanding little cunt, you know how he talks. But of course that’s not true, is it? We’ve got all sorts of shit on you.

The fugitive became still.

Do you remember, Feels, when you thought you could take on Hawkie? People don’t know about that. Felix Moore vs. the future Prime Minister of the nation.

This is what you told Celine, isn’t it?

Woody shrugged. There were a mob of you, as I recall. No-one had more moral authority with the unions than the head of their collective body. Hawke used all that clout to stop the general strike? Right. He was a mate of the US ambassador. Etc. etc.

He was. You know he was.

And then you, my nervy little mate, do you remember? You were auditioning for
Drivetime Radio
. Someone was on holiday. Matt Cocker? No, not him. They gave you three weeks to try out
Drivetime Radio with Felix Moore
. It went to your head, no? Just a teensy bit? Somehow you thought you could call a general strike from the fucking ABC. You were worried, as I recall, how you would fit eighteen left-wing
union leaders into a little studio on William Street. Eighteen. That was optimistic.

You weren’t against it, mate. As I recall, you sort of egged me on.

Let’s just say, I was very interested in everything you had to say. You were born in a country that never had a war. You were blessed, but you thought we should suffer like the Bosnians, the Rwandans, the Palestinians, everyone. I never heard anything so fucking stupid. You really wanted civil war.

Whatever. You were on my side.

Oh, mate, he said and he cocked his head and the expression on his face was almost fond.

What?

What do you think?

You weren’t playing on the other side?

Other side of what? Other side of bloodshed? You bet. Fortunately you didn’t have the balls for it. You were shitting yourself, I remember that, looking for any chance not to follow through.

You told Celine this?

You were frightened of where your imagination was leading you. Remember we sat up half the night before? You got so pissed you couldn’t walk. You slept at my place in Neutral Bay. Do you remember the morning?

We drank all your tequila.

No, not that, mate. Your car caught fire.

Of course I remember. You were with me. You’re the one who dragged me out the passenger side. It was not my fault the car caught fire.

No, it was my fault.

Bullshit.

Yes, me. I fucking saved you from yourself. You should be grateful I gave you your excuse. Although you could have still got to the studio if you’d really wanted to.

We had to wait for the police.

Ah, look at you, said Woody Townes, delighted. The boy who cried pig. You’ve spent a lifetime screaming at everyone for being so gutless in ’75. To the barricades, and all that shit. If there was any credible opposition you had them, every available pinko and ratbag, waiting to go on
Drivetime Radio
. What will your little girls think of their daddy when they hear all this?

The wine was dripping, but only very slowly. The hermit turned his attention to the visitor’s flask from which he slowly refilled two large glasses, one of which he drank.

Why? he asked his biggest fan.

Woody leaned back, as if to give the writer a sporting chance to grab the gun. Mate, you know me.

He slid the second glass across the table. Felix Moore did not reject the gift.

So you’ve got nothing to give me, Feels? Not a single page?

Sorry mate. Wish I did.

Woody stood. He kicked irritably at the tangled typewriter ribbon as he slid the gun back inside what was, clearly, a highly specialised garment.

You’re not up to this game, he said. You’d like to play at this level, but you never could. Here, take my phone. When you realise what shit you’re in, call me on my landline. It might not be too late.

It was an iPhone, the latest model, but Woody left it without regret.

The hermit remained in his doorway as the visitor continued down the path. When he heard the gunfire he felt no particular alarm. Woody, he understood, wished to use his weapon, and firing the last fifteen rounds at an aluminium dinghy was the best he was going to do today.

THE QUEEN HAD
locked the saint in a tower room filled with straw and ordered him to spin the straw into gold, on pain of death. And how he worked. He slammed at the spinning wheel, night and day until, one morning, it was necessary to shove the gold into a plastic bag and hurl it from the tower.

Cleverly done. Well saved. But when peace returned it was no simple matter to retrieve the treasure. The saint lay down on his stomach and stretched himself full-length on the edge of the outcrop, peering down through the undergrowth and scrub where he could see, in nets of light produced by slapping wavelets, the aerial roots of mangroves poking up like nails from yellow sand.

The so-called “outcrop” was host to a jungle of wattles, wild lantana and various bits of prickly stuff. Here, just a hand’s span below his fleshy nose, grew a knotted little eucalypt with a trunk no thicker than an axe handle.

Further down, a man’s length he calculated, there was a convenient ridge in the rock where he might gain purchase with his toes. Below that, he could not really see.

As a schoolboy he had achieved serious status as a hundred-kph spin bowler, in spite of which he had been, sporadically, unpredictably followed by boys swinging their arms and making “chee-chee” monkey cries. That is, duh, his arms were long. But, as his mother once said when answering a query re his testicles, God put everything there for a purpose and now the time had come when his arms would prove their
Darwinian value. He grasped that twisted eucalypt and, completely forgetting his age, lowered himself in the direction of the ridge.

His arm was yanked like a bone from a rotisserie chicken. He kicked at the rock and gained no purchase. He swung with his feet twitching and shuddering like a hanged man. As always, part of his mind was administered by a cartoonist and he was encouraged to believe he might somehow slither down the remaining inches to the ridge.

Instead, he fell, scratching, scraping, slipping past whatever ridge or ledge he had imagined. Death awaited him. He awaited death. He landed in a twisted eagle’s nest of wattle and lantana where the black plastic bag was pushed like a horse’s arse against his face. All three bags had been partly inflated with accidental air, so it was this, not the sand, which cushioned the final fall.

His face stung. He loudly fucked and shat. A fierce pain assailed his shoulder as he splashed along the waterline. He wrapped his arms around his treasure, binding it to his chest, like a spider with a sac of eggs. Cautiously, he made his way under the gloomy mangroves, amidst the forest of aerial roots, until he arrived at the place where he had beached so long before.