Amnesia (38 page)

Sando had to be the good guy, Celine said. It was what his life was for. He could not bear it that his daughter would think otherwise. Of course Gaby knew that, and she was totally relentless. She took him to visit dying gardens in the little houses on McBryde Street. She nagged at him until he actually raised the issue in parliament. This did nothing to calm his daughter and he was mocked by the minister who was the one, presumably, who arranged for a “reliable source” to leak him a chemical analysis of Agrikem’s effluent which showed no trace of dioxin at all.

He was a politician, Celine said, as the semitrailers shrieked, so therefore he must be corrupt. But the poor darling could be completely unworldly and when he was fed bad information from the left faction, he believed it utterly. He sat Gaby down at the kitchen table and went through the printout with her. He gave his solemn word that there was no dioxin in the Agrikem effluent.

I wasn’t there, Celine said. I can imagine: how it must have hurt to confront his daughter’s grey and hostile eyes.

Pause. Rewind. Play.

What if you wished to obliterate the corporatists? the Angel said.

WHEN TWO HEADLIGHTS ARRIVED
directly outside his window Felix snapped awake and stumbled towards the white-quartz glare, naked arm held across his red-rimmed eyes, but nothing else to ensure his modesty.

There came a violent thumping on the connecting door behind him.

He drew one of the curtains and saw, through the mountain fog, a tall windowless van with a high old-fashioned radiator which he would later learn had the singular virtue of being unburdened by computer operating systems. For now, however, the thumping on the door took precedence.

At other times he had pressed his ear against this door, sometimes his back. Sometimes he had heard laughter, sometimes television. No-one had ever knocked on it before. Who’s there, in the name of Beelzebub? He had, until that very moment, assumed that those on the other side like the woman who had driven him from Newcastle, the boy who delivered him upriver, that whole tribe of river rats and dry drunks who had kept him supplied with food and drink, the crew of surf lifesavers, all these people had a benevolent intention towards him. He knew them to be brave individuals who revered his occupation and would place themselves at risk to ensure the story was told in all its complexity, no matter what pistol-wielding thug might try to stop it.

What? he asked the door.

A white paper napkin slid in over the carpet, its message clearly visible.

KEEP AWAY FROM THE WINDOW.

He retreated to the vicinity of the bed and donned a pair of boxer shorts.

He imagined he could hear newcomers entering the next room of the suite. There were sounds of distress, although they possibly had been produced by a television soundtrack. Someone coughed. He thrust his papers, tapes and batteries under the mattress and remade the bed. Then, with his heart beating loudly in his ears, he slipped beneath the iridescent quilt. He waited. He faced the door with his knees drawn up. He embraced his pillow like the child of divorcing parents. He threw off the blanket and pulled his trousers on. He took three steps to the connecting door which, being of the hollow-core variety such as can be purchased at Mitre 10 for less than $50, was no serious barrier to anything. Perhaps he might have kicked it down.

He knocked.

The voices ceased. TV ditto. The door flew open. He saw several young men and women fleeing like cockroaches from light. He saw a woman with two gold earrings shaped like shells. On her slender wrist there was a bracelet, also gold. She reached to grasp a hand. He was shocked to realise that the hand belonged to Claire Moore, his wife. She wore a long man’s coat and tennis shoes. Her perfect girlish legs were bare, as if straight off the court, and she was flushed.

You’ve lost weight, she said, and held out her ruined potter’s hands.

Celine Baillieux, who did not know her, then placed her hands familiarly on Claire Moore’s shoulders.

Felix Moore felt the force of emotions he had imagined safely locked away.

His wife was searching his face. She asked, How much are you drinking?

I fucked it up.

Idiot, I love you.

The fugitive held up a single finger, then two palms, then retreated to the bathroom where he confronted the embarrassment of his crumpling mask, the snot in his mad beard, the red wine stains on his dirty teeth.

Fubsy, Claire called, let me in.

But he was ugly with snivelling gratitude.

Let me clean my teeth, he said. But he had no toothbrush [
sic
] and
when he finally emerged his eyebrows were mad and his wet hair stood on end.

His wife then informed him that Gaby was Celine’s only daughter. So would Felix please write what Celine wanted him to write.

Claire patted the bed and he sat beside her. He was very pleased to have his hands taken.

You’ve got a lovely wife, Celine said now.

You shouldn’t be here, he told his wife. There are people trying to kill me.

I went with them, Claire said. I’m here to drive some sense into you. They’re on deadline. They’re editing right now.

He registered that his writing was being fucked with. At the same time he beheld that dear familiar face and understood that she would take him back.

I was at Five Dock tennis club, she said. The game was nearly over.

You walked away from a third set?

She honoured him with a private smile.

That was who Claire was. She was being taken to see her estranged husband but she was a good citizen, she would not let down the others. That was who she was. She could not play singles because she had no killer streak, but she was an ace at doubles because she could never let her partner down.

Listen, Celine said, listen to what Claire wants to say.

Claire’s hand was pressing on his knee. Felix, she said, please do what they want.

What do they want?

Are you really making Gaby seem as if she’s guilty?

In the midst of this upset, the fugitive was pleased to feel his wife’s restraining hand.

You will not fiddle with my words, he told Celine.

Listen to your wife.

What is all this “editing”?

We are fixing your awful spelling. We are
preparing
the digital edition. But it reads like you want my daughter dead, so maybe you could think about that.

Then don’t publish it. Burn it. I don’t care.

Fubsy, Claire said.

The fugitive looked into his wife’s brown eyes and when she had taken stock of him she shook her head and laughed. He can’t be changed, she said and, with the back of her hand, brushed the tangled beard. Dear old fool, she said. Don’t be brave.

He was frightened that he would make an ugly scene by crying. See you soon, he said, and abruptly turned his back. She knew enough to let him be, and he was stupid enough to let her climb back in the truck without once saying that he loved her.

When it was quiet he returned to work as he had left it. That is, he knew his subject had no wish to be innocent. It was her job to be the guilty one. They will say there are no female programmers, she said on tape, and everything is there to make sure your gorgeous boy is on the fast track, making deep algorithms while you are likely to get yourself stuck in some fucking data centre mounting servers, changing tapes, and running cable under the floor. If you drop out of high school your workmates will be idiots trying to feel your tits, managers who want to fuck you and “promote” you to marketing or customer support, on the phone all day explaining technology to morons. I almost did this to myself.

I thought I was being brave but I was being the girlfriend without knowing it. I had so much fun hacking that I spent almost no time programming. I was my own worst dream: a fucking “hobbyist” or a “power user” sitting in the dunny reading old issues of
Macworld
. But when I got it, she said, I got it: writing software is so intensely pleasurable it should be against the law. I was not employed to do this. You don’t get paid to do it, it pays you. You go to sleep at four in the morning. You are awake at seven, with your brain already working: why is that program running slowly, what is causing this lurking bug. Girls don’t program? Bullshit. When I was a daytime suit I was a good suit because I knew more than the programmers. Even in the years when Frederic was an overpaid public genius, when he grew his hair, long like a Beatle, wore button-down shirts, narrow black ties, and slim tight single-breasted jackets, through those years I was a suit by day, we binged at night together.

Code is simple to understand. It is a language to talk to people and machines. Think of Montaigne writing an essay, shaping ideas, seeking beauty, clarity, simplicity and concision. A good code language lets you do this. When you are on fire then
beauty
arises. It’s like, for instance, Euclid’s proof that prime numbers are infinite. Or it’s like Brancusi’s
Bird in Space
, elegant solutions to complex problems. Some coding languages make this impossible and some computer programmers are the walking dead, but if you’re working in an expressive language you spend your nights all over the heavens quote unquote.

From the beginning, Frederic and I were builders, she said. We reconstructed Zork when we were babies. Later, much later, we would make architecture, feature by feature, clamp interfaces together, squash bugs, supercharge the hotspots to make them faster still. We built in air and electricity, in 1’s and 0’s and nothing more.

But when Frederic came back from northern New South Wales, we built a physical structure in the paddock outside Agrikem. This was the premier event. This is all you need to understand.

IT WAS WINTER
. There was frost on the grass and Frederic and I were cockatoos, keeping watch on McBryde Street while Mervyn crawled beneath the fence. He was dressed in rubber boots and waterproofs, so this was not an easy thing to do. Plus he had gaffer tape to close the gap between his sleeves and his rubber gloves and he wore a motorcycle helmet with a visor. Not bad for a man of seventy-five. He opened the sewer plate and lowered in a billy can and we watched as he retrieved it and poured its contents into three brown bottles. He took his time, wrapping each one in a plastic bag. Finally we met him at the fence and held up the barbed wire for him to get back out.

We were there because Mervyn was a relentless old codger with a long history in the labour movement. His mate Herby Waltzer was a former secretary of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union. Herby had a nephew at the Batman Institute of Technology (BIT). The nephew was doing a PhD in environmental science and would be “honoured” to analyse our effluent for free. Even better, he could do this under supervision by the acting head of his department. All we had to do was get a sample.

The BIT tests took a whole month. Herby Waltzer’s nephew had found a furan (2,3,7,8-
TDCF
) and other toxic polychlorinated dioxins. His supervisor had written: there are no safe levels for dioxins and furans. They should not be entering the sewage system at all. They are dangerous in the sense that they can cause harm to the environment in even very small amounts.

This arrived by snail mail in Darlington Grove and I went to Sydney Road and paid for photocopies.

This was when I would bridge the gap between my father and Mervyn. Maybe Mervyn was a stirrer and a ratbag but corporate crime was right up Sando’s alley. This was the best gift you could give him: a polluter, caught red-handed, and shamed with solid proof, printed out in rows of numbers from the Batman Institute of Technology. I said nothing about Mervyn yet. It was the numbers that were the point and when my father had finished reading he dragged me into his chair and there, with me all bruised and tangled, he kissed my head. We’ve got the bastards, he said. I was not going to screw this up. I said nothing about Mervyn. I cooked him tuna casserole instead. We washed up together and then he took me through the BIT report which he clearly understood.

He said that this student had found 1.4 parts per billion of the furan 2,3,7,8-
TCDF
. This level was equivalent to 143 parts per trillion of dioxin 2,3,7,8-
TCDD
. Don’t worry what it means. Just understand that 0.038 parts per trillion in water is enough to start killing fish. Agrikem’s effluent also contained chlorophenols, the precursors for the manufacture of 2,4-
D
. Several different types of these chemicals were found, including dichlorophenol and trichlorophenol. The samples contained one hundred times Agrikem’s allowed limit of their Trade Waste Agreement.