Amnesia (42 page)

I drove back to Lionel dewy-eyed. I was her mother, said Celine Baillieux, speaking with that strange flatness of affect that marks all varieties of Australian speech, whether it be Lebanese from Denbo or Samoan or the descendant of a man who expected to live in the Lake District all his life. The fugitive imagined he detected a deep historic grief in the voice of Celine Baillieux, as familiar to him as the sound of wind in lonely European pine windbreaks planted in L-shapes in the paddocks, the denuded land from Balliang East up to Morrisons and Bullengarook and Maryborough. That was our fate, he thought, to love that abused landscape, in spite of the evidence before our wind-wet eyes.

The writer turned off the burning gas below his underpants and rescued his scorched trousers from the bathroom floor. He inserted another cassette, a young woman’s voice which would whisper in his sleep.

NOW FREDERIC AND I
were back together I had thought that Cosmo would disappear. Next Monday morning we had “Monday remarks” as per usual. Frederic had previously considered this a waste of time. Now he wanted to raise the issue of “Cosmo’s gun.”

I could not be embarrassed by Freddo but this was pretty close. Cosmo’s gun was an infantile steampunk gun he had constructed from antiqued copper and brass tubing and several eccentrically shaped “steam chambers.” He had made it with Doug in shop, which was OK. But when he brought it to home room and acted like it was “significant” he got completely pissed on. No-one knew what steampunk was and didn’t care. It was guns they voted against. This was why Crystal failed to recognise the R. F. Mackenzie teaching moment. Cosmo the loser had raided Palermo Plumbing and found totally new uses for flexible copper tubing, hose clamps, thermocouples, heating elements, copper and brass fittings, all sorts of crazy Jules Verne shit that his father would never let him work with in real life. I did not speak against him. Even when he said Macs were for girls. I was just sad, because he was so big and damaged.

Frederic had generally exhibited disdain for the class’s good opinion. Now they were outraged by his nerve, amazed to find themselves the subject of his sexylove.

And Cosmo with his staring eyes and long chin and great Sicilian schnozzle, huge Cosmo, pressed rigidly into his desk, mustn’t he have thought, why is this happening to me? Did it occur to him there would
be a price? Had he decided it would be worth anything, to get a social upgrade in this unexpected way?

I thought it was about Cosmo. I was so pissed off, I didn’t see it was for me. Frederic was always a sort of bowerbird, building astonishing displays to court me, and he did this again and again over many years. Just when I thought he was bored with me, he would perform his mating dance. How would I guess this was one of those? He was so sly and devious and funny, and he forced the home room to admire Cosmo in a totally Freddo way. He gave them a talk about steampunk, in whole sentences, with punctuation: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hayao Miyazaki’s
Laputa: Castle in the Sky
blah blah blah. Steampunk was an alternative history of Victorian England, the Wild West too, separately, together. It was a variety of science fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic future. Steampunk featured anachronistic technologies like Cosmo’s gun which as anyone could see (apparently) harnessed steam and gas for its propellant force.

Crystal had her mouth open. I thought, she is hypnotised. I thought, she loves Frederic in spite of everything. He was so perfectly 100 percent R. F. Mackenzie, showing the teacher what a syllabus she could have built from steampunk: literature, physics, the study of naval vessels. Steampunk brought you slam-bam against Charles Babbage who designed the world’s first computer in 1822. And so on. Frederic was an actor’s son. He walked between the desks. He was deft and sibilant while the apparent object of his speech sat locked inside his big stiff body, blushing, glowing, his black curly hair erupting from his red bandana.

The class had never seen Frederic in this way. (I’m not sure I had myself.) Certainly they did not understand where this creature came from, and they were indignant to be charmed, to be asked, by him, to tell him what steampunk music might be like. They had no fucking idea. They looked to Crystal who did not help at all.

Cosmo never spoke in class, but Fred asked him anyway: what might steampunk music sound like.

Cosmo beamed, as if he could hear a private orchestra: synth, brass bells and bagpipes and he wasn’t going to share. He was so happy, me too, weirdly happy, proud and astonished and in love beyond salvation.

Frederic’s mother was back in rehab so after school Frederic and I crawled into the back of her van and when I was all relaxed and dozy he
listed every obstacle to exposing MetWat, and how he would personally overcome them one by one. I can do this, he said. He described it like a quest game, with different levels.

First problem: the toxic dishwater was flowing through the dark, buried in the ground. We will raise it up, he said, or something sort of biblical. This was like stoner talk. I was slow to realise he planned this for real life. Freddo could not draw for nuts, but he drew the sad overgrazed paddock beside the Agrikem car park, all the time talking about plumbing, PVC pipes, Bostik plumber’s weld. He drew a sort of cobra which turned out to be a giant garden tap rising from the sewer.

You don’t know how to do that, I said.

Don’t worry. He could fix it. As we publicised the true effluent analysis we would also raise up the actual poison, see it, smell it as it descended back into the public sewer. Then we would turn off the tap, on television.

We would need Hazchem suits for a start, he said.

I thought this would look cool and scary on TV, but where would we get a Hazchem suit? How much would it cost?

Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.

Of course he did not know how to fix anything but he was, instinctively, creating an event. He was seventeen. It was
Field of Dreams
, if you build it they will come. He had recruited Cosmo. Cosmo didn’t know that yet.

I told him how I loved him.

He said, We could get into a lot of trouble.

I said I knew. I was totally high on danger, on justice, righteousness and rage. It was not my fault my father failed. It was not my fault that this was left to us to do.

The following night I brought Frederic to Darlington Grove and we sat around the kitchen table. It was scorching hot and the sprinkler was sighing in the garden. Miss Aisen wore a tennis dress and her father shorts and a navy singlet. Miss Aisen sat on her hands and would not look at me, and I thought, we have made a big mistake here. She will not break the law. Plus Mervyn had been having trouble looking at Frederic. I hadn’t thought of that: Freddo was back on the eye shadow and nail polish. Mervyn directed everything to me.

Later I discovered Miss Aisen was waiting for me to say I was pregnant.
She was working out her position, although she never told me what that was. Was she Catholic? Maybe. All I could feel was the very heavy vibe and I was incapable of asking for what we really wanted. I babbled. I regurgitated everything they had taught me: MetWat’s brutal mistreatment of the creek, its totally misconceived attempts at flood control, its deceit over Agrikem’s effluent. I did not reveal that we finally had the proof.

Miss Aisen asked me, Is this what you came to talk about? She put a hand on her father’s arm, and I thought, he is too creeped by Freddo. He can’t even look at him.

It’s to do with that, Frederic said. In that area.

To do with MetWat? Miss Aisen asked while Mervyn studied a salt shaker.

Yes.

Oh, she said, and totally beamed at Frederic.

Mr. Aisen, Frederic said, Gaby tells me you took the dragline in hand.

Sabotaging the MetWat dragline had been a serious crime. No-one had ever told me Mervyn had committed it. Now I must have seemed a gossip and a dangerous girl.

She did, did she? said Mervyn. After which he went back to his salt shaker.

I said I was very sorry if I had been wrong.

We all sat in awful silence until Mervyn finally allowed his smile to show. You tricky old codger, I thought. So I told him about Frederic’s hack. Frederic offered to go online to show them how, but Miss Aisen did not want to break the law.

Her father said she was a nervous little mouse. He winked at Frederic.

So she let Frederic do it, in the kitchen. Then she was so excited and angry she donated a floppy so we could have a screenshot of our evidence.

You’ll need a plumber, Mervyn said.

I’ve got one already, Frederic said.

Today we could have dealt with Agrikem differently. We could have hacked their system and instructed the plant to shake itself apart. But twenty years ago remote access to physical assets was a different matter—a business like Agrikem would not have had the level of instrumentation of the modern sort. Everything was operated in person. You opened a valve by hand. You set the speed of the centrifuge manually.
Twenty years ago we needed four metres of 80mm PVC pipe, four metres of 80mm flexible agricultural drainpipe, a two-into-one 45-degree PVC junction, a joiner, a tub of Bostik PVC Weld, a plastic bucket, a roll of gaffer tape, a metre of 3/8 steel rod from Surdex Steel in Edward Street Brunswick, two 3/8 nuts and washers, a scrap of 8-ply, a hacksaw, a jig saw, tap and die set, an adjustable spanner, a drill, a 9mm drill bit, a jemmy, eight Undertoad suits and Cosmo natch.

SO, FREDDO GAVE
Cosmo the chance to build a PVC drain system with a plunger that would induce a suction action to expose Agrikem’s toxic dioxin effluent to the public eye. Cosmo became scarily excited. He began to make dumb jokes so often, he was a liability. I took him up to the Ferguson Plarre and bought him a neenish tart and said he must not even say our names. He could not even tell Doug what he was doing.

What should he say to Doug?

Say it’s steampunk, I said and Cosmo looked so winded that I bought him a malted milk and then, quite clearly, the great wilful dork went back to Doug the Organic Mechanic and spilled the beans.

Doug was like one of those whiskery barkless dogs with a traumatic stare. Whatever dog that was, Gaby did not know, only that his most prosaic shop instruction was whispered.
Draw a line all round and cut it off square
. Doug had lived in Japan. He taught woodwork with Japanese handsaws. He was also a furtive sci-fi fan and
manga otaku
and Cosmo’s sole supporter amongst the staff.

Now, suddenly, Doug began publicly distancing himself from Cosmo. He used his
loud voice
so everyone would hear he would no longer let Cosmo Palermo drag “all your crap” into the classroom. Go find somewhere else, not here. We’re not a plumbing business, mate.

But it was Doug who found us a safe place where we could assemble the pipes: an abandoned building site just near the school on David Street. Under the awning was a rough workbench. Below the bench were a few empty beer bottles and a lot of fag ends sort of composting themselves.

Doug was fulltime engaged with his own innocence. He said Cosmo better take more time with his English literature he would end up an unemployable moron.

Go to my office. I’m sick of you, Palermo.

Then they spent about an hour compiling the list of stuff that Cosmo would need to make his pump.

We were not worth a plumber’s bootlace, but somehow we managed to assemble the basic structure of his pump with not much more than a hacksaw and a tub of Bostik PVC Weld. We had it done in one weekend and it stayed there unprotected for five more days until Mervyn brought his mate the Catholic Worker. The Catholic Worker had some very complimentary things to say about how Cosmo had attached the brass spigot to the PVC. Being an activist himself, he understood we must have a steel cage to protect us from the cops.

The cops never did arrive but that cage, chained to that sewer manhole, is what most people remember of the action: a steel-mesh cube imprisoning two operators in Hazchem suits. One of these operators was Mervyn and the other was his Catholic Worker mate.

It was later said I was the innocent tool of left-wing unions, but in fact the opposite was true: it was my will that drove our war machine. I was the one who “borrowed” the Hazchem suits. I was the one who would reveal her face to the cameras when I removed my hood. I wanted to be responsible. Look at this young girl. If she can do it, why can’t we?