Amnesia

1

IT WAS A spring evening in Washington DC; a chilly autumn morning in Melbourne; it was exactly 22:00 Greenwich Mean Time when a worm entered the computerised control systems of countless Australian prisons and released the locks in many other places of incarceration, some of which the hacker could not have known existed. Because Australian prison security was, in the year 2010, mostly designed and sold by American corporations the worm immediately infected 117 US federal correctional facilities, 1700 prisons, and over 3000 county jails. Wherever it went, it travelled underground, in darkness, like a bushfire burning in the roots of trees. Reaching its destinations it announced itself: THE CORPORATION IS UNDER OUR CONTROL. THE ANGEL DECLARES YOU FREE.

This message and others more elaborate were read, in English, by warders in Texas, contractors in Afghanistan, Kurdistan, in immigrant detention camps in Australia, in Woomera, black sites in the Kimberley, secret centres of rendition at the American “signals facility” near Alice Springs. Sometimes prisoners escaped. Sometimes they were shot and killed. Bewildered Afghans and Filipinos, an Indonesian teenager wounded by gunfire, a British Muslim dying of dehydration, all these previously unknown individuals were seen on public television, wandering on outback roads.

The security monitors in Sydney’s Villawood facility read: THE ANGEL OF THE LORD BY NIGHT OPENED THE PRISON DOORS, AND BROUGHT THEM FORTH. My former colleagues asked, what does this language tell us about the perpetrator?

I didn’t give a toss. I was grateful for a story big enough to push me off the front pages where I had already suffered PANTS ON FIRE. I was spending my days in the Supreme Court of New South Wales paying Nigel Willis QC $500 an hour so I could be sued for defamation. Nigel’s “billable hours” continued to accrue well past the stage when it became clear that he was a fuckwit and I didn’t have a chance in hell, but cheer up mate: he was betting 3:2 on a successful appeal. That my barrister also owned a racehorse was not the point.

Meanwhile there was not much for me to do but read the papers. FEDS NOW SAY ANGEL IS AN AUSSIE WORM.

“Would the defendant like to tell the court why he is reading a newspaper.”

“I am a journalist, m’lud. It is my trade.”

Attention was then brought to the state of my tweed jacket. Ha-ha, m’lud. When the court had had its joke, we adjourned for lunch and I, being unaccompanied on that particular day, took my famously shambolic self across to the botanic gardens where I read the Daily Telegraph. Down by the rose gardens amongst the horseshit fertiliser, I learned that the terrorist who had been “obviously” a male Christian fundamentalist had now become the daughter of a Melbourne actress. The traitor appeared very pale and much younger than her thirty years. Dick Connolly got the photo credit but his editor had photoshopped her for in real life she would turn out to be a solid little thing whose legs were strong and sturdy, not at all like the waif in the Telegraph. She was from Coburg, in the north of Melbourne, a flat, forgotten industrial suburb coincidentally once the site of Pentridge Prison. She came to her own arraignment in a black hoodie, slouching, presumably to hide the fact that our first homegrown terrorist had a beautiful face.

Angel was her handle. Gaby was her name in what I have learned is “meat world.” She was charged as Gabrielle Baillieux and I had known her parents long ago—her mother was the actress Celine Baillieux, her father Sando Quinn, a Labor member of parliament.

I returned to my own court depressed, not by the outcome of my case, which was preordained, but by the realisation that my life in journalism was being destroyed at the time I might have expected my moment in the sun.

I had published several books, fifty features, a thousand columns, mainly concerned with the traumatic injury done to my country by our American allies in 1975. While my colleagues leapt to the conclusion that the hacker was concerned simply with freeing boat people from Australian custody, I took the same view as our American allies, that this was an attack on the United States. It was clear to me, straight away, that the events of 1975 had been a first act in this tragedy and that the Angel Worm was a retaliation. If Washington was right, this was the story I had spent my life preparing for. If the “events of 1975” seem confusing or enigmatic to you, then that is exactly my point. They are all part of “The Great Amnesia.” More TC.

In court, I listened as my publisher got a belting from the judge and I saw his face when he finally understood he could not even sell my book as remaindered.

“Pulp?” he said.

“Including that copy in your hand.”

Damages were awarded against me for $120,000. Was I insured or not insured? I did not know.

The crowd outside the court was as happy as a hanging day.

“Feels, Feels,” the News International guy shouted. “Look this way. Felix.”

That was Kev Dawson, a cautious little prick who made his living rewriting press releases.

“Look this way Feels.”

“What do you think about the verdict, Feels?”

What I thought was: our sole remaining left-wing journalist had been pissed on from a mighty height. And what was my crime? Repeating press releases? No, I had reported a rumour. In the world of grown-ups a rumour is as much a “fact” as smoke. To omit the smoke is to fail to communicate the threat in the landscape.

In the Supreme Court of New South Wales this was defamation.

“What next, Felix?”

Rob a bank? Shoot myself? Certainly, no-one would give me the Angel story although I was better equipped (Wired magazine take note) to write it than any of the clever children who would be hired to do the job. But I was, as the judge had been pleased to point out, no longer employable in “your former trade.” I had been a leader writer, a columnist, a so-called investigative reporter. I had inhabited the Canberra Press Gallery where my “rumours” had a little power. I think Alan Ramsey may have even liked me. For a short period in the mid-seventies, I was host of Drivetime Radio on the ABC.

I was an aging breadwinner with a ridiculous mortgage. I had therefore been a screenwriter and a weekend novelist. I had written both history and political satire, thrillers, investigative crime. The screen adaptation of my novel Barbie and the Deadheads was workshopped at Robert Redford’s Sundance Institute.

But through this, even while bowing and scraping to get “seed money” from the Australian Film Commission, I remained a socialist and a servant of the truth. I had been sued ninety-eight times before they brought me down with this one, and along the way I had exposed the deeds of Kerry Packer and Rupert Murdoch (both Old Geelong Grammarians, btw) always a very dangerous occupation for a family man, and apparently terrifying for those who rely on him for succour. As the doors of the mainstream media closed to anyone unworldly enough to write the truth, I still published “Lo-tech Blog,” a newsletter printed on acid paper which was read by the entire Canberra Press Gallery and all of parliament besides. Don’t ask how we paid our electricity bill.

I worked as a journalist in a country where the flow of information was controlled by three corporations. Their ability to manipulate the “truth” made the right to vote largely meaningless, but I was a journalist. I did my best. In “Lo-tech Blog,” I revealed the Australian press’s cowardly reporting of the government lies about the refugees aboard the ill-fated Oolong.

“I can’t comprehend how genuine refugees would throw their children overboard,” said our Prime Minister.

Once again, like 1975, here was a lie of Goebbelsesque immensity. The fourth estate made a whole country believe the refugees were animals and swine. Many think so still.

Yet the refugees belonged here. They would have been at home with the best of us. We have a history of courage and endurance, of inventiveness in the face of isolation and mortal threat. At the same time, alas, we have displayed this awful level of cowardice, brown-nosing, criminality, mediocrity and nest-feathering.

I was overweight and out of breath but I was proud to be sued, reviled, scorned, to be called a loser by the rewriters of press releases. I took comfort from it, which was just as well because there was comfort nowhere else. As would be confirmed in the weeks ahead, none of my old mates were going to rescue me from the slow soul-destroying grind of unemployment.

2

A FIVE-STAR HOTEL might seem an unwise venue for a bedraggled outcast to lick his wounds but the Wentworth was favoured by my old mate Woody “Wodonga” Townes. My dearest friends all exhibit a passionate love of talk and drink, but of this often distinguished crowd it was Woody Townes who had the grit and guts. He had attended court every day although he had had to fly seven hundred kilometres from Melbourne. Any fight I had, he was always by my side. And when I had endured the whacking from the press I found him where I knew he would be, where he had waited on almost every gruesome afternoon, with his meaty body jammed into a small velvet chair in the so-called Garden Court. The moment he spotted me he began pouring champagne with his left hand. It was a distinctive pose: the heavy animal leg crossed against his shiny thigh, the right elbow held high to ward off the attentions of an eager waiter.

I considered my loyal friend’s exposed white calves, his remarkable belt, his thick neck, the high colour in his cheeks and I thought, not for the first time, that it is Melbourne’s talent to produce these extraordinary eighteenth-century figures. In a more contested space, life would compress them, but down south, at the Paris end of Collins Street, there was nothing to stop him expanding to occupy the frame. He was a Gillray engraving—indulgence, opinion, power.

By profession my mate was a “property developer” and I presumed he must be sometimes involved in the questionable dealings of his caste. My wife thought him a repulsive creature, but she never gave herself a chance to know him. He was both a rich man and a courageous soldier of the left. He was a reliable patron of unpopular causes and (although he was possibly tone deaf) Chairman of the South Bank Opera Company. He financially supported at least two atonal composers who would otherwise have had to teach high school. He had also bankrolled my own ill-fated play. Woody’s language could be abusive. He did occasionally spoil his philanthropy by demanding repayment via small services, but he could be relied upon to physically and legally confront injustice. In a time when the Australian Labor Party was becoming filled with white-collar careerists straight from university, Woody was old-school—he did not fear the consequences of belief.

“Fuck them all,” he said, and ground the champagne bottle down into the ice. That would be pretty much the content of our conversation, and three bottles later, after several rounds of fancy nibbles, he called for the bill, paid from a roll of fifties, got me into a taxi and gave me a Cabcharge voucher to sign at the other end.

“No surrender,” he said, or words to that effect.

It was only a short drive across the Anzac Bridge to our house at Rozelle. Here the best part of my life awaited me, my wife, two daughters, but—in the narrow passageway of our slightly damp terrace house, there stood, by poisonous chance, five cardboard cartons of my book, maliciously delivered that very afternoon.

Were these for me to pulp myself?

Was this not hilarious, that my puce-faced publisher, with his big house in Pymble, had gone to the trouble and expense of having boxes sent to my humble door? I was laughing so much I barely managed to carry this burden through the house. Apparently my daughters saw me and cared so little for my distress that they went straight up to watch the Kardashians. Claire must have been there somewhere, but I didn’t see her yet. I was much more occupied with enacting the court order.

I could never light a barbecue. I had no manual skills at all. It was my athletic Claire who handled the electric drill, not me.

Naturally I overcompensated with the firelighters. Did I really enclose a free firelighter in every book? Was that a joke? How would I know? It was not necessarily self-pitying and pathetic that I set my own books on fire, but it was certainly stupid or at least ill-informed to add a litre of petrol to those feeble flames. I was unprepared for the violent force, the great whoosh that lifted off my eyebrows and caught the lower limbs of our beloved jacaranda.

As the flames crawled from the branches to the second-floor extension, I should—people never cease insisting—have picked up the garden hose and put it out. Fine, but these dear friends did not see what I saw. I made my judgement. I chose human life before real estate. I rushed up the stairs and snatched the audience from the Kardashians. Yes, my babies were teenagers. Yes, they resisted, but here was no time for explanation and I had no choice but treat them roughly. Apparently I smelled “like a cross between a pub and a lawnmower.” I rushed them out into the street and left them screaming.

I don’t know what happened then, but somehow the next-door copywriter stole my girls and the Balmain fire brigade were soon pushing me aside, dragging their filthy hoses down our hall and Claire, my wife, my comfort, my lover, my friend was waiting for me.

The next bit should remain private from our kids. But I will never forget exactly what was said.

3

CLAIRE WAS CLEVER, kind and funny. She slept with her nose just above the sheets like a little possum. She woke up smiling. She stripped a century of paint from the balustrades and waxed and oiled them until they glowed. She climbed on the roof during lightning storms to remove the leaves from the overflowing gutters. She canvassed door to door for the Leichhardt by-election. She was a Japanese-trained potter whose work was collected by museums but there was never a night when I came home from Canberra or Melbourne or a union pub in Sussex Street that she was not waiting to hear what had happened.

She was commonly regarded as a perfect mother while I was known to have been unfaithful or at least to have attempted it. I was said to be continually drunk and impatient with decent people whose politics I did not like. I was allegedly unemployable. It was thought I was a communist who did not have the intelligence to see that he had become historically irrelevant.

All day Claire ripped her strong square hands with gritty clay, from which human sacrifice she extracted long necks and tiny kissing lips. She cooked like the farmer’s daughter that she was, leg of lamb, baked vegetables, proper gravy. But each night she devoured the life that I brought home. My darling was what is commonly called a political junkie—awful term—but I delivered what she wanted most. We had fun, for years and years. Yes, I developed a Canberra belly and was ashamed to jog. She, as everyone remarked, stayed neat and trim. She wore jeans and windcheaters and sneakers and cut her hair herself, eschewing “sexy” legs and teetering fuck-me heels. After the fire I learned that certain mates had wondered if she might be gay. Idiots. None of them had the slightest clue about our love life. We were tender maniacs in ways known only to ourselves. If not for debt we would be in bed today.

Some people are good at debt. We were bad at it, and only discovered it in the way people who get seasick learn of their weakness when the ship has left the shore. We were a journalist and a potter thinking they could send their kids to an expensive private school. You get the joke.

Earlier I described how I abandoned these children on the footpath. Abandoned? For God’s sake, they were almost at the end of their investment curve. To listen to their conversation you would never dream that their parents were both third-generation socialists. Did they even remember their father toasting crumpets in the smoky fire? Can they hear their mother’s lovely voice sing “Moreton Bay”?

I’ve been a prisoner at Port Macquarie

At Norfolk Island and Emu Plains

At Castle Hill and cursed Toongabbie

At all those settlements I’ve worked in chains

But of all places of condemnation

And penal stations of New South Wales

Of Moreton Bay I have found no equal

Excessive tyranny each day prevails

She sang that to our little girls? You bet she did.

We had made the awful mistake of sending the girls to school with the children of our enemies. We thought we were saving Fiona from dyslexia. In fact we were wrecking her family by putting it under a financial strain it could not withstand. I would never once, not for a second, have thought to call Claire timid. How could I know that debt would make her so afraid? We got a line of credit for $50,000 and every time I acted like myself she hated it. She had loved me for those qualities before: I mean, my almost genetic need to take risk, to stand on principle, to poke the bully in the eye. I could not compromise, even when I was—so often—physically afraid. A sword hung over the marriage bed and I did not see it. I refused compromises she privately thought a father was morally obliged to make.

And of course the girls had not the least idea of what was at stake. If they paid attention to a newspaper it was only the Life and Style section. I doubt they had read a single one of my words, and had no notion of my work and life. They had never seen the evidence that might have justified my absences. If I allowed Claire’s bond to be the strongest it was because I saw how much she wanted them to be “my daughters.” Only once I bought them clothing (T-shirts, that’s all). Then I learned that this was not my job and I should never try again.

Before this final defamation suit, Claire had been the pillion passenger who closed her eyes and hung on tight but the Supreme Court’s finding was the final straw. When she heard the size of the damages, she quite collapsed.

As a child she had seen the family farm taken by the bank. Was it that? Was it something else? In any case, she did not believe my assurance that “everything will be OK” because Woody had flown up from Melbourne for the court case. He had promised nothing. She was correct to say this, but she could not grasp that this was exactly the sort of situation when you could rely on Woody. Claire could not grasp his influence. She did not care that he had saved me from my burning car. All she could see was that his father had been a slumlord and a thug.

Nor did she trust Nigel QC because she believed, correctly, that he was the prosecutor’s friend. I told her that did not matter. I was right. If only she had trusted me, I would have got back on the bike and taken her hurtling through the bends at a hundred and fifty kilometres an hour. I would have won the appeal. I would have sorted out the legal costs, and we would have celebrated as we had celebrated many times before.

“Everything will be OK,” I said, and it was dreadful to see the fury in her eyes.

4

I WAS FROM a small town in Victoria, but I had thought of gorgeous wicked Sydney as my home for fifteen years. Yet once I was cast out of Denison Street, Rozelle, I saw I had no home at all. I was pushed up into the heartless traffic of Victoria Road and across the vertiginous Anzac Bridge. I had to admit my mates had all abandoned me. Darling Harbour was below. All of that bright chaotic city lay before me. I had no mobile phone. I had no bed. I was reduced to ringing doorbells in the eastern suburbs. I cannot go into the details of my reception, but so reluctantly was I given refuge that I felt compelled to refuse my host’s coffee in the morning. I certainly would not crawl on my belly to ask to use his phone.

I spent the day at Martin Place, at the post office, searching the Sydney phone books and getting change at the counter.

“Do I know you? You were on TV last night?”

“That’s me, mate.”

This clerk was a pale red-headed fellow with no bum and his sleeves rolled up to show his biceps. He slowly counted out my phone money.

“Felix,” he said.

“Yes, mate.”

“You’re a wanker, mate.”

I took my money down the far end and crouched in the gloom, trying to find someone to take my call. I had expected my colleagues might enjoy a gossip, but they were clearly nervous of what I was going to ask of them. So many people “stepped away” from their desks at the same time, they must have made a conga line, from Pyrmont to Ultimo, from Fairfax to the Australian Broadcasting Corporation.

I left Martin Place and walked under the gloomy Moreton Bay figs in Hyde Park, down along William Street, past Westfield Tower, an ugly building once occupied by the most exhilarating mix of power, almost forgotten figures such as Gough Whitlam, Neville Wran, Harry Miller before and after his spell in Cessnock jail.

Dusk came early and I really had no heart to test another friendship so I ended up at the inevitable: the Bourbon and Beefsteak in King’s Cross. Why did we always love the B&B? It was an awful place, owned by an American called Bernie Houghton. We all knew that Houghton was an arms dealer with an uncontested CIA affiliation. That never stopped us going to eat there late at night, and even when we discovered Bernie was a partner in Nugan Hand, the same CIA bank that helped finance the events of 1975, we continued to go to drink at the Bourbon and Beefsteak.

My wife said I was a romantic, that the B&B was my idea of noir, with prostitutes and tourists, bludgers and transvestites, well-connected criminals and murdering policemen. She may not have been completely wrong.

It was not dark yet and I got a breezy table near the street from which vantage point I soon saw—approximately forty-five minutes after my arrival—our dinged-up Subaru rise from the street and mount the footpath. Did I cower? Oh probably. But I did not dive under the table no matter what your friends have told you. In fact my wife was carrying nothing more frightening than a plastic bag which would later turn out to contain a mobile phone, a charger, a framed photo of my daughters, and my complete signed set, all six volumes, of Manning Clark’s much loved History of Australia.

The photograph was on the top. It gave me hope. If I had seen my treasured Manning Clarks I would have known this was the coup de grâce, but in my foolish optimism I thought, sweet girl, she knows my life is built upon my family. She came straight at my table. I thought, thank God, I would have died to lose her.

“They cut the jacaranda down this morning.”

She had such a pretty face but her eyes were red-rimmed and her mouth was straight as a knife. What was I to say? Sit down?

“Call Woody,” she said, attempting to hand over the carry bag.

I grabbed at her. She said not to touch her. The charger fell to the floor. By the time I had discovered the Manning Clarks, she was gone.

And who would ever feel sorry for me? Had I not risked my family’s life?

But even then I was an optimist. Woody wanted me to call him and I knew exactly why. He had talked to Claire. He knew I was in the doghouse. Naturally he would find me a place to stay. I called immediately and he picked up.

“You’re in the shit.”

“I am.”

“Where are you now?”

“Where else? The B&B.”

“Fucking Bernie,” he laughed.

“I thought he was dead.”

“Yes mate.” His tone became weirdly serious and I thought, of course Woody would know Bernie Houghton, and probably Frank Nugan too. There were stranger friendships in this town. Shoot me for saying it, but Sydney, our dense dark city, is really very small.

“I’ve got something for you,” he said. I thought, thank God. I could not bear to go begging for a bed.

“You’re a mate,” I said.

“You’re going to have to get your arse down here.”

“Where’s here?”

“Melbourne.”

“Why Melbourne?”

“Jesus, don’t argue with me Feels. I’m about to save your life again. Why Melbourne? Jeez. Don’t be offensive.”

“Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.”

Of course Melbourne was where he owned most property, where he would most easily find an empty flat for me. I should be very, very grateful.

“You want this or not?”

“Yes, I want it.”

“Then I’ll see you tomorrow in my office. I’ll take you to lunch at Moroni’s like the old days.”

I could have charged the flight to our joint credit card, but truly, I had seen Claire’s face. It was Thursday night, late night shopping. I took a cab to the distinguished book dealer on Oxford Street where I offered my Manning Clarks. Each one was signed “To Felix with respect.” I argued that they were association copies.

“The association being?”

I was not one of Manning’s many worshippers, but I liked him and he was unfailingly amused by me. “He is Manning Clark,” I said. “I am Felix Moore.”

The bookseller showed no particular reaction, although he did spend an awfully long time staring at the spine of Volume I. He was a gentle, diplomatic young man. He did not call me a wanker or argue about the plunging value of my name. Rather, he indicated, quite correctly, that Vol. I was associated with red wine and biro and Vol. V was foxed. He offered two hundred in the manner of his caste, giving me my books back as if to say, don’t even try to haggle. Of course I took the money and it turned out just enough: $112 for the ticket, $60 for a shitty room I found nearby in Surry Hills.

Sad and sorry on my slippery motel sheets I called my wife.

To my delight she took my call.

“If you do this one more time,” she said, “I’ll have your phone cut off.”

5

BEFORE EXHAUSTING the last of the birdshit deposits which were the source of its fabulous wealth, before going into business as a detention facility for asylum seekers, the nation state of Nauru destroyed two landmark buildings in Collins Street and erected a 52-floor octagonal monument to its own ineptitude and corruption.

Who would want to have an office on this site? My mate of course.

“If I applied your standards, Feels, I’d be sleeping on the beach. Also,” he said, revealing his true Melbourne heart, “the last time I looked, you lived in Sydney.”

Woody had his office on the fiftieth floor and here he liked to swing back and forth in his fancy chair and gaze up at the violent scudding clouds and down on Parliament House and out to his developments at Docklands. He could see all the way south to St. Kilda and north-east to Collingwood and all that rising damp he had inherited when his father was shot to death.

That murder was not a subject I ever raised with Woody. His personal history resided in the world of “it is said.” It is said that he was a stellar student at Melbourne High. It is said he had wanted to be a literature professor. It is said he had no choice but to pick up his father’s revolver. It is said that he continued that habit long after he employed others to collect his rents. I know this last is true because he once persuaded me to go to the beautiful old Florentino restaurant to pick up “something” he had stupidly left behind. He didn’t say it was a pistol but I noted the blanched face of the unerringly polite Raymond Tsindos when he presented me with a shoebox marked “Mr. Townes.” Outside, on Bourke Street, by the window of that famous bookshop, I lifted the lid. I never told him what I saw.

It is not common for people in Melbourne to carry guns. Indeed it is a criminal offence. So it may seem odd that, rather than stain his good name, my friend’s idiosyncrasy brought a certain frisson to his reputation. Patron of the arts, collector of first editions, street fighter, champion of the left, also, of course, most of all, a property developer. In a different society Woody Townes would have been a player in nothing grander than a city council, but in our dry sclerophyll country his species nests very high indeed.

“I’m going to save your arse, young Felix.”

“That’s very noble of you, mate.”

He stared at me and I, like a drunk who realises he has caused offence, was confused and hurt and dared not look away. This was not Woody in the Wentworth but Woody in his office. My mate had scary moments.

“Thanks for this,” I said.

“Ah, comrade,” he sighed, “you know I am not noble.”

“In your fashion, mate.”

“You thought you were fucked,” he said. “You were up shit creek again.”

“Pretty much, yes.”

“Now you’re going to be top dog.”

Oh fuck, I thought, as I sat down opposite him, he is offering me one of his disgusting penthouses on the Yarra. It would be impossible to refuse.

“Just a place to stay till I get started.”

“But what would you possibly start on? Workwise.”

“Jeez. I’ve just arrived.”

“Maybe you’ll be working sooner than you think. You know who the Angel’s mother is?”

“Yes. And so do you.”

He raised his big eyebrows, grinning, withholding.

“You’ve been in touch with her,” I suggested.

“Mate, I’ve never stopped being in touch with Celine.”

The innuendo was not prettily expressed, but I wanted to believe what he was hinting at. “You got me a gig?”

“You write the bloody story, mate. Exclusive. Felix Moore. The defendant won’t talk to anyone but you.”

“Bullshit.”

“I bailed her. Five hundred k,” Woody said, as if he’d purchased a Dobell portrait. I did not judge him for his vulgarity. I admired him. Who else in Australia would have stepped up in his place? “While you were packing shit in the park in Sydney, I was on the phone. I bailed the bloody Angel before the US could touch her. What about that? She’s yours.” He was grinning at me like a wide-mouthed frog. I didn’t have to tell him I was already on her side.

“And she wants me to write her story? That’s what you’re saying.”

“Mate, she never heard of you.”

I didn’t believe him for a second, and in any case I did not care.

“No newspaper’s going to run this,” I said.

Wodonga threw his sandwich in the bin and I recalled I had heard his stomach had been stapled and that when you ate with him at Florentino he would vomit discreetly into his handkerchief. He sat more formally now, his awful elephantine hands clasped gently above his stomach.

“Book,” he said. “Big advance. You can lose your court appeal and pay your damages and still buy Claire a sexy nightie. The contract is being written now. But if you don’t want the job, just say so.”

As it turned out the money was terrific, although his company would own the copyright and I would have no royalty, ever, and no recourse if my name was, without consultation, removed from the title page. Nor did he tell me that he did not control the source at all. For many weeks I would be tormented by the subject’s unavailability. If he had warned me? It would not have changed a thing. I saw myself accept a fat brown envelope that I imagined contained a paperback. Woody said it was $10,000 and I did not even count.

“A good-faith deposit,” he said. “Buy yourself a suit.”

“Fair enough,” I said, thinking, fuck the suit, I can pay the school bills.

Woody slipped into his jacket and took a dainty umbrella from his drawer.

“You’re going to write about a traitor,” he said, watching me stuff the envelope into my jacket. “Being the mug you are, you will fall in love with her. The only problem is: she will most likely be put to death.” I was about to remind him that Australia had no death penalty but he retreated to a private bathroom in the office and peed so long and loud I knew he was showing off his prostate operation.

“I’ve got the table at Moroni’s,” he said when he emerged. “Do you need a comb?”

“Certainly not.”

I did not need a comb to gain admittance to Moroni’s. I had eaten there a hundred times, with Gough Whitlam, John Cain—that is, a Prime Minister and a State Premier whose speech I had once rewritten in that very restaurant, assisted, it might be added, by Moroni’s lethal grappa.

The maître d’ was named Abramo. He was always the same, like a benign James Joyce with perfect vision. Abramo had good reasons to be fond of me as he shortly demonstrated by ignoring Wodonga and warmly welcoming my slovenly self. He showed me to a corner table where there sat an unusual individual. First, she was a woman, the only one in all the hushed besuited room. She was wearing a charcoal silk Shanghai Tang jacket with a brick-red lining and her haircut was a million-dollar job, by which I mean short and simple and sustained by strong, almost springy, silver hair. I was wrong about her age, and so would you have been. She had all those looks that come from great cheekbones, the sort of structured beauty a hundred years of Gauloises could not corrode.

As I approached she stood to shake my hand. She said her name but I did not catch it. I assumed she was the publisher.

“Felix Moore,” I said. I heard Woody groan. He could not believe I didn’t recognise the famous face.

“Felix,” she said. “It’s Celine.”

I began to speak but could not end the sentence. The traitor’s mother leaned across and kissed me on both burning cheeks.

6

IT WAS NOT simply a famous face I failed to recognise. We had known each other for years and years. Celine and I had been two of 347 freshmen at Monash University. There had been no second- or third- or fourth-year students. Indeed there had not been a Monash University the year before. The so-called “campus” was a raw construction site twenty kilometres east of Moroni’s. There were acres of hot shadeless car park across which a young woman walked in stiletto heels.

This Celine was a vision, like the redhead on the Redhead matches box. She was in no way like the woman at the table in Moroni’s. She was much taller, fuller breasted. She had flouncing skirts, gorgeous bouncing fair hair.

The woman at Moroni’s was famous. Her lips were full but also pale, carved in soapstone. The nineteen-year-old had a violently red mouth and was dramatically “accessorised” by what we might now call her “posse,” a very dangerous-looking collection of young men who I immediately decided would have to be my friends. There was a beatnik, a poet, a queeny boy, a sort of Hell’s Angel, and finally her lover, Sandy Quinn, an older man in a linen jacket who certainly had not come from high school. It would be years before I learned a trade union was paying him to go to university. I did not notice any sadness in his eyes. I saw his beard, sun-bleached, trim and sculpted to his jaw. I took his silence to be both powerful and judgemental.

“I was a total dork,” I told her, and this was true.

“He was very cute,” she said to Woody.

“So he was a randy little dog,” said Woody. “Cop a feels.”

This caused a silence. I thought of my tumescent adventure with her father’s photograph. Abramo filled my glass.

I had been short and scruffy with the nasal vowels I had learned in Bacchus Marsh. My hair was short and less clean than it might have been. I did not have the requisite sloppy sweater. Celine’s gang had been at first amused, then appalled, then made completely rat-faced by my presumption—that I was fit to be their friend. They said things which would have made a lesser person run away and cry.

But I was the son of a man who would stand in a muddy potato paddock all afternoon if that was what it took to sell a Ford. Those were my genetics.

Celine never thought me cute. But she saw my will, which was well in advance of my other attractions and was therefore dazzling. One afternoon in Springvale she told me I would be the only one of all of them who would make something of my life. Now she was about to make her own prediction come true. She would give me sole access to her outlaw daughter. So watch me, I thought, watch me do the rest.

The waiters had surely seen my recent humiliation on television and I was pleased they would now be witnesses to this redemption, those tall private men with white aprons and elegant grey moustaches. Now they saw the queen of stage and screen kiss me on my raddled cheek.

“To Felix,” she said and clinked my glass.

“I am in disgrace,” I said, referring of course to PANTS ON FIRE, but also, in my own way, underlining my outcast character which could never really be acceptable. I did not reveal that I had information about her life that she herself was unaware of, but I most definitely hinted, in my subtle way, that an honourable writer needs to be a scorpion as well. A writer serves the story. He dare not weigh the private consequences.

“It is not you who are in disgrace,” she said. “You shamed them, as usual.” And I recalled that very particular fire in her grey eyes, her characteristic arousal at the prospect of a little danger.

“You might have lost the case but you made them look as corrupt and venal as they are.”

Yes, I had fought the good fight all my life but I had also become an awful creature along the way.

7

THE BEGINNING OF the academic year had been stinking hot. The rain fell in buckets and the steam rose off the lawn where I had recently stood beside my father while the Chancellor of Monash University delivered his opening address. I was the first member of my family to get past the lower reaches of high school. I had no conscious knowledge of why I had chosen a university with no cloisters, no quadrangles, no suck-up colleges, no private school boys with their Triumph TR3s. Instead I had chosen the sea of mud that had been a market garden, where the footpaths were not yet paved, where the campus was surrounded by light industry and the cream brick homes of those who worked beneath those sawtoothed roofs. My choice was not political. I had no politics I was aware of.

This was three years before the Gulf of Tonkin, three years before conscription for Vietnam, seven years before the Monash Labor Club invented revolution, which would involve—I was given this message personally—being put against a wall and shot.

We students walked on narrow paths, single file like cows on their way to milking. We returned to landladies whose husbands were fitters and turners but were introduced as engineers. We were barbarians to our hosts to whom we delivered our Monash mud (PLEASE REMOVE YOUR SHOES) and splashing urine (PLEASE LIFT THE SEAT).

I am not sure that Celine’s high heels were muddy as she later claimed, but there is no doubt she had peed standing at the urinal. Everybody mentioned it. I was impressed by Sando’s crumpled linen jacket and did not know enough to buy my own clothes second-hand. I tried too hard, most likely. I listened to everything they said. As a result I got the train from Clayton into Flinders Street and found, not without some difficulty, both Ulysses and The Cantos of Ezra Pound. I carried these heavy volumes back to the suburban bedroom I shared with a chemistry student from Wonthaggi. There was just one desk. When that was occupied I read lying down or wrote whilst kneeling at my bed. I shoplifted an expensive commentary on Ulysses and made margin notes on the significance of “Agenbite of inwit,” for instance. “Inwit” should have been “inwyt.” Did Sandy know James Joyce couldn’t spell? Did he understand that “U.P.:up” was meant to suggest urination and erection? I kneeled. I annotated. I stored away my ammunition. Beyond the sad lace curtains, parallel with my bed, was a grey wood-paling fence. One kilometre away, the electric train line was also parallel. In a long black cape, Barry Humphries stalked the streets.

It should have been obvious that I was not suited to engineering, but my father’s ambition was to see me established as Shire Engineer of Bacchus Marsh. He bought me an expensive slide rule which I never learned to use. I faked my physics experiments, working back from the correct value of g which I still recall as 980 cm per sec per sec.

I had no idea that I was on the path to catastrophic failure. Indeed, anything seemed possible. Celine’s friends were drama majors, psychologists, political philosophers and poets. They discussed Description, Narration, Exposition, Argumentation. Had I been capable, I would have faked this too, but all I had to offer them were some controversial facts: Agenbite of inwit. U.P.:up.

My clever father never had a need to develop a treatise or present an abstract. Nor had this skill been required of me at high school up in Ballarat. I had sat my matriculation confident I was a whiz at chemistry and mathematics, but I arrived in Celine’s magic circle with four plain passes and no clue as to how to play their game. They were reading Frantz Fanon, Simone de Beauvoir, Alfred Jarry. Any radical thought I might offer—that there might be no God for instance—was tedious to them, and they seemed embarrassed I should mention it. I was staggered that, while they had not known each other previously, they seemed to be continuing a conversation which they had started years before. They all knew rhinoceros was a play.

More than once they told me to piss off, but I had chosen them, and I would stay until they saw my worth.

The motorcyclist rarely spoke to me. Sandy Quinn had the habit of smiling while I talked. Years later he would tell me he had been anxious on my behalf and had only smiled to give me some support.

Celine’s body could not have been at all as I imagined it but she would always be a physical actor who could make you believe her waist was smaller and her legs longer than in real life. She was not as clever as I thought she was. Sometimes she was cold to me, other times quite tender. Once she mussed up my hair in public, and perhaps she was as much on my side as she later claimed, but she was always, unfailingly, relentlessly amused to see me run to fetch the balls thrown by the poet. The poet had a long square-shouldered body and a freckled face that might have been bland if you could not see that he was, in his very quiet brown-eyed way, capable of absolutely anything.

“Catcher in the Rye,” the poet said mildly. “You said you read it, but you didn’t, did you? Not really.” His manner was so agreeable. It was hard to believe he was tormenting me.

The leather boy had his head down rolling cigarettes, one after the other, lining them up on the table edge then tucking in their hairy ends.

“Not really, no.”

The poet had a smile like someone sucking on a match. “Too American I suppose?”

“Stop it Andrew,” said Sandy. “Enough.”

“So Felix,” Andrew persisted, “it’s Patrick White for you and Salinger Go Home?”

I had not read Patrick White either. “Sometimes that’s necessary,” I said.

“So, with literature, you are Australia first.”

It was time to take this idea and run with it.

“For me it’s the Battle of Brisbane,” I said, “every bloody day, mate.”

The leather boy snorted through his nose, but of course not even Sandy had heard of the Battle of Brisbane.

“There was no battle of Brisbane,” he said. “You must mean the Brisbane Line. We were ready to give the Japs everything north of Brisbane.”

“No, Sandra.”

Even now I am ashamed I spoke to him like that. I was too defended to even glimpse his extraordinary capacity for empathy. I called him Sandra and it was as if a starling spat at him. He smiled wanly. “I think you’ll find the Japs bombed Darwin and Broome in 1942,” he said.

I was a scrappy little fellow and I thought I was being condescended to. “It was not a battle with the Japs,” I said. “The Americans were in Brisbane,” I said. “Brisbane was MacArthur’s headquarters. So you tell me, Sandy, what was the other garrison in Brisbane in 1942?”

“Australian obviously,” he said, and cocked his head at me. Fuck you, I thought. You’re wrong.

“Australian soldiers fought the Americans in the streets of Brisbane,” I said. “It is known as the Battle of Brisbane.”

It took a lot of nerve for me to let the silence last.

“OK,” he said.

“No. It was censored. The only reason I know is that my old man lost half his hand to an American shotgun.”

Celine caught my eye and I didn’t know if I should be pleased or nervous. It was my uncle not my father who had the flipper hand. I waited. She poured sugar from the glass dispenser and pushed it into a heap. In this action, as in so many, she managed to generate a certain heat, an expectation that she would do something wild and dangerous and we would be condemned to simply sit and watch. She emptied the ashtray on top of the sugar and planted matches there. Then she glared at me and I understood I had offended her, and all this compressed and coded malice was for me.

“What would you know about the bloody Battle of Brisbane?”

“I think I answered that already, love.”

“Love bullshit. What crap.”

I knew my cheeks were burning.

“Stop smirking you big baby,” she said. “You can’t even find it in a book.”

“I think Mr. Moore may be thinking about the Brisbane Line,” said Sandy.

Celine snatched away her lover’s cigarette and threw it on the floor.

“No, pom-pom, he is not confused.”

Seeing how the poet enjoyed this revelation of a secret name, I recognised one more competitor. He helped himself to one of the motorcyclist’s beautiful hand-tailored cigarettes. “So what was the Battle of Brisbane?” he asked me.

“It was about sex,” Celine answered. “The stupid Australians were jealous of the Yanks. The only people in the world who want to help us, and so they shoot them because they like Australian girls.”

“A brawl.”

“No, a bloody battle. It lasted two days, with guns. And it was really stupid because those Americans were the ones who went off to New Guinea to fight the Japanese there.”

“There were no Yanks in New Guinea,” said the motorcyclist. “None, baby, none.”

“Bullshit, baby,” said Celine. “My father was there, baby, baby.”

“I meant Americans.”

“My father was American, baby. He bloody died there,” and she was crying, standing, turning away from the group. “Come on Titch,” she said to me, and took my arm.

She was crying, and I was callow enough to be overjoyed. She was sobbing, but I had won. I had stood my ground. Thus the previously unthinkable circumstance developed where Sandy and his car were banished and I was invited to walk Celine Baillieux to the bus on Ferntree Gully Road.

8

CONTEMPLATING THE CRACKED blackened portraits of colonial no-ones on Moroni’s gloomy walls, I recalled that Sir Robert Menzies was one of two prime ministers who “owned” this corner table. Paul Keating was the other. Of course Keating was NOT A MELBOURNE PERSON, but he always looked at home in Moroni’s, his strangely delicate pale face peering out of the same chiaroscuro which soaked up his dark tailored suits. It was here, at this corner table where I now sat with Celine and Woody Townes, that the Prime Minister’s wife—I mean Annita Keating—had spoken so passionately about the “thread counts” of her sheets. This was probably a safe conversation in New York or Washington or even Sydney, but in our puritanical socialist certainties we were offended by thread counts. Or perhaps we did not know what thread counts were.

The menu in Moroni’s had not changed since 1970, the year of the Vietnam Moratorium, when we marched outside the windows, behind the great Jim Cairns (“The responsibility for violence will rest squarely with him”—The Age). There were a hundred thousand of us including me with my celebrated banner FUCK THE RICH. Four months later I was first taken to Moroni’s and disturbed the genteel weather with my exploding hair.

Veal chop.

Osso bucco.

Rum baba.

Same then. Same now. There could be no other only half-serious Italian restaurant in the world that served such plastic bread.

While Abramo filled my glass assiduously I watched, in the high tilted mirror on the western side, a certain “hard man” from the Trades Hall Council being entertained by a class enemy. He would not catch my shit-stirring eye.

Woody offered San Pellegrino but those bleak bleached paddocks where my dad sold Fords, the loveless rock-and-rabbit farms of Anakie, now produced this flinty straw-coloured Chenin Blanc as complex as a Vouvray. Who would have dreamed it possible?

“I’m fine with the wine,” I said. “Talk to me.”

Celine had one of those faces we adore on screen—thoughts and feelings passing like shadows, leaving one not wiser, but drawn in. She looked at my wine longer than was polite.

Forty-nine years ago she and I had set off up to Ferntree Gully Road and finished at her mother’s home in Springvale. Later we found ourselves working together in the Deputy Prime Minister’s office, but the last time I had seen her was at a Christmas party, breastfeeding her baby girl.

Now she produced a yellow legal pad and with this simple action made herself a lawyer.

As always, I declined to take notes. Silence fell while my glass was filled again.

“I need unlimited access.”

Celine glanced at Woody. Woody turned to me. “All you want mate, she’s yours. That’s why you’ve got the moolah.”

“Do you call her Gaby or Gabrielle?”

“Both.”

“She is in Melbourne?”

“Need-to-know basis, mate.”

Woody. What a prat!

“She has agreed to all this?” I asked Celine. “To speak to me at length and on the record?”

“Mate,” said Woody, “don’t make problems where there are none.”

Moroni’s famous whiting arrived, but Celine did not touch her cutlery. “Before we rush ahead so merrily,” she said, “can we deal with this crap about extradition? She’s an Australian citizen for Christ’s sake. Why do the Americans think everything’s to do with them?”

“She opened hundreds of their jails.”

“She didn’t mean to, obviously. And we cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty,” Celine told me. “You have daughters,” she insisted. “Surely you can imagine how I feel.”

“Felix’s job,” Woody said, and Celine cut him off.

“What did your great barrister say to you? You told me. They cannot extradite her to a country with the death penalty.”

Woody laid his meaty hand upon her slender wrist. “If she actually intended to attack America, that’s a political act. That’s a good thing. Once we prove it was a political act she cannot be extradited. Felix is the man to pitch that story. He can do it standing on his head.”

“Will you listen to what I’ve told you? She is a gutsy kid, but she could not have done what she is charged with. I love her, but she isn’t all that bright.”

“Sando is her father,” I said. “She’s got two very brainy parents.”

“Actually, I got B’s and C’s. And Gaby never finished high school which is why she had such shitty jobs at IBM. She is incapable of doing what the charge sheet says she did. That is how we should be fighting this,” she said to Woody. “Let them give her exams. She’ll fail them. She’s got the B-C gene. She’s innocent.”

“Fair enough,” I said. “But I do believe she has confessed?”

“She can confess all she likes.”

“She bragged she was going destroy twelve corporations. She named them. The Koch brothers are on her to-do list.”

“Actually, her mad supporters did that for her. They go on chat rooms and make up all sorts of shit. They project. They invent. They write her lesbian love letters. They’re nuts, and God help you if you speak out against them. They’ll destroy you.”

“Felix’s role,” Woody began again and this time Celine let him finish. “His role will be to properly educate the Australian public who are naturally inclined to believe the Americans are over-reaching again. Once Felix writes the story, she’ll be Gaby from Coburg. She won’t lose any points for pissing off the Yanks. No-one will want to hand her over.”

“She didn’t mean to hurt them,” Celine said.

“Australianise her, mate,” Woody said. “Gaby from Coburg. Fair dinkum. Blood is thicker than water.”

“Please fire me,” I asked Celine. “You know I’ll do this because I need the money.”

“Why on earth would we fire you?”

To be true, I thought. To be decent. Because clearly I’m being used. Because I know things about you, Celine, I would have to reveal. I couldn’t help myself.

“They could just grab her,” she said, “off the street. Like they grabbed what’s-his-name in Rome.”

“In Milan. Please take your deposit back,” I said to Woody. “Put it in your legal fund. I’m a journalist. I can’t do PR. What are you sniggering about?”

“What sort of mug would ask you to do publicity?”

“We have to try everything,” Celine said. “We have to celebrate her real life without hysteria.”

“Your job is to save an extraordinary human being,” Woody said. “I want to impress that on you, mate.”

His little elephant eyes had become so moist and sentimental that I had to look away. “I’m not the right person,” I told Celine. But at the same time I ordered a grappa, and even while Woody tried to catch my eye, I continued to insist that I was not the man to do the job. I then learned that, legally speaking, I had accepted the deal when I accepted the envelope of cash. I also accepted a second grappa. I negotiated a prescription for Dexedrine, a MacBook Pro, a Cabcharge account and, finally, a place to live until my wife forgave me for being myself.

9

NEITHER CELINE NOR WOODY had said I was to live in Eureka Tower and yet their silence as we entered Melbourne’s tallest building seemed to confirm that this would be my home. Passing the fiftieth floor, my ears popped. As we continued skywards, I experienced a pleasurable murmuring in my neck, a very particular excitement which arrives, inevitably, when one is cast into a decadent situation without it being in any way one’s fault.

The lift door opened on giddy walls of glass.

“You’re scared of heights.” The bastard laughed. He was my friend, yes, but he would not let me grab his forearm for support.

The lift door closed and I was imprisoned.

“You know I get vertigo.”

Celine certainly did. There had been an episode at Monash when she had me climbing the scaffolding of the Menzies Building. She put great store in courage in those days. Now I was unmanned again she would not even catch my eye.

Woody strolled to the windows from where he observed me as I stabilised myself on the kitchen counter. “Don’t be a girl,” he said. “Come on out here.”

Celine had now disappeared and I understood that she was intimately acquainted with this apartment. I once more had that feeling, common back in those Monash days, of being outside the sexual inner circle, of not knowing what was going on.

“Kitty, kitty,” Woody called me, tapping his keys against the glass.

“Bathroom,” I demanded.

Only when the dunny door slammed behind me did I see I was locked up with the very view I was seeking to avoid.

Who would ever dream of such a thing? A toilet with a wall of glass.

“You can shit all over Melbourne,” he called. “That should suit you, mate. You’ve been doing that for years.”

“Let me out.”

“Door’s not locked.”

I flushed then emerged to find him by a grand piano, leaning back against the plate glass, ankles crossed, a vaudeville joke that would only pay off when he plummeted to his death. Of course he had a bottle and the corkscrew. He took the Vosne-Romanée between the wool press of his thighs and slowly withdrew its long French cork. “Cellar Pro constant-temperature wine cellar,” he said. “Valet service. Cleaner comes twice a week—just throw your undies in the basket. The devil took Jesus into a high place,” he said. “Get used to it.”

Claire would be in heaven here, seated at this Steinway. I locked the thought away.

The great Wodonga had splashed some wine as he filled the glasses, and he now attended to the spill with a large white handkerchief.

“Château Valium,” he offered.

I accepted the gift and sunk to the piano stool. Celine called. Then Woody seemed to be discussing my bed sheets with her. By the third glass I was able to raise my eyes. Then, of course, we were to leave.

“Here’s your key mate. When you lose it, the concierge will let you in.”

Then we were all safely back in the elevator and a moment later on the earth where I was introduced to Bruce the concierge who had “read your book.” Bruce gave Woody a package which Woody handed on to me. It was my new iPhone and MacBook, all set up, he claimed. I was not at all suspicious.

Celine kissed both my cheeks. Was she leaving? Woody punched me on the arm and shepherded me to the lift and then, once more, I was alone, being sent back to the place of terror.

If you have never had vertigo it is likely you will have no sympathy for me and I will only make the situation worse by confessing what I did. By day’s end, however, I was piss-faced drunk, sitting cross-legged by the windows. The sun was low over the water-bound fingers of container terminals behind which, somewhere in the drowning dark, lay those drear volcanic plains and my childhood home in Bacchus Marsh. The east, in comparison was a vault of gold, threaded by the Yarra River. My wineglass was a murder scene, besmirched with the brutal sediment of Château Valium. I pressed my nose against the window.

Out there eastwards, not too far, seventeen kilometres perhaps, lying dead and buried like a gangster beneath the Monash Freeway, was the place where I had once planned to kiss Celine.

Her father was American. He died. In her distress she had chosen me from all the others to walk her to the bus. I honestly tried to ask about her father but we were, as she reminded me, walking to the bus not going to confession. What then? We crossed the car park and started up the gravel road. I asked her if she had heard of Ornette Coleman.

“Oh Felix, don’t be boring.”

But of course I was boring. I was a wet-feathered thing just fallen from his nest. What grade are you in? Have you heard of this? Have you heard of that? “Do you have a record player?” I asked.

She considered me, smiling so frankly that I knew my virginity was naked in the light.

“Do you like me Felix?”

I had been aroused beyond hope by the occasional brush from her pleated skirt. Now I found a stone and threw it further up the road. “I don’t know you yet.”

She held her thick fair hair up from her eyes and studied me so insistently that my cheeks took fire. “Why did I ask you to walk me to the bus? What did you think? That I wanted to cry on your shoulder? What went through your head?”

Sex went through my head. I had thought I would play her side two, track three, Una Muy Bonita. For days I had had the album in my bag. All I needed was a stereo. I would tell her she was Una Muy Bonita. I would kiss her if I could.

“I don’t know.”

“Obviously,” she said, “it’s the Battle of Brisbane.”

Then it seemed I was following her inside a pub. That’s what being eighteen was like, learning that walking to the bus meant going to the Notting Hill Hotel, also called the Vicarage or Nott.

I have known famous Monash graduates, all men, get dewy-eyed about the Nott and its licensee, Kath Byer, but on that day I noticed only that Celine’s skirt had a dangerous flounce to it and she chose an isolated table where she carefully arranged her Ronson lighter and a pack of black Sobranies, as exotic in their way as women’s underwear. She bit the cellophane with her straight white teeth. The black cigarettes had gold tips. I had not known such things existed in the world.

“I was conceived in Brisbane,” she said as she placed a Sobranie in her mouth. “You’re blushing.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re very sweet, Felix. Would you please loan me a whisky lime and soda? I really will pay you back.”

I had intended to show her Ornette Coleman when I returned, but it took a good while to clear up the misunderstanding about my age, and by the time I had the drinks in hand she had spread an untidy collection of photographs and clippings across the table. What these were she did not explain. She took her drink and pushed her chair back so I might easily examine her display: a small Kodak print showing a white and willowy American soldier standing beside a palm tree. There was one clipping that had been pressed and folded as flat as a violet in a scrapbook. There were bigger prints, all soldiers, clearly Americans. The Melbourne Herald had stamped a number on the back of some of the larger glossy prints but the biggest had been cut from Life magazine, leaving scalloped nail-scissor marks along one side. Two of the subjects wore bib and braces, three uniforms, and the entire tribe had fair hair and good teeth. All but the grey-haired matriarch enthroned in a bentwood chair with an exceptionally long-barrelled rifle across her knees.

“He wasn’t a hero. He didn’t die in New Guinea,” she said. “That was the bullshit she raised me on. Now she says it was the Battle of Brisbane. Why would she say that to me now, like she has saved it up all my life, and used it to punish me the first time I stay out all night?”

She had stayed out all night with who?

“Did you hear me?”

“What?”

“My father died in a bar-room brawl.”

“It was a battle,” I said. “Two Americans did get killed.”

“Then my father was one of them.”

“Then he was the victim of a crime. The military police killed them.”

“Yes, but she’s a liar. Why would she tell me New Guinea all those years. I never needed a hero, just a father of some kind, but the more you look at it the more he vanishes.” She crumpled her Sobranie. “I can’t tell Sandy any of this.”

I thought, she slept with him.

“Never,” she said. “It would ruin my life.” She spat on her hand and held it out.

Her nails were bright vermilion. There was a gold bangle around her slender suntanned wrist. It did not take a lot to arouse me. Our hands slid together, skin and spit on skin.

“Who’d want to marry the daughter of a madwoman?”

“The right man will understand,” I said, but she did not see the point that I was making.

“You think I’m exaggerating. Look at these photographs.”

“I looked already.”

She moved her chair closer. “Look again.”

“For what?”

“Don’t play silly buggers.” Her hair brushed my cheek.

“One of them’s your father, right?” I said, but all these men had in common was fair hair and American uniforms.

“What if I told you I was raised to believe they were the same man?” She held my eyes. It was unbearable. “All my life. What do you say to that?”

“I don’t know.”

Whatever pheromones were in the air she did not seem to notice. “Thank you Felix, that’s very diplomatic of you, but if you’re brought up to see a thing a certain way you just see it. It wasn’t until she came out with that Battle of Brisbane I took the frames off the wall to look at them. I had an awful hangover. I was in no shape to see anything very much, but when she saw what I was doing she went really nuts. I saw her face. Then I understood how terrified she was. So I carried the whole lot into my room and locked her out and I took them all out of their frames, and found pictures hidden behind pictures. She was crying and knocking on my door.”

“What did she say?”

“I don’t care. I’m never going to talk to her again.”

Did she mean that literally? I didn’t take it to be so, but then, as we both agreed, I did not know Celine. I never would.

“Can you imagine what my mother’s done to her only child? Why would she punish me like that?”

Well, I also had a missing parent whose absence from my life was a source of constant pain. My mother had gone, that’s all I knew. My father could not speak of her without crying. I did not think he was mad or we were strange but I kept my secret folded tight and locked away and I had no intention of revealing it to Celine Baillieux.

But I finally listened to her with authentic interest. I learned to see the house in Springvale from whose backyard her peculiar mother ran a taxi service. The house was like its neighbours, cream brick, triple-fronted, the sort of place we saw in our Melbourne minds when we heard Pete Seeger sing about little boxes made of ticky tacky. Who would have known that it contained, in its plastic-wrapped front room, its dark passages, its neon kitchen and dining room, an obsessive memorial to a fallen American who was known as “Dad”? There were, besides the seven framed photographs, odd artifacts like cowry shells and a faded pink tram ticket and a Purple Heart, framed and hung beside the certificate that declared the kitchen the registered offices of the taxi company.

The pretty girl needed me, not handsome Sandy Quinn whose heart was clearly not big enough to hold her pain. Of course Sandy’s life business would be to hold the pain of others, but in my ignorance I thought myself the better man. Celine stroked my arm. She touched my hair. I judged it would be OK to kiss her just behind the ear.

“Quit it,” she cried suddenly.

I reached to touch her cheek but she slapped my hand away.

“You’re a baby. I can’t believe I’ve chosen you to tell,” and suddenly there were fat tears and eyeliner and mascara everywhere and two gents were curious to know if I was “bothering the lady.”

“No,” the lady said, “go away you bloody oicks.”

“It’s all right, mate,” I told them both.

“Yes mate,” she sneered at me when her rescuers retreated. “It’s all right, mate, baby.” She pushed her untouched drink towards me, and then she began to sob.

“I’m pretty screwed up,” she said.

She rocked forward in her chair and then she leaned a little further, with her face all wet, kissed me, softly, all ash and whisky, with mascara cheeks, she kissed me very slowly on the lips.

“You’ve a lovely kind face,” she said. “I’m pleased I chose you to tell.”

I thought, I will solve this puzzle for her. I lifted her chin—smeared blue eyeliner, iridescent like abalone shell—and I kissed her, at last, not understanding the role I had been cast in.

10

HOW WAS GABY going to reach me? If she encrypted her email how in the hell would I decrypt it? Forget what I said about Wired magazine. I had no preparation for this modern world.

As the days passed my vertigo gave way to a general unease, something worse than the fatty biliousness caused by takeaway food. I was queasy. I was impatient. I abused the delicate MacBook as I had once hammered my Olivetti Valentine (until I snapped a character straight off the type bar.) Already, in Eureka Tower, my keyboard had developed bright white stress marks on the “f” and “t.”

I peered and pecked on Google and LexisNexis where my subject was a teenager of interest to the police, a schoolgirl, totally enclosed in a yellow Hazchem suit, arrested for interfering with chemical effluent.

I traced one of her former teachers at R. F. Mackenzie Community School. Her name was Crystal, for God’s sake. She was an activist. A progressive. We spent a lot of time on the telephone while she explained that R. F. Mackenzie had been an almost perfect place for a clever radical to go to school. It was hard to divert her. She talked mournfully about a whole chain of inner-city schools, East Brunswick through to Bell Street High School, to Moreland, where progressive teachers had once been able to make a difference. She remembered Gaby Baillieux had a boyfriend but she forgot his name. She knew Gaby had Samoan friends but then decided this was “private information.” She was more informative about all the smart left-wing teachers who had been sucked out of classrooms and swallowed up by the Education Department once Labor came back to power.

Through the Samoan Methodist Church in Coburg, I tracked down Gaby’s friend Solosolo. Solosolo was now living out in Sunshine where her sister, a big girl, had been stabbed, just before I called. Yes, Solosolo played with Gaby in the Bell Street High girls’ soccer team. She prayed for her. She had to go.

Gabrielle Baillieux disappeared from my screen until I found her in a fossilised blog: she was twenty-two, a technical solutions engineer at IBM. Three years later a Gaby Baillieux was charged with trespass and causing wilful damage to a government facility near Alice Springs.

Of course IBM fired her. They must have. Two years ago a Gaby Baillieux had been appointed as a project engineer at a game startup in South Melbourne. The company still existed, but they refused to talk to me. I found her credit rating: Fair. She had not married. She had owned no property and had not given birth.

I found no evidence of hacking or any other criminal or political activity. I began to wonder if her mother might be correct, that she was innocent. Perhaps it just meant that she was very, very skilled. I really hoped so. I wanted her to exist.

I called Sando at his electoral office in Coburg and he told me to go and fuck myself. Fair enough. I belly-flopped into the shallow end of computer crime, an online world of Tor and bitcoins. I made many notes, understood nothing, and stopped short, thank God, of entering the dark web without protection.

I studied the extradition treaty between Australia and the US and learned that everything Woody had said was true, but, really, so what? Everything we knew from life suggested that America would do what it liked and Australia would behave like the client state it always was.

I saw Sando on CNN, poor bugger, his looks gone, his hair worn down with worry and divorce. Due to his strange mustard-coloured coat the Labor MP had an unfortunate Eastern European appearance. The Washington Post had already written that Gaby was a product of the “Culture of Envy,” which was their nod to the Socialist Left faction of the Australian Labor Party.

Sando told CNN he hadn’t seen his daughter in many years, he could not remember when.

Still, Mr. Quinn, if you had to choose between betraying your country or your daughter?

It was clear Sando wished to cry. I turned away from him and put my nose against the window and realised that it had become my comfort, the cool glass in the middle of the night.

I slept badly.

I would lie in bed imagining the apartment was full of people only to discover that it was nothing but the television where, at any hour, one could see the same old footage of the Angel and hear, again, the American politicians who did not seem to understand she was not their citizen and therefore could not be their traitor any more than she could be their patriot. The House Majority Leader found it politically necessary to call for her execution.

It was in the midst of this swelling hysteria, with dawn breaking over the Dandenong Ranges, that I learned that her pompous barrister had obtained his first adjournment. There had been a late night news conference outside the court where Gaby hesitated and glanced timidly at her bewigged QC who patted her familiarly, the creep.

Now, I thought, my wait is over. This woman needs me. Then a day passed, then another, then one more. I woke to discover bottles and pizza cartons and cold French fries littered over my quilt.

My first thought was that Woody had got legless and trashed his own apartment. This was not a rash conclusion. I had been drunk with him many times and had witnessed a whole spectrum of behaviour that went from hiding raw prawns inside a motel’s hollow curtain rods to sharing the logic of a real estate development that would cost him $30 million. He could be rude, crude and sentimental, but throughout it all he had been my protector, never embarrassed to be an admirer or a servant to a higher cause.

I had been pleased but not at all surprised when he came to sit with me in court each day. I cannot describe the comfort. That was how we had been together all our lives. He was, he said so often, “a fan.” It was only when my attention moved beyond the shocking debris on my bed, when I read the notes sellotaped around the bedroom wall, that I understood there had been a tectonic shift in our relationship. My fan was now my boss.

YOU ARE PAID TO WRITE, NOT EAT YOURSELF TO DEATH.

He awaited me at breakfast, dressed like a patron Pope in a carmine jogging suit, twin white stripes down each side. My computer was on his generous lap and he was opening my files which contained all sorts of shit he had no business reading. The secrets of Celine’s mad mother and the imaginary father were not the worst of it.

“It’s only notes, mate.”

“I can’t publish your fucking notes,” he cried. “I want whole pages with proper spelling and punctuation. Australianise her, for Christ’s sake. Please, Feels. Be a sport.”

I said I would prefer him not to read my files.

For reply he slammed the MacBook shut and threw it on the table top.

“Do you think we control the duration of the discovery process? How long will it take? Five months? A year? If there is going to be an extradition request we need your book in the stores by the time it happens. You saw her on TV? You think she’s cute, right? You got a hard-on just watching her. But listen to me, she’s on the spectrum. She’s scary. She does not respond normally.”

“I need background. That’s what you’ve been reading on my laptop. Background notes.”

“My laptop,” he corrected. “It’s foreground I’m paying for, mate. That’s what we need. Do what you always do. Did you really go to the war in Bougainville? No. Was the piece impeccable? Absolutely. You’re a genius. Make it up, and most of all make the bitch loveable, all right?”

“She won’t be like that, Woody. Remarkable people never are.”

“Come on, Feels. Who’s the big sook who sat with you in court and smelled your socks all day? Who applauded when you told the court that there was no such thing as objective journalism?”

“That was not a defence of making things up.”

“Extrapolate, isn’t that how you explained it? Be intuitive. You want some useful advice? Don’t make this story all about yourself. That’s what pisses people off. That’s why they don’t like you. That is why you are always in the shit. No offence.”

This was hurtful, and yet the very peculiar thing about the history of patrons is how often the most ignorant and barbaric amongst them have shaped great works of art. Only because of this offensive speech did I finally glimpse what my book might really be.

“And for Chrissakes go and buy some clothes.”

“I am waiting for her to make contact.”

“You think you can dress like this for your interviews? What if you end up on TV? Get decent. Buy clean socks too. Go. I’ll wait here until you come back.”

So it was, strolling across the Swanston Street bridge for the first time in forty years, I found myself swimming in the giddiness of time, knowing exactly where I was and having no idea at all. I chose to go to Henry Bucks by way of Flinders Street, in order that I might pass the embalmed corpse of The Herald building (where I had once been so firmly edited). The bitter wind drove lolly papers past its shuttered doors.

I sometimes dream of the Herald as it was so long ago: the marble and terrazzo, oak panels, the whistling thumping vacuum tubes above your head. There are always bizarre copy boys and copy girls with carbon-paper smudges on their cheeks. People come and go in pursuit of unimaginable business. Some walk directly to the banks of clunking lifts. Men in hats rush past the front desk and through a swinging door.

The first time I entered this holy place I was carrying all Celine’s putative fathers in a manila envelope. It was my strongly held conviction that one of them would turn out to be real. I explained my general purpose to the receptionist who clearly did not take me seriously.

I waited. I missed my physics lecture. Then physical chemistry. As the clock struck eleven, an hour when Professor R. D. Brown could be relied upon to wipe the blackboard clear of his gnomic equations, I saw a snazzy-suited fellow with a ramrod back charge through the swinging door. This, although I did not yet know his name or rank, was Captain Stackpole. Captain Stackpole thought he knew me. Clearly, I answered a description. He pointed a finger at me and raised an inquiring eyebrow.

“Thomas Ryder?”

I stood. It was enough.

“Follow me,” he said, returning through the swinging door with me at his heels. I was afraid. I followed him deeper, down stairs, up stairs, along corridors, into the office where I saw his name written very clearly on his door.

What could he do to me?

Captain Stackpole was a short man, very trim, and brisk. He had a dimpled chin and a military moustache and an RSL badge in his brown lapel. He indicated a chair but I could not waste a moment and displayed the photographs of Celine’s various fathers.

“What’s this?”

“I need to see the photo editor.”

“The librarian?”

“I don’t know.”

“Don’t know?” He whacked his pipe against his ashtray. “You’re Thomas Ryder.”

“I’m Felix Moore, sir.”

“You said you were Thomas Ryder.”

“No.”

“No?”

“No, Captain Stackpole.”

He stared at me belligerently. He reached for the telephone. I thought, oh shit. He changed his mind. “This place is a bloody circus,” he said and shoved my pictures back at me and grabbed my arm and marched me down some stairs and along a hallway to a door with a tacked-on paper sign that read ABBOT.

Inside was a large room like my dad’s spare-parts department: grey steel with regularly drilled holes stretching from floor to ceiling, deep shelves about a metre apart stacked with what I would now call archival boxes, patchy brown or straw colour, each corner protected by metal tips.

Captain Stackpole led me down different aisles or avenues, bawling out Miss Abbot’s name.

I turned a corner and there she was, the librarian of The Herald, riding on the top rung of a wheeled loft ladder, propelling herself forward with her white-gloved hands. Even perched so high, it was clear she had a lot of waist and long straight legs.

“Herr Steckenpoo,” she cried, descending.

In the year of the bouffant her black hair was radical, not just for being short and shaped, but in anticipating the fashions of the years to come. She was handsome, with high cheekbones and the jawline of a heroine. All this was eroticised by her narrowed eyes, which, in their present puffy state, suggested very bad behaviour.

“Cobber,” she said to me, holding out her hand which revealed, beneath the curatorial white glove, the inflexibility of a prosthetic.

“Miss Abbot, might you assist this young fellow?”

“Captain Steckopopo, your servant.”

“You are asking for it, Miss Abbot.”

“Yes, but not from you. What can I do for you, cobber?” asked Miss Abbot and left Captain Stackpole to make his own arrangements.

“Let’s have a deck at what you’ve got.” She had a lovely reckless coordinated walk and if her bum was not small it was not corseted and therefore lovely to behold.

She settled herself at a long high work bench. Her thighs were generous and her ankles nicely turned.

I turned over the manila envelope and she briskly emptied the contents onto her desk. “Give me a squiz.” With her left hand (which, being ungloved, was slender and long-fingered) she began to sort the images into different categories.

“One of these men is my dad,” I said. “I don’t know which one.”

“You couldn’t just ask your dad himself?”

I did not lie, but she clearly saw my grief.

“Ah, so.” Miss Abbot had an active bright intelligence which was not contradicted by her puffy eyes.

“Can you help me?”

She lightly touched my upper arm.

“No-one better, cobber. I’m your man.”

Celine’s pictures were in five piles. The first consisted of the prints I judged to have been already purchased from The Herald. Miss Abbot recorded the pencilled numbers on their verso sides.

“Stand by,” she said and I listened to the ladder wheels moving amongst the stacks. Then silence. Then she was back with the names of all the four soldiers and the date and place where they had been photographed.

I thought, I am a genius. I am going to win. I am going to ask Celine to the Purple Eye Jazz Club next Friday night.

Miss Abbot took a blank sheet of paper and drew a grid. She made notes of all of the photos but one, a yellowed cutting, which she slid back in the envelope.

“What about that one?”

“It’s not your dad.”

“Why?”

“The Yanks were mostly lovely,” she said. “You can’t say that in Melbourne without being called a tart, but they were gentlemen. You had a very handsome daddy whichever one he is.”

This father, here, had appeared in The Argus between 1942 and 1946. That one was in The Age after 1943. This here was definitely Life magazine and the Melbourne public library had bound volumes so I must go there straight away. As the Yanks were in the war so bloody late, there were only two hundred issues to check.

I was looking at a cheeky GI offering an apple to a grinning girl. I was wondering if they did “it.” Miss Abbott rested her left hand on my wrist. “Don’t be hard on your mum,” she said.

“OK.”

“Cobber, you’re not listening. We all thought we were going to die. Everyone did a lot of stupid things. If your mum slipped up, you must forgive her. She doesn’t know you’re doing this, does she? Your mum.”

“Not really.”

She searched my face and I did not know how to respond. She removed a large white envelope from her lower drawer and extracted a 10″x8″ glossy black and white print. It was the sort of picture I had seen before: the liberation of a European city, an American tank, crowded with soldiers and a very pretty girl with tangled jet-black hair. The girl was a photographer. She had two big cameras slung around her neck. She waved both arms in triumph. Beside her was a handsome GI with a wolfish grin who, I realised with a shock, had both his hands upon her breasts.

“You get it.”

“Yes,” I said, but only as she slipped the photograph away did I understand that this stunning girl photographer had become Miss Abbot.

“Be nice to your mum,” she said. “It was a different time.”

When she had finished with her sheet of paper she tucked it back with all Celine’s photographs.

“Do you know where the public library is? Of course you don’t.”

So she led me out and up the stairs and through the newsroom and into the foyer past the receptionist with the hairsprayed bouffant and then she walked with me two blocks to the corner of Swanston Street.

“Walk that way,” she said. “The library is on the corner of La Trobe Street, on the right. You can go and see Phar Lap when you’re finished. You know who Phar Lap was?”

“A horse that died.”

“Yes, a horse that died. Do you smoke, cobber?”

I said I did and she gave me a Craven “A” and lit it for me.

“Come back and see me,” she told me as I tried hard not to cough. “Come and tell me which hunk is which.”

She kissed me then, rather strangely, directly on the lips.

I should have been in lectures, but there was no contest in my mind. So I walked up towards the library carrying the burning Craven “A.” There was a hot north wind, and you could smell the smoke of bushfires amongst the traffic.

I was high and happy, triumphant in my quest, and then quite suddenly, as I crossed Bourke Street, unspeakably sad.

It was a puzzle then, but I know what caused it now: the tears in my eyes were precipitated by the flavour of lipstick on my mouth, the taste of my mother perfectly preserved. Gone, empty, then as now as I go to Henry Bucks to buy my suit.

11

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.

12

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.”

“That’s right.”

I had no choice but trust him. I listened as he explained that he must put a blanket over me, “like a budgie in its cage.” I was more excited than afraid. I would meet the Angel without her mother’s help. I would shake her hand. The blanket had a certain logic. That is, we were just five minutes from the CIA’s great bum boys, ASIO, the Australian secret service on St. Kilda Road. That was only one of about six state and corporate “entities” I could imagine watching me. When we entered the car park I was relieved to see, waiting right outside the lift, a thirty-year-old Holden sedan with powdery paintwork.

“Are you a potter?” I asked him but he was busy opening the boot, sorting through an unappetising tangle of crocheted rugs and quilts. He selected an unsavoury lemon-coloured blanket and held it up as if for size.

“OK?” he asked. I had no time to answer because he wrapped the blanket round my head.

“Don’t panic.”

I was mainly worried about my suit. “How long do I need to keep it on?”

“Just till we get going.”

And with that the bastard picked me up. It was then, in his fierce embrace, I knew I had been kidnapped. I screamed with fright.

“Shut up,” he cried and dumped me in the boot.

You work for property developers this is what they do to you.

13

I WAS a complete idiot. I would die now, because I could not acknowledge what was clearly true, which I had always known, that my greatest admirer was capable of anything.

How pathetic that I had got myself entangled in his love affairs. I did not even know what my offence was, or why Celine should be so afraid, but I would die without my decent law-abiding daughters knowing I was something better than a drunken arsonist. They would never see me in a decent suit. They would not imagine how I loved them or what I had suffered, nor imagine these smells inside this airless coffin, wet burlap and mould, the odour of real Melbourne crime. My father once traded in a Holden and discovered £10,000 hidden in its doors. Being a Holden, the door had filled with water and all the money turned to pulp which smelled like this exactly. I could not breathe. I found a tyre lever and began to beat the boot lid. The car slowed, accelerated violently, then pulled off the road. I heard the driver’s door open and slam shut.

A key entered the lock. The lid cracked open. I saw a slice of my kidnapper’s bright red lips.

“I can’t breathe.”

“If you hit my car again,” he spoke with chilling deliberation, “I’ll tear your fucking throat out. Do you understand that? Can you hear me?”

“Yes.”

“What the fuck got into you? Are you mad?”

“I can’t breathe.”

“Here.” He pushed a paper bag through the gap.

“What’s this?”

By the time I understood what was in the bag, we were on a freeway and I knew I was a dead man. Vodka, to help me through my execution. It would be a western suburbs murder but committed in the east, a nail gun, probably, on sale at Mitre 10 at Thomastown, six-inch nails inside my skull.

What would you have done? I had Woody’s number on speed dial but when I called he had his phone turned off. We all used to laugh about Woody. We used to say that the Big Fella knew where the bodies were buried. Now I drank his vodka and prayed the exhaust fumes might have me dead before we reached my destination. Then I dialled again.

My kidnapper drove on and on and I must have called Woody’s number twenty times. Then we left the freeway and then—an hour from Moroni’s—we were off the sealed road and were bumping along one of those dirt tracks which had once allowed me to pretend that I had escaped suburbia. I should have called my daughters but I would have cried. They could never know what a dirt road used to signify. They had grown up city kids. They would laugh to think of their father even chopping wood.

I wondered if he would stop to buy the nail gun or if he already had it. The road was so rough I wished it would knock me out. I phoned Woody one more time.

“Hi Felix, where are you?”

“In a car.”

He laughed, sadistic bastard.

“Woody, I didn’t mean to be hurtful about Celine.”

Long silence.

“That’s the last thing I wanted to do.”

Another pause before he spoke. “Didn’t sound like that last night.”

“I am an appalling creature.”

“Felix, don’t say another word. You’ve been making that grovelling speech for thirty years.”

“You’re right, mate.”

“Did it ever occur to you that I might go public with that Drivetime Radio event?”

“What part?”

“The chickenshit part.”

“Oh, mate, you wouldn’t.”

He would though, the bastard. He had my moral cowardice in the bank and he would be a hard man if he had to. He could destroy my left-wing reputation in a heartbeat.

“I’m thinking I’m not suited to this project, Woody.”

“You’re not trying to renege are you?”

“I can give you the money back.”

“Feels, you signed the fucking contract.”

Jesus. “You still want me to write it?”

“Why would I put up with you otherwise?”

I could not ask him, why am I still in a car boot? “I’m up for it, mate,” I said. So long as you want to continue, mate. I really wanted to continue in every sense.

Was he laughing? It wasn’t clear. “That’s good,” he said. “We don’t want misunderstandings.”

“Just one thing.”

“Got to go, mate. We’re taking off.”

“Woody, is there something you need to cancel?”

But he was gone, and when I called Celine I got her voicemail. I had never used a GPS before but this was a brand-new iPhone and it told me we were just past Eltham where Claire and I began our family. Long weekends of planting tiny trees, station wagons all coated with yellow dust, the smell of wattle, and that pungent blackcurrant smell from the deep gullies of the bush, all the rural beatniks from Eltham and Cottles Bridge sniffing at each other’s bums. In those years I worked the police beat in the city and came back home to this non-suburbia, mudbrick houses, slate floors. You got an excessive amount of adultery in the so-called “extended community” but not a lot of murdered men. Eltham was rutting ground but not much worse.

I dialled Woody. He was gone. I was sweating in private places. The car was pulling to a stop. I drained the awful vodka and took the tyre lever in my hand so, when the lid was lifted, I was crouched inside, my back in agony, my calves both cramped.

“Oh Felix!” The kidnapper relieved me of the lever as he helped me out one hand beneath my arm. He threw the lever back into the boot.

“You remember a piece of arse named Skye Olson?”

“You’re her husband.”

“I’m her son you twat.”

He spat at my feet and climbed back behind the wheel. I remembered a little boy with a curled lip and big black accusing eyes.

“What now?” I asked.

“I’m off home mate.”

“What about me?”

It was an open invitation for him to tell me I could fuck myself. Instead he pointed up the hill where two pale tyre tracks were interrupted by the evidence of a vigorous four-wheel drive engagement.

14

FORTY-FIVE KILOMETRES FROM the Melbourne GPO, I crossed a narrow creek and came upon a burned-out jeep with wild blackberries growing through its broken eyes and imagined every possibility at once, not only Woody’s enforcers but also Angel’s angry “supporters” waiting to grill a reporter from “the mainstream media.”

I was not a brave man. I never said I was. Two rutted wheel tracks had once continued up the hill but now they were swallowed by wattles and all the regrowth that follows fire. It looked like Eltham in the 1950s when tracks like these led to the homes of communists and free lovers and artists and bullshitters of all varieties. Beyond the fallen fence there was a stand of peeling paperbarks, no path other than that indicated by a piece of blue rope that might mean something if you knew. Children had left dirty drawings on the tattered white bark, broken crayons on the ground. Why did this seem sinister? Beyond these melaleucas was a rise on which stood a stand of slender white-barked eucalypts. From here one looked down on a sea of creeper which had colonised a long flat tin roof and a cedar pergola. Sensing a surprise might be dangerous to my health I called, “Coo-ee.”

A woman said hello. And I saw what I expected although, honestly, who could have anticipated the gorgeous white pyjamas or Monet’s broken light. My suit was like nothing I had ever owned. It had the faintest hint of indigo hidden in its charcoal, like a crow’s feather reflecting the sky. As I descended the rocky steps I was alive to every sense and colour. My hair thrilled on my neck.

“Felix Moore,” I called.

“I know who you are,” said Celine Baillieux.

I thought, fuck you. “It was you who kidnapped me? You locked me in a fucking coffin.”

“That was not the plan,” she said and she was monstrous in her injury, the whole of her lower left eyelid both black and purple, swollen, shocking, inflamed and ugly like baboon sex. She slid open a slick glass door and I followed her. She paused. She turned. And slapped me, twice. I saw sparks. My ear went dull. “You cunt,” she said.

For what? I had already been punished, tortured even. I realised my lovely suit jacket was torn, revealing stuffing like a sofa at an auction. Onward I tottered, entering a baronial room with a brick floor and heavy beams and long dark refectory table whose surface was awash with that pearl-white manuscript. My assailant walked to the big slate-floored kitchen and filled a glass with water, then again, then again. Her back was to me, but as the tap turned on and off I could hear mad rage knocking in the pipes.

“If I’d got into your manuscript before I came up here, I would have left you to deal with your psycho mate.”

She thrust her ruined face at me.

“You’re a dreadful person,” she said.

“No.”

“Have you always been like this?”

I was innocent. I had not laid a hand on her. But what came to my mind was the helicopter that had clipped the top of Sydney’s Westpac building and killed the pilot who I knew. I was sent down to Bondi Junction to ask the widow for a photograph of the dead man. I was twenty-one years old. The journos at the gate laughed at me for even trying. The widow wasn’t speaking, but I was already Felix Moore. I had my will. I knocked on the front door. A boy opened it, almost my age. I said I knew how he felt. I had lost my own father last week. I said the Sun-Herald made me come and do it and I needed the job to support my mum. For this I got asked inside. I was given a photograph. His mother kissed me. Yes I was a dreadful person. It had been my trade for years. But this—that I had discovered the trauma of Celine’s birth and not revealed it to her? Honestly, that did not seem as bad, although I certainly did not say that now. Instead, I apologised. I confessed that I had been infatuated with her. She had run away from home. She had been so frail. I could not bear to hurt her anymore. This, and other stuff, was true.

“You’re a fantasist.”

“Not at all.”

“You’re a creep.”

I wasn’t really a creep. I was a good person. I had been secretly in love with her. I had lost her to another man. Now was not the time for that discussion. “You’ve got the only copy in the universe,” I said. “Tell Woody to check the Mac. I deleted everything.”

“You’d as likely chop your hand off.”

“This is all there is.”

“You’re a liar. But why would you think you could write this in the first place? How could you be such an authority of my mother’s home? I wasn’t even born. You were never there. What makes you think you can write about her?”

“Show me what you read.”

“825 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba,” she said, and thrust my stuff back at me. “The house isn’t even there anymore. They put a highway through it. Everyone is dead.”

15

THE GREATEST VIRTUE OF 825 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, I had written, was the trams which rattled past the front door and thence across the Brisbane River where, if you took care with your appearance, no-one would know where you had come from. Without these trams Celine Baillieux could not have been born.

Celine’s grandmother—who died at the beginning of our first year at Monash—was “tall and skinny as a rake.” She “never had a sick day in her life.” She had a son and husband fighting overseas. She took in boarders, but she was always broke. She was a Methodist. During the Depression she fed her family by stealing her neighbours’ potatoes in the middle of the night. She had all the good manners and principles she could afford and when the women of Australia were instructed to welcome the “Yanks” into their homes, when they learned it was their daughters’ patriotic duty to be “Victory Belles,” in those few short months before she understood exactly what this meant, she communicated to the authorities that she would be very happy to entertain some officers, except no Jews.

Her gratitude to the Americans was well based. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Thailand, and the Philippines, seized Guam, marched into Burma and landed on the beach in British Borneo. Soon they would bomb the port of Darwin, then Broome, then what? They bayoneted men tied to trees, they raped and chopped off heads. They were headed for Brisbane and the British “could not do a bloody thing about it” except run for home. As for “our own boys,” they were in Egypt in their bargain-basement uniforms, trying to save the Poms.

In these first days, Celine’s grandmother was grateful to the Americans with all her heart, plus, of course, sugar and cigarette rationing did not apply to GIs and they could be expected to unwind their well-fed bodies from their taxis carrying cartons of chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, silk stockings most of all. She was not alone in expecting this.

Her daughter Doris (she who would be Celine’s mother) was at secretarial school in the city every workday, but both women were at home on Saturday afternoon when the Americans arrived.

Celine’s grandmother was, at that time, only forty. She had good legs. She was ready in her best frock which was from St. Vincent de Paul’s although “you wouldn’t guess.” When the door knocker echoed through the dark hot house she collected Doris and brought her to the door.

What was there revealed were four officers of the United States Army, or if not officers you would never know, for the fabric was so fine, the cut so flattering it made you feel sorry for Our Boys who had no chance at all, poor buggers.

The four soldiers stood there, together, their smiles extra-white, gifts held in their dark hands, that is, the Americans were as black as night, and Celine’s grandmother, a Woolloongabber all her life, held her right hand against her breast while the left searched unsuccessfully for the daughter.

The men introduced themselves. Their voices were deep and melodious.

“Oh dear,” Celine’s grandmother said when they were finished. “There has been a mix-up.”

The soldier at the front was small, if only in comparison, but he stood proudly with his shoulders back holding his carton of Lucky Strikes. Peering from behind her mother’s stringy shoulders, Doris smiled at him.

“I’m so sorry,” the future grandmother said. “There’s been a mistake.”

Doris had detected the scent of aftershave which she had never smelled before. Behind her was what you would expect: cabbage and mutton fat. Ahead was America: cleanliness and beauty and a young man, at the rear, so tall and slender with modest lowered eyes. He had a cherubic face, if cherubs could be black, and it was clear they could. The girl smiled; the young man smiled right back.

The mother was now pushing the door closed and the daughter was pulling it open.

“No,” Doris cried, and held it open.

“Shut up,” her mother hissed. “I didn’t ask for them.”

At this the smiling ceased.

“I’m sorry,” Celine’s grandmother probably said. “It’s not your fault. It’s just a mistake, that’s all.”

And for a moment there was no pressure on the door.

“Well ma’am,” said the short wide-shouldered man with the proud expression, “we are very sorry to have inconvenienced you. We will be on our way now, but it was not a mistake. Our Captain Cohen, he don’t make no mistakes.”

Later Doris would possibly think her mother had been the victim of a prank, but at the time all she knew was that darkness had descended on the hall. The slap jolted her head sideways. She felt a sharp cruel pain, heard the loud heavy steps ascending the uncarpeted stairs. This injustice, this fear, was as normal as the smell of mutton stew and when Celine’s grandmother’s bedroom door had slammed, life remained as normal as could be.

At Doris’s secretarial school a girl from Rockhampton was discovered wearing a scarf to hide the lovebites on her neck. She was sent away.

Time passed. Sundays were slow. Doris crossed back and forth on the tram between Stanley Street and the city, back and forth, without particular hope. The houses in Woolloongabba were perched high on sticks. She could hear the bands at the Trocadero—Eastern Swing, Lindy Hop, Jive—all happening just a mile away.

She turned seventeen. There was a song on the wireless late at night. It said that her lips were so close to his that she could not help but kiss him, and he didn’t mind at all.

With her eyes deep in the pillow, Doris saw him very well. He was American of course. His uniform was tailored and his teeth were lovely and it had suddenly become a sin to prefer him to the Aussie boys as so many girls now did. They had wanted you to show hospitality to the Yanks. But very soon they started to hate you for doing what you had been told. You were an Aussie girl. Then you should only go dancing with the Aussie boys, your brothers who were dying for you, who had to wear the awful uniforms that the mingy government provided, not tailored, not slick, not even the right size. They were your flesh and blood, dear Aussie boys who had sunken cheeks, their teeth all pulled out to save the money on the dentist. The Americans were a knife twisted in their guts, overpaid, oversexed, over here.

Each evening at sunset Celine’s grandmother locked the door. Outside, the trams from the city delivered more and more black men “with one thing on their minds.”

The white Americans were kept in the city, but Stanley Street was near Brissy’s “black zone,” that is, an area where black Americans were allowed to look for entertainment. The blacks were bees to honey pots at the Trocadero dancing to “Chattanooga Choo Choo.”

Why us? Celine’s grandmother wished to know. The authorities think we aren’t no better. Can you see your father’s face? He’d murder them.

You can forget that Victory Belle rubbish, her mother said. To emphasise this point she unplugged the hot water jug and doubled the power cord to make a whip.

Don’t you even dream of going out that door at night, her mother said. She knew how to use that flex like the father used his leather belt. The flex hurt more than the belt. It left bright red stripes around the girl’s very shapely calves.

Would her mother please let Doris go if she promised never ever to dance with a black man?

No.

How about the Red Cross Service Club? Aussies go there too.

No.

Doris was a good girl. She was very quiet and docile but she was wilful to a genetic degree. She folded her arms across her bosom. She returned to her room where she made nice French scanties from parachute silk.

Her mother knew all about French scanties. She searched the room and found them and thrust them in the kitchen stove then sat down quietly with her darning. She knew what girls did in return for American stockings. She heard “the authorities” would soon require blood tests for women seeking government assistance for their American babies.

Doris purchased more parachute silk and wrapped it in brown paper and hid it underneath the house. She sat out the warm winter days between July and October, but in November she managed to buy a pattern for the dress.

Her skin was not from Brissy but the moon—translucent, glowing. Her eyes were sapphire-blue. In her room she stood up straight and pushed her chest out—she might have been American herself. She listened to songs on the wireless and danced in front of the mirror. She had wicked dreams. She sat by the front door, her head meekly bowed as she picked old socks apart for knitting wool. She was ready, or nearly ready, but when the opportunity presented itself—when her mother finally left the house to attend the Temperance—she had nothing but gravy mix to give her legs a stocking colour. She tried to draw the seam but could not get it right. It was already seven o’clock and she had to scrub everything clean with cold water. That made her skin red and raw but she had no choice. She gave her legs a second coat of Gravox and when that had dried she knocked on the door of the old poofter who worked as a window-dresser in Barry and Roberts. The joke amongst the boarders was that he wore a wig, but when he answered the door his hair was perfectly in place.

His room smelled of peppermint and dirty socks. She was embarrassed to ask him to draw her seams, but when he finally understood what she wanted he was very sweet and kind, and also fast and accurate. He told her “Mum’s the word” and she kissed him on his soapy cheek.

“Don’t get caught ducky.”

Of course she would be caught. There was no choice. She could already feel the sting of the flex whipping around her legs.

It was Thanksgiving on that balmy evening she got onto the tram, but that—if she had known—would have been of no significance at all. She had never heard of Thanksgiving. Australians did not give thanks. If you said thanks, your father would say, don’t thank me, thank Christ you got anything at all.

November was a lovely time of year in Brissy. The tram had open sides and swayed and snaked towards the city and the girl sat up straight with her hands in her lap, seemingly unaware that she was beautiful. No-one dared to speak to her.

The tram rattled across the dirty old girders of the bridge, and her silk gown glowed pearlescent above the oil-slicked water of the Brisbane River. The dress had a scooped neckline and just three buttons down the back.

The American Red Cross Service Club was on the corner of Creek Street and Adelaide Street, just opposite the American PX. She walked from the tram stop with her little handbag, a clutch, beneath her arm, afraid of the attention she was drawing, surprised by the size of the crowd, Aussies and Yanks, milling in the evening air.

She had gravy-mix legs and a parachute-silk dress. She was going to be examined like livestock in an auction and be judged by men she wouldn’t even fancy. The thick knot of uniforms pressed hard against her and she turned to go back home.

That was exactly when the most beautiful man emerged from the khaki tangle of sweat and beer. There was a brownout and the voltages were dropped but there was light enough to see him very clearly—golden hair, broad shoulders, a narrow waist and strong arms that pushed against the confines of his shirt.

“You are a songbird,” he said to her and she was astonished by the lilt of his voice as it slid upwards, tentatively, thus contradicting the assertiveness of his movement. You are a songbird question mark.

She should have been frightened but she felt relief that the auction was now over.

“Beg yours?” she said.

“You sing in the choir,” he said and she guessed his eyes would turn out to be pale and gentle like her own, as indeed they would.

“Yes.”

He beamed at her. “I can always pick a songbird.”

“You must be a clever bloke,” she said.

“Oh no, Miss,” he said. “It’s very easy to see a songbird in this crowd. You do stand out.”

She was laughing, perhaps with relief, or just the simple wonder that someone would know she had a good voice, and when the man asked her would she like to go to The Society for a meal she was very grateful that she did not have to enter the churning scrum. He held out his arm and Doris took it, and as they cut through the mob towards Queen Street the crowd parted to let them through and she smiled more, thinking it a tribute to her beauty. She did not expect to be abused, but when the spit hit her cheek she thought, of course. I’m a tart, a traitor with a Yank.

16

SEARCHLIGHTS CUT the empty sky and the tropical night was rank with beer and sandalwood, the latter the property of Hank, the American whose arm was now clamping Doris snug against his side, hurrying her to safety while the Australian soldiers called her tart and slut and cunt. She had a glob of slag on her cheek. She would not touch it with her hand, but in the doorway of a restaurant her rescuer produced a large white handkerchief and with it wiped her clean. In the midst of all the fear and fright there was space to know he was a lovely man.

The door swung open and she stumbled into the restaurant with a cry. It was too bright. She was exposed, embarrassed, in awe, of the flowers, the carpet, the American officers and beautiful women. She was set on by a very old head waiter in a long black coat.

“Pardon me,” she said. She knew her scanty line was showing through the silk.

“Two,” Hank said to the head waiter.

But it was at Doris the waiter looked. She was south Brissy rubbish. How dare she even breathe his air?

She smiled right in his sour old face. You are a coward, she thought, you will not turn a Yank away.

He didn’t either. He told the waitress number 23. Then Doris and her handsome fellow were led through The Society’s crowded downstairs room.

They made a strong impression. Why wouldn’t they? Doris had gravy mix on her legs, and spit-smeared makeup. She followed the waitress along the hall and up the stairs and of course it was a second-best room, with one table of Australian NCOs and, in a far corner, two plain American servicewomen in mufti, poor things, she pitied them.

Hank was not intimidated by anything. He announced they would sit by the curtained window i.e. not where they were put. He held out Doris’s chair and waited for her to be comfortable before he took his place.

“It’s lovely,” she said.

He was incredibly handsome, with full lips and straight white teeth. He sat so square and broad, a lifeguard she thought.

“I must look awful,” she said.

“You are perfect,” he said, and he touched her cheek where the horrid spit had been.

“Well,” she said, “you’re not so bad yourself.”

“I’m no angel, baby.” But his voice was so light and its inflection so tentative she laughed. He smiled too, and narrowed his eyes so that her tummy went quite strange. His eyes were pale and clear as water with no stones or pebbles or specks or flecks or injuries of war.

“You have lovely teeth,” she said, which was much too fast of her.

“All the better to eat you with.” As a joke, he bit his own hand and then showed her the bright red teeth marks embedded in his skin.

“You’re a strange one.”

“Well thank you, ma’am,” he beamed at her, and took her fingers and kissed the inside of her wrist so gently that she had to snatch it back.

“Whoa, Dobbin.”

“Sing for me,” he said. And she might have (why not? who would ever ask her such a thing again?) but there came a great roar of men from the street below, as if a wicket had just fallen at the Gabba.

Immediately he drew the curtain back. She whispered you were not allowed to do that after dark but he said it was a brownout not a blackout. Someone shouted to close the curtain. He said, not quietly, that the Australians were always in a panic. She was more frightened of what was about to happen in the dining room than in the street and was slow to understand the scene below on Queen Street which was turbulent with pushing men.

She watched two American officers enter the street from the front door of the restaurant.

The first was knocked to the ground. She saw. The second was lifted into the air, his napkin or handkerchief still in his hand as he was passed like a side of butchered beef, over the heads of the crowd and thrown on the footpath on the other side. The Aussies made a circle around him then kicked his face.

There were now three, four, five circles in the crowd. An American would come walking down the street, the Aussies would grab his arms and legs and throw him up in the air to get him to a clear space to bash him more. Throughout there was a loud hammering, like blows on bone. Doris finally understood it was a mob hammering on the restaurant door.

“We can’t stay here,” she said.

Hank sat down. He did not seem to realise that the Aussies were coming in to get the Yanks and kill their whores, to break them limb by limb.

“They’ll murder us.” She took his hand and pulled him up. He looked furious but he did allow her to lead him past the coat rack where she had the nous to grab an Aussie slouch hat. She pulled him down the stairs and through the stinking kitchen and out into a slippery laneway where the air was rank with fat and blood.

Beyond the alley was Queen Street and a howling mob.

“Come on,” she said, but now he had his arms around her and was pushing her stomach with his thing.

“Songbird,” he said. “Sing to me.”

“Jeez,” she said, “lay off, will you?”

She got the slouch hat onto his head and his situation seemed to dawn on him. He set the hat, tipping it back in the style favoured by the Aussies.

They were saved by the brownout and the happy coincidence that the northbound tram was tipped over just as they left the lane. There was such confusion. The American military police brought out their shotguns. All she could think was they had to get home, south Brissy, somewhere safe. She heard the first blast, then the second. She would have settled for a pillbox but it seemed every pillbox was occupied by men and women doing what she had never done, and would not do, no matter what she drank. She knew girls who had a “bit of a pash” in a pillbox but she had never anticipated the stink.

“They’ll kill you,” she said, but he wanted to pash into her there and then. He was strong and persistent, persuading her down into a lane, still very gentle with his mouth—soft little puffy kisses all around her neck. “Sing to me,” he said, his hard arms around her, those mad kisses on her throat. She sang “Danny Boy” for fear. “Don’t stop,” he said, “don’t stop.”

He was doing what she did not know.

“Don’t stop. Keep singing.”

He had to let her go to fiddle with her bra and she slipped free and ran, unhooked, with her shoes in her hand, down Queen Street, thinking God Jesus let there not be broken glass. The tram for south Brissy was already rolling when she leapt aboard, and he was right behind her, she heard him, laughing like a drain.

The man and girl plonked down together on the bench, she in disarray, he laughing hopelessly, and the whole tram went silent on her and judged her for a tart. She folded her hands in her lap, covering her ring finger, pretending to herself they were engaged, going to live in Deetroit, no longer Doris Crook, something better, safer, clearer, richer, thank the Lord he behaved himself. He put his arm around her shoulder and that is how it happened, when they arrived in Stanley Street and she saw, a cricket-pitch length from the tram’s running board, the thirteen front steps of her home, that she was still holding Hank Willenski’s hand.

17

OUR SOLE RESPONSIBILITY to our ancestors, I had written, is to give birth to them as they gave birth to us. The houses in south Brissy were wrapped with skirts of lattice, as secret as a veil. Doris’s mother had her bedroom up there overlooking Stanley Street. Yes, it was the noisy side, but she could be out of bed in a jiffy when the front gate clicked. You could rely on her being up there, waiting, the electric flex already wrapped round her hand.

The house was twelve feet off the ground and all the underneath was latticed too. If it had not been for the brownout the street would have looked so lovely—sky deep, black blue, and the latticed houses glowing like golden lanterns in the honeysuckle air, and if you shut your eyes and hid the trams and the pub and the shunting train and the drunk peeing by the lamppost you could almost think Woolloongabba was beautiful.

She brought Hank Willenski home, not knowing what else to do. When she jumped off the moving tram, she knew she would get caught. She did not doubt she’d get roared up. She wished for nothing better than the flex across the legs. The American was right behind her as the tram rolled on, its wheels screaming worse than nails on a blackboard.

She was for it now. Thank God.

“Home,” she said, quite loudly. She could make out his teeth. “My dad will have waited up,” she said.

She put her finger to his lip to show he must not kiss her.

He bit her finger, hard.

“That wasn’t funny.” Why was she whispering? She wanted to get caught.

“Sing me a song.”

He got her around the waist and lifted her up in the air and she grabbed at the fence and felt the splinter drive into her injured finger. Why did she not scream? He had her over his shoulder. He was passing through the gate. Her mother would hear the latch.

But then she was out of sight, dragged underneath the house. There was stuff lying everywhere, snakes in bottles, axes, preserved quince, dead marines. She thought, he’ll trip and fall.

“Let me down,” she said, “I’ll help you do it, honest.”

He set her down very slowly but then he was at it again, kissing her on the neck, holding her hands together tight, pushing his thing against her.

“I’ll show you,” she said. Show what? Show where? She was embarrassed by the smell of her home. Nightsoil and honeysuckle, dirt and gas. He kicked the preserves and she heard a bottle crack and the smell of sugary peach juice making witch’s pudding with the dirt.

“No, I’ll show you,” he said.

And then he pushed her down so hard she fell. No glass. No cuts. Thank God, she thought. He had shoved her head onto the chopping block without knowing what it was. She felt the cold air between her legs. He was pushing and breaking and her tummy was filled with hurt but she dared not scream. His hands around her neck. He said, “You better sing.” He was kneeling behind her, evil thing.

She could no longer breathe but she did “Danny Boy.” The air came through the words and the air was ripped-up rags. His hands were large and very strong and she finally understood, without a doubt, he would kill her when he’d finished.

He clamped her windpipe. He shivered like a horse. The thing inside her was in spasms, like a cat dying from a hammer blow. And then he screamed, right in her ear.

Later she would know he had driven a broken preserve bottle into his knee and leg. But she was free. He was off her. She fled.

For once in all its history, Stanley Street was quiet.

“Mum,” she cried from the front gate. She heard a slamming door upstairs, thank God.

“Ma’am?”

In the street, against the lamppost she saw them, a black man with a hire-girl. Even at this voltage it was clear. The soldier left the girl. He crossed the tracks, his hand held out towards Doris. He looked drunk.

“Mum,” she wailed.

It was the very same GI who had arrived so sweetly at her door. He stood before her, swaying.

“Miss, what happened?”

“Are you going to do her or me?” said the hire-girl. It was Glennys Craig who had been the fastest runner in the grade.

“He’s in there,” Doris said. “Under the house.” The black soldier looked at Glennys Craig and then at Doris. Then, as the front door of the house yawned open, the soldier opened his wallet and gave the prostitute some bills.

“You’re a mug,” said Glennys Craig, and teetered off into the dark. The lights behind the lattice came on, one by one, and suddenly, in the midst of the brownout, the whole of 825 Stanley Street was a wooden lantern and the pansy window-dresser was sprinting—him at his age—turning on the lights as he passed each switch and Doris’s mother was behind turning them all off.

“Now all the world can see,” the mother said when she arrived out in the street. She flashed her Eveready torch over the stunned black face and then across the parachute-silk dress which was marked with blood and spunk and woodchips from the past.

As the girl began to vomit on her shoes, Doris’s mother confronted the American soldier who, drunk or not, was clearly the same fellow she had already turned away. He stood the same, shoulders back, squared off, his cap in one hand, explaining.

“Just go,” said Celine’s grandmother. “Before you get your balls cut off.”

18

CELINE ROSE FROM the battered leather club chair. She returned my pages to the floor without saying what she’d read. She was not finished, that was clear. I watched as she chose a poker and, like a blacksmith, brought down a rain of blows upon a log already sheathed in glowing red and orange scales. How far had she got? Sparks glinted in her eyes.

I had done an extraordinarily professional job, but clearly she was not considering that. She blew the ash from her fingertips and pulled the kimono tight around herself and retreated to the hallway. Then I heard her retching in the bathroom, vomiting.

So she had reached that part. I was so sorry. But I would seem to be a hypocrite to say so. I returned to my seat and waited to be abused but I certainly did not expect her to return with a rifle at her hip.

“My father gave me this,” she said, “my real father.”

Fire was dancing along the gun metal.

“He was the most decent man you could ever know. Strictly speaking, he was a criminal, but he changed my nappies when my mother couldn’t. He left enough money for me to go to university. He cut my hair. He taught me how to shoot. How many rabbits do you think I’ve killed?”

“I am not wrong about Willenski. It doesn’t make me happy, but it’s true.”

“I brought you out here to get you out of Woody’s clutches, you shit. But I had no idea of what you’d done.” She jerked the rifle violently, like a pitchfork. “Can’t you learn your lesson in a courtroom? Lying is not socially acceptable. Do I have to punish you as well?”

“It’s not made up.”

“You’re a convicted slanderer.”

“No.”

“My father is a rapist? You can’t possibly know that.”

“Why do you think I didn’t tell you at Monash?”

“You kept it from me, all my life?”

“Don’t you remember the state you were in? You stayed with what’s-his-name, the poet. Then Sando took you in. His landlady threw you both out and you slept in his car. You were too busy burning down the house.”

Sandy had taken her pain and held her and never let her go until he married her. I did not tell her how I had mourned her.

“How could you know shit about any of this?”

“There was only one American soldier who’d been photographed in Brisbane. The rest were Melbourne. The dates work too. Willenski was front page of the Courier-Mail.”

“And that’s it? On the basis of this you write this? Anyone who knows you can see what you’re doing. America rapes Australia. It’s pathetic. Do you know how many Americans were here during the war? You want this psycho to represent them all.”

“I confirmed it again. Last week.”

“How could you?”

“I let my fingers do the walking for me, as the ad says.”

“You phoned my mother?”

“She’s in the White Pages.”

“Why would she want to talk about this to a stranger?”

“People with secrets. It’s what they do.”

“But why you?”

“It’s a talent.”

“She would never talk to me.”

“As I understand it, Celine, really darling, you have been particularly unforgiving of your mother. She says you never took Gaby to meet her?”

“No. She met her.”

I raised an eyebrow.

“Don’t get prissy with me, Titch. Who does all this muckraking serve? Not Gaby, that’s for sure.”

“You came to me.”

Celine returned to her armchair and laid the rifle on the side away from me. “No, you were Woody’s contribution,” she said. “He could not have expected to be so lucky.”

19

DORIS’S MOTHER LOCKED the verandah door in silence, I had written. Only when both women reached the kitchen did the elder woman unwrap her naked wrath. “Filth,” she cried.

Crouching, wet rag in hand, she attacked her daughter’s hem and thighs.

“Mum, please. You’re making it worse.”

“Worse,” she cried, and tugged at the silk dress, ripping to reveal a raw abrasion.

“Jeez. Leave off. No-one saw.”

“No-one saw. God save me.” Her eyes were frightening but frightened too, clearly searching for an instrument to thrash the legs, the arms, the neck. “I’ll learn you, girlie. No-one saw.”

The girl made a break, upstairs, towards the safety of the bathroom but her mother was a scrapper, knees and elbows, in the bathroom first.

“Save the hot water for the boarders.”

“Please, Mum.”

And they were collapsed, crying, wringing their hands, grabbing for understanding, pushing violently away, and then the mother turned on the cold tap and threw a fist of salt into the claw-legged tub.

“Clothes off.” The girl might as well be six years old the way she was forcibly undressed. It was pull out your hair, rip off your nose.

“You smell of him,” the mother said. She wiped her eyes with the back of her arm. If you thought that meant sympathy, you were mistaken. “Come on. Give me. Scanties.”

“Don’t leave me naked.”

“You’ve got your bra. Use a towel.”

What occupied the mother was not disease or pregnancy. The issue was—who knew? Who saw?

“You could have picked a white boy but.”

Who was going to write her husband poison letters? She would burn the parachute silk and she wished she had the strength to destroy the house entirely. He was going to kill her. He would kill them both and who would blame him? Where there’s smoke there’s more smoke. His wife was not Miss Pearly Pureheart either.

The daughter locked the bathroom door and cried. She felt the sting of salt kill her germs and babies. It destroyed the lather so her body got coated with a grey scum which she would still smell in the morning, on the tram. The damaged part was not where you expected.

At secretarial school she was lucky or unlucky—her classmates could see nothing but the size of the stones in Maisie’s engagement ring. Maisie’s fiancé was an American called Captain Baillieux. Doris had her write it down. No-one cared or noticed that she kept the scrap of paper.

Of course Doris had not yet decided to become Baillieux, but she would not have told them if she had. She could not trust her girlfriends with anything important. She waited for her period alone and was relieved to see the blood. Next day she got blisters “down there.” She used the salt twice a day and the blisters went away, thank heavens, but it wasn’t over yet. The bank teller in the western room paid his rent on time but he was a pigpen. He liked his Courier-Mail and left it everywhere, including on the kitchen table where she saw the news, December 2nd, 1942. THE BROWNOUT STRANGLER. And there he was, the American, his perfect smile, his awful handsome face, his cowlick hair. He had raped six girls and strangled them and mutilated them in ways particular. After that she could hardly eat at all. Her period stopped. Her hair went dull and lifeless. If she had managed to eat a little custard, say, she would puke in the middle of her sleep.

Yet even as her appearance changed she found herself the beneficiary of unexpected acts of kindness. Late at night, after ten o’clock, she and the window-dresser listened to the wireless and the little chap was nice enough to brush her hair. Once he tucked her in. Her mother made a rabbit pie. You could taste the butter—although she had no ration coupons left. The girl resisted the awful need to read her stolen Courier-Mail. Finally, they had a lovely Christmas with the boarders and the window-dresser played piano. He was a strange kind creature with a white soft hairless neck below his wig, and the mother was happy and did not think what Black and White Rag might really be, thank God for that.

Then it was a different year. The rains arrived. The Allies took Buna in New Guinea. Then it was Sanananda. In Guadalcanal, the Japs had their tails between their yellow legs. In March they were blown to screaming pieces in the Battle of the Bismarck Sea. It was still mango season then. The bank teller loved mangoes so much he ate them in the bath. The girl ate them too. Her appetite returned. Then a letter came from Dad—he was back in Perth and coming home. Then Tom was in Aden waiting for a ship. And it was only then, when she knew they could all recover from everything, that her mother barged into the bathroom.

She was in the nuddy when the door slammed hard against the wall.

“You idiot. Why didn’t you tell me?”

“I put the pounds back on.”

“Pounds. Dear Jesus help me, look at yourself.”

“It’s been since Christmas.”

“It’s four bloody months. No wonder you’ve been throwing up. You’ll have to leave before your dad gets home. Don’t cry. You should have thought about this. You can’t be giving him a little piccaninny.”

Without another word, the mother went downstairs, soft as a ghost, an angel of the annunciation.

The girl found her kneeling at the front door polishing the knob.

“Mum.”

The mother’s head was tiny as a coconut, the hair lank, eyes leached. “You’re an idiot,” she said, “I could have helped you.”

“Mum, it wasn’t the black chap. It was a white chap, Mum. You’ll see. You’ll be sorry for what you said.”

The mother’s mouth was just a little line, a scar, a screwed-up sewed-up wound. “Dear Mouse,” she said, and the girl shivered to receive the tenderness. “We’ve got no choice, my titchy mouse. You’ll have to be gone when he arrives.”

“I have to go to the hostel?”

“I’ll say you got a job in Sydney.”

“Wouldn’t he like a nice white baby?” she asked, but she was already bilious at the thought of the mouse-sized Hank Willenski growing in her womb.

The mother’s eyes were brimming, and she stroked her daughter’s tiny ears.

“Do you even know his name?”

“Baillieux,” she said, and spelled it.

“Is he French?”

“I don’t know, Mum. He didn’t say.”

“Is he in New Guinea, love?”

“Yes Mum, he is.”

“God save him then,” her mother said.

“God save him, Mum.” She did not say the brownout strangler was dead already, murdered by the Aussies in his cell on Boggo Road.

20

“DID YOU EVER IMAGINE how it might feel for me to read this?”

I smelled Celine’s acrid breath. I observed her blackened eye, the hard contusion on the cheekbone, the awful puce in the soft cave of the orbit. I reached towards her tenderly. She thrust my hand away.

I said I was not her enemy. I would never wish to hurt her. I was startled she couldn’t see that I had been a time traveller on her behalf, that I had given her what she could have never known. Her life was a miracle to me. From Stanley Street to all those nights of mad applause on stage.

“Everything you’ve written is reprehensible,” she declared, and of course, the truth is ugly and often frightening. We have placed truth in our stained-glass windows but when it arrives in person, unwashed and smelly, loud and violent, our first act is to pull a gun on it.

“What you have written hurts everyone.”

I never wanted to hurt a soul, but a laboratory rat would have learned by now that I was doomed to repeat my action like some automaton in a Disney underworld. I felt ineffably sad. I stared at the monster log until it had burned through and collapsed onto a sparky bed of fine white ash. Celine gathered my pages to her breast. Her fingernails were delicate and uncorrupted, swimmer’s nails, I thought, the colour of cuttlefish shells. I watched her turn my pages. A single A4 sheet slipped free and glided towards the hearth. I snatched at it.

“Liar,” she cried. She launched a flock of paper. Two hundred and twenty-one pages struck my head, beat my ear, landed in the fire, white wings curling into black.

I had sworn this was the last copy on the earth and as I was being a good man I could not be a liar. I had no choice but to plunge my hands into the flames.

Then Celine was at my side, raking pages to the floor, stamping on their carmine skirts. The paper was like stinging nettles. I had expected it would have hurt much more than this.

“Stop it,” she said. “What is the matter with you?”

In the kitchen I permitted her to plunge my sacrificial hands beneath the tap. She emptied trays of ice into a bowl and I watched my injuries: red and black palms, bloating like dead fish.

“This is bullshit,” she said softly and I could once more smell her acrid breath. “This cannot be the only copy.”

“I know that.”

“Then why did you do this?”

I shrugged.

“Did no-one ever love you Felix?”

“I’m an awful person.”

“You wanted to hurt me, you should be happy. You’ve shown that my father is American.”

“So?”

“It gives them a claim on Gaby.”

“No it doesn’t.”

“You’re sloppy and careless. You don’t know where you are. You told Woody I could not deliver Gaby. He believed you. He thought I had tricked him into paying bail. You just wandered off to bed and locked your door. I heard you.”

“I’m sorry.”

It was not Celine’s character to have a first-aid kit, but there it was, a black backpack with a white cross in house paint. From this she produced a roll of white surgical bandage which she wound delicately around my injuries.

“Woody is your admirer, God help you. He’ll kill us both.”

I should not have let her say this.

“Felix, did you ever ask yourself, why is Woody paying me so much money?”

“He’s always been like that.”

“Yeah, right.” Even as she was sarcastic, she was also kind, tidying up both hands and securing them with small elastic clips. “Gaby was not even arraigned,” she said, “and I had Woody on the phone offering to pay her bail and legal support. Whatever he wants you to do, it’s not for me. And now he will use this dirt you’ve dug up for him.”

“He offered bail. You said you asked him.”

The firelight caught the colours of her bruised and shiny cheekbone. Her fingers felt like feathers as she snipped away the loose threads of my bandage. “I knew Woody when he was a Maoist with a red cashmere sweater.”

“Everyone trusts Woody.”

“I certainly trusted he would help me now.”

“Jim Cairns trusted him. Woody loved Jim Cairns, early, before he was the Treasurer, before he was Deputy Prime Minister.”

Celine poured me a glass of wine and held it to my lips. I sipped.

“Exactly.”

“You’re being sarcastic?”

“Think about it, Felix. The Americans thought Jim was the enemy. Dr. Cairns, the Deputy Prime Minister of their ally, was a communist. Gough talked about it—the ‘American Terror’ that Jim would be briefed on Pine Gap. Imagine: a communist had got access to all that shared security.”

“And?”

“Don’t you imagine they would have recruited someone close to Cairns?”

“So Wodonga is an American spy? Jesus, Celine. You never mentioned this before.”

“Calm down. I never thought of it before. Remember the photos on Woody’s office walls. How does a Melbourne property developer get to play golf with the US Secretary of State?”

“I don’t know, but he loved Jim. He’d do anything for him.”

“I worked in Jim’s office when he was Treasurer. I do believe I remember you there too. Don’t you recall how embarrassing Woody was? Cleaning Jim’s shoes at the party conference at Terrigal? In public. And in the office, what a dogsbody. Woody is a sort of thug but there he was standing by his desk turning pages for Jim to sign.”

I picked up the glass and held it with both wrists and drank. She watched, as if waiting for me to fail. “Jim had that effect,” I said and in the sad silence that followed me setting down the wine, I thought about those great men in that government which was overthrown in 1975. Gough Whitlam, the Prime Minister, was a patrician. But Jim Cairns was from the basalt plain, from Sunbury. He had been a policeman, a champion runner, a working-class intellectual. It was Jim who had the moral authority to lead a hundred thousand of us up Bourke Street in 1970. My most intoxicating night as a young writer was spent staying up with Jim, composing captions for the pictures in his book on Vietnam. I admired him just as much as Woody did.

When Jim was brutally beaten by the Painters and Dockers, it was because he always had an open house. He was Treasurer of the nation and you could walk in off the street and meet Junie Morosi (Jim’s lover and office coordinator), me, Woody Townes his millionaire intern, Celine with a kaftan and no bra. There were Nimbin hippies, confusion, awful instant coffee. Those were heady days to be so young and close to government. Australia had withdrawn from Vietnam, and recognised China. If Woody was a spy he was in a perfect place, except that he loved Jim Cairns.

“He is very loyal,” I said, and Celine picked up her rifle and ejected a single shell.

“Catch.”

I grabbed and missed. I heard the bullet bounce and roll. Then she was in the bathroom with her face creams and I was in the dark, alone with the smell of ashes.

21

SO: CLEARLY: the armchair was to be my bed. No-one brought a blanket and I slept like a reporter on the red-eye and woke to find a pale thing standing over me.

“What?” I asked of the pale thing standing over me.

“I keep hearing things,” she said.

Was this like me, to retreat from a woman’s touch when it was offered?

“I’m scared,” she said. “Would you come in with me, just for company?”

If I hesitated it was not because I was still a married man, but because I was nervous to go with her, and nervous to refuse. She was unusually fragile, even needy and I also remembered how she had been Medea, Antigone, Hedda Gabler, all these dangerous women.

I was an old man, but I was still a man. I had never been to bed with a woman without at least the possibility of sex and as the eucalypts of Smiths Gully tossed restlessly in the night, I lay very very still, too aware of that musky scent inside the tent. Celine went straight to sleep, snoring intermittently. Her frame was slight and birdlike. Her chest rose and fell. Broken sticks fell on the corrugated roof. Honey myrtles scrubbed themselves against the naked window glass.

Who doth murder sleep?

My father could not sleep, not ever. I would find him in the middle of the night, in striped pyjamas, looking down at the car yard and all the unsold Fords gleaming on their gravel bed of quartz, like fish on ice. He hoarded pills. I forget so much about my childhood, but I can still recite his pharmacopoeia which included legal codeine and Valium which last he eked out because it was hard to get. He was awake and worried he paid too much to trade in Henry Wilmot’s Holden Ute. I was now worried that my present sleeping partner was unstable and that my supporter was a deeper and darker character than I could bear to think about.

I turned and discovered her staring patchy eye, a small and touching night creature.

“What might happen to us now?” she whispered, and lifted an arm, a motion as smudgy as a flying-fox wing in the dark.

“What?” I asked.

“Come here.”

I laid my head upon her shoulder and she stroked my hair with such sad consoling familiarity we might have been lovers after all.

“I can’t believe you,” she said. In the cloud-scudding light, her lips appeared to be deep blue. I inhaled her toothpaste together with her pheromones. I did not doubt she was afraid. Somewhere far off, a car door slammed. Her body stiffened, but then a soft rain began, and there were no more noises and the corrugated iron played that song of safe childhoods, and Celine lay still and I thought of the house in Rozelle with our daughters beneath a sudden Sydney storm. It was unthinkable that I had abandoned them. It had been the only thing I knew I would never do.

The rain was louder and through the din there was a heavy thumping.

“Kangaroo,” she said. “Don’t worry.”

“What did you say to him? Woody.”

She propped herself on her elbow. “Their own citizens don’t count anymore.”

“Is that what you told him?”

“They murder their own people on the basis of suspicion. There are no boundaries of any sort. They break their own laws all the time. Half of them are locked in jail. And my daughter thought she could fuck them over. Say something.”

“What?”

“They say she infected their base at Pine Gap. Do you think that’s credible? Is it possible? Is that her crime?”

“Did you accuse Woody of being a spy? Is that why he hit you?”

“That would make it all OK?”

It was not at all OK but it made a sort of sense. Woody was an emotional man. Loyalty was a big deal with him.

The rain had stopped and there was no sound but the occasional flurry of drips from the big gum tree overhead. Clouds had covered the moon and it was unclear as to whether I could see the shed roof or if I only thought I could.

“I was sitting in the sunshine yesterday,” Celine said, her inflection upwards in that mild hippie fashion she sometimes adopted.

“Yes.”

“I saw a tiny bird, like those spotted things, they live in New South Wales.”

“You mean a spotted pardalote?”

“They don’t live here, Felix.”

“I think they might.”

“No, they don’t. If you’re in Pakistan, what are you to think if you see a little pretty bird that shouldn’t be where it is?”

“This is not Pakistan.”

“Would I be mad to think it was a drone that could destroy me?”

“Sweet Celine.”

“Don’t maul me, Felix. Turn on the light.”

“You don’t mind people looking in?”

“Whoever comes to get me will walk straight in. Turn on the light. Open the cupboard door. Pick up that box.”

“This?”

“Open it.”

She was sitting on the bed with haystack hair and her legs crossed and a clay-coloured blanket pulled around her like a shawl.

“Do it, please.”

I opened the box and discovered, lying on a bed of discoloured cottonwool, the bloody remains of what I took, from the evidence of the colourful feathers, to be what she possibly thought it was. It had been mostly blown apart.

How extraordinary this was: the accuracy, the physical stability in the midst of turmoil.

“You shot this?” I asked. It was too late to argue about the habitat of the spotted pardalote.

“You know I did. I killed this lovely thing.” She began laughing, her big bruised lips crumpling and her eyes screwed up like paper in a bin, this miracle that began its journey underneath a Queensland house.

Who can foretell us? Who can limit what we’ll be? Her marksmanship, I soon realised, was a natural gift, one recognised and encouraged by the rifle’s previous owner, the man she sometimes called “my father.” That is, Mr. Neville.

Mr. Neville was a most unlikely chap, a dear friend of that same window-dresser who had drawn the seams on her mother’s gravy-coloured legs and, later, when Doris was thrown out of home, carried her cardboard suitcase to the tram. He had bestowed on her two envelopes. One was addressed to “My Good Friend, Mr. Neville Peterson.” The other contained thirty-three pounds and ten shillings.

“Be a brave girl,” he said, and kissed her on both cheeks. Did Celine not want this information? She herself had travelled the thousand miles in utero, unable to know anything except, presumably, that the waters of the world were full of fright and shame as her mother braved the Melbourne streets knowing that her cotton dress could not hide the curve of her belly to her bush, her thighs, bare legs. There was no-one to forgive her. She lugged her cardboard “port” which is what they called a suitcase in Brissy, from the French portmanteau. In Melbourne “port” meant cheap fortified wine which was sold, together with other necessaries, from Mr. Neville’s back gate and on occasions from his Bedford van. It was hard to credit the number of cigarettes and chocolate bars and nylon stockings stored inside that tiny space.

His house was in Dorcas Street, South Melbourne, which was working-class and industrial in 1943. It is still there, a single-story late Victorian twenty-two feet wide with a curbed corrugated-iron verandah and an ornate pediment on which the word “Balmoral” stands in bold relief. It is on a deep block, almost two hundred feet, with access from the wide rear lane.

In 1943 the backyard held a trove of lumber, lead, copper, and various other valuables best traded after dark. The daylight merchandise lay on racks or stacked against the shed like sticks around a bonfire. Nearer to the gate stood the aforementioned van in which the terrifying driver, the left lens of his specs pasted with brown paper, made his expeditions to collect windfall coal or bunny jumpkins or mushies or cackleberries and there were many farms from the Dandenongs to Ballarat where the tall dry man with the cinched-in belt and no bum in his trousers was known and welcomed for no better reason than his nod, his tight-rolled cigarettes, his reassuring companionable way of saying “yairs” (a spelling which misrepresents him in this age where such a thing looks comic). It is said authoritatively that there was no black market in the war.

Doris found her future half hidden by a bamboo thicket, behind Mr. Neville’s cast-iron gate.

As it was now noon the master of the house had just risen. He appeared at the front door with his first hand-rolled cigarette in the corner of his mouth, his slitted eyes peering through the smoke. He had a high nose, a long chin. His hollow cheeks were shining from the razor.

He accepted the crumpled envelope without a word. Having no sight in one eye, he read the two pages lopsidedly. Then he considered the subject of the letter.

“You don’t drive I suppose?”

“Does it say I do?”

“No.” He folded the envelope once and then twice, making it much smaller than was needed to accommodate it in the pocket of his khaki shirt. “Not exactly, no.”

“Why do you ask?”

He paused. “Is he happy then, your Mr. Clive?”

“Does he say?”

“Is he lonely?”

“I wouldn’t know about that.”

“But he must have friends. Doris?”

“Yes, I’m Doris. What does he say about me?”

“He’s a silly bugger our Clive. He has nothing to audition for except a role he is too nervous to accept.”

“He said you were a nice man.”

“Did he, darls?”

“Yes, he did.”

“Are you in trouble, love?”

“I must be the consolation prize,” she said.

Mr. Neville pursed his lips and she saw that she had somehow hurt him.

“My, look at you,” he said. “Is that a baby boy?”

“I don’t know yet.”

“Can I eat him when he’s cooked?”

He said that to pay her back. Why not? She was a cast-out tart with her stomach and her bosoms growing tight inside her dress. “I’m so sorry.”

“Come in, come in by all means,” said Mr. Neville, backing down into the darkness.

“I’m so sorry,” she said, inside the hall of Balmoral, with tears washing down her cheeks. “I’m sorry.”

“Here you are, love, first door on the left, here.”

Doris felt all the cold of Melbourne autumn in the walls.

“Here we go, here we go. Just as his nibs left it.”

And he rushed ahead into a room such as she would never have expected. It was the window-dresser’s bedroom, with pink silk bed and pink pillows and bows tied in the padded bedhead. Mr. Neville laid her poor old port directly on the lovely quilt.

“He must have expected you,” he said, and squinted over his fragrant rollie and shoved his big dry hands in his back pockets so his shoulders bent towards her.

Which was, she understood immediately, his way of making peace.

She said: “I haven’t got a job or nothing.”

“That’s all right.”

“You don’t want a little baby crying all the night.”

“Can I be frank, darls?”

“It’s your house, isn’t it?”

“I’m a deaf old poofter.”

There was nothing in his appearance to show her how to take this—he was like a stick insect, 100 percent camouflage, all dry and wiry, with one brown-papered eye and smoke closing down the other.

“All right,” she said.

“You understand?”

“I suppose so,” she said. Then the old bugger winked at her.

“Don’t let me worry you, Doris.”

“All right.” She guessed he wouldn’t either. He winked again.

“It’ll be nice to have such pretty company. Do you drive?” he asked.

“No,” she said.

He left her then and if he came back she did not hear him. It was hours before she discovered the pot of tea outside her door.

If Doris had been a bag of spuds it would have been the same to Mr. Neville, and her relief at his lack of interest in her body temporarily obscured the quality she would soon learn to treasure—Mr. Neville was a highly effective person.

He ran sixteen hot-dog stands. He did business with those American soldiers who had arrived in Australia months before only to be refused admittance to Port Melbourne because, although they had arrived to save our country, their black skin was not permitted by the White Australia Policy. Once this snafu was sorted out, the negroes turned out to be a big plus. Mr. Neville was soon in partnership with a tailor reproducing their box-backed drape jackets, pants tight at the cuffs but loose along the legs. His “threads” were made to a price and the fabric was what we used to call bodgie, that is, no good. That is how the bodgie gangs got their name.

Mr. Neville resold V-Discs which included sets by Art Tatum, Louis Armstrong, Earl Hines, Coleman Hawkins, Lionel Hampton, Louis Jordan, Benny Carter and Fats Waller dreaming about a reefer five feet long. He had a secret source of butter at Bacchus Marsh which he maintained until 1945 when bodgie rivals burned the dairy to the ground. He had a “working relationship” with the American 4th General Hospital, particularly but not exclusively its quartermasters. And by the second night, after Doris had met an obstetrician (an American captain) and gynaecologist (an American major), she understood that he could save her life.

Inside the Royal Melbourne Hospital, which the Yanks had stolen from the locals, her unborn child was pronounced healthy.

“Would you like to learn to drive?”

She would like it just as much as flying, maybe more.

Mr. Neville shouted her the first Coca-Cola of her life. Then (“quick as a wink,” Doris told me) her name became Baillieux, legally, spelled exactly like she wanted it. A week later she had her driving licence and it read: Mrs. Doris Baillieux. He bought her one black suit and one black dress and she became his driver straight away.

It was not difficult for a man like this to lay hands on almost anything, say a Remington rifle manufactured in 1939. The weapon would later play a part in the bodgie wars but until then it travelled in the back of the van, sufficiently accessible for shooting rabbits or jam tins lined up along a fence.

After Celine was born, and named to match Baillieux, the boss observed how Doris wore gloves to touch her baby. He asked no questions but he made himself the master of the bottle feed and the sixty-second nappy change. He nursed Celine while the mother drove.

Celine grew up with driving, with campfires along the Lerderderg River, rabbit shooting above the warrens at Coimadai, jam-tin targets by the Darley road. She knew the high potato country up by Bungaree and the goldmines of Anakie. All these scenes are free on postcards but you must add the tall stringy man with the baby in his arms and his attendant driver: a woman in a black frock with violent red lips.

Would Celine ever understand how her mother brought distinction to Mr. Neville? She not only drove “without jerkiness,” she could wait for hours on end and never need to sleep or hum or read the Sporting Globe. She was always there, waiting, bright as a button. She was always calm, whether he was in a great hurry or a slightly drunken stumble or, on the occasion that the wars with the bodgie gangs reached their final stage, a little bit of both.

It was a very particular childhood for Celine, providing intense nurture but of a most distinctive kind. As for nature, Celine’s body would turn out to possess an astounding stillness very like her mother’s, and this would one day prove to be one of her most interesting qualities as an actress. This was what made her, Doris told me, a “deadeye Dick. You know what that is?”

“An expert marksman.”

“Don’t print that,” she said. “She’s a real dingbat. She’s got a shocking temper.”

22

I SLEPT WITH HER, Celine Baillieux, good grief, of course it wasn’t what it sounds like. I couldn’t sleep at all.

Fifteen mg of Temazepam did nothing except dry my mouth so I set off, bare feet on ashy brick, seeking the solace of the vine. She had hidden the Jacob’s Creek but the refrigerator motor drew itself to my attention, and Jesus Christ, there it lay, sweet sleep, Veuve Clicquot, glowing golden from beneath a plastic drawer. I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m really sorry. Never steal champagne. I found a tumbler. Seeking privacy, I slipped outside and the damp cold Victorian air washed over me. An owl cried, a mopoke. There was a possum thrashing carelessly around the branches of a blackwood.

As gentle as a safe-cracker, I closed the door. My hands were injured, the pain intense as I levered out the cork, a sweet and sneaky fart.

My feet were ice. I didn’t care. I filled the glass and felt the bubbles bathe the desert of my throat. If I could do this I could do anything. A huge hand clamped itself upon my shoulder.

Celine was later nice enough to say she did not hear me scream. Supposedly she woke to white lights as thin as needles raking the trees and dirty bedroom windows. She thought to herself, I am on their kill list, this moment has been waiting for me all my life. She drew a blanket across her head and slid across the freezing floor and lay hidden, heart pounding. There was a distant motor running, then it died. She crawled into the dark hallway. The air was cold and ashen and she could see through the living-room windows and out to the bush where men with flashlights slashed the dark. Two human figures stood at her open door. One of these was Wodonga Townes.

“Don’t do that again,” he said, and he put his arm around me and pressed me like a lover to his chest. “Jesus, mate. There are people who care about you. Don’t ever disappear like that again.”

“Sorry.”

Woody borrowed my Veuve Clicquot and took a swig. “Christ, Felix. I thought you were a goner.”

Behind him were men with the word POLICE in reflective letters thirty centimetres high. They were thumping around the bush as loud as wombats.

“What in the fuck are you doing here, Felix?” A possibly affectionate mass of flesh collapsed around my shoulder.

“Looking for my source.”

“But that’s my job. I bailed her. You’re the bloody writer. This wastes everybody’s time.”

“You could have just phoned me,” I said. “I would have answered.”

“Yes, yes,” he said, suddenly, typically, distracted by another thought. “You’ve got red wine?”

“Sorry.”

He released me from his lock.

“Dobbo,” he called. “Go back and see our mate, the licensee.”

As he gave orders to the policeman his voice was clear as ice. I observed the flash of paper money as he peeled it off a roll. I was confused, but not at all ungrateful.

“Buy a case of Château Nasty,” said Woody Townes. “That should wake the bugger up. See if he’ll sell you some steak. I’m hungry.”

I attempted to get back into the house but found my way blocked.

“Get those people off my land,” Celine said, not to me, to Woody who was hard behind me. “Do they have a warrant?”

“My pretty Celine.” His tone was wheedling, creepy in conjunction with her injured eye. “They’re police, my love.”

Celine tugged her blanket hard around her. “Put my champagne back where you found it.”

“I was worried something bad had happened to you.” The Big Fella handed me the bottle and took her hand. “God knows who might have grabbed you.”

Celine folded her arms across her chest.

“Sweetheart,” Woody said, “you are in a vulnerable position.”

“So you explained last night.”

There was a silence. What was going on between them? Celine stared right at him, fierce in her injury.

“Good,” he said at last. “Then we’re clear on that.”

Another silence, then she blinked and looked away. “I’m sorry, Woody.” Only then did it occur to me: her daughter was very close nearby. “Come in,” she said.

In the generous kitchen Woody peeled himself a banana, drank water from the tap, wiped his red mouth with paper towelling which he left crumpled on the draining board. From inside a cocoon of blanket, Celine watched.

“Darling, you’ve got a public road grown over. You must know that.”

She dropped his garbage in a tidy. “I’m at the end of the road,” she said carefully. “No-one comes here but me.”

“This is fire country. There is no direct access to the house.”

“They shouldn’t be here,” she said.

“Why would you be pissy about them? They’re here because I was worried about your personal safety.”

Celine snatched her champagne back from me. “You’re pathetic,” she told me, en passant. I watched with interest as she attempted, and failed, to stand the bottle inside the fridge door. Woody winked at me. “You inherited this mansion from Lionel Patrick?” he asked.

“It’s not a mansion,” she said and I understood that she had got involved with the long forgotten Lionel Patrick, a conservative attorney-general. She had been one of Lionel’s girls.

Woody began shining his flashlight on her artworks, edging his way along the walls, around the corner. “Lionel was a bit of a collector,” he said and I heard a door open and then close behind him.

Celine glared at me: “Don’t say a bloody word.”

Woody returned, holding a small canvas.

“Cliff Pugh,” he said. “Cliff Pugh painted this.”

“For Christ’s sake.” Celine poured her champagne down the drain. “Will the pair of you stop touching my things.”

“Great artist, Cliff, bit far left for Lionel though. Didn’t Cliff live up the road at Cottles Bridge?”

“Yes, he did. In a moment you’ll reveal that you own his work yourself. It’s a portrait of Jim Cairns isn’t it?”

“Cliff was a big fan of the Deputy Prime Minister. Mate,” Woody said to me, “will you rehang this painting for me. Sorry.”

By the time I returned, Celine was nowhere to be seen and Woody was affecting to read a book. I took my shoes to the dining table where I could sit and lace them.

“You know she isn’t stable,” he said.

Was he explaining why he punched her? I stared at him. “I don’t blame you getting all shitty and sarcastic,” he said, not looking up.

“I wasn’t.”

“Yes, that’s what you’re like. But you’ve never known her like I have.”

“How exactly would that be, mate?”

His book made a good loud thwack as it hit the slate.

“Don’t fuck with me, Felix. You wouldn’t be that stupid would you?”

“I’m a coward, you know that Woody.”

He brought his crocodile eyes to bear on me. Then he sighed and picked up a copy of the Melbourne Age. “I wish to Christ you were that simple.”

I waited as he rolled up the pages, tying them in what I know as “granny knots.” I watched as he heaped these on the ashes and assembled the remnants of the old fire and threw in some kindling. I was standing in front of it, warming the back of my legs, when the cops returned with a case of wine and a small soft parcel which would turn out to contain butcher’s sausages.

Woody was now immediately active and you would have thought he was Rupert Murdoch who always liked to cook breakfast for his “boys” down at his farm at Yass. He was jovial, generous, benign. He set the snags to cook and cracked a lot of eggs into a bowl and addressed the gas cooker with one hand on his fleshy hip. When Celine did appear, in jeans and plaid shirt, she was not pleased to see this alien food invade her table. She stood before it, arms folded across her chest.

“Jeez, cut me some slack,” said Woody.

“You can’t say the words?”

“You want me to apologise?”

“Take your fucking plates outside,” she said.

“These men have been up all night on your account,” said Woody.

“On your account, I think.”

I felt him stiffen, the whole weight of his body inclining towards her. Then he snorted, and picked up his sausages and scrambled eggs and led his men out of the house.

The magpies were carolling and the sky was cold and yellow. The intruders gathered on the terrace juggling plates and drinks like footballers at a barbecue.

I finally got some red wine only to have Celine grab it back. “Later,” she said. “You’re meant to be a good guy. Please be a good guy. Please don’t fuck up.”

“What can I do? I don’t know anything.” I thought, what had she done with Woody? How had she inherited a house from Lionel bloody Patrick? “You shouldn’t piss off the cops. You know that.”

“OK, OK, go and eat with them. Tell them what a bitch I am. If they start poking around, just keep them away from the east.”

“Where’s that?”

She closed her eyes, and squeezed them shut. It is a credit to her character that she was smiling as she opened them.

“Where the sun comes up,” she said. “Boofhead.”

23

DET. SGT DOBBO CLUTCHED a handful of plastic bags, for what reason no-one said, ditto the matt-black equipment the others strung around their necks. Woody Townes carried a flashlight and a fresh-peeled stick, still slippery with sap, which he swung enthusiastically as he headed towards a slab-sided corrugated shed. His heels glowed fluorescent orange in the rising sun.

“I’m worried about her, Felix.” He whacked at a prickly Moses, slicing it in half. “If you want to think about it, she was never good with stress.” He came upon a pale blue Cootamundra wattle, twenty-five centimetres high, planted just last spring. He whacked that too.

“Jesus. Don’t do that.”

“You think she should grow more bloody trees? People get burned to death out here,” he said. “I thought I knew Celine, very intimately, mate. But she has always had the great capacity to surprise. Did you know she had been bonking Lionel Patrick?”

“No.”

“But how does she seem to you? What’s her state of mind?”

“Anxious, obviously.”

“She hasn’t pulled any carving knives on you?”

“She did you? When?”

He paused, considering. “When we were all young she was fucking amazing, the stunts she’d pull. But now … Is she OK, really? She looks shaky.”

“Anxious, I’d say.”

“But isn’t this a very fucking strange place for an anxious woman to have a house? She’s got professional car thieves as neighbours up the road. Did you see that? The used cars scattered through the scrub. That’s what we used to call a hide-out. Her road’s all grown over. I had to leave the Merc at the bottom of the hill.”

“I’m sure it will be fine.”

“A Mercedes-Benz S500. Do you have any idea what that is?”

The Mercedes-Benz S500 is the four-door sedan preferred by Chinese businessmen, wealthy Americans and Third World dictators. “No,” I said. “What is it?”

“You don’t drive? This one will drive for you. It’s got three computers. This is the Merc for you, mate. It’s got ‘Lane Keeping Assist.’ You could use that, for sure.”

He rested his hand on my shoulder and we walked a way together and it was difficult to resist the old habits of mockery and affection. “It’s got bluetooth,” he said, “and Sirius and HD radio, USB and SD ports, you’re not listening. All right, I understand. We’ll save her idiot daughter if we can. I’m more concerned about mumsy. Has she compromised herself, Felix? Has she placed herself in any danger that you know of?”

“She does have a black eye, mate.”

Of course that gave him pause and his mouth entered one of those unstable states, never predictable in their conclusion, which resolved, on this occasion, when he took my hand companionably. “We need her cooperation, you get it don’t you? Harbouring is a crime.”

“I’m confused.”

He blinked as if considering my “confusion” from different angles. Then, suddenly, he was off walking earnestly towards the east, head down, thrashing passionately at the dogwood bushes. I had no way to turn him. “How does she get her food?” he demanded. “You never noticed that mailbox up on the road?” He blew his nose. “Why is it so big? And when a great mad bushfire comes exploding across the tree tops, what does she do then? Why would she live somewhere so extreme?”

Then, certainly without me planning it—I did not even know it existed—we arrived at a forestry dugout. You cannot get a better fire defence than a dugout. This one had been driven directly into a hill like a mineshaft, with heavy wood framing around the entrance, tons of earth supported by a rough-adzed tree trunk. A dirty canvas curtain was set back a few feet from the doorway.

We stood together gazing at it and it was then I felt his massive stillness.

“So you’re the country boy,” he said. “Then tell me: why wouldn’t a big fire burn all the oxygen inside?”

“That’s a curtain. They wet it down. The tunnel will be L-shaped.”

“Ah, you’ve been in there?” I recognised a peculiar poker face from those long-lost days when I was agonising over my plans for Drivetime Radio and we played cards and drank all through the night.

“Why would I do that?”

He grinned as he took me by my upper arm and locked me tight. I thought, the Angel is in there. I’ll get my interview.

“I should feel sorry for you,” he said, dragging me bodily towards the entrance. Suddenly I was afraid. I kicked at his knee and almost put my back out, and it was at that moment—just as the faint light of his flashlight reached the rusty canvas—that the magpie swooped. It hit as the white-backed males always do, with a rush of wings, a loud thwack, landing with sufficient momentum to jolt Woody’s head a good eight centimetres forward. A moment later the assassin was back up his tree, indistinguishable from his brothers and sisters, safe from the passions he had unleashed below.

I have suffered the brutality of magpies all my life. In England, I am told, their magpie is a gentle creature. In Bacchus Marsh, in magpie season, kids would return from their run to the outside lavatory, heads streaming with blood, most of them in tears, while the more timid remained in the classroom, shitting in their pants rather than suffer the terrors of assault.

But lord, I never witnessed anything like this: Woody Townes, a hundred and thirty kilograms of meat, fell to his knees. Blood washed his forehead and filled his eyes he bawled like a heifer in a barbwire fence.

It is amazing, I thought, how such a large strong man, a beast electrified by his own barely suppressed violence, has so little tolerance for pain. He was left like the blinded Cyclops, his fluorescent feet all dusty, swinging his fat fist at what must have been my shadow.

Celine, of course, came running, 100 percent in character, black-eyed, barefoot, swinging her first-aid kit.

“Be still,” she told the fallen man.

There was a war between kookaburras and magpies above our heads. I could hear the clacking of their beaks. Celine drew on a pair of rubber dishwashing gloves and separated the strands of Woody’s hair.

He bellowed. Celine raised her hands.

I glimpsed a deep meaty gouge from crown to brow.

Celine said: “All I’ve got is methylated spirits.” And she was pouring it, straight from the bottle, drenching his scalp before he had a chance to stop her.

“Shit. Lay off will you?”

“You need stitches.”

“Piss off.” He wiped his eyes and left his wrist a bloody mess. “It’s just a magpie.”

“Listen my love,” Celine said, way too tenderly. “You are losing too much blood.”

“Bullshit.”

“Yes, but let’s get you to the car.”

The argument was interrupted by Dobbo and his gang and their impatient boots, their long investigative noses, their professional judgements: “That’s not a magpie wound.”

“All due respect, Sergeant, but allow me to know what hit me. It was a bloody magpie. I got swooped.”

“Was it carrying a hammer and chisel?” said Dobbo. “It must have been.”

“Come on Sergeant,” Celine said urgently. “Help me please.” She had her hands under Woody’s armpits and was attempting to help him to his feet.

“I can do it myself,” cried the patient. “My legs still work.” At which his eyes rolled back in his head and he collapsed on the dirt.

“Sergeant,” cried Celine, which was the first moment I began to think about the mother plover, the habit of dragging her wing as if wounded.

Dobbo stood with his hands on his hips looking at Celine with unsympathetic amusement. “You know why we can’t even get the car up here, Mrs. Baillieux. Because you’ve broken the law.”

It was at this point, I marked later, that Celine became completely manic. “You have to help,” she said.

I thought, why is she antagonising him like this? She dug her hands under Woody’s armpits again and showed herself ineffectual to an alarming degree.

“All right, darling,” Dobbo said, “get out of the way.”

“No,” said Celine.

“Go on,” said Dobbo. “Off.”

I did not think, not for a moment, that I was dealing with an actress, so I was alarmed to see her panic, to follow the fraught procession through the paperbarks, down into the blackberries, across the creek to Woody’s computerised Mercedes-Benz. He regained consciousness for long enough to refuse to let anyone else drive, but when he was safely in the back seat Celine took a paper towel and wiped his indignant eyes and held a wad of red tissue against his wound. It was not pleasant, to see this tenderness invested in a man who had hurt her. The engine fired, and the black monster lumbered slowly down the corrugated road. Celine waved, although I doubt anyone was looking.

“Holy Christ,” she said.

24

WOODY’S HUNDRED-DOLLAR FLASHLIGHT lay abandoned in the sunlight. Behind it was a lower part of his assassin’s iridescent beak, clean ripped away. Behind this, was a small hexagonal nut and I spat on my finger to make it stick. It was only then that I saw, in the black mouth of the tunnel, my source. She was luminous with cloudy-climate skin and tangled wheaten hair. She wore a grubby singlet. Her collarbone was pooled with darkness. Her bare arms were folded across her breasts.

No-one introduced her. She stepped out to the light, and I saw she was not quite as symmetrically pretty as I had expected, also shorter, thicker waisted, sturdier than she had seemed on CNN. She looked me directly in the eyes.

I nodded but all the niceties, the civilities, everything superfluous had been rubbed off her and she was left with that isolated, glass-cased quality, that sheen and distance that so often accompany power.

“Sweetie, did you have to use that thing just now?” Celine said.

“Who is this?” she demanded.

“If they were suspicious, now they’re certain.”

“Yes. Who is this?”

“This is Felix Moore.” I turned towards Celine only to understand she was a junior officer, dismissed, already walking back towards her house. There was no time to feel anything except: I had the interview. I would be worthy of it. My subject led the way and I was mentally recording: dancer’s walk, shoulders back. The pocket of her jeans was torn. I followed into the earthen gloom, to a back wall supported by rough-cut planks—incontestably solid, clay showing between the timber. It swung smoothly open and I was admitted to what was arguably, at least from the viewpoint in Langley, Virginia, the most dangerous place on this earth. I remember my entry like a car accident, awash with adrenalin, very slow and very fast. The covert world smelled like a pottery, but also a teenager’s bedroom. It was illuminated by computer screens, small video monitors beneath the ceiling which I would not really see until I was out in the air again: spooky black and white images, gum trees swaying, a car travelling along a dirt road, that same white feather of clay dust left by the police. I stumbled then tripped on an orange power cord. There was an indoor toilet, definitely, many small green lights, and a young man with the build of a bodyguard. His eyebrows were mad and heavy, his curling black hair explosive, and he stooped a little, as if he would not quite fit in the box he came in. He stood stiffly, his arms pressed against his sides like a schoolboy in short pants.

“This is Paypal,” she said.

I reached to shake his hand, an offer not accepted.

“Paypal. This is him. He’s famous.”

If this was a story about hackers I was laughably ill-equipped. I had never heard of Paypal. I had never heard of the Crypto Anarchist Manifesto, or even the lowly practice of “carding,” the criminal process of using or verifying phished credit numbers.

When Paypal seated himself at a cluttered card table and fitted a jeweller’s loupe beneath his hairy eye, I did not think this particularly strange.

“Your mother had this place waiting for you?” I asked Gabrielle Baillieux.

She hooded her eyes. “Here is what you’ve got to know about my mother. OK? She’s got to own the story. Whatever danger I am in she has to be in worse herself.”

There were two plastic milk crates on the floor between us. She kicked one towards me. “You can’t upstage my mother, that’s the point.” As she sat, her jeans rode up and there was no evidence of the controversial anklet which had been a condition of bail.

She set a small black tape recorder on a milk crate. Of course. She was famous. She was accustomed to control.

“Don’t you take notes?” she asked.

“No.”

She switched on her recorder. I thought I would have to instruct her, later, about the dangers of this game whose rules she did not know. There was no tape recorder ever manufactured that could protect her from a journalist, but she clearly thought there was, and her broad expanse of forehead had a tense uneven surface like wet tidal sand.

“You just asked your mother who I was. But you clearly knew already.”

“Yes. You’re someone working for someone who wants to sell something.”

“That’s unfair.”

“It’s normal.”

“But not for you.”

“No, I’m a soldier.”

“You’re also a person with a life.”

“Duh.”

Of course I had interviewed far ruder people, but not one of them had been in such extreme danger. Earlier she had decided to trust me but now I was here she baulked. She loudly worried that a book would jeopardise her further.

“I wish you’d read my work. You’d know I’m not just some slimebag who will pretend he’s on your side then knife you. I won’t be cheap or reductive. I won’t ask you about politics and then leave out everything you want to say.”

The frown remained the same, but the eyes narrowed.

“Here’s what I think,” I said. “You want the world to actually understand you. You have put your life at risk, but for a rational reason. You are a sort of equation,” I said, not dishonestly, but not knowing exactly what I meant. I paused.

“No, go on.”

“Every life has a logic. Following the logic can be persuasive. Wouldn’t you prefer to be understood in your own terms?”

Her face, in considering me, was totally expressionless but I trusted that feeling in my gut.

“You’re trying to see if I’m wearing my anklet?”

Actually I had been touched by her little oblong feet, the chipped polish, all the toes of equal length.

“The Department of Justice is cost-cutting,” she said. “So they buy the anklets from K5C who source them in China.” She affected weariness, as if no single thing would be understood by anybody else. “They’re crap, of course. They break down all the time. Then K5C hires a mob of amateur hackers and recidivists to watch the monitors. The pay is shit and the kids are high and the monitors fuck up almost every day. When a monitor goes on the fritz they assume it’s just a false alarm. How you fix a false alarm is wait for it to fix itself. Do you want the technical details? Would you understand them? Do you know what a Faraday cage is?”

“Not yet.”

“Maybe this is not a good idea.”

“I’m here to help you.”

“It’s Paypal you should talk to. He transferred my anklet to a dog. They monitor the dog’s progress. They think the dog is me.”

I thought, Woody Townes did not come out here following a dog. “Someone stands to lose a lot of bail money,” I said.

“That big slob didn’t buy me, if that’s what you mean.”

“Do you know who he is?”

“He’s a pervert. I’ve known him all my life.”

In the corner of the dugout Paypal seemed to be soldering a circuit. He was so big and stiff it was hard to imagine him doing anything precise.

“Give me back the beak,” he said, not looking at me.

Gaby took the beak and passed it to him in a gesture somehow so familial I had no doubt that they were lovers. He lifted an inert magpie from the bench, then ejected something, a black metal battery or perhaps a motor, from the bird’s underside.

“You actually made this?” I asked him.

“We own it.” Gaby said. “They made it.”

By “own” I thought they had hacked it. Was “they” a corporation or our favourite nation state? I looked to Paypal but he turned his back on me. She also seemed to be in retreat.

“What exactly have you been hired to write?”

“Gabrielle, you agreed to this already. That’s why I’m here.”

She shrugged.

“My job is to make you likeable,” I said. “They want me to make the case for your good character.”

She almost smiled.

“Your mother is trying to save you from extradition. I can help with that.”

“Fear is not helpful to anyone.”

“You think I’m afraid?”

“Celine is shitting herself.”

“What if I simply wrote the truth?”

“People wouldn’t like my equation. You won’t either.”

I thought, she’s a nightmare. No-one can control her. I have a contract, but not with her.

“You think you’ll like me, but you won’t.” She smiled and for a moment I didn’t understand that this sweetness was for the idiot who had the unmanned aerial magpie hovering above his desk. The machine rose vertically like no magpie ever born. I thought, you’re a waste of hope and time.

“My mother is a bad introduction to our situation,” she said. “She’s defeated by them before she even starts. It does not occur to her that we might possibly defeat them.” I thought she sounded paranoid and grandiose but she clearly did not give a rat’s arse about what I thought. She was smiling at the curly-haired man-child as he elevated the drone almost to the ceiling. I heard the high-pitched whine of an engine but when I felt my hair lift in the breeze I would not look.

“Them?” I asked her. “Who is them?”

The machine dropped, like a catastrophic phone book, on my head. Maybe I cried out. Who wouldn’t? Whatever I did, they fell around laughing like a pair of clowns. It was not my own fright that pissed me off, but their carelessness of who they were. I had a higher opinion of them than they did themselves.

“It was just a joke.”

There are many journalists, most journalists, who could be auditioned and mocked and still do a more than decent job. This juvenile behaviour would be a gift to them, not me. My head hurt. My hands throbbed. Fuck it. I stood. “This won’t work if you want to fight against me.”

“Oh, take a joke,” she said, but I was truly pissed off. This was what our great historian would call the flaw in my human clay.

“You’ve got plenty of enemies,” I told her. “Go fight with them. Or find out who I am and get in touch with me.” And that was my character, how I normally fucked my life.

She smiled at me then, and touched my arm. I had heard she was casual with her hygiene. No-one had mentioned she was charming.

“Mr. Moore, I am not nice, but I do know exactly who you are. Really I do. I first read you when I was still in high school.”

I tried very hard to disguise my pleasure, but knew that my smirky little mouth would be a traitor to my cause. “Sleep on it,” I said.

“OK but I don’t need to.” She put her small warm hand in mine and I shook it and thought, dear Jesus Christ, she reads books. I’m saved. I said goodbye. I had done a good day’s work. I emerged from the dugout as king parrots sliced the bush with their low trajectory, flashing their pretty sunlit colours above the darkness of the ridge tops. I filled my lungs with clean fresh air. I stretched my spine. I finally noticed, above the dugout entrance, in the tossing umbrellas of the gum trees, dozens of tiny whirling fans, each one camouflaged with mottled paint and strapped in place. Were there power cables? Yes, there, travelling towards the earth like careful lizards, down the dark side of the trunks into the exclusive story by Felix Moore.

25

I HAD NOT, previously, been thought of as the kind of writer who might make a difficult character loveable. My most notable work of fiction, Barbie and the Deadheads, had been a satire. As a journalist it was my talent to be a shit-stirrer, a truffle hound for cheats and liars and crooks amongst the ruling classes. These pugnacious habits had served me well for a whole career but the story of this young woman demanded I become a larger person, a man who had it in his heart to love our stinking human clay.

If I had been Tolstoy himself, I could not have been granted more than this, my almost vascular connection to the drama and its actors, a privileged role where I might be both a witness and participant in a new type of warfare where the weapons of individuals could equal those of nation states. I was a failed novelist but I saw I had the novelistic smells I needed (from shit to solder), the pixelated light, the women with related cheekbones, the great Australian bush rolling on out past Kinglake, ranges like ancient animals asleep, slender upper branches turned pretty pink by afternoon.

I had a lifetime of hard-won technical ability, but was my heart sufficient? Could I transcend my own beginnings as that stinging little creature who had been the object of Sando Quinn’s pity? Did I have the courage for something more than a five-column smash and grab? Did I, along the way, truly wish to make myself a conduit for the corrosive hurts and betrayals of a guilty mother and an angry child? My own daughters would judge I had a better chance of chopping down a tree.

As I came to the top of Celine’s steps I saw, high on the ridge tops, a magpie glide exactly like a hawk, New hatched to the woeful time, or words to that effect.

Then I sat at Celine’s long table, drinking Jacob’s Creek through a straw while she very kindly re-dressed my throbbing hands.

There was a large blister on one palm and a vicious lesion on the other. My fingers were scarlet and my nurse observed that I would not be typing for a while. I did not comment. She cooked, early. At an hour when Melbourne’s office workers crossed the Swanston Street bridge on their way home, we ate. And then we sat before a mellow bed of coals, toasting bread and slathering it with jam and butter.

Celine still did not mention her daughter, except tangentially, to say it was a shitty time to be young.

It was always a shitty time. I said so.

But Celine seemed to have become romantic about our past. I was gently “reminded” that we had one hundred thousand people on the streets of Melbourne for the Vietnam Moratorium. In her view we had “won.” Then we voted in a Labor government. One moment Jim Cairns was the evil man who led the moratorium. Then he was Deputy Prime Minister. Soon he would be Treasurer. We had learned that we could change the world.

She was completely correct, if only in the short term.

Change was what we wanted. Our new Prime Minister didn’t keep us waiting. In the first two weeks, without a cabinet, Gough Whitlam brought home Australian soldiers from the US war in Vietnam. Was it then that Washington decided we were all communists? This was a big joke if you knew Gough Whitlam.

The party was elected on Gough’s platform and, by Jesus, he was going to honour it. He abolished conscription. He let the draft resisters out of jail, made university free, gave land rights to Aboriginal peoples wherever the federal government had the power. He, the Prime Minister of what had previously been a reliable American client state, denounced the Nixon bombing of North Vietnam. This outraged our ally, but that’s what we had elected him to do. After almost two centuries of grovelling, we grew some balls. At the UN we spoke up for Palestinian rights. We welcomed Chileans fleeing the CIA coup. We condemned nuclear weapons in the South Pacific.

To Celine this list was proof that we had won.

I said our victory was built on the mad idea we would not be punished. For it was exactly these “proofs” that caused Nixon to order the CIA review of US policy towards Australia. In our beginning was our end. Our victory triggered an ever-escalating covert operation which would finally remove the elected government from power.

Later it would be said that it was the world recession that had undone the Whitlam government. Of course that didn’t help. But Nixon had made Marshall Green his ambassador before the recession hit. Marshall Green was the same guy who had overseen coups in Indonesia in 1965 and Cambodia in 1970.

Why didn’t we see what the appointment of the coup-master would mean for us? Because the pilot fish thinks it is safe to swim beside its shark? Because we were not Chile? Because we thought it was our own country and we could do what we liked in it? Our newly elected representatives could actually raid our own security service and read all the misinformation in their secret files. Whose security service was it? The Americans thought it was theirs. We knew it was ours. We were thrilled to see the vaults of ASIO open to the air.

We were naive, of course. We continued to think of the Americans as our friends and allies. We criticised them, of course. Why not? We loved them, didn’t we? We sang their songs. They had saved us from the Japanese. We sacrificed the lives of our beloved sons in Korea, then Vietnam. It never occurred to us that they would murder our democracy. So when it happened, in plain sight, we forgot it right away.

When the time came, no aircraft bombed the Australian Treasury, but our elected government was attacked continually and relentlessly in so many different ways from so many different quarters. Scandals were seeded in the clouds by hacks and circulated by Packer, Fairfax, Murdoch most of all. Misinformation rose into the sky above Canberra, like rockets that flared and died and left their lies on our retinas so we continued to see what was not true.

Gough’s ministers set out to raise a loan to “buy back the farm.” It’s a shame they did not go about it in a more worldly manner, that they were forced to act without the hostile Treasury, that they permitted the minister for mines to get himself involved with a broker named Khemlani. Khemlani was a CIA stooge. His job was not to buy back the farm but bring down the government. Of course he never raised a penny of the $4 billion loan the government approved.

Finally Khemlani would arrive in Australia with a fat briefcase full of “evidence” showing that the Labor ministers were all taking kickbacks from these loans. He was escorted before the cameras with bodyguards. He made a statutory declaration in which he swore his evidence. On the strength of his word, the free press was happy to report the people’s government were crooks.

It was a death of a thousand cuts. Scandal, scandal, scandal. It was next reported that a Bahamas bank had issued a letter seeking $4,267,365,000 for the Australian government, an outrageous $267 million being “proposed profit.” It didn’t matter that the government had not sought the loan. The headlines were the size of bricks.

Then Cairns was also offered money by a Melbourne dentist and property developer named Harris. Harris came to Jim’s office and offered to raise $300 million for a “one time commission”: of 2.5 percent. He had a letter he wanted Jim to sign. Jim, who had resisted the Khemlani loan, now refused this.

In parliament the opposition claimed he had approved this loan.

Jim denied it, naturally.

The opposition then tabled a letter which made our man a liar. There it was: his signature, giving his approval to pursue the loan on these terms. Thus was Jim ruined by a letter he had never knowingly signed. Today the question is, who slipped the letter in the pile? Who was the dogsbody? After the “evidence” had been obtained, who fed it to the press and the opposition? Who destroyed the Treasurer? Who killed Jim Cairns?

There was more to come.

Gough Whitlam had told the American ambassador that Australia would probably, but not necessarily, extend the lease on the so-called “US signals facility at Alice Springs.” This was and is Pine Gap, the same base that lets the US guide its drones today, but we did not have a clue what happened there, none of us, not even the Prime Minister knew what happened at Pine Gap. But the US would react so drastically to the threat of its closure, it was (and is) clearly so much more than a “signals facility.”

The American trauma can be seen and measured in a cable, dated days before the Whitlam government was deposed. It is from the CIA to its close collaborators at ASIO. As a kindness to the reader, the following is both edited and summarised. SHACKLEY CHIEF EAST ASIA DIVISION CIA REQUESTED ME TO PASS THE FOLLOWING MESSAGE TO DIRECTOR GENERAL OF ASIO.

The CIA, the cable stressed, had cause for serious complaint. The Prime Minister of Australia had stated that the CIA had been funding the conservative opposition in Australia. This was true, of course, although the cable admitted no such thing. The American embassy in Australia had approached the Australian government “at the highest level.” At this meeting the Americans “categorically denied” that CIA had given or passed funds to an organisation or candidate for political office in Australia.

Next day the US State Department relayed the same message to the Australian embassy in Washington. The CIA had not funded an Australian political party.

The effect of this, as the cable reveals, was unexpected.

PRIME MINISTER GOUGH WHITLAM PUBLICLY REPEATED THE ALLEGATION THAT HE KNEW OF TWO INSTANCES IN WHICH CIA MONEY HAD BEEN USED TO INFLUENCE DOMESTIC AUSTRALIAN POLITICS.

The Australians then publicly identified CIA agents working in their country under US State Department and Defense Department cover. This was outrageous enough. Then their Prime Minister revealed that Richard Stallings, the head of the Pine Gap facility, was a CIA agent.

CIA IS PERPLEXED AS TO WHAT ALL THIS MEANS. DOES THIS SIGNIFY SOME CHANGE IN OUR BILATERAL INTELLIGENCE SECURITY RELATED FIELDS?

The CIA were then forced to confer with their cover agencies and these agencies (State and Defense) stuck to their stories. This involved them claiming that Pine Gap’s Richard Stallings was a “retired Defense Department employee.”

Oh, really?

CIA CANNOT SEE HOW THIS [public dialogue] CAN DO OTHER THAN BLOW THE LID OFF THOSE INSTALLATIONS WHERE THE PERSONS CONCERNED HAVE BEEN WORKING AND WHICH ARE VITAL TO BOTH OF OUR SERVICES AND COUNTRIES, PARTICULARLY THE INSTALLATIONS AT ALICE SPRINGS … CIA FEELS IT NECESSARY TO SPEAK DIRECTLY TO ASIO BECAUSE OF THE COMPLEXITY OF THE PROBLEM.

That is, the American secret service could not talk to the elected leader of Australia. They had not forgotten Gough’s threat to permanently terminate the lease on Pine Gap which, as events transpired, was only days from expiring. Whitlam told the US ambassador: “If there were any attempts, to use familiar jargon, ‘to screw or bounce us’ inevitably these arrangements would be a matter of contention.”

IS THERE A CHANGE IN PRIME MINISTER WHITLAM’S ATTITUDE IN AUSTRALIAN POLICY IN THIS FIELD?… CIA FEELS THAT EVERYTHING POSSIBLE HAS BEEN DONE ON A DIPLOMATIC BASIS.

If ASIO could not fix this troublesome government, the CIA did not see how OUR MUTUALLY BENEFICIAL RELATIONSHIPS COULD CONTINUE … THE CIA FEELS GRAVE CONCERNS AS TO WHERE THIS TYPE OF PUBLIC DISCUSSION MAY LEAD … THIS MESSAGE SHOULD BE REGARDED AS AN OFFICIAL DEMARCHE ON A SERVICE TO SERVICE LINK … THE ASIO DIRECTOR-GENERAL SHOULD BE ASSURED THAT CIA DOES NOT LIGHTLY ADOPT THIS ATTITUDE.

Two days following the transmission of this cable the government was illegally dismissed.

Of course there was a conspiracy. We are old enough to know this now. There are institutions whose task it is to conspire all day long. They spy in every corner of our lives. They employ hundreds of thousands of workers and build acres of employee parking lots. If they are inefficient they are not always ineffective.

Of course the CIA could not do it all alone. It was like a brute-force attack on a corporate website. It required muscle, persistence, even luck. It required the conservative senate to block the supply of money to the government, which was unconstitutional. It needed Mr. Murdoch and his collaborators to make this seem OK, to create a bullshit crisis which could only be resolved by the governor-general, the representative of the Queen of England, who would then dismiss the people’s government. It also required the press to keep up the hysteria, to slander and criminalise an elected government, to name the process of its illegitimate removal “The Coup” while insisting it was no such thing.

These events have mostly passed from mind, yet not completely. Mr. Murdoch’s Australian newspaper recently commemorated THE DISMISSAL—30 YEARS ON:

There was never blood in the streets. Hawke refused to call a general strike. The Queen slept in her Buckingham Palace bed while her prime minister was executed. The media repaired to a restaurant for the biggest binge in Canberra’s history … We don’t kill each other over politics. The army was not called out. Gough Whitlam, a constitutionalist to his core, accepted his fate and went to the hustings. In Jakarta, Gough’s admirer, a confused President Suharto, summoned Australia’s ambassador, Dick Woolcott, to ask, “Why didn’t the prime minister arrest the governor-general?” Good question. The conspiracists were unleashed and their phony claims about a CIA plot ran for years.

The events of 1975 have been the obsession of my erratic and mostly unsuccessful life, so now I cannot fail to note that Gabrielle Baillieux was born into a Labor Party household in the midst of this traumatic Coup. It is therefore not insane to write about her life and activism in relation to this long-forgotten history.

26

NEXT MORNING AT Smiths Gully, I prepared for my mission. I washed and scrubbed my human envelope and shaved three times. As the morning sun illuminated the opposite hillside, I was mentally composing my opening sentences. I wished to incorporate the colours of my native land, the warm pink and ivory and the bright underside of parrot wings. I placed the battered kettle on the gas, dropped two thick slices in the toaster, when bang, bang, bang, a big-beaked, square-headed kookaburra, just outside the windows, beat the shit out of a baby snake on the pergola.

I buttered my toast. The kettle boiled. I poured.

Bang, bang, bang. Nature was so violent. Looking up, I was startled to discover the kookaburra had become Wodonga Townes, slamming on the glass door with his open palm and second wedding ring. With a string of sausages he could have played the part of Punch. The kookaburra dropped the snake and swooped to retrieve it.

Celine hurried from the hallway towards the visitor and then, a metre from the glass, she paused and wrapped a towel around her hair. Did she sense what was about to happen? All I could think was, my first interview with Gaby must be aborted.

“Hoy. Let me in.” The Big Fella spread his arms and grasped the door. As I turned the locks the kookaburra ascended to its perch and resumed its murder.

Our visitor wore perfect Persil whites, a tracksuit with gold piping. He had a one-inch strip of shaven scalp, and six red stitches. “What in the fuck are you doing?” he demanded.

“We’re doing nothing, Woody,” Celine said. “What are you doing?”

For answer he drank all my coffee and ate half my toast. “Don’t fuck with me,” he said directly to Celine. “You can go to jail for harbouring a fugitive. That includes you, mate.”

“I’m working for you, remember?”

He looked astonished.

“That contract?”

“Relax Feels. I’m your biggest fan. Just tell me where you’ve got our subject hidden.”

Celine’s eyes narrowed as she turned to me, but Woody grabbed her by the wrist and jerked her violently towards him. “You must think I’m very stupid, Mum.” He was so clearly resolved to remove her by brute force that she stopped resisting. She was tiny but her cheekbones glazed with anger.

I told Woody to quit it.

“Mate,” he smiled, and reached out his hand to me and I smiled duplicitously and that was when the treacherous bastard shackled my wrist with his big red hand. Then he dragged us both behind him, out the door, up the steps, towards the dugout where he planned (it was obvious to me) to confront us with our own deceit. The kookaburra flew overhead and landed in the tree above the dugout amongst the whirling battery chargers. In the midst of all my other upsets I was certain it would drop the snake.

Our captor produced another hundred-dollar flashlight and Celine took her chance to slap him rapidly, on both cheeks. Did he really spit at her? I never saw it. Certainly his face was contorted and later I wondered if he was more frightened of her than she was of him.

Once he had us inside the dugout it was over. I flicked a switch to no effect. Inside was total silence, not a milliwatt of illumination. There was a hateful smell. The beam of Woody’s flashlight tracked across split truck batteries, wires ripped like prawn veins straight from the earthen walls. There were no computers anywhere. Blankets and sleeping bags were wet with what I first thought was gore but turned out to be the contents of the composting toilet. When Woody released my wrist I escaped into the light, trembling.

In the shadow of the entrance Celine was striking Woody’s chest. That he accepted this confirmed my fears. They had murdered her.

“What have you done to my daughter?”

“Done to her? I’ve paid half a million dollars bail for her. She’s got no choice. She has to go to trial. So where is she?”

“Woody,” I said. “She doesn’t know.”

“You’re a sucker, Feels. This one,” he nodded to Celine, “you cannot trust.”

“Me?” Celine cried. “Oh, please.”

“No, I learned it a long time ago, but I keep forgetting it. You’re a dickhead, Celine. The safest thing for you to do is go to trial.” With that he turned and strode into the bush.

As Woody crashed through the undergrowth, I put my arm around Celine and felt her strangely calm. I thought, if I had been privileged to have Gaby as a daughter I would have been going nuts, throwing myself into the metaphoric grave, pounding my head and rubbing ashes in my hair. Celine walked unsteadily to the house and turned on her computer. I thought, she’s reading bloody email.

“Come here,” she said, and pointed: the cursor was moving, seemingly of its own accord, opening files and putting them away. We were hacked and owned by who we could not know. Celine held a finger to her lips, picked up the laptop between thumb and forefinger, and I followed her to the bathroom where she placed it in the tub.

Minutes later, with our iPhones and computer drowned in bathwater, we were stomping through the bush, Celine with a rucksack and a cardboard box, me with two bottles, a corkscrew, following the story, perhaps, or running for my life. We arrived at my former kidnapper’s disgusting Holden parked in the midst of the chaotic refuse from demolition sites.

Celine opened the driver-side door and beeped the horn and here he came, her servant, my tormentor, on his way to work.

I waited while she spoke to him, but of course I understood what was about to happen. I went to the rear of the car and waited like a well-trained dog.

It was a tight fit for two, head to tail like a dirty joke and as the engine started Celine kicked and jabbed me and surprised me by farting as we set off down the rutted track. When she pushed the cardboard box at me I did not act well.

“Calm down.”

I do not like being told to calm down. We all know what that means.

“Check out the box.”

It was not wine, which was what I had hoped, but a mess of papers and a huge number of objects, the smaller ones like mahjong tiles, that crutch of lazy reporters: the microcassette. Plus, also, larger cassettes, C120s as it later turned out.

“I need access,” I said.

We crossed a culvert and I banged my head. Between my disappointment and my claustrophobia, I could have wept.

“This is access,” she said. “You’ve got hours and hours of access in this box. Forget Woody,” she said. “Woody will never hear these tapes. You can write this book to please yourself.”