Amnesia by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online

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.

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