Amnesia by Peter Carey Read Free Book Online Page A

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 mynose 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