Amnesia (15 page)

“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.”

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.

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.