Amnesia (16 page)

“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.

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.