Free Amnesia by Peter Carey

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