Free Amnesia by Peter Carey Page B

week. I said the Sun-Herald made me come and do it and I needed the job to support my mum. For this I got asked inside. I was given a photograph. His mother kissed me. Yes I was a dreadful person. It had been my trade for years. But this—that I had discovered the trauma of Celine’s birth and not revealed it to her? Honestly, that did not seem as bad, although I certainly did not say that now. Instead, I apologised. I confessed that I had been infatuatedwith her. She had run away from home. She had been so frail. I could not bear to hurt her anymore. This, and other stuff, was true.
    “You’re a fantasist.”
    “Not at all.”
    “You’re a creep.”
    I wasn’t really a creep. I was a good person. I had been secretly in love with her. I had lost her to another man. Now was not the time for that discussion. “You’ve got the only copy in the universe,” I said. “Tell Woody to check the Mac. I deleted everything.”
    “You’d as likely chop your hand off.”
    “This is all there is.”
    “You’re a liar. But why would you think you could write this in the first place? How could you be such an authority of my mother’s home? I wasn’t even born. You were never there. What makes you think you can write about her?”
    “Show me what you read.”
    “825 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba,” she said, and thrust my stuff back at me. “The house isn’t even there anymore. They put a highway through it. Everyone is dead.”

THE GREATEST VIRTUE OF 825 Stanley Street, Woolloongabba, I had written, was the trams which rattled past the front door and thence across the Brisbane River where, if you took care with your appearance, no-one would know where you had come from. Without these trams Celine Baillieux could not have been born.
    Celine’s grandmother—who died at the beginning of our first year at Monash—was “tall and skinny as a rake.” She “never had a sick day in her life.” She had a son and husband fighting overseas. She took in boarders, but she was always broke. She was a Methodist. During the Depression she fed her family by stealing her neighbours’ potatoes in the middle of the night. She had all the good manners and principles she could afford and when the women of Australia were instructed to welcome the “Yanks” into their homes, when they learned it was their daughters’ patriotic duty to be “Victory Belles,” in those few short months before she understood exactly what this meant, she communicated to the authorities that she would be very happy to entertain some officers, except no Jews.
    Her gratitude to the Americans was well based. The Japanese had bombed Pearl Harbor, invaded Thailand, and the Philippines, seized Guam, marched into Burma and landed on the beach in British Borneo. Soon they would bomb the port of Darwin, then Broome, then what? They bayoneted men tied to trees, they raped and chopped off heads. They were headed for Brisbane and the British “could not do a bloody thing about it” except run for home. As for “our own boys,” they were in Egypt in their bargain-basement uniforms, trying to save the Poms.
    In these first days, Celine’s grandmother was grateful to the Americans with all her heart, plus, of course, sugar and cigarette rationing did not apply to GIs and they could be expected to unwind their well-fed bodies from their taxis carrying cartons of chocolate, sweetened condensed milk, silk stockings most of all. She was not alone in expecting this.
    Her daughter Doris (she who would be Celine’s mother) was at secretarial school in the city every workday, but both women were at home on Saturday afternoon when the Americans arrived.
    Celine’s grandmother was, at that time, only forty. She had good legs. She was ready in her best frock which was from St. Vincent de Paul’s although “you wouldn’t guess.” When the door knocker echoed through the dark hot house she collected Doris and brought her to the door.
    What was there revealed were four