Amnesia Read Online Free PDF

smiled wanly. “I think you’ll find the Japs bombed Darwin and Broome in 1942,” he said.
    I was a scrappy little fellow and I thought I was being condescended to. “It was not a battle with the Japs,” I said. “The Americans were in Brisbane,” I said. “Brisbane was MacArthur’s headquarters. So you tell me, Sandy, what was the other garrison in Brisbane in 1942?”
    “Australian obviously,” he said, and cocked his head at me. Fuck you, I thought. You’re wrong.
    “Australian soldiers fought the Americans in the streets of Brisbane,” I said. “It is known as the Battle of Brisbane.”
    It took a lot of nerve for me to let the silence last.
    “OK,” he said.
    “No. It was censored. The only reason I know is that my old man lost half his hand to an American shotgun.”
    Celine caught my eye and I didn’t know if I should be pleased or nervous. It was my uncle not my father who had the flipper hand. I waited. She poured sugar from the glass dispenser and pushed it into a heap. In this action, as in so many, she managed to generate a certain heat, an expectation that she would do something wild and dangerous and we would be condemned to simply sit and watch. She emptied the ashtray on top of the sugar and planted matches there. Then she glared at me and I understood I had offended her, and all this compressed and coded malice was for me.
    “What would you know about the bloody Battle of Brisbane?”
    “I think I answered that already, love.”
    “Love bullshit. What crap.”
    I knew my cheeks were burning.
    “Stop smirking you big baby,” she said. “You can’t even find it in a book.”
    “I think Mr. Moore may be thinking about the Brisbane Line ,” said Sandy.
    Celine snatched away her lover’s cigarette and threw it on the floor.
    “No, pom-pom, he is not confused.”
    Seeing how the poet enjoyed this revelation of a secret name, I recognised one more competitor. He helped himself to one of the motorcyclist’s beautiful hand-tailored cigarettes. “So what was the Battle of Brisbane?” he asked me.
    “It was about sex,” Celine answered. “The stupid Australians werejealous of the Yanks. The only people in the world who want to help us, and so they shoot them because they like Australian girls.”
    “A brawl.”
    “No, a bloody battle . It lasted two days, with guns. And it was really stupid because those Americans were the ones who went off to New Guinea to fight the Japanese there.”
    “There were no Yanks in New Guinea,” said the motorcyclist. “None, baby, none.”
    “Bullshit, baby,” said Celine. “My father was there, baby, baby.”
    “I meant Americans.”
    “My father was American, baby. He bloody died there,” and she was crying, standing, turning away from the group. “Come on Titch,” she said to me, and took my arm.
    She was crying, and I was callow enough to be overjoyed. She was sobbing, but I had won. I had stood my ground. Thus the previously unthinkable circumstance developed where Sandy and his car were banished and I was invited to walk Celine Baillieux to the bus on Ferntree Gully Road.

CONTEMPLATING THE CRACKED blackened portraits of colonial no-ones on Moroni’s gloomy walls, I recalled that Sir Robert Menzies was one of two prime ministers who “owned” this corner table. Paul Keating was the other. Of course Keating was NOT A MELBOURNE PERSON, but he always looked at home in Moroni’s, his strangely delicate pale face peering out of the same chiaroscuro which soaked up his dark tailored suits. It was here, at this corner table where I now sat with Celine and Woody Townes, that the Prime Minister’s wife—I mean Annita Keating—had spoken so passionately about the “thread counts” of her sheets. This was probably a safe conversation in New York or Washington or even Sydney, but in our puritanical socialist certainties we were offended by thread counts. Or perhaps we did not know what thread counts were.
    The menu in Moroni’s had not