Amnesia Read Free Page B

in this town. Shoot me for saying it, but Sydney, our dense dark city, is really very small.
    “I’ve got something for you,” he said. I thought, thank God. I could not bear to go begging for a bed.
    “You’re a mate,” I said.
    “You’re going to have to get your arse down here.”
    “Where’s here?”
    “Melbourne.”
    “Why Melbourne?”
    “Jesus, don’t argue with me Feels. I’m about to save your life again. Why Melbourne? Jeez. Don’t be offensive.”
    “Thank you,” I said. “I appreciate everything you’ve done.”
    Of course Melbourne was where he owned most property, where he would most easily find an empty flat for me. I should be very, very grateful.
    “You want this or not?”
    “Yes, I want it.”
    “Then I’ll see you tomorrow in my office. I’ll take you to lunch at Moroni’s like the old days.”
    I could have charged the flight to our joint credit card, but truly, Ihad seen Claire’s face. It was Thursday night, late night shopping. I took a cab to the distinguished book dealer on Oxford Street where I offered my Manning Clarks. Each one was signed “To Felix with respect.” I argued that they were association copies.
    “The association being?”
    I was not one of Manning’s many worshippers, but I liked him and he was unfailingly amused by me. “He is Manning Clark,” I said. “I am Felix Moore.”
    The bookseller showed no particular reaction, although he did spend an awfully long time staring at the spine of Volume I. He was a gentle, diplomatic young man. He did not call me a wanker or argue about the plunging value of my name. Rather, he indicated, quite correctly, that Vol. I was associated with red wine and biro and Vol. V was foxed. He offered two hundred in the manner of his caste, giving me my books back as if to say, don’t even try to haggle. Of course I took the money and it turned out just enough: $112 for the ticket, $60 for a shitty room I found nearby in Surry Hills.
    Sad and sorry on my slippery motel sheets I called my wife.
    To my delight she took my call.
    “If you do this one more time,” she said, “I’ll have your phone cut off.”

BEFORE EXHAUSTING the last of the birdshit deposits which were the source of its fabulous wealth, before going into business as a detention facility for asylum seekers, the nation state of Nauru destroyed two landmark buildings in Collins Street and erected a 52-floor octagonal monument to its own ineptitude and corruption.
    Who would want to have an office on this site? My mate of course.
    “If I applied your standards, Feels, I’d be sleeping on the beach. Also,” he said, revealing his true Melbourne heart, “the last time I looked, you lived in Sydney.”
    Woody had his office on the fiftieth floor and here he liked to swing back and forth in his fancy chair and gaze up at the violent scudding clouds and down on Parliament House and out to his developments at Docklands. He could see all the way south to St. Kilda and north-east to Collingwood and all that rising damp he had inherited when his father was shot to death.
    That murder was not a subject I ever raised with Woody. His personal history resided in the world of “it is said.” It is said that he was a stellar student at Melbourne High. It is said he had wanted to be a literature professor. It is said he had no choice but to pick up his father’s revolver. It is said that he continued that habit long after he employed others to collect his rents. I know this last is true because he once persuaded me to go to the beautiful old Florentino restaurant to pick up “something” he had stupidly left behind. He didn’t say it was a pistol but I noted the blanched face of the unerringly polite Raymond Tsindoswhen he presented me with a shoebox marked “Mr. Townes.” Outside, on Bourke Street, by the window of that famous bookshop, I lifted the lid. I never told him what I saw.
    It is not common for people in Melbourne to carry guns. Indeed it is a