We’re the pros from Dover.
He was slow to register the “we” and slower still to understand that these friendly wraiths who had appeared at his door were a subset of a caste of Sydney surf lifesavers, once known locally for eating live canaries in bread rolls and sticking their naked backsides out car windows during late night shopping. These anarchic characters would now exhibit towards the hermit an intoxicating sort of reverence and he found himself wishing that his daughters could witness this moment of redemption or, at least, prestige.
What’s your name? he asked.
Mate, the publicly available tools for making yourself free from surveillance are ineffective against a nation state.
I don’t understand a word you’re saying.
Time to go.
Now?
The visitor explained that there was no longer a safe way out by water. So they must walk back up the ridge. The moon was good.
The fugitive did not resist or argue although he insisted, from the start, that he carry his own bag. This he managed well enough, but his sodden deck shoes rubbed his delicate heels and they were not even at the fire trail before he was limping. The track was a pale yellow, and there could be no better conditions for walking in the night, except that his calves were soon cramping and his blisters were bleeding and then, when it was clear he could not keep up the pace, when it became obvious he must be unmanned and suffer the indignity and pleasure of being carried, he was moved by their tenderness towards him. A fireman’s lift, of course, is not the most comfortable way to travel and Felix Moore passed through the Marramarra National Park from the Hawkesbury to Forest Glen with his head down, filled with blood, dropping pencils and paperclips and Duracell batteries along the way.
He was a stick-case moth enveloped in silk, finally redeemed, the treasure of his nation.
The night seemed endless. He saw no “spectacular ridge-top colours of iconic Hawkesbury sandstone” or “gullies of bright red waratahs and Gymea lily.” His escort would not permit him to walk, but merely shifted his load between them, until the lights of a four-wheel drive could be seen bumping below, snaking up the switchbacks.
Time for your pill, mate, said the first man who had spoken to him.
For what?
Travel sickness.
I’ll be fine.
Take my word.
The hermit held out his hand and took the pill.
What is it?
Men in Black, they said.
Whatever chemical that was, he would never discover, but it was sufficient to ensure that it would be eight hours before he awoke in what was clearly, on the evidence of the shiny bedspreads and pastel-pink art, a motel. His wet shoes were on the floor, stuffed with newspaper. There were bandaids on his heels. He drew the curtains aside and saw a concrete paved courtyard, almost empty, and beyond this a two-lane road and mountainous bush.
On the desk there were two bottles of McLaren Vale shiraz, a large washed rind cheese, a Triumph-Adler Twen T180 electric typewriter. There also, God help him, were tapes, new tapes, and enough batteries to play them for a year.
As to where on earth he was, there was no newspaper or television to solve the problem. One door led to the bathroom. He tried the other, and although it was, unsurprisingly, locked, he could hear the murmur of voices on the other side. He wrenched out the wine cork in the grim knowledge that he had, for the first time in his professional life, been worthy of a suite.
28
THE EIGHTEEN-WHEELER SEMITRAILERS roared past the motel all night. You could hear them from miles away, descending through eight gears, then a screaming ninth, air brakes exploding so loud you might imagine the glass-walled reception area shorn away and frosted donuts liberated, rolling down the middle of the road.
Meanwhile the tapes continued at 7/8 of a centimetre/second, more or less, as Gaby made her didactic “confession,” explaining, for instance, why it was thought there could be no female hackers. She would not even discuss rule 37 (devised by adolescent boys) which asserted there are no girls on the internet. Google it, she told her listener, as if that were something you could do on a Triumph-Adler electric typewriter. Search, she said. Look for “teenage-male voyeur-thrill power-trip activity.” Look for this actual sentence or, same difference, “don’t find female computer intruders, any more than you find female voyeurs who are obsessed with catching glimpses of men’s underwear.” This will take you to Cornelia Sollfrank in Rotterdam in 1999. Full credit please. “Women are very, very rarely arrested for sneaking around in the dark of night, peering through bedroom windows. Teenage males are arrested for this all the time.”
This is so morally satisfying, but it is just total crap and cruditude, she said. Not even the sisterhood could imagine me, she said. I could not exist. I must be doomed to rage and skin rash. But what if? What if you wished to obliterate, eliminate the corporatists? What if your Bonnie found your Clyde, if your Sid found your Nancy, then you would be blessed from your clitoris to your earlobe to your small pink toes, no shit, to find a boy who would allow you to become wwb, a world-wide boy yourself, to become Fallen Angel or even Fnu (first name unknown) Lnu (Last name unknown), to be a boy, a girl, a silver shark. We can be anything we wish, Gaby said, unaware she was addressing a captive with bandaged heels.
My bourgie parents, she said, tried to remove me from every good influence I had discovered. My mother only bought me the Apple to get me free of the Aisens, and my father dragged me out of Bell Street High for the same reason. Frederic was safely exiled, or so they thought, but The Superior Person waits for wisdom and clarity (as the fat book says).
R. F. Mackenzie Community School, she said, was a ten-minute bike ride from B. S. High, but it was another universe. I scowled and would not say my name. I walked into the so-called “home room” a very bad girl and there he was, a pop-up, my laughing boy, girl-boy, returned from Nimbin a man-boy now.
So guess what my mother said when she finally saw him? He was “strapping.” He had such shoulders. Celine was a sex maniac but she would always hate what Frederic was, even if he had been a manly man fixing roofs with Claude Poulos, Meg’s Northern Rivers lover. Claude finally did do time for carding, but he was not, primarily, a criminal. He was a grey-haired cyber-hippie with a motto: “If you engage in behaviour that carries the risk of negative consequences from an adversary you must be invisible.” Claude existed on no database. He did not fit the pigeonhole. He appeared to be a plumber surfie with bleached hair and earrings. In real life he was a cryptographer, author of an elaborate banking system so private that not even the bank would know how much you had. So while Frederic’s mum was getting on heroin and screaming and shrieking her way off it, Frederic not only learned to surf, he became an apprentice plumber and cryptographer whose aim was to live beyond the reach of any “nation state.” When he came back to me at R. F. Mackenzie Community School he was a total wave of possibility, far beyond the world of Zork.
Celine could have used a little I Ching, her daughter thought i.e. Because you are the foreigner in this setting, you have no history to acquit you. Watch, listen, study, contemplate, then step lightly but decisively on.
In the motel, Celine’s tapes never touched Gaby’s tapes. They stood in different piles, each had its own machine. The trucks roared down the hill. A note came beneath the door to tell the occupant to stay away from the window. Return this page, it said. His meals would be delivered to the shared bathroom. Slide this note back to its sender. The connecting door is always locked. We will unlock it when required. On her stretchy tape Celine said, My daughter thinks I am a homophobe. How can she be so dumb? My one true father was a faggot. He nursed me. Like a wasp burying its eggs in a corpse, he left his baby’s education waiting in his will. When he died Doris found tons of gelignite stored above the hallway ceiling. It was not a symbol, but a fact. Not a bad symbol just the same. She said, I wish I had been conceived like Tristram Shandy. How sweet and innocent to wind the clock. Now I can see the semen and the crime. I wish I never knew. I wish I had been nice to Doris in those years. I was such a cow. Can this ever be repaired? I should kiss the damage, bless the glove, forgive me.