I suggested she just give them to her father.
He’ll burn it, she said.
When I properly understood what she had got hold of, I was frightened for her. MetWat were indeed issuing secret waste-disposal licences and worse. I was also appalled by that fucking R. F. Mackenzie school which hadn’t bothered to teach its students that there would be consequences for their pure and lovely actions.
Of course I wouldn’t dream of telling Lionel, but he had been the attorney-general and he was a very experienced lawyer. So it was not at all weird to talk about the law, in general, hypothetically. Forget the conversations. I don’t recall them anyway, but what I concluded was that this printed evidence would never see the light of day. The memoranda were stolen property, the product of a crime. In this case the criminal would be my daughter. This is what I told her. She would be punished and not get what she wished. She shouted at me, of course. I was a defeatist. I was bourgeois. She would get the story in the media. I told her that our news had become driven by press releases and managed events. PR flacks outnumbered journalists at the rate of four to one.
She almost spat at me. You think I don’t know this? What do you think our film was there to do? She said, I am making history. You haven’t got a clue.
If I was such crap, why was she bothering to tell me?
Because you are my mother, she said.
And her chin went rubbery, and I cried and so I completely failed to notice what she was clearly telling me: she would manage an event which would force the government to act.
I drove back to Lionel dewy-eyed. I was her mother, said Celine Baillieux, speaking with that strange flatness of affect that marks all varieties of Australian speech, whether it be Lebanese from Denbo or Samoan or the descendant of a man who expected to live in the Lake District all his life. The fugitive imagined he detected a deep historic grief in the voice of Celine Baillieux, as familiar to him as the sound of wind in lonely European pine windbreaks planted in L-shapes in the paddocks, the denuded land from Balliang East up to Morrisons and Bullengarook and Maryborough. That was our fate, he thought, to love that abused landscape, in spite of the evidence before our wind-wet eyes.
The writer turned off the burning gas below his underpants and rescued his scorched trousers from the bathroom floor. He inserted another cassette, a young woman’s voice which would whisper in his sleep.
35
NOW FREDERIC AND I were back together I had thought that Cosmo would disappear. Next Monday morning we had “Monday remarks” as per usual. Frederic had previously considered this a waste of time. Now he wanted to raise the issue of “Cosmo’s gun.”
I could not be embarrassed by Freddo but this was pretty close. Cosmo’s gun was an infantile steampunk gun he had constructed from antiqued copper and brass tubing and several eccentrically shaped “steam chambers.” He had made it with Doug in shop, which was OK. But when he brought it to home room and acted like it was “significant” he got completely pissed on. No-one knew what steampunk was and didn’t care. It was guns they voted against. This was why Crystal failed to recognise the R. F. Mackenzie teaching moment. Cosmo the loser had raided Palermo Plumbing and found totally new uses for flexible copper tubing, hose clamps, thermocouples, heating elements, copper and brass fittings, all sorts of crazy Jules Verne shit that his father would never let him work with in real life. I did not speak against him. Even when he said Macs were for girls. I was just sad, because he was so big and damaged.
Frederic had generally exhibited disdain for the class’s good opinion. Now they were outraged by his nerve, amazed to find themselves the subject of his sexylove.
And Cosmo with his staring eyes and long chin and great Sicilian schnozzle, huge Cosmo, pressed rigidly into his desk, mustn’t he have thought, why is this happening to me? Did it occur to him there would be a price? Had he decided it would be worth anything, to get a social upgrade in this unexpected way?
I thought it was about Cosmo. I was so pissed off, I didn’t see it was for me. Frederic was always a sort of bowerbird, building astonishing displays to court me, and he did this again and again over many years. Just when I thought he was bored with me, he would perform his mating dance. How would I guess this was one of those? He was so sly and devious and funny, and he forced the home room to admire Cosmo in a totally Freddo way. He gave them a talk about steampunk, in whole sentences, with punctuation: Jules Verne, H. G. Wells, Hayao Miyazaki’s Laputa: Castle in the Sky blah blah blah. Steampunk was an alternative history of Victorian England, the Wild West too, separately, together. It was a variety of science fiction, set in a post-apocalyptic future. Steampunk featured anachronistic technologies like Cosmo’s gun which as anyone could see (apparently) harnessed steam and gas for its propellant force.
Crystal had her mouth open. I thought, she is hypnotised. I thought, she loves Frederic in spite of everything. He was so perfectly 100 percent R. F. Mackenzie, showing the teacher what a syllabus she could have built from steampunk: literature, physics, the study of naval vessels. Steampunk brought you slam-bam against Charles Babbage who designed the world’s first computer in 1822. And so on. Frederic was an actor’s son. He walked between the desks. He was deft and sibilant while the apparent object of his speech sat locked inside his big stiff body, blushing, glowing, his black curly hair erupting from his red bandana.
The class had never seen Frederic in this way. (I’m not sure I had myself.) Certainly they did not understand where this creature came from, and they were indignant to be charmed, to be asked, by him, to tell him what steampunk music might be like. They had no fucking idea. They looked to Crystal who did not help at all.
Cosmo never spoke in class, but Fred asked him anyway: what might steampunk music sound like.
Cosmo beamed, as if he could hear a private orchestra: synth, brass bells and bagpipes and he wasn’t going to share. He was so happy, me too, weirdly happy, proud and astonished and in love beyond salvation.
Frederic’s mother was back in rehab so after school Frederic and I crawled into the back of her van and when I was all relaxed and dozy he listed every obstacle to exposing MetWat, and how he would personally overcome them one by one. I can do this, he said. He described it like a quest game, with different levels.
First problem: the toxic dishwater was flowing through the dark, buried in the ground. We will raise it up, he said, or something sort of biblical. This was like stoner talk. I was slow to realise he planned this for real life. Freddo could not draw for nuts, but he drew the sad overgrazed paddock beside the Agrikem car park, all the time talking about plumbing, PVC pipes, Bostik plumber’s weld. He drew a sort of cobra which turned out to be a giant garden tap rising from the sewer.
You don’t know how to do that, I said.
Don’t worry. He could fix it. As we publicised the true effluent analysis we would also raise up the actual poison, see it, smell it as it descended back into the public sewer. Then we would turn off the tap, on television.
We would need Hazchem suits for a start, he said.
I thought this would look cool and scary on TV, but where would we get a Hazchem suit? How much would it cost?
Don’t worry. I’ll fix it.
Of course he did not know how to fix anything but he was, instinctively, creating an event. He was seventeen. It was Field of Dreams, if you build it they will come. He had recruited Cosmo. Cosmo didn’t know that yet.