The Last Magician (27 page)

The musicians are silent, the dancers are under a spell, you can hear a pin drop on the manicured lawn. Catherine moves. Someone else, a Chinese boy, a friend of Catherine's, someone Constance recalls seeing at Grammar formals, also steps like a heron across the grassblades of a trance.

There are missing frames, a jerky sequence, and then another frame with sound: three people hugging each other, laughing and sobbing, a little tableau of minor hysteria, joyful, distressing in some way, embarrassing, just a joke perhaps. Yes. Probably a joke. It is the instinct of a party to close over such incidents, for waves of talk to lap around them and blur their edges, for the music to start up and the dancers to move again.

“I'll never forget it,” Gabriel's mother said, although it was the nature of such a memory that it never seemed quite real, that one began to wonder quite soon if one had imagined the event, or dreamed it even, or if rumour had expanded on something only momentarily glimpsed, or if memory had embroidered a comment.

“Anyway, then the music started up again, and I was dancing with your father and I already had stars in my eyes. He'd been on high voltage all evening and by then he was drinking champagne like water and practically flying and I can't even remember actually leaving the party. I can just remember getting all worked up in his car.”

Gabriel's mother sat down in the chair again and took his hand, and he waited for her to surface from a fond electric time. “So on the tram,” she said, “I suddenly made the connection, you know, between her appearance and the way your father … the way he was so wound up at that party and so reckless and so … magnetic. I was swept off my feet. But on the tram — it really was, well, an epiphany, it was like all those fuzzy years suddenly coming into focus, it was absolutely sharply clear; I suppose Catherine's reaction to my engagement had always buzzed away at the back of my mind, and now suddenly I had a translation, and in a strange way it was an enormous relief. I mean, he was giving off that same sort of … he was like a dynamo.”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. “I remember.”

“And I recognised her, I remembered her, and it clicked. You see, I knew he'd been going off and seeing someone, sometimes he wouldn't come home till about four in the morning.”

Gabriel flinched, seeing the men who came and went, upstairs at Charlie's Place, the way they averted their eyes from one another.

His mother smiled. “I suddenly admitted to myself it wasn't working with your father and me, it would never work, and it hadn't from the start, but that it wasn't because of something I'd done or not done. And now I just felt there wouldn't ever have been anything I could have done. And somehow I got swept up in her laughter and felt gloriously free.

“Once I realised it was her, you know, not someone else … I suppose that doesn't make much sense, but there was something about her, she had this ability … she somehow gave me this great rushing sense of freedom and power, I felt as though nothing could ever hurt me.” She sighed. “But of course, that sort of euphoria never lasts long. Panic sets in. All that. Fear of loneliness, public embarrassment, that kind of thing.”

“But that doesn't explain -” Gabriel began. Gil Brennan came out of the dark and into the soft light of the veranda lamp. Without speaking, he stood beside his wife's chair for a moment and put a hand on her shoulder and a sort of soft non-verbal murmur passed between them. Then he went inside and got a beer and returned and the three sat in companionable silence, listening to the shrill conversation of crickets. That doesn't explain the suddenness, Gabriel thought to himself. Perhaps it explained the fight he had overheard between his parents on the night of the tram ride, but it didn't begin to explain the suddenness of the departure for Sydney, or the absolute absence of his mother for so many years.

“Well,” Gil said at last. “Reckon I'll be turning in.”

“I'll join you in a few minutes, darling,” she said.

Crickets and night birds and unspoken questions filled the air. “Mum,” Gabriel said at last. “I don't understand why we left so suddenly.”

In the light of the low-wattage veranda bulb, he saw her put her hands over her eyes, her fingertips pushing back, holding in, some kink of pain at the temples, but she said nothing.

“Why wouldn't he let me see you all those years?
Why?
”

“I don't know, Gabriel.” She seemed to be negotiating something with herself. She got up and disappeared into the house and he waited, not sure if she had gone to bed or not. When she reappeared, she had something in her hand but had still not reached a decision. They sat there for half an hour, not speaking, then she gave him a matchbox. “I found it the next day, doing the washing. It was in his pocket,” she said. “So he must have gone back to see her that night. Whatever happened between them has nothing to do with me, and it doesn't even concern me anymore, but I suppose it might concern you.

“For a long time,” she said, “I thought I needed to know, but now I don't. I don't need to, and I don't want to.” She closed his fingers around the box. “You'll be free when you don't need to know, Gabriel. And that's what I wish for you. That you won't need to know.”

She went and stood behind his chair and put her arms around him and kissed the top of his head. “Goodnight,” she said, and left him alone in the dark.

Inside he found a blue plastic butterfly brooch, the kind a child might buy in Woolworths. He recognised it instantly. It was part of the bizarre costume of the woman on the tram.

When he took it out of the matchbox and held it in his hand, he touched that day again, the day of the tram ride, the day of the haunting laughter, the day of the unreadable look on the woman's face, the day of the loss of McWhirter's and sugar doughnuts, the last day of happiness.

It was one thousand kilometres back to Sydney, yet it seemed to me that Gabriel had travelled much further than that. He was on the way to his answer, I was watching him recede. I tried not to panic, I tried not to care. I'd always flown solo, after all.

Like knights on a quest for the Holy Grail, together now, daily, nightly, whenever they could leave Sheba and me in charge of the restaurant and bar, Charlie and Gabriel roamed the Quarry Perilous. They were both of them looking for Cat. They also wanted to catch the entire shoal of nine-digit numbers in their net. They believed that Cat and the nine-digit numbers were two sides of the same equation.

So did Catherine, who was making a documentary on people like me. “Voices from Underground“, it was called.
A lost generation,
the voice-over said.

“I'm not lost,” I told the eye of her camera. “I'm a tourist here. I'm wearing a costume. I can take it off whenever I want.”

“Terrific,” her cameraman said. “Terrific.” He panned the room, he shot the view from my window, he caught the pimps and scouts on the pavement below. Her soundman swung his boom out the window to catch the raucous street cries and traffic din.

“Can
you leave whenever you want?” came Catherine's off-camera voice.

“In my case,” I said, “I reckon I can. But not everyone. For some, the only way out is down.”

Afterwards she said to me: “What on earth are you doing here? You don't belong.”

“I do and I don't,” I said. “Did Gabriel or Charlie set this up?”

“Neither,” she said. “I was at a dinner party once, downstairs. You were a waitress and you interested me. Your watchfulness, your satirical eyes.” She smiled. “I decided then I'd be back. But I think you should get out of here before it's too late.”

“I've been driven to it anyway, by Gabriel.”

“Gabriel,” she sighed. “He's a very persistent young man.” She said it as though she believed it would bring him to harm.

Oh, Gabriel was persistent all right. I have said that when we got back from his mother's, I felt him receding, moving away from me, and yet that is ridiculous in a sense. At his insistence, I was about to move in with him. I was about to move out of Charlie's Place and into Gabriel's flat. He'd worn me out. I'd wearied of him tapping on my door — very courteously — in the middle of things. He'd wrecked my business, he'd scared off all my clientele. He couldn't help it, he said. He couldn't stop himself He simply couldn't bear the idea of those men …

“But you don't understand,” I said. “They don't touch me. My body's just a costume, they can't reach behind it, they can't touch.”

“It's intolerable,” he said. He wasn't furious or jealous, it wasn't like that. He simply said patiently: “It's absolutely
intolerable.
”

He had that quiet relentless kind of innocence, and I'd given in. I'd given in even as I sensed him slipping beyond my reach, entering the orbit of his riddle, moving into the answer's rare atmosphere where I sensed it might be difficult to breathe.

“I could do with someone who knows the city's underside,” Catherine said. “I could do with a guide and a researcher. Does a job with me interest you?”

“All right,” I said.

I moved into Catherine's profession and Gabriel's flat the same week. But in the evenings, I still helped out in the restaurant and its satellite pub. I still hung around Charlie's Place.

4

Gabriel saw a photograph of Charlie's called
Golden Boy.
For a long time he studied it. “Is this my father?” he asked at last.

“Yes,” Charlie said.

Frowning, Gabriel murmured: “I can't tell if it's satire or tribute.”

“No,” Charlie said.

Gabriel nodded.

It sometimes seemed to him that if only he had never shown his father the newspaper photograph of their neighbours on the tram, nothing would ever have begun to go wrong. But then that was the way of things. Whatever was going to happen did.

Nevertheless, he wished he had a photograph of his mother tucking him into bed when he was five years old, his father leaning against the bedroom door watching them both. He remembered the look in his father's eyes as a weather of happiness in which he once lived. He wanted that weather back. Sometimes he could hardly breathe for the pain of that lost time. He was, he believed, on a long return journey to that weather. He would find it in time.

“What do you think of my father now?” he asked.

Ah, what?

This was Charlie's working position: that a chain of events set in motion long ago, at the railway cutting and afterwards in the long grass of Cat's front yard, had been costly, very costly, for Catherine and himself, and infinitely more so for Cat. They were all still in arrears, they were still paying heavily, they still dragged lead weights of silence and shame.

Yet these same events had cost Robinson Gray nothing at all, or they seemed to have cost him nothing, or
almost
nothing, and this imbalance of accounts disturbed. It lacerated. Charlie was waiting to see if unpaid bills ever fell due, or if, indeed, unknown to him, Robbie had been paying all along in some hidden coin.

Charlie looked at Gabriel looking at
Golden Boy,
an ambiguous photograph, and saw Gabriel's desire to be told that his father, though flawed like all of us, was a good and honourable man.

So are they all, all honourable men …

“When we were children,” Charlie said, offering weighty evidence in Robinson Gray's favour, “Cat loved him.”

Cat loved him, Gabriel thought with a surge of understanding, a surge of hope. My mother loved him. Do I?

Gabriel thought the answer was yes. Yes possibly. He thought that was surely the meaning of the fact that his father was almost never out of his mind. He thought
love
was at least as accurate a word for his thoughts as
anger,
though often neither seemed as accurate as
grief.
But there was some high, invisible, impenetrable wall between them. Perhaps he was as responsible for this wall as his father was; perhaps every uneasy perception, every doubt on Gabriel's part, had added a layer to the wall.

“Where did you take this one?” Gabriel asked, picking up another.

The photograph showed a swarm of backs, laden with sorrow, rising up a laddered wall. Each figure had his eyes on another's ankles, each hand was chained to its attaché case or its burden of dread. “On the law court steps,” Charlie said.

Gabriel studied the backs with a magnifying glass and circled one figure in white ink.

He picked up another. “Which night was this?” he asked.

“Let me see.” Charlie looked at one of his many shots of a Newtown pub. It was said that The Shaky Landing, in the quarry's first circle, was a true doorway to the underworld and that trapdoors existed in the tavern on the main floor, and in the back kitchens, and in the hallways and lavatories too. It was said that people had disappeared through these trapdoors. It was said that they were never seen again. “I can't remember,” Charlie said. “We've been there so many times. It's probably last week's batch.”

The entire photograph was actually of the mirrored wall behind the bar, but reflected in one corner of the mirror was a table at which sat three women of the night. (Such women, of course, always congregate in threes. That is the rule. There is nothing a recorder of events can do about this.
When shall we three meet again?
et cetera.) The reflection of one of the women was interrupted by the Tooheys sign painted across the mirror behind the bar. Charlie grabbed a magnifying glass and held it over the photograph. What was visible of the face and the almost shaved head stirred him to a sudden excitement. “My God!” he said. “This is where you heard her name the first time, remember?”

“Yes,” Gabriel said. Then he frowned. “No, that wasn't the first time.” He put a hand vaguely to his forehead because the chink in time had opened again and a flying pellet of the past hit him between the eyes. (He sees the white nightgown, hears the shouts, the door slams.) Gone again. And he wondered: was he remembering her name from those distant arguments? Or was he remembering the more recent discussion with his mother? Or were Charlie's memories growing over his?

I said to him sadly: “You're obsessed with your father, don't you see? You give him the power to go on hurting you, you
let
him. Your mother's settled for happiness, Gabriel. She doesn't need to know.”

“His father is certainly obsessed with
him
,” Sheba told me. “He hardly talks about anything else.”

In the restaurant, I overheard Roslyn Gray who was having lunch with a woman friend. “Robbie's
obsessed
,” Roslyn said. “Everything Gabriel does is designed to upset his father, and Robbie falls for it every time.”

Invisible and deaf as waitresses are, I hovered and listened and wondered: was it true?

“The thing is, Lucy,” Sheba warned, “he's a stirrer, he's a shit disturber. He's gettin' a lot of people very nervous again, you'd think he would've learned his lesson in Brisbane. There's a lotta talk going round, about the photographs. About all this note-taking stuff. Ya gotta get him to back off.”

“Sheba says you're making certain important people very nervous,” I warned.

“I hope so,” Gabriel said.

“It isn't just my father,” he explained. “It isn't just
personal.
It's the interconnections, it's the different forms of violence, it's violence itself, it's the importance of understanding why a society seems to
need
violence.” Gabriel could not understand either the will or the ability to cause harm. He was baffled and disturbed by it. He probed the epidemiology of harm as a dedicated medical researcher might stalk a cancer cure or the black secret of AIDS.

“Come up the coast with me,” I begged. “Let's get out of here. Let's go up to Collaroy or Avalon for a while, let's head for Byron Bay.”

“There isn't time,” Gabriel said. This world is burning, his eyes and his flushed skin said. This world is on fire and all things burn and there isn't time. Gabriel was burning, I could see. He was smouldering. He was slowly going up in smoke. “I'm sorry, Lucy,” he said gently. “It never feels as though I have a choice.” He stroked my cheek. “I'm sorry, Lucia.” He held me against himself. Our kisses were so hungry, we might have been eating each other. “It'll be different,” he promised, “once I
know.
”

“Please, Gabriel.” I had a vision of tunnels made of some dread elastic that stretched further and further into the quarry dark. Down the capillaries of all the nightmares of Sydney, I could sense Gabriel travelling beyond the vanishing point. “Please, Gabriel,” I begged. “Please stop. Couldn't we go to Brisbane again? Stay a while with your mother and Gil?”

“Soon,” he promised. “Yes, I'd love to do that. That's what we'll do afterwards, Lucia, grow pineapples. We'll live in the rainforest. Maybe further north, maybe Cairns, maybe right up in the Daintree, somewhere as far away as possible from all this.”

“Oh when?” I asked, mad with hope.

“Soon,” he promised. “After, you know … I don't just mean about my father, I mean all the sordid interconnections, all the …”

I knew what he wanted. He wanted a miracle, he wanted
change,
he wanted to fix the whole bloody world.

“Gabriel,” I said mournfully. “Why don't you lick the pus from other peoples boils? Why don't you clean the quarry with your tongue?”

“I could ask you that, Lucia.”

“Yeah, you did. But I've stopped, haven't I?” I said. “I was after
knowledge
and I've got it. And maybe in a hundred years I'll figure out how to use it to change a comma or two in the world, but we're no good to anyone dead, and I'd like to bail out.”

“But you can't,” he said. “That's my point. It's not so easy to bail out. Things are more tangled up than anyone knows. The quarry props up a lot of walled gardens,” he said.

I had meant bail out of attachments, bail out of coming pain. I flew solo and I always had. I was unhurtable. I stayed clear of everyone's nets.

“I'm beginning to think it's no small accomplishment to build a walled garden,” I said wistfully. I thought of Gabriel's mother and his stepfather walking between their spiked rows of fruit, the wall of the rainforest like a sheltering ring, the solar benedictions. “I thought we were going to grow pineapples and mangoes.”

“We will,” he said. “We
will.
”

But this world was burning, the quarry had spread, there wasn't time.

Charlie took a photograph of us standing close together, talking, burnished with quiet intensities. He double-exposed it with a photograph of a fire so that we seemed to be walking untouched in flames. This photograph, I read in an art magazine last year (my heart turning somersaults) was on display at a recent Chang exhibition in Greenwich Village. The photograph is called
The Fire Sermon.

I remember touching my own burning cheeks. It was attachment which caused all this pain, I thought. It was the savagery of love, the brutality of desire. These things were a match to skin and hair.

Charlie's body hummed with excitement. He was looking at another photograph of the bar in The Shaky Landing and the woman in the corner was there again. You could see her eyes and her short spiky hair in the mirror behind the bar, but the lower part of her face was obscured by painted words: TOOHEYS, CARLTON, XXXX, SWAN LAGER.

“It's
her,”
Charlie said. He could hardly speak for excitement. “It's Cat.” He couldn't understand why he hadn't seen her when they were there, but she must have seen him first and slipped away, she must have hidden for reasons of her own. It was the only explanation, he believed.

But he had known she was close by, he knew she would send for him, he knew that sooner or later she would tap on his window and beckon him into the night. He had to let Catherine know. He had to show her the photograph. He saw her so rarely, except on TV. She never returned his calls.

He had to go to her.

“Ah!” Catherine said, startled, opening her office door at the SBS television studios. If she felt something more than surprise and ordinary courtesy, she managed not to show it.

“I've found Cat,” he said.

Had she heard him? Was there some barrier around her that blocked out sensory invasion?

“I've found Cat,” he said again.

He could see pain moving through her body like dye. She blinked and turned her head away from him. She buried her face in her hands. She went back to her desk and sat at it and rested her elbows on the desk. He could see the tips of her fingers through her hair. He could not see her face. She said nothing.

Charlie put the photograph on the desk in front of her, and she picked it up and pushed it back without looking. “Please Charlie,” she said.

Amnesia, he knew, was hard work. It took all one's energies.

Charlie sat in the chair across from her and waited. He could feel the taste of Catherine on his tongue, he could smell her hair, he could feel himself returning to her body as naturally as sea-water returns to hollows in the sand. He was at home there. My twin, he thought.
Myself.
He could even feel the rough texture of the office chair against the underside of her thighs and the abrasion of the wooden desk against her knees and the slight pressure where her ankles touched each other.

It seemed a very long time before she raised her head and looked at him. Her eyes were drugged. It was as though he had interrupted a long journey she had been making in her sleep. What do you want of me? her body asked.

He didn't say anything. He simply looked at her and wanted the missing parts of himself.

She nodded and came toward him as a sleepwalker comes.

And then they were back in his apartment. On the hushed side of the shoji screens, against the white sheets, above the raw gaudy life of King's Cross, they flowed back into each other as effortlessly as the whitewater braids of Cedar Creek meet in the pool. From the wall of his bedroom they were watched by photographs of Cat.