The Last Magician (13 page)

(Did
Lucy see these particular film clips with Mr Prufrock? What year was Mr Prufrock a client? What year did the prisoners' faces grab the world by the scruff of its fears? Retrieval systems are faulty. Press the wrong button, you get the wrong rerun. Then what? Then you get Virgil wandering through Christian cosmography and discoursing on Florentine affairs, you get Plantagenets sounding like Tudors, you get Cordelia keeping silence for us all, you get Henry V's footsoldiers, on the anti-romantic eve of battle, as ghostly voices on “Catherine Reed Presents”.

But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, “We died at such a place''; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle …)

Catherine Reed fears there are few live well who are captured in time of war.

“Now,” Mr Prufrock says. “Any second now, they'll get back to
her
.”

Lucy wonders if she will ever forget those soldiers' faces, the young American one, a boy's face, plump-cheeked, pocked with peppershot wounds; and the British one, darker, older, bruised, his shoulder (possibly dislocated) hunched into the camera in pain.

The voice of the young American is that of a bewildered child, a frightened child who no longer has any confidence that black is black and white is white, who will dully, abjectly, listlessly — if required to do so — state that black is in very truth white.

Then the British pilot speaks. His voice is different, it hangs grimly onto its truths, it will resist surrendering them, though it has no illusions about the cost of this stubbornness. A shock of black hair shields the exhausted eyes, the shoulder braces itself against coming pain.

“I can't bear this,” Lucy says. “I can't bear to see those faces again.”

Mr Prufrock is agitated. “Wait,” he says. “Wait. She'll be back.”

Catherine Reed reappears, her brows knit, her face strained. “I think all of us,” she says quietly, “have flinched on behalf of these men. Tonight I will be talking to someone who remembers that condition of powerlessness …”

Music, a view of the dusty western suburbs of Sydney, a neat front garden, a modest house, a curtained window, a man behind the window staring out at nothing, at the unfocused distance, the past, the bamboo cage, the Burma jungles.

“Mr Rex Kenney,” the unseen voice says, “was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, a worker on the notorious Burma Railway. At one point, in retaliation for his shouting at a guard who was kicking a fallen friend, Mr Kenney was kept in a bamboo cage for several weeks, with only ricewater for food.

“Mr Kenney, when you saw the captured pilots on television, can you tell us what your reactions were? Can you give us some idea of what they are going through?”

We are inside Mr Kenney's living room now, an ordinary sort of room with a couch and two armchairs and a beige carpet and a TV set in one corner. Mr Kenney does not face the camera, but looks across the room, apparently studying the intricate pattern in his wife's lace curtains. He looks like a man under constant and exhausting siege from nightmare.

“To tell you the truth,” he says, coughing — it's a smoker's cough, a dreadful hacking sound which occupies several seconds — “to tell you the truth, I couldn't watch. I mean, I did see them the first time, but I got the shakes so bad that I had to … I had to…”

There is a long silence. Mr Kenney runs the fingers of his right hand back and forth across his forehead, kneading the skin, as though a fierce headache is yanking at the nerves of his eyes and twisting them, braiding them into thoughts he cannot hide from. Lucy suffers for him, intimately aware of his thumping blood and snarled nerves, running her cool fingertips over his temples, massaging his neck.

Mr Prufrock's caresses have become sharply rhythmic, staccato, playing demi-semi-quavering needs. “You can
feel
her, can't you?” he asks, intent. “Even when she's not on the screen at all, you can see her there, just off the edge, with those eyes … You see, she won't cut in, she lets him take his own time, she'll let him take all the time in the world if he needs …”

“The first twenty-four hours is the worst,” Mr Kenney says suddenly, vehemently. “It's the not knowing, you see. It's the not knowing if anyone will ever know … You see, it's not the beatings themselves, it's waiting for the next one, not knowing how many nexts, not knowing what they
want
from you.”

He drags the back of one hand across his eyes and coughs again and fumbles for a large slightly grubby handkerchief. He blows his nose, and surreptitiously rubs his eyes again with the back of a wrist.

“I'll tell you what I was thinking,” he said. “You mightn't believe me, but I was wishing I could do it for them, see? I wish I could spare them, change places, because I've got the knack now, see? Those poor buggers, right now, they don't know what's hit 'em, they don't know there's all that everafterwards, wondering what you said to them, frightened of what you might've said, hating yourself, blaming yourself. I'm stuck with that, see? I'm shot.” His body suddenly and visibly relaxes as though this acknowledgment, this realisation, is a great relief to it. “It's criminal to give 'em brand new fodder,” he says. “It's like throwin' babies into a cement mixer, there oughta be a rule …”

He begins coughing again, helplessly, shockingly His eyes are streaming from the coughing fit. He blows his nose vigorously.

“After the first twenty-four hours,” he says calmly, “things settle down. Once there's a pattern, see? It's the not knowing that flattens you.” Mr Kenney retreats into memory, forgetting the camera. There is a long, long silence.

An intimate silence, Lucy thinks, her breast against Mr Kenney's cheek.

From just off screen, Catherine Reed's voice, gentle and respectful, asks: “And after the war, Mr Kenney. After your release and safe return home. Were bad dreams a problem?”

“Yes,” he says, wincing. “Yes, bad dreams.” The ghosts of bad dreams smoke around him. “It's funny that,” he says frowning. “Not while you're a prisoner, at least not me, I didn't dream at all. Or if I did, I never remembered them. But afterwards, yes. My wife will tell you. It's hard to tell, you see …” He shifts awkwardly in his armchair, embarrassed. “Sometimes it's hard to tell if you're dreaming or if you're back there, sometimes even after you wake … My wife can tell you.”

“And how long was it before you stopped having nightmares?”

Mr Kenney presses his hands together, the fingers splayed out, until the knuckles crack. “I still have them,” he says.

“How long does it take, then, for the worst after-effects of the trauma to wear off, would you say?”

Mr Kenney, startled, looks directly at the point where it can be assumed Catherine Reed is sitting, off camera. He raises his eyebrows in a kind of shock, as though she has asked: And when do day and night stop arriving? When do birth and death disappear? Then he looks away again. He twists himself in the armchair to turn his face as far from the camera as possible. His left hand gestures vaguely behind him, pawing at the cameraman in distress. Impassive, the camera records. There is a long, long silence. Mr Kenney's body trembles like a tuning fork.

“I can't bear it,” Lucy says. “It's cruel. It's cruel to keep shooting.”

Mr Prufrock, half on top of Lucy, her breast in his mouth, his eyes intent on the screen, sucks noisily.

“I'm sorry,” Mr Kenney mumbles. “I can't seem to … Could you take that thing away please?”

Mercifully, the camera shifts around the room.

“Thank you, Mr Kenney,” Catherine Reed, in profile, says in her low quiet voice. “Thank you for speaking to us.” Then her face fills the screen and she looks directly at Mr Prufrock. Her eyes soften, she turns on him her small sad smile. “Good night,” she says, and Mr Prufrock, a little clumsily, messily, reaches climax.

10

Lucy has a recurrent dream. Sometimes she is in the lower left-hand corner of Charlie's photograph of the Serra Pelada mine, and sometimes she is at the bottom of the quarry. She has a sense of urgency about climbing up the rock face and escaping, but the ladder sways precariously and no matter how many rungs she negotiates, the top seems ever further and further away. She can never, in fact, see the top, only the endless vertical wall of pocked rock. Besides, it is dangerous even to look up, since throughout the dream it is raining birdshit from unseen birds. On her arms, in her hair, on the nape of her neck, running slimily down inside her clothes, she can feel the wet, viscous, ammoniac-smelling coating. When she looks up, it falls in her eyes, putrid.

Knock, knock.

An ordinary sound from the ordinary waking world invades the dream, and a door appears, dimly visible through ladder rungs, fantastically cut into the rock, neatly surrounded by pine mouldings and chipped white paint, its brass handle dinted with age.

Who's there?

Lucy does say this, and she does actually open the door of her room (of the room where she works; the room where she is permitted to sleep, for a fee, between five in the morning and ten). It's early. It's only eight o'clock. She is still half inside the dream and half out.

Gabriel leans against the wall of the upstairs hallway at Charlie's Inferno, his arms folded, waiting.

Oh God. And here she is covered in birdshit, stinking; the last thing she wants is to be seen. She slams the door shut, or tries to, but Gabriel — bloody persistent Gabriel — sticks his foot, then his body, inside the frame.

“Go away,” she says, pushing him, pitting her weight against the door.

“Why don't you lick the pus from other people's boils, Lucia?” he asks mildly. This is cheating, using her own words against her. This was something she had told him, those stories of saints passionate in their rituals of self-mortification, the ones who cleaned convent floors with their tongues, the eaters of spiders, the wearers of burrs against the skin. “Why don't you just let people shit on you, and be done with it?” he wants to know.

“Go away, Gabriel. Please.”

“Last night,” he says, “I saw a friend of my father's, an old professor, coming downstairs from your room. He couldn't look at me. If he comes here again,” Gabriel warns, “I'll just drop in, in the middle of things, for a chat, Lucia.”

“Don't call me that.” This is what happens when worlds and incarnations intersect: vertigo. And how does one ever know what Gabriel's verbal intentions are? Satiric? Accusatory? Grieving? Take your pick. Shoulder against the door, her weight backed up against his, she is brushing at herself to scrape off the lingering skin of the dream. Black spots float in clusters in front of her eyes. As usual, she has not had enough sleep, and feels dizzy. She flattens her palms against the door. “Listen to who's talking,” she says. She is closing the gap, squeezing him out. “The judge's son himself, all dressed up in his hairshirt, atoning for the sins of the fathers.” Under his quick surprised pain (but is that what it is?
is
it?) she digs at what might be a wound, but the power seesaws. “You never told me he was Robinson Gray,” she accuses, probing, stabbing, giving ground and sliding back into the room with the opening door. “It's interesting how you avoided ever actually mentioning his name.”

“Did I?” he says, surprised. He is in the room now, and closes the door behind him. “Well, I wasn't making any attempt to hide the fact. Funny thing, that, the way people generally say ‘my father' instead of using their father's first name.” He is watching her with a mixture of tolerant amusement and sadness, but also with a sharp eye. Nothing escapes Gabriel's careful interest. “I gather you've met my father in other circumstances, Lucy.”

Lucy. She notes that shift. Of course it is what she wants (birdshit is birdshit, a spade should be called a bloody shovel, a new mask should be acknowledged when the wearer demands it) and yet a small grief, perversely, lodges itself behind her ribs. “If you weren't hiding something,” she says defensively, “why did you tell me you were Gabriel Brennan, not Gabriel Gray?”

“Ah,” he acknowledges. He is miles away now, lost in thought, examining his own motives with the attentiveness of a trial lawyer. “I never thought of that as concealment,” he says. He wrinkles his forehead, concentrating, sifting through the evidence for and against himself. “It was a statement of allegiance. My mother's name.” He begins to nod at some inner point raised by the prosecution, he nods at Lucy as though conceding something, as though acknowledging her non-hoodwinked eye and her acuity and her superior translation. (He sees me, Lucy thinks with another sense of vertigo, as I see him: as the dispassionate observer who can't be fooled.) “But perhaps you're right. I think you may be right.”

She can never, at any time, and certainly not first waking thing, late in a headachy morning, unravel the muddle of what she feels about Gabriel though she knows it is composed of love and panic and a sense of betrayal and desire. She sets bluster between them as protective barrier. She opts for attack. “How come you're here? How come you're working for Charlie?”

“I thought I would ask you that.”

Now he has his back against the door and stands watching her with his arms folded, reading her carefully, noting changes, decoding her, doing some kind of interior translation, implying (so it seems to her) that nothing she might be thinking or feeling is foreign to him. This partly infuriates her, partly makes her feel wary. She fears it is true.

“Lucia.” He reaches out and touches her cheek.

“Don't!”

He lets his hand fall but stands close enough that she is aware of a faint smell of stale tobacco from restaurant patrons on his shirt, and something else, a pleasant familiar smell of Gabrielness that transmutes itself instantly into hunger. It is not any kind of hunger she can readily put a name to, or not a name that makes sense. It is intensely physical and sexual, but that seems such a small part of the ravenousness. It is certainly composed partly of nostalgia for those languid days at Cedar Creek Falls, those long intense discussions and silences.
Coming home
, her mind tells her.
Sliding back into myself.
But what kind of nonsense is that? She feels dizzy with the desire to touch him and the determination that he will not be aware of her desire; and yet she knows that such elaborate emotional subterfuge is pointless. Gabriel will know already, will take it as unremarkable, will be neither flattered nor
not
flattered by it, neither sexually excited nor
not
excited. He will not be immune, he will not be indifferent, but nor will he be affected in any of the predictable ways.

Or perhaps it is she who invests him with such enigmatic and intuitive powers. Perhaps he is simply preoccupied with other matters all the time. She feels nervous; almost ill.

“Hey,” he says, concerned. “Are you okay?”

“I'm fine. Not enough sleep, that's all.”

“Let's go somewhere where we can talk.”

“I don't want to talk to you, Gabriel.”

“Yes you do.”

“I want to sleep.”

“I'll buy you breakfast on the ferry,” he says. “C'mon, let's go.”

Of course, I haven't been fully honest. I haven't told you everything. I glossed over the nature of my response to coming downstairs one day and seeing Gabriel tapping off beer behind the counter.

I was thunderstruck, needless to say — and yet in another sense, his presence seemed inevitable and utterly unsurprising.

Is there further evidence against the reliability of the witness Lucy?

Yes, Your Honour.

Are her intentions honourable?

As to intentions, Your Honour, she is not at all clear about them herself, but as far as she can determine, through rigorous self-analysis, they are to find a needle in a haystack, and to follow a thin thread of truth through a dark wood. She is not at all sure this will lead to a way out, or to anywhere. Given the messy and provisional nature of her enterprise, Your Honour, her intentions are honourable.

She may have neglected some peripheral details about the dinner party in the restaurant, some of the activity offstage, for example, and certain reactions in the wings at the very moment when Catherine Reed caused a slight stir while the salad was being passed.

I haven't told lies, Your Honour — no; you have my word on that — but there have been, perhaps, little sins of omission (sometimes intentional, sometimes not; sometimes conscious, and sometimes, undoubtedly, not; but then how would I know about the latter?). On the other hand, I am well aware of bits of embroidery, indirections, avoidances, digressions and subplots (but these are because I am going in circles myself, stalking the meaningful coincidence, sniffing at possible connections, leaving no meander unwandered). And sometimes, because all the implications are still unclear to me, or are troubling, I will admit that there have been careful skirtings of certain revealing moments.

For instance, the following exchange, a few days after Gabriel materialised behind the row of taps in the pub.

“Who the hell do you think you are, Charlie?” Lucy asks, quietly furious, deeply uneasy, a little panicked perhaps (and perhaps, on some level, relieved, but afraid that her pleasure will show). “Are you auditioning for the role of Big Brother, or what?”

Charlie, always mild, raises his eyebrows in surprise.

“Oh, very touching,” Lucy says drily “Very convincing, I'm sure.”

Charlie smiles his polite inscrutable smile. He never fails to be amazed at the powers people ascribe to him. The less he says, the more they insist he knows. He asks patiently: “What are we talking about, Lucy?”

“Why's Gabriel here?”

Charlie raises his eyebrows. “He was looking for a job so I offered him one.”

“That's not what I meant.”

“I gather you know him, Lucy.”

“I would like to know what's going on. For instance, why are you taking photographs of him?”

Charlie raises his eyebrows. “For the same reason I took photographs of you.”

“But that was just one session. You follow Gabriel round like a shadow. Why?”

“Surely that's obvious. It's like having Michelangelo's David roaming around.”

“That's not what I meant either. And
why
did you offer him a job? Why
him
?”

Charlie stares at Lucy, fascinated. The more questions a man is asked, he thinks, the more pieces of the answer he has.

“You're playing some sort of game and it makes me nervous,” Lucy says, blundering helplessly into further self-revelation. “And I hate it when you just smile and say nothing like that. You
are
playing a game, aren't you?”

The thoughtful way in which Charlie fails to answer, Lucy notes, pulls a whole hatful of questions out of air.

“I don't like to have anyone keep tabs on me,” she warns. She and Gabriel are both leaning on the ferry railing, staring into the water that rises like a sleek fin and curls outwards and melts back into shapelessness. Gabriel, watching the wave shift shape, thinks: Lucia, Lucy, lucent, loose end, lost.

“Charlie says your customers call you Wildcat.”

“Oh
Charlie
.” She rolls her eyes. “It's news to me.” She watches the shavings of the wake curl away from her, she notes the way the same shape is always there and always vanishing. “But I'm sure you gave him the third degree. I'm sure you've both got a dossier on me that would put the KGB to shame. I'm sure you're going to tell me what your old professor and I talk about between the sheets and TV. What is it, exactly, that you're fishing for, Gabriel?”

“Who's been fishing for whom, Lucy?”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“Who got Charlie to offer me a job?”

“Not me,” she says hotly. “I thought it must have been your idea of irony. Who came sniffing along my trail from Brisbane to Sydney?”

“Well,” he says. “That wasn't the reason I left Brisbane, but it's true I was looking for you. And who dropped clues and invitations like a trail of crumbs?”

“Not me,” she says. She can be definite about that. She was running away, leaving Lucia and Gabriel behind for good, shaking the dust of Brisbane from her shoes. She was done with all that. She was crossing the bridge from past to future and blowing it up behind her.

She smells Brisbane streets, she smells the green yeasty smell of Cedar Creek. She says quickly: “You've got tickets on yourself, mate. Believe me, I don't want
anyone
on my case. I fly solo.”

“Hmm. The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

“Oh yeah?” she says belligerently. “The gentleman is not what he seems, I think.”

Gabriel raises his eyebrows, interested. “What
does
he seem, exactly? And what is he really, in your opinion?”

This was pure disorienting Gabriel: the fact that he could, and would, ask such questions seriously, that they would bubble out of him, they would grab him, and then he would buttonhole you for an answer. But this odd habit had nothing whatsoever to do with vanity or arrogance or self-consciousness. In fact, it was as though Gabriel was without consciousness of a self at all; no, that was not the way to put it, since that suggested insecurity or neediness, and he was none of those things. He was, as far as Lucy could tell, fearless. He had, as far as she could see then, as far as I can see now, that rare and enviable form of confidence which simply accepts what it is without pride or embarrassment, and so requires none of the subtle rituals of preening or self-justification or self-aggrandisement, none of the discreet denigration of others that most egos require. Gabriel's integrity, too, was of the daunting kind: he could never quite understand the dishonourable action, nor quite comprehend it as temptation. I would describe Gabriel as one of the Holy Innocents, except that he was by no means uninformed or innocent of an awareness of the seamy underside of things, Gabriel lived inside a moral riddle. The riddle breathed him.