The Last Magician (14 page)

He says gravely: “Your opinion matters to me, Lucia. It interests me.”

But Lucy's opinion of him is chaotic, and so is mine. I can't pin him down, I don't quite know how to describe him, and never did, then or now.

And so Lucy was in awe of him, and was made uneasy by him, and she resented him. Like Charlie, she feared for him. And she resisted him with instinctive irreverence.

“The gentleman,” she says, “the right honourable Angel Gabriel, is really just a common old tomcat sniffing round.”

Gabriel grins. (That was disconcerting too, the sudden slides, the easy switching to her terms, the affectionate teasing as though she were a fish on the hook and might have all the line she wanted, and all the time in the world, because, after all, if he wanted to reel her in, what could stop him?) “Naturally the local cathouses were on my list,” he says easily. “But to be offered a job in the very place …? It stretches credulity, Lucy.”

“Exactly,” she says. “You're not going to convince me that was pure chance. I find it pretty bloody curious that you show up, and next thing it turns out we're both waiting table on your father.”

“I found it pretty bloody curious too,” he says. “Lucia, why did you run away from me in Brisbane? Why did you disappear?”

“Because.”

“I was frantic at first,” he says, “until I got your message from Sheba. And then I was stunned. I simply couldn't make sense of it.”

The doors to synchronous time and parallel space are everywhere, and between one word and the next, a crevasse can open. You can step into nowhere. You can fall through an abyss between yesterday and today, you can walk into The Shamrock in Brunswick Street in Brisbane on a Saturday afternoon and hear a young man say to a barmaid: “It's curious, watching you.”

“Yeah?” The girl flutters heavily blackened eyelids as she taps off his beer. “Why's that?”

“Because you're acting. The pub's not your natural element.”

Her hand, pushing down on the spigot, pauses. “That's where you're wrong.” She looks him directly in the eyes, and plonks his glass of Four-X on the counter. You have no idea, she thinks. This is my natural element.

“Ah,” he says, raking his fingers through hair the colour of pale mustard seed. The gesture suggests slight malaise, but it is not that he feels rebuked or is conceding error. It is more that he seeks to be polite while contradicting. “Well. I've seen you in other places.”

“Like where?”

“Like the university library.” He smiles. “I've got a file on you, Lucia Barclay.”

“Really?” She monitors the way the shock of fair hair keeps falling across his forehead, and the way he rakes it out of his eyes. “Well, if you don't mind, I'm
Lucy
here, and as it happens, I've got a file on you too.”

“I thought you noticed me,” he says.

Blue eyes like that, and long lashes: they seem almost improper in a man. “You must be rather used to being noticed,” she says drily.

He doesn't seem to get the point of this. Is it possible he is unaware of his effect on the beholder? Perhaps those who turn heads from birth take it for granted. Perhaps they don't notice it. “So you know who I am?” he asks.

“Oh, I don't know your name, or anything about you. It's not that sort of file. I've traced you through the Quattrocento and the High Renaissance though. Masaccio, Fra Angelico, Uccello, Michelangelo, Botticelli, you show up quite a bit in Siena and Florence.”

He frowns for a minute, then laughs.

“I like to look at you,” she says boldly. Elbow on the bar, chin propped on her fist, she smiles lazily and runs the tip of her tongue around her lips. She lets her eyelids droop.

He rests his elbow on the opposite edge of the bar, knuckles under chin, and grins back, not a come-hither smile but a grin of collusion. “It's the way you do that kind of thing,” he says. “The bit of melodrama. I recognise the phenomenon. That's what interests me.”

In the act of sucking one fingertip, Lucy goes still, as though she has suddenly backed into an iceberg in blood-warm Barrier Reef waters. “Mind you,” she says evenly, withdrawing her middle finger languidly from her mouth and tapping off another pot of draught, “looking is all that's called for, I reckon. Much too pretty for eating.”

He is not at all provoked. He considers her with indulgent amusement and considerable fascination. “I'm not implying that you don't mean it,” he says. “The sexual innuendo and all that. It's the style, the campiness, that interests me. Certain patterns I recognise.”

She would feel slapped in the face, except that his manner is not arrogant or rude. She does not know what his manner is. She feels caught in a searchlight.

“You're atoning for something,” he says.

She waits to see if he will be able to explain the ferment, to see if there will be a
click,
to see if some inner bodily shift will occur and she will be able to take a deep relieved breath and say,
Yes, that's it, that's exactly why.

“Upper middle class,” he says thoughtfully. “Private school education, academic prizewinner, high distinctions in every course. Your English tutor happens to be —”

“Oh, old Sparky,” she laughs. In an instant, she somehow rearranges the shape of her body to indicate a nervous, introspective young man. “I don't think he likes the way I argue in tutorials.”

He is very much amused by her mimicry. “You do him well,” he says. “He's a friend of mine, he says your mind scares the pants off him. It'll get you into no end of trouble, he says.” He rakes his fingers through his hair again and grins. “I told you I had a file on you.”

She can imagine. “And now we get the sermon on how I'm throwing away my life.”

“Are you?”

She is deeply disappointed in him. “And who the hell are you, darling?” she asks with exaggerated motherly disdain.

“Gabriel Brennan.” He simply sits there, elbows on the grubby formica bartop, watching her. She doesn't know what to make of him. It's not small talk, bar talk. Perhaps he will not be a total disappointment after all. Abruptly, for no reason she can think of, she wants to give him a real answer.

“It's not a case of throwing away or
not
throwing away,” she says. “It's like finding a secret cupboard under the stairs. You have to open it. It's like Columbus or Cook finding a whole continent that isn't on the maps. You have to explore. You
want
to explore.”

He nods.

“Hey, Luce love!” another customer calls. “Do I hafta wait till bloody judgment day for me beer?”

She moves away and blows a kiss at the impatient customer. “Sorry, Jack. Got a talker over yonder,” she says.

“Ah, Luce,” Jack says lovingly, taking hold of her shoulders and leaning across the counter, “yer a wonder, love.” He plants a slobbering kiss on her bosom, the upper half of which is exposed by her barmaid's dress.

“Go on with ya, Jack. Ya know I hate touchers.” But there is touching and touching, and this kind doesn't bother her. This is my natural element, she thinks, pushing a foaming pot across the bar. I go for beery uninhibited warmth. She has discovered pleasant fevers in the blood. Her own body and its sensations are a miracle to her. Daily, she feels full of joy and recklessness.

When the brisk traffic in beer and repartee brings her back to Gabriel, she whispers hotly: “It's
not
an act.” Under his steady gaze, she amends: “Well, maybe being a barmaid is. But the play itself, the real play” — she waves her hand to take in the men on bar stools, the whole pub, Brunswick Street — “the cupboard under the stairs, that's real.”

“And when did you discover the cupboard under the stairs?”

“Oh … a few years ago. Not far from here. On Brunswick Street station one day. There was this woman … there was a girl …”

“Circe,” he says.

“Yes,” she agrees, startled. And in this elliptical way, they appear to understand each other completely. She feels as though she has been waiting for Gabriel. She has been waiting to tell someone. “Yes, it was like that. Circe. Well, Sheba in actual fact.” She gestures with her thumb at the lounge beyond, where another barmaid moves between tables. “Sheba spat at me. She called me the bloody Queen of Sheba and spat in my face.” She puts her hand to her cheek. “She put a spell on me till I found her again. Now I call her bloody Sheba, and it's stuck.”

“Hey, Luce!”

“Coming.” She moves along the bar and he watches.

When she drifts back, she says: “It's impossible to be just a student, if that's what Sparky wanted you to tell me.” He shakes his head and begins to demur but she barrels on. “The thing is" — and she can feel anger rising, a waste of energy, something to flee from — “I've taken a hard look at women in the university.” She shudders. “It's not a safe place for a woman's mind. Besides, I've got something
here
.” She knocks lightly on her own ribcage with one fist. The voraciousness, she means. The hunger. The passion to explore, to know everything. She wishes she knew where it came from, this frenzy, and where it will take her.

“Yes,” he says, laying the palm of one hand against his own ribs. “Well, I told you I recognised the phenomenon.”

“Hey, Luce!” the far end of the counter calls again. “We got a bloody drought on down here.”

She moves away, she laughs, she teases, she flashes energy.

Gabriel watches.

When she returns to his end of the counter, she says to him: “You're like a bloody detective, the way you watch every move.” He smiles and says nothing. She leans across the bar and asks in a low urgent voice: “Have you ever felt as though you could
eat
each day? As though you could gobble it up, every single day, the entire thing, morning, noon, and night, but you'd still be
starving
?”

“Look,” he says. “How'd you like some weekend work picking pineapples?”

“What?” She has to laugh.

“I live out near Samford. My mother and stepfather have a farm at the edge of the rainforest — well, a market garden to be more accurate. We give street kids jobs, give them a place to stay.”

“Rescue the perishing.” She's affronted. She's disappointed again. Maybe he hasn't understood at all. “Fuck you, love. What if it turns out that the perishing are the ones who found El Dorado and never bothered to send back word?”

“Maybe that's why I lure them out to the farm,” he says. “But rescuing you is not on my mind. Just telling you there may be people you know out there. And maybe not. They come and go. You interested?”

“Maybe.”

“When do you knock off work?”

“Another hour.”

“I'll hang around then.”

She considers him carefully. Finally she says, “Okay, mate. You're on.”

Perhaps it was that time, or perhaps it was the next time, or maybe the one after that, when he turned off Samford Road just after it crosses Cedar Creek and followed the unpaved detour until it ended, and then parked the car. I suppose we were so busy talking that I barely noticed walking through rainforest or reaching the falls. It is odd how certain memories trail streamers of connecting detail and others have sharp diamond edges against a void, entire in themselves.

This memory presents itself complete, inside a bubble, or like a sudden frame in a darkened cinema, a young woman sitting on a boulder, a young man slightly further downstream, just off camera, his body comfortably wedged into a crevice not far from the great rock on which the girl sits. Around them, cold clear mountain water cords and ruffles itself noisily, so that it is something of an effort to talk; or rather, talking itself is in consequence particularly private and easy, but the effort to hear, and to be heard, demands energy.

Sometimes the garrulous scrub turkeys interject. They are cheeky birds, not at all afraid, and they come in little clusters to the edge of the creek to eavesdrop and comment.

“I'll be honest,” Gabriel says into the green clamour. “You remind me of someone. I've been watching you for weeks.”

Déjà vu
, she thinks. No.
Déjà vécu.
I have already lived this. This feels strangely familiar. I have always known him.

But that is absurd. That is patently ridiculous, she tells herself irritably.

And yet how odd. Two strangers, believing themselves unobserved, watch each other for weeks, circle each other, and suddenly find themselves cocooned in rainforest, sharing secrets. How odd that she is not at all surprised. She thinks of the way she had to find the girl who spat at her, had to find the old woman,
had
to. She remembers how the next weekend pulled at her, compelled her, how it was like a magnet dragging her back to Brunswick Street, how she walked for miles and hours, peering into back alleys, into fish and chip shops, into pubs, until at last the girl looked up and said matter-of-factly, “Oh it's you again, is it?”

And then she had to ask: “Why me? Why did you pick me, of all the people on the platform, to swear at and spit on?”

“Dunno,” Sheba shrugged. “You're the one I noticed, that's all.” She laughed. “Maybe because I knew you'd ask barmy questions.” She chewed her gum thoughtfully and blew a bubble and snapped it. “Tell ya somethin' funny, though. I knew you'd come lookin' fer me. I had a dream about it, only in me dream ya come waltzing right off the train while it's chuffing off to Mayne Junction and come walking back between the railway lines cool as a cucumber.”

Lucy says to Gabriel: “Do you think we live in magnetic fields or something?”

Gabriel thinks obsessions create their own magnetic fields. “We go round and round on our treadmills,” he says. “We plaster meaning over everything the way tradesmen slap paint on a wall.”