The Last Magician (15 page)

“Yes,” she says. “I suppose that's it. But you know, till that day on the platform, I never gave gutter people a thought. I didn't really see them, and then quite suddenly I felt they were my natural kin.”

“Must have been something there, though, some dormant memory, for you to react the way you did.” Gabriel puts a fist against his stomach. “In my case, certain things trigger this … this
buzz.
When I said you remind me of someone, I don't mean you look like her. I can't really remember what she looks like, not clearly, it's one of the things that drives me crazy, trying to get her face in clear focus. But I think I see her all the time. I have to tell you you're not the first woman I've watched and followed, and I don't suppose you'll be the last. It's a
type
that … an archetype, I suppose. When I see it, I'm hooked, I get this compulsion, I have to speak to the woman.”

“It is an ancient Mariner,” she murmurs, “And he stoppeth one of three.”

“Yes. And he does have to talk. Unfinished business, a therapist would say. Unresolved pain.”

She recites:

“Since then, at an uncertain hour,

That agony returns:

And till my ghastly tale is told,

This heart within me burns.”

“Yes,” Gabriel nods. “That's exactly how it is.”

She murmurs on:

“I pass, like night, from land to land;

I have strange power of speech;

That moment that his face I see,

I know the man that must hear me:

To him my tale I teach.”

“The first time I felt it,” Gabriel says. “I was only six years old.” He crosses his arms and runs his hands up and down from elbow to shoulder as though monitoring electric pulsations on the skin. “And yet I can remember as clearly as if it was last week.” He frowns, pondering this. “Of course, what I'm remembering at this point are my own endless replays, and there's no way of knowing whether they've altered subtly over the years. I keep going over them in case there's something I've missed.

“I was six years old,” he says.

BOOK II

Cat

In ancient Rome the cat was a symbol of liberty. No animal is so opposed to restraint as a cat.

Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable

1

Gabriel's father was with them because of the imminence of the funeral for the trams. TRAMS DEAD, one headline read. TRAMS GET THE AXE read another. By the end of the year, reported the
Courier-Mail
(this was in 1969), Brisbane would be free of the dragging past, free of antiquated road-clutterers, free of traffic jams; and suddenly people who had used nothing but cars for a decade were grief-stricken, people who could not even remember the last time they had rumbled along Adelaide Street in a “silver bullet ” were lining up at the tram stop outside the City Hall. Petitions were signed. Aldermen were telephoned. AN ERA PASSES lamented posters on the newsagents' stalls. In the tabloids (the
Truth,
the
Telegraph
) there were front page spreads of whole families leaning from tram windows. The
Sunday Mail
ran an entire supplement of photographs.

It occurred to Gabriel that his father was with them because his father rather hoped to be spotted by a reporter. Dr Horvath, their neighbour, had been on the front of the Telegraph with his wife and three daughters.
“Part of our heritage,” prominent doctor says.

“Look, Dad!” Gabriel was excited. “Ruthie's in the paper.” Gabriel and Ruthie fished for tadpoles together in the gully behind her house. Ruthie had soft golden down on her arms and at the nape of her neck. She wore her hair in plaits tied with blue ribbons.

But to Gabriel's bewilderment, the photograph did not please his father. Gabriel was the apple of Robinson's eye — he knew that — and anything that gave Gabriel pleasure automatically pleased the man who spoke with such boyish charm and warmth to the mothers of all his friends. Gabriel's friends and their mothers were extremely fond of Mr Robinson Gray So it was something quite new that his father should frown and become agitated, taking a book down from the shelves of his study, sitting in his armchair, reading a page, jumping up again, putting the book back, taking down another. This went on for some time while Gabriel watched, mystified but fascinated. His father seemed to have forgotten Gabriel's presence entirely. Then, abruptly, his father went outside and got the lawnmower out and began mowing energetically.

At dinner that evening his father announced: “I think we'll take a tram ride on
Friday
afternoon. We'll go out through The Valley to New Farm.”

Gabriels mother was astonished. “Friday afternoon?”

“I'll take the afternoon off,” his father said.

“But why?” she asked.

“To take the tram to New Farm.”

Gabriel's mother stared blankly as though trying to translate. Every Thursday she and Gabriel took the bus into the city from St Lucia, and then, because she always shopped at McWhirter's, they took the tram from the city to Brunswick Street in The Valley. Gabriel's father had sole use of the family car (his mother, like most Brisbane mothers, did not yet have a driver's licence) and his father drove every day to the law courts in George Street. “To go to New Farm Park?” Gabriel's mother asked, puzzled, trying to imagine why they would not use the car.

“To ride in the tram as a family.” Robinson spoke with a certain amount of impatience. “A keepsake for Gabriel. It's something I want him to remember.” He moved into the tone he frequently used when speaking to Gabriel's mother. It made Gabriel think of the way teachers spoke to you at school. “It's a momentous occasion,” his father said. “The present crosses the Great Divide and descends into history.”

Unbidden, an image popped into Gabriel's mind of a future grainy picture in the
Telegraph,
three faces behind the bars of the tramcar window, six-year-old Gabriel in the middle, his mother on one side, his father on the other.
“Momentous occasion,” prominent lawyer says. “The present crosses the Great Divide and descends into history.”

Gabriel felt strangely furtive and uneasy about this thought. Where had it come from? He felt as though he had done something wrong, and any minute now his father, stern but grieving, would send him to his room. He turned the sentence over again in his mind.
The present crosses the Great Divide.
It had such a lovely murmuring kind of sound, as though it had rolled under and over the pointed arches of a church. Another deeply disturbing thought zipped into Gabriel's mind the way nasturtium pods pop their seeds.
Zing! Pok!
He saw his father mowing the lawn again, the strange jerky way he had pushed the mower past the nasturtiums and round the mango tree to the Horvaths' fence and then turned and crossed back again and turned. He suddenly seemed to hear the voice inside his father's head, trying out different comments for the reporters, testing how they sounded, imagining how they would look on the front page of a newspaper.

Gabriel was so confused by these dreadful thoughts that he jumped up and ran to fetch his father's slippers from the bedroom. When he brought them to the table, he could see how silly this was, so early in the evening, but it was such a relief when his parents both laughed at him and his father tousled his hair and his mother kissed him and he felt, rather than saw, the smiles that passed over his head. He felt that warm glow, which was getting rarer now, that meant both his mother and his father were happy.

And now they were all on the tram. His parents sat opposite, on the grey-painted slatted curved seats, facing him across the small alcove. He loved the trams. He loved watching the straphangers as they clutched at the overhead leather loops, the way they swayed together, now this way, now that, not quite in unison but as if a wave moved along them, like a row of passionfruit runners on the side fence when the wind was in them. He loved the sound of the
ding-dong
when the conductor gave the cord two quick tugs after a stop. How unbelievable it was, how appalling, that the City Council wanted to axe the trams. He tried to imagine this scene of carnage: a mob of city councillors swinging weapons above their heads, the sound of splintering, the silver metal ripping and squealing, the trams bleeding to death.

A sudden question arose.

“What will they do with the dead trams, Daddy?”

Gabriel's parents looked at one another and smiled. Gabriel's father took hold of his mother's hand. “The makings of a barrister, Constance. A quirky imagination and the ability to mull over a riddle from new angles.”

“But what they will they do?” Gabriel persisted.

“Bury them, I'm afraid, son,” his father said, and his parents smiled at each other again.

Such happiness flooded Gabriel. He looked at their interlaced fingers lying lightly against the navy cotton of his mother's dress. The dress had a soft lace collar and the way her throat rose from it made Gabriel, for some curious reason, want to stand guard for her with his wooden sword. There was something precious and frail about her neck. It was like the neck of the porcelain shepherdess on their living room mantel. His mother's hair was light brown and brushed her cheeks like feathers. She was very beautiful, Gabriel thought, and he was filled with happiness to see the smile in her eyes. Lately, it seemed to him, she had become quiet, quieter, and her skin seemed stretched more tightly across her delicate bones, almost as tightly as the cellophane across the jars of new home-made jam. Impulsively, he stood and leaned across the space of the small alcove and kissed his mother.

“Gabriel,” she said softly, smiling, touching his cheek with the hand that was not interlaced with his father's.

Gabriel sat down again and then,
crash
, the lovely glow was in splinters. That look was on his father's face again, that edginess in the way his father uncrossed his ankles and shuffled them on the floor and then recrossed them the other way. Gabriel was in an agony. There was nothing he could do. It was not permissible to give his father a hug and a kiss in public. If he had done it, his father would have said in a stern but kindly way: “Now Gabriel, that's for girls and sissies, not for grown-up young men who are six years old.” But his father was hurt, Gabriel could see that. His father wanted a hug and a kiss, and he also didn't want it. Gabriel said urgently, guiltily: “Dad, where will they bury the trams? And what will they do with the tram lines?”

It was like turning on the rugby game on Saturdays. It was like watching the yabby water leak into the bays he and Ruthie made in the creek bank, the way his father's body soaked up energy again. Such relief flooded Gabriel. I must watch more carefully, he told himself. I must be more careful what I do.

His father said boisterously: “The trams will mostly go for scrap metal, I'm afraid, son. When I said ‘bury' I was using a figure of speech. We call that a metaphor. That's when we say something dramatic, for effect, but we really mean something else. Do you understand?”

Gabriel, a little foggy, nodded solemnly.

“Though there'll be some for the museum, no doubt,” his father added. “When you have a son of your own, you can take him to the museum and sit in a tram with him and say, ‘Son, when I was as old as you are now, I rode along Queen Street on a tram like this with my dad. The old tram lines ran down the middle of the street in those days.' ”

Gabriel laughed with pleasure and his mother smiled and his father squeezed his mother's hand.

“As for the tram lines, they'll probably have to pull them up, though they might be able to run asphalt right over the top,” his father said. “And we won't have any more of those wretched traffic snarls or that crawling along and getting held up at all the tram stops. It's good for the flow of traffic, Gabriel. That's progress.”

A reporter with a camera who had got on at the last stop and had been moving along the car paused at their alcove. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but are you Mr Robinson Gray?”

Gabriel's father looked enormously surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. Gabriel's mother blushed a little, and pressed her lips together, and looked out of the window because she hated having her photograph taken. A cloud passed across her eyes. Into Gabriel's mind another nasty little cobbler's-peg weed of a thought intruded.
How did the reporter know we would be on this tram?

The reporter's camera sprouted a silver pudding basin on a black neck. Pop, pop, it said, and lightning flashed across the tram. “Just another with the little lad in the middle,” the reporter said, and Gabriel was half-sitting on their laps, an idiotic grin on his face. “And do you have a comment, sir?” the reporter asked in a deferential tone.

“Well, It's just something I want my boy here to remember,” Gabriel's father said solemnly. “Something he can one day say to his own son in a museum somewhere.” He patted Gabriel on the head. “It's a momentous occasion,” he said. “The present crosses the Great Divide and descends into history.”

“Oh very good, sir,” the reporter said. “And ma'am?” he nodded to Gabriel's mother. “Do you have a comment?”

Gabriel's mother smiled shyly and brushed her hair a little nervously out of her eyes. “Well,” she said, “I've always used the trams, I like to go to McWhirter's every —”

“Gabriel has a comment,” his father said jovially. “Tell the man from the newspaper what you wanted to know, Gabriel.”

And so Gabriel dutifully repeated: “What will they do with the dead trams?” and the reporter laughed, and pop, pop, pop, he flashed lightning again, and “Just this way a bit, sir, father and son, that's wonderful. Chip off the old block, eh Mr Gray?”

“Time will tell,” Gabriel's father laughed, ruffling his son's hair. “But I think this young fellow may well leave his mark on the Queensland courts in time.”

Behind him, Gabriel could feel the way a warm rash was moving up his mother's throat, fanning out from the white lace collar, mottling her face. When he sat down opposite again, she was smiling fiercely at him and her eyes were very, very bright. His parents were no longer holding hands.

“Mummy,” he said, desperate, “when we get to McWhirter's, can we buy sugar doughnuts again?”

She smiled and nodded, grateful to him, her eyes full of love (
It's all right, then
) and the reporter handed his father a card, “Ted Bixby, sir.
Sunday Mail.
It's up to the editor, of course, but I think you'll find …” and his father swelled with such well-being (Gabriel — oh he wishes he didn't, but he does — Gabriel thinks of the frogs on the back porch at night) that it was going to be all right after all. There was such happiness again.

Now, in fact, Gabriel's father was bubbling over with energy and helpfulness. “See the tree?” he pointed for Gabriel at the triangular junction with Eagle Street. The Moreton Bay fig, at least a hundred feet high and a hundred across, stood serene as a pagan colossus in its own shaggy green light. “That tree was there when Captain Cook sailed up the coast.”

The tiniest of looks and an unsmiled smile passed between Gabriel and his mother. Every Thursday he would say to her: “Do you think Captain Cook could have seen the tree, Mummy?” And she would say: “I'm sure he might have through his telescope, darling.”

“There's the Story Bridge,” his father pointed, crossing the alcove and sitting next to Gabriel and leaning across him, excited as a boy.

“McWhirter's is soon,” Gabriel said. He thought with pleasure of the amazing doughnut machine in McWhirter's, how watching was as much fun as eating, how the little circles of white dough plopped down out of the metal chute into the river of burning oil, sizzle sizzle, and the slow wheel with its twenty metal gates slowly turned and the white dough got puffier and firmer, and exactly halfway round a magic lever rose from the burning oil like Excalibur and flipped the doughnut over, and lo, the underside was golden brown and the circle kept turning, slowly, slowly, toward the avalanche of sugar, the final gate, the final flip, the hot sugary doughnuts popping into little waxed-paper bags and then into desiring mouths. On Thursdays after school, Gabriel and his mother sat at the café table in McWhirter's and laughed together and ate and licked their sugary lips and wiped their greasy fingers on paper serviettes. “Two more stops to the sugar doughnuts,” Gabriel, veteran of tram rides, sang joyfully.