The Last Magician (18 page)

“Cat,” he calls nervously. “I think the train's coming soon.”

“Course it is,” she calls back. “Hasn't got to Wilston yet, but. You can hear it whistle.”

Yes of course, he thinks, feeling foolish. His parents' shop is opposite Wilston station. He knows perfectly well that the train whistles as it leaves. He knows you can hear it from here.

“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three,” calls Cat, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, turning, coming back past the cutting, turning.

“What's the time, Mr Wolf?” Willy calls, jumping up and down with pleasure and tugging at Charlie's hand.

“Train time, Willy!” Cat calls. “You stay right there or I'll smack you.”

The train whistles and Willy calls excitedly
What's the time Mr Wolf what's the time Mr Wolf what's the time Mr Wolf?
and Cat claps her hands and laughs. Then she does something quite mad, quite terrifying. Directly opposite the cutting, she lies on a sleeper, her head propped against one shining steel rail, her feet on the other. Charlie gives a strangled cry and lets go of Willy's hand and rushes forward, but stops transfixed at the edge of the mound of crushed bluestone on which the tracks are laid. In the distance, down the long shimmering silver lines, he can see the train leaving Wilston station, belching smoke, its black moustache grille almost scraping the rails.

He is weak at the knees, he cannot move, he cannot speak. “Cat!” he tries to call, but no sound comes. Cat says to him calmly, “When it gets to the bridge, I get up.”

The overhead footbridge is fifty yards from the cutting. Charlie, paralysed, watches the train streak toward it. Oddly, it takes much longer than usual, it takes forever, it is coming in slow motion without a sound and Charlie is in a dream now, he is moving through water or through honey, this is not real at all. Sobs of laughter come up out of his mouth like hiccups. He feels a small warm hand clutch his and wants to tell Willy to go back to where Cat drew the X on the ground or he'll smack him, but only the bubbles of laughter come out of his mouth. They should step back, they should run, but he cannot move. He can feel something warm and wet trickling down his legs. Willy murmurs in a singsong voice:
What's the time, Mr Wolf?

And then the train is at the bridge and Cat jackknifes up and catapults herself across the gap, and she is pulling Charlie and Willy and they are all rolling over and over in the grass of the cutting like tennis balls rolling down a hill and the train is like a rushing mighty wind and the roaring of the end of the world is in his ears and Cat and Willy are laughing and Cat is kissing him on the lips. He has never been so frightened or so excited in his life, he has never felt so powerful. If he snapped his fingers, the train could roll over them like a cloud passing and not a hair of their heads would be touched. He kisses Cat back and wants to go on kissing her forever.

“You wanna marry me?” she asks.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes yes yes.”

“Okay,” she says. “Willy can marry us.”

And the three of them, laughing and shrieking, kissing and hugging, roll around in the long soft grass of the cutting like nestlings waiting for the mother bird's return.

3

Five children played in a deep rock pool at Cedar Creek Falls: Charlie and Cat and Willy and Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed.

It is not difficult for me to picture this scene, knowing the place as I do, knowing the people as I came to know them, knowing the way the green closeness of the rainforest folds people in on themselves, knowing the way it holds secrets. They became part of me, those people. I met them in the dark wood of Charlie's memory and in his photographs, I swam in the looped rock pools of Gabriel's dreams. Dreams hang around in the rainforest. There is not enough sunlight to lift their fog.

I don't think I could go back there now. No, I'm sure I couldn't. And yet that place is always with me. I am never absent from it.

When Gabriel and I swam there, and talked, and made love, he used to say he felt his father's childhood watching him from the damp clumps of ferns. Sometimes when we were making love, things would go awry; he could not function in front of those paternal eyes. In the rainforest, things stay in the drugged air, they drip back out of the warm green fog, they cling to the ladders of climbing pandanus, they lodge under rocks. Moss grows over them. They steam and ferment.

Gabriel said he sometimes thought the only thing his father minded about the divorce was losing the Samford farm and the falls. Not that he actually
lost
them. He disposed of them rather, his motives tangled, and then later regretted it. Indeed, so anxious was his father, at the time of the settlement, that the farm not fall into his ex-wife's hands that he sold it off hugger-mugger to Gil Brennan, a neighbouring pineapple farmer. But creepers snake their way up to the light and things that passionately wish to connect do connect. This came to be one more thing Gabriel's father held against his mother.

“She belonged out here,” Gabriel said. “This was just our weekend place when I was a kid, but Mum took to it the way a bowerbird takes to scraps of blue.”

I had a vision of Gabriel's mother as soft and feathery, her liquid eyes darting about on the lookout for blue, coveting blue, stealing blue socks and scraps of blue T-shirts from clothes-lines, snapping blue foil milk-bottle tops from open rubbish bins, lining her nest, turning an inhospitable clutter of sticks into paradise. I relayed this fanciful vision to Charlie once and he said: “It's the
male
bird who makes the bower. The bower is a trap.”

“Did you ever meet her?” I asked. “Gabriel's mother?”

“I think I did at a university formal once,” he said. “She was a friend of Catherine's. They went to high school together, I think. She was a shy little bird, and I remember thinking how typical. Robbie was peacocking all over the place as usual, and I reckoned he'd want a drab little peahen to set himself off And I must have met her at Catherine's twenty-first, I suppose.”

“I think,” Gabriel said, “when the marriage began to go wrong, she could come out here to the farm and the rainforest and it didn't matter.”

After the fall, and the freefall, she flew into Gil Brennan's life and they built a nest. To watch his mother and his stepfather moving absorbed along the spiky rows of pineapples, Gabriel said, or just walking through the rainforest, or picnicking at Cedar Creek (though she wouldn't go near the falls any more as she used to when he was a child; she wouldn't go anywhere near the falls), to watch his mother with her young second family was to know the sheer simplicity of happiness. Poetic justice, he said. He hadn't known, all those years away from her, that his mother was happy. His father had led him to believe otherwise. “She can't cope, I'm afraid,” his father had said, “and we both think it's better if you don't … She just wouldn't be able to cope with you, you see. She just doesn't want you right now.”

To discover her tranquillity when he was twenty, Gabriel said, to walk into the peaceable kingdom of the sweet ordinariness of her life with Gil Brennan and their ten-year-old daughter and their eight-year-old son, was a miracle. And to find that it was not true that she had banished him …! But he must not be harsh with his father, she said. Behind every lie, she said, there is a wound. One should be gentle with the bloody gashes in other people's lives.

And what was this bloody gash in his father's life? he wanted to know bitterly.

Be gentle, Gabriel, she said.

He was eight or nine, Gabriel thought, and they were living in Sydney when his father, fuming, and pacing up and down, told him: “Your mother's got hold of the farm.”

He wanted to ask if he could visit her now, but was afraid to say anything.

“It's her way of getting back at us,” his father said.

“It's funny,” Gabriel mused. “I never thought he even liked the place much. Mum and I used to come out here every weekend, and all the school holidays, but Dad used to stay in town and work. Well, he had to, I suppose. But I never thought he liked the place much.”

Gabriel, I remember from those green and golden days, used to turn suddenly and look behind him (perhaps once every half hour or so), or stare intently downstream where the churning water bumped under thick low-slung vines. I never teased him about it.

It was a disturbing stillness.

“Once,” Gabriel mused, “when he realised Mum and I used to come here to swim …” Gabriel, perched on the boulder like a gnome, knees crooked up under his chin, hands clasped around his knees, was staring into the whirlpool that the water made between the two boulders. “He hadn't realised it. I suppose he simply hadn't thought about it. The falls aren't on our land.”

In the whirlpool, I could see our reflections whizzed into concentric circles of colour like clothes in a washing machine. You could not look into the whirlpool for too long. You had to look away or you could lose your balance and fall.

“He threw a tantrum,” Gabriel said. “Not at me, of course, he was never angry with me, only with Mum. He said it was dangerous, and Mum was never to bring me here again.”

Sometimes I would wait silently, never interrupting, never prompting, for half an hour before Gabriel would dredge up another bit of his life. It was like a vast jigsaw puzzle to him. He was always picking up one small piece or another and holding it up to the light and studying it and trying it out in different places, but never quite finding where it belonged.

“Then one day he brought me here himself,” Gabriel said.

In the whirlpool I could see the other Gabriel, maybe four years old, maybe five, the apple of his father's eye, the angel child, the dryad in the pool, still down there in the swirling water's black eye, the plughole where everything went.

“It's strange, isn't it?” Gabriel asked me, “that I can remember these things so vividly when they all happened before I was six. He took me to Sydney when I was six. And yet I see them as clearly as if … The trouble is, I can't remember the in-betweens.” It was, he said, like having a drawerful of photographs without any captions or any known sequence to them. He looked behind him and stared into the deep green-black shadow. “Did you hear something?” he asked.

“Only scrub turkeys.”

“Yes, I suppose so.” In the whirlpool, I could see his brooding face race and spin and stretch itself into a funnel. Those are stones that were his eyes, and those are merely pitted dimples in the rock, those hollows that look like eye sockets gouged. “The day he brought me here, he behaved very strangely. I thought he was frightened of the place. No, not exactly frightened, that's not right. But tightly wound, the same way he would get on the footbridge near Wilston station.” New water keeps coming and keeps coining, racing into the same spinning circle and then on. I suppose it was possible, somewhere in the millions of years of climatic history of the world's oldest land mass, that there had been droughts of sufficient length to make the whirlpool disappear. “He kept looking behind him,” Gabriel said. “He was in a strange state of nervous excitement. He kept turning around suddenly as though someone was watching him from in there.” Gabriel, looking over his shoulder again, gestured into the murk where someone unseen could indeed be silently watching, where strangler figs and epiphytes and she-oaks and creepers fed off each other and fought a deadly silent fight in the quest for sun.

Gabriel closed his eyes, concentrating. “He must have had his camera with him. I keep trying to see him with the camera in his hand, or in the knapsack, but I can't seem to … it won't show itself. I can never remember the camera. But he has a photograph of me sitting on this boulder, and he had it enlarged. Once I woke up at night because I heard something and I crept down to his study (we were still in the terrace house in Paddington then, it wasn't long after we'd moved to Sydney) and he was sitting with just the reading lamp on, staring at a photograph. He didn't hear me. I stayed there for ages watching him, until he put it in his desk drawer, and then I tiptoed back to bed.

“The next day, when he wasn't around, I looked. It was the photograph of me at the falls.

“It's funny, though. I never thought he liked the place when I was a kid.”

Once, when Gabriel and I were picnicking and I had gone back to the car alone to get a jumper (it turns cool very quickly in the rainforest if the sun goes; I think the moss and the damp black earth suck warmth out of the air), I came back to find Gabriel kneeling on the boulder, his back to me, holding his hands out toward one of the trees a little upstream, the one that has been choked by the strangler fig whose roots make a thick mazy ladder up the old smothered trunk to the sky. We climbed that ladder once, Gabriel and I. It was not very difficult, not difficult at all really (so long as you didn't look down) with so many woody rungs for the feet, so many vines to grab. We climbed up to where the tree orchids and the wheel-of-fire flowers run amok. We looked at each other and couldn't say a word.

So at first I thought Gabriel was praying to the strangled tree. (I don't mean literally; I mean in the way the pagan privacy of the rainforest affects most people.) Then I thought he was placating someone. I waited quietly. I never told him I'd seen.

“Dad told me the worst mistake he ever made was selling the farm,” Gabriel said. “And yet I can always hear him shouting at Mum and telling me the falls were dangerous and I must never never come here without him.”

He looked behind him. He stared into the whirlpool and watched his spinning history doing cartwheels. Five children played in the pool beneath the boulders: Charlie and Cat and Willy, and Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed.
With a down, hey down, hey down.

There were five children played in a pool with a down, derry derry derry, down down,
and here we go round the mulberry bush, the stinging bush, the banyan tree, the merry-go-round.

Oh yes, it's easy for me, having lain beside Gabriel on the boulder in the sun, having listened, drowsy and happy, to the murmur of his voice, to picture those five children in that place, to know the way the dark green wall of the rainforest shut them in on themselves. I can hear their shrieks as the chilly water that comes from under the mountain splashed shock on their young bodies.

It was not a school day, it was a Saturday, but nevertheless, for Charlie, it had all the trappings of forbidden enchantment. Cat had waved her wand. She had put a hex on everyone, on Charlie's watchful protective parents, on her own unpredictable father, on Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed, and here was Charlie in a place as beautiful as the lost paradise around Innisfail in North Queensland, here he was with people who would in other circumstances ignore him, or even torment him.

“This is Robbie Gray,” Cat said. “His dad owns the farm, but
my
dad does all the work.” She laughed. “Robbie's just Lord Muck like his dad and he lives up on Wilston Heights with the snobs and he goes to snob school.”

“Grammar,” Robbie Gray explained. “Brisbane Grammar School.”

“Robbie's old,” Cat said.

“I'm twelve,” Robbie explained.

“This is Charlie,” Cat said.

“Pleased to meet you.” Robbie Gray put out his hand the way grown-ups did, and Charlie, a little overwhelmed, extended his. The two shook hands solemnly, quite as though they were a pair of aged scholars in Wang Wei's painting, bowing to each other on the low curved bridge beside the willow tree. “Samford's just our weekend place,” Robbie Gray explained, as though Charlie were a person of substance to whom careful explanations were due.

(Charlie, telling Lucy this many years later, is momentarily overcome. He walks up and down his spartan living room and stops in front of the large photograph of the Cedar Creek pool. I loved him at that moment, Charlie said. I was moved to the point of tears. When you are so used to being treated more or less like a dog by other kids, especially by other boys, so used to it that you don't even think about it, it's just the way things are, and then suddenly …

I loved him, he said. I would have died for him.)

But Cat made a face at Robbie Gray. “Robbie's got a plum in his mouth and he tries to talk like a bloody Pom. They make them talk that way at snob school.” She pinched Robbie on the arm and he blushed and tweaked the dirty yellow ribbon in her hair. “Ouch,” Cat said. “Cut it out.” But she liked it, Charlie saw. She liked Robbie Gray, and Robbie Gray couldn't take his eyes off Cat. There was a wall around them made of all the times they had played at the farm and at the falls. There were secrets between them. Charlie passionately wanted to step into the circle that ran around them.

“And you know Catherine,” Cat said. “She's in our class.”

“Yes,” Charlie said, swallowing. But he wouldn't have said he knew Catherine. He wouldn't have dared.

“She lives next door to me,” Robbie explained. “I said she could come.”

Charlie noted the way Catherine let her eyes rest on Robbie for a moment then move away. “Hello, Charlie,” she said. She gave him a small shy smile and dropped her eyes.