The Last Magician (19 page)

“Hello, Catherine,” he said awkwardly. He felt exposed. Catherine had heard the chanting in the playground:
You're a yellow wog from China, Charlie Chink.
So had Cat, of course, but that was different; he and Cat were two of a kind, there were songs about her too, though people were more wary about teasing Cat. They were more likely to do it behind her back.

Catherine moved in a different orbit. It was, in fact, hard to believe that she would walk onto the same piece of earth as himself and Cat. He felt as he had felt the first day the boys on the corner arrived at the railway cutting and began to add new rules to the railway game. They had seen the dark stain on Charlie's pants (it appeared every time Cat lay on the tracks; he couldn't stop it) and they jeered and pointed and made up a new song on the spot.
Last one home is the one who snitches, Charlie Chink has wet his britches.
Cat, who always lay on the rails longer than the boys did, Cat who was always the last one up before the train came through, Cat flew into the boys like an avenging little wheel of arms and legs. They had a certain respect for Cat. Charlie thought they were afraid of her. And there was something else in their eyes; he couldn't tell if it was love or hate, but whatever it was they let her be. Charlie, however, was always terrified they would break into the wet-britches song in the playground and his disgrace would be complete. He felt as though Catherine brought the knowledge of such shames with her, and that it was between them, smoking like a compost heap. They were both embarrassed by it, he thought. Yet she simply smiled shyly and said: Hello, Charlie.

Although she and Charlie were in the same class, they had never spoken to each other before. They had never looked at each other, except furtively. Catherine was the cleverest of the girls, and Charlie of the boys — so it transpired after various tests and exams, and after the visit of the school inspector. Therefore only an aisle separated their desks in the back row, but they might as well have sat on different planets.

Charlie was not at all certain of what to do, confronted with Catherine Reed in a swimming suit.

“C'mon,” Cat called. “Last one in is a rotten egg.”

She jumped off the boulder, hugging her knees up to her chest, and made an explosive fan of water leap high into the green air. It sounded like a shot from a gun. Willy shrieked and chortled and went waddling in after her from the edge of the pool like a plump duckling, burbling
What's the time, Mr Wolf?

Charlie, too timid to jump in, watched Catherine and Robbie with interest. They were timid too, he saw instantly, worried about the stones on the bottom of the swimming hole, worried about the depth of the hole, worried about the whirlpool. Nevertheless Catherine, pale and determined, stood on the knob of the boulder where Cat had stood and closed her eyes and jumped. She did not hug her knees in elastic joy, but went straight down like an anchor being dropped. When she surfaced, she spluttered, but she paddled about gamely in the pool with Cat and Willy, ducking when they smacked the surface of the water with their hands, copying them, smacking water back at them, laughing with Cat.

Charlie was fascinated. At school, Catherine could have held court if she wanted to but she didn't seem to like company much. A bevy of girls followed her around, but she would slip off and disappear. He had seen her in the school library — one of his own retreats — a number of times. She never looked up when he came in. She kept her head buried in a book. Charlie very much wanted her to lift her head and look at him now, on the boulder. He wanted Cat and Catherine, both, to look at him and to approve.

He climbed on the boulder and looked down. It seemed very high and the stones below all had edges like razor blades.

“Look out, I'm going to jump,” he called, and Cat and Catherine both stopped splashing and backed away from the centre of the pool and looked up. Cat had to keep paddling with her hands to stop herself from being moved back over the rock lip and into the sucking mouth of the funnel between the boulders. Charlie felt giddy. He could see their faces, pale as the underside of leaves, turned toward him, Cat and Catherine smiling, both of them waiting.

Waiting.

“Come
on
,” Cat called, impatient, and he wrapped his panic around himself like a blanket and closed his eyes and jumped.

What a strange and thrilling world he torpedoed into. The inside of the rainforest hummed in his ears and the churn of a washing machine was pulling him through to the other side of the earth. He was so surprised by the sense of weightlessness and euphoria that he opened his eyes and the water was crystal clear. He saw each dimple in the great basalt slabs and he saw moss waving itself like flags, and he saw the pale ghostly legs of Cat and Catherine, twin mermaids, trailing above him. When he popped above the surface like a cork from a bottle, he was spluttering but laughing too. He thought his laughter might take him up above the water, past the boulders, past the laddered fig, past the canopy itself. He was flying.

He looked at Catherine and he knew that she knew. She knew from the high breathless gasping way he laughed that they had discovered the same thing: there is nothing quite so thrilling as leaping into the very teeth of your fear. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Cat splashed them and duckdived beneath them and tugged at their ankles. Down they went again, and Catherine's wafer of a face, pale as pearlshell, was inches from his, her long fair hair streaming upwards like a drowning woman's cries.

Time ticked differently underwater. Charlie didn't care if he never drew a breath of air again, he was floating in the orbit of Catherine's eyes. When she reached out and touched him and he took her hands, he expected fins to form themselves, and gills. He thought they would stay forever with the flags of moss and the white stones that did a slow minuet toward the lip of the whirling.

Shaboom! Like champagne corks, they were up in the pool again, the three of them gasping and spluttering in a knot of limbs, he couldn't tell where Cat ended and Catherine began. They duckdived, they surfaced, they dived. He wanted to stay in that fluid place where shapes undid themselves. Sometimes, in later years, it seemed to Charlie they spent that whole hot summer under the skin of the pool. Years later, he could close his eyes and summon up the bodily memory at will; the weightless drift of it, the green filtered light, the ghostly floating presences of Catherine and Cat, the champagne fizz building and building in the lungs, the torpedo resurrection. He would sit alone in rooms in New York, in Sydney, rocking himself in clear undercurrents, hugging the hollows in his sides where Cat and Catherine coiled their long mermaid tails.

In this memory, Robbie Gray was never underwater with them, but was high and distant on the boulder.

Robbie Gray was sitting on the boulder, king of the pool, the sun king. How selfish happiness is, Charlie thought. It might have been hours that he spent tripling and dippling in the pool with Catherine and Cat, with Willy happy as always in his strange solo world, before it occurred to Charlie that Robbie might be lonely up there, and before an even more disturbing thought occurred: that Robbie might be afraid to jump. He remembered that his recklessly happy heart rushed out to Robbie Gray. He wanted to say: Look, just close your eyes and do it. Catherine was scared, and I was scared, but we did it. He wanted to say: Trust me, Robbie, there's nothing like it. There's nothing to equal tilting your lance at fear and charging in.

But it was not the sort of thing he felt a yellow wog from China could say to the sun king.

There was a moment when silence fell, except for the scrub turkeys and Willy's warbling in his private cocoon, and he and Catherine and Cat climbed out, slithering on the rock, and sat with Robbie and didn't know what to say. Well, Charlie and Catherine didn't know what to say Cat said: “You're the rotten egg, you silly drip.”

“I've already been swimming this morning,” Robbie said. “Before you came.” Charlie watched Catherine, who had arrived with Robbie, give him a quick sideways look. “While my dad was showing you the barn, Catherine,” he said. He jumped up. “Let's explore. Let's climb up the falls.” And he was off, the leader of the pack, though the others followed happily enough. Cat had to scamper back and forth between Willy and the forward scouts. Sometimes they walked up the watercourse itself, stepping across the flat rock platforms; sometimes they had to take the boundary paths, clambering over fallen tree trunks gone soft, watching for the dreaded stinging tree. Robbie Gray was a ferocious climber. He was determined to stay in the lead where indeed, Charlie thought, he rightfully belonged. In particular, he thought that Robbie became upset whenever Cat got ahead of him, and this friction between two such adored beings distressed him terribly Charlie did not think Cat was aware of Robbie's irritation; she simply darted back and forth, checking on Willy in the rear, barrelling up ahead of all of them and back again, because that's what her energy made her do. He wondered if she ever slept at night. Or did she go stalking the back alleys with other cats, climbing his mango tree, spying on him as he sat at his little table in the sleepout reading a book? It made a difference to him, knowing that.

Cat is watching, he would think happily, looking out into the night.

When they came to the base of the steepest stretch, where the falls were really
falls
for a quick short drop of fifty feet, Robbie announced suddenly: “Okay, last one back is a rotten egg,” and swung about and went crashing his way back downstream.

And Charlie would have instantly obeyed except that Cat called out: “Poohey! I'm going to climb the falls first.”

Looking upward, Charlie bit his lip.

“You mind Willy, Charlie,” Cat said. She hoisted herself up to the next rock ledge, lithe as a possum, and grabbed at trees and reached for handles of rock. She got about halfway up, “Okay,” she shouted, panting. “I quit. I'm coming down.”

She planted herself on a ledge to rest, and Catherine, gritting her teeth, called out: “Wait there for me.”

Charlie could see the muscles in Catherine's arms and legs bleating with fear. When she hoisted herself past the first great ledge and walked her fingers up the rock face feeling for something to grab onto, her straining ankles made him think of desperate flies bucking about on the struts of a funnelweb.

He couldn't look. He sat on the rock platform and put his hand in the water, against the rock, and prayed to it:
Don't let her fall.

He had not felt frightened for Cat. He knew now that Cat was invulnerable. (In the cutting, it was the train he didn't trust.) He knew that if Cat lost her footing she would simply sail across space the way glider possums did, she would settle as lightly as a puffball on the next ledge. But he felt himself enter Catherine's frail and trembling body and could not bear it.

Willy put his arms around Charlie's neck and cooed in his ear:
What's the time, Mr Wolf?
and Charlie pressed his lips against the soft delectable cheek and held Willy like a pillow and prayed
Don't let her fall don't let her fall please don't let her fall please don't.
He only looked up when there were loud halloos and there they were, both of them, waving at him from halfway up. “Look, Willy!” he yelped with excitement. “Look up there!” And he and Willy laughed and hugged each other and he covered Willy with kisses and told him over and over again: “I love them, Willy, don't you? I love them all.” He was awash in love, he floated in it for one entire summer, duckdiving, and surfacing, and submerging himself again and moving languidly through that weightless space where everything connects with everything else.

He could not remember the trip back down to the pool; that is, he could not separate it from the water or the green air or the climbing or the swimming and diving or from other times and other days, except for the clear sharp moment when the three of them and Willy were lying on their stomachs on the great boulder, staring down at Robbie who floated on his back with arms outstretched, king of the pool.

“You're all rotten eggs,” Robbie said.

Charlie thought of the elegant Grammar School way Robbie had shaken his hand and he wanted to make an offering from out of the rich cloud he moved inside. “Cat and Catherine climbed up the falls,” he called out. “You should've climbed up with them, you would've won.”

Robbie ignored him. “It's best in the pool when you're by yourself,” he said. “You can jump further off the boulder then. I only like to jump off it when I'm here by myself,”

“Eenie meenie minie mo,” Cat called, sliding on her belly on the boulder like a lizard. “Look out, here I come!” She went in like a water snake, and Charlie and Catherine could see her wreathing a slow coil around Robbie and then yanking him down. There was a spluttering thrashing game, and laughter, and they could see Robbie kissing Cat and Cat kissing back.

Charlie, on his stomach on warm rock, wanted to kiss all of them. He most especially wished, however, that Cat was dunking him in the pool and kissing
him.
Catherine touched his arm, and he turned sideways to look at her. “Cat loves everyone,” she said.

He laughed happily. “Everyone loves Cat.”

She smiled at him and he smiled back. How beautiful she was. He loved her. He would have kissed her if he'd dared.

“
I
love Cat,” she said. “And so do you.”

“So does Robbie,” he said.

Catherine looked at him without blinking for three seconds, four, five. “
Here
he loves her,” she said.

Charlie, startled, could not sustain the weight of her gaze. He watched Cat and Robbie in the water. When he turned again, Catherine was still looking at him. She frightened him just a little. With Cat, you knew exactly what to expect. With Catherine, you didn't quite.