The Last Magician (20 page)

“I love Robbie,” he said.

Catherine raised her eyebrows. She kept looking at him, unblinking. “Not as much as Robbie loves Robbie,” she said.

“Don't you like him?”

She watched Robbie, expressionless, for several seconds, then she looked at Charlie again. “Not very much,” she said.

In front of the barn there were two fathers and two cars. It was like a game that teachers gave you in school, Charlie thought. Which father belongs with which car? It wasn't hard to guess. Cat's father owned the battered red utility truck, a much scarred vehicle. There were a number of places on its body where Cat's father, after too many beers, had had close encounters with lamp-posts and kerbs and various other immovable objects and with other vehicles. In these places he had daubed applications of lurid pink metal primer, so that the car had a fevered chicken-pox look. Robbie's father stood beside a sleek black Buick.

As soon as the children came within sight of the cars, Cat and Robbie, propelled by some unheard starting gun, broke into a run and pelted toward the two fathers. Robbie won by a whisker. “I won!” he announced, and then grandly: “But for the second prize, you can have a ride back in our car, Cat. Dad, can everyone come in ours?”

Robbie's father frowned a momentary frown, looking askance at the wet swimsuits and at the always-slightly-grubby face of Cat, but graciousness fell so quickly as a veil that Charlie wondered if he had imagined the frown. “Certainly,” Robbie's father said mellowly. “You won't object, Reilly, if your youngsters ride in the Buick? I'll drop them off at your place on the way home.”

Cat's father turned his head to spit a wad of tobacco. “No skin off my back,” he shrugged. “If they wanna be posh and la-de-dah.”

“I don't wanna,” said Cat, unhooking the backboard of her father's Holden and pulling it down. “It's more fun in the ute. C'mon, Willy.” She hoisted him into the back. She pulled herself up as easily as possums do.

Robbie, only fleetingly thrown off stride, said graciously, “You can still come with us, Charlie, but you'll have to sit in the middle, that's all. I always let Catherine have the other window.”

Catherine smiled her demure smile at Robbie. It was a smile that already made Charlie hold his breath. “Thank you, Robbie,” she said, her gaze resting on him until he looked at her and smiled in his gracious way. “But you can let Charlie. Mr Reilly, could I come back in the ute too, please? It's more fun.”

She took Charlie's breath away, her sheer delicate savagery, the smile, the look in her eyes; and he couldn't bear to have Robbie's feelings hurt. He wanted to offer tribute, he wanted to give himself in homage to Robbie who had shaken his hand and who had spoken to him as though he were another Grammar boy. He also wanted to be with Cat and Catherine and Willy.

Mr Reilly laughed, and Charlie saw his mouthful of yellow and uneven teeth. “Right you are, luv,” he said to Catherine, and picked her up and set her down next to Cat. She might have been a piece of dandelion fluff. “Not as posh as you look, little lady.” He nodded approvingly. Mr Reilly didn't have much time for posh.

Cat and Catherine sat on the dirty floor with Willy between them, their backs against the driver's cabin. Charlie wanted to join them, but he also wanted to please Robbie Gray.

“Utes are for girls and little kids,” Robbie said. “The Buick is for boys. We'll still let you come with us, Charlie.”

We'll still let you …

“Thank you, Robbie,” Charlie said.

Ah, and he felt important — more than that, he felt like an ambassador at the court of the emperors, sitting next to Robinson Gray who lived on Wilston Heights and went to Grammar. He could not deny that sinking into that pillowed back seat and fingering leather as soft as Willy's cheek filled him with wonder. He could not deny that he savoured the excitement on his parents' faces when the black car pulled up at the shop door, and he got out and went inside and said casually: “I got a ride home in Mr Gray's Buick. He lives on Wilston Heights.” He could not deny the thrill of feeling the power beneath him, of soaring down the hill (it felt like flying), of overtaking and gliding past every other car on Samford Road, on Kelvin Grove Road, on Newmarket Road. Oh, and he had to admit he was quite profoundly grateful that the boys on the corner just happened to be in the shop in full rude domineering flight over his parents when the black car stopped and he got out.

Nevertheless, when Robbie's father overtook Mr Reilly's leprous ute and Charlie stuck his head out the window and waved madly to the three in the back — the three who swayed together and laughed together and sang, their hair whipping about their heads like flags in a storm — he knew that was where he really wanted to be. And he knew from the moment he pulled himself back inside the Buick that Robbie Gray would rather have been there too.

It was Cat who made the difference, he thought. He and Catherine and Robbie Gray all wanted Cat to touch them with her wand. He thought Robbie Gray was baffled that the Buick did not exert a stronger magic. Robbie Gray gave him a look whose meaning he could not decipher.

“Very immature, isn't it?” Robbie Gray said. “The way they behave.”

Charlie swallowed. That was the elegant sort of way Grammar boys talked. He did want to agree with Robbie. Yes, he allowed, it was a bit immature.

At the shop, Robbie Gray shook hands with him. “See you again,” he said.

Something warm and rich stirred within Charlie. “Would you like to come in?” he offered. His mind raced across possible attractions he could offer. “My father can read the I
Ching,
” he said. “You throw three coins and he can tell you your future.”

Robbie hesitated. Charlie thought Robbie wanted to be liked. It was a miracle, but Robbie wanted to be liked by Charlie. He hesitated for a second, and Charlie always kept that second in his mind.

“Maybe some other time,” Robbie said.

But that second was there like a warm little seedling between them all summer, floating between them in the pool at the falls on weekends, germinating slowly in the car on the long rides home.

It was a pity, Charlie thought, that though it put forth a fragile green shoot, it never did come to bud.

4

Across the railway line there was a footbridge linking Wilston Heights with the humbler side of the tracks and it kept on showing up in Charlie's nightmares and photographs. Not only Charlie's. Once, after I got to know Catherine, after I began to follow in her footsteps, moving around the world with my own TV crew, we found ourselves collaborating on a documentary in London. In Willesden and Harlesden, to be precise. There was talk of Mole People, there were rumours of underground coils of settlement, there were whispers about the murky urban ravines along the Bakerloo line.

“There's the perfect place for the shot,” our cameraman said, pointing to the overhead footbridge with its steps down to the platform at Willesden Junction. “We'll get an aerial view of the station without comment, the faces on the platform will say it all, and we'll pan along the cobweb of lines from there.” Catherine nodded, but on the bridge she began to feel dizzy. She hung onto the railing and put her head down on her hands. She told the crew she thought she'd have to go home. “I must have picked up something in Asia,” she said.

Nightmares are infectious, I am certain of this. There are virulent strains which go on the rampage, which move around like the Hong Kong 'flu, which have no regard whatsoever for borders, which enter the genes, which cross generations and visit their harm on the sons of the fathers and the lovers of the sons, which possibly persist even unto the third and fourth generations.

I know the footbridge that is roughly halfway between Wilston and Newmarket stations. I know it because it was part of the riddle that swallowed up Gabriel. On the way out to his mother's pineapple farm at Samford we used to drive along Newmarket Road. We used to stop at a little grocery store, the kind that hardly exists anymore, and we would buy ice creams and then we would walk along the road to the footbridge and we would climb its zigzag steps and lean over the railings and watch the trains rushing beneath. We would lick our ice creams and talk. It was one of our rituals.

“It was a kind of habit with my father,” Gabriel said. “Whenever he came with us to the farm, he'd drive here with me — just with me, he never brought my mother here — and we'd stand on the bridge and watch the trains. I suppose I do it because it brings back that time before they split up. There was an old Chinese couple running the shop back then. They were always very obsequious toward my father, very pleased to see him, smiles all over.”

Gabriel would lean over and stare at the lines as though they were telegraph wires, as though if he looked at them long enough they would yield up some message. “I suppose we came here because the house Dad lived in when he was a kid was up on the hill there,” he said. “It was strange, though. I thought he was almost frightened of the trains, actually, but it was like an addiction. He'd get very agitated, or very excited in a strange sort of way when the trains came through. Did you know people can be addicted to their fears? I read about it somewhere. It's got something to do with endorphins.

“After we finished our ice creams, we used to cross over and walk up the hill past the old house. In the front yard next door, in a pen where people passing by could look at it, there was a huge tortoise that was supposed to be a hundred years old. 'A hundred and thirty now,' my father would say. It was supposed to be a hundred when he was a kid.”

“I wonder if it's still there,” I said. “We should go up and see.”

“I suppose that's why we came. Me and Dad. Nostalgia.”

But he would frown and stare at the rails as though something about the ritual puzzled him. There was a piece missing and he kept looking for it.

“It was a very strange state he got into. Looking back from here, I'd be tempted to say it was sexual excitement, but I suppose that's the adult twisting the child's memories. Reading something into them.”

There was something his father always said to him on the bridge, a rather pompous and formulaic thing it seemed to Gabriel now, part of the ritual of ice-creams-and-bridge. “The law is like railway lines, Gabriel, straight and true. The law protects the truth. What the law decides is truth.”

“I suppose,” Gabriel said, “it's the kind of thing fathers say to sons, especially when they've made up their minds their sons will study law. I suppose it doesn't mean anything.” But in fact, everything seemed cryptic to him, any platitude could have been a code, any cliché, looked at from the proper angle, might turn into gold.

“Of course,” he said, “it did leave an imprint. Straight and true, I've discovered, is exactly what the law is not.” Gabriel was already making a name for himself as a dropout from law, a legal maverick, a brumby, combing the city's underside, keeping a meticulous file on certain policemen and judges and politicians, hawking his investigative services
like a vulgar fishmonger
his father said (deep in his disappointed cups, full of grief). Gabriel's capacity for moral outrage seemed limitless.

“Your boyfriend's nuts, you know,” Sheba used to say. She couldn't figure him out. “He probably still believes in Santa Claus,” she said. “You'd better warn him,” she said. “He's gonna get himself killed if he doesn't watch out. He's making some of my best clients very angry. He doesn't understand the way the world works.”

“He's more like his father than he likes to think,” Gabriel's mother confided. “He gets a bee in his bonnet and he can't leave it alone. His father was a man of strange obsessions.” She put her hand on my arm. “Be very wary, Lucy, about a man who's obsessed. He has no space left for someone else.”

I said brightly: “Don't worry. I'm a congenital soloist anyway.” I laughed, but she didn't. She looked at me for so long, in such a sad kindly way, that I felt uneasy. “Look,” I said, jokey. “Don't worry about me. I don't bruise.”

“I hope it will be all right,” she said. “I hope neither of you will be hurt.”

“I'm unhurtable,” I said.

“I do know this, Lucy. I've discovered there isn't anything, there simply isn't anything, that you can't survive.”

She was moving among the orchids in her greenhouse, a tranquil woman, a woman one could imagine putting forth leaf and lateral root systems, attaching herself to the earth.

“Were you …? Did you and Gabriel's father …?” I stammered around, curious about the dislocations and scars in my lover's life, curious about the sudden absences, but unable to frame a question that might not cause pain.

“The years without my child,” she said quietly, “were like an amputation.” She was dividing the roots and nodes of two orchids, using a penknife and her fingers, patient, meticulous, never hurrying. When they came apart — I would never have had the patience myself — she packed them lovingly into two separate pots. “But what's past is past,” she said. “I couldn't ask for greater happiness than I have now. That is the thing I've learned,” she said. “You think you can never be happy again. But then you are.

“Some people,” she said, “seem to get it right the first time with marriage, but I think it must be a fluke. Sheer luck. You're too young to know what you're doing. Anyway, for us it was a mistake, that's all, and yet it brought me here, and it gave me Gabriel. I can't regret it.” She tamped the earth around her orchids with her fingers. “Poor Robbie,” she said. “He's such a
haunted
man. I think he'll be throttled by his own demons in the end, and yet, you know, I'd like him to find peace. I loved him once.”

“Why is he haunted?” I asked.

But she was concentrating on her orchids and didn't answer.

“Catherine,” I asked years later, on a London night when we were talking late, our tongues loosened by brandy, “is Robinson Gray haunted, would you say? Has he got demons on his back?”

“I don't know about haunted,” she said. “But I know about demons.”

“When we were kids,” she said, “there was this tortoise that was supposed to be a hundred years old.” She has her fingers hooked through the old front fence again, watching the armoured hump, apparently headless, move in its slow weird waltz across the lawn. Its head is tucked under its shell. It won't stick its head out when Robbie wants it to, and suddenly Robbie is red in the face and his eyes are a violent purple and he is smashing smashing smashing at the shell with a mallet and Catherine puts her hands over her ears and screams …

“Were you afraid of him?”

Catherine thought for a long silent time. “Not for myself,” she said. “Because he's afraid of me.”

“Who were you afraid for?”

“Lucy, don't ask me anything. I won't talk about it. I can't.”

They used to congregate at the bridge after school. Charlie could never quite remember the sequence of events that led to the railway game being a regular thing, or to its awful escalation, or to the bridge as the gathering point, and not just for the five children who had spent so much of the summer at Cedar Creek.

The railway game was simply there as a fullblown regular event, part of Grade 5.

What he did remember was his own obsession with the nature and varieties of power. That was mainly what he watched in those years — the workings of power, its instinctive groupings and alliances, its varieties, the people who were polite to his parents and the people who were rude to them — and that was what he pondered afterwards, alone in the sleepout at the back of the shop, staring out through the louvres at the mango tree and the stars.

There was Cat's kind of power, which came from not caring if you got hurt and not caring what people thought of you. Which came first? he wondered. Cat's not caring? or her knowledge that for people like herself there was no point whatsoever in caring? In its way, Cat's power was absolute; and yet people with a different sort of power (teachers, for example; or the kind of people who lived up on Wilston Heights; but also the boys on the corner whose power was simple brute strength), those people despised the kind of power that Cat had, they snapped their fingers at it, they did not acknowledge that it was any kind of power at all. And yet, it seemed to Charlie, they were also afraid of her power. They ignored it because it made them uneasy, because it didn't acknowledge
their
kind of power.

Not that Cat gave a fig about whether they acknowledged it or not. But Charlie minded, and Catherine minded too, and in both, the increasingly frequent revelations of discrepancy between Cat's power and other kinds of power gave rise to a terrible intensity that was partly composed of euphoria and partly of fear. It was as though they could both smell tumult coming, it was as though Cat stank of something that was either cataclysm or omnipotence and they knew it. Charlie knew that Catherine knew, and she knew that he did, and they shared this fevered excitement-and-anxiety, and the unexpressed shared secret bound them in a telegraphy of quick exchanged looks in the classroom and on the long walk home from Wilston School over Wilston Heights and on the footbridge.

In the classroom they both suffered for Cat constantly, though she herself gave no sign of being bothered in the least. The classroom was high comic drama for Cat. When she was made to read aloud from the Grade 5 Reader, which she was made to do every day, her halting mumble and long pauses and mispronounced words were painful to hear. Hopeless, Miss Oswell said. Cat clowned about her hopelessness. Cat would, in her ignorant way, sometimes substitute shocking and forbidden words for others which bore only a slight resemblance. The class would guffaw, a sound like a pressure cooker letting off steam.

“What else can we expect?” Miss Oswell would ask the air. “Water finds its own level and guttersnipes find the gutter.”

Catherine found herself fantasising that Miss Oswell would fall down the steps and be killed, or that a car would hit her and she would be paralysed and would send a letter of apology to Cat from her hospital bed. Catherine was frightened by this violence inside her mind; all the more so since Miss Oswell invariably treated Catherine with the greatest affection and respect. Often Miss Oswell would ask Catherine to stay behind and help her with the stacking of school readers in the press or the filling of inkwells. She would stroke Catherine's long fair hair and say: “You must brush it, you know. Let me brush it for you.” And she would take a hairbrush out of her desk drawer and Catherine would look stonily out the window while Miss Oswell drew the brush through her hair. Catherine could see Cat and Charlie dawdling along the road, still separate but gradually approaching each other the way railway lines, when you follow them into the distance with your eyes from an overhead bridge, eventually touch. They were waiting for her, and she wanted to be with them.

“It does credit to you, Catherine,” Miss Oswell said, “to show pity on the Reilly girl.”

Catherine closed her eyes. Cat and Charlie would be in the big dip of Wilston Road by now, taking the shortcut through the spare lot where the wattles were in bloom.

“But It's wasted, I'm afraid,” Miss Oswell said. “She's a bit of a sewer rat, I'm afraid. She'll drag you down. As for schoolwork, she's hopeless, you know, and you'll win a scholarship to university.”

Miss Oswell always required the class to laugh about Cat's hopelessness, which the class readily did with the most boisterous relief. Catherine and Charlie never laughed. They never even smiled during obligatory Rat-on-Cat time. (This was Catherine's term and it startled Charlie, but he noted it as further evidence of Catherine's unexpected way with a knife.)

“The guttersnipe strikes again,” Miss Oswell would say, and the class would laugh.

“Now if only everyone could read as well as Catherine,” she would say. Or: “If only everyone could do mental arithmetic as well as Charlie.”

Both Catherine and Charlie began, during that Grade 5 year, to feel ashamed of the ease with which they excelled, to feel there was something dirty and disloyal and even obscene about it.