The Last Magician (21 page)

(“Do you know,” Catherine said to me in a dazed voice in London on one of our drinking nights, “when I think back, I realise that schooling in Queensland in the fifties and sixties was still as bad as anything in Dickens. It scarred all of us. It scarred us even if we were teacher's darlings.”

“Do you know,” I said to her drunkenly, “that if you put two Queenslanders together anywhere in the world, you get a cabal. Once Charlie and I were talking in the bar at the Inferno and some visitor from Melbourne says: Oh God, not two Queens-landers, get me outta here. God's chosen idiots, he says. I upended his glass on his head.”

“If any of that smug, self-righteous, tepid, supercilious lot from Melbourne or Sydney starts Queensland-bashing,” Catherine said, “that's it. They're off my list.”

And we laughed till we cried.

“You should have had Miss Oswell in Grade 5,” she said. “Or Mr Brady in Grade 7.”

“I did,” I said. “They had different names, that's all.”

And we laughed till we cried again. We laughed till we made ourselves sick.)

Though she herself did not administer the cane, Miss Oswell was a frequent sender of boys to the headmaster's office for any talking in class, any horseplay, any look that could be construed as “cheeky". Two or three times a day, boys would depart and return, sometimes pressing their lips hard together for it was obligatory to be nonchalant and to signal to the class, during the first moment that Miss Oswell turned to write on the board, the number of cuts received: two, three or six. For mysterious reasons these were the unchanging coordinates of punishment, with six cuts the most favoured dose.

For small misdemeanours, such as a mistake in spelling, an error in tables, the capital of Western Australia not known, the products of the Atherton Tableland not memorised, Miss Oswell herself would administer a thump on the shoulder or a quick whack of the ruler across the palm. These latter were the punishments meted out to girls at all times, both for the aforementioned major crimes (talking, horseplay, cheeky looks), and for the further, and apparently exclusively female, felony of sulking. “I cannot abide sulking,” Miss Oswell said. So strongly could she not abide it that it was quite possible for a girl, looking as though she were on the point of tears from a shoulder thump, to receive a second thump for sulking.

It was not surprising, Catherine and Charlie thought, that Cat came to school infrequently, rarely more than three days in five, because when she did come Miss Oswell devoted a considerable amount of her considerable malevolent energy toward making certain that Cat hated being there.

“Do I smell something?” Miss Oswell would ask when Cat arrived, sniffing the air with delicate distaste. “Do we have someone in the class who didn't have a bath last night?”

“But I did have a bath, Miss Oswell,” impetuous Cat could never learn not to say.

“Don't be cheeky to me, my girl.” Miss Oswell would raise her eyebrows and look heavenward as though she could never quite believe the extent of Cat's insolence. On cue, the class would laugh. “What is the rule in this class?” Miss Oswell would ask.

Speak when you're spoken to
, the class would chant.

“Precisely,” Miss Oswell would say. “Come here, Cat Reilly. Hold out your hand.”

Cat collected many red stripes across her palm and she would wink at the class as she sat down. She had a devastating way of mimicking Miss Oswell when the teacher's back was turned, and the class would grin and press its lips together in silent glee. “Do I detect horseplay?” Miss Oswell would demand, whirling. Cat would be still as a statue, the class frozen in solemnity.

Once, however, Ross Johnson spluttered audibly with laughter and Miss Oswell whirled and pointed and said with magnificent rage: “To the office with you, my boy.”

“I'll go, Miss Oswell,” Cat said. “I made him laugh.”

Ross Johnson paused.

“So we have a namby-pamby little mummy's boy who wants a girl to take his cuts for him, do we?”

“No, Miss Oswell,” Ross Johnson said, his eyes flashing. He left the room.

“And tell the headmaster I said six of the best,” Miss Oswell called after him. “As for you, my girl, come here.”

There was something about her tone that made the class, inured though it was to the wraths and ragings of Miss Oswell, take a collective swallow and hold its breath.

“Hold out your hand,” Miss Oswell said.

Cat obediently extended her arm, palm upwards, and looked Miss Oswell in the eye, her face carefully blank of expression.

“Don't give me that cheeky look, you bold girl,” Miss Oswell said. The ruler descended, side on. This, everyone knew, was forbidden. It was required that girls be disciplined with the flat of the ruler. Cat flinched, and looked with surprised eyes at the sharp red line across her hand. The ruler descended again. And then again.

Catherine looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked back, but what could they do? From desk to desk, furtive glances were exchanged. It was rumoured that a rule existed about hitting girls: if a teacher did it more than twice, one's parents could report the teacher to the Board of Education. There had been a celebrated case involving a Grade 7 teacher. It could be safely assumed, however, that Miss Oswell was not too worried about the parents of Cat. It was clear to the hushed class that Miss Oswell had crossed some line and was possessed by passions which were galloping without any reins.

On the sixth stroke of the ruler, something happened, and what happened would live in school legend. On the sixth fall of the side-on ruler, Cat closed her palm around it and took it. Miss Oswell was totally unprepared. Thrown off stroke, she opened her mouth and her mouth seemed to hang there in front of the class in a large silent O as though whatever sound Miss Oswell intended to make stuck in her throat. She simply stood there, and it began to occur to the class that she looked distinctly foolish, though no one was stupid enough to smile. Cat returned to her seat and placed the ruler neatly along the top of her desk.

Miss Oswell's voice, almost unrecognisable, came back to her. It was like a mute placed in a trumpet. “Leave the room,” she said.

Cat did.

She didn't come back for a week.

When she did come back, it was as though the incident had never occurred, as though she and Miss Oswell had agreed to wipe it from the book of memory But there was a change, and it could not go unnoticed by the class. From this point on, Cat was invisible, and the change seemed to disturb Cat as much as anyone. No matter what Cat did, no matter how rowdy or impossible she was, no matter how many tables she got wrong, no matter how badly she read, no matter how her mimicry stirred the class to spluttering mirth, Miss Oswell ignored her. She might as well not have been there. At first Charlie and Catherine were immensely relieved, but there was something eerie about the change. They both noted that this eeriness seemed to affect Cat. She seemed to get wilder. There was an almost desperate edge to her recklessness.

All this, it seemed to Charlie, was part of Cat's power and part of the mystery of its potency and of its impotence. All this came with her every day to the footbridge and to the cutting beside the railway line.

On the footbridge over the railway line, what fascinated Charlie were the unexpected alliances. He thought he could remember a time when just the five of them — Cat and Catherine and Willy and Robbie Gray and himself — used to gather there. He and Cat and Catherine, officially strangers at school, would converge somewhere along Wilston Road, they would walk home together over the hill, past Catherine's place, past Robbie's place, past the ancient tortoise which was said to be a hundred years old. They would wait on the bridge. Sometimes Catherine came late; sometimes she had to stay and help Miss Oswell put the books in the press. Cat always went home for Willy and came back; and on the days when she didn't bother to go to school, she and Willy waited on the bridge. Robbie Gray would join them. In the beginning, Charlie was fairly sure, Robbie Gray would come alone, after he got the tram home from Grammar and walked from the tram stop toward Wilston Heights. Charlie could never pinpoint a time when the boys on the corner also showed up on the bridge as a regular thing (he always thought of the boys that way, long after they stopped molesting him on the corner nearest his parents' shop). The boys on the corner — there were three of them — went to Wilston School but they were bigger and older. They were the same age as Robbie and were in Grade 8. He never knew their names, or if he did the names disappeared behind their boys-on-the-corner masks. He had trouble remembering their faces. In his nightmares, they had long hairy arms and deep eye sockets and large black jaws like apes. When he put them in a photograph, they held gorilla masks in front of their faces. And somewhere early on there was another boy from Grammar, older than Robbie and the boys on the corner, someone else who lived up on Wilston Heights. Charlie must have known his name, Catherine knew him, but he remained an extra, a walk-on part, in recollection.

Here was the puzzle: the boys on the corner hated Grammar School types, but not as much as they despised girls and wogs. Charlie knew that Robbie was caught in the middle and felt sorry for him. He thought Robbie must feel the way he and Catherine did when the class laughed at Cat.

He supposed there was a progression of events. Certainly he knew that the older boy from Grammar and the Wilston boys hated Cat's reckless way with the railway game, and that Robbie felt somehow aligned with it, felt a sort of possessive pride, rather as though he were the circus trainer and Cat his clever performing seal. Robbie was proud of her, Robbie boasted about her, and whatever Robbie boasted about, Cat would do.

Charlie thought there were strange sorts of pride around the way the game developed: Cat's pride, and Robbie's pride, and certainly the determination of Catherine and himself not to be found wanting. He was sure the game was Robbie's suggestion, though the other boy from Grammar, older than Robbie, a senior whom Robbie clearly admired, was in charge. What puzzled Charlie and absorbed all his attention was the way the Grammar boys and the Wilston boys automatically clubbed together and declared themselves ringmasters, and what bothered and disturbed him afterwards (for the rest of his life, in fact) was the way he and Cat and Catherine consented to the circus act. Willy, of course, made no decisions at all. Pliant Willy loved everyone and smiled and sang his Mr Wolf song, and Cat and Catherine and Charlie, and sometimes Robbie too (when the other boys weren't around) bestowed hugs and kisses on him constantly. The Wilston boys and the Grammar boy paid no attention to Willy at all.

Charlie knew that, for himself, the decision to lie on the rails was made by his body. He remembered that his body stored the knowledge of earlier encounters with the boys on the corner, and that lying in front of an approaching train seemed the lesser of unpleasant options, especially after you had done it once or twice and learned there was nothing to it. It seemed, also, a small way of thumbing his nose at the boys on the corner. He could frighten them. There was something about his body lying on the tracks that pulled their punches and stilled their kicks. He was buying a kind of safety, but he also sensed this: the more untouchable he became, the more they hated him.

He did learn that danger was addictive. As he and Catherine lay beside Cat on the sleepers, their heads against one steel rail, their feet on the other, he learned how quickly one learns to feel nothing. They were not allowed to get up until the boys said they could, until Robbie and the Grammar boy and the boys on the corner said
Now.
And then he and Catherine vaulted up like corks from champagne bottles, neat as flies evading a swatter, but Cat always waited. She always waited till the boys were nearly wetting their pants with fright. The engine would be past the bridge and she would stretch and sit up as though she were waking from a nap.

The boys were furious. You wait too long, they said. The driver will see you and we'll all get into heck.

But the train never stopped, and Cat waited longer, and the boys cheered and berated her with a strange kind of intensity.

Charlie and Catherine began to taste Cat's power. You could
frighten
the ringmasters, they learned. The longer you waited, the more you saw your power in the cold sweat on the ringmaster's brow. But Charlie and Catherine tempered that power with the knowledge of oncoming pistons and wheels. Cat, Charlie thought, was indifferent to them. Was it because she trusted her own reflexes the way a possum does? Or was she drunk on her own kind of powerless power? Did she think she was omnipotent?

Afterwards, Robbie would act as though the triumph were his. “I told you,” he would say. “I told you she doesn't know the meaning of fear.”

The trouble with Cat's kind of power, Charlie saw, is that there are people who develop a passion to break it. And the trouble with people like Cat is that they always have some point where they are vulnerable, and the ringmasters have a sixth sense for sniffing it out.

Cat's vulnerable point was Willy.

Charlie could not remember (and if Catherine did, she would never speak of it to me) why, on the particular day the railway game was played for the last time, he and Catherine were still on the bridge instead of down in the cutting. Perhaps they had stopped at Catherine's place on the way; perhaps Miss Oswell had brushed Catherine's hair longer than usual, and Charlie had waited for her. Whatever the reason, they felt responsible.

It could not have happened if I'd been there on time, Charlie said, because I would have held Willy. I wouldn't have cared what they did to me, they could have punched and kicked all they pleased, I would never have let them take Willy.

Catherine thought: I should have stopped it earlier. I knew something was going to happen, I could smell it. I could smell it on Robbie. It was like the time he tried to smash the tortoise, the same kind of smell. I knew Robbie's fear of the boys on the corner, I knew his desire to please that Grammar School senior was making him crazy. I knew he was terrified they'd make him lie on the rails. I knew it. It was like Miss Oswell hitting Cat that day. You know something has snapped. You feel sorry for them in a way, for people like Miss Oswell and Robbie. You know you should do something, but you can't think what to do. They are like springs that wind themselves tighter and tighter and tighter and you close your eyes, waiting, because you can't bear to watch, because you know if you beg them to stop, they'll ignore you.