The Last Magician (25 page)

Charlie feels something like nausea. He feels unclean. He feels that he has become one of the boys on the corner. He knows the glances, the raised eyebrows, the quietly polite comments and their snide subtexts that will wing their way around the dingy cluttered confines of his parents' shop. He knows how friendly and obsequious his parents will be. He feels the thoughtless good humour of Robbie Gray like a constriction in his chest. A strong undertow of intuition tells him that this thoughtless good humour is in fact malice, but as usual there seems too much evidence to the contrary. What would be the point of the malice? And if Robbie felt malice, why would he bother to confer the golden benefits of his endorsement on Charlie in the first place?

Mr Chang is at the counter and when the four boys enter he registers first amazement and then radiant joy. He calls excitedly to his wife who is in the rooms behind the shop. “Charlie has brought some of his friends to visit us,” he calls.

Charlie can feel rather than see the repressed smiles of the debating team. He feels in equal measure a rush of embarrassment and a rush of fierce protectiveness. Not one of you, he wants to say hotly to the boys, deserves to polish my father's shoes.

But the debating team takes its cues from Robbie Gray, and Robbie is the essence of courtesy. “Delighted to see you again, Mr Chang.” Robbie's voice is as pleasing as caramel. He extends his hand as gentlemen of substance do, and Mr Chang, enchanted, takes it warmly in both of his and bows over it, smiling and smiling. He calls to his wife again.

When she comes into the shop, Charlie can tell instantly from the turbulent mix of pleasure and anxiety on her face that the visit at this particular moment is disturbing. Her actions are those of someone forestalling danger. They are camouflage actions designed to deflect entry into the shop. She comes out from behind the counter, she comes toward Charlie to embrace him, she is instinctively shepherding the visitors toward the door. Images rush through Charlie's mind, a riff of snapshots from the past: if she had not finished preparing accounts when the tax inspector came, if she did not have the cash in hand when the city rates-collector came, if she were not properly dressed when an important visitor arrived, she gave off that same charged aura of disturbance.

“G'day, Mum,” Charlie says quietly, greeting her in front of those boys who register everything, who store everything as fodder for future witticisms, exposing himself and his mother, putting his hands on her shoulders and giving her a quick kiss.

“Oh Charlie,” she says softly, a barely perceptible tremor in her voice. She manages to encode a whole treatise into the two words.

Robbie Gray, standing between Charlie and his father at the counter, watches with intense and apparently benign interest.

“Right, Mum, good to see you too,” Charlie says lightly. His eyes say: Message received. I'll stay behind and you can tell me what it is.

But what it is abruptly makes itself manifest.

Because of where he is standing, Charlie sees simultaneously the faces of two principals in a drama. Robbie is watching him. Behind Robbie's head, in the doorway which leads to the back of the shop, an opening flimsily covered with a bead curtain, a figure appears.

It is, of course, so startling and so overwhelming for Charlie to see Cat with almost-shaven head standing there, that he is transfixed. And naturally Robbie turns to see where the fireworks are.

Which means that Charlie has an uncensored, unmediated view of Robbie's reaction. It is as though Robbie has been hit by a pellet from a gun. It is as though some powerful vacuum cleaner has sucked all the blood and all the colour from his body in one split second. It is as though invisible pincers have taken him by the head and by the feet and put him into the machine which shakes up oil paint in hardware stores.

Then, whitefaced, trembling, apparently blind, he bolts.

He rushes out of the shop, they hear the car door slam, the Buick drives off.

Charlie never does learn what face-saving explanations Robbie gives to the rest of the debating team. He doesn't care. He feels as though the pain of a bleeding ulcer has been momentarily staunched for the first time in years. Pouf! It is as though a magician has waved a wand. He realises that he has become so used to a certain kind of ache that he cannot remember not having it. Now, for a moment, it has vanished. The difference is immense.

But Cat has vanished too. She is not in the back of the shop, she is not at the mango tree. When he pelts down the street to her old house, he thinks he sees her on the veranda and he crashes through the hole in the fence, through the waist-high grass, sobbing, calling to her.

He hears police sirens. A car pulls up at the gate and Charlie leaps over the side railing of the veranda and races along the backs of the houses to the shop. He has a mad hope that she will be waiting in the sleep out for him, or up in the mango tree, but she is not.

“Who called the police?” he asks his parents.

Ah who?

The
Courier-Mail
said she eluded capture for two days.

A pernicious and total lack of respect for authority, the police said. The way she clawed them upon recapture, more like an animal than a young woman. Beyond reform, they said.

Triage

School magazine photograph. Two debating teams. In school blazers, side by side in front row, the two captains, one with prefect's crest on pocket. Night of the intramural debate.

Topic: TRIAGE — that in times of crisis or natural disaster, it is legitimate, in the interests of a stable society (whether macro or micro) and for the greater good of the majority, for the authorities to establish a system of priorities; that is, it is legitimate to ask,
If all cannot be saved, who then should be saved?

Team arguing in affirmative captained by Robinson Gray.

Team arguing in opposition captained by Charles Chang.

Statement of Headmaster acting as judge: Though both teams advanced powerful and well-argued cases, reason wins over passion. Successfully argued by Robinson Gray that the ability to be intelligently “cruel” when the occasion demands is the hallmark of enduring civilisations. Award given to affirmative team.

Lost and Found

This photograph, taken in a bathhouse or in the locker room of some school swimming pool, shows two adolescent boys, naked, their backs to the camera, towelling themselves. Their school uniforms hang from pegs on the wall. Small duffle bags are visible near their feet, tucked under the wooden bench that presumably runs the length of the room.

The title of this photograph, printed neatly on the back, would not make sense except for something Charlie once told me.

I always had to remember, he said, at Grammar, to take off the chain with Cat's earrings before swimming lessons. (These were compulsory, twice a week.) You know what would happen to a boy seen with a necklace on, he said.

But he hated to take the chain off. He had such primitive, intense, superstitious feelings about Cat's earrings. He needed to feel them against his skin. So he used to wait until he got into the locker room, and then he would remove the chain quickly and surreptitiously, before he took off his shirt. He used to slip the chain into the pocket of his pants and then remove the pants and hang them on the peg.

Once he forgot.

He was in his swimsuit, under the obligatory shower, about to walk outside to the pool.

“Hey Chang, you sissy!” someone yelled. “Is that from your girlfriend or your mummy?”

Charlie felt instant fever. He turned to face them, stepping out from the shower. “It was a dare,” he said lightly, his survivor's instincts racing. “I had to keep it on till someone noticed. Thought you were all bloody blind.”

But he saw the way Robbie, very close to him, stared at the gold rings and their tiny blue beads. He thought Robbie was going to strike him. He saw that mad red-eyed look come and go, the look he associated with Cat's veranda and spiders and shit.

Robbie turned away. “Wouldn't have picked Chang for a queer,” he said.

Everyone laughed.

Charlie yanked the chain from his neck, breaking it, and walked back up the locker room and stuffed his shameful bit of Woolworths jewellery into his duffle bag.

He didn't dare look at it after the swimming lesson, but at the end of the day, when he got home, it was gone.

He felt so ill, he was unable to sleep. He crept from the sleepout and spent the night sitting under the mango tree, his back against the spot on the tree trunk where Cat had leaned on that long gone night.

Two days later, after the next swimming lesson, the chain and its earrings reappeared in his duffle bag.

After that, he was more careful. On swimming days, he left the chain at home in his underwear drawer.

The Black Pussycat

Snapshot of sleazy nightclub in lower George Street in Brisbane, a notorious place of ill repute. To call a spade a spade, it was a cathouse.

Ah, how legends billow from the photograph.

Once upon a time a woman of enchantments walked the catwalks of the night. When she moved, men swayed as the grass sways for the wind. She wore seven veils of silence and perhaps for that very reason, by some instinctive urge toward balance, men were particularly noisy when she appeared — though the sounds they made were not the sounds of rational discourse.

Was she beautiful? This was passing strange. All the evidence indicates that she was very far indeed from being beautiful. She was not even pretty. In fact, patrons would say in a puzzled kind of way, if you had to find a single word, ugly would be closer to the mark. There was something scrawny about her, something that made you think of an alley cat, something quite remote from beauty, something feral and sinuous, something that stretched itself toward you, green eyes glittering, until your skin began to catch fire and your body began to purr and you began to smell the sharp primitive musk of your underwear and your secret desires. You began to want her, you began to feel convinced that she was keeper of some powerful secret, you believed she was luring you, compelling you, you began to move toward her as Cat's move, motion flowing like a slow spill of perfumed oil from brain to nerve.

Yes, she was quite ugly really. She had short spiky hair, feral eyes, hollowed cheeks, small breasts, the body of a wild underfed boy. She looked frail and tiny but she was a wafer of dynamite and she held men in thrall. Under the enchantment of her Circe eye, they were turned into swine and they certainly behaved like pigs. Though she was under a curse of silence, it was rumoured that her tongue could speak the whole of the Kama Sutra and every item in the Kinsey Report. Men had wet dreams and blew a week's wages on a tonguelashing from the witch at the Pussycat.

Did she dance? Ah, when she danced, men saw fire as they had seen it the first time, when Prometheus filched it from the gods. It flickered with defiance and pain, it tantalised, it licked at their hopes.

She lived by theft and by enchantment, it was said. At night, you might see her moving like a possum from roof to roof, a cat burglar against the moon. She would slide noiselessly through the openings in your house and make off with your valuables and set up camp in your sleep. Once her eyes fell upon you, you were marked. You would never be free. You would feel compelled to put your sign on her, oh and men did, they felt challenged. You cannot make her cry out in pain, it was said, and there were those who went to unusual lengths to verify the truth of this claim. Who could resist?

Yes, she was certainly ugly. There were many scars on her arms and legs and on other more intimate stretches of her skin: cigarette burns, razor blade scars, the marks of whips. Some of the slashes she had administered to herself with rusty razor blades or broken beer bottle necks.

“You do it when you need to scream but you can't,” another self-slasher from the Holy Family School for Little Wanderers told
Truth
. “It doesn't hurt when you're doin' it. You don't feel nothin'. You don't notice it. You're just tryin' to cut away all this other pain, see? It's like pus, and you're tryin' to let it
out.
”

This is the kind of sensational thing the tabloid newspapers print. It's in very bad taste. Respectable people avert their eyes, and rightly so. Let us return to modesty and social decorum, they say, for these are the proper hallmarks of our time, and of civilisation, that delicate flowering tree. Let us return to lapdogs, let us examine the
Angst
of the dinner party, the distressing intimations of the tap-tap-tapping of the quarry's tunnels beneath mahogany sideboards and against the undersides of pillowcases of pure combed cotton, handkerchief-fine; let us consider the disturbance of a shiver passing through the frail stemmed crystal, the exquisite prose of lamentation for the falling off in the quality of wines. These are the modest details of our lives — of the lives that count — and therefore let us read only of such matters, let us have a literature that is unassertive, limpid, economical, and lean. Let those with gothic taste and vulgar memories keep a proper silence, please.

And rightly so.

The woman of the catwalks, the alley cat dancer, is not the stuff of literature. There is something far too excessive about her. Let her keep silence. Let those who would speak of her silence keep silence too.

Let us turn instead to those who discuss Chekhov and Irigaray over wine.

For Cat was ugly and vulgar and absolutely non-literary, and ideologically she was definitely unsound.

She was a dangerous woman, but a challenge. How men loved it, how intoxicated they became, when she silently fought and scratched. On dirty beds, they wrestled with their turbulent fantasies, they dreamed of belling the cat, they had visions of breaking the unbroken colt and taming the shrew.

This is the sort of trashy fantasy that is reported in tabloid newspapers.

Odysseus on the Island of Circe