The Last Magician (28 page)

“The photograph you wouldn't look at,” he said. “It's a cathouse in the quarry. Gabriel and I have been going there.”

He could feel her whole body go tight in his arms. He trailed his fingers over her breasts and belly and rested his hand between her legs until she softened again. She said: “I feel responsible for Gabriel. For his
existence,
I mean.”

“Why did you ask Robbie to your party?”

“You can't not ask the boy next door to your twenty-first.”

“And Cat?”

“She must have seen my parents' announcement in the paper. They gave the
Courier-Mail
my graduation picture.”

“You see, she watches. She sends signals. That's what she's doing now.”

“Unless Robbie told her about the party,” she said.

“Yes,” he sighed. “Well.” They did ignore each other excessively that night, he recalled.

Catherine ran an index finger around Charlie's lips and across his chin and the curve of his neck, and down the line of his sternum. She was remembering that moment at her party when the three of them, incredulous but euphoric, stood embracing each other in full view of fifty guests. She could smell Cat's musk again, that wave of cheap perfume (it was like entering pungent fog), she can smell it now, she can feel the stubble of Cat's hair against her cheek, she can feel the hum that always came off Cat's body, she can feel Charlie fitting like a matching puzzle-piece against her right side. She feels weak with desire. She begins to cry.

“What's in the photograph?” she asks.

But Charlie was still in the past. “Can you remember leaving the party?”

“No. Can you?”

“No. Who suggested it?”

“No one did. It just … My parents were furious the next day,” she remembered. “Disappearing from my own party like that. But we were just there,” she said.

They were simply there at Cedar Creek again, in the pool beside the two boulders, the moon shredded by the forest canopy, flakes of it white on the water, their naked limbs drifting like ghostly weed.

“We shouldn't have taken her back to The Black Pussycat,” Catherine said. “I should've made her stay at my place.”

“She wouldn't have. You know that.”

“Yes. No. Do we know it? Do we know it for sure?”

Charlie thought of himself as a child beneath the mango tree, bloodied earrings in his hand, howling like a dingo for Cat. “I think” he said, “that she was terrified of pushing trust in us too far. If
that
went too … I think that's the explanation.”

“But why did it happen, all that mayhem? That very night,
why
?”

He could smell them, he could feel their bodies, Cat's and Catherine's, how wet they were (they had no towels at Cedar Creek; wet and shining and reckless, they had pulled their ludicrous formal clothes back on, laughing, shivering a little, sopping wet), he could hear them squelching in their shoes, he could feel them dripping onto the car seat, sticking wetly to the leather, he can see them fogging up the glass …

The three of them are damp and steaming in the car, Charlie driving, Cat in the middle. She never speaks, but her body gives off a high-intensity hum of happiness. So it seems to them. We were planning to go away, they tell her, Catherine to London and Charlie to New York, but now perhaps …

Cat is part of them. They are whole again. They speak of hopes and Cat listens. They can feel her hot damp body against theirs. Cat reaches toward Charlie's wet unbuttoned shirt and touches the gold chain and the earrings with her index finger. The car bucks, Charlie brakes, and swerves, but keeps going. He wants to laugh and cry and sing and never let either of them go. Without thinking about it, he drives to Chang's Grocers & Greengrocers on Newmarket Road.

But Cat will not get out of the car. She shakes her head.

“Will you come back to my place, Cat?” Catherine asks.

Cat shakes her head. Charlie and Catherine exchange looks. He starts the car.

Outside The Black Pussycat, Catherine says: “Cat,
why
? Why won't you come home with me? We've got a spare bed on the veranda.”

Cat neither nods nor shakes her head. Perhaps she feels the undertow of something inexorable, the kind of thing that pulled the Sylkie back to the sea at dawn, the kind of thing that made Psyche's lover vanish when she looked at him. She reaches across Catherine and opens the car door. “Please, Cat,” Catherine begs. “Can we see you more often? We
miss
you.”

Cat walks into The Black Pussycat without looking back.

“There must have been a connection,” Catherine said to Charlie over twenty-five years later. “Between us and the aftermath. But it doesn't make sense.”

“Unless it had something to do with Robbie.”

“Yes,” Catherine said. “But it still doesn't make sense.”

But then, Charlie thought, what
would
make sense in Cat's life? Does muteness tend toward explosion? Do all the unspoken words build up pressure and blow their container? Does love weaken the armour in devastating and near-fatal ways? Perhaps Cedar Creek washed the anaesthetic off and the pain was unbearable and Cat had to cut it away. Perhaps, in spite of everything, she missed Robbie at the pool. Perhaps she had to cut Robbie's absence away. Who knew?

In the debris of barroom brawl, broken beer bottles, slashings and stabbings, chaos, police sirens, arrests, who could trace a pattern that made sense? Some witnesses said she slashed at customers, others that she slashed herself. Certainly blood flowed on both sides, and nobody could remember how it began. Would a year in jail have been any more senseless to Cat than the years in reform school? Would it have made much difference to her one way or the other?

At least she'll be safe there, Charlie and Catherine, knowing nothing of the inside of prisons, told each other after seeing the papers the next day

But she had already disappeared when they went back to The Black Pussycat. She had jumped bail, she was on the run, there were rumours that she was heading for Sydney, they would pick her up in time, never fear.

“I'm going to London,” Catherine had said. “I want amnesia.”

And Charlie said: “I'll come with you.”

“No.”

New York then. It didn't much matter where.

“She did serve that time, you know,” Charlie murmured into the warm hollow between Catherine's breasts more than twenty-five years later. “She was caught in Sydney, and she did time. Then she worked out of one of those old hotels in New Farm, The Empire. She was still in Brisbane in '69. Gabriel saw her on a tram, well you know that, he gave you the third degree too. I've checked, via contacts, at The Empire. They said she just disappeared one day, per usual; right about the time Gabriel saw her on the tram. Took off to Sydney again, the rumour was. The quarry, they reckoned. So it fits.”

“What fits?”

“The Shaky Landing, the photograph, it's her,” Charlie said. “You can only see part of her face, but It's her. She just needs to
know,
that's what I think. That's why she came to your twenty-first. She just needed to know we still … And now she's sending out signals.”

“I don't know,” Catherine said.

“Look, I'll show you.”

She studied the photograph for a long time.

“Well,” he prompted. “It is, isn't it? Don't you think so?”

“I don't know,” she sighed. “I
want
it to be her. But I know what lifespans in the quarry are, I've done too many documentaries …”

“It's her,” Charlie insisted. He had spent so much time with her, with both of them, they were both so hugely and constantly present inside his head.

Catherine hugged herself and shivered. “Sometimes in London I'd dream. We'd be swimming at the falls and she'd call me, and I'd wake and my heart would be hammering so much I could hardly breathe. She'd be caught in the whirlpool like someone going down a plughole in a sink, and I couldn't reach her in time, and she'd be struggling, she'd never give up …”

“She'll never give up,” Charlie said. “We can count on that.”

And
the decayed willow may still produce flowers,
he thought.

So the
ta kwo
hexagram said.

“I want it to be her,” Catherine sighed.

“It
is
her.” Charlie unfastened the thin gold chain around his neck and dangled Cat's earrings before Catherine's eyes. He trailed them across her lips. She licked them with the tip of her tongue. “She's coming back for her earrings,” Charlie promised. “She knows we're here.”

Catherine sucked at the little gold hoops and felt the smooth nub of the glass beads with her tongue. The hoops had an empty metallic taste. She fastened them, wet with saliva, round Charlie's neck again. She wished she could believe him. She feared that grief and desire played terrible tricks with hope.

They sat at a corner table in The Shaky Landing: Charlie and Catherine and Gabriel, and I was there too. With Catherine was a soundman and a cameraman. No one could think, let alone talk. The music was like a heart beat, it throbbed inside the skin, it filled the cranium the way pealing bells fill their tower, it deafened, it exhausted, it was meant to be taken with various white powdered substances. Catherine put her mouth against Charlie's ear and shouted: “I can't tolerate this for very long.”

Lights in hot shredded purples and primary reds bounced across the skin like meteors. Auras buzzed about every head, migraines as large as dinosaurs flicked their languid tails and stirred their limbs and sent warning volleys of pain across eyeballs and temples and into the soft vulnerable cortices at the napes of necks. In the weird and constantly shifting light, bodies glowed green and magenta, they purred like leopards with lurid spots. They were distorted, elongated, flattened, turned fluid; they seemed to float as though the whole place were underwater.

A waiter dressed in black leather, whose hair resembled steel wool to which electric prods had been applied, brought a tray with jug and glasses to the table. In the light, the beer looked green.

Charlie showed the waiter a photograph and pointed to the woman partially visible in the mirror. Against the din, he mimed inquiry. The waiter fluttered eyelids shadowed with kohl and shrugged indifference.

Charlie shouted: “Could we talk to the manager, please?”

The waiter shrugged again and drifted into a shaft of purple light and purple noise and disappeared. We drank green beer and tried to think thoughts in whatever colour thoughts would come, but it was difficult to think at all.

Catherine put her lips against Charlie's ear and shouted again: “I can't take this. I'll have to leave.”

And as though her wish burgeoned into monstrous form, two bouncers in black leather pants and black muscle-shirts, with biceps like the ropes on an ocean-going ship, appeared at the table with clear and unfriendly intention.

“Interesting,” Gabriel shouted against my ear.

There was a knife. There was a scream. There were, it had long been rumoured, two to three deaths a week at The Shaky Landing. In the quarry, the police had been saying, it was better to let civic infection run its course.
Triage,
various gentlemen of authority (political scientists, judges, members of the Order of Australia) murmured intermittently on TV. Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword, they said, and ditto for guns, knives, white powders, arson, dynamite, assault rifles, crack, and assorted sexual appetites.

Deaths in the quarry don't count, Gabriel told me (as though I didn't know). They only make the newspapers if they spill over into neat treed streets, he used to say.

Blood thumped in my ears, I could feel the hearts of Gabriel and Charlie and Catherine pounding inside my skin. Our departure from The Shaky Landing was sudden and undignified. There were trapdoors underfoot, knives in the corners of our eyes, dizzy craters, the dangerous shells of boarded-up shops on every side. Nevertheless we reached the lip of the quarry and escaped.

“The trouble is,” Charlie said, “there's no way of knowing if that meant anything much at all. It could have been just because we asked questions.”

“Or it could be that our faces make certain people nervous,” Gabriel said.

“It was probably because of the camera,” Catherine claimed.

“I know she's around,” Charlie insisted. “I'll go back. I'll wait there from 2 a.m. to dawn every night if that's what it takes.”

“I want you to be right,” Catherine sighed. “But I'm not going back. It's crazy. It's suicidal to go back.”

“I agree,” I said. “It's madness. It's asking for trouble.”

But Gabriel said, “I'll go with you, Charlie.”

Gabriel constructed flowchart sheets which he kept under lock and key. “The network is incredible,” he said. “You can't afford to tip anyone off, you can't let anyone inadvertently give out clues, and you never know who's hooked in.”

“He's writing the bloody book of secrets,” Sheba said.

“I'm
reading
it,” Gabriel contended.

“Look, mate,” Sheba said, “I've been reading it for donkey's years. It's not exactly news to some of us, you know. You'll get yourself killed if you don't watch out, and a hell of a secret that's gonna be.”

Gabriel paced our apartment like a tiger in a cage. (A tiger? Is that the right image? He was always so quiet, so calm, and yet I had the sense of tightly coiled intentions waiting to spring.) “Lucy?” he said.

“What?”

But the labyrinth sucked him down between the thought and its telling. He had traced tunnels all the way to Brisbane. “They come out in Brunswick Street,” he said.

“Tell me something I didn't know,” I said wearily. “Sheba could have told you that years ago. I could have told you that. Where d'you think I heard about Charlies Place before Charlie did?”