The Last Magician (31 page)

They produced a folder with photographs of bones. These were close-ups, showing scars and indentations on the bone. I remember thinking what a sense of drama the body had, how extraordinary its shapes, how I'd never realised before the stunning beauty of bones. “Brutally and viciously stabbed,” they said. “Thirty-six times, to be precise.” They pointed to the nicks and chips in the bone. “Incredible ferocity,” they said.

“Yes,” I agreed. I could see their logic, the way it coiled itself around femurs and ribs.

“Suppose we told you,” they said, “that we are very curious indeed about Chang and Gray's interest in the woman called Cat.
Obsessive
interest, I think we could say. What would you say to that?”

The only thing that came into my mind to say was a little bubble of nonsense. Curiosity killed the cat, I thought, and swallowed the thought in time, and said nothing at all. I could taste the edge of hysteria in the words I had swallowed, I was afraid I would burst into something unstoppable, laughter or sobbing, I wasn't sure which.

“Suppose we told you,” they said, “that these are the bones of the woman called Cat.”

Oh God.
That
shook the cobwebs in my brain. Was that what Gabriel and Charlie had found out? And was the news unbearable, was that why they hadn't even phoned? Had they simply fled? People run away from pain, I know that. I bolted from Brisbane once. Catherine fled to London, Charlie to New York.

Unsolved mystery, the police said. One of her lovers, we think. They went on and on, but all I could hear was the door closing behind Gabriel on Monday night. Obsessive interest on the part of Chang and Gray, I heard, and I struggled to concentrate again. Maybe dead in a tavern brawl, and maybe not, they said. Maybe arrangers of their own “deaths", wouldn't be a first for that trick, eh? They watched me for a reaction, but I didn't have one. Or maybe got out of the way by someone else, they said. But why? That was the interesting question. All very curious, they said.

Wait a minute, I thought dizzily. Wait a minute, what's going on here?
(Interrogation technique. We need to catch you off guard, don't we, love?)

Suppose we told you that these are the bones
… Suppose they told me the moon was made of green cheese? What proof did I have that the woman was Cat?

You can't afford to tip anyone off,
Gabriel had warned about notes that he kept under lock and key; notes that had disappeared in a burglary.
The network is incredible … you never know who's hooked in.

That is Cat in the mirror,
Charlie had said of a photograph that was stolen from my place and then shown to me again by the police.

What proof did I have that the woman in any of the police photographs was Cat? What proof did I have that the photograph of Charlie and Gabriel was taken just before the fight broke out? What proof did I have that it was even taken on Tuesday night? Just what kind of information were the police fishing for?

I felt a huge swooping upcurrent of relief, and I glided on it straight into happiness. They were on their way up to Brisbane, just as they said. Maybe they'd found Cat, maybe they even had her with them. It wouldn't be the first time Cat had fled from the police, goaded the law, driven them all to a feral possessive frenzy. What did all this sudden official interest in her mean, anyway?
Obsessive
interest, I think we could safely say. Oh yes. In my mind's eye I could see the three of them in a car on the Pacific Highway, heading north. I could see them in Brisbane. I could see them at Cedar Creek.

“I'm afraid I can't tell you anything,” I said.

“We'll get back to you,” the police promised.

Naturally I thought it was Gabriel. In my dream, the knocking figured as hail on an iron roof, I was back in Queensland, childhood, a tropical thunderstorm. In the dream I was walking down a long dark corridor that branched off on every side. I didn't know where I was going. The rain and the hail were hammering down and I ran into total darkness and opened a door …

It was Gabriel's father.

“Wha …?” I blinked. “What time is it?”

He came inside and closed the door behind him. I blinked at my watch. Five a.m.

“Oh God, what's happened?” I said.

“Where is he?” Robinson Gray demanded. He walked down our hallway and into the bedroom. He looked under the bed. He roamed around our apartment as though he owned it. He picked up books of Gabriel's, he picked up a shirt, he picked up a framed family photograph and put it down. His movements were jerky. “Do you know where he is?”

I suppose his anxiety brought the smell of harm into the house like fog. It smelled of uncollected garbage, of vinegar, of public toilets long uncleaned. I could feel my heart thumping like a piston, then skipping and doing little butterfly beats. I had to lean against the wall before I could speak. “He's gone to Brisbane,” I said.

I don't think he even heard me. He was like someone going through a house frantically to shut off a burglar alarm he couldn't find.

I made myself count to twenty. “I'll put coffee on,” I said. “Would you like some?”

He didn't answer but he followed me into the kitchen and sat at the kitchen table and put his head in his hands. “Do you think he's alive?” he asked.

I spilled ground coffee all over the counter and had to wipe it down. I couldn't answer. I turned to look at him, but he wasn't listening for answers anyway. He had his hands on the side of his head in a curious way, like claws, his thumbs against his cheek bones, his fingers like cages over his eyes, the fingertips on the temples.

“It's full of borers,” he said. “I can feel them tunnelling and boring and blasting inside my head. They never stop. They never stop. I know what they're after, they're digging me out.”

I watched him nervously.

“I keep having this nightmare,” he said.

They wait just beyond the borders of sleep and every night he walks the streets to stave them off. He prowls through back alleys, he watches the figures in doorways, he goes into phoneboxes and dials a number and listens when a voice answers. He says nothing, he inserts no coin, he pushes no button, he listens, he waits.

Sometimes he keeps sleep at bay for several nights in succession, but they always get him in the end.

They start in his head, chip chipping away at his skull, but they are everywhere, they have taken over his arteries, his veins, his capillaries, he has been invaded, he has been quarried, the Mole People have set up camp in his intestines, they are photographing him from the inside out, making flowcharts, keeping notes. He is mapped and drawn and quartered. He is known. He has become the quarry.

He writhes and beats off their maggoty advance and wakes.

(I have seen this nightmare on Charlie's wall. Has he? Which came first, Charlie's photograph or Robinson Gray's black dream?)

Robinson Gray shook himself as though he were sloughing off the effects of a drug. He looked at me and asked me quite lucidly, “Do you think he's alive?”

I swallowed. “Of course he is,” I said. Once I had spoken, I felt calmer. “They've gone to Brisbane. They were looking for someone,
something”
- I corrected myself quickly, delicately — “and they had to check something out.”

“Check what out?” he asked sharply. “What did he tell you?”

“Oh, nothing,” I said. “Not really. He just said they had to check something out.”

I poured the water into the top of the coffee maker.

“Poor Gabriel,” he said at last. “Poor Gabriel. He couldn't finish anything. Maybe it was my fault, I don't know. There just seemed to be some sort of fatal flaw. He couldn't stick at jobs, he couldn't stay settled, he couldn't finish his degree, he couldn't stay still.
Bartending
, for God's sake,” he said bitterly. “Pub crawling! The only thing he could stick at was trying to upset me. He hated me.”

He put his head down on his hands, against the table.

“No, he didn't hate you. He
doesn't.
” The past tense bothered me. “He doesn't hate you.”

“I
loved
them,” he said, jumping up again, pacing, his face twisted with baffled pain. “I
loved
them, and they turned on me.”

Them. Cat and Gabriel, I thought. Such a forcefield of grief and pain came off him, that I went to him and put my hand on his. Then: shock. Something happened as it happened once before, in The Shamrock in Brisbane. When I looked into his eyes, I had the sense of looking into black and bottomless wells. I don't mean that as a simple metaphor. I don't quite know what I mean, but it was more than metaphor. I wouldn't know what to call it, I wouldn't know if that is what a vision is, or a premonition, or what the psychological explanation would be. All I know is that I had a dizzy sensation, that I felt as though I were standing on the lip of a pit looking down twin craters that opened out vertiginously into nothingness.
Howl, howl, howl, howl,
I thought. Something has happened to Gabriel, I thought, and in some fearful prescient way our bodies know it. Something has happened to Gabriel and Charlie and Cat.

I felt such anxiety that I recoiled. And when he registered my recoiling, I felt such pity that I simply held him, and we stood there (I have no idea for how long, it could have been fifteen minutes, it could have been one) and then without saying a word, he left.

Catherine sat in her office in the television studios and stared at nothing.

“Catherine,” I said. “There's every reason to believe they'll turn up, and they'll have Cat with them. It's tracking her down that's taking so long, they won't give up. Would they stay on her trail this long if it didn't go anywhere? If they didn't think it was worthwhile? You
know
they wouldn't. Four weeks, that's nothing really.”

I
believed
that. I insisted on believing that.

“The police have a file on Cat,” Catherine said.

“I know.”

“I should never have come back,” she said. “I should never never have come back.”

“Catherine, what proof do we have that those bones are Cat's? You can't trust the police anymore.”

“Lucy, I've arranged with London.” She sounded very brisk and businesslike. “I'm going next week.”

Panic was what I felt, domino losses, a gaping row of absences. I had to grab hold of her desk to steady myself. Already, I danced like a fish on a line for every footstep behind me, my heart turned somersaults at every knock on the door, every ring of the phone. Adrenalin sloshed around inside me like a choppy sea. It was exhausting. It was like having vertigo all the time.

“If you want to come,” she said, “there's a job.”

“Yes,” I said, grabbing at the lifebelt she threw. “Yes, I'll go with you.”

“I want amnesia,” she said.

BOOK IV

The Last Magician

Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.

John Maynard Keynes

1

In the middle of the journey, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was wholly lost and gone. A spotted leopard snarled fitfully in my dreams all the way from London to Singapore, and after Singapore there was a grey wolf and a winged cat and black holes.

I fell through a black hole.

I found myself back in a pub in Sydney where everything had changed and nothing had changed.

This puzzles me.

I understand neither time nor memory though I thrash about between them constantly, and I resent being caught again in Charlie's net. In the beginning all this had nothing to do with me, and then it did, and then I escaped again. I resent being caught unawares, I resent coming face to face with myself on a screen, I resent finding myself back here reliving the past.

Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

I watch two men at a table in the corner of Charlie's Place (of course it's someone else's place now, I don't know whose), I watch these two men, a jug of beer between them, a litter of empty glasses at their elbows. I cannot quite hear their conversation, but one appears to be telling the other a joke. They are big loose-limbed men and they throw back their heads and fill the room with a deep joyful laughter that sounds like a convocation of tippling frogs. And it's infectious. People half turn in their direction and little smiles wing their way from face to face. I can even feel my own cheek muscles relax as though a butterfly of a smile briefly settled there. And yet, simultaneously, I feel a weight of desolation so heavy it is as though I have been given lead shot intravenously. How is it possible for a roomful of people to laugh when grief, and matters far more disturbing than grief, silently prowl around this very building on their clawed padded feet?

“Lucy,” Sheba says, “you gotta snap out of this. It doesn't do a bloody bit of good, moping round, it doesn't bring anyone back.”

“I know.” And yet I understand the handling of relics now, I understand the veneration of totemic objects. When I sift through the boxes and boxes of photographs that Sheba keeps stashed under her bed, I feel something approaching tranquillity. It's as though Charlie's photographs retain the lost essence of their maker and their subjects and the essence comes off on my hands. It's like ointment. Of course I know that's ludicrous, even pathetic, It's not the sort of thing I would want to confess in public. But that's how it feels. I spend hours every day just sitting on the floor in Sheba's room, fondling the past.

“I don't know what you're trying to make Charlie tell you,” Sheba says, exasperated. “We already know what's what.”

I stare at her. “I don't know anything,” I said. “I don't feel that there's one single thing I know for certain.”

“We know and we don't know,” she shrugs. “And you don't want to know, Lucy.”

There's some truth to this, I suppose. In London, Catherine and I lead busy lives and never speak of the past except perhaps late at night, after too many drinks. At such times, we have worked things out to our own satisfaction. Charlie, we agree, is in New York. He didn't find Cat, or else he found out that she was indeed dead, and either way he couldn't bear the disappointment so he fled (or else he did find her and took her with him, he had to keep her out of prison, he had to get her away from the police). He wanted amnesia (or else he wanted amnesia for Cat; he wanted a fresh start for her, no baggage). We understand this instinct completely. We subscribe to it. The occasional appearance of Charlie's photographs in small galleries and of his films in small cinemas bears this theory out. Let sleeping dogs lie, we say. One day one of us will bump into him in a bar in Greenwich Village (we both go back and forth a lot between London and New York). I've been meaning to get in touch, he'll say. But you know how it is.

Yes, we'll say. We know how it is.

And we'll all get blind drunk and we'll swim in hilarity and we'll go skinny-dipping in the East River or the Thames or somewhere, well, maybe not the East River or the Thames, maybe we'll just hop on a plane and head for Cedar Creek.

Gabriel, we agree, is in Queensland, possibly Brisbane, but more probably further north: Heron Island, Dunk Island, Green Island, somewhere with rainforest and coral cays, very likely the Daintree or Cape Tribulation. I have no trouble at all seeing Gabriel moving between rows of pineapples, or between tea bushes perhaps, in a clearing in the Daintree forest. He has found the same peace his mother found. He doesn't need to know anymore.

It's typical of them, we feel, to bugger off, and it certainly doesn't bother us. We don't miss them (well, sometimes we do, if a pause in work creeps up on us, or if we've had too many drinks, but we've come to terms with this, we've adjusted to it). Anyway, we know they're stuck with us, just as we are with them, and they'll never quite get us out from under their skin. We don't have a shadow of a doubt about that. They're solitary types, like us, with crowded heads.

We're like war vets, Catherine says. We can't talk to anyone else.

We never do talk much, not even to each other, though the long silences we share are noisy with thought and sometimes the tip of a memory will show and will splash into words. There was that photograph Charlie did, I might say broodingly, without noticing I'm thinking aloud.
Hot News of Gabriel.
It was very early on, that's what's so puzzling, a newspaper on fire, Gabriel going up in smoke.

Yes, Catherine will say in a drugged sort of voice. Well, that was Charlie. There was a very disconcerting edge to his wit.

Yes, I'll sigh. And then we'll lapse into silence again.

We hardly speak at all on our TV shows, we let the interviewees do the talking. We tend to do a certain kind of documentary. We like to listen to the people no one listens to. I suppose we have this fantasy of catching Ann Bruin on tape, Ann Bruin who went berserk and sheared off her own hair and smashed her own hand through glass in Hobart in 1827.

I suppose we're waiting for Cat's voice to bubble up through someone else's throat.

And Cat could be anywhere. She could be with Charlie in New York, or she could be back in Brisbane, or she could be dead and buried, or holed up in a burrow in the quarry. I picture her, black and lithe in the moonlight, moving across the rooftops of proper Sydney on her silent padded feet, letting herself in through windows and chimneys and terrace-house balconies, quiet and quick-fingered, gathering up the loose silverware and cash. When she leaves she lifts her hands to the sides of her face like claws and hisses softly. Fuck you, she says. Fuck all of you.

She says it over and over again from Charlie's photographs.

Photographs seduce.

The longer you look at them, the more you see.

Take
Giacometti's Foot,
the black-and-white photograph of a pierced earlobe sporting a small gold hoop on which is strung a single bead that I know to be blue. When I saw that photograph for the first time last week, it hit me like a medicine ball thrown hard at the gut. It had the same dizzying impact that the sight of myself on a screen in London had. I doubled up. I felt like a Geiger counter. I would imagine that the rind of air encasing my body was visible as blue fire.

But why? I thought. Why? What is it about Cat's earring that affects me this way?

I tried to be analytical about it. Okay, I thought,
one:
seeing the earring in the photograph brings back the initial and overwhelming shock of seeing it in my hand in Charlie's film.

But why did the film barrel into me so violently in the first place?
One:
mainly the sheer shock of seeing myself at all when I wasn't expecting it. And
two:
seeing myself in that particular place, a place that thumped into me with a tidal wave of erotic memories (my own, and Charlie's, and Catherine's too). And
three:
the mind being a swift and powerful retrieval system, I was affected by Charlie's story of Cat ripping the hoops from her ears, I was affected by his intensity as he told me about that night. And
four:
the shock of seeing the thin gold chain and its pendant earrings in
my
hand.

But what was the nature of that particular shock? It was mainly a sense of sacrilege, I think. Charlie had shown me the chain and the earrings once, but I'd never held them. I'd never touched them. I knew what they meant to him who wore them always against his skin, his own little reliquary to ward off harm. So I was shocked, as though I had been taken in blasphemy, to see them idly dangling from my hand.

And I was mystified too, and quite profoundly disturbed, because the conjunction of things that don't belong with each other affects the sense of balance in primal ways. I remember something I saw at a fair in Brisbane as a child: a cow with five legs. The fifth leg dangled uselessly from the cow's breast, between the two front legs, and didn't touch the ground. It wasn't a trick, it was a genuine freak, a birth abnormality. I sobbed and sobbed and then I vomited.

That was roughly the way I felt when I saw Cat's earrings dangling on a chain from my index finger.

They're an arrogant and dangerous lot, the photographers, the film-makers, the story tellers and spinners of images and words, the black magicians. They make hay with a lot of memories and lives, they tamper with things, they hold nightmares up to the light and they don't consider the consequences carefully enough.

I think now about the photographer's technical sleight-of-hand, the nature of celluloid magic. Of course, it had simply been an illusion that it was
my
hand holding the chain. It was like the switching to doubles in movies for nude love scenes and dangerous stunts.

I can piece it together now. Gabriel had a photograph of me on the rocks at Cedar Creek. I'd been talking away, gesturing with my hands as I always do, fingers extended, the index finger making a point. Charlie had seen the photograph and used it. He'd added a close-up of a different hand, a woman's hand, holding the chain. He'd spliced the two together in that seamless way that constitutes film-making magic. Hey presto, the rabbit pulled out of the hat, the coin from behind the ear, Cat at my fingertips.

Whose hand did he use, I wonder?

Catherine's, I would think. I can't imagine who else would be holding the relic. Who else would be permitted to?

And it must be Catherine's earlobe in
Giacometti's Foot
when I think about it, because Charlie certainly wasn't taking photographs in those distant days when Cat yanked her earrings off under the mango tree.

Is it this realisation of Catherine's presence in the photographs, then, which for some reason continues to register on my personal Richter scale?

I don't know.

If only we could know what we know, as Charlie used to say. If we could see what we've seen. Because whatever Sheba may say, I don't know what's what. I don't.

Of course, I can easily find out if it's Catherine's earlobe and Catherine's hand by phoning her, which I will certainly do in a day or two, a week or two. I know she's still there in London, of course I know, of course she is, Sheba saw her on TV last week. It's just that every time I contemplate putting the call through, every time I start dialling, I decide to wait a little longer just in case she's not there, though she may very well be panicking about me by now. We know we overreact on this issue and we make allowances for each other. We have a terrible fear of sudden disappearances. But in any case, what will it prove if it's Catherine's earlobe and Catherine's hand?

Nothing.

1 don't think it will shut the Geiger counter down.

“I notice you haven't even opened the box full of
me
,” Sheba says, faking offence.

“I don't need to look at photos of you, do I? You're still around. It's the ones Charlie took — ”

“A lot of these
are
Charlie's.” She crawls under the bed and pulls a shoebox out from the wall. “And a lot are by other blokes. It's a hell of a turn-on for some of them, taking pics.”

“Okay, Sheba,” I say fondly, “I'll look.” The persistence of someone in my life is a miracle to me, I feel weak with affection, I feel maudlin with gratitude to Sheba. “I can't tell you how much it means to me, Sheba, that you're still here.”

“Oh, cut the crap, Lucy. Why wouldn't I be? Shut up and tell me what you think of this set.”

“Okay,” I say, rallying, working up to flippancy. “I know what you're after. I know you just want to be admired.”

“Fuck off!” she laughs. “I
charge
for that. Now you gotta make allowances, remember. Blokes are into costumes and props.”

“Yeah. I remember.” I idly flip through a sheaf of Sheba dressed as an army sergeant with shirt unbuttoned, Sheba in nothing but black stockings and nun's veil, Sheba in pink feathers, Sheba painted blue, Sheba as the Tattooed Lady (“That's an old bloke, an electrician,” she says. “Can't get it up till he's drawn all over me with magic markers.”), Sheba in a tiger-striped bodysuit with strategic peek-a-boo holes.

“Sheba,” I ask with sudden interest. “If
you
were looking at you, how would you photograph yourself?”

“Jeez, Lucy,” she laughs, shaking her head. “Reckon the minute I first laid eyes on you on Brunswick Street station I knew you'd drive me nuts till kingdom come. Here's someone with a bloody tiptruck full of dumb questions, I says to meself. Here's someone to give me laughs on a rainy day.”

“Yes, but tell me. How
would
you photograph yourself?”

“I wouldn't, would I? I don't look at meself at all.”

“But you keep these photographs,” I point out. “And you look at them. And you want
me
to look at them.”