The Last Magician (32 page)

She taps her forehead with one finger to indicate I am not very bright. “We're not looking at
me
, you drip. We're looking at the blokes who took the pics. This one now.” She picks up the tiger-bodied one. “He's got leather boots on and a whip in his hand, a poor weedy little bloke, shy as a possum. He's a postman, he rides his bicycle around and puts messages in other people's boxes, and he lives by himself. Pretty sad, huh?”

“Yeah. But Sheba …” I am immensely curious. “You must have some image of yourself.”

“Well, sure,” she says. “I'm me. Sheba. I think the world stinks but I don't take crap from anyone and I know how to have a good time.”

“You're a feminist's nightmare, Sheba,” I laugh.

“Feminists,” she says witheringly. “Don't give me feminists. I'll tell you how I know a feminist: they treat me like dirt. They treat me worse than any of the blokes do.”

“Oh, ouch. But the ones who treat you like dirt don't have a monopoly on the definition, Sheba.”

“Yeah?” she says. “Who cares?”

I care, in fact, but Sheba would be supremely uninterested in my theories, so I turn to the photographs. “Ah. Here's one that Charlie took,” I say with a connoisseur's eye. It's just a polaroid snapshot, three-and-one-half inches square, but it's unmistakably stamped with Charlie's mark. Sheba is wearing black mesh stockings and black bodysuit and sits astride a chair with an open curved back, her stockinged calves hooked around the chair's hind legs, her hands at the sides of her face like claws. “That's one of Charlie's, all right.”

“Wrong, smartypants!” she says gleefully “That's Sonny Blue.”

I feel a buzz of excitement. Well of course, I think. Of course. They were both obsessed with Cat. I feel as though the photograph will yield something if I look at it long enough. “Can I borrow this for a while? Can I take it back to my hotel?”

“Got the hots for me, eh?” she grins. “Sure. Why not?”

“Can I keep the boxes of Charlie's photographs?”

“That's why I saved them,” she says. “I thought you'd want them.”

“How come the men give you the pictures they take? Don't they want to keep them for … you know …?”

“Jerking off. Yeah, they do. But I always ask for a copy. It's my scrapbook of
them.
I look at a pic, I can always remember the bloke, and that one is definitely Sonny Blue.”

“Does Sonny Blue ever talk about …?” But I seem to have developed a superstitious aversion to saying certain names out loud. It is as though only silence can keep them safe.

“Gabriel?” she prompts.

“Yes.”

“All the time. He always did. He's obsessed. That's why Lady Muck left him in the end.”

“Roslyn?”

“Yeah. He's married to his son, she says. So now there's a Number Four who's very young.”

“But he still comes to see you?”

“Oh yeah.” She puts her hands up to her face like claws and hisses. “Pussy on the side,” she says.

“Sheba …” I swallow, but there are a couple of questions I have to ask. “When you say you know what happened … what do you mean?”

She gives me a hard look. “You sure you want me to say this?”

I nod.

“I mean that Charlie and Gabriel were killed in a barroom brawl, Lucy. There's no point kidding yourself.”

I don't bother to argue, but in fact I do think (and Catherine and I, who know the principals more intimately than Sheba ever did, have thrashed this out endlessly) I truly do think there is every reason to believe they are off in the wide world somewhere being their solitary selves.

“And Lucy, I have to tell you I'm angry with them,” Sheba says. “I'm angry as hell with them. You have to admit they were looking for it. Jeez, anyone who goes night after night to a bar where deals get done and takes photographs, what the hell does he expect, a Sunday School prize?”

“But their bodies weren't there,” I remind her.

“Panic, I reckon. Cops call a few bigwigs in the middle of the night — maybe they even call Sonny Blue himself — and they all agree shit like this won't help, judge's son, quarry hysteria, et cetera et cetera, and pouf! two bodies disappear, abracadabra. That's what I mean.”

“No,” I say. “I don't think so. Who would have done it?”

“The killing? Person who did it probably doesn't even know who did it. Jeez, haven't you ever seen a drug fight in a bar? And the cover up? Could have been anyone from Sonny Blue down.”

“Sonny Blue? You're not serious.”

“Fair chance, I reckon, but also a fair chance not. Wouldn't be the first time a few cops panic, a few cops make their own decisions. Cops do that all the time, CYOA, cover your own arse, that's their motto. That's their very first rule.”

“But you said Sonny Blue talks about Gabriel all the time.”

“So what? Jeez, Lucy I get blokes talk to wives who've been dead twenty years. I get blokes tell me they gotta go, Barbara's waiting at home with the kids, she'll be mad with them, and I know damn well Barbara buggered off and left them half a lifetime ago.”

“Sheba,” I say, “you've got an even wilder imagination than Charlie has.”

2

On the way, perhaps with a kind of perverse black nostalgia, perhaps with my documentary eye for rank incongruencies, I get the taxi to make a long detour through the quarry (that is, through its upper and outer edges) before heading to Point Piper, enclave of urban delights. Needless to say, the taxi driver is not at all keen and has to be financially cajoled. He has to be cajoled in spades; and also in bills of large denomination.

“Jeez,” he mutters, threading the dead-ended streets in Newtown and Redfern (his car doors locked, the windows tightly closed), “now I seen everything. Gotta be outa your mind, lady. You a danger freak, or what?”

“I make documentaries for television,” I tell him.

“Yeah? Well put this in yer dockermentry,” he says. “Here's what Joe Blake, taxi driver, thinks. They should drop a bomb on it, blow the whole quarry to kingdom come. It's a sewer, that's what, It's crawling with cockroaches and criminals and druggies and wogs and whores and it's spreading like a fucking cancer. There's tunnels comin' up through the sand at Bondi now, they reckon, and all the way out to Parramatta. They should blow the whole thing up before it's too late.”

“What about the kids?” I ask. “I believe there are nine — and ten-year-old kids in the quarry, in fact I believe there's a heavy market in — ”

“Blow them up too,” he says. “Just gonna grow into full-size criminals, aren't they?”

“Unless we do something,” I say as the taxi swings into another world, the grotto of laurels, the wisteria-thick homes against the harbour so brilliantly blue, with a flock of white sails bucking in the wind off the heads.

“Right,” he says, depositing me at the gates. “Unless we do something. And what we gotta do is drop a bomb. Mention me name on yer dockermentry, okay? It's Joe Blake.”

The gates are locked, but when I push the buzzer a voice asks me to identify myself, and then the delicate scrolls of wrought iron part soundlessly. I move beneath wisteria and jasmine, manicured, toward the soft clink of glasses and talk. Mostly TV and film people, I've been told; and some painters and actors and one opera singer, and the inevitable clutch of graziers and wives who've flown in for a few days from sheep or cattle stations at Wagga Wagga or Forbes or back of Bourke. Beyond voluminous quantities of floral silk and black bow-ties, the harbour shimmers like cut glass, blue as sapphires. It is late afternoon. Another hour and the sun will slash itself into blood-reds and purples, sluicing primary colour over the bridge and the graceful white wings of the Opera House. Then the quick summer dark will gulp everything down.

I'm nervous, I'm not exactly sure of what.

I'm not exactly sure who my hosts are either, only that I'm considered a minor luminary because of an urban documentary or two that has shown up here on SBS. This has put me in the margins of someone's list for cultural do's, and I do mean the margins, for God knows, to have been born here and gone away is about as good as having been born here of Chinese stock. No known category. Please check “Other” on all forms and beware the jabberwock, my son, for the jabberwock was not true blue.

I wish Catherine were here. We would head for the bar and then for that dark little nook under the galloping avocado where we could stare at the harbour and the bridge and the Fabergé eggshells of the Opera House and toss thought back and forth without speaking.

Or Catherine might say: When it gets a bit darker, the view of the harbour from here reminds me of Cedar Creek Falls.

Except for the bridge, I'd say drily. Except for this congestion of seven-figure real estate. Except for that smog of noise on the skyline, that haze coming off the quarry from the other side of Bennelong Point.

You're not mellow yet, Lucy, she'd say You've still got that sardonic edge to you, you need smoothing out, you need softening, you need to have another beer or two.

Luckily, no matter where in the world I bump into them, I do feel at home with the people who tap off beer and dole out icecubes for the cocktail crowd, so I set sail for the bar. I can sit down in comfort in the easy jaundiced-eye view from behind the kegs and swap jokes in whatever idiom is required.

“Got any Four-X?” I ask this red-headed bloke with freckles from collar to scalp.

“Christ,” he says. “Not a Queenslander in the Holy of Holies. Who brung you?”

“The cat brung me,” I say. “By accident. So who's the Boss Cocky here, could you point him out for me? Discreetly of course.”

“Gonna have to ask someone else, luv. I'm the caterer's bartender's bartender. I get paid by the hour for smiling and pouring grog and sweating like a pig in this bloody rented tux. Knowing who's who is right outside my field.”

I gulp the Four-X down as though it were water because I can't take this kind of occasion straight. I lean over the padded vinyl of the outdoor bar and confide to the bartender's bartender. “I have no idea why I accept invitations to this kind of do. I must be a masochist at heart. Can I use your phone?”

He grins at me. “And you're not even being paid to be here,” he says. He pushes one of these white cordless things across the vinyl counter, which is trying unsuccessfully to look like grained wood. “You gotta pull the aerial out,” he explains.

I pull the aerial out to its full chrome length and call Sheba.

“What the hell's the matter with you, Lucy?” she says. “You only left here an hour ago.”

“Yeah,” I say. “Sorry. Panic attack. I'm feeling maudlin all of a sudden. I'm feeling godawful lonely.”

Sheba's annoyed with me. “Lucy,” she says, “you think you're the only person in the world who's lost someone? You think you're the only person who's had someone go and die on them? Join the fucking Lonely Hearts Club and pull your fucking self together, for God's sake!” She slams down the phone.

She's getting angry with me the way she got mad at Gabriel and Charlie. Sheba has precious little patience with anxiety attacks. Of course I know only too well she's right. I know there's nothing more tedious than someone else's grief or state of shock.

“I'm pulling myself together,” I tell the bloke with the freckles and red hair. “I can't remember why the hell I came, and I want to get out already, only I can't remember how. I need a drink to help me think about how to leave, and then I need one for the road.”

“Another one coining up,” he grins. “But I gotta tell ya, this lot'd drive anyone to drink. Go and tell 'em from me they'd make a possum piss.”

And I do. Schooner in fist, I move swimmingly across the lawn and join the outskirts of a group which is tossing confetti talk around.

“What I think,” this woman is saying (she sounds like Roslyn Gray, but she's not), “what I think is that the quarry is a figment of the morbid imagination, and of certain elements in the press and the cultural sector. I mean, look around you …” And she sweeps her arm toward the sunset over the bridge and the indigo waters. “I mean,
look
!” she says. “If this is urban blight, I'm all for it.”

“Hear, hear!” I say, and everyone turns to look at me.

“But according to the latest demographic studies,” a gentleman says …

“… only you can't compare North American cities with ours, apples and oranges, it just doesn't …”

“Asia in many respects is a truer model, Singapore, for instance, or Bombay …”

“… look, mate, it's the same old cringe rearing its head in new shapes, we don't need to cite models, we've got Third World in our own back pockets, we've got
bona fide
Third World …”

“Frankly, all this Third World bunkum drives me right up the wall, all this drivel from daggy artists who don't know their own arse from a — ”

“Better watch yourself, mate, or you'll find your face sticking up your bum …”

And then friends are restraining friends and I have to go somewhere urgently to laugh. Jesus, I think. Could this party be happening anywhere else than Australia? Where else is the membrane between manicured lawn and quarry so wafer thin?

“… quarry's like the Loch Ness monster,” I hear at the edge of another group. “Everyone's heard the rumour but no one's ever seen it and no one can prove it exists.”

“It doesn't,” someone says, and I move away to an arc of deckchairs beside flowering grevillea where someone is holding forth on the importance of triage, not my cup of tea, and I keep moving on. I veer toward the goldfish pond though fragments of triage theory reach me. There comes a time, a gentleman is saying, radiation therapy and cancer cells, the amputation of a limb to save the whole, the necessary pruning of the rhubarb plant, blah blah, and urban blight, and
jug jug
to quarry ears.

“What I might even call the judicial poetry of urban grief,” says a voice that makes me turn my head. Well, well, well. Sonny Blue. “The courts, in this sense, are the prophets crying in the wilderness,” says Sonny Blue. “The voice of the turtledove in the land, the memory of order in chaos, the wish to survive.”

I would like to vanish now, I would like to move quietly through the crowd and disappear, but I can't seem to move.

“But do you think, Robinson,” someone challenges, “that our judicial history is such that we can draw any confidence at all … I mean, consider the early governors, not Phillip, but the next lot, and their record of penal justice, talk about
triage,
talk about scapegoating an entire segment of — ”

“And yet from those very seeds has come the most egalitarian justice system in the — ”

“Oh
please
, Robbie. Next you'll tell me Australia's a classless society. Pull the other one, mate.”

“There's no real logic to the history of justice,” the sonorous voice ripostes. “Case by case, I'd be the first to admit it's riddled with …”

“Exactly. Any reforms have been more by good luck than good magistrates. I say that until the judiciary admits its history of expedience and impotence and outright error …”

“But you could say that for the progress of most ideas,” His Honour replies. “And for the seminal changes in western consciousness, for that matter. Lucky accidents. Take Newton, for instance. He revolutionised scientific thought in the seventeenth century, and yet he was mentally unbalanced, we have plenty of evidence.”

His Honour seems to suck admiration from the circle around him, he draws himself up a little, he radiates charm, he ascends a pulpit of hot air.

“Newton was an alchemist,” he says. “His genius was as much hocus-pocus as anything else, his
Principia
and his
Opticks
and the laws of gravity were almost accidents, the voodoo man's sideline. His main interest was deciphering the secret codes of the universe, and he computed the year that Jason found the Golden Fleece. Can you believe it? He may have got the guernsey for the laws of motion and gravity, but that's sheer fluke. According to Maynard Keynes, and I agree, Newton wasn't the first note of the enlightenment, he was the final trumpet blast of the wizards and seers, he was the last of the magicians, in fact. And the law's a bit like that, I think. A bit hit-and-miss, but the bearer of our highest aspirations just the same.”

Perhaps the needling spirit of Catherine enters me. Perhaps my mind, an impetuous retrieval system, merely connects two occurrences of a phrase before I have time to think. I know there are words bobbing around in the air and apparently they fell out of my mouth.

“I used to know a photographer named Charlie Chang,” I say. “The New York police once called him the last magician.”

There is one of those awkward silences and people swivel in my direction, a bit bemused, waiting for an anecdote or a joke but my voice and my mind have come to a dead halt.

So has His Honour, Mr Justice Gray, member of the Order of Australia.

It is as though the last magician dropped a spell of slow motion from the sky Robinson Gray turns (it seems to take an infinitely long time) and I don't know who is less publicly prepared, he or I, but I do know I seem to come as Banquo to his feast and that most people have their eyes on him, not on me.

“Are you okay, Robbie?” his consort asks.

His face is white, but then again, so is mine, I would think. It's natural, given that the last time we saw each other we had police news from underground, none of it propitious. Also, I trail ghosts like balloons, I evoke the inscrutable Charlie, I give off the faint desired scent of the lost child, the son and heir. Robinson Gray and I bring each other, as it were, hot news of Gabriel. I'm sure I would have turned and left first if I could have thought how it was done, but he beat me to it.

To me, it seemed that he moved with the slowness of a drifter in a dream, but according to the bartender, he left as abruptly as he once must have left Chang's Grocers & Greengrocers on Newmarket Road, on the day that Cat appeared in the rear doorway to the shop.

“That tells you something,” Catherine will say.

“Yes, but what?” I will ask.

Evidently I found my way back to the bar and the bartender and the cellular phone and called a cab. Instinct would have taken me back to Charlie's Place, but I suppose I also knew instinctively that I wasn't equal to one of Sheba's “pull yourself together” talks. I wanted to brood disgracefully, I wanted to sit in my hotel room and feel Charlies photographs in my hands.

So here I am.

I fondle my relics, and that mysterious peacefulness comes off them again.

I tuck the edge of
Gabriel Comes with Clouds Descending
under the frame of the dressing-table mirror and it seems to light the whole room. It shows Gabriel stepping into the storage cellar of Charlie's pub, the sun behind him. A nimbus comes off it, and foggy rings of gold slip themselves over me like magic quoits. I feel folded into great soft wings. I can smell the faint scent of Gabrielness, I can feel the imprint of chest hairs against my cheek, I can taste his sweat.