The Last Magician (5 page)

“Oh, lots,” she
says.

“What happens when they
see you downstairs?”

“It's funny, that. It's
really something. I used to think they were just putting on a careful act in
front of their wives.” She waves her right hand airily about. “Or
business colleagues, law partners, girlfriends, mum and dad, what have you. I
used to think they were incredibly good actors. Not the slightest sign, no nervousness,
no embarrassment, nothing. I might as well be a coat rack as a waitress.”

He visualises this. He sees flesh hooks branching out of her
like rainforest vines, he sees empty coats, fitted
around the shapes of ghostly men, swimming like exotic fish through wet green
air toward the hook. He considers lighting and shutter speeds. He calls these
things photofallacies; or sometimes, singular (and
his sense of the absurd is certainly singular), a photophallus.
He names a possible future image
On the Rack.

“Yes?” he prompts,
into her silence.

“Well,
it isn't acting at all, I've decided. I'll tell you something: there are two
things that show you people as they really are, and I've done them both.” There is a long grey silence, and the grey truth about people-as-they-really-arc
presses down on her as an atmospheric condition, though she wishes to fight her own weather. “Except,
I dunno, for maybe one in a hundred.” She
offers this small miracle for contemplation: “You do actually meet people
who make you want to keep on looking.”

“Looking for what?”

“Oh
you know,
goodness, meaning,
crap like that.
One throw in a hundred.”

“One
in a hundred,” he says drily. “Quite hopeful really.
So they're not acting, the upstairs-and-downstairs men?”

“No,
they're not acting. They really don't see you. They really don't know they know
you.” This interests him. He has his feet on the chair rung, his knees
hunched up, his elbows on his knees. He leans forward
and rests his face in his hands so that his fingertips graze his temples. She
thinks he looks like a genie out of some extravagant jade lamp from sing-sing dynasty, Chinatown. Through the frame of his fingers,
he observes her closely Fisheye lens, soft focus, he
thinks, so the girl is the eye of the whole curved room, but blurred.
“They don't even see me when they're in this room,” she says.
“I'm just part of the furniture. Literally. When they leave, they lock a
door in their minds.”

“Context,” he says.

“Oh
yeah.
Context
.” She mimics him, mock plum in her mouth.
“That's it all right, context. Outside of this context (and what'll we
call it? High Bordello? Ratbag Rococo?) outside of
here, they wouldn't recognise me if they fell over
me. Don't look at me like that.” She feels as though he has seen through
the disguise again. She feels as though she is being touched, and she hates to
be touched. It's what appeals about the life, the money always between, the
thick sheets of contempt, the sweet fact that you can never be touched. She
would prefer the camera as partition again. She swings her legs off the bed and
crosses to the window. She turns her back on him. “F'r
example, would you notice that chair if I switched it with one in the
restaurant? How about the pillow? How about the sheet, if you bumped into it in
a pub? It's the same with hookers. And with waitresses.”

“And
with restaurant managers,” he says. “And photographers. It's a plus,
you know. It's like being made of one-way glass. You see everything without
being seen.”

“Yeah. You see everything
all right.”

“So how long have you
been here?” he asks again.

“Oh, a while.”

“Upstairs and downstairs
the whole time?”

“Yeah.”

“And before that?”

She
laughs. “Oh, you wouldn't want to know. You wouldn't believe me.”

“In the quarry?” he
suggests.

She turns from the window.
“Yeah, the quarry for one. Lived in it for three months. Quarry's a
one-way trip. That's the rubbish heap, strictly for junkies.” She
shudders. “Last stop on the line.” Disconsolate, she flops back on
the bed and stares at the ceiling. “Three years, they reckon, once you're
in the quarry, till snuff-out time. That's if you're hooked. If you're not, I
suppose you last as long as you're strong enough to steal. There's a woman, Old
Fury we call her, who looks about sixty. She's probably not. She might only be
forty, the quarry does that. For that matter, three years in an up-market joint
like this is about the limit. Then it's move out, or fall down the black hole
fast. I'm a tourist,” she says. “An explorer. These places interest
me, but I can leave, I've dabbled, part of the research, but I don't touch
dope.”

Fisheye lens, shallow
depth-of-field, he thinks; so the girl's
edges are sharp as glass within the cloudy bubble of the room. “I thought
girls needed dope to put up with the johns.”

“Yeah. Well …” She
shrugs. “There're other ways.”

“What other ways?”

“Professional
secret. Personally, I'm rather fond of silent mastication of Milton.” She
sits up and recites in a toneless rush:
“Of man's first disobedience,
and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the
world, and all our woe /With loss of Eden, till one greater So-and-so/Et
cetera
et cetera and so on.”

He is astonished by this and laughs, but
he is looking at her differently again. She finds herself embarrassed by his
delight. Self-conscious. The disguise has slipped again, she thinks, furious
with herself. Without being aware of it, she pulls the sheet up in front of
her and holds it around her shoulders. They study each other cautiously, tense
with interest. A macro lens, he thinks; 100 mm at f/16, with flash, to get the
face of a tiger caged by bedding.

“What
did you do before the quarry?” he asks again. “In Brisbane?”

“Why d'you
take the photographs?” she parries.

“Because
the
Tao
of the photographer is like the stretching of a bow.”

“What's that supposed to
mean?”

“It
brings down what is high; it lifts up what is low. I quote Lao Tzu.”

“You're not a real
restaurant manager,” she accuses.

“You're not a real
hooker.”

“I am,” she says
hotly. “I
am.
I fuck real blokes for real money.”

“And I manage real
restaurants.”

“Okay,
deuce,” she says, conceding. “But what are the photographs for?”

“There's
a small and very unfashionable gallery in New York sells my stuff, that's
partly why. But I mostly take them for myself. So I'll see what I've
seen.”

“So
you'll see what you've seen.” She gives the words a dry mocking emphasis,
but he will not be provoked.

“That's right,” he
says mildly.

“You're very weird.”

“Hmm.
Now your turn. What did you do before? Tit for tat, that's fair.”

“You
won't believe me.” She still has the sheet up around her shoulders and
still feels exposed. In the contrived manner of a child on a school concert
stage, she hooks her hands together and recites:
“There was a little
girl who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she urns
good, she was very very good, And when she was had
she was horrid.
That's me,” she says. “I'm a brainy sheila, I'm afraid. I even went to Queensland Uni. As a
matter of fact, if exam results are anything to go by, I'm practically bloody
brilliant.”

(Would
I have actually said that? Yes, I think I might have, very sarcastically in the
spirit of crossing a border and giving obedient answers to Customs and
Immigration.
Do you have anything to declare?
Yes, an inconveniently
busy and sceptical mind.

I would have been making full and
absolute confession. I would have announced my contraband with the air of a
diagnosis handed down. I would have dutifully declared an infection, a rather
nasty one, and terminal, though I could not imagine where or how I had picked
it up.)

“How's that for a laugh?” Lucy says. “But my true
intellectual vocation is renegade.”

There
is no expression on his face. He imagines her in a frame of recording and
examining monks, slow shutter speed to make a smoke of movement, every stylus
erect, one sly gargoyle sticking out its tongue. A photophallus.
He nods and shrugs, impassive. “Not so hard to believe.”

She
says harshly: “You re a sucker then. I make up
any damn thing I please.”

He
smiles to himself, not patronisingly, and not in
amusement. It is perhaps more like a slight wincing than a smile. It is as
though he recognises something, as though her
prickliness is entirely familiar to him, and eminently understandable. “I
went there too,” he says, as though this explained everything. “To
Queensland Uni.” She has the disconcerting sensation that he knows exactly
what her sudden rudeness was designed to conceal.

To be
unexpectedly endorsed, to have one's angle of vision acknowledged, accepted,
taken as given: it is seductive. He knows it. He knows — so it seems to her — that she is afraid of what else she may be tempted to tell him.

(Do you have anything else to declare?

Yes. Shapeshifting.
From time to time, I find myself inside the skin of other people. I see out of their
eyes. This affliction swoops down like seasickness. It changes things
irrevocably.

“So why are you
here?” he asks quietly.

Why am I anywhere? she thinks.

She says flippantly: “No known
antecedents or place of origin. I'm a genuine foundling, left in a home for
unwed mothers, isn't that something? and beyond that I haven't inquired. I'm
sure there's plenty I never want to know, but I got sent to the very best
boarding schools and taken into the very best homes. I was everyone's clever
Little Wonder, the emperor's nightingale.”

But
how would she explain that day when the air parted, when she saw suddenly that
there were parallel worlds, that you could cross a line, that you could fall
through a hairline crack and cartwheel giddily down and round and down in slow
motion, like moondust in space? And how did you know
that wasn't your real world, the one you came from and to which you properly
belonged?

She was still Lucia then, on the day the fissure
appeared, the day she walked right through the looking glass to the other side.
She was still Lucia Barclay then, immaculate in the uniform of one of
Brisbane's best private high schools for girls, a senior, a prefect, a winner
of academic trophies, sports trophies, debating club trophies, a bit of a
madcap and a devil but still the flower of her school where she discussed
Virgil with the Latin mistress, where she asked the English mistress awkward
but oh-so-innocent questions about certain lines in Shakespeare, where she had
elegant Sunday dinners with the headmistress. She had yet to step on a crack.

She is still Lucia.

She is standing, surrounded by other
schoolgirls, on the platform of Brunswick Street railway station in the
inner-city section of Brisbane known as the Fortitude Valley. Hundreds of
Brisbane high-schoolers are on the platform because
they have all walked down from the Exhibition Grounds where an interschool
athletics carnival has been held. In Lucia Barclay's group, there is a certain
amount of simpering and giggling and coy sideways glancing toward the knot of
Brisbane Grammar boys who stand nearby. The boys, conscious of being watched and
overheard, discuss matters both intellectual and carnal rather loudly.

“You remember Greg Harvey who
was a prefect at Grammar last year?” Barbara
Williams is saying to her, pretending to be nonchalant and modest. “He's
at uni now. Engineering. He's invited me to the
King's College formal and I suppose I'll …” And someone else is
wondering if Miss Dunlop will give them extra time for the Tennyson essay
because now, having made the sports finals, they will certainly need … And
there is talk of Latin translations and basketball matches, of hairdressers, of
kings and queens and history facts, of university formals and high school
balls, when suddenly Diane Barbour screams.

What
is it? What is it? they clamour, and Diane,
embarrassed, claps a hand over her mouth and points. Lucia, frowning, turns to
look.

Everyone looks.

The
whole platform, crowded with shoppers and mothers and toddlers and uniformed
high school students, looks.

The
sight is so outside the range of what anyone on the platform might imagine
happening, that it does not seem real. It is as though they are dreaming a
collective dream. This cannot be Brisbane. It is like one of those European
movies about the war, Lucia thinks, something by that Italian director (de Sica, was it?), that stark film they were shown in a
history class, the one with Sophia Loren in a ravaged village screaming at
soldiers.

Whenever
Lucy remembers the scene on the railway platform, she sees it in black and
white, with Lucia at one side of the screen and the woman at the other. She
sees it as part of a film by de Sica. The film starts
with a wide-angle shot of the woman, then gets closer and closer.

The
woman appears to be in late middle age and is raggedly dressed, dirty, her
matted hair sticking out around her head like short snakes. She is making a
spectacle of herself. She is standing with straddled legs, holding up her dirty
cotton skirts in a bunch at her waist, and pointing to the black fuzz between
her legs. Under the skirts, she wears nothing. The skin of her thighs and belly
is slack and wrinkled and grotesque. It is as though she has a large bearded
prune between the legs. The woman is howling like a dingo.