The Last Magician (9 page)

“Your
sleep is disturbed by the quarry,” Charlie pointed out.

Gabriel laughed uneasily. “I was warned you were a bloody oracle, Charlie. Inscrutable, people say.”

Inscrutable.
That word used to get tossed around fairly often, in various tones and accents, for all strata and creeds and colours used to mix at Charlie's Place (well, not such a great range of colours, to be scrupulously accurate; for certain reasons, for certain — what shall I call them? —
historical
reasons, persons of darker persuasion were always under-represented, at least on the ground floor where the pub and the restaurant were). Still. The mix was decidedly eclectic, for that was one of the dispensations attaching to outsiders, a general moratorium on the rules. Nothing
counted
at Charlie's establishment, you see. When I call it Charlie's establishment, I do not, of course, mean that he owned it. None of us knew who owned it, not even Charlie, who was paid from a numbered account. No doubt the profits flowed, as they usually do, to some consortium of entirely respectable people, pillars of society no doubt. Charlie merely managed the place for a nine-digit number. He had his own reasons, the reasons of a professional voyeur, which is what a photographer is when you get right down to it, and he had his own apartment and darkroom on the top floor. The floors between … ah well, they were out of his control. In style and substance and tone, however, the restaurant and the pub, both at street level, were decidedly Charlie's.

Government ministers came to Charlie's Place, and so did the people whose faces appeared in newspapers and on television, and so did the anti-establishment establishment. (You know who I mean. The university people and the arts bureaucrats and the literati: that distinguished group who look after culture and host conferences and play safe games of subversion in the literary journals and newspapers.)

Quite other sorts of people also came. For example, the girls from the Cross and from the quarry itself came (though to different floors, of course, to different floors; if there was any going up or down stairs, it was not something on which anyone used to comment). Carlton and South Melbourne would fly up for a visit, Vaucluse and Bellevue Hill and Balmain and the university crowd, in short, used to mix with riffraff, with people of dubious standing, with the vibrant, dangerous, highly charged, illegal visitors from underground.

When Charlie was proprietor of The Inferno (that was his name for the place, but hardly anyone else called it that; they usually called it Charlie's Place, though there were many who referred to it simply — not in polite company of course — as the Cat House), when Charlie was there I imagine many of you dreamed of visiting his fizzy enterprise in the combat zone between city and quarry You always wanted to come, did you not? You imagined coming. (Ah, and many of you
did
come, many of you nodded to me as you handed me your coats; many of you talked to me, upstairs, as you took off your clothes. You won't remember my face, but I remember yours. Indeed, it's entirely possible that your face is on record in Charlie's archives.) The
idea
of a place like Charlie's has always lurked in the shadows of your mind, although by most standards
the
place was far from shadowy It was, in the opinion of many, the place to be seen. Charlie's was the pub where significant discussions took place. And with respect to secret desires, with respect to those scenarios that you visualise hazily in unguarded libidinous moments but dare not put into words, with respect to those encounters you do not even permit into conscious thought, with respect to covert hungers that visit even the elect and are no respecters of age or gender or status, with respect to unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, absolutely innocuous visits to the upper floors, the arrangements were impeccably discreet.

Charlie was situated, you might say, in the first circle of the quarry. He occupied the border lands. He looked both ways.

The view from here is always interesting, Charlie used to say.

“It's true,” Gabriel acknowledged quietly, surfacing from his own preoccupations. “I see horrible things every night and every day.” He hunched forward and hugged himself as though the things he had seen were lodged painfully behind his ribs, a knot of angina. “I don't know what to do. I don't know if there's anything that would make any difference.” Gabriel was like the little boy who kept his fist in the dyke all night, a frail buffer against inundation.

“I heard that there's been more blasting,” Charlie said casually, as he might have said that more rain was on the way. “The quarry's spreading. I hear there's more talk of the courts taking tougher measures.”

Gabriel brushed this aside, distracted. “Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever been obsessed with something … or with someone …?” He rolled up his eyes, mocking himself. “And everything you see or hear seems to have something to do with … You're always convincing yourself you've bumped into a clue, that the person you're looking for is actually watching you, waiting, luring you on. Of course it's crazy.”

Charlie smiled and turned away He composed a photograph inside his head:
Gabriel Comes with Clouds Descending.
The photograph shows the gloomy cellar beneath a pub, and between the cobwebs and small pyramidal mountains of kegs, in the darkness, are three huddled figures, Cat and Catherine and Charlie himself. Gabriel stands in the open cellar doors, at the top of steps, the sun and a cloudbank behind him. He seems to have wings but they are merely pure shafts of light.

This photo exists. It's the illusion of control, Charlie told me; a kind of sympathetic magic; the frail hope that you can benignly influence a course of events that is already underway.

He said neutrally: “What name did you hear?”

“It just seemed as though the name had something to do with her, that it meant something I already knew,” Gabriel said thoughtfully. “Of course, in one sense the reason's obvious, but I don't mean for the obvious reason.” He laughed, shrugging off portents. “What's
déjà vu
for sounds? It's like a dream you can't quite remember.” He stretched upwards with both arms, a self-mocking dismissive gesture, so that Charlie saw the winged figure he'd imagined the day before. “Anyway, except for this premonition that came with it and won't go away, this is about nothing. I overheard a few words in a pub and it was a very strange conversation, that's all.”

A sharp moment of knowledge came to Charlie, not the kind he invited. They arrived like little pieces of heartburn. Gabriel is too physically perfect for this world, he thought; too passionate, and too stupidly given over to goodwill. He will invite violation as surely as we did, Cat and Catherine and me.

He felt angry. He felt an urgency to hang a bike chain on Gabriel, to construct the Hell's Angel photograph by way of protective charm.

“There was a fight in a pub in Newtown,” Gabriel said. “And a stabbing. There was a hell of a racket.” He drifted inside the noise. “And then these bits of conversation reached me, I couldn't even tell who the speakers were. I heard one man say: ‘They reckon she's a witch.' And then his mate said: ‘She's got bloody claws, I can tell you that, a raging maniac when she's up and going.' And then the first one said: ‘That's why they call her Cat.' ”

The spigot on a keg of draught ale snapped upright and bit Charlie's hand. If Gabriel could have read the texts Charlie read, he would have known much from that. He might even have remembered why the name sent seismic tremors across his own synapses, why it gave off echoes (quite apart from the obvious ones; quite apart from the description of someone who could have been me). He might have smelled the name in his own blood, since it must have come down in his genes, it must have travelled round his veins before birth. Knowledge travels on unnoticed routes; it sprints along so much faster than thought; it leaps along image and sensation and unremembered memory the way a possum leaps from branch to branch.

Everything is foretold of course. The text of everything that is going to happen is written somewhere. That was what Charlie believed. My ancestor Fu Hsi, he used to say, first of the Five Emperors of the Third Millennium BC, who taught his people how to split the wood of the t'ung tree and how to spin silk and how to read the history of what has not yet happened; my ancestor Fu Hsi, who invented the sixty-four hexagrams of the
I Ching
, the Book of Changes as my father called it, the Book of Secrets my mother said, my ancestor who spoke once of a young man at a distant border who would meet a shining messenger at the edge of a pit, my ancestor already saw, at the shimmering edge of his future dream, the building on Bayswater Road and Waratah Street from whose upper-floor windows both Sydney Harbour and the quarry could be seen. (Did Charlie believe a word of this? He did and he didn't, I think. I think the ancestors and their gnomic predictions were safety and consolation, both, like his hiding behind the lens of a camera and composing kaleidoscopic truth.) But when he heard the mention of Cat's name, he did feel that a die was cast. He believed that Gabriel had been sent.

And if it became true, what does that mean? Perhaps simply that Charlie made a choice at that point. Whatever is going to happen, will happen, he said. It is already known somewhere. I wait and I watch.

But is it true that the future is unalterable? Or can a watcher, a mere watcher, influence the course of events?

I have come to think so. Watchers, after all, make choices; they choose what to see. And certainly the course of events changes the watcher.

Of course, this is hindsight. Yet it seems to me that the body does instinctively recognise turbulence. I have read that the oscillation of butterfly wings in Brazil may set off storms in Texas. More colloquially, more domestically: a goanna moving its tail on a rock near Perth, by a long and escalating chain of air displacements, can unleash flooding in Queensland. Certainly, then, it is mathematically possible that the speaking of a name can cause cyclonic disturbance of a different and more dangerous kind. In a dizzy instant, Charlie saw — no, he
felt
— the unstable convergence of past and future, the storm warnings, the betrayals, the old and new deaths.

But it passed, of course. Such moments pass. We reel and then we steady ourselves. We rub the back of a clammy hand across our eyes. We forget what we saw, we convince ourselves we saw nothing. It is not a gift, it is a curse, to read ahead. Charlie was as human and lonely as the next magician. He told himself that he was talking to an extraordinary young man in a pub, nothing more.

Gabriel talked his way through glass after glass of Tooheys.

(“They drink by reflex, Australians,” Charlie said. “They have genetic immunity to toxins that would savage the livers of the foreign-born.”)

Gabriel talked as people always will talk to a silent listener. (Silence, Charlie said, seduces.) With a kind of greedy languor, the talkers stretch themselves out in the voluptuous cushions of quietness — something priests and prostitutes, something therapists and interrogators, something bartenders know all too well — the burdened talkers settle in and colonise silence with their unburdenings.

Gabriel talked and talked and Charlie listened, both to what he said and what he didn't say.

The sages tell us, Charlie said, that when doubts about great matters arise, consult the tortoise shell and the milfoil stalks.

In his own way, he kept the records as meticulously and as creatively as his ancestor, Fu Hsi, recorded the cracks in the dermal plates of muddy reptiles and wrote down, in his Book of Secrets, the arcane translations of scattered stalks. Like Fu Hsi, he was also an interpreter of the gaps and the spaces. When it was necessary, he read between the cracks. He saw the negative print. He underexposed and overexposed as he saw fit.

“So,” he said to Gabriel at last. “Would you like the job?”

7

So she reappeared to him first in the form of her name. Gabriel, angel of the annunciation, brought word of her, and her absence filled the pub and the restaurant and the stairwells and the waiting emptiness of Charlie's apartment. Absences were potent for Charlie.

If the potter takes clay, he said, to make a pitcher, its usefulness lies in the hollow where the clay is not. I am quoting Lao Tzu, he said.

There were absences that had never left Charlie, and he believed that his own absence would have clung to Cat, to all of them, like a second skin. He believed that Cat was fishing for him, that she was using her name as bait. He believed that just as twenty-five years in New York had done nothing to stop them all surfacing and resurfacing in dreams, in the same way they would
know
, they would in some sense be aware of his return. Cat and Catherine certainly would, though he was less certain about His Honour the judge. Much less certain. In fact, the more he thought about it, the more he realised that part of the thing that would not be dislodged (he did not name it in so many words; Charlie did not think in words exactly; words were visual objects for him, shapes and colours; he saw a cloudy black tumorous mass behind his own ribs which would translate roughly as “the thing that would not be dislodged”), the more he thought about this thing, the more he realised that part of it lay in the fact that it was all too likely Robinson Gray would remember nothing at all, not Charlie's name, not his face, not Catherine or Cat, nothing. Robinson Gray's eyes would be cloudless, untroubled, smiling, full of charm. But Cat and Catherine would sense his return; most certainly Cat would. Yes. She had sent her messenger.

(Had
she sent her messenger to Charlie? Or had Charlie sent for the messenger? Or was someone else altogether leaving a trail of clues for Gabriel to follow, someone who finds it safer and less painful to avert her eyes from certain shadowy corners? Here is my dilemma: an intricate web existed, that much is definite; perhaps Charlie was spinning it as he went along, perhaps he was its still centre. Only now, in his absence, do I sense the full dimensions of his power. Absence is potent, unanswerable questions are the ones that engage us, the silences are thick with story. All I can do is feel my way, advancing, retreating, positing theories, testing, rejecting, going in circles and always covering new ground. Everything I say is provisional. A hapless fly in Charlie's web, fleeing from memories of my own, I spin my webbed translation as I go.)

So a messenger came or was sent for.

At any rate, Charlie did not invent her annunciation in the pub (though since this is my record, my history, Charlie's thoughts curl up inside mine just as my ideas take shape from his photographs. His words flow into the shapes of my words just as the thought of Fu Hsi reaches us through the commentaries of the Duke of Kau, and through many subsequent scholars.) It is written: the water that flows into the earthenware vessel takes on its form. So Charlie said. So he showed in a black-and-white photograph. And it is noted that Charlie Chang nursed a deep and abiding respect for annunciations, whatever he called them.

He was waiting for Cat herself to reappear.

After the last table was cleared and the last drunk shunted out of the bar, in the hours before dawn, Charlie went looking for manifestations. With Gabriel as guide, he set out for the pub where her name had appeared. He crossed the line. He sat with his camera in the bar of The Shaky Landing in the quarry's first circle, and watched and waited. Sometimes he took photographs, sometimes not, he let his eye decide.

The quarry is far larger than appears on the map. Far larger. Nobody knows exactly where it begins or where it ends, most people have only hearsay and their fears and nightmares to guide them. Everyone knows certain details of course, the quarry brushes us like cobwebs in unused rooms, some of us descend into it and climb back out (and yet our memories remain very unclear, our memories are instinctively —
protectively
— fuzzy), some merely descend, everyone has felt glancing blows (panhandlings, muggings, fights, stabbings, sexual assaults, drug transactions, break-ins, the numerous small acts of arson, the blastings and tunnellings) but it is difficult to pin down facts.

In Sydney, it is said that the quarry began in the rift valley of the Redfern railway station, though some claim the Newtown station, when squatters
(the Mole People
as we began to say,
a permanent and wilful underclass
as the newspapers intimated), when the Mole People began tunnelling into the rock cliffs. Homes for the homeless, they chanted, chip chipping through the back passages of the city. And the newspaper dirge, antiphonal, responded with a slow black tolling of headlines: honeycomb hovels, shit holes, rat traps, rabbit warrens, cankers, the deadly lace-trace of white ants, the under miners. That was the beginning.

Others date the quarry from the year when inner-city insurance became untenable, when burned-out buildings were boarded up, left to decay left to squatters; when the squatters began digging in the burned-out shells, tunnelling their way down beyond basements and into underground parking lots, occupying the zigzag layers of concrete, setting up camps, invading the subways and sewers.

But what does anyone know? Even underground, no one knows. I used to live there. We used to grope about on the underside of Sydney, we used to put our ears against rock, against concrete, against earth, we would hear the world. I have only black misshapen memories and Charlie's photographs and Gabriel's obsessions to guide me. Poor Gabriel, afflicted with the conviction that atonement must be made, that the futility of action does not absolve from the failure to act, alas poor Gabriel, he knew the quarry well. Sober and clear-eyed, he probably knew the quarry — in one sense, anyway — better than I ever did. I imagine them, Gabriel and Charlie, in the quarry's first circle.

Now let us descend into the blind world down there, began Virgil, deadly pale. I will be first, and thou second.

Let's go, Gabriel says. I'll go first and you stick close to me, Charlie.

In the bar in the quarry's first circle, noise inhabits Charlie, he breathes it in and out. Through the soles of his feet, through the nerves of his bar stool, through the skin on his face, he ingests the music of a heavy-metal band which might conceivably launch earthquakes. Two men in black leather pass a rag doll of a woman back and forth. She is limp with dope. Charlie is strobe lights and sound waves. He watches himself being shredded into particles of coloured glitter and reassembled on the opposite wall. He tastes amplifiers, drums, electric guitar, the quick slash of deals contested. Soon he may piss knives and sweat blood. He paws at the air in a vague distressed way, as a dog with its guts on the street might do, wanting to breathe, wanting to clear a little space in the fights, in the smog of noise. And a voice slips through the clearing.

“Shit, the way that cat moves.”

Noise smashes and flows and spumes around the words. Then another tiny lull, a bobbing phrase: “She'll be the death of him, she will.” Do these splinters have anything to do with Cat? Unlikely. The mind gathers up what it wants to, it picks and chooses sounds as children choose shells on a beach.

But Charlie takes messages as they come. A photograph composes itself: a woman, sinuous as a cat, slinks along a bar on all fours. Her thighs are bloody. Louts surround her, catcalling. She turns her face back toward the camera, exposing a man's head in her tiger jaws. The photograph is entitled
Catcall
. It exists.

It is written, Charlie said, that the ruthless man, oblivious to what he has bred, will step on the tail of his own palace tiger and be devoured.

He leaves Gabriel and strikes out on his own. He pushes his way past the black-leather thugs, past their limp rag doll, past the door, past the boarded-up buildings. His nerves listen. He skirts the small craters and shanties of the Princes Highway. A kid shoves someone who shoves back, a knife moves, and the kid teeters there for whole seconds before falling like a swallow. You'd think the little rifts and canyons sucked him down.

Behind Charlie's shoulder, someone leans out of the charred skeleton of a building and his nerves feel it, see it. There is another head inches from his. An absolute stillness hangs within the uproar like a bubble.

“Cat got your tongue, darling?” A feline voice, scarcely audible, comes slinking into Charlie's ear. The voice purrs, it tastes of syrup and hate. “Cop's like a piece of rotten meat,” it says sweetly. “Smell one a mile off.”

“I'm no cop,” Charlie says without moving. “But I'm looking for someone.”

A thin young woman (they are all dreadfully thin) leans over the blackened sill. “Who're you looking for, luv?”

“A woman named Cat.”

“Fuck you, darling,” the woman says in her honeyed whisper, leaning close. She spits in his face, then she withdraws behind the wall.

Behind the wall, there is nothingness. Behind the wall, an old construction site corkscrews dizzily downwards, strip-mining its way, circle by circle, into hell. Behind this wall, behind the next, behind every burned-out shell of a building: a grand canyon of random blasting and burrowing by quarry squatters. Lights float about the crater like small moons. Just below the sill, Charlie can feel the struts of a ladder, he can feel it sway as the woman climbs down, he imagines her looking up, waiting for him, mocking him, daring him, lithe as a kitten, a gaunt siren. Not gaunt, he thinks. No, not exactly gaunt. Wiry, or feral, perhaps. He imagines reaching for the scruff of her neck as a tomcat might. He shivers and swings himself woodenly, deliberately, with a show of indifference, across the sill and onto the rungs.

Down, down. He passes rock ledges where people are still swinging hammers and scraping with scrapers, savagely, mindlessly, maybe they do it all night long, maybe they can't stop. The hammers fall one microsecond after the other, a jazz riff with syncopated words:
she'll be the death of me, Cat will, Cat will, Cat will, and the way, and the way she moves.

There is order and disorder, both, he thinks, mesmerised. His eye speaks to him, he adjusts lens opening and shutter speed, he hooks his legs around the ladder to leave his arms free. He sees:
The Grid System of Chaos.
This photograph exists.

The photograph is heresy, but Charlie calibrates the spillage and run-off daily, in files and negatives and dreams. The quarry is leaking into the city, and the city is seeping quarrywards. Everyone knows this, but everyone denies it. The quarry is growing, imperceptibly, relentlessly, inch by inch. This is held to be inevitable, given the times, the nature of the times, the limited wars here and there, the worldwide recession, the unemployment, the migrant problem, the angers, but infiltration of the city proper is denied and the spreading is not a problem, not a problem at all, officially speaking. Officially, there is a policy of containment. Conditions with respect to the quarry, the government announces daily on national television, are stable. The boundaries and demarcation points are clear, although they cannot be shown on a map. Between city and quarry, the division is absolute.

In one sense, this is true. Of course the funnels of the quarry, when compared to the spread of the city, are minuscule, a negligible area, but it is feared that the separate vortices in the capital cities might now have serpentine underground links, illegal, untraceable, and alarming. This is what is widely believed: that the quarry is not only chipping away at the walls of its cauldron, gnawing at the flanks of settled suburbs, the quarry is tunnelling its way beneath the streets, there are miles and miles of intestines winding below the larger urban lots and landscaped gardens. Nothing can be done about this. Rumours fly: that the quarry tunnels have entered the subway system, that its feelers have merged with city sewers. As far from the quarry boundaries as Toorak and Vaucluse and Ascot, in those manicured suburbs where alarm systems blink their electronic eyes, people can hear a tap tap tapping at the undersides of their pillows at night. The sound is faint, like a parakeet pecking at soft wet wood, but the dreamers stir uneasily and thrash at their sheets and wake and lie waiting for dawn. It's nothing, they tell themselves resolutely, listening to the soft thump-thump of their fears.

The concept of seepage is not countenanced by the honourable members of parliament, the directors of public welfare, the rulers of straight lines.
“Triage,
” they say earnestly, on the Prime Minister's behalf, “in such times as these, is a moral imperative. For the greater good, for the healthy growth of the body politic as an organic whole and a flourishing plant, a certain pruning is essential. The burning off of dead wood is required.”

Sometimes one or other of them, someone with tousled hair and boyish charm, a judge perhaps, an officially sanctioned cultural figure, someone who doesn't rock boats unnecessarily, someone who can be counted on to want his oceanfront hideaway on the side, may pause in an informal game of Rugby or Aussie Rules, reaching for a pass in a city park, drop-kicking the ball to his darling little sons and their mates. He may wipe his sweaty forehead with the sleeve of his guernsey and smile into the camera. “There is a tough rightness to our policy with respect to the quarry,” he may say, “that can only be compared to the rightness of a good clean catch in footy.”

(Sometimes I have tried to remember exactly when newspapers, when all of us, stopped referring to the sinkhole or the cesspit and fled into euphemism. The quarry, we began to say neutrally. The people from the quarry, we said. Or the Mole People, we said, of those who lived in the tunnels and subways. And when did
triage
first appear in political speeches? Was there once a time when people had to scurry to dictionaries and look it up, when they didn't kick the word around like a football at backyard picnics?