The Last Magician (23 page)

Of course, at the time, they simply thought her silence was temporary shock. They didn't know that the last words she would ever speak were those she had tossed across the court:
I won't let the buggers say nothin' behind yer back.

They sat one on each side of her and held her hands, but she could have been a rag doll. It was this, Cat's listlessness, that stunned Charlie. A tidal wave of grief hit him, he floundered, he felt he would drown. That the fire could be extinguished in Cat: it made the world falter in its orbit. It seemed to Charlie they sat there for hours, not a word being said. And then, when it was nearly dark, the others came: Robbie and the three Wilston boys.

It was, Charlie thought, almost certainly an accident that they arrived together. It was entirely possible that Robbie was on a pilgrimage of remorse or a consolation mission of his own. (This was what Charlie thought. Catherine, I discovered years later, was much less sure.) It was virtually certain, Charlie thought, that Robbie, disconcerted by the presence of the boys on the corner, aligned himself with them out of fear.

“What did they do?” I whispered into the long silence in Charlie's room on the top floor of the building in King's Cross.

“There were four of them and three of us,” Charlie said.

I waited and waited. I stared at the photograph of Cedar Creek Falls. I could feel myself floundering in Charlie's grief and his memory of fear. I could feel myself going under. This drowning sensation had as much to do with Gabriel as with Charlie, as much to do with my fear for the way he kept ferreting around in the underside of respectable lives, my fear of the riddle that lay between him and his father, my fear. Charlie stared at his blow-up of the Serra Pelada mine.

“I remember lying on the grass in front of the veranda,” he said. “I remember seeing into the crawl space in the dark and knowing it was full of cobwebs and spiders, ladders and ladders of cobwebs and furry spiders. It was too dark to see them but I could see them anyway. I felt as though Cat and Catherine and I were at the bottom of a bottomless pit and we would never climb out.”

“What did they do?”

But he could not speak of it. Nearly forty years later, all he could say was, “They taught us a lesson.”

He can hear the hissed whispers:
We'll teach you to dob us in. We'll teach you. We'll teach you a lesson you won't forget, you little slut, you little wog, you little stuck-up bitch.

After a long long silence, I asked: “Did they hurt you?”

He looked at me as though I were a stranger inexplicably in the room. “At first,” he said — but he was speaking in a sort of trance, he was thinking aloud — “at first, the worst pain was
why
? They'd got off scot-free, but they were furious, they wanted revenge.” He shook his head.
“Revenge,”
he said, mystified, still incredulous. With his fist, he made the motion of a knife twisting and twisting in his lungs. “It used to bore into me.
Why
?

“I've thought and thought about it,” he said. “I've decided there were two things they couldn't forgive. They couldn't forgive what Cat knew about them, and they couldn't forgive her for being articulate. They wouldn't have minded if she'd screamed and sobbed. They didn't mind her dad, that was okay, they expected the Reillys to make fools of themselves, they could forgive that any old time. But they wouldn't forgive Cat for despising them.”

“What did they do?”

He walked to the window and moved aside the pearly paper of the shoji screen. The Sydney sun and the King's Cross neon came into the room like gaudy pimps. He looked down at the street: “You know,” he said, “to be stabbed by some stranger in a drug deal, that's nothing. It's quick and kind.” He pulled the screen back across the space. “Shame is more deadly and permanent,” he said. “If an attacker shames the person he attacks, he can do whatever he wants and get off scot-free, because the attackee won't speak of it, and he knows it.”

He stood in front of the photograph of the Serra Pelada mine. “It was their faces,” he said. “It was Robbie's face. I'll never forget Robbie's face.”

I don't know why, but I had a terrible nauseating sense of premonition, I wanted to rush out and go downstairs and find Gabriel and say, Let's leave here. Let's go and live with your mother and stepfather and plant pineapples and never come near the quarry or any sort of harm again. Let's flee. But I knew it would be useless. I knew the riddle and the need to atone wouldn't leave Gabriel alone.

“Charlie,” I said, “what did they do?”

“They taught us a lesson.”

He stood in the window again and stared at the opaque screen and said over his shoulder, with his back to me: “I can't talk about it. That's what was so brilliant about it, you see.” He turned around and said urgently, “We weren't meek, mind you, we weren't passive. But they were bigger.”

He turned his back to me again and said in a low quick monotone, “They pulled our pants off and they did things. And then the Wilston boys pissed on us, and one of them shat on us.” He said it in such a rush, in such a quick low voice, that I had to play it back in my mind to hear it properly.

He turned round and his face was stricken. It was as though he had fouled himself in front of me. “If you ever tell anyone,” he said, “I'll …”

“Oh Charlie,” I whispered, instinctively moving toward him, but he flinched and hugged himself, his crossed arms a fortress. Don't touch me, his body said.

“And Robbie watched,” he said. “He didn't do anything. He just watched.”

“Oh Charlie.”

“It was their faces,” he said. “The looks on their faces. I'll never forget Robbies face.”

BOOK III

Photograffiti and Silence

Picture taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily that of a machine.

Susan Sontag

Where can I find one who has forgotten words? That is the one I would like to talk to.

Chuang Tzu

1

The loudest and most chilling scream in the world is the silent one in Edvard Munch's painting. It is composed of every scream the viewer has ever heard, every fear he has ever felt, every nightmare that has ever jackknifed him out of sodden sheets. It cannot be shut off, that scream. It is deafening. It is not just the open
rictus
of the mouth which screams, but the skull, the hands, the whole body. The body is at risk of imploding, the scream sucks the body into itself. The giddy sky screams too, and the contortionist earth writhes in the grip of the same endless shriek.

Only the geometric grid of the bridge suggests, by its parallel railings, that there are in fact two side-by-side worlds in
The Scream.
There is the world that is only scream, and the world where the scream means nothing and is not even heard. They occupy the same space, but one world fits inside the other like a hand inside a glove.

The bridge rails bisect the painting. They warn that the hunters are coming, those two elongated figures, the stalkers, the black birds of prey, the executioners. They warn that the executioners are deaf, indifferent, sinister, grim as reapers with black scythes, as schoolteachers looming above young children, as bullies hanging about on a corner, as judges. They are unmoved but moving closer, their intentions unswerving, straight as railway lines, straight as the law, relentless as death or the black fact of power.

And the screamer puts his own hands over his own ears but the sound which shreds him will not abate.

I have never seen Munch's original painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. I have only seen reproductions in books, and I have seen Charlie's photograph of it, taken (in violation of copyright, I suppose) from a book on modern painting and incorporated into several collages of his own.

In one of Charlie's photographs, the Grade 5 class at Wilston School in one particular yesteryear (that one in which Cat and Catherine and Charlie sat at the feet, as it were, of the wise Miss Oswell, paragon of good exam results and discipline, that oldfashioned virtue), the Grade 5 class in that year is somewhat incongruously posing for its photograph on an overhead railway bridge. The photographer, as was the case in those distant days, is also on the bridge with his tripod and with his black cloth over his head, almost as though he were the hangman rather than the archivist.

His right hand is held aloft and one expects to see the shutter-trigger attached to cord, but in fact he holds a hand mirror up by its wooden clasp. Look at the birdie, he seems to say, and when the class does so, the reflection that it sees is Munch's loud silent scream.

In another of Charlie's photographs, the class sits in front of a blackboard and the blackboard is full of Munch's scream. Miss Oswell, leaving a cut-out silhouette behind her in the class photograph, stands at the blackboard and points with her long teacher's pointer right into the open ellipse of the screamer's mouth. Miss Oswell is tall and gaunt and dressed in black and looks remarkably like the long figure of one of the stalkers at the far end of Munch's bridge.

Silence seduces, Charlie said. People cannot resist silence. They fill it with confession, he said. This is something therapists and prostitutes and bartenders know all too well.

And photographs also seduce, he said. Their seeming passivity and their silence is irresistible, it invites transgression. Certainly Charlie would know. He lusted after photographs, his passion for them was unbridled. He bought them in droves from junk shops and estate auctions, he saved them from newspapers and old school magazines and illustrated weeklies, he scavenged in abandoned rooms and rubbish bins for them. He hoarded them and studied them. You can read infinity in a grainy snapshot, he said.

And he himself took photographs obsessively in order to see what he had seen.

He arranged and composed, but he did not believe that these arrangements lied, or that they refashioned the truth. All photographs lie and they all tell their own particular truth, he said, the truth of their own lie. They reveal and conceal, they enlighten and deceive, they hold steadfast and they manipulate the truth - but all this is beside the main point.

Photographs
beckon
, he said. Photographs seduce.

The relationship between a photograph and its viewer is one of seduction, and like all seducers, photographs know how to enthral. It is what is
not
seen that tantalises us. It is what is excluded from the frame that we desire. It is the figure in the photograph with her back to the camera, her face averted, that we cannot forget, that young woman, scarcely more than a girl, only partly visible in a doorway on a city street.

It is the thought of what would have happened if the photographer had focused a few feet further to the left, the thought that perhaps he in fact did do just that, that perhaps a photograph already exists somewhere which would, let us say, reveal the face of a man about to approach the young woman.

I'll tell you a story, Charlie said. I'll tell you why I suddenly came back from New York after twenty-five years. Actually, I'll tell you two very strange stories, he said. They are both true and they are both about photographs and death.

The first story. A car salesman who lived in New York City took his family (a wife, two teenage daughters, a younger son) to Florida for vacation. They had two weeks of Daytona Beach and body-to-body sunning, they opened themselves up to pleasure as unguardedly as day lilies do, the teenagers had five beach romances between them, the boy and his father went fishing, the mother read ten paperbacks and had an epiphany out there alone in the salt waves where she swam into a beatitude which stayed with her on the beach, and hovered above the trailer in the campground, so that she knew life would be irrevocably different henceforth. All these poignant little hedonisms were crammed into the family's Kodak instamatic and hoarded for the return to the mundane world.

When they got back to New York, they found their townhouse had been ransacked. The back door had been forced, the microwave, the TV, the VCR, the compact disc player had all been taken. Drawers and jewellery boxes had been emptied, their contents apparently dumped into T-shirts and sweatshirts and carried out like laundry in a basket. One of the shirts, in the burglar's haste, was left on the living room floor. Tax receipts (why on earth had the thief bothered with that desk drawer?) from five years past were spilling out of the hammock of an overlarge New York Yankees T-shirt. There was an iron-on badge proclaiming
John Lennon Lives
on one sleeve. At least they brought their own shirts, the mother said with a forlorn attempt at dry wit. It's not one of ours.

It was a horrid end to a wonderful vacation, and chaos and depression ensued for some time. Weeks later, when the tedious business of insurance claims and replacements was behind them and the family was more or less back to normal (except for that queasy sense of unsafety which visited them daily like shadows falling on the kitchen wall), the mother, cleaning out a sandy beachbag, discovered four rolls of undeveloped Kodak film.

Our happy Florida time, she thought, with a certain forgivable excess of sentimental regret. That beatitude, that happy family time, safe and sound.

She had the films developed and over supper the family slipped under the fence of the burglary and retouched that Florida joy. Oh look, they laughed, Jerry's fish! And the one that got away from Dad. And Nancy's romance. Oh look, there's that gorgeous hunk on the motorcycle, that Tim, who took Maggie to Disneyworld. He said he'd come and visit back here, he said he lived in Queens, remember? We thought he was really stuck on you, Maggie. Oh well,
que sera,
he must have found someone else.

Maggie sighed. “I gave him our phone number and address,” she said. “You never know. He might call me one of these days.”

The whole family studied gorgeous Tim on his Yamaha, his blond curls falling to his shoulders, his leather boots high and polished, his tanned and muscled arms protruding from his Yankees shirt, the perky
John Lennon Lives
badge caressing his delectable bicep.

“Oh my God,” Maggie said softly.

They all stared at the T-shirt, then they stared at one another. Oh my God, they said.

“Did he give you his address?” they asked Maggie.

“Just a phone number,” she said.

That was enough, and the police did the rest. Unfortunately the beautiful suntanned Tim, being part of a busy professional ring which specialised in vacation-emptied houses, panicked when the police showed up in Queens and there was a shoot-out and he was killed by an officer's bullet. Most of the stuff had already been fenced, of course. But there were a couple of incriminating pieces of jewellery and the microwave, microwaves having become so cheap at the discount stores that they cannot be easily fenced anymore.

To die for a T-shirt and a microwave, Maggie thought, stunned that someone who had so recently groped inside her jeans could be dead. In dreams, her beach lover came to her wearing nothing but John Lennon glasses, and he parked his motorcycle on her bed and revved it and posed for his photograph.

Almost all burglaries, almost all acts of assault, and almost all murders, the police told the family, are committed by people the victims know. A house is virtually always burgled by someone you or your children know, and in eighty per cent of murders, perpetrator and victim are related or known to each other. An act of violence is an intimate act, they explained.

The greater the violence, the greater the intimacy. And vice versa.

In fact, they said, when we get a mutilated body, twenty stab wounds, a head beaten to a pulp, a limb cut off, stuff like that — begging your pardon, young lady, we didn't mean to upset you — but when we get stuff like that, we know right off it's family or a lover, they said. Only love does that. Strangers kill quick and clean, but family is vicious, they said, and love is a savage beast.

Funny thing, the police said, but statistically you're safer on the streets than at home, and safer with a stranger than with family or friends.

“1 read all this in the
New York Times,
” Charlie said.

The second story. In my apartment building in New York, Charlie said, was a music director from one of the city's most exclusive private schools. He was a gregarious chap with a wife and several children and a passion for music. I liked him enormously I didn't know him well, but every so often he'd show up in my restaurant, or come to my exhibitions, and I'd go to his concerts, and we'd meet on his balcony or mine to have a few drinks and discuss music and art.

We used to look over the balconies at a children's playground and it was during one of our conversations, as a matter of fact, that I suddenly got the idea of doing a series on children at play. I began to sit in the playground with my camera and watch. I was fascinated by the paradox of angelic faces and sheer jungle behaviour, the little group cruelties. I was thinking of my own childhood, I suppose. I did a whole series of the more striking faces against a backdrop of jungle-gyms and sandpits and swings. I had an exhibition, and my musician friend came to it. He seemed profoundly affected. He said something very odd to me at the end. He said:
So you know.
And I thought it was a statement of our shared artistic sensibilities. I thought he meant we were both aware of this paradox of the angelic and the cruel.

Then just a week later, out of the blue, stupefying me, there was a suicide and mass publicity. The musician's body was found in the East River. Just in time, the papers said. There had been insistent allegations of patterns of sexual abuse: of boys in the school orchestra, of friends of the musician's own offspring, of children in the apartment building where the musician lived.

It transpired, Charlie said, that every single face in my series was in fact the victim of regular abuse. It transpired that the musician, this friendly family man, had got more and more reckless in his predatory habits, more and more coercive with his prey, and more and more confirmed in his sense of personal invulnerability.

It is hubris, a criminologist said on the local evening news, that eventually does the repeat offender in. They get away with it so many times, they begin to think they have magic powers. We were gathering evidence, we would soon have been in a position to lay charges, but he pre-empted us. He was getting careless, the detective said, the way they always do in the end. He thought he was invulnerable, he thought he lived a charmed life, he thought he had magic powers. That's when we get them, he said.

In fact, Charlie told me, still half incredulous, the musician had once made a tasteless joke about a scoutmaster who'd been jailed — (“Got his fingers caught in the honeypot,” he'd snickered. “Too fond of fingering little boys, the old perv, and serve him right.”) So I had no idea, Charlie said. Not the slightest clue. I couldn't believe it when I read the papers. In fact, I
didn't
believe it at first.

That's what protects them, the detective told Charlie, These people are safe for astonishing lengths of time. They are protected by our capacity for denial, you see, by our need not to know. And so they come to feel they are immune. This fellow, now, we knew he thought he was a magician, but I guess you trumped him. I guess you were the last magician, the detective said. You must have had an inkling, eh?

But I didn't, Charlie told me. I didn't. I suppose I had a need not to know. I was grateful, I suppose, for someone in my building I could talk to about music and art. There was a link, you see, he said thoughtfully. We were both attracted to the most angelic young faces. But I didn't have the slightest shadow of a suspicion about him. And yet, when he saw that line-up, he thought I knew. And that out-magicked his magic. He panicked and killed himself.

Do you see what I mean? Charlie said.