The Last Magician (24 page)

After the death of Willy, he said, Cat disappeared into the barred world of reform, and Catherine was whisked off to private school by her parents for safety, and Charlie himself retreated into the magic rituals that had protected him and kept him company before the days of Catherine and Cat. “I never talked about any of it to anyone,” he said, “and nor did Catherine. In its different ways, silence swallowed the three of us up.”

Everyone's parents wanted to expunge the whole event, Charlie said. Cat wasn't allowed visitors at reform school, because visitors would have a bad effect. So the officials decreed. Charlie saw Catherine occasionally, fleetingly, accidentally, but her parents forbade all contact.

There was that day on the tram however. He sees her sitting next to her mother at the far end of his tram, on another planet, in outer space, forty feet away from him. She feels his gaze. They are so powerfully aware of each other that he can smell her hair. Her mother speaks. She looks away. They get off the tram.

Charlie didn't see Robbie Gray for three years.

Then he won a scholarship to Brisbane Grammar.

He recalled the strange mixture of excitement and anxiety he felt, going there for the first day, knowing he'd see Robbie again …

Charlie tosses all night. He imagines every conceivable scenario for a first encounter. Robbie will go rigid with shock and remorse. Robbie will be icy and distant. Robbie will give him a wide berth but there will be little telltale signs of nervousness because Charlie
knows
… Robbie will come unstuck and will turn into the wild thing he was that last night at Cat's, a red-eyed lunatic, raving, drunk with either blood or fear.

Charlie has the recurrent nightmare again (it has dwindled in frequency over time). He and Cat and Catherine are thrashing about in a river, drowning, being sucked under. The river is boiling hot. It is not water they swim in, but shit. They cling to each other. Robbie sits on the bank enthralled, his eyes glowing like coals, a manic rictus of pleasure on his face, pushing them under with a long stick every time they reach for the bank.

Charlie wakes and paces. He stands at the window and holds the talisman Cat gave him before reform school swallowed her up. (She gave him her gold hoop earrings with their blue glass beads; he wears them on a thin chain about his neck at all times; they are safely hidden under his shirt.) Does
he
have nightmares? Charlie wonders. Does he ever wake with a thudding heart and go to his window to look for Cat? Will I know? Will I see telltale signs? Will it
help
if I see telltale signs?

He closes his eyes and thinks of Cat. He is sometimes able to believe that behind the barred windows of her school, she knows when he does this. When he puts her earrings to his lips, he smells her hair and her funky body perfume.

But nothing at all happens at Brisbane Grammar School. It is such a civilised place.

“Hello, Chang!” Robbie Gray says brightly, courteously. “I think we've met before, haven't we? You came out to our farm in Samford once or twice, years ago, didn't you? Your parents, wasn't it? For produce or something?”

Oh, Robbie Gray is invariably gracious to him. Robbie Gray is a charming sort of person, well liked, a senior now, a prefect, a pillar of the school community. Other boys like to be in his company. He treats Charlie as though they had perhaps met casually once or twice at his weekend farm, at someone's tennis court, in someone's pool.

This confuses Charlie. It baffles him. Sometimes he begins to doubt his own memory; at other times, he finds himself wondering if in fact the punishment was just and if this explains Robbie's easy conscience. Were there nameless and unspecified crimes of which he, Charlie, was guilty? There
was
the death of Willy, yes. And Robbie had loved Willy, they had all loved Willy, and Robbie had especially loved Cat. Yes, Charlie is definite about that. He remembers the way Robbie always glanced about to see if Cat was watching him, the way Robbie looked at her, the way his eyes gleamed.

Sometimes he thinks his memory of the whole event is feverish and not to be trusted. At other times he feels a helpless rage. He wants to see Robbie lying on the tracks with the train coming closer. He wants to hold him down and see the fear in his eyes. At still other times he feels a black hopelessness, as though Miss Oswell held up a white stick of chalk and asked Charlie: “What colour is this, black or white?” And he said: “White.” And she said: “Wrong,” and sent him straight to the office for the cane.

The most disturbing thing of all is that he still feels seduced by Robbie Gray. There is a cachet to being recognised by the golden boy. He notes its effect on other students, he notes that because of it, Charlie Chang has ceased to be invisible. People listen to his opinion simply because he is one of those who gets a nod from Robbie Gray. He cannot pretend that he doesn't in some sense enjoy this. It is like arriving in front of his parents' shop in a black Buick. He feels both grateful and unclean.

Charlie's nightmares are frequent again. There is a cloudy thing, a kind of tumour, thick and heavy, behind and beneath his ribs. He gets used to it. It is simply always there. Its name is bafflement.

“Then one day,” Charlie told Lucy in his room above King's Cross, “we both saw Cat in my parents' shop …”

It was an incredible coincidence. Or perhaps it was not. Chance was thick with message for Charlie.

“We both saw Cat,” he said, “and Robbie bolted. He went white as a sheet and he
bolted.
We were with a bunch of Grammar boys, he would have had to account for it later.”

So then Charlie knew that things weren't necessarily as they seemed. He had a brief cessation of bafflement. “I can't tell you how it eased the pain,” he said. “For a while.”

“I wouldn't count on a conscience.” That was Catherine's opinion, expressed to me at another time, another place. “Wounded vanity, that's my guess. It's the only way he can be touched.”

“I don't know,” I said. “He's quite vulnerable in a way. Maybe all that bland charm is a form of protection, a sort of shell.”

A tortoise shell, Catherine thought, remembering the boy with the maddened eyes and the mallet, smashing, smashing. “But there's no one inside,” she said.

When in doubt about great matters,
Charlie's ancestor believed,
consult the milfoil stalks or the tortoise shell.

“For twenty-five years,” Charlie said, “I stuffed up every hole where the past might show through.”

Then he read about the family photographs and the burglary in the
New York Times.
Then his neighbour said So you know. Then the police spoke to him of hubris, of people who come to think they're invulnerable, of people who overplay their hands.

And Charlie thought about Robbie at Grammar, and about Robbie bolting at the sight of Cat, and it seemed to him the play had still not reached its final act. It occurred to him that all he had to do was wait, though the taking of photographs, he knew, was germane to the plot.

I thought that maybe if I came back, he said, I'd precipitate something. So I came back. Perhaps I nudged tilings a bit, he admitted. I read the social pages, I knew he'd be advertising himself, I studied his watering holes. But all I'm doing is watching and keeping the record, he said.

And waiting.

And now I'll tell you one more story the way I heard it told in my own pub downstairs, he said. It's a story about waiting and death.

Once upon a time, said a bloke in the pub at Charlie's Inferno, Madame de Sévigné was writing a letter to her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan, a thing she did just about every day. Epistolary addiction, the doctors said. Not a thing they could do.

“Oh
Gawd
,” said Clancy. “He's off again. King Bluey Kuttorze.”

At the time of this story, King Bluey said, Madame
la mère
was in residence at Chantilly, and she wrote at the top of her letter in a neat round hand: April 26, 1671.

“Once upon a bloody long time ago,” Clancy said, “you blokes used to stay in the university pub where you belonged.”

Madame was at Chantilly, said King Bluey, and so was the king, for it happened that Louis XIV and his entire court were visiting the Prince de Condé, and festivities were planned for the prince's chateau: a staghunt by moonlight, lanterns in the woods, a promenade, banqueting under the stars, music, fireworks, the whole shebang.

“The whole bloody shebang,” Clancy groaned. “We're stuck with the whole shebang.”

Paparazzi and gossips were on the scene, King Bluey said, and Madame de Sévigné, all décolletage, wore a divine little thing in blue silk. The king ogled her breasts and Monsieur le Prince chatted her up and Monsieur Vatel, the most sought-after cook in the kingdom of France, that astonishing Monsieur Vatel whom the good Madame knew
personally
, the gifted Vatel surpassed himself.

“He has fucking surpassed himself,” announced Clancy to the pub at large.

The banquet, continued King Bluey, was fit for a king. So pleased was Monsieur le Prince with the groaning board that some time after midnight he himself went to Vatel's room. ‘Felicitations,' he said. ‘Congratulations, libations, and bouquets. Nothing could have been more perfect. You're a true blue bobbydazzler of a
maître d',
and you bloody well did the chateau proud. Good on you, mate.'

“Good on ya, mate,” Clancy said. “There's no stopping you, I'll give ya that.”

But Monsieur Vatel was distraught, King Bluey said.

‘I will die of shame, Monsieur le Prince,' he wept. ‘My honour is at stake. I am disgraced, I am in agony, I am having a king-sized bout of the watery shits.'

‘Merde!'
said Monsieur le Prince. ‘Pull yourself together, man. What the devil's got into you?'

‘Woe is me,' wept Monsieur Vatel.

“He's pissed as a newt,” Clancy said. “He's bloody crying in his bloody beer.”

Because of unexpected extra guests, King Bluey said, two of the tables had been without a roast. Not the king's table, and not the next, but certainly the twenty-fifth table from His Majesty, and also the twenty-eighth, had been meatless, ruined, undone.

Après moi,
King Bluey declaimed, no lamb, no venison, no roast suckling pig.

“Pardon my French,” Clancy said.

But Monsieur le Prince was kindness itself, King Bluey went on. ‘Look, mate, relax,' the prince said. ‘His Royal Highness thought it was A-l grub, he told me so himself. And tomorrow, you can go for the gold.'

But all night Monsieur Vatel could not sleep. He paced and worried. He was one of these perfectionist types, he couldn't bear the disgrace of two roastless tables at the royal spread.

At dawn, still sleepless, he began at last to turn his thoughts to a new day's meals. He paced, waiting for his orders to arrive. Seafood, seafood, the call had gone out. The orders had been placed, the shopping lists drawn, the runners sent to every port in the realm. Monsieur Vatel paced and paced. At last, by the sun's early light, a man arrived with baskets of fish. One basket. Two. Monsieur Vatel, pale about the gills, held fast to the kitchen table for support. ‘Is that all there is?' he asked faintly.

The poor bloke, knowing nothing of the army of runners converging from fifty other fishing towns, told him yes. Two baskets,
oui, monsieur, c'est tout.

“Mademoiselle from Armentières,” Clancy sang, off-key, at the top of his lungs, and the barroom chorus joined in. “Hasn't been kissed for forty years,” they roared. “Inky pinky parlez-vous.”

Thanks, mates, King Bluey said. I appreciate the concern for atmosphere. But Monsieur Vatel was frantic. He moaned to his kitchen crew in a low stricken voice: ‘I'm done for. My honour is destroyed. I am up shit creek without a paddle. I am dead.'

“Glory hallelujah,” Clancy cried.

His
sous-chef
urged him to calm down, King Bluey said, and have a cup of coffee while they waited for the day's catch to catch.

But this was no joking matter to Monsieur Vatel.

He went up to his room, planted his sword in the floor, and fell on it.

“He
what?
” Clancy asked.

He fell on his sword.

“Shit,” Clancy said.

And then, said King Bluey, almost immediately, shipments of fish and lobster began to arrive from all directions, seafood seafood everywhere, all over the bloody kitchen and not a cook near the sink. These goddam perfectionists, the
sous-chef
fumed to himself. These damned slavedrivers, these neurotic bloody
prima donnas
who get a fit of the vapours at the very moment you want maximum elbow grease. Swamped with mussels and carp, he sent hot words and a kitchen boy rushing upstairs for Monsieur-the-Worrywart-Vatel, but alas, alas, Monsieur Vatel was hooked on his own grim line, he was dead in a pool of bright blood.

“Bloody hell,” Clancy said, fortifying himself with a drink. “Then what?”

Then they all wept salt tears, King Bluey said. The king, and the prince, and Madame de Sévigné, and the rest. The king said he was awfully sorry, and so did the queen and the prince.

“Cooked his own bloody goose,” Clancy offered.

The End, King Bluey said.

And the moral of the story, Charlie told Lucy, is patience. You have to
wait
.

Silence, exile, and cunning, he said.

And patience.

And photographs.

2

There is no order, no sequence. Charlie's photographs spill out of boxes with the randomness of memory itself. Sometimes there is a caption, sometimes not. The sequence is determined by the viewer, a magician of sorts, who must shuffle the crossed destinies and read the cards. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and I sift through an avalanche, picking up random pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, trying them out here, moving them there, looking out at the photographer, trying to make circles intersect and dead ends meet.

Photographs seduce, Charlie said, and studying them is a passionate act of transgression. It's a dangerous pastime, he warned.

Violence is a Persistent Weed

This is postcard size, in colour, its title scrawled across the back. It shows a paddock that stretches into the distance and is covered in dandelions as far as the eye can see.

In the foreground, her back to the camera, the stooped figure of a woman in straw hat and gardening gloves (it could be Catherine, I think) removes the dandelions one by one with a small knife.

The Three Judges

One of Charlie's frequent collages. Rouault's painting of the three judges appears on the pocket of a blazer where the school crest should be. The photograph is 8x10, the pocket occupies most of the space, though part of the lapel and a brass button can also be seen.

The judges have fleshy red faces and bull necks and little pig eyes.

Sex in the Head

A large photograph of a white skull. Through the eye sockets, one sees that the back of the skull is the wall of a quarry, pitted with blastings and tunnellings and laced with long swaying ladders.

Through the gaping mouth, one sees the bottom of the quarry, crossed with a railway line. A naked man and a naked woman are locked in sexual embrace on the rails.

Blind Justice

A
papier mâché
head, wearing juridical wig and a blindfold, is at the left of a postcard-sized photograph. The figure (only its black-gowned shoulders and head visible) stands at the edge of a large picture window, its back to the glass. Through the window one can see the city of Sydney. The photograph appears to have been taken from perhaps the eighteenth floor in one of the new highrises near the Opera House. We can see the Harbour Bridge in the background, the water and Circular Quay in the foreground, and, in this view, the quarry occupying everything south and west of the quay.

The Quarry

A view of a path corkscrewing its way into a pit. Two figures in black, furtive, one stalking the other, descend into the funnel. Because of the circular nature of the paths and the optical oddity of the aerial view down into the quarry, it is impossible to tell who is stalking whom.

Untitled

The three famous monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil) sit on a boulder in the rainforest somewhere, except that each one has its hands over its mouth.

Mute Testimony

An enlargement of the Grade 5 photo. There are three absences, three white cut-out silhouettes. In the space where Cat would otherwise be is a photograph of a panther's head. In place of Catherine is a TV screen on which appears a tiny image of Catherine hanging as an earring from the ear of a talking head. In place of Charlie is the blank black eye of a camera.

The Hollow Man

A man stands in front of a mirror, his back to the camera. There is no reflection in the mirror. A neat caption across the bottom reads:
Don't worry this is no reflection on you.

(There is clearly a witty double homage to Magritte here, and a witty double reversal with special reference to Magritte's
Ceci n'est pas une pipe.
)

Untitled

This is simply a snapshot of Charlie and Catherine at a dance. In the bottom right-hand corner there is a logo:
Cloudland Photographers.

The photograph beckons.

Catherine is wearing a long gown with shoestring straps. Her hair is shoulder-length and stray curls wisp across her forehead and into her eyes, Charlie is wearing a rented evening suit. They are holding hands and are turned slightly toward each other, their shoulders touching. At the time of the photograph, they have recently completed degrees at the University of Queensland. The event is the Graduation Formal, but neither Catherine nor Charlie gives the appearance of being at a festive dance. There is a haunted look to their eyes, their faces are drawn. One might be forgiven for thinking they were on their way to a wake or a funeral in fact.

The relationship between a photograph and its viewer is an act of seduction, Charlie said.

They did not, in fact, go to the formal together. They had other partners, officially. In fact, Charlie hates these things, but friends have fixed him up with a girl because it is really not acceptable, in his graduating year, not to be part of the final extravaganza at Cloudland, Brisbane's ballroom palace on the hill. Needless to say, his partner is shy and awkward (why else would she be available in this blind and demeaning way?) As they shuffle miserably through a foxtrot together on the mercifully overcrowded floor, and as the girl chatters nervously about her father's peanut farm in Kingaroy, Charlie mentally calculates the number of minutes before escape.

And then he sees Catherine. He feels her eyes actually In that press of people, he feels something warm and compelling on his left cheek. He half turns, and there she is, and there is childhood, there they are in the pool at Cedar Creek, the warm sun fingering them through the canopy, the water linking them, their blood warm in each other's veins.

He supposes they managed to be polite and keep to formalities, he hopes so, he hopes he wasn't rude to the awkward little girl from Kingaroy, but here he is with his cheek against Catherine's, here he is in the dimmed light with his lips against the hollow of her neck, here he is flowing into Catherine, curve to hollow and hollow to curve, her thigh against his crotch, his leg between hers, two people in one space, his twin. They do not speak. They do not dance with anyone else all evening.

Here they are in a taxi, here they are creeping into the sleepout at the back of his parents' shop. Here they are occupying the same space in his narrow bed, floating in a Cedar Creek haze. It is perhaps not so much ecstasy as a cessation of pain. He is floating in remembered happiness. He realises: this is the first time he has felt happy since that summer. He had forgotten what it was like.

Catherine begins to cry. “We're like war veterans, Charlie,” she whispers. “We can only talk to each other.”

“I talk to you all the time in my head,” he whispers back. “And to Cat.”

“Yes. Me too. Not with words.”

“Shh,” he murmurs. His parents will hear sounds, but will say nothing. They will ask no questions. Beyond the louvres, he sees the mango tree and the stars. He kisses the soft skin of Catherine's breast, which feels like Willy's cheek, the silken skin of innocence. She undoes the buttons of his shirt and reveals a thin gold chain and its pendant: two small hoops, each threaded with a blue glass bead. Catherine kisses the earrings. “She gave me something too,” she says. “She gave me her hair ribbon. I keep it in a jewel box in my room.” He puts his finger against her lips. Ssh. He unfastens the chain from around his neck and puts it on Catherine, so that Cat's earrings hang between her breasts. He would like to eat her. Starting at her lips and working down, he licks and sucks and nibbles her creamy body. She tastes of the pool at Cedar Creek.

“I'm a virgin, Charlie,” she whispers.

He kisses the hollow between her legs, then rises to kiss her on the mouth again. “So am I.”

Charlie thinks, though he loses all track of time, that they simply lie there for hours. They lie together naked, holding each other, and Catherine cannot stop crying though she doesn't make a sound. Then he licks the tears from her face. He licks her neck and her breasts and her belly. He licks her between her legs till she cries out and stifles her cry in the pillow and clutches at him and he comes to her and they both come and cling to each other and cry soundlessly

“I'm going to London, Charlie,” she whispers. “My parents are having a twenty-first birthday party for me in a few weeks and I'm going right after that. I've got a job with a newspaper, I can't stay here.”

Of course, he thinks. We can't stay here. He decides on the spot. “I'll come too.” But she puts her finger against his lips and shakes her head. “I want to have amnesia, Charlie.” Then I'll go somewhere else, he thinks. New York perhaps. Anywhere. It doesn't really matter where as long as it's away.

She unfastens the chain from her neck and gives it back to Charlie. Then she asks: “Have you seen her?”

“Once. One of her escapes. She came here, to the shop. Well, she came to see her dad, I suppose.”

“I tried to visit her at that school,” she says. “They wouldn't let me.”

“Yes,” he says. “Me too. She was let go, you know, when she was eighteen. She got a job at The Black Pussycat.”

“Yes,” she says. “I heard that. She's, um, a dancer, I heard.”

“Yes,” he says. Neither of them wants to say the word
stripper.
“I've heard other students, engineers, talk about her. She's very popular.”

“Yes,” she says. “Robbie goes there a lot.”

“So I heard.”

“Have you seen her?”

“I can't bring myself to go and … not like that,” Charlie says.

“No.”

“But I tried to make contact. I mean I went there during the day and left messages, but they always said she wasn't around.”

“I tried too,” she says. “It's not … you know, women don't go into places like that. They told me she'd gone to Sydney, I don't know if it's true or not.”

“She still doesn't talk,” he says. “That's what I heard. Ever.”

“No,” she says. “That's what I heard too.”

Giacometti's Foot

An 8x10 black-and-white photograph with the title neatly lettered in white ink at the base. The photograph is simply a close-up of an earlobe and an earring. The earring is a plain gold hoop with a small glass bead like a teardrop at its lowest point. Since the photograph is black and white, one cannot tell what colour the glass bead is.

The ironic title needs some explaining, and I recall the anecdote Charlie told me about Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966, the famous sculptor of those striking elongated forms. When Giacometti was a young student at art school in Geneva, Charlie said, the nude model for figure-drawing classes was the generously endowed and luscious Loulou. To the instructor's exasperation, however, Giacometti never moved higher than her ankle. He religiously and obsessively drew endless studies of the model's foot. The secret of all her sensuality is in that foot, he implied.

Charlie had reason to find the whole of Cat encoded in the fleshy tip of her ear.

On the last night before she was taken away to reform school, the night after the violent events in her own overgrown yard, Charlie lay awake in the sleepout, staring out at the mango tree and the stars. There was a tapping on the glass louvres and Cat was there.

“Wait,” he whispered. “I'll come outside.”

They sat together among the ferns, leaning against the mango tree, holding hands, looking at the stars, saying nothing. A hot damp breeze stirred the ferns. From time to time there was the screech of a flying fox, and a banana or a mango would fall to the ground with a soft thump. They sat there for hours. They sat there until it was almost dawn.

A cock crowed.

Cat flinched violently.

She stood, and he could not bear the look on her face, so he closed his eyes and put his arms around her and he felt her go limp, with her head tucked under his chin. He held her fiercely.

She broke loose suddenly and began running away, stopped, ran back, with a quick movement of both hands reached up and pulled her earrings sharply from her ears. She simply tugged, so that the gold circles cut through the lobes as piano wire cuts. She put the trinkets in his hand and then she fled.

Neither of them ever said a word, but after she had gone he clung to the mango tree and sobbed. He howled like a dingo for her.

When he looked at the gold hoops by daylight, he saw the dried beads of blood as well as the blue glass beads.

Holy Family School for Little Wanderers

Black-and-white photograph of complex of grey cement block one-storey buildings surrounded by high chain-link fence and barbed wire.

Running Wild

Newsprint pasted on white paper. Clipping from
Courier-Mail,
subheading, small black caps, RUNNING WILD. A million black and grey newspaper dots congregate into the approximate configuration of Cat's face. Her spiky hair has been cut so short that she looks like a prisoner of war. Photo credit: court records.

Item:
Catherine Reilly, aged 15, nicknamed “Wildcat” by police and social workers, has escaped from Holy Family School for Little Wanderers for the sixteenth time in five years. Reilly holds the record for the number of escapes from a Queensland institution. A spokesman said Reilly is obdurate and non-reformable. “You get a certain hardcore type which has never had any respect for authority,” the school spokesman said, “and there's nothing to work with. Nothing that can be done, I'm afraid.”

Chang's Grocers & Greengrocers

A small black-and-white snapshot of the shop on Newmarket Road.

What is not visible in the photograph is a knot of boys in Grammar School uniforms. They constitute the debating team and have been on a trip to another school for a tournament. The four boys on the team (which includes both Robbie Gray and Charlie Chang) are in the elegant black Buick owned by Robinson Gray's father, who is one of the volunteer drivers for school trips. There is no reason to go anywhere near Newmarket Road, but Robbie has graciously invited the team back to his place on Wilston Heights where there is a backyard pool, and on the way it occurs to him that he needs a particular kind of gum eraser, very difficult to get these days, available only from old-fashioned family shops like the grocer's on Newmarket Road.