The Last Magician (2 page)

2

Very likely, though I remember nothing, people were
solicitous. They probably offered water, air, advice, assistance, and I imagine
I said quite polite and rational things. It's nothing, I probably said. Or
perhaps, apologetic and dismissive, I murmured that it was just a dizzy spell.
(But were they looking at me strangely? Did they recognise
me? Did someone say: Excuse me, but aren't you the woman in the film? And if
they didn't say it, what would that mean?) Anyway, no doubt the formalities
were observed. And after that I must have made my way onto one of the harbour ferries by instinct, because I've always done that
when I'm in Sydney and in the grip of an obsession. I can go to Manly and back
six times and watch my theories shape and unshape themselves in the water. Leaning over the ferry railing and
staring at the sleek green curl-and-spin below, I can see the undersides and
loopholes of harebrained ideas, the way their parapets hide secrets, the way
they spiral into minarets of possibility before they disappear with the ferry
wake.

Wakes.
Now there is a pertinent topic.

No, I do not want to think
about wakes.

This is
the thing: my instinct is for comedy (Sheba would consider that a great joke; it is nevertheless true), but events keep trying to cast me in a darker rolc. Forget it. What would I say to a shark, for example,
if I swam into its arms off a Queensland beach? Listen, I'd say, you've got
yourself in a bit of a bloody mess here, haven't you, mate?

“Have
you?” this bloke says, leaning over the railing beside me, nice and
friendly managing to imply that the slow wallow of a dowager ferry is entirely
responsible for the pressure of his frontage against my thigh. Some things
never change. Your average Sydney male has a limited repertoire of enticement.
One thinks of freight trains blundering about in heat.

“What?” I say.

“Got yourself
in a bit of a bloody mess?”

“Oh bugger. Was I
thinking out loud again?”

“'Fraid
so,” he says. “Bad sign, eh?”

“You
don't know the half of it,” I say. “I've got this friend, Charlie,
and I've just seen one of his films.”

“And who's your friend
Charlie when he's at home?”

“Oh well. Now there's a
question. You ever read the Russian novelists? One of the Russians — I think it
was Tolstoy speaking of Gogol, but it could have been Gorky on Tolstoy
whichever. Anyway, one of them wrote:
While that old man is alive, the stars
will stay in their proper place.
Or something to that effect, I'm probably
not quoting exactly. Anyway, that's how I feel about Charlie.”

This
guy laughs. I can tell he thinks he's got a nut on his hands,
the kind he reckons will be easy game.

“What's
your name?” he asks, lunging sideways as a wave almost as big as a bathtub
spillover licks the ferry hull, grabbing at the railing on the far side of me
with his left hand, surprise surprise, moving in for
the kill.

“Lucy.”

“Mine's Tony.” He manoeuvres easily, swivelling
around on his plumbing, getting his downspout up. “Rough trip, eh?”

“Oh yeah,” I say
drily. “I can feel a bit of a swell.”

“You've got a nice little
bum, Lucy,” he offers.

“And
you want to buy me a beer in Manly, right? And after that, if one thing leads
to another the way you hope, a quick fuck.” I love doing that, taking the
wind out of their sails.

“Jeez,” he says, affronted, all innocence. He actually licks
his index finger and makes an X somewhere left of his sternum. “Cross my
heart,” he says, as evidence that a carnal thought never entered his head.

“The
thing is,” I tell him, “I've got another man on my mind. Two, actually. Forget dessert, but if you want to listen to
a monologue, you can buy me the beer” — because I need to conjure up
Charlie and Gabriel again. I have to. “I just saw them both,” I tell
him. “I saw them on film, their moving breathing celluloid selves, looking
as though they were alive.”

Tony lifts one eyebrow.
“I think you lost me,” he says.

“Sorry. It's
a reflex. That was Browning. ‘My Last Duchess'.”

“Never
seen it,” he says. “Any good? Can you get it
on video yet?”

I have to
laugh, because this does strike me as curiously appropriate. I imagine how
Charlie might do it: someone's duchess of the moment sprawled naked across a
bed, one arm bent a little awkwardly beneath her perhaps, a bit of blood
splashed on the wall
(I call that piece a wonder now)
, fully
dressed middle-aged man in legal robes, juridical mane falling lavishly about
his shoulders, a platinum tendril brushing one cheek, whip in hand, tear in one
eye.

Even
had you skill In speech
—
(which I have not)
—
to make your will Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this Or
that in you disgusts me
…”

“Not
unless Charlie's done it,” I say. “You never
know. It's exactly the kind of thing that would catch his eye.” Yes, the
more I think about it …

The thing
is, I've got into the habit of thinking Charlie's
thoughts. You say a word like
duchess,
you push a button, and the
retrieval system spills out a whole drawerful of
associations and they all cluster around the theme you've already got in your
mind. Before you can snap your fingers here you are at Titian's
Venus of Urbino.
Oh, he'd certainly start with that on his
video, Charlie would. I've got the hang of it now, I'm inventing for him.

“I'm
not sure if it's out on video yet,” I tell Tony “But it's worth
waiting for. It's about a painter and a duchess and a prostitute.”

“Yeah?”
Tony's definitely interested.

“You heard of
Titian?”

“A tit man, is he?”Tony leers.

“Actually, a fetish for red
hair, I think. Well, this duchess, the Duchess of Urbino,
rather old, and rather ugly according to her none-too-gallant husband, wants
her portrait done. She wants it done naked. She wants to look like a goddess,
she says. Every day she conies to Titian's studio and lies starkers
on his red sofa draped with a sheet — I mean, the sofa is draped, not the
duchess — and Titian tries not to show any disgust or embarrassment or, God
forbid, pity, which is mainly what he feels, I expect. He's a little nervous,
you know, because if she doesn't like the painting, his head will roll. Career-wise, anyway.”

Tony
shakes his head. “It's like these old girls who go topless on Bondi, mutton trying to look like lamb. It's disgusting.
There oughta be a law.”

“That's what the Duke of Urbino thought. And so did a friend of Titian's, a poet, a
smart-arse man-about-town, Pietro Aretine.
He rather fancied himself as a satirist, this Aretine,
he wrote obscene sonnets, that kind of thing. So one evening, after the Duchess
has put her clothes back on and left the studio, Aretine
arrives with a nubile little prostitute in tow. ‘Look, Titian old boy,' he
says, ‘why don't you use Lulu here as the model for the body, and stick the old
cow's head on top of it? Fix the old lady's face up a bit, you know, give her
the works, the red hair. Vanity being what it is, the Duchess will love it.'
”

Tony
laughs. “Meanwhile the three of them are at it between the paint pots,
right?”

“Something
like that. But here's the joke. When the Duke sees the
portrait, he says, ‘If I could have had that body in my bed, even with my
wife's head on it, I would have been a happy man.' And Pietro
Aretine laughs so hard he has a stroke and dies on
the spot. That's the gospel truth,” I say. “You can look it up in a
library.”

“Holy
shit,” Tony says uneasily. “Dying from laughing at a joke, that's not
very funny.”

“Maybe not. But it's the Duchess who has the last
laugh, you see.” Yes, it's coming to me now. “She and the prostitute
have an affair. It turns out that the prostitute, who had to wait behind the
curtain every day, fell in love with my lady's dignity and self-possession. She
was dazzled by the way the duchess was so at ease with her ageing body, and
with the way she didn't really give a damn what the famous painter and the
famous poet thought. This is in Charlie's version, anyway.”

“Jeez, lesbians?” Tony's
a bit shocked, but very interested. “Do they …? On
screen? I mean, do you actually see much …?”

“A
certain amount is left to your imagination,” I say. “In Charlies version.”

“Well,
look,” Tony says, willing to swim on through opaqueness for the sake of
the beer because who knows what might happen after a schooner or two?
“Obviously you want to talk about this bloke. There's a nice pub on the Corso —”

“I
blacked out during Charlie's film,” I tell him. “You know that little
arts cinema at the university? There. It was full of students, I was right in
the middle of them, and then bang, I fell down a black hole. You want to hear
about this?”

He's beginning to think he's made
a miscalculation here, but in spite of himself he's curious, and in spite of
the pointlessness, I feel a compulsion to talk.

“You blacked out? In the middle of this
Duchess
film?”

“Not the
Duchess
one,
no. Something else of Charlie's, a short feature.
Not just Charlie's. Five Postmodern Film-makers, it was called. I saw an ad. It was on a poster at Circular Quay.”

“This
Charlie, is he with the ABC or something?”

“No, not
the ABC.” In the sleek belly of the wake turning over, depending on
the way the light fills, depending on the way I look at it, I can read ten
different messages from Charlie. Seriously. Charlie
believed this. It's got nothing to do with magic, he would say. We know the
answers to the burning questions but we are afraid of them, and so we need a
screen. We need to project explanations and read them back. “The film was
a kind of telegram,” I say. “It was typical Charlie.”

“So does he always do
X-rated stuff then?”

There's
a question.
“In a way,” I say.

“What was this one
about?”

“Well,
among other things, I suppose you could say it was about the quarry.”

“Yeah?” Tony gets a gleam in his eye because he's
thinking of the quarry's first circle, the limbo of hot neon and strip joints
and the retail trade in young girls and the little boys waiting in doorways.

But
here's the trapdoor that Charlie's camera always falls through, here's the
underside, here's one of the times (not the one on the film I'd just seen, but
the one he called
Hungers)
, here's the hole where I fell right
through to an earlier time, here's the day I took him down through the
labyrinth to meet Old Fury …

She comes and goes, she disappears for months at a time,
suddenly you may see her every day for two weeks, and then she's gone again.
They say she has a niche on the Eastern Suburbs line between Martin Place and
King's Cross, a cubbyhole behind steam pipes. If you watch, it is said, you can
see the whites of her eyes, especially between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., when the
commuter trains hurtle through. This is what the tabloids claim. But then
tabloid readers, commuters, the border people, they are all haunted by
underground eyes, they see them everywhere, they see squatters evil-eyeing them
when it's almost certainly cats, or rats, or possums, or simply chips of glass
in the tunnels beside the railway lines. The commuters hear subterranean tappings on the undersides of their pillows at night. They
are not reliable.

“Old
Fury,” I say. “This is Charlie. He takes photographs of black
holes.”

She gives
him a bright fierce look. Above the birdbones of her
face, her eyebrows meet and touch and she taps her index finger against her
forehead as if to say: the black hole is
here.
I carry it round inside
me. Her eyes, which are disproportionately large, gleam owlishly. The black
hole is all that there is, her owl eyes say, though I
could have the translation wrong. It is said that she prophesies. It is said
that she speaks in tongues. In fact there is no way of knowing if she
understands a word you utter or not, though I myself believe she has the gift
of reading thought and of understanding everything that is left unsaid. She is
supposed to be simple, but it could be that she sees no point in speaking
except for when her Voices come. When her Voices visit, watch out! An infernal
gale comes with them, it's like an oil well blowing, a
black gush gurgling out of her mouth.

“Charlie thought he might
know you,” I say.

I wait
for her to ask if he's someone I picked up on the ferries again. (I have to
supply her end of the dialogue, it's good practice.
Down in the quarry, if you're not careful, you can lose the knack of civilised discourse.) I've told her before that riding the
ferries is something I do when
I'm upset. Obsessively I go to Manly and back for as long as it takes.

Old Fury watches. She waits. She
hunches her small angular body up against the cold. God, the
cold. In July in Sydney it's worse than the damp, worse than the
darkness, though the latter is something down here. I expect us to evolve
internal radar any day now. I expect us to start communicating by highpitched head-noises, like bats. Any week now I expect a
new crop of kids, fresh from subway trafficking and car jobs and the meat markets,
to arrive with radar systems which are fully formed and which have installed
themselves quite naturally within the body, possibly as cysts on the shoulderblades, or possibly tucked into a scab on the
forehead, a third eye.