The Last Magician (26 page)

Newspaper clipping on white card. The title,
Odysseus
… etc., printed beneath in Charlie's hand. Photo credit:
Truth.

What is truth? asked a smiling judge.

Truth
was a tabloid newspaper in Brisbane, Your Honour. It was not read by respectable people, and rightly so.

What does the photograph show? It shows the frontage of the infamous Black Pussycat in George Street. Through the large picture window the bar can be seen, and along the bar the fuzzy line-up of the backs of a number of men. Some are wearing suits, some are in working-class shirts. One can safely assume that the men are ogling the scantily clad woman who walks along the top of the bar.

Newspaper caption: BACK TO BASICS. Does Brisbane know where respectability and prestige go on their odd night off?

In Charlie's handwriting: When men act like pigs it is entirely the fault of Circe, naturally. But Odysseus draws his sword and sticks it in Circe's mouth, and lo, he may leave unscathed.

Sheba

It could be at The Shamrock in Brisbane, it could be later at Charlie's Place. Whichever. She worked in both joints. Golden in the light that streams through stained-glass Four-X and Swan Lager signs, the Queen of Sheba presides over the bar with a languid contentment that has been known, on occasion, to break into runnels of flame the way a bushfire does. Then her anger will lick and scorch. A few quick sparks of contempt for the great cloud of unknowing that hovers above the comfortable, above those who live at very safe removes from nether worlds, a few sparks, and
whoosh,
her disdain may leap out of control.

Mostly, however, Sheba accepts the world as it is, and deploys her energies in its many pleasures, and sets her compass for survival. That is why she says to Lucy: “Your boyfriend's gonna get himself killed.”

Ah. The Shamrock. In Brisbane still. “He's making a lot of people very jumpy,” she says. “Taking pictures, keeping records like that, asking too many questions. You just don't do that sorta thing around Brisbane.”

“I thought that's what you were after, Sheba, when you first put your hex on me. Someone to shake things up. Wave a white wand.”

“Fat chance,” Sheba says. “Daydreams. I just didn't forgive ya for thinkin' ya lived in outer space, that's all. For thinking you could keep your starched white petticoat clean. I
know,
see, the way the clean world and the dirty world mix. They mix every day on Brunswick Street and every night. It's the clean world that keeps the dirty world going. So it just makes me want to chuck up when clean people try so hard not to know about that.”

“You should be happy about what Gabriel's doing then,” Lucy contends. “Keeping a file on all those Mr Cleans.”

“There's ways and ways,” Sheba says. “He's just gonna get himself killed.”

But she drapes her warning around Lucy lightly as a streamer and moves along the bar and between the tables in the lounge, a ministering angel. Above her head, poised aloft on the wing of her graceful arm, circular trays laden with jugs of ale and glasses float across the top of the crowd. Sheba love, the men say, patting her generous behind. Watch where you put your fingers, mate, she says, smacking them. Or they'll get chopped off.

“Listen,” she says to Lucy, returning through cigarette smoke and laughs, “I got a bloke over there can't keep his eyes off you. He's quite the gentleman, plum in 'is mouth, loads of dough. One of me sugar daddies, as a matter of fact, comes up from Sydney like clockwork, on business I suppose but how would I know? and he wants his naughty on the side, and back 'e goes. He's a dud fuck, bugger it, but aren't they all? That's why they come to me, innit?

“I'm fond of 'im,” she says. “He's a gentle bloke with the usual blues, disappointed in love, he says. Well aren't they all?

“It's not fucking he wants from you, Lucy. He gets that from me,” she says. “He wants to buy you a drink, that's all, he wants to talk. Well, that's all he does when he's
paying,
is talk the bloody leg off an iron pot.

“He's got the hots for you, Lucy. I told him you had this dirty secret life at the university, studying and that, and it really got his engine going.” Sheba laughs. “I don't mean he wants to race you, he just wants to talk. You gonna go for it?”

“Sure,” Lucy shrugs. “Why not?”

“That's him over there by the window. He's a bloody judge in Sydney, so mind your Ps and Qs. You can call him whatever you like, but I call him Sonny Blue.”

There is no photograph, except in Lucy's mind, of the table at The Shamrock and the two glasses and the amber light that falls through the window onto Lucy and Sonny Blue. His Honour, Judge Sonny Blue.

They speak of this and that, of shoes and ships and sealing wax, of cabbages and kings, of the interesting ways in which the bonds of human kindness are both loosened and strengthened by a glass or two of Four-X beer, of the ways in which
communitas
becomes more elastic, more inclusive, more durable. They speak of the vibrancy of pubs as compared to the modes of community in law courts, say or in universities.

Live and let live, they agree. At least, as a general principle. Though of course there are certain things which are over the top and below the belt and out of bounds. One did have to draw lines, or where would society be? One drew lines, and one turned a blind eye: this was an instinctive corrective measure in all societies. Wonderfully complex, they agree, the social animal. Consider bees, Sonny Blue says. But neither of them knows enough about bees to pursue this analogy at length.

Consider the single-minded, Sonny Blue says. Consider the overly pure in heart. Consider the damage fanatic reformers have wrought: Cromwell, the French Revolution, the puritan witch hunts in New England, the Stalinist purges, the Red Guards, Islamic fundamentalists, the thought police. Both the inability to turn a blind eye, and the inability to draw straight lines when they had to be drawn — these lacunae were always present in the recurring dark ages of civilisation.

Yes, Lucy says. But how does one know when the lines must be drawn and
where
exactly …

It's a matter of instinct, he says.

Yes, she says. But are not the people with the power to impose their particular lines more inclined to draw them for their personal benefit? Can we, in fact, ever trust them? Doesn't the fact of power create an automatic conflict of interest?

Ah, he says sadly. I sense a streak of destructive bitterness. We
inherit
the lines, you see, they are sanctioned by time. We inherit the instinct for when it is appropriate to turn a blind eye. It is tradition, and respect for tradition, that makes the web of civilisation. And it is the bitter zeal of those who want to redraw the lines which destroys.

I see, Lucy says.

Consider, he says sorrowfully, the zealous son of a colleague of mine. He's breaking his father's heart. His father asks me to keep an eye on him when I'm in Brisbane.

Why is he breaking his father's heart? Lucy asks.

He's trying to redraw the lines, Sonny Blue says. He doesn't know when to turn a blind eye.

Such sadness clouds Sonny Blue's eyes, such pain comes off the clenched knuckles on the beer glass, that Lucy impulsively leans across the table and puts her hand on his. She has a disturbing visionary flash: his eyes are not eyes, but deep black wells, they are cavernous scarred openings like quarry pits. She puts this vision down to the third beer.

(Even from this distance, I told Catherine, knowing what I now know, I would maintain that his pain was intense, and it was real.

Yes, Catherine said. But the question is, what was the nature of the pain?)

Sonny Blue sighs. The young won't listen, he says sadly. I feel my colleague's pain as if it were my own. The young are so arrogant, he says. So unforgiving. Gabriel, for example, won't even speak to his father. It's breaking his father's heart.

Gabriel?
Lucy asks, startled.

The son of my colleague, Sonny Blue says. You know him?

Lucy shrugs. Weird name, that's all. We meet too many blokes to remember who's who in here.

I suppose, Sonny Blue says. Yes, I suppose, with so many men. You should keep a lookout though. This is just the sort of place Gabriel hooks onto, and you're just the type he makes use of. Quite ruthless about it in his own zealous way. His father — my colleague, that is — is left picking up the legal pieces for him.

How exactly do you mean? Lucy asks.

Oh well, the judge says, gesturing with his hand in a manner that suggests
sub judice
taboos. Let's not … a long history, that's all. A certain kind of puritan zeal. A very
pure
sort of callousness, one might perhaps say, or a righteous ruthlessness. You know the sort of thing. (Sonny Blue implies courteously, world-wearily, that he and Lucy are all too familiar with …) You know, the old pattern of cosying up to barmaids and prostitutes, using them for information, until, well, you know, then dropping them like hot cakes, and then …

Sonny Blue brushes the legal pieces into a sorry little pile with his hand. And then …, he sighs.

And then
what
? Lucy asks.

Sonny Blue waves this aside in distress. He's so convincing, Sonny Blue says, as the earnest lover. Well, that sort of self-anointed charmer always is, isn't he? And barmaids are such suckers for that kind of thing, bless their little hearts of gold.

Apart from the debris, Sonny Blue says, and the legal fallout, it's the arrogance that bothers his father. There's a callous sort of self-righteousness to it.

Yes, Lucy says. In the glow of the Four-X signs, she holds herself very still. She can feel a bruise spreading forwards and backwards in time.
You would play upon me, you would seek to know my stops …

Sucker!
she tells herself furiously.

Sonny Blue picks up her hand and kisses the palm. If you ever come to Sydney, he says, I have a friend who owns several hotels, restaurants, pubs, that kind of thing. I'm sure he'd offer you a place.

The kind of place where you turn a blind eye? Lucy asks.

Exactly, he says.

Sheba, she says later, I've had it with Brisbane. I'm clearing out. I'm buggering off to Sydney in the morning.

What? Sheba says. Bit sudden, innit? I'm thinking of heading for the Big Smoke meself for a bit of a blast. But what about Gabriel?

Screw Gabriel, Lucy says. And you can tell him I said so.

3

Gabriel mapped the quarry with notations of his own. In back streets, in boarded-up buildings, in subway tunnels, in the sewers, he recorded intimate encounters between strangers. He filled notebooks. He used stealth, persistence, hunches, intuition, and his map-making was full of intimate detail. He prowled like a tomcat. His brooding eye monitored the night. He also chronicled the garish day and its artefacts: the hypodermics in gutters, the quick and furtive exchange of folded bills and other substances in doorways, the patterns of visitation to underground parking lots, the number plates of cars, the figures with upturned collars and downturned caps who cruised through the quarry's back passages.

He collected
faces,
he took Charlie with him to keep a record, he scribbled notes on the backs of Charlie's photographs, documenting and dating: the tired expressions at bus stops, the ravaged cheeks and great puppy-dog eyes of children in parks, the young girls in doorways, the glazed beatitude of those who dozed on the footpath outside pubs in the morning sun. Gabriel was following a trail. He was looking for clues. He was arrested by a certain kind of body, a facial type. (I was neither the first nor the last to catch his eye.) He was keeping records of the men whose eyes were caught by just such women, such types of women, of the men who returned and returned by night to certain underground haunts. There was something he needed to understand.

He was looking for the woman who rode one of the last Brisbane trams. He was looking for the men who stalked her, sniffing her scent.

He was driven by a riddle and by grief, but he also had a calm sense of inevitability. He knew that an answer lay waiting, he believed he was slowly reeling it in, that it lay beyond his patient unravelling of words spoken long ago. They were spoken by his father on an overhead bridge.
The law is like railway lines, Gabriel, straight and true. The law protects the truth. What the law decides is truth.

Was
the law the arbiter of truth?

His father's agitation on the bridge was part of the riddle and also part of the clue. That strange state of excitement had suggested to Gabriel, long before he could articulate it to himself, something lurking underneath his father's dogma: heresy, perhaps; a countertruth; a lie. He followed the riddle's thread.

Already in Brisbane — before my abrupt departure, before I fled from the calculated untruths of Sonny Blue, before I realised who Sonny Blue was — already Gabriel had a reputation as a maverick, a renegade law student, a troublemaker, an uncomfortably sharp observer and notekeeper of official behaviours, of the backroom-backstairs-off-the-record ways of the public keepers of public truth.

When you grow up with the habit — the
necessity
— of watching and listening closely, he said to me then (in those distant, tranquil, Shamrock and Cedar Creek days), you take note of every little inconsistency, every clue.

He couldn't mention his mother in Sydney, he said (it was an unwritten rule), but he studied her absence, he explored every nuance of its meaning, he became an expert, nothing escaped his eyes and ears. And when the Law, he said, in numerous dignified incarnations, was constantly in your childhood and in your home — at dinner parties, by the swimming pool, on the tennis court, on the harbour yachts, in discussions overheard, in partly listened-to phone conversations — well … “You notice certain discrepancies,” he said.

“Straight and true,” he told me back in Brisbane before I fled, “is exactly what the law is not.”

“Sheba says you're making some powerful people very nervous,” I told him back then. And he only smiled in his calm, unruffled way, that
interior
way. “Sheba says you'll get yourself killed if you don't watch out,” I had warned more sharply, distressed. “Sheba says that no one with any sense fools around with the Queensland police or the Queensland courts.”

But I could never make any impact. Perhaps because of the way he refound his mother and her happiness, perhaps because of the way the woman on the tram led him to The Shamrock and to me, Gabriel trusted in the logic of the inevitable. And how could he worry if whatever was going to happen
would?

Perhaps he was following me, perhaps he was following a different thread entirely when he came to Sydney. Perhaps the two threads intersected at Charlie's Place. Maybe everything, ultimately, leads to the Inferno and the quarry, who knows? Whatever. Gabriel was charting his way down through the labyrinth, looking for the nine-digit number at its core, keeping watch, taking notes, looking for the woman, looking. Gabriel led, and Charlie followed, keeping the photographic record so that both of them could see what they had seen.

“Charlie,” I pleaded privately. “
Tell
him.”

“I can't,” he said. “I
can't.
”

“You could tell him
some
of it,” I said. I couldn't stand it, there was something indecent about it. It was like watching a rat in a laboratory maze. So I told Gabriel what I could, which wasn't much. I told him what I could without violating a confidence.

“Charlie knew the woman on the tram,” I said. “Charlie knows what she looks like. Her name is Cat.”

“
Cat!"
Gabriel said, electrified, unearthing for a split second an argument, shouts, a white nightgown, his mother's cry … But it was out-of-focus, staticky, getting fuzzier, gone. “So
that
was why …

“Cat,” he said, exploring the name with his tongue. “Cat. Her name was Cat.” He kept repeating it,
Cat
,
Cat
, but the shimmer had gone, the chink in time had closed over again.

And Gabriel couldn't get Charlie to talk, or not more than minimally. There was an accident when we were kids, Charlie said. Cat had been sent to reform school. Charlie missed her. He had lost track of her. That was all Charlie would say, except for this: “I'd like to find her again.” The words gave him visible pain. “When I roam the quarry with you, that's who I'm looking for. The woman you saw on the tram.”

“But what … ?” Gabriel pressed.
And when … ? And how … ? And when was the last … ?
But to no avail. Charlie would not, could not, speak of the past to the son of Robinson Gray.

“Catherine Reed knew her too,” I told Gabriel.

He already knew Catherine Reed, who was part of his father's social scene; in a sense, part of it. In his last high school years, before he declared himself for his mother and Brisbane, pressured to put in an appearance at his father's parties, he'd met her from time to time, though she always came late and left early. She'd been overseas for many years, he'd heard. He thought his father was attracted to her, but edgy around her too, which interested him. He thought of her as gracious but aloof.

“Catherine Reed knew Cat,” I told him. So he went to see her at the studios where she worked. He questioned her. He watched her non-answers in his attentive unnerving way.

He sifted through the meanings of her evasion, and of Charlie's too. He was an expert on gaps. The particular way in which Catherine and Charlie refused to talk was revealing to him. In their vagueness, he found illuminating clues.

There was an image that persisted in his mind like a street lamp in fog: the expression on the face of the woman on the tram. He wanted a translation. The word
cat
was surely part of the translation. He wanted to find Cat and make her translate. And what had her laughter meant? He had to know.

He knew he would find out in the end, he never doubted that, it was ordained, his journey was inexorable, there was no turning aside. And since Charlie and Catherine wouldn't talk, he decided he would have to ask his mother.

This was not something he had been able to do in our Cedar Creek days, so soon after he had found her again, too soon, when he'd been too afraid of loss and of distressing his mother in any way. But now he had to know. So he went back to Brisbane for a weekend, and I went with him.

They were alone together, sitting on the veranda of the farmhouse at Samford in the cool of evening. Half the sky was blood red with sunset, and the dark wall of the rainforest seemed to be advancing on them like an army of gigantic black horsemen. The young children of his mother's second family, of whom Gabriel was very fond, were already in bed. Against the dying light, they could see the silhouette of Gil Brennan out on the hillside, moving between the pineapple rows, checking the infant fruit in their spiky cribs, casting spells against flying foxes.

I was quite close, not far from them, invisible among the hibiscus bushes in the dark, breathing in the jasmine that hung from veranda posts. They had forgotten I was there.

“Remember,” Gabriel said peacefully, “when you used to take me swimming in the pool by the falls?” Back in the golden time, he meant, the time of sugar doughnuts at McWhirter's, before things went awry.

His mother reached across to his deckchair and momentarily put her hand on his wrist.

“Were you happy then, Mum?”

She didn't answer for a long time, then she said: “Not as happy as I am now.”

“Did you love Dad?”

“Yes, I did.”

“Did he love you?”

Again she didn't answer for a long time. “I think so,” she said. “In the beginning. In his own way.” Though she had never been quite sure.

“Mum, the woman on the tram that day … ” A look of such pain crossed his mother's face that he reached to touch her and she took his hand and held it, looking across the fields and the rainforest into the red sky. “I'm sorry,” he said.

“No, it's all right.”

Gabriel moistened his lips. “Why did you both laugh that day?”

Absent-mindedly his mother stroked his arm. Some time after he had given up expecting any answer, she said: “I suppose for her it meant that whatever had happened didn't matter any more. It was irrelevant. She was free of it.”

“What had happened?”

“I don't know” she said. “There was something terrible that happened when they were children. Your father would never talk about it, and nor would Catherine. I met your father at a twenty-first birthday party for Catherine Reed. You know, the one with the TV show.”

“Yes,” he said. “I know her. I see her in Sydney.”

“Do you?” His mother was momentarily startled. “Yes, I suppose. We were at high school together, and she and your father lived next door to each other when they were kids. Has she ever … ?”

“I don't know her well enough for that,” he said.

“Catherine's twenty-first,” his mother said dreamily. She lapsed into reverie, smiling to herself “Your father was like a skyrocket that night, I was absolutely dazzled. He got very drunk on champagne and drove me home and we sat in the car in a park and talked for hours and then we … Well,” — she looked away, but he sensed from the way her body softened that she was smiling — “you were conceived that very night, I think. And the next day we announced our engagement.”

She let go of Gabriel's hand and stood up and crossed to the edge of the veranda railing. She stood there, looking out at the bloody sky. “I'll never forget Catherine's reaction when I told her. About the engagement, I mean. It was shock at the suddenness, I suppose. No, perhaps more than that. She looked as though I'd told her I'd decided to shave my head or something. And then she said, ‘Oh God, it's because of Cat. I feel responsible.'

“And I said, ‘What do you mean?'

“And then she said, ‘That was awfully rude of me, Constance. I'm sorry. It's just, you know, the boy next door, the past … ' And then she said congratulations and all the conventional things and would never discuss it again.”

Constance turned to face Gabriel. “The woman on the tram was at that party … ”

Here are the streamers and balloons again, and the Chinese lanterns strung across the lawn, and the hired band, and the dancers under the tent on Wilston Heights.

“She created quite a stir when she came. I mean, a twenty-first birthday party in those days … it was as formal as a wedding. And then suddenly, very late, a bit like Cinderella in reverse … ”

Yes, let us add the trappings, for they are irresistible, and certain lives have a curious tendency to conform to ancient folk grooves. Is that what we have always done with such lives? Turned them into witches and wicked fairies and bad stepmothers and evil eyes? Do we wrap them up in fairy tales so that we can put them at the back of the toy cupboard with the bogeyman? Well then, very late, just before the stroke of midnight in fact, Cat appeared at the formal garden party and dance for Catherine's twenty-first.

“It was pretty startling. I mean, she was just there, like an apparition under one of the lamps at the edge of the tent, and she was dressed like a woman in one of those nightclub paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. You might as well have put a whole box of firecrackers on the lawn and lit them.”

She stands there, pale as Medea, pale as the ghost of Banquo at the feast of Macbeth and just as disturbing, except that everyone sees her and turns to stare. The musicians play on, unaware, for a bar or two and then trail into silence. Is this part of the entertainment? A skit? A joke? The joker in the party magician's deck of cards?

Or is this the uninvited guest, the thirteenth fairy, showing up to deliver her curse?

“I remember she wore a black strapless dress in a sort of cheap-looking satin, very shiny” — excessively shiny, let us make that, shiny as though slick and wet like the pelt of a seal — “and it was covered in sequins and it clung like a second skin. Her hair was very short like a boy's and she wore these huge fake diamond earrings, they must have come from Woolworths. She wasn't beautiful in the least — she was actually a bit scrawny, really Sort of … sort of … she made me think of a possum, or an animal anyway — but there was something quite stunning about the way she stood there. She glittered. She seemed to give off some sort of heat.”