The Last Magician (29 page)

“Where
did
you?” Gabriel asked with sharp interest. “And who exactly — ?”

“Oh,” I said hastily, slamming Sonny Blue back inside his box. “Some bloke in The Shamrock. Can't remember now. It isn't important.”

“It might be,” Gabriel said.

He was very solemn, I remember. He put his hands on my shoulders and made me look at him. “We've found someone who remembers Cat,” he said. “We found someone who knew her at the Empire Hotel, an old hooker. She was working out of the Empire with Cat at the very time I saw her on the tram.”

“God,” I said quietly, awed in spite of myself.

“Cat disappeared right after that,” he said. “But this woman thinks she knows what happened. She's got a longtime client who's an old Brisbane cop. We're meeting them both at The Shaky Landing, Charlie and me.”

“Do they know where Cat is now?” I asked.

“They think so. I think we've located her. We have to go to Brisbane to check it out.”

“Brisbane!” My heart leaped up. “We can stay with your mother and Gil.”

“Not this time, Lucy,” he said quietly. “I meant that Charlie and I — ”

“Oh sure,” I said, hurt. “When you bring her back,” I said tartly, “we'll throw a bash.”

“I'm not sure it'll be a party,” he said. He seemed weighted down, absent, as though the answer he had hunted after for so long had now attached itself to him like a ball and chain. So now, I thought wearily, we enter a new phase, I suppose. I felt exasperated. Perhaps I was jealous of Cat with her hold on so many lives.

“So she's been in Brisbane all along?”

“Well, this old hooker thinks … But Charlie's sure she's in Sydney A lot depends on what we hear tonight,” he said. “Not that you can trust a Queensland cop, retired or not.” At least we agreed on that, but I suppose I owed them something. I suppose he wouldn't have fled Brisbane and found me here if it weren't for the Queensland police. “We're leaving for Brisbane tomorrow anyway,” he said. “We'll get away early and drive up in Charlie's car. It won't make sense for me to come back here tonight, I'll stay at Charlie's so we can leave at the crack of — ”

“Sure,” I shrugged. “See you again sometime.”

“Lucia.” He made me look at him, with my face between his hands. Minutes passed.

“What?”
I demanded, not gently.

“After this, we'll grow pineapples,” he promised. “We'll get as far away from here as we can. Innisfail, Cairns, I don't know. The Daintree, maybe.”

But I wouldn't be won over, I wouldn't smile. I'll believe it when I see it, I thought.

“I love you, Lucia.”

“Yeah, yeah,” I said irritably, breaking free.

That was Monday night. Good riddance, I said lightly to myself as he left. Give The Shaky Landing my regards.

That was the Monday night.

5

I would like to stop here. I would prefer not to go any further.

I once saw a woman flayed. You would not believe how it altered her appearance for the worse. The police have photographs of this, but I'm not going to speak of it.

I once saw a horse baulk at a jump because it would not smash itself against the wall of its instincts. It would not. No amount of whipping or spurring could change its mind. It threw its rider. Later, the burrows of small animals were found beyond the jump.

I baulk at having to look at the police photographs. I baulk at mentioning the burglary. Well, the burglary. Burglary is nothing these days, is it? A free prize at the door to anyone who knows someone whose place hasn't been subjected to break and enter. Big deal. So I come home one day and the flat has been ransacked, and all Gabriel's notebooks have gone. So what? Also a small cache of Charlie's recent photographs, the ones Gabriel has been poring over late at night. I have no problem with mentioning that, but then I draw the line.

I will rummage only so far and no further in the rubble of the past. I am seduced by the desire to stay behind the bar in Charlie's pub, with the laughter and the jokes and the men averting their eyes as they go upstairs, with Gabriel distant and burning but nevertheless beside me in bed each night, with Charlie and Catherine together again at last, with Sheba rolling her eyes at us all and making a crude sign with her finger and tapping off draught, with Cat hovering about, flamboyant and indomitable, sending messages from just offstage, showing up in mirrors, beckoning and daring us, making claws with her hands, casting reflections.

End there.

Why not? Nothing's perfect, but that was close. Love had meaning, waiting had meaning, even anxiety had a meaning that was quite precise. Nothing was resolved, but what ever is? And as narratives go, that's reasonably acceptable these days, almost fashionable indeed, though most readers — and many critics — still declare without apology that they will have no truck with unsatisfactory endings or inconclusive final chords. Oh, and I agree. I cannot tell you how passionately I agree. I would like to go on record as being desperately eager to have no truck with unsatisfactory and inconclusive ends.

Here's Cat, I'd like to say Yes, we coaxed her out of the mirror at The Shaky Landing and cleaned her up and got her a good therapist and she stopped slicing herself and exposing herself and selling herself, and Robinson Gray told her he'd never for a minute intended but was apologising just the same because remorse and other transforming emotions were strangling him, and he paid for her to enter the University of Sydney as a mature student where she did extraordinarily well and where the fresh and original candour of her mind was a source of wonder and His Honour reserved a job for her in his law office and she bought a house and a car. She learned how to cook asparagus exactly right and she learned which wines to serve with fish and which with fowl, and she so captivated Robinson Gray with her dinner parties that he, having tired of his tedious third wife, at last married the Cinderella of his childhood for she had long ago stirred him sexually as no other woman ever had. And then Robinson Gray, rinsed pure and transfigured, had all the nine-digit numbers rounded up and put on trial and put away and he ensured that the quarry was turned into Luna Park (with jobs and social security for all former residents and hot dog stands on the corners) and he had it planted with banksias and paperbarks and wattles and the soft pink flowers of Geraldton wax and he looked upon his work and it was good. It was so good, so meet and right, so worthily done, that it touched the heart of dearest him who had gone away Gabriel and his father embraced, there were reconciliations on all sides, bells pealed, a new golden age was ushered in. And Charlie took Catherine for his wife, and Gabriel and myself got married too ... no, of course we didn't get married, this isn't Shakespearean comedy, this is modest late twentieth-century social realism, but Charlie and Catherine, and also Gabriel and myself, did cohabit joyfully in two nice little side-by-side terrace houses in Paddington, with season subscriptions to the Opera, and correct opinions on Aboriginal Rights and the Gulf War and the
Australian
and Mr Murdoch, and we read Chekhov and Proust and a few sanctioned Australian writers appropriate to these times, and we gave dinner parties where the discussions were exceedingly literate and high-minded and where the utmost care with asparagus and hollandaise was always taken, and we lived happily ever after, amen.

No, no, the fashionable critic says: That is not what I meant. That is not it at all.

There is no warrant for crude mockery or slapstick, that is not what was meant, not at all. The true satisfactory ending is shot through with tender angst and subtle shadows the way shot silk is dappled with light, it is indeterminate in a suggestively closed sort of way.

... and twisting away from the table, he bent to pick up the napkin ring.

“The oddest thing,” Andrew said. “Wouldn't you say, Rob? Of all the cases we've had referred since I've been on the Premier's Board of State Police, this has to be the most bizarre.”

Catherine, taking the napkin ring from Robinson Gray, paused momentarily then placed the ring neatly beside her glass.

“We're not even clear who the principals are,” Andrew said, “though that woman would probably have to be counted as one of them. How she fits into the picture, though, is anyone's guess.”

“
Habeas corpus
,” someone joked.

“Exactly.”

“They say she was practically tattooed with scars,” Andrew's wife said. “Most of them from her own hand.”

“I think perhaps I should have poached the salmon a minute or two more,” Roslyn said. Against parsley, the silver and pearl-handled servers gleamed modestly. Roslyn Gray, expertly sliding silver blade between pink flesh and bone, bisected the fish. Tenderly she peeled the backbone away and displayed it in the candlelight. Ahhh, they murmured. It was like an exotic translucent comb.

“It's like an arsenal of tiny pearl daggers,” Andrew's wife offered.

“Speaking of daggers. According to the coroner's report, there were thirty-six stab wounds,” Andrew said. “Incredible ferocity. Rob actually knew her once, didn't you, Rob?”

His Honour mused a little space. He thought wistfully: she had a memorable face.

“Not really,” he said. “Only very slightly. Years ago, when we were children.”

Roslyn marked out the indentations of the ichthyoid spine with lemon segments, and passed the platter and the drawn butter sauce down the table. “Didn't you go to school with her, Catherine?”

“Yes,” Catherine said. She balanced a slice of fish between the servers and set it, fragrant with parsleyed butter, beside the grilled sweet peppers on her plate. She pressed a lemon wedge against her fork. Using the linen napkin as grip, she took the serving dish with both hands (it was quite heavy) and passed it on to her host. “It's odd, isn't it?” she asked mildly, “the way memory pivots around food. We had salmon at my twenty-first, I remember. Isn't that an eccentric association?”

Sliding wetly on slick glass, the salmon made a small sucking noise. Four hands, like duellists waiting, held the platter, the fingers of one pair quaintly fat and flattened through dimpled glass, the fingers of the other wrapped in white.

“It's strange,” Catherine said, “the way it keeps coming back to me lately Because Gabriel had so many questions, I suppose.”

Roslyn nestled a crescent moon of lemon in the palm of her hand and slowly crushed it. “The cross we had to bear,” she said mournfully. She was absorbed in the task of extracting every last drop of juice. “It was a duel to the bitter end.”

“Look at those two,” Andrew's wife teased, indicating Catherine and their host by the delicate tilt of her fork. “Are you casting spells over the fish, or what?”

“I wonder if you'd excuse me for a moment?” His Honour said. He set the platter on the tablecloth with the care of a man stacking eggs and left the room.

Roslyn pressed her lips together and studied her plate. “He's doing remarkably well actually,” she said. “Considering everything.”

End there.

That would be bearable.

And yet, though this narrative is private, though it has a reading audience of one, the traditional expectations still intrude because the very reason for telling stories (even to oneself) is to insist there is shape and meaning and direction in the messy flood that we find ourselves floundering in, the one that sweeps us up at birth and hurls us along, lumping us in with flotsam and random event, making a pattern as it goes. Yes, it must make a pattern. We want to insist on that.

Humankind cannot bear very much lack of meaning. If we have to experience horror, there has to be a point. There has to be. In fact, it is not the horror itself that torments us so much as the need to understand. We have to get to the heart of the labyrinth where the minotaur lurks. We want to know that the labyrinth is mappable, that there is a minotaur, that there is at least
something
at the core of things which is responsible for all this dread, and we want to reassure ourselves that if we trail Ariadne's thread behind us we can find a way out again.

Still, there are terrible risks. How close to the minotaur can we get and still survive? We only want a glimpse. As a matter of fact, the beast as
metaphor
will suffice. A lot of bull, we can then say flippantly. Or, in angrier, more distraught moments, we can say: I've had a run-in with one hell of a beast. But we can do without close-ups of the corded throat and slavering mouth, and we can certainly skip the actual goring and devouring and the tearing limb from limb and all that.

Of course terrible things do happen. Of course the newspapers report atrocities every day, we acknowledge this readily and sagely enough in the literary salons over sherry, but those who need direct private explanations should pursue them in the decent privacy of their minds. A work of fiction has nothing to do with this. It may have had for Sophocles and Euripides, but not for us. Modesty and the intimate domestic scale are the appropriate postures for our time. Also: good taste is better than bad taste, this is an axiom. And we are all in agreement, are we not, on what constitutes the boundaries of good taste?

In a drawing room somewhere, perhaps, a critic of exceptionally good taste and modesty smooths the brocaded arm of her chair with delicate fingers. Reference to the
literal
violence of the minotaur, she says, is a bid for cheap glamour, I'm afraid. (The critic always does speak in this
ex cathedra
way.) The intention, she says, sipping her sherry and noting en passant the exquisite oysters, the intention, I'm afraid, is transparent: titillation of the reader, plus the comfort of horror happening to someone else.

Quite so.

Consider Cat.

There she stands, tarted up in black with Woolworths glass in her ears and self-inflicted scars like jewels on her shoulders and arms. Pure transparent provocation on her part; and thank God she isn't us. She is an exhibitionist to the core, a slut in fact, as a number of schoolteachers and judges and owners of bars and cathouses pointed out to her over the years. (But Cat is a slow learner, and wilfully so no doubt. We wash our hands.)

Moreover Cat slashes herself. She sculpts her own body into an artefact of abuse, she makes a monument of her own pain. This is not only ideologically unsound, it is distressingly un-Aristotelian.

The critic spears her asparagus through hollandaise. “Ahhh,” she says, closing her eyes. “Perfection.” She tests the hollandaise with the tip of her tongue. “A soupçon more lemon, perhaps,” she says. “Violence in fiction,” she says, “should illuminate. It should not simply horrify.” She sips her wine.

“If it is boiled just seconds too long,” she sighs, “asparagus is ruined.”

If the text simmers more than glancingly in horror — in murder, or the dismemberment of a body, or violent rape, let us say — the flavour is spoiled. The deft touch is what is required, the sleight-of-hand, for example the quick decoy of Leda's swan,
the great wings beating still … her thighs caressed by the dark webs … the feathered glory
…

Ah, the sensual transcendence of brutal assault, the soft way the light falls on rape.

And did Leda
put on his knowledge with his power?

Have her
terrified vague fingers
found illumination yet? Or are they still scrabbling, gnarled and untransformed and unenlightened, in mud and in her own shit?

Howl, howl, howl, howl,
as Lear said, and as Charlie screamed at the mango tree.

End there.

I would like to end there.

I don't want to look at the police photographs.

It is quite amazing, actually, how many photographs they have of Cat. More than Charlie does, I would say. Reform school files, court record files, surveillance photographs from various places of employment that were considered volatile elements in the tapestry of urban life, medical files from reform school and prison archives (each self-inflicted slash dated and numbered and thoughtfully commented on.)
I once saw a woman flayed …
You would not believe how she altered her own appearance for the worse. It is amazing, really, how many expert and professional words have accumulated on the incorrigibility and incomprehensibility of the propensity to self-destruct. One could almost see the endless reports and treatises,
words, words, words,
as in inverse ratio to Cat's silence.

Of course, both the propensities and the stupefied responses have an honourable tradition in our national history. Perhaps Cat received certain hereditary tendencies in her genes.

Consider, for example, the 1827 report on Ann Bruin by the superintendent of the Hobart Female Factory for convict women. For absenting herself overnight from her master's house, Ann Bruin's head was to be put to the razor and shorn. Considering alternatives, the superintendent thought, hardly a severe or brutal punishment, right? And yet, he wrote …