The Last Magician (34 page)

Authors: Janette Turner Hospital

(I
loved
them, I
loved
them, he said.)

(Only love does that.)

(So you know.)

There are things we know. And there are things we don't realise we know. And there are times when we decide it is better not to find out what perhaps we unconsciously know.

If I know anything at all, I know that Gabriel's father twists and turns and writhes in private torment. If I feel anything, I feel pity.

But I don't know anything. Nothing can ever be known for sure.

Unanswerable questions are the ones that engage us, Charlie said.

There are only these three facts: the fact of Cat's skeleton, the fact of love, and the fact of absences.

I feel a need to talk to Catherine so intense that I can scarcely breathe. The house is quiet and still awash in the grey light between night and day. I pad barefoot into the kitchen to the phone and my fingers tremble violently as I dial a number in Harrow, county of Middlesex, London.

Three rings, four, my throat is dry.

She answers on the fifth ring.

“Catherine,” I whisper. “Oh Catherine, thank God you're there. It's Lucy.”

“Hello?” Catherine says. “Hello? I'm afraid I can't hear you.”

Catherine, I try to say, but I can't make a sound.

A tentativeness comes into Catherine's voice. “Lucy?” she ventures. “Lucy, is that you?”

I nod furiously, awash in salt water, but I can't seem to speak.

“Lucy,” she says, “if it's you, please say something.”

“It's me. It's me, Catherine.”

“Oh God, I can hardly hear you. God, Lucy, how could you do this to me, where are you?”

“I'm sorry,” I say. “It was panic. I'm in Brisbane. I'm in Samford, at Constance and Gil Brennan's place. I saw one of Charlie's films and I just freaked out.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know. I saw it too. But Lucy, listen. Listen to this.” And now I hear the burr of excitement in her voice. “This has been the strangest week. Last weekend I saw Charlie's film, and today you call, and yesterday I got a call from New York. It was the strangest thing. This operator says, 'I have a call for you from New York. Go ahead, please.' And I wait and wait, and no one conies on the line, and I'm saying
hello, hello,
and I'm about to hang up in disgust, when suddenly I begin to have this certainty, this
certainty,
Lucy, that Charlie is on the other end of the line. And I just stood there holding the receiver and I felt as though â¦ I felt as though â¦ and then I remembered something Charlie used to say about Lao Tzu.
Lao Tzu says that speaking in words is like trying to sound the middle of the ocean with a six-foot pole."

I can hear her breathing coming in the ragged little spurts of hope, and she begins to laugh in a high brittle way and I think: hope and love are all we have and they are very potent baggage for people who travel light.

“Lucy?” she says.

“Yeah. I'm here.”

“I'm not going crazy,” she says. “I don't want you to think that I literally mean â¦ but just the same â¦ I mean, it
could
be.”

“Yeah, I know. God, Catherine, I can't tell you how glad I am to hear your voice.”

“Yeah, me too,” she says. “We're like bloody war vets, Lucy.”

“Yeah.” No point in telling her anything yet, I think. Maybe never. Or maybe one of these nights in the wee small hours when we've drunk too much.

“Lucy,” she says, “I didn't think I would ever want to go back, I didn't think I could be that stupid again, but I don't know. What's the air smell like?”

“I can smell the rainforest,” I say “I can hear scrub turkeys on the veranda.”

“Oh God,” she says. “They've been asking me to do something on Aboriginal land rights in northern Queensland, but I don't know.”

“You want to meet me there?” I say.

I can hear the mix of desire and panic in her voice. “Oh God,” she says. “I have to think about it.”

The body, I think, seeks to return to the sites of joy and pain. Something pulls us, something simple and primitive and as old as the soft broken trees on the rainforest floor.

“I dreamed about Cat again this week,” she says. “After I saw the film. We were in the pool at the falls â”

“Don't,” I say.

We send each other silence, and I think that today I will begin to travel north. I'll hug the coast and go out to the coral cays and I'll work my way up to the Daintree, because who can say what I'll find up there, who can say for certain where Gabriel is? And if anyone should presume to mock this hope, let him remember it comes with a long pedigree. Let him remember how Dante found his way out of the wood when the path was wholly lost and gone. Let him not cast stones. And if he thinks he knows better than we do how Catherine and I should respond to absence and loss, let him consider Charlie's story of Chuang Tzu and the fish in the River Hao.

Chuang Tzu and a friend leaned on a bridge and looked into the River Hao. “Look at the way the fish play,” Chuang Tzu said. “They ignore the fisherman's hook, they refuse to think about it, they give themselves over to delight.”

And his friend said: “Chuang Tzu, you are not a fish. How do you know what they feel?”

And Chuang Tzu said: “My friend, you are not I. How do you know I don't know how the fish feel?”

I begin to laugh. “Catherine,” I say, “do you remember Charlie's story about the fish in the River Hao?”

“Speaking of fish,” she says, “what about that story Charlie used to claim he'd heard in his pub, the one about King Bluey Kuttorze and Madame de SÃ©vignÃ© and the cook who ran himself through and all the crates and crates of seafood coming in â ”

“That wasn't funny,” I say, spluttering with mirth. “That was awful, that was a dreadful story, that was sad â ”

We are weeping with laughter.

“What about Giacometti's Foot?” she says.

What about Hot News of Gabriel, I think, and the thought scalds me, it winds me, but oh how potent these absences are, how they fill the air with the beating of their radiant wings.

“Catherine,” I say. “I'll wait for you in Cairns, okay?”

“Okay,” she says.

“Catherine. You know, we should do a documentary on the quarry. We owe it to Gabriel.”

“Yeah,” she says. “I know. It's something I owe Cat and Charlie. When I can handle it.”

I think of the camera moving along the back alleys and tunnels, falling on Old Fury's face, on Danny's, on Julie's, giving Old Fury's voices a window on the world â¦

But first the rainforest. Today I'll start travelling north, partly because who knows where Gabriel might be? but mostly because I've never really lived anywhere but Queensland and It's time to come home.

“Lucy?”

“Yeah. I'm here.”

“We're like bloody war vets,” she says.

And we hang on to the lifeline of the silence that connects us, the great beating wings of our absent ones deafening us and filling the air with light.

First published 1992 by University of Queensland Press
Box 6042, St Lucia, Queensland 4067 Australia
Reprinted in paperback 1992, 1993, 1995, 1998
This edition 2003

www.uqp.uq.edu.au

This book is copyright. Except for private study, research, criticism or
reviews, as permitted under the Copyright Act, no part of this book may be
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Typeset by University of Queensland Press

Quotations from Dante
are taken from the translation by John D. Sinclair,
The Divine Comedy of
Dante Alighieri,
3 Vols, with translation and
comment by John D. Sinclair (New York: Oxford University Press, 1961).

Journal entries on female convicts are from Robert Hughes,
The Fatal
Shore
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1987).

Quotations from the
I
Ching
(used
entirely for my own imaginative purpose) are from
I
Clung: Book of
Changes,
translated by James Legge, edited with
Introduction and Study Guide by Ch'en Chai with Winberg Chai (New York: Bantam, 1969; Â© University Books, 1964).

Allusions and partial line references from T.S. Eliot are from “The
Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” in
Collected
Poems 1909-1935 (London: Faber & Faber, 1936).

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