The Last Magician (4 page)

“Well,” I whisper to him. “What do you think about Old Fury? Is she Cat?”

“No,” he sighs.
“She's not Cat.”

“Yeah, well,
look,” Tony is saying nervously. “Maybe you'd rather be by yourself. Maybe some other time, eh? The beer, I mean.” He's
backing away toward the safety of his mates. “Nice talking to you,
Lucy.” He's practically falling over his feet with apprehension.

So what have I rambled on
about, I wonder?

Nice
talking to you, Lucy, the swift water says. It has wings and tongues and
memories, and an easy fluid way with the past.

The past has heft and jagged edges. Down
there, where the water licks the flank of the ferry like a lewd green tongue, I
can watch the past dwindle and balloon and dwindle. I can watch it slowly
submerge itself like a drowned man going under. I can watch it surface again,
and sink, and spread its subterranean self from Circular Quay to the Heads. I
can see rooms down there, passageways, a whole wing of recycled years, the
slope of the quarry, the time spent at Charlie's Place …

Oh
Charlie's Place, Charlie's face, the ace up Charlie's
sleeve. He was a bit of a magician, Charlie was.

The
waves are sleek but memory is sleeker and the race is to the swift and that
time comes washing back around me, it's a rough sea, a tidal wave, oh here it
is, quick, run, hide, it's at flooding depth, drowning depth, you can never
build ramparts strong enough to keep the past in its place, it skulks like the dammed-up Pacific behind North Head, it bursts, it spumes,
it rampages, here it comes, here comes the first day I met Charlie …

3

“What I'm
after,” the photographer explains, “is a sense of those fishnet
stockings as snare. As a trap that a man swims into.”

“Oh yeah?”
Lucy leans back, propped on her elbows, and coils one leg around a bedpost.
“Like this?” she challenges. Her legs are like jaws, like scissors.
She is mostly black mesh hose with a bit of bodysuit attached. The bodysuit is
also black and cut high on the thighs.

“Talk,” he says, moving round
her, crouching, sometimes leaning over her like a crow after pickings. He too
is dressed in black: black jeans, black turtleneck, black eyebrows, black hair.
He has pale skin and dark almond-shaped eyes. “Keep talking.”

“Why?” she asks. He puzzles her. He is older than she is, but she cannot tell by how
much. Twenty years? Not so much? More? He seems
curiously ageless, a young old man. “Why do I have to keep talking?”

“It
makes a difference to the pictures. It makes a difference to which pictures I
take. The pictures will show you things you don't know about yourself.”

“As if I want to,”she says.

“You always wear
this?”

“Mostly. Unless they ask for
different. Funny, this thing they've got about black. I wonder why.”

“Nuns and priests,” he says.

“Yeah. Could be. Most of the
girls are Catholic or ex, not me though. They reckon most of the johns are
Catholics too, I wonder why?” The shutter winks and winks and winks. “You a Catholic?”

“No.”

“And a lot are hellfire and
damnation types,” she laughs. “Religious, anyway.
You wouldn't believe how religion conies into it. There's this one bloke, an
old bloke, I gotta sit here stark naked, reading the
Gideon Bible while he jerks off. I gotta sit on the
edge of the bed with my legs wide open, and he kneels on the floor and
stares.” She swings her legs wide open to demonstrate and balances an
imaginary book high on her hands. “
Woe to them that devise iniquity,
and work evil upon their beds.
So then I let him rest his head here” — she pats her crotch — “and I stroke his hair and I gotta
sing to him.” She turns her palms out to the photographer and hunches up
her shoulders, inviting him to make sense of such a thing. He photographs her
upturned palms. “Not that I'm complaining, it's
easy money. He's one of my regulars. He's a nice old bloke.”

The camera records pensive
reflection.

“You ever visit hookers
without your camera?” she needles.

“No.”

“You
religious?”

The
camera records question and provocation. The man says nothing.

“Christ,” she says sarcastically, “what a talker you are. I'm glad I'm not
working.” She sits up, forgetting him, and lights a cigarette. “You
know why I hate the ones who don't talk? They want too much of the other. Get
them talking, you don't have to do as much.” She inhales and dragons smoke
from her nostrils. “I hate being touched.”

He
says nothing. He moves around the room, not always pointing his camera at the
girl. He takes a photograph of rumpled sheets and a stain on the floor. He
takes another of pillows and headboard, with the window beyond, and through it
the skyline of Sydney. The pillow is grubby.

“That's
why I like old blokes best,” she says. “Sixties, seventies, over
seventy is best of all.”

“But fucking them?
Kissing them?”

“Jesus,” she says,
shocked. “We don't
kiss
.”

He
photographs her disgust. He moves around, above, below, behind. He photographs
the way her disgust dwindles and disappears like water through sand.

“Where are you
from?” she asks.

Curiously,
the question seems to throw him. He pauses and considers it for several
seconds, as though testing out possible responses, and finally answers with the
camera between them, “New York.”

“How come you've got an
Aussie accent?”

He seems disconcerted. Annoyed
perhaps. But then, from the small sheepish smile,
oddly flattered, oddly pleased. He says in a very New York voice: “It creeps up on me sometimes apparently.” He changes lenses.
“I'm sliding back into it, I guess. Especially in
certain kinds of company. No, don't move. Keep your legs crossed like
that.” He photographs her fishnetted ankles and
spike heels against the stain on the floor. “I've been away,” he
says. “Been in New York for twenty-five years.
Just came back.”

“Jesus.
To live?” He is occupied with rewinding film,
changing spools, and doesn't answer. He gives no sign
of having heard the question.

“
Why
?” she
demands.

“Why
what?”

“Why would you want to
come back?”

“Why not?”
He takes hold of one of her ankles and lifts the leg as though it were a piece
of stage furniture. He drags a wooden chair up close, puts her foot on it,
takes her hands by the wrists and arranges them at her ankle. He photographs
the arrangement of chair and spike-heeled shoe and stockinged
leg and fishnet-adjusting hands. “Ever dream of escape?”

She
laughs. “Oh, I have. I
have
escaped. This is where I've escaped
to.” She laughs again. “If you mean New York, I might some day,
though it hardly seems worth the trouble.” She taps her head. “Too much baggage that can't be left behind.”

“Exactly,” he says, but he looks at her differently, his eyes registering a flicker of
surprise. Careful, she warns herself. She is annoyed by these little slippages
from character.

“So
where're you from then?” she asks, affecting bored politeness.
“Before New York, I mean.”

He
checks his light meter, tests the flash.
Pop, pop,
it is like the sound
of one hand clapping. “Okay, now at the window, leaning out. I want the
buttocks.” Click, his camera says. Click, click. Beyond the window, the
neon glitz of King's Cross winks back, hot pink, hot purple. Jackpot, says the
camera. Click, click. He stashes her fishnet buttocks in his snare.

“So where are you from
then?” she persists.

“The sage is from the
mountain and the fox is from his hole.”

“What?”

“Keep
talking.” He makes a record of her inquisitiveness, of her surprise.

“Is
this for a magazine, or what?” Click, click, his camera says. Click,
click. “Or just for dirty pictures?” She
cannot resist the guise of innocent question. Between one blink of the shutter
and the next, by a clean arrangement of dark, of the absence of dark, the dirty
picture settles. “You sell them? Or you keep them for jacking off?” He keeps a record of her sneer. “Jeez,” she says, giving up. “Like talking to a bloody block of wood.” She
slumps across the bed, her chin on her hands, and broods. He keeps a record of
her brooding and boredom.

Apparently
listless, she demands, “When do I take my clothes off?”

“You don't.”

“Yeah?
What's this
for
, then?”

“What's
your name?” he asks, recording the way curiosity, like a skittish breeze,
quickens the dead lake of apathy.

“Which one would you
like?”

“What's your working
name?”

“I step into any name they
want. A lot of times they don't want you to have a name at all, and I'm nobody.
I like being nobody.”

“What's
your private name then? The one you have for yourself?”

“Fuck
off,” she says angrily. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

“Terrific!”The shutter licks up the blaze of a border violated. She brings her hands up
like claws and hisses at him.

For a moment he looks strangely
shocked. She might have struck him. He lowers the camera and stares. Then he
recovers.

“Terrific,” he says again, as a parent to a clever child. Click, click, says the shutter.
Click, click.

“Who
the fuck
are
you?” She stands up
and swivels her hips and humps her crotch in slow derisive motion, thrusting
toward him, back forward back, purely hostile, a
parody of invitation.

“Sorry,” he says. “Hey, cool it. I'm sorry. I'm done now.” He finishes the
film and rewinds and removes the cartridge and reloads. He grins. “Great
shots, though.” He sets the camera down. “As a matter of fact,” he says, “I'm your new boss. You work downstairs too, in the restaurant,
right?”

“You're
the new restaurant manager? You're Mr Charlie
Chang?” She lights another cigarette and regards him warily. “D'you know what you're getting
into?”

Does he know what he's getting into? he asks himself. Yes and no. The curiosity, the impatience
even, for the tomorrows to unfold themselves is like benzedrine sometimes (he can feel the buzz along the
surface of his skin), though at other times he feels suspended in a slow dream,
trapped like a fly in honey. He could say to her: I know exactly what I'm
doing; I came back to nudge a train of events into motion; I came back to
watch. But that wouldn't be quite correct. He could say: a chain of chemical
reactions, set in motion long ago and never still, has pulled me back. Would
that be any more accurate? Sometimes he feels he has made a clear choice; sometimes he feels it has been beyond his power to make any kind of choice at
all.

“What did the iron filing
say to the magnet?” he asks her.

“I dunno,” she says. “I give up.”

“We're poles apart, but
something keeps pulling me.”

“Very funny,” she
says. “You're weird.”

Yeah,
he thinks. Weird. Is he the stage manager or a puppet,
the magician or the magician's stooge? He is never sure.

(If we come across old diaries we have written, if we find — in an attic, a locked chest, someone's desk drawer after a death — letters that
we wrote long ago, we almost invariably cringe. Oh God, we think, embarrassed.
Sometimes we are shocked. Sometimes we feel a stirring of tenderness for that
earlier self, for its griefs, its panics, its narcissism. Occasionally we are even impressed by a
ten-year-old's or a nineteen-year-old's
turn of phrase or by insights we would not have expected that callow sloughed
wraith of former existence to possess. Certainly we read ourselves with the
same greedy curiosity and prurience that entice us through the erotic
correspondence of strangers.

When
we watch the self on the screen of the past, we watch a stranger, but one for
whom we have complicated feelings.

I
watch Charlie and myself in a room. I watch Gabriel and myself at Cedar Creek
Falls, before either of us has met Charlie. I watch Charlie and Lucy, who is
only myself in the most tenuous and convoluted way,
and who was, in any case, acting the part of Lucy. She wished desperately to
appear as a native. She wished to belong to the non-belongers.)

Lucy puckers her lips and
blows smoke rings at the photographer, and the smoke rings settle. Haloes? Nooses? She keeps blowing
them, batting at them with a casual hand, pushing a message across the space
between them, though he cannot say if the message is playful or insulting or
whether it represents the throwing down of a gauntlet. He watches her,
impassive.

“This place is a wank,” she says. “This place is a silk purse in pigshit.” She waits, breathing smog into the room. She
waits, she waits. “Just your style, maybe.”
As far as she can tell, neither her disdain, which is a heavy bass thing, nor
the flippant smoke rings, nor the sharp little cuts her words are intended to
make, have any impact. He might be an indulgent older brother or an uncle or a
former fond schoolteacher, affectionately amused. He might simply be deaf. She
says tartly: “We hear you're not a normal sort of restaurant manager. Into
art and philosophy, we hear. High-Brow, capital H, capital B.
So downstairs is right up your alley, I reckon. Right up your street. A feeding trough for rich wankers playing
danger games.” He smiles but says nothing. She gives up. “So
where are you from, before New York?”

“Brisbane,
as a matter of fact.”

“Brisbane!”She whoops with laughter and throws herself back on the bed and kicks up her
legs. He grabs the camera and shoots. “Well, whad'ya
know?” she laughs. “Brisbane.” She sits
up and studies him while she finishes her cigarette. The shutter clicks.
“Oh for God's sake,” she says irritably, “could you put that
fucking thing away?” and he sets the camera aside with a show of
deference. They watch each other in a nervy, fascinated, almost drugged
silence. “Me too,” she grins finally “I'm from Brisbane too.
Well, whad'ya know?” Conciliatory, she offers: “The other girls call me Lucy.”

He nods.
Without the camera in his hands, he seems different. Like what? Like someone in
a mournful intellectual movie, she thinks, a European one naturally, or else
one of those slow bleak things by that Japanese bloke; like someone alone on a
stage; like Hamlet. Without the camera, he is naked. Every few seconds his eyes
turn to the shabby card table beside him. Every few seconds, unconsciously, he
reaches out and touches the camera, lets his hand rest on it. She cannot
imagine him as a restaurant manager. She cannot imagine him as someone who
photographs hookers.

“How long have you been
working here?” he asks.

“Is
this an employment check?” There are two of him,
it seems to her. There is the vulnerable one; and the armoured
one who operates restaurants and cameras. He interests her.

He says: “I'm curious about the ones who work upstairs and downstairs both. Any of
the restaurant patrons use upstairs too?”