The Last Magician (16 page)

“Two more stops to what?” his father said.

“To the sugar doughnuts,” Gabriel said. “At McWhirter's,” he explained, since his father looked a little blank. Then a trifle uncertainly: “That's where we get off.”

“We most certainly do not,” his father said. “We're going straight on to New Farm wharf. We can ride the ferry across the river and back if you want.”

“But Mummy said …” Gabriel began, and bit his lip.

“Constance?” his father said sharply. “You haven't been buying the boy rubbish, I hope? It's very bad for his teeth.” Teeth were a big issue for Gabriel's father, whose smile was crowded with them, dazzling white. Brushing was a big issue too, and so were dentists.

“Just occasionally,” Constance said meekly.

“Well kindly don't do it again,” his father warned.

Gabriel, budding rugby player under weekend tutelage from his father, made a quick feint to the right. “It's not fair, Daddy,” he grumbled. “You and Mummy never let me have sugar doughnuts when I want them.”

“That's because your parents know what's best for you,” his father said. And Gabriel saw his mother's eyes, expressionless, rest on him and stay there and he looked back at her and smiled sadly, knowing that both gratitude and surprise lay behind her expressive non-expression.

He loved his mother. He loved her so much that when she was unhappy he could feel it like a bruise on his arm.

He worshipped his father. Nothing made him happier than the feeling of his father's hand tousling his hair.

Right now, he felt as though his skin was being stretched across his bones by two dogs who would not let go. He was angry with himself. He thought that he must be more careful, that he must watch very carefully indeed, and that he must think very very carefully before he said anything. When the tram lurched round the corner into Brunswick Street and The Valley, and he saw McWhirter's loom large and then dwindle from view, he found himself wondering how the doughnuts felt being flipped out of burning oil and sliding down the chute toward somebody's mouth.

It seemed to him that the wonderful hot sugary taste was something he would never know again; that next Thursday, when he and his mother sat in McWhirter's café, something bitter would be in the little wax-paper bags, spoiling things.

It was two stops after McWhirter's, as the tram began to rumble by the huge old gone-to-seed houses with the rotting verandas, as it stopped outside the shabby old Empire Hotel, that the thing happened. It was this event which, more than the death and burial of the trams, more than the sandpaper edges of his parents' unhappiness, more than the loss of sugar doughnuts, would fix the day forever in Gabriel's mind.

At the stop outside The Empire Hotel a woman got on the tram. She entered through the wide door in the middle, and came down the aisle toward Gabriel and his father who was, in the wake of posing for photographs, still sitting next to him. Instantly she had all Gabriel's attention. For one thing, she had shorter hair than he had ever seen on a woman, and for another, she was dressed very oddly, and for another, she had such sharp darting eyes. She made him think of a magpie. She sat across the aisle from the alcove where Gabriel and his parents sat. She sat level with his mother, diagonally across from Gabriel and his father.

Gabriel was not at all surprised that she attracted his father's attention instantly too. What did surprise him was the bold and unwavering way the woman stared back at his father. He thought with great interest about the fact that someone who ought to feel self-conscious, someone of whom it was possible to imagine the whole tram smiling and whispering behind its hands (in fact, he could see people doing exactly that, raising their eyebrows at one another), someone who ought to feel embarrassed and ashamed … that person could act, in some mysterious way, as if she were queen of the tram. Perhaps it was the way she held herself, with her back very straight and her head high.

With her wiry hair — it was black, jet black — in a strange spiky fuzz around her head, she should have looked absurd, but she did not. She was old, at least as old as Gabriel's parents, maybe more. Her arms were browner, more leathery, but were crisscrossed with the strangest patterns of lines. Were they scars? Some were ghostly white, as though ferns had imprinted themselves long ago, and some were vivid and new. She looked like a woman warrior from some unknown tribe. She looked, Gabriel thought, magnificent in some wholly new way, in spite of the fact that she wore white bobby socks like a little girl, and a dreadful yellow cotton dress of the kind you could see in Woolworths' windows, and — on the left lapel of the front opening — a plastic brooch, a turquoise Ulysses butterfly, a Blue Wanderer as Gabriel's Grade 1 teacher called it in Nature Lesson. It was the kind of brooch you could buy in tourist shops, the kind little girls wore.

Gabriel was becoming aware of a curious throbbing, or humming, coming off his father's thigh which was pressed against his. It was as though he were sitting next to a dynamo.

Because Gabriel and his father were so obviously mesmerised, Gabriel's mother glanced sideways. The woman, who had been looking at Gabriel's father as a queen looks at a slave, caught the slight movement to her left and turned. The two women stared at each other for a moment, and they both seemed a bit startled, then Gabriel's mother smiled slightly, very shyly, and the woman gave a most wonderful radiant smile in return and did something quite odd. She leaned across the aisle to shake hands with Gabriel's mother.

Gabriel's mother took the hand and the strange woman pumped it up and down, very vigorously (Gabriel thought of a magpie again, that chirpy energy, those darting vibrant eyes), and Gabriel's mother said hesitantly: “I think I met you once, at Catherine Reed's party, didn't I? Catherine and I were at high school together. At Clayfield College.”

The woman never spoke, but she laughed a most wonderful belly laugh, as though the thought of Clayfield College was a huge joke, and Gabriel's mother laughed, and Gabriel laughed too because it was such a rollicking boisterous king-sized breaker of hilarity rolling and surfing over them, sweeping them up, rushing them along, foaming and spuming and over-and-overing them, a laugh so infectious that other people joined in and the reporter came back and pop, pop, he flashed lightning at them all again, he caught the strange woman and Gabriel's mother leaning in across the aisle toward each other.

Then Gabriel became more intensely aware of the vibration against his thigh.

“Daddy?” he said alarmed, because his father was clearly trembling now, visibly and violently. This did not help, this drawing of attention to his father.

His father flashed a very toothy smile at everyone, a very dazzling white smile. “Crossing the Great Divide into history,” his father boomed in a strange tight voice, and the reporter pop-popped again, and everyone laughed and cheered, but Gabriel could still feel his father's thigh against his, and his father's hand in his, and his father was vibrating like a jackhammer doing roadwork. He would not look at the woman in the yellow dress, but the woman looked at Gabriel's father and the way she looked at him frightened Gabriel. He did not know the meaning of her look, but it made him feel queasy and dizzy. It was as though someone had told him that when you step off a footpath you fall straight through a grating that goes to the bottom of the world. And had proved it to him.

He felt as though he was going to be sick.

He supposed they stayed on the tram until the terminus at New Farm. He supposed they went into the park and the woman went in some other direction. Perhaps she took the ferry across the river to Norman Park, or perhaps Gabriel and his parents did. He could recall nothing whatsoever from this part of the day. It was blank. He remembered his father's trembling, and the unreadable look on the woman's face. The next thing he could remember was the feel of his own sheets against his skin and the murmur of his mother's voice and then the blank of sleep from which he was jolted awake to the sound of his father shouting and shouting and then the crash of something being thrown.

He could hear, but he could not remember what the fight was about. He seemed to be watching from his bedroom doorway, he was frightened, there was a glimpse of his mother in her white nightgown, his father was shouting something, his mother's hands were in front of her face, then he couldn't remember anything more. He could only see a shut door.

The next morning when he woke, his father had already gone out, and Gabriel found his mother crying silently in the garden. There was a large red mark on her cheek and one eye was purple, but otherwise her face was frighteningly pale. Gabriel tiptoed up to her and put his arms around her, and she held him very tightly for a long time.

Then she dried her eyes on the back of her hand and smiled brightly.

“Whatever happens, Gabriel,” she said, “you must remember that Mummy and Daddy both love you more than anyone else in the world.”

And he did remember that. When his father took him to Sydney the next weekend, he remembered it. Through the weeks and weeks of muddle, the hotel rooms, the changing schools, the three months in the rented terrace house in Paddington, he remembered it. When his father took him finally to the school with manicured lawns and verandas and panelled rooms, when his father showed him the new house with its view of the harbour, he remembered. “No more changes, mate,” his father promised. “This is your school from now on, and this is our house.”

Gabriel, remembering, asked timidly: “When's Mummy coming?”

“Mummy's not coming, old boy,” his father said.

On the balcony of the house in Point Piper, he sat in a wicker chair and pulled Gabriel onto his knee. “I'm going to tell you something, man to man, Gabriel. And I expect you to behave like a man and not cry.” Through the tree tops, Gabriel could see the curve of the Harbour Bridge, and when his father sighed, very heavily and sorrowfully, he connected the sighs with the steel girders. He saw his father's breath looping through the grey struts, crossing the water, heading northwards for Brisbane. “The truth is, Gabriel, your mother is not a very stable woman.”

Gabriel didn't say anything. He watched the way the sun caught the steel girders of the bridge and bounced off them again.

“Well, there,” said his father with immense joviality, tousling his hair. “That's that, then, and you've taken it like a man. I'm proud of you, son. We'll have a bonzer time in Sydney, you and me. We love doing things together, don't we, old chap?”

“Yes, Daddy,” Gabriel said.

He did. He adored his father. He certainly did.

It was fourteen years before he saw his mother again. From time to time, he would hear his father comment sadly at dinner parties: “She just couldn't cope, I'm afraid. Biochemical, the doctors think.”

He always associated the strange woman, and the marks on her arms, and the yellow dress, and the blue butterfly brooch, with cataclysm. He would remember that wave of laughter that had engulfed the woman and his mother and himself. He remembered the way the woman had looked at his father. There was no one he could ask about this. The smell of hot sugared doughnuts could still make him ill with grief and longing. There was a riddle that smelled of McWhirter's café and of sugar and hot oil and waxed-paper bags. The riddle kept eating him. He was ravenous.

2

“It was Cat,” Charlie says, excited. “He saw Cat.”

Lucy watches with awe as inscrutable undemonstrative Charlie paces up and down the room of the photographs, his face in his hands. If I touched him now, she thinks, I would be jolted across the room. The air around him would spit blue lightning.

“So she was still in Brisbane in '69,” he says. “When did Gabriel tell you this?”

“Oh, I don't know. The very first time I met him, I think. The first time we drove out to Cedar Creek. You should ask him about her.”

Charlie shakes his head, but throws himself into one of the low black leather chairs and sits hunched up in it, staring at the wall of his neatly framed past. Lucy goes to the kitchen and finds the Scotch and pours him a drink. She pours one for herself, she pries ice cubes from the tray in his refrigerator, drops three into each glass, and goes back to the living room. “Why not?” she says, as she puts a glass into his hand. “Couldn't you give each other answers?”

Charlie gulps his Scotch. “If he comes and asks me, perhaps,” he says. “But you can't …” Whatever ambivalence Gabriel feels toward his father, Charlie is thinking, one of his emotions must be love.

“You can't what?” Lucy prompts.

“I don't want to tell him what happened, that's all. I don't want to be the one. Other people could tell him. Probably his own mother could tell him. She went to high school with Catherine Reed, they were friends. Besides …”

He sips his Scotch and stares at his wall of photographs.

Lucy follows his line of vision. He is not looking at the collage of
The Two Catherines
but at a grainy photograph of a laughing woman with short spiky hair. “Oh my God,” she says quietly, going over to look more closely. Behind the woman, she sees now, are the slats of a tram seat. A chrome pole rises from behind her left shoulder, a leather loop hangs from above. Someone is hanging onto the leather loop, curving with the sway of the tram, making a kind of bracket round the woman. She is leaning out from the seat, laughing at someone unseen across the aisle. The photograph has been cropped so that the people across the aisle are missing.

“My God,” Lucy says. “That's the very day …?”

“It was in a box of old
Sunday Mail
rejects,” he says. “I bought it this year at an antiquarian shop in Regent Street.”

“Incredible,” Lucy says. “Now I see why you scavenge in second-hand shops.”

He becomes silent for so long that Lucy prompts: “Will you show Gabriel?”

“What?” he says, dazed. Then, as though he were still locked in conversation with someone else, he says: “Yes. You're right. You're right. You were right about that all along. And we had to get out, you were right.”

“Who was right? Who are you talking about?”

“Catherine,” he says. “She was right. We had to get out.”

“Is that when you left?” Lucy asks.

“What?”

“After this?” She taps the photograph. “After the trams went. Is that when you left for New York?”

“I'd already been gone more than six years.”

“So you never saw this in the
Sunday Mail
?”

“It was never in the
Sunday Mail.
It was a reject. I found it in the antiquarian shop.”

“That's positively spooky,” Lucy says. “So when did you leave?”

“After her twenty-first, we knew we had to.”

“After whose twenty-first?”

“Catherine's.”

There is a long silence. “She didn't stay with the
Manchester Guardian
very long,” he says. “She started moving round the world. She couldn't keep still.”

“But you've always stayed in touch?”

“What? No.” It seems to Lucy that the mere acknowledgment bruises Charlie. “No,” he repeats sadly. “Well, in a sense of course. I read her articles. I saw her on television from time to time. I wrote, but she never replied. Then I read that she'd come back here.”

He drains his Scotch as though it were water and barely seems to notice when Lucy brings him another. “We tried to see Cat again before we left,” he says. “But she'd gone.”

“Charlie, who
is
Cat?”

“She's part of me.”

The boy looks strange, even to Charlie, from this distance. Something about the way he walks draws attention, though that is the last thing he wants: that is, in fact, the very thing his rituals are designed to deflect. After every sixth step, the completion of a hexagram, he slides his right foot sideways, brings the left foot across to touch it, pauses, slides the left foot back again, transfers weight to it, slides the other foot across, then steps forward. It is essential to begin every hexagram with the right foot, since only by the most scrupulous attention to proper detail will he be rendered invisible. (When there is necessity for stealth, the sages say, the wise man moves as the dragonfly moves.)

There are further refinements. The boy must not step on a crack in the concrete footpath, nor must he fail to touch hedges as he passes them. Since meaning attaches to the number of feet which approach, he must keep a careful count and he must also keep classification by type: male feet or female, bare feet or shod, adult or child. If someone were to walk towards him, to block his path, he would stand stock still, his attention fixed on the person's shoes, then, a hexagram having been broken, he would do his foxtrot side-slides around the obstruction and begin again.

Charlie, describing him for Lucy, looking back at him, can hardly bear to watch as he approaches the three boys on the corner. He wants to intervene, but what could he say? Suppose he said: Your oddities make other school children nervous, your oddities speak to them of obscure threat, all the more dangerous for its obscurity; your oddities excite gestures of self-defence in response to this threat: first verbal mockery, then public humiliation, then savagery.

The boy is only nine years old, but already he knows all these things. He knows more: he knows that there is nothing he can do, or fail to do, to change his status or his original crime, which is that of
difference.
Might as well be hanged for a sheep as a lamb, he thinks; especially since the rituals are a corridor to somewhere else.

So even now Charlie averts his eyes as the boy walks into the un-gentle hands waiting on the corner, just as the boy himself averts his eyes. The boy is, after all, invisible. There is nothing to watch. Charlie feels nothing as they move in on him, just as the boy, having vanished down his private corridor, feels nothing. But Charlie finds it harder to protect himself from the boy's walk, and he describes for Lucy its bizarre zigzag progress down a Brisbane street with embarrassment, with a kind of pain, with the same helpless mixture of anxiety and pride that his parents feel, watching from the window of their shop. Charlie watches the parents as they watch the boys on the corner. The boys on the corner play with dragonflies, plucking wings off for sport. Afterwards, the boys on the corner swagger into the shop to buy liquorice sticks, and the parents smile and smile and serve them, always placating.

The boy embarrasses Charlie and amazes him. Where did he get his ideas? There is nothing I could tell him, Charlie says, although I wish I could make a voice in the crowd call out:
Good on yer, mate, you're a tough little bugger.
I wish I could reassure him. I wish I could say: Look, mate, in its own strange fashion, your system works. You are on your way to my vantage point.

Charlie wants to invent a comforter for him, he wants to invent friends. Just hang on for a bit longer, old chap, he wants to say. At this very moment, Cat is watching. At this very moment, Cat is on her way to meet you. Catherine, though more distant, approaches. Robinson Gray waits to befriend.

Charlie sighs and is silent.

He wishes he could promise the boy that they will then live happily ever after. He wishes Cat didn't have to prick her finger on the spindle, that Catherine didn't have to get the glass splinter in her eye, that Robinson Gray would always be Prince Charming and would always be true. But that is the way of things, he thinks. That is the way all stories go, following unalterable laws. We find, we lose.

(But Charlie, I could say to him now, keening for him, hugging myself and rocking backwards and forwards, grieving for the absent people who are part of me. You've done the same to me, Charlie. You and Gabriel have done the same thing that Cat did to you. You've buggered off, you've absented yourselves, and sometimes I forgive you and sometimes I'm furious and sometimes I storm and weep, but I've learned something too. There is something I could say to the little boy with his curious walk. You will find Cat and lose her, I could say, but loss is a kind of permanent presence. I could tell him all this. But he will learn it around the next corner anyway.)

Already he has been applying the salve of thrown coins, from whose configuration has emerged the first hexagram, the
Khien
, which tells him:
The dragon lies hid in the deep.
And his father explains: The solitary person can experience disapproval without trouble of mind. Though sorrowing, he is not to be torn from his root within himself. This root, his father says, is “the dragon lying hid”.

Though solitary, the boy sits curled up at night on his bed in the closed-in veranda at the back of the shop. Within him, the dragon stirs. He could reach through the glass louvres of the sleepout and touch stars. He could step into China. He feels his body webbing its way down through the mattress and the veranda floor and into the warm mud of the crawl space, feeling its way, stretching, touching the couch grass and paspalum, dropping into the hollow where the ferns crowd the mango tree, burrowing deep below the pawpaws. He feels omnipotent, drunk, euphoric. He feels
rooted.
The stars, it seems to him, recognise his power. There is nothing the boys on the corner can do about it.

He opens the Book of the Emperors that was given at his last birthday. He enters the court of Fu Hsi, his other home. In the court of Fu Hsi, on a certain page of the Book of the Emperors, is a painting by Wang Wei,
Clearing after Snowfall on the Mountains along the River.
He enters the painting. In the cabin among the firs on the headland, he meets with friends, he records adventures, he consorts with swordsmen and courtesans. He consults the Book of Secrets where the glittering future is revealed.

Out of a quick brash sunset, night drops. Safety. Corner encounters are swallowed up by darkness and by calls from sundry front doors. The boy with the dragonfly walk comes home for tea, for what his parents — following local custom — call tea, although it is a concoction of rice and beansprouts and whatever is left in the greengrocery section, not what anyone else has for the evening meal. One of the boy's theories hinges on this fact: it is because his food is different, that is where the problem lies. At the back of the shop, after tea, his parents count the day's cash, write out their order for the dawn visit to the farmers' markets, and make a list of the number of tins of soup and packets of dried peas and cakes of soap to be replaced. They sweep the shop and wash down the counter. The boy is not required to help. His task is to read and study, to win scholarships, to be the hope and salvation of the family line.

When matters of doubt or uncertainty arise, a prescribed ritual ensues. We will ask the milfoil stalks, the parents say. What they actually do is toss three threepenny bits, lucky threepences, the coins kept wrapped in a scrap of silk in a lacquered box.

Questions are specific. Should we buy a freezer and sell paddlepops and vanilla buckets and family ice cream bricks? Will the landlord extend our lease? Will the new supermarket on Enoggera Road ruin our business? Will Charlie come top in his exams? Will he win a scholarship to Brisbane Boys' Grammar School?

“Grammar,” Charlie tells them. “It's just called Grammar.” This was knowledge painfully gained from the boys on the corner whose opinion of Grammar is not particularly high. The mothers of the boys on the corner buy their groceries at Mr Chang's shop, and Mr Chang has confided to them his dreams. “Charlie is very very clever,” he has told the mothers proudly. “In Innisfail, his teacher say Charlie is brilliant, must come to school in Brisbane.” The boys on the corner, who are much older than Charlie, who are in Grade 8 in fact, tell Charlie he has tickets on himself, for which he must pay.

“Where're you from, Charlie Chink?” they demand.

“Innisfail,” he says. A vivid memory of paradise lost assaults him: the sugar cane, the thick yeasty rainforest smell, the pearling luggers off Flying Fish Point, coral cays against the line of sky. Home. His own place, the great wide untrammelled pre-school place before difference arrived.

“Where's Innisfail, Chinkie Charlie? We never heard of Innisfail.”

“Up north,” he says. “Near Cairns.”

“No, it ain't, Charlie Chink, you ain't from there. You're a yellow wog from China, Charlie Chink.” A song evolves on the spot.

Charlie Chink is a yellow wog.

He was born in China under a log.

“No, I wasn't,” he says, a slow learner. “I was born in Innisfail.”

The leader of the boys on the corner affects surprise.
“Where
were you born, Charlie Chink?”

“Innisfail.”

“Wrong.” There are penalties which must be paid for wrong answers. “You're a yellow wog from China, Charlie Chink. Where were you born?”

“China,” he says, learns to say, learns to believe. In time, he will improve on the right answer, he will build extensions for it, new wings, cantilevered bridges, turrets, drawbridges, a portcullis, moats, secret passages, elaborate maps. The right answer will fill a whole book, he will spend a lot of time colouring it in.