The Last Magician (17 page)

“Where was I born?” he asks his parents.

“Innisfail,” they say. “You are true blue Australian, Charlie.”

How many right answers, he wonders, can questions have?

When questions arise, Charlie's mother tosses the coins and recites the results. Two heads, one tail. Three heads. Two tails, one head. Whatever. She throws the coins six times. With a soft lead pencil, very black, Charlie's father constructs the hexagram, converting the statements of the coins into solid or broken lines. The Book of Changes (or the Book of Secrets as his mother calls it) is consulted and gives this advice:
The feudal prince with his bow shoots at the hawk, which falls to earth.
Quietly elated, Charlie's father tells him: You will win the scholarship, you will be accepted by the Brisbane Boys' Grammar School. We will buy a freezer.

The best answers, the safe answers, are riddles, Charlie notes.

The boy takes six steps forward, carefully avoiding the cracks. If he touches the hedge with his left hand eighteen times between here and the end of the block, will he see the face again, the one that sometimes watches, the one that sometimes sits in the front row of his class at school? If he resolutely refuses to look as he passes that space, that hole in the wooden fence, matted with orchids and trumpet vine and lantana hedge, will the face be there when he finishes the hexagram and looks back over his shoulder?

The face is there.

It vanishes.

The boy stands uncertainly in front of the hole in the fence. Jungle is behind those rotting pickets, the kind of front yard he loves, the kind people had up in Innisfail, the kind that stretches back forever from the fence, reaching all the way to China. Pawpaw trees poke up all over the place like scaly stakes in a vegetable patch, circles of banana clumps bump into each other, a rubber plant threatens to engulf the whole house. Perhaps it
has
engulfed the whole house, since, in fact, only a bit of rotting veranda can be seen, but the boy assumes there is still a house behind the dark galloping green. What he likes best: the grass is waist high, the sticky heads of paspalum brush the trumpet vine. There is something thrilling, defiant, deliciously unruly, something full of illicit promise about an unmown lawn. When a breeze moves across it, secret pathways are revealed, tunnels are hinted at. There is a murmured suggestion of hidden loot: rubber tyres, rusty iron, lost tennis balls.

The face is there again. It is a grubby face, framed by short spiky hair. It has green eyes. There are two tiny gold hoops in its earlobes, and hanging from each hoop, like a teardrop, is a blue glass bead. The ends of a yellow ribbon tied around the head droop over the forehead and into the green eyes. The mouth blows them off, but they flop into the eyes again. He has seen that face in the front row of the classroom and in the playground, he has heard many stories about it, but boys and girls live in different territories at school. They don't look at each other. Besides, the face comes and goes. Sometimes it doesn't appear for weeks.

“Whad'ya staring at?” the apparition asks.

“Nothing.”

“Were so. Where ya from?”

The boy thinks for a moment. “China,” he says.

“No, yer not. What's yer name?”

“Charlie Chang.”

“I'm Cat. Yer wanna come in?”

“Yes,” he says. When he crawls through the hole in the fence and the lantana, he feels that he has crossed a line similar to the one he crosses when he enters the painting by Wang Wei. On the trek toward the rotting veranda through the waist-high grass, Cat leading the way, they pass a rainwater tank, several stacked boxes with rusty grilles on one side (they appear to be birdcages), and the rusted corpse of a car resting legless on its axles. Charlie stops with wonder.

“It's me dad's old Holden,” she calls, amused, having mislaid him and coming back for him. “You wanna get in?”

“Yeah,” he breathes, awed.

She opens the door for him and he sits, kingly, behind the wheel. He has never been permitted to sit behind the wheel of his father's utility truck, which is used strictly for bringing vegetables and fruit from the farmers' market. She stands outside and hooks her arms over the glassless window and grins at him. He is oblivious, driving to China. Then she goes around and gets in the other side. His absorption interests her. She watches him, amused.

“I seen you in the shop sometimes,” she says. He looks at her, surprised. He cannot remember seeing her in the shop. “Round the back,” she says. “I climb yer mango tree. I seen yer with yer books in the sleepout.”

This makes him uneasy, to know that he has been observed in that private space. He says carefully: “I've seen you at school sometimes.”
Half wild,
he has heard teachers say.
A little tart,
they say,
with those shameless pierced ears.
And from other children have come certain facts: she lives in a loony bin, her family is nuts, her dad is raving mad when he's drunk, her dad's drunk all the time, her dad'll kill you if you go too close, they live in rubbish tins, they eat pig slops, she's a tart, only whores and tarts wear rings in their ears, she smells of manure, she can put a hex on you. “But you don't go to school much,” he adds.

She grins. “I nick off. They catch me sometimes, but.”

“What do they do?”

She laughs, and he feels invited into her conspiracy, into the funnel of her power. What, after all, can they do? “They come and see me dad and he tells them to bugger off, and then they tell me I gotta go to school.”

“Where do you go?” he asks, “when you don't go to school?”

“I play with Willy,” she says. “We go fishing at Breakfast Creek. Or else Dad takes us out to the farms.”

“Who's Willy?”

“Me bruvver. He's potty but we don't care, Dad and me. You wanna come and see Willy?”

“Okay,” he says, reluctant to let go of the driving wheel, but very much under her spell, willing to do anything she suggests. She laughs at him again, then gets onto her knees on the passenger seat and leans over and puts her arms around his neck and kisses him on the lips. He feels as though he has been pitched over the cliff in Wang Wei's painting and is soaring through sky. He has never been kissed on the lips. His father, very occasionally, touches him on the shoulder. When he goes to bed, his mother puts both hands on his shoulders and presses her lips lightly and briefly against his forehead.

She has put a hex on me, he thinks. He feels light-headed and full of a wild happiness.

Cat laughs and kisses him again and he kisses her back.

“C'mon,” she calls gaily, and is out of the car and off through the long grass like a rabbit. He goes pelting after her. He is flying.

Two of the steps up to the veranda are missing, and the rest are so soft with rot he is afraid he will sink right through. On the veranda, sitting playing with an arrangement of stones, is a child who must be about five. Charlie, who is nine years old, suspects that Cat might actually be ten, though she is in the same grade as he is at school. He has heard that she was “kept back", because of her frequent absences, perhaps. (Because she's thick, other kids suggest, tapping their foreheads.)

“That's Willy,” Cat says, and flings herself on the child and covers his cheeks with kisses. Charlie is greatly tempted to do the same. There is something about Willy that makes one want to cuddle him. He is quite unnaturally beautiful. His skin is translucent, his hair is wheaten blond, his eyes are the watery green of rainforest pools, a paler green than Cat's, a limpid blue-green. “Willy's cracked,” Cat says lightly.

“What's the time, Mr Wolf?” asks Willy.

“It's three o'clock,” Cat says, smothering him with kisses again.

“No it's not,” Charlie says. “We get out of school at three and I've been home for ages. It's five o'clock maybe.”

Cat laughs. “Doesn't matter,” she says. “Willy always asks the time. He's cracked. Dad says he's got the holy spirits in his blood, coz he was drinking too much the night he made Willy, or else Mum fooled round with an angel, he doesn't know which.”

“Where's your Mum?” Charlie asks, peering into the dim interior beyond the front door.

“She buggered off,” Cat says cheerfully.

“Where'd she go?”

“We dunno. There's just Dad, but he's out on the farms.”

“What farms?”

“Ferny Grove. Or maybe Samford or Cedar Creek, he works at all them places.”

“What does he do?”

“Farms,
” she says, exasperated. “He mucks about for the farmers. You know, manure and stuff, and picking pineapples and vegies, and the pigs. He takes us sometimes. You wanna come?”

“When?”

“Tomorrow, if me dad'll take us.”

“You mean miss school?”

Her eyes glitter. “Yeah.”

Charlie is awed. He feels the lure of breaking the rules, but says uncertainly, “I'd have to ask my father.”

Cat wrinkles up her nose. He cannot tell if she is disgusted with him, or simply puzzled.

“Who looks after you?” he asks curiously.

Cat wrinkles up her nose again. “I look after me.”

“You mean,” he asks, in a hushed voice, “there's no one here?”

Cat looks puzzled. “We're here,” she says.

“But I mean, no grown-ups?”

Cat lies on the wooden floor of the veranda and kicks her legs like a frantic beetle on its back and laughs.

“You'll get splinters,” Charlie says, embarrassed and excited by the sight of her grubby panties. There are loose boards, and oddly slanted ones, and strange warps and bumps and missing planks. Through one of the spaces he can see the dark crawl space thick with cobwebs. He shudders.

“You wanna play the railway line game?” she asks suddenly, sitting up.

The dangerous thrill of the forbidden seems to rise from the cobwebs in the frightening black space below them. It occurs to Charlie that he is sitting on top of hundreds of spiders. Underneath him, they are moving in their noiseless silken way, and some of them are redbacks and some are funnelwebs and they carry secret little pouches of poison.

“You wanna play?” she asks again.

“Play what?”

“I
told
ya. The railway line game.”

In the shadowy cutting in the railway embankment, his parents have warned, lurks death. Can Cat seriously be suggesting…? What does she mean by the railway line game?

Charlie's shop and Cat's overgrown house are both on Newmarket Road, and both face the railway line that runs from Brunswick Street to Ferny Grove, the end of the line. On the other side of the road from their houses, a high embankment separates trains from cars. There is an overhead footbridge — it is not far from Cat's place — that leads up to Wilston Heights where the snobs and the nobs and the private school kids live. On the other side of the line, the Wilston Heights side, the lawns are always mown and the fences do not lean or sway or have missing planks. There are no rusted cars in long grass. There are two ways to go from Cat's and Charlie's side of the railway line to the other side: by the overhead bridge, or through the cutting which is quite close to the bridge.

Charlie has been absolutely forbidden by his parents to go anywhere near this cutting, but he has seen the boys on the corner, his Grade 8 tormentors, duck under the fence and stand there in their loose gigantic bodies to watch the trains rush by. From the far side of the street, hidden behind bushes, he has observed, awestruck, that when the trains go by, the wind they make flattens the grass in the cutting and whips his tormentors' hair about their heads.

“C'mon, Willy,” Cat says. She grabs Willy's hand with her right, Charlie's with her left. Her hand is wiry and hard.

“I'm not allowed,” Charlie says.

“You don't have to do it if you're scared. You can stay with Willy and watch.”

She does not, however, as he learns with alarm, mean that he can stay on the other side of the street, or even on the footpath outside the fence. As soon as they reach the cutting, she ducks under the sign that says DANGER. ENTRY FORBIDDEN BY ORDER, BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL, and Willy bobs under with her.

“Well,
c'mon
,” she says impatiently, and Charlie hesitates only for a minute. His desire to please Cat is greater than his desire to stay beyond the fence. And he finds, in fact, that he is no longer afraid because he believes Cat could step on the lines and raise her hand as a policeman might, and the trains would brake and rumble to a halt, or would vanish into thin air. She has holy spirits in her blood, he thinks. When she moves, the yellow ribbon bobs about like a kite tail and he can see a fizzing glow around her, the kind you see around a light bulb when you squint.

“You hold Willy's hand,” she says. She draws an X in the ground with a stick. “Now Willy, you know you gotta stay right here,” she says. “Don't you move or I'll clobber ya.”

Charlie, his heart racing, stands in the valley of the shadow of the cutting and takes Willy's hand. It is soft and plump and Willy looks up into his face and laughs and asks: “What's the time, Mr Wolf?”

“It's five o'clock,” Charlie says, and kisses Willy on his soft silken cheek. Willy tastes delicious, and Charlie kisses him again. From the corner of his eye he can see Cat, but he can hardly bear to watch. It is not exactly fear that is coming back into that place in the stomach where butterflies breed. No. He knows Cat is all-powerful. It is more the frightening mystery of the exercise of her power, of not knowing what might happen next, where he might be taken, what he might see. She is doing what the boys on the corner do: walking between the lines on the wooden sleepers. His heart is beating so fast, he thinks it may leap up into his mouth like a fish. What time is it? Is it time for the 5:30 train to come through?