The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Lucy.”

  “Mine’s Tony.” He manoeuvres easily, swivelling around on his plumbing, getting his downspout up. “Rough trip, eh?”

  “Oh yeah,” I say drily. “I can feel a bit of a swell.”

  “You’ve got a nice little bum, Lucy,” he offers.

  “And you want to buy me a beer in Manly, right? And after that, if one thing leads to another the way you hope, a quick fuck.” I love doing that, taking the wind out of their sails.

  “Jeez,” he says, affronted, all innocence. He actually licks his index finger and makes an X somewhere left of his sternum. “Cross my heart,” he says, as evidence that a carnal thought never entered his head.

  “The thing is,” I tell him, “I’ve got another man on my mind. Two, actually. Forget dessert, but if you want to listen to a monologue, you can buy me the beer” — because I need to conjure up Charlie and Gabriel again. I have to. “I just saw them both,” I tell him. “I saw them on film, their moving breathing celluloid selves, looking as though they were alive.”

  Tony lifts one eyebrow. “I think you lost me,” he says.

  “Sorry. It’s a reflex. That was Browning. ‘My Last Duchess’.”

  “Never seen it,” he says. “Any good? Can you get it on video yet?”

  I have to laugh, because this does strike me as curiously appropriate. I imagine how Charlie might do it: someone’s duchess of the moment sprawled naked across a bed, one arm bent a little awkwardly beneath her perhaps, a bit of blood splashed on the wall (I call that piece a wonder now), fully dressed middle-aged man in legal robes, juridical mane falling lavishly about his shoulders, a platinum tendril brushing one cheek, whip in hand, tear in one eye.

  Even had you skill In speech — (which I have not) — to make your will Quite clear to such an one, and say, “Just this Or that in you disgusts me …”

  “Not unless Charlie’s done it,” I say. “You never know. It’s exactly the kind of thing that would catch his eye.” Yes, the more I think about it …

  The thing is, I’ve got into the habit of thinking Charlie’s thoughts. You say a word like duchess, you push a button, and the retrieval system spills out a whole drawerful of associations and they all cluster around the theme you’ve already got in your mind. Before you can snap your fingers here you are at Titian’s Venus of Urbino. Oh, he’d certainly start with that on his video, Charlie would. I’ve got the hang of it now, I’m inventing for him.

  “I’m not sure if it’s out on video yet,” I tell Tony “But it’s worth waiting for. It’s about a painter and a duchess and a prostitute.”

  “Yeah?” Tony’s definitely interested.

  “You heard of Titian?”

  “A tit man, is he?”Tony leers.

  “Actually, a fetish for red hair, I think. Well, this duchess, the Duchess of Urbino, rather old, and rather ugly according to her none-too-gallant husband, wants her portrait done. She wants it done naked. She wants to look like a goddess, she says. Every day she conies to Titian’s studio and lies starkers on his red sofa draped with a sheet — I mean, the sofa is draped, not the duchess — and Titian tries not to show any disgust or embarrassment or, God forbid, pity, which is mainly what he feels, I expect. He’s a little nervous, you know, because if she doesn’t like the painting, his head will roll. Career-wise, anyway.”

  Tony shakes his head. “It’s like these old girls who go topless on Bondi, mutton trying to look like lamb. It’s disgusting. There oughta be a law.”

  “That’s what the Duke of Urbino thought. And so did a friend of Titian’s, a poet, a smart-arse man-about-town, Pietro Aretine. He rather fancied himself as a satirist, this Aretine, he wrote obscene sonnets, that kind of thing. So one evening, after the Duchess has put her clothes back on and left the studio, Aretine arrives with a nubile little prostitute in tow. ‘Look, Titian old boy,’ he says, ‘why don’t you use Lulu here as the model for the body, and stick the old cow’s head on top of it? Fix the old lady’s face up a bit, you know, give her the works, the red hair. Vanity being what it is, the Duchess will love it.’ ”

  Tony laughs. “Meanwhile the three of them are at it between the paint pots, right?”

  “Something like that. But here’s the joke. When the Duke sees the portrait, he says, ‘If I could have had that body in my bed, even with my wife’s head on it, I would have been a happy man.’ And Pietro Aretine laughs so hard he has a stroke and dies on the spot. That’s the gospel truth,” I say. “You can look it up in a library.”

  “Holy shit,” Tony says uneasily. “Dying from laughing at a joke, that’s not very funny.”

  “Maybe not. But it’s the Duchess who has the last laugh, you see.” Yes, it’s coming to me now. “She and the prostitute have an affair. It turns out that the prostitute, who had to wait behind the curtain every day, fell in love with my lady’s dignity and self-possession. She was dazzled by the way the duchess was so at ease with her ageing body, and with the way she didn’t really give a damn what the famous painter and the famous poet thought. This is in Charlie’s version, anyway.”

  “Jeez, lesbians?” Tony’s a bit shocked, but very interested. “Do they …? On screen? I mean, do you actually see much …?”

  “A certain amount is left to your imagination,” I say. “In Charlies version.”

  “Well, look,” Tony says, willing to swim on through opaqueness for the sake of the beer because who knows what might happen after a schooner or two? “Obviously you want to talk about this bloke. There’s a nice pub on the Corso —”

  “I blacked out during Charlie’s film,” I tell him. “You know that little arts cinema at the university? There. It was full of students, I was right in the middle of them, and then bang, I fell down a black hole. You want to hear about this?”

  He’s beginning to think he’s made a miscalculation here, but in spite of himself he’s curious, and in spite of the pointlessness, I feel a compulsion to talk.

  “You blacked out? In the middle of this Duchess film?”

  “Not the Duchess one, no. Something else of Charlie’s, a short feature. Not just Charlie’s. Five Postmodern Film-makers, it was called. I saw an ad. It was on a poster at Circular Quay.”

  “This Charlie, is he with the ABC or something?”

  “No, not the ABC.” In the sleek belly of the wake turning over, depending on the way the light fills, depending on the way I look at it, I can read ten different messages from Charlie. Seriously. Charlie believed this. It’s got nothing to do with magic, he would say. We know the answers to the burning questions but we are afraid of them, and so we need a screen. We need to project explanations and read them back. “The film was a kind of telegram,” I say. “It was typical Charlie.”

  “So does he always do X-rated stuff then?”

  There’s a question. “In a way,” I say.

  “What was this one about?”

  “Well, among other things, I suppose you could say it was about the quarry.”

  “Yeah?” Tony gets a gleam in his eye because he’s thinking of the quarry’s first circle, the limbo of hot neon and strip joints and the retail trade in young girls and the little boys waiting in doorways.

  But here’s the trapdoor that Charlie’s camera always falls through, here’s the underside, here’s one of the times (not the one on the film I’d just seen, but the one he called Hungers), here’s the hole where I fell right through to an earlier time, here’s the day I took him down through the labyrinth to meet Old Fury …

  She comes and goes, she disappears for months at a time, suddenly you may see her every day for two weeks, and then she’s gone again. They say she has a niche on the Eastern Suburbs line between Martin Place and King’s Cross, a cubbyhole behind steam pipes. If you watch, it is said, you can see the whites of her eyes, especially between 5 p.m. and 7 p.m., when the commuter trains hurtle through. This is what the tabloids claim. But then tabloid readers, commuters, the border people, they are all haunted by underground eyes,
they see them everywhere, they see squatters evil-eyeing them when it’s almost certainly cats, or rats, or possums, or simply chips of glass in the tunnels beside the railway lines. The commuters hear subterranean tappings on the undersides of their pillows at night. They are not reliable.

  “Old Fury,” I say. “This is Charlie. He takes photographs of black holes.”

  She gives him a bright fierce look. Above the birdbones of her face, her eyebrows meet and touch and she taps her index finger against her forehead as if to say: the black hole is here. I carry it round inside me. Her eyes, which are disproportionately large, gleam owlishly. The black hole is all that there is, her owl eyes say, though I could have the translation wrong. It is said that she prophesies. It is said that she speaks in tongues. In fact there is no way of knowing if she understands a word you utter or not, though I myself believe she has the gift of reading thought and of understanding everything that is left unsaid. She is supposed to be simple, but it could be that she sees no point in speaking except for when her Voices come. When her Voices visit, watch out! An infernal gale comes with them, it’s like an oil well blowing, a black gush gurgling out of her mouth.

  “Charlie thought he might know you,” I say.

  I wait for her to ask if he’s someone I picked up on the ferries again. (I have to supply her end of the dialogue, it’s good practice. Down in the quarry, if you’re not careful, you can lose the knack of civilised discourse.) I’ve told her before that riding the ferries is something I do when I’m upset. Obsessively I go to Manly and back for as long as it takes.

  Old Fury watches. She waits. She hunches her small angular body up against the cold. God, the cold. In July in Sydney it’s worse than the damp, worse than the darkness, though the latter is something down here. I expect us to evolve internal radar any day now. I expect us to start communicating by highpitched head-noises, like bats. Any week now I expect a new crop of kids, fresh from subway trafficking and car jobs and the meat markets, to arrive with radar systems which are fully formed and which have installed themselves quite naturally within the body, possibly as cysts on the shoulderblades, or possibly tucked into a scab on the forehead, a third eye.

  What am I saying, expect?

  Already we have a whole new range of underground hearing. I believe this has to do with certain adaptations of the inner ear. I believe we have developed antennae as fine as angelhair seaweed and these filaments — so it seems to me — these filaments float about and fan out through the murk, decoding the rumble of subway trains, noting and cataloguing screams, classifying the ways a knife cuts and the sound of a needle in a vein and the different sound of a spent needle falling somewhere in an empty room, registering the courting calls of sirens (these are a long way above us, of course, far above) and the carhorn of johnny cruiser and the different one of the man who dispenses snow. We read the dark. We decode it and swim in it so naturally that when I wake I feel for mutations: webbing between my toes, fur, gills.

  “Did you know that someone found fin prints of ichthyosaurus down here?” I ask Charlie. “So the tabloids claim. There were photographs.”

  “They were probably mine,” Charlie says.

  “I should have known. When I lived down here, I used to check my shoulders for wing buds every night. I reckoned if they sprouted, they’d be black, and they’d be barbed at their scalloped tips.”

  Charlie smiles. “I’ll make a record of that on film.”

  “I know you will. Why doesn’t someone nick an oil heater?” I complain fretfully. “Haven’t we got any more candles? We’ve got candles somewhere, haven’t we? We used to have. Someone nicked a whole carton, I know we’ve got them.” I grope around. Debris collects here, particularly in the corners of the room. I find two tallow stubs. I light them. “I don’t know how you’ll manage for light,” I say.

  “I’ll manage,” Charlie says. “It’s all done with lens opening and shutter speed. Pretend I’m not here. Just ignore me.”

  “Just ignore me, ignore me,” sings Julie who rocks herself in the corner. Julie is queen of the rubbish heap. She trails hypodermics. “Oh jeez,” I say, weary. “Have we got coffee or anything to bring her round?”

  Old Fury rummages in the box in the corner where we always used to hoard what we could, a generally futile endeavour, and she manages to find not only the coffee tin but the primus stove which hasn’t been ripped off yet. This is a small miracle. When she’s intent on the nuts and bolts of survival, you cannot question Old Fury’s intelligence. There is a feral intensity to her. Sometimes, most of the time, I believe she can read my thoughts, but at other times I accept the prevailing view that she is vacancy itself.

  Look at her now. There’s no heat, no plumbing, we’re a few levels underground (it’s anybody’s guess if this was once subway, or an underground parking lot, or the remnants of warehouse storage cellars that have been extended by the squatters and blasters), but she’s found some more candles. Lighted tapers bob about with her so that she’s always ringed with golden cloud. She has scooped a kettleful of water from the storage bin, boiled it on the primus and made coffee, and now she’s sitting beside Julie, which is, in itself, a delicate balancing act. The bed is no prize. Because it is a mattress which rests uneasily, lopsidedly, on a frame of bricks and boards — the mattress is very mangy, very lumpy, the bricks are uneven — the bed is subject to pitch and toss, the same kind that afflicts the harbour ferries in the choppy-zone between the Heads. (Just the same, in its time, the bed has slept a goodly number of bodies simultaneously) Old Fury is cradling Julie and humming something deep in her throat, a lullaby And this is what we all come back to, you see, this is what pulls us back below the streets, this hibernation ritual, this warmth. It comes off the old madwoman like a kind of radiance and pulls me in.

  From the dark beyond the candlelight, I hear Charlie’s camera like a soft shudder of batwings.

  “Old Fury,” I murmur, cuddling up. I wrap my legs around her spindly shanks, with the lumps of mattress pressing up against my right thigh and soft Julie in between us, too-pliant Julie, yielding-as-goosedown Julie, our Julie-comforter. We used to have a blanket, the last time I was here we definitely had it, but I recall Julie telling me that some fucker from a Redfern gang ripped us off. Old Fury hums, and Julie splutters and snuffles and sleeps a near overdose off, and it’s cosy. I want to tell Old Fury and Julie that I love them both.

  “This is what brings me back, you see, Charlie.” All this love, this communion. It’s very scarce above ground. Of course it comes and goes down here too. Certain substances, certain optimal amounts of certain substances, inhaled or absorbed, are more conducive than others to this state of well-being. Sometimes we can dolphin about for hours in the ocean of I-am-you, you-are-me. Sometimes not.

  “Just forget I’m here,” Charlie says.

  “I live at Charlie’s place now,” I tell Old Fury. “I don’t live in the quarry anymore.”

  Laughter, like a visitor from much deeper down, rises out of the old woman’s throat and swirls about us. Julie stirs and shivers in its spin and subsides again.

  “All of us,” I say reproachfully, “used to live in the world outside the quarry. Once upon a time, the quarry didn’t even exist.”

  No. That’s not true. I have to concede that from before the very first once-upon-a-time, there has always been another world, a nether world, invisible, nestled inside the cracks of the official world like a hand inside a glove, like two spoons spooning. But it didn’t exist quite like this, not in quite this same form, not in Sydney anyway, and it didn’t spread quite so far, and there was a time — “Believe me,” I tell them — before we ourselves entered it.

  They don’t believe me.

  “Tell them, Charlie,” I say.

  But there’s no sound from the outer darkness, I can’t even hear the camera now. Maybe he’s gone.

  “Believe me, Julie,” I say (she is trembling violently; Old Fury is massaging her bluish hands).

&
nbsp; Down here, the other world is like shadows on the wall of a cave, like the negative prints of the photographs Charlie is taking.

  As for me, I go back and forth, above and under. I cross borders. That world, this world, they coexist all the time and I move between them. It’s a kind of greedy curiosity I have, a voraciousness, I was born with it, a hunger to live all my possible lives.

  Underground woman, you might call me.

  Yes, I am partial to the Russian novelists, who may have been mad, but who were not blind, and who did not wilfully close their eyes. They saw both worlds. Perhaps because I read them very early, too early to know they were not supposed to apply in this hemisphere, too early to dilute and deconstruct, perhaps because I read them when I was still at school, when I was just an impressionable Brisbane changeling, before I’d even been taught what not to see, perhaps because of all this, I have always wanted to mail my own notes from underground. I want to see the nether side of our cities and send back word. Just as Charlie does.

  “In the other world,” I tell Julie, “people move through rooms that are full of music. They sit by windows where the light falls on a pot of orchids. They pour fine wine into crystal, they light candles on mahogany sideboards where silver gleams. They think we are just a bad dream.”

  A voice comes out of Old Fury’s mouth, a sound rather, high-pitched like a boy’s voice, a singsong taunting playground voice: Dreams, dreams, dreams, it says. (I think that is what it says.) Objection, Your Honour, it says. The witness dreamed there was an ordinary world and now she thinks she’s remembering it. It’s cock and bull.

  I have to ponder this. I consider it only common sense to take Old Fury seriously. Playing devil’s advocate against myself, Your Honour, I will record two short pieces of evidence I read somewhere.

  One: Report of a Sleep Disorders Clinic. A haggard patient, who was in a desperately insomniac state, presented himself for treatment. He was ravaged. One could have said that he was ill with desire for sleep, that sleep toyed with him, that sleep behaved toward him as a cruel mistress behaves toward an idiot lover, that he pursued her and pleaded and cajoled and promised the moon and grovelled. Alas, sleep spurned him. For six straight weeks, he said. Yet the clinic’s monitoring showed this: that the patient in fact slept a good eight hours each night, but dreamed, recurrently, that he tossed and turned and lay awake from dusk till dawn, and in the morning he woke exhausted.