The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Upstairs, where the men come and go, half-hour by half-hour, hour by hour, averting eyes at the turning of the stair when they pass one another, upstairs it is understood that sleeping, buying enough hours, enough bedtime, to sleep, is an inordinate extravagance for which they must pay dearly. Some do. There is never any telling what they will want. It is not at all what you think. Sex is not what you think, not at all.

  Consider, for example, the two gentlemen who visit Lucy on the first Thursday of every month. Order is important to them, and schedules, and the quiet midweek discretion. They are orderly men, and they are certainly men of absolute discretion. She calls them the peanut-butter-and-raspberry-jam twins, but they are not, in fact, twins. They are not related at all, though they went to school together (a private school for the sons of graziers, a boarding school) and they went to university together, and studied law together, and were received at the bar together. There they parted company and now practise from different chambers, not infrequently facing each other on opposite sides of a courtroom case. They are married to quite different women, and between them they have five children, whose pictures they carry proudly in their wallets. Lucy knows this because in the latter stages of each monthly visit (they are affluent and extravagant young men, and pay for much of the night), in the latter stages, when she has to discipline them, they have shown her the photographs and have often wept over them and have become, if the truth be told, a trifle maudlin.

  Knowledge is a kind of power, and sometimes Lucy wonders if it is shadow potency to which she is addicted. No, not addicted exactly, but she does find it endlessly seductive simply to discover what will be required. She is a scholarly observer, an expert of sorts, on the lonelier intimacies. She is dumbfounded, grieved, humbled, moved, by how trusting the men are, how vulnerable, how … well, the extent to which they will humiliate themselves. And sometimes she ponders the relationship between this and the fact that so many of her clients are tangled up with the law. They are policemen, lawyers, Queen’s Counsellors, judges. Does the strain of juridical power, the weight of order, exact this toll? An eye for an eye? Ah abject citizen in the dock exacting the abjectness of the locker-up? It is clear to Lucy that the risk the lawkeepers take is part of what holds them in thrall. It is also clear that the lawkeepers like to believe that risk itself is subject to their control, that they are experts (as they from time to time point out) when it comes to undermining the credibility of a witness — Lucy, for example — in court. Even so, even knowing the considerable dominion of their safety, Lucy is overwhelmed by revelations. By no means is she blind to the meaning of their view of her, the meaning of their choosing her as a safe receptacle for revelation. It is not a flattering meaning. Even so, she is overwhelmed.

  (In another sense, she sometimes thinks, it is a flattering meaning: Here, where it doesn’t count, the unvarnished truth will serve. That is why Lucy continues to make do. That is why she is here — though she is in transit, a tourist, someone who could, and eventually will, leave. That is why, in choosing one cage over another, she finds more leg room here. For the time being.)

  And perhaps the very infantile nature of so many of the legal disclosures is brilliant, perhaps it is not reckless but cunning, an intuitive tour de force calling forth, as it invariably does, a maternal instinct. When Lucy thinks of the twins, her primary urge is protective.

  (And when I think of Lucy and the twins? Lucy, or at least that particular Lucy, Lucy-upstairs-at-Charlie’s-Inferno, was a costume I wore for several years. I stepped into that costume and out of it. Sometimes, mentally cleaning house, telling stories to Catherine in London for example late at night after several brandies, or talking silently to my reflection from the ferry railing, I pull the costume out of the back of a closet and look at it. I step inside it for a moment to look again at Lucy’s visitors with Lucy’s eyes. I think this: What a piece of work is man! How needy in all seasons, how infinite in abasement, in action how like a child.

  What is this quintessence of lust?

  And Lucy remembers from that time: lust is a frightened manchild in the dark.)

  Upstairs at Charlie’s Inferno the men are safe, and they sense it, for the very nature of the power of the women upstairs weakens the women. They are moved to pity. And are they also moved to contempt? Rarely, in fact. This is what we are, the daily singularities tell them. The women are moved to awe, they are often moved to a kind of fear. Ask not for whom the games are played, for whom the whips prepared. Upstairs the women are silent, keeping the secret of communal shame.

  What the twins require is simple. It’s easy work, Lucy says, though not without its distressing side. Specifications have been made with an exactitude befitting the legal mind. Lucy must wear the white button-front uniform, the thick pearl grey stockings, the flat lace-up shoes with crepe soles. She must add a hairnet and synthetic braids which coil themselves around her head and then snake their way into a bulky knot on the nape of her neck. “My name is Miss Montmorency,” she must say, “school matron. There will be no hanky panky while I am around.” She must then stand by sternly and watch while the twins undress, and she must bring them peanut-butter-and-raspberry-jam sandwiches.

  From this point, her role in the script remains passive until the third act. Sitting cross-legged on the floor, facing each other, the twins eat the sandwiches while playing with each other’s pricks. Lucy must watch. The twins giggle, they sway, they duck and dodge, they rub jam on each other’s faces, they sometimes escalate to bread fights and raspberry cocks which must be licked. Ride a cock horse to Raspberry Cross, they sing. Lucy must keep supplying them with peanut butter and raspberry jam. Her face is stern, it must always be stern and deeply shocked, but the twins are deliciously free to defy her in a fever pitch of nervous mirth. When their playful torment reaches climax, however, Lucy must fetch the switch. Act Three. This is reckoning time. The switch, significantly, is of lawyer cane, a withy of great suppleness and bite, a two-edged sword. Bent over the footboard of the bed, side by side, the naked legal bottoms receive six of the best and take their punishment like staunch little men.

  And then? Then Matron Montmorency tucks them up in bed and brings hot milk and turns out the light. Furtive movement in the dark, furtive cuddling, subplots hatching in the dark, secrets, secrets, oh no, oh help, oh please, matron is back, the light is on, the bedding is thrown back to reveal the naughty boys who must be switched again and made to sit in the corner where they subsist on prisoner rations of peanut butter and raspberry jam, poor little bad boy shenanigans going off half-cocked and having to begin again begin again begin again.

  So it goes.

  Mr Prufrock has quite different needs.

  It is because of Mr Prufrock that Lucy watches certain television programs she would never otherwise have time to see. For Mr Prufrock, preparing a face to meet the faces on the screen, television is a flickering tingling electronic cave of carnal possibilities, all of them safe. Certain faces on television arouse Mr Prufrock to paroxysms of derring-do, and in the soft, safe darkness of a curtained room there is nothing to stifle his murmured Do I dare? and do I dare?

  Anything, it transpires, absolutely anything, can be the mysterious machinery of desire, can be eroticised, fetishised, tantalised, sandwiched between peanut butter and raspberry jam. Mr Prufrock is intimate with a number of women, all of them newscasters or hosts of forums where cultural and political events are aired. He has his current affairs.

  Mr Prufrock, who feels naked even when neatly dressed in suit and tie (his collar mounting firmly to the chin), is not the kind of man who can be easily imagined without clothes. Perhaps a vision of pale flabby stomach, an incipient paunch, confronts Mr Prufrock in his morning shower, but he banishes it instantly. In his own inner notion of himself, he is always clothed. Fully dressed therefore, except for the shoes carefully aligned beneath the chair and the tie which he folds in quick expert coils and places on the card table, he sits on the bed in his black-socked feet, with
the pillows behind his back and the remote control channel-changer close to his left hand. Lucy, naked, sits on his right and keeps his other hand occupied, his fingers languidly stroking her smooth young body, exploring cavities and creases, assessing textures. Being a man highly sensitive to touch, Mr Prufrock translates and transmits through his fingertips, giving his entire visual attention to the screen.

  Mr Prufrock is in love with Catherine Reed. Though he has never met her, and would indeed be terrified of doing so, he finds in the weekly watching of “Catherine Reed Presents” a sort of Arabian Nights. She is his Scheherazade. Who knows where she will take him? Who can predict what intimacies she will lure him into? Fearless Catherine Reed travels the nation and the world, where danger lurks she will be there, talking to rice-farming guerrillas in the Philippines, to Palestinians on the West Bank, to Koori protesters in Kakadu, to rebels in Afghanistan, to Kurdish caravans fleeing across the Turkish border from Iraq …

  Ah, but I am mixing the Now and the Then, Catherine Reed presenting last night, Catherine Reed presenting last year, Catherine Reed presenting a decade ago, I am mixing time as a television special does, as The Decade in Retrospect does, as Charlie did, as memory does, one image bleeding into another, Lucia taking off her neat school uniform and putting on Lucy, Lucy seeping by degrees into me, but who am I?

  There is a woman who pauses in her writing, puzzled; a woman without a name, without a face, without a voice. Underground woman, who lives below the text, a misinterpreter, a mischief-maker perhaps, a faulty retrieval system which sometimes presumes to call itself an “I”.

  The woman pinches her left forearm with the thumb and index finger of her right hand. She watches an old scar turn bright red and then fade. She touches the imprint of perpetual Nows of pleasure and of harm, of joyous fucks and Lucy-fucks, of pain.

  She frowns. She observes her mind, which sits there like a derisive crow on a fence, changelessly monitoring her changing body, doggedly discriminating between Now and Then. Then, her mind says with elaborate and withering patience, you were earning money in a grubby room. Now you are someone who shies away from speech, who dreams of writing without language since language deceives, who wants to give the silences their say, who watched Catherine Reed last night, live, and who also last night watched Catherine Reed in re-run, “The Decade in Retrospect”, who watched the mostly silent Catherine Reed giving time past and time present their cues, pulling history onto one little pocket-handkerchief screen, letting other people speak, giving airtime to Queensland Greenies and Albanian democrats and Bangladeshi flood victims and the quarry riots in inner Sydney and the anti-quarry demonstrations in the suburbs and rival black factions in South Africa and antiwar activists in Melbourne.

  “Now,” Mr Prufrock warns, as the camera curves away from the marchers on Lygon Street. “Any second now,” he says. For always, in those brief moments when Catherine Reed fills the screen, silent, listening, she speaks directly to Mr Prufrock.

  “Do you notice,” he asks Lucy in his fastidious voice, “that she practically never talks? That is what I like about her. She listens. That is why people tell her so much, that is why they trust her. She is not one of those tiresome celebrity hosts who have guests as an excuse for showing off, who cut in and control and cannot be induced to shut up.”

  Lucy marvels at how talkative Mr Prufrock becomes during “Catherine Reed Presents”, since he is otherwise such a shy and retiring man, a professor of literature. This too surprises Lucy, for she rarely sees academics. Academics, as a rule, don’t need the services of Charlie’s Inferno; they have so many bright young bodies at their beck and call.

  “She hardly ever speaks,” Mr Prufrock says in a thrum of excitement, his fingers paddling frenetically in Lucy’s crotch. “Do you notice that? She’s so intimate with her guests, there’s this … you can feel the electricity between them. Just the same, waiting for her voice, it’s almost unbearable. I don’t know why her producer keeps giving us crowd scenes like this.”

  “Hush,” Lucy soothes, stroking his thinning hair, motherly, leaning toward him.

  Mr Prufrock sucks Lucy’s breasts. “Catherine,” he moans.

  Catherine Reed fills the screen. “Tonight,” she says, “we’ll be exploring the psyches of prisoners of war, the powerlessness and the sense of abandonment and the loss of self, and the long, long aftermath.”

  To music, Catherine fades from the screen. Two film clips succeed her, they are film clips that Lucy, and indeed the whole watching world, has seen a number of times already. Lucy knows she will never forget those faces, the young American one and the older, haggard, darker British one …

  (Did Lucy see these particular film clips with Mr Prufrock? What year was Mr Prufrock a client? What year did the prisoners’ faces grab the world by the scruff of its fears? Retrieval systems are faulty. Press the wrong button, you get the wrong rerun. Then what? Then you get Virgil wandering through Christian cosmography and discoursing on Florentine affairs, you get Plantagenets sounding like Tudors, you get Cordelia keeping silence for us all, you get Henry V’s footsoldiers, on the anti-romantic eve of battle, as ghostly voices on “Catherine Reed Presents”.

  But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath a heavy reckoning to make; when all those legs and arms and heads, chopped off in a battle, shall join together at the latter day, and cry all, “We died at such a place’’; some swearing, some crying for a surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their children rawly left. I am afeard there are few die well that die in a battle …)

  Catherine Reed fears there are few live well who are captured in time of war.

  “Now,” Mr Prufrock says. “Any second now, they’ll get back to her.”

  Lucy wonders if she will ever forget those soldiers’ faces, the young American one, a boy’s face, plump-cheeked, pocked with peppershot wounds; and the British one, darker, older, bruised, his shoulder (possibly dislocated) hunched into the camera in pain.

  The voice of the young American is that of a bewildered child, a frightened child who no longer has any confidence that black is black and white is white, who will dully, abjectly, listlessly — if required to do so — state that black is in very truth white.

  Then the British pilot speaks. His voice is different, it hangs grimly onto its truths, it will resist surrendering them, though it has no illusions about the cost of this stubbornness. A shock of black hair shields the exhausted eyes, the shoulder braces itself against coming pain.

  “I can’t bear this,” Lucy says. “I can’t bear to see those faces again.”

  Mr Prufrock is agitated. “Wait,” he says. “Wait. She’ll be back.”

  Catherine Reed reappears, her brows knit, her face strained. “I think all of us,” she says quietly, “have flinched on behalf of these men. Tonight I will be talking to someone who remembers that condition of powerlessness …”

  Music, a view of the dusty western suburbs of Sydney, a neat front garden, a modest house, a curtained window, a man behind the window staring out at nothing, at the unfocused distance, the past, the bamboo cage, the Burma jungles.

  “Mr Rex Kenney,” the unseen voice says, “was a prisoner of the Japanese during World War II, a worker on the notorious Burma Railway. At one point, in retaliation for his shouting at a guard who was kicking a fallen friend, Mr Kenney was kept in a bamboo cage for several weeks, with only ricewater for food.

  “Mr Kenney, when you saw the captured pilots on television, can you tell us what your reactions were? Can you give us some idea of what they are going through?”

  We are inside Mr Kenney’s living room now, an ordinary sort of room with a couch and two armchairs and a beige carpet and a TV set in one corner. Mr Kenney does not face the camera, but looks across the room, apparently studying the intricate pattern in his wife’s lace curtains. He looks like a man under constant and exhausting siege from nightmare.

  “To tell you the truth,” h
e says, coughing — it’s a smoker’s cough, a dreadful hacking sound which occupies several seconds — “to tell you the truth, I couldn’t watch. I mean, I did see them the first time, but I got the shakes so bad that I had to … I had to…”

  There is a long silence. Mr Kenney runs the fingers of his right hand back and forth across his forehead, kneading the skin, as though a fierce headache is yanking at the nerves of his eyes and twisting them, braiding them into thoughts he cannot hide from. Lucy suffers for him, intimately aware of his thumping blood and snarled nerves, running her cool fingertips over his temples, massaging his neck.

  Mr Prufrock’s caresses have become sharply rhythmic, staccato, playing demi-semi-quavering needs. “You can feel her, can’t you?” he asks, intent. “Even when she’s not on the screen at all, you can see her there, just off the edge, with those eyes … You see, she won’t cut in, she lets him take his own time, she’ll let him take all the time in the world if he needs …”

  “The first twenty-four hours is the worst,” Mr Kenney says suddenly, vehemently. “It’s the not knowing, you see. It’s the not knowing if anyone will ever know … You see, it’s not the beatings themselves, it’s waiting for the next one, not knowing how many nexts, not knowing what they want from you.”

  He drags the back of one hand across his eyes and coughs again and fumbles for a large slightly grubby handkerchief. He blows his nose, and surreptitiously rubs his eyes again with the back of a wrist.

  “I’ll tell you what I was thinking,” he said. “You mightn’t believe me, but I was wishing I could do it for them, see? I wish I could spare them, change places, because I’ve got the knack now, see? Those poor buggers, right now, they don’t know what’s hit ’em, they don’t know there’s all that everafterwards, wondering what you said to them, frightened of what you might’ve said, hating yourself, blaming yourself. I’m stuck with that, see? I’m shot.” His body suddenly and visibly relaxes as though this acknowledgment, this realisation, is a great relief to it. “It’s criminal to give ’em brand new fodder,” he says. “It’s like throwin’ babies into a cement mixer, there oughta be a rule …”