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.
“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 Last Magician Page 16
