“Your boyfriend’s nuts, you know,” Sheba used to say. She couldn’t figure him out. “He probably still believes in Santa Claus,” she said. “You’d better warn him,” she said. “He’s gonna get himself killed if he doesn’t watch out. He’s making some of my best clients very angry. He doesn’t understand the way the world works.”
“He’s more like his father than he likes to think,” Gabriel’s mother confided. “He gets a bee in his bonnet and he can’t leave it alone. His father was a man of strange obsessions.” She put her hand on my arm. “Be very wary, Lucy, about a man who’s obsessed. He has no space left for someone else.”
I said brightly: “Don’t worry. I’m a congenital soloist anyway.” I laughed, but she didn’t. She looked at me for so long, in such a sad kindly way, that I felt uneasy. “Look,” I said, jokey. “Don’t worry about me. I don’t bruise.”
“I hope it will be all right,” she said. “I hope neither of you will be hurt.”
“I’m unhurtable,” I said.
“I do know this, Lucy. I’ve discovered there isn’t anything, there simply isn’t anything, that you can’t survive.”
She was moving among the orchids in her greenhouse, a tranquil woman, a woman one could imagine putting forth leaf and lateral root systems, attaching herself to the earth.
“Were you …? Did you and Gabriel’s father …?” I stammered around, curious about the dislocations and scars in my lover’s life, curious about the sudden absences, but unable to frame a question that might not cause pain.
“The years without my child,” she said quietly, “were like an amputation.” She was dividing the roots and nodes of two orchids, using a penknife and her fingers, patient, meticulous, never hurrying. When they came apart — I would never have had the patience myself — she packed them lovingly into two separate pots. “But what’s past is past,” she said. “I couldn’t ask for greater happiness than I have now. That is the thing I’ve learned,” she said. “You think you can never be happy again. But then you are.
“Some people,” she said, “seem to get it right the first time with marriage, but I think it must be a fluke. Sheer luck. You’re too young to know what you’re doing. Anyway, for us it was a mistake, that’s all, and yet it brought me here, and it gave me Gabriel. I can’t regret it.” She tamped the earth around her orchids with her fingers. “Poor Robbie,” she said. “He’s such a haunted man. I think he’ll be throttled by his own demons in the end, and yet, you know, I’d like him to find peace. I loved him once.”
“Why is he haunted?” I asked.
But she was concentrating on her orchids and didn’t answer.
“Catherine,” I asked years later, on a London night when we were talking late, our tongues loosened by brandy, “is Robinson Gray haunted, would you say? Has he got demons on his back?”
“I don’t know about haunted,” she said. “But I know about demons.”
“When we were kids,” she said, “there was this tortoise that was supposed to be a hundred years old.” She has her fingers hooked through the old front fence again, watching the armoured hump, apparently headless, move in its slow weird waltz across the lawn. Its head is tucked under its shell. It won’t stick its head out when Robbie wants it to, and suddenly Robbie is red in the face and his eyes are a violent purple and he is smashing smashing smashing at the shell with a mallet and Catherine puts her hands over her ears and screams …
“Were you afraid of him?”
Catherine thought for a long silent time. “Not for myself,” she said. “Because he’s afraid of me.”
“Who were you afraid for?”
“Lucy, don’t ask me anything. I won’t talk about it. I can’t.”
They used to congregate at the bridge after school. Charlie could never quite remember the sequence of events that led to the railway game being a regular thing, or to its awful escalation, or to the bridge as the gathering point, and not just for the five children who had spent so much of the summer at Cedar Creek.
The railway game was simply there as a fullblown regular event, part of Grade 5.
What he did remember was his own obsession with the nature and varieties of power. That was mainly what he watched in those years — the workings of power, its instinctive groupings and alliances, its varieties, the people who were polite to his parents and the people who were rude to them — and that was what he pondered afterwards, alone in the sleepout at the back of the shop, staring out through the louvres at the mango tree and the stars.
There was Cat’s kind of power, which came from not caring if you got hurt and not caring what people thought of you. Which came first? he wondered. Cat’s not caring? or her knowledge that for people like herself there was no point whatsoever in caring? In its way, Cat’s power was absolute; and yet people with a different sort of power (teachers, for example; or the kind of people who lived up on Wilston Heights; but also the boys on the corner whose power was simple brute strength), those people despised the kind of power that Cat had, they snapped their fingers at it, they did not acknowledge that it was any kind of power at all. And yet, it seemed to Charlie, they were also afraid of her power. They ignored it because it made them uneasy, because it didn’t acknowledge their kind of power.
Not that Cat gave a fig about whether they acknowledged it or not. But Charlie minded, and Catherine minded too, and in both, the increasingly frequent revelations of discrepancy between Cat’s power and other kinds of power gave rise to a terrible intensity that was partly composed of euphoria and partly of fear. It was as though they could both smell tumult coming, it was as though Cat stank of something that was either cataclysm or omnipotence and they knew it. Charlie knew that Catherine knew, and she knew that he did, and they shared this fevered excitement-and-anxiety, and the unexpressed shared secret bound them in a telegraphy of quick exchanged looks in the classroom and on the long walk home from Wilston School over Wilston Heights and on the footbridge.
In the classroom they both suffered for Cat constantly, though she herself gave no sign of being bothered in the least. The classroom was high comic drama for Cat. When she was made to read aloud from the Grade 5 Reader, which she was made to do every day, her halting mumble and long pauses and mispronounced words were painful to hear. Hopeless, Miss Oswell said. Cat clowned about her hopelessness. Cat would, in her ignorant way, sometimes substitute shocking and forbidden words for others which bore only a slight resemblance. The class would guffaw, a sound like a pressure cooker letting off steam.
“What else can we expect?” Miss Oswell would ask the air. “Water finds its own level and guttersnipes find the gutter.”
Catherine found herself fantasising that Miss Oswell would fall down the steps and be killed, or that a car would hit her and she would be paralysed and would send a letter of apology to Cat from her hospital bed. Catherine was frightened by this violence inside her mind; all the more so since Miss Oswell invariably treated Catherine with the greatest affection and respect. Often Miss Oswell would ask Catherine to stay behind and help her with the stacking of school readers in the press or the filling of inkwells. She would stroke Catherine’s long fair hair and say: “You must brush it, you know. Let me brush it for you.” And she would take a hairbrush out of her desk drawer and Catherine would look stonily out the window while Miss Oswell drew the brush through her hair. Catherine could see Cat and Charlie dawdling along the road, still separate but gradually approaching each other the way railway lines, when you follow them into the distance with your eyes from an overhead bridge, eventually touch. They were waiting for her, and she wanted to be with them.
“It does credit to you, Catherine,” Miss Oswell said, “to show pity on the Reilly girl.”
Catherine closed her eyes. Cat and Charlie would be in the big dip of Wilston Road by now, taking the shortcut through the spare lot where the wattles were in bloom.
“But It’s wasted, I’m afraid,” Miss Oswell said. “She’s a bit of a sewer rat, I�
�m afraid. She’ll drag you down. As for schoolwork, she’s hopeless, you know, and you’ll win a scholarship to university.”
Miss Oswell always required the class to laugh about Cat’s hopelessness, which the class readily did with the most boisterous relief. Catherine and Charlie never laughed. They never even smiled during obligatory Rat-on-Cat time. (This was Catherine’s term and it startled Charlie, but he noted it as further evidence of Catherine’s unexpected way with a knife.)
“The guttersnipe strikes again,” Miss Oswell would say, and the class would laugh.
“Now if only everyone could read as well as Catherine,” she would say. Or: “If only everyone could do mental arithmetic as well as Charlie.”
Both Catherine and Charlie began, during that Grade 5 year, to feel ashamed of the ease with which they excelled, to feel there was something dirty and disloyal and even obscene about it.
(“Do you know,” Catherine said to me in a dazed voice in London on one of our drinking nights, “when I think back, I realise that schooling in Queensland in the fifties and sixties was still as bad as anything in Dickens. It scarred all of us. It scarred us even if we were teacher’s darlings.”
“Do you know,” I said to her drunkenly, “that if you put two Queenslanders together anywhere in the world, you get a cabal. Once Charlie and I were talking in the bar at the Inferno and some visitor from Melbourne says: Oh God, not two Queens-landers, get me outta here. God’s chosen idiots, he says. I upended his glass on his head.”
“If any of that smug, self-righteous, tepid, supercilious lot from Melbourne or Sydney starts Queensland-bashing,” Catherine said, “that’s it. They’re off my list.”
And we laughed till we cried.
“You should have had Miss Oswell in Grade 5,” she said. “Or Mr Brady in Grade 7.”
“I did,” I said. “They had different names, that’s all.”
And we laughed till we cried again. We laughed till we made ourselves sick.)
Though she herself did not administer the cane, Miss Oswell was a frequent sender of boys to the headmaster’s office for any talking in class, any horseplay, any look that could be construed as “cheeky". Two or three times a day, boys would depart and return, sometimes pressing their lips hard together for it was obligatory to be nonchalant and to signal to the class, during the first moment that Miss Oswell turned to write on the board, the number of cuts received: two, three or six. For mysterious reasons these were the unchanging coordinates of punishment, with six cuts the most favoured dose.
For small misdemeanours, such as a mistake in spelling, an error in tables, the capital of Western Australia not known, the products of the Atherton Tableland not memorised, Miss Oswell herself would administer a thump on the shoulder or a quick whack of the ruler across the palm. These latter were the punishments meted out to girls at all times, both for the aforementioned major crimes (talking, horseplay, cheeky looks), and for the further, and apparently exclusively female, felony of sulking. “I cannot abide sulking,” Miss Oswell said. So strongly could she not abide it that it was quite possible for a girl, looking as though she were on the point of tears from a shoulder thump, to receive a second thump for sulking.
It was not surprising, Catherine and Charlie thought, that Cat came to school infrequently, rarely more than three days in five, because when she did come Miss Oswell devoted a considerable amount of her considerable malevolent energy toward making certain that Cat hated being there.
“Do I smell something?” Miss Oswell would ask when Cat arrived, sniffing the air with delicate distaste. “Do we have someone in the class who didn’t have a bath last night?”
“But I did have a bath, Miss Oswell,” impetuous Cat could never learn not to say.
“Don’t be cheeky to me, my girl.” Miss Oswell would raise her eyebrows and look heavenward as though she could never quite believe the extent of Cat’s insolence. On cue, the class would laugh. “What is the rule in this class?” Miss Oswell would ask.
Speak when you’re spoken to, the class would chant.
“Precisely,” Miss Oswell would say. “Come here, Cat Reilly. Hold out your hand.”
Cat collected many red stripes across her palm and she would wink at the class as she sat down. She had a devastating way of mimicking Miss Oswell when the teacher’s back was turned, and the class would grin and press its lips together in silent glee. “Do I detect horseplay?” Miss Oswell would demand, whirling. Cat would be still as a statue, the class frozen in solemnity.
Once, however, Ross Johnson spluttered audibly with laughter and Miss Oswell whirled and pointed and said with magnificent rage: “To the office with you, my boy.”
“I’ll go, Miss Oswell,” Cat said. “I made him laugh.”
Ross Johnson paused.
“So we have a namby-pamby little mummy’s boy who wants a girl to take his cuts for him, do we?”
“No, Miss Oswell,” Ross Johnson said, his eyes flashing. He left the room.
“And tell the headmaster I said six of the best,” Miss Oswell called after him. “As for you, my girl, come here.”
There was something about her tone that made the class, inured though it was to the wraths and ragings of Miss Oswell, take a collective swallow and hold its breath.
“Hold out your hand,” Miss Oswell said.
Cat obediently extended her arm, palm upwards, and looked Miss Oswell in the eye, her face carefully blank of expression.
“Don’t give me that cheeky look, you bold girl,” Miss Oswell said. The ruler descended, side on. This, everyone knew, was forbidden. It was required that girls be disciplined with the flat of the ruler. Cat flinched, and looked with surprised eyes at the sharp red line across her hand. The ruler descended again. And then again.
Catherine looked at Charlie, and Charlie looked back, but what could they do? From desk to desk, furtive glances were exchanged. It was rumoured that a rule existed about hitting girls: if a teacher did it more than twice, one’s parents could report the teacher to the Board of Education. There had been a celebrated case involving a Grade 7 teacher. It could be safely assumed, however, that Miss Oswell was not too worried about the parents of Cat. It was clear to the hushed class that Miss Oswell had crossed some line and was possessed by passions which were galloping without any reins.
On the sixth stroke of the ruler, something happened, and what happened would live in school legend. On the sixth fall of the side-on ruler, Cat closed her palm around it and took it. Miss Oswell was totally unprepared. Thrown off stroke, she opened her mouth and her mouth seemed to hang there in front of the class in a large silent O as though whatever sound Miss Oswell intended to make stuck in her throat. She simply stood there, and it began to occur to the class that she looked distinctly foolish, though no one was stupid enough to smile. Cat returned to her seat and placed the ruler neatly along the top of her desk.
Miss Oswell’s voice, almost unrecognisable, came back to her. It was like a mute placed in a trumpet. “Leave the room,” she said.
Cat did.
She didn’t come back for a week.
When she did come back, it was as though the incident had never occurred, as though she and Miss Oswell had agreed to wipe it from the book of memory But there was a change, and it could not go unnoticed by the class. From this point on, Cat was invisible, and the change seemed to disturb Cat as much as anyone. No matter what Cat did, no matter how rowdy or impossible she was, no matter how many tables she got wrong, no matter how badly she read, no matter how her mimicry stirred the class to spluttering mirth, Miss Oswell ignored her. She might as well not have been there. At first Charlie and Catherine were immensely relieved, but there was something eerie about the change. They both noted that this eeriness seemed to affect Cat. She seemed to get wilder. There was an almost desperate edge to her recklessness.
All this, it seemed to Charlie, was part of Cat’s power and part of the mystery of its potency and of its impotence. All this came with her every
day to the footbridge and to the cutting beside the railway line.
On the footbridge over the railway line, what fascinated Charlie were the unexpected alliances. He thought he could remember a time when just the five of them — Cat and Catherine and Willy and Robbie Gray and himself — used to gather there. He and Cat and Catherine, officially strangers at school, would converge somewhere along Wilston Road, they would walk home together over the hill, past Catherine’s place, past Robbie’s place, past the ancient tortoise which was said to be a hundred years old. They would wait on the bridge. Sometimes Catherine came late; sometimes she had to stay and help Miss Oswell put the books in the press. Cat always went home for Willy and came back; and on the days when she didn’t bother to go to school, she and Willy waited on the bridge. Robbie Gray would join them. In the beginning, Charlie was fairly sure, Robbie Gray would come alone, after he got the tram home from Grammar and walked from the tram stop toward Wilston Heights. Charlie could never pinpoint a time when the boys on the corner also showed up on the bridge as a regular thing (he always thought of the boys that way, long after they stopped molesting him on the corner nearest his parents’ shop). The boys on the corner — there were three of them — went to Wilston School but they were bigger and older. They were the same age as Robbie and were in Grade 8. He never knew their names, or if he did the names disappeared behind their boys-on-the-corner masks. He had trouble remembering their faces. In his nightmares, they had long hairy arms and deep eye sockets and large black jaws like apes. When he put them in a photograph, they held gorilla masks in front of their faces. And somewhere early on there was another boy from Grammar, older than Robbie and the boys on the corner, someone else who lived up on Wilston Heights. Charlie must have known his name, Catherine knew him, but he remained an extra, a walk-on part, in recollection.
The Last Magician Page 20
