The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Thank you, young lady, and I think that will be enough,” the judge said. “Would the constables please remove Mr Reilly from the room.”

  “It’s okay, Dad,” Cat called to him. “I won’t let the buggers say nothin’ behind yer back.”

  “That will be enough, young lady,” the judge said.

  “Good on yer, Cat, tell the fuckers orf, luv,” her father called back, but then he began sobbing in a noisy helpless blubbering way, the way children do, the way drunks do outside hotels after closing time.

  When the shuffling subsided the judge addressed the room. He spoke sorrowfully of the decline of civilisation and the decline of the family. He spoke of the corrupt effect of modern music and films, the cheap taste for excitement, the lack of respect for authority. There was no one person to blame, he said. There was the acknowledged tendency of boys to be boys, but (with a slight rueful smile) there was no one who could be a boy like a wild tomboy could. He paused for the smiles and the rueful shaking of heads. Beyond that, he said, there was a long trail of sorry neglect, a long sad trail. And this sort of family breakdown was like a disease, he said. Like a cancer. Unless it was stopped, it would spread and infect others, even those whose family circumstances were entirely admirable. (Here, he let his eyes rest briefly on the parents who lived on Wilston Heights.) His finding was that the tragic death was wholly an accident, but in order to prevent further harm, and for her own future good as well as that of society, he ruled that Cat Reilly should be removed from the inadequate home and desperately inadequate parental situation in which it was her sad fortune in life, through no fault of her own, to find herself. He ruled that she should be placed in the Holy Family School for Little Wanderers where, by God’s grace, she would learn the proper deportment required of a young lady on the verge of puberty. In such a setting, he believed, there was every reason to hope she would learn discipline and moral rectitude before her life was beyond all repair.

  Charlie saw a little jolt to Cat’s body, as though a pellet had hit her, then she was still.

  Nobody needed a translation of Holy Family School. Everybody knew what it meant. Reform School. Delinquent girls. When the judge asked Cat if she had anything to say, she did not answer him. But she turned toward the boys, toward Robinson Gray in particular, and lifted her hands up to her face like claws, and made a soft hissing sound.

  Afterwards.

  Charlie was never sure how much time elapsed between the inquest and the afterwards. It could have been the same night. It could have been the next. He thought the worst thing was that they came into Cat’s place, into that magic untouchable kingdom of long grass and old tyres and the rusted skeleton of a car.

  There were four of them and three of us and they were all much bigger than us, he said. It was dark. God knew where Cat’s father was.

  Charlie and Catherine had gone to Cat’s place by instinct after school. Cat sat on the rotting veranda and stared at nothing. She didn’t move, she didn’t speak to them. She had finished with words.

  Of course, at the time, they simply thought her silence was temporary shock. They didn’t know that the last words she would ever speak were those she had tossed across the court: I won’t let the buggers say nothin’ behind yer back.

  They sat one on each side of her and held her hands, but she could have been a rag doll. It was this, Cat’s listlessness, that stunned Charlie. A tidal wave of grief hit him, he floundered, he felt he would drown. That the fire could be extinguished in Cat: it made the world falter in its orbit. It seemed to Charlie they sat there for hours, not a word being said. And then, when it was nearly dark, the others came: Robbie and the three Wilston boys.

  It was, Charlie thought, almost certainly an accident that they arrived together. It was entirely possible that Robbie was on a pilgrimage of remorse or a consolation mission of his own. (This was what Charlie thought. Catherine, I discovered years later, was much less sure.) It was virtually certain, Charlie thought, that Robbie, disconcerted by the presence of the boys on the corner, aligned himself with them out of fear.

  “What did they do?” I whispered into the long silence in Charlie’s room on the top floor of the building in King’s Cross.

  “There were four of them and three of us,” Charlie said.

  I waited and waited. I stared at the photograph of Cedar Creek Falls. I could feel myself floundering in Charlie’s grief and his memory of fear. I could feel myself going under. This drowning sensation had as much to do with Gabriel as with Charlie, as much to do with my fear for the way he kept ferreting around in the underside of respectable lives, my fear of the riddle that lay between him and his father, my fear. Charlie stared at his blow-up of the Serra Pelada mine.

  “I remember lying on the grass in front of the veranda,” he said. “I remember seeing into the crawl space in the dark and knowing it was full of cobwebs and spiders, ladders and ladders of cobwebs and furry spiders. It was too dark to see them but I could see them anyway. I felt as though Cat and Catherine and I were at the bottom of a bottomless pit and we would never climb out.”

  “What did they do?”

  But he could not speak of it. Nearly forty years later, all he could say was, “They taught us a lesson.”

  He can hear the hissed whispers: We’ll teach you to dob us in. We’ll teach you. We’ll teach you a lesson you won’t forget, you little slut, you little wog, you little stuck-up bitch.

  After a long long silence, I asked: “Did they hurt you?”

  He looked at me as though I were a stranger inexplicably in the room. “At first,” he said — but he was speaking in a sort of trance, he was thinking aloud — “at first, the worst pain was why? They’d got off scot-free, but they were furious, they wanted revenge.” He shook his head. “Revenge,” he said, mystified, still incredulous. With his fist, he made the motion of a knife twisting and twisting in his lungs. “It used to bore into me. Why?

  “I’ve thought and thought about it,” he said. “I’ve decided there were two things they couldn’t forgive. They couldn’t forgive what Cat knew about them, and they couldn’t forgive her for being articulate. They wouldn’t have minded if she’d screamed and sobbed. They didn’t mind her dad, that was okay, they expected the Reillys to make fools of themselves, they could forgive that any old time. But they wouldn’t forgive Cat for despising them.”

  “What did they do?”

  He walked to the window and moved aside the pearly paper of the shoji screen. The Sydney sun and the King’s Cross neon came into the room like gaudy pimps. He looked down at the street: “You know,” he said, “to be stabbed by some stranger in a drug deal, that’s nothing. It’s quick and kind.” He pulled the screen back across the space. “Shame is more deadly and permanent,” he said. “If an attacker shames the person he attacks, he can do whatever he wants and get off scot-free, because the attackee won’t speak of it, and he knows it.”

  He stood in front of the photograph of the Serra Pelada mine. “It was their faces,” he said. “It was Robbie’s face. I’ll never forget Robbie’s face.”

  I don’t know why, but I had a terrible nauseating sense of premonition, I wanted to rush out and go downstairs and find Gabriel and say, Let’s leave here. Let’s go and live with your mother and stepfather and plant pineapples and never come near the quarry or any sort of harm again. Let’s flee. But I knew it would be useless. I knew the riddle and the need to atone wouldn’t leave Gabriel alone.

  “Charlie,” I said, “what did they do?”

  “They taught us a lesson.”

  He stood in the window again and stared at the opaque screen and said over his shoulder, with his back to me: “I can’t talk about it. That’s what was so brilliant about it, you see.” He turned around and said urgently, “We weren’t meek, mind you, we weren’t passive. But they were bigger.”

  He turned his back to me again and said in a low quick monotone, “They pulled our pants off and they did things. And then the Wilston boys pissed
on us, and one of them shat on us.” He said it in such a rush, in such a quick low voice, that I had to play it back in my mind to hear it properly.

  He turned round and his face was stricken. It was as though he had fouled himself in front of me. “If you ever tell anyone,” he said, “I’ll …”

  “Oh Charlie,” I whispered, instinctively moving toward him, but he flinched and hugged himself, his crossed arms a fortress. Don’t touch me, his body said.

  “And Robbie watched,” he said. “He didn’t do anything. He just watched.”

  “Oh Charlie.”

  “It was their faces,” he said. “The looks on their faces. I’ll never forget Robbies face.”

  BOOK III

  Photograffiti and Silence

  Picture taking is first of all the focusing of a temperament, only secondarily that of a machine.

  Susan Sontag

  Where can I find one who has forgotten words? That is the one I would like to talk to.

  Chuang Tzu

  1

  The loudest and most chilling scream in the world is the silent one in Edvard Munch’s painting. It is composed of every scream the viewer has ever heard, every fear he has ever felt, every nightmare that has ever jackknifed him out of sodden sheets. It cannot be shut off, that scream. It is deafening. It is not just the open rictus of the mouth which screams, but the skull, the hands, the whole body. The body is at risk of imploding, the scream sucks the body into itself. The giddy sky screams too, and the contortionist earth writhes in the grip of the same endless shriek.

  Only the geometric grid of the bridge suggests, by its parallel railings, that there are in fact two side-by-side worlds in The Scream. There is the world that is only scream, and the world where the scream means nothing and is not even heard. They occupy the same space, but one world fits inside the other like a hand inside a glove.

  The bridge rails bisect the painting. They warn that the hunters are coming, those two elongated figures, the stalkers, the black birds of prey, the executioners. They warn that the executioners are deaf, indifferent, sinister, grim as reapers with black scythes, as schoolteachers looming above young children, as bullies hanging about on a corner, as judges. They are unmoved but moving closer, their intentions unswerving, straight as railway lines, straight as the law, relentless as death or the black fact of power.

  And the screamer puts his own hands over his own ears but the sound which shreds him will not abate.

  I have never seen Munch’s original painting, which hangs in the National Gallery in Oslo, Norway. I have only seen reproductions in books, and I have seen Charlie’s photograph of it, taken (in violation of copyright, I suppose) from a book on modern painting and incorporated into several collages of his own.

  In one of Charlie’s photographs, the Grade 5 class at Wilston School in one particular yesteryear (that one in which Cat and Catherine and Charlie sat at the feet, as it were, of the wise Miss Oswell, paragon of good exam results and discipline, that oldfashioned virtue), the Grade 5 class in that year is somewhat incongruously posing for its photograph on an overhead railway bridge. The photographer, as was the case in those distant days, is also on the bridge with his tripod and with his black cloth over his head, almost as though he were the hangman rather than the archivist.

  His right hand is held aloft and one expects to see the shutter-trigger attached to cord, but in fact he holds a hand mirror up by its wooden clasp. Look at the birdie, he seems to say, and when the class does so, the reflection that it sees is Munch’s loud silent scream.

  In another of Charlie’s photographs, the class sits in front of a blackboard and the blackboard is full of Munch’s scream. Miss Oswell, leaving a cut-out silhouette behind her in the class photograph, stands at the blackboard and points with her long teacher’s pointer right into the open ellipse of the screamer’s mouth. Miss Oswell is tall and gaunt and dressed in black and looks remarkably like the long figure of one of the stalkers at the far end of Munch’s bridge.

  Silence seduces, Charlie said. People cannot resist silence. They fill it with confession, he said. This is something therapists and prostitutes and bartenders know all too well.

  And photographs also seduce, he said. Their seeming passivity and their silence is irresistible, it invites transgression. Certainly Charlie would know. He lusted after photographs, his passion for them was unbridled. He bought them in droves from junk shops and estate auctions, he saved them from newspapers and old school magazines and illustrated weeklies, he scavenged in abandoned rooms and rubbish bins for them. He hoarded them and studied them. You can read infinity in a grainy snapshot, he said.

  And he himself took photographs obsessively in order to see what he had seen.

  He arranged and composed, but he did not believe that these arrangements lied, or that they refashioned the truth. All photographs lie and they all tell their own particular truth, he said, the truth of their own lie. They reveal and conceal, they enlighten and deceive, they hold steadfast and they manipulate the truth - but all this is beside the main point.

  Photographs beckon, he said. Photographs seduce.

  The relationship between a photograph and its viewer is one of seduction, and like all seducers, photographs know how to enthral. It is what is not seen that tantalises us. It is what is excluded from the frame that we desire. It is the figure in the photograph with her back to the camera, her face averted, that we cannot forget, that young woman, scarcely more than a girl, only partly visible in a doorway on a city street.

  It is the thought of what would have happened if the photographer had focused a few feet further to the left, the thought that perhaps he in fact did do just that, that perhaps a photograph already exists somewhere which would, let us say, reveal the face of a man about to approach the young woman.

  I’ll tell you a story, Charlie said. I’ll tell you why I suddenly came back from New York after twenty-five years. Actually, I’ll tell you two very strange stories, he said. They are both true and they are both about photographs and death.

  The first story. A car salesman who lived in New York City took his family (a wife, two teenage daughters, a younger son) to Florida for vacation. They had two weeks of Daytona Beach and body-to-body sunning, they opened themselves up to pleasure as unguardedly as day lilies do, the teenagers had five beach romances between them, the boy and his father went fishing, the mother read ten paperbacks and had an epiphany out there alone in the salt waves where she swam into a beatitude which stayed with her on the beach, and hovered above the trailer in the campground, so that she knew life would be irrevocably different henceforth. All these poignant little hedonisms were crammed into the family’s Kodak instamatic and hoarded for the return to the mundane world.

  When they got back to New York, they found their townhouse had been ransacked. The back door had been forced, the microwave, the TV, the VCR, the compact disc player had all been taken. Drawers and jewellery boxes had been emptied, their contents apparently dumped into T-shirts and sweatshirts and carried out like laundry in a basket. One of the shirts, in the burglar’s haste, was left on the living room floor. Tax receipts (why on earth had the thief bothered with that desk drawer?) from five years past were spilling out of the hammock of an overlarge New York Yankees T-shirt. There was an iron-on badge proclaiming John Lennon Lives on one sleeve. At least they brought their own shirts, the mother said with a forlorn attempt at dry wit. It’s not one of ours.

  It was a horrid end to a wonderful vacation, and chaos and depression ensued for some time. Weeks later, when the tedious business of insurance claims and replacements was behind them and the family was more or less back to normal (except for that queasy sense of unsafety which visited them daily like shadows falling on the kitchen wall), the mother, cleaning out a sandy beachbag, discovered four rolls of undeveloped Kodak film.

  Our happy Florida time, she thought, with a certain forgivable excess of sentimental regret. That beatitude, that happy family time, safe and sound.<
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  She had the films developed and over supper the family slipped under the fence of the burglary and retouched that Florida joy. Oh look, they laughed, Jerry’s fish! And the one that got away from Dad. And Nancy’s romance. Oh look, there’s that gorgeous hunk on the motorcycle, that Tim, who took Maggie to Disneyworld. He said he’d come and visit back here, he said he lived in Queens, remember? We thought he was really stuck on you, Maggie. Oh well, que sera, he must have found someone else.

  Maggie sighed. “I gave him our phone number and address,” she said. “You never know. He might call me one of these days.”

  The whole family studied gorgeous Tim on his Yamaha, his blond curls falling to his shoulders, his leather boots high and polished, his tanned and muscled arms protruding from his Yankees shirt, the perky John Lennon Lives badge caressing his delectable bicep.

  “Oh my God,” Maggie said softly.

  They all stared at the T-shirt, then they stared at one another. Oh my God, they said.

  “Did he give you his address?” they asked Maggie.

  “Just a phone number,” she said.

  That was enough, and the police did the rest. Unfortunately the beautiful suntanned Tim, being part of a busy professional ring which specialised in vacation-emptied houses, panicked when the police showed up in Queens and there was a shoot-out and he was killed by an officer’s bullet. Most of the stuff had already been fenced, of course. But there were a couple of incriminating pieces of jewellery and the microwave, microwaves having become so cheap at the discount stores that they cannot be easily fenced anymore.

  To die for a T-shirt and a microwave, Maggie thought, stunned that someone who had so recently groped inside her jeans could be dead. In dreams, her beach lover came to her wearing nothing but John Lennon glasses, and he parked his motorcycle on her bed and revved it and posed for his photograph.