The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Almost all burglaries, almost all acts of assault, and almost all murders, the police told the family, are committed by people the victims know. A house is virtually always burgled by someone you or your children know, and in eighty per cent of murders, perpetrator and victim are related or known to each other. An act of violence is an intimate act, they explained.

  The greater the violence, the greater the intimacy. And vice versa.

  In fact, they said, when we get a mutilated body, twenty stab wounds, a head beaten to a pulp, a limb cut off, stuff like that — begging your pardon, young lady, we didn’t mean to upset you — but when we get stuff like that, we know right off it’s family or a lover, they said. Only love does that. Strangers kill quick and clean, but family is vicious, they said, and love is a savage beast.

  Funny thing, the police said, but statistically you’re safer on the streets than at home, and safer with a stranger than with family or friends.

  “1 read all this in the New York Times,” Charlie said.

  The second story. In my apartment building in New York, Charlie said, was a music director from one of the city’s most exclusive private schools. He was a gregarious chap with a wife and several children and a passion for music. I liked him enormously I didn’t know him well, but every so often he’d show up in my restaurant, or come to my exhibitions, and I’d go to his concerts, and we’d meet on his balcony or mine to have a few drinks and discuss music and art.

  We used to look over the balconies at a children’s playground and it was during one of our conversations, as a matter of fact, that I suddenly got the idea of doing a series on children at play. I began to sit in the playground with my camera and watch. I was fascinated by the paradox of angelic faces and sheer jungle behaviour, the little group cruelties. I was thinking of my own childhood, I suppose. I did a whole series of the more striking faces against a backdrop of jungle-gyms and sandpits and swings. I had an exhibition, and my musician friend came to it. He seemed profoundly affected. He said something very odd to me at the end. He said: So you know. And I thought it was a statement of our shared artistic sensibilities. I thought he meant we were both aware of this paradox of the angelic and the cruel.

  Then just a week later, out of the blue, stupefying me, there was a suicide and mass publicity. The musician’s body was found in the East River. Just in time, the papers said. There had been insistent allegations of patterns of sexual abuse: of boys in the school orchestra, of friends of the musician’s own offspring, of children in the apartment building where the musician lived.

  It transpired, Charlie said, that every single face in my series was in fact the victim of regular abuse. It transpired that the musician, this friendly family man, had got more and more reckless in his predatory habits, more and more coercive with his prey, and more and more confirmed in his sense of personal invulnerability.

  It is hubris, a criminologist said on the local evening news, that eventually does the repeat offender in. They get away with it so many times, they begin to think they have magic powers. We were gathering evidence, we would soon have been in a position to lay charges, but he pre-empted us. He was getting careless, the detective said, the way they always do in the end. He thought he was invulnerable, he thought he lived a charmed life, he thought he had magic powers. That’s when we get them, he said.

  In fact, Charlie told me, still half incredulous, the musician had once made a tasteless joke about a scoutmaster who’d been jailed — (“Got his fingers caught in the honeypot,” he’d snickered. “Too fond of fingering little boys, the old perv, and serve him right.”) So I had no idea, Charlie said. Not the slightest clue. I couldn’t believe it when I read the papers. In fact, I didn’t believe it at first.

  That’s what protects them, the detective told Charlie, These people are safe for astonishing lengths of time. They are protected by our capacity for denial, you see, by our need not to know. And so they come to feel they are immune. This fellow, now, we knew he thought he was a magician, but I guess you trumped him. I guess you were the last magician, the detective said. You must have had an inkling, eh?

  But I didn’t, Charlie told me. I didn’t. I suppose I had a need not to know. I was grateful, I suppose, for someone in my building I could talk to about music and art. There was a link, you see, he said thoughtfully. We were both attracted to the most angelic young faces. But I didn’t have the slightest shadow of a suspicion about him. And yet, when he saw that line-up, he thought I knew. And that out-magicked his magic. He panicked and killed himself.

  Do you see what I mean? Charlie said.

  After the death of Willy, he said, Cat disappeared into the barred world of reform, and Catherine was whisked off to private school by her parents for safety, and Charlie himself retreated into the magic rituals that had protected him and kept him company before the days of Catherine and Cat. “I never talked about any of it to anyone,” he said, “and nor did Catherine. In its different ways, silence swallowed the three of us up.”

  Everyone’s parents wanted to expunge the whole event, Charlie said. Cat wasn’t allowed visitors at reform school, because visitors would have a bad effect. So the officials decreed. Charlie saw Catherine occasionally, fleetingly, accidentally, but her parents forbade all contact.

  There was that day on the tram however. He sees her sitting next to her mother at the far end of his tram, on another planet, in outer space, forty feet away from him. She feels his gaze. They are so powerfully aware of each other that he can smell her hair. Her mother speaks. She looks away. They get off the tram.

  Charlie didn’t see Robbie Gray for three years.

  Then he won a scholarship to Brisbane Grammar.

  He recalled the strange mixture of excitement and anxiety he felt, going there for the first day, knowing he’d see Robbie again …

  Charlie tosses all night. He imagines every conceivable scenario for a first encounter. Robbie will go rigid with shock and remorse. Robbie will be icy and distant. Robbie will give him a wide berth but there will be little telltale signs of nervousness because Charlie knows … Robbie will come unstuck and will turn into the wild thing he was that last night at Cat’s, a red-eyed lunatic, raving, drunk with either blood or fear.

  Charlie has the recurrent nightmare again (it has dwindled in frequency over time). He and Cat and Catherine are thrashing about in a river, drowning, being sucked under. The river is boiling hot. It is not water they swim in, but shit. They cling to each other. Robbie sits on the bank enthralled, his eyes glowing like coals, a manic rictus of pleasure on his face, pushing them under with a long stick every time they reach for the bank.

  Charlie wakes and paces. He stands at the window and holds the talisman Cat gave him before reform school swallowed her up. (She gave him her gold hoop earrings with their blue glass beads; he wears them on a thin chain about his neck at all times; they are safely hidden under his shirt.) Does he have nightmares? Charlie wonders. Does he ever wake with a thudding heart and go to his window to look for Cat? Will I know? Will I see telltale signs? Will it help if I see telltale signs?

  He closes his eyes and thinks of Cat. He is sometimes able to believe that behind the barred windows of her school, she knows when he does this. When he puts her earrings to his lips, he smells her hair and her funky body perfume.

  But nothing at all happens at Brisbane Grammar School. It is such a civilised place.

  “Hello, Chang!” Robbie Gray says brightly, courteously. “I think we’ve met before, haven’t we? You came out to our farm in Samford once or twice, years ago, didn’t you? Your parents, wasn’t it? For produce or something?”

  Oh, Robbie Gray is invariably gracious to him. Robbie Gray is a charming sort of person, well liked, a senior now, a prefect, a pillar of the school community. Other boys like to be in his company. He treats Charlie as though they had perhaps met casually once or twice at his weekend farm, at someone’s tennis court, in someone’s pool.

  This confuses Charlie. It baffle
s him. Sometimes he begins to doubt his own memory; at other times, he finds himself wondering if in fact the punishment was just and if this explains Robbie’s easy conscience. Were there nameless and unspecified crimes of which he, Charlie, was guilty? There was the death of Willy, yes. And Robbie had loved Willy, they had all loved Willy, and Robbie had especially loved Cat. Yes, Charlie is definite about that. He remembers the way Robbie always glanced about to see if Cat was watching him, the way Robbie looked at her, the way his eyes gleamed.

  Sometimes he thinks his memory of the whole event is feverish and not to be trusted. At other times he feels a helpless rage. He wants to see Robbie lying on the tracks with the train coming closer. He wants to hold him down and see the fear in his eyes. At still other times he feels a black hopelessness, as though Miss Oswell held up a white stick of chalk and asked Charlie: “What colour is this, black or white?” And he said: “White.” And she said: “Wrong,” and sent him straight to the office for the cane.

  The most disturbing thing of all is that he still feels seduced by Robbie Gray. There is a cachet to being recognised by the golden boy. He notes its effect on other students, he notes that because of it, Charlie Chang has ceased to be invisible. People listen to his opinion simply because he is one of those who gets a nod from Robbie Gray. He cannot pretend that he doesn’t in some sense enjoy this. It is like arriving in front of his parents’ shop in a black Buick. He feels both grateful and unclean.

  Charlie’s nightmares are frequent again. There is a cloudy thing, a kind of tumour, thick and heavy, behind and beneath his ribs. He gets used to it. It is simply always there. Its name is bafflement.

  “Then one day,” Charlie told Lucy in his room above King’s Cross, “we both saw Cat in my parents’ shop …”

  It was an incredible coincidence. Or perhaps it was not. Chance was thick with message for Charlie.

  “We both saw Cat,” he said, “and Robbie bolted. He went white as a sheet and he bolted. We were with a bunch of Grammar boys, he would have had to account for it later.”

  So then Charlie knew that things weren’t necessarily as they seemed. He had a brief cessation of bafflement. “I can’t tell you how it eased the pain,” he said. “For a while.”

  “I wouldn’t count on a conscience.” That was Catherine’s opinion, expressed to me at another time, another place. “Wounded vanity, that’s my guess. It’s the only way he can be touched.”

  “I don’t know,” I said. “He’s quite vulnerable in a way. Maybe all that bland charm is a form of protection, a sort of shell.”

  A tortoise shell, Catherine thought, remembering the boy with the maddened eyes and the mallet, smashing, smashing. “But there’s no one inside,” she said.

  When in doubt about great matters, Charlie’s ancestor believed, consult the milfoil stalks or the tortoise shell.

  “For twenty-five years,” Charlie said, “I stuffed up every hole where the past might show through.”

  Then he read about the family photographs and the burglary in the New York Times. Then his neighbour said So you know. Then the police spoke to him of hubris, of people who come to think they’re invulnerable, of people who overplay their hands.

  And Charlie thought about Robbie at Grammar, and about Robbie bolting at the sight of Cat, and it seemed to him the play had still not reached its final act. It occurred to him that all he had to do was wait, though the taking of photographs, he knew, was germane to the plot.

  I thought that maybe if I came back, he said, I’d precipitate something. So I came back. Perhaps I nudged tilings a bit, he admitted. I read the social pages, I knew he’d be advertising himself, I studied his watering holes. But all I’m doing is watching and keeping the record, he said.

  And waiting.

  And now I’ll tell you one more story the way I heard it told in my own pub downstairs, he said. It’s a story about waiting and death.

  Once upon a time, said a bloke in the pub at Charlie’s Inferno, Madame de Sévigné was writing a letter to her daughter, the Comtesse de Grignan, a thing she did just about every day. Epistolary addiction, the doctors said. Not a thing they could do.

  “Oh Gawd,” said Clancy. “He’s off again. King Bluey Kuttorze.”

  At the time of this story, King Bluey said, Madame la mère was in residence at Chantilly, and she wrote at the top of her letter in a neat round hand: April 26, 1671.

  “Once upon a bloody long time ago,” Clancy said, “you blokes used to stay in the university pub where you belonged.”

  Madame was at Chantilly, said King Bluey, and so was the king, for it happened that Louis XIV and his entire court were visiting the Prince de Condé, and festivities were planned for the prince’s chateau: a staghunt by moonlight, lanterns in the woods, a promenade, banqueting under the stars, music, fireworks, the whole shebang.

  “The whole bloody shebang,” Clancy groaned. “We’re stuck with the whole shebang.”

  Paparazzi and gossips were on the scene, King Bluey said, and Madame de Sévigné, all décolletage, wore a divine little thing in blue silk. The king ogled her breasts and Monsieur le Prince chatted her up and Monsieur Vatel, the most sought-after cook in the kingdom of France, that astonishing Monsieur Vatel whom the good Madame knew personally, the gifted Vatel surpassed himself.

  “He has fucking surpassed himself,” announced Clancy to the pub at large.

  The banquet, continued King Bluey, was fit for a king. So pleased was Monsieur le Prince with the groaning board that some time after midnight he himself went to Vatel’s room. ‘Felicitations,’ he said. ‘Congratulations, libations, and bouquets. Nothing could have been more perfect. You’re a true blue bobbydazzler of a maître d’, and you bloody well did the chateau proud. Good on you, mate.’

  “Good on ya, mate,” Clancy said. “There’s no stopping you, I’ll give ya that.”

  But Monsieur Vatel was distraught, King Bluey said.

  ‘I will die of shame, Monsieur le Prince,’ he wept. ‘My honour is at stake. I am disgraced, I am in agony, I am having a king-sized bout of the watery shits.’

  ‘Merde!’ said Monsieur le Prince. ‘Pull yourself together, man. What the devil’s got into you?’

  ‘Woe is me,’ wept Monsieur Vatel.

  “He’s pissed as a newt,” Clancy said. “He’s bloody crying in his bloody beer.”

  Because of unexpected extra guests, King Bluey said, two of the tables had been without a roast. Not the king’s table, and not the next, but certainly the twenty-fifth table from His Majesty, and also the twenty-eighth, had been meatless, ruined, undone.

  Après moi, King Bluey declaimed, no lamb, no venison, no roast suckling pig.

  “Pardon my French,” Clancy said.

  But Monsieur le Prince was kindness itself, King Bluey went on. ‘Look, mate, relax,’ the prince said. ‘His Royal Highness thought it was A-l grub, he told me so himself. And tomorrow, you can go for the gold.’

  But all night Monsieur Vatel could not sleep. He paced and worried. He was one of these perfectionist types, he couldn’t bear the disgrace of two roastless tables at the royal spread.

  At dawn, still sleepless, he began at last to turn his thoughts to a new day’s meals. He paced, waiting for his orders to arrive. Seafood, seafood, the call had gone out. The orders had been placed, the shopping lists drawn, the runners sent to every port in the realm. Monsieur Vatel paced and paced. At last, by the sun’s early light, a man arrived with baskets of fish. One basket. Two. Monsieur Vatel, pale about the gills, held fast to the kitchen table for support. ‘Is that all there is?’ he asked faintly.

  The poor bloke, knowing nothing of the army of runners converging from fifty other fishing towns, told him yes. Two baskets, oui, monsieur, c’est tout.

  “Mademoiselle from Armentières,” Clancy sang, off-key, at the top of his lungs, and the barroom chorus joined in. “Hasn’t been kissed for forty years,” they roared. “Inky pinky parlez-vous.”

  Thanks, mates, King Blue
y said. I appreciate the concern for atmosphere. But Monsieur Vatel was frantic. He moaned to his kitchen crew in a low stricken voice: ‘I’m done for. My honour is destroyed. I am up shit creek without a paddle. I am dead.’

  “Glory hallelujah,” Clancy cried.

  His sous-chef urged him to calm down, King Bluey said, and have a cup of coffee while they waited for the day’s catch to catch.

  But this was no joking matter to Monsieur Vatel.

  He went up to his room, planted his sword in the floor, and fell on it.

  “He what?” Clancy asked.

  He fell on his sword.

  “Shit,” Clancy said.

  And then, said King Bluey, almost immediately, shipments of fish and lobster began to arrive from all directions, seafood seafood everywhere, all over the bloody kitchen and not a cook near the sink. These goddam perfectionists, the sous-chef fumed to himself. These damned slavedrivers, these neurotic bloody prima donnas who get a fit of the vapours at the very moment you want maximum elbow grease. Swamped with mussels and carp, he sent hot words and a kitchen boy rushing upstairs for Monsieur-the-Worrywart-Vatel, but alas, alas, Monsieur Vatel was hooked on his own grim line, he was dead in a pool of bright blood.

  “Bloody hell,” Clancy said, fortifying himself with a drink. “Then what?”

  Then they all wept salt tears, King Bluey said. The king, and the prince, and Madame de Sévigné, and the rest. The king said he was awfully sorry, and so did the queen and the prince.

  “Cooked his own bloody goose,” Clancy offered.

  The End, King Bluey said.

  And the moral of the story, Charlie told Lucy, is patience. You have to wait.

  Silence, exile, and cunning, he said.

  And patience.

  And photographs.

  2

  There is no order, no sequence. Charlie’s photographs spill out of boxes with the randomness of memory itself. Sometimes there is a caption, sometimes not. The sequence is determined by the viewer, a magician of sorts, who must shuffle the crossed destinies and read the cards. Meaning is in the eye of the beholder, and I sift through an avalanche, picking up random pieces of the jigsaw puzzle, trying them out here, moving them there, looking out at the photographer, trying to make circles intersect and dead ends meet.