The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Sonny Blue brushes the legal pieces into a sorry little pile with his hand. And then …, he sighs.

  And then what? Lucy asks.

  Sonny Blue waves this aside in distress. He’s so convincing, Sonny Blue says, as the earnest lover. Well, that sort of self-anointed charmer always is, isn’t he? And barmaids are such suckers for that kind of thing, bless their little hearts of gold.

  Apart from the debris, Sonny Blue says, and the legal fallout, it’s the arrogance that bothers his father. There’s a callous sort of self-righteousness to it.

  Yes, Lucy says. In the glow of the Four-X signs, she holds herself very still. She can feel a bruise spreading forwards and backwards in time. You would play upon me, you would seek to know my stops …

  Sucker! she tells herself furiously.

  Sonny Blue picks up her hand and kisses the palm. If you ever come to Sydney, he says, I have a friend who owns several hotels, restaurants, pubs, that kind of thing. I’m sure he’d offer you a place.

  The kind of place where you turn a blind eye? Lucy asks.

  Exactly, he says.

  Sheba, she says later, I’ve had it with Brisbane. I’m clearing out. I’m buggering off to Sydney in the morning.

  What? Sheba says. Bit sudden, innit? I’m thinking of heading for the Big Smoke meself for a bit of a blast. But what about Gabriel?

  Screw Gabriel, Lucy says. And you can tell him I said so.

  3

  Gabriel mapped the quarry with notations of his own. In back streets, in boarded-up buildings, in subway tunnels, in the sewers, he recorded intimate encounters between strangers. He filled notebooks. He used stealth, persistence, hunches, intuition, and his map-making was full of intimate detail. He prowled like a tomcat. His brooding eye monitored the night. He also chronicled the garish day and its artefacts: the hypodermics in gutters, the quick and furtive exchange of folded bills and other substances in doorways, the patterns of visitation to underground parking lots, the number plates of cars, the figures with upturned collars and downturned caps who cruised through the quarry’s back passages.

  He collected faces, he took Charlie with him to keep a record, he scribbled notes on the backs of Charlie’s photographs, documenting and dating: the tired expressions at bus stops, the ravaged cheeks and great puppy-dog eyes of children in parks, the young girls in doorways, the glazed beatitude of those who dozed on the footpath outside pubs in the morning sun. Gabriel was following a trail. He was looking for clues. He was arrested by a certain kind of body, a facial type. (I was neither the first nor the last to catch his eye.) He was keeping records of the men whose eyes were caught by just such women, such types of women, of the men who returned and returned by night to certain underground haunts. There was something he needed to understand.

  He was looking for the woman who rode one of the last Brisbane trams. He was looking for the men who stalked her, sniffing her scent.

  He was driven by a riddle and by grief, but he also had a calm sense of inevitability. He knew that an answer lay waiting, he believed he was slowly reeling it in, that it lay beyond his patient unravelling of words spoken long ago. They were spoken by his father on an overhead bridge. The law is like railway lines, Gabriel, straight and true. The law protects the truth. What the law decides is truth.

  Was the law the arbiter of truth?

  His father’s agitation on the bridge was part of the riddle and also part of the clue. That strange state of excitement had suggested to Gabriel, long before he could articulate it to himself, something lurking underneath his father’s dogma: heresy, perhaps; a countertruth; a lie. He followed the riddle’s thread.

  Already in Brisbane — before my abrupt departure, before I fled from the calculated untruths of Sonny Blue, before I realised who Sonny Blue was — already Gabriel had a reputation as a maverick, a renegade law student, a troublemaker, an uncomfortably sharp observer and notekeeper of official behaviours, of the backroom-backstairs-off-the-record ways of the public keepers of public truth.

  When you grow up with the habit — the necessity — of watching and listening closely, he said to me then (in those distant, tranquil, Shamrock and Cedar Creek days), you take note of every little inconsistency, every clue.

  He couldn’t mention his mother in Sydney, he said (it was an unwritten rule), but he studied her absence, he explored every nuance of its meaning, he became an expert, nothing escaped his eyes and ears. And when the Law, he said, in numerous dignified incarnations, was constantly in your childhood and in your home — at dinner parties, by the swimming pool, on the tennis court, on the harbour yachts, in discussions overheard, in partly listened-to phone conversations — well … “You notice certain discrepancies,” he said.

  “Straight and true,” he told me back in Brisbane before I fled, “is exactly what the law is not.”

  “Sheba says you’re making some powerful people very nervous,” I told him back then. And he only smiled in his calm, unruffled way, that interior way. “Sheba says you’ll get yourself killed if you don’t watch out,” I had warned more sharply, distressed. “Sheba says that no one with any sense fools around with the Queensland police or the Queensland courts.”

  But I could never make any impact. Perhaps because of the way he refound his mother and her happiness, perhaps because of the way the woman on the tram led him to The Shamrock and to me, Gabriel trusted in the logic of the inevitable. And how could he worry if whatever was going to happen would?

  Perhaps he was following me, perhaps he was following a different thread entirely when he came to Sydney. Perhaps the two threads intersected at Charlie’s Place. Maybe everything, ultimately, leads to the Inferno and the quarry, who knows? Whatever. Gabriel was charting his way down through the labyrinth, looking for the nine-digit number at its core, keeping watch, taking notes, looking for the woman, looking. Gabriel led, and Charlie followed, keeping the photographic record so that both of them could see what they had seen.

  “Charlie,” I pleaded privately. “Tell him.”

  “I can’t,” he said. “I can’t.”

  “You could tell him some of it,” I said. I couldn’t stand it, there was something indecent about it. It was like watching a rat in a laboratory maze. So I told Gabriel what I could, which wasn’t much. I told him what I could without violating a confidence.

  “Charlie knew the woman on the tram,” I said. “Charlie knows what she looks like. Her name is Cat.”

  “Cat!" Gabriel said, electrified, unearthing for a split second an argument, shouts, a white nightgown, his mother’s cry … But it was out-of-focus, staticky, getting fuzzier, gone. “So that was why …

  “Cat,” he said, exploring the name with his tongue. “Cat. Her name was Cat.” He kept repeating it, Cat, Cat, but the shimmer had gone, the chink in time had closed over again.

  And Gabriel couldn’t get Charlie to talk, or not more than minimally. There was an accident when we were kids, Charlie said. Cat had been sent to reform school. Charlie missed her. He had lost track of her. That was all Charlie would say, except for this: “I’d like to find her again.” The words gave him visible pain. “When I roam the quarry with you, that’s who I’m looking for. The woman you saw on the tram.”

  “But what … ?” Gabriel pressed. And when … ? And how … ? And when was the last … ? But to no avail. Charlie would not, could not, speak of the past to the son of Robinson Gray.

  “Catherine Reed knew her too,” I told Gabriel.

  He already knew Catherine Reed, who was part of his father’s social scene; in a sense, part of it. In his last high school years, before he declared himself for his mother and Brisbane, pressured to put in an appearance at his father’s parties, he’d met her from time to time, though she always came late and left early. She’d been overseas for many years, he’d heard. He thought his father was attracted to her, but edgy around her too, which interested him. He thought of her as gracious but aloof.

  “Catherine Reed knew Cat,” I told hi
m. So he went to see her at the studios where she worked. He questioned her. He watched her non-answers in his attentive unnerving way.

  He sifted through the meanings of her evasion, and of Charlie’s too. He was an expert on gaps. The particular way in which Catherine and Charlie refused to talk was revealing to him. In their vagueness, he found illuminating clues.

  There was an image that persisted in his mind like a street lamp in fog: the expression on the face of the woman on the tram. He wanted a translation. The word cat was surely part of the translation. He wanted to find Cat and make her translate. And what had her laughter meant? He had to know.

  He knew he would find out in the end, he never doubted that, it was ordained, his journey was inexorable, there was no turning aside. And since Charlie and Catherine wouldn’t talk, he decided he would have to ask his mother.

  This was not something he had been able to do in our Cedar Creek days, so soon after he had found her again, too soon, when he’d been too afraid of loss and of distressing his mother in any way. But now he had to know. So he went back to Brisbane for a weekend, and I went with him.

  They were alone together, sitting on the veranda of the farmhouse at Samford in the cool of evening. Half the sky was blood red with sunset, and the dark wall of the rainforest seemed to be advancing on them like an army of gigantic black horsemen. The young children of his mother’s second family, of whom Gabriel was very fond, were already in bed. Against the dying light, they could see the silhouette of Gil Brennan out on the hillside, moving between the pineapple rows, checking the infant fruit in their spiky cribs, casting spells against flying foxes.

  I was quite close, not far from them, invisible among the hibiscus bushes in the dark, breathing in the jasmine that hung from veranda posts. They had forgotten I was there.

  “Remember,” Gabriel said peacefully, “when you used to take me swimming in the pool by the falls?” Back in the golden time, he meant, the time of sugar doughnuts at McWhirter’s, before things went awry.

  His mother reached across to his deckchair and momentarily put her hand on his wrist.

  “Were you happy then, Mum?”

  She didn’t answer for a long time, then she said: “Not as happy as I am now.”

  “Did you love Dad?”

  “Yes, I did.”

  “Did he love you?”

  Again she didn’t answer for a long time. “I think so,” she said. “In the beginning. In his own way.” Though she had never been quite sure.

  “Mum, the woman on the tram that day … ” A look of such pain crossed his mother’s face that he reached to touch her and she took his hand and held it, looking across the fields and the rainforest into the red sky. “I’m sorry,” he said.

  “No, it’s all right.”

  Gabriel moistened his lips. “Why did you both laugh that day?”

  Absent-mindedly his mother stroked his arm. Some time after he had given up expecting any answer, she said: “I suppose for her it meant that whatever had happened didn’t matter any more. It was irrelevant. She was free of it.”

  “What had happened?”

  “I don’t know” she said. “There was something terrible that happened when they were children. Your father would never talk about it, and nor would Catherine. I met your father at a twenty-first birthday party for Catherine Reed. You know, the one with the TV show.”

  “Yes,” he said. “I know her. I see her in Sydney.”

  “Do you?” His mother was momentarily startled. “Yes, I suppose. We were at high school together, and she and your father lived next door to each other when they were kids. Has she ever … ?”

  “I don’t know her well enough for that,” he said.

  “Catherine’s twenty-first,” his mother said dreamily. She lapsed into reverie, smiling to herself “Your father was like a skyrocket that night, I was absolutely dazzled. He got very drunk on champagne and drove me home and we sat in the car in a park and talked for hours and then we … Well,” — she looked away, but he sensed from the way her body softened that she was smiling — “you were conceived that very night, I think. And the next day we announced our engagement.”

  She let go of Gabriel’s hand and stood up and crossed to the edge of the veranda railing. She stood there, looking out at the bloody sky. “I’ll never forget Catherine’s reaction when I told her. About the engagement, I mean. It was shock at the suddenness, I suppose. No, perhaps more than that. She looked as though I’d told her I’d decided to shave my head or something. And then she said, ‘Oh God, it’s because of Cat. I feel responsible.’

  “And I said, ‘What do you mean?’

  “And then she said, ‘That was awfully rude of me, Constance. I’m sorry. It’s just, you know, the boy next door, the past … ’ And then she said congratulations and all the conventional things and would never discuss it again.”

  Constance turned to face Gabriel. “The woman on the tram was at that party … ”

  Here are the streamers and balloons again, and the Chinese lanterns strung across the lawn, and the hired band, and the dancers under the tent on Wilston Heights.

  “She created quite a stir when she came. I mean, a twenty-first birthday party in those days … it was as formal as a wedding. And then suddenly, very late, a bit like Cinderella in reverse … ”

  Yes, let us add the trappings, for they are irresistible, and certain lives have a curious tendency to conform to ancient folk grooves. Is that what we have always done with such lives? Turned them into witches and wicked fairies and bad stepmothers and evil eyes? Do we wrap them up in fairy tales so that we can put them at the back of the toy cupboard with the bogeyman? Well then, very late, just before the stroke of midnight in fact, Cat appeared at the formal garden party and dance for Catherine’s twenty-first.

  “It was pretty startling. I mean, she was just there, like an apparition under one of the lamps at the edge of the tent, and she was dressed like a woman in one of those nightclub paintings by Toulouse-Lautrec. You might as well have put a whole box of firecrackers on the lawn and lit them.”

  She stands there, pale as Medea, pale as the ghost of Banquo at the feast of Macbeth and just as disturbing, except that everyone sees her and turns to stare. The musicians play on, unaware, for a bar or two and then trail into silence. Is this part of the entertainment? A skit? A joke? The joker in the party magician’s deck of cards?

  Or is this the uninvited guest, the thirteenth fairy, showing up to deliver her curse?

  “I remember she wore a black strapless dress in a sort of cheap-looking satin, very shiny” — excessively shiny, let us make that, shiny as though slick and wet like the pelt of a seal — “and it was covered in sequins and it clung like a second skin. Her hair was very short like a boy’s and she wore these huge fake diamond earrings, they must have come from Woolworths. She wasn’t beautiful in the least — she was actually a bit scrawny, really Sort of … sort of … she made me think of a possum, or an animal anyway — but there was something quite stunning about the way she stood there. She glittered. She seemed to give off some sort of heat.”

  The musicians are silent, the dancers are under a spell, you can hear a pin drop on the manicured lawn. Catherine moves. Someone else, a Chinese boy, a friend of Catherine’s, someone Constance recalls seeing at Grammar formals, also steps like a heron across the grassblades of a trance.

  There are missing frames, a jerky sequence, and then another frame with sound: three people hugging each other, laughing and sobbing, a little tableau of minor hysteria, joyful, distressing in some way, embarrassing, just a joke perhaps. Yes. Probably a joke. It is the instinct of a party to close over such incidents, for waves of talk to lap around them and blur their edges, for the music to start up and the dancers to move again.

  “I’ll never forget it,” Gabriel’s mother said, although it was the nature of such a memory that it never seemed quite real, that one began to wonder quite soon if one had imagined the event, or dreamed it eve
n, or if rumour had expanded on something only momentarily glimpsed, or if memory had embroidered a comment.

  “Anyway, then the music started up again, and I was dancing with your father and I already had stars in my eyes. He’d been on high voltage all evening and by then he was drinking champagne like water and practically flying and I can’t even remember actually leaving the party. I can just remember getting all worked up in his car.”

  Gabriel’s mother sat down in the chair again and took his hand, and he waited for her to surface from a fond electric time. “So on the tram,” she said, “I suddenly made the connection, you know, between her appearance and the way your father … the way he was so wound up at that party and so reckless and so … magnetic. I was swept off my feet. But on the tram — it really was, well, an epiphany, it was like all those fuzzy years suddenly coming into focus, it was absolutely sharply clear; I suppose Catherine’s reaction to my engagement had always buzzed away at the back of my mind, and now suddenly I had a translation, and in a strange way it was an enormous relief. I mean, he was giving off that same sort of … he was like a dynamo.”

  “Yes,” Gabriel said. “I remember.”

  “And I recognised her, I remembered her, and it clicked. You see, I knew he’d been going off and seeing someone, sometimes he wouldn’t come home till about four in the morning.”

  Gabriel flinched, seeing the men who came and went, upstairs at Charlie’s Place, the way they averted their eyes from one another.

  His mother smiled. “I suddenly admitted to myself it wasn’t working with your father and me, it would never work, and it hadn’t from the start, but that it wasn’t because of something I’d done or not done. And now I just felt there wouldn’t ever have been anything I could have done. And somehow I got swept up in her laughter and felt gloriously free.