I believed that. I insisted on believing that.
“The police have a file on Cat,” Catherine said.
“I know.”
“I should never have come back,” she said. “I should never never have come back.”
“Catherine, what proof do we have that those bones are Cat’s? You can’t trust the police anymore.”
“Lucy, I’ve arranged with London.” She sounded very brisk and businesslike. “I’m going next week.”
Panic was what I felt, domino losses, a gaping row of absences. I had to grab hold of her desk to steady myself. Already, I danced like a fish on a line for every footstep behind me, my heart turned somersaults at every knock on the door, every ring of the phone. Adrenalin sloshed around inside me like a choppy sea. It was exhausting. It was like having vertigo all the time.
“If you want to come,” she said, “there’s a job.”
“Yes,” I said, grabbing at the lifebelt she threw. “Yes, I’ll go with you.”
“I want amnesia,” she said.
BOOK IV
The Last Magician
Newton was not the first of the age of reason. He was the last of the magicians.
John Maynard Keynes
1
In the middle of the journey, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was wholly lost and gone. A spotted leopard snarled fitfully in my dreams all the way from London to Singapore, and after Singapore there was a grey wolf and a winged cat and black holes.
I fell through a black hole.
I found myself back in a pub in Sydney where everything had changed and nothing had changed.
This puzzles me.
I understand neither time nor memory though I thrash about between them constantly, and I resent being caught again in Charlie’s net. In the beginning all this had nothing to do with me, and then it did, and then I escaped again. I resent being caught unawares, I resent coming face to face with myself on a screen, I resent finding myself back here reliving the past.
Everything has changed and nothing has changed.
I watch two men at a table in the corner of Charlie’s Place (of course it’s someone else’s place now, I don’t know whose), I watch these two men, a jug of beer between them, a litter of empty glasses at their elbows. I cannot quite hear their conversation, but one appears to be telling the other a joke. They are big loose-limbed men and they throw back their heads and fill the room with a deep joyful laughter that sounds like a convocation of tippling frogs. And it’s infectious. People half turn in their direction and little smiles wing their way from face to face. I can even feel my own cheek muscles relax as though a butterfly of a smile briefly settled there. And yet, simultaneously, I feel a weight of desolation so heavy it is as though I have been given lead shot intravenously. How is it possible for a roomful of people to laugh when grief, and matters far more disturbing than grief, silently prowl around this very building on their clawed padded feet?
“Lucy,” Sheba says, “you gotta snap out of this. It doesn’t do a bloody bit of good, moping round, it doesn’t bring anyone back.”
“I know.” And yet I understand the handling of relics now, I understand the veneration of totemic objects. When I sift through the boxes and boxes of photographs that Sheba keeps stashed under her bed, I feel something approaching tranquillity. It’s as though Charlie’s photographs retain the lost essence of their maker and their subjects and the essence comes off on my hands. It’s like ointment. Of course I know that’s ludicrous, even pathetic, It’s not the sort of thing I would want to confess in public. But that’s how it feels. I spend hours every day just sitting on the floor in Sheba’s room, fondling the past.
“I don’t know what you’re trying to make Charlie tell you,” Sheba says, exasperated. “We already know what’s what.”
I stare at her. “I don’t know anything,” I said. “I don’t feel that there’s one single thing I know for certain.”
“We know and we don’t know,” she shrugs. “And you don’t want to know, Lucy.”
There’s some truth to this, I suppose. In London, Catherine and I lead busy lives and never speak of the past except perhaps late at night, after too many drinks. At such times, we have worked things out to our own satisfaction. Charlie, we agree, is in New York. He didn’t find Cat, or else he found out that she was indeed dead, and either way he couldn’t bear the disappointment so he fled (or else he did find her and took her with him, he had to keep her out of prison, he had to get her away from the police). He wanted amnesia (or else he wanted amnesia for Cat; he wanted a fresh start for her, no baggage). We understand this instinct completely. We subscribe to it. The occasional appearance of Charlie’s photographs in small galleries and of his films in small cinemas bears this theory out. Let sleeping dogs lie, we say. One day one of us will bump into him in a bar in Greenwich Village (we both go back and forth a lot between London and New York). I’ve been meaning to get in touch, he’ll say. But you know how it is.
Yes, we’ll say. We know how it is.
And we’ll all get blind drunk and we’ll swim in hilarity and we’ll go skinny-dipping in the East River or the Thames or somewhere, well, maybe not the East River or the Thames, maybe we’ll just hop on a plane and head for Cedar Creek.
Gabriel, we agree, is in Queensland, possibly Brisbane, but more probably further north: Heron Island, Dunk Island, Green Island, somewhere with rainforest and coral cays, very likely the Daintree or Cape Tribulation. I have no trouble at all seeing Gabriel moving between rows of pineapples, or between tea bushes perhaps, in a clearing in the Daintree forest. He has found the same peace his mother found. He doesn’t need to know anymore.
It’s typical of them, we feel, to bugger off, and it certainly doesn’t bother us. We don’t miss them (well, sometimes we do, if a pause in work creeps up on us, or if we’ve had too many drinks, but we’ve come to terms with this, we’ve adjusted to it). Anyway, we know they’re stuck with us, just as we are with them, and they’ll never quite get us out from under their skin. We don’t have a shadow of a doubt about that. They’re solitary types, like us, with crowded heads.
We’re like war vets, Catherine says. We can’t talk to anyone else.
We never do talk much, not even to each other, though the long silences we share are noisy with thought and sometimes the tip of a memory will show and will splash into words. There was that photograph Charlie did, I might say broodingly, without noticing I’m thinking aloud. Hot News of Gabriel. It was very early on, that’s what’s so puzzling, a newspaper on fire, Gabriel going up in smoke.
Yes, Catherine will say in a drugged sort of voice. Well, that was Charlie. There was a very disconcerting edge to his wit.
Yes, I’ll sigh. And then we’ll lapse into silence again.
We hardly speak at all on our TV shows, we let the interviewees do the talking. We tend to do a certain kind of documentary. We like to listen to the people no one listens to. I suppose we have this fantasy of catching Ann Bruin on tape, Ann Bruin who went berserk and sheared off her own hair and smashed her own hand through glass in Hobart in 1827.
I suppose we’re waiting for Cat’s voice to bubble up through someone else’s throat.
And Cat could be anywhere. She could be with Charlie in New York, or she could be back in Brisbane, or she could be dead and buried, or holed up in a burrow in the quarry. I picture her, black and lithe in the moonlight, moving across the rooftops of proper Sydney on her silent padded feet, letting herself in through windows and chimneys and terrace-house balconies, quiet and quick-fingered, gathering up the loose silverware and cash. When she leaves she lifts her hands to the sides of her face like claws and hisses softly. Fuck you, she says. Fuck all of you.
She says it over and over again from Charlie’s photographs.
Photographs seduce.
The longer you look at them, the more you see.
Take Giacometti’s Foot, the black-and-white photograph of a pierced earlob
e sporting a small gold hoop on which is strung a single bead that I know to be blue. When I saw that photograph for the first time last week, it hit me like a medicine ball thrown hard at the gut. It had the same dizzying impact that the sight of myself on a screen in London had. I doubled up. I felt like a Geiger counter. I would imagine that the rind of air encasing my body was visible as blue fire.
But why? I thought. Why? What is it about Cat’s earring that affects me this way?
I tried to be analytical about it. Okay, I thought, one: seeing the earring in the photograph brings back the initial and overwhelming shock of seeing it in my hand in Charlie’s film.
But why did the film barrel into me so violently in the first place? One: mainly the sheer shock of seeing myself at all when I wasn’t expecting it. And two: seeing myself in that particular place, a place that thumped into me with a tidal wave of erotic memories (my own, and Charlie’s, and Catherine’s too). And three: the mind being a swift and powerful retrieval system, I was affected by Charlie’s story of Cat ripping the hoops from her ears, I was affected by his intensity as he told me about that night. And four: the shock of seeing the thin gold chain and its pendant earrings in my hand.
But what was the nature of that particular shock? It was mainly a sense of sacrilege, I think. Charlie had shown me the chain and the earrings once, but I’d never held them. I’d never touched them. I knew what they meant to him who wore them always against his skin, his own little reliquary to ward off harm. So I was shocked, as though I had been taken in blasphemy, to see them idly dangling from my hand.
And I was mystified too, and quite profoundly disturbed, because the conjunction of things that don’t belong with each other affects the sense of balance in primal ways. I remember something I saw at a fair in Brisbane as a child: a cow with five legs. The fifth leg dangled uselessly from the cow’s breast, between the two front legs, and didn’t touch the ground. It wasn’t a trick, it was a genuine freak, a birth abnormality. I sobbed and sobbed and then I vomited.
That was roughly the way I felt when I saw Cat’s earrings dangling on a chain from my index finger.
They’re an arrogant and dangerous lot, the photographers, the film-makers, the story tellers and spinners of images and words, the black magicians. They make hay with a lot of memories and lives, they tamper with things, they hold nightmares up to the light and they don’t consider the consequences carefully enough.
I think now about the photographer’s technical sleight-of-hand, the nature of celluloid magic. Of course, it had simply been an illusion that it was my hand holding the chain. It was like the switching to doubles in movies for nude love scenes and dangerous stunts.
I can piece it together now. Gabriel had a photograph of me on the rocks at Cedar Creek. I’d been talking away, gesturing with my hands as I always do, fingers extended, the index finger making a point. Charlie had seen the photograph and used it. He’d added a close-up of a different hand, a woman’s hand, holding the chain. He’d spliced the two together in that seamless way that constitutes film-making magic. Hey presto, the rabbit pulled out of the hat, the coin from behind the ear, Cat at my fingertips.
Whose hand did he use, I wonder?
Catherine’s, I would think. I can’t imagine who else would be holding the relic. Who else would be permitted to?
And it must be Catherine’s earlobe in Giacometti’s Foot when I think about it, because Charlie certainly wasn’t taking photographs in those distant days when Cat yanked her earrings off under the mango tree.
Is it this realisation of Catherine’s presence in the photographs, then, which for some reason continues to register on my personal Richter scale?
I don’t know.
If only we could know what we know, as Charlie used to say. If we could see what we’ve seen. Because whatever Sheba may say, I don’t know what’s what. I don’t.
Of course, I can easily find out if it’s Catherine’s earlobe and Catherine’s hand by phoning her, which I will certainly do in a day or two, a week or two. I know she’s still there in London, of course I know, of course she is, Sheba saw her on TV last week. It’s just that every time I contemplate putting the call through, every time I start dialling, I decide to wait a little longer just in case she’s not there, though she may very well be panicking about me by now. We know we overreact on this issue and we make allowances for each other. We have a terrible fear of sudden disappearances. But in any case, what will it prove if it’s Catherine’s earlobe and Catherine’s hand?
Nothing.
1 don’t think it will shut the Geiger counter down.
“I notice you haven’t even opened the box full of me,” Sheba says, faking offence.
“I don’t need to look at photos of you, do I? You’re still around. It’s the ones Charlie took — ”
“A lot of these are Charlie’s.” She crawls under the bed and pulls a shoebox out from the wall. “And a lot are by other blokes. It’s a hell of a turn-on for some of them, taking pics.”
“Okay, Sheba,” I say fondly, “I’ll look.” The persistence of someone in my life is a miracle to me, I feel weak with affection, I feel maudlin with gratitude to Sheba. “I can’t tell you how much it means to me, Sheba, that you’re still here.”
“Oh, cut the crap, Lucy. Why wouldn’t I be? Shut up and tell me what you think of this set.”
“Okay,” I say, rallying, working up to flippancy. “I know what you’re after. I know you just want to be admired.”
“Fuck off!” she laughs. “I charge for that. Now you gotta make allowances, remember. Blokes are into costumes and props.”
“Yeah. I remember.” I idly flip through a sheaf of Sheba dressed as an army sergeant with shirt unbuttoned, Sheba in nothing but black stockings and nun’s veil, Sheba in pink feathers, Sheba painted blue, Sheba as the Tattooed Lady (“That’s an old bloke, an electrician,” she says. “Can’t get it up till he’s drawn all over me with magic markers.”), Sheba in a tiger-striped bodysuit with strategic peek-a-boo holes.
“Sheba,” I ask with sudden interest. “If you were looking at you, how would you photograph yourself?”
“Jeez, Lucy,” she laughs, shaking her head. “Reckon the minute I first laid eyes on you on Brunswick Street station I knew you’d drive me nuts till kingdom come. Here’s someone with a bloody tiptruck full of dumb questions, I says to meself. Here’s someone to give me laughs on a rainy day.”
“Yes, but tell me. How would you photograph yourself?”
“I wouldn’t, would I? I don’t look at meself at all.”
“But you keep these photographs,” I point out. “And you look at them. And you want me to look at them.”
She taps her forehead with one finger to indicate I am not very bright. “We’re not looking at me, you drip. We’re looking at the blokes who took the pics. This one now.” She picks up the tiger-bodied one. “He’s got leather boots on and a whip in his hand, a poor weedy little bloke, shy as a possum. He’s a postman, he rides his bicycle around and puts messages in other people’s boxes, and he lives by himself. Pretty sad, huh?”
“Yeah. But Sheba …” I am immensely curious. “You must have some image of yourself.”
“Well, sure,” she says. “I’m me. Sheba. I think the world stinks but I don’t take crap from anyone and I know how to have a good time.”
“You’re a feminist’s nightmare, Sheba,” I laugh.
“Feminists,” she says witheringly. “Don’t give me feminists. I’ll tell you how I know a feminist: they treat me like dirt. They treat me worse than any of the blokes do.”
“Oh, ouch. But the ones who treat you like dirt don’t have a monopoly on the definition, Sheba.”
“Yeah?” she says. “Who cares?”
I care, in fact, but Sheba would be supremely uninterested in my theories, so I turn to the photographs. “Ah. Here’s one that Charlie took,” I say with a connoisseur’s eye. It’s just a polaroid snapshot, three-and-one-half inches square,
but it’s unmistakably stamped with Charlie’s mark. Sheba is wearing black mesh stockings and black bodysuit and sits astride a chair with an open curved back, her stockinged calves hooked around the chair’s hind legs, her hands at the sides of her face like claws. “That’s one of Charlie’s, all right.”
“Wrong, smartypants!” she says gleefully “That’s Sonny Blue.”
I feel a buzz of excitement. Well of course, I think. Of course. They were both obsessed with Cat. I feel as though the photograph will yield something if I look at it long enough. “Can I borrow this for a while? Can I take it back to my hotel?”
“Got the hots for me, eh?” she grins. “Sure. Why not?”
“Can I keep the boxes of Charlie’s photographs?”
“That’s why I saved them,” she says. “I thought you’d want them.”
“How come the men give you the pictures they take? Don’t they want to keep them for … you know …?”
“Jerking off. Yeah, they do. But I always ask for a copy. It’s my scrapbook of them. I look at a pic, I can always remember the bloke, and that one is definitely Sonny Blue.”
“Does Sonny Blue ever talk about …?” But I seem to have developed a superstitious aversion to saying certain names out loud. It is as though only silence can keep them safe.
“Gabriel?” she prompts.
“Yes.”
“All the time. He always did. He’s obsessed. That’s why Lady Muck left him in the end.”
“Roslyn?”
“Yeah. He’s married to his son, she says. So now there’s a Number Four who’s very young.”
“But he still comes to see you?”
“Oh yeah.” She puts her hands up to her face like claws and hisses. “Pussy on the side,” she says.
“Sheba …” I swallow, but there are a couple of questions I have to ask. “When you say you know what happened … what do you mean?”
The Last Magician Page 31
