The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Then I tuck it under the dresser frame to the left of Gabriel, and stare at the three images until a kettledrum of knocking at my door interrupts. It is Gabriel’s father. I realise I am not surprised.

  “Can I come in?” he says, though he walks past me without waiting for an answer. He sits in one of the armchairs and stares at me, and I sit in the other and stare back. Sadness envelops him, though I have the sense that his being with me brings him the same kind of abeyance of loss that handling Charlie’s photographs brings me.

  “Do you know anything?” he asks at last, with equal measures of hope and anxiety, it seems to me. “Have you found him?”

  “No,” I say.

  “Why did you come back?”

  “I don’t know really. Well, because of a film. Because of a photograph.”

  He frowns a little and looks around the room and sees the three photographs tucked under the upper edge of the dresser mirror. I see his fingers tighten against the arm of the chair. He gets up and stands in front of the mirror and studies the photographs. I stand behind him and just a little to one side, so I can see his face in the mirror and he can see mine.

  No one moves, no one speaks.

  “So you know,” he says at last to my reflection.

  Does he mean I know about him and Sheba? Since way back at The Shamrock, I could tell him. Does he refer to Gabriel transfigured? But neither of us is willing to accept a verdict on that.

  Does he mean I know of his obsession with Cat?

  That is most likely what he means, I think, so I say yes.

  “I loved them,” he says.

  “I know.”

  I put my hand on his arm but he backs away as though I have scorched him. “So you know,” he says again, and turns and leaves.

  Then I look at the photographs again. I know the one of Sheba has something to tell me — something about her hands and her eyes - but I cannot translate. The picture of myself at Cedar Creek beckons me. You have to come back, it says.

  3

  Everything has changed and nothing has changed.

  Gil Brennan moves between his rows of pineapples in the morning light, Constance and I sit in deckchairs on the veranda and look across the paddocks to the dark green rainforest wall. Constance rests her right hand on the back of my left.

  “I hoped you’d come one day, Lucy,” she says. She squeezes my hand tightly and smiles. Her eyes are very bright. “And now you have.”

  I think of all the questions I’m afraid to ask, all the answers I might not want to know.

  “It makes other things seem more possible,” Constance says.

  I know what she means. I know she means that if I step out of absence suddenly, why not Gabriel?

  “Catherine and I think he might have gone to North Queensland,” I say. “The Daintree maybe. You know he has that solitary celibate streak, and he had a dream of living like you and Gil one day Growing pineapples somewhere.”

  “Yes,” she says. “He did, didn’t he?”

  We sit there silently, her hand resting on mine, for the longest time. Then she asks, not looking at me: “He’s never contacted you, then?”

  “No,” I say.

  But there are so many reasons why people refrain from making contact with those they love. So many reasons. Think of all the years — twenty-five years — that Catherine never answered Charlie’s letters. I’ve never wanted to ask Gabriel’s mother if he ever reached Brisbane that week, and I don’t want to now.

  She says quietly: “A very strange thing happened about six months after he disappeared. A very lovely thing, Lucy.”

  Hearing the tone of her voice, I can hardly breathe. She begins to play with my fingers as she must have played with Gabriel’s when he was a child. She smiles fondly “A delivery boy, just one of the local Samford boys from the grocer’s, came riding in on his bicycle. ’Here’s yer pastry delivery, Mrs Brennan,’ he said. And I said, ’But I didn’t order anything.’ And he dug a notebook out of his pocket and checked it and he said, ’Well, that’s what I got on me list.’ It wasn’t their own pastry, he said. It was a special order, it had been sent out from the city. ’Must be yer lucky day, Mrs Brennan,’ he said. ’Must be a present.’ And he hopped on his bicycle and off he went. Lucy, do you know what it was?”

  I just wait.

  “One dozen sugar doughnuts,” she says.

  We stare at each other. I try to say something, but can’t. My eyes ask instead: any message?

  She shakes her head. “No card. And no name on the box. Nothing. Of course, McWhirter’s isn’t a shop anymore. And then the next day, the Samford grocers called and said they were terribly sorry, there’d been a mistake.”

  “A mistake,” I repeat.

  “Yes,” she sighs. “A mix-up with the deliveries.”

  “Still,” I say.

  “Yes. That’s what I thought too.”

  “Sugar doughnuts. It’s such a strange coincidence.”

  “Yes,” she says. “A lovely thing.”

  We smile a little, watching Gil Brennan against the rainforest wall.

  “Since then,” I say after a while, “he hasn’t …?”

  She doesn’t answer. But there are so many reasons why people don’t. So many convoluted reasons.

  “I thought I’d go and sit on the rocks at the falls,” I say, and suddenly she shivers a little. “Will you come?”

  She shakes her head. “I don’t go there now.”

  “I’ve got a photograph Gabriel took.” I can say his name now that she’s told me about the sugar doughnuts. I take the photographs out to show her but she can’t even look at the one of me at the falls. She averts her eyes as though I’d shown her something grotesque. “Sorry,” I say hesitantly, and she brushes this aside with her hand, embarrassed.

  “It’s just … It’s nothing. It’s the falls, that’s all. I don’t -”

  So I show her Gabriel Comes with Clouds Descending instead, and now her face softens and she holds it and gazes and smiles and her eyes are so bright she has to blink.

  “It’s the light in the photograph,” I say.

  “Yes,” she says. “Extraordinary.”

  Then I show her the one of Sheba as Cat, I’m not sure why. She stares blankly for a moment and then she tenses as though heartburn is suddenly behind her ribs.

  “What is it?”

  “Who took this?” Her face is white, the colour has gone from her lips.

  I feel the buzz of anxiety again, the sense of a coming translation I do not want to have. (It’s not a picture of me, you drip. It’s of the bloke who took the photograph.)

  “Who took this?” she asks again.

  “Gabriel’s father,” I say. I moisten my lips. “Why?”

  “It’s the clip,” she says, and points to the plastic trinket in Sheba’s hair. I look at the photograph again. It’s Sheba’s eyes and hands that have been distracting me. I haven’t paid any attention to the clip in her hair, but now I make out the butterfly shape and instantly I see the bizarre woman on the tram through Gabriel’s six-year-old eyes, I see her bobby socks and her short shaved hair and the blue butterfly brooch on her dress.

  Constance is pale. “I gave it to Gabriel,” she says.

  I remember, I remember, though he never showed it to me. Across an immense distance, I can see him holding it. He is on the far side of the gaping space between seeing and interpreting.

  Constance breathes slowly. She looks stricken. “Where …?” she says. “How …?”

  “What does it mean?” I whisper.

  Constance looks at me, startled. She shakes herself as though she is waking from a trance. She looks at me as though a suggestion has been proffered that is quite beyond the pale and is not to be countenanced. I have the weird feeling that she thinks this suggestion has come from me and must be rebutted. “Well, I don’t suppose it means anything. You can buy blue plastic butterflies in Woolworths,” she says. She is silent, breathing raggedly, searching within her
self for an explanation for her distress. “For me, it brings back that day. That night.”

  Memories of cosmic laughter on a tram, of panic, of chaos, wisp around her. “I used to feel I had to know what happened,” she says. “But then gradually, it didn’t matter anymore.”

  She hugs herself in the damp night air. “I’ve never told a living soul, Lucy, not even Gil.” She is speaking with difficulty, gasping a little. “Sometimes such terrible thoughts have crossed my mind. I’ve always been afraid that if I put them into words …”

  She shrugs and gives me a small self-deprecating smile. “When your life is falling apart, very black thoughts come to you. But you can’t trust them, and after a while they go away.”

  Crickets call from the hibiscus bushes beyond the railing and there is the soft thud of ripe fruit falling somewhere beyond the line of the veranda light.

  “We both laughed,” she says, musing. She is not so much talking to me as thinking aloud. “It’s strange, Gabriel remembering that all those years. I felt freed that day.” Her body relaxes slightly as the memory of that fleeting freedom visits it. “But then …”

  The silence goes on and on and I dare not break it.

  “But then,” she says at last, “he must have gone back to her hotel to find her. That’s what I assumed. It must have been later than three in the morning when I finally heard him come in, but then such a long time went by that I wondered if he’d hurt himself or something, or was drinking, or … I didn’t know what. I was groping for my robe — I only had my nightgown on — but I couldn’t find it, and I went out to the kitchen … I didn’t mean to surprise him, that wasn’t my intention at all, but he flew into a terrible rage …” She licks her dry lips. She looks so ghastly and ill that I go into the kitchen and get a glass of water and bring it to her.

  “He was like a caricature of himself,” she whispers. “It was someone else in his body, it wasn’t him, it was horrible. And he was spattered in … he seemed to be spattered in …” She shakes her head hopelessly. “He’d been in a fight at the pub, I think, and put his fist through glass, but I don’t trust any of my perceptions or my memory of that night.

  “In the morning, I wanted to believe it was a nightmare, that nothing had happened, and in a way he acted as though nothing had happened, except he was very brisk and efficient and cold, and he was packing. He said he’d move into a hotel for a few days, and then he was taking Gabriel away. He said I was hysterical, and he thought I might be deranged.”

  She turns to me. “And I was frightened of that too, Lucy. I was frightened I was mad, maybe I wanted to believe that. In a way, it was a less disturbing explanation.” She falls silent again and breathes slowly and heavily. “After a time it didn’t matter. You just stop gnawing away at puzzles that don’t make sense. You want amnesia.”

  We can hear the shriek of a flying fox in the mangoes. Night birds call. A weary heavy breeze moves the hibiscus against the damp veranda rails.

  “You should never remember someone in rage or panic,” she says. “It isn’t fair to them, they’re not themselves. The way I remember Robbie is sitting on the end of Gabriel’s bed telling him stories. Gabriel was the sun and the moon and the stars to him. It’s sad he didn’t have more children. There’s too much strain, too much expectation on both sides when there’s only one.”

  There is the soft thump thump of a frog on the veranda steps. When it senses our presence, it stops and watches us unblinking from its black bulbous eyes. It wears its heart on the bleating balloon of its chest.

  “You don’t see the green ones much anymore,” Constance says. “The cane toads have just about killed them off.”

  The frog makes a faint hiccupping sound, a little pre-croak.

  “Years and years later,” she says, “when they found a body at the falls, I had such terrible thoughts, such awful dreams.” She puts her head in her hands and begins to shake.

  “At the falls? They found a body at the falls?”

  “Some children found it, pushed down between those two big boulders, weighted down in the mud with rocks. It was a skeleton, a woman’s skeleton, they said, and it could have been there fifty years, how would we know? Anyway, nothing came of it. Nothing happened.” She looks at the photograph of Sheba again and looks away. “You can’t trust anything you think in black times,” she says. “It’s your own blackness. It breeds black ideas.”

  I can feel horror seeping into me, I feel the suck of dread, I feel lost in a vast dark wood with no way on and no way out.

  “Lucy,” Constance says at last. “I had to tell someone, It’s been strangling me.”

  The passing on of secrets, I think, is like the passing of time in the rainforest, strangler figs on dead hosts putting forth their new shoots, the smell of decay and the smell of yeast always there.

  “But black times go away,” she says. “And you know bad dreams don’t mean anything except your own worst fears, that’s all.”

  We can see Gil coming in from the hillside like the coming of warmth, a red sunset behind him.

  “Lucy,” she says. “You won’t go to the falls, will you? Please don’t go to the falls.”

  “No,” I say. “I won’t go there.”

  I walk along the Samford road for miles and miles in the dark and then I walk back. I don’t think anything, I don’t feel anything, I just walk. Something black and suffocating moves with me, a cloud of dread. I will have to get used to it, I think.

  I am seeing the documentation on Cat in those police reports. The skeleton found (the file didn’t say where: in a rural area on the outskirts of Brisbane, was all it said), the forensic reports, the chips in the bone denoting ferocity of the multiple stab wounds. Unsolved mystery, the police said. Trail long gone cold, one of her lovers no doubt.

  (An act of violence is an intimate act, the police say. The greater the violence the greater the intimacy.

  Strangers kill quick and clean, but family is vicious, they say.

  When it’s savage, we know. Only love does that.)

  Old bones, the police said. One of her lovers no doubt.

  So you know, Sonny Blue said.

  But the truth is, we don’t know anything, and even less do we want to know.

  We don’t know anything.

  When I come back, Gil and Constance have gone to bed and I sit on the veranda, indifferent to mosquitoes and moths, and watch the night till the sun comes up. By dawn light, I look at the photographs again. The photograph of Sheba is so small, just a polaroid snapshot, that you’d never notice the clip was a butterfly clip unless it were pointed out to you. I reach for Constance’s reading glasses left beside her chair, and look at the clip again through them. The magnification makes me feel giddy, the photograph seems to undulate like a wave. And then I notice that the locket round Sheba’s neck is not a locket at all. It is a thin gold chain threaded with two tiny rings, each with its own glass bead, and the earrings hang between Sheba’s breasts.

  No worst, there is none, I think.

  Pitched past pitch of grief, I feel the suck of all the whirlpools, all the nightmares, all the black bat fears …

  I stumble off the veranda and run drunkenly across the paddocks, howling and sobbing like a wild child who has been brought up by dingoes. I run until I am safe in the arms of exhaustion. I collapse between the pineapple rows.

  And then, like a drowning woman grasping at a straw, I think with a sudden delirium of relief: sexual obsession is not a crime. Anyone can buy cheap earrings and a butterfly clip at Woolworths to deck out a fantasy. It doesn’t mean anything.

  It doesn’t mean anything.

  So you know, he said.

  But what do we know?

  There is not one single thing we know for sure, except perhaps the fact of Cat’s skeleton. And perhaps also the fact of love.

  (I loved them, I loved them, he said.)

  (Only love does that.)

  (So you know.)

  There are things we know. An
d there are things we don’t realise we know. And there are times when we decide it is better not to find out what perhaps we unconsciously know.

  If I know anything at all, I know that Gabriel’s father twists and turns and writhes in private torment. If I feel anything, I feel pity.

  But I don’t know anything. Nothing can ever be known for sure.

  Unanswerable questions are the ones that engage us, Charlie said.

  There are only these three facts: the fact of Cat’s skeleton, the fact of love, and the fact of absences.

  I feel a need to talk to Catherine so intense that I can scarcely breathe. The house is quiet and still awash in the grey light between night and day. I pad barefoot into the kitchen to the phone and my fingers tremble violently as I dial a number in Harrow, county of Middlesex, London.

  Three rings, four, my throat is dry.

  She answers on the fifth ring.

  “Catherine,” I whisper. “Oh Catherine, thank God you’re there. It’s Lucy.”

  “Hello?” Catherine says. “Hello? I’m afraid I can’t hear you.”

  Catherine, I try to say, but I can’t make a sound.

  A tentativeness comes into Catherine’s voice. “Lucy?” she ventures. “Lucy, is that you?”

  I nod furiously, awash in salt water, but I can’t seem to speak.

  “Lucy,” she says, “if it’s you, please say something.”

  “It’s me. It’s me, Catherine.”

  “Oh God, I can hardly hear you. God, Lucy, how could you do this to me, where are you?”

  “I’m sorry,” I say. “It was panic. I’m in Brisbane. I’m in Samford, at Constance and Gil Brennan’s place. I saw one of Charlie’s films and I just freaked out.”

  “Yeah,” she says. “I know. I saw it too. But Lucy, listen. Listen to this.” And now I hear the burr of excitement in her voice. “This has been the strangest week. Last weekend I saw Charlie’s film, and today you call, and yesterday I got a call from New York. It was the strangest thing. This operator says, ’I have a call for you from New York. Go ahead, please.’ And I wait and wait, and no one conies on the line, and I’m saying hello, hello, and I’m about to hang up in disgust, when suddenly I begin to have this certainty, this certainty, Lucy, that Charlie is on the other end of the line. And I just stood there holding the receiver and I felt as though … I felt as though … and then I remembered something Charlie used to say about Lao Tzu. Lao Tzu says that speaking in words is like trying to sound the middle of the ocean with a six-foot pole."