The Last Magician Read online

  THE LAST MAGICIAN

  “The Last Magician is unashamedly dense with ideas … It is her finest novel to date, surpassing even the excellent Borderline, and should establish her as one of the most powerful and innovative writers in English today.”

  Times Literary Supplement

  “The author proves herself a magician with words and narrative structure … Impeccable, sensuous prose and a fiercely intelligent imagination.”

  Publisher’s Weekly

  “A brilliantly layered, complex and profound work … an allegory of the soul’s journey toward light.”

  Toronto Globe and Mail

  “The Last Magician is highly imaginative, tough minded, and intelligent … language is Turner Hospital’s greatest strength. Her prose shimmers, and her delight in word play is infectious … An engrossing and powerful novel.”

  Sun Herald

  “She fills her novel with evocative settings, characters we care deeply about, and language that is entrancingly lyrical … An ambitious, intense and satisfying book.”

  New York Times Book Review

  “Janette Turner Hospital has a rare sense of her own work, pacing herself so every achievement is full, mature and glowing. She is as magical with her words as the knowing magician of her title. Applaud the conjurer.”

  Sunday Age

  “The most sensuous artistic novel of the year.”

  New England Review of Books

  “With refreshing disregard for literary decorum, Janette Turner Hospital grasps Dante’s central image for the Inferno and makes it her own … a vision wide enough to tackle themes that range from the intimate to the universal.”

  Literary Review (UK)

  “Few Australian writers throw out such a challenge as Janette Turner Hospital; few repay acceptance of the challenge with such tangible and topical rewards.”

  Adelaide Advertiser

  “Heady, engrossing and rather wonderful … High-voltage prose … The real magician is of course the author.”

  Spectrum (UK)

  “Insightful and original, The Last Magician poses the burning questions — about sexuality and repression, about ‘innocence’ and its relation to violence, about the masks power wears when it demonizes the Other — on a wide and richly textured screen.”

  The Boston Globe

  “Janette Turner Hospital writes with powerful beauty … A story of high tension and terrifying allure … Her writing has perfect pitch.”

  Los Angeles Times

  “We marvel at how Hospital makes her novel work on so many different levels — as psychological thriller and detective story, as sociopolitical commentary as both a jaggedly postmodern novel and a compulsively readable one … Hospital’s prose showers over us like a torrent, leaving us amazed, breathless, and perhaps a bit terrified.”

  New York Newsday

  “Its essence is an emotionally charged meditation on loss and absence, on the head’s ability to deny what the heart knows.”

  Maclean’s Magazine (Canada)

  THE LAST MAGICIAN

  Janette Turner Hospital was born in Melbourne in 1942, but her family moved to Brisbane when she was seven years old. She has taught in Queensland high schools, and in universities in Australia, Canada, USA, England, and Europe. Her short stories and her novels have won a number of international awards, and she is published in ten languages. The Last Magician was shortlisted for the Miles Franklin Award in 1993 and the Adelaide Festival National Fiction Award in 1994. It was listed in the New York Times Book Review’s “Most Notable Books of 1992” and in Publishers Weekly’s Best 16 Novels of 1992. In 1999, Janette Turner Hospital was invited by the University of South Carolina to be the successor to the late James Dickey, and she now holds a permanent position there as Professor and Distinguished Writer in Residence.

  Other books by

  Janette Turner Hospital

  Novels

  The Ivory Swing

  The Tiger in the Tiger Pit

  Borderline

  Charades

  Oyster

  Due Preparations for the Plague

  Short Stories

  Dislocations

  Isobars

  Collected Stories

  North of Nowhere, South of Loss

  For my daughter

  Cressida

  Contents

  Book I Charlie’s Inferno

  Book II Cat

  Book III Photograffiti and Silence

  Book IV The Last Magician

  With special thanks to A.A.

  whose restaurants and wildly imaginative photographs

  gave me the idea

  BOOK I

  Charlie’s Inferno

  The first message is that there is disorder.

  James Gleick

  There is no question that there is an unseen world.

  The problem is how far is it from midtown and how late is it open?

  Woody Allen

  1

  In the middle of the journey, I came to myself in a dark wood where the straight way was lost.

  No. That is not the way to put it. In the middle of darkness, I came to the black fact that there was no straight way — no way on, no way out. This knowledge engulfed me, a thick sack over the head. Suffocation was the least of it.

  Ah, how hard a thing it is to tell of that wood.

  Do you see the two boulders where the rapids make a sort of courteous ruffle of detour? That was where the bones were found. They were wedged deep down, pushed, prodded under the rocks with the blunt end of something far more complex and disturbing than hate, and they might have been missed for another ten years.

  But I mustn’t think of that now. I cannot start there.

  The wood is dark, and full of the soft rot and manic growth we call rainforest. The rainforest has always spawned secrets. Light itself is clandestine here. Under the matted canopy the sun becomes furtive, it flickers, it advances by stealth, it hides, it is coy, it sneaks down through the tangle of treetops, creepers, leggy bird’s-nest ferns, lianas, orchids, battling its way earthwards through layers of aerial clamour, slithering below ground fungi to breed green yeast. The rainforest smells of seduction and fermentation and death. It smells of Queensland.

  Like the dark wood itself, which can burgeon into anyone’s sleep, Queensland is fluid in size and shape, it ebbs and flows and refuses to be anchored in space, it billows out like a net that can settle without warning over its most wayward children and pull them home. There is no escaping it. It is always larger than would appear on the map. At this particular point, however, in the middle of the dark wood, it is known as Cedar Creek Falls and its coordinates are finite and precise: latitude 27 degrees and 19 minutes south; longitude 152 degrees and 46 minutes east of the Greenwich meridian.

  Here are directions: from the City Hall and King George Square in the heart of Brisbane (capital of the state of Queensland, Australia; population 1.3 million), follow Ann Street one block to George and turn right, proceed to Roma Street, then continue along the north-west artery toward the State Forest. The artery snakes through lush but well-manicured residential suburbs and mutates through various names: Kelvin Grove Road, Enoggera Road, Samford Road. Depending on traffic, you should reach the suburb of Ferny Grove, end of the railway line, in just under an hour. Somewhere between Ferny Grove and Samford Village, a mere five kilometres further on, you will cross that indistinct and provisional line where the city of Greater Brisbane could perhaps be said to end, and primordial time could be said to begin.

  Perhaps the crucial point is where the road surface changes.

  Not far beyond Samford, you will cross Cedar Creek, and here, if you wish to locate the falls (which are really many miles of
rapids bumping and churning down an escarpment of the D’Aguilar Range from Mt Glorious) you must turn off the road and follow an unpaved detour until it ends, and then you must leave your car and enter the dark wood and keep going until the straight way is lost.

  When I say I came to myself in that black wood, I mean it literally I mean that without any warning, in a darkened theatre on the other side of the world, I stumbled over my own feet as it were, bumped into myself on a cinema screen, sitting on one of the two boulders in the spuming ladder of Cedar Creek Falls. The shock was so great that I blacked out.

  This happened in a theatre in London, at a little cinematic hole in the wall, and when I came to myself all the rainforest paths and all the best laid paths in the world led straight to chaos. Dazed, I wandered about, got lost in the Underground, surfaced at Tottenham Court Road, and phoned Catherine.

  Catherine, I wanted to say, I’ve just seen both of us in one of Charlie’s films. I’ve seen you, and Charlie himself, and Cat and Gabriel, and His Honour Robinson Gray. The whole bang lot of us, Catherine.

  Catherine and I work together, but I’d just got in the day before (I’d been away for several months, New York, Boston, another documentary) and I hadn’t managed to make contact yet. For us, this was unusual. I dialled the number of her townhouse in Harrow.

  I let the phone ring ten times.

  No answer.

  There had been no answer the night before either. She had not been at the studios that morning, she was not away on location, where was she? I found myself inside the little pub that was three steps from the telephone booth. I made myself sit over a drink for an hour, refusing to panic.

  Catherine, I needed to say. I miss them, Catherine. I’m scared.

  We baffle people, Catherine and I. She is, I suppose, practically old enough to be my mother, not that I ever think of us in terms of age. But people talk. People find our closeness odd, I don’t know why. We work together (well, for the same television company anyway; and frequently on the same projects) and we are often seen together in the evenings as well. People talk. They do have men from time to time, people whisper, so they’re not, you know … And no, we’re not. But we need each other. The bond between us is intense.

  I made myself sit in the pub on Tottenham Court Road for an hour then I phoned again, first the studios (no; no sign of her, no message), then Harrow.

  Still no answer.

  I panicked. I completely flipped out. Not Catherine too, I thought. I was getting used to people disappearing, I was getting horribly used to it. There are too many missing people and too many damn deaths, I thought. The whole bloody world is crowded with absences.

  Much has been fomented by panic: wars, stampedes, stock-market crashes, and worldwide depressions, to name a few. Great accidents and remarkable trains of events from little anxieties grow, and when I found myself staring blankly into a travel agent’s window, when temptation presented itself in a poster of the harbour and the bridge and the Opera House, I hesitated only for seconds, yielded, went inside and bought a ticket home. MasterCard, Qantas, London-Singapore-Sydney

  This was extreme. I knew I was being extreme, but something Charlie once said was buzzing inside my mind like a fly in a bottle and it was clear I wouldn’t be able to shut the din off till I went back and settled things. In any case, when you travel as much as Catherine and I do, living on the move half the time and treating the world as an office, there is nothing so very unusual about arriving home one day and leaving again a day later. It happens often: we unpack, do the laundry, repack, head for Heathrow and the next assignment. I didn’t try to call Catherine again for fear of what I might find out. Once I got to Sydney, I’d decide whether to head up to Brisbane or not. First, I wanted to find out if Sheba, at least, was still around.

  She was. She was still in Sydney She was still barmaid at the very same bar, though its name had changed several times. “Well whad’ya know?” she said. “If it isn’t Lady Muck herself swanning back in.” But she grinned and tapped off a schooner and stuck it in front of me. “High bloody time,” she said. “Whyn’t you send a telegram and give me a day to get a party up?”

  “Sudden urge, Sheba,” I told her. “I saw one of Charlie’s films in London. I saw all of us in it. Well, not you, but the rest of us. It’s given me the most dreadful ideas, I had nightmares all the way out on the flight. It’s Charlie’s bloody black magic again.”

  “Bullshit,” she said. “It’s jetlag. It’s those travel sickness things you take. You mix them with alcohol, watch out!”

  “Sheba,” I said, “have you seen it?”

  “What? Are you kidding? One of Charlie’s arty things? Do you think I’m bloody likely to?”

  “It’s knocked me for six. I feel as though we’re all lost in a dark wood, and there’s no way on and no way out.”

  “You mean we’re going round in circles?” she said. “You just figured that out? Jesus, Lucy, get a hold of yourself. Brisbane’s right where it always was, and so’s Sydney, and Catherine’s in London (I saw her on TV the other night), and the quarry’s spreading, they reckon, but so what? We got beer on tap and the world’s still turning.”

  “And what about Gabriel? What about Charlie and Cat?”

  “Oh well,” she said, “there’s too many missing people, I’ll give you that. But there always bloody well has been, hasn’t there? You’re not gonna make the evening news with that.”

  “And what about Robinson Gray?”

  “He keeps coming around, naturally,” she said. “He’s got the Order of Australia now, isn’t that a blast? He got his picture in the paper for the Queen’s Birthday whad’ya-call-’ems. He thinks he’s Lord High Mucky-Muck now, if you please, but I still call him Sonny Blue.”

  “Look,” I said. “Charlie’s put this thought inside my head, it’s buzzing like a bloody mosquito in there and it scares me to death. I think I’m going to ride the ferries for a while.”

  “Suit yourself,” she said. “But don’t blame Charlie. We’ve always known what’s what, you and me.”

  I stared at her.

  “We know and we don’t know,” she shrugged. “And you don’t want to know, Lucy Look, the problem with people like you and Gabriel, you just won’t admit the way the world works. Cat and Charlie, they knew. Catherine knows.”

  “I’m going to ride the ferries,” I said.

  “You’re not gonna change anything,” she said. “You’re just gonna make yourself sick for nothing, or get yourself killed.”

  “I’m going to ride the ferries,” I said.

  And then at Circular Quay, what did I see but another poster for Charlie’s film? Now was that a coincidence or wasn’t it? Charlie believed the world was thick with messages, you could hardly move for secret codes in Charlie’s world. I found the theatre and saw Charlie’s Inferno again, and I blacked out again — I can’t explain that, since I already knew what to expect, although there were certainly a few telling details I’d missed in London on the first time round. Perhaps it was my febrile imagination projecting translations onto the screen. Or perhaps it was something else,

  Whatever Sheba says, I believe it was part of Charlie’s magic.

  And whatever it was, I blacked out.

  2

  Very likely, though I remember nothing, people were solicitous. They probably offered water, air, advice, assistance, and I imagine I said quite polite and rational things. It’s nothing, I probably said. Or perhaps, apologetic and dismissive, I murmured that it was just a dizzy spell. (But were they looking at me strangely? Did they recognise me? Did someone say: Excuse me, but aren’t you the woman in the film? And if they didn’t say it, what would that mean?) Anyway, no doubt the formalities were observed. And after that I must have made my way onto one of the harbour ferries by instinct, because I’ve always done that when I’m in Sydney and in the grip of an obsession. I can go to Manly and back six times and watch my theories shape and unshape themselves in the water. Leaning over t
he ferry railing and staring at the sleek green curl-and-spin below, I can see the undersides and loopholes of harebrained ideas, the way their parapets hide secrets, the way they spiral into minarets of possibility before they disappear with the ferry wake.

  Wakes. Now there is a pertinent topic.

  No, I do not want to think about wakes.

  This is the thing: my instinct is for comedy (Sheba would consider that a great joke; it is nevertheless true), but events keep trying to cast me in a darker rolc. Forget it. What would I say to a shark, for example, if I swam into its arms off a Queensland beach? Listen, I’d say, you’ve got yourself in a bit of a bloody mess here, haven’t you, mate?

  “Have you?” this bloke says, leaning over the railing beside me, nice and friendly managing to imply that the slow wallow of a dowager ferry is entirely responsible for the pressure of his frontage against my thigh. Some things never change. Your average Sydney male has a limited repertoire of enticement. One thinks of freight trains blundering about in heat.

  “What?” I say.

  “Got yourself in a bit of a bloody mess?”

  “Oh bugger. Was I thinking out loud again?”

  “’Fraid so,” he says. “Bad sign, eh?”

  “You don’t know the half of it,” I say. “I’ve got this friend, Charlie, and I’ve just seen one of his films.”

  “And who’s your friend Charlie when he’s at home?”

  “Oh well. Now there’s a question. You ever read the Russian novelists? One of the Russians — I think it was Tolstoy speaking of Gogol, but it could have been Gorky on Tolstoy whichever. Anyway, one of them wrote: While that old man is alive, the stars will stay in their proper place. Or something to that effect, I’m probably not quoting exactly. Anyway, that’s how I feel about Charlie.”

  This guy laughs. I can tell he thinks he’s got a nut on his hands, the kind he reckons will be easy game.

  “What’s your name?” he asks, lunging sideways as a wave almost as big as a bathtub spillover licks the ferry hull, grabbing at the railing on the far side of me with his left hand, surprise surprise, moving in for the kill.