The Last Magician Read online

  Two (and this is something Charlie told me): Once Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly, perhaps a turquoise butterfly like the Blue Wanderer, the Ulysses, that haunter of Queensland rainforests, and that he drifted through air like light. The butterfly, needless to say, knew nothing of Chuang Tzu. It fluttered here, there, it quivered, it alighted on dawn. The dream pecked against the outer shell of sleep, the butterfly woke, and there in its bed was Chuang Tzu who was not even good-looking or mild-tempered, let alone luminous. Unshaven, dazed, rumpled, grumpy, he smelled of morning breath and of slight piss stains on his pyjamas. What a falling off was there. What a metamorphosis. Afterwards, the philosopher was never certain if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

  “So you have a point, Old Fury,” I concede. “But the point could be this: you could be a figure in one of Charlie’s photographs. You could be in one of the films I think up for him. We could both be up there, in the quarry’s first circle, dreaming you.”

  Old Fury’s heard something, I don’t mean me babbling on, something else, and she pricks up her ears.

  “What is it?” I ask her.

  Shhh, she says, or doesn’t say, but puts a finger to her lips. I can hear it. At first the sound is like the slow heavy vapour which drips from rainforest canopies after dark, a quiet sobbing coming down, coming closer. But it turns into Danny who is only twelve and very new to the quarry, and who is not broken in at all. Something is pressing down on him. He ignores us and huddles himself in one corner, whimpering. Old Fury goes to him and sits beside him and cradles him in her arms, rocking backwards and forwards, humming.

  “I’m sore,” he whimpers. “It hurts. They were at me all night. It hurts.”

  I leave Julie, who’s shuddering quietly, and bring a candle over. Danny is wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and even in the half-light, you can see the dried blood on his thighs and the bruises.

  “Oh jeez,” I say. “Clumsy buggers. How many?”

  “Two of them,” Danny says. “They did me all night.”

  Oh Danny, I think, all this for one fix? But no, he’s not even had time to get hooked, he’s a brand new runaway, he’s been buggered to ribbons for common old garden-variety hunger. He’s starving. “And then all they give me,” he sobs, “is a packet of cigarettes.” He pulls it out of the pocket of his shorts, a packet of Winfields. “I tried to swap it for a pie, but the pie man wouldn’t go for it. I’m hungry.”

  Hunger: now there’s a topic. I can imagine the visual layers, the literal and metaphorical densities, that Charlie will bring to this one.

  “Have we got anything, Old Fury?” I ask her, not because she’ll answer. I crawl under the brick-and-board bed where I recall we used to hide a battered tin box and please, I say silently, please, and thank God, there’s something there, some dry biscuits and a tin of soup. Danny is much too hungry to wait for anything elaborate like a hot meal, which is fortunate since I am not very good with the primus. It’s hit or miss with me. I open the tin and give him a spoon and he gulps down tomato pulp and alphabet noodles, a cold, concentrated, gelatinous mass. “You want coffee, Danny? We’ve got some. I’ll see if I can light this thing again, it might take me a while.” He’s cuddled up in Old Fury’s arms and she’s rocking him, crooning to him in those throaty noises she makes. “Coffee’s coming,” I promise. “Warm the cockles of your heart, Danny boy.”

  It works. I get the damn thing lit. We all have coffee and I prop Julie up against the wall and manage to get some more down her, but she’s still out of it, she slumps into the mattress again like soggy bread. We sit there sipping our coffee, and I don’t know what thoughts go through Old Fury’s head, or through young Danny’s, but whatever shape they come in, I’m willing to bet we are all entering bliss itself through the warm mugs in our hands. You see, it is difficult to find words for these things, it would be difficult to explain to the people pouring wine into crystal about the great pounding flood of joy that comes at you in this kind of situation, that comes at you through the skin, through the insides of fingers and palms, that kindly heat, the way it swamps you with happiness.

  “Come over on the bed,” I invite Danny, whose eyes, in Hungers, will one day seed nightmares among filmgoers in the other world. “I’m going to tell you a story about the time I first went on the streets.”

  “How old were you?” Danny asks.

  “Older than you. Older than Julie. I was a university student. I lived two lives.”

  So we make a sort of four-headed person, all warm together, all soft, all tangled up in arms and legs, a JulieDannyOldFuryandme kind of person, a love knot, you can see what brings me back, all this warmth, Old Fury humming her lullaby and me telling a bedtime story and urging Charlie to join us.

  “Well,” I whisper to him. “What do you think about Old Fury? Is she Cat?”

  “No,” he sighs. “She’s not Cat.”

  “Yeah, well, look,” Tony is saying nervously. “Maybe you’d rather be by yourself. Maybe some other time, eh? The beer, I mean.” He’s backing away toward the safety of his mates. “Nice talking to you, Lucy.” He’s practically falling over his feet with apprehension.

  So what have I rambled on about, I wonder?

  Nice talking to you, Lucy, the swift water says. It has wings and tongues and memories, and an easy fluid way with the past.

  The past has heft and jagged edges. Down there, where the water licks the flank of the ferry like a lewd green tongue, I can watch the past dwindle and balloon and dwindle. I can watch it slowly submerge itself like a drowned man going under. I can watch it surface again, and sink, and spread its subterranean self from Circular Quay to the Heads. I can see rooms down there, passageways, a whole wing of recycled years, the slope of the quarry, the time spent at Charlie’s Place …

  Oh Charlie’s Place, Charlie’s face, the ace up Charlie’s sleeve. He was a bit of a magician, Charlie was.

  The waves are sleek but memory is sleeker and the race is to the swift and that time comes washing back around me, it’s a rough sea, a tidal wave, oh here it is, quick, run, hide, it’s at flooding depth, drowning depth, you can never build ramparts strong enough to keep the past in its place, it skulks like the dammed-up Pacific behind North Head, it bursts, it spumes, it rampages, here it comes, here comes the first day I met Charlie …

  3

  “What I’m after,” the photographer explains, “is a sense of those fishnet stockings as snare. As a trap that a man swims into.”

  “Oh yeah?” Lucy leans back, propped on her elbows, and coils one leg around a bedpost. “Like this?” she challenges. Her legs are like jaws, like scissors. She is mostly black mesh hose with a bit of bodysuit attached. The bodysuit is also black and cut high on the thighs.

  “Talk,” he says, moving round her, crouching, sometimes leaning over her like a crow after pickings. He too is dressed in black: black jeans, black turtleneck, black eyebrows, black hair. He has pale skin and dark almond-shaped eyes. “Keep talking.”

  “Why?” she asks. He puzzles her. He is older than she is, but she cannot tell by how much. Twenty years? Not so much? More? He seems curiously ageless, a young old man. “Why do I have to keep talking?”

  “It makes a difference to the pictures. It makes a difference to which pictures I take. The pictures will show you things you don’t know about yourself.”

  “As if I want to,”she says.

  “You always wear this?”

  “Mostly. Unless they ask for different. Funny, this thing they’ve got about black. I wonder why.”

  “Nuns and priests,” he says.

  “Yeah. Could be. Most of the girls are Catholic or ex, not me though. They reckon most of the johns are Catholics too, I wonder why?” The shutter winks and winks and winks. “You a Catholic?”

  “No.”

  “And a lot are hellfire and damnation types,” she laughs. “Religious, anyway. You wouldn’t believe how religion conie
s into it. There’s this one bloke, an old bloke, I gotta sit here stark naked, reading the Gideon Bible while he jerks off. I gotta sit on the edge of the bed with my legs wide open, and he kneels on the floor and stares.” She swings her legs wide open to demonstrate and balances an imaginary book high on her hands. “Woe to them that devise iniquity, and work evil upon their beds. So then I let him rest his head here” — she pats her crotch — “and I stroke his hair and I gotta sing to him.” She turns her palms out to the photographer and hunches up her shoulders, inviting him to make sense of such a thing. He photographs her upturned palms. “Not that I’m complaining, it’s easy money. He’s one of my regulars. He’s a nice old bloke.”

  The camera records pensive reflection.

  “You ever visit hookers without your camera?” she needles.

  “No.”

  “You religious?”

  The camera records question and provocation. The man says nothing.

  “Christ,” she says sarcastically, “what a talker you are. I’m glad I’m not working.” She sits up, forgetting him, and lights a cigarette. “You know why I hate the ones who don’t talk? They want too much of the other. Get them talking, you don’t have to do as much.” She inhales and dragons smoke from her nostrils. “I hate being touched.”

  He says nothing. He moves around the room, not always pointing his camera at the girl. He takes a photograph of rumpled sheets and a stain on the floor. He takes another of pillows and headboard, with the window beyond, and through it the skyline of Sydney. The pillow is grubby.

  “That’s why I like old blokes best,” she says. “Sixties, seventies, over seventy is best of all.”

  “But fucking them? Kissing them?”

  “Jesus,” she says, shocked. “We don’t kiss.”

  He photographs her disgust. He moves around, above, below, behind. He photographs the way her disgust dwindles and disappears like water through sand.

  “Where are you from?” she asks.

  Curiously, the question seems to throw him. He pauses and considers it for several seconds, as though testing out possible responses, and finally answers with the camera between them, “New York.”

  “How come you’ve got an Aussie accent?”

  He seems disconcerted. Annoyed perhaps. But then, from the small sheepish smile, oddly flattered, oddly pleased. He says in a very New York voice: “It creeps up on me sometimes apparently.” He changes lenses. “I’m sliding back into it, I guess. Especially in certain kinds of company. No, don’t move. Keep your legs crossed like that.” He photographs her fishnetted ankles and spike heels against the stain on the floor. “I’ve been away,” he says. “Been in New York for twenty-five years. Just came back.”

  “Jesus. To live?” He is occupied with rewinding film, changing spools, and doesn’t answer. He gives no sign of having heard the question.

  “Why?” she demands.

  “Why what?”

  “Why would you want to come back?”

  “Why not?” He takes hold of one of her ankles and lifts the leg as though it were a piece of stage furniture. He drags a wooden chair up close, puts her foot on it, takes her hands by the wrists and arranges them at her ankle. He photographs the arrangement of chair and spike-heeled shoe and stockinged leg and fishnet-adjusting hands. “Ever dream of escape?”

  She laughs. “Oh, I have. I have escaped. This is where I’ve escaped to.” She laughs again. “If you mean New York, I might some day, though it hardly seems worth the trouble.” She taps her head. “Too much baggage that can’t be left behind.”

  “Exactly,” he says, but he looks at her differently, his eyes registering a flicker of surprise. Careful, she warns herself. She is annoyed by these little slippages from character.

  “So where’re you from then?” she asks, affecting bored politeness. “Before New York, I mean.”

  He checks his light meter, tests the flash. Pop, pop, it is like the sound of one hand clapping. “Okay, now at the window, leaning out. I want the buttocks.” Click, his camera says. Click, click. Beyond the window, the neon glitz of King’s Cross winks back, hot pink, hot purple. Jackpot, says the camera. Click, click. He stashes her fishnet buttocks in his snare.

  “So where are you from then?” she persists.

  “The sage is from the mountain and the fox is from his hole.”

  “What?”

  “Keep talking.” He makes a record of her inquisitiveness, of her surprise.

  “Is this for a magazine, or what?” Click, click, his camera says. Click, click. “Or just for dirty pictures?” She cannot resist the guise of innocent question. Between one blink of the shutter and the next, by a clean arrangement of dark, of the absence of dark, the dirty picture settles. “You sell them? Or you keep them for jacking off?” He keeps a record of her sneer. “Jeez,” she says, giving up. “Like talking to a bloody block of wood.” She slumps across the bed, her chin on her hands, and broods. He keeps a record of her brooding and boredom.

  Apparently listless, she demands, “When do I take my clothes off?”

  “You don’t.”

  “Yeah? What’s this for, then?”

  “What’s your name?” he asks, recording the way curiosity, like a skittish breeze, quickens the dead lake of apathy.

  “Which one would you like?”

  “What’s your working name?”

  “I step into any name they want. A lot of times they don’t want you to have a name at all, and I’m nobody. I like being nobody.”

  “What’s your private name then? The one you have for yourself?”

  “Fuck off,” she says angrily. “Who the hell do you think you are?”

  “Terrific!”The shutter licks up the blaze of a border violated. She brings her hands up like claws and hisses at him.

  For a moment he looks strangely shocked. She might have struck him. He lowers the camera and stares. Then he recovers.

  “Terrific,” he says again, as a parent to a clever child. Click, click, says the shutter. Click, click.

  “Who the fuck are you?” She stands up and swivels her hips and humps her crotch in slow derisive motion, thrusting toward him, back forward back, purely hostile, a parody of invitation.

  “Sorry,” he says. “Hey, cool it. I’m sorry. I’m done now.” He finishes the film and rewinds and removes the cartridge and reloads. He grins. “Great shots, though.” He sets the camera down. “As a matter of fact,” he says, “I’m your new boss. You work downstairs too, in the restaurant, right?”

  “You’re the new restaurant manager? You’re Mr Charlie Chang?” She lights another cigarette and regards him warily. “D’you know what you’re getting into?”

  Does he know what he’s getting into? he asks himself. Yes and no. The curiosity, the impatience even, for the tomorrows to unfold themselves is like benzedrine sometimes (he can feel the buzz along the surface of his skin), though at other times he feels suspended in a slow dream, trapped like a fly in honey. He could say to her: I know exactly what I’m doing; I came back to nudge a train of events into motion; I came back to watch. But that wouldn’t be quite correct. He could say: a chain of chemical reactions, set in motion long ago and never still, has pulled me back. Would that be any more accurate? Sometimes he feels he has made a clear choice; sometimes he feels it has been beyond his power to make any kind of choice at all.

  “What did the iron filing say to the magnet?” he asks her.

  “I dunno,” she says. “I give up.”

  “We’re poles apart, but something keeps pulling me.”

  “Very funny,” she says. “You’re weird.”

  Yeah, he thinks. Weird. Is he the stage manager or a puppet, the magician or the magician’s stooge? He is never sure.

  (If we come across old diaries we have written, if we find — in an attic, a locked chest, someone’s desk drawer after a death — letters that we wrote long ago, we almost invariably cringe. Oh God, we think, embarrassed. Sometimes we are shocked. Sometimes w
e feel a stirring of tenderness for that earlier self, for its griefs, its panics, its narcissism. Occasionally we are even impressed by a ten-year-old’s or a nineteen-year-old’s turn of phrase or by insights we would not have expected that callow sloughed wraith of former existence to possess. Certainly we read ourselves with the same greedy curiosity and prurience that entice us through the erotic correspondence of strangers.

  When we watch the self on the screen of the past, we watch a stranger, but one for whom we have complicated feelings.

  I watch Charlie and myself in a room. I watch Gabriel and myself at Cedar Creek Falls, before either of us has met Charlie. I watch Charlie and Lucy, who is only myself in the most tenuous and convoluted way, and who was, in any case, acting the part of Lucy. She wished desperately to appear as a native. She wished to belong to the non-belongers.)

  Lucy puckers her lips and blows smoke rings at the photographer, and the smoke rings settle. Haloes? Nooses? She keeps blowing them, batting at them with a casual hand, pushing a message across the space between them, though he cannot say if the message is playful or insulting or whether it represents the throwing down of a gauntlet. He watches her, impassive.

  “This place is a wank,” she says. “This place is a silk purse in pigshit.” She waits, breathing smog into the room. She waits, she waits. “Just your style, maybe.” As far as she can tell, neither her disdain, which is a heavy bass thing, nor the flippant smoke rings, nor the sharp little cuts her words are intended to make, have any impact. He might be an indulgent older brother or an uncle or a former fond schoolteacher, affectionately amused. He might simply be deaf. She says tartly: “We hear you’re not a normal sort of restaurant manager. Into art and philosophy, we hear. High-Brow, capital H, capital B. So downstairs is right up your alley, I reckon. Right up your street. A feeding trough for rich wankers playing danger games.” He smiles but says nothing. She gives up. “So where are you from, before New York?”