The Last Magician Read online

  “Brisbane, as a matter of fact.”

  “Brisbane!”She whoops with laughter and throws herself back on the bed and kicks up her legs. He grabs the camera and shoots. “Well, whad’ya know?” she laughs. “Brisbane.” She sits up and studies him while she finishes her cigarette. The shutter clicks. “Oh for God’s sake,” she says irritably, “could you put that fucking thing away?” and he sets the camera aside with a show of deference. They watch each other in a nervy, fascinated, almost drugged silence. “Me too,” she grins finally “I’m from Brisbane too. Well, whad’ya know?” Conciliatory, she offers: “The other girls call me Lucy.”

  He nods. Without the camera in his hands, he seems different. Like what? Like someone in a mournful intellectual movie, she thinks, a European one naturally, or else one of those slow bleak things by that Japanese bloke; like someone alone on a stage; like Hamlet. Without the camera, he is naked. Every few seconds his eyes turn to the shabby card table beside him. Every few seconds, unconsciously, he reaches out and touches the camera, lets his hand rest on it. She cannot imagine him as a restaurant manager. She cannot imagine him as someone who photographs hookers.

  “How long have you been working here?” he asks.

  “Is this an employment check?” There are two of him, it seems to her. There is the vulnerable one; and the armoured one who operates restaurants and cameras. He interests her.

  He says: “I’m curious about the ones who work upstairs and downstairs both. Any of the restaurant patrons use upstairs too?”

  “Oh, lots,” she says.

  “What happens when they see you downstairs?”

  “It’s funny, that. It’s really something. I used to think they were just putting on a careful act in front of their wives.” She waves her right hand airily about. “Or business colleagues, law partners, girlfriends, mum and dad, what have you. I used to think they were incredibly good actors. Not the slightest sign, no nervousness, no embarrassment, nothing. I might as well be a coat rack as a waitress.”

  He visualises this. He sees flesh hooks branching out of her like rainforest vines, he sees empty coats, fitted around the shapes of ghostly men, swimming like exotic fish through wet green air toward the hook. He considers lighting and shutter speeds. He calls these things photofallacies; or sometimes, singular (and his sense of the absurd is certainly singular), a photophallus. He names a possible future image On the Rack.

  “Yes?” he prompts, into her silence.

  “Well, it isn’t acting at all, I’ve decided. I’ll tell you something: there are two things that show you people as they really are, and I’ve done them both.” There is a long grey silence, and the grey truth about people-as-they-really-arc presses down on her as an atmospheric condition, though she wishes to fight her own weather. “Except, I dunno, for maybe one in a hundred.” She offers this small miracle for contemplation: “You do actually meet people who make you want to keep on looking.”

  “Looking for what?”

  “Oh you know, goodness, meaning, crap like that. One throw in a hundred.”

  “One in a hundred,” he says drily. “Quite hopeful really. So they’re not acting, the upstairs-and-downstairs men?”

  “No, they’re not acting. They really don’t see you. They really don’t know they know you.” This interests him. He has his feet on the chair rung, his knees hunched up, his elbows on his knees. He leans forward and rests his face in his hands so that his fingertips graze his temples. She thinks he looks like a genie out of some extravagant jade lamp from sing-sing dynasty, Chinatown. Through the frame of his fingers, he observes her closely Fisheye lens, soft focus, he thinks, so the girl is the eye of the whole curved room, but blurred. “They don’t even see me when they’re in this room,” she says. “I’m just part of the furniture. Literally. When they leave, they lock a door in their minds.”

  “Context,” he says.

  “Oh yeah. Context.” She mimics him, mock plum in her mouth. “That’s it all right, context. Outside of this context (and what’ll we call it? High Bordello? Ratbag Rococo?) outside of here, they wouldn’t recognise me if they fell over me. Don’t look at me like that.” She feels as though he has seen through the disguise again. She feels as though she is being touched, and she hates to be touched. It’s what appeals about the life, the money always between, the thick sheets of contempt, the sweet fact that you can never be touched. She would prefer the camera as partition again. She swings her legs off the bed and crosses to the window. She turns her back on him. “F’r example, would you notice that chair if I switched it with one in the restaurant? How about the pillow? How about the sheet, if you bumped into it in a pub? It’s the same with hookers. And with waitresses.”

  “And with restaurant managers,” he says. “And photographers. It’s a plus, you know. It’s like being made of one-way glass. You see everything without being seen.”

  “Yeah. You see everything all right.”

  “So how long have you been here?” he asks again.

  “Oh, a while.”

  “Upstairs and downstairs the whole time?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And before that?”

  She laughs. “Oh, you wouldn’t want to know. You wouldn’t believe me.”

  “In the quarry?” he suggests.

  She turns from the window. “Yeah, the quarry for one. Lived in it for three months. Quarry’s a one-way trip. That’s the rubbish heap, strictly for junkies.” She shudders. “Last stop on the line.” Disconsolate, she flops back on the bed and stares at the ceiling. “Three years, they reckon, once you’re in the quarry, till snuff-out time. That’s if you’re hooked. If you’re not, I suppose you last as long as you’re strong enough to steal. There’s a woman, Old Fury we call her, who looks about sixty. She’s probably not. She might only be forty, the quarry does that. For that matter, three years in an up-market joint like this is about the limit. Then it’s move out, or fall down the black hole fast. I’m a tourist,” she says. “An explorer. These places interest me, but I can leave, I’ve dabbled, part of the research, but I don’t touch dope.”

  Fisheye lens, shallow depth-of-field, he thinks; so the girl’s edges are sharp as glass within the cloudy bubble of the room. “I thought girls needed dope to put up with the johns.”

  “Yeah. Well …” She shrugs. “There’re other ways.”

  “What other ways?”

  “Professional secret. Personally, I’m rather fond of silent mastication of Milton.” She sits up and recites in a toneless rush: “Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit/Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste/Brought death into the world, and all our woe /With loss of Eden, till one greater So-and-so/Et cetera et cetera and so on.”

  He is astonished by this and laughs, but he is looking at her differently again. She finds herself embarrassed by his delight. Self-conscious. The disguise has slipped again, she thinks, furious with herself. Without being aware of it, she pulls the sheet up in front of her and holds it around her shoulders. They study each other cautiously, tense with interest. A macro lens, he thinks; 100 mm at f/16, with flash, to get the face of a tiger caged by bedding.

  “What did you do before the quarry?” he asks again. “In Brisbane?”

  “Why d’you take the photographs?” she parries.

  “Because the Tao of the photographer is like the stretching of a bow.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It brings down what is high; it lifts up what is low. I quote Lao Tzu.”

  “You’re not a real restaurant manager,” she accuses.

  “You’re not a real hooker.”

  “I am,” she says hotly. “I am. I fuck real blokes for real money.”

  “And I manage real restaurants.”

  “Okay, deuce,” she says, conceding. “But what are the photographs for?”

  “There’s a small and very unfashionable gallery in New York sells my stuff, that’s partly why. But I mostly take them for myself.
So I’ll see what I’ve seen.”

  “So you’ll see what you’ve seen.” She gives the words a dry mocking emphasis, but he will not be provoked.

  “That’s right,” he says mildly.

  “You’re very weird.”

  “Hmm. Now your turn. What did you do before? Tit for tat, that’s fair.”

  “You won’t believe me.” She still has the sheet up around her shoulders and still feels exposed. In the contrived manner of a child on a school concert stage, she hooks her hands together and recites: “There was a little girl who had a little curl, Right in the middle of her forehead. When she urns good, she was very very good, And when she was had she was horrid. That’s me,” she says. “I’m a brainy sheila, I’m afraid. I even went to Queensland Uni. As a matter of fact, if exam results are anything to go by, I’m practically bloody brilliant.”

  (Would I have actually said that? Yes, I think I might have, very sarcastically in the spirit of crossing a border and giving obedient answers to Customs and Immigration. Do you have anything to declare? Yes, an inconveniently busy and sceptical mind.

  I would have been making full and absolute confession. I would have announced my contraband with the air of a diagnosis handed down. I would have dutifully declared an infection, a rather nasty one, and terminal, though I could not imagine where or how I had picked it up.)

  “How’s that for a laugh?” Lucy says. “But my true intellectual vocation is renegade.”

  There is no expression on his face. He imagines her in a frame of recording and examining monks, slow shutter speed to make a smoke of movement, every stylus erect, one sly gargoyle sticking out its tongue. A photophallus. He nods and shrugs, impassive. “Not so hard to believe.”

  She says harshly: “You re a sucker then. I make up any damn thing I please.”

  He smiles to himself, not patronisingly, and not in amusement. It is perhaps more like a slight wincing than a smile. It is as though he recognises something, as though her prickliness is entirely familiar to him, and eminently understandable. “I went there too,” he says, as though this explained everything. “To Queensland Uni.” She has the disconcerting sensation that he knows exactly what her sudden rudeness was designed to conceal.

  To be unexpectedly endorsed, to have one’s angle of vision acknowledged, accepted, taken as given: it is seductive. He knows it. He knows — so it seems to her — that she is afraid of what else she may be tempted to tell him.

  (Do you have anything else to declare?

  Yes. Shapeshifting. From time to time, I find myself inside the skin of other people. I see out of their eyes. This affliction swoops down like seasickness. It changes things irrevocably.

  “So why are you here?” he asks quietly.

  Why am I anywhere? she thinks.

  She says flippantly: “No known antecedents or place of origin. I’m a genuine foundling, left in a home for unwed mothers, isn’t that something? and beyond that I haven’t inquired. I’m sure there’s plenty I never want to know, but I got sent to the very best boarding schools and taken into the very best homes. I was everyone’s clever Little Wonder, the emperor’s nightingale.”

  But how would she explain that day when the air parted, when she saw suddenly that there were parallel worlds, that you could cross a line, that you could fall through a hairline crack and cartwheel giddily down and round and down in slow motion, like moondust in space? And how did you know that wasn’t your real world, the one you came from and to which you properly belonged?

  She was still Lucia then, on the day the fissure appeared, the day she walked right through the looking glass to the other side. She was still Lucia Barclay then, immaculate in the uniform of one of Brisbane’s best private high schools for girls, a senior, a prefect, a winner of academic trophies, sports trophies, debating club trophies, a bit of a madcap and a devil but still the flower of her school where she discussed Virgil with the Latin mistress, where she asked the English mistress awkward but oh-so-innocent questions about certain lines in Shakespeare, where she had elegant Sunday dinners with the headmistress. She had yet to step on a crack.

  She is still Lucia.

  She is standing, surrounded by other schoolgirls, on the platform of Brunswick Street railway station in the inner-city section of Brisbane known as the Fortitude Valley. Hundreds of Brisbane high-schoolers are on the platform because they have all walked down from the Exhibition Grounds where an interschool athletics carnival has been held. In Lucia Barclay’s group, there is a certain amount of simpering and giggling and coy sideways glancing toward the knot of Brisbane Grammar boys who stand nearby. The boys, conscious of being watched and overheard, discuss matters both intellectual and carnal rather loudly.

  “You remember Greg Harvey who was a prefect at Grammar last year?” Barbara Williams is saying to her, pretending to be nonchalant and modest. “He’s at uni now. Engineering. He’s invited me to the King’s College formal and I suppose I’ll …” And someone else is wondering if Miss Dunlop will give them extra time for the Tennyson essay because now, having made the sports finals, they will certainly need … And there is talk of Latin translations and basketball matches, of hairdressers, of kings and queens and history facts, of university formals and high school balls, when suddenly Diane Barbour screams.

  What is it? What is it? they clamour, and Diane, embarrassed, claps a hand over her mouth and points. Lucia, frowning, turns to look.

  Everyone looks.

  The whole platform, crowded with shoppers and mothers and toddlers and uniformed high school students, looks.

  The sight is so outside the range of what anyone on the platform might imagine happening, that it does not seem real. It is as though they are dreaming a collective dream. This cannot be Brisbane. It is like one of those European movies about the war, Lucia thinks, something by that Italian director (de Sica, was it?), that stark film they were shown in a history class, the one with Sophia Loren in a ravaged village screaming at soldiers.

  Whenever Lucy remembers the scene on the railway platform, she sees it in black and white, with Lucia at one side of the screen and the woman at the other. She sees it as part of a film by de Sica. The film starts with a wide-angle shot of the woman, then gets closer and closer.

  The woman appears to be in late middle age and is raggedly dressed, dirty, her matted hair sticking out around her head like short snakes. She is making a spectacle of herself. She is standing with straddled legs, holding up her dirty cotton skirts in a bunch at her waist, and pointing to the black fuzz between her legs. Under the skirts, she wears nothing. The skin of her thighs and belly is slack and wrinkled and grotesque. It is as though she has a large bearded prune between the legs. The woman is howling like a dingo.

  Eerie, horrifying, the howls echo around the platform and bounce back from the iron roof. More than howls. The woman is blubbering, sobbing, gurgling, coughing up gobs of air, scuds of high frantic laughter, chunks of words, everything mixed like phlegm. Lucia lowers her shamed eyes from the woman’s pointing finger (Look, look, the finger seems to say. Do you know what this? — jabbing at her wrinkled thighs and tuft of hair).

  A voice from nowhere says inside Lucia’s head: That could be your mother. How would you know?

  Lucia, lowering her eyes, is transfixed by the woman’s shoes. One is a canvas sandshoe without a lace. The other is a man’s shoe, black.

  That is when it happens the first time. It comes like vertigo. Lucia can feel a canvas shoe on her left foot, an overly large man’s shoe on her right. She can feel the ridge on the ball of her right foot where the leather sole is cracked. Through some unimaginable, unconscionable error, she is exposed, without underwear, to a mob. She looks out at them uneasily. They are all in black and white, blurred, like a ravening pack of animals straining at leashes, teeth bared. If the leashes give way, Lucia notes with terror, they will devour her. She marshals up her fear like a shield to keep them at bay. For whole seconds, the crowded platform is struck dumb and struc
k motionless. Lucia, the witch of the Fortitude Valley, has them in thrall. Feast your shocked eyes, her howling and her pointing demand, and they do, riveted, mesmerised.

  Click. The affliction passes. Lucia is wearing neat black lace-up shoes again, regulation school shoes. She fingers the embroidered crest on her blazer pocket for reassurance. Her mouth is dry She keeps her eyes on the woman. Feast your shocked eyes, the howling woman invites, and she does.

  Then, through the turbulent weather of her sobbing, a tornado of speech racks the woman, or rather gobbets of words gush from her, strung together into something resembling speech. “Bloody,” she shrieks. “Bloody fuckers bloody fuckers bloody fuckers …”

  And this breaks the spell.

  Mothers cover their children’s eyes and ears, people surge forward, railway porters appear, the police surface from nowhere, the woman — struggling and kicking and shrieking curses — is restrained and dragged off.

  Lucia, shaken, her mouth dry, is for some reason face to face in the melee with another girl of about her own age, a girl not in a private school uniform, not in a state school uniform, not in a uniform at all. The girl wears shapeless army-surplus pants and a torn white T-shirt and she has dirty brown hair and her eyes smoulder with scorn.

  For seconds, possibly minutes, they are face to face, eye to eye. Then the girl speaks. “You stuck-up bitch!” she says in a low intense voice. “No one’s ever gonna lay a finger on you, are they, Lady Muck? No one’s gonna ram his prick up your arse when you weren’t expecting it, is he? you prissy little fancypants cunt!”

  Lucia blinks. At school she has a reputation for saying unsayable words, but this is not a language she knows, and she attempts to translate slowly, groping for meaning, dazed. “Pardon?” she asks from polite habit.