The Last Magician Read online

  “Oh fuck off,” the girl says. “Think you’re the bloody Queen of Sheba!” She spits in Lucia’s face.

  Then it happens again. Lucia can feel the baggy pants around her legs, and she is looking out at a girl in a neat private school uniform, an almost unbelievably ignorant foolish girl, a stuck-up bitch, a mere kindergarten child, a prissy little fancypants cunt. She feels as shaken with despair and rage as a piece of tin roofing in a cyclone. She spits in the stupid girl’s face, she spits at the clucking bevy of rescuers.

  Lucia, Lucia, Lucia, come on Lucia, her friends are calling, because the train is in the station, carriage doors are open, someone is pulling on her arm, yes, she’s in the train compartment, there’s a babble of talk, the train is moving, but the howling of the woman with the lifted skirts is in her ears, and the eyes of the girl on the platform are scorching her. The girl on the platform is still standing there with her hands on her hips, leering. Her eyes follow Lucia, they dart and bother and intrude and buzz about her the way mosquitoes do. Lucia feels stunned, as though she has been hit on the head with a mallet. She thinks she might faint. I know nothing, she thinks. Nothing. Vaguely, she wipes a clotted wet mess from her cheek. Her hands are trembling.

  Oh yuck, she sees the lips of Barbara Williams saying.

  Grotesque! she sees in the shape of Diane’s lips.

  She cannot hear what anyone is saying, their mouths move silently, she cannot respond to them, she cannot remember how those things are done: talking, opening a train door, getting out, walking, and yet here she is at the headmistress’s dinner table, the lace cloth over mahogany, the silver gleaming, the dimmed golden light of the dining room bouncing back off the Royal Albert china.

  “Lucia dear,” the headmistress is saying, “what on earth is the matter?”

  “Don’t tell us about woolgathering!” the English mistress smiles.

  “What is it, dear?”the headmistress asks. “What is it?”

  You can never step into the same dining room twice, Lucia thinks.

  “So are you going to Sydney Uni on the side?” the photographer asks.

  “What?”

  “You wouldn’t be the first MA student at Sydney to support herself by …”

  She says vehemently: “Forget that.” She lights a cigarette and smokes it violently. “For one, I can’t stand academics, especially the Sydney crowd. I can’t stand the …” She searches for a word. “They’re so tepid, I’d rather talk to johns, that tells you something. And for two …” She laughs. “If I was good at being good, I just happen to be even better at being bad. I should get a medal. And for three …” She is searching carefully for a way to express point three, but abandons it.

  “And for three?”

  “Oh I dunno. Freedom. Choice of cages. I don’t have to … shut down so much in this one as in the others. And something to do with choice of sides too. I dunno. I suppose I reckon if it’s come to the Quarry versus Them, I’m not Them. I could never be Them.”

  He nods. Same team, she thinks; him and me. “And what about you? Where’re you from?”

  “I told you. Brisbane.”

  She waves this aside. “No, but before that. In the beginning, I mean.” Her gesture implies: you’ve got more exotic baggage than is bought on a weekday in Brisbane. “Where were you born?”

  He considers her for several silent seconds, for so long, in fact, that she looks away, uncomfortable, and busies herself with lighting another cigarette. At last he says: “One of the reasons I could breathe better in New York. Nobody asked me where I came from.” She senses that she might have been dropped from his team, that at the very least she has lost crucial marks on a covert test. “Which answer would you like?” he asks politely. “I’ve got an old Brisbane one. As a kid, I got into the habit of saying Hong Kong. It simplified things.”

  “But it isn’t true?”

  “I’ve never set eyes on Hong Kong. I’m a true blue Aussie.” He smiles, certainly not in anger, not even in sorrow, simply remembering. “I said that to a teacher once, in Brisbane. I was born in North Queensland, Mr Brady. I’m a true blue Aussie.”

  “And?”

  “And he said, Because a man’s born in a stable, that doesn’t make him a horse.”

  “Rude jerk.” Conscious of clumsiness, but wanting nevertheless to make reparations of some sort, she says: “Would you like a cuppa? I’ve got teabags. Or beer, if you’d rather.”

  “There are compensations,” he says. “It’s like being a hooker or a restaurant manager. You see without being seen.”

  She opens a paint-chipped cabinet on the wall. “I’ve got Earl Grey or plain old Bushells.”

  It interests her, the fastidious distaste that wasn’t there in his photographer’s eye. He looks around the tacky room and calculates something, running debits and credits. He is balancing the room and the stink of other men against his interest in the girl, which is not a sexual interest, she is clear about that and therefore engaged. Challenged, even. Oddly excited. He is perhaps gauging the dangerous impact of that simple offer of the making of tea. She herself feels at risk. It is personal, the making of tea. It’s like kissing, it’s out of bounds. He is perhaps weighing the greater aesthetic pleasure and tranquillity of his own apartment, upstairs, against the invasion of privacy and who knows what breed of future threat?

  Offhandedly, inviting refusal, he says: “We could go upstairs, I suppose. If you really want.” He begins to leave in a way that suggests dismissal. “I’ve taken the top floor for myself.”

  “Yeah. We heard.” Her eyes gleam. “Okay, sure. Let’s go.” His immediate regret is so obvious, so comic, that she breaks into a Cheshire cat smile. “Shouldn’t have offered if you didn’t want to.”

  “No.”

  “Fuck off then.” She is affectionate almost, but exasperated with him, baring her teeth and making claws with her hands. He is transfixed. Macro lens, large aperture, slow speed, he thinks. Mock savage, she bats at him with her cat paws and he cannot move.

  Curious, she says: “Jeez, just a joke.”

  He blinks. Focuses. Embarrassed, he picks up his camera, a piece of armour, and the detached photographer is back, a man who records the world without reaction or comment.

  “What’s eating you?”

  “I’m not aware of being eaten.”

  “I had the distinct impression that I hit a nerve,” she says, fascinated.

  Basilisk. He raises his eyebrows and gives her the steady polite gaze of a man too well-bred to offer any response to impertinence. She puts one hand on her hip and raises her eyebrows back at him, a dare. “I hit a nerve,” she insists.

  “You think so.”

  “I know so.”

  “Tenacious, aren’t you?” He smiles to himself, then laughs. “The second coming of Cat.” He says it aloud, but not to Lucy.

  “I remind you of someone.”

  “You do,” he admits.

  “Named Cat.”

  “Hmm.”

  “That why you took the pictures?”

  “Maybe.”

  “So who is she?”

  He concentrates on fitting the various lenses into the carry case.

  “Another hooker?” she needles. “From the days of your Brisbane youth?”

  He says drily, “Do you want to come upstairs or not?”

  “Sure,” she says. “You’re not getting off that easy.”

  “Let’s go then.”

  4

  Beyond the windows, King’s Cross still fizzes and roars and trumpets its brassy notes sky high, and they are certainly aware of it, but it seems to Lucy that Charlie has adjusted the lighting and fiddled with the volume controls, that a muting of noise and brightness has been achieved. What a difference is made by another two floors’ remove from the street. Bamboo and rice paper screens, stretched tight as drumskins, subdue the afternoon glare and even the garish staccato shouts of neon, so that a wash of soft light, flickering, streaked with watered colour, seeps t
hrough the windows and fills the space. Space. That is what the apartment celebrates: the mysterious quality of space, and the way it draws attention to single objects placed judiciously within it, and the way these isolated objects, in turn, give space a form.

  Lucy feels like a traveller entering another atmosphere, like a spacewalker, like someone setting foot in emptiness, like someone returning to a lost world. Though many questions occur to her (When did you do this? How long ago did you move in? How could you have moved in without the rest of us knowing? What was it like before? How much stuff did you have to move out?), she does not want to violate the hush of the place by voicing them.

  Charlie has taken off his shoes. Instinctively, Lucy does the same, and she wanders around the large main room in her stockinged feet, pad pad pad, silent. The floor is polished wood, bare, and the walls are white, and both pull the eye toward a single table, long, narrow, and high, of gleaming black lacquer, against the far wall. Here a rakish statement is made. Flamboyant and asymmetrical, six shafts of orchids, each stem crowded with flowers, flaunt themselves in a glass cylinder on the table, purple throats brushing white backdrop. By one of the screened windows are two soft black leather chairs, low slung, facing each other. Apart from these objects, and the photographs, the room is empty.

  The room is full of mystery.

  It is also full of photographs.

  Occupying the end wall to Lucy’s left, an afterimage of the world they have escaped from, is a black-and-white photograph six feet long by four feet high. In the white wall, it is a shocking window into hell. Lucy sees a great crater with pocked rock walls and rope ladders, their bamboo rungs knotted together, columns of people moving up and down the ladders like ants. The faces visible in the foreground are the faces of nightmare. They are faces which might climb staircases to rooms like Lucy’s, which might come and go and leave money on the table. Lucy backs away from the photograph.

  “What do you think?” Charlie asks, behind her, and she jumps. “Striking, isn’t it? Wish I could say it’s one of mine, but it’s not. It’s by a Brazilian, Sebastiao Salgado. I bought a print and re-photographed it and blew it up. Adds to the graininess, but that’s appropriate, I think.”

  “Is it the quarry?”

  “Ah,” Charlie says, and she hears a burr of excitement in his voice. She hears his pleasure in her response and is momentarily pleased, and then annoyed that she has still not cured herself of a desire to please the setters of tests. “Is it the quarry?” he repeats, changing the inflection subtly, making a meditative statement. “Salgado claims it’s a gold mine in Brazil.”

  “You know what else it reminds me of?” she asks. “Dante’s Inferno. The Botticelli drawings. Have you seen them?”

  “Yes,” he says. “I have. And it reminds me of them too.”

  Lucy turns and looks beyond his shoulder into the grotto of the photograph on the opposite wall, this one in colour, equally large, shadowy, full of luminous greens. “Rainforest,” she says wistfully, and thinks of Gabriel and veers away quickly from the thought. She tips her head to one side, and considers the moss-thick debris of fallen trunks over which new growth rages. “It could be Tamborine, or Mt Glorious.” She walks up to it, into it, and traces the course of the water with one finger, stopping at the shush of spray around the two boulders. “I think it’s Cedar Creek Falls. I know someone who … ” She pauses and corrects herself. “I used to know someone who lived at Samford. We used to picnic at the falls. We used to swim here.” She feels as though she is touching a bruise. “I used to sit on that boulder and read.” She retreats into time past, pensive, her hand on the boulder.

  “I’ll make tea.” Charlie stands close behind her, closer, until his chin touches the top of her head. Lucy flinches and moves.

  “Did you take that one?” she asks, setting a question between them.

  “Yes.”

  “It is Cedar Creek, isn’t it?”

  “Yes.” He moves toward the door which is in the corner between the gold mine and the lacquered table. “I’ll make tea.”

  She turns to the fourth wall, the one that faces the black table and the orchids. This one is a honeycomb of framed pictures, snapshots, family groups, old school photos, sepia wedding portraits (grandparents? parents?), a Chinese bride, a Chinese couple behind a shop counter, Brisbane street scenes, New York street scenes, the signposts of a life.

  “God,” she calls out, disgusted, noting high school uniforms. “You went to Grammar. Bloody snob, wouldn’t have come here if I’d known.”

  (Was this any way for Lucy, former private school girl, to talk? Oh yes. It was Lucia, not Lucy, who went to that school, it was Lucia who had gone to formals with Grammar boys. Lucy was full of contempt for Lucia. She’d shed all that, the trappings of safe stuck-up bitches. She’d adopted a different history. She wanted no part of a private school past.)

  “Won a scholarship,” he calls from the kitchen. “Fish out of water.”

  A Grade 5 photograph: the boy in the middle of the front row (always the smallest kid in the class) holds an old school slate clearly chalked: Wilston State School. Grade V. Lucy laughs. “Is that you with the slate? They’re probably still using slates in school photos. Still used them when I was at school.”

  Another photograph, a composed one, catches her eye, because its enlarged central image is Charlie-with-the-Grade-V-slate. Under the curve of each arm, in the hollows of his waist, fitted to him like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle, are two girls, one on each side. The photograph is neatly titled, in India ink script on the taupe mat, The Two Catherines. The Catherine under Charlie-with-the-slate’s left armpit is poking a face at the watcher, hissing perhaps, her finger-claws curved to strike. She seems convulsed with inner laughter and levitates, cross-legged, between Charlie’s shoulder and his thigh.

  Lucy runs her finger along the ranks of the Grade 5 photograph and finds both Catherines. One. is in the second row, several spaces to the right of Charlie-with-the-slate. The other, like a singled-out gnome, is actually sitting cross-legged on the ground in front of the front row, at the feet of the teacher who stands to Charlie’s left, at the side of the class, the grimacing gargoyle at the teacher’s ankles, out of line and off-centre, a mocking point of asymmetry.

  The Catherine in the second row, with her plaits falling neatly over her shoulders and ending in long corkscrew curls, looks demure. Butter wouldn’t melt in her mouth, people might have said of her, particularly if they failed to look too closely. She is wearing the regulation school tunic, as are all the girls, but the ribbons tied to her plaits, at the point where braiding ends and curl begins, scroll across the box pleats of the tunic in a very quiet subversion of the rules.

  The other Catherine, the one in front of the front row, under the teacher’s close distrustful eye it would seem, has very short dark spiky hair. If it were not for the school tunic, Lucy might have mistaken her for a boy. Everyone else in the front row, including Charlie-with-the-slate, looks solemn even if smiling, for the taking of a school photograph is a sobering and momentous event. Catherine with the short spiky hair, however, has the tip of her tongue showing through a mouth that seems to be half hiss, half clownish grin, and she is positively seismic with revolt and tamped-down mirth.

  (I remind you of someone. You do. Named Cat. Hmm.)

  Catherine, Cathy, Cat, Lucy thinks.

  She goes to the kitchen, which is as stark and spare and beautiful as the living room, one wall a mosaic of framed photographs, and watches Charlie setting teapot and cups (small bowls, really, without handles) on a lacquered tray.

  “Found her,” she says. And when he looks up, she makes claws and hisses softly.

  “Don’t,” he says.

  “Who are they?”

  He unplugs an electric kettle, fills the teapot, sets the kettle down. He strokes the warm bellied curve of the teapot with his hands. Lucy notes how thin his wrists are, like a girl’s. She thinks it must have been hell at Wilston State School for a
boy like him. She knows a little about the penalties for difference. He pours tea into the small bowls and then offers her one, holding it reverently in both hands. He might have been holding an injured bird. She takes it as though receiving communion, sips, wrinkles her nose. “What is it?”

  “Jasmine,” he says. “Don’t you like it?”

  She shrugs and takes another sip. “It’s okay, I guess.”

  “Would you like a tour?”

  “Sure.”

  His bedroom, the walls covered with photographs, contains otherwise nothing more than a black futon, in one corner of a bare floor; except that a black jar of white arum lilies stands on the floor below the window.

  “Gosh,” she says, joking. “How do you live with all this clutter?”

  (But something wholly unexpected hit me then, a sharp pang of loss, a sensual vision of a room dimly lit, of crocheted lace over mahogany, of a headmistress smiling in a dining room on the other side of a great abyss. I felt something like physical pain, or hunger, and pressed a hand against my stomach, wincing.

  “What’s wrong?” Charlie asked.

  “Nothing,” I said, embarrassed.)

  Bright Lucy turns away from his bedroom. “Talk about busy rooms,” she says flippantly. “So what’s next?”

  The bathroom is completely white — white tiled floors, white tiled walls, white fixtures — except for a single blood-red hibiscus in a black vase beside the sink.

  “And this is my workshop,” he says of a final small room. “I’ve turned the cupboard there into a darkroom. Bit of a squash. You wouldn’t want to be claustrophobic.”

  After the patterns of emptiness, this room feels crowded, not just because of the workbench and the developing trays and stacked frames, but because of the shelves crammed with books and tapes, the television, the VCR, the chair. Lucy sets down her bowl of jasmine tea and picks up a videotape.

  “Charlie’s Inferno,” she says, reading the neat lettered spine. “Sounds like either Beckett or Monty Python.”