The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “A name like what?” Charlie was registering the way Gabriel’s fingers drummed against the thick lens at the bottom of his glass. Something more than a name has got its claws in, he thought; something the name is pulling behind it, something Gabriel can feel along the tips of his nerves. There was sexual arousal, but also nervous excitement, maybe fear, maybe even dread, in the sweat on his palms. Yes, I believe Charlie detected all that. It was astonishing — to Charlie, at any rate, even after all those years, even after half of his lifetime spent on the kindergarten side of world history — it was astonishing what Australians would broadcast through the large-print magnifications of the bottoms of beer glasses.

  Charlie said little, he saw everything, it was a lifelong habit.

  Charlie read small print and invisible signs.

  “Jesus, mate!” customers used to say, unnerved, after he’d translated their throw of the milfoil stalks, or the yarrow sticks, or three Australian coins thrown six times. “How’d you know that?”

  If he’d said that their secrets were written all over them, that he read pages and pages of their past and inner lives before they even took the coins in hand, if he said that his knowledge was only startling because Australians are illiterate when it comes to a text that is not written down (the text of a life, for example; or the text of a disarming lie), if he said any of that, they’d get resentful. They’d turn nasty in that quick belligerent way Australians have. Got tickets on yourself, haven’t you, mate? they’d challenge, and he’d see their knuckles turn white.

  So he used to shrug and smile enigmatically. “Ancient Chinese secret,” he’d say, which was what they wanted to hear. Which allowed them to laugh it off, to demystify, to make crude jokes. “Bloody Chink mumbo-jumbo,” they’d grumble affectionately. “Ought to ship the whole bloody lot of you back. Where you from anyway, Charlie?”

  “Brisbane,” he’d say.

  That was a good one, they loved that, they killed themselves laughing over that one. You even sound Australian, you bloody two-bob magician. You don’t even have an accent, you little Chink cheat.

  This is the measure of love in Australia, Charlie used to say. The blunt edge of insult. The blunter the blow, the greater the level of acceptance.

  “No, but before that,” they’d persist. “Before Brisbane.”

  “Hong Kong,” he’d say. “Family of merchant princes. They sent me out to God’s own country to go to school.”

  “Yeah? And you could never bear to leave again? Good on yer, Charlie.”

  “So yer people got rich from tin watches and plastic junk? Half their bloody luck.”

  “You blokes and the Japs are gonna have us all in your pockets if we don’t look sharp, we got our eye on you, Charlie.”

  “Heard the one about Dad and Dave and the Chinaman, Charlie? See, the three of them kicked up their heels in Kings Cross with three very well-stacked sheilas, and afterwards Dad says: ‘Well, Dave, I may be getting on, but I’m not over the hill yet. Lulu and me, we did it three times last night. What about you?’

  “An’ Dave says: ‘Well, Dad, I can’t tell a lie. I reckon I was feelin’ me oats last night, I reckon we managed six times.’

  “ ‘An’ how’d the little Chinaman do?’ says Dad. ‘He’s looking mighty pleased with himself. How’d you do, mate?’

  “An’ the little Chinaman smiles from ear to ear. ‘Velly velly nice,’ he says. ‘One hundred and twenty-six times.’

  “ ‘What???’ says Dad. ‘Now, hold your horses a minute. You count the same way we do?’

  “ ‘Velly careful count,’ says the Chinaman, smiling. And he makes his fist go up and down, up and down, like a piston, see? ’One-two, three-four, in-out, in-out, five-six, seven-eight, in-out …’

  “You get it, Charlie?” they’d ask, falling over the bar in raucous laughter. “You get it, Charlie? You count the same way as us?”

  Charlie couldn’t keep count of the number of times he’d been told that joke, but he used to smile and say nothing and serve another round of drinks.

  “So what do you think, Mr Chang?” asked Gabriel, on that day when the chickens began to fly home to roost. He was restive. He slopped his Tooheys on the bar and puddled in the spill with an index finger. “I hear you have a bit of a gift. What do you read in my beer?”

  “You’re just back from Queensland,” Charlie said.

  Gabriel laughed. “No prizes for that one, Mr Chang.”

  “Charlie.”

  “Pardon? Oh. Thanks. Tell me something half the world doesn’t know.”

  “This name you bumped into is going to lead you a merry dance. You are looking for someone. She is going to bewitch you and lure you and lead you into the pit.”

  “Hell,” Gabriel said, alarmed, and knocked over his glass, precisely because Charlie had told him something he already and instinctively knew. “Hell, Charlie, what kind of rubbish is that?” He brushed his soaked shirtfront with agitation. “I admit I’m looking for someone. Well, in a sense I’m looking for two people, and one reminds me of the other in some way I was hoping it was her, of course. It’s just the kind of name she’d choose.”

  “A whore’s name?”

  Gabriel frowned. About some things, he was quaintly old-fashioned in a way that bemused his peers. He could be positively perverse in his refusal to face certain facts. “She tries to be, but she’s not. She plays at it. She plays with names. She hides behind them. I heard this one last night in the quarry That’s where she’d go.”

  Ah, the quarry.

  “You saw something horrible last night.” Charlie mopped up the spill and refilled Gabriel’s glass. “You’d like to forget it, but you can’t.”

  “Come off it, Charlie. People see bloody horrible things all the time in the quarry, don’t they? Doesn’t seem to disturb anyone’s sleep. It was just a striking name, that’s all. And for some mad reason I got excited and I thought, It’s her again.”

  Names have potency, this is ancient and unassailable knowledge. Charlie’s name, for instance, his real name, was Fu Hsi, though no one had ever used it. Can you imagine how Fu Hsi would go down in Brisbane? You’re Charlie Chink, the kids said, because they do that in Australian schools, bash the difference out. Deviation from the ordinary is not permitted here except as a source of amusement (What’smatter, can’t you take a bloody joke, mate?), bewilderment is no excuse, certainly not in frightened little boys encumbered with arcane social rituals and bafflements and bed-wettings and sheer foreignness, which is a terrible liability in Australia. So Fu Hsi began to become someone else, he began to become Charlie Chink who could always be a good sport and take a joke.

  A name that goes underground, however, continues to have a life of its own.

  “Your sleep is disturbed by the quarry,” Charlie pointed out.

  Gabriel laughed uneasily. “I was warned you were a bloody oracle, Charlie. Inscrutable, people say.”

  Inscrutable. That word used to get tossed around fairly often, in various tones and accents, for all strata and creeds and colours used to mix at Charlie’s Place (well, not such a great range of colours, to be scrupulously accurate; for certain reasons, for certain — what shall I call them? — historical reasons, persons of darker persuasion were always under-represented, at least on the ground floor where the pub and the restaurant were). Still. The mix was decidedly eclectic, for that was one of the dispensations attaching to outsiders, a general moratorium on the rules. Nothing counted at Charlie’s establishment, you see. When I call it Charlie’s establishment, I do not, of course, mean that he owned it. None of us knew who owned it, not even Charlie, who was paid from a numbered account. No doubt the profits flowed, as they usually do, to some consortium of entirely respectable people, pillars of society no doubt. Charlie merely managed the place for a nine-digit number. He had his own reasons, the reasons of a professional voyeur, which is what a photographer is when you get right down to it, and he had his own apartment and darkroom on the top floor. The
floors between … ah well, they were out of his control. In style and substance and tone, however, the restaurant and the pub, both at street level, were decidedly Charlie’s.

  Government ministers came to Charlie’s Place, and so did the people whose faces appeared in newspapers and on television, and so did the anti-establishment establishment. (You know who I mean. The university people and the arts bureaucrats and the literati: that distinguished group who look after culture and host conferences and play safe games of subversion in the literary journals and newspapers.)

  Quite other sorts of people also came. For example, the girls from the Cross and from the quarry itself came (though to different floors, of course, to different floors; if there was any going up or down stairs, it was not something on which anyone used to comment). Carlton and South Melbourne would fly up for a visit, Vaucluse and Bellevue Hill and Balmain and the university crowd, in short, used to mix with riffraff, with people of dubious standing, with the vibrant, dangerous, highly charged, illegal visitors from underground.

  When Charlie was proprietor of The Inferno (that was his name for the place, but hardly anyone else called it that; they usually called it Charlie’s Place, though there were many who referred to it simply — not in polite company of course — as the Cat House), when Charlie was there I imagine many of you dreamed of visiting his fizzy enterprise in the combat zone between city and quarry You always wanted to come, did you not? You imagined coming. (Ah, and many of you did come, many of you nodded to me as you handed me your coats; many of you talked to me, upstairs, as you took off your clothes. You won’t remember my face, but I remember yours. Indeed, it’s entirely possible that your face is on record in Charlie’s archives.) The idea of a place like Charlie’s has always lurked in the shadows of your mind, although by most standards the place was far from shadowy It was, in the opinion of many, the place to be seen. Charlie’s was the pub where significant discussions took place. And with respect to secret desires, with respect to those scenarios that you visualise hazily in unguarded libidinous moments but dare not put into words, with respect to those encounters you do not even permit into conscious thought, with respect to covert hungers that visit even the elect and are no respecters of age or gender or status, with respect to unplanned, spur-of-the-moment, absolutely innocuous visits to the upper floors, the arrangements were impeccably discreet.

  Charlie was situated, you might say, in the first circle of the quarry. He occupied the border lands. He looked both ways.

  The view from here is always interesting, Charlie used to say.

  “It’s true,” Gabriel acknowledged quietly, surfacing from his own preoccupations. “I see horrible things every night and every day.” He hunched forward and hugged himself as though the things he had seen were lodged painfully behind his ribs, a knot of angina. “I don’t know what to do. I don’t know if there’s anything that would make any difference.” Gabriel was like the little boy who kept his fist in the dyke all night, a frail buffer against inundation.

  “I heard that there’s been more blasting,” Charlie said casually, as he might have said that more rain was on the way. “The quarry’s spreading. I hear there’s more talk of the courts taking tougher measures.”

  Gabriel brushed this aside, distracted. “Has it ever happened to you? Have you ever been obsessed with something … or with someone …?” He rolled up his eyes, mocking himself. “And everything you see or hear seems to have something to do with … You’re always convincing yourself you’ve bumped into a clue, that the person you’re looking for is actually watching you, waiting, luring you on. Of course it’s crazy.”

  Charlie smiled and turned away He composed a photograph inside his head: Gabriel Comes with Clouds Descending. The photograph shows the gloomy cellar beneath a pub, and between the cobwebs and small pyramidal mountains of kegs, in the darkness, are three huddled figures, Cat and Catherine and Charlie himself. Gabriel stands in the open cellar doors, at the top of steps, the sun and a cloudbank behind him. He seems to have wings but they are merely pure shafts of light.

  This photo exists. It’s the illusion of control, Charlie told me; a kind of sympathetic magic; the frail hope that you can benignly influence a course of events that is already underway.

  He said neutrally: “What name did you hear?”

  “It just seemed as though the name had something to do with her, that it meant something I already knew,” Gabriel said thoughtfully. “Of course, in one sense the reason’s obvious, but I don’t mean for the obvious reason.” He laughed, shrugging off portents. “What’s déjà vu for sounds? It’s like a dream you can’t quite remember.” He stretched upwards with both arms, a self-mocking dismissive gesture, so that Charlie saw the winged figure he’d imagined the day before. “Anyway, except for this premonition that came with it and won’t go away, this is about nothing. I overheard a few words in a pub and it was a very strange conversation, that’s all.”

  A sharp moment of knowledge came to Charlie, not the kind he invited. They arrived like little pieces of heartburn. Gabriel is too physically perfect for this world, he thought; too passionate, and too stupidly given over to goodwill. He will invite violation as surely as we did, Cat and Catherine and me.

  He felt angry. He felt an urgency to hang a bike chain on Gabriel, to construct the Hell’s Angel photograph by way of protective charm.

  “There was a fight in a pub in Newtown,” Gabriel said. “And a stabbing. There was a hell of a racket.” He drifted inside the noise. “And then these bits of conversation reached me, I couldn’t even tell who the speakers were. I heard one man say: ‘They reckon she’s a witch.’ And then his mate said: ‘She’s got bloody claws, I can tell you that, a raging maniac when she’s up and going.’ And then the first one said: ‘That’s why they call her Cat.’ ”

  The spigot on a keg of draught ale snapped upright and bit Charlie’s hand. If Gabriel could have read the texts Charlie read, he would have known much from that. He might even have remembered why the name sent seismic tremors across his own synapses, why it gave off echoes (quite apart from the obvious ones; quite apart from the description of someone who could have been me). He might have smelled the name in his own blood, since it must have come down in his genes, it must have travelled round his veins before birth. Knowledge travels on unnoticed routes; it sprints along so much faster than thought; it leaps along image and sensation and unremembered memory the way a possum leaps from branch to branch.

  Everything is foretold of course. The text of everything that is going to happen is written somewhere. That was what Charlie believed. My ancestor Fu Hsi, he used to say, first of the Five Emperors of the Third Millennium BC, who taught his people how to split the wood of the t’ung tree and how to spin silk and how to read the history of what has not yet happened; my ancestor Fu Hsi, who invented the sixty-four hexagrams of the I Ching, the Book of Changes as my father called it, the Book of Secrets my mother said, my ancestor who spoke once of a young man at a distant border who would meet a shining messenger at the edge of a pit, my ancestor already saw, at the shimmering edge of his future dream, the building on Bayswater Road and Waratah Street from whose upper-floor windows both Sydney Harbour and the quarry could be seen. (Did Charlie believe a word of this? He did and he didn’t, I think. I think the ancestors and their gnomic predictions were safety and consolation, both, like his hiding behind the lens of a camera and composing kaleidoscopic truth.) But when he heard the mention of Cat’s name, he did feel that a die was cast. He believed that Gabriel had been sent.

  And if it became true, what does that mean? Perhaps simply that Charlie made a choice at that point. Whatever is going to happen, will happen, he said. It is already known somewhere. I wait and I watch.

  But is it true that the future is unalterable? Or can a watcher, a mere watcher, influence the course of events?

  I have come to think so. Watchers, after all, make choices; they choose what to see. And certainly the course of events changes
the watcher.

  Of course, this is hindsight. Yet it seems to me that the body does instinctively recognise turbulence. I have read that the oscillation of butterfly wings in Brazil may set off storms in Texas. More colloquially, more domestically: a goanna moving its tail on a rock near Perth, by a long and escalating chain of air displacements, can unleash flooding in Queensland. Certainly, then, it is mathematically possible that the speaking of a name can cause cyclonic disturbance of a different and more dangerous kind. In a dizzy instant, Charlie saw — no, he felt — the unstable convergence of past and future, the storm warnings, the betrayals, the old and new deaths.

  But it passed, of course. Such moments pass. We reel and then we steady ourselves. We rub the back of a clammy hand across our eyes. We forget what we saw, we convince ourselves we saw nothing. It is not a gift, it is a curse, to read ahead. Charlie was as human and lonely as the next magician. He told himself that he was talking to an extraordinary young man in a pub, nothing more.

  Gabriel talked his way through glass after glass of Tooheys.

  (“They drink by reflex, Australians,” Charlie said. “They have genetic immunity to toxins that would savage the livers of the foreign-born.”)