The Last Magician

by Janette Turner Hospital

  Unbidden, an image popped into Gabriel’s mind of a future grainy picture in the Telegraph, three faces behind the bars of the tramcar window, six-year-old Gabriel in the middle, his mother on one side, his father on the other. “Momentous occasion,” prominent lawyer says. “The present crosses the Great Divide and descends into history.”

  Gabriel felt strangely furtive and uneasy about this thought. Where had it come from? He felt as though he had done something wrong, and any minute now his father, stern but grieving, would send him to his room. He turned the sentence over again in his mind. The present crosses the Great Divide. It had such a lovely murmuring kind of sound, as though it had rolled under and over the pointed arches of a church. Another deeply disturbing thought zipped into Gabriel’s mind the way nasturtium pods pop their seeds. Zing! Pok! He saw his father mowing the lawn again, the strange jerky way he had pushed the mower past the nasturtiums and round the mango tree to the Horvaths’ fence and then turned and crossed back again and turned. He suddenly seemed to hear the voice inside his father’s head, trying out different comments for the reporters, testing how they sounded, imagining how they would look on the front page of a newspaper.

  Gabriel was so confused by these dreadful thoughts that he jumped up and ran to fetch his father’s slippers from the bedroom. When he brought them to the table, he could see how silly this was, so early in the evening, but it was such a relief when his parents both laughed at him and his father tousled his hair and his mother kissed him and he felt, rather than saw, the smiles that passed over his head. He felt that warm glow, which was getting rarer now, that meant both his mother and his father were happy.

  And now they were all on the tram. His parents sat opposite, on the grey-painted slatted curved seats, facing him across the small alcove. He loved the trams. He loved watching the straphangers as they clutched at the overhead leather loops, the way they swayed together, now this way, now that, not quite in unison but as if a wave moved along them, like a row of passionfruit runners on the side fence when the wind was in them. He loved the sound of the ding-dong when the conductor gave the cord two quick tugs after a stop. How unbelievable it was, how appalling, that the City Council wanted to axe the trams. He tried to imagine this scene of carnage: a mob of city councillors swinging weapons above their heads, the sound of splintering, the silver metal ripping and squealing, the trams bleeding to death.

  A sudden question arose.

  “What will they do with the dead trams, Daddy?”

  Gabriel’s parents looked at one another and smiled. Gabriel’s father took hold of his mother’s hand. “The makings of a barrister, Constance. A quirky imagination and the ability to mull over a riddle from new angles.”

  “But what they will they do?” Gabriel persisted.

  “Bury them, I’m afraid, son,” his father said, and his parents smiled at each other again.

  Such happiness flooded Gabriel. He looked at their interlaced fingers lying lightly against the navy cotton of his mother’s dress. The dress had a soft lace collar and the way her throat rose from it made Gabriel, for some curious reason, want to stand guard for her with his wooden sword. There was something precious and frail about her neck. It was like the neck of the porcelain shepherdess on their living room mantel. His mother’s hair was light brown and brushed her cheeks like feathers. She was very beautiful, Gabriel thought, and he was filled with happiness to see the smile in her eyes. Lately, it seemed to him, she had become quiet, quieter, and her skin seemed stretched more tightly across her delicate bones, almost as tightly as the cellophane across the jars of new home-made jam. Impulsively, he stood and leaned across the space of the small alcove and kissed his mother.

  “Gabriel,” she said softly, smiling, touching his cheek with the hand that was not interlaced with his father’s.

  Gabriel sat down again and then, crash, the lovely glow was in splinters. That look was on his father’s face again, that edginess in the way his father uncrossed his ankles and shuffled them on the floor and then recrossed them the other way. Gabriel was in an agony. There was nothing he could do. It was not permissible to give his father a hug and a kiss in public. If he had done it, his father would have said in a stern but kindly way: “Now Gabriel, that’s for girls and sissies, not for grown-up young men who are six years old.” But his father was hurt, Gabriel could see that. His father wanted a hug and a kiss, and he also didn’t want it. Gabriel said urgently, guiltily: “Dad, where will they bury the trams? And what will they do with the tram lines?”

  It was like turning on the rugby game on Saturdays. It was like watching the yabby water leak into the bays he and Ruthie made in the creek bank, the way his father’s body soaked up energy again. Such relief flooded Gabriel. I must watch more carefully, he told himself. I must be more careful what I do.

  His father said boisterously: “The trams will mostly go for scrap metal, I’m afraid, son. When I said ‘bury’ I was using a figure of speech. We call that a metaphor. That’s when we say something dramatic, for effect, but we really mean something else. Do you understand?”

  Gabriel, a little foggy, nodded solemnly.

  “Though there’ll be some for the museum, no doubt,” his father added. “When you have a son of your own, you can take him to the museum and sit in a tram with him and say, ‘Son, when I was as old as you are now, I rode along Queen Street on a tram like this with my dad. The old tram lines ran down the middle of the street in those days.’ ”

  Gabriel laughed with pleasure and his mother smiled and his father squeezed his mother’s hand.

  “As for the tram lines, they’ll probably have to pull them up, though they might be able to run asphalt right over the top,” his father said. “And we won’t have any more of those wretched traffic snarls or that crawling along and getting held up at all the tram stops. It’s good for the flow of traffic, Gabriel. That’s progress.”

  A reporter with a camera who had got on at the last stop and had been moving along the car paused at their alcove. “Excuse me, sir,” he said, “but are you Mr Robinson Gray?”

  Gabriel’s father looked enormously surprised. “Why, yes,” he said. Gabriel’s mother blushed a little, and pressed her lips together, and looked out of the window because she hated having her photograph taken. A cloud passed across her eyes. Into Gabriel’s mind another nasty little cobbler’s-peg weed of a thought intruded. How did the reporter know we would be on this tram?

  The reporter’s camera sprouted a silver pudding basin on a black neck. Pop, pop, it said, and lightning flashed across the tram. “Just another with the little lad in the middle,” the reporter said, and Gabriel was half-sitting on their laps, an idiotic grin on his face. “And do you have a comment, sir?” the reporter asked in a deferential tone.

  “Well, It’s just something I want my boy here to remember,” Gabriel’s father said solemnly. “Something he can one day say to his own son in a museum somewhere.” He patted Gabriel on the head. “It’s a momentous occasion,” he said. “The present crosses the Great Divide and descends into history.”

  “Oh very good, sir,” the reporter said. “And ma’am?” he nodded to Gabriel’s mother. “Do you have a comment?”

  Gabriel’s mother smiled shyly and brushed her hair a little nervously out of her eyes. “Well,” she said, “I’ve always used the trams, I like to go to McWhirter’s every —”

  “Gabriel has a comment,” his father said jovially. “Tell the man from the newspaper what you wanted to know, Gabriel.”

  And so Gabriel dutifully repeated: “What will they do with the dead trams?” and the reporter laughed, and pop, pop, pop, he flashed lightning again, and “Just this way a bit, sir, father and son, that’s wonderful. Chip off the old block, eh Mr Gray?”

  “Time will tell,” Gabriel’s father laughed, ruffling his son’s hair. “But I think this young fellow may well leave his mark on the Queensland courts in time.”

  Behind him, Gabriel could feel the way a warm
rash was moving up his mother’s throat, fanning out from the white lace collar, mottling her face. When he sat down opposite again, she was smiling fiercely at him and her eyes were very, very bright. His parents were no longer holding hands.

  “Mummy,” he said, desperate, “when we get to McWhirter’s, can we buy sugar doughnuts again?”

  She smiled and nodded, grateful to him, her eyes full of love (It’s all right, then) and the reporter handed his father a card, “Ted Bixby, sir. Sunday Mail. It’s up to the editor, of course, but I think you’ll find …” and his father swelled with such well-being (Gabriel — oh he wishes he didn’t, but he does — Gabriel thinks of the frogs on the back porch at night) that it was going to be all right after all. There was such happiness again.

  Now, in fact, Gabriel’s father was bubbling over with energy and helpfulness. “See the tree?” he pointed for Gabriel at the triangular junction with Eagle Street. The Moreton Bay fig, at least a hundred feet high and a hundred across, stood serene as a pagan colossus in its own shaggy green light. “That tree was there when Captain Cook sailed up the coast.”

  The tiniest of looks and an unsmiled smile passed between Gabriel and his mother. Every Thursday he would say to her: “Do you think Captain Cook could have seen the tree, Mummy?” And she would say: “I’m sure he might have through his telescope, darling.”

  “There’s the Story Bridge,” his father pointed, crossing the alcove and sitting next to Gabriel and leaning across him, excited as a boy.

  “McWhirter’s is soon,” Gabriel said. He thought with pleasure of the amazing doughnut machine in McWhirter’s, how watching was as much fun as eating, how the little circles of white dough plopped down out of the metal chute into the river of burning oil, sizzle sizzle, and the slow wheel with its twenty metal gates slowly turned and the white dough got puffier and firmer, and exactly halfway round a magic lever rose from the burning oil like Excalibur and flipped the doughnut over, and lo, the underside was golden brown and the circle kept turning, slowly, slowly, toward the avalanche of sugar, the final gate, the final flip, the hot sugary doughnuts popping into little waxed-paper bags and then into desiring mouths. On Thursdays after school, Gabriel and his mother sat at the café table in McWhirter’s and laughed together and ate and licked their sugary lips and wiped their greasy fingers on paper serviettes. “Two more stops to the sugar doughnuts,” Gabriel, veteran of tram rides, sang joyfully.

  “Two more stops to what?” his father said.

  “To the sugar doughnuts,” Gabriel said. “At McWhirter’s,” he explained, since his father looked a little blank. Then a trifle uncertainly: “That’s where we get off.”

  “We most certainly do not,” his father said. “We’re going straight on to New Farm wharf. We can ride the ferry across the river and back if you want.”

  “But Mummy said …” Gabriel began, and bit his lip.

  “Constance?” his father said sharply. “You haven’t been buying the boy rubbish, I hope? It’s very bad for his teeth.” Teeth were a big issue for Gabriel’s father, whose smile was crowded with them, dazzling white. Brushing was a big issue too, and so were dentists.

  “Just occasionally,” Constance said meekly.

  “Well kindly don’t do it again,” his father warned.

  Gabriel, budding rugby player under weekend tutelage from his father, made a quick feint to the right. “It’s not fair, Daddy,” he grumbled. “You and Mummy never let me have sugar doughnuts when I want them.”

  “That’s because your parents know what’s best for you,” his father said. And Gabriel saw his mother’s eyes, expressionless, rest on him and stay there and he looked back at her and smiled sadly, knowing that both gratitude and surprise lay behind her expressive non-expression.

  He loved his mother. He loved her so much that when she was unhappy he could feel it like a bruise on his arm.

  He worshipped his father. Nothing made him happier than the feeling of his father’s hand tousling his hair.

  Right now, he felt as though his skin was being stretched across his bones by two dogs who would not let go. He was angry with himself. He thought that he must be more careful, that he must watch very carefully indeed, and that he must think very very carefully before he said anything. When the tram lurched round the corner into Brunswick Street and The Valley, and he saw McWhirter’s loom large and then dwindle from view, he found himself wondering how the doughnuts felt being flipped out of burning oil and sliding down the chute toward somebody’s mouth.

  It seemed to him that the wonderful hot sugary taste was something he would never know again; that next Thursday, when he and his mother sat in McWhirter’s café, something bitter would be in the little wax-paper bags, spoiling things.

  It was two stops after McWhirter’s, as the tram began to rumble by the huge old gone-to-seed houses with the rotting verandas, as it stopped outside the shabby old Empire Hotel, that the thing happened. It was this event which, more than the death and burial of the trams, more than the sandpaper edges of his parents’ unhappiness, more than the loss of sugar doughnuts, would fix the day forever in Gabriel’s mind.

  At the stop outside The Empire Hotel a woman got on the tram. She entered through the wide door in the middle, and came down the aisle toward Gabriel and his father who was, in the wake of posing for photographs, still sitting next to him. Instantly she had all Gabriel’s attention. For one thing, she had shorter hair than he had ever seen on a woman, and for another, she was dressed very oddly, and for another, she had such sharp darting eyes. She made him think of a magpie. She sat across the aisle from the alcove where Gabriel and his parents sat. She sat level with his mother, diagonally across from Gabriel and his father.

  Gabriel was not at all surprised that she attracted his father’s attention instantly too. What did surprise him was the bold and unwavering way the woman stared back at his father. He thought with great interest about the fact that someone who ought to feel self-conscious, someone of whom it was possible to imagine the whole tram smiling and whispering behind its hands (in fact, he could see people doing exactly that, raising their eyebrows at one another), someone who ought to feel embarrassed and ashamed … that person could act, in some mysterious way, as if she were queen of the tram. Perhaps it was the way she held herself, with her back very straight and her head high.

  With her wiry hair — it was black, jet black — in a strange spiky fuzz around her head, she should have looked absurd, but she did not. She was old, at least as old as Gabriel’s parents, maybe more. Her arms were browner, more leathery, but were crisscrossed with the strangest patterns of lines. Were they scars? Some were ghostly white, as though ferns had imprinted themselves long ago, and some were vivid and new. She looked like a woman warrior from some unknown tribe. She looked, Gabriel thought, magnificent in some wholly new way, in spite of the fact that she wore white bobby socks like a little girl, and a dreadful yellow cotton dress of the kind you could see in Woolworths’ windows, and — on the left lapel of the front opening — a plastic brooch, a turquoise Ulysses butterfly, a Blue Wanderer as Gabriel’s Grade 1 teacher called it in Nature Lesson. It was the kind of brooch you could buy in tourist shops, the kind little girls wore.

  Gabriel was becoming aware of a curious throbbing, or humming, coming off his father’s thigh which was pressed against his. It was as though he were sitting next to a dynamo.

  Because Gabriel and his father were so obviously mesmerised, Gabriel’s mother glanced sideways. The woman, who had been looking at Gabriel’s father as a queen looks at a slave, caught the slight movement to her left and turned. The two women stared at each other for a moment, and they both seemed a bit startled, then Gabriel’s mother smiled slightly, very shyly, and the woman gave a most wonderful radiant smile in return and did something quite odd. She leaned across the aisle to shake hands with Gabriel’s mother.

  Gabriel’s mother took the hand and the strange woman pumped it up and down, very vigorously (Gabriel thoug
ht of a magpie again, that chirpy energy, those darting vibrant eyes), and Gabriel’s mother said hesitantly: “I think I met you once, at Catherine Reed’s party, didn’t I? Catherine and I were at high school together. At Clayfield College.”

  The woman never spoke, but she laughed a most wonderful belly laugh, as though the thought of Clayfield College was a huge joke, and Gabriel’s mother laughed, and Gabriel laughed too because it was such a rollicking boisterous king-sized breaker of hilarity rolling and surfing over them, sweeping them up, rushing them along, foaming and spuming and over-and-overing them, a laugh so infectious that other people joined in and the reporter came back and pop, pop, he flashed lightning at them all again, he caught the strange woman and Gabriel’s mother leaning in across the aisle toward each other.

  Then Gabriel became more intensely aware of the vibration against his thigh.

  “Daddy?” he said alarmed, because his father was clearly trembling now, visibly and violently. This did not help, this drawing of attention to his father.

  His father flashed a very toothy smile at everyone, a very dazzling white smile. “Crossing the Great Divide into history,” his father boomed in a strange tight voice, and the reporter pop-popped again, and everyone laughed and cheered, but Gabriel could still feel his father’s thigh against his, and his father’s hand in his, and his father was vibrating like a jackhammer doing roadwork. He would not look at the woman in the yellow dress, but the woman looked at Gabriel’s father and the way she looked at him frightened Gabriel. He did not know the meaning of her look, but it made him feel queasy and dizzy. It was as though someone had told him that when you step off a footpath you fall straight through a grating that goes to the bottom of the world. And had proved it to him.

  He felt as though he was going to be sick.

  He supposed they stayed on the tram until the terminus at New Farm. He supposed they went into the park and the woman went in some other direction. Perhaps she took the ferry across the river to Norman Park, or perhaps Gabriel and his parents did. He could recall nothing whatsoever from this part of the day. It was blank. He remembered his father’s trembling, and the unreadable look on the woman’s face. The next thing he could remember was the feel of his own sheets against his skin and the murmur of his mother’s voice and then the blank of sleep from which he was jolted awake to the sound of his father shouting and shouting and then the crash of something being thrown.