The best answers, the safe answers, are riddles, Charlie notes.
The boy takes six steps forward, carefully avoiding the cracks. If he touches the hedge with his left hand eighteen times between here and the end of the block, will he see the face again, the one that sometimes watches, the one that sometimes sits in the front row of his class at school? If he resolutely refuses to look as he passes that space, that hole in the wooden fence, matted with orchids and trumpet vine and lantana hedge, will the face be there when he finishes the hexagram and looks back over his shoulder?
The face is there.
It vanishes.
The boy stands uncertainly in front of the hole in the fence. Jungle is behind those rotting pickets, the kind of front yard he loves, the kind people had up in Innisfail, the kind that stretches back forever from the fence, reaching all the way to China. Pawpaw trees poke up all over the place like scaly stakes in a vegetable patch, circles of banana clumps bump into each other, a rubber plant threatens to engulf the whole house. Perhaps it has engulfed the whole house, since, in fact, only a bit of rotting veranda can be seen, but the boy assumes there is still a house behind the dark galloping green. What he likes best: the grass is waist high, the sticky heads of paspalum brush the trumpet vine. There is something thrilling, defiant, deliciously unruly, something full of illicit promise about an unmown lawn. When a breeze moves across it, secret pathways are revealed, tunnels are hinted at. There is a murmured suggestion of hidden loot: rubber tyres, rusty iron, lost tennis balls.
The face is there again. It is a grubby face, framed by short spiky hair. It has green eyes. There are two tiny gold hoops in its earlobes, and hanging from each hoop, like a teardrop, is a blue glass bead. The ends of a yellow ribbon tied around the head droop over the forehead and into the green eyes. The mouth blows them off, but they flop into the eyes again. He has seen that face in the front row of the classroom and in the playground, he has heard many stories about it, but boys and girls live in different territories at school. They don’t look at each other. Besides, the face comes and goes. Sometimes it doesn’t appear for weeks.
“Whad’ya staring at?” the apparition asks.
“Nothing.”
“Were so. Where ya from?”
The boy thinks for a moment. “China,” he says.
“No, yer not. What’s yer name?”
“Charlie Chang.”
“I’m Cat. Yer wanna come in?”
“Yes,” he says. When he crawls through the hole in the fence and the lantana, he feels that he has crossed a line similar to the one he crosses when he enters the painting by Wang Wei. On the trek toward the rotting veranda through the waist-high grass, Cat leading the way, they pass a rainwater tank, several stacked boxes with rusty grilles on one side (they appear to be birdcages), and the rusted corpse of a car resting legless on its axles. Charlie stops with wonder.
“It’s me dad’s old Holden,” she calls, amused, having mislaid him and coming back for him. “You wanna get in?”
“Yeah,” he breathes, awed.
She opens the door for him and he sits, kingly, behind the wheel. He has never been permitted to sit behind the wheel of his father’s utility truck, which is used strictly for bringing vegetables and fruit from the farmers’ market. She stands outside and hooks her arms over the glassless window and grins at him. He is oblivious, driving to China. Then she goes around and gets in the other side. His absorption interests her. She watches him, amused.
“I seen you in the shop sometimes,” she says. He looks at her, surprised. He cannot remember seeing her in the shop. “Round the back,” she says. “I climb yer mango tree. I seen yer with yer books in the sleepout.”
This makes him uneasy, to know that he has been observed in that private space. He says carefully: “I’ve seen you at school sometimes.” Half wild, he has heard teachers say. A little tart, they say, with those shameless pierced ears. And from other children have come certain facts: she lives in a loony bin, her family is nuts, her dad is raving mad when he’s drunk, her dad’s drunk all the time, her dad’ll kill you if you go too close, they live in rubbish tins, they eat pig slops, she’s a tart, only whores and tarts wear rings in their ears, she smells of manure, she can put a hex on you. “But you don’t go to school much,” he adds.
She grins. “I nick off. They catch me sometimes, but.”
“What do they do?”
She laughs, and he feels invited into her conspiracy, into the funnel of her power. What, after all, can they do? “They come and see me dad and he tells them to bugger off, and then they tell me I gotta go to school.”
“Where do you go?” he asks, “when you don’t go to school?”
“I play with Willy,” she says. “We go fishing at Breakfast Creek. Or else Dad takes us out to the farms.”
“Who’s Willy?”
“Me bruvver. He’s potty but we don’t care, Dad and me. You wanna come and see Willy?”
“Okay,” he says, reluctant to let go of the driving wheel, but very much under her spell, willing to do anything she suggests. She laughs at him again, then gets onto her knees on the passenger seat and leans over and puts her arms around his neck and kisses him on the lips. He feels as though he has been pitched over the cliff in Wang Wei’s painting and is soaring through sky. He has never been kissed on the lips. His father, very occasionally, touches him on the shoulder. When he goes to bed, his mother puts both hands on his shoulders and presses her lips lightly and briefly against his forehead.
She has put a hex on me, he thinks. He feels light-headed and full of a wild happiness.
Cat laughs and kisses him again and he kisses her back.
“C’mon,” she calls gaily, and is out of the car and off through the long grass like a rabbit. He goes pelting after her. He is flying.
Two of the steps up to the veranda are missing, and the rest are so soft with rot he is afraid he will sink right through. On the veranda, sitting playing with an arrangement of stones, is a child who must be about five. Charlie, who is nine years old, suspects that Cat might actually be ten, though she is in the same grade as he is at school. He has heard that she was “kept back", because of her frequent absences, perhaps. (Because she’s thick, other kids suggest, tapping their foreheads.)
“That’s Willy,” Cat says, and flings herself on the child and covers his cheeks with kisses. Charlie is greatly tempted to do the same. There is something about Willy that makes one want to cuddle him. He is quite unnaturally beautiful. His skin is translucent, his hair is wheaten blond, his eyes are the watery green of rainforest pools, a paler green than Cat’s, a limpid blue-green. “Willy’s cracked,” Cat says lightly.
“What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” asks Willy.
“It’s three o’clock,” Cat says, smothering him with kisses again.
“No it’s not,” Charlie says. “We get out of school at three and I’ve been home for ages. It’s five o’clock maybe.”
Cat laughs. “Doesn’t matter,” she says. “Willy always asks the time. He’s cracked. Dad says he’s got the holy spirits in his blood, coz he was drinking too much the night he made Willy, or else Mum fooled round with an angel, he doesn’t know which.”
“Where’s your Mum?” Charlie asks, peering into the dim interior beyond the front door.
“She buggered off,” Cat says cheerfully.
“Where’d she go?”
“We dunno. There’s just Dad, but he’s out on the farms.”
“What farms?”
“Ferny Grove. Or maybe Samford or Cedar Creek, he works at all them places.”
“What does he do?”
“Farms,” she says, exasperated. “He mucks about for the farmers. You know, manure and stuff, and picking pineapples and vegies, and the pigs. He takes us sometimes. You wanna come?”
“When?”
“Tomorrow, if me dad’ll take us.”
“You mean miss school?”
Her eyes glitter. “Yeah.”<
br />
Charlie is awed. He feels the lure of breaking the rules, but says uncertainly, “I’d have to ask my father.”
Cat wrinkles up her nose. He cannot tell if she is disgusted with him, or simply puzzled.
“Who looks after you?” he asks curiously.
Cat wrinkles up her nose again. “I look after me.”
“You mean,” he asks, in a hushed voice, “there’s no one here?”
Cat looks puzzled. “We’re here,” she says.
“But I mean, no grown-ups?”
Cat lies on the wooden floor of the veranda and kicks her legs like a frantic beetle on its back and laughs.
“You’ll get splinters,” Charlie says, embarrassed and excited by the sight of her grubby panties. There are loose boards, and oddly slanted ones, and strange warps and bumps and missing planks. Through one of the spaces he can see the dark crawl space thick with cobwebs. He shudders.
“You wanna play the railway line game?” she asks suddenly, sitting up.
The dangerous thrill of the forbidden seems to rise from the cobwebs in the frightening black space below them. It occurs to Charlie that he is sitting on top of hundreds of spiders. Underneath him, they are moving in their noiseless silken way, and some of them are redbacks and some are funnelwebs and they carry secret little pouches of poison.
“You wanna play?” she asks again.
“Play what?”
“I told ya. The railway line game.”
In the shadowy cutting in the railway embankment, his parents have warned, lurks death. Can Cat seriously be suggesting…? What does she mean by the railway line game?
Charlie’s shop and Cat’s overgrown house are both on Newmarket Road, and both face the railway line that runs from Brunswick Street to Ferny Grove, the end of the line. On the other side of the road from their houses, a high embankment separates trains from cars. There is an overhead footbridge — it is not far from Cat’s place — that leads up to Wilston Heights where the snobs and the nobs and the private school kids live. On the other side of the line, the Wilston Heights side, the lawns are always mown and the fences do not lean or sway or have missing planks. There are no rusted cars in long grass. There are two ways to go from Cat’s and Charlie’s side of the railway line to the other side: by the overhead bridge, or through the cutting which is quite close to the bridge.
Charlie has been absolutely forbidden by his parents to go anywhere near this cutting, but he has seen the boys on the corner, his Grade 8 tormentors, duck under the fence and stand there in their loose gigantic bodies to watch the trains rush by. From the far side of the street, hidden behind bushes, he has observed, awestruck, that when the trains go by, the wind they make flattens the grass in the cutting and whips his tormentors’ hair about their heads.
“C’mon, Willy,” Cat says. She grabs Willy’s hand with her right, Charlie’s with her left. Her hand is wiry and hard.
“I’m not allowed,” Charlie says.
“You don’t have to do it if you’re scared. You can stay with Willy and watch.”
She does not, however, as he learns with alarm, mean that he can stay on the other side of the street, or even on the footpath outside the fence. As soon as they reach the cutting, she ducks under the sign that says DANGER. ENTRY FORBIDDEN BY ORDER, BRISBANE CITY COUNCIL, and Willy bobs under with her.
“Well, c’mon,” she says impatiently, and Charlie hesitates only for a minute. His desire to please Cat is greater than his desire to stay beyond the fence. And he finds, in fact, that he is no longer afraid because he believes Cat could step on the lines and raise her hand as a policeman might, and the trains would brake and rumble to a halt, or would vanish into thin air. She has holy spirits in her blood, he thinks. When she moves, the yellow ribbon bobs about like a kite tail and he can see a fizzing glow around her, the kind you see around a light bulb when you squint.
“You hold Willy’s hand,” she says. She draws an X in the ground with a stick. “Now Willy, you know you gotta stay right here,” she says. “Don’t you move or I’ll clobber ya.”
Charlie, his heart racing, stands in the valley of the shadow of the cutting and takes Willy’s hand. It is soft and plump and Willy looks up into his face and laughs and asks: “What’s the time, Mr Wolf?”
“It’s five o’clock,” Charlie says, and kisses Willy on his soft silken cheek. Willy tastes delicious, and Charlie kisses him again. From the corner of his eye he can see Cat, but he can hardly bear to watch. It is not exactly fear that is coming back into that place in the stomach where butterflies breed. No. He knows Cat is all-powerful. It is more the frightening mystery of the exercise of her power, of not knowing what might happen next, where he might be taken, what he might see. She is doing what the boys on the corner do: walking between the lines on the wooden sleepers. His heart is beating so fast, he thinks it may leap up into his mouth like a fish. What time is it? Is it time for the 5:30 train to come through?
“Cat,” he calls nervously. “I think the train’s coming soon.”
“Course it is,” she calls back. “Hasn’t got to Wilston yet, but. You can hear it whistle.”
Yes of course, he thinks, feeling foolish. His parents’ shop is opposite Wilston station. He knows perfectly well that the train whistles as it leaves. He knows you can hear it from here.
“Fifty-one, fifty-two, fifty-three,” calls Cat, stepping from sleeper to sleeper, turning, coming back past the cutting, turning.
“What’s the time, Mr Wolf?” Willy calls, jumping up and down with pleasure and tugging at Charlie’s hand.
“Train time, Willy!” Cat calls. “You stay right there or I’ll smack you.”
The train whistles and Willy calls excitedly What’s the time Mr Wolf what’s the time Mr Wolf what’s the time Mr Wolf? and Cat claps her hands and laughs. Then she does something quite mad, quite terrifying. Directly opposite the cutting, she lies on a sleeper, her head propped against one shining steel rail, her feet on the other. Charlie gives a strangled cry and lets go of Willy’s hand and rushes forward, but stops transfixed at the edge of the mound of crushed bluestone on which the tracks are laid. In the distance, down the long shimmering silver lines, he can see the train leaving Wilston station, belching smoke, its black moustache grille almost scraping the rails.
He is weak at the knees, he cannot move, he cannot speak. “Cat!” he tries to call, but no sound comes. Cat says to him calmly, “When it gets to the bridge, I get up.”
The overhead footbridge is fifty yards from the cutting. Charlie, paralysed, watches the train streak toward it. Oddly, it takes much longer than usual, it takes forever, it is coming in slow motion without a sound and Charlie is in a dream now, he is moving through water or through honey, this is not real at all. Sobs of laughter come up out of his mouth like hiccups. He feels a small warm hand clutch his and wants to tell Willy to go back to where Cat drew the X on the ground or he’ll smack him, but only the bubbles of laughter come out of his mouth. They should step back, they should run, but he cannot move. He can feel something warm and wet trickling down his legs. Willy murmurs in a singsong voice: What’s the time, Mr Wolf?
And then the train is at the bridge and Cat jackknifes up and catapults herself across the gap, and she is pulling Charlie and Willy and they are all rolling over and over in the grass of the cutting like tennis balls rolling down a hill and the train is like a rushing mighty wind and the roaring of the end of the world is in his ears and Cat and Willy are laughing and Cat is kissing him on the lips. He has never been so frightened or so excited in his life, he has never felt so powerful. If he snapped his fingers, the train could roll over them like a cloud passing and not a hair of their heads would be touched. He kisses Cat back and wants to go on kissing her forever.
“You wanna marry me?” she asks.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes yes yes.”
“Okay,” she says. “Willy can marry us.”
And the three of them, laughing and shrieking, kissing an
d hugging, roll around in the long soft grass of the cutting like nestlings waiting for the mother bird’s return.
3
Five children played in a deep rock pool at Cedar Creek Falls: Charlie and Cat and Willy and Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed.
It is not difficult for me to picture this scene, knowing the place as I do, knowing the people as I came to know them, knowing the way the green closeness of the rainforest folds people in on themselves, knowing the way it holds secrets. They became part of me, those people. I met them in the dark wood of Charlie’s memory and in his photographs, I swam in the looped rock pools of Gabriel’s dreams. Dreams hang around in the rainforest. There is not enough sunlight to lift their fog.
I don’t think I could go back there now. No, I’m sure I couldn’t. And yet that place is always with me. I am never absent from it.
When Gabriel and I swam there, and talked, and made love, he used to say he felt his father’s childhood watching him from the damp clumps of ferns. Sometimes when we were making love, things would go awry; he could not function in front of those paternal eyes. In the rainforest, things stay in the drugged air, they drip back out of the warm green fog, they cling to the ladders of climbing pandanus, they lodge under rocks. Moss grows over them. They steam and ferment.
Gabriel said he sometimes thought the only thing his father minded about the divorce was losing the Samford farm and the falls. Not that he actually lost them. He disposed of them rather, his motives tangled, and then later regretted it. Indeed, so anxious was his father, at the time of the settlement, that the farm not fall into his ex-wife’s hands that he sold it off hugger-mugger to Gil Brennan, a neighbouring pineapple farmer. But creepers snake their way up to the light and things that passionately wish to connect do connect. This came to be one more thing Gabriel’s father held against his mother.
“She belonged out here,” Gabriel said. “This was just our weekend place when I was a kid, but Mum took to it the way a bowerbird takes to scraps of blue.”
The Last Magician Page 17