I had a vision of Gabriel’s mother as soft and feathery, her liquid eyes darting about on the lookout for blue, coveting blue, stealing blue socks and scraps of blue T-shirts from clothes-lines, snapping blue foil milk-bottle tops from open rubbish bins, lining her nest, turning an inhospitable clutter of sticks into paradise. I relayed this fanciful vision to Charlie once and he said: “It’s the male bird who makes the bower. The bower is a trap.”
“Did you ever meet her?” I asked. “Gabriel’s mother?”
“I think I did at a university formal once,” he said. “She was a friend of Catherine’s. They went to high school together, I think. She was a shy little bird, and I remember thinking how typical. Robbie was peacocking all over the place as usual, and I reckoned he’d want a drab little peahen to set himself off And I must have met her at Catherine’s twenty-first, I suppose.”
“I think,” Gabriel said, “when the marriage began to go wrong, she could come out here to the farm and the rainforest and it didn’t matter.”
After the fall, and the freefall, she flew into Gil Brennan’s life and they built a nest. To watch his mother and his stepfather moving absorbed along the spiky rows of pineapples, Gabriel said, or just walking through the rainforest, or picnicking at Cedar Creek (though she wouldn’t go near the falls any more as she used to when he was a child; she wouldn’t go anywhere near the falls), to watch his mother with her young second family was to know the sheer simplicity of happiness. Poetic justice, he said. He hadn’t known, all those years away from her, that his mother was happy. His father had led him to believe otherwise. “She can’t cope, I’m afraid,” his father had said, “and we both think it’s better if you don’t … She just wouldn’t be able to cope with you, you see. She just doesn’t want you right now.”
To discover her tranquillity when he was twenty, Gabriel said, to walk into the peaceable kingdom of the sweet ordinariness of her life with Gil Brennan and their ten-year-old daughter and their eight-year-old son, was a miracle. And to find that it was not true that she had banished him …! But he must not be harsh with his father, she said. Behind every lie, she said, there is a wound. One should be gentle with the bloody gashes in other people’s lives.
And what was this bloody gash in his father’s life? he wanted to know bitterly.
Be gentle, Gabriel, she said.
He was eight or nine, Gabriel thought, and they were living in Sydney when his father, fuming, and pacing up and down, told him: “Your mother’s got hold of the farm.”
He wanted to ask if he could visit her now, but was afraid to say anything.
“It’s her way of getting back at us,” his father said.
“It’s funny,” Gabriel mused. “I never thought he even liked the place much. Mum and I used to come out here every weekend, and all the school holidays, but Dad used to stay in town and work. Well, he had to, I suppose. But I never thought he liked the place much.”
Gabriel, I remember from those green and golden days, used to turn suddenly and look behind him (perhaps once every half hour or so), or stare intently downstream where the churning water bumped under thick low-slung vines. I never teased him about it.
It was a disturbing stillness.
“Once,” Gabriel mused, “when he realised Mum and I used to come here to swim …” Gabriel, perched on the boulder like a gnome, knees crooked up under his chin, hands clasped around his knees, was staring into the whirlpool that the water made between the two boulders. “He hadn’t realised it. I suppose he simply hadn’t thought about it. The falls aren’t on our land.”
In the whirlpool, I could see our reflections whizzed into concentric circles of colour like clothes in a washing machine. You could not look into the whirlpool for too long. You had to look away or you could lose your balance and fall.
“He threw a tantrum,” Gabriel said. “Not at me, of course, he was never angry with me, only with Mum. He said it was dangerous, and Mum was never to bring me here again.”
Sometimes I would wait silently, never interrupting, never prompting, for half an hour before Gabriel would dredge up another bit of his life. It was like a vast jigsaw puzzle to him. He was always picking up one small piece or another and holding it up to the light and studying it and trying it out in different places, but never quite finding where it belonged.
“Then one day he brought me here himself,” Gabriel said.
In the whirlpool I could see the other Gabriel, maybe four years old, maybe five, the apple of his father’s eye, the angel child, the dryad in the pool, still down there in the swirling water’s black eye, the plughole where everything went.
“It’s strange, isn’t it?” Gabriel asked me, “that I can remember these things so vividly when they all happened before I was six. He took me to Sydney when I was six. And yet I see them as clearly as if … The trouble is, I can’t remember the in-betweens.” It was, he said, like having a drawerful of photographs without any captions or any known sequence to them. He looked behind him and stared into the deep green-black shadow. “Did you hear something?” he asked.
“Only scrub turkeys.”
“Yes, I suppose so.” In the whirlpool, I could see his brooding face race and spin and stretch itself into a funnel. Those are stones that were his eyes, and those are merely pitted dimples in the rock, those hollows that look like eye sockets gouged. “The day he brought me here, he behaved very strangely. I thought he was frightened of the place. No, not exactly frightened, that’s not right. But tightly wound, the same way he would get on the footbridge near Wilston station.” New water keeps coming and keeps coining, racing into the same spinning circle and then on. I suppose it was possible, somewhere in the millions of years of climatic history of the world’s oldest land mass, that there had been droughts of sufficient length to make the whirlpool disappear. “He kept looking behind him,” Gabriel said. “He was in a strange state of nervous excitement. He kept turning around suddenly as though someone was watching him from in there.” Gabriel, looking over his shoulder again, gestured into the murk where someone unseen could indeed be silently watching, where strangler figs and epiphytes and she-oaks and creepers fed off each other and fought a deadly silent fight in the quest for sun.
Gabriel closed his eyes, concentrating. “He must have had his camera with him. I keep trying to see him with the camera in his hand, or in the knapsack, but I can’t seem to … it won’t show itself. I can never remember the camera. But he has a photograph of me sitting on this boulder, and he had it enlarged. Once I woke up at night because I heard something and I crept down to his study (we were still in the terrace house in Paddington then, it wasn’t long after we’d moved to Sydney) and he was sitting with just the reading lamp on, staring at a photograph. He didn’t hear me. I stayed there for ages watching him, until he put it in his desk drawer, and then I tiptoed back to bed.
“The next day, when he wasn’t around, I looked. It was the photograph of me at the falls.
“It’s funny, though. I never thought he liked the place when I was a kid.”
Once, when Gabriel and I were picnicking and I had gone back to the car alone to get a jumper (it turns cool very quickly in the rainforest if the sun goes; I think the moss and the damp black earth suck warmth out of the air), I came back to find Gabriel kneeling on the boulder, his back to me, holding his hands out toward one of the trees a little upstream, the one that has been choked by the strangler fig whose roots make a thick mazy ladder up the old smothered trunk to the sky. We climbed that ladder once, Gabriel and I. It was not very difficult, not difficult at all really (so long as you didn’t look down) with so many woody rungs for the feet, so many vines to grab. We climbed up to where the tree orchids and the wheel-of-fire flowers run amok. We looked at each other and couldn’t say a word.
So at first I thought Gabriel was praying to the strangled tree. (I don’t mean literally; I mean in the way the pagan privacy of the rainforest affects most people.) Then I thought he was placating som
eone. I waited quietly. I never told him I’d seen.
“Dad told me the worst mistake he ever made was selling the farm,” Gabriel said. “And yet I can always hear him shouting at Mum and telling me the falls were dangerous and I must never never come here without him.”
He looked behind him. He stared into the whirlpool and watched his spinning history doing cartwheels. Five children played in the pool beneath the boulders: Charlie and Cat and Willy, and Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed. With a down, hey down, hey down.
There were five children played in a pool with a down, derry derry derry, down down, and here we go round the mulberry bush, the stinging bush, the banyan tree, the merry-go-round.
Oh yes, it’s easy for me, having lain beside Gabriel on the boulder in the sun, having listened, drowsy and happy, to the murmur of his voice, to picture those five children in that place, to know the way the dark green wall of the rainforest shut them in on themselves. I can hear their shrieks as the chilly water that comes from under the mountain splashed shock on their young bodies.
It was not a school day, it was a Saturday, but nevertheless, for Charlie, it had all the trappings of forbidden enchantment. Cat had waved her wand. She had put a hex on everyone, on Charlie’s watchful protective parents, on her own unpredictable father, on Robbie Gray and Catherine Reed, and here was Charlie in a place as beautiful as the lost paradise around Innisfail in North Queensland, here he was with people who would in other circumstances ignore him, or even torment him.
“This is Robbie Gray,” Cat said. “His dad owns the farm, but my dad does all the work.” She laughed. “Robbie’s just Lord Muck like his dad and he lives up on Wilston Heights with the snobs and he goes to snob school.”
“Grammar,” Robbie Gray explained. “Brisbane Grammar School.”
“Robbie’s old,” Cat said.
“I’m twelve,” Robbie explained.
“This is Charlie,” Cat said.
“Pleased to meet you.” Robbie Gray put out his hand the way grown-ups did, and Charlie, a little overwhelmed, extended his. The two shook hands solemnly, quite as though they were a pair of aged scholars in Wang Wei’s painting, bowing to each other on the low curved bridge beside the willow tree. “Samford’s just our weekend place,” Robbie Gray explained, as though Charlie were a person of substance to whom careful explanations were due.
(Charlie, telling Lucy this many years later, is momentarily overcome. He walks up and down his spartan living room and stops in front of the large photograph of the Cedar Creek pool. I loved him at that moment, Charlie said. I was moved to the point of tears. When you are so used to being treated more or less like a dog by other kids, especially by other boys, so used to it that you don’t even think about it, it’s just the way things are, and then suddenly …
I loved him, he said. I would have died for him.)
But Cat made a face at Robbie Gray. “Robbie’s got a plum in his mouth and he tries to talk like a bloody Pom. They make them talk that way at snob school.” She pinched Robbie on the arm and he blushed and tweaked the dirty yellow ribbon in her hair. “Ouch,” Cat said. “Cut it out.” But she liked it, Charlie saw. She liked Robbie Gray, and Robbie Gray couldn’t take his eyes off Cat. There was a wall around them made of all the times they had played at the farm and at the falls. There were secrets between them. Charlie passionately wanted to step into the circle that ran around them.
“And you know Catherine,” Cat said. “She’s in our class.”
“Yes,” Charlie said, swallowing. But he wouldn’t have said he knew Catherine. He wouldn’t have dared.
“She lives next door to me,” Robbie explained. “I said she could come.”
Charlie noted the way Catherine let her eyes rest on Robbie for a moment then move away. “Hello, Charlie,” she said. She gave him a small shy smile and dropped her eyes.
“Hello, Catherine,” he said awkwardly. He felt exposed. Catherine had heard the chanting in the playground: You’re a yellow wog from China, Charlie Chink. So had Cat, of course, but that was different; he and Cat were two of a kind, there were songs about her too, though people were more wary about teasing Cat. They were more likely to do it behind her back.
Catherine moved in a different orbit. It was, in fact, hard to believe that she would walk onto the same piece of earth as himself and Cat. He felt as he had felt the first day the boys on the corner arrived at the railway cutting and began to add new rules to the railway game. They had seen the dark stain on Charlie’s pants (it appeared every time Cat lay on the tracks; he couldn’t stop it) and they jeered and pointed and made up a new song on the spot. Last one home is the one who snitches, Charlie Chink has wet his britches. Cat, who always lay on the rails longer than the boys did, Cat who was always the last one up before the train came through, Cat flew into the boys like an avenging little wheel of arms and legs. They had a certain respect for Cat. Charlie thought they were afraid of her. And there was something else in their eyes; he couldn’t tell if it was love or hate, but whatever it was they let her be. Charlie, however, was always terrified they would break into the wet-britches song in the playground and his disgrace would be complete. He felt as though Catherine brought the knowledge of such shames with her, and that it was between them, smoking like a compost heap. They were both embarrassed by it, he thought. Yet she simply smiled shyly and said: Hello, Charlie.
Although she and Charlie were in the same class, they had never spoken to each other before. They had never looked at each other, except furtively. Catherine was the cleverest of the girls, and Charlie of the boys — so it transpired after various tests and exams, and after the visit of the school inspector. Therefore only an aisle separated their desks in the back row, but they might as well have sat on different planets.
Charlie was not at all certain of what to do, confronted with Catherine Reed in a swimming suit.
“C’mon,” Cat called. “Last one in is a rotten egg.”
She jumped off the boulder, hugging her knees up to her chest, and made an explosive fan of water leap high into the green air. It sounded like a shot from a gun. Willy shrieked and chortled and went waddling in after her from the edge of the pool like a plump duckling, burbling What’s the time, Mr Wolf?
Charlie, too timid to jump in, watched Catherine and Robbie with interest. They were timid too, he saw instantly, worried about the stones on the bottom of the swimming hole, worried about the depth of the hole, worried about the whirlpool. Nevertheless Catherine, pale and determined, stood on the knob of the boulder where Cat had stood and closed her eyes and jumped. She did not hug her knees in elastic joy, but went straight down like an anchor being dropped. When she surfaced, she spluttered, but she paddled about gamely in the pool with Cat and Willy, ducking when they smacked the surface of the water with their hands, copying them, smacking water back at them, laughing with Cat.
Charlie was fascinated. At school, Catherine could have held court if she wanted to but she didn’t seem to like company much. A bevy of girls followed her around, but she would slip off and disappear. He had seen her in the school library — one of his own retreats — a number of times. She never looked up when he came in. She kept her head buried in a book. Charlie very much wanted her to lift her head and look at him now, on the boulder. He wanted Cat and Catherine, both, to look at him and to approve.
He climbed on the boulder and looked down. It seemed very high and the stones below all had edges like razor blades.
“Look out, I’m going to jump,” he called, and Cat and Catherine both stopped splashing and backed away from the centre of the pool and looked up. Cat had to keep paddling with her hands to stop herself from being moved back over the rock lip and into the sucking mouth of the funnel between the boulders. Charlie felt giddy. He could see their faces, pale as the underside of leaves, turned toward him, Cat and Catherine smiling, both of them waiting.
Waiting.
“Come on,” Cat called, impatient, and he wrapped his panic around
himself like a blanket and closed his eyes and jumped.
What a strange and thrilling world he torpedoed into. The inside of the rainforest hummed in his ears and the churn of a washing machine was pulling him through to the other side of the earth. He was so surprised by the sense of weightlessness and euphoria that he opened his eyes and the water was crystal clear. He saw each dimple in the great basalt slabs and he saw moss waving itself like flags, and he saw the pale ghostly legs of Cat and Catherine, twin mermaids, trailing above him. When he popped above the surface like a cork from a bottle, he was spluttering but laughing too. He thought his laughter might take him up above the water, past the boulders, past the laddered fig, past the canopy itself. He was flying.
He looked at Catherine and he knew that she knew. She knew from the high breathless gasping way he laughed that they had discovered the same thing: there is nothing quite so thrilling as leaping into the very teeth of your fear. She smiled at him. He smiled back. Cat splashed them and duckdived beneath them and tugged at their ankles. Down they went again, and Catherine’s wafer of a face, pale as pearlshell, was inches from his, her long fair hair streaming upwards like a drowning woman’s cries.
Time ticked differently underwater. Charlie didn’t care if he never drew a breath of air again, he was floating in the orbit of Catherine’s eyes. When she reached out and touched him and he took her hands, he expected fins to form themselves, and gills. He thought they would stay forever with the flags of moss and the white stones that did a slow minuet toward the lip of the whirling.
Shaboom! Like champagne corks, they were up in the pool again, the three of them gasping and spluttering in a knot of limbs, he couldn’t tell where Cat ended and Catherine began. They duckdived, they surfaced, they dived. He wanted to stay in that fluid place where shapes undid themselves. Sometimes, in later years, it seemed to Charlie they spent that whole hot summer under the skin of the pool. Years later, he could close his eyes and summon up the bodily memory at will; the weightless drift of it, the green filtered light, the ghostly floating presences of Catherine and Cat, the champagne fizz building and building in the lungs, the torpedo resurrection. He would sit alone in rooms in New York, in Sydney, rocking himself in clear undercurrents, hugging the hollows in his sides where Cat and Catherine coiled their long mermaid tails.
The Last Magician Page 18