Here was the puzzle: the boys on the corner hated Grammar School types, but not as much as they despised girls and wogs. Charlie knew that Robbie was caught in the middle and felt sorry for him. He thought Robbie must feel the way he and Catherine did when the class laughed at Cat.
He supposed there was a progression of events. Certainly he knew that the older boy from Grammar and the Wilston boys hated Cat’s reckless way with the railway game, and that Robbie felt somehow aligned with it, felt a sort of possessive pride, rather as though he were the circus trainer and Cat his clever performing seal. Robbie was proud of her, Robbie boasted about her, and whatever Robbie boasted about, Cat would do.
Charlie thought there were strange sorts of pride around the way the game developed: Cat’s pride, and Robbie’s pride, and certainly the determination of Catherine and himself not to be found wanting. He was sure the game was Robbie’s suggestion, though the other boy from Grammar, older than Robbie, a senior whom Robbie clearly admired, was in charge. What puzzled Charlie and absorbed all his attention was the way the Grammar boys and the Wilston boys automatically clubbed together and declared themselves ringmasters, and what bothered and disturbed him afterwards (for the rest of his life, in fact) was the way he and Cat and Catherine consented to the circus act. Willy, of course, made no decisions at all. Pliant Willy loved everyone and smiled and sang his Mr Wolf song, and Cat and Catherine and Charlie, and sometimes Robbie too (when the other boys weren’t around) bestowed hugs and kisses on him constantly. The Wilston boys and the Grammar boy paid no attention to Willy at all.
Charlie knew that, for himself, the decision to lie on the rails was made by his body. He remembered that his body stored the knowledge of earlier encounters with the boys on the corner, and that lying in front of an approaching train seemed the lesser of unpleasant options, especially after you had done it once or twice and learned there was nothing to it. It seemed, also, a small way of thumbing his nose at the boys on the corner. He could frighten them. There was something about his body lying on the tracks that pulled their punches and stilled their kicks. He was buying a kind of safety, but he also sensed this: the more untouchable he became, the more they hated him.
He did learn that danger was addictive. As he and Catherine lay beside Cat on the sleepers, their heads against one steel rail, their feet on the other, he learned how quickly one learns to feel nothing. They were not allowed to get up until the boys said they could, until Robbie and the Grammar boy and the boys on the corner said Now. And then he and Catherine vaulted up like corks from champagne bottles, neat as flies evading a swatter, but Cat always waited. She always waited till the boys were nearly wetting their pants with fright. The engine would be past the bridge and she would stretch and sit up as though she were waking from a nap.
The boys were furious. You wait too long, they said. The driver will see you and we’ll all get into heck.
But the train never stopped, and Cat waited longer, and the boys cheered and berated her with a strange kind of intensity.
Charlie and Catherine began to taste Cat’s power. You could frighten the ringmasters, they learned. The longer you waited, the more you saw your power in the cold sweat on the ringmaster’s brow. But Charlie and Catherine tempered that power with the knowledge of oncoming pistons and wheels. Cat, Charlie thought, was indifferent to them. Was it because she trusted her own reflexes the way a possum does? Or was she drunk on her own kind of powerless power? Did she think she was omnipotent?
Afterwards, Robbie would act as though the triumph were his. “I told you,” he would say. “I told you she doesn’t know the meaning of fear.”
The trouble with Cat’s kind of power, Charlie saw, is that there are people who develop a passion to break it. And the trouble with people like Cat is that they always have some point where they are vulnerable, and the ringmasters have a sixth sense for sniffing it out.
Cat’s vulnerable point was Willy.
Charlie could not remember (and if Catherine did, she would never speak of it to me) why, on the particular day the railway game was played for the last time, he and Catherine were still on the bridge instead of down in the cutting. Perhaps they had stopped at Catherine’s place on the way; perhaps Miss Oswell had brushed Catherine’s hair longer than usual, and Charlie had waited for her. Whatever the reason, they felt responsible.
It could not have happened if I’d been there on time, Charlie said, because I would have held Willy. I wouldn’t have cared what they did to me, they could have punched and kicked all they pleased, I would never have let them take Willy.
Catherine thought: I should have stopped it earlier. I knew something was going to happen, I could smell it. I could smell it on Robbie. It was like the time he tried to smash the tortoise, the same kind of smell. I knew Robbie’s fear of the boys on the corner, I knew his desire to please that Grammar School senior was making him crazy. I knew he was terrified they’d make him lie on the rails. I knew it. It was like Miss Oswell hitting Cat that day. You know something has snapped. You feel sorry for them in a way, for people like Miss Oswell and Robbie. You know you should do something, but you can’t think what to do. They are like springs that wind themselves tighter and tighter and tighter and you close your eyes, waiting, because you can’t bear to watch, because you know if you beg them to stop, they’ll ignore you.
“I think that’s what happened,” she told Charlie. “I think because we weren’t there, they ganged up. I think they wanted Robbie to lie on the rails.”
It was Robbie who suggested Willy, Cat swore to that. It was the boys on the corner who held Willy down, and Robbie who held down Cat. They used long forked sticks, no, not sticks, small branches of stringybark trees.
Cat struggled and screamed. “I’ll kill you, Robbie,” she yelled.
The wave of pleasure Robbie felt was so intense, he thought he might choke on it. He felt drunk. He forgot he was afraid of the rails. He threw himself down on top of Cat and kissed her full on the mouth. She bit him. He was in a frenzy of excitement, struggling on top of her, kissing, being bitten and biting her back. Her wrists were manacled with his hands but she fought against them and reached up and yanked his hair. He gave a yelp and laughed in triumph, but vaulted back and held her down with the branch.
“I’ll clobber you, Robbie!”
“But I knew they’d let Willy up in time,” Robbie protested. “And I knew Cat would get up in time, she always does.”
They did let Willy go in good time — Catherine and Charlie, watching from the bridge, had to testify to that fact. They let him go while the engine was beneath the bridge, while Charlie and Catherine still had a clear view of the tracks, while there was plenty of time. But Willy, not frightened in fact, probably prattling about the time and Mr Wolf, Willy didn’t get up.
“Get up!” the Wilston boys screamed, suddenly panicked, too mesmerised by the approaching train to run and grab him.
“Get up!” Charlie screamed from the bridge.
“Willeeeeeee!” Catherine screamed.
And after that, they couldn’t see anything. The train, like an evil black slug, was underneath them, filling the space from the cutting to the bridge. The engine braked with a great hiss and a dreadful shuddering of buffers, and Cat’s scream curdled around them like soot.
5
It was not so much Willy’s death for which Charlie blamed Robinson Gray. The death was an accident. Even Cat knew it was an accident, she knew no one wanted Willy to die, she didn’t blame Robbie any more than she blamed herself, though he was the one she tore at with her nails when he wouldn’t let her look below the train. Robbie held her and she fought and screamed and kicked until she was exhausted, and then she went limp and howled in his arms.
It was not the death they blamed him for. It was for what happened afterwards.
Between the accident and the afterwards was a blur. People came across the road from the houses, the engine driver kept saying Oh Jesus Christ Jesus you stupid bloody ki
ds oh Jesus Jesus, Catherine was sick, the Wilston boys and the Grammar boy were pale and trembling, Robbie was shaking, you couldn’t tell if he was holding up Cat or she was holding up him, Charlie could feel his bowels turning to gruel, an ambulance came, police came, cars came, blur came, more blur, and blur. It was blur for days. Charlie could never remember how he got from the railway cutting to his parents’ shop, though he must have gone in someone’s car, a police car in fact so his parents said, and he must have gone by way of the police station because he read what he said in the Courier-Mail, though he had no recollection of saying it.
A tragic and senseless accident, the paper said. A terrible game of dare. CHILDREN PLAY WITH FIRE AND GET BURNED.
Cat was in hospital. Cat was under sedation. Cat’s father, who went on a roaring drunken binge, raged up Wilston Heights and smashed the windows of Mr Gray’s Buick with a cricket bat and slashed the tyres. Mr Gray was very gracious about it. There was a picture of him in the Courier-Mail Understandable grief, he said, and no of course he was not pressing charges. As a matter of fact he would vouch before a court of law (and he himself, after all, was a member of the judiciary) he would vouch for the fact that Mr Reilly was a good man, salt of the earth, a trusted labourer on Mr Gray’s own weekend farm, a bit immoderate with the drink perhaps but under the circumstances … and the Reilly children were practically like a son and daughter to him. He himself was in shock, his own son was suffering as much as anyone, he said. A terrible awful thing. A tragedy.
The Courier-Mail could not print what Mr Reilly said.
At Willy’s funeral, Cat and her father looked like shadows. Charlie was there with his parents, and Robbie Gray with his, and Catherine with hers. There were acres of space between them all. It was all a blur. It was like floating under the skin of Cedar Creek at midnight, Charlie thought. He was drifting, everything was blackness, there was no fixed shape to anything, there was a feeling that something dark and heavy like tar would drown them all. Cat wouldn’t look at any of them. He looked at Catherine and she looked at him and her eyes seemed like two black holes. They frightened him.
Mr Gray went to shake Mr Reilly’s hand and Mr Reilly spat in his face.
Robbie came over to talk to Catherine and Charlie.
“Poor Willy,” he sighed. “And poor poor Cat.”
“Poor Robbie,” Catherine said silkily, and Charlie and Robbie, both startled, looked at her but her expression was unreadable.
There was blur and drifting and then there was the inquest, and that was where Cat broke some unwritten rule. It was odd how the inquest turned into the trial of Cat. Replaying that inquest for the rest of his life, Charlie thought that what was curious was that he and Catherine and Cat all blamed themselves. It was an accident, yes. Everyone agreed it was an accident. But just the same they blamed themselves. They were responsible. They would never be free of guilt.
But Robbie Gray, and the boy from Grammar, and the Wilston boys, they did not blame themselves. They did not feel responsible. They felt it was all Cat’s fault.
They seemed to fear, however, that some sense of their culpability was in the air, in the press, in the eyes of others, and this awareness bred in them a particularly volatile anger which they kept demurely hidden (like pet poisonous snakes in plastic bags) in the pockets of the neat suits they wore in court.
They themselves knew they had been goaded and put into the wrong. They knew Cat had it in for them.
She started it, they told the judge. One by one they said it. She started it, they said. And she wouldn’t stop. She loved it, she kept egging us on, she made us do it, it was her idea.
The judge, with his kind fatherly face, was looking directly into Charlie’s eyes. “Did Cat Reilly start it?” he asked.
Charlie wanted to explain about Miss Oswell and the ruler, and about the playground songs and the jokes about Cat not being clean, and the things the boys on the corner did. “They made her do it,” he said.
“They made her do it,” the judge repeated very carefully and solemnly. “And did they make you do it too?”
“Yes, sir.”
“They held you down, did they? So you couldn’t get up?”
“N-no, sir. But they made the rules.”
“I see. What rules did they make?”
“They said we couldn’t get up till the train reached the bridge. Till they said.”
“But they didn’t do anything to stop you getting up?”
Charlie thought about the way the ghostly shapes of former punches and kicks hung in the air. “I was afraid they’d hurt me if I did, sir.”
“Who were you afraid would hurt you? Which of the boys did you think would hurt you? Could you point them out to me, son?” The judge was so kindly, so fatherly, so understanding.
Charlie looked at the faces of the Wilston boys. They looked back with bland neutral eyes. Between their eyes and Charlie’s, a regiment of boots and knuckles marched, left right left right left right, he could see hobnails and knuckledusters and sharp brass rings, he saw broken windows in his parents’ shop, a promise of future harm. “I don’t know, sir,” he said.
“You’re a foreigner in this country, young man,” the judge explained, “and I make allowances for the fact that you do not, perhaps, fully understand our Australian commitment to fair play. Australian boys seem a bit rough to you, perhaps, but I believe there is no Australian boy alive who won’t give his rival a fair go. In fact, a fair go is something we believe in quite passionately. Would you say you’ve had a fair go since you’ve been in this country, son?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie murmured obediently.
“And is it true that in fact you often didn’t get up when these young gentlemen said, but you waited longer?”
“Yes, sir,” Charlie said.
“Thank you,” the judge said. “That will be all.”
“And how did you come to be lying on the railway lines, little lady?” the judge asked Catherine. You could tell he would have liked to brush her hair. You could tell he thought she was there by some freakish accident.
Catherine looked him right in the eye. “Because I want to be as brave as Cat,” she said.
“You like Cat, do you?” asked the kindly fatherly judge.
“I like her better than anyone else in the world,” Catherine said in a clear steady voice.
“I see,” the judge said. You could tell he thought the matter very grave. “You like her because she does dangerous things.”
Catherine frowned, as though this was not quite correct. “Because …” she said, faltering.
“Thank you, my dear,” the judge said in a kindly way.
“Because she doesn’t pretend,” Catherine blurted.
“Thank you, dear,” the judge said. “That will be all.”
“And what were you doing at the railway cutting, young man?” the judge asked Robinson Gray. Robbie was wearing his Grammar uniform and looked very smart.
“I tried to look after Cat, sir,” Robbie said. “I felt responsible for her. She doesn’t know the meaning of fear.”
“But you went along with the game, I understand?”
“I pretended to, sir, but it frightened me.”
The judge nodded sympathetically. “As it would any sensible person,” he said. “Indeed yes. Anyone with a grain of common sense.”
“We couldn’t stop her, sir,” Robbie said. “I think she loves danger, sir.”
“Yes,” the judge said. “It would seem so.”
“And you, young woman,” the judge asked Cat sternly. “What do you have to say for yourself?”
Cat stared at him silently.
The judge frowned a little. “Did you, or did you not, start this game?” he asked.
Cat said nothing.
“Young lady,” the judge said sternly. “Your attitude to authority is very revealing, I’m afraid. Very revealing indeed. This tragic death was clearly an accident, but I fear a long trail of family negligence leads to this sad
place. A runaway mother, I understand. A father who leaves his children to run wild. A reckless little girl, product of a broken home, who has no sense of responsibility for the younger brother left in her care, no sense whatsoever, a wild little ruffian addicted to danger it would appear — ”
There was a crashing sound from the vicinity of Mr Reilly, a chair knocked over, a bloodcurdling string of words not often heard in the presence of juridical gowns and wigs.
“I would ask the constables to remove Mr Reilly from the courtroom,” the judge said, though Mr Reilly was not disposed to be removed until his daughter, catching everyone by surprise, said quietly but clearly: “It’s okay, Dad. I’m okay.” She addressed herself to the judge: “But I got somethin’ to say before ya cart me Dad off.”
The judge raised his eyebrows. “I’m pleased to hear it, young lady.”
“It was an accident,” she said. “It wasn’t Willy they wanted to hurt, it was me. They couldn’t’ve ever got me, but.” She flashed her eyes at the five of them, the Wilston boys, and the Grammar boy, and Robbie Gray. “They knew they could never get me,” she said witheringly. “It made ’em wanna spit chips.” She flung back her head and her dirty yellow ribbon jabbed the air, and the little glass beads on her earrings flashed blue fire. “It was my fault they got Willy,” she said. “I shoulda thought of it, but I never.” She pointed at the Grammar boy. “He was the boss,” she said. “He told them to grab Willy.” She pointed at the Wilston boys, one by one. “And they grabbed Willy and held him down,” she said. “They knew he was simple. They knew he didn’t even know he was supposed to get up.” She pointed to Robinson Gray. “And he held me down so I couldn’t get to Willy in time. He wanted to see if he could make me cry.”
Charlie, transfixed by Cat, flicked his eyes to Robbie’s face in time to see the disbelief, the shock, the blank baffled look, and then the rage. All of these zipped across Robbie’s face like shadows on the pool at Cedar Creek. Then they were gone. Then there was Robbie wearing his mask of “poor poor Cat” for the kindly judge.
The Last Magician Page 21