Photographs seduce, Charlie said, and studying them is a passionate act of transgression. It’s a dangerous pastime, he warned.
Violence is a Persistent Weed
This is postcard size, in colour, its title scrawled across the back. It shows a paddock that stretches into the distance and is covered in dandelions as far as the eye can see.
In the foreground, her back to the camera, the stooped figure of a woman in straw hat and gardening gloves (it could be Catherine, I think) removes the dandelions one by one with a small knife.
The Three Judges
One of Charlie’s frequent collages. Rouault’s painting of the three judges appears on the pocket of a blazer where the school crest should be. The photograph is 8x10, the pocket occupies most of the space, though part of the lapel and a brass button can also be seen.
The judges have fleshy red faces and bull necks and little pig eyes.
Sex in the Head
A large photograph of a white skull. Through the eye sockets, one sees that the back of the skull is the wall of a quarry, pitted with blastings and tunnellings and laced with long swaying ladders.
Through the gaping mouth, one sees the bottom of the quarry, crossed with a railway line. A naked man and a naked woman are locked in sexual embrace on the rails.
Blind Justice
A papier mâché head, wearing juridical wig and a blindfold, is at the left of a postcard-sized photograph. The figure (only its black-gowned shoulders and head visible) stands at the edge of a large picture window, its back to the glass. Through the window one can see the city of Sydney. The photograph appears to have been taken from perhaps the eighteenth floor in one of the new highrises near the Opera House. We can see the Harbour Bridge in the background, the water and Circular Quay in the foreground, and, in this view, the quarry occupying everything south and west of the quay.
The Quarry
A view of a path corkscrewing its way into a pit. Two figures in black, furtive, one stalking the other, descend into the funnel. Because of the circular nature of the paths and the optical oddity of the aerial view down into the quarry, it is impossible to tell who is stalking whom.
Untitled
The three famous monkeys (hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil) sit on a boulder in the rainforest somewhere, except that each one has its hands over its mouth.
Mute Testimony
An enlargement of the Grade 5 photo. There are three absences, three white cut-out silhouettes. In the space where Cat would otherwise be is a photograph of a panther’s head. In place of Catherine is a TV screen on which appears a tiny image of Catherine hanging as an earring from the ear of a talking head. In place of Charlie is the blank black eye of a camera.
The Hollow Man
A man stands in front of a mirror, his back to the camera. There is no reflection in the mirror. A neat caption across the bottom reads: Don’t worry this is no reflection on you.
(There is clearly a witty double homage to Magritte here, and a witty double reversal with special reference to Magritte’s Ceci n’est pas une pipe.)
Untitled
This is simply a snapshot of Charlie and Catherine at a dance. In the bottom right-hand corner there is a logo: Cloudland Photographers.
The photograph beckons.
Catherine is wearing a long gown with shoestring straps. Her hair is shoulder-length and stray curls wisp across her forehead and into her eyes, Charlie is wearing a rented evening suit. They are holding hands and are turned slightly toward each other, their shoulders touching. At the time of the photograph, they have recently completed degrees at the University of Queensland. The event is the Graduation Formal, but neither Catherine nor Charlie gives the appearance of being at a festive dance. There is a haunted look to their eyes, their faces are drawn. One might be forgiven for thinking they were on their way to a wake or a funeral in fact.
The relationship between a photograph and its viewer is an act of seduction, Charlie said.
They did not, in fact, go to the formal together. They had other partners, officially. In fact, Charlie hates these things, but friends have fixed him up with a girl because it is really not acceptable, in his graduating year, not to be part of the final extravaganza at Cloudland, Brisbane’s ballroom palace on the hill. Needless to say, his partner is shy and awkward (why else would she be available in this blind and demeaning way?) As they shuffle miserably through a foxtrot together on the mercifully overcrowded floor, and as the girl chatters nervously about her father’s peanut farm in Kingaroy, Charlie mentally calculates the number of minutes before escape.
And then he sees Catherine. He feels her eyes actually In that press of people, he feels something warm and compelling on his left cheek. He half turns, and there she is, and there is childhood, there they are in the pool at Cedar Creek, the warm sun fingering them through the canopy, the water linking them, their blood warm in each other’s veins.
He supposes they managed to be polite and keep to formalities, he hopes so, he hopes he wasn’t rude to the awkward little girl from Kingaroy, but here he is with his cheek against Catherine’s, here he is in the dimmed light with his lips against the hollow of her neck, here he is flowing into Catherine, curve to hollow and hollow to curve, her thigh against his crotch, his leg between hers, two people in one space, his twin. They do not speak. They do not dance with anyone else all evening.
Here they are in a taxi, here they are creeping into the sleepout at the back of his parents’ shop. Here they are occupying the same space in his narrow bed, floating in a Cedar Creek haze. It is perhaps not so much ecstasy as a cessation of pain. He is floating in remembered happiness. He realises: this is the first time he has felt happy since that summer. He had forgotten what it was like.
Catherine begins to cry. “We’re like war veterans, Charlie,” she whispers. “We can only talk to each other.”
“I talk to you all the time in my head,” he whispers back. “And to Cat.”
“Yes. Me too. Not with words.”
“Shh,” he murmurs. His parents will hear sounds, but will say nothing. They will ask no questions. Beyond the louvres, he sees the mango tree and the stars. He kisses the soft skin of Catherine’s breast, which feels like Willy’s cheek, the silken skin of innocence. She undoes the buttons of his shirt and reveals a thin gold chain and its pendant: two small hoops, each threaded with a blue glass bead. Catherine kisses the earrings. “She gave me something too,” she says. “She gave me her hair ribbon. I keep it in a jewel box in my room.” He puts his finger against her lips. Ssh. He unfastens the chain from around his neck and puts it on Catherine, so that Cat’s earrings hang between her breasts. He would like to eat her. Starting at her lips and working down, he licks and sucks and nibbles her creamy body. She tastes of the pool at Cedar Creek.
“I’m a virgin, Charlie,” she whispers.
He kisses the hollow between her legs, then rises to kiss her on the mouth again. “So am I.”
Charlie thinks, though he loses all track of time, that they simply lie there for hours. They lie together naked, holding each other, and Catherine cannot stop crying though she doesn’t make a sound. Then he licks the tears from her face. He licks her neck and her breasts and her belly. He licks her between her legs till she cries out and stifles her cry in the pillow and clutches at him and he comes to her and they both come and cling to each other and cry soundlessly
“I’m going to London, Charlie,” she whispers. “My parents are having a twenty-first birthday party for me in a few weeks and I’m going right after that. I’ve got a job with a newspaper, I can’t stay here.”
Of course, he thinks. We can’t stay here. He decides on the spot. “I’ll come too.” But she puts her finger against his lips and shakes her head. “I want to have amnesia, Charlie.” Then I’ll go somewhere else, he thinks. New York perhaps. Anywhere. It doesn’t really matter where as long as it’s away.
She unfastens the chain from her neck and gives it back to Ch
arlie. Then she asks: “Have you seen her?”
“Once. One of her escapes. She came here, to the shop. Well, she came to see her dad, I suppose.”
“I tried to visit her at that school,” she says. “They wouldn’t let me.”
“Yes,” he says. “Me too. She was let go, you know, when she was eighteen. She got a job at The Black Pussycat.”
“Yes,” she says. “I heard that. She’s, um, a dancer, I heard.”
“Yes,” he says. Neither of them wants to say the word stripper. “I’ve heard other students, engineers, talk about her. She’s very popular.”
“Yes,” she says. “Robbie goes there a lot.”
“So I heard.”
“Have you seen her?”
“I can’t bring myself to go and … not like that,” Charlie says.
“No.”
“But I tried to make contact. I mean I went there during the day and left messages, but they always said she wasn’t around.”
“I tried too,” she says. “It’s not … you know, women don’t go into places like that. They told me she’d gone to Sydney, I don’t know if it’s true or not.”
“She still doesn’t talk,” he says. “That’s what I heard. Ever.”
“No,” she says. “That’s what I heard too.”
Giacometti’s Foot
An 8x10 black-and-white photograph with the title neatly lettered in white ink at the base. The photograph is simply a close-up of an earlobe and an earring. The earring is a plain gold hoop with a small glass bead like a teardrop at its lowest point. Since the photograph is black and white, one cannot tell what colour the glass bead is.
The ironic title needs some explaining, and I recall the anecdote Charlie told me about Alberto Giacometti, 1901-1966, the famous sculptor of those striking elongated forms. When Giacometti was a young student at art school in Geneva, Charlie said, the nude model for figure-drawing classes was the generously endowed and luscious Loulou. To the instructor’s exasperation, however, Giacometti never moved higher than her ankle. He religiously and obsessively drew endless studies of the model’s foot. The secret of all her sensuality is in that foot, he implied.
Charlie had reason to find the whole of Cat encoded in the fleshy tip of her ear.
On the last night before she was taken away to reform school, the night after the violent events in her own overgrown yard, Charlie lay awake in the sleepout, staring out at the mango tree and the stars. There was a tapping on the glass louvres and Cat was there.
“Wait,” he whispered. “I’ll come outside.”
They sat together among the ferns, leaning against the mango tree, holding hands, looking at the stars, saying nothing. A hot damp breeze stirred the ferns. From time to time there was the screech of a flying fox, and a banana or a mango would fall to the ground with a soft thump. They sat there for hours. They sat there until it was almost dawn.
A cock crowed.
Cat flinched violently.
She stood, and he could not bear the look on her face, so he closed his eyes and put his arms around her and he felt her go limp, with her head tucked under his chin. He held her fiercely.
She broke loose suddenly and began running away, stopped, ran back, with a quick movement of both hands reached up and pulled her earrings sharply from her ears. She simply tugged, so that the gold circles cut through the lobes as piano wire cuts. She put the trinkets in his hand and then she fled.
Neither of them ever said a word, but after she had gone he clung to the mango tree and sobbed. He howled like a dingo for her.
When he looked at the gold hoops by daylight, he saw the dried beads of blood as well as the blue glass beads.
Holy Family School for Little Wanderers
Black-and-white photograph of complex of grey cement block one-storey buildings surrounded by high chain-link fence and barbed wire.
Running Wild
Newsprint pasted on white paper. Clipping from Courier-Mail, subheading, small black caps, RUNNING WILD. A million black and grey newspaper dots congregate into the approximate configuration of Cat’s face. Her spiky hair has been cut so short that she looks like a prisoner of war. Photo credit: court records.
Item: Catherine Reilly, aged 15, nicknamed “Wildcat” by police and social workers, has escaped from Holy Family School for Little Wanderers for the sixteenth time in five years. Reilly holds the record for the number of escapes from a Queensland institution. A spokesman said Reilly is obdurate and non-reformable. “You get a certain hardcore type which has never had any respect for authority,” the school spokesman said, “and there’s nothing to work with. Nothing that can be done, I’m afraid.”
Chang’s Grocers & Greengrocers
A small black-and-white snapshot of the shop on Newmarket Road.
What is not visible in the photograph is a knot of boys in Grammar School uniforms. They constitute the debating team and have been on a trip to another school for a tournament. The four boys on the team (which includes both Robbie Gray and Charlie Chang) are in the elegant black Buick owned by Robinson Gray’s father, who is one of the volunteer drivers for school trips. There is no reason to go anywhere near Newmarket Road, but Robbie has graciously invited the team back to his place on Wilston Heights where there is a backyard pool, and on the way it occurs to him that he needs a particular kind of gum eraser, very difficult to get these days, available only from old-fashioned family shops like the grocer’s on Newmarket Road.
Charlie feels something like nausea. He feels unclean. He feels that he has become one of the boys on the corner. He knows the glances, the raised eyebrows, the quietly polite comments and their snide subtexts that will wing their way around the dingy cluttered confines of his parents’ shop. He knows how friendly and obsequious his parents will be. He feels the thoughtless good humour of Robbie Gray like a constriction in his chest. A strong undertow of intuition tells him that this thoughtless good humour is in fact malice, but as usual there seems too much evidence to the contrary. What would be the point of the malice? And if Robbie felt malice, why would he bother to confer the golden benefits of his endorsement on Charlie in the first place?
Mr Chang is at the counter and when the four boys enter he registers first amazement and then radiant joy. He calls excitedly to his wife who is in the rooms behind the shop. “Charlie has brought some of his friends to visit us,” he calls.
Charlie can feel rather than see the repressed smiles of the debating team. He feels in equal measure a rush of embarrassment and a rush of fierce protectiveness. Not one of you, he wants to say hotly to the boys, deserves to polish my father’s shoes.
But the debating team takes its cues from Robbie Gray, and Robbie is the essence of courtesy. “Delighted to see you again, Mr Chang.” Robbie’s voice is as pleasing as caramel. He extends his hand as gentlemen of substance do, and Mr Chang, enchanted, takes it warmly in both of his and bows over it, smiling and smiling. He calls to his wife again.
When she comes into the shop, Charlie can tell instantly from the turbulent mix of pleasure and anxiety on her face that the visit at this particular moment is disturbing. Her actions are those of someone forestalling danger. They are camouflage actions designed to deflect entry into the shop. She comes out from behind the counter, she comes toward Charlie to embrace him, she is instinctively shepherding the visitors toward the door. Images rush through Charlie’s mind, a riff of snapshots from the past: if she had not finished preparing accounts when the tax inspector came, if she did not have the cash in hand when the city rates-collector came, if she were not properly dressed when an important visitor arrived, she gave off that same charged aura of disturbance.
“G’day, Mum,” Charlie says quietly, greeting her in front of those boys who register everything, who store everything as fodder for future witticisms, exposing himself and his mother, putting his hands on her shoulders and giving her a quick kiss.
“Oh Charlie,” she says softly, a barely perceptible tremor in her voice. S
he manages to encode a whole treatise into the two words.
Robbie Gray, standing between Charlie and his father at the counter, watches with intense and apparently benign interest.
“Right, Mum, good to see you too,” Charlie says lightly. His eyes say: Message received. I’ll stay behind and you can tell me what it is.
But what it is abruptly makes itself manifest.
Because of where he is standing, Charlie sees simultaneously the faces of two principals in a drama. Robbie is watching him. Behind Robbie’s head, in the doorway which leads to the back of the shop, an opening flimsily covered with a bead curtain, a figure appears.
It is, of course, so startling and so overwhelming for Charlie to see Cat with almost-shaven head standing there, that he is transfixed. And naturally Robbie turns to see where the fireworks are.
Which means that Charlie has an uncensored, unmediated view of Robbie’s reaction. It is as though Robbie has been hit by a pellet from a gun. It is as though some powerful vacuum cleaner has sucked all the blood and all the colour from his body in one split second. It is as though invisible pincers have taken him by the head and by the feet and put him into the machine which shakes up oil paint in hardware stores.
Then, whitefaced, trembling, apparently blind, he bolts.
He rushes out of the shop, they hear the car door slam, the Buick drives off.
Charlie never does learn what face-saving explanations Robbie gives to the rest of the debating team. He doesn’t care. He feels as though the pain of a bleeding ulcer has been momentarily staunched for the first time in years. Pouf! It is as though a magician has waved a wand. He realises that he has become so used to a certain kind of ache that he cannot remember not having it. Now, for a moment, it has vanished. The difference is immense.
The Last Magician Page 24