The Last Magician (3 page)

What am I saying,
expect
?

Already
we have a whole new range of underground hearing. I believe this has to do with
certain adaptations of the inner ear. I believe we have developed antennae as
fine as angelhair seaweed and these filaments — so it
seems to me — these filaments float about and fan out through the murk,
decoding the rumble of subway trains, noting and cataloguing screams,
classifying the ways a knife cuts and the sound of a needle in a vein and the
different sound of a spent needle falling somewhere in an empty room,
registering the courting calls of sirens (these are a long way above us, of
course, far above) and the carhorn of johnny cruiser and the different one of the man who
dispenses snow. We read the dark. We decode it and swim in it so naturally that
when I wake I feel for mutations: webbing between my toes, fur, gills.

“Did
you know that someone found fin prints of ichthyosaurus down here?” I ask
Charlie. “So the tabloids claim. There were photographs.”

“They were probably
mine,” Charlie says.

“I
should have known. When I lived down here, I used to check my shoulders for
wing buds every night. I reckoned if they sprouted, they'd be black, and they'd
be barbed at their scalloped tips.”

Charlie
smiles. “I'll make a record of that on film.”

“I
know you will. Why doesn't someone nick an oil heater?” I complain
fretfully. “Haven't we got any more candles? We've got candles somewhere,
haven't we? We used to have. Someone nicked a whole carton,
I know we've got them.” I grope around. Debris collects here, particularly
in the corners of the room. I find two tallow stubs. I light them. “I
don't know how you'll manage for light,” I say.

“I'll
manage,” Charlie says. “It's all done with lens opening and shutter
speed. Pretend I'm not here. Just ignore me.”

“Just
ignore me, ignore me,” sings Julie who rocks herself in the corner. Julie
is queen of the rubbish heap. She trails hypodermics. “Oh jeez,” I
say, weary. “Have we got coffee or anything to bring her round?”

Old
Fury rummages in the box in the corner where we always used to hoard what we
could, a generally futile endeavour, and she manages
to find not only the coffee tin but the primus stove which hasn't been ripped
off yet. This is a small miracle. When she's intent on the nuts and bolts of
survival, you cannot question Old Fury's intelligence. There is a feral
intensity to her. Sometimes, most of the time, I believe she can read my
thoughts, but at other times I accept the prevailing view that she is vacancy
itself.

Look at her now. There's no heat,
no plumbing, we're a few levels underground (it's anybody's guess if this was
once subway, or an underground parking lot, or the remnants of warehouse
storage cellars that have been extended by the squatters and blasters), but
she's found some more candles. Lighted tapers bob about with her so that she's
always ringed with golden cloud. She has scooped a kettleful of water from the
storage bin, boiled it on the primus and made coffee, and now she's sitting
beside Julie, which is, in itself, a delicate balancing act. The bed is no
prize. Because it is a mattress which rests uneasily, lopsidedly, on a frame of
bricks and boards — the mattress is very mangy, very lumpy, the bricks are
uneven — the bed is subject to pitch and toss, the same kind that afflicts the harbour ferries in the choppy-zone between the Heads. (Just
the same, in its time, the bed has slept a goodly number of bodies
simultaneously) Old Fury is cradling Julie and humming something deep in her
throat, a lullaby And this is what we all come back to, you see, this is what
pulls us back below the streets, this hibernation ritual, this
warmth.
It
comes off the old madwoman like a kind of radiance and pulls me in.

From
the dark beyond the candlelight, I hear Charlie's camera like a soft shudder of
batwings.

“Old Fury,” I murmur,
cuddling up. I wrap my legs around her spindly shanks, with the lumps of
mattress pressing up against my right thigh and soft Julie in between us,
too-pliant Julie, yielding-as-goosedown Julie, our
Julie-comforter. We used to have a blanket, the last time I was here we
definitely had it, but I recall Julie telling me that some fucker from a Redfern gang ripped us off. Old Fury hums, and Julie
splutters and snuffles and sleeps a near overdose off, and it's
cosy. I want to tell Old Fury and Julie that I love
them both.

“This
is what brings me back, you see, Charlie.” All this love, this communion.
It's very scarce above ground. Of course it comes and goes down here too.
Certain substances, certain optimal amounts of certain substances, inhaled or
absorbed, are more conducive than others to this state of well-being. Sometimes
we can dolphin about for hours in the ocean of I-am-you, you-are-me. Sometimes not.

“Just forget I'm
here,” Charlie says.

“I
live at Charlie's place now,” I tell Old Fury. “I don't live in the
quarry anymore.”

Laughter, like a visitor from
much deeper down, rises out of the old woman's throat and swirls about us.
Julie stirs and shivers in its spin and subsides again.

“All
of us,” I say reproachfully, “used to live in the world outside the
quarry. Once upon a time, the quarry didn't even exist.”

No. That's
not true. I have to concede that from before the very first once-upon-a-time,
there has always been another world, a nether world, invisible,
nestled inside the cracks of the official world like a hand inside a glove,
like two spoons spooning. But it didn't exist quite like this, not in quite
this same form, not in Sydney anyway, and it didn't spread quite so far, and
there was a time —
“Believe me,”
I tell them — before we
ourselves entered it.

They don't believe me.

“Tell them,
Charlie,” I say.

But
there's no sound from the outer darkness, I can't even hear the camera now.
Maybe he's gone.

“Believe
me, Julie,” I say (she is trembling violently; Old Fury is massaging her
bluish hands).

Down
here, the other world is like shadows on the wall of a cave, like the negative
prints of the photographs Charlie is taking.

As for me, I go back and forth,
above and under. I cross borders. That world, this world, they coexist all the
time and I move between them. It's a kind of greedy curiosity I have, a voraciousness, I was born with it, a hunger to live all my
possible lives.

Underground woman, you might
call me.

Yes, I
am partial to the Russian novelists, who may have been mad,
but who were not blind, and who did not wilfully
close their eyes. They saw both worlds. Perhaps because I read them very early,
too early to know they were not supposed to apply in this hemisphere, too early
to dilute and deconstruct, perhaps because I read them when I was still at
school, when I was just an impressionable Brisbane changeling, before I'd even
been taught what not to see, perhaps because of all this, I have always wanted
to mail my own notes from underground. I want to see the nether side of our
cities and send back word. Just as Charlie does.

“In
the other world,” I tell Julie, “people move through rooms that are
full of music. They sit by windows where the light falls on a pot of orchids.
They pour fine wine into crystal, they light candles on mahogany sideboards
where silver gleams. They think we are just a bad dream.”

A
voice comes out of Old Fury's mouth, a
sound
rather, high-pitched like a
boy's voice, a singsong taunting playground voice:
Dreams, dreams, dreams,
it
says. (I think that is what it says.)
Objection, Your Honour,
it says.
The witness dreamed there was an ordinary world and now she
thinks she's remembering it. It's cock and bull.

I have to ponder this. I consider
it only common sense to take Old Fury seriously. Playing devil's advocate
against myself, Your Honour, I will record two short
pieces of evidence I read somewhere.

One: Report of a Sleep Disorders Clinic. A haggard patient, who was in a desperately
insomniac state, presented himself for treatment. He was ravaged.
One
could have said that he
was ill with desire for sleep, that sleep toyed with him, that sleep behaved
toward him as a cruel mistress behaves toward an idiot lover, that he pursued
her and pleaded and cajoled and promised the moon and grovelled.
Alas, sleep spurned him. For six straight weeks, he said. Yet the clinic's
monitoring showed this: that the patient in fact slept a good eight hours each
night, but dreamed, recurrently, that he tossed and turned and lay awake from
dusk till dawn, and in the morning he woke exhausted.

Two (and
this is something Charlie told me): Once Chuang Tzu dreamed he was a butterfly,
perhaps a turquoise butterfly like the Blue Wanderer, the Ulysses, that haunter
of Queensland rainforests, and that he drifted through air like light. The
butterfly, needless to say, knew nothing of Chuang Tzu. It fluttered here,
there, it quivered, it alighted on dawn. The dream
pecked against the outer shell of sleep, the butterfly woke, and there in its
bed was Chuang Tzu who was not even good-looking or mild-tempered, let alone
luminous. Unshaven, dazed, rumpled, grumpy, he smelled of morning breath and of
slight piss stains on his pyjamas. What a falling off
was there. What a metamorphosis. Afterwards, the philosopher was never certain
if he was Chuang Tzu who had dreamed he was a butterfly, or a butterfly
dreaming he was Chuang Tzu.

“So
you have a point, Old Fury,” I concede. “But the point could be this: you could be a figure in one of Charlie's photographs. You could be in one of
the films I think up for him. We could both be up there, in the quarry's first
circle, dreaming you.”

Old
Fury's heard something, I don't mean me babbling on, something else, and she pricks up her ears.

“What is it?” I ask
her.

Shhh,
she says, or doesn't say, but puts a finger to her lips. I can hear it. At
first the sound is like the slow heavy vapour which
drips from rainforest canopies after dark, a quiet sobbing coming down, coming
closer. But it turns into Danny who is only twelve and very new to the quarry,
and who is not broken in at all. Something is pressing down on him. He ignores
us and huddles himself in one corner, whimpering. Old Fury goes to him and sits
beside him and cradles him in her arms, rocking backwards and forwards,
humming.

“I'm
sore,” he whimpers. “It hurts. They were at me all night. It
hurts.”

I
leave Julie, who's shuddering quietly, and bring a candle over. Danny is
wearing boxer shorts and a T-shirt, and even in the half-light, you can see the
dried blood on his thighs and the bruises.

“Oh jeez,” I say.
“Clumsy buggers. How many?”

“Two of them,” Danny
says. “They did me all night.”

Oh Danny, I
think, all this for one fix? But no, he's not even had time to get hooked, he's
a brand new runaway, he's been buggered to ribbons for common old garden-variety
hunger. He's starving. “And then all they give me,” he sobs, “is
a packet of cigarettes.” He pulls it out of the pocket of his shorts, a
packet of Winfields. “I tried to swap it for a
pie, but the pie man wouldn't go for it. I'm hungry.”

Hunger: now there's a topic. I can imagine the visual layers, the literal and
metaphorical densities, that Charlie will bring to
this one.

“Have we got anything, Old
Fury?” I ask her, not because she'll answer. I crawl under the
brick-and-board bed where I recall we used to hide a battered tin box and
please,
I say silently,
please,
and thank God, there's something there, some
dry biscuits and a tin of soup. Danny is much too hungry to wait for anything
elaborate like a hot meal, which is fortunate since I am not very good with the
primus. It's hit or miss with me. I open the tin and give him a spoon and he
gulps down tomato pulp and alphabet noodles, a cold, concentrated, gelatinous
mass. “You want coffee, Danny? We've got some. I'll see if I can light
this thing again, it might take me a while.” He's cuddled up in Old Fury's
arms and she's rocking him, crooning to him in those throaty noises she makes.
“Coffee's coming,” I promise. “Warm the cockles of your heart,
Danny boy.”

It works. I get the damn thing lit. We all
have coffee and I prop Julie up against the wall and manage to get some more
down her, but she's still out of it, she slumps into the mattress again like
soggy bread. We sit there sipping our coffee, and I don't know what thoughts go
through Old Fury's head, or through young Danny's, but whatever shape they come
in, I'm willing to bet we are all entering bliss itself through the warm mugs
in our hands. You see, it is difficult to find words for these things, it would
be difficult to explain to the people pouring wine into crystal about the great
pounding flood of joy that comes at you in this kind of situation, that comes
at you through the skin, through the insides of fingers and palms, that kindly
heat, the way it swamps you with happiness.

“Come over on the bed,” I invite Danny, whose eyes, in
Hungers,
will one day seed nightmares
among filmgoers in the other world. “I'm going to tell you a story about
the time I first went on the streets.”

“How old were you?” Danny asks.

“Older than you. Older than Julie.
I was a university student. I lived two lives.”

So
we make a sort of four-headed person, all warm together, all soft, all tangled
up in arms and legs, a JulieDannyOldFuryandme kind of
person, a love knot, you can see what brings me back, all this warmth, Old Fury
humming her lullaby and me telling a bedtime story and urging Charlie to join
us.