The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital

mouth is dry She keeps her eyes on the woman. Feast your
shocked eyes, the howling woman invites, and she does.
    Then,
through the turbulent weather of her sobbing, a tornado of speech racks the
woman, or rather gobbets of words gush from her, strung together into something
resembling speech. “Bloody,” she shrieks. “Bloody fuckers bloody
fuckers bloody fuckers …”
    And this breaks the spell.
    Mothers
cover their children’s eyes and ears, people surge forward, railway porters
appear, the police surface from nowhere, the woman — struggling and kicking and
shrieking curses — is restrained and dragged off.
    Lucia, shaken, her mouth dry, is for some
reason face to face in the melee with another girl of about her own age, a girl
not in a private school uniform, not in a state school uniform, not in a
uniform at all. The girl wears shapeless army-surplus pants and a torn white
T-shirt and she has dirty brown hair and her eyes smoulder
with scorn.
    For seconds, possibly minutes, they are
face to face, eye to eye. Then the girl speaks. “You stuck-up bitch!” she says in a low intense voice. “No one’s ever gonna
lay a finger on you, are they, Lady Muck? No one’s gonna
ram his prick up your arse when you weren’t expecting
it, is he? you prissy little fancypants cunt!”
    Lucia
blinks. At school she has a reputation for saying unsayable
words, but this is not a language she knows, and she attempts to translate
slowly, groping for meaning, dazed. “Pardon?” she asks from polite
habit.
    â€œOh
fuck off,” the girl says. “Think you’re the bloody Queen of
Sheba!” She spits in Lucia’s face.
    Then it
happens again. Lucia can feel the baggy pants around her legs, and she is
looking out at a girl in a neat private school uniform, an almost unbelievably
ignorant foolish girl, a stuck-up bitch, a mere kindergarten child, a prissy
little fancypants cunt. She feels as shaken with
despair and rage as a piece of tin roofing in a cyclone. She spits in the
stupid girl’s face, she spits at the clucking bevy of rescuers.
    Lucia, Lucia, Lucia, come on Lucia,
her friends are calling, because the train is in the station, carriage doors
are open, someone is pulling on her arm, yes, she’s in the train compartment,
there’s a babble of talk, the train is moving, but the howling of the woman
with the lifted skirts is in her ears, and the eyes of the girl on the platform
are scorching her. The girl on the platform is still standing there with
her hands on her hips, leering. Her eyes follow Lucia, they dart and bother and
intrude and buzz about her the way mosquitoes do. Lucia feels stunned, as
though she has been hit on the head with a mallet. She thinks she might faint.
I know nothing, she thinks. Nothing. Vaguely, she wipes a clotted wet
mess from her cheek. Her hands are trembling.
    Oh yuck, she sees the
lips of Barbara Williams saying.
    Grotesque! she sees in
the shape of Diane’s lips.
    She cannot hear what anyone is
saying, their mouths move silently, she cannot respond to them, she cannot
remember how those things are done: talking, opening a train door, getting out,
walking, and yet here she is at the headmistress’s dinner table, the lace cloth
over mahogany, the silver gleaming, the dimmed golden light of the dining room
bouncing back off the Royal Albert china.
    â€œLucia
dear,” the headmistress is saying, “what on earth is the
matter?”
    â€œDon’t tell us about
woolgathering!” the English mistress smiles.
    â€œWhat is it, dear?”the headmistress asks. “What is it?”
    You
can never step into the same dining room twice, Lucia thinks.
    â€œSo are you going to
Sydney Uni on the side?” the photographer asks.
    â€œWhat?”
    â€œYou
wouldn’t be the first MA student at Sydney to support herself by …”
    She says vehemently: “Forget
that.” She lights a