The Last Magician by Janette Turner Hospital Page B

hands. He is transfixed. Macro lens, large
aperture, slow speed, he thinks. Mock savage, she bats at him with her cat paws
and he cannot move.
    Curious, she says: “Jeez,
just a joke.”
    He blinks.
Focuses. Embarrassed, he picks up his camera, a piece of armour,
and the detached photographer is back, a man who records the world without
reaction or comment.
    â€œWhat’s eating you?”
    â€œI’m not aware of being
eaten.”
    â€œI
had the distinct impression that I hit a nerve,” she says, fascinated.
    Basilisk.
He raises his eyebrows and gives her the steady polite gaze of a man too
well-bred to offer any response to impertinence. She puts one hand on her hip
and raises her eyebrows back at him, a dare. “I hit a nerve,” she
insists.
    â€œYou think so.”
    â€œI know so.”
    â€œTenacious,
aren’t you?” He smiles to himself, then laughs. “The second coming of
Cat.” He says it aloud, but not to Lucy.
    â€œI remind you of
someone.”
    â€œYou do,” he admits.
    â€œNamed Cat.”
    â€œHmm.”
    â€œThat why you took the
pictures?”
    â€œMaybe.”
    â€œSo who is she?”
    He
concentrates on fitting the various lenses into the carry case.
    â€œAnother hooker?” she
needles. “From the days of your Brisbane youth?”
    He says drily, “Do you
want to come upstairs or not?”
    â€œSure,” she says.
“You’re not getting off that easy.”
    â€œLet’s go then.”

4
    Beyond the windows, King’s Cross still fizzes and roars and trumpets its brassy notes sky high, and they are certainly aware of it, but it seems to Lucy that Charlie has adjusted the lighting and fiddled with the volume controls, that a muting of noise and brightness has been achieved. What a difference is made by another two floors’ remove from the street. Bamboo and rice paper screens, stretched tight as drumskins, subdue the afternoon glare and even the garish staccato shouts of neon, so that a wash of soft light, flickering, streaked with watered colour, seeps through the windows and fills the space. Space. That is what the apartment celebrates: the mysterious quality of space, and the way it draws attention to single objects placed judiciously within it, and the way these isolated objects, in turn, give space a form.
    Lucy feels like a traveller entering another atmosphere, like a spacewalker, like someone setting foot in emptiness, like someone returning to a lost world. Though many questions occur to her (When did you do this? How long ago did you move in? How could you have moved in without the rest of us knowing? What was it like before? How much stuff did you have to move out?), she does not want to violate the hush of the place by voicing them.
    Charlie has taken off his shoes. Instinctively, Lucy does the same, and she wanders around the large main room in her stockinged feet, pad pad pad, silent. The floor is polished wood, bare, and the walls are white, and both pull the eye toward a single table, long, narrow, and high, of gleaming black lacquer, against the far wall. Here a rakish statement is made. Flamboyant and asymmetrical, six shafts of orchids, each stem crowded with flowers, flaunt themselves in a glass cylinder on the table, purple throats brushing white backdrop. By one of the screened windows are two soft black leather chairs, low slung, facing each other. Apart from these objects, and the photographs, the room is empty.
    The room is full of mystery.
    It is also full of photographs.
    Occupying the end wall to Lucy’s left, an afterimage of the world they have escaped from, is a black-and-white photograph six feet long by four feet high. In the white wall, it is a shocking window into hell. Lucy sees a great crater with pocked rock walls and rope ladders, their bamboo rungs knotted together, columns of people moving up and down the ladders like ants. The faces visible in the foreground