Cairo (13 page)

The woman regarded them with disbelief, as if they might be the precise papers she had been seeking her whole life and whose loss had precipitated her current misfortune.

She shuffled about on the spot. ‘Can I have them?'

I held up the enrolment forms. ‘You want these?'

‘Yep.'

Such an impudent and unexpected request demanded an equally surprising response. I considered the forms for a few seconds before handing them to her. Why not? After all, they were most likely of more interest to her than me.

As I watched her leave with them tucked under her arm, I imagined (with something like satisfaction, but not quite) a professor calling my name in a classroom, glancing over her spectacles at the ensuing silence and striking a line through my name.

THOSE FIRST FEW WEEKS OF 1986 WERE, UNTIL THAT TIME, THE
happiest of my life. I explored my new neighbourhood — with its noirish, junk-strewn alleys and raffish share houses, jazz music and conversation drifting from their backyards. Many of the storefronts on Brunswick Street were former sweatshops, now boarded up and disused. There were two or three cafes, a laundromat, half-a-dozen pubs, a milk bar, and a smattering of fashionably shabby second-hand clothing and bric-a-brac stores. The local population was made up mainly of students, recent migrants, punks and drunks. Its patron saints were Sylvia Plath and Jack Kerouac. An old man with a Qantas bag walked about loudly weeping; girls wore cool sunglasses, boys winklepickers; the air was fragrant with hair gel, cigarette smoke and coffee.

I bought myself clothes designed to hide my country-town origins and attempted to pass myself off as a local, adopting a look of contrived carelessness. Before leaving my apartment I spent extravagant amounts of time smoothing my unruly hair in the mirror and making sure my demeanour was correctly calibrated. I took up smoking. More than once, I locked the door behind me and was about to leave the grounds of Cairo when I was overcome by self-consciousness, whereupon I was compelled to return to
my apartment and change a shirt I suddenly feared would invite unspoken ridicule. I perched in the famous Black Cat cafe (waiters so laid-back they barely served at all, Tretchikoff prints on the wall, Coco Pops available all day) to drink coffee. For a time, life was as exquisite as a dream.

In subsequent weeks, I met some of the other tenants of Cairo. In addition to a couple of architecture students, there was old Mr Orlovsky from flat eleven, directly opposite mine, who looked as though he had dressed in the winter of 1974 and never changed again. His tie was spattered with gravy stains, as were his trousers. He was ever so tall, kindly and doddering but had the alarming habit of lurching forth — rather like an unfashionable Frankenstein's monster — from the deep shade of the garden when I entered through the front gate, and bombarding me with questions about recent news or sporting events and cryptic reminiscences.

This might have been fairly harmless but for the fact that he was, on account of ill-fitting dentures, difficult to understand and prone to a stutter that made even the most rudimentary chat rather a trial. In addition, he tended to spray the damp, un-swallowed portions of his lunch into one's face when speaking; to meet his gaze while talking, in accordance with basic social etiquette, was to risk a speck of masticated bread in the eye.

The man had fought in the Korean War, and the experience left him on the constant lookout for the devious machinations of any ‘Orientals' he encountered in his rare sorties into the world outside Cairo's front gate.

Somehow, most likely on account of my gender, Mr Orlovsky had got it into his head that I was as fascinated with Test cricket as he, and never missed an opportunity to discuss with me the intricacies of team selection for the following year's Ashes series, a topic about which I knew almost nothing.

‘That bloody Gower,' he would say with a heavy sigh, ‘he's a lively one, eh?' Or: ‘What about that Allan Border? Move him up the batting list?' There would follow an incomprehensible guttural remark or question to which I would make a sound (of agreement, of despair, of amusement) hopefully commensurate in tone with his own. Cricket bored me to tears, but after a number of these one-sided conversations, I had not the heart to reveal this and stooped to perusing the sports pages for names and figures I could mention to pass myself off as tolerably knowledgeable.

The ancient Italian woman who had warned me about Max Cheever was named Maria and, although I didn't run into her often after that initial meeting, I was aware of her peeking through her screen door as I passed her apartment on my way to the clothes line. Her television was on most of the time, and it was not uncommon to hear the scene-chewing emoting of daytime TV soap stars emanating from her apartment, borne on a flavoursome waft of spaghetti sauce or minestrone.

There was the child Eve, who could be heard rampaging through the block at all hours, spelling out everything that fell within her sight, her screams bookended by her mother's indulgent chuckles. Although Caroline seemed to me a far cry from an intellectual giant, she home-schooled her daughter according to some specific methodology designed to fashion the girl into a genius. Most mornings the child could be heard torturing her violin or spelling out the names of flowers or animals in the garden. ‘Magpie. M-A-G-P-I-E. Wattle. W-A, wait! Don't tell me! W-A-T-T-U-L.' She was like a bird pecking shrilly at the language, tearing it into bite-sized pieces with gamine fury.

Since our encounter on that first morning, Eve had started knocking on my door and trying the handle at all hours of the day. Rather pathetically, I took to pretending I wasn't at home during the hours she might be up and about; it was easy enough because
it was difficult to notice signs of life inside the apartments from outside, unless the door were open. Even so, I tended to stop what I was doing and shrink against the wall at the sound of her voice or the slap of her bare feet along the concrete walkway.

I couldn't, however, always be as vigilant as I wished and, in addition, I had to leave my front door ajar on hot days to facilitate a breeze through the apartment. Thus, Eve became a semi-regular visitor, perched on my green sofa with a cup of milky tea and a surreptitious sweet biscuit, imperious as a tiny Mogul empress issuing instructions and demanding answers to obscure questions (‘When dogs close their eyes do they see the same reddy darkness that we do?' ‘When is the future?').

There were other people I saw only occasionally and whose names I never learned: a stern New Zealand couple next door, who kept strict nine-to-five hours and were so self-contained they might have been a cult of two; an old woman who lived alone on the ground floor with her black cat called Belle; a single, middle-aged man who always wore a grey trench coat and carried a briefcase. Others I saw not at all, their presence only hinted at by the discovery of clothes drying on the washing line at the back, or bags of rubbish piled by the overstuffed bins.

*

By this time I was working three or four days a week at Restaurant Monet, mainly the night shift, which began at six in the evening and ended at midnight or one a.m. The work was hot and greasy, but satisfying. I scrubbed pots and pans. I rinsed plates and glasses and sent them through the dishwasher. I emptied the rubbish bins and did basic food preparation — chopping parsley, dicing meat for stews, cleaning prawns and the like. At the end of each shift I mopped the tiled floor and wiped the benches.

The other staff were mostly European. In addition to Claude,
there was a lugubrious Italian waiter, Michael, prone to cursing in foreign languages and lamenting the eating habits of Australians when he swept into the kitchen to deliver an order. ‘Australians,' he would say.
‘Porco dio
. No
fucking
idea. Take away table three, please.' Marcel, who it turned out was both the chef and the owner, refused point-blank to cook steak any more than medium rare. He drank beer throughout the afternoon. Sometimes he threw pans to the floor or launched into long, drunken rambles about his days as an apprentice chef in Switzerland (‘Five o'clock in the morning, winter, we would milk those cows, almost nude!') or how the Nazis should have been given the chance to finish off the Jews in Europe. His cantankerousness seemed — at least in part — an affectation and was, in any case, thrilling to me. They treated me as one of their own, allowing me a glass of beer or Pinot Noir at the end of the night, whisking out Zippos to light my cigarette, inviting me to discern notes of pepper or pencil shavings in the wines I sampled. I felt grown up, a part of the city's machinery.

When I wasn't working I spent as much time as possible with Max, Sally and James. We formed a quartet that roamed far and wide in my old Mercedes — from the hedge mazes of the Mornington Peninsula to the surf beaches of the coast. Sometimes I would come home from work to find a note had been slipped beneath my front door, on which would be written instructions (
Our place 7 p.m. tonight
or
Meet us at the corner
).

We went boating on the Yarra River at Studley Park, and for my eighteenth birthday in mid-February we picnicked on smoked-salmon sandwiches at Hanging Rock. We spent Sunday mornings trawling through bric-a-brac stalls at Camberwell Market for clothes and records. We played rummy and bridge late into the night. It was a period when many of my lifelong personal characteristics were forged — for better or (it must be said) for worse. Being with my new friends appealed to two contradictory
aspects of my personality: that of wishing myself distinct from the mass of ordinary people while, at the same time, satisfying a human need to belong to a group.

During my childhood in Dunley, there had been no one I sought to emulate in any way. I held my father in contempt and was largely ignored by my mother and sisters. The thought of becoming a local baker like ‘Crusty' Brown or a real estate agent like my father and his second wife distressed me almost more than I could bear. Aunt Helen had been the closest to a mentor I might ever have had, but the family rift had put paid to that relationship. And now she was dead. It wasn't until I met Max and his friends that I realised, with a fierce jolt of recognition, that these were the people I had been longing to know my whole life; my lost tribe.

To me they were fabulous, magical beings, capable of anything. They could do no wrong. If, in my more insecure moments, I wondered why they should befriend a gauche bumpkin such as me, I quickly banished the thought. Self-preservation is a necessary trait, particularly when one is young. There was the fact of my owning a car, but even now (stubborn rather than innocent) I refuse to believe they were interested in me purely for the part they hoped I might play in their sinister and dangerous scheme.

Max knew an inordinate number of people. It was rare to go anywhere with him — whether to the twenty-four-hour pool hall in Carlton or a filthy pub in Port Melbourne at six a.m. — and for him not to know at least one person, usually many more. Despite his archaic views about the need for a ruling intellectual aristocracy and such nonsense, he was at ease talking with anyone, whether they be loutish drunkards encountered at the Albion Hotel or attenuated classical violinists sipping ginger beer through a straw at an art opening. I was even startled to encounter him one afternoon at a tram stop in Brunswick Street, engaged in a complicated but genial transaction involving a carton of cigarettes
with the blue-lipped vagrant (whom he introduced as Peter) who had so frightened me on my first day in the city.

I saw Anna Donatella several more times, usually at exhibition openings at dingy artist-run galleries, where we drank nasty white wine from plastic cups while musing over the latest offerings from an artist committed to presenting modern anxieties in original and disturbing ways. She never behaved in a manner that could be described as friendly (she would volunteer the type of smile typical at funerals, subdued, as if pleased to see me but aware of the constraints of the event).

I was also introduced to Anna's French assistant, Queel, her so-called ‘good eye' when it came to the appraisal of artists for representation. He was a short, toadish chain-smoker in his mid-thirties who always looked both guilty and immensely satisfied, like a swimmer pausing to relieve himself in a pool. He wore ill-fitting suits and a cravat. His face was shiny, his fingers hairy and short.

Despite his obvious physical shortcomings — perhaps because of them — Queel exuded a malign sexuality and was always accompanied by a woman of barely credible beauty. At first I assumed it to be the same one, but over time I realised they were, in fact, different women who looked very much alike: tall, blessed with abundant cleavage, long-haired, clad in knee-high boots and miniskirts. One was rumoured to be a Russian pole-vaulter; another to have shot a lover during the course of a torrid affair.

Where such women gathered when not pouting on the corner sofa of an inner-city art gallery was a mystery. One might be forgiven for assuming they lived together in a fortress out of sight of regular mortals; it was impossible to imagine any of them walking down the street in daylight to buy a bottle of milk. I never heard them utter a word. It's not that they didn't speak; rather, their conversation consisted solely of whispering and giggling with
Queel. My single attempt at talking to one of these women was met with mute but deadly scorn, as if I were a servant egregiously overstepping the bounds of my employ.

Although they attended gigs and gallery openings, Edward and Gertrude almost never ventured out with us during the day. On the two or three occasions we managed to persuade them to accompany us, they did so under sufferance (‘Ugh, that sun is
very
bright. Is it always like that?') and were either listless or else preoccupied, borrowing coins to make phone calls and suddenly remembering other places they needed to be.

As expected, Max was pleased when I told him of my decision not to pursue a formal tertiary education. He accepted it as a personal triumph. I know now that, despite their manifold personal shortcomings, Max, Edward, Gertrude, Sally and James provided me with not only companionship, but also a far more eclectic education than I would have received at university. They each possessed in their way the naive certainty (previously unknown to me) of their right to hold an opinion on virtually anything.