Cairo (2 page)

But I became an author, of all things, and although I never intended to write about that time, now there is no choice. When younger, I was free to imagine my future at will, idly, and it was a pleasant and dreamy act. But that future has gone, and now the past crooks a finger to summon me.
Come here
, it says.
We have a score to settle
.

Any memoir is a kind of confession. Here, then, is mine.

I STAGGERED FROM SPENCER STREET STATION WITH MY BULGING
green suitcase and stood on the footpath, bewildered in the city light. It was January, 1986. I was seventeen years old. The railway station loomed behind me like an infernal machine into which people vanished, heads down, all business. I had been too anxious to eat much that day and felt light-headed, even faintly delirious. The pavement was baking through the soles of my shoes. The air smelled of hot chips, of vinegar, of car exhaust. A lone taxi honked. A skinny boy sauntered past with a boom-box on his shoulder, the music blasting from it distorted into sheer incomprehension.

It was too late to turn back, but I experienced a swooning feeling of solitude that was unfamiliar and utterly exhilarating.
Anything could happen to me here
, I thought.
And no one would know
. This realisation provided me with inexplicable comfort. I am never happier than when on the verge of an experience; it is, often, victory enough.

It was warmer in Melbourne than Dunley, and I had broken out in a nervous sweat. Terrified that someone might perceive me for what I really was — a boy with almost no idea of the world beyond the country town where he had spent his childhood — I set off walking with what I hoped was a purposeful air. The suitcase banged against my calf.

I had gone two blocks and was in sight of the murky Yarra River before noticing I had headed in the wrong direction. I stopped in the bright sunlight and squinted about me, cursing under my breath. I blushed as I imagined the snickering and eye-rolling this error would have prompted in my sisters. But I was self-reliant to a fault, and the thought of asking anyone for directions appalled me, so I ducked into a side street and retrieved my wrinkled street map.

In those days, that lower part of Melbourne was deserted on Saturday afternoons, an arrangement of blunt concrete canyons abutting the docklands. A gritty wind scuttled along the footpath, bringing with it cigarette butts and a crumpled chip packet. I closed my eyes to the dust. Upon opening them a few seconds later, I was startled to see a man bearing down on me with a peculiarly intense and rollicking gait. He was about twenty metres away and getting closer, talking and gesticulating. ‘Get out of here,' he was yelling. ‘Get away.' His voice echoed off the buildings.

He wore very tight trousers and a green pirate blouse. His hair was long, his eyes were wild and his feet were bare, but the most alarming aspect of his get-up was his lips, which were tattooed a deep blue. I looked around, unsure if I should pick up my suitcase and attempt to outrun this bizarre apparition or whether such a move would merely antagonise him. I had read in
National Geographic
that it was fatal to try to outrun a grizzly bear; preferable to back away slowly while maintaining eye contact. This wildlife knowledge was, naturally, of no use to me; we didn't even
have
grizzly bears in Australia. Not only that, but it was in this blur of trivia retrieval and frantic indecision that he was almost upon me. His bellowing had subsided to an indistinct but menacing mutter. I froze. My heels knocked on the brick wall against which I had backed. I might even have turned my head away in expectation of a blow, but he paid me no heed as he walked past and vanished around the corner into Flinders Street, leaving a waft of sweet perfume in his wake.

I retraced my steps and caught the tram at Bourke Street. Rattled after my encounter with the blue-lipped man and worried about missing my tram stop and ending up in the wilds of suburbia, I watched through the window, mentally checking off the landmarks as we went: Myer department store; Darrell Lea chocolate emporium; the cinema complex; and the famous Pellegrini's cafe, where my late Aunt Helen had taken me for lemon granitas on the few occasions I had visited her alone. So many shops, so many people. A group of boys in sharp suits were busking in the mall, crowds of onlookers. As the tram clattered up Bourke Street towards my destination, my heart began to beat wildly. Surely, disappointment could be the only result of such high expectations.

I alighted one stop past the Exhibition Building in Nicholson Street and waited on the narrow traffic island as cars whizzed by. On one side of the large, busy road were the Carlton Gardens with their tennis courts and stately avenues of elm trees. On the other side, almost hidden behind a hedge and an overgrown peppercorn tree, was the apartment block with its name spelled out in white metal lettering affixed to one of its red-brick walls:
Cairo
.

Passing into its shady gardens on that summer afternoon, I felt transported (as even now my recollections transport me) into another world. Dappled sunlight, the cool scent of bricks, the abrupt cessation of traffic noise.

I lugged my suitcase up the unusual cantilevered staircase and along the walkway to the apartment in which Aunt Helen had lived for so many years. The key turned easily in the lock. With trepidation, I opened the door and stepped inside. On the floor in front of me, spilling from the service hatch where it must have been placed, was a pile of unopened mail. Also in the hallway were three or four boxes of Aunt Helen's things that my dad had packed up to be thrown out.

The apartment was compact but even lovelier than I recalled. Light splashed through the large, floor-to-ceiling window of the main room. I put down my suitcase in the narrow entrance hallway and knew, if only dimly, that my life would never be the same.

*

Cairo had been a focus for so much of my imaginative energy that to find myself there was confusing. Although the apartment only had two rooms (four, including the bathroom and kitchen), I spent a bit of time on that first sunny afternoon prowling around opening and closing cupboards, peering in drawers, half expecting to encounter someone hiding in a corner. But, of course, there was no one in the apartment and there hadn't been for some months, as was evident by the stuffy air and layers of dust on the furniture. My father had come and cleared away many of Aunt Helen's personal items after her death, but there were others yet to be disposed of, household things made strange and strangely meaningful by her absence: books, photographs, an empty vase, a dish of loose change on the fridge.

Constructed in a U-shape around an overgrown garden, Cairo apartments were completed in 1936. With only two storeys, the thirty or so one- and two-bedroom apartments had been built with bachelors in mind, and the block retained many of its original features, including the service and rubbish-bin hatchways designed as modern, labour-saving features. A dining room at the rear of the block, which had once served meals, had been transformed into a milk bar long before I moved in. Three cantilevered concrete staircases provided access to the upper floor at the southern and eastern corners. Architectural flourishes were kept to a minimum, in accordance with the modernist aesthetic of the era. The apartments' front doors all had porthole windows and these, combined with the waist-high railing along the exterior walkways,
gave one the impression of being on board a liner moored at the edge of the city, waiting for clearance to set sail.

Helen's apartment was sparsely furnished, but tasteful: a green sofa, an armchair, Persian rugs over the bare floorboards, a wooden table by the window, a coffee table with a pile of magazines, a low bookcase. On the floor was a record player with a stack of old records (the soundtrack from
Dr Zhivago, Scottish Military Anthems
) leaning against the skirting board beside it. A floorboard under a rug in the narrow hall squeaked when stepped on.

The bedroom contained a spongy double bed, a wardrobe and a bureau of drawers upon which, among the scattering of jewellery and desiccated cosmetics, stood a framed, black-and-white photograph of Aunt Helen at a party with one hand resting on the forearm of the corpulent, bejewelled actor Frank Thring, who lived nearby.

The kitchen led off the entrance hall and was dim and poky, not much larger than a galley. A window of frosted glass set high above the sink allowed for some natural light. The kitchen's shallow cupboards contained a profusion of teacups, packets of spices, noodles, tins of tomatoes, bottles of liquor.

Opposite the kitchen was the equally small bathroom with its glorious deep bath, a mirrored cupboard, tiles of the palest green. It smelled of musty drains and peppermint mouthwash. Spider webs fluttered in the corners; the sink bore a rusty tear-drop from the dripping tap.

There was an elegant balcony off the lounge room that looked over a side street. Standing on it in the blazing sun, I could see the balconies of my neighbours on either side of this apartment, but no one appeared to be home. A car drove past in the street below, trailing a cricket commentary in its wake. I stretched out, tore off a handful of leaves and dry buds from the peppercorn tree, and held them to my face. To this day I cannot open a jar of peppercorns
without being plunged into that distant afternoon; it is an aroma (blunt, complicated; familiar yet exotic) that contains multitudes.

My assessment of the apartment didn't take long. Obviously, it needed to be thoroughly cleaned, but on that first afternoon I could do no more than lie on the couch, red satin cushion beneath my head, and gaze through the window at the swaying fronds of the peppercorn tree. Every so often, the thin curtain billowed out in the warm breeze like a woman's dress. I was exhausted, relieved, scarcely able to believe my good fortune. I imagined Aunt Helen lying here doing the same thing. I felt at rest, as if I had travelled vast distances to be here.

The heat subsided as the afternoon drew to a close. People came and went along the walkway outside. I sensed doors opening and closing, birds chirruping, voices, a woman humming an indistinct tune as she walked by, the vague sound less a melody than an enticing scent that hung on the air long after she had passed.

IT'S DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT THE PRECISE BEGINNING BUT, IF I
were to try, I would need to start earlier than the murder and that infamous heist; back further than meeting the Cheevers and their intriguing friends; before moving into Cairo, even though those events might be the obvious starting points for what transpired.

Let's face it: the rot set in early. Much later, Sally (dear Sally) told me that without a past a person has no character, and she might have been right. Now, perhaps, I have too much character.

If I cast my mind back into the murky waters of that ever-receding past, I can picture myself late one afternoon on a low hill overlooking the football oval in Dunley, Victoria, population 3250. There I sat, young and prickling with desires and grievances I would be hard pressed to name.

It was the winter before I moved into Cairo. I was in my final year at Dunley High School, where I studied French, European history, literature, art history and English with an earnestness and dedication that now surprises me. I struggled through irregular French verbs; tried to decipher Eliot's
Preludes;
and pored over my 1970 edition of E.H. Gombrich's
The Story of Art
(in which Pablo Picasso still lived), with its grimy reproductions of great paintings, as if they might reveal to me another, better world. In a hard
country town like Dunley — where a man's worth was measured by his ability to stake a fence or identify the number of cylinders in a car by sound alone — this made me a misfit. In addition, I was scrawny and morbidly uncomfortable in my skin. I bit my fingernails with grim determination and often scrutinised myself in the mirror for hours, as if the clue to my character might be found on or behind the cold, smooth glass.
What do people see when they look at me?
I wondered.
How am I supposed to be in this terrible world?

Adolescence is a swirl of superiority and crushing doubt. Nowadays the so-called experts fret over epidemics of low self-esteem in our teenagers but, really, it is one of the many necessary planks used for the raft that transports us from youth to adulthood. Without it, we are nothing.

I lived with my mother, Emily, who worked as a bookkeeper at Stockdale's law firm. My parents had divorced four years earlier. My father, Roger, a real estate agent, had married his colleague Barbara Moore, who was famous around town for her bouffant hairdo that made her look like a rather addled extra from
La Dolce Vita
, an impression augmented by rumours that Barbara had an addiction to sleeping pills. My elder sisters, Meredith and Rosemary — with whom I did not get along — were both married and lived nearby.

In addition to school, I worked one or two shifts a week as a waiter at Eddie's Cafe on Main Street. My life at that time was characterised by yearning; I would find myself standing (in my bedroom, at the kitchen sink, the back door at Eddie's) gazing through a window at the sky, wondering what might lie beyond, what adventures people were having in New York or Casablanca. Even now, the images that most readily come to mind when I think of my youth in Dunley are of the low, grey sky; the flat horizon; a plastic bag snagged on a barbed-wire fence. I hated Dunley and most of the people who lived there, including my family. Or at least I thought I did, which is perhaps the same thing.

On that afternoon, the trees were skeletal, empty of leaves, and the air had in the last few weeks taken on an icy quality. In a month or two, the oval would be mud, and the streets of the town would be more or less deserted after nightfall — apart from drunks staggering home after last drinks at the Great Southern Hotel, kids doing wheelies on their bikes, and the occasional police car cruising, shark-like, along Main Street. Dunley was always a mean place, but in winter it became a town lurking with sinister possibilities; the bitter cold stripped away any bucolic veneer the place had acquired during summer. The few tourists who visited for the bushwalking or a weekend away vanished, the sun struggled low on the horizon, and sharp winds sheared across the boggy fields.