Cairo

by Chris Womersley

  The theme of James’s friendlessness was one to which Max returned now and again, and the barb found its mark: James twiddled his earring and lapsed into a sullen, embarrassed silence.

  It was not long after that Max, having wandered unwittingly into an improvisational dead-end, stopped to light a cigarette and mop his brow with a handkerchief. He acknowledged our applause with a gracious nod before launching into a left-handed vaudevillian rag.

  After a minute or so of this, his voice adopted the gravelly intonation of a sideshow barker. ‘We live in dangerous times, ladies and gentlemen. A senile religious zealot is in the White House, his finger on the nuke-you-lar trigger. Let us not forget that we have never been closer to the end, and let us not forget also that it is in such times that life is at its sweetest. We are at the pointy end, no doubt about it. Don’t fear the end, my friends, but embrace it. We will sing while the bombs fall. And now, gentlemen — you, too, James — allow me to introduce the incomparable Sally Cheever, who will break the hardest of hearts. Sally is set to become the greatest of her generation and you, ladies and gentlemen, will have the privilege, the honour, the downright satisfaction of seeing her here tonight. In the future, you will be able to say you saw Sally Cheever sing in March 1986 and your friends will weep with envy. That is, if we have a future.’

  By this time Sally was standing beside him, smoothing her blue dress with one hand, her other resting on the piano lid.

  She was usually reticent, so I was surprised by the alacrity with which she had leaped to her feet at Max’s introduction. She arranged her hair. Her hips swayed ever so gently along with the introductory riff, which trailed away to be replaced by hesitant, meandering notes in search of their doleful key.

  By the time these notes had found their key — independently, it seemed, of Max, who now slumped, inconspicuous, at his stool — Max and Sally Cheever’s apartment had transformed into an ill-lit Parisian boîte with sawdust underfoot and the prick of absinthe in the air.

  Sally cleared her throat and began to sing the wonderful Leiber and Stoller tune Is That All There Is? in a voice that, like an exotic scent, had a blend of textures, some silken, others faintly tubercular. Although I knew she was a singer, I had never heard her perform; my eavesdropping from the rooftop scarcely counted. During her rendition, each and every part of her body acquired its own eloquence, from the curl of her neck to the arch of her foot, the straight lines of her nose. Her clavicle, her milky wrist. One of her upper front teeth — the left — was cracked, which gave her smile a rare, flawed quality. She wore no jewellery aside from her wedding ring, no make-up apart from deep-red lipstick. The overall effect was electrifying.

  While Max kept playing, Sally pushed away from the piano and wound her way to where I was sitting. She stood before me, one hip cocked, hand outstretched until I put my hand in hers.

  ‘It looks like the only way a girl can get to dance,’ she said with a faux aggrieved smile, ‘is by asking for it herself.’

  I was alarmed, but rose to my feet. What else could I have done? Until then I had hardly danced in my life, but dance we did for a minute or two, Sally and I, slowly, tentatively, until she detached herself and went back to stand beside the piano.

  Relieved and disappointed, I resumed my seat and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. I had broken out in a nervous sweat. At eighteen years old my heart was as keen and clumsy as a puppy, and my experience of women was scant. I developed crushes on terse, scarlet-lipsticked women who worked in the city’s record shops; on girls waiting at tram stops. I fantasised about women I spied sitting in bookstores or alone in cafes. But on that day I fell deeply in love with Sally Cheever, the woman destined to haunt me for so many years to come.

  *

  My growing familiarity with my new friends did nothing to lessen their mysterious appeal; if anything, intimacy with their peculiarities only enhanced their allure.

  I spent the most time with James, because we were the only single people in the group. As he had on that first evening on Cairo’s rooftop, he assumed the role of a sort of Greek chorus, filling me in on the personal histories of the Cheevers, whom he had known the longest.

  Both Sally’s and Max’s childhoods had been troubled. Sally, he told me, was originally from Sydney and had a younger brother. Her mother died when she was a girl, and afterwards her father converted to a ghastly evangelical religion that indulged speaking in tongues and other kitsch displays of devotion, including beachside camps at which suitable marriages between young parishioners were orchestrated by church leaders and parents. It was from one of these weekends that Sally absconded when she was about seventeen, winding up in Melbourne, where she found temp work as a secretary and singer in a local band.

  Her father remarried and made a show of enticing her back to the family, but was more or less grateful that his most irksome child was no longer around to embarrass him in front of his new friends. She met Max two or three years later when he moved into Cairo, and they had lived together ever since.

  Max’s parents had been killed by Cyclone Tracy while they were holidaying alone in Darwin, when he was a teenager. Max and his elder sister, Edwina, had been raised by an aunt (‘A creature straight out of Roald Dahl,’ according to James) who returned to England once she had discharged her duties in regard to her niece and nephew. Edwina had moved to America and, although they didn’t see each other often, she and Max exchanged regular letters.

  In addition to his modest inheritance, Max had made a decent sum of money about ten years before, when a song of his became an unexpected hit in Europe and was used in worldwide TV advertisements for Volkswagen. There had even been a time when it looked likely that a Swedish version of the song would be nominated as that country’s Eurovision entry, but there were complications over Max’s nationality and the idea was scrapped. James couldn’t recall the song title but sang a portion of it for me (We will go on and on, our song will still be sung, forever …) and, with a thrill, I recalled the advertisement of which he spoke, and had a flashback to watching TV while lying on the carpet in our lounge room (swooping aerial shot of yellow Beetle whizzing along a mountain pass, grinning blonde, sunset over snow-capped peaks).

  Although it made him wealthy for a time, Max was most ashamed of this brush with popular success, and James advised me never to mention the song or the advertisement in his presence. It did explain, however, how Max had managed to buy the two apartments and combine them to make his and Sally’s current residence — not to mention affording him the time to devote to his magnum opus without having to work at a ‘day-job’ to make ends meet.

  James knew so much of Max’s personal history because they had attended the same high school. It was, he said, the sort of alternative high school fashionable among parents who considered themselves to be of a liberal, artistic disposition — an establishment at which students were allowed to smoke in the common room and call the teachers by their first name, but where discipline was non-existent and very little actual education took place.

  ‘Max couldn’t read until he was fifteen,’ James told me late one night.

  ‘What? No.’

  We were sitting around the filthy laminate kitchen table in his apartment and eating Paddle Pops, having attended a party in a nearby warehouse. James’s apartment was behind a shop on Smith Street, accessed through a door of frosted glass beside a barber shop, where — if the curling, black-and-white photographs in the window were indicative — Gene Pitney was still the height of fashion, and older men favoured hair from a can.

  The apartment was ugly and chaotic, its crummy kitchen benches piled high with old takeaway food containers encrusted with the remains of curry, with dirty dishes and boxes that formerly contained frozen sausage rolls. The kitchen’s linoleum floor was the deep shade of green most often found in hospital wards. James lived alone and subsisted almost exclusively on a diet of junk food, frozen desserts, alcohol and cigarettes, most of which he shoplifted from local superma
rkets and grocery stores.

  James licked his chocolate Paddle Pop and slouched over the table. He was drunk. Ice-cream had stained his mouth, giving his smile a half-cocked, sinister edge, like the Joker from Batman.

  ‘Absolutely true. Well, he could write his name and a few other things besides, but for ages he couldn’t read anything much more sophisticated than Dick and bloody Jane books. He only made it through high school because I helped him so much. I wrote half his assignments.’

  ‘But what about all those books in his apartment?’ I said. ‘He’s quoted long passages of things to me, talked about what he’s read —’

  ‘Let me guess: a few lines of Nietzsche, perhaps a bit from Walt Whitman, a stanza or two from his beloved Maldoror?’

  I was puzzled by the bitterness that had crept into James’s voice, taken aback also by the reassessment of Max’s erudition that this information entailed.

  ‘Have you ever seen him read anything?’ James asked, keen to press his point.

  I thought about this for a few seconds, sorting mentally through snapshots of our acquaintance. I recalled Edward reading the newspaper aloud to him that first morning at the warehouse, and I’d observed him doing that since. And I thought back to the day that I’d met Max when I’d delivered the letter that had erroneously been put through my mail slot. Had I actually watched him read? Perhaps not.

  ‘But he sent me an invitation asking me to dinner that first night I met you,’ I told him.

  James shook his head. ‘It would’ve been written by Sally. If you’ve still got it somewhere, look at the hand it’s written in and you’ll find it’s a woman’s handwriting.’

  This prompted in me, not for the first time, a stab of affection for Sally. I imagined her labouring over the invitation — hair tumbling into her eyes, lips pursed in concentration — and relished the illusion she had written it expressly for me.

  James wiped the back of his hand across his mouth and tossed the clean Paddle Pop stick aside. ‘Don’t get me wrong, Max is no fool. He does have a fantastic memory and a capacity to absorb and understand information. Knows recipes by heart, can quote chunks of Shakespeare. He can read now, but not terribly well. Sally does most of that stuff — pays bills, reads and writes the letters to and from his sister and so on. He reads music, knows complex rhythms and musical schemes, can hold symphonies in his head. A few years ago he and Sally got hold of a home-schooling guide from the 1960s and devised a curriculum to compensate for Max’s abominable education. Haven’t you noticed that most of the stuff he goes on about is — how should we put it — outdated?’

  Now that I considered it, many of the poems Max quoted were idiosyncratic (he had, for example, a few days earlier regaled me with all fifty-five lines of Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade, complete with exegesis). I had assumed his and Sally’s arcane traits were merely an endearing affectation, but at that moment I understood they formed part of a more comprehensive worldview, in which much of the second half of the twentieth century had not yet taken place.

  James leaned over the table in a manner I recognised as preparatory to imparting a confidence. ‘You know what I call him? The Undercheever. Do you like that? Do you? That bloody masterpiece he’s been working on for years, that Maldoror or whatever it is. He has these piles of notes sitting on his piano, but they’re the same bundles of paper that have been sitting there forever. Most of what he plays are segments of other works that he strings together. He can get away with it because none of his friends know enough about classical music to pull him up. He does have an extraordinary memory, which is why he seems to know so much. Sally reads to him almost every night. She’s an excellent reader, can do it for hours on end. Novels, textbooks, history books, you name it. She read Lord of the Rings to him, for God’s sake. That must be a zillion words long. Full of creepy hobbits and wizards.’

  That explained a mystery that had been bothering me for some time. While taking the night air on the rooftop I had often heard Sally’s soliloquising voice drifting through their open windows, and I must admit to having taken a somewhat unhealthy interest in the noises emanating from their apartment — sounds that ranged from the frankly amorous to others that belied a more explosive relationship. A number of times I had heard shouts, threatening growls, a woman weeping, and had to resist the urge to skim down the stairs and pound on their door, demanding explanations.

  James got to his feet and, after rummaging about, produced a half-full bottle of red wine from a cupboard. He poured it into two grubby tumblers and raised his glass before gulping from it.

  The combination of the late hour, the alcohol we had consumed and James’s apparent ill-humour towards Max — each of which alone might have been an excuse for such indiscretion — encouraged me to mention I had heard Max and Sally quarrelling a number of times.

  He licked his lips and put his glass down to light a cigarette. ‘Oh, have you?’

  I nodded, already feeling queasy at broaching the subject.

  ‘Yes. Theirs is an unusual relationship. Can’t say I understand it but, then again, the inner workings of other people’s lives are often hard to figure out. They are both desperate to have a baby but so far haven’t been able to achieve it. Max organised a weird solstice fertility rite last winter in the Carlton Gardens. God, the things he manages to persuade us to do. I had to pour a jar of cow’s blood over both of them and mutter some ancient spell. Then we had to hop about in a circle like rabbits …’

  I recalled what my neighbour Maria had said about seeing them dance in the park like animals.

  ‘The fault is Max’s, but he can’t bear to admit it,’ James went on. He made a pistol of his right hand and depressed the thumb repeatedly in a pantomime of uselessness. ‘Our Maxy is shooting blanks. What did I tell you? The Undercheever.’

  ‘How did you find out he’s, you know, shooting blanks?’

  Another brief pantomime, this time of reluctance to gossip. ‘Well. Sally got herself into a spot of bother a few years ago. She and Max have been trying to get pregnant for ages, but only when she has a fling with another man does it happen for her.’

  I said nothing, but the expression on my face must have betrayed my incomprehension to James.

  He leaned across the table, tumbler in one hand, and said in a stage whisper, ‘Abortion. Pretty women can only ever rely on a man like me. Anyone else has ulterior motives.’

  Flushed with embarrassment, I inspected my own deliquescent Paddle Pop, licked a chocolate dribble from my knuckle. ‘What do you mean — a man like you?’ I asked.

  He regarded me for a second before smiling, delighted at my question. ‘God, you truly are an innocent, aren’t you? Our Sally’s not as squeaky clean as you might think. I suggested she keep the child. She could have told Max it was his and no one would have been the wiser. It’s not as if it would’ve been black or anything. They could have lived happily ever after. Her having a fling is completely understandable, considering how Max screws around. It’s a miracle they don’t fight more often.’

  I thought back to the night of that first rooftop dinner party or, more precisely, to the blood on Sally’s face that prevented her from joining us for a nightcap at El Nidos. Concern at what might have taken place between her and Max behind closed doors had bothered me ever since, but I had not yet been able to bring myself to ask James about it, for fear — I see now — of what the answer could mean for my infatuation with my new friends and the bohemian idyll in which I had found myself. I resolved to bring it up with him, but before I could say anything James staggered from his chair, knocking it to the floor, and vanished to the bedroom, grumbling about Paddle Pop stains on his white shirt. I heard the noise of drawers being opened and slammed shut as he searched for clean clothes.

  I finished my ice-cream and smoked a cigarette. I had assumed James would return to the kitchen having changed his shirt but, after ten minutes or so — in which I heard no further sounds — I ventured in to see if he was alright
.

  His bedroom was as grotty as the rest of the place. Strewn around the room were clothes, cigarette packets, empty Coke cans, liquor bottles, a volume of his beloved Cavafy and a paperback edition of Edgar Rice Burroughs’ A Princess of Mars. In the middle of this detritus was a mattress upon which James himself was sprawled on his back, shirtless, mouth agape, arms flung to either side like a wayward Christ upon a raft.

  He was fast asleep. His body was so thin, the skin of his pale chest almost amphibious in appearance despite the smattering of hair. On his left wrist were two thick, purple scars that looked old, each of them two or three centimetres long. A row of faint dots on either side of the scars marked the placement of stitches. I considered his habit of constantly checking the length of his sleeves and was filled with pity, with tenderness and with shame that I had glimpsed him exposed in a manner that was doubtless embarrassing for him.

  I covered his sleeping form with a blanket and crossed to the open window. On the windowsill, and along the skirting board, there were at least two dozen cologne bottles, assorted pieces of jewellery, tiny plastic toys and fancy pens arranged in neat configurations. James’s kleptomaniac tendencies were well known among his circle of friends, and I was not unduly surprised to notice among the hoard a pen with Dunley Tigers — Hear them roar! printed on it that had gone missing from my place.

  His room looked out over Smith Street. The display cabinet of the pawn shop opposite was dim, having been emptied for the night of its range of cameras, watches and jewellery. A fluoro light in the drycleaners flickered erratically, illuminating in split-second increments a row of washing machines, grey linoleum floor, a bright blue box of Cold Power.

  The first tram of the day ground down the street. In the east, over distant mountains, the sky was lightening. Bulbous clouds were turning deep orange as if, rather than the sun rising beyond, there were instead a magnificent eruption taking place, one so cosmic in scale and so far away that its effects were nigh on indiscernible. In the foreground was an assortment of antennae sprouting from rooftops, the commission towers a block away on Wellington Street, a graffitied wall. This sight might have been dispiriting for some people — bleak, even — but on that morning it inspired in me the most exquisite melancholy. I love beautiful objects, but it is generally those considered less than beautiful (concrete, wire fences, alleyways and broken things) that inspire deep emotion in me and whose desolate charms I find hard to resist.