Cairo

by Chris Womersley

  I looked around for Max. From a far corner of the apartment I heard a tap running, the slam of a cupboard door. What the hell was he doing?

  Queel contemplated me, wiped his mouth again. ‘Let me give you some advice. You should be more careful who you associate with. They are — what? — fun, interesting?’ He gave a theatrical shiver. ‘They are glamorous; all this is glamorous. You want to be like them, don’t you? But that is not the same as being their friend. I saw you with them at some openings. They let you come along with them, like a leetle, um … pet. That’s all. I can see maybe what you get out of it, but what do they get from you? Who knows, eh?’

  My determined refusal to answer only goaded him. ‘And that girl, what’s her name? Sally? Leetle, innocent Sally. Very attractive, no? She would pretend anything to get what she wanted. Let’s say you would not be the first to fall for her. In fact I myself —’

  ‘Shut up, will you!’ I said, furious — not because I thought he was wrong, but because I feared he was right. Embarrassed at my outburst, I scrutinised the ice melting in my glass.

  He raised one hand palm outwards in surrender and recrossed his legs. ‘I have a sense for this sort of thing. Besides, I saw you and her together. At that Roar Gallery in Fitzroy, out the back one time.’

  I knew the night he was referring to. It was a month or so ago, at the opening of an exhibition of drawings by a friend of Edward’s. We were all there: Gertrude, Edward, Max and Sally, even James. The crowded room was thick with the fragrance of hair gel and pencil shavings. It was not long after Sally and I had spent our first night together, and I was sick about her. I had drunk too much cheap white wine, and when I happened upon her alone in the dim back stairway, I couldn’t resist clasping her around the waist in a clumsy attempt to steal a kiss. It happened quickly, but the memory of it was still vivid: her warm body pressed to my own, her hand at my hip, the winey flavour of her lips. My actions were stupid, dangerous, but I was confident that nobody had seen us.

  I said nothing, but Queel — relishing the raw nerve he had touched — smirked. ‘You’re lucky it was me who found out,’ he said. ‘Lucky it wasn’t someone else.’

  I didn’t know if he was referring to the theft or to the incident with Sally, but at that instant Max materialised in the lounge room. He was pale and war-eyed, like a desperado from one of Egon Schiele’s drawings come to life. My first thought was that he had done something terrible.

  Queel sprang from the couch to fix Max a drink. ‘There you are, Max. Now join us and let’s have a good talk. We were chatting about your wife.’

  I couldn’t stifle a low groan. Surely he wouldn’t say anything about Sally and me? My body felt heavy, almost too much for my legs to support.

  Although I have — most reluctantly — relived the next few seconds over and over in my mind, what happened is forever unclear. The memory footage is grainy and scratched.

  Max strode across the room as Queel turned (wet smile on his fishy lips, tumbler in hand) to face him. An expression of puzzled alarm.

  ‘What do you have there, Max? No!’

  Then a crack. Queel grimaced and doubled over. The glass slipped from his hand as he collapsed to the floor. The twitch of his leg, ice glistening on the plush carpet. I had never seen a man shot before, but I was familiar with the choreography of murder from a thousand such cinematic snapshots and realised at once what had happened.

  For the following twenty minutes we might have been underwater. Noises dark and muffled, gliding down the back stairs and onto the street. Not a word about what had happened. The drag of a wet, black night. Driving up Punt Road, tail-lights of cars ahead fragmenting beyond the glass, the digital clock on the abandoned silos displaying — between juddering swipes of windscreen wipers — 11:12. A city soundless and full of sound. 11:13. 12°.

  ‘Merde,’ Max said as we passed beneath the Richmond station bridge. ‘We did it, Tom. We did it. What a thing to do. It’s not like I thought it would be. I have a weird taste in my mouth. Like metal. I never heard of that. Have you got that, too?’

  I shook my head, watched the traffic straight ahead. But I felt his searching gaze upon me. Those glittering eyes, that beatific smile, the exultation eerily reminiscent of the minutes after the Challenger disaster. We drove on. Our breathing loud and close in the car interior. And seconds passing like hours.

  TWENTY

  THE PARTY WAS BEING THROWN IN A LARGE TWO-STOREY, Victorian-era share house in Carlton. Max and I arrived around eleven-thirty and parked on the opposite side of the wide street. I clenched the sticky steering wheel to keep my hands from shaking.

  Proceedings were in full swing; snatches of a Prince song and ragged outbreaks of laughter drifted over the road to where we sat smoking in my car. I saw a long-haired woman writhing in the hall. The famous Dancing Susan. People spilled from the front door onto the porch. Despite the wet weather, others gathered on the upstairs balcony. For some reason I was sickened by the sight; they reminded me of maggots thronging a carcass.

  ‘Do we have to go inside?’ I asked. ‘I don’t feel very well.’

  ‘People need to see us here. You understand that, don’t you?’

  I nodded.

  Max gripped my shoulder. ‘It will be alright. I promise I’ll look after you. We need to keep ourselves together for another week and then we’ll be out of here. Just think of it — we’re almost in France.’

  My throat felt sour and swollen, as if a lump of vomit had congealed there. I nodded again; it was all I was capable of.

  Ebullient, he opened his car door and stepped onto the pavement. ‘Alright,’ he said, ‘let’s get shickered.’

  We encountered James in the busy entrance hall. He was more anxious than usual, tugging at his sleeves and rubbing his neck. It was clear he was drunk. His mouth glistened with red wine, and there was ash scattered on the lapels of his black velvet jacket like flakes of grubby snow.

  ‘Well?’ he asked. ‘What happened?’

  ‘Don’t you worry your pretty little head,’ said Max, looking around with his hands jammed into his trouser pockets. He nodded a greeting at a woman descending the stairs.

  But James was not so easily deterred. ‘What do you mean? Tell me what happened.’

  Max waved him away. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  ‘Your idiotic plan,’ James hissed. ‘As if you would ever get away with this.’

  Max grabbed James by the sleeve, but James shrugged him off. Max took hold of him again, more firmly this time. ‘Look,’ he said in a low voice. ‘Pull yourself together, for God’s sake. We’re almost there. Don’t wreck it for everyone now, James. It’s all been sorted out. Trust me.’

  James gulped wine from his plastic cup. He shook his head and tightened his mouth; he was on the verge of tears.

  Realising his aggressive approach was not working, Max put an arm over James’s shoulder and pulled him close. Until then I had not noticed the disparity in their respective heights; Max was several centimetres taller. He nuzzled his mouth into James’s silvery hair. He kissed him there.

  ‘It will all be fine,’ he whispered. ‘It will soon be over and we can get away from this place. Alright, baby?’

  People brushed past us in the hall. I felt distinctly uncomfortable, but James smiled, reassured.

  ‘I know,’ he said. ‘I’m sorry, Max. It’s …’ He drank the last of his wine and made a face. ‘I think I’m a bit drunk.’

  Max released him. ‘A drink. Yes. Excellent idea. I’ll fetch us each a glass of wine, eh? Are you alright now?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘You’re sure?’

  James nodded and straightened his jacket.

  ‘Make sure he doesn’t do anything crazy,’ Max whispered to me as he brushed past and waded into the throng.

  James cast aside his empty plastic cup and wiped his nose with a handkerchief. After some fumbled attempts, he extracted a crooked cigarette from a packet and lit it. ‘Tell me, Tom. What happene
d tonight? What did Max do? What did you both do?’

  I didn’t know what to say. There were some acts too monstrous for the paltry words that might describe them. I gazed around. Most of the people at the party were a few years older than me. I recognised a junkie friend of Edward’s who was wearing earrings that glowed different colours. A woman who had modelled her look after Madonna (torn fishnets, bright red lipstick, layers of necklaces) slouched against a doorjamb, smoking. I wondered if she had witnessed the incongruous tableau between Max and James and, for a few seconds, my embarrassment at being associated with them overcame my nausea at the events of the evening.

  Just then, a pair of very drunk guys crashed into a bike that had been resting along the wall and sent it toppling to the floor, where it lay with one wheel spinning lazily. James and I watched them lurch off into the melee with arms around each other’s shoulders. I didn’t answer James’s question, and he didn’t press me further. Either he sensed already what had happened or he didn’t want to know. He smoked his cigarette and staggered out the front door without another word.

  The next few hours were a weird and busy nightmare. Edward and Gertrude had, I was told, been at the party, but no one had seen them for an hour or so. Sally had not attended at all.

  Although I liked the idea of parties and was always grateful to be invited, I was never sure whether I enjoyed them. My woeful self-consciousness made it difficult to talk with strangers or dance. Instead, I hovered on the sidelines smoking and drinking, uncertain what to do — how to convey the impression I was enjoying myself with the least outward suggestion of doing so. All this was intensified to an almost unbearable degree that night.

  In the bathroom I discovered a bathtub filled with melting ice and bottles of beer. When I lifted a bottle from it, the ice cubes rattled like cheap jewellery. When that bottle of beer was finished, I gulped some horrible red wine from a plastic cup. I was cornered by a tall Englishman named Rod, who related his saucy seaside adventures in Byron Bay earlier that month. I caught glimpses of Max throughout the remainder of the night: arguing about Cole Porter with a moon-faced boy with braces on his teeth; warming his hands over a fire in a rubbish bin out the back; sitting on the stairs with his hand on the knee of a freckly, redheaded girl.

  At some point a grinning hippy handed me a joint as I waited in line to use the outside toilet. I was not a fan of marijuana, but I sucked on the joint gratefully. When the outhouse was free, I sat on the cold toilet lid for as long as I dared without incurring the wrath of those still queuing in the garden. From a hook dangled a string of Tibetan prayer flags on which were printed, supposedly, invocations to the goddess Tara in the Dzongkha language but might have been recipes for yak-butter tea or directions to Lhasa by road for all anyone knew. Every time I managed to forget what had happened earlier, the memory of it cuffed me like a furious lion freed from its shackles. I put my head in my hands. I might have wept; anything was possible. Anything.

  Some time later I found myself in the kitchen, talking to a girl with black eyes. We had exchanged greetings before at parties, and Naomi had always seemed to me one of those people rather enamoured of their burgeoning intellect. She wore a tight red sweater and smelled of fruity perfume and — rather more exotically — of five-spice powder. She was, I guessed, the type of person I would have studied alongside at university, had I bothered to enrol. This thought reminded me of the drive back from the animal hospital with Max and Gertrude after Buster had been shot, and the groups of students we had seen. Although only eight months earlier, it felt a lifetime ago, on the distant shore of my Rubicon. Alea iacta est, as Caesar himself is reported to have said as he crossed that river. The die is cast.

  I was stoned, senses sharp and prickling, mouth uncomfortably dry. Every so often the physical world looked to be on the verge of melting or assuming a more gelatinous state; the chipped cupboards, the glinting sink, the fridge, all trembling at their edges. The black-and-white linoleum floor tilted and pitched.

  In an effort to maintain a veneer of sanity, I forced myself to concentrate on Naomi. She was majoring in cultural studies at Melbourne University. I was acutely aware of the heat of her hip against my own. I feigned interest in her subjects, nodding and sipping my ghastly wine as she expounded on Roland Barthes and semiotics but, really, all I wanted was to retreat somewhere secluded with her. I had never found her that attractive before, but I longed for the type of solace that only another human can provide. If I could only lose myself for a short while.

  ‘It’s very interesting,’ she was saying. ‘You do a close semiotic analysis of, say, Sale of the Century, and you’ll find that the project is nothing more than … Oh no. Is that that arsehole Max Cheever?’

  I followed her gaze. Sure enough, Max had lurched into the adjacent lounge room and was instructing the redhead in the intricacies of the foxtrot. They were both drunk, and the room was far too crowded to attempt such a step. When they almost knocked over a man, frowns of disapproval rippled from face to face. Someone called out, ‘Watch it, man!’

  ‘Do you know him?’ Naomi asked me.

  I was reluctant to admit my acquaintance with Max lest it jeopardise my chances of spending the night with Naomi, but figured it impossible to get away with a lie on the matter. Fortunately, she required no confirmation from me to elaborate on her antipathy.

  ‘He slept with a good friend of mine, Danielle, over summer. She was so keen on him and he promised her all sorts of things. Led her on. Turns out he’s married to some mousey blonde. Ugh. Can you believe that? Bloody creep. I’d love to give him a piece of my mind. Dani was devastated. Lucky she’s not here tonight …’

  I remembered the letter addressed to Max that I had found in my apartment when I first moved into Cairo. Dearest Max, Thank you so much for last night. So that was who the mysterious ‘D’ was.

  ‘He got into a fight with Michael Hutchence at a party in Brunswick last year,’ Naomi continued. ‘When he was here to make that movie Dogs in Space? Hutchence got a bit sleazy with the wife and Max tried to punch him. I don’t know. That’s only what I heard. And anyway, someone said he hits his wife.’

  I lost sight of Max and the redhead. It was late. Every table or window ledge was covered with ashtrays and empty bottles. A thick slab of smoke hovered above the heads of the remaining dancers in the lounge room. Hand in hand, Naomi and I wound our way through the crowd and cosied up at the top of the stairs. She was so warm, so soft. Her lips were sweet and fizzy, like cider.

  ‘Tom! There you are. I’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  Naomi and I turned to the voice. It was Max, standing a few steps below us and waving a bottle of beer around. His stance was precarious. The redhead was nowhere to be seen.

  ‘You know this guy?’ Naomi asked me.

  Max looked affronted. ‘Of course he knows me. This man here is pretty much my best friend. Come on, Tom. Let’s go. I’m tired.’

  Naomi pulled back from me, as if scorched. ‘You lied.’

  ‘Naomi, I —’

  ‘Natalie! My name is Natalie. Ugh, you’re all the same.’ She stood up, steadied herself against the wall and stomped down the stairs, pushing past Max, and disappeared.

  Max wiped hair from his eyes. ‘Well, she’s a’ — he stopped talking to belch — ‘cute little firecracker, isn’t she?’

  It was only when we attempted to cross the road that I realised how drunk Max was. He could hardly walk. When at last I guided him to the car and shoved him in the back seat, my endeavour was rewarded with boozy cheers from revellers watching from the balcony.

  Although the effects of the joint had worn off, I was still drunk and in no condition to drive. I did not, however, relish the prospect of getting Max home on foot across the park and figured I’d take my chances. Besides, it was almost five a.m. and there were few cars on the roads.

  Unwilling or unable to sit up properly, Max collapsed along the length of the back seat, where he lay muttering and moaning
to himself. I set off as carefully as I could, talking myself through each manoeuvre, as if in so doing I might assume the precision of an automaton. ‘OK. Indicate right. Turning here into Johnston Street. Easy does it. Car coming, that’s it. Slow and steady …’

  Waiting at a red light at the corner of Nicholson Street, Max loomed up from the back seat like Michael Myers in Halloween. I jumped in my seat. The car jerked and stalled.

  ‘Jesus, Max! You scared the hell out of me.’

  His breath was hot on my neck as he leaned between the front seats. ‘Natalie, eh? She was a very pretty thing.’

  Unimpressed, I restarted the Mercedes but waited until we had turned safely into Nicholson Street before responding. ‘She said she knew you.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Yes. You had a fling with a friend of hers called Danielle?’

  He was unfazed by my knowledge of his affair. ‘Danielle! Oh yes. Now she was a real beauty. Absolutely incredible thighs.’

  This was more than I could bear. ‘Max, why on earth would you chase other women when you’re already married to Sally? She’s …’ I chose my words deliberately, barely able to stifle my outrage. ‘I mean, she’s so great.’

  Max harrumphed. ‘Oh, Tom. You’re a sweet boy, but you’re so …’

  ‘What? So what?’

  ‘You know. So bloody old-fashioned. So, I don’t know, boring.’

  I bristled. This was among the worst possible insults in Max’s lexicon, one he invested with a moral dimension; rather than being a mere social inconvenience, banality was a spiritual failing. In his world it was preferable to be nasty, unlikeable, ugly, crazy — almost anything but dull.

  ‘You can’t let yourself get all tied up with such nineteenth-century claptrap,’ he went on. ‘It doesn’t do anyone any good. And I bloody adore Sally. I miss her when she takes a bath. I miss her body, the smell of her, when she’s not there. I would do anything for her and she would do anything for me. Anything at all.’ Max stopped talking and sat back, doubtless feasting on memories of Danielle’s thighs.