Cairo

by Chris Womersley

  As usual, I parked in Hanover Street. I stepped from the Mercedes and walked through the gate into Cairo’s soggy grounds. Everything felt surreal, but at least it was done with. Not only that but also, somehow, we had gotten away with it. As I mounted the stairs, I mused about how later that day I would fill in the paperwork for my passport and then, later that week, we would all go to a travel agent and organise flights to Europe. I remember the smell of wet foliage and of eggs frying. I remember the oyster-coloured clouds overhead. But what I remember most — with an acuity that has not dimmed over time, and the mere thought of which never fails to send through me a tremor of pure, blood-sizzling panic — is what happened on the landing.

  I detected a hubbub of conversation, a familiar voice, others not so familiar. Across the concrete, a wedge of light spilled from my open front door. I vacillated — tense, doubtful — on the walkway. A bulky man carrying a clipboard stepped from my apartment. He wore an ill-fitting grey suit jacket and black trousers.

  At first this stranger didn’t notice me. A sparrow landed on a nearby branch, dislodging a cascade of rainwater. A door slammed somewhere below. Then the man considered me. He had a bushy moustache, ruddy cheeks. Although I registered that something was awry, this confetti of discrete impressions refused to coalesce into anything coherent. He smiled, glanced down at his sheaf of notes. He nodded in response to the familiar voice emanating from my apartment. Then he turned to me again, brow knitted, and I noticed the holstered pistol at his hip.

  ‘Ah,’ he said, flashing a shiny badge at me. ‘Hello there. I’m Detective Sergeant Bird from Melbourne CID. We’ve been looking everywhere for you.’

  The jig, it seemed, was already up.

  TWENTY-THREE

  DETECTIVE BIRD CHECKED HIS NOTES AGAIN.

  ‘You are Tom Button, aren’t you?’

  I hesitated. The moment fell apart like an overstuffed file, in which I glimpsed the crumpled documents and items bearing witness to my fate; saw handcuffs, my trial, my mother weeping, the bars of a prison cell, a mugshot, scandal.

  He motioned for me to approach, and when I was close enough he grasped my upper arm and presented me to a crowd of people hovering in the hallway of my apartment.

  I was unsure whom or what I expected to see (a judge in his wig? the hangman?), but was astonished to see my father, as well as Uncle Mike and Jane. In addition, there was a middle-aged man I didn’t recognise standing in the lounge room with his arms crossed.

  ‘Here he is,’ the detective announced.

  To my immense confusion everyone cheered. Jane even clapped, as if I had won a prize. My father jostled past Uncle Mike to give me a bear hug that almost knocked me over. His tears were cold on my neck. There was general confusion, expressions of amazement.

  With his hands on my shoulders, my father stepped back to inspect me. ‘Are you alright?’

  Unable to speak (at a loss as to what I could possibly say), I nodded.

  He looked me up and down. ‘Where the hell have you been? We’ve been calling you. No one’s heard from you for weeks. We thought something terrible had happened. In fact, you look sick.’

  ‘No,’ I managed to say. ‘I’m tired. I’ve been at a party.’

  ‘At a party?’ he repeated, as if this were the most wonderful news he had heard in his life.

  Uncle Mike edged forwards. ‘Your mum rang us last night. Said you hadn’t shown up for work last weekend. Your boss at the restaurant rang her. And you were supposed to come for lunch on Sunday, remember? When we couldn’t get hold of anyone, we called the police and came over. Got in with your dad’s key.’

  My father, who had never thought much of my mother’s brother, gestured for Uncle Mike to back off.

  Detective Bird cleared his throat and shouldered his way through the throng, asking me to follow him into the lounge room. ‘Shall we clear this up?’ he said. He pointed to the other man. ‘This is Senior Detective Powell. We’re both from Taskforce Bolt. Mind if we sit down, Tom?’

  I indicated the couch. Detective Bird sat with his clipboard balanced on one meaty knee. I was puzzled at their geniality. I stared around; in the fantasies of my arrest, the scene was much more chaotic than this, with flashbulbs and hordes of people, probably a smack around the head, arms twisted behind my back.

  I slumped onto the couch and lit a cigarette with trembling hands. Might as well get it over with. I wondered if they had already raided the warehouse, how much they knew. The question of loyalty was a tricky one. After all, who has not considered how long they might hold out to protect their friends when their own safety or freedom was in jeopardy? We all imagine ourselves a part of the Resistance rather than Vichy but, until it comes to the crunch, who can ever know?

  Detective Bird leafed through his papers while whistling a jaunty tune through his lower teeth. Most inappropriate, I thought, considering the gravity of my situation. The other detective perched on the arm of my lounge chair, looking rather bored. Perhaps it was some sort of good-cop, bad-cop routine. My palms were sweaty.

  Detective Bird found what he was searching for. ‘OK. Now. Looks like the confusion started when you didn’t show up for work on Saturday night. Let’s see, the chef at your work called here and said there was no answer. You were meant to work Sunday night, as well. The chef rang your mum. She rang here, rang your uncle and aunt the next afternoon, who said you’d missed your Sunday lunch. They dropped over here yesterday but none of your neighbours had seen you for a couple of days. That’s when they called your dad.’

  My father chimed in. ‘The phone has been ripped from the socket. That’s why we thought the worst.’

  ‘I’ve been at a friend’s place for the past few days,’ I said.

  ‘Girlfriend?’

  ‘No. Just a friend.’

  Detective Bird scratched his moustache. ‘Uh-huh. And your mum called the university yesterday and they had no record of you. Which is odd because your mum was pretty sure — and your dad here, for that matter — that you were studying up there. Even had a few names of lecturers and so on you had talked about. Other students. A literature tutor called — let me see — a Mrs du Maurier? And your dad told us you had become friends with a boy called Jim Joyce, said you’d even been to his family’s holiday house at Point Lonsdale. For Easter?’

  Detective Powell smirked.

  ‘Now,’ Detective Bird continued, ‘none of that is police business but …’

  Indeed, I wondered what on earth all this had to do with the theft of the Weeping Woman, not to mention Queel’s murder. I assumed he was setting the trap — Detective Columbo-style — from which it would be impossible for me to extract myself.

  ‘… as it happens, there weren’t any records of the lecturers you had mentioned. Or the students, for that matter.’

  Detective Bird contemplated me with concern. There was a fleck of food (egg yolk, perhaps) in his moustache, and this grooming oversight, more than anything, made him seem a safe and kind man. He would understand if I told him everything. I imagined him nodding sagely, saying It’s OK, son. Everyone was looking at me. My body was burning with terror and shame and guilt. I wanted to dissolve into the fabric of the couch. I ground out my cigarette in an ashtray.

  My father, who I had noticed becoming impatient with these preliminaries, interjected. ‘And when we couldn’t get hold of you, we feared the worst. That some horrible psychopathic freak …’

  ‘I heard he chopped off men’s you-know-whats,’ Jane said primly.

  ‘… so we called the police.’

  ‘And did all sorts of other things to them.’

  ‘You’ve been sacked from your job anyway.’

  Detective Powell held up a palm for everyone to be quiet. ‘The thing is, Tom. I take it you’ve heard about the case of this so-called Moonee Ponds killer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘OK. Well, yesterday we picked up a lady in connection with those crimes, and it turned out she had in her possession a couple of
documents belonging to you. University enrolment papers and so on.’

  No one spoke as Detective Bird produced from his sheaf of notes my enrolment papers. Each page was in a clear plastic divider marked with police stickers, but I could see they were filthy, crumpled, stained here and there with what might have been blood. The sight of them creeped me out, but I was still confused as to what all this had to do with the painting, or Queel, or anything I had been involved with in the past couple of weeks.

  Detective Powell stood and smoothed the creases from his trousers. ‘And when your dad called the police to tell us about you going missing, and then we found these enrolment papers in our suspect’s possession, well, we thought the worst might have happened. The woman we’ve got in custody said you had given them to her at a laundromat but we didn’t think that was very likely, and considering she is under suspicion for involvement in these brutal killings, well …’

  The detective continued talking, interrupted now and then by my uncle or father, but my attention slipped its mooring and drifted elsewhere. It was all too bewildering. The front door was still wide open, and I stared vaguely at the tree beyond the walkway, at the light reflecting from the opposite window. I heard Eve shrieking in the distance. ‘Wild protester!’ she seemed to be saying again. What was that?

  Meanwhile, Detective Powell was fending off salacious questions about the Moonee Ponds killer.

  ‘I read in the Herald that it was a Satanic thing,’ my father was saying.

  Jane offered to make tea and went into the kitchen, where I heard the click and slap of her opening and closing cupboards. I wondered if I’d run out of tea. With all these people standing around, my apartment felt low-ceilinged and cramped.

  ‘No,’ Uncle Mike was saying to Detective Powell when I tuned in again to the conversation around me. ‘Seriously. How old do you think I am?’

  The detective gave him the once-over. ‘Forty-five?’

  Mike glanced about for his wife, who was still in the kitchen, washing the dishes by the sound of it. He shook his head and leaned in to reveal the answer, as if it might be a mystery Detective Powell had been sweating over for some time. ‘Fifty-two.’

  ‘Oh?’

  ‘It’s all in the diet. Plus the kays every morning on the bike.’

  I tried to focus. Gradually it dawned on me. ‘So you’re only here because my parents thought I was missing?’

  Detective Bird didn’t even bother to look up from the report he was writing. ‘That’s right. There was a bit of confusion over where you’ve been for the past few days. Remember in future to let your parents know what you’re up to.’

  My relief was sudden and intense, as if I had surfaced after being held underwater for several minutes. I inhaled deeply; colour rushed back into the room. I felt the nip on my thigh of a spring that was poking through the couch’s ragged green upholstery.

  ‘Tom? Tom?’ Detective Bird was saying, and I realised he had asked me a question.

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘You were at a party all night, did you say?’

  ‘A party. Last night? Yes.’

  He rested his elbows on his knees, clicked his pen in and out. ‘And how do you think our suspect got hold of your enrolment papers?’

  Click-click. Click-click.

  ‘I gave them to her.’

  ‘You did?’

  ‘Yes. In that laundromat in Brunswick Street. Months ago.’

  He and Detective Powell looked at each other. ‘But why would you do that?’

  What could I tell them? That I had decided to forgo a bland formal tertiary education in favour of lessons in art and history and friendship and love? That I had sacrificed my ordinary life for one so filled with excitement and danger that it was almost unbearable? I looked at them. I wanted to laugh in their faces. They would never understand, not if they lived to be a thousand years old. All I could do was shrug in response.

  Predictably, my father was outraged. ‘Why in hell did you do that?’

  As Jane glided from the kitchen with a tray of steaming mugs, Detective Bird tucked his papers under his arm, and stood. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘it doesn’t look like there’s any need for us here.’

  The detectives declined tea, bade farewell and made their way to the front door, accompanied by my father (not before he had promised to deal with me later).

  Jane smiled and handed me a cup of tea. ‘We’re just glad you’re OK.’

  I had never liked her a great deal, but Jane’s gesture of making tea felt like the kindest thing anyone had ever done for me and I was filled with gratitude. My eyes clogged with tears.

  After a whispered conference in the hallway, the detectives departed. I sipped my scalding tea, comforted by the menial task at hand.

  ‘What the hell?’

  It was my father, who was looking quizzically at the floor underneath his shoes, eyes narrowed. He pressed down with one foot. With renewed despair, I realised he was standing on the squeaky floorboard — beneath which rested the shoebox containing Aunt Helen’s pistol. Again he rested his weight on the floorboard and grunted with satisfaction at the resultant squeak.

  Like many Australian men, my father fancied himself a home handyman (saw it, in fact, as intrinsic to his masculinity), and it was with no small degree of horror that I recognised the expression on his face: it was that of a man discovering a construction fault he might be able to repair himself.

  With the intention of manoeuvring him away from such a dangerous spot, I jumped up and strode towards him. Before I could distract him, however, he had crouched on one knee and peeled back a corner of the Persian carpet to expose the offending floorboard.

  ‘This needs fixing,’ he muttered. ‘Probably needs something to wedge it. Do you have a bit of wood, by any chance?’

  ‘What?’ I said.

  ‘Wood. Are you deaf as well as stupid? A bit of wood. As a matter of fact, it looks like you might be able to …’

  I became aware of a high-pitched voice nearby. A few seconds later, Eve was standing in my front doorway. She was gasping for breath, as if she had run some distance to get there.

  Still on one knee, my father swivelled around and said good morning to her.

  ‘Eve,’ I blurted out, grateful for once to see her, for the distraction she would provide. Grateful, that is, until she opened her mouth.

  ‘There’s that child protester!’ she announced, and I detected her piquant revenge for all the times I had avoided her. She was nodding so energetically that her pigtails flopped about behind her.

  Then I heard the voice of Detective Bird, who was still on the walkway outside. ‘What did you say, little lady?’

  My father looked back at me, eyebrows raised. I felt I was sinking into a dreadful zugzwang in which I might be compelled to implicate myself in one awful crime to absolve myself of a worse one.

  ‘He’s a child protester.’

  Caroline, the horrible girl’s mother, loomed up behind her, also short of breath. ‘It’s molester, honey. Mo-les-ter.’

  Detective Bird peeked around the doorjamb at me. Then, addressing Eve: ‘What makes you say that? Did he hurt you?’

  Eve, usually so eager to be the centre of attention, was struck mute. Confused, she glanced back and forth between me, her mother and the detective, who had lowered himself onto his knee to meet her eye.

  ‘No, no,’ she said at last.

  Caroline, ever astounded by her child, chuckled.

  My father was by then standing again, hands on hips, mouth agape.

  ‘Then what makes you say that, honey?’ Detective Bird persisted.

  The child hopped from foot to foot. ‘Um, um.’ She gazed around, unable to contain herself, then pointed to the middle of the apartment block. ‘Max told me!’

  I recalled Max joking that he would use this to keep the girl from bothering me, but I never considered he would do it.

  Submitting to the childish belief that I might render myself invisible if un
able to see my persecutors, I closed my eyes.

  TWENTY-FOUR

  FORTUNATELY, THIS MOST HEINOUS OF ALLEGATIONS WAS SOON cleared up. With Detective Powell left to watch over me, Detective Bird trooped over to Max and Sally’s apartment with Caroline and Eve. Although nobody answered the door, on the way the detective managed to ascertain from Eve and her mother that I had not touched her at all and that her allegation was based on the throwaway comment of an eccentric (and often drunk) neighbour. Finally, most of my unwelcome visitors left.

  My trials were not, however, finished for the day. Hungover and exhausted, I endured a gruelling lunch with my father at bustling Tiamo in Lygon Street. We made small talk: Barbara had damaged her Achilles tendon playing tennis; their real estate business was going well; the Dunley football club was raising money to build a new locker room. To my ears it was news from a distant land for which I cared not a jot. I hadn’t been alone with my father in many months, and I knew I was being sullen and uncooperative.

  My father stared at me, a steaming forkful of spaghetti marinara suspended between his mouth and plate.

  After a while, he put it down. ‘You were such a sweet boy when you were small,’ he said, taking up a paper napkin and wiping his mouth. ‘I remember once, when you were about eight years old, you tried to run away. You had a bag of stuff, some sandwiches and an apple, things like that. Meredith and Rosemary caught you sneaking along the side of the house. You had some idea you were adopted. I don’t know where you thought you were going. To find your real family, I suppose. I’m not sure if you remember that.’

  I did remember the day — the whine of cicadas, the rough drag of pampas grass trailing through my fingers as I crept past the house.

  My father laughed to himself and began shovelling spaghetti into his mouth.