Cairo (14 page)

For me — brought up within the fearful, cloistered domesticity of a country town — it was immensely liberating. They shared their interests, plied me with records to listen to, books to read, and artworks to consider. Their unalloyed enthusiasm saved their arrogance from being insufferable, and it was during those months, through being in their company, that I discovered a way of navigating society, and a political and aesthetic perspective that has remained with me. It was through being with them, because of them, that I became myself.

One night, after finishing work late at the restaurant, I climbed the stairs to the Cairo rooftop. It was late summer, and the air was fragrant and mild. I gazed out over the eastern and northern suburbs, past the tower blocks suffused in their own chemical glow. On the eastern horizon, stars merged with the twinkling
lights of houses. Below in the street, a man called to his dog. Hands in pockets, I patrolled the rooftop as if it were the battlements of a castle, and I its contented but watchful king.

On the far side, away from Nicholson Street, I became aware of a sound distinct from the traffic noise and the restless murmur of the city. It was Sally humming to herself, perhaps after taking a shower. I listened for several minutes, feeling privileged and dishonest.
My Funny Valentine
. I imagined her drying herself with one foot on the edge of the bathtub, hair across her face, the curve of her unseen back.

I leaned on the railing and inhaled the city's warmth.
At last
, I thought.
I have made it at last
.

THOSE MONTHS ARE SO CROWDED WITH HAPPY MEMORIES IT IS
as difficult to individuate them as it might be to pick out a specific face in a crowd: there is Edward in his trademark frayed dark suit, wilting beneath a parasol on the boardwalk of Brighton Sea Baths one blindingly hot afternoon, features pinched with distaste as an ancient woman (skin as leathered as that of an Egyptian mummy) saunters past wearing nothing more than a G-string; of James cruising regally along Brunswick Street on his ramshackle bicycle with a cigarillo jammed between his teeth; Gertrude cackling at a caustic joke involving nuns; Max gesticulating so excitedly that he knocks a stack of dirty plates to the floor of his tiny kitchen, before drawing me close to whisper that ‘Schoenberg was able to see through walls, you know'.

There is, however, one memory that surfaces with more frequency, for reasons that will become clear. It was late March. Summer had by this time drifted into autumn. High, gauzy clouds and the clatter of dry leaves along the road, the wind a friendly Labrador nuzzling at one's heels.

James and I were at Max and Sally's cluttered apartment one overcast weekday morning. Max was in a generous mood, playing the piano for us, the cuffs of his white shirt kept free of the keys
with armbands. A cigarette burned in an ashtray on the lid of his instrument.

Sally sat cross-legged in a lounge chair, smoking her hand-rolled cigarettes, swinging a foot idly in time with the music. As so often happened, I found my gaze drifting over to her, as if my response were calibrated according to hers. I had watched her, nose buried in a tattered paperback copy of
I Capture the Castle
but alert to everything around her, the golden hairs on her forearms glowing like a miniature field of wheat in the light; strolling with a distracted air, as if unsure of her destination; lounging on a rug and picking at grapes in the Carlton Gardens, a massive, floppy hat shading her features; riffling through a rack of clothes in a secondhand shop.

Embarrassed to realise James had noticed my staring, I shifted my focus, hoping to give the impression that I had instead been admiring a sketch hung on the wall behind her.

Max rarely played any of his
Chants
for an audience but he liked, as on this day, regaling us with a variety of standards. He had treated me to many similar displays, and it was clear he took great pleasure in performing. As his fingers strutted and crept up and down the keys, his eyes would close, and across his face would pass an expression of rapt concentration. Despite the physical effort he expended (shoulders hunched in a tight shrug, head bobbing in time, even standing to navigate difficult sequences), it was while playing that he was at his most relaxed. He was a talented pianist and a natural performer, segueing from the pot-holed jauntiness of George Gershwin's
Sweet and Low Down
to a Beethoven sonata to a mordant cabaret tune.

At times he altered the tempo or volume to elucidate for us some details of a work or its composer. ‘And this elegant bagatelle,' he would say, turning his head, ‘was written by Erik Satie. A Rosicrucian in the late eighteen-hundreds, you know. House
composer for the Order of the Rose Cross in Paris. Drawn to the occult.'

James, however, was in a foul mood. ‘For God's sake,' he muttered, under his breath but loudly enough for the room to hear, ‘just play the thing, will you.'

Although James was on the whole a genial person, these swerves in temper — provoked by what, I had not yet ascertained — were not unusual. There had been a number of times when he refused to be agreeable, a dangerous frame of mind in which to encounter Max, who relished needling him when these touchier aspects of his friend's personality arose.

That day was no exception. Max shot him a pointed look. ‘Now, my dear. Don't be like that.'

‘I don't think we need your carry-on, that's all. Play the damn tune.'

‘You don't have to stay here if you don't enjoy it. You're welcome to run off and play with all your other friends.'

‘Max,' Sally warned.

‘Oh, that's right — you don't
have
any other friends.'

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 supermarkets and grocery stores.