Cairo (15 page)

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.

I closed the window and walked back through Fitzroy to Cairo.

AS I HAD PROMISED MY PARENTS, ONCE A MONTH I HAD AN
excruciating Sunday lunch of half-cooked health food with Uncle Mike and his wife, Jane, at their enormous house in the leafy, middle-class suburb of Malvern.

The pair were keen cyclists and wore lycra around the house on Sunday afternoons after their dawn ride. They had no children but doted on three Siamese cats named after planets. Jane worked as a receptionist at the practice Mike owned. She never said a great deal, but Mike more than compensated for it. His favourite conversational gambit with new acquaintances was to demand they guess his age (usually estimated at around forty-three) just to bask in their gasps of amazement when they learned the truth (fifty-two!). His interest in me was perfunctory, which was a relief because it meant I was rarely placed in the position of having to lie about my attendance (or lack thereof) at university. In fact, the only questions Mike asked about anyone's life were intended as a springboard for him to deliver impromptu lectures on whatever topic (Roman myths, Japanese literature of the nineteenth century) piqued his restless interest that week.

I was lying on the couch in my apartment on a chilly Sunday afternoon recovering from one of these horrible lunches when
there was a knock at my door.

I turned down the radio and stayed still on my sofa, thinking it was Eve come to torment me with questions and demands to play with Aunt Helen's jewellery. The obnoxious child had become difficult to avoid; she had begun taking note of my movements and delighted in catching me out if I told her I'd missed a visit because I wasn't home, when she knew for a fact that I was. The child's mother chuckled at these accusations, eager to believe such tactics were indicative of her daughter's brilliance rather than signs of a nascent totalitarian personality.

But the knock came again, louder this time, followed by Max calling out my name.

‘Hello there,' he said when I had ushered him inside. ‘Not napping, were you?'

‘Sorry, Max. I thought you were Eve.'

Max shuddered. For reasons that were unclear, his dislike of Eve was even more pronounced than mine. Taking his cue from Willy Wonka, Max pretended she wasn't there and, if cornered by her on the stairwell or in the garden, would ignore her interrogations (‘What is that strange
buzzing noise
?' he'd say) until she went away, preferably close to tears.

He made a face and patted his chest with theatrical delicacy. ‘You know her mother still feeds the little palindrome … from those withered
dugs
? “Special milk”, Eve calls it. Truly a disgusting sight, like a scene from one of those medieval end-of-the-world paintings.'

‘How on earth do you know that?'

‘There's not much that goes on in Cairo that I don't know about. Anyway,' he said, flopping into my armchair, ‘I could help keep her away from you.'

‘How?'

‘Tell the mother you're a child molester.' He made a spooky
twiddle in the air with his fingers. ‘They're everywhere these days, you know.'