Cairo (24 page)

This inspired in me a sudden terror, as if, like a pack of wild dogs, the fear I had held in abeyance for so long was let loose. ‘What do you mean?'

Edward grunted. ‘Do you honestly want to know? He threatened to cut off my fingers with a pair of secateurs once.'

‘Jesus.' I reached for my cigarettes with one shaking hand. With the other I gripped the phone receiver, inhaled its homely smell of plastic and electrical wiring. What had I thought would happen if we were caught, if the forgery were not good enough?

‘We'll pay you back as soon as we've done this thing,' Edward went on. ‘When we've been, you know' — another sneeze — ‘paid.'

‘I'd have to go to an ATM,' I said at last.

‘That's OK. Great. Thanks. Oh, and Tom? Can I ask one more favour, please?'

I hesitated. ‘Sure,' I said, even though I wasn't sure at all.

*

Which is how I found myself in the unlikely position of chauffeuring Edward around on a freezing Thursday night looking for drugs. He told me the police had launched a crackdown that had put their regular dealers out of business. Gertrude was too ill to accompany us — she could hardly raise her head from the bed to greet me at the warehouse — but I drove Edward to half-a-dozen different places around the city. It was raining, and the car heater was broken.

Usually affable, Edward's demeanour was unsettling; he resembled a famished ghost, sneezing, sniffling and trembling in the passenger seat beside me. His breath stank of rotting fruit from the cough syrup he was swigging from a bottle (‘For the codeine, you know'). He groaned and shuddered in his seat, as if
the discomfort were unbearable. The windscreen wipers squawked horribly at each pass.

Following his directions, I pulled up outside a double-storey terrace house in nearby George Street. He vanished inside for ten minutes while I sat in the car. After re-emerging he directed me to another house in Napier Street. Again nothing, but he had been given a scrap of information and was confident he was on the scent; it seemed there was a clandestine network throughout the city that he was tapping into.

We drove south of the Yarra to the seedy beachside suburb of St Kilda. Knife-eyed hookers loitered along Grey Street, clutching collars to their chins. I sat in the car in a side street while Edward scuttled into Mandalay apartments, which overlooked the bay. There was a woman in one of the apartments who knew someone who still had some heroin to sell. A black hairball of Goths — like offcuts from The Cure — stalked past. I fiddled with the radio dial and smoked.

I didn't have long to wait. Soon the car door opened and Edward folded himself like a collapsible ruler into the passenger seat. A woman he introduced as Skye got into the back seat. They conferred and Edward directed me along Canterbury Road back towards South Melbourne.

‘Where are we going now?' I asked Edward.

‘The Orphanage,' he said. ‘We're going to see Spider.'

The Orphanage was a huge squat on Clarendon Street. It was indeed established as an orphanage in the 1850s but had been abandoned twenty years earlier. More recently, it had been taken over by a disparate tribe of subcultures who had set up camp in its derelict buildings.

I parked off the main road, next to one of the property's high walls. Against the low cloud I could make out the silhouette of a crooked spire, the sharp angle of a slate roof. Amid assurances
of a hasty return, my two passengers alighted from the car, Skye leaving a scent of fresh sweat and stale patchouli in her wake. I watched them trot away and turn the corner into Clarendon Street.

Half an hour went by, then an hour. No sign of them, no sign of anything. I got out of the car and wandered down the street. After some indecision, I went through the unhinged gate at the Clarendon Street entrance.

The buildings were ruined, unlit. Here and there on the ground were sodden piles of rubbish, bits of plaster, lengths of wood. The air stank of burning rubber. The place possessed a distinctly malevolent atmosphere, and I was not reassured by my first glimpse of some of its tenants — a pair of lanky, army-booted skinheads warming their hands over a fire, reminiscing, perhaps, about Kristallnacht. I hesitated to ponder the best course of action, but advertised my presence by stepping on some broken glass.

The two skinheads, mouths agape like a pair of laughing clowns, turned to look in my direction. Neither of them spoke. My instinct was to turn and scurry back the way I had come, but by that stage my instincts were easily ignored, rather as a parent learns to fob off the squalling demands of children. Instead, I took a step towards the skinheads and told them I was looking for Spider. It was then I noticed another skinhead — a girl — sitting on a chair behind the first pair, swigging from a bottle of Green Ginger Wine.

All three considered me for what felt like an age. At last, the girl explained how to get to Spider's place: through the courtyard, along a passageway, turn left up a flight of stairs.

‘Look out for a sign that says
Asylum
,' she said. ‘But watch out for the hippies. They're fucking crazy tonight. They've all taken some psychiatric drug.'

As if to underscore her warning, there came from somewhere in the darkness a distant crash, followed by a shriek of delight. The skinheads grinned at one another.

I thanked them and set off in the direction she had indicated. I spent a surreal and distressing half-hour wandering through unlit corridors, stepping over piles of rubbish and feeling my way through abandoned rooms. Occasionally, around me in the monstrous building, I detected music, the reverberations of a party. It was an immense effort to maintain my nerve, and the single thing that kept me going was the fear of never finding my way out alone.

The only person I came across was a teenage girl in a corridor who ignored me and, chewing on a strand of her hair like a crazed Ariadne, stared at some point on the crumbling ceiling. All this was terrifying enough, but the room that unnerved me most was an orphans' washroom: a row of dusty little sinks set low to the ground, cracked mirrors, dozens of broken children's shoes heaped in a corner.

By some miracle, I stumbled upon Spider's abode. As the skinhead had advised, there was a metal sign outside his room that read
Orphan Asylum
— the name of the original establishment, prised free of the main gate — but with the A in the second word enclosed in a crude texta'd circle. First skinheads, now anarchists. Great.

If I had hoped to enter an exotic opium den of luxurious decadence (rugs on the floor; slippered eunuchs stuffing pipes for prone, hollow-cheeked raconteurs) then I was sorely mistaken. Spider's room was cold and dingy, illuminated only by a medical-looking lamp on the floor. No one displayed any surprise at my unannounced arrival.

It was clear they were all very stoned. Edward and Skye were sitting on a sagging couch, intent on a game of cards laid out on
the torn upholstery between them. Another fellow — presumably Spider, our host — crouched on the floor, doubtless engaged in some nefarious pursuit. He was the thinnest, most evil-looking person I had ever seen, a sub-species of human being I had never before encountered: scabby cheeks, eyes like bullet holes, hands patterned with tattooed swastikas of various shapes and sizes.

Unschooled in the etiquette expected in a drug dealer's lair, I sidled over to Edward and suggested we get back to Gertrude, who must be worried about us. Spider snickered and tore a square of paper from a page of a
Penthouse
magazine. With a razor blade, he was apportioning quantities of white powder into tiny handmade sachets. A flicker of glossy breast and mouth was manipulated by his ragged fingers and added to a small pile. He hummed as he worked.

Edward was too preoccupied to respond to my suggestion, but Skye glanced up and smiled. ‘I'm doing a reading, honey. We won't be very long.'

I realised the cards arranged on the couch between them were Tarot cards.

Skye turned her attention back to them. ‘Uh-oh,' she said, unable to keep a note of dismay from her voice, ‘the Nine of Swords. Hmmm.'

Edward sat up. ‘What?'

Skye cupped her chin and pondered the array of garish cards, which included, by my layman's reckoning, a whole bunch of unfavourable things — a skeleton on a pale horse not least among them.

‘What is it?' Edward asked again, pointing to the skeleton on horseback, around whom people were falling in states of distress. ‘Is that one Death?'

Skye grimaced and bobbed her head, reluctant to make so bold a prediction. ‘Not necessarily death. Change, more like it. And
change can be really, really good, you know.'

‘What sort of change?'

‘Who knows. You got anything planned?'

‘Well, yeah, I'm planning to give up dope pretty soon and go and live in Berlin.'

‘Good for you. Might be that.'

‘But it could also be Death?'

‘Well. Could be.'

Edward pressed a hand to his forehead and uttered a throaty gurgle of despair.

‘But not necessarily yours,' Skye added.

She then pointed to the Nine of Swords, which featured an image of a woman sitting up in bed with her hands pressed to her face. On the black wall beside her was the arrangement of nine swords.

‘This one here represents your current position,' she said brightly, perhaps hoping to move on from the dismal prospect of foretelling anyone's demise. ‘See the swords hanging over the woman? That's usually about anxiety, despair. It can be about deception, too … But placed where it is in the overall spread, it might not be so bad. Let me see. What else do we have here?'

Spider stalked across and bent over with hands on knees to inspect the cards. He breathed stertorously, as if he had run a marathon rather than walked three metres.

‘You reckon you can do Janie's cards after?' he croaked. ‘You know, like with the baby's fortune and stuff?'

Skye gazed up at him with her kohl-rimmed eyes. ‘OK, Spidey. How you doing over there, Janie?'

There came a stirring from the furthest corner of the room, and a face materialised in the gloom like a pale moon rising in the night sky. A girl stepped forwards with a shy smile. ‘OK, I guess. You know how it is.'

Skye tutted sympathetically. ‘Yeah. Not long now, though.'

The girl called Janie nodded, approached and allowed herself to be enfolded into Spider's clumsy embrace. With horror, I realised she was heavily pregnant.

In the dim light, with their heads bent over the spread of cards, the four of them resembled a Goya-esque coven. Junkies — in my limited experience — tended to be a cynical lot, and I was surprised at their esteem for this mumbo jumbo. In later years, however, I came to see how aligned were heroin addiction and the occult. There was the obsessive secrecy, a fetishism for specific objects related to its practice (special spoons for mixing up, a favoured belt as a tourniquet), a love of cryptic language (smack, horse, dope), delight in the sinister and — above all — a belief in one's enlightenment in relation to those unfortunate mortals yet to sample the divine. Both the heroin addict and the occultist are in love with death, or at least their own flavour of it.

For a minute I seemed to be the only person awake in the room. Then, as if activated by a signal discernible to them alone, they stirred. Skye flicked a dreadlock from her eye. Spider led Janie off into the darkness from where I heard the squeak of a mattress, murmured endearments.

And Edward, as if addressing my unspoken misgivings about the ritual being enacted in front of me, scratched his nose and said, ‘Skye's grandmother was a psychic, you know.'

I felt beholden to express interest in this snippet of family history. Besides, any conversation would cover the creepy sounds emanating from the other side of the room. ‘Oh, is that right?'

‘Yes, she was,' Skye said. ‘In the nineteen-twenties. She was in a travelling sideshow with her older brother. It's a gift that's handed down through all the women in our family. My brother can't read the cards. He can't read a comic book. I've read tons of people's cards. Loads of musicians. That guy from Shower Scene from
Psycho. Even did Nick Cave's when he toured last year.'

I stifled a chuckle and checked Edward's response to this claim. He had often mocked the tendency of Melbourne's heroin addicts to claim kinship with the underground rock hero on the flimsiest of pretexts. ‘If you believed Melbourne's junkies,' he had told me only a day or two earlier, ‘then everyone in town's shared a syringe with old Nick.'

Edward, however, had nodded off again.

‘Yeah,' Skye went on, ‘he had a weird reading. Anyway, let's get back to you, Eduardo. Nine of Swords. Deception. And the woman sitting on the bed is crying.'

Edward jerked to life, wiped his mouth of drool. ‘Crying?'

‘Yes. That's a pretty bad card to get. Beware the weeping woman. She's always going to be trouble.'

It was after two a.m. by the time we stumbled from the Orphanage. I dropped Skye at her flat in St Kilda and drove through wet and deserted streets back to Carlton. I trudged up the warehouse stairs for a glass of wine. Instead of going home straight afterwards as intended, however, I fell into a deep sleep on Edward and Gertrude's couch.

By the time I woke, it was late morning. There was no sign of Edward or Gertrude. Someone had thrown a blanket over me in the night, but I was still cold. I heard the sound of a door banging in the wind. Repetitive, insistent, annoying.

*

Once they awoke, and with their drug supplies replenished, Edward and Gertrude were back in fine fettle. The whole day leaked away. Fearful of seeing Sally, although fearful of not seeing her, I procrastinated over returning home. The weather outside was foul; windy and wet. The three of us spent the afternoon in the studio, the cosiest place in the warehouse. In the late afternoon,
Edward and Gertrude retreated to their room to inject some more heroin and, after more dithering, settled down to work. Rain pattered on the tin roof, almost drowning out the music playing on the cassette deck.