Cairo Read online

  I downed the last of my orange juice and put the glass on the sink. ‘I can’t believe you read that drivel.’

  ‘Come on, Tom. Don’t be so stuck up. It’s fun. Everyone knows you only read those’ — she pointed to my National Geographic — ‘to perve on the topless African ladies. You’re an Aquarian, right?’

  I rolled my eyes. ‘Yeah.’

  ‘OK, the water carrier. Let me see. Well, it says here to beware of strangers promising great riches. And … that secrets you have been guarding will be revealed, whether you want them to or not. Sounds interesting. What secrets have you got, brother?’

  ‘None.’

  ‘Oh, I reckon you do.’

  I flashed her my retard face and left the kitchen.

  ‘Wait!’ she shouted after me as I walked down the hall. ‘It also says here that you’re a complete and utter loser. See? I told you. Mystic Medusa is usually pretty spot-on.’

  I went into my bedroom and collapsed onto the bed. Never before had my room, my life, my prospects been so desolate and so few. My window rattled in the wind. After a while I became aware of Meredith talking on the phone in the hallway. To block her out, I rolled onto my back, closed my eyes and placed the National Geographic over my face. What fresh hell was this?

  Meredith droned on.

  ‘… And then we went to Sarah Lumb’s place after school. She’s such a spunk and I’m pretty sure she likes me but Billy told me he kissed her a few weeks ago at John’s party …’

  Sarah Lumb? A spunk? Billy? I sat up, horrified. By now Meredith was leaning against the doorframe, my journal with its characteristic red cover splayed open in her hand.

  ‘What else is there?’ she went on. ‘Oh yeah. This is great, this bit. A poem. Mystic Medusa said your secrets would be revealed.’

  I jumped up from my bed and lurched across the room, but Meredith ducked into the hallway and I sprawled on the floor, cracking my temple on the skirting board as I fell.

  ‘By now it is night and the stars they shine like your eyes …’

  ‘Give me that!’

  ‘… and I wish … I wish … Wait. Sorry, but it’s hard to read your scribbly writing here.’

  I lunged for the book again, but Meredith, although overweight, was nimble on her feet and she backed away with an agility honed by years of playing wing defence in netball. I heard someone at the back door.

  ‘Oh, Sarah. Oh, Sarah. Oh, man, this is so great. Oh, Sarah, I wish we could lie together. Lie together!’ Meredith doubled over with laughter. ‘Like river reeds.’

  Again I ran at her, this time managing to wrest my precious diary away from her, tearing a number of pages in the process.

  ‘What in the hell is going on?’

  Our mother stood at the entrance to the kitchen, plastic shopping bags in her hands. The blue corner of a Weet-Bix box had nudged through the plastic and threatened to tear the bag. There was a pause while Meredith and I caught our breath — something about our mother’s demeanour made us stop in our tracks.

  ‘Sit down, you two,’ she said. She went into the kitchen and put the shopping bags on the floor, then faced us. ‘I’ve got some bad news. Your Aunt Helen had a stroke and died last night.’

  Just like that.

  *

  Aunt Helen, my father’s younger sister, had for many years been a distant figure in our family landscape. Despite this (or, more likely, because of it), she loomed large in my imagination, a magical island glimpsed from the deck of the family vessel from which I longed so desperately to disembark.

  Helen was a public servant and worked in the city. She knew interesting people. We saw her regularly when I was young, and as I got older she would take me back to the city alone to stay with her for a night or two. Her apartment was cluttered with books and knick-knacks and held a fantastic appeal for me. Helen treated me not as a mere child but more like the adult she assumed I would become. Unlike anyone I knew in Dunley, she was fascinated by the world at large. She had an encyclopedia and Cole’s Funny Picture Book, to which I had unfettered access — even the rude bits. She taught me to play rummy and asked for my assistance doing the crossword. We spent time on the roof of her apartment block watering her herbs. She explained their names, held up their crushed leaves in her dry palm for me to smell. From her I learned how to tie a variety of useful knots, how to eat spaghetti properly, how to approach unfamiliar dogs in the street. No one else in my family ever showed me how to do anything, and this aspect of my childhood — of being left to my own devices — fostered in me an almost fanatical self-sufficiency, but also a quality of emotional distance; I am an easy person to like, but so much harder to love.

  In any case, the infrequent visits to Helen’s apartment had dried up about five years earlier. From that time, any mention of her name in our house or suggestions to visit her were met with an uneasy We’ll see — a phrase that, as any child knows, is code for Probably not. She continued to mail gifts to my sisters and me for birthdays and Christmas, but Helen was no longer invited to family celebrations. She and my parents had fallen out, although the nature of their disagreement was never specified.

  And in this vacuum of information there evolved a belief that Helen was, in fact, my real mother. I didn’t construct this theory consciously but, rather, various elements combined over time in my childish imagination until they assumed the shape of truth fattened far from the sight of others. It was partly a consequence of feeling so disconnected from my family, a sensation that is, I have since discovered, so common as to be a tedious rite of passage. The constant bickering with my sisters, my mother’s distance, my father’s abrupt departure: these emotional sore spots I could salve with the application of this single thought. The idea that the people I lived with were not my actual family was not a source of angst for me but, rather, a trusted secret to which I turned at times of stress or familial conflict, as other children might a blanket or favoured teddy bear. I never asked my parents about my suspicion in any direct fashion, preferring to console myself that, yes, my family were awful and didn’t understand me, but my own tribe were elsewhere, waiting to embrace me. In a way, this proved to be true.

  I had no theory as to how I came to be in the Dunley family in which I was raised, but the details were unimportant and would not have borne close scrutiny; after all, how to explain the oft-told tale of Rosemary vomiting on the hospital floor when she and Meredith came in to visit my mother and me after my birth, or that crinkled black-and-white photo of my sisters sitting on a blanket in our garden cradling my one-month-old self?

  Certainly Aunt Helen never gave me reason to think her simple kindnesses were different from those of any aunt. She enjoyed drinking Scotch, playing patience late into the night, and listening to dreadful Barbra Streisand records. Stories swirled around her: that she had once met a spy operating a radio transmitter out of a tree stump in Sherbrooke Forest; that she had been married for two weeks but, scandalously, refused to change her name; that she had a pistol hidden behind a skirting board in her apartment. After the disagreement (or whatever it was that prompted the estrangement), I had overheard my parents discussing her in our kitchen late one night and, although details of the conversation have long since evaporated from memory, I recall my mother and father — who argued over so many things in those years — agreeing that Helen was a bad influence on the kids.

  Despite the recent lack of contact with her, news of Aunt Helen’s death hit me hard. I retreated, wounded yet again, to my room. Rain pebbled against my windowpane.

  *

  From that day forwards, I was more determined than ever to escape that dreadful town. I formulated a new plan for getting away from Dunley and stuck to it with the wilful tenacity that only a teenager can summon.

  Helen had died intestate and, being unmarried and childless, her Fitzroy apartment was left to her only living relative, my father. The place was small, ramshackle, and in a part of Melbourne’s inner city deemed seedy and undesirable. My father
was unsure whether to sell the apartment and, somehow, while he was deciding what to do, I got him to allow me to move in there. I told him I would paint the apartment and fix it up while I attended university in Melbourne the following year. By working away at the guilt he felt for leaving his family, I was able to convince him of the idea’s inherent excellence. My mother’s brother Mike was a GP who lived in Melbourne’s eastern suburbs, and although I found him insufferable I promised to check in and have dinner regularly with him and his wife, Jane. In so doing, I persuaded my parents that I should move to Cairo.

  All this took a few months, and involved careful and cunning arguments. In reality, though, my mother didn’t have the heart for a struggle. I was the last of her children to leave home, and I suspect she was not sorry to finish that phase of her life. In the meantime I hunkered down and completed my final year of high school. My results were unspectacular, but good enough for me to enrol in an arts degree at the University of Melbourne, whose campus was a mere fifteen-minute walk from Cairo. I felt on the dizzy verge of real life at long last.

  That final Christmas in Dunley was the most pleasant I had experienced since I was a child. It was a blazing day, thick with the sound of cicadas. We ate lunch among the rose bushes in my mother’s garden. My sisters appeared genuinely moved at the prospect of their little brother heading off to bigger and better things; Meredith might have had a tear in her eye. Even their profoundly stupid husbands were on that day bathed in auras of Labrador-like, simple-minded goodness that was hard to begrudge. In the setting sun we played croquet with the neighbours. My father and Barbara came over late in the afternoon to wish me well and slip me an envelope containing five hundred dollars in cash. Such pre-departure bonhomie I have since come to mistrust; a place is never more appealing than when one is preparing to leave it forever.

  In early January I caught a train to Melbourne. I had a suitcase stuffed with clothes and another canvas bag full of books. My offer of a place at the university was in my jacket pocket, along with the money my father had given me, plus three hundred dollars I had saved from my job at Eddie’s. At last I was on my way.

  THREE

  I WOKE GRADUALLY, AS IF BEING HAULED UP THROUGH A TUNNEL towards daylight. To wake in a new room for the first time is always disorienting; it can feel as though one has been relocated during the night without consent. The realisation of where I was seeped through me but, rather childishly, I kept my eyes closed and luxuriated in that dim land between wakefulness and sleep, where anything might happen.

  One after another my senses came to life. I became aware of unfamiliar bird noises, the almost subterranean grumble of a tram. My bed was cosy, perfumed with sleep. I imagined the city outside my window waiting for me, the magnetic draw of its charms. A car revved in the street; a man laughed.

  But in the peace that followed I heard a different noise, perhaps a mouse moving around in the next room. I opened my eyes, as if to hear more clearly. A muffled thump, not loud but definitely caused by a creature much larger than a mouse. The dire warnings offered by my weird and unhelpful sisters gathered murmurously in my imagination: You’ll get killed in that Fitzroy; my friend Joan’s sister once saw a bloke get stabbed there in broad daylight.

  I held my breath, drew the bedsheet aside as gently as possible and swung my feet onto the cold floor. Then came the squeak of that loose floorboard in the hallway. There was no doubt: someone was in the apartment. I picked up a teapot from the floor by the bed — if all else failed, I could hurl it at my intruder. I tiptoed as fast as I could across the room and hid behind the partly open door, teapot at the ready. More footsteps, now drawing closer. I waited. Dear God, perhaps my sisters had been right?

  But, to my surprise, a young girl with pigtails walked into the room, wheeled around to see me standing there (clad only in ill-fitting pyjama pants), and demanded to know who I was and what I was doing.

  ‘What?’ I croaked.

  ‘You shouldn’t say what,’ the girl said loudly, as if she assumed I were hard of hearing. She blinked and sniffed. She looked no more than five or six years old. ‘My name is Eve,’ she said, and took a step closer.

  Still too astonished to speak, I cowered by the wall.

  ‘Are you making tea? I love tea! This apartment has been locked up for ages. Since that old lady died.’

  ‘Who are you?’ I managed to say.

  ‘I told you, already. Eve. E-V-E.’

  As I would learn over the coming months, this declamatory manner of speech (like an annoying doll on which the volume cannot be reduced) was typical of Eve, who indeed was six years old.

  I sidled across the room, placed the teapot back on the floor and pulled on a T-shirt, all the while observed by this child who was unperturbed at discovering someone lurking in an apartment that wasn’t even hers to enter.

  A woman’s voice called her name and, preceded by the child, I wandered back into the lounge room. Hopefully, someone had arrived to take her away.

  A dumpy woman wearing ghastly tracksuit pants and a shapeless, navy-blue sweater, her own greying hair also in pigtails, hovered in the front doorway. Eve ran to her, then wriggled free from her cuddle and dashed back to me.

  The woman — who was surely too old to be the mother of a child so young — chortled. ‘Oh, Eve,’ she said in a sing-song voice, ‘you can’t go into other people’s apartments.’ Then to me: ‘Sorry about that. I’m Caroline, by the way. We live over the other side. I trust Eve has introduced herself.’

  By now I had the teapot again in my hand and, for want of a more suitable response to this invasion, held it up as if acting in an advertisement spruiking the neighbourly qualities of freshly brewed tea. ‘Yes. I’m Tom Button. Hi.’

  ‘But he told me to come in! The door was unlocked, Mother.’

  Caroline pursed her lips and addressed the girl. ‘Are you telling the truth, young lady?’

  Eve had drifted away from me and was riffling through a basket of my aunt’s jewellery on the lounge-room bureau, but stopped to stamp her foot at her mother’s query. ‘Yes!’

  Without invitation, Caroline stepped inside. ‘Honestly,’ she said to me, ‘you shouldn’t go around inviting girls into your apartment. It’s highly inappropriate.’

  I started to protest my innocence, but she ignored me and waddled over to stand beside Eve and join her in examination of the jewellery. I regretted not throwing the teapot at the child when I’d had the chance.

  Ignoring me, they oohed and aahed over the various trinkets, Caroline giving her daughter an impromptu spelling lesson as they did so. ‘Locket. Can you spell locket, Eve? What do you think it begins with? Locket. Locket. Oh, this tiny key is nice. It must be for a box of some sort.’

  I tore open a packet of crackers and began popping them into my mouth. They were dry and tasteless. Out of the window I could see the peppercorn tree lit up savagely in the morning sun. As I watched, a magpie landed on a branch, lifted its tail feathers and expelled a shit as if in agreement with my unspoken misgivings. The creature reshuffled its feathers briskly, warbled and flew off.

  After a few more spelling lessons, Caroline took Eve’s hand and tried to coax her home for breakfast. The child, however, was having far too much fun. She wrenched free from her mother’s grasp and collapsed to the floor with fury, where she pounded her tiny feet and fists on the boards. ‘But I don’t want to go! I don’t want to go!’ she wailed.

  Caroline kneeled beside her daughter and tried to reason with her. Above the squalls of childish distress and the thumping of Eve’s feet on the floor, Caroline said she would take her to the park to ride her bicycle. She asked her daughter to behave herself. She tried being more stern. All this was to no avail, and the crying increased in vigour. I was horribly uncomfortable, while Caroline was unruffled, as if I were somehow experiencing the embarrassment on her behalf.

  In desperation, I held out the box of crackers. ‘Would Eve like a biscuit, perhaps?’

  Caroline flung o
ut a hand as if I had offered the child a dose of arsenic. ‘No, thank you. We only eat organic food.’ She turned again to her daughter. ‘Eve, if you promise to come with me now without any more fuss, you can have an extra taste of’ — she lowered her voice — ‘special milk when we get home.’

  This was obviously some sort of parental trump card. The girl’s tantrum was downgraded to sniffles in a matter of seconds. She sat upright in the glittering pool of jewellery and rubbed her eyes. ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Do.’ Eve sniffed. ‘You.’ Sniff. ‘Promise?’

  ‘Mummy would never lie to you, would she? Come along now.’

  Eve stood and wiped her snotty nose with the back of one hand. Whatever special milk was, it had worked a treat. My uninvited guests dusted themselves off, packed away the jewellery and were gone almost immediately. I was left staring around my apartment as if in the aftermath of a storm. I closed the door and locked it before heading into the bathroom to shower.

  *

  After dressing, I sat on the sofa with a cup of tea and sorted through the mail that had piled up in the hallway in the months since Helen’s death. In addition to out-of-date flyers advertising department-store Christmas sales, there were bills and half-a-dozen postcards from a variety of South American cities (Hola de Buenos Aires! La Paz, the world’s highest capital!) sent by a person named Pat. The postcards were only semi-legible, written in a sprawling script, their most notable feature the effusiveness of the sign-offs embroidered with kisses.

  Most mysterious of all was a letter addressed to someone called Max. The envelope was cream coloured. Its triangular, sticky flap had not been sealed but rather tucked into the body of the envelope, as if delivered in haste. It smelled faintly of perfume. I sipped my tea and balanced the envelope on my palm. I knew I would inspect the letter (for who could resist the lure of someone else’s private correspondence, especially when it was as good as open?) but nonetheless played out a brief charade of indecision.