Cairo (12 page)

She returned to her magazine. The topic, it seemed, was closed. I went to the window and pulled the blind aside a fraction. Outside, sunlight shimmered on corrugated-tin roofs. Below in the abandoned lot was my blue Mercedes with another, newer car parked beside it. A bearded man wearing sunglasses lounged against the second car.

As I watched, he collected a handful of rocks and began lobbing them at a busted red bucket several metres from where he stood. His aim was not very good but, after three or four attempts, one of the rocks landed in the bucket with a thunk and clatter. The man, satisfied with his work, wiped his mouth and leaned back on the car.

I was growing impatient and wondered how much longer we would have to cower in the hot room. Max had said the visitors were art dealers, but I was baffled as to why it was so crucial that we hid. Gertrude's enigmatic outburst had done nothing to clarify the matter. The chap below in the abandoned lot crouched with one hand outstretched towards the long grass erupting from the broken concrete. Then I heard voices in the hallway outside the bedroom. I let the blind fall back against the window. Edward and Max were showing their guests into the studio.

‘So this is where the magic happens, is it?' Mr Crisp said in a gruff voice. His remark prompted a round of nervous laughter and a number of muffled comments. More laughter.

From outside came a pair of dull cracks in quick succession: the driver in the vacant lot outside must have taken up rock throwing again, this time at an object more solid than a plastic bucket.

Max, Edward, Anna Donatella and Mr Crisp remained in Edward's studio for more than half an hour, during which time Gertrude and I remained still and quiet. Gertrude continued to
stare at her magazine, but I could tell she wasn't reading it. Instead, her gaze flickered about with the ebb and flow of voices from the adjacent room as if she hoped to discern details of the conversation from particles of mere noise. The murmuring was punctuated by Anna Donatella's barking laugh.

When the tour finished, Gertrude and I watched through the window until we saw Mr Crisp emerge and greet his companion waiting below. The two men sat in the car and chatted for several minutes before driving away.

Almost immediately, Max popped his head around the bedroom door. ‘Hey,' he said to me, ‘come and meet Anna.'

I was happy to leave the stuffy bedroom, but puzzled at the change in Max's attitude towards my encountering the art dealer.

‘But,' said Gertrude, ‘surely it's better if …'

‘Now, now. Don't be like that. She asked to meet Tom.'

I sensed, rather than saw, Max and Gertrude exchange a meaningful glance.

‘I hope you know what you're doing,' Gertrude said as she slouched off to take a shower. To whom this was addressed was unclear.

I followed Max from the bedroom.

If possible, Anna Donatella was even more impressive up close. She and Edward cut short a whispered conversation as we approached, and she spun on the heels of her leather boots, in the manner of a robotic Gestapo agent, to fix me in her sight.

When we were in reach, she flung a swathe of her outfit across her shoulder. Max introduced us and she took my proffered hand. Her own hand was clammy, decorated with a range of treacherous-looking rings. Her eye-patch was made of black suede. She was, I guessed, about fifty years old. Anna drew herself up to her full (considerable) height and glowered at me as if I were an artwork she suspected of being not much good but was forced, reluctantly,
to appraise. I was petrified, but after a few excruciating seconds, she relaxed her bearing and eked out a smile. ‘Tom. So very pleased to meet you.'

None of us sat, but instead stood around the kitchen. What followed was a disjointed interview made all the more difficult by my hangover and the fatigue that pressed against the top of my skull.

I was flattered to learn that Max had told Anna about me. She appeared gratified to confirm that my family lived elsewhere and was also pleased to hear that most of the people I knew in Melbourne were, at that very moment, at Edward's place.

‘And you know James Kilmartin,' she added.

‘Yes, I've met James.'

‘And that is your car parked out the back, is it?'

‘The Mercedes? Yes.'

‘What year is it?'

‘1974.'

‘Very nice.'

‘Thanks. It was my aunt's.'

‘It's reliable?'

‘It was serviced a couple of weeks ago.'

‘Registered? Roadworthy?'

‘Yes.'

She busied herself in realigning her robes (or capes, or whatever such a profusion of fabric might be termed in the fashion world) before returning her attention to me. Because of her limited vision, she kept her head on an angle as she spoke with us.

After about another ten minutes of uncomfortable chit-chat, Anna said, ‘I mustn't keep you any longer. You all look
very
tired.' Then she smiled again, having wrung more satisfaction from our conversation than I would have thought possible.

Max, who had been uncharacteristically quiet, spoke up
then. ‘Yes. What say we trundle back to Cairo, eh? Sally will be wondering where on earth we are.'

I was almost too exhausted to think, and the prospect of my bed was an inviting one. After brief farewells, Max, Anna and I clomped down the stairs. Stepping out into the scorching morning was a shock. I reeled in the heat, clutching at my hungover head. In front of my eyes, weird and colourful shapes floated in the air like bats, and I waited to adjust to the glare before picking my way over broken glass to my car. Anna seemed unperturbed by the temperature, although she was dressed for more wintry climes. She inspected my Mercedes with a keen eye, but declined my offer of a lift and stalked away up the alleyway with a curt goodbye.

I unlocked the Mercedes (fug of roasted leather and metal) and turned to see Max hesitating near the warehouse door with a dazed expression on his face. His shirt was wrinkled, and there was a glaze of sweat on his forehead.

‘What is that god
awful
noise?' he said, looking around.

I shuffled over to him and, after several seconds, made out the sound he was referring to. It
was
godawful, a sort of guttural squeak.

‘It sounds like some sort of monster,' Max said with bemused horror. ‘Perhaps it's to do with that space shuttle?'

And he squinted into the sky, as if seriously searching for the craft in which the mysterious creature might have journeyed.

A nearby clump of grass shivered: something was in there. Another movement, closer this time. Whatever it was, it was heading towards us. With an imagination grown hysterical with fatigue, I thought of giant urban rats made fierce on their diet of burgers and waste. An unwelcome memory of seeing the film
Alien
with David Blake at the Dunley Odeon (teeth and drool, the girl in the front row so scared that her box of popcorn flew into the air).

Max swore and grabbed my arm. We stepped backwards. I cast about for an object to use as a weapon and spied a brick nearby, but before I could wrest myself free of Max to retrieve it, a creature stumbled out.

It was Buster. He whined up at us pitifully. Max and I laughed with relief, before realising the pug was in some sort of trouble. He dragged his hindquarters along the hot ground; his head lolled. There was blood smeared on the fur around his haunches, and it was clear that his left hind leg was damaged. And that pathetic grunt, over and over, each sounding like it might be his last.

I crouched down. ‘What do you think happened to him?'

‘God only knows. He'll be alright. He's a pug. They'll survive a nuclear holocaust, don't you know.'

‘But we can't leave him here.'

‘Oh, I'm so tired,' said Max, picking at a loose thread on his shirt.

His lack of concern for the animal was bewildering. After a few dithering seconds, in which Buster attempted again to raise himself from the hot concrete, I dashed across to the door. I rang the bell a number of times and managed to rouse Gertrude. She was horrified to hear what had happened, bursting into tears on the spot. Barefoot, wet-haired and wearing a tattered red kimono, she scooped Buster up in her arms, comforting him as best she could in that weird language she had spoken earlier. (‘Stupid dog only understands Esperanto,' Max informed me as we filed back up the stairs.)

Edward slept through the entire drama. Gertrude dressed quickly, and with Buster wrapped in a blood-stained pillowcase on her lap in the back seat, and Max begrudgingly providing directions, I drove as fast as possible to the veterinary hospital in North Melbourne.

*

We slumped in the waiting room at the Lort Smith Animal Hospital while Buster was operated on. The place reeked of urine and disinfectant, of terrified creatures large and small. Owners sat glum-faced with their pets in cardboard boxes or wire cages. A large marmalade cat meowed like an air-raid siren. From somewhere out the back came a relentless yapping. The waiting-room walls were covered with posters about pet care, and advertisements for doggy shampoos and grooming services. Cartoon fleas rubbed their gloved hands together as they prepared to feast on poor Fido's blood. None of us spoke. Max dozed with an unlit cigarette in one hand.

After an hour, the vet came out to see us, clipboard under her arm. She introduced herself as Trish. She was short, wide-hipped, dressed in pale-blue medical trousers and jacket. Her shoes scritched on the linoleum.

‘Well, you'll be pleased to know that Buster is going to be OK.'

‘Thank God,' Gertrude said, bony hand pressed to her chest.

‘His back leg was broken badly so we've set it and stitched his wound. We'll keep him here overnight to observe him.' Trish consulted her clipboard. ‘So you have no idea what happened to him?'

Gertrude, who had been sniffling all this time, shook her head. ‘We have no idea. At least he's going to be OK. Could he have been attacked by another dog?'

The vet contemplated us, as if she suspected us of withholding information. ‘I doubt it. The wound is not consistent with a bite, or none I've ever seen.'

‘Maybe he was hit by a car?'

Trish pursed her lips. ‘This might sound crazy, but it looks to me like Buster might have been shot.'

At this, Max, who had been half comatose in one of the moulded plastic chairs, sat up and began paying attention to
our conversation. An overweight woman beside him mouthed
Goodness
. Others in the waiting room glanced up from their year-old magazines.

‘I can't be sure and there was no bullet left in him. He was very lucky, but it looks like a small-calibre bullet might have penetrated his upper thigh and exited.' She patted her own meaty thigh in demonstration.

After filling out various forms and arranging a possible time to pick Buster up the following day, we trooped back to my car.

‘Well,' I said when we were all seated, ‘I guess we'd better go to the police station.'

Max, in the passenger seat beside me, shook his head as he lit a crooked cigarette with the car lighter and exhaled. ‘No, no. No police.'

‘But we can't let someone run around shooting pets.'

I turned and appealed to Gertrude in the back seat but she, too, shook her head. ‘No, Tom. There's no need to do anything like that. Can we go home, please? I'm so tired. The main thing is that Buster will be alright.'

Although I didn't understand their reluctance, they were both so resolute that I shrugged and let the matter drop. By then it was nearly midday. We drove through leafy Carlton streets. Near the university, fresh-faced teenagers swarmed around clutching knapsacks. They wore colourful clothes and shrieked with excitement as they crossed Grattan Street.

Max snorted. ‘Look at the damn fools.'

I gazed through the car windows at these young people — ostensibly my peers — from whom I felt so distant.

‘He hardly ever goes outside,' Gertrude was saying, returning to the problem of Buster and his injury. ‘I don't even know how he got out today.'

‘Those art dealers,' I said, slowing the car to allow a pair of
pretty blonde girls to cross the road. ‘Buster must have snuck out the door when your art dealers came over this morning.' Neither Max nor Gertrude responded to this comment, and I felt compelled to fill the pause that followed. ‘But who on earth would shoot a dog?'

In the rear-vision mirror I saw Gertrude nodding as if the puzzle were beginning to make complete sense to her. She lit a cigarette with a tight flourish. ‘
Art dealers
. Of course.'

*

A few days later I was doing my laundry at Bert's laundromat in Brunswick Street. In my laundry bag I was surprised to find a sheaf of papers I recognised as the various enrolment forms for my university degree. Somehow they had ended up with my dirty clothes. Examining the documents, surrounded by the busy thrum of machinery, I calculated that the date nominated for me to enrol had been the morning I'd spent at the veterinary hospital with Max and Gertrude.

I had completely forgotten to enrol. Some of the young people thronging around Carlton when we drove back from the hospital would perhaps have been my classmates, had I remembered to select my classes and begun the course I had moved to Melbourne to study. My panic and confusion were temporary, replaced by relief as I imagined Max's pleasure at discovering this. It had been an oversight, but I was not unhappy at the outcome.

As these thoughts were coalescing in my mind, a tiny woman I knew to be one of Fitzroy's homeless population poked her head through the door and unleashed a twitchy smile upon me. I smiled back.

Encouraged by this, but darting her eyes about (for Bert was known to be most unwelcoming to vagrants), she came inside and sidled up to me.

‘What have you got there?' she asked in a croaky voice.

‘These? Some forms. For the university.'