Cairo (8 page)

He closed his eyes and listened. ‘No point fooling around with anyone else, is there? That's what I'm always telling Sally. Pop music, my God. Why would you even bother? Cole Porter, sure. Anyway, enough of that for now. I need to check on dinner. Tom, isn't it? Help me out in here for a second.'

Without waiting for my response, Max propelled me through a bead curtain into the galley kitchen, where pots bubbled away on the stove. Dirty pans and dishes filled the sink. A magnificent vase of wilting red roses stood on the bench.

He crouched to check whatever was cooking in the oven. ‘I'm making pheasant,' he said. ‘Roast pheasant with chestnut sauce. One must be meticulous with such a dish. Magnificent when it's done right. One of Oscar Wilde's favourites, I'm reliably told. Let's see … Excellent. Look at that. What do you reckon? Another fifteen
minutes, I should say. Now, a drink? What's your poison? I tell you what — I'll make you a Tom Collins. Your namesake drink is perfect for summer weather. Basically gin and lemon, dash of soda. Sound OK?'

I nodded, staggered by his extravagant and reckless charm that laid to waste any misgivings I might otherwise have had about spending an evening in his company. He mixed my cocktail with dextrous efficiency, slamming cupboard doors, squeezing a lemon by hand and whisking his creation with a fork before handing the glass to me.

‘Sorry there are none of those miniature umbrellas. But tell me, Tom, how is it?'

Up to that point, I had never in my life even heard of a cocktail called a Tom Collins, let alone drunk one. The concoction tasted of the brittlest, most verdurous perfume. It was redolent to me of the Charleston, of bons mots, of glorious failed suicides.

‘It's fantastic,' I answered, cringing inwardly at my fawning eagerness to please my host by being myself pleased.

The record of the Beethoven string quartet playing in the other room died away, and into the ensuing lull burbled disconnected words of conversation. A woman laughed, said, ‘Yes, perhaps …'

Max became flustered. He grabbed my shoulder and drew me close. His voice sank to a whisper, and he affected the facial expression of one walking barefoot over broken glass. ‘Ah. Now, Tom. Do me a favour.'

‘Sure.'

He glanced at the doorway. ‘We don't ever need to mention that, uh,
letter
you found at your apartment, do we.'

‘No, I suppose not.'

‘Do you promise?'

I perceived, dimly, a chink in his otherwise bluff armour, but was content to assume the role of the innocent. ‘OK.'

His grip on my shoulder tightened. ‘It's very important. In fact, let me be even clearer. Breathe a word of it and there will be trouble.'

My nervous giggle was curtailed by the suspicion, reinforced by his blunt stare, that perhaps he wasn't joking.

Before alarm truly set in, however, he snapped back to his previous genial self. ‘Good. It might make things, ah, difficult for us, that's all. Now, do me yet another favour and look at that recipe up there. I can't recall how long they recommend cooking our fat friend.' He indicated a large, food-stained cookbook propped open on top of the fridge.

Relieved at the brisk change of subject, I did as he asked. ‘It says … cook for an hour and a half at 180 degrees Celsius.'

‘Excellent news!'

There was a wonderful fragrance, followed by movement at my right shoulder. I turned to see a woman standing in the hallway, which was gorgeously lit by the sun setting through the trees — hot wooden floor, glancing light, a mermaid breaching the shadows.

Although she was obscured by the jangling bead curtain, I recognised her as a woman I had admired many times around the neighbourhood. I had, in fact, seen her that morning at Cafe Rhumbarella reading a paperback novel and smoking thin, hand-rolled cigarettes. Up close, her loveliness was heart-stopping. I heard myself gasp but, fortunately, any adolescent embarrassment I might otherwise have betrayed was eclipsed by Max dashing across the tiny kitchen to pop his head through the beads.

He pecked her on the cheek. ‘Feeling better, my love?'

The woman shrugged and smiled sleepily. She wore a cream dress patterned with large red hibiscus flowers. Her blonde hair was damp and marginally darker where it touched her neck.

‘Sally. This is our new neighbour, Tom. Tom, this is my wife, Sally. Poor thing has been lying in a cool bath all afternoon. This damnable heat, you know.'

We exchanged greetings and shook hands. Again she smiled. Her body exuded an orchidaceous warmth. I felt the insistent tug of what I would recognise, in later life, as doomed romance.

‘Dinner's ready,' Max said behind me. ‘Tom, will you grab some cutlery from that drawer. Sally, take him up, will you. Are you prepared for a feast?'

Sally cocked her head and held out a hand to me. ‘Come.'

*

To my surprise and my everlasting delight, that dinner took place on the Cairo rooftop. Somehow, Max had managed to transport a table (complete with white tablecloth, crystal decanter of wine and candelabra) and chairs up there. Strung up around us were half-a-dozen red and orange Chinese paper lanterns. The tower blocks to our east glowed in the late sun and, below us on the other side, trams and cars and people passed by in the street. I imagined passengers in planes far overhead peering down upon the magical scene, wondering who on earth we were and how they could possibly be invited to our exclusive party.

The first hour of that dinner is little more than a blur of sensory snapshots in my memory: chilled Sauvignon Blanc, Max tossing his fringe from his eyes, James's smoke rings disintegrating like ramshackle galleons as they sailed the length of the table, Sally's collarbone as luminous as coral. The pheasant (in reality a very fat chicken) was rich and juicy, so different from anything I had ever eaten before, and followed by buttermilk panna cotta (which was custard from a packet, tasty nonetheless).

Keen to impress my new friends — or, rather, desperate to avoid making a dolt of myself — I tried not to spill food on my
shirt or interject with idiotic questions, although they were all so kind it was unlikely anyone would have taken umbrage, had they even noticed. The party was lively and intimate, presided over by Max, who was the most gracious of hosts, ensuring the conversation flowed as freely as the wine. I felt I was being initiated into an eccentric cabal and, of course, this was exactly what was happening.

At first it was difficult to keep up with the current of conversation, and I was relieved that not a great deal was asked of me other than to be an attentive audience. I tried my best not to ogle her but was fascinated as Sally laughed and played with her food. She was an expert at rolling cigarettes but, endearingly, smoked them like an amateur, tentative as she held each one between her slender fingers.

I sat beside James, who smoked cigarillos throughout the meal and filled me in — parenthetically, from the side of his mouth — with sly and precise wit on the details of friends and incidents they discussed. It would be a role he adopted for the duration of our friendship.

In the course of that evening I learned Max was composing a major musical work based on an obscure nineteenth-century French poem called
Les Chants de Maldoror
. His piece would, according to him, change the musical landscape in the way Schoenberg's twelve-tone compositions had done earlier in the century.

I discovered that Sally had been a singer in a local pop group, but that Max had ‘rescued her from the dreadful nightclub scene in order to preserve her voice'. She now worked as a temp secretary in offices around the city — only until the completion of Max's opus, naturally, whereupon her career would be re-launched into stratospheric new artistic realms.

Max told me the apartment he and Sally shared below us had, in
fact, been two neighbouring apartments they had transformed into one by removing the dividing wall, which accounted for its size and unusual design.

‘Poor Sally was living here all alone when I moved next door nearly eight years ago,' he explained. ‘But after we met and fell in love, I bought her place. We smashed out a few walls and made a much bigger apartment. Bit of vision is sometimes all it takes, isn't it? Damned planning people wouldn't allow it but we went ahead and did it anyway. Sometimes you have to make your own rules. That's one of the many problems with this country. No vision. Everyone is so bloody
ordinary
. The cult of the ordinary man. Even the prime minister wants to be an ordinary man, God help us. Who wants to be the same as everyone else? You don't want to be ordinary, do you, Tom?'

I hesitated, self-conscious in the spotlight of sudden attention. It was a good question, and an opportunity to make a case for myself that might not again be presented. I was already tipsy, but paused to sip my wine.

‘No. I don't want to be ordinary,' I said truthfully, feeling defiant and alive as the words left my lips. To say such a thing was a kind of delicious blasphemy, for which I might well be strung up were it to become public knowledge in Dunley.

‘Of course you don't! Tell me, what is it you wish to do? You're not an office-worker type, are you? And you're not a tradesman. You, sir, are destined for greater things. Come on. Don't be shy. Tell us.'

‘Well, I'm going to study at Melbourne University this year. Literature and history. An arts degree.'

‘What?'

‘I'm enrolling in —'

‘Yes, I heard you. I'm puzzled, that's all. A chap like you.'

‘Max,' said Sally, ‘leave him alone.'

But Max was not to be restrained. ‘You know what they study these days? You think by going to university you might learn about Tolstoy or Camus? Virginia Woolf? The causes of the revolutions of 1814, the philosophies of Aristotle? No! They study
TV shows
. It's absolutely true,' he shouted, as if someone were attempting to speak over him, which none of us was. ‘They analyse game shows and fashion magazines and this kind of thing. Advertisements. Ask anyone who goes there. It's all about bringing everything down to the level of the average Joe. There's that bloody ordinary man again. Instead of bringing people up to a higher level, they bring everything down. That way, everyone's a winner. No one gets upset. Don't want to hurt anyone's feelings now, do we. Ugh. And art has been infected, as well. Look at Edward.' He lowered his voice, as if Edward might be in earshot. ‘Even
he
will admit he's not much of an artist, but the thing is you don't have to be these days. People still buy his stuff as decoration. His dealer is practically blind, for God's sake.'

Max shook his head and wagged a finger at me, but not unkindly. ‘No. You misunderstand. I don't want to hear the line you rehearsed to tell your granny or the bloody careers counsellor. Listen to me, Tom Button. Who. Do. You. Want. To.
Be
?'

I felt myself blushing and was rendered mute by an image crowding my mind: that of my smirking sisters, their mouths full of biscuit crumbs.
Look at him, will ya. What a bloody wanker
.

‘I want to be a writer,' I said at last.

‘Aha! I knew it. Didn't I say that, Sally? Didn't I? You've got a bit of the novelist about you. Secretive, watchful. I could see straight away that you were one of us. But listen: you don't need university for that. It will ruin someone like you. Art and university almost never make good bedfellows. Just write a novel. In fact,' he said grandly, casting his arms wide like a net with which to embrace the table, ‘stick with us and we will give you a tale to write.'

Foremost among Max's talents was that of making everyone he
encountered feel special merely by being in his company. In part, it was an ability to divine — like a palm reader — what people wished to hear about themselves. I did not yet know that such a gift had a more sinister property; an ability to draw forth those aspects of one's personality best kept under lock and key.

Rather, that night, such flattery filled me with a desperate sort of gratitude. To be honest, I was enchanted by their company. Their lives seemed hermetically sealed, untainted by the universe at large and not even subject to its natural laws. In contrast to those in Dunley, they had no qualms as to what the neighbours might think of them, their clothes, their habits or their opinions. They gossiped about friends, discussed modern art and advised me as to the easiest department store from which to steal underwear or gourmet food. They warned me about a neighbour named Fiona Plinker (‘That connoisseur of Third World cuisines'), told me to go to St Mark's Church in George Street for food parcels if I ran short of funds, and revealed that sticks of marijuana could be purchased at the Turkish takeaway shop on nearby Brunswick Street (‘Ask for Jimmy').

Max was a man of strong opinions on an endless array of topics, ranging from the government of the day, to the best way to cook turkey, to the role of the artist in modern society. He was perpetually on the precipice of a vital revelation or in the throes of explicating, say, the obscure animal motifs littered throughout the poetry of Arthur Rimbaud or how chess could provide an avenue to creative play
par excellence
, as it had with Marcel Duchamp. That night he held forth at length on the new phenomenon of video art, which, according to him, involved filming something tedious rather badly and sticking it in a gallery. ‘Why not watch TV, for goodness sake? At least something
happens
.'

He reserved his most strident criticism, however, for modern pop music. ‘Such stuff,' he said with a scowl, tossing a chicken bone
aside. ‘My Sally here was singing with some group — what were they called again? — when we met. Hideous bunch of perverts, they were.'

Sally rolled her eyes and ashed her cigarette. ‘Oh, Max.'

‘Oh, darling, they were. Do you remember the leather trousers?'