IT’S DIFFICULT TO PINPOINT THE PRECISE BEGINNING BUT, IF I were to try, I would need to start earlier than the murder and that infamous heist; back further than meeting the Cheevers and their intriguing friends; before moving into Cairo, even though those events might be the obvious starting points for what transpired.
Let’s face it: the rot set in early. Much later, Sally (dear Sally) told me that without a past a person has no character, and she might have been right. Now, perhaps, I have too much character.
If I cast my mind back into the murky waters of that ever-receding past, I can picture myself late one afternoon on a low hill overlooking the football oval in Dunley, Victoria, population 3250. There I sat, young and prickling with desires and grievances I would be hard pressed to name.
It was the winter before I moved into Cairo. I was in my final year at Dunley High School, where I studied French, European history, literature, art history and English with an earnestness and dedication that now surprises me. I struggled through irregular French verbs; tried to decipher Eliot’s Preludes; and pored over my 1970 edition of E.H. Gombrich’s The Story of Art (in which Pablo Picasso still lived), with its grimy reproductions of great paintings, as if they might reveal to me another, better world. In a hard country town like Dunley — where a man’s worth was measured by his ability to stake a fence or identify the number of cylinders in a car by sound alone — this made me a misfit. In addition, I was scrawny and morbidly uncomfortable in my skin. I bit my fingernails with grim determination and often scrutinised myself in the mirror for hours, as if the clue to my character might be found on or behind the cold, smooth glass. What do people see when they look at me? I wondered. How am I supposed to be in this terrible world?
Adolescence is a swirl of superiority and crushing doubt. Nowadays the so-called experts fret over epidemics of low self-esteem in our teenagers but, really, it is one of the many necessary planks used for the raft that transports us from youth to adulthood. Without it, we are nothing.
I lived with my mother, Emily, who worked as a bookkeeper at Stockdale’s law firm. My parents had divorced four years earlier. My father, Roger, a real estate agent, had married his colleague Barbara Moore, who was famous around town for her bouffant hairdo that made her look like a rather addled extra from La Dolce Vita, an impression augmented by rumours that Barbara had an addiction to sleeping pills. My elder sisters, Meredith and Rosemary — with whom I did not get along — were both married and lived nearby.
In addition to school, I worked one or two shifts a week as a waiter at Eddie’s Cafe on Main Street. My life at that time was characterised by yearning; I would find myself standing (in my bedroom, at the kitchen sink, the back door at Eddie’s) gazing through a window at the sky, wondering what might lie beyond, what adventures people were having in New York or Casablanca. Even now, the images that most readily come to mind when I think of my youth in Dunley are of the low, grey sky; the flat horizon; a plastic bag snagged on a barbed-wire fence. I hated Dunley and most of the people who lived there, including my family. Or at least I thought I did, which is perhaps the same thing.
On that afternoon, the trees were skeletal, empty of leaves, and the air had in the last few weeks taken on an icy quality. In a month or two, the oval would be mud, and the streets of the town would be more or less deserted after nightfall — apart from drunks staggering home after last drinks at the Great Southern Hotel, kids doing wheelies on their bikes, and the occasional police car cruising, shark-like, along Main Street. Dunley was always a mean place, but in winter it became a town lurking with sinister possibilities; the bitter cold stripped away any bucolic veneer the place had acquired during summer. The few tourists who visited for the bushwalking or a weekend away vanished, the sun struggled low on the horizon, and sharp winds sheared across the boggy fields.
That afternoon I was sitting with David Blake. David and I weren’t friends in the manner in which I have subsequently come to understand the term; we had been thrown together in the way one might befriend another tourist in a restaurant abroad — for no other reason than you shared a common language and could moan about the public transport or the quality of the food. Isolated among Dunley’s beer-swilling, ute-driving football players called Macca and Robbo, David and I needed each other.
We had become acquainted four years earlier, when the Dungeons & Dragons craze swept the school — or at least captured the interest of those students who considered themselves brighter and more imaginative than the others. At lunchtimes, a cabal of bespectacled, Monty Python-quoting nerds assembled in one of the spare classrooms to listen to Kraftwerk, throw polyhedral dice around, and debate the relative merits of the broadsword against the ability to render a troll immobile for twenty seconds. For an hour or so each day — and sometimes, if it could be organised, for a rainy weekend afternoon — we embarked on campaigns to villages called Riverweft or Dugshen, squalid settlements populated by scheming wizards and elves, encrusted with smoky taverns in which one drank mead and gathered information for the onward journey to Nighthawk Cove, where (according to legend) a trove of treasure could be found.
I became mildly obsessed with the world of Dungeons & Dragons. For hours I pored over large books with the heft of grimoires that outlined the various monsters and the types of characters who might attempt to slay or woo them. I always cast myself as a Ranger (daring, handsome, heroic, physically powerful), the character perhaps most removed from my real self (plain, weedy, impractical, cowardly).
Older than me by nearly a year, David had finished high school and joined the ranks of restless teenagers in country towns with not an awful lot to do. He rode his (by now too small) bike around, trying to convey the impression he had an urgent task at hand when, in fact, he was going to buy milk for his mum; he smoked pot when his dole cheque came through; he saw movies at the Dunley Odeon during the day. To me, he exuded a kind of diffident, louche charm but, crucially, he was also the kind of teenager who had a sixth sense when it came to dealing with parents. He asked after people’s ageing relatives; he could advise mothers on baking, discuss with fathers the shortcomings of Holdens. Parents adored him, and invariably considered him delightful and responsible for his age. Even my mother, who was by nature suspicious, thought David a ‘very nice boy’ and would rise, cobra-like, to his defence should a rumour swirl and threaten his pristine reputation.
David and I both despised the parochialism of Dunley, and over the years we had developed an elaborate fantasy of escaping the place, a plan that, like a many-roomed mansion to which we were constantly adding new parlours and wings, had expanded over hundreds of late afternoons. In essence, however, the plan was simple and embarrassingly familiar to teenagers the world over: as soon as I finished high school, we would get jobs at the local peach cannery and save enough money to travel to exotic countries. In many respects, the route of our adventure — even the specific countries to which we would travel — was unimportant and varied from month to month.
What remained unchanged, like some great palace steadfast in the shifting sands of the desert, was the desire to escape to a larger life and, for me, to become a wholly different — and far more interesting — person. To remain in Dunley would be to risk ending up like David’s older brother Jason, who had transformed from one of the few vital students at Dunley High School to a pothead living in the leaky bungalow at his Aunt Milly’s place near the railway station.
This, most certainly, was not for us. In our future lives, David and I would argue in Parisian cafes with beautiful, troublesome women who wore stockings and high heels; we would climb the pyramids at dusk; we would urge our faltering ponies through the snow of the Russian steppes. We would take risks; we would live. What a time of life is youth! To have all of that in front of you, unsullied by reality or — as in my case — by the shortcomings of one’s character. Yet embedded in such dreams is, inevitably, an irresolvable tension: the persistent lure of elsewhere, the longing for other, better places.
Such a life was, for me, part of some vague, unarticulated plan to transform myself into a scholar — or an artist at the very least. Not that I had any obvious artistic talent; moreover, in my family such a thing was not encouraged. I suspect my ambition, if it can even be called that, was a matter of seeking to transform my clichéd alienated adolescence into a tale with a narrative roughly commensurate with biographies of actual artists I had read about. I sketched things on scraps of paper, as I had read Henri Matisse did; and, recently, acting on the advice of an author I had read about in the serious weekend papers (found abandoned on a table at Eddie’s Cafe; my mother would never buy such a thing), I had begun to keep a journal in which I scribbled quotes from books or films and earnest observations about my oh-so-unique troubled interior life. Love is a battlefield. L’enfer, c’est les autres.
On that evening in 1985, the local footy team, the Dunley Tigers, were training out on the oval, and their hoarse cries were like those of drowning men as they barrelled about on the floodlit grass, their shadows circling and re-circling as they tackled and ran. Every so often, the team huddled in the middle of the ground to receive instructions from the coach, where their steaming breath plumed around them before dissipating in the night air.
David and I observed the footballers with the potent mixture of envy and scorn that is, I suspect, the default emotional setting of teenagers the world over. Many of those training on the oval were our classmates at school, friends even, but those bonds were gradually loosening as we began veering on our separate ways through life.
‘They look like trolls, don’t they?’ David said as he riffled through his coat pockets and produced a packet of Marlboros. He lit one and inhaled deeply. ‘Running around stinking, crashing into each other.’
I asked him if any jobs had come up at the cannery yet.
‘Nah. Bugger all. They say things are pretty bad. I don’t reckon they’ll have anything all year.’
I doubted this but said nothing. In the past few months I had noticed a change in David. He was becoming impatient with me, querulous, reluctant to engage in discussing our plans even as their fruition grew ever closer.
We watched the Tigers practise kicking for goal from a variety of difficult angles. I recognised Spider Murphy, who insisted on trying to dribble the ball through from impossible positions on the boundary line in imitation of a Collingwood player famous for such a talent; Dale Freck, the butcher’s kid, notorious for punching the maths teacher Miss Dawson after failing surds in spectacular fashion last year. The shouts of frustration and triumph — the phrases and intonation lifted directly from radio commentary of matches — drifted up to us through the thin air. He goes for it and, aaarrrghhh, so close. Frecky shoots aaaaaannnnnndddddd, did you see that? What a goal!
David smoked in monkish silence, popping out fragile, trembling smoke rings. ‘I’m going to do an apprenticeship with Mr Wilson, starting next month,’ he announced.
I felt as if the air were drained from my lungs. Graeme ‘Sparky’ Wilson was an electrician with his own business. We saw him driving around town in his van with a yellow light bulb painted on the side.
‘I thought you said you’d never do anything like that in a million years, that you’d —’
‘Shut up, Tom, will ya.’
I was wounded and couldn’t help but stutter in a whining tone that appalled even me. ‘What about our trip? What about the pyramids? Paris? I’ll finish school this year, remember. Then I can start saving some money. I can get more work at Eddie’s. Full-time. It’ll only take me six months or so. An apprenticeship takes years.’
David jammed his cigarette butt into the damp ground where it sizzled before going out. ‘God, don’t you realise? Those things are only dreams.’ His voice rose above my protests. ‘Don’t be such a baby. What else am I going to do? I need money, don’t I?’
I thought of the stash under my bed — the maps on which we had scrawled proposed routes, the colour pictures of ancient ruins scissored from National Geographic magazines, the postcards we’d hoarded from the few people we knew who had travelled abroad (Salut de Montparnasse!) — and I understood at once, with sudden, humiliating clarity, that David had never intended to follow through on our plans. He had been humouring me for years. And now I was on my own.
David smoked another cigarette, then hopped on his bike and left with a curt ‘See ya’. In retrospect I can recognise that he was as disappointed as I was, but life lived backwards is of no use, is it?
I wouldn’t be exaggerating to admit that at that moment, on a low hill in a wintry dusk, I had to resist the urge to weep with frustration. It was a betrayal of the most heinous kind. I wandered home through the empty town, taking the back way past Sarah Lumb’s house. I dawdled on the other side of the street in the hope of glimpsing my latest crush but only saw her mother at the kitchen sink, brushing her hair from her forehead with the heel of one sudsy hand.
It was dark by the time I stepped through the back door into the kitchen. My sister Meredith was sitting at the kitchen table with a packet of Iced VoVos, flicking through an old Women’s Weekly. She was wearing a woollen coat over her blue nurse’s uniform. Meredith was ten years older than me, and although she lived with her husband Bill, she was often at our kitchen table or sitting on the sofa, drawn back by the sweet biscuits in constant supply at our house.
‘Oh,’ she said with a smirk, looking up long enough from the heartbreaking exclusive story of a soap star’s marriage bust-up to register my arrival. ‘It’s you. Hi, Spaz. How’s your existential angst today?’
I counted off on my fingers. ‘That’s a big word for you. Four whole syllables. But it’s pretty good, thanks. How are you?’ I waited a beat. ‘Still barren?’
Meredith stiffened, and for a second I regretted bringing out the big guns so soon. In the four years of her marriage, Meredith had so far been unable to fall pregnant. That alone would have been bad enough — she had wanted to have children since she was a child herself — but her misery was compounded by the fact that our sister, Rosemary (younger than her by two years), had two children with her idiotic husband, Jason. This was a source of distress for Meredith and the main reason she could be found so often at our house, seeking solace from our mother and a packet of biscuits.
When it became clear she was not going to respond to my barb with the venom I anticipated, I opened the fridge and poured myself a glass of orange juice. On the table was the latest edition of National Geographic. The historical and the exotic had always exerted an almost irresistible pull on me, and the delivery of a new edition never failed to prompt in me a jolt of pure joy. It was addressed to my father (his late mother had given him a lifetime subscription years earlier), but they continued to arrive at our house with pleasing regularity. There were many dozens of these magazines in the back shed, stacked in yellow-spined piles. Over the years, I had spent hundreds of happy hours immersed in the last days of the Incas or the Ancient Egyptians. Learning about Pompeii, the Battle of Cajamarca, Pizarro, roomfuls of gold, garrotting; a world so far removed from my own that it glittered with an impossible, surreal magic. After an afternoon in the company of such feats and wonders, I would look up, dazed, neck sore, and the dim shed (heavy cobwebs in its corners, rusty tools on the bench) unnerved me, as if this real home of mine — not the historical dramas by which I had been entranced — were utterly foreign.
I tore the wrapper off the latest magazine and flicked through it. Photos of Amazonian Indians with red plates wedged beneath their lower lips, a Mexican boy being tossed from a bucking bull. Meredith watched me with an amused expression, and I sensed her formulating a withering riposte. But, to my surprise, she said nothing.
I rolled up the National Geographic and tucked it under my arm. ‘What are you doing here, anyway?’
She made an inarticulate noise, wetted a finger with her tongue and turned a page. She had always been matronly, my sister, hunch-shouldered and plump. It was hard to see her running around after children. In fact, it was hard for me to imagine her anywhere but sitting right here picking over women’s magazines and munching on an Iced VoVo. That we supposedly shared parents was not only unlikely to me, but downright distasteful. I watched her as I might a sorrowful creature in an exhibit and suddenly felt contrite. In an effort to be conciliatory, I asked her where our mother was.
She shrugged without looking up. ‘Still at work, I guess.’
Mystic Medusa’s horoscopes snagged her attention and she read for a few seconds, lips moving, eyes narrowed with concentration. What she gleaned evidently chimed with her and she leaned back, popped the final shard of her Iced VoVo into her mouth and nodded with approval. Then she wiped away the crumbs on her lip. ‘What star sign are you again?’
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.