Cairo Read Free Page A

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 hardcountry 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