Cairo Read Free Page B

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 smokytaverns 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 peachcannery 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,