Free Cairo by Chris Womersley Page B

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
.
    â€˜I want to be a writer,’ I said at last.
    â€˜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 heencountered 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