• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

By Root 1147 0

family grounds.) At any rate, time after time, he would appear unannounced. I was easy to surprise, as from a very early age I was generally bent over my labours, wonderfully ignorant of all that happened around me. And he would snatch my work from me, crumple up hard-won hieroglyphs. He would, with a noisy, liquorish menace, uncork the usual cant: “Boy, how can you think it wise to truck with this culture of death?” Even at ten I knew the correct answer to that cataclysmic catechism: “Right you are, Father. Much better to stick with the life-embracing imagery of a cult that worships a bleeding corpse nailed to bits of wood.” Of course, I had to be in the mood for a thrashing, or worse, if I chose that path.

But the point, which I understood even at that age: Egypt was not—I must repeat for Readers who still do not know it—a culture of death, for all the mummies and bottled lungs, the jackal-men and cobra-queens. The Egyptians were the inventors of immortality, the first men who saw they could live forever.

Atum-hadu wrote:

The gods and I walk slowly arm in arm

And sometimes we do not walk at all,

But sit upon a rock and watch the charm

Of two goats f—ing behind a peasant’s wall.

—(Quatrain 13, Fragment C only, from Desire

and Deceit in Ancient Egypt by Ralph M. Trilipush,

Collins Amorous Literature, 1920)

Sunset on the Bayview Nursing Home

Sydney, Australia

December 6, 1954

Mr. Macy,

In my experience of human behaviour (and I’ve seen all there is to see, it’s fair to say), I’ve concluded there aren’t but five motivations for a man to do anything. They’re hardly mysterious, you know: money, hunger, lust, power, survival. That’s all there is. You hear in the courtrooms and in the cinema all sorts of fancy-dress explanations why someone becomes Prime Minister or kills his neighbours. But if you listen hard, it’s all just the same five balls, juggled up in the air, decorated with distracting words. No one ever did a damn thing but for one of those five.

Which brings us to the tale of Paul Caldwell and Catherine Barry, Bolshevik and former librarian, a tale of a power-hungry traitor, a manipulative woman playing on the emotions of a vulnerable young man, leading the weak into corruption. The story of Paul’s tragic death in Egypt begins right here, when he’s eight or nine years old in Sydney, pushed towards his doom by Catherine Barry, cold, dangerous, terribly beautiful.

I am surrounded by my reconstructions of Miss Barry’s words (July 10th, 1922), a typically self-justifying letter from her, an interview I did with her brother (July 11th, 1922), and the summary I wrote for my final report back to London. I also have the letter from Ronald Barry (the brother), engaging me to find any evidence of Paul Caldwell’s survival and, if he was alive, to procure his address discreetly. Ronald, I’m sure, meant to kill Caldwell. It obviously never came to that, and it’s fair to point out no one’d ever hired me to protect Paul Caldwell.

So my memory’s feeling well-primed, no matter the shouting coming from some of my housemates, feebly battling for control of a partial set of torn playing cards. When you consider that I took notes, expanded them into full speeches when I got home, rewrote them again for my report to London, and am now fleshing them out further for you here, our readers should get a convincing pre-sentation, but by all means you should add whatever you feel they still need.

Here we are then. Paul’s eight or nine or ten. This is before winning the heart of Mrs. Hoyt at age nineteen, before snake acts in the circus, before lightening pockets in the market. This is a little boy going to the state school. He’s a quiet, sullen little fellow, no surprise. He absorbs his share of beatings from Eulalie and the men she keeps. But he has no feeling at all for his fellow victims, his half siblings, because when Eulalie’s not whacking him about, she’s holding him on her lap and telling him that those other filthy kids aren’t on his level, since he’s the son of the great gentleman Barnabas Davies, lost