Rusty called from Cairo. This was 1985, which means he called from very far away on a line that cost more per minute than either of us could afford. Why? He said he needed me to bring something down to him. His birth certificate. His mother had it. Could I swing by, pick it up, fly down? We have an extra room, he said. The drugs are spectacular.
Rusty and I had been in a band together once. He played bass. Not brilliantly but well enough that nobody winced. The band broke up, he moved away and I hardly heard from him again until Cairo. Cairo. The word itself felt exotic. Yet there he was with his bird Marla, calling me out of the blue, perhaps because I was the only working number left in his address book. Rusty had always been a heavy drinker. Never violent, just unreliable. The sort of bloke who disappeared for months and then phoned asking you to fly to Egypt. He needed a courier, he said.
I was on the dole which meant a couple of things. One, I had no real responsibilities. I was exactly the right person to disappear to Cairo at a moment's notice. Two, I barely had enough to cover food and heat costs. It was the middle of winter and Cairo was significantly warmer. I had to sign on every two weeks meaning I could head for Cairo for 13 days. Rusty was paying the airfare and giving me a free place to stay so I’m laughing. 13 days of warmth and hash. He didn’t need to ask twice.
His mother gave me an envelope and looked at me the way mothers look at people who are flying to Cairo to bring their son his birth certificate. I didn't ask what the birth certificate was for. Cairo sounded like the sort of place where people needed papers for mysterious reasons. That was enough.
The flight was fine. The airport was not.
Cairo from the air looks like someone started building a city and then got distracted and then came back and got distracted again, repeatedly, for a thousand years. The concrete frames with rusted rebar poking into the sky like calcified fingers. Everything seemed either half-built or half-destroyed.
Marla and Rusty were not at the airport to greet me. I should have expected as much. Sure, I had the address, but he'd paid my airfare to bring his birth certificate to him in person. I thought that might at least have been worth a trip to the airport.
I walked out of the terminal and was immediately swarmed by aggressive taxi drivers shouting for my attention. I had no idea what a taxi should cost. I'd turned my dole savings into 150 Egyptian pounds at the currency exchange. I bought a Stella and calculated in my head that I could buy 150 of them with this. Not bad. A week's dole money was about two months' wages in Cairo. No wonder Rusty liked it here.
The address was written on a scrap of paper, but would anyone understand it? I hadn't written it in Arabic.
Everyone said “yes, yes, come, come.” The louder I shouted "How much?", the wider they would smile, nod vigorously, and shout "Yes! Dokki! Very close! Good price, come!" Nobody would tell me what the fare was.
I thought I might never get out of the airport. Then this kid, maybe 12 or 15, hard to tell, appeared from the crowd. He spoke surprisingly fast, slang-heavy English. I had no idea how he'd learned it.
He walked right up to me, completely ignoring the shouting taxi drivers, took one look at me and said in his higher-pitched voice “Hey mister, no problem, don’t listen to them. They are crazy. Let me see the paper.”
I handed him the paper with the address on it. He read the English address easily, and then turned to the drivers and spoke to them in rapid-fire Arabic.
The boy took charge. He spoke, they answered, then argued among themselves before finally nodding reluctantly.
Then he turned back to me with a charming smile and said “Okay, meester, I fixed it. Dokki, Seven pounds. Very good driver, my uncle. You give me a small tip for helping you?”
Sure, of course. Anything to get out. Seven Egyptian pounds plus one for him and that was eight Stellas out the window before I’d even got to Rusty’s. That fuck. He could have just come out and saved me this hassle; I had his birth certificate. If I could have figured out a cheap place to stay I’d have let him sweat it out a few days before showing up.
The flat was on the fourth floor. No lift. The bed bugs introduced themselves that night.
Marla and Rusty had been in Cairo for eight months. They had arrived with a plan and a budget and something to prove and the city had taken all three and replaced them with hash and aimlessness. They wandered the souks in the mornings before it got too hot. In the afternoons they lay on the floor under the ceiling fan when the electricity was working, which was not always. When the power cut the apartment became an oven and they lay on the floor anyway, in the dark, in the heat, waiting for the city to let them go again.
Anyway, it didn’t take long to understand Marla and Rusty’s lethargy. Not just the hash but the aimlessness. Cairo doesn’t break you, Marla informed me one night between coughing spells. It just makes forward motion seem like a category error. You stop asking where you’re going. You wander the souks in the morning. You lie on the floor in the afternoon. You listen to the city breathe around you constantly, a million people and their million problems running on infrastructure designed for a fraction of that, creaking and groaning and somehow still standing.
The more urgent discovery was that although my passport had been stamped on arrival, every foreign tourist was legally required to register their local address with the police within seven days. Rusty hadn’t thought to drop that information on me until after a few days and a few deep hits had me already floating through the city streets.
“Oh yeah mate,” Rusty exhaled. "If you don't get that registration stamp, they'll hammer you with a massive fine when you leave."
Rusty didn’t say so but I suspected that’s why he and Marla had ended up staying.
Since I was staying thirteen days, this was a big problem. Well, not a problem. More a direction. I would not be sightseeing. I would be looking to get my registration stamp.
That meant I needed the Mogamma. The Mogamma is at Tahrir Square, a brutalist monument to administrative density. Twelve thousand civil servants under one roof. Cavernous halls with tiled floors that turned every sound into an echo of itself. People sleeping on the floor waiting for offices to open. Staircases that spiralled up into departments that may or may not have existed. Every document requiring a stamp. Every stamp requiring a superior’s stamp. Every superior located on a different floor, in a different queue, in a different wing of a building designed to make you lose your will before you reached them.
I spent an entire day there, struggling not to let the bureaucracy enter me. A few days earlier I was still sitting around Bradford writing song lyrics that, as it turned out, nobody would ever hear.
I made up for lost time by staying awake all night because the city was bearable then. Every evening I left Rusty and Marla to their stupors and wandered alone. El-Fishawy at two in the morning. Mint tea. Musicians. Al-Alfi Street. The ahwas. I wasn’t sightseeing anymore. I was simply being present, slightly lost and increasingly comfortable with being lost.
I was still under the impression that I had come to Cairo because Rusty had phoned me.
Years later I would wonder whether that had ever been true.
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