Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

  Dublin, 16 October 1992. An A4-sized advertisement for Sinéad O’Connor’s new CD, I ripped it off a shop window and I write on the back. Gorgeous, isn’t she? I’m so glad to get out of London. Everyone was whingeing and gloomy. Ireland is obviously poorer but people are friendlier. Also, too many Aussies in England. I wanted to escape all that. I’m going to Belfast, to visit some of Dad’s family. I feel at home here in Ireland. Does that sound weird? I don’t think it’s a pretence. I am relaxed here. There’s a Palestinian student I met at the hostel that you’d really like. Her name is Anna and she’s doing a PhD on Gertrude Stein. Do you know her? She was a dyke writer long ago. Of course you probably know her. I’ve got one of her books, QED. I’m sending it to you surface mail along with some other things. Anna is good to talk to. She talks about Israel, Palestine, war. She explained to me the differences between Christians and Muslims. I just listen to her, keep my mouth shut. I’m realising I know nothing.

  New York City, 3 January 1993. The Chrysler Building. Happy New Year, Zaz. It’s fucking freezing and the hotel room is sucking up all my cash. I’m going to try and hitch down to the south tomorrow. Is the Chrysler still your favourite building? I keep trying to look inconspicuous on the streets but I can’t help looking up and then standing like a stunned mullet in awe of the architecture. Don’t write now, I’ll be back home soon. Unless some rich yank wants to be my sugar mummy or daddy (at this stage, I’m open to all offers). You’ll have to visit here. You’d love it, it is so exciting. At the bottom of the card, two sentences are scrawled out with heavy ink.

  This is what I crossed out, what I couldn’t send to Zazie: Mate, I hate this place, I hate NY, I am lonely and I’m cold and no one speaks to me. I hate their fast chicken, fast ribs, fast burgers, fast fries, fast lives.

  And from San Francisco, 10 January 1993. A crumpled paper napkin. Across it, scrawled in blue pen, were the words: Zazie, Australian girls are cool. It was signed Jennifer Jason Leigh.

  I add a note. Zaz, she was sitting, reading a paper, in a booth across from me. I felt like a deep dag but I had to get her autograph for you. You’re absolutely right. She’s fucking beautiful! The USA, mate. What a trip!

  •

  She picked me up from the airport. She had her hair shaved. I hugged her tight. Driving into Melbourne, the city looked fragile, deserted and flat. We had a coffee in Smith Street and all I could think of was how big the streets were, and how white everyone’s face was. Zazie was very white. Not just pale, but skin that came close to the perfection of white.

  ‘Sorry I didn’t write. I was so busy, I’m making another film, a real film this time.’

  ‘The other one was a real film.’

  ‘No, that was video.’

  She kept talking, I sat there watching Australia go by. Home. I was missing Europe.

  •

  Her film is called Trace. It’s eight minutes long and shot in black and white. It opens on an old woman’s face; in voiceover we hear her talk about an old pub in Richmond where dykes used to hang out. It was called the Kingston. Then we see the old woman climb some stairs and enter a dance club. The music is loud, something not quite techno, not quite house. The old woman takes a seat by herself and watches young women in leather and vinyl on the dance floor. Another close-up on her face, lashed by the strobe. The music fades. She starts talking to the camera, telling us about the Kingston. There’s a cut to a group of women sitting around a pub table. The camera pans across their faces. Some are middle-aged, the others are much older. They are drinking and laughing. Two of the women kiss, a long, passionate, wet kiss. Then up come the credits.

  Zazie’s film did have an effect on me. It was the kiss. There was something unique in that screen kiss. It wasn’t that they were women; it was that they were old.

  ‘That’s the best bit,’ I told her afterwards.

  ‘Yeah,’ she answered, ‘I know.’

  •

  My wedding was small, a ceremony in a garden and lunch at a pub. I invited Zazie but she couldn’t make it. She sent us a card, addressed to me and Tania. Good luck, kids. That’s what it said.

  •

  Tania comes into the bathroom. I’m taking a shower. She’s got the TV Guide in her hand. She says something but I don’t catch it. She pops her head in and I kiss her on the lips. The Guide gets wet. ‘Look,’ she points to the page, ‘next Friday they’re playing Zazie in the Metro on SBS.’

  I jump on the phone as soon as I get out of the shower. I ring, there’s a long wait, and some guy answers.

  ‘Is Zazie there?’

  ‘She doesn’t live here anymore. I don’t have a number.’

  I watch the movie with Tania, tape it. It’s about a young French girl who always misbehaves. She even looks like Zazie—I mean, the real Zazie. It is shot all around Paris and I turn to Tania. ‘We should go. I’d like to take you there one day.’

  Tania says, simply, ‘We will.’ I rub my face all over her, smell her, touch her, kiss her, and I forget about watching the movie.

  •

  I come home from work and the house is empty. Tania’s still at college, evening classes. The answering machine is flashing three messages. After a call from Mum and a message from the plumber, Zazie’s voice crackles and laughs.

  ‘Anyone there? Anyone there! Jesus, this is costing a fortune. I’m in Alexandria—it’s ugly. They’ve ruined it. They must have burned down everything, it’s all fucking concrete boxes. Except for the Mediterranean. Now, that’s beautiful. I got my tarot done by this Egyptian woman. She spotted I was a Virgo straight away. Probably all crap but it was fun. She let me videotape her. Jesus, I wish you were home. We haven’t talked for ages. I don’t know when I’ll be back. Maybe never. I’ll write, I promise I’ll write. Or maybe I’ll phone from New York. Sorry, this is costing a fortune. Love to Tania. Goodbye.’

  The machine spurts out a few weak beeps, the tape wheezes back on rewind and then clicks to a stop. I make myself a sandwich, munch on Vegemite and bread. I go outside. There’s still a few hours of light. I start digging and planting.

  Saturn Return

  I WISH WILLIAM BURROUGHS HAD NEVER done the Nike ad. As Barney says, he lasted into his eighties without compromising his credibility and then he blows it all to sell sports shoes on television. Trying to be generous, I argue that the approach of the millennium is screwing with lots of people’s heads.

  ‘Sure, sure,’ mutters Barney, ‘but how’s he going to stand up now and recite poetry that tells multinationals to fuck off and go to hell?’ He bangs his fist on the steering wheel.

  ‘Why does everyone end up disappointing you?’

  I’ve come to expect to be disappointed by people. The faces that stare down on me from my bedroom wall are all dead. I mean the famous faces: Monroe, Clift, Rainer Werner. Janis, River and Jean Seberg. They are all dead and they all died young. I’m much harder on the living: not so much with family and friends; you learn to tolerate the vulnerabilities of the people around you. It is harder to do that with those beautiful faces caught timelessly on film, photograph or screen, who one moment are expressing their love of art, or talking passionately about their dreams, about changing the world; then flick, another image and they have reneged, become fake. There’s a photograph of Jane Fonda, black and white, limp hair over her face, her fist raised in support of the Vietcong; and then there’s that video of her, with her airbrushed body outstretched, doing aerobics to bad disco. Once you lose someone’s respect it is the hardest thing to win back.

  •

  We are travelling to Sydney. The sun is beating down on us and the inside of the Valiant feels like an oven: our skin sticks to the vinyl seats. Barney is driving, his hands steady on the wheel as the sun tans his naked torso.

  ‘Whoo hoo, baby,’ he sings out to me, ‘ain’t it fucking great to be out of the city?’

  It takes around eleven hours to get from Melbourne to Sydney, nine if you put the foot down on the accelerator and evade th
e cops. We take three days. The first night we stop at Bonegilla, just before the New South Wales border. Barney wants to see the skeleton of the migrant camp. It is an obsession for him. Many nights at dinner at my folks’ he would spend the evening asking my father about his life in the camp, his voyage to Australia. I would let the two of them talk, occasionally butting in with an observation they would both ignore. Often I’d leave them talking in the lounge and I’d go in and help Mum wash up. Their intimacy never disturbed me. I never had a close relationship with my old man but through Barney’s persistent questioning I discovered my father’s history.

  The sun is retreating when we arrive in Bonegilla. Barney wants to go straight to the camp but we can’t see any signs showing where it might be. When we book into a caravan park on the edge of the lake, I ask the owner if she knows where the old camp is located.

  ‘Love, it was over there,’ and she points across the lake to a small stretch of land jutting out into the water. ‘But there’s nothing left, you know. It all belongs to the army now. Were your parents at the camp?’

  ‘My father was,’ I reply.

  •

  That night we get fish and chips and watch a science-fiction movie on the TV. I roll a joint and Barney pokes fun at the stilted dialogue. I lie next to him and blow smoke into his face. He cradles me in his arms and kisses me softly. I taste the beer, the nicotine, the marijuana. A thin layer of grease and salt lines his lips.

  ‘Baby,’ he tells me, ‘I can’t believe they haven’t put up some kind of museum here. Think about the fucking history.’ He shakes his head and goes back to watching the movie.

  I finish the joint and lie back in his arms. As the drug begins to take effect I can hear sounds outside: ghosts murmuring in a discordant chorus of many languages. But it is only the wind blowing over the water and through the trees. The nocturnal music is punctured by staccato bursts of gunfire coming from the television.

  Barney whoops with exhilaration every time there is a glorious, bloody death. He tickles me and kisses me again. ‘Hollywood is bullshit, ain’t it, mate,’ he whispers to me, and he returns to watching the movie. I don’t answer. It isn’t a question.

  •

  Next morning it takes me a long time to wake from the depths of sleep and enter the real world. I drag myself into consciousness and Barney is above me, video camera in front of his face.

  ‘Happy birthday,’ he yells and I pull the sheet over my face.

  ‘Fuck off,’ I manage to say in between fits of giggling. He drags back the sheet and films up and down my body. He hands me the camera and I focus on the top of his head as he licks my thighs, rolls his tongue over my balls and cock. I film myself shooting cum over his face, onto his neck and shoulders. A little unsteady, I zoom into the white patches of sperm. He wipes his face and body with the sheet and stands above me on the bed, holding his hard cock in one hand. The roof of the caravan is low and he has to crouch. I film his face, move down his body and zoom into the wrinkled skin of his balls; they flap wildly as his masturbation becomes more vigorous. As he nears coming I zoom out and frame his upper body. He is silent until a trickle of clear liquid coats his cockhead. He comes in a small white spray and I cut to his moaning, sweating face. He kneels next to me, covers the camera lens with his hand and whispers, ‘That’s enough.’ I turn off the camera.

  We have a hurried breakfast and set off for the camp. He whistles as we walk along and I remain a few steps back, watching the rhythm of his shoulders as he strides along the edge of the lake. I fell in love with this man’s walk. His walk, and the soft melody of his baritone voice. He keeps looking back at me, eager, smiling.

  ‘Excited?’ he keeps asking as we draw ever closer to the peninsula. I don’t answer him, just return the smile.

  The truth is that the closer we get to what may be the old camp the less sure I am about what I’m expecting to find there. When I listened to my father’s stories I imagined Bonegilla in black and white, imbued with a melancholy mid-century European sadness. The sharp summer colours of the land and the sky do not fit the images in my head. As we approach the peninsula, a congress of black birds takes flight and sweeps in a curve above us. An army van sits still on a dirt track in front of us. A young blond soldier is sitting on the bonnet rolling a cigarette and watching the lake.

  Barney walks up to him. ‘Hey, mate,’ he says, ‘we’re looking for the old migrant camp. Know where it is?’

  The soldier rubs his brow and stares listlessly at us. He looks very young; his eyes are clear blue and his skin is soft and hairless. He finishes rolling his cigarette and jumps off the bonnet and walks towards us. He points to the video camera hanging off Barney’s shoulder. ‘What’s that for?’

  Barney smiles even more widely. ‘My friend’s dad was at Bonegilla. We want to make a video for him. That’s alright, isn’t it?’

  The soldier shuffles uncomfortably for a moment, then shrugs and grins, won over. He waves towards a timber fence in the distance, behind which a row of tiled roofs is visible. ‘See those houses? Behind them is where the camp used to be. But there’s shit there now.’ He draws deeply as he lights the cigarette. ‘Have a look around, but you’d be better off going back towards town and checking out the old administration hall. The railway used to run into Bonegilla and that’s where the ethnics got off.’ He rubs his brow again. ‘Fuck-all really to see.’

  When we get to the site of the camp I have to agree with him. There is fuck-all there except for a few corrugated-iron huts. They are dirty, ramshackle, with broken windows, and they all smell of urine. But Barney is excited and immediately starts filming.

  I walk into the largest hut. The timber floor is littered with old newspapers, rat shit and cigarette butts. Graffiti is scrawled on the shattered walls. I walk past what must have been an old kitchen and notice a syringe dumped in the filthy sink. The deep cavern of the hut is cool and dark. The sun peeks through a few broken windows but fails to enliven the decay.

  I walk out into the sunshine and cross over to a smaller hut, its shell scarred black by some past fire. The hut consists of tiny cubicles. I walk in and out of them, touching the fragile walls and kicking away fallen timber. In the last cubicle I look out of the small window from where I can just glimpse the blue water of the lake. The earth outside is a dull orange. I light a cigarette and wonder what my father thought of this landscape when he first arrived. I recall the dark mountains that surround his village in Eastern Europe, the cool air that bites into the skin, the luscious green of the forests. I awake from my daydream: I thought I heard the whisper of a voice not speaking English.

  Outside Barney wraps a firm arm around my shoulder. He kisses me and we walk around the huts and back towards the main road.

  The old administration hall is as decrepit as the huts. Dry yellow grass grows wild and tall around it. The hut is locked and Barney tries unsuccessfully to break down the door. I’m too nervous to assist. The badly weathered mess hall marks one of the boundaries of the old camp, and now, across the road, there is a bright red-and-white-painted restaurant announcing specials on chicken and chips. As we walk around the back of the hall, where the grass grows even taller, I stamp on the ground with my boots to scare away the snakes. We walk back to the front and Barney films me as I walk up to the battered doors. I peer through the windows secured by wire mesh and try to see inside. But there’s not enough light.

  ‘Let’s go,’ I tell Barney. He keeps his camera on me. I wave my hands in front of my face and order him to stop. He keeps filming. I run around, my back to him, and he comes closer. When he has me in close-up I turn around quickly and yell into the lens, ‘Wogs rule!’ The words ring loudly around us; their echo bounces around the whole stinking town and finally is lost in the deep blue emptiness of the sky.

  •

  Barney insists on driving and I rest back in my seat, watching the scenery and listening to soul. He avoids the main highways and we drift east. Late in the afternoon, we drive alon
g a crest that rises towards the sky and then drops us in front of the great sapphire span of the Pacific.

  ‘Where we going?’ I finally ask. The beauty before me makes me forget the forlorn fantasies my imagination had begun to spin back at Bonegilla.

  Barney just smiles.

  He pays for a night in a hotel in a coastal town just outside of Eden. I argue that he can’t afford it but he shrugs off my concern. The hotel is small but comfortable and we have a room that overlooks the lazy port.

  ‘Are you sure you’ve got money for this?’

  Barney gives me a thumbs-up. ‘Hey, I got well paid for the painting job I did with Harry.’ He sits next to me on the bed and strokes my face. ‘And, baby, it’s your twenty-eighth birthday.’ He smiles slyly at me. ‘Saturn return. Big cosmic year for you. Your karma is coming home to roost.’

  I throw a pillow at him. ‘I don’t believe in that shit.’

  He keeps grinning. ‘It doesn’t matter whether you believe in it or not. It happens.’

  I jump up and start getting dressed. When we’re both ready we scout the town looking for a seafood restaurant. On the way we stop at a payphone and I ring my parents. Mum wishes me a happy birthday and asks a rapid series of questions, but I’m anxious to talk to Dad. She finally goes to find him. The small screen on the payphone tells me I only have forty cents worth of time.

  ‘Many happy returns.’ My father sounds gruff and tired on the phone.

  ‘Dad, Dad,’ I say quickly, ‘Barney and I stayed in Bonegilla last night.’

  The old man laughs. ‘What the hell you want to go to that shithole for?’