Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘No. It’s a hire car.’

  She was examining the stereo unit. ‘I should have brought along my iPod. There’s a jack.’ She turned to him eagerly. ‘Do you have one?’

  So that was what that attachment on the stereo was for. She, like his own kids, seemed to have a second sense for technology. He shook his head. ‘I’m sorry, I left mine back at the house.’

  Disappointed, she turned the radio on instead. She kept punching buttons, rapid sprays of music, country and western, pop, snatches of talkback. She settled on a familiar strained melancholic voice singing above a jangling melodious electric guitar.

  ‘Do you like U2?’

  They were a favourite, one of the few passions he shared with Matthew. ‘I think I have every album,’ he announced proudly.

  ‘They’re alright.’ She sounded uncertain. Then with a derisive sniff, ‘But that Bono is a sanctimonious cunt. He makes me want to hate them.’ She was flicking through her purse and she placed a cigarette to her lips.

  ‘This is a non-smoking car.’

  ‘I thought you lot were all anarchists?’

  ‘I’m not part of that lot and I don’t want you to smoke in the car.’

  She made a face, but returned the cigarette to its packet. Her fingers started tapping on the dashboard. ‘How come I’ve never met you before?’

  ‘Leo and I haven’t seen each other for a while.’

  ‘What’s a while?’

  ‘Eleven years.’

  ‘Fuck!’ There was awe as well as shock in her exclamation. ‘You must be feeling awful.’

  She was right. Probably not in the way she thought, but she was right nonetheless. He did feel awful. He was furious at himself. He had been cold and unfeeling for days and this was not the moment to experience the sting of tears in his eyes. He did not dare look at her.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ For the first time her voice had lost its brazen inflection. It sounded young and frightened.

  He did turn to her. She was looking out of the window at the lush landscape falling away from them. She continued to speak in that shy, childlike tone. ‘I loved Leo. He was amazing, wonderful. But he could be so mean.’

  She followed him confidently into the pub, as if they had known each other for years. The Demons Creek Hotel was a three-storey Victorian building with an ugly, box-like extension attached to the side of it which functioned as a bottleshop. It was blessedly cool inside the double-bricked walls of the building.

  All heads turned to look at them as they walked into the bar, then just as quickly everyone went back to contemplating their drinks. It was far from crowded. A few tradesmen who’d just knocked off work, two ferals with dreads, some elderly National Party types propped up on stools at the bar. The pub catered with egalitarian ease to the long-established farmers, to the hippies and children of hippies who had laid claim to the hills over the past three decades, and also to the constant stream of local and international tourists who passed through on their way south to Byron Bay. The locals obviously assumed that Anna and Saverio were part of the latter group. No eyebrow was raised at Anna’s aggressively urban attire. Saverio was conscious that if their entry had aroused any suspicions, they would have had to do with what a middle-aged man like him was doing in the company of such a young woman. She’s my brother’s goddaughter, he wanted to call out. She’s got nothing to do with me. Instead he asked her if she wanted a beer and she said yes.

  The three elderly blokes at the bar fell silent as he approached. He nodded to them and received a gruff ‘g’day’ in response. They all had wrinkled ruddy skin and thin wisps of silver-yellow hair, and all wore open-necked white shirts that accentuated the burnt V of their necks.

  Saverio looked around the bar as he waited for the beers. He wondered if his brother had spent much time there; he couldn’t really imagine Leo discussing Marxism with the farmers or anonymous gay sex with the hippies. He took a glass in each hand, nodded again to the old men, and found Anna at the rear of the pub.

  As part of the extensions a small square dance area had been constructed against the back wall. On three sides mirrors ran from floor to ceiling reflecting the bar beyond. Anna was gazing at her reflection. A mirror ball hung from the ceiling. Some of the shingles of glass were missing.

  ‘I guess this is where you come if you want to go clubbing.’ She laughed again, a deep resonant sound that came all the way up from her belly. ‘I can see Leo here, he loved a bit of a dance.’ She put on an accent, Leo at his most queenie, cruelly caricaturing other gay men. ‘They’re playing “I Will Survive”, Brooce! They’re playing “I Will Survive”!’ She was wiggling in such a close approximation of Leo’s stilted dancing style that Saverio couldn’t help laughing.

  Anna took the beer and indicated a door with a handwritten sign taped to it: To the beer garden. ‘Am I allowed to smoke out there?’

  I’m not your father, he almost snapped at her. Instead he opened the door for her and followed her out to the courtyard.

  It was a stunning view. The gently sloping yard was immaculately mowed, with tall grey-limbed gum trees throwing shade over the tables and chairs set around the lawn. There were no fences and the ground disappeared abruptly to give way to the jutting tops of thick forest trees. Beyond the greenery and as far as the eye could see was the curve of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

  The garden was empty except for a blonde woman sitting on a bench at the end of the lawn, looking out over the view. She did not turn at the sound of their voices.

  ‘So why did you and Leo stop talking to each other?’

  He wished he had said nothing to her in the car. Tomorrow was the funeral and after that he would return to Melbourne. Then it would all be over.

  He took a mouthful of beer. ‘It really doesn’t matter now.’

  She was searching his face again, her eyes inquisitive and excited. She drew ravenously on her cigarette. ‘Your father was a fascist, wasn’t he?’

  He banged the beer glass on the table. ‘That’s nonsense. Did Leo tell you that?’

  Anna was not at all perturbed. ‘Yep. He said that your father supported Mussolini . . .’

  ‘My father did not support Mussolini!’ Saverio drew breath and looked out at the view. She was a child; she wasn’t to blame. ‘My father hated the Blackshirts, thought them thugs and criminals, but he respected some of what Mussolini was able to achieve for Italy and for poor people in Italy. He was not alone in that. Millions of Italian peasants were in agreement.’

  ‘He did beat your mother, though, didn’t he?’

  And how the fuck is that your business? Saverio looked out to the horizon again. The sky and sea offered no assistance. The setting sun still had heat in it and he wished he had remembered his sunglasses.

  ‘I think Leo might have exaggerated some of what occurred.’ It was impossible to explain further. Yes, their father had hit their mother, not very often, never bashed her; but yes, he had hit her, three, possibly four times that Saverio could recall, in front of him and Leo, smacks and slaps, always out of exasperation, driven almost unhinged by her whining, her hypochondria, her almost bovine passivity. How to explain any of this to a young woman coming into adulthood at the dawn of this digital century? How to explain the behaviour of men and women from the end of a feudal millennium?

  ‘If he wasn’t so bad, why did Leo hate him so much?’

  That question was so childish; as if there were any easy answers to it. Because Leo was unforgiving. Because Leo was stubborn. Because Leo was selfish. Because Leo relied upon their mother’s support and when she died he felt betrayed. Because mothers always favoured the gay son. All of this was true, but to say any of it was to lead into an argument.

  He wished she hadn’t come with him. He had wanted to forget Leo for a few hours, and her presence and her questions couldn’t help but remind him of the duties he faced the following day. He couldn’t do it; he just wasn’t up to it. He would say so to Julian, and Julian would understand. I can’t gi
ve a eulogy. I have nothing to say. I can’t say what I want to say. I can’t say that Leo was the kind of man who wouldn’t go and visit his dying father, the kind of man who didn’t have it in him to ask after his niece and nephew. The rage seemed to flood through him, threatened to drown him. The heat, the humidity, the thickness of it, like a blanket over the world, was exhausting.

  ‘Are you okay?’ She was concerned now, biting her bottom lip. Her incisors were long and crooked. He wanted her to shut her mouth; the exposed teeth made her look crude, ugly.

  ‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

  It was blissful to be inside the cool anteroom of the toilets. They were part of the original hotel and the thick tiled walls were effective insulation against the heat. He was the only occupant of the men’s toilets and he unbuttoned his shirt to the navel and splashed water on his face, his neck, under his arms. He used his handkerchief to wipe himself dry.

  He examined his face critically in the mirror. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and across his chin and along his upper lip there had already formed a soft shadow of alternating white and black stubby bristles. He wished he’d had time for a haircut. His smoky grey hair was shapeless, and the harsh fluorescent light in the toilets seemed to shine directly above where his hair was thinnest.

  You idiot, he hissed to himself. You vain, stupid fuck, you want to impress that young girl.

  The colourless scar above his left eyebrow was almost invisible. He should point that out to Anna. This is where my brother hit me with a hammer when I was ten. The reason for the argument was long forgotten. All he could remember was trying to squeeze the life out of Leo, his hands around his brother’s neck, and how Leo would not submit, how he kicked and struck and scratched like a wild animal. The argument had started in their bedroom. They had punched and kicked each other into the kitchen and rolled into the laundry where Saverio’s hands were around his brother’s throat and Leo’s hand had landed on a hammer and it was in raising this hammer to Saverio’s face that the battle had ended. He had blood in his mouth and had fallen across the laundry door and Leo was on top of him, the hammer raised, ready to strike another blow.

  ‘Don’t!’ Saverio had screamed. ‘Don’t!’

  Leo had dropped the hammer. His lips were trembling. ‘You’re bleeding.’ He started to whimper.

  ‘It’s okay, I’m alright.’ His own anger, his brother’s anger, had disappeared in an instant.

  When he got back to the table, the woman who had been at the end of the beer garden was sitting across from Anna. They were both smoking and looked up, smiling, as his shadow fell across them.

  ‘Saverio, this is Melanie.’

  ‘Call me Mel,’ the woman said. Her voice was shockingly nasal and broad, almost a take-off of a rural Australian accent. Her grip was tight, firm. She wore sunglasses with big round lenses so he couldn’t see her eyes but he guessed she was in her mid-forties. The skin around her mouth was wrinkled, her lips were thin, and her hair was dyed a chemical yellow. She wore a black T-shirt a size too small for her full breasts and pot belly, and black jeans too small for her expanding arse and thick thighs. She was obviously what Matty and Adelaide would derisively call a bogan, and what his parents, with equal derision, would have called an Australiana. She was a woman who could not take root anywhere else but in this enormous infinite landscape. Unabashed, unashamed.

  ‘He’s better-looking than Leo.’

  ‘Mel knew Leo,’ Anna rushed to explain.

  ‘Yeah, he was a good bloke, your brother.’ Mel stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m really sorry for your loss.’

  It was the expected phrase, it came from a stranger, but she said it with unforced sincerity and they were the first words since he’d heard of Leo’s death that brought home the finality of the event. His brother was no more. From now on there would only be past.

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘When I first left Brendan and began seeing Suzanne, Leo was the only one I could talk to about things.’ Mel was continuing a conversation she had begun with Anna while he was in the toilet. ‘Small towns are fucked. Everyone knows you, and Brendan’s really popular with everyone. He’s done work on most people’s pipes or plumbing so you can imagine what they thought of me when I took off with a woman.’ Mel was shaking her head. ‘I thought they were going to kill me. Kill both of us. Leo’s was always a safe house; he’d let us come and stay, sleep over. Talk to us about gay rights and shit. Suzanne loved him. She’s devastated he’s gone.’

  Saverio was horrified. Mel had started to cry.

  ‘Fucking bitch, I hate her!’

  Anna wrapped her fingers around Mel’s hand. Saverio, confused, looked away. A line of surfers, black and grey and silver strokes, was visible against the vast blue of the ocean. Mel blew her nose into a tissue one more time then glanced down guiltily at Anna’s cigarettes.

  Anna nodded.

  ‘I shouldn’t.’

  ‘Today doesn’t count.’

  Mel laughed. ‘Yeah, that’s right.’

  She was looking at Saverio. He couldn’t smile, he didn’t know what she wanted from him. All he could think was what an unlikely lesbian she seemed. He had thought she was a bikie’s moll, an ex-stripper, a small-town mum. Of course it was possible she was all of those things, and a lesbian to boot. Though Dawn wouldn’t find much communion with her. Just like him, Dawn wouldn’t know what to say to Mel.

  The woman was standing up. ‘Thank you for the smokes.’

  Anna jumped to her feet and hugged her. ‘You’ll look after yourself?’

  ‘Of course.’ Mel seemed embarrassed by the spontaneous affection. She slipped out of Anna’s embrace and held out her hand to Saverio, who had also risen. ‘Mate, again, I’m really sorry. Your brother was a real good man.’

  He couldn’t speak. They watched in silence as Mel walked back into the pub. She was shaky on her feet.

  ‘She shouldn’t drive,’ he said gruffly.

  ‘I know, but her girlfriend’s just left her for a younger woman so of course she’s just going to do whatever she likes tonight. We’d all do that.’ Anna pointed to the empty glasses. ‘Another round?’

  ‘One more.’ He pointed to her empty chair. ‘But you sit. I’m buying.’

  ‘You bought the last round.’

  ‘I work. I’m a corporate cocksucker, as my brother used to so fondly put it. You’re young and a student. I’m paying.’

  Anna looked as if she was about to protest again. Then, suddenly, she beamed. ‘Sure. Thank you.’

  At the bar, Mel was arguing with two men, one of them in a khaki uniform with an orange and yellow National Parks and Wildlife insignia stitched on the pocket, the other in football shorts, a paint-splattered work singlet and Blundstones. She winked at him as he walked past. Saverio noticed that the painter had his right hand sitting flat against her wide buttocks.

  ‘I hope our friend is alright in there,’ he said to Anna as he delivered the new beer.

  Anna shrugged and drank greedily. ‘She looks like she can take care of herself.’

  That was not his impression. She looked tough but Mel hadn’t struck him as being tough.

  The dying afternoon sun was still strong, but finally a breeze was coming off the darkening water.

  ‘She really liked Leo.’

  ‘Yes.’ He would keep his answers short, non-committal, give nothing away.

  ‘It’s good to be reminded of what a wonderful man he could be. You could always talk to Leo about anything. He’d always listen.’

  He sipped at his beer slowly.

  ‘One of the things I loved about him was that he would never give you the standard adult answer, he’d always take you a little by surprise. When I was ten I found a stash of Julian’s pornos in the house and wanted to read them, but Leo asked me if I had started masturbating. I said no and he wouldn’t let me have them, said it might dull my imagination. That was so unlike him, usually he let us watch and read anything we liked, no censorsh
ip whatsoever. Not this time. But he was right.’ Anna sniggered. ‘’Course, once I started doing the old five-finger dance he let me have them.’ She winked at Saverio. ‘He was such a character. Was he always like that?’

  ‘I guess so.’

  Anna was frowning. For Christ’s sake, what did she want from him? She lit a cigarette, sat back in her chair and crossed her arms. ‘Saverio, I think you should forgive him.’

  Sin, confession, absolution. These children of communists and feminists and true believers were just as moralistic as the old believers.

  ‘Anna, I’m sorry, but you’re a child. You don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.’

  He had humiliated her. He could see that she was holding back tears and felt immediate regret. Again, she so reminded him of Adelaide. She was young, she had yet to learn how to hide her emotions from the world. He knew he should apologise but he was enjoying the relief of being harsh and uncompromising. There was a thrill to punishment, he had learned that raising his own children; the thrill of deflating them, confronting them with their own limitations, ignorance, powerlessness, foolishness, inadequacy. What did she know about him and Leo? She should just keep her fucking mouth shut.

  Don’t cry, please don’t cry.

  She wasn’t crying. She was looking out to sea.

  ‘Four years ago, for my seventeenth birthday, I came to stay here with Rowan, who was my boyfriend. I thought Rowan was going to be the love of my life. He was two years older, he played guitar in a band, he was at university, his mother was a feminist academic and his father was an actor. I thought he was so cool and so handsome and so wonderful and that I was going to be in love with him forever. I wanted Row to meet Leo and I wanted Leo to meet Row. I thought they were both the most fabulous men in the world and I wanted them to know each other.’

  Her voice was detached, she stumbled a little over her words, but she sounded confident and deliberate. He was aware that a large part of it was a pose, that there was something theatrical in her delivery. She kept her eyes out to the horizon of sea and sky, but he knew that she was fully conscious of his stare.