Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

  ‘Rowan took to Leo immediately. He loved how funny he was and he loved all the gossip. We stayed up all that first night smoking ice while Leo told him the Germaine Greer story and the Sasha Soldatow story and the Jim Sharman story and who fucked who and who blasted heroin and who really should have taken the credit for what, and of course Row was like a grateful child, just lapping it all up.’

  Anna took a big breath. ‘Do you want to hear all this?’

  She was hesitating for effect. She would be crushed if he said no. He wanted to say no, that there was nothing that he could hear about Leo that would make his own heart feel any lighter.

  ‘We all fall asleep at dawn, all in the big bed, and I wake a few hours later and decide to take a walk in the forest. It’s a beautiful day and I’m still feeling fantastic because of the drugs and I walk all the way to town to the bakery and pick up some croissants and rolls and I walk all the way back to Leo’s. I get there and Leo is cooking in the kitchen and Rowan is playing his guitar on the porch and when I come up the steps and I’m smiling he looks at me and bursts into tears. He just keeps saying, “We had sex, Anna, we fucked, Anna, I’m so sorry.” I drop the bag of croissants and rolls and look up at the door where Leo is standing, a stupid apron on, a fork in one hand, and he just says, “Rowan wanted to tell you, I didn’t. But he’s still young and foolish. I told him you didn’t have to know.” Then he goes back into the kitchen and continues making us breakfast.’

  Saverio couldn’t believe that the bowerbirds continued their whispering song in the trees above, that the drumroll of the waves echoed off the coast below. He could barely control his voice as he asked, ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I cried and I asked them both how they could do it to me and Row was crying as well and he kept saying, “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” and I ran after Leo and said, “Are you going to apologise, are you going to say you’re sorry?” and he just said, “Anna, you know I am an anarchist and a libertarian. You don’t possess Rowan and he doesn’t possess you. There is nothing I have to apologise for.” ’

  There was a burst of laughter. Mel and the two men had crashed through the door into the beer garden, cigarettes in their mouths. Mel called out to them as they sat around a table but Saverio did not register the names of the men as they were introduced. He heard Mel whisper loudly to the man in the singlet, ‘That’s Leo’s brother.’

  ‘What did you say to him?’

  Anna turned back to him, her face now unsmiling. ‘I hit him. I hit him so hard, I wanted to break him.’

  ‘What did he do?’

  ‘He kicked me out. He said he couldn’t abide violence, that he had grown up in a violent house and he would not have it in a house of his own. He kicked me out, and Row and I drove back to Sydney, both of us crying all the way.’ Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘Man, it was a miracle we weren’t killed.’

  Saverio stumbled out of his chair, across the lawn, bashed through the door, almost ran into the toilets. He wanted to put his fist through the mirror, kick down a cubicle door. If someone said the wrong word, offered the wrong look, made a move to stop him, he would gladly bring them down. He would gladly break their necks. But once again the toilets were empty. He breathed in deeply. Thankfully the toilets were empty.

  •

  ‘Do you think she’ll be okay?’

  He had been silent when he returned to the beer garden, had said nothing as they walked to the car, had been quiet for most of the drive. Anna, too, had said little.

  As they’d been about to leave the pub, Mel had rushed after them, taken Anna’s arm and tried to lead her onto the dance floor.

  ‘I can’t, we have to go.’

  ‘Come on, just one dance, I love this song.’

  The pub had begun to fill. The music was steak-and-three-veg Australian rock-and-roll, ‘Cheap Wine’ by Cold Chisel.

  Anna pulled away from Mel. ‘I can’t dance to this.’

  Mel, pouting, flung herself onto the dance floor. She danced on her own, claiming all of the small space, throwing herself into ugly jerks and spasms, singing along to the lyrics at the top of her lungs.

  Uncertain, Anna looked around the pub, at the tables of men laughing at the dancing woman. ‘Maybe we should stay a little while longer?’

  Saverio ignored her and walked outside. She could stay if she wanted. Mel was obviously going to be a messy drunk and he did not want the responsibility of looking after her. Anna would learn that life lesson soon enough. But Anna was running after him. Without a word they got into the car.

  ‘She won’t be okay. We should have stayed.’

  He grunted again.

  Anna crossed her arms. ‘Why are you so angry?’

  Maybe he should drive the car off the road, end it all in screeching tyres, smoke and fire and melting metal.

  ‘Aren’t you going to say a thing?’

  His reply was to switch on the radio.

  She turned it off immediately. ‘If I have forgiven him, so can you.’

  The petulant spoilt child. This broke his silence.

  ‘You have not forgiven him. How could you forgive him?’

  ‘I have. I really have.’ Her tone was urgent, pleading. But he didn’t believe her. His brother did not deserve forgiveness.

  ‘What you told me just confirms that he was indeed an animal.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ She was fumbling for the right words. ‘He was just, you know . . . uncompromising . . .’

  ‘For fuck’s sake, Anna, he was a cunt. I’m glad he’s dead.’

  The words appeared to strike her with the force of a punch. Her body shrank into itself. When she spoke next, she was timid, barely audible. ‘Leo never lied. He loved sex. Sex was his politics. I always knew that about him.’

  Politics? This wasn’t politics, this was delusion. Thank God it was over, thank God what they called politics—Leo, Dawn, Tom, the whole damn lot of them—thank God the world no longer listened to such rubbish. Thank God it was all going to die with them.

  ‘Nothing can excuse what he did to you.’

  ‘You’re so hard. Just like him, just like all of them. Why the fuck is your generation so hard?’

  His foot slammed on the brake and the car swerved onto the side of the road. Anna jolted forward. She screamed.

  He turned on her. ‘I am not like them. I’m not anything like them. Do you understand?’

  She was terrified now. He was mortified. It didn’t matter that Leo was dead. He’d always do this to him, always lay bare a rage he had thought long buried. Alive or dead, the memories and scars wrought on him by Leo were there forever.

  She had just seen it, that childish selfish annihilating hate. She cowered away from him.

  ‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

  ‘What the fuck did Leo do to you?’

  He tried to explain. He told her about their father’s cancer, how it began in the stomach, then spread to the pancreas and reached the lungs, how the old man, a skeleton in his bed, the folds of flesh hanging off his bones, how he had succumbed to a delirium in which the past and the present were one. Where is my son? Saverio, where is your brother? Has he forgiven me?

  He told her about his countless calls to Leo, pleading with him, begging him to come home one last time. He told her what Leo had said to him: ‘Good, the old bastard deserves to die in pain, he deserves to suffer.’

  ‘You can’t mean that, Leo.’

  ‘Don’t you get it, Sav? That man means nothing to me.’

  He then told her how the fury had gripped him, how he had organised the plane ticket and flown to Coolangatta and hired the car and driven down the coast and up through the hills to force Leo to return. He told her how they had screamed at one another, slapped and punched one another, how he had gripped Leo’s hair and pulled him onto the porch, down the steps, dragged him through the gravel, Leo shrieking, biting him, scratching him, how it was only Julian who stilled their frenzy, Julian crying, howling
at them to stop. Don’t, please, don’t. They were the words that had broken him.

  He’d left Leo in the dirt and walked back to the car. ‘Fuck off!’ he’d roared, as he’d walked away, and Leo had screamed back, ‘You’re just like him!’ And to this day, he explained to Anna, he did not know if they had been Leo’s last words to him or his last words to Leo.

  By the time he’d finished speaking, Anna was sobbing. Saverio, his eyes dry, his hands steady, eased the car back onto the road and drove them back to the house.

  It was dusk when they arrived. The party was still in full swing on the verandah.

  ‘Have you got my bloody whisky?’ Dawn called out to them.

  ‘We forgot,’ Anna yelled back. She was looking at her face in the rear-view mirror. She took a compact from her purse and applied powder to her face. ‘How do I look?’

  Like a child, he wanted to answer, you look like a child. ‘You look fine.’

  He didn’t acknowledge anyone on his way to the bedroom. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the laughter and jokes and talk.

  On the bed lay a small square canvas. It was a painting of his own children when they were toddlers on the beach. Matty was naked, plonked down in the sand, Adelaide standing next to her brother in pink undies. The colours were intense, garish blues and greens, flaming reds and yellows. His children’s faces were elongated, distorted, but recognisable nevertheless. Adelaide looked bored, impatient. Matty’s dough-like baby face stared blankly out at him.

  Leo had painted them the first year that he and Julian had moved up to the coast. Saverio, Rachel and the kids had spent a week with them over the summer holidays, a week in which Leo had cooked for them every night and entertained Rachel with his wild stories, the gossip and slander from the past, extravagant narratives of sexual escapades and orgies. During the day, Leo and Julian would take the kids swimming or into town while Rachel and Saverio took long walks in the bushland, found near-empty coves to swim in, read books, had sex and did crosswords.

  There was a knock on the door and Julian entered. ‘Dawn’s all good. I found a bottle of Jameson’s in one of the kitchen cupboards.’ He looked at the canvas in Saverio’s hands. ‘I thought you might want to keep it.’

  Saverio wanted to say, I don’t want to talk tomorrow, there is nothing I can say. ‘Thank you.’

  ‘Come out for a drink. Our bark is worse than our bite.’

  Saverio shook his head. ‘Nah, I want to ring Rachel, I want to check on things at home.’

  •

  The service began with a recording of Maria Callas singing an aria from Tosca, and then it was Dawn who first stepped onto the platform. Before she spoke she walked to the back of the dais and took down the Australian flag. There was a burst of applause. Leo wouldn’t have wanted it, she explained to the shocked civil celebrant. This time there were no outlandish stories, no off-colour jokes or declarations. She told the assembled mourners of how she had first met Leo when they were volunteers at the Aboriginal Legal Centre in Fitzroy, of how frightened she had been of the Aboriginal men, of how Leo had never succumbed to white guilt, how one youth had hurled a barrage of abuse at them one afternoon, to which Leo had stood his ground and answered, ‘You pay me and you can call me a white cunt—but if I’m a volunteer and you insult me then you’re a black cunt.’

  Tom Jords spoke next, about Leo’s work and activism in those first terrible years of the AIDS epidemic, Leo’s sense of humour, how the door of his flat in the Cross was always left open in case any of the working girls or boys needed a safe house to escape to.

  Margaret Cannon got up after Tom and read Leo’s favourite poem, ‘To Posterity’ by Bertolt Brecht.

  Then it was Saverio’s turn to speak. He scanned the crowd. Mel was up the back of the room in a black dress, a chunky silver crucifix around her neck, holding hands with an Islander woman who wore black jeans and a black T-shirt.

  His eyes came to rest on Anna. He spoke to her. To her and to Julian. He began by telling them that Leo’s real name was Luigi, how Leo had hated that name because it was yelled at him with such derision and spite by the Aussie boys.

  ‘Once he started university, Luigi became Leo. You’re his family, you were the ones he learned with and experimented with and found so much joy with. You looked after him, you protected him, you understood him. Thank you for that.’

  The room had fallen quiet except for the screams of the birds, the steady hum of the distant ocean.

  ‘I’m not going to speak about Leo but about Luigi, my younger brother. When he first started school Dad made sure I understood that I had to walk with him every day, that I was not to let him out of my sight. “He’s your brother,” he said to me, “you will always have to look after him. Do you understand?” But from the second day of school Luigi was determined to walk on his own. I guess he was an anarchist from birth.’

  There was a ripple of laughter.

  ‘I knew I couldn’t change his mind. I knew it even back then. So I said, yes, you can walk ahead of me. That’s my favourite memory of him, him walking ahead, a hundred metres in the distance, but every now and then turning back to look at me to make sure I was still there. That was what he was like: always wanting to be independent, free, not reliant on anyone. But I have to believe that from time to time he was still turning back, searching for me.’ At this Saverio’s voice cracked. ‘I have to believe he never forgot me.’

  The applause that followed him back to his seat was warm and generous. Anna’s claps were the last to die out. Saverio looked over at Julian, who was walking onto the dais. Thank you, the younger man mouthed. It was Julian who spoke at the end, and he spoke simply about love. There were no hymns, there was no religion, no prayers. The service finished with Lou Reed’s voice singing ‘Perfect Day’.

  •

  Rachel was waiting for him at the airport and as she folded him into her arms he submitted to the sweet calmness of their life together.

  At home, as he unpacked, she sat on their bed, took Leo’s painting of their kids and scrutinised it closely. ‘I always liked this painting.’

  She took it and walked out of their bedroom.

  He followed her into the lounge room where she held up the canvas against a stretch of blank wall above the stereo.

  ‘Here,’ she said. ‘I think it will be perfect here.’

  Sticks, Stones

  MARIANNE HAD WORKED ALL WEEKEND AT a trade fair in town. She’d risen just after dawn on Saturday morning, and detoured to collect Darren and Aliyah on the way so they could help her set up the stall at the exhibition hall and make sure that their brand-new cyan and white T-shirts with the dark blue company logo had been delivered and were available to give out to any potential clients. As usual Darren had left the women to set up and staff the stand and had spent both days ‘networking’, slipping out for beers with Arnie from Northern Territory Travel, Marty from Travelworld, and whoever else he could find to ensure he spent as little time as possible actually working. It had been exhausting but Marianne enjoyed the fair, chatting with colleagues, catching up on gossip, making contacts. Her effusiveness, her straight-talking honesty, had as always made her popular. Unlike Darren, she never pretended to be able to offer more than was possible. Aliyah found it hard to step out from behind the table; her attempts to overcome her timidity made her voice sound shrill and unconfident. On the Sunday, Siobhan, the head of sales and their immediate manager, had come to see them. Darren had butted in immediately to tell her about the deals he had nearly struck, the contracts just about to be signed. Siobhan had smiled politely and told the three of them they could take the Monday off. Then she had whispered to Marianne, ‘You can take off the Tuesday as well; just keep your phone on, okay?’

  Marianne had smiled to herself. Siobhan could tell a bullshitter.

  •

  Now it was Tuesday afternoon and Marianne experienced a frisson of guilt over how much she had enjoyed her time off. All Monday she had worked in the
garden, pruning the apricot tree, weeding, spreading compost on the vegetable patch to prepare the soil for its slow-brewing hibernation and regeneration. She had put on and hung out two loads of washing, and on Tuesday morning had woken up just before six to take a long walk down to Darebin Creek along the path that ran by the back of the high school, and finished off with a coffee at Carmen’s. She was back in time to wake Jack for school and to make another coffee for herself and Rick before he headed off to work.

  He had looked at her with a bemused grin when she brought in his work shirts off the line and piled them on the redwood dining table. ‘You going to iron my shirts?’

  ‘Mm-hm.’

  He pulled her close to him and kissed her. ‘But it isn’t my b-b-b-b-b-birthday.’

  She flicked her finger at the snub of his nose, made a face. ‘Just this once, boyo.’ She stretched, arched her back. ‘But I am enjoying being a lady of leisure. I think I might quit my job.’ The quick flush of panic that crossed his face made her collapse into laughter.

  He began laughing as well and slid up behind her, placing his large long-fingered hands across her shoulder, his left hand slipping underneath her gardening shirt, under her bra strap, his thumb lightly brushing her nipple. ‘Maybe I should take the day off as well.’

  ‘Mmm.’ Please don’t, she thought, I want another day just to myself. They heard Jack slam the bathroom door and Rick jumped back and sat down again to finish his coffee.

  ‘Mum, I can’t find my laptop.’

  She winked at her husband and called out to the hallway, ‘It’s in the lounge where you left it last night.’

  ‘Thanks, Mum.’

  No, she thought wickedly to herself, thank you.

  •

  She liked working, appreciated her job and the freedom it gave her. Most days she was on the road, visiting clients, travel agencies and tourist bureaus; once a month she would fly to Adelaide to take agents on a tour of the South Australian wine districts or beaches. She hadn’t worked for five years while Jack and her daughter, Kalinda, were preschoolers; by the end she was bored and unhappy. It had been just before Jack started at primary school that she’d mutinously informed Rick she was not ever going to iron his shirts again. More than any other of the myriad household chores, it was the ironing she had focused on to distil her rage. Rick hadn’t put up a fight, an anticlimax that had annoyed her no end. It had been the worst period of their marriage—they had just taken out the mortgage on that first house in Watsonia, Kalinda had been diagnosed with dyslexia, and Jack, not adjusting to kindergarten, was still wetting the bed. Her life seemed a constant cycle of washing, cleaning, drying tears, intervening in squabbles, driving, driving, driving. She had come to hate the family car, the smell of it, the metallic trace of Kalinda’s vomit that they could never seem to wash out of the back seat, the stereo trapped forever on Classic Hits FM. There had been three months back then when she would wake up every night from a nightmare in which Australian Crawl’s ‘The Boys Light Up’ seemed to be playing endlessly on an infernal loop.