Merciless Gods

by Christos Tsiolkas

  •

  They asked me his name. I could give them that. They asked me his next of kin. That I could not answer. The smack was good, very good, and I wondered if he had touched heaven when he died.

  They asked me if I knew his friends, a relative, someone who could vouch for his past. I shook my head. The ambulance men gave me twin looks of disgust as they dismissed me and put him on a stretcher. Outside, the neighbours had gathered to bear witness to his death.

  ‘What happened?’ a young woman holding a baby asked me.

  ‘He OD’d.’

  She clicked her tongue in distaste and wandered back to her house.

  I thought I heard one of the ambulance men say that ‘picking up after these black bastards is a waste of time’. I might have been mistaken. But the thought was definitely in the air.

  •

  I fall in and out of sleep watching the endless straight road, half dreaming of Led Zeppelin. When I awake the road is still stretched out before me but now darkness has fallen on the plain. Melodic country and western is playing on the stereo. I stretch, yawn and reach for my pack of fags.

  The driver chuckles and turns to me. ‘Good sleep, mate?’

  I nod and light my cigarette. The air blowing in my window is now cold and uncomfortable and I reach into my backpack to pull out a jumper. The driver, wired on speed and lack of sleep, is impervious to the cold in his singlet and shorts.

  The shapes in the desert are now dark shadows suggesting bush phantoms, but I am aware that these are only fantasies drawn by my imagination and that what lies before me is the same flat earth that I have already spent an age watching. The only object which I can be sure of is the road. Lit by the high beams of the headlights, the straight narrow chasm across the continent appears to be leading us towards infinity.

  A mounting hunger is gnawing at my stomach. I turn around in my seat and look in the back of the cabin for a bag of chips I bought at the last stop. When I turn back I see a small dark shape move out of the shadow landscape and into the path of the truck. The driver shouts out a warning, I hold my breath and there is a loud bang which seems to explode right inside my head. In that moment the desert evaporates and only the shock of the collision is real. Then the moment passes and the wind howls back through my open window; there is only the cocoon of the black desert earth and sky, and Bonnie Raitt.

  The driver turns to me and gives a sheepish laugh. ‘Sorry, mate, I think I might’ve just hit some pissed coon.’

  •

  I wasn’t the only white person at his funeral, but I was the only one who looked like he didn’t belong there. I spent the whole day in a stoned haze, a wall of opiates protecting me from the harsh outside world. I may even have pretended that my exclusion was of my own choosing. I chain-smoked cigarettes on the porch and watched a procession of men carry in slabs of beer from the pub down the road. The women sat in groups drinking beer or cask wine, telling each other stories or holding each other’s hands. No one was rude to me but nor did anyone welcome me. I assumed I was an uncomfortable presence, a reminder of the way their son, nephew, brother, cousin or friend had lived and died.

  I was struck by the very Australianness of their mourning. Here there was no Mediterranean lamentation or hushed silences. No women in black forming a shrill fresco of despair. Instead everyone was getting pissed.

  An old woman sat in the backyard, surrounded by a circle of other women. She sat there not moving and it seemed she was looking past the timber fence, past the suburb and into another world altogether. I managed to find some courage and stepped off the porch. As I walked towards her the group surrounding her looked suspiciously at me.

  I ignored everyone else and walked straight up to the old woman. ‘I’m sorry.’ She didn’t seem to hear me. But I was determined to proceed with my confession. ‘I wish I could tell you something about him.’

  She did not avoid my eyes but I felt that she was looking through me, ignoring me with all her senses.

  ‘He told me about your place up north. I think he missed it very much.’ Was I making this up? He had never spoken those words to me, we had never been so intimate that he revealed emotional desire, but I do remember one conversation in which sex and drugs did not figure but instead he told me about swimming with crocodiles while an old woman chanted a song that kept the beasts tame.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I repeated lamely.

  This time she turned to me and started a low quiet laugh. Tears filled her eyes. She said something to me but I did not understand her. A young woman sitting beside her started to laugh with her and soon the circle of women were all laughing and crying together. I stood there, humiliated.

  The young woman tugged at my shirt sleeve and whispered to me, ‘It’s okay. She just called him a silly young poof. Maybe he wanted to come back home but he was too busy running around after you white guys in the city.’ She shook her head at my obvious dismay. ‘Hey, boy, don’t worry. We’re not upset at you. His spirit be happier now.’ She looked into my eyes and gave a soft whistle. ‘You look after yourself, boy.’ She offered me a beer.

  I refused the beer and instead pointed to the old woman. ‘Tell her I wanted to say I’m sorry.’

  The young woman whispered my apologies to the grandmother, who turned her head to me one last time and nodded. With that I was dismissed. The circle fell back into conversation and drinking.

  I turned away, walked back through the house and out onto an ugly suburban street. My anger finally conquered the chemicals in my blood and I spat a large glob of venom onto the dry pavement.

  And what about you, you bastards? I was thinking. What about you lot? You were family. You should have done something. And now you insult him. You were too busy drinking and getting out of it in your own way. You fucking good-for-nothing lazy black bastards.

  I’m ashamed even as I write these words. But it would be more shameful to pretend I did not think them.

  •

  The truck keeps thundering through the night and I am stunned and frozen. As the driver’s words sink in I mutter a pathetic, ‘Are you serious?’

  He laughs at my unease. ‘If I’ve put one of those black arse-holes out of their misery, I’m happy.’

  ‘Stop the fucking truck.’ I grab for my knapsack and clutch it to my chest. ‘I said stop the fucking truck.’

  He says nothing for a moment, he does not slow down. Then he points a finger out into the dark. ‘Look out there. It is real easy, dead easy, to lose someone in this place. You could lose a body here and no one would ever find it.’

  I am pierced by his menace and I am shivering with hate and fear. I cannot stand the stench of him, the poison of his amphetamine sweat.

  The truck slows down with a loud scream. I open my door and prepare to lower myself down. As I am about to jump, he slams a fist into the back of my head. I sprawl onto the hard road and I let go of my pack. He revs the truck and I am scared he will run me over. Though my body and face are hurting I roll off the road and he roars away, the lights of the truck carving up the thick black night.

  The first thing I do is fumble for my pack in the pitch dark. After a few minutes of fruitless searching I sit exhausted on the ground, massaging my aching jaw. I look up to the sky. The astonishing celestial dance pacifies me and I begin to grow accustomed to the dark. I watch the stars, let myself breathe, then attempt another search. I find the pack close to where I fell. My relief is quashed when I remember the reason I am here alone in the middle of an empty world. Shivering from the cold and the thought that somewhere close is a dead human body, I make my way back down the road. The asphalt shimmers in the night light and I have little difficulty keeping along it. But I have no concept of how much distance we had travelled between the accident and my undignified fall from the truck. As I walk along I keep looking up to the sky, asking the stars for warmth and light.

  There are sounds out here. Alien sounds. Of course there is the wind but underneath its whistle there seems to b
e a soft pounding booming coming from the very depths of the earth I’m walking on. Time too has no concrete shape in this terrain and I have no idea how long I have been walking. The black night is now forming faces and bodies which change shape with every breath I take, as if they are breathing along with me.

  Somewhere in the distance I hear a rustle and I am scared. The cold night air digs through the wool of my jumper, runs up and down my legs and reaches far into the core of me. The shapes are now forming lizards and snakes writhing in front of me. The road itself seems to pulsate, as if keeping a beat to the disconcerting pounding of the earth. I’m beginning to feel foolish and almost regret leaving the truck. But then I remember the driver’s malevolent laugh and I keep walking.

  I first smell the body. The scent is very much animal. Nervously I kneel to touch it. It does not move. I run my hand along a thick hide which still feels warm. Excited and relieved I trace the curves of its body and feel thick liquid. The blood has not dried yet. ‘It was a roo,’ I scream into the night, ‘it was only a fucking roo.’

  I find my cigarettes squashed in my shirt pocket and put a battered one in my mouth. I smell the blood on my hand. Appalled, I spit out the cigarette and wipe my hand in the scrub. I light myself another cigarette and lie back in the dirt.

  The sky is raining down sharp slivers of light and I’m disappearing into the fire. Around me the earth is still shifting: animals and flora come in and out of view. It is almost as if an acid trip is coming on, but though my body is sinking into my mind, there is no bitter pharmaceutical aftertaste. I’m vanishing. Reptiles and insects are weaving around my legs and the night no longer seems cold. Up in the sky the familiar constellations have gone, replaced by ancient primeval clusters. A collection of stars forms the outline of a great lizard and in its centre one large star pulsates to the rhythm of my heart.

  My fear has gone. In the distance a mountain is forming, a large purple dream at the edge of a pitch-black horizon. The mountain becomes the giant face of a black girl and as I look at her, earth starts to crumble down her face and she begins to age. I cannot tell how long this takes. I think that perhaps I’m dying. But if this is death it does not hurt and it does not touch my body.

  The old woman of the mountain surrounds me and I can make out the hollows of her eyes. Her mouth opens and she sucks in the world. The ancient stars do a final dance, a mad symphony of colour, then they too disappear into her mouth. I shut my eyes and when I look up again the stars of the Milky Way are back in their place. I look around me, I look back up at the sky, I grab a fistful of dirt but all that I can sense are the physical shapes, sights and smells of the desert. The vision has gone.

  I remain in the scrub, exhausted. The cold begins to eat into me again and I curl into a tight ball. I’m aware that I have just experienced a kind of magic, that I have finally been touched by the caress of gods, but I’m also sure that the magic sung tonight, all the colours and light, the fire and music, were not meant for me. My presence here is not needed. I sink into sleep, grateful for that accident of fate.

  I will wake the next morning bathed in sand. I will spend most of the day thirsting for water and running a dry tongue across burnt lips. A truck will pick me up late in the afternoon and the driver will tell me stories of women and drugs and how the boongs control the economy. I will neither agree with him nor argue with him, but he will find security in the colour of my skin and proceed to off load hatred as if talking to a close friend. At Port Augusta I will get off and wander the streets seeking food. It will take me another two days to get to Sydney and when I arrive there I will avoid my old friends and acquaintances. I will not touch chemicals and instead I will slip quietly into a peaceful life in the inner western suburbs. I will gather a new circle of friends and I will learn how to play cards, and how to bet on the horses. I will feel safe and I will not question this safety. But occasionally, when a hot wind blows in from the west, I will remember that they are gathering guns in the outback.

  The T-shirt with a Fist on it

  for Malcolm Hay

  AMANDA RETURNED FROM THE AIR FRANCE counter shaking her head. She took her book out of her backpack and sat on the plastic seat next to Daniela. ‘Sorry, honey, it’s going to be another thirty minutes before they even open the counter.’

  Daniela slumped further in her seat. All over the lounge, distressed and anxious travellers were volleying between the one television monitor listing departures and the other showing an episode of CSI: New York dubbed into Arabic.

  Daniela’s lip curled up sharply in frustration. ‘Damn, I’m bored,’ she announced loudly.

  Amanda placed an arm around her lover’s shoulders but Daniela shrugged it off. ‘Not here,’ she warned.

  Amanda mouthed an obscenity and opened her book, a detective novel she had picked up in an English-language bookshop in Cairo. The story was lurid, the writing soporific and the mystery self-evident, but she and Daniela had exhausted their supply of books and it was the only one she hadn’t read. It was an awful book but a rapid read, and in all likelihood with the plane delayed she would finish it before they boarded. She read two paragraphs and then slapped it shut. It was terrible. She saw that Daniela was rereading The Edible Woman.

  Amanda peered over her spectacles at a young broad-faced Egyptian man in thick grey overalls leaning on his mop. He was staring intently at both of them. She frowned, but that only made his face break out in an inane grin. He stared even more intently. She was sure that his right hand was jiggling in the pocket of his overalls. For God’s sake. She was so weary of that, but this time she didn’t groan out loud, not wanting to alert Daniela to the man’s attentions. Daniela would be both offended and confused, her feminist ire conflicting with her cultural sensitivities. Amanda’s Arabic was limited to Salaam Alaikum, Merhaba, Shkrun, Bekam and La. When they reached Amman she was determined to find someone who would translate for her the phrase ‘I am old enough to be your mother’. She was probably much older than his mother.

  The tender-aged mothers and the boyish fathers: she had noticed them from their first day in Istanbul. It had been the same throughout southern Turkey and Egypt. She was sure it would be no different in Jordan. She had expected it of the women; all the usual prejudiced crap, of course, that the Arabs kept their women barefoot and pregnant, as if Arabic culture was some ludicrous mirror of backwoods Georgia or outback Western Australia. Nevertheless, all that bigotry had to be there in her head too, because she had not been thrown by the young women who looked like girls holding their babies or chasing after their children. The youth of the fathers had been more shocking. She had been taken aback to see baby-faced Turkish youths carrying their sons through the markets; and a working man in a small town south of Izmir arriving home for lunch, his son and two daughters rushing around him, his oil-streaked uniform almost slipping off his slight shoulders. He had seemed so young. Back home, boys his age were still locked in their rooms playing video games and delaying the responsibilities of adulthood for as long as possible.

  Wherever she and Daniela had travelled, she could not help thinking about Eric. She wished she had fallen pregnant younger. Eric’s adolescence was exhausting. She loved him, but he could be such a snappy, moody little shit. It seemed fantastical to imagine him coping with a job and three young children, but surely he was only a few years younger than the boy she’d seen on the outskirts of Izmir? She kept telling herself that being away from Eric for six weeks was not a bad thing; in fact, it was positive: good for him to be spending more time with his father and stepmother. But wherever they went she was constantly reminded of her son.

  In the end she didn’t manage to finish the book. The plane lifted, they flew across a stretch of golden desert and then seemed to follow the coastline of the dazzling sea. Every few minutes it seemed Daniela was exclaiming, I think that’s Beirut, no, maybe that’s Tyre, oh I think that’s Tel Aviv, is that Tel Aviv? Oh my God, is that Jerusalem? No, I think that’s Haifa. Then all of a sudden,
first in Arabic, then in French and finally in English, a steward was announcing their descent into Amman.

  The proximity of the world in the northern hemisphere was startling, astonishing. They had just passed over three countries, a desert, two seas and the juncture of three continents in less time than it took her to drive across Melbourne to visit her mother. Amanda gripped tight to her armrests, preparing herself for the stomach-churning moment when the plane’s wheels unfolded and it prepared to touch the earth. She refused to cross herself, thought touching wood superstitious. Her ritual was to count to seven, over and over.

  They had landed. They were safe.

  They had booked three nights in Amman, and that was one night too long. After the ferocious scale of Istanbul and then Cairo, the compactness of the Jordanian capital was pleasing. But after a visit to the Roman ruins, a half-day getting lost in the labyrinth of the ugly, congested downtown area, and another half-day wandering the national museum, there was nothing much left for them to do. It was not impossible to buy alcohol but the cafés and restaurants they found themselves in did not serve any, and the nightlife—at least that which was visible to tourists—was not the kind to attract two middle-aged women.

  It did not help that on the second day Daniela developed a stomach bug. Amanda thought she should stay in the room and rest, but Daniela would not hear of it. She was determined to see the ancient amphitheatre of Philadelphia.

  ‘Don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine,’ she said, but she wasn’t bloody fine. She followed Amanda around with a pained expression, putting on a stoical smile whenever her lover glanced back at her. It nearly drove Amanda mad. That smile oozed martyrdom.

  The stone steps of the amphitheatre were steep, and the desert sun was already broiling by mid-morning. Daniela looked sullen when Amanda announced that she wanted to climb to the top.

  ‘It looks slippery.’