Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

That’s her name. I should tell you that. Her name is Zazie.

‘Did you like it?’

‘Dunno. Don’t think so. It was strange with no talking, no kissing.’

‘Did you want to kiss him?’

‘Nah, not really, but I still wish we had. I didn’t really want to kiss him but I wanted there to be kissing.’

The bell whistles the beginning of class and she jumps off the fence, tramples the cigarette. ‘Would you do it again?’

I shake my head no. ‘I like girls,’ I tell her.

We head for the lockers.

•

The name Zazie has no history, she tells me, none at all. Her mum made it up, plucked it out of the multicultural air. Zazie’s mother has a mix in her. Scottish, English, some French and maybe something Spanish, but she shed her European skin long ago. She had got pregnant at twenty-four, two years out of uni, one year into a research job on radio. She decided to keep the baby. The father was doing a PhD in agricultural science, measuring and counting the land. Neither wanted marriage. But Zazie’s mum wanted the baby. Every summer after New Year, Zazie would go up north to stay with her father, his wife, and their two children. I’d miss her like crazy. My suburb’s asphalt streets stank from the heat. There was nothing to do.

She would come back bush-brown. ‘Fuck, it was boring up there,’ she’d always say, and straight away she was back to watching videos, smoking cones. I always envied her those summer escapes. It was nowhere, a farmhouse amid a numbing puzzle of paddocks, but it wasn’t home, it wasn’t the suburbs. It wasn’t fucking Blackburn.

Blackburn used to be orchards. Shady fruit trees, apples and oranges. But I never knew the orchards — they got taken over by supermarkets. There was one magic spot left, a hillside that ran into a creek. I walked up and down along that creek, winter and summer, fleeing the wearisome suburban grind. I saw a snake once. It was thin and shone a brilliant black. I had jumped on a log and it slid away from underneath, flashing into the undergrowth. It was a tiny thing really; my fear was only momentary.

I told Zazie about it. She laughed. ‘You should see the whoppers I’ve seen in Queensland.’ Another reason to be envious.

In the library, flicking through film books, I came across an entry for a film called Zazie in the Metro . A French film by Louis Malle, the guy married to Candice Bergen. I showed it to Zazie. She got all excited. ‘Did you name me after that film?’ she asked her mother when she got home. Her mum had never heard of it. But Zazie was not convinced. She must have come across it at some stage. Zazie must have come from somewhere.

‘So you do have a history,’ I told her.

‘Yeah,’ she laughed. ‘I’m related to Murphy Brown.’

•

Our last summer at school I had sex with Kayla Robinson. I forgot the condoms and splashed all over her stomach. We lay close together afterwards, listening to each other breathing. The radio, whose sound had disappeared while we were fucking, came back slowly. I gently pushed her away from me, wanting to get up, and our skin had stuck together. Patterns were forming across her stomach, her breasts were wet. I kissed her and she tickled my dick.

‘It’s droopy — it looks tired,’ she giggled.

I didn’t say anything, I grabbed my T-shirt. The drying semen looked odd on her body, on her soft skin. I cleaned her up.

•

Kayla, Zazie and I were watching The Color Purple on video. I was a little stoned, a little bored and flicking through magazines.

‘They’ve changed it,’ Zazie complained. ‘The women were lovers for ages in the book.’

‘Hey, Zaz, you’re a lesbian, aren’t ya?’ asked Kayla. The question was straightforward, interested. There was nothing sly or malicious about it. But the room became dangerous.

‘Yes,’ said Zazie.

We didn’t look at each other. When the movie finished we went out to get smokes. Zazie was strolling the aisles of the 7-Eleven, shoplifting chocolates. The three of us were walking around the shop, hand in hand.

•

A girl at school got murdered. Her body was dumped on the train line. She was younger than me, two years below, but Kayla was good friends with her sister. Zazie was angry, not scared like Kayla, but furious. Cops came to talk to students, to teachers, news crews would follow us home.

‘I want to get out of here,’ Zazie started saying. ‘I’ve had it with this place.’

The murdered girl was Orthodox. Kayla and I went to the funeral. The church was weird, smelly but wonderful. I got high on the incense, on the colours and gold of the icons. The saints looked poor and tired, some of the holy pictures seemed weathered and damaged. The dead girl’s mother was hysterical. That was the part of the ceremony I hated the most; she was falling and twisting into cracked shapes, supported by her sons. She was howling. Beside me, Kayla was crying softly. I tried to cry, I squeezed my eyes tight, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sad.

•

Zazie moved. Her mother sold their place, got a flat in Brunswick. That changed everything. I was a regular house guest, crashing out on the sofa in the lounge room. I loved Brunswick, the small houses, the trams and the streets. It was noisy and the air there smelt like a city. I was looking for work, Zazie was studying. It was just one year really, one small year, but we had tremendous fun. There was always speed and there were always parties. Strange beds all the time. Kayla and I broke up, Derek moved to Sydney. It was just me and Zazie.

She has a photograph of me from that time, standing outside a Victoria Street grocery. I’m in a black T-shirt and my arms are crossed. The sign above me reads, HUNG PHAT! It’s Vietnamese and we don’t know what it means. But she thinks it’s funny. ‘Are you hung?’ she yells at me. We’re at Luna Park, off our heads, riding a roller-coaster. I scream back, ‘You’ll never know!’

We’ve never seen each other nude. I have imagined it.

The photograph of me rides her wallet. It’s the only photograph there.

•

Work changed me. Zazie said that about me and I guess she was right. I was working in the city, selling phones and faxes, the odds and ends of communications. I sleepwalked through it, putting money away each week, cutting down on going out. I was determined to travel and Zazie slipped out of my life. She was studying, meeting people, fucking women. I receded from her world. From time to time we’d ring. I’d leave messages on her machine and she’d leave messages with my mum. She got tattooed and nose-ringed. Work had me in a white shirt and a tie. She came in one day to take me to lunch. The guys I worked with stared hard at her.

She kissed me across the counter. ‘Can I take you away from here?’

‘Please do.’ I was in the middle of a sale, spinning bullshit about mobile phones to a nervous carpenter who was sniffing the air. It was Zazie he could smell. She smelt of sweat and incense, of dope and cigarettes. Herbal cigarettes. She walked through the store, caressing the hardware.

Lunch was three quick pots and a packet of Twisties at the Charles Dickens. She told me about a video she was making, asked me how my savings were going.

She pulled at my tie, poked fun at me. ‘You look so straight.’

‘I have to look straight.’

I promised to send her a postcard from America. She’d always been in love with the myth of New York. I was visiting America for her, she was making me do it. ‘New York, now that’s a real city,’ she said, ‘the only real city.’ She promised to write to me while I was away.

I returned tipsy to work, chewing on some PK, fingers yellow from the Twisties. I could no longer smell Zazie in the shop. Only the dry odour of plastic.