Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

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 along 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?’

I’m disappointed in his response. ‘I just wanted to see what it was like.’

He laughs again. ‘Anything there?’

‘Nah. Just a few sheds falling apart and the old administration centre.’

‘They should burn the whole of it down. It was a hateful place.’ We are both silent on the phone. Twenty cents left: the screen is flashing a warning.

‘Wish Barney my best, will you? You know, with his old man and everything.’ The phone goes dead.

That night Barney and I have a huge meal over two bottles of red wine. We talk about Bonegilla, about our fathers, about work and how to get it. We make plans to see the world, and laugh about our favourite episodes of Gilligan’s Island and Number 96 . We stumble back to the hotel, Barney singing snatches of mean-spirited punk, as we are silently cruised by a cop car.

In our room I take off Barney’s clothes and he tells me he loves me over and over. I cradle him in my arms as he sits naked on the floor, his clammy skin tasting sour from alcohol. He is crying softly. There is nothing I can say or do to stop the tears.

We are going to Sydney to be with Barney’s father when he dies. I haven’t spent much time with Daniel but he is a remarkable man. For twenty years he has wandered the country, trying to find work as a musician, more often settling for any labouring work he could find. For a long time Barney and his mother followed the stray paths Dan chose to take them along, but eventually Sheila had had enough. Barney and his mother moved to Sydney and Dan continued to crisscross the desert to get to whatever was on the other side. His guitar remained faithful.