Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

Dan catches me at it and hugs me spontaneously. ‘You Greeks are like the friggin’ Irish,’ he raves loudly. ‘Born bullshitters.’ He drops his arm awkwardly then whispers close to my ear, so Barney can’t hear: ‘Look after my son. He’s got too much of me and not enough of his mum in him.’

At night’s fall the guests leave. All except for Sheila, Stanley and Katerina. Sheila and I cook a light dinner for everyone, and we eat our green salad and nachos sitting around in a circle. I want to remember a certain moment: Barney lying across Sheila’s lap, his leg entwined in mine, Dan nodding along as Katerina plays African music on the stereo.

‘I never did get to Soweto.’ Dan taps his fingers to the music. Barney and I sit silent as the older people talk about the past, about what Surry Hills was like before the yuppies and the gays took over.

‘Don’t get me wrong, Stanley,’ Dan says quickly, but looking over at me, ‘there were always poofters around here, but they didn’t used to have money.’

Katerina talks about coming to Australia, about the dullness of the conservative fashions, and how odd it seemed that people did not go out at night. Sheila nods and then moves the conversation on to Whitlam. Labor in government. Feminism. Dan butts in and soon there is a heated argument. Sheila calls him an irresponsible bludger and he calls her an ideologue. They curse expertly at each other, but again there is the weird absence of bitterness or anger. Tonight I can imagine them having once been in love.

After a break in conversation filled only by the bass-enhanced tribal rhythms bouncing from the speakers, Barney asks Dan to name his desert island discs.

Dan leans forward. ‘How many can I choose?’

‘Five.’

‘Individual songs or albums?’

‘Either.’

There is a pause. ‘This is it, Danny Boy, the final list,’ says Stanley quietly.

‘ The White Album .’ This is said firmly. I find myself waiting eagerly for his next words.

‘“Good Year for the Roses”, the George Jones version.’

‘Of course,’ groans Sheila.

‘ Highway 61 Revisited .’

‘Sixties child,’ Barney teases.

‘And proud of it,’ responds Sheila.

‘Shh,’ interrupts Stanley. ‘Go on, Dan.’

‘“Runaround Sue”, “Sweet Jane”, the Street Hassle album, “God Bless the Child”, “I’ve Been Loving You Too Long”, “Solsbury Hill”.’ A whole chain of songs is rattled off. ‘And that one rap song I like; you used to have it, Barney.’ Dan starts chanting the rap.

‘“The Message”.’ Barney shakes his head. ‘Dad, you can only have five.’

‘Never was good with limits,’ chuckles Dan.

‘How about films?’ I interject. ‘What about your desert island films?’ All eyes are on me.

‘That’s easy. The Godfather, Medium Cool, Paths of Glory, The Wild Bunch and Rosemary’s Baby .’

Barney laughs. ‘Dad, that list hasn’t changed for over twenty years.’

Dan yawns and the room goes very quiet. Stanley stands up and from his jacket pulls out a small paper bundle. An elastic band is folded around a paper bag and its contents. He leaves the bundle on the table. Katerina rises as well. She is crying. So is Sheila. Barney is looking down at his feet but I can tell he is frightened. So am I. Dan walks Stanley and Katerina out to the front verandah. The night has exhausted him: they both support him. Sheila opens the package on the table. There is a syringe and a small plastic bag of powder. Sheila lights a candle and begins to prepare a solution of the powder. I am holding my breath.

‘You don’t have to do that.’ Dan stands in the doorway; Stanley has a thick arm around him. Dan looks tiny. He looks frightened as well. And — maybe because of the fear — he looks years younger.

Sheila smiles sadly. ‘I don’t mind. I can’t believe I can still remember how to do this.’ She looks up at Stanley.

‘Best friend.’ His voice cracks, falls into a sob.

Sheila has mixed the solution in a small glass bowl and she holds it over the candle a few moments. She pulls back the plunger and fills the syringe.

‘Are you sure this is what you want?’ Her tone is surprisingly matter-of-fact.

Dan nods his head.

She looks down at her son. ‘Are you ready, baby?’ she asks softly.

Barney gets to his feet. Dan hugs me, kisses me on the lips, and I watch the four of them walk down the corridor to Dan’s bedroom. I remain standing in the doorway. The bedroom door shuts. The night is humming wildly in my ears. Time is suspended.

When the door finally opens again, Barney rushes out sobbing and falls on me. I hold him tight. It is not as if he is crying exactly; rather, sorrow is pouring out of him, from every heaving breath, from every lacerating tear. The warm lounge room is suddenly freezing and the only heat comes from the place where our bodies touch. I strengthen my hold on him. I’m scared that if I let go, not only the room, not only this city, but the whole world will go cold forever.

I SAY, ‘HI, DAD, HOW ARE you doing?’

His eyes snap in my direction, there is a sudden jerk of his body as he recoils from my voice, then he slumps back in his chair. There’s nothing in his eyes: no light, no emotion, no recollection. ‘Who are you?’ he asks me, his voice listless.

I’m your son, Dad, I’m your fucking son .

But I don’t say that, of course. My sister has instructed me — as is her way, not once but over and over—‘You have to remind him of who you are, you have to give him a narrative that he can make sense of.’

‘I am David. I’m your son. I’m Sophie’s brother.’

The eyes looking up at me are still blank. I resent my sibling’s use of the word narrative ; I know she has gleaned it from the medicos and the social workers. I am irritated every time she uses the word, as if it contains a metallic core that whips against my ear as she says it. There’s no narrative for this old man: no illumination I can offer him, no characters he can identify with, no descriptions to orientate him, no plot strands for him to follow. I feel useless. Much worse, I think he is useless.

‘We’re living too long.’ Mick’s father is eighty-seven. He has a walking frame, has had his right knee reconstructed, his hips replaced. It takes him an age to walk to the coffee shop on High Street where he has his coffee with his Maco mates.

Every morning he wakes up and says, ‘Why didn’t the damn night take me? Who wants this useless body? We’re living too long.’

Mick’s mother, Adriana, mocks him, shouts, ‘Then why the bloody hell don’t you take your shotgun and blow your brains out?’ She is ten years younger than her husband, she is sprightly, still thin, will only ever eat half of the food on her plate, and rushes from the grocers to the supermarket to the butcher without having to stop for a rest or take a breath. At Sunday lunch she hovers over all of us, making sure we have enough food on our plates, and enough beer in our glasses.

Adriana is always on the go. ‘I walk,’ she admonishes her husband. ‘I have always walked; I walked ten miles to school and back every day as a child and I still walk every evening. If you walked,’ she yells at him in Macedonian, ‘if you had walked instead of coming home and sitting in front of the bloody television, you wouldn’t need a new hip, you wouldn’t need a new knee.’

I stand next to her, helping dry the dishes, listening to her abuse her husband.

Then she will lower her voice, and whisper to me in English, ‘But he’s right. We are living too long.’

My father, who doesn’t recognise me, who doesn’t know where I fit into the story, because he has no story left beyond his nursing-home bed and the slow shuffle to the canteen where he eats, is purposefully ignoring me. If he looks at me the fear returns. So instead he sits staring out of the window to the stretch of even mown lawn beyond. The grass is such a vivid green it seems plastic, as do the beds of hydrangeas. He is dressed in striped blue and white pyjamas, like the people in Auschwitz, I cruelly think, or Mauthausen or Bergen-Belsen. My father doesn’t recognise me and I think if only I had a shotgun I would put it on his lap. He’d take it and blow his brains out. That’s what he’d want to do, that’s how he’d want his narrative to end.