Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

Anna took the beer and indicated a door with a handwritten sign taped to it: To the beer garden . ‘Am I allowed to smoke out there?’

I’m not your father , he almost snapped at her. Instead he opened the door for her and followed her out to the courtyard.

It was a stunning view. The gently sloping yard was immaculately mowed, with tall grey-limbed gum trees throwing shade over the tables and chairs set around the lawn. There were no fences and the ground disappeared abruptly to give way to the jutting tops of thick forest trees. Beyond the greenery and as far as the eye could see was the curve of the mighty Pacific Ocean.

The garden was empty except for a blonde woman sitting on a bench at the end of the lawn, looking out over the view. She did not turn at the sound of their voices.

‘So why did you and Leo stop talking to each other?’

He wished he had said nothing to her in the car. Tomorrow was the funeral and after that he would return to Melbourne. Then it would all be over.

He took a mouthful of beer. ‘It really doesn’t matter now.’

She was searching his face again, her eyes inquisitive and excited. She drew ravenously on her cigarette. ‘Your father was a fascist, wasn’t he?’

He banged the beer glass on the table. ‘That’s nonsense. Did Leo tell you that?’

Anna was not at all perturbed. ‘Yep. He said that your father supported Mussolini. .’

‘My father did not support Mussolini!’ Saverio drew breath and looked out at the view. She was a child; she wasn’t to blame. ‘My father hated the Blackshirts, thought them thugs and criminals, but he respected some of what Mussolini was able to achieve for Italy and for poor people in Italy. He was not alone in that. Millions of Italian peasants were in agreement.’

‘He did beat your mother, though, didn’t he?’

And how the fuck is that your business? Saverio looked out to the horizon again. The sky and sea offered no assistance. The setting sun still had heat in it and he wished he had remembered his sunglasses.

‘I think Leo might have exaggerated some of what occurred.’ It was impossible to explain further. Yes, their father had hit their mother, not very often, never bashed her; but yes, he had hit her, three, possibly four times that Saverio could recall, in front of him and Leo, smacks and slaps, always out of exasperation, driven almost unhinged by her whining, her hypochondria, her almost bovine passivity. How to explain any of this to a young woman coming into adulthood at the dawn of this digital century? How to explain the behaviour of men and women from the end of a feudal millennium?

‘If he wasn’t so bad, why did Leo hate him so much?’

That question was so childish; as if there were any easy answers to it. Because Leo was unforgiving. Because Leo was stubborn. Because Leo was selfish. Because Leo relied upon their mother’s support and when she died he felt betrayed. Because mothers always favoured the gay son. All of this was true, but to say any of it was to lead into an argument.

He wished she hadn’t come with him. He had wanted to forget Leo for a few hours, and her presence and her questions couldn’t help but remind him of the duties he faced the following day. He couldn’t do it; he just wasn’t up to it. He would say so to Julian, and Julian would understand. I can’t give a eulogy. I have nothing to say. I can’t say what I want to say. I can’t say that Leo was the kind of man who wouldn’t go and visit his dying father, the kind of man who didn’t have it in him to ask after his niece and nephew. The rage seemed to flood through him, threatened to drown him. The heat, the humidity, the thickness of it, like a blanket over the world, was exhausting.

‘Are you okay?’ She was concerned now, biting her bottom lip. Her incisors were long and crooked. He wanted her to shut her mouth; the exposed teeth made her look crude, ugly.

‘I have to go to the bathroom.’

It was blissful to be inside the cool anteroom of the toilets. They were part of the original hotel and the thick tiled walls were effective insulation against the heat. He was the only occupant of the men’s toilets and he unbuttoned his shirt to the navel and splashed water on his face, his neck, under his arms. He used his handkerchief to wipe himself dry.

He examined his face critically in the mirror. He hadn’t shaved that morning, and across his chin and along his upper lip there had already formed a soft shadow of alternating white and black stubby bristles. He wished he’d had time for a haircut. His smoky grey hair was shapeless, and the harsh fluorescent light in the toilets seemed to shine directly above where his hair was thinnest.

You idiot , he hissed to himself. You vain, stupid fuck, you want to impress that young girl.

The colourless scar above his left eyebrow was almost invisible. He should point that out to Anna. This is where my brother hit me with a hammer when I was ten. The reason for the argument was long forgotten. All he could remember was trying to squeeze the life out of Leo, his hands around his brother’s neck, and how Leo would not submit, how he kicked and struck and scratched like a wild animal. The argument had started in their bedroom. They had punched and kicked each other into the kitchen and rolled into the laundry where Saverio’s hands were around his brother’s throat and Leo’s hand had landed on a hammer and it was in raising this hammer to Saverio’s face that the battle had ended. He had blood in his mouth and had fallen across the laundry door and Leo was on top of him, the hammer raised, ready to strike another blow.

‘Don’t!’ Saverio had screamed. ‘Don’t!’

Leo had dropped the hammer. His lips were trembling. ‘You’re bleeding.’ He started to whimper.

‘It’s okay, I’m alright.’ His own anger, his brother’s anger, had disappeared in an instant.

When he got back to the table, the woman who had been at the end of the beer garden was sitting across from Anna. They were both smoking and looked up, smiling, as his shadow fell across them.

‘Saverio, this is Melanie.’

‘Call me Mel,’ the woman said. Her voice was shockingly nasal and broad, almost a take-off of a rural Australian accent. Her grip was tight, firm. She wore sunglasses with big round lenses so he couldn’t see her eyes but he guessed she was in her mid-forties. The skin around her mouth was wrinkled, her lips were thin, and her hair was dyed a chemical yellow. She wore a black T-shirt a size too small for her full breasts and pot belly, and black jeans too small for her expanding arse and thick thighs. She was obviously what Matty and Adelaide would derisively call a bogan, and what his parents, with equal derision, would have called an Australiana . She was a woman who could not take root anywhere else but in this enormous infinite landscape. Unabashed, unashamed.

‘He’s better-looking than Leo.’

‘Mel knew Leo,’ Anna rushed to explain.

‘Yeah, he was a good bloke, your brother.’ Mel stubbed out her cigarette. ‘I’m really sorry for your loss.’

It was the expected phrase, it came from a stranger, but she said it with unforced sincerity and they were the first words since he’d heard of Leo’s death that brought home the finality of the event. His brother was no more. From now on there would only be past.

‘Thank you.’

‘When I first left Brendan and began seeing Suzanne, Leo was the only one I could talk to about things.’ Mel was continuing a conversation she had begun with Anna while he was in the toilet. ‘Small towns are fucked. Everyone knows you, and Brendan’s really popular with everyone. He’s done work on most people’s pipes or plumbing so you can imagine what they thought of me when I took off with a woman.’ Mel was shaking her head. ‘I thought they were going to kill me. Kill both of us. Leo’s was always a safe house; he’d let us come and stay, sleep over. Talk to us about gay rights and shit. Suzanne loved him. She’s devastated he’s gone.’