Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

There was a burst of laughter. Mel and the two men had crashed through the door into the beer garden, cigarettes in their mouths. Mel called out to them as they sat around a table but Saverio did not register the names of the men as they were introduced. He heard Mel whisper loudly to the man in the singlet, ‘That’s Leo’s brother.’

‘What did you say to him?’

Anna turned back to him, her face now unsmiling. ‘I hit him. I hit him so hard, I wanted to break him.’

‘What did he do?’

‘He kicked me out. He said he couldn’t abide violence, that he had grown up in a violent house and he would not have it in a house of his own. He kicked me out, and Row and I drove back to Sydney, both of us crying all the way.’ Anna shrugged her shoulders. ‘Man, it was a miracle we weren’t killed.’

Saverio stumbled out of his chair, across the lawn, bashed through the door, almost ran into the toilets. He wanted to put his fist through the mirror, kick down a cubicle door. If someone said the wrong word, offered the wrong look, made a move to stop him, he would gladly bring them down. He would gladly break their necks. But once again the toilets were empty. He breathed in deeply. Thankfully the toilets were empty.

•

‘Do you think she’ll be okay?’

He had been silent when he returned to the beer garden, had said nothing as they walked to the car, had been quiet for most of the drive. Anna, too, had said little.

As they’d been about to leave the pub, Mel had rushed after them, taken Anna’s arm and tried to lead her onto the dance floor.

‘I can’t, we have to go.’

‘Come on, just one dance, I love this song.’

The pub had begun to fill. The music was steak-and-three-veg Australian rock-and-roll, ‘Cheap Wine’ by Cold Chisel.

Anna pulled away from Mel. ‘I can’t dance to this.’

Mel, pouting, flung herself onto the dance floor. She danced on her own, claiming all of the small space, throwing herself into ugly jerks and spasms, singing along to the lyrics at the top of her lungs.

Uncertain, Anna looked around the pub, at the tables of men laughing at the dancing woman. ‘Maybe we should stay a little while longer?’

Saverio ignored her and walked outside. She could stay if she wanted. Mel was obviously going to be a messy drunk and he did not want the responsibility of looking after her. Anna would learn that life lesson soon enough. But Anna was running after him. Without a word they got into the car.

‘She won’t be okay. We should have stayed.’

He grunted again.

Anna crossed her arms. ‘Why are you so angry?’

Maybe he should drive the car off the road, end it all in screeching tyres, smoke and fire and melting metal.

‘Aren’t you going to say a thing?’

His reply was to switch on the radio.

She turned it off immediately. ‘If I have forgiven him, so can you.’

The petulant spoilt child. This broke his silence.

‘You have not forgiven him. How could you forgive him?’

‘I have. I really have.’ Her tone was urgent, pleading. But he didn’t believe her. His brother did not deserve forgiveness.

‘What you told me just confirms that he was indeed an animal.’

‘That’s not true.’ She was fumbling for the right words. ‘He was just, you know. . uncompromising. .’

‘For fuck’s sake, Anna, he was a cunt. I’m glad he’s dead.’

The words appeared to strike her with the force of a punch. Her body shrank into itself. When she spoke next, she was timid, barely audible. ‘Leo never lied. He loved sex. Sex was his politics. I always knew that about him.’

Politics? This wasn’t politics, this was delusion. Thank God it was over, thank God what they called politics — Leo, Dawn, Tom, the whole damn lot of them — thank God the world no longer listened to such rubbish. Thank God it was all going to die with them.

‘Nothing can excuse what he did to you.’

‘You’re so hard. Just like him, just like all of them. Why the fuck is your generation so hard?’

His foot slammed on the brake and the car swerved onto the side of the road. Anna jolted forward. She screamed.

He turned on her. ‘I am not like them. I’m not anything like them. Do you understand?’

She was terrified now. He was mortified. It didn’t matter that Leo was dead. He’d always do this to him, always lay bare a rage he had thought long buried. Alive or dead, the memories and scars wrought on him by Leo were there forever.

She had just seen it, that childish selfish annihilating hate. She cowered away from him.

‘I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to scare you.’

‘What the fuck did Leo do to you?’

He tried to explain. He told her about their father’s cancer, how it began in the stomach, then spread to the pancreas and reached the lungs, how the old man, a skeleton in his bed, the folds of flesh hanging off his bones, how he had succumbed to a delirium in which the past and the present were one. Where is my son? Saverio, where is your brother? Has he forgiven me?

He told her about his countless calls to Leo, pleading with him, begging him to come home one last time. He told her what Leo had said to him: ‘Good, the old bastard deserves to die in pain, he deserves to suffer.’

‘You can’t mean that, Leo.’

‘Don’t you get it, Sav? That man means nothing to me.’

He then told her how the fury had gripped him, how he had organised the plane ticket and flown to Coolangatta and hired the car and driven down the coast and up through the hills to force Leo to return. He told her how they had screamed at one another, slapped and punched one another, how he had gripped Leo’s hair and pulled him onto the porch, down the steps, dragged him through the gravel, Leo shrieking, biting him, scratching him, how it was only Julian who stilled their frenzy, Julian crying, howling at them to stop. Don’t, please, don’t. They were the words that had broken him.

He’d left Leo in the dirt and walked back to the car. ‘Fuck off!’ he’d roared, as he’d walked away, and Leo had screamed back, ‘You’re just like him!’ And to this day, he explained to Anna, he did not know if they had been Leo’s last words to him or his last words to Leo.

By the time he’d finished speaking, Anna was sobbing. Saverio, his eyes dry, his hands steady, eased the car back onto the road and drove them back to the house.

It was dusk when they arrived. The party was still in full swing on the verandah.

‘Have you got my bloody whisky?’ Dawn called out to them.

‘We forgot,’ Anna yelled back. She was looking at her face in the rear-view mirror. She took a compact from her purse and applied powder to her face. ‘How do I look?’

Like a child, he wanted to answer, you look like a child. ‘You look fine.’

He didn’t acknowledge anyone on his way to the bedroom. He closed the door behind him, shutting out the laughter and jokes and talk.

On the bed lay a small square canvas. It was a painting of his own children when they were toddlers on the beach. Matty was naked, plonked down in the sand, Adelaide standing next to her brother in pink undies. The colours were intense, garish blues and greens, flaming reds and yellows. His children’s faces were elongated, distorted, but recognisable nevertheless. Adelaide looked bored, impatient. Matty’s dough-like baby face stared blankly out at him.

Leo had painted them the first year that he and Julian had moved up to the coast. Saverio, Rachel and the kids had spent a week with them over the summer holidays, a week in which Leo had cooked for them every night and entertained Rachel with his wild stories, the gossip and slander from the past, extravagant narratives of sexual escapades and orgies. During the day, Leo and Julian would take the kids swimming or into town while Rachel and Saverio took long walks in the bushland, found near-empty coves to swim in, read books, had sex and did crosswords.