Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

‘Stop it!’ It felt good to scream at them. She wished she could stop the car and order them out into the traffic on St Georges Road, force them to walk all the way to the game. She felt overwhelmed by the stench of them, the size of them, their vanity and arrogance. Billy was eyeing himself in her rear-view mirror. She glanced over at her son. He had his arms crossed and his neck and face were flushed. She had embarrassed him in front of his friends. Good. He should be ashamed. No one said a word all the way to the oval at Pascoe Vale.

•

All three boys played well that afternoon and their team won 3–1. At one point Jack took the ball all the way up the field, kicked it across to Billy, who then flicked it expertly with his left foot back across to Jack, who kicked it long and smooth into the corner of the goal. The boys wrapped themselves around her son, their screams filled the air. Jack emerged from the scrum with his hands held aloft, his eyes searching the stand for her. She looked down at her feet, pretending to studiously observe a small streak of mud on her heel. She would not catch his eye. She had wanted him to miss that goal, had wanted him to be disappointed, to feel nothing but shame.

She continued her silence on the drive home, dropping off Billy first and then Stavros. Both boys thanked her but neither apologised for teasing Amelia. Her goodbyes were short, gruff. She had not congratulated them on the game.

Jack combated her silence with his own, his eyes fixed on the world rushing past the window. As soon as she had driven up their drive, Jack was out of the car, slamming the door behind him.

She caught the word he muttered as he heaved himself out of his seat.

Bitch. He had called her a bitch. Another word not supposed to hurt.

You called her a mong. A mong? What kind of animal are you?

•

Rick was home and cooking a stir-fry. She kissed him curtly on the cheek, annoyed that he had taken the ritual of preparing the meal away from her. She’d been looking forward to the routine of chopping the vegetables, grinding the spices and chillies. Jack was already in the shower.

Rick turned to her and gestured with his chin towards the bathroom. ‘What’s wrong with him?’

‘I heard him call Amelia Carlosi a terrible name. I’m not speaking to him till he apologises.’

Rick started to laugh and then, wary of the look in her eyes, stopped mid-chuckle. He turned back to tossing the beef and vegetables. ‘You two are exactly the same.’

I am nothing like him. Nothing.

‘He’ll calm down, you’ll calm down, then he’ll apologise.’ Rick lifted the wok off the flame. ‘He’s a good kid, he wouldn’t have meant anything by it.’

‘I can’t believe you’re defending him.’

‘Can you check the rice cooker?’

Check it your fucking self. He looked over his shoulder at her, sighed, put down the wok and moved over to the cooker. He turned around with a wounded smile. ‘It’s ready.’

She knew it was childish, pathetic really, but she couldn’t help it. She kicked off her shoes into a corner. ‘I’m not hungry,’ she growled as she walked out of the kitchen.

•

She tried reading a book but couldn’t concentrate. Amelia’s blurred babyish features, the old woman’s eyes in the young girl’s face, kept appearing in and out of the words, flooding the spaces between paragraphs and sentences. She turned on the television instead. Hunger scraped at her insides but she couldn’t bring herself to leave the bedroom. In a while there was a knock. Jack walked in with a bowl of food in one hand, a fork in the other. He laid them sheepishly on the bedside table and then sat awkwardly at the foot of the bed. An episode of Seinfeld was playing, a rerun they had both seen two or three times before. ‘I’m sorry,’ she heard him mutter. She knew exactly what she should do. She should reach out to him, rub his shoulder. She should. But she couldn’t. She picked up her bowl and started eating, her eyes fixed on the screen. He sat there till the ad break, then left the room.

•

Marianne woke just after four, the bedroom in darkness, Rick snoring softly beside her. She couldn’t recall a dream, there was dryness in her throat. She carefully slid out of bed. Rick turned over, called out for her, and she whispered to him to go back to sleep. She pulled on a T-shirt and walked out into the kitchen. Let it go, she kept whispering to herself, let it go. But she couldn’t. The dirty word kept repeating itself in her head. Mong. Mong. Mong. Wog. Maco. Nigger, slope, bitch and cunt and slut and fag and poofter and dyke. She did not trust their ease with words that hurt so much. She refused to believe that they had been exorcised of their venom and their cruelty. She squinted, tried to make out the hands of the clock. It was four-twenty. She switched on the light and put on the coffee.

•

She got to the gym just as the morning staff were switching on the computers. She spent forty minutes on the treadmill, running on an incline at a tremendous speed. She did fifteen minutes of weights, swam twenty-five laps. Exhausted, she drove home and showered. She woke Rick and called out to Jack to get up. She dressed for work, brewed another coffee and, while Rick was dressing and Jack was showering, she went into her son’s room and looked around. The photos of Beyoncé and Gwen Stefani, of Harry Kewell and Ronaldo, tacked on the walls, the poster from True Blood , the shelf of soccer and swimming trophies, his books on a pile by his bed, his laptop on the desk, his clothes strewn across the floor. She quickly snatched up his soccer shirt, his socks, his track pants, lifted the lid off the cane basket, tossed the clothes inside. But not before she noticed the handkerchief rolled into a ball at the bottom of the basket. She jumped when Jack entered the room, a towel around his waist. The hairs around his belly button tracking down beneath the towel were wiry, thick and black. There was a sprout of thin curls around his nipples. When had they appeared?

Her son tightened the towel around himself. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I think it’s about time you did your own laundry.’

‘What are you talking about?’

‘I was not put on this earth to be your slave.’

‘No, but you are my mother.’

He thought he’d won, she could see a half-smile flicker across his face. She could smell the cologne he’d splashed on his face, under his arms, a cheap birthday present from Rick’s mum and dad. All-chemical imitation of spice. You’re so full of it, you think you’re God’s gift. It delighted her that the odour was so awful, that it revealed his ignorance, showed that he knew shit.

‘I’m not washing your clothes anymore.’

‘Oh, piss off.’

‘And that includes your handkerchiefs.’ Her eyes dared his. ‘I don’t want to touch them.’

That wiped the smile off his face; he dropped his gaze. For a moment she thought he might cry. And then he sneered and she flinched, as though he was about to strike her. ‘Get the fuck out of my room!’

She knew her son, she knew his fears, his shames, his strength. She had received a warning. She knew she had hurt him. She had hurt him more than if she had raised a hand to him. She was in a daze as she walked down the corridor. My God, she thought, a coldness settling in her, do I hate him?

•

At work she could forget. She joked with Aliyah and Siobhan, listened to Darren boasting about the woman from Jet Start Travel he had picked up at the pub on Sunday night, smiled at Aliyah making faces at her behind his back. It felt so good to laugh. She went to visit agencies in Elwood, Sandringham and Elsternwick. She had lunch on her own by the beach at Elwood, and took off her shoes and stockings and paddled in the freezing shallow waters of the bay. When Kalinda and Jack were babies, they had taken them down to this beach, stood with them as they fearfully entered the water, squealing at the cold, their eyes growing enormous with astonishment at the roll and pull of the waves around their little feet. Rick had never been a swimmer and it was she who had first taught them to swim. She’d been awed by their trust in her when they had first battled with the power of the sea — she had held them, released them, held them and released them, till they understood they could master the waves, the rolling of the sea currents, till they were able to laugh and relax and enjoy the water.