Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

She loved Elwood Beach. On achingly hot Melbourne summer days, the whole esplanade would be filled with families from across the world: Greeks and Italians with baskets of food; Muslim families, the women in their heavy dresses and their veils, hoisting their skirts above their knees like strange black birds at the water’s edge; Tongans and Vietnamese, Turks and alabaster-white families like her own caking on layers and layers of sunscreen to protect themselves from the unforgiving glare of the Australian sun. Her kids had played in the water, in between the wading Muslim women and the beautiful young gay men cruising each other as they tanned on the beach. Holding them, releasing them, wanting them to be free and good in this world. Mong, mong, mong. Wog, Maco, poofter, nigger, faggot.

She met up with Joyce from Tourism Tasmania for an afternoon coffee in Richmond and they gossiped about the weekend trade show. Joyce worked with a man as conceited and deluded as Darren was. He too had boasted about picking up some bright young travel agent at the drinks session at the end of the trade show. I mean, do they honestly think we believe them? Joyce giggled incredulously over her coffee. Don’t they ever look in the mirror? They talked about work, then the conversation moved on to their husbands and then their sons. Marianne said nothing to Joyce about the word that had made her so contemptuous of Jack or about how she had humiliated him that morning. She listened as Joyce rolled out her usual complaints about her own son, how lazy Ben was, how absent-minded and forgetful. But there was no harshness in the complaints, no bile. Her love tore the sting from her words.

Marianne returned to the office though there was no reason to. She didn’t want to go home. She deliberately left at the hour the traffic would be at its worst, drove twice around the block to finish listening to an interview on ABC radio with the minister for transport justifying the terrible performance of the state’s public transport system. Round and round the blocks of her suburb: past young men with their ties loosened, swinging their backpacks as they trudged up the hill from the railway station, groups of Indian students waiting at the bus stops, the drinkers and the smokers crowding the café tables on the footpath of High Street. The sun had set by the time she got home.

Rick had phoned earlier in the day to tell her that he was going to be late, and there was a message from Kalinda saying she was coming over for lunch on Sunday. Marianne slipped off her work blouse and skirt, stretched out on the bed. She thought she might sleep but the silence of the house was too intense, created its own din. She turned onto her side, rolled her hands across the fleshy padding of her belly, looked across to Rick’s bedside table, at his jug of water, the clock radio, the book on the history of the Ottoman Empire that he had been reading for months. What if he didn’t come home? What if there had been an accident? She gave herself over to the shameful release of imagining the funeral, the never-ever again of having to explain herself, the run of an empty house. She reached for the table next to his side of the bed, touched wood, mouthed Rick’s name and lightly sketched a cross on the naked skin above her breasts.

•

She sat up suddenly. She must have dozed off but now she was sharply awake. Jack had left no message on her phone, nor was there any word from him on the answering machine. There was no training tonight, no soccer, no swimming. The silence pressed on her, seemed to be slowly suffocating her. A slow nauseating wave of panic uncurled in her stomach, pushing upwards, tugging and clutching at her heart. She scrambled off the bed, put on a jumper and her pyjama bottoms and walked into Jack’s room. Its emptiness startled her. She wanted it to be full of him, his smell, his presence; she wanted to fill the house with him. She lifted the cane basket under her arm and walked, stumbled, to the laundry. She pulled the clothes out one by one and tossed them into the machine. His school shirts, his trousers, his T-shirts, his shorts, his singlets, his socks, his underwear, the crusted handkerchiefs. Come on, Jack, she pleaded, please come home. She was carrying the cane basket back to his room when the exterior light on the back verandah flicked on. She waited, holding her breath, listening for the sound of the sliding door.

Her son walked into the dark kitchen. ‘Mum?’

She could breathe. She inhaled. She could breathe him in. He switched on the light and the brightness hurt, making her close her eyes. No, it wasn’t the brightness. She opened her eyes. He had come up next to her, his shirt untucked, his schoolbag over his shoulder, looking down at her (how much taller could he grow, how much more handsome?), alarm in his eyes, concern.

He moved towards her. ‘Mum,’ he said softly, ‘are you alright?’

She shut her eyes again, kept them closed. She could hear the washing machine chugging through the cycle, she could hear his shallow anxious breaths, smell the day and the sweat and the boy of him. She couldn’t open her eyes. She didn’t dare look at him. Looking at him, how it hurt.

AFTER DRUGS THERE IS ONLY GOD. I don’t want to forget that it was drugs that taught me how to feel. Before drugs, I was immersed in a stultifying mediocrity where the cold, clammy hands of the modern world reached deep into my heart and psyche. There was no joy in school, family or the tense bravado of adolescent friendships. When I was a very young child, it’s possible I may have felt moments of great elation. I remember fragments of intense light: staring at the wings of a fly, tracing the path of a slug and watching the sun reflect off the slime. In those moments I may have experienced that phenomenal pleasure of intoxication which begins as a pinprick deep in the gut and then grows to flood the physical body. But these fragments are stray pieces from a jigsaw and I cannot imagine what whole they belong to. Was I a happy child? I have no idea. My first memory of being happy is as a teenager, smoking a joint with a cousin after school.

I am thinking about God, what it would look like, taste like, smell like. Outside the window of the truck the ochre ocean of the Nullarbor spreads out before me. The massive vehicle I’m travelling in is dwarfed by the grandeur of the prehistoric earth. Its deep guttural snorts, its thundering wheels are no competition for the explosive silence of the desert.

God is absent from this landscape. Or rather, God too is eclipsed by the rocks and the dirt, the scrub and sand. I began this journey across the desert to search for some intimation of spirit. Unable to perceive it in my usual urban environment, I am hoping to catch a glimpse of it out here in the naked wilderness. I cannot pretend to know what it may look like or what it may feel like but I am determined to experience it if it exists. If I fail to uncover divinity out here I will slink back to the city, tired and cynical, and I will pursue again the euphoria of chemical intoxication. It will be a pursuit of death, the day-to-day, minute-by-minute abandonment of self to dissembling and forgetfulness. Every step I have taken in my worship of the chemical I have been aware of the stripping away of myself. First the body, then the mind and finally the abandonment of soul. (I cannot offer an exact or universal definition of what I mean by the word ‘soul’ except to say that it is the part of me which resists being numbed, be it by drugs or money or inertia.) It is my soul, not my intellect or my pride, which has led me into the desert, searching for a divinity that does not eschew life.

The truck driver, overweight and ravaged by sun, offers me a Marlboro. I suck on it gratefully.

‘Where are you heading, mate?’ he asks me.