Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

‘Over east,’ I reply. Aware that the question demands more of me, I make up a destination. I say Sydney, though I am not yet sure of where this journey will end. Probably when the one hundred dollars in my pocket is spent.

‘Is this your first time across the Nullarbor?’

I nod.

‘I must have done this journey a few hundred times.’

I glance over at him. His skin, shockingly pale at the edges of his singlet, is coarse and dark where it has been exposed to the sun. In particular his face, which is still handsome but lined with the history of too much alcohol and too many cigarettes, is the colour of the desert earth. We pass the skeletons of abandoned vehicles on the side of the road. In time the scrub grows over the decaying bodies and forms shrubs in the shapes of Volkswagens and EJ Holdens. Nothing can withstand the hold of the desert. The truck driver, over a working life of breathing in this landscape, is also becoming part of it.

‘Don’t you ever get bored by it?’

He laughs loudly and points out to the plain. ‘You can’t get bored by this. I get real fucking bored by this road, by the asphalt and the bloody white lines. But you can’t get bored by this,’ and again he points across the scrub. ‘This land that looks like an atom bomb hit it is the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen.’

He lights a cigarette and offers me another one. I again accept gratefully.

‘Why Sydney?’ he asks. ‘I hate the place.’

‘To get away from Perth,’ I tell him.

•

Perth, all bland office buildings and vast suburban stretches, is a modern city at the edge of the world. It is an automated, clean city. The railway stations don’t have toilets in them, as though it wasn’t a city for human use, for the daily animal cycle of eating, drinking, shitting, pissing and sleeping. People there are proud of their trains. But the landscape makes a mockery of their attempts to control and master the environment. Even in the middle of the business district, in the dead centre of the city’s heart, the ancient sand seeps through every crack. With every strong gust of wind the sand rises and swirls and dusts the concrete and plastic with a faint orange tinge.

The sand is not the only ancient element which taunts and threatens the city. This white city lives in fear of the shadows cast by its black inhabitants.

They drink too much.

They are lazy.

They hate work.

They steal cars.

They are dirty.

They are animals.

Like the sand, the shadows remind the city that it too will decay.

•

It was a thin young man with beautiful dark eyes who taught me that the sand is one of the weapons the landscape uses to fight back against the arrogance of the city. The unfathomable sky is another. Dwarfed by the sky and breathing in sand, Perth feels like a make-believe city. I kept meeting people who told me how in a few years it would be one of Australia’s great cities. A few even suggested that one day it might be one of the world’s great cities. But when I got to Perth I had no time for claims of a grand future. I was not impressed by the swiftness of the electric trains and the efficiency of the state-of-the-art communications systems. Instead I loved hearing him talk about the soil eating away at this baby metropolis. By the time I’d arrived in Perth I had stopped believing in cities.

We met when he asked me if I would buy him a drink because the barman would not serve him. I started an argument with the barman and got both of us thrown out. We then wandered into another pub and I bought him cigarettes and drinks till my money ran out. He was genuinely surprised that I only had twenty dollars on me. We then went back to his house and fucked. I fell asleep on his mattress while he stayed up listening to music on a cheap ghetto-blaster, getting stoned on a bong.

In the morning he made me a disgusting coffee and smoked my last cigarette. When I snapped at him he offered me a drag. I watched him go to the wardrobe, search behind a pile of T-shirts and lift out a plastic mineral-water bottle. He sat by me on the mattress and covered the opening of the bottle with his mouth. After taking a few short sharp breaths he offered the bottle to me. I smelt strong chemical fumes and backed away.

‘I’m all out of dope,’ he said, shrugging his shoulders. ‘You can either sniff this or it’s nothing.’

Glue sniffing is harsh on the lungs. I coughed into the bottle and he started a melodic chain of laughter. I lay back on the pillow and tried to chart the rush from the solvent. I experienced nothing except the faint throb of a hangover. But when I tried to lift my head up again, to take in another snort from the bottle, he had to help me. Again, the laughter. I sniffed some more and felt the beginning of a rhythmic tattoo beating at the back of my head.

His room was bare except for the old wardrobe and the single mattress. A pile of dirty clothes lay in a heap against a wall, and a torn tie-dyed sheet was nailed across the window. Two pictures were Blu-tacked to the wall, a poster of an American rapper and a photo of a very old Indigenous woman.

‘Who’s she?’ I asked.

‘My nan. She’s up north.’ He got up and pulled a T-shirt over his slender frame. ‘I’ll be back soon. You want to wait for me?’

I was touched that he trusted me with the care of his tiny kingdom. I nodded and sank back into the mattress. He left me with a kiss, and placed the plastic bottle with its clear liquid contents by my side.

•

The truck driver begins to tell me about his life. I’m not really listening, more intent on being lulled into a trance by the landscape we are gliding through. I’m making a mental note of the number of carcasses we pass. Twelve roos. Eight wombats. A score of large birds. The trucks must be going exceedingly fast, for the bodies are torn apart, smashed by the velocity of the impact.

‘There’s gonna have to be a war soon in this country.’

I look up at him and he’s glancing over at me.

‘People are getting ready,’ he continues, ‘arming themselves. And who can blame them? The fucking government is in cahoots with the niggers, giving them all this land, paying them money so they can get drunk and piss it all away.’ He snorts angrily and accelerates. I offer neither resistance to nor approval of what he is saying. ‘Do you know those bastards get money to send their kids to school? And what do the parents do with all that money? Drink it or spend it on drugs. The pricks up in Canberra keep giving them our money, buying them houses and cars.’ He is animated now, anger and passion softening the hard surfaces of his skin, making him seem younger. ‘It’s our money that pays for all those gifts to the bloody blackfella while he sits on his lazy arse and sells his kids and wife for extra cash. They’re cunning bastards. No natural intelligence at all, just animal cunning.’ He spits out this last insult. ‘They know how to use the system. But the bastards are making use of my taxes to live the good life.’

His voice drops. ‘I hate them. Every last fucking one of them. I work my arse off to feed and clothe my family, drive these bloody trucks across the continent three, four times a month, and then have to pay most of it back to the government so it can waste it on these ugly bastards who won’t work, can’t make anything, have never been any good for anything.’ The hate in his voice is hot. It blows hard into my face. ‘I reckon we need to kill each and every one of them. The women and children too. I’m mad about kids, myself, I can’t wait to be a grandfather. But when I see one of those black babies and know what it’s going to grow up to be, I want to take it and smash it against a wall or on a rock. I want to see it die in front of me.’