Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

The sky is raining down sharp slivers of light and I’m disappearing into the fire. Around me the earth is still shifting: animals and flora come in and out of view. It is almost as if an acid trip is coming on, but though my body is sinking into my mind, there is no bitter pharmaceutical aftertaste. I’m vanishing. Reptiles and insects are weaving around my legs and the night no longer seems cold. Up in the sky the familiar constellations have gone, replaced by ancient primeval clusters. A collection of stars forms the outline of a great lizard and in its centre one large star pulsates to the rhythm of my heart.

My fear has gone. In the distance a mountain is forming, a large purple dream at the edge of a pitch-black horizon. The mountain becomes the giant face of a black girl and as I look at her, earth starts to crumble down her face and she begins to age. I cannot tell how long this takes. I think that perhaps I’m dying. But if this is death it does not hurt and it does not touch my body.

The old woman of the mountain surrounds me and I can make out the hollows of her eyes. Her mouth opens and she sucks in the world. The ancient stars do a final dance, a mad symphony of colour, then they too disappear into her mouth. I shut my eyes and when I look up again the stars of the Milky Way are back in their place. I look around me, I look back up at the sky, I grab a fistful of dirt but all that I can sense are the physical shapes, sights and smells of the desert. The vision has gone.

I remain in the scrub, exhausted. The cold begins to eat into me again and I curl into a tight ball. I’m aware that I have just experienced a kind of magic, that I have finally been touched by the caress of gods, but I’m also sure that the magic sung tonight, all the colours and light, the fire and music, were not meant for me. My presence here is not needed. I sink into sleep, grateful for that accident of fate.

I will wake the next morning bathed in sand. I will spend most of the day thirsting for water and running a dry tongue across burnt lips. A truck will pick me up late in the afternoon and the driver will tell me stories of women and drugs and how the boongs control the economy. I will neither agree with him nor argue with him, but he will find security in the colour of my skin and proceed to off load hatred as if talking to a close friend. At Port Augusta I will get off and wander the streets seeking food. It will take me another two days to get to Sydney and when I arrive there I will avoid my old friends and acquaintances. I will not touch chemicals and instead I will slip quietly into a peaceful life in the inner western suburbs. I will gather a new circle of friends and I will learn how to play cards, and how to bet on the horses. I will feel safe and I will not question this safety. But occasionally, when a hot wind blows in from the west, I will remember that they are gathering guns in the outback.

AMANDA RETURNED FROM THE AIR FRANCE counter shaking her head. She took her book out of her backpack and sat on the plastic seat next to Daniela. ‘Sorry, honey, it’s going to be another thirty minutes before they even open the counter.’

Daniela slumped further in her seat. All over the lounge, distressed and anxious travellers were volleying between the one television monitor listing departures and the other showing an episode of CSI: New York dubbed into Arabic.

Daniela’s lip curled up sharply in frustration. ‘Damn, I’m bored,’ she announced loudly.

Amanda placed an arm around her lover’s shoulders but Daniela shrugged it off. ‘Not here,’ she warned.

Amanda mouthed an obscenity and opened her book, a detective novel she had picked up in an English-language bookshop in Cairo. The story was lurid, the writing soporific and the mystery self-evident, but she and Daniela had exhausted their supply of books and it was the only one she hadn’t read. It was an awful book but a rapid read, and in all likelihood with the plane delayed she would finish it before they boarded. She read two paragraphs and then slapped it shut. It was terrible. She saw that Daniela was rereading The Edible Woman .

Amanda peered over her spectacles at a young broad-faced Egyptian man in thick grey overalls leaning on his mop. He was staring intently at both of them. She frowned, but that only made his face break out in an inane grin. He stared even more intently. She was sure that his right hand was jiggling in the pocket of his overalls. For God’s sake. She was so weary of that, but this time she didn’t groan out loud, not wanting to alert Daniela to the man’s attentions. Daniela would be both offended and confused, her feminist ire conflicting with her cultural sensitivities. Amanda’s Arabic was limited to Salaam Alaikum, Merhaba, Shkrun, Bekam and La . When they reached Amman she was determined to find someone who would translate for her the phrase ‘I am old enough to be your mother’. She was probably much older than his mother.

The tender-aged mothers and the boyish fathers: she had noticed them from their first day in Istanbul. It had been the same throughout southern Turkey and Egypt. She was sure it would be no different in Jordan. She had expected it of the women; all the usual prejudiced crap, of course, that the Arabs kept their women barefoot and pregnant, as if Arabic culture was some ludicrous mirror of backwoods Georgia or outback Western Australia. Nevertheless, all that bigotry had to be there in her head too, because she had not been thrown by the young women who looked like girls holding their babies or chasing after their children. The youth of the fathers had been more shocking. She had been taken aback to see baby-faced Turkish youths carrying their sons through the markets; and a working man in a small town south of Izmir arriving home for lunch, his son and two daughters rushing around him, his oil-streaked uniform almost slipping off his slight shoulders. He had seemed so young. Back home, boys his age were still locked in their rooms playing video games and delaying the responsibilities of adulthood for as long as possible.

Wherever she and Daniela had travelled, she could not help thinking about Eric. She wished she had fallen pregnant younger. Eric’s adolescence was exhausting. She loved him, but he could be such a snappy, moody little shit. It seemed fantastical to imagine him coping with a job and three young children, but surely he was only a few years younger than the boy she’d seen on the outskirts of Izmir? She kept telling herself that being away from Eric for six weeks was not a bad thing; in fact, it was positive: good for him to be spending more time with his father and stepmother. But wherever they went she was constantly reminded of her son.

In the end she didn’t manage to finish the book. The plane lifted, they flew across a stretch of golden desert and then seemed to follow the coastline of the dazzling sea. Every few minutes it seemed Daniela was exclaiming, I think that’s Beirut, no, maybe that’s Tyre, oh I think that’s Tel Aviv, is that Tel Aviv? Oh my God, is that Jerusalem? No, I think that’s Haifa. Then all of a sudden, first in Arabic, then in French and finally in English, a steward was announcing their descent into Amman.

The proximity of the world in the northern hemisphere was startling, astonishing. They had just passed over three countries, a desert, two seas and the juncture of three continents in less time than it took her to drive across Melbourne to visit her mother. Amanda gripped tight to her armrests, preparing herself for the stomach-churning moment when the plane’s wheels unfolded and it prepared to touch the earth. She refused to cross herself, thought touching wood superstitious. Her ritual was to count to seven, over and over.