Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

Daniela surprised her by listening without interruption except for gentle urgings to continue when Amanda stumbled over words as she tried to shape sense and order out of the panic of thoughts in her head.

When she had finally exhausted herself through talking, and started to cry, Daniela, oblivious to the waiters, to the other guests, had taken her hand and held it, squeezing it tight.

Amanda took a sip of her wine, wiped her eyes and blew her nose. ‘I’m fine,’ she whispered. ‘I’m fine.’

‘My love,’ said Daniela, ‘you’re absolutely right. We are fools to think we can just walk into a different country and a different culture with some facts and figures taken from the opinion pieces in the Sunday papers and think we can fit in and remain unobserved.’ She let go of Amanda’s hand and signalled the waiter for another two glasses of wine. ‘At the very least, to even begin to be able to do that, we would need to know the language . Shukrun and Salaam Alaikum will only get you so far.’

She cupped her hands around her mouth and blew a secret kiss to Amanda. It made them both laugh. It had started years ago, when they were just getting together, their secret, something they would do at weddings and christenings, at family barbecues and family birthdays.

‘That’s better,’ said Daniela. ‘Now go and fix your make-up, it’s all smeared.’

In the toilets the attendant was a scarfed young woman. She watched as Amanda carefully reapplied her pink lipstick, as she carefully wiped the inky smudges from under her eyes. The girl’s curiosity was unabashedly forthright. The spark in her honey-coloured eyes reminded Amanda of Hassan’s implacable intensity.

She slipped her lipstick back in her bag and smiled at the girl. She wanted to say, Yes, my clothes look like a man should wear them but I also like lipstick. Yes, the reason I do not have a wedding ring is because I love women and they love me. Yes, I am fifty-five, the age of grandmothers, but my son is still only sixteen. And the girl might reply, I know all of that or have guessed most of that and still all I want to know is where you got that lipstick. But because she knew no Arabic, Amanda said nothing and instead just handed the young woman a large tip.

She asked for Hassan at the front desk, having to check the surname on the card given to her by Archie and Colm. She was directed to a room on the top floor.

As soon as she stepped out of the lift, she almost keeled over from the force of the heat. There was no air-conditioning on the sixth floor, not even overhead fans. The air was heavy, and she had to stay herself a moment. She took a deep breath; already a sheen of perspiration was glistening on her arms, her face and neck. Apart from the syrupy heat, the smell of cigarettes and chemical cleaning agents was overpowering. The corridor looked as though it had not been painted for generations; the walls were peeling, with enormous patches of damp and mildew. The thin acrylic carpet was threadbare. A maid’s trolley, laden with cleaning equipment and detergents, blocked her way and she had to hug the wall to pass it. She could hear the tinkle of music from somewhere; also shouts and male laughter. She found Hassan’s room and knocked.

There was the sound of scraping on floorboards, a questioning shout in Arabic, and the door opened a fraction. Hassan appeared, dressed in a singlet, his belt buckle loosened. On seeing her, his face registered disbelief and for a moment she thought he was going to close the door on her. He raised his arm, as if blocking her view, and she caught a whiff of his robust odour. He was drenched in sweat. She could see little behind him and did not want to look, but could tell that the room was tiny, and it had to be insufferably hot. So these were the shitboxes where the drivers slept, where the menials who catered to the wealthy tourists like herself in the air-conditioned lower floors came for rest. This thought strengthened her resolve.

‘Dear Hassan, I have come to apologise. What I said before was unacceptable and shameful. I do hope you can forgive me.’

There was a giggle from inside his room, girlish and quickly muffled. Hassan was looking straight at her and his eyes were moist, so dark that the pupils seemed to disappear within the blackness. She was shocked at the weariness they expressed, the fatigue and sorrow.

He’s ashamed, she realised. He has some woman in this room and he is ashamed. She would not judge him, she refused to judge him.

He lowered his arm and offered her his hand. She took it, he clutched hers tight — it was as if a life was passed on to her in that grip — and then he released her. ‘There is nothing to forgive. Thank you.’

He was a bear of a man, he was a husband and father, but to her he looked so young, she could still see the boy in him.

‘We’ll see you in the morning.’

He returned her smile and closed the door.

Only then, only then did she allow herself a tremor of disbelief. For when he had dropped his arm to shake her hand, she had seen behind him. A pair of bright red shorts lay crumpled on the floor.

She turned back to the corridor and there was a short, thin-necked young man, with two long scars on his left cheek, smoking a cigarette by the cleaning trolley. She had to slide past him and as she did she felt his body shift and press hard against hers.

While she waited for the lift, she berated herself for not having shoved the dirty little pervert back against the wall. She was twice his size and over twice his age. He hadn’t scared her at all.

She glanced back and he was staring at her, his hand was sliding up and down the furrows of his jeans pocket.

She burst out laughing. ‘You stupid, stupid boy,’ she called down the corridor, ‘I am probably older than your mother.’

His quizzical expression, the lift of his head, the click from his tongue hitting the roof of his mouth, all said that he hadn’t a clue what she had said. She was still laughing when the lift doors opened.

In their room Daniela was reading her Margaret Atwood, naked on the bed, the top sheet crumpled loosely around her feet as the overhead fan whirred noisily. Amanda stood in the doorway, taking in Daniela’s pudgy body: the full roundness of her breasts, the almost lavender smudge of her areola, her stubby nipples, the rolls of fat around her belly, the wide inviting girth of her hips that always reminded Amanda of the sensuous contours of the guitar.

Daniela lowered her reading glasses. ‘Did it go well?’

‘Yes.’ Amanda sat on the bed, and gently kissed her lover’s nipples, her belly, buried her face in the salt and pepper thistles of Daniela’s pubic hair. She inhaled her lover’s odour: the sourness of her sweat, the bitter hint of urine, and the delicious pungency of her cunt. Amanda breathed her in, and the world of men disappeared.

‘Come to bed,’ whispered Daniela, throwing aside her book. ‘Just come to bed.’

The next morning Hassan drove them to Petra. That evening, writing a postcard to Eric, she tried to distil her wonderment at the vastness of the site; the terror of a city of such scale and endeavour built on the most inhuman and unforgiving of ground; the melancholy of the ancient city succumbing to the relentlessness of time. She had watched a Bedouin shepherd walk his flock over the decaying marble floor of Aphrodite’s temple; she had brought rainwater to her lips from a Roman aqueduct, still functioning in the desert millennia after the empire that had built it had gone. She tried, but words could not take the measure of such splendour.

In the end, across the back of the postcard, she wrote: My Darling Son, it is indescribable .

THE HARSH FLUORESCENT LIGHTS WERE A shock. She had been expecting the store to be dark and dingy, everything in disguising shadow. However, the young man nonchalantly flicking through the newspaper at the counter was an unremarkable, commonplace youth, with a mop of ginger hair and a rash of acne beneath his bottom lip. He was not that different to the bored young men who served her at the supermarket. Except that he was smoking a cigarette in brazen defiance of the no-smoking sign at the entrance; that was the first sign that she was indeed entering an illicit world.