Christos Tsiolkas - Merciless Gods

‘You have to understand,’ Mark was saying, ‘that for the first time in my life I understood what it meant to be outside society.’ He looked directly at Hande and then at Vince. ‘I was a middle-class white kid who had an intellectual understanding of oppression but I had never felt the outrage of injustice. The man who died was just like me — a little older, sure, but a professional white middle-class guy who happened to be a faggot and because he was a faggot his death was permissible.’ Mark drew a breath and held back his tears.

‘If that bastard had apologised once, if just once he had said sorry for what he did, I think my anger would have dissipated. But he was in that courtroom day after day and behind him was the lover and the brother and the sister and the mother and the friends of the man he had killed and he didn’t look at them once. And they had to hear every sordid sexual story about their lover and their brother and their son and their friend. He was portrayed as a pervert, it was implied that he was a paedophile because he visited beats. Well, I visit beats .’

He spoke the words with molten fury; they rang through the apartment. I visit beats.

‘I remember the killer’s face when the verdict was read out, how he was beaming, how he looked vindicated. He hadn’t done anything wrong, and as far as our society was concerned, he was right. He had done nothing wrong.’

Mark, who rarely smoked, reached over for a cigarette from Hande’s pack. She lit it for him. Her eyes were wet; she stroked his hand before flicking the lighter. A wave of euphoria rushed through my body.

‘He had two children,’ Mark continued, the first intake of nicotine steadying his voice. ‘A girl of about seven and a boy about five. They were there only the first day of the trial, to make a fucking impression I guess, and they never showed up again. But I realised I knew them.’ Mark handed the cigarette to me. ‘I was working in that coffee shop in Victoria Street at the time and I realised I had seen them at the primary school down the road, that I had even seen their father pick them up.’

This was where it got hard. This was when his voice began to tremble.

‘I’d finish my shift at Time Out and I’d walk down the street to the school. I’d look through the bars of the playground and watch the kids play. I didn’t think about the girl; it was the boy I was looking for.’

I didn’t dare look away from Mark. He was searching the floor as he spoke, his voice muffled, not braving the faces of our friends.

‘I knew that if I did something to the boy, that would hurt their father the most. I just sensed it, he was the kind of guy who would feel it the most if something happened to his son. Sometimes they would walk home from school alone, they didn’t live far. I followed them once: I now knew where they lived. There was nothing that didn’t go through my mind, how I could hurt that little boy, make him suffer, destroy him, punish him for what had happened to the dead man. There was no terrible thought that didn’t cross my mind. I wanted to do it. I wanted to do the unimaginable to him.’

‘My God, my God, what did you do?’

Mark looked up, he smiled at Ingrid. A wide, humble, relieved smile. ‘Nothing.’ He squeezed my knee. ‘I did nothing. I walked away. I quit that job, I went back to study, I fell in love. I didn’t do anything.’ He let out a rush of breath, wiped the sweat from his brow and tipped his head onto my shoulder. ‘I came to understand how you could do the most terrible things because of hate.’

I smelt him, the sweat and the smoke and the fear in him. I could smell the perfume of relief. How I miss that smell, how I still long for it.

Hande crawled on her knees and collapsed into us, her arms around his and my shoulders. ‘You are such a good man,’ she whispered to my lover, holding his face and kissing him, her tears falling on both of us. ‘A good man doesn’t let hate dictate what he does. You are the best man I know.’

Vince’s voice called out, cold and clear and hard, ‘But if you had done something to that boy, bashed him, fucked him, killed him, I wouldn’t have blamed you.’

The words were too harsh. Even Mark recoiled.

Hande swung around, furious. ‘That’s because you are not a good man.’

It was exactly what we needed. She sounded so incensed, a mother defending her brood, that Mark burst into laughter. He hugged her, tickled her, until we were all on the floor together, giggling like children. Mark extricated himself from the melee, going to sit on the sofa. He put an arm around Vince. ‘He’s alright, is our Vince.’

I never loved him more, I was never so proud of him.

The laughter had not quite died out but Vince’s voice, assured and clear, sliced through it and we all fell quiet. ‘I’m not a good man,’ he agreed with Hande, unsmiling, looking at me, looking only at me. ‘It’s my turn.’

I believed I was the only one among our friends who understood Vince, even though the unspoken undercurrents of our friendship, his indulgence of my obsession, might have indicated to anyone with any insight that our relationship did not rest on an equal footing. I was a fool, but that I did know him well. As he started telling his story I was aware that though he would have appeared calm to everyone else, assuming the unconcern of the born raconteur, there was a certain relish in his performance that evening. It wasn’t just the drugs: Vince Varkos had the constitution of an ox, I never once saw him lose control on drugs. This evening, though, there was perspiration on his upper lip, a tremor to his voice. Vince was flushed with exhilaration; he couldn’t wait to tell us all his story.

‘Revenge is a dish best served cold,’ he began. ‘Isn’t that what they say?’ I found myself nodding, as always his best, most attentive audience. ‘This is a story,’ he continued, ‘of how I exacted my revenge years after the fact. I should warn you that I am not proud of what I am about to tell you.’

That was a lie. His gleeful tone betrayed him.

‘As Hande will attest, having also grown up in Westmeadows, our schools were full of migrant kids. There were poor Anglos, of course, but mostly we were Slav and Islander, Italians, a scattering of Greeks like myself, and lots and lots of Turks. The Turks dominated the schoolyard — wouldn’t you say that was true, Hande?’

‘Yes,’ she answered, ‘we were definitely the majority.’

‘I had no idea you went to the same school.’

Vince dismissed Serena with a wave of his hand. ‘We didn’t, but we were just down the road from one another. Broadmeadows, Westmeadows, Campbellfield, Fawkner, they were all close together. Wogs ruled. Unlike in your schools,’ he added.

I caught the shared grin between him and Hande and a spike of jealousy went through me.

‘Now you have to understand, in this environment the fact that my mother was a widow, and an attractive young widow, was already a sign of difference. That I was also an exceptional student, a reader with little time for the sporting obsessions of my fellow students — that simply accentuated those initial feelings of being an outsider. For my classmates I was a soft Greek pansy and my mother was a slut.’

‘Surely the other Greeks didn’t think that?’

Vince raised an eyebrow. ‘Hande, don’t be so fucking naïve, you’re from that world as well. My mother wore make-up, she took great care of her appearance and she refused to wear mourning black for more than forty days. The Greeks did not hide their envy and dislike for her. No, the Greeks were the ones who were most vile to her.’

‘Your poor mother.’

Vince smiled once more at Ingrid’s comment. ‘My poor mama, indeed. By the end of fifth grade I found myself being bullied by three boys, all in my class, all Turks, all stronger and bigger than me — Omet, Hussan and Serkan. The one I hated the most was Serkan. He was the ringleader and he was the cruelest. Their teasing of me was relentless. On my way to school, at school, on the walk back home. They would steal my lunch, stop the other boys from playing with me. I didn’t mind their hitting me, their spitting at me, what I detested most was their constant slurs against my mother.’ His voice was raised and contemptuous. ‘ Your mother’s a slut! A whore! You’re the son of a whore! ’