Merciless Gods

  ‘We should get another drink?’

  Amanda shook her head. ‘We’re off to the dining room for dinner.’

  ‘Oh, but why?’ said Frankie. ‘We’ve just met—how about one champagne to celebrate twenty-two years?’

  She didn’t want anything more to drink, she didn’t want to have to look at his stupid T-shirt that he had no right to wear, she didn’t want to spend another moment in their idiotic company. ‘No, we really must be off.’

  ‘How about you, Hassan? You’ll stay for a drink, won’t you?’

  Hassan nodded, not at Frankie but at Keira.

  Amanda was suddenly furious, the force of it hitting her like a wave. She turned to Hassan and said sharply, ‘I hope you understand that any further drinks you have you must pay for yourself.’

  The silence was dreadful. Frankie and Keira were looking down at their drinks; Daniela, who had been getting up to follow Amanda, froze in mid-motion. And Hassan. Hassan looked as if he had been struck. As he probably had, thought Amanda, the red flame rising from her chest, burning her throat, her neck, her cheeks. There was such dismay in the man’s deep-set eyes, but it only lasted an instant. He composed himself, a genial smile returned to his lips and he lifted his head, tapping the roof of his mouth with his tongue.

  ‘Of course, I would not have done otherwise.’

  Daniela took the man’s hand. Surprised, he looked down at where she was touching him, as if he could not quite believe it was true.

  The burden of Amanda’s mortification was unbearable, as if she could not breathe from the immensity of it. Insensibly, almost tripping over herself, she fled the verandah. She could hear Daniela’s heels hurriedly clicking along the tiles, following her; she heard the scrape of Hassan’s chair as he must have sat back down. The last thing she heard was Frankie saying, ‘It’s alright, Hassan, don’t worry, we’ve got plenty of money.’

  It wasn’t until she had crossed the lobby, past the long front desk, and was about to enter the dining room that Daniela finally caught up with her.

  ‘How dare you?’ she exploded.

  Amanda couldn’t answer. Daniela was waiting impatiently for some kind of response and she did not have one to give her. She didn’t know where she could begin, how to explain the shame she had experienced at the table, the jealousy she felt towards Keira. But worst of all was her shaming of that wonderful, gentle man who had won her heart that day; by his gravity and subsequent equilibrium, by his unforced instinctual civility. These were the traits she so wished she could find in Eric; it was that kind of man she wanted her son to be.

  That wasn’t all, though. How could she explain that Hassan’s gentleness had exhausted her? As had Daniela’s constant anxiety to respect cultural niceties, to not offend anyone, to always do the right thing. She did not only envy Keira her youth, but also her and Frankie’s exuberant arrogance, their bolshiness, the fuck-you audacity she herself had once had as a militant student feminist. Amanda couldn’t bear her lover’s stony opprobrium a minute longer. She tried to find the words.

  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 an
d 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.

  Porn 1

  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.

  She coughed and the young man looked up. His lazy pose snapped to deference. ‘Can I help you?’

  She was suddenly flooded with shame. She shook her head, turned and quickly walked further into the store.

  She looked everywhere and saw nothing, she had to will colour and light and shadow into form. In one of the aisles, a middle-aged gentleman in a suit was flicking through magazines. He looked up at her, stiffened, and quickly grabbed his briefcase off the floor. He walked to the back wall, opened a blue door—sunlight, true light—and rushed out into the alley.

  She breathed in deeply, a moment of relief. She had almost laughed, so boyish had he been in his embarrassment.

  She scanned the shelves. Everywhere there seemed to be images of women proudly pulling at their nipples or cupping their breasts and smiling lasciviously at the camera. Most of them were young, of course, girls really, but she was surprised to see quite a few older women on the covers of the videos and DVDs.

  There seemed to be no faces of men. Instead there was a dizzying display of penises: short, long, thick, white, black, brown, erect, outlandishly enormous, even some puny and limp. At the age of fifty-nine, for the first time in her life, she finally understood that every man she knew and every man she had known, in fact every man in the world, had a unique and identifiable penis. And every one of them was hideous. She was overtaken by rage. Every one of them was ugly. She turned into the next aisle.

  The homosexual videos and DVDs filled one narrow panel. She tensed and walked towards the shelf. These penises had naked bodies attached to them. Those bodies had faces. Without thinking, she blindly stretched out her hand and grabbed a video from the shelf. She turned it around, silently read the names on it, and then placed it back. She took the next one, then the next, then the one next to that. The actors’ names were all silly, all-American: Randy and Calvin, Lance and Kirk. If not all-American they were exotically European: Sven, Hans, Lazlo or Misha. As she methodically scanned the videos and DVD slicks, she refused to engage with the images. Of course she was aware of the naked bodies twisted around each other, the stark close-ups of genitalia, the carnal directness of the images, but she did not think about them, did not allow herself any emotion. She felt neither curiosity nor disgust. She was seeking a name.

  Men would approach the shelf and then, spotting her, swiftly turn around and walk away. A portly bearded man reeking of tobacco and aftershave looked at her with undisguised spite, but he too did not dare come close. Let them wait. Let them bloody well wait before indulging themselves in filth.

  When she found what she’d been looking for, she froze. The image on the cover was of a man in uniform, a grey sheriff’s attire. A preposterous erection strained the actor’s tight pants. His name was there, in red type: Ricky Pallo. She held the video cover in her hand, noting the baton in the actor’s hand, the deep black void of the sunglasses that hid his eyes. She willed herself to turn over the cover, to look. But she couldn’t; her hands were suddenly clammy, her breath restricted. She thought impulsively of praying, but it seemed blasphemous to ask for God in this place.

  She took a breath. Foolish woman, she sharply reprimanded herself. She turned over the video cover.

  She caught her breath. He looked so very handsome. She was unaware of it but her tongue fiercely ground against her teeth, her lips were suddenly parched. She carried the cover back towards the entrance.

  The young man at the counter was clearly bemused by her choice but he said nothing. He searched under the counter and found the cassette. ‘Twenty dollars.’

  ‘What?’ She was staring at a poster for a magazine called Kink. A woman’s ecstatic face was drenched in a thick paste of semen.

  ‘That will be twenty dollars.’ The man’s tone was patient.

  ‘Of course.’ She fumbled with the catch of her purse, took out a fifty-dollar note and gave it to the youth. She knew her face was flaming red; she did not look at him again. He handed her the change and put the video in a brown paper bag. She allowed herself a smile at this small conceit. Like a greengrocer, she thought to herself; only greengrocers and, evidently, pornographers still use brown paper bags. She accepted the package and stuffed it deep into her bag, covering it with her scarf.

  ‘Goodbye.’

  She did not answer him. Making her exit she nearly collided with a man. He too was young, with slightly chubby cheeks on which the unshaven down could not quite muster to form a full beard. He stepped back, threw himself against the wall, and turned his face away from her. He cringed, his cheeks and neck flushing to bright pink.

  She walked quickly into the light, into the street, making rapid strides away from the store, looking at no one, experiencing a humiliation that was visceral. She was terrified that one of the shadows rushing past her in the city street would not belong to a stranger. She only stopped when she reached the corner of Russell and Lonsdale.

  That boy she had so nearly collided with—he was still a boy to her—who had been mortified by he
r presence, he had a sweet, charming face. She had wanted to hug him, stroke his hair, his cheek. She had so wanted to comfort him.

  •

  ‘A packet of Supa Mild cigarettes, thank you.’

  ‘What?’ The girl at the counter was surly. Customers waited impatiently behind her.

  ‘Supa Mild.’

  The girl stared back blankly. ‘Never heard of them.’

  ‘They finishing to make them long time ago. I smoke them too once. They very good cigarette.’

  She turned. The man behind her was beaming; he was her own age and his trim beard was speckled with silver.

  ‘Oh, I’m sorry.’ She was apologising to everyone. She scanned the tray of cigarettes and recognised a brand from her past. ‘Peter Stuyvesant, please.’

  •

  She had not had a cigarette in over fifteen years when she had asked for one in Los Angeles, in the tiny grim office at the back of the police station. She and her husband had flown across the Pacific, mostly in silence, to collect their son’s body and take it home.

  There had been two policemen. The older, white one had seemed a little bored, as if detailing the particulars of an overdose to distressed kin was a familiar, tedious routine for him. As it probably was. But the young black officer had been courteous and gentle. His broad face had worn a sad smile throughout. She had found herself talking to him, asking him questions, though it was often the other one who answered her, reading directly from his notes. They had found a combination of heroin and cocaine in their son’s body, he explained, as well as traces of alcohol, marijuana, Viagra and Zoloft. Had their son been suffering from depression? There had been an embarrassed silence. She was ashamed to admit that it had been years since they had seen Nick, that they had not spoken since that phone call in the middle of the night, when he had been slurring, making outrageous accusations, making no sense at all. Her husband had grabbed the phone from her and slammed it down so hard that the casing had cracked.