Merciless Gods

  I pull his head up by his hair to give it to him a third time.

  He is a caught fish, a dying fish, his mouth opening closing opening closing.

  I let go of his hair.

  He is seeing black and in the black a yellow light. He can’t get up, he is there around my legs, twisting like the damned adder he is. I let him squirm. I wrap Tzim’s cloth around my hand and I dip into the latrine, I grab his three fat shits.

  —I hears you have accident, Stiv.

  He knows what is awaiting for him. He is trying again to go to his feet but I smack him hard and he falls back on the latrine. I pull his mouth, he is a frightened dangerous serpent but I am now having the hunger of a god and I don’t care that he is bite me and scratch me and punch me. I am opening his mouth, I am seeing right down to his black heart and I am grabbing the shit and pushing it all the way down, I am filling his mouth and I am filling his throat. I fill the animal’s lungs with the shit.

  Two years and three months.

  I leave him, let him drop. I go to wash my hands. I clean them and I clean them, I don’t want his stink on my skin. I clean them and I clean them and I can hear the Stiv is making retches and then I hear him vomiting. He is on his hands and knees. He retches again and then the vomit is coming, all that shit but also there is pink and there is the yellow of the sun and there is blue and there is orange and there is purple. So many colours for this shadow place.

  Mother of us all, where have you taken me, that vomit is beautiful here? Stiv is taking a breath, still on all fours and looking up at me. Black his eyes, dark the wild stare in his eyes: I am not managing to conquer that.

  I close the tap. I open my lungs and I start to sing.

  Where are the greens of the meadow, the water from the well?

  —Who said you can sing, wog?

  Two years and three months. I’ll go to the desert, that most bleak of seas, I’ll become a black bastard. I’ll make that my home.

  —This is Australia, wog! We speak Australian here, wog!

  Every hour of every day. Every hour of every day, dear God, these condemned, these barbarians, these animals, they cannot take breath without curses falling from their mouth.

  Two years and three months.

  I am walking back to the latrine. He is a snake, that is what he is, he is venom. I am kicking him, he falls. Then I am raising my right foot, our boots in here they are thick-soled and they are heavy. With all my might, with all the strength that God has given me, I am smashing my foot down. I am Bobi Mor, I am Eusevio and that miracle child, I am Pelai. I am sing, Where are the greens of the meadow, the water from the well? With every kicking of my foot on his head, I can’t do anything but singing.

  All around me, just for a moment, one blessed moment, there is the sweetest scent of roses.

  Written in Greek and translated into English by the author

  Hung Phat!

  SHE NAMECHECKS HYPATIA AS A HERO. She wraps herself in white cloth: scarves and sheer shawls. ‘You know how they killed Hypatia,’ she asks me, ‘do you?’ I don’t.

  She tells me. They stripped her and hacked away at her skin with shards of broken pottery. ‘They ripped her skin off.’ She shudders. ‘Can you believe that?’

  Hypatia was head of the library at Alexandria, keeper of knowledge for the whole of the ancient world. They burned down the library, destroyed the scrolls. They skinned her alive.

  ‘Who’s they?’

  She shrugs. A scarf is wound theatrically around her head. ‘They is they: the Pope and the Emperor, their priests and their soldiers. The same they as always. That’s the part of history that never changes.’

  She’s a pessimist. It comes naturally, she says, she doesn’t have to bullshit to be it. But she can’t shake her addiction to astrology and will always read a horoscope if she comes across one. We’re walking down the street, oblivious to the movement around us, we are together in her world. I’m guiding a path and she’s reading aloud from a Woman’s Day. ‘Crap, crap, crap.’ Her voice is a stiletto. ‘Horoscopes are just another lie,’ she loudly tells the street. She throws the magazine onto a bench and we keep walking. A few steps on and she’s changed her mind, turns back to grab the magazine, to have another look. ‘It’s because I’m a Virgo,’ she explains. ‘We’re hard to please.’

  Virgos are hard to please. Virgos make enemies easily. They love to talk but they’re not subtle, and at their worst they are just plain fucking rude. The ones I know are all independent. They’re virgins, untouched. I don’t know shit about astrology but my best friends are always Virgos. It is the only sign I can pick. I can always pick a Virgo.

  ‘I can piss standing up,’ she tells me.

  ‘Bullshit.’

  ‘Wanna bet?’

  ‘Okay. How much?’

  ‘Five dollars.’

  She’s got her feet wide apart, knees slightly bent, leaning over. She’s doing it. I rub the bottom of my chin with my thumb. I’ve lost the bet and the piss is sinking into the dirt.

  She hitches up her undies.

  I hand over the money.

  •

  We’ve known each other from day one. Which is not quite true, but true enough. We met in school when we were fifteen. She had been a student in some hippie institution, and wore colours and beads. She and I liked each other immediately. We fell upon each other. We were misfits but we desperately wanted to be liked.

  I was very young when I worked out that I preferred spending time with girls. Kid-in-the-sandpit young. At fifteen, it was a little bit different. I was kissing girls as well as hanging out with them and that was changing everything. She didn’t care; sex didn’t muddle us up. We knew it straight away, just by looking at each other. She made me laugh, and she seemed like a sister to me. I don’t have a sister but I imagine her and me is what it would feel like.

  She gave me good advice about sex, about love, about the differences between men and women. Much better than anything I received from other girls, from guys, from Mum, Dad, from my teachers; even better than the television. I had another friend, Jessie, and we used to talk, but one night we rolled around together drunk at a party and pashed on. They were only alcohol kisses. The next day at school, we avoided each other. My crush was on Bella, big, beautiful, black-haired, long-legged Bella. But Bella never looked at me.

  I was also close to Derek. We were cool. He was okay, but he wanted to fuck me. That sounds up myself but it was true. He told me and I said it was alright, that I didn’t mind, that I was kind of flattered. But that changed things too. Again, I just wasn’t interested. I did have sex once with a guy, Dominic Borstino. I guess it was sex. We wanked together watching porn. His dad was out and we found the pornos under Mr Borstino’s bed. We watched them and touched each other’s dicks a few times. We didn’t look at each other. As soon as I blew, he jumped up and left the room. He spent ages in the bathroom. I heard a flush through the porno-disco music and he came out with a towel, all zipped up. I was pissed off. I had wanted to see him come. I never told Derek about Dominic. But I told Zazie.

  That’s her name. I should tell you that. Her name is Zazie.

  ‘Did you like it?’

  ‘Dunno. Don’t think so. It was strange with no talking, no kissing.’

  ‘Did you want to kiss him?’

  ‘Nah, not really, but I still wish we had. I didn’t really want to kiss him but I wanted there to be kissing.’

  The bell whistles the beginning of class and she jumps off the fence, tramples the cigarette. ‘Would you do it again?’

  I shake my head no. ‘I like girls,’ I tell her.

  We head for the lockers.

  •

  The name Zazie has no history, she tells me, none at all. Her mum made it up, plucked it out of the multicultural air. Zazie’s mother has a mix in her. Scottish, English, some French and maybe something Spanish, but she shed her European skin long ago. She had got pregnant at twenty-four, two years out of uni, one year into a resear
ch job on radio. She decided to keep the baby. The father was doing a PhD in agricultural science, measuring and counting the land. Neither wanted marriage. But Zazie’s mum wanted the baby. Every summer after New Year, Zazie would go up north to stay with her father, his wife, and their two children. I’d miss her like crazy. My suburb’s asphalt streets stank from the heat. There was nothing to do.

  She would come back bush-brown. ‘Fuck, it was boring up there,’ she’d always say, and straight away she was back to watching videos, smoking cones. I always envied her those summer escapes. It was nowhere, a farmhouse amid a numbing puzzle of paddocks, but it wasn’t home, it wasn’t the suburbs. It wasn’t fucking Blackburn.

  Blackburn used to be orchards. Shady fruit trees, apples and oranges. But I never knew the orchards—they got taken over by supermarkets. There was one magic spot left, a hillside that ran into a creek. I walked up and down along that creek, winter and summer, fleeing the wearisome suburban grind. I saw a snake once. It was thin and shone a brilliant black. I had jumped on a log and it slid away from underneath, flashing into the undergrowth. It was a tiny thing really; my fear was only momentary.

  I told Zazie about it. She laughed. ‘You should see the whoppers I’ve seen in Queensland.’ Another reason to be envious.

  In the library, flicking through film books, I came across an entry for a film called Zazie in the Metro. A French film by Louis Malle, the guy married to Candice Bergen. I showed it to Zazie. She got all excited. ‘Did you name me after that film?’ she asked her mother when she got home. Her mum had never heard of it. But Zazie was not convinced. She must have come across it at some stage. Zazie must have come from somewhere.

  ‘So you do have a history,’ I told her.

  ‘Yeah,’ she laughed. ‘I’m related to Murphy Brown.’

  •

  Our last summer at school I had sex with Kayla Robinson. I forgot the condoms and splashed all over her stomach. We lay close together afterwards, listening to each other breathing. The radio, whose sound had disappeared while we were fucking, came back slowly. I gently pushed her away from me, wanting to get up, and our skin had stuck together. Patterns were forming across her stomach, her breasts were wet. I kissed her and she tickled my dick.

  ‘It’s droopy—it looks tired,’ she giggled.

  I didn’t say anything, I grabbed my T-shirt. The drying semen looked odd on her body, on her soft skin. I cleaned her up.

  •

  Kayla, Zazie and I were watching The Color Purple on video. I was a little stoned, a little bored and flicking through magazines.

  ‘They’ve changed it,’ Zazie complained. ‘The women were lovers for ages in the book.’

  ‘Hey, Zaz, you’re a lesbian, aren’t ya?’ asked Kayla. The question was straightforward, interested. There was nothing sly or malicious about it. But the room became dangerous.

  ‘Yes,’ said Zazie.

  We didn’t look at each other. When the movie finished we went out to get smokes. Zazie was strolling the aisles of the 7-Eleven, shoplifting chocolates. The three of us were walking around the shop, hand in hand.

  •

  A girl at school got murdered. Her body was dumped on the train line. She was younger than me, two years below, but Kayla was good friends with her sister. Zazie was angry, not scared like Kayla, but furious. Cops came to talk to students, to teachers, news crews would follow us home.

  ‘I want to get out of here,’ Zazie started saying. ‘I’ve had it with this place.’

  The murdered girl was Orthodox. Kayla and I went to the funeral. The church was weird, smelly but wonderful. I got high on the incense, on the colours and gold of the icons. The saints looked poor and tired, some of the holy pictures seemed weathered and damaged. The dead girl’s mother was hysterical. That was the part of the ceremony I hated the most; she was falling and twisting into cracked shapes, supported by her sons. She was howling. Beside me, Kayla was crying softly. I tried to cry, I squeezed my eyes tight, but nothing happened. I wasn’t sad.

  •

  Zazie moved. Her mother sold their place, got a flat in Brunswick. That changed everything. I was a regular house guest, crashing out on the sofa in the lounge room. I loved Brunswick, the small houses, the trams and the streets. It was noisy and the air there smelt like a city. I was looking for work, Zazie was studying. It was just one year really, one small year, but we had tremendous fun. There was always speed and there were always parties. Strange beds all the time. Kayla and I broke up, Derek moved to Sydney. It was just me and Zazie.

  She has a photograph of me from that time, standing outside a Victoria Street grocery. I’m in a black T-shirt and my arms are crossed. The sign above me reads, HUNG PHAT! It’s Vietnamese and we don’t know what it means. But she thinks it’s funny. ‘Are you hung?’ she yells at me. We’re at Luna Park, off our heads, riding a roller-coaster. I scream back, ‘You’ll never know!’

  We’ve never seen each other nude. I have imagined it.

  The photograph of me rides her wallet. It’s the only photograph there.

  •

  Work changed me. Zazie said that about me and I guess she was right. I was working in the city, selling phones and faxes, the odds and ends of communications. I sleepwalked through it, putting money away each week, cutting down on going out. I was determined to travel and Zazie slipped out of my life. She was studying, meeting people, fucking women. I receded from her world. From time to time we’d ring. I’d leave messages on her machine and she’d leave messages with my mum. She got tattooed and nose-ringed. Work had me in a white shirt and a tie. She came in one day to take me to lunch. The guys I worked with stared hard at her.

  She kissed me across the counter. ‘Can I take you away from here?’

  ‘Please do.’ I was in the middle of a sale, spinning bullshit about mobile phones to a nervous carpenter who was sniffing the air. It was Zazie he could smell. She smelt of sweat and incense, of dope and cigarettes. Herbal cigarettes. She walked through the store, caressing the hardware.

  Lunch was three quick pots and a packet of Twisties at the Charles Dickens. She told me about a video she was making, asked me how my savings were going.

  She pulled at my tie, poked fun at me. ‘You look so straight.’

  ‘I have to look straight.’

  I promised to send her a postcard from America. She’d always been in love with the myth of New York. I was visiting America for her, she was making me do it. ‘New York, now that’s a real city,’ she said, ‘the only real city.’ She promised to write to me while I was away.

  I returned tipsy to work, chewing on some PK, fingers yellow from the Twisties. I could no longer smell Zazie in the shop. Only the dry odour of plastic.

  •

  I ring her on a Friday night. I leave this message on the machine: ‘Zaz, it’s me. Got a call from Kayla yesterday. She’s getting married. She’d like you to come along. It’s a small do, no big church bullshit. Call me.’

  On the following Thursday, Dad tells me Zazie called. She wants to know when the wedding is.

  I call back, leave this message: ‘Zaz, the wedding is on March twenty-third. Can you make it? Call me. I want you to be my date.’

  Three weeks later I get a call. I’m home alone, watching a porno. I pause the video and grab the phone. The TV screen flickers on a bright yellow image, a close-up of a woman’s face, her eyes closed, her head tilted back, simulating ecstasy.

  Zazie rushes into a conversation, stumbling and sliding through words and emotions. She can’t make the wedding. Too much study. She’s in love. Her video is going to be shown in some festival in St Kilda. Anyway, she doesn’t like weddings. Tells me to give her best to Kayla, bitches about her buying into the suburban dream. She sounds as if she’s speeding. Abruptly she tells me she has to go. Someone’s at her door. I say goodbye. There’s a click, then the dial tone.

  I continue the video but I’m wanking without a hard-on. When I come, it’s nothing, a zero instead of a feeli
ng; it’s like taking a leak but there’s less sensation.

  •

  There were between seven hundred thousand and a million scrolls in the ancient library in Alexandria. Writings from Phoenicia and Persia, from across the Mediterranean. Mathematics and astrology, plays and epics.

  In Zazie’s video, simply called Hypatia, a woman is seen walking through a library, touching the spines of books. A security guard comes into the library and arrests her. There is a fire and books are thrown on it. Then the video cuts to the woman’s head being shaved; her hands are cuffed and her clothes are stripped away. Cut. A scroll is thrown on the fire. A flash to a computer screen being logged out, then a hammer smashes through the screen. The end.

  There is light applause after the screening. I cheer, I whistle, I stamp my feet. Zazie is in the row in front of me and she turns around with a wicked smile. ‘Quiet, you dag,’ she whispers. She’s blushing. I keep cheering. I am—there is only one possible word for it—I am proud.

  •

  Five postcards and a letter.

  Greece, 5 May 1992, a statue of Athena on a suburban roof, crisscrossed by television aerials. I write: Zazie, this place is chaos. The banks are always on strike, the streets are always crowded, day or night, and it stinks. I kind of like it. I met up with a German woman who speaks very good English and what sounds like passable Greek. She and I are going to travel to some of the islands together.

  Lesbos, 23 May 1992. Three naked women, all blonde, lying on a beach. Zaz, saw this card and immediately thought of you. I’ve spotted many dykes here but there doesn’t seem to be any Museum of Lesbian History. Did you make that up? It is stunning here, but I miss Australian spaces. You can’t get away from anyone here, too many tourists. All the Greeks seem to have a brother or sister or cousin in Melbourne. Write to me at 17 Rue d’Alsace, Paris. Claudia, who I’m travelling with, has got a friend who’ll put us up there. Write. I underlined this final word twice.

  Paris, 8 July 1992. The Eiffel Tower. I love this city. It is beautiful in the morning light, in the bright sun, it’s glorious at night. I feel cheap and nasty, everyone else is dressed so well. Australia seems very far away and Melbourne seems so limp in comparison. The flat we’re staying in is small and cramped, it overlooks the railyards. But I don’t give a damn. It took less than a minute, Zazie, less than a minute to love this place. P.S. Visited Morrison’s grave. Placed flowers on Oscar’s tomb, from both of us.