The Jesus Man

  —Shut up, he screamed at him.

  —I’m just praying, pleaded the abomination.

  Did you let them pray, you bastard, did you let the little girls pray, you fucking cocksucking scum!

  Tommy watched the man pray. Neil’s eyes were closed, his head high, his hands outstretched. Tommy moved behind him.

  I did it.

  Tommy was looking at the Christ. Jesus was speaking.

  I killed them, I cut them up. I was foul with them.

  Why did you do it?

  I wanted to feel what their bodies would be like, what their young bodies would feel like, to touch.

  Neil turned round, He was staring up at Tommy.

  To foul their pure white bodies. Do you understand that?

  Yes.

  —No! Tommy roared. You’re sick. You’re evil.

  The man dropped his head, his lips moved silently.

  —What? ordered Tommy.

  Yes. Jesus had spoken. Evil.

  Neil sighed, his massive frame shuddered, jerked, danced.

  —Oh Lord, he whispered, I am exhausted.

  Neil raised his head, eyes closed, to heaven, to Christ. He was waiting.

  The first cut was swift but the fleshy bulk around the man’s neck did not allow for a deep incision. There was a line of blood and Neil had begun a groaning. Tommy grabbed the man’s head, tilted it back and stuck the knife straight, deep into his neck. The blood, black not red, splashed across the wall, on the print. Jesus was bleeding. And then, quickly, in a rapid succession of jabs, Tommy sliced through the oesophagus. The head lopped clumsily to the left side, veins and meat exposed. Neil’s body collapsed into his arms and Tommy held him, caressed the greasy hair. He looked down at his hands, everything scarlet. And there was the smell. Tommy staggered out of the room.

  The Madonna’s face was still turned away from him, her eyes shrouded in the darkness. He heaved, retched. His arm hurt, the arm that held the knife. The exertion had been violent. He felt a pressure between his legs. He looked down, he felt the wetness inside his underpants. He groaned.

  He tightened his grip on the knife’s sharp blade, the pain was a relief. Eyes were still watching and in the empty house he blushed. The stain on his pants.

  He walked into the living room. On one wall there was a mirror and on the mantelpiece there were photos. Darren in school uniform, a large dark woman. He stood before the mirror and looked closely into his face. His eyes were animal, savage and thirsty. His skin rough and taut around his skeletal face. His body appalling, an ugly mass of flab and skin. He started, slowly, then with a rapid pleasure, to scratch at himself. The lines of blood were a comfort. He looked away from the mirror. The Virgin’s black face, her vanished eyes, reproved him. He looked back in the mirror. Neil’s face. He smashed his fist into the glass. The slivers, like rain, fell around him.

  He knew now what to do. He took a long angular piece of glass, he ripped at his stomach. The pain stopped him, not the blood, not the visibility of his own meat. He stopped, gasped for air and tried again. He screamed and doubled over. He looked at the Virgin, at the sad eyes of the child-man Jesus. They were still unsatisfied. He touched the stain on his trousers, it stung as if it were poison.

  A sound. He turned around.

  No-one there.

  They were all waiting.

  He lowered his pants. His cock was thick, the head peeping from underneath the foreskin purple in its wetness and from its work. He wished it expunged. He said the Lord’s name and took up again the sliver of glass. Blood was seeping all around him. The mat of hair on his groin had coloured crimson. He took the sliver, closed his eyes and slashed.

  The pain, when it came, was all white light. From somewhere beyond the room there was a shuddering howling. He opened his eyes. The pain was gone and there were loops of fine veins falling across his thigh. A petit testicle, a pale jelly, lay seeping on the floor. His grip tight, his palm bleeding, he held his severed penis in his hand. Again, the Lord’s name on his lips, praying for this one moment of strength, he raised the sliver and sliced. A thick injection of blood slammed against the mirror, spraying the room. There was pain, there was the penis in his hand, and then there was relief. He crashed onto the coffee table and the contents tipped around him. He looked across to God. The Virgin’s face was white, her eyes a gleaming pride. The child-man too was smiling. Then there was the pain, a cruel annihilating pain. But there was the face of the Virgin, her smiling eyes, forgiving him, loving him. The pain drank from her light and he was swimming towards it. Her love and, finally, her respect vanquished all.

  There was the fluttering of wings, the angry flight of the demon.

  Then there was nil.

  Lou and Dominic cleaned out Tommy’s life from the flat. The landlord, furious at the damage done to his property, at first refused to let the family in. But Artie, patient even in his grief, assured the man that all damages would be paid for. But Artie refused to clean up the remainder of his dead son’s life. And it was inconceivable that Maria would do it.

  Her grief was all hysteria and shame. The funeral had come close to destroying her. For her family their concern over her health helped stay the horror they experienced at recognising the suicide.

  —Jesus Christ! Dominic stood in the middle of the room, looking at the charred walls. The room still smelt of fire.

  Lou took a large green plastic bag from his brother.

  —Let’s get to it.

  There was little remaining to pick up. A few prints off the wall, a family photograph, the baby Luigi in Maria’s arms; the surly Tommy and the swaggering Dominic, arms folded, next to their tall father. The photograph miraculously unscarred. Lou popped it in a box.

  —I’ll do the bedroom, he yelled to his brother.

  He noticed the cold first. He shivered and looked around. The bed, the walls, the mirror, all black. The wooden trunk was a sad pyre. Lou carefully lifted the lid. It fell to ash and charcoal. Inside, everything was black. He lifted fragments of cloth and stuffed them inside the plastic bag. He suddenly had to stop as he came across an album of photographs. He opened it and the photographs were all curled and bubbled. Nothing remained. He was crying as he slipped it into the bag.

  Lou hesitated. The disjointed shapes of video cases, a mad sculpture; the corroded blackened magazines, the mad catalogues of the body and its uses; he touched a smoked crucifix. He hesitated, then threw it in the bag.

  He took the pornography and pushed it deep in the bag, to the back, to be hidden under the dust and wood and fabric. He cleared the trunk and then kicked at it and kicked at it. It fell to rubble.

  Dominic was at the door.

  —Found anything?

  Without looking at his brother, Lou shook his head.

  —Let’s go then. There’s nothing left. Even the stereo’s fucked. I just grabbed some kitchen stuff.

  Dominic walked over to his younger brother and put a hand on the kneeling boy’s shoulder.

  —You all right?

  Lou nodded and got to his feet. His grip was firm around the bag. Dominic reached for it but Lou refused.

  They walked out of the flat, not bothering to lock it up behind them. Under the sun, in its warmth, Lou stood still and closed his eyes.

  —You all right?

  Lou smiled at his brother.

  —It’s good to get out of there.

  On the way to their parents’ house, Lou stopped and placed the rubbish bags in a large industrial bin. The bang of the shutting lid echoed through the quiet street.

  The brothers drove home. Wordlessly, music on the radio.

  The weekend after the funeral, in Edithvale, a bayside suburb at the edge of the city, a little girl, in her checked school uniform, walked to the corner milk bar to buy a bag of lollies and some milk for her mother. She went missing, abducted, and she was never to return.

  INTERMISSIONS

  Fremantle, 1947

  A black crow had followed Artie Stephens f
or all his life. It had been there at his birth, he had been told, as it had been at the birth of his brothers and his sisters. It was there on the day of his marriage, a shining liquid sky and the gentlest of breeze. Showered with confetti, holding Maria’s hand, he noticed the birds keeping a vigil on the stone fence of the Orthodox Church. He stared straight into one bird’s opium yellow eye and shivered, wished to raise his arm to Catholic prayer. Instead he tightened his grip on his wife’s hand and wrist, silently mouthed a promise to her. I will protect you.

  Artie fell in love with Maria at a barbecue, watching her slim dark body, watching her bring out trays of salad, meat and bread. She had smiled shyly as her brother Peter introduced them.

  She spoke Greek and he blushed.

  —He’s an Aussie, laughed Peter.

  —Sorry, replied Maria, her English crisp and broken.

  —I’m half Greek, half Italian, he stammered, and his face was a wide grin.

  —He’s an Aussie, insisted Peter, and slapped him hard on the back. Maria had continued smiling. The few words she spoke to him that afternoon, in the company of men, they were all in English.

  He had kissed her, a stolen kiss, unasked, he had kissed her lightly on the mouth while she was alone in the kitchen preparing peppers in oil. He tasted lemon juice on her lips. She had returned his kiss and then quickly stepped away, refused to look at him. He stammered an apology to her in his half forgotten Greek and he went back to the men circling the fire.

  For Maria, the kiss had sealed a fate. No-one else would have dared, she told him much later. Are you kidding, in my brother’s house, no-one would have dared touch me. It had excited her, the risk of that kiss. It promised the adventure she had not yet found in this strange land, this large and ugly land.

  He wooed her. He sent flowers and took her dancing. He helped her learn the intricacies of Australian English. She taught him caresses in Greek and pleaded with him all the time to speak his love in Italian. It is, she said to him, pouring over magazines featuring black and white pictures of Rossellini and Bergman, Anita and Frederico, it is the language of love.

  Her brother Peter had been appalled. He liked Artie, admired him as a man, they worked together affixing engines to the new hulls of automobiles, but Artie was not Greek. And his wife Aphrodite warned him against the crime of giving away his younger sister to a stranger.

  —You’ll regret it, ordered Peter. We’ll find you a Greek husband.

  —He is Greek, insisted Maria.

  —He’s a bastard, warned Aphrodite, half and half. Your children, think about them, they will not be Greek if you marry him. This warning silenced Maria.

  But he was too handsome. She had found, to her shame, that she had fallen in love.

  Maria had arrived in Australia convinced that love was a sham. She found the new country strange and isolated, no life in the streets and no passion in conversation. Unlike the other Greek women who worked with her, threading textiles through the clanking teeth of industrial machines, she was an Athenian, a girl of the city, and she had known the delights of cafes and bars, of dancing and movie houses. She felt as estranged from the village gossip of the migrants as she did from the harsh bigotry of the Australians. Melbourne had disappointed her, horrified her: the closing of the bars at six in the evening, the tame unsophistication of a colonial town. She fell asleep, every night, dreaming of Athens. Sipping coffee, eating cake, smoking cigarettes on the sidewalks of Kolonaki; being pestered by the kamaki, the seductions of boys walking along Sygrou. Every night she prayed to God to return her, one day, when she had made some money, to return her to Greece.

  Greece, where she had been the youngest girl in a family of four daughters. Greece, where her lazy generous father had no money to pay for her dowry. Greece, where she was ordered to marry louts and idiots. Or take up whoring, her father had screamed at her in a drunken rage, we cannot afford to marry you to gentlemen. No, she had grown into a woman who did not believe in love. She had seen the cruel contract of marriage and knew herself to be poor. She was attractive, she was hard working, she was intelligent and a dancer. But she was poor. No man in Greece had bothered to ask her to be his wife.

  Artie Stephens told her, quietly, in English and in Italian, I Love you. Ti Amo.

  And I love you too, she had breathed it into herself.

  —We must marry in the Orthodox Church, she ordered. I will not be a Catholic.

  —Yes, he had promised.

  —And our children, they will be raised Greek?

  He had hesitated. I’m a mongrel, he had thought, I don’t know what that means.

  —Yes, he had answered. Above all, I promise to protect you, to protect our children. Maria, there will only be you. Understand. Only you.

  She had said yes and that night, whistling ‘Summertime’, he had skipped home, back to the little room in Carlton he shared with three Italians. I will buy you a house, he had promised, I will give you everything. In the blackening sky, a crow had swooped. He stopped. Cursed. I will protect you, Maria, he whispered. Defying the bird.

  He had always thought of the bird as female. His Nonna had always spoken of a young woman’s ghost.

  —How do you know, Nonna? he once asked, when still a child.

  —I’ve seen her.

  His grandmother had been a strange sullen woman who rarely left the house. She sat in the kitchen or on the back verandah, with her tobacco, chewing and spitting. The grandchildren spent their childhoods in the shadow of her glare. But she had a special affection for Artie, she called him Turro, and only to him was she indulgent with her love. She took to teaching him her own language, small words, affections. And dirty words.

  —Poutsa! he’d repeat and she would clap her hands and laugh and laugh.

  —Skata? She’d grab him and hold him in her black folds. She told him the stories of her faith, the Panagia, Christ’s mother, a statue in the holy church of Agia Sophia who cried tears of blood and would continue to cry tears of blood till Constantinopli was once again returned to the Greeks. She told him of the ancient gods, and it was Apollo who was his favourite, riding the chariot across the sky each dawn.

  But mostly, especially if anyone else but Artie was in the room, she would just glare.

  Only English and Italian were allowed in the house, his Papa’s orders. And as the children began school, it was, finally, only English that was spoken. The Greek had been forbidden Nonna, a condition of entering her son-in-law’s house. Even her title was foreign. Not Giagia, but Nonna, or Nana.

  It is 1947 and the war has been over for two years. At fourteen, Artie Stephens’ body has already been hardened by work. There is nothing of the plumpness, the softness of childhood. He is handsome, and dark but his Mediterranean face has been scorched by an alien sun; a fairness is emerging, in the hair, even in the shade of the skin. Stephens is not his real name. As war became inevitable, Artie’s father took the children to an office, and there, silently watched over by sullen men in suits, he changed their name from Stefano to Stephens. Though this did not completely save Papa Stefano—he was interned for three months, at the beginning of the war—it did mean his children could continue their schooling. They faced insults and exclusion from the sons and daughters of patriotic Australians but the school in Fremantle included enough dark faces to allow for the possibility of mateship. Artie’s best friend, Victor, was Portuguese, his sister Sophia’s best friend was the Greek girl Marina. When Italy became an ally, the taunt dago lost some venom and became a word that simply marked a difference.

  It is 1947 and a black crow is circling the sky.

  Artie laid down the saw and winked at the man beside him on the wall.

  —Too hot.

  —Yeah, mate, too bloody hot.

  Simultaneously the two men lit cigarettes and put them to their lips. Bill spat, and watched the thick white trace spin to the earth below. His brow, his neck, his shirt was wet, his hair plastered flat under his cap.

  —Too fucking
hot, he emphasised.

  Artie was silent, he was looking down at the harbour. They were sealing a roof and the building faced the firm solidity of the Port Authority. Beyond that, there were the ships in the port. Beyond them there was only ocean.

  —We should chuck it in, go for a swim. Artie searched the street below. Where’s Pickett, you reckon?

  —The old bastard. Down at the pub, of course.

  Artie winked again. But Bill was apprehensive.

  —We can’t leave, mate. Sorry, he’ll skin us.

  The sea. Artie didn’t speak the words, he had no need to. The gentle breeze off the water was invitation enough.

  Bill was shaking his head.

  —Sorry, mate, can’t do it.

  It was not the possibility of a beating from Pickett that halted Artie. Not only work had made him strong. He had painfully, almost from the beginning of boyhood, with a fierce determination, skilled himself at defiance. Pickett did not dare hit Artie with the ferocity he showed to his other apprentices. And Pickett’s strength was nothing compared to Papa’s. Artie’s father had softened, weakened with age, but his fury could still make the boy flinch. Only the Nonna dared to challenge Papa: even after so many years the mother and the son-in-law still refused to show each other a respect. But Papa did not spare the children. Artie had been slapped when they had returned from the Town Hall, their name no longer dago but Australian—he had addressed his father with the English word, Dad. The slap had knocked him to the floor.