—I’d like to take her on a holiday, maybe to Europe. She deserves a rest.
He loves her, he loves her very much.
—You going to do it?
When he answers it is with fury.
—How? He stands up. I’m going to watch some TV.
—Don’t you want to know about my trip?
—No. He looks down at me, still angry. I don’t want to know about your fucking trip. He grabs at me, pulls at my shirt. What the fuck are you looking for, arsehole? He’s dead, gone, finito. That’s it, that’s all.
—He was our brother.
I’m scared.
—He killed a man.
And Dominic is shaking.
—He fucking killed a man, the bastard. Why’d he do that, eh, Louie, why that?
I’m crying his tears.
—Don’t know, I say softly, sniffing. I don’t care about that.
—You should. His voice is cold, he’s straightened up. It’s a debt. He goes inside.
Later I wander in, stoned, still shaky, wondering if I should head back home. Dominic is on the couch, the heating is on and he’s wearing a singlet and boxer shorts, Eva is curled around his legs. They are watching the television. She smiles as I walk in.
—Come. She pats the space next to her. I sit down and we watch ‘The Footy Show’. Eva rests her head on my shoulder and Dominic is playing with my hair. On the television, Saverio Rocca is on the panel, shirt and tie, so very handsome. I sit up.
Eva punches me, softly.
—You like him, don’t you?
I’m blushing.
—He’s a good player, ain’t he, Dom?
—He’s a spunk is what you mean, giggles Eva.
Dominic says nothing, he’s rubbing my shoulder.
In the morning I wake up with Lisa jumping on the bed. I kiss her warmly and she pulls me up, into the morning. Dominic is in his overalls, sipping a coffee. Eva is making breakfast. Arthur is in the lounge room watching cartoons. I look up at the clock. Seven-fifteen.
Dominic follows my stare. He puts down his coffee.
—Got to go.
—Where’s the job?
—Fucking Mordialloc.
—Yow, I answer, that’s a long way.
—It’s all right. He kisses his wife, his daughter, his son and he comes around for me, grabs me, hugs me. Good to have you back, Luigi.
He’s out.
Eva makes me bacon and eggs.
—He didn’t sleep much last night, kept tossing and turning. Her eyes question me.
—What? I say defensively.
—Nothing. Did you talk about Tommy?
—Kind of. I look at her. He never really wants to talk about him.
—It’s hard for Dom, he never understood Tommy. Everything’s black and white for Dom.
I wonder if she’s bitter. She touches my face.
—I don’t think anything was simple for Tommy.
She starts clearing the breakfast table.
—Louie, maybe it’s time to let go.
—Of what?
—Tommy. Let it rest.
I don’t answer, play with the egg.
—That doesn’t mean forget him, she whispers softly.
Eva prepares her daughter for school. I shower, I dress, I piss. And try to think of nothing, pure beautiful nothing.
5
Antipolitics
The night was bitter, cold. The wind’s severity hurt. The crowd was fuelled by anger. There were songs, chanting, abuse and laughter. Betty was riding my shoulders and she was giggling.
—You cold up there?
—No. She hugs my neck.
—Where is she, Uncle Louie?
—Don’t know.
The Racist had yet to appear. She was addressing a meeting. I wanted to go inside, now that I was here, mostly to check out the crowd. There were nervous men with mobile phones outside the entrance to the hall.
Nadia and Soo-Ling were hugging each other, challenging the cold. Young women and men weaved through the crowd, offering pamphlets and proclaiming meetings. They were dressed in black and in hippie. The church crowd, older, more sedate, eyed them suspiciously. But a camaraderie was being forged, through hatred directed against the Racist.
I felt nothing but my usual exclusion. The stale slogans, their misty humanism, annoyed me. Slowly, protected by the large frames of the police, people arrived to enter the meeting. They were greeted with insults, fire and brimstone. They cowered, the invective of the protesters, the flashing bulbs of the media. Betty’s eyes were wide open. This was a circus.
I gripped tight to her hand. I was not going to let her go. The crowd’s solidarity seemed tenuous. The anger that seethed through them, the angry insults to the police, was mounting to violence. And it was being returned with cold efficiency by the police. I tried to look at them, tried to catch the hazel eyes of a young blond cop. He refused to see me.
—Fuck off. This is a free country!
A burly bearded man, motorcycle jacket, was walking towards the hall.
—Racist! screamed back a young woman, socialist badges. The bearded man made as if to rush at her, but he was held back by one of the police. Instead he shook his head and walked grimly through the crowd. There was a chorus of abuse.
Soo-Ling laughed suddenly and pointed to the edge of the crowd. Three young Vietnamese boys, shivering in white T-shirts, had joined us.
—Check out their T-shirts.
One of the boys turned around. In bold black letters the T-shirt read: White Trash And Proud Of It.
I laughed with a deep enjoyment.
—Look, Betty, that’s us.
She read the words and turned back, with curiosity, to the seething crowd.
I was here for her, more than for Soo-Ling, much more than for philosophy or belief. Yes, the Racist’s venom against the non-European immigrant disgusted me. I detested her arrogant dismissal of the Aborigines. I thought her language and her petty hatreds abominable. But it was her refusal to see Betty, to acknowledge the mongrel child I loved, that I hated most. The Racist warned against a future where ethnicity was purged of purity. I was living only for that future.
The pamphlets tried to explain. But pamphlets were empty. The target, they claimed, was capitalism not immigration. There were no jobs. The solutions they spoke for belonged to a distant past, to something called rationality. And this protesting crowd contradicted the pamphlets. The working class were inside the hall. It was mostly the middle class doing the antiracist chanting. I don’t believe in the logic of Apocalypse but I sensed that I was living through its history. One hundred metres down the road, as we were coming up towards the rally, a young teenage girl was huddled behind a brick fence, shooting up.
—What’s she doing? whispered Betty. At six she knew enough to whisper.
—She’s taking drugs.
Soo-Ling glanced at me quickly, said nothing.
Betty kept looking back, over her shoulder.
A huge murmur was buzzing through the crowd. She’s coming, she’s coming. The numbers had swelled; the police formed a thick line along the corded barricade that separated us from the people arriving for the meeting. Spit was now being thrown along with the abuse. I dropped Betty from my shoulders and took her to the edge of the crowd. Soo-Ling and Nadia remained in the thick of it.
An elderly couple walked slowly towards the hall. He had his arm, tattooed arm, around the woman, protecting her, his head upright. She was frightened. They walked through and she shivered as the words fell on her.
—Racist bitch.
A young man aimed a powerful projectile of spit, caught the shoulder of her coat. There was laughter. The couple disappeared from my view.
The crowd was now feverish in its anticipation. I sat on a small park bench on the edge of the fury, Betty on my knees. The guests were now running into the hall and the whole street was ablaze with the flaming lights of the television crews. An elderly Chinese man, his hands in hi
s pockets, stood silent, watching.
A young man arrived. He was blond and pissed. He walked slowly towards the hall, laughed at the protesters. This accelerated their fury. He lifted his fingers towards them and his voice boomed.
—Kill all fucking boongs!
There was a silence, his words were a shock, and then a ferocious response. The crowd hurled itself against the barricade and the police scrambled to contain the force. There was pushing and screaming. A young woman was dragged away, thrown back into the crowd. The drunk man was still laughing. An object smashed against the back of his head. The juice of the tomato was as blood. The man stopped, wiped his neck and turned vicious onto the crowd. He tried to punch the protesters and two large policemen held him back.
This time it was the crowd laughing. He walked into the hall, cursing the boong and the gook, the poofter and the nigger. The crowd roared poison after him.
By now I could not feel the cold. A group of high-school kids had joined the protest and, rap style, were calling for the murder of all racists. Four news cameras were focused on them.
How about you? I thought to myself. Aren’t we all racist? There was one black man, black African, the only one at this protest. I felt embarrassment, I just did, whenever I caught his eye.
The barricade was shifting. More guests arriving, more protest. Projectiles of fruit and spittle, of words, were thrown in the direction of the barricade. The air began to smell of vegetable. The police grabbed at protesters, but a young man broke through and smashed his weight against a large man who was trying to run into the hall. The man fell across the barricade and into the crowd and he was swept up. Police rushed towards the fall. There was screaming, I saw a flash of kicking. More protesters broke through and the police line fell. There was simply noise and the high pitched squeals of pain. A woman, young, short cropped hair, was dragged along the ground, swung violently into an awaiting police wagon. Betty screamed and pushed her face into my jacket. She started crying. I held her tight.
A man emerged, his face blood, bruises. I didn’t know whether he was protester or guest. He collapsed. The sound of sirens.
Soo-Ling grabbed Betty from my arms. Beside her Nadia was shaking, trying unsuccessfully to light a cigarette. We were a moment of grace and around us there was chaos. The cameras, the protest, the police, the light, the shouting, the anger, all of it had formed a whirlpool around us.
—Let’s go, Soo-Ling ordered. We followed, shifting our bodies around crying couples, furious cops. One of them, blue faced, pudgy, young, stopped in front of Soo-Ling. His eyes burnt towards her, hating her. She stood, stared, and he dropped his gaze. We walked past and he rushed back into the crowd. An ambulance screeched to a halt. It was followed by a van from National Nine News. We were flooded by the spotlight of a helicopter.
A few hundred metres from the hall the world again descended into suburban darkness. Only silence and the flickering of TV screens from inside the brick veneers. A Vietnamese man on a porch looked in the direction of the protest. He was clothed in a striped dressing gown, smoking. He looked at us, stubbed the cigarette, went inside.
We drove to Nadia’s in silence. Betty’s crying had stopped and she just wanted to be in my arms. We were together in the back. Nadia, driving, went to turn on the radio. Soo-Ling stopped her. We needed some silence.
Back home Nadia rushed to the television, flicked through a movie and an ad, found a news channel. The scene we had just been in but everything cut up and fractured. The rapping high school students, the flying fruit. Cops being pushed. The rushing guests. A helicopter view of the world below and the falsely anxious face of a journalist.
A man in hospital. A guest, not a protester. Nadia groaned. Nine arrests.
Nadia poured three vodkas.
—Betty, it’s time for bed.
The girl shook her head.
—Bets, I pleaded, you know it’s way past your bedtime. She took hold of my fingers.
—Please. Just some quiet time. Her eyes were still a little red from the crying.
—How about some Simpsons?
Betty agreed gleefully.
—Just one episode, warned Soo-Ling.
The girl nodded.
Nadia went through her video tapes, put one on. Lisa Simpson hugging an older woman. She rewound. The episode made the four of us laugh. Homer finds his mother, who he thought was dead. She had left, had to go underground, because at the height of the sixties counterculture she had planned the destruction of a germ warfare laboratory built by Mr Burns. Lisa and her grandmother find a communion, a shared faith, a shared idealism. The episode ends with an old hippie driving the mother away in a beat-up Kombie.
—Why are you sad, Uncle Louie?
Tears must have been shivering in my eyes. Betty patted my cheek curiously.
—It’s sad, don’t you think, that she has to run away because of doing a good thing?
—I hate Mr Burns.
I put Betty to bed, kissed her forehead. She smelt of fruit and shit and piss and raspberry.
When I return to the lounge room—a second hand couch and posters for Circus Oz and I Heard The Mermaids Singing—Nadia has poured vodka for the three of us. Sinead O’Connor is on the stereo. The women are arguing about the protest, about the country, about division. Nadia believes the violence was a mistake. Soo-Ling hesitates, but she is also excited by the night’s events.
—I don’t care, you don’t understand. I’m glad they hit back, that’s something wonderful. You know how many times I’ve wanted to do that, kick some ugly redneck’s head in? All my life.
—I’m a wog too, says Nadia quietly.
—Not like me, not the same kind of wog, flashes Soo-Ling.
And me? I have no contribution to make. All I felt from the night was fright. I felt fear, and I felt the desire to escape, with Betty, to remove us from the conflict. I wanted nothing more and possibly that means I am not prepared to fight for anything more than the right to safety. My weakness in the face of violence does not bother me. Quite the opposite. I want to exalt in it. Immune to the slasher video and the six o’clock news, I can’t help but experience an immense relief at my abhorrence to real pain, to real blood and fury.
I am stretched on your grave.
I turn up the volume.
—We’re trying to talk. Soo-Ling is angry.
—Let him listen. He’s done nothing wrong.
Soo-Ling stares at me, long. I turn away.
—What do you think?
—Of what? My happiness was gone. Evaporated. I’m sullen. She is exasperated.
—Of tonight, of course. What do you think of what happened?
—It was stupid.
—Why?
—It proved nothing. It gave the racists more attention.
—Just lie down and take it, right? That’s your fucking answer?
—I was there, remember? I was protesting.
—That’s sometimes not enough.
The two women are looking at me, the man.
—I guess I’m not that angry.
My answer booms through the room. The music, the light, everything fades.
—Those people tonight, yeah sure, some were freaks, some were fascists. But mostly they were just ordinary folk, you know. I pause, struggle for articulation. The racists don’t hate me. I look at Soo-Ling. I’m not Asian, I guess. I don’t feel it the way you feel it.
—You are a fucking wog.
—No, I answer, sadly. Mum is, Dad even. But not me.
—You’re pathetic. Soo-Ling drowns the vodka, she is trembling.
I’m not black, I’m white. I can’t pretend a fury. I’m sad, depressed about it, confused about it. But I think of the pale white faces of the protesters tonight, faces twisted into ugliness, screaming abuse at other white faces entering the hall. Where does their anger come from? I’m disappointed, exasperated, frustrated and, above it all, I am an elitist. I think the whole mob of them fucking stupid. Most people, I’m
discovering this, most people are ignorant: wilfully ignorant, wilfully stupid.
I look at Soo-Ling. I wish I could silence her fury.
I think of Betty. The racists also wish to hurt Betty.
—I do get angry, sure I do.
—Good. Soo-Ling turns away.
—But I get angry at everyone.
Nadia pours another drink.
—I don’t like violence, I argue. Soo-Ling interrupts me.
—You’re weak. Shoots for my heart.
Just like my brother, eh?
I don’t, of course, say this.
We get shit-faced on vodka. Nadia asks Soo-Ling about Patrick. Her answers are hesitant. I know she is conscious that I’m in the room.
—So, come on. Are you two still together? Nadia pushes.
—No.
I can’t pretend otherwise. I’m happy.
Soo-Ling on the way to the stereo, to change a CD, knocks over a box of videos. Naked black cases. Soo-Ling stoops and picks one up.
—What’s this? The jacket features naked women, their legs apart.
Nadia laughs.
—Want to see one?
I’m titillated but I search Soo-Ling’s face, wait for her approval. She simply smirks.
—Which one should we watch?
—Louie can choose.
All eyes on me. I look through the box.
—A gay one. Nadia is insistent.
—But you’re a dyke, says Soo-Ling.
—I get off on the poofter ones, don’t ask me why, I just do.
I’m surprised at how shocked I am at Nadia’s words. I imagine her, alone, masturbating to the videos. I blush and glance through the covers. Most are LA, American custom bodies.
A cardboard box. A moustached dark haired man. A porno from the seventies.
—What’s this like?
—Put it on.
We go quiet. The video is different to the pornography I’m used to. It’s shot directly on film and so the colours are richer, the actors’ skin by turn amber and gold, there is texture to the bodies, there is the absence of the dull flat yellow of video. And there are cuts, real edits. The sex scenes are fast, the men handsome, strong, but their beauty is not impossible. I am most aroused by the come shots, semen falling into mouths, over eyes, over cheeks and faces. I am hard. I can hear, above the instrumental funk, a soft breathing from Soo-Ling. We don’t look at each other.