Merciless Gods Read online

  ‘Anyway, I was frustrated by the banal analysis that was coming out of Western journalism and equally annoyed by the confusion of the left. Euphoria on one side, apocalypse on the other. I was convinced that the reduction of Russian history to a narrative of tyranny and oppression was only one side of the story, that there was an equally important history of dissent and opposition that informed the actions of people like Gorbachev. I worked and reworked and reworked that thesis. It was the best work I had ever done. It will be the best work I ever do.’

  We were now all seated around the coffee table, some of us on cushions on the floor, Vince and Madeline sharing the sofa, Marie on the armchair across from them. Antony’s story was making me melancholy as I recalled that period when experience occurred in a rush, when I seemed to be learning something new every moment. There was an elation and excitement to life that Antony had reminded me of: his words were the first premonition I had that it would not always be so, that time had already passed.

  ‘I got second prize.’ Antony sculled his drink and lit a cigarette. Ingrid let him smoke inside. She too seemed lost inside her memories of that time.

  ‘I bloody came second and that knob Peter Rothscomb won with a thesis on Menzies.’ Antony’s face was so incredulous that I couldn’t stop myself bursting into laughter.

  ‘It’s not funny, mate. I was livid.’

  ‘So what did you do?’ asked Serena.

  ‘Yeah,’ Vince said. ‘How did you get your revenge?’

  It was at this point that Hande grabbed a cigarette and headed out to the balcony.

  ‘It’s okay, you can smoke in here,’ Ingrid called out to her.

  ‘It’s alright,’ Hande replied, ‘I can hear everything from here.’

  Antony was blushing now. I felt for him. Hande’s reaction had unnerved him and it was clear he was reluctant to continue.

  ‘Go on, Ant,’ Hande’s voice rang clearly from the balcony. ‘Tell them.’

  He took a deep breath. ‘I fucked Sally St John.’

  ‘Who?’ Serena didn’t know that crowd.

  Vince’s laugh was loud and coarse and abrupt. ‘You fucked her? When?’

  ‘At her hens’ night.’

  We all exploded into laughter. Even Hande, her back against the balcony rail, watching us all, even she was trying hard not to smile.

  ‘Who the fuck is Sally St John?’ shouted Serena.

  ‘Hon, she was this guy Peter’s fiancée. They’d been together for years,’ Ingrid explained.

  ‘Since the sandpit,’ Vince and I said simultaneously, which made us collapse into laughter again.

  Serena was shaking her head in bewilderment. ‘What were you doing at the hens’ night?’ Her face lit up in delight. ‘You were the stripper!’

  ‘No.’ Antony was laughing and blushing, stealing glances at Hande, who had stubbed out her cigarette in a pot plant, and now came back inside and sat herself next to Antony. She laid a hand on his shoulder, flicked him gently on the cheek with a long scarlet-painted fingernail.

  ‘Remember how he used to work at Mietta’s?’ Hande asked. ‘The most handsome waiter in the world? Well, Sally’s hens’ night had their dinner there before they headed out. Sally got wasted and Antony here fucked her behind the garbage cans out on the street while one of the sous-chefs kept watch. Isn’t that right, darling?’

  Serena giggled. ‘She sounds like an easy lay.’

  ‘It wasn’t the first time though?’

  It was one of those moments when the sound of the traffic on the streets below seemed to cut out at exactly the point when a track on the CD fell to a close.

  ‘What do you mean?’ Hande demanded of Vince, her voice furious.

  ‘It was a question,’ he answered, holding up his hands defensively. ‘I assumed that if she fell into his arms so easily there was previous history there.’

  ‘There wasn’t, alright?’ Antony growled.

  ‘I didn’t mean anything by it. I just knew that she and your sister were friends. They went to the same school, didn’t they?’

  ‘They weren’t friends, they were classmates.’

  ‘My apologies then. I was only asking.’

  The tension that had seized us all was broken by Hande’s hearty laugh. She shook her head and leaned across the coffee table to clink Vince’s wineglass with her own. ‘Well spotted,’ was all she said.

  Antony had the good grace to blush, then threw up his hands. ‘Okay, okay,’ he confessed. ‘We might have fooled around as teenagers, but we never had sex. But I knew she liked me and I might have—yes, I might have played on those feelings that night.’ He grinned proudly and began rolling another joint. ‘What can I say? I’m irresistible.’

  We all groaned at this and Hande playfully smacked the top of his head with a cushion.

  ‘Who’s next?’

  Serena’s hand shot up at Ingrid’s question. ‘Me, me. I want to go next.’

  Serena was one of those people who couldn’t relate a story or tell a joke without falling into fits of giggling. If the anecdote wasn’t funny she would sometimes fall silent in mid-sentence, collect her thoughts and then continue. The result was that everyone felt the need to encourage her when she took the floor; her lack of confidence coupled with her sincerity and kindness meant that we all felt great goodwill towards Serena. It was a relief for all of us that she was willing to be the next player. For one, we knew that her story wouldn’t make anyone uncomfortable as Antony’s story had: she would never deliberately embarrass Ingrid. Also—and I am sure I was not alone in this—I was desperately trying to think of a story to tell which would be sufficiently daring to compete with Antony’s revelations. As a child I once snapped off the head of my sister’s most beloved doll in retaliation for her dobbing on me when I’d accidentally broken a crystal vase playing footy in the sunroom, something which was explicitly forbidden. But that was so prosaic and uninteresting. Should I make something up instead?

  ‘Who is it?’

  Madeline’s question snapped me to attention. Serena was telling us about someone she knew and refused to name, who was a writer and married to another writer. Now Antony was urging her to divulge the woman’s name.

  ‘I’m not going to tell you that.’

  ‘So we do all know her,’ he concluded.

  Serena, giggling, glanced over at Ingrid, who quickly shook her head.

  ‘No,’ said Serena with finality. ‘I’m not telling. You don’t know her personally, though you all know her by reputation. Anyway, that’s not important. As I said, she’s older than us, was just about to turn forty when her husband confessed to an affair with a mutual friend. Shell-shocked, as you would be, she decided to accept an invitation to a high school reunion. Usually she would hate going to such a thing but she was feeling shitty, broken-hearted, and the last place she wanted to be was home . . .’

  ‘Had they split up?’

  Serena shook her head at my question. ‘No, but her husband had just confessed, and she felt gutted and in no state to make a decision. Anyway, she attends the reunion, gets drunk and ends up sleeping with a man she had a crush on when she was at school.’ Serena took a sip of her wine. ‘From what she told us he was a typical suburban jock, handsome in a blokey way, and now working as a tradie of some sort. His wife wasn’t at the reunion, she was back at home in the city minding the kids, so our friend ends up back at his hotel room and they fuck their brains out for two days before she goes home.’

  ‘Where was the reunion?’

  The tip of Serena’s tongue slipped through her teeth and licked at her upper lip. It was a habit of hers, something she did whenever she was anxious or unsure. To this day this is the image of her I carry with me, the pink tongue worrying at her top lip.

  ‘I don’t know, I can’t remember.’ She giggled again. ‘Somewhere in the country? Anyway, that’s not important.’

  ‘Is that it?’ Vince rolled his eyes. ‘That’s not much of a revenge story.’

  �
��No, no, no! I haven’t finished.’ Serena had become so excited she was jiggling up and down in her seat. ‘So she gets home, tells her husband everything, they fight, they scream at one another, they cry, they make up and all is finally forgiven . . .’

  ‘Yeah right . . .’

  ‘Six months later there’s a short story competition in the Age,’ Serena’s words spill over Madeline’s objection, ‘and her husband submits a story that gets published.’ Serena paused, her eyes shining. ‘This is where it gets interesting. She opens the newspaper on Saturday morning, her husband hasn’t said a word to her that he’s submitted the story, he wants it to be a surprise . . .’

  ‘Remember,’ Ingrid interrupted, ‘this friend of ours is a writer as well.’

  ‘Shut up, shut up,’ Serena wailed. ‘This is my story.’ She paused again, to make sure we were all listening. ‘So she starts reading her husband’s story . . .’

  ‘Wait, wait.’

  Serena frowned at Hande. ‘What?’

  ‘Where’s the husband?’

  ‘Jesus, I don’t know. In the kitchen? Taking a slash?’

  ‘But he is there?’

  ‘Yeah, of course . . . will you all just shut up and let me finish? He’s there. So she begins reading and it’s a story about a man who on his fortieth birthday is told by his wife that she has been having an affair with a mutual friend. He’s upset—very upset. His high school reunion is coming up and he decides to go. He goes, he gets drunk and hits on a girl he used to have a crush on. She’s married, with kids, leading a very suburban life. They fuck like rabbits and then he comes home and tells his wife. They fight, they argue, they cry, they make up. Our friend finishes reading that story.’

  We had all fallen quiet. Serena sat back with a jubilant grin on her face.

  ‘My God,’ exclaimed Madeline. ‘What did your friend do?’ At this point Serena started laughing so hard, so convulsively, that we couldn’t help but all laugh ourselves. She couldn’t speak. She pointed at Ingrid. ‘Finish it, finish it,’ she managed to stammer out. Ingrid wrapped her girlfriend in her arms and took over the story.

  ‘She doesn’t say a word to her bloke. Or maybe she says something like, good story, congratulations. She’s cool, pretends to be unconcerned. But she gets up and goes to his study, climbs up on his desk and proceeds to take a dump right over his keyboard and his computer. She shits and pisses all over his desk.’

  There was stunned silence for a moment—even Serena had gone quiet, looking at all of us expectantly—then the moment was broken by Vince loudly clapping.

  ‘Now that,’ he said, ‘is great revenge.’

  Hande was clapping too. ‘Good on her. Bravo, bravo. That’s exactly what the creep deserved.’

  ‘Why?’ It was Marie.

  We all turned to her in surprise.

  ‘Don’t look at me like that. Why did he deserve it?’

  ‘Because the prick stole her story,’ Vince said through clenched teeth.

  Marie shrugged. ‘That’s what writers do, they steal stories. She’s a writer, she knows that.’

  ‘No, no.’ Hande had crossed her arms. ‘He betrayed her.’

  ‘Oh, come on,’ Marie groaned. ‘What probably pissed her off is that she didn’t write the story first. Women do that all the time. We think that because we’re in a relationship we shouldn’t compete.’ I remember how furious she seemed as she spoke, how her voice rose, that she wiped away spittle from the edge of her mouth. ‘She’s an artist involved with another artist. She can’t run away from competition. She just can’t.’ Possibly aware that we remained unconvinced, she lowered her voice. ‘I understand her reaction. Her husband should have told her about the story, shown it to her before it was printed. But I’m not going to blame her husband for writing it. That was his right.’

  I was looking at Vince while she spoke; I couldn’t read his face. He had no idea I was so focused on him. He was staring intently at Marie.

  Serena reached over and took the joint from Antony. ‘But you have to admit, it is a great revenge story.’

  Vince was now nodding his head slowly. Suddenly he looked over at me. His eyes were gleaming. ‘It is a terrific story, revenge on revenge on revenge.’ He nodded once more. ‘And I do believe that Marie is right.’ He raised his glass to her. ‘Everything is fair in love and art.’

  His comment unsettled us all. I lowered my eyes to the floor.

  Ingrid tittered nervously. ‘Who’s next?’

  She looked across at Madeline, who shook her head violently. ‘Not me, not me, I can’t think of anything.’

  At that precise moment I looked up and saw that Vince was about to speak. But before the words could come I heard Mark’s voice. ‘I’ll go next.’

  Mark was on his knees, scanning the CD collection on the shelves. He pulled out a disc, slotted it into the player, then came and sat beside me. His knee lightly touched mine and as it did so I knew immediately the story he was going to tell. I knew it so well I could have told it myself.

  He had first told it to me when we had just started sleeping together. It was in what is lazily described as the ‘honeymoon period’. But it is not a honeymoon, it is not a holiday. It is the ardour of love, it is sweat and labour and exertion, it is boundless energy, when lovers are consumed by the project of understanding one another, discovering one another, of forging union, when every inch of the lover’s body is new territory to be discovered and claimed, when their scent is as necessary to one’s life as air, the time when the rest of the world vanishes and all those things that once seemed important no longer matter: not friends, not family, not work, not study, not sleep, not food; when what matters most is their eyes, their smell, their skin. He had told it to me after a night of making love. We were smoking cigarettes in bed, waiting for sleep or waiting for the dawn. In that act of narration his story had become my story as well, one of those acts that bonded us to one another; but I am being honest when I write that his divulging it to our friends did not make me feel betrayed or jealous. They too were part of our lives, and it seemed to me that in telling it to them all, with me beside him, Mark was further cementing our union. I think this was what his knee glancing mine was all about. I had never loved Mark more than I did at that moment; I was never so proud of him.

  Before we became lovers Mark had been living in a flat in North Fitzroy for three years. It was basic, one bedroom, with a tiny kitchen. But though it was poky and unattractive, he was loath to move out. It was, for all its shortcomings, home. The apartments were across the road from a park and in the middle of that park was a toilet block that was a notorious homosexual beat. Not long after Mark had first moved into the flat, a middle-aged man was viciously bashed in one of the cubicles. When he was discovered he was in a coma, a sleep from which he never recovered. The police found his killer, a young father in his twenties who was arrested and charged with murder. When the case came to trial the defence lawyers argued that their client’s assault had been precipitated by the dead man’s soliciting of him at the urinal. Mark became obsessed by the trial, took the tram into the city every day to sit in on the deliberations. It could have been me, he would always say, I used to go across to that beat on a weekly basis, it could have been me bashed and left dying on that concrete slab, it could have been me that bastard punched and kicked and pissed on. In the end, the killer pleaded guilty to manslaughter with diminished responsibility. It may seem strange now that such a cruel crime could lead to such a verdict, but it occurred at a time when sexual minorities had not long been demanding a space within mainstream culture; and the law, being the law, being slow and cautious, took pity on a father. The killer walked away with a suspended sentence.

  ‘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 in
justice. 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.’