7 ½ E-Book

Christos Tsiolkas

• Herausgeber: Atlantic Books
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2022

Beschreibung

A man arrives at a house on the coast to write a book. Separated from his lover and family and friends, he finds the solitude he craves in the pyrotechnic beauty of nature, just as the world he has shut out is experiencing a cataclysmic shift. The preoccupations that have galvanised him and his work fall away and he becomes lost in memory and beauty. He begins to tell us a story ... A retired porn star who is made an offer he can't refuse for the sake of his family and future. So he returns to the world he fled years before, all too aware of the danger of opening the door to past temptations and long-buried desires. Can he resist the oblivion and bliss they promise? A breathtakingly audacious novel by the acclaimed author of The Slap and Damascus about finding joy and beauty in a raging and punitive world, about the refractions of memory and time and, most subversive of all, the mystery of art and its creation.

Leseprobe

Also by Christos Tsiolkas

Loaded

Jump Cuts

The Jesus Man

The Devil’s Playground

Dead Europe

The Slap

Barracuda

Merciless Gods

Damascus

First published in Australia in 2021 by Allen & Unwin.

First published in hardback in Great Britain in 2022 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christos Tsiolkas, 2022

The moral right of Christos Tsiolkas to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act of 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.

This novel is entirely a work of fiction. The names, characters and incidents portrayed in it are the work of the author’s imagination. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

Every effort has been made to trace or contact all copyright-holders. The publishers will be pleased to make good any omissions or rectify any mistakes brought to their attention at the earliest opportunity.

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A CIP catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Hardback ISBN: 978 1 83895 565 6

E-book ISBN: 978 1 83895 566 3

Printed in Great Britain

Atlantic Books

An imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd

Ormond House

26–27 Boswell Street

London WC1N 3JZ

www.atlantic-books.co.uk

For Wayne van der Stelt

Novels are not humanitarian reports. Indeed, let us be thankful that there remains sufficient cruelty, without which beauty could not be.

JEAN GENET, MIRACLE OF THE ROSE

The burst of birdsong is set in motion by their flight. An arc of white rises into the sky, a family of cockatoos swooping and then descending onto the eucalypts. Abruptly and in unison their squawking ceases, replaced by the calls of lorikeets. I turn away from the forest canopy, half close my eyes, and I can hear the melodic warble of the honeyeater, its song as tender and consoling as the purring of bees. It is an hour till sunset and the sky is aglow with magnificent slants of light. The inlet waters shimmer and beyond is the defiant blue of the ocean. This is an eastern sea. It fades slowly into night and awakens magnificent and overpowering in the morning.

I pour a wine. I light a cigarette. The computer sits on the long hardwood table of the deck. I walk over to it, finger the pad and turn it off. I am in no mood for writing this evening.

There is no silence, even after night’s descent. Darkness spreads across water and mountain, the bird cries subside to be replaced by the mechanical scrape and beat of cicadas. Their stridency is muted this night; it doesn’t rise and crash in deafening waves, it does not last long. The dark captures the world. Only out in the far reaches of the ocean is there a waning line of light.

So, it isn’t that I sit in silence, but near enough. The electronic sensor is activated and if I were to move suddenly, the outside deck would be flooded with artificial light. It is only when the black night dazzles with stars that I realise I have been still for an age. The globe has turned, and I have been lost in this fixity. The ignored cigarette in the ashtray has burnt to the filter. With that recognition I move and abrasive yellow light fills my vision.

This house I have rented for the fortnight is comfortable, with a large wooden deck that stretches over the well-manicured English-styled garden below. There is a narrow galley kitchen, expertly constructed so that there is a surprising amount of storage space, and the stove is only a few years old. The main bedroom is of a good size and off the deck with a sliding glass door that opens the room to the breeze and to the ocean’s roar. A mesh screen offers protection for the sleeper and the dreamer. The house itself is built from the ubiquitous industrial red brick that dominated the architecture of Australia’s twentieth century. It is not an ostentatious house. There is a further bedroom, and also a study.

Two short flights of stairs descend from the deck to the garden. There is an annexe built there below, and the owners have made a granny flat out of this cellar space. I have deliberately left my phone down there. That way I only need to check it at most twice a day. Also, it means that I am less tempted to use the internet connection on the phone to pair with my laptop. I can control the ubiquity of digital information that flows into my consciousness.

I light another cigarette, and this time I concentrate on the rough hit of the smoke as it fills my lungs. I am approaching fifty-five this year and I have decided to limit myself to five cigarettes a day. This is only my third and I won’t have any more tonight.

No, I might have one more. Straight after dinner.

I have brought a cluster of DVDs with me, and a small stash of books. I may not watch anything at all. I might lie in bed and read. In the fridge is a kingfish fillet from the fishmonger below the bridge and a slice of blueberry tart that I bought with some sourdough from the bakery in Cann River, where I stopped for lunch. Clearly, I am not roughing it. Yet there is an almost mischievous defiance in not having the phone nearby, to have already begun my disappearing from the world.

The birds have fallen quiet. There are the croaking burps of frogs. I stub out my cigarette and go into the kitchen to make dinner.

*

I have come here to write a book. I don’t know yet exactly what it will be. I do know this: I don’t want it to be about politics; I don’t want it to be about sexuality; I don’t want it to be about race; I don’t want it to be about gender. Not history, nor morality and not about the future. All of those matters—politics, sexuality, race, history, gender, morality, the future—all of them now bore me.

Of course, they haven’t always bored me. And I may one day find myself once again animated and agitated by such things. I still read history and will always love to imagine the currents and sentiments that connect us to past worlds and peoples, as well as trying to fathom the chasms in consciousness and belief that separate us irrevocably from that past. But I doubt very much that I will ever again be engaged or captivated by capital-H History or capital-P Politics. I no longer have faith in the elementary forward thrust of culture and humanity. I have become deeply suspicious of capital-P Progress.

It is treacherous being a writer; it would be so much more simple and desirable to be a musician or even a painter. The abstract is essential to the former and liberating for the latter. With writing, with words, one is always bound to language, and to the imperative for language in the Western and European consciousness to extol progress and to endorse teleology and to revere reason. Even now I feel an imperative for declaration and revelation: before I can begin my work, I must confess my apostasy.

So, here goes.

I am suspicious of the homogenising effect of globalisation and cosmopolitanism and I suspect that ingrained in every manifestation of those worldviews is a rapacious greed for the material over the spiritual. I wish to be—and try to be—a universalist in every human exchange; yet what I truly long for is the specific and the local. In essence, I am egalitarian in my hopes and conservative when it comes to the immutability of human nature. I think the right wing’s cataclysmic failure has been its entanglement with the vilest of racist dogma and the equally cataclysmic failure of the left has been its derision of the notions of individual freedom and of independent thought. A pox on both their fucking houses.

Will that do?

I hope that the exploration I undertake while writing this book will stumble towards some kind of doubt. I have abandoned my belief in certainty. The only answers I desire now are those cast in doubt.

These choices—to abandon the city for a fortnight and drive up the coast road and keep a distance from the snares of digital technology—are part of a retreat I feel I must make in order to divine what I wish to do with this vocation called writing. I have a friend who I can imagine now staring over my shoulder as I type and crossing her arms and snorting, ‘Just tell a fucking good story.’ It is good advice for a novel, but I am not sure whether it is a novel that I want to write. I admire my friend’s challenge: you are a writer and therefore a storyteller; write a fucking good story. Yet I can imagine other equally good friends peering at the computer screen, already feeling dismay or contempt for what I have written. But their opprobrium is neither unsettling nor challenging.

I do want to write a good story. But I no longer trust the judgements of my age. The critic now assesses the writer’s life as much as her work. The judges award prizes according to a checklist of criteria created by corporations and bureaucrats. And we writers and artists acquiesce, fearful of a word that might be misconstrued or an image that might cause offence. I read many of the books nominated for the globalised book prizes; so many of them priggish and scolding, or contrite and chastened. I feel the same way about those films feted at global festivals and award ceremonies. It’s not even that it is dead art: it’s worse, it’s safe art. Most of them don’t even have the dignity of real decay and desiccation: like the puritan elect, they want to take their piety into the next world. Their books and their films don’t even have the power to raise a good stench. The safe is always antiseptic.

Is there God in that sky? Instead of looking up at the darkening sky above me, I close my eyes.

•

I am in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Burnley Street, Richmond, in downtown Melbourne. I am not yet five years of age. I am dressed in a light-grey boy’s suit, a three-buttoned jacket and knee-length shorts. My shirt is white and I am wearing the clip-on black bow tie my father attached to the collar as he helped me dress that morning. Am I holding my younger brother’s hand as we push through the crowd? In my memory it is so.

The clearest impression is of the crowd. There are so many bodies climbing the steps to enter the church, ready to toss coins into the collection box, to grab and light the yellow wax candles and place them carefully and proudly in the sandbox. All I can see are the backs of the men, in their white or pale blue shirts, the outline of their singlets visible beneath, or the sombre palettes of their suit jackets. The women are dressed in a blaze of colours, and I stare up at the strange bouffant sculpting of their hair. The jumble of long skirts and shirts and trousers and jackets and shawls. I am comforted by my father’s presence behind me; he has one hand on my shoulder and is guiding me deftly through the crowd. My mother’s face is clear and genial, her dark sweep of hair falls around her shoulders as she turns back, looks down, finds us and smiles. Then she drops coins into the slot of the collection box, takes four candles and hands one each to my brother and me, and one to my father. Then my father lifts me as my mother cradles my brother, and with my father’s hands holding me high, I proudly bring my candle to the flame of another, watch its wick catch fire, then plant it firmly in the sandbox. Will my candle remain alight or will it burn out? And what malevolence or misery will be augured if the flame is not sustained? But the candle burns and my father twirls me around and now I am at the shoulder-height of the crowd and I can see the thin black and grey ties of the men; their unshaven faces, their dark olive skins; and the powdered faces of the women, the carefully applied beauty spots and the faint hint of scandalous lipstick. I am high above the old grandmothers, stooped and tiny, so high above them that I can see the thinning scalps of those whose heads are not covered with thick black cloth. There are balding old men with sparse coils of white hair on their napes or temples. The bald spots terrify me because they are ugly; bruises, spots and blue veins are visible, and awful puckered skin.

And then I am swung across to where the icons are placed and my father holds my face over the silver leaf-embossed visage of the Holy Mother and the Holy Child. The glass frame is dirty and smudged with the imprints of countless lips and kisses, and there are droplets of moisture—I know it is spit—and I don’t want to kiss it because I think it dirty, and if it were only my father with us I know he would let me blow air onto the smeared glass surface so my lips wouldn’t have to touch it, but my mother is there as well and she demands loyalty to our faith and to our God, so my father gently, reluctantly—I can sense his aversion—pushes my face towards the icon and I kiss it quickly, and as quickly I turn away. My father settles me back on the ground.

And now, the crowd separates into two. There are the men to one side of me, which I call my writing hand side, for I am not yet confident to claim left or right, and the women go to the other side. It isn’t cloth and fabric, hair and height that I notice now. It is the intensity of smell. The smoky odour of the burning candles; the sharp spice-waft of the incense. The hair oil, the perfume, the cologne, the sweat. The aromas have taken on a physical force and I can feel them all around me, sense them settling on my skin. The church is now as much liquid as it is air. I am swimming among the smells.

I look up to see God in the sky. God is aged, the oldest of old men, and his countenance is stern but not frightening. His beard and hair are a sea of white. On the walls the saints are depicted in dark and sober colours. They are strangely elongated, so they appear as emaciated giants. My first impression of the saints is that they are famished, and I am concerned for their health. But these grim and forbidding women and men can’t hold my attention for long. Surrounding them are depictions from the Bible, and I have already been told some of these stories: I know the Flood, I know the Garden and about our expulsion from it—and these tableaux have been painted in vibrant and glorious colour. The shade of the sea engulfing Noah’s Ark is a shimmering amethyst and Eve’s skin is a luminous auburn. These colours do not exist in the world around me and so I think of them as ancient. The mesmerising scenes and the people depicted on the ceiling—they are all gone. Except for God. He is real. At the centre of the church’s dome, God’s face is incandescent. He is watching it all. He is watching me.

Is it possible that even at this tender young age I had a premonition of sin? I knew shame. I saw that God was watching me and knew that I was tempted by the shaved skin of the men I had looked down on when I was hoisted in my father’s arms. I stared across to where a young man, bored, yawning, was scratching his forehead and in doing so he half turns, catches me looking at him and he winks, and as it is summer he has his suit jacket draped over his arm and the white sleeves are folded up to his forearms and the skin is dark and I want to kiss it. I knew that I wanted to kiss it. I wanted to know what it would feel like to rub my lips across the fine black hairs on that arm.

The priest’s resounding chanting makes me look away. I don’t look up but I know that God is looking down at me. My brother is swinging his feet, banging them against the wood of the pew in front—until a man swings around and orders, ‘Stop!’ Terrified, my brother freezes.

My father’s hands immediately land on each of our shoulders. We look up at him. He points to the back of the sullen man who rebuked my brother, then, wickedly, our father pokes out his tongue. My brother and I are laughing.

This is one of my earliest memories. It is infused with smell and sensation, with touch and the nascent stirring of the erotic.

•

Everything begins with the erotic.

The next morning, waiting for my coffee to brew, I go out to the deck. I sit there with my eyes closed, enjoying the warm touch of the sun, my hands behind my head and my body stretched out in the wooden chair. There is the beginning quiver of an itch at the base of my left nostril. My body still half-asleep, I lower my face to the top of my arm and scratch the itch, at the same time inhaling the strong and pungent smell of my armpit. My eyes open, the blinding flash of the sun shuts them tight again. My arm drops and I no longer have any awareness of the odour. It is the strangest thing, as if my scent does not belong to me. As if it is another’s perfume. I look down at the three cigarette butts in the ashtray from the night before, recoil from the stale stink. At that moment the coffee pot begins to wheeze, and I rush to the kitchen.

I have a routine most mornings consisting of a series of push-ups and sit-ups, stretches and exertions, to counter the inevitable sag of my ageing body. I stretch out on the living room floor and I begin.

With the first gasp as I lunge forward, the whiff of my night sweat returns, the scent now commingling with the acrid perfume of the coffee and that lingering hint of cigarette ash. I lie on the floor and again bring my face to my perspiring armpit. I inhale deeply. My nostrils flare and I allow myself to sink into the smell. Of sweat, of coffee, and of cigarettes. In Greek, I hear the words, ‘Tell me all about your day, my child.’

•

Until I went to school, we shared our home with a couple, George and Irene, and a young bachelor called Stavros. They were all immigrants from Greece. My family—my parents, myself and my brother—shared the first bedroom, the middle one was rented by Stavros, and the third bedroom belonged to George and Irene. My mother and Irene worked at a biscuit factory by the river in Richmond, the working-class neighbourhood in which I was born and spent my childhood. A twenty-minute stroll from our home would bring you to the very centre of the city.

Many years later, I asked my father whether he and Stavros worked together, and he shook his head. Neither he nor my mother told me that he and Stavros had met gambling, but something in my mother’s sardonic smile when talking of him has always made me think this must have been the case. Richmond was full of Greek cafes and gambling dens, and it was to these places that my father would retire for relaxation after work. Pubs back then had to adhere to Protestant hours, and, in any case, my father was not much of a drinker. The women, of course, had to stay at home.

I close my eyes and I can smell Stavros. The sharp sweetness of the cigarettes he smoked. The rank, almost shockingly potent smack of his sweat, especially when he’d just got back from work, starting to strip out of his dirty blue overalls as soon as he was in the door. The sting of the apple-scented cologne he used. Each of those intoxications can return to me effortlessly through the decades that have passed since I last saw him. I can see a tumbler of red wine in his hand; over lunch or on one of those late Saturday night dinners when our kitchen was full of people: the women bustling and gossiping and singing while they were preparing the food, the men also lost in gossip, and very soon the ashtrays would be spilling over with ash and butts, and the discarded shells of cracked pistachio nuts. At some point, my father or George or Stavros would rise, put a 45 rpm single on the turntable in the lounge room—I can still see the scarlet insignia of the Attikon label and the black lettering of the Odeon song company; I haven’t forgotten any of them—and at the first strum of a familiar chord my mother would call out, ‘Turn it up! Turn it up!’, and there at the basin, alongside Irene and my aunt Diamanda and our neighbours Stella and Maria—the adults were all aunts and uncles to me; in this new country we were all kin—my mother would start singing and the men would clap along. No one would clap harder and longer than Stavros.

His thumb and finger would expertly crack open the pistachios and flick the kernel to his mouth. I tried to imitate him, but I could never master his insouciance, no matter how much I practised while sitting on the black-and-white-checked lino floor as the women cooked and my mother scolded me for wasting precious nuts. I will never forget him coming home, me rushing to the hallway when I heard his step on the front porch, him in half-shadow, shrugging off his overalls, the front flaps falling to his waist. Me running into his arms and him holding me high, so high that sometimes it seemed impossible that my head would not slam that ceiling, but it never did, it never did, and I was not frightened because I trusted Stavros, and him hugging me close and rubbing his face in mine and saying, ‘Boy! Boy! Let me wash—how can you bear this stink?’ But I did not care. That emanation from his body, its wetness and its sourness, it was the most delicious marvel of my child’s life. He’d put me down and I’d follow him to the outhouse, a clumsy lean-to built from rusting corrugated-iron sheets that was both toilet and bathroom, always cold in winter and always sweltering in summer, and I’d watch him fill the basin with water, the bib of his overalls still falling, his singlet damp and tight against his hard torso, as he bent to wash his face and his neck and his arms and his hands and underneath his armpits, and the shock of thick, black, wet hair there always gave me a jolt. Then, when he was finished, I’d faithfully trail after him back into the house.

I’d have followed him anywhere. There was a joke among the adults: ‘Christo would follow Stavros to the bog and watch him take a shit if he didn’t block the door with his foot.’ And though the joke was meant to be good-humoured, it would always make Stavros frown, and he would respond—only to me, kneeling or squatting so we were eye to eye—‘Don’t listen to them, boy, they are jealous.’ And any disquiet I had felt from the hint of meanness in the teasing vanished; of course they were jealous. He had taught me an early and vital lesson: that the world is jealous of love.

So I’d follow him back to his room and I would sit on the bed and watch him strip off his singlet and finally remove his overalls, and the curls on his chest and belly were dark and his skin was the colour of honey and the underwear he wore was thick, ill-fitting and unattractive; and it is only now, years later, that I understand it was handwoven and homemade, spun and stitched together by his mother or his sisters in the Balkan mountain village he had come from. Standing in front of the small shaving mirror on the dresser, he would carefully measure out a few drops from a bottle of cologne—always so careful in his use of that treasured bottle—and he would slap a few drops on his neck, on his chest and underneath his arms. Then he’d open a drawer, select a fresh singlet that my mother had washed and ironed for him, and put it on. Then, and only then, he’d reach for his cigarettes, sit down next to me on the bed, pull me affectionately onto his lap and say, quietly and with gravity, ‘Tell me all about your day, my child.’

My face in his chest hairs, so soft on my cheeks. My nose slowly, daringly, even then intuiting that this was a transgression, searching and wanting to inhale the odour under his arms, the perspiration only subtly veiled by the soap and dabs of cologne; and the strength and swooning safety of his arm around me.

He’d smoke, listening to my prattle, then kiss me on the top of my head. He’d hoist me off his lap, sniffing the air and patting his stomach, winking while giving the ultimate Greek compliment: ‘Your mother cooks as well as mine does!’

From the moment of his shadow in the corridor to the final butting out of his cigarette in his room, no one else existed: not my parents or my brother, not my aunt Irene or my uncle George. The world consisted only of Stavros and me.

•

I finish my sit-ups. The coffee has cooled and I sip the last of it with distaste. Two lorikeets screech, swoop and dive as I walk down the narrow stairs to the room below. There is the stinging clout of the sun on the back of my neck—it will be a very warm day. My phone is sitting on the small square coffee table. I glance at it and smile. A text, loving and brief, from Simon, my lover. I will call him tonight. And a missed call from Andrea, who has left a message.

I make sure not to look at anything else, not to enter the world. No news, I want nothing of news.

The world is not just myself, nor just me and Simon. The world is not just a memory of Stavros. The world is greater than all that. And I don’t want it.

I wipe Andrea’s message. As if I am deleting the world.

I have to force myself to ignore the lure of the phone, force myself to follow the sun. Nothing better exemplifies the perversity of our present age than the fact that I have to will myself to shun it. The digital intrusion wrought by the phone has shattered my equilibrium. There was no urgent demand in the message; Andrea had simply rung to say that she had heard I was there and, given that she was only an hour or so down the road, should we catch up? But as I delete the message, my action inadvertently opens a browser window and the news of the world floods in. A race riot in America. And possibly a responding one in Australia? Some sexual scandal and impropriety involving a media financier. Is he Brazilian or French? An opinion piece on the misunderstood subversion of 1990s bling culture. Without even noticing, I’m scrolling through the feed of headlines. Realising the idiocy of what I am doing, I switch off the phone.

I am out of breath. The poison of white noise has entered my head. Surely I need to read more about the race riot? Surely. Yet I don’t. I know what will be said about it and, even if I agree with the righteousness of the sentiments, I will be nauseated by the smugness and the puritanical zeal with which they are pronounced.

I will force myself to follow the sun. I drop the phone back onto the table.

I had said to Simon that I wanted to leave my phone behind when I came on this retreat. He responded that I would kick myself if I then found myself in trouble—say, the car didn’t start one morning, or I slipped and sprained an ankle on a walk and was unable to get help or contact him. In the end, I brought it along. But I have resolved to keep it at a far remove: to make it a physical effort to retrieve it.

I lock the back door, slap some sunscreen over my face and neck and arms, stride up the drive to the street and begin my walk. I head down the hill that leads to the inlet. Andrea’s message is forgotten. The image of an enraged face at a protest; that too is gone.

The surface of the water is alive, all dazzling play and wavering light flashing silver and sapphire, producing an almost absurd rush of joy in me.

The tide is low and a brinish scent rises from the mangroves. The graceful slope of the mountain in the distance is a deep lavender in the play of light, a fragile cirrus shrouding its twin peaks. Apart from those wisps of white, the heavens are one vast blue stratum.

I cross the path under the bridge and walk the length of the boardwalk. Stepping onto the sodden planks that lead to the beach I take off my sandals and carry them to the water’s edge. Now the skies have a rival for my attention: the tumble and roar of the waves, the chant from the ocean. There are a few solitary figures at the far end of the beach; their dogs leap and bark and retreat from the waves. In the bobbing swell, four surfers are lying patiently on their boards, waiting for the next set: they are stabs of black oil paint on the overexposed whiteness and cyan of sky and water. There is a young woman lying on a scarlet towel, her skin glistening from tanning oil, large sunglasses shading her eyes. Her left hand lies straight and palm up beside her body; the other clutches her phone.

Had I been anxious, resentful, such a short time ago up at the house? Resentful of that other world coming in, that world of capitalised demands: Politics and Meaning and Justice? Now I feel foolish that I had let it bother me; in the sensual beat of sun on my eyes and cheeks, from the splendid, bracing chill as the waves run across my feet, a chill that only lasts a minuscule bite of a second before I am immersed to my waist and my body adjusts to the water and it is no longer cold but as refreshing to my flesh as spring water is to thirst. I look out to the horizon, and I have to raise my hand to shield my eyes; it’s not yet mid-morning and the sun is already blazing. A dog barks, as if indeed animals are blessed with a connection to the natural world lost to us trapped in self-consciousness; in that glint of time between me raising my hand and the dog’s bark, a significant change has taken place on the water: a swell is building, rushing in from the far depths. The barks are joined by faint cries from the surfers. They are alert on their boards now, and are paddling further out. One of the surfers turns and is on a wave, and before I can blink she is standing, as exquisite and simple a figure as those painted on walls by archaic man, and she rides the wall of wave with confidence and with awe, and though again this beauty only lasts a few seconds—the wave rolls and roars and the surfer is heaved into the sky and then as quickly dumped by the ocean god—in those few seconds her nobility and prowess are such that my hand rises to my chest and I offer a thanksgiving. I have seen something exquisite, something elemental.

Is it any wonder that those who live outside cities, on mountains or on plains or in valleys or on naked stretches of coast, is it any wonder that they are by nature conservative? Not that revolutions and annihilations can’t be wrought by famished or humiliated and betrayed farmers and peasants. But they won’t seek to change the Eternal.

I realise I have betrayed my peace, and I am lost in my own head.

I concentrate on the line of surfers, all now chasing the waves. To shake the wearisome thoughts that have entered my head, I turn my back to the surfers and start walking along the beach.

The damp sand shifts beneath my feet. I walk as far as the rock cliffs at the northern edge of the beach, then climb the weathered stairs to the hill overlooking the ocean. As I begin the slight climb away from the beach, the heat intensifies and I start to sweat. My odours mingle with the sweet smell of the sunscreen, the tang of brine all around me. I rub the sand off my feet along the grass, flicking it off my heels and calves with my towel, and put on my sandals. All I can feel is thirst. I find a water fountain and I drink uncouthly, the water dripping and drenching my chin and the front of my shirt. I keep drinking, hungrily and greedily, till I am sated.

I look up. At beauty. There is the beauty that is the Eternal, cognate to the natural world. And then there is the beauty that is discrete and exists only in the gaze bestowed on the one who possesses it. A son is helping his father prepare a boat for the water. The youth is sublime. The father is also good-looking, a little extra flesh on the jowls, a plumpness at his midriff. His hair is unkempt and falls messily over his ears to his shoulders, but his lack of concern about his appearance gives the father the most attractive of qualities: an easy masculine confidence. It is clear, even at a stolen glance, that the son will grow into the father: the same sun-touched blond hair, long limbs, and strong and elegant neck.

My glance has to be furtive. To let my stare linger for too long will betray the wantonness of my desire. This is the reality of homosexuality that all the rhetoric of liberation and the assertion of equality can never undo: that when confronted with the magnificence of heterosexual masculinity and beauty, the homosexual must submit. Even raging against the desire, perverting it, mocking it and wanting to destroy it, what traverses the rage or the perversion, the mockery or the resistance, is the indubitable power of the desired male.

In a breath, I once more take in the beauty of the son and the father, and then keep walking along the boardwalk back into town. The blare of sun mellows into dappled dashes; the placid water flowing beneath the boards is a startling jade green. For a moment a stingray, its flesh mottled black and grey, glides alongside me, slapping its wings on the surface before plunging into the depths. Though I am aware of the water and the bridge and town in the distance, of the creaking hardwood boards and the cool air along this stretch of boardwalk in the shade of the towering gums, and though I take note of the tiny silver-bellied fish darting through the water and the cormorant that dives after them, and also register further out a pod of pelicans gliding serenely on the glassy water, though I see all of this, it is the flush of desire that animates me most of all.

It is this urge to make beauty the focus of my work that has precipitated my retreat from the world and brought me here. Yet to do so I must be as a neophyte. I have been too well trained in the notion of the novel as it is celebrated in the Western world: that which is deciphered, analysed and dissected—there supposedly lies truth. The natural, sensual world lies outside the reach of arbitration and condemnation, and therefore all of it is deemed ephemera. It is the great scandal of contemporary fiction that novelists think beauty unworthy of their efforts.

I must extol that father and son whom I have just passed, who are as beautiful and fine as anything wrought by nature. I am jealously guarding the brief images I have of them; I will make of them a memory.

It is in this precise sense that beauty has a connection with the erotic; it is in resurrecting them as memory that we focus and perfect them both.

•

I am twenty-seven, I have had my heart broken, and in the misery of loss I have returned to the places of my adolescence. I want to rewrite the timidity of my youth, and in doing so reclaim the potency that has been stolen from me by being rejected in love as an adult man. So I have returned to the parks and ovals, the public swimming pool and its change rooms and toilets, where I spent my early adolescent years yearning to touch the bodies of the men and boys showering with me, pissing at the urinals beside me. I want to act on the longings that I was too frightened to pursue as a boy, to be desired again and, in the reflection of that desire, soothe the agony of a betrayed heart.

I am twenty-seven years old, and I am at the Elgar Park swimming pool. I have swum my laps, I have showered and changed, and as I leave the sports centre I do not head straight to my car but walk assuredly to the toilet block. I stand at the urinal and pretend to piss, and as I am standing there, my heart drumming with anticipation and fear, my desire more urgent because of the fear, I hear the scrape of a lock being undone and I look over my shoulder and there he is, an angel; and if that word seems hyperbolic and risible then please forgive me for that is what he is. In his paleness and his fairness, in the physical grace of his athletic body, he is what I believed in my teenage years to be the antithesis of my swarthiness and darkness, the very opposite of my flawed, repellent self. I thought myself to be the very negation of such sublime beauty. Of course I cast him in the form of purity.

And this youth, his black denim jeans fallen in a crumple around his feet, his white shirt collar unbuttoned, his eyes looking at me with both terror and anticipation, even in fear his cock erect in his fist—he was an angel, I assure you of that. And it was also clear, in the hunger of his gaze, that he wanted me. And not bothering to zip myself up, I stepped off the urinal platform and walked over to him and I grabbed the back of his head and I kissed him hard and the kiss was returned, and I was lost in him. What was remarkable was the relief I experienced as his mouth ground onto mine, as our tongues lashed together, our spit passed between us. The astounding confidence of such a kiss from someone so young; and then my hand reaching under his shirt and touching his skin and him trembling from the touch and kissing me harder and I had never touched such pale skin before, like touching light. The skin I touched was cool with his sweat, and hence the perfume of his fear and his desire, but it also boasted a union of hardness and softness that only ever belongs to the young. The hardness was the nipple and the softness was the gentle concave of his belly; the hardness of his abdomen and the softness of his buttocks. When my finger touched the soft down between his balls and his anus, he moaned; still kissing me, he moaned inside my mouth. My other hand reached lower and stroked the coils of hair at the base of his cock. I released his mouth and looked down: the hair there was fair and gold. The youth touched one finger to my cheek, and I looked up at him. His smile was tender and sad and yearning, and he whispered then, ‘Kiss me again,’ and I rose to my feet and again I grabbed the back of his head and brought his face closer to mine and it was then, looking at those pleading eyes, that I knew he was going to ask me to fuck him, and instead of waiting for that entreaty, I asked, ‘How old are you?’

‘Sixteen.’

The jeans still around his ankles. The unbuttoned white shirt: it was a school shirt.

I allowed fear to conquer desire. I hoisted my own pants, fumbled for and buckled my belt, and I pulled away from him. Or did I throw him off me? I was fearful of the world and I acted in that calamity of shame, of what the world would think, which now, so long later, I realise was a pitiful and unworthy fear: for what did I renege on in panicking and rejecting this boy? I made him ashamed of his beauty and infected him with my shame. I said something like, ‘I’m sorry, you’re too young,’ which was pathetic moralism and therefore complete falseness and he must have known it too for he looked away—I had failed him—and I slinked out of the toilet: unproud.

•

The boy assisting his father with the boat, that boy’s fairness recalls that shame to me.