Merciless Gods E-Book

Christos Tsiolkas

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

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Beschreibung

A collection of urgent, thrilling and original stories from the award-winning, bestselling author of The Slap and Barracuda. Love, sex, death, family, friendship, betrayal, tenderness, sacrifice and revelation... This incendiary collection of stories from acclaimed writer Christos Tsiolkas takes you deep into worlds both strange and familiar, and introduces you to characters that will haunt you long after you have turned the final page.

Leseprobe

Christos Tsiolkas is the author of five novels: Loaded, which was made into the feature film Head On; The Jesus Man; Dead Europe, which won the 2006 Age Fiction Prize; The Slap, which was published in 2009 and has since been published all over the world; and Barracuda. The Slap won the 2009 Commonwealth Writers’ Prize, the 2009 Australian Literary Society’s Gold Medal and was longlisted for the 2010 Man Booker Prize. Tsiolkas is also a playwright, essayist and screenwriter. He lives in Melbourne.

First published in Australia in 2014 by Allen & Unwin.

First published in Great Britain in 2015 by Atlantic Books, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd.

Copyright © Christos Tsiolkas, 2014

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 and not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or localities, is entirely coincidental.

‘Petals’ first published in Overland 216 Spring 2014

‘Hung Phat!’ first published in Below the Waterline, ed. Garry Disher, Harper Collins, 1999

‘Saturn Return’ first published in Blur, ed. James Bradley, Random House, 1996

‘Jessica Lange in Frances’ first published in Pub Fiction, ed. Leonie Stevens, Allen & Unwin, 1997

‘The Disco at the End of Communism’ first published in Brothers and Sisters, ed. Charlotte Wood, Allen & Unwin, 2009

‘Sticks, Stones’ first published in the Get Reading! collection 10 Short Stories You Must Read in 2010, The Australia Council, 2010

‘Civil War’ first published in Picador New Writing 3, eds, Drusilla Modjeska and Beth Yahp, Pan Macmillan, 1995

‘Porn 1’ first published as ‘The Pornographic Scientist’ in Readings and Writings: 40 Years in Books, eds Jason Cotter and Michael Williams, 2010

10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

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

Trade paperback ISBN: 978 1 78239 727 4

E-book ISBN: 978 1 78239 728 1

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,who has been there from the beginning

Contents

Merciless Gods

Tourists

The Hair of the Dog

Petals

Hung Phat!

Saturn Return

Genetic Material

Jessica Lange in Frances

The Disco at the End of Communism

Sticks, Stones

Civil War

The T-shirt with a Fist on it

Porn 1

Porn 2

Porn 3

Merciless Gods

I WANT TO TELL YOU A story about an evening many years ago. I hardly see anyone who was at that dinner party anymore; apart from the occasional email we have all disappeared from one another’s lives. I dare say it could be argued that our drifting away from one another is not extraordinary, that it would have occurred in the normal course of events—the raising of children, changing address, moving away, stagnating friendship—but I am certain that the events of that evening had no small role to play in the fracturing of our group.

There were nine of us seated around the table. We had been to university at the same time, some of us had worked together, we were a group of young professionals just beginning to pair off, find lovers, even think about marriage. Serena and Ingrid were the hosts that evening and the dinner was in honour of Marie, who was soon to leave for San Francisco to become an editor for a leading publisher of travel guides. I was there with Mark—we had just celebrated the first anniversary of our relationship—and there was Antony and Hande, and Madeline and Vince. We were also celebrating the news that Hande had just been accepted as a solicitor in one of the city’s major labour-law firms; we were all keen to toast her and Marie’s good fortune.

We had all dressed up for the occasion; it was the first time I had seen Mark in a suit and a tie. The women had all bought new outfits for the evening and were complimenting each other and striking model poses. The men looked debonair and rather splendid in their dinner suits and crisp white shirts. We looked as though we belonged in the elegant apartment that Serena and Ingrid had just moved into on Collins Street; their view across the illuminated cityscape was dazzling. The Cold War had only recently been relegated to history, technology was promising boundless opportunity and the recession had not long ended. Our generation was buoyant. We owned the future.

Mark nominated himself DJ that night (a beatless house track would follow Pearl Jam or the Screaming Trees—it was the season of grunge and Café del Mar compilations), Antony had scored us some ecstasy and Serena had spent the day cooking us a feast. That night was a film. We were a sophisticated art-house movie; we were chic and we were young. We were beautiful.

Though the setting was perfect it could not be said that we were all completely at ease as we popped the cork from the first bottle of champagne and filled our glasses. I think now that we never really settled that night, never quite managed to give ourselves over to the abandonment that beckoned, even with all that fine food and the elation of the stimulants and intoxicants. It seemed that the evening had begun with a faint tremor of anxiety, and somehow that sense of unease never quite retreated; we never managed to banish it. It entered our drinks and our food, we breathed it in. It was a mild early-autumn night, the breeze was cooling without chilling us, but even with the balcony doors wide open, the air in the apartment seemed inordinately heavy.

You see, although we were all there to celebrate with Marie, we also knew that she had beaten Vince for the job. Since university they had both pursued careers in publishing. Vince initially backpacked through Indonesia and started filing travel reports on Flores, Borneo, Java and Sumatra for the nascent travel-guide industry. His writing was pungent, informative and free from cant or cliché, and before long he was editing and writing the guides to Oceania and the Pacific. Marie began working as a copy editor in a small publishing collective that was riding the last dying swell of second-wave feminism. When the press folded, Vince let her know there was an opening at the company he worked for. She got the job. Good-natured rivalry had defined their professional relationship for the first few months, but none of us were surprised when it became more competitive. Vince was brilliant, sharp, quick-witted, a child of migrant factory workers who wore his entry into the bourgeoisie as both a chip on his shoulder and a badge of honour. He had a wicked temper that made him unpopular with those not seduced by his charm and intellect. He did not hide his contempt for intellectual laziness. When the position in San Francisco came up, he had applied for it and so had Marie. It was Marie, whose father was a diplomat and who was fluent in three languages, who’d got the job.