Loaded (9 page)

On the dance floor my brother is swaying clumsily, self-consciously. He hasn't drunk enough to give himself over to the
zembekiko
. Ariadne is dancing with him, making no elaborate moves so as not to embarrass him, but even
restrained her dancing is sensuous, her falls and twirls graceful; she moves in time with every painful note the band is playing. I watch them, a little embarrassed for my brother. I move to Joe's table and he asks me where I have been. Around, I tell him. Dina is pissed and holding on to his arm. We haven't seen you all night, she accuses me. Then, unexpectedly, she jolts, springs up and offers me her mouth to kiss. I kiss her gently on the lips, a kiss over in a second, but her lips feel soft against mine, warm. I sit beside her and she clutches my arm.

–Joe won't dance with me, she pouts. Joe doesn't do Greek dancing I answer.

–I know. She turns to her boyfriend and hits him hard on his chest. You should learn, she tells him in Greek. Joe, stoned, not drunk, because he is driving, gives her a smile and a long kiss. I turn away and Arno asks if I'd like a drink Joe and Dina continue being affectionate to each other and I try to have a conversation with Stav and Mary.

I ask if they're enjoying the night. They both nod in unison. Stav leans over and shouts in my ear, I hear you're looking for work. Mary leans over as well. No, I answer, I'm not looking for work. Together they lean back. Stav leans forward again and I look at Mary to see if she's going to follow but she turns her head and watches the dancing. I'm studying commerce, Stav tells me.

–What's that? Mary hears, turns back to look at me. She seems angry. Stav is flustered. He tries to explain commerce to me but I'm not listening. The band have started playing a favourite song of mine. An old song of Tsitsanis,
Cloudy Sunday
, and the singer's seductive voice fills my ears. Stav's earnest words slip away, murmurs that cannot stop my enjoyment of the song. I ask them if they want to dance and they both refuse. I turn to Dina but she's in Joe's arms, her eyes closed, humming along. I get up and as I am about to jump on the dance floor Stav yells at me, Mary is doing law. Lawyers can't dance I tell him but they don't hear.

On the dance floor I move between bodies twirling and swaying to the pain of the music. But in our motions we transform the pain into joy. The speed lifts me above the other bodies and as the chorus is repeated for the last time I fall on one knee, jump up immediately, fall on the other, twirl, fall back on my knees and jump back into a standing position. The song ends quickly and I wipe a sweaty arm across my face and sit down. You're a good dancer, Stav tells me. I thank him. Arno arrives with the drinks and I swallow from my glass.

–Do you want to study? Arno has wide, round eyes that dominate his thin face. No, mate, I tell him, I don't want to study and no, I don't want to work. Joe gets up from the table. Ari, he says, you're a dickhead. I take another swallow of whisky. His words hurt me, there is a stab right down in my gut. The whisky reaches that spot and the pain diffuses. Joey, I answer him, you better apologise. He ignores me and heads off for the toilet. I get up and follow him.

–Fuck off. He spits the words at me. I keep following him, across the room into the toilet, and while he stands at the urinal pissing, I try to have a conversation. What have I done? I ask, trying not to plead, trying not to sound upset. He refuses to talk to me. He refuses to look at me. Someone flushes in one of the cubicles and I lower my voice and touch Joe on the shoulder.

–Man, what did I do, what did I do? Joe finishes his piss, shakes his cock, flushes and turns around to me. Grow up, fucking hell Ari, grow up. Get a job, I'm embarrassed to be seen with you. I study his face. Notice the light layer of fat forming under his chin, the small strands of wrinkles around the eyes. Get a life are his final words to me and he walks out of the toilet. A young boy comes up beside me and washes his hands at the sink. How are you doing? he asks in Greek. I don't reply, walk into a cubicle, close the door behind me, gather my fingers into a fist and smash into the cistern. The sound, a loud crash, reverberates around the
cubicle. Mad motherfucker I hear the boy say and hear him leave the toilet. Alone, smelling urine, shit and cheap cologne, I spit into the basin. Fuck you, Joe, fuck you, you cunt. The words keep repeating. Fuck you Joe, fuck you, you cunt. I repeat them twice, three times, they become a chant. I breathe in deep, get out of the cubicle, comb my hair, check myself out in the mirror, run some water across my dry lips and go back.

I watch Joe leave the pub, Dina holding onto his hand: watching an ordinary man walk out with an ordinary woman into an ordinary life.

Joe's mother went into hospital in our third year in high school. The woman flipped out, went crazy, took her Bible in one hand, an egg beater in the other, and roamed the streets of Burnley screaming that the Antichrist was coming. The news rushed through the school, there were whispers and jokes made in the locker rooms, in the
kafenio
, across the counters of the milk bars. My mother told me, and I listened wide-eyed, that the priest from the Burnley Street church tried to take her by the hand and she started pounding him with the Bible. My mother crossed herself as she told me.

In the school yard the story became embellished with adolescent lewdness. She had tried to stick the holy book in her vagina, had tried to proposition the priest, the priest accepted, they fucked on the altar. The simple story was that the woman had gone crazy. The embellishments were nursery horror stories to frighten the children and to keep the presence of insanity away. Joe's mother was normal, that was what scared everyone. An-eight-hours-a-day-factory-worker-with-two-normal-kids-and-a-fat-hard-working-wog-husband. The woman was so normal, a standard Greek wife
heading towards middle age that her craziness affected everyone who knew her. The devil made her do it. That was the comfortable answer.

Joe's father kept everyone away, kept Joe and his sister away from school. I tried to call him and the phone was answered by his aunt who promised to pass my messages on. One Saturday morning I walked over to his house, Mum made me put on a clean shirt, and knocked on the door. Three old women in black, big crosses around their necks were sitting in the lounge. Joe's father, in a bathrobe and boxer shorts, was sipping whisky and watching the cartoons. I greeted him, shifting nervously from one foot to another, and he got up, wrapped his arms around me and covered my face in stoned kisses. Behind him the three old women started a lament, cries of agony, of despair, a chorus of chants that frightened me, and I stiffened in the man's arms: washed in his alcoholic fumes; in the tears falling from his eyes. I remember his bristles biting into my cheeks. Ari, Ari, he murmured, in time to the chants, God has abandoned us. One of the old women pulled me away from him and took me into the kitchen and gave me a glass of coke. She asked after my parents, my brother, my sister, asked how school was going.

–Can I see Joe? I asked. She took me by the hand and we went into the master bedroom. Joe's mother was lying in bed, half-asleep, groaning from time to time, words in Greek that I couldn't understand. Joe was sitting beside her, holding her hand, and Betty, just a child then, was building houses of cards on the floor. She looked up, saw me and winked. Mum's still crazy, Ari, she said with a big smile. Shut up, shut up, the old woman screamed at her and slapped her across the face. The house of cards fell around Betty's feet. I sat next to Joe and looked down at his mother.

Joe's mother looked like a teenager, lying on her wet sheets, falling in and out of sleep, wrapping her hand tight around her son's fingers. I sat with Joe for half-an-hour, we
were wordless, listening to Betty's chatter, his mother's groans, the laments of the old women. I avoided Joe's face, looking at the vials of pills on the dresser, watching Betty play cards. Their mother, as they had known her, was dead. That was the reason for the laments. This beautiful young ghost in the bed had taken her place. We remained silent, remembering the dead.

When I got up to leave Joe followed me out and we sat on the verandah, smoking cigarettes, saying nothing much. People would pass the house and ask after his mother. She's fine he would answer, choking on the words, spitting out his hatred. Wogs, he muttered to me, hypocrites. I left him, wanting to go, not wanting to go, and walked home. The shops, the milk bar, the row of cottages I walked past were bathed in the light of a winter's sun. They appeared alien to me that day. I remember walking past them seeing them as if for the first time. That day I began to feel alone in this world. I walked past
Agia Triada
, the Greek church in which I had been baptised in the blood of the holy trinity and I opened the iron door and walked in. I lit a candle and crossed myself, looking for God. No one answered. Of course. I looked at the icon of the Madonna, the picture in a gold frame, and looked past her mysterious smile, noticed the cracks in the purple of her robes, noticed the lipstick marks on the glass. The Madonna was mad. She too must have been beautiful when she roamed the streets of some middle-eastern village claiming that God had deposited his sperm in her belly. I remember thinking this thought, thinking that God would strike me now, that the chandelier hanging from the church ceiling would fall on my head. Nothing stirred in the church. I touched the icon, left the building and outside spat on the church steps. I turned, gathered my fingers into a fist and smashed hard against the iron doors. Fuck you, fuck you, I muttered, going crazy myself, not sure who I was cursing.

Joe returned to school, shaved his head, became a
neighbourhood lout. They locked his mother away for a while, and his father hit the bottle with a ferocious hunger. Then the doctors took out what they thought shouldn't be in his wife's head, pumped her high with drugs and settled her back into the real world. The father gave up the booze and the cards and they moved out into the suburbs, to a neighbourhood where no one knows anybody and whatever happens in the confines of your four walls is your own business, your own pain. Joe and I would see each other every weekend, get stoned, get high together. Over at his house his mother would make me a drink, give me some cakes to eat. She moved in her world in slow motion. The little pills she took kept her safe, her eyes were empty of colour, of light. Every couple of years Joe's father would take his wife to Greece, make a trek to a valley where the Virgin was said to appear. They would drink the holy water, cross themselves, and still the woman would search through her bag to get to the little pills that kept her sane. Sanity is a chemical reaction.

I sit at a table with my brother, listening in to conversation, drumming the table in time to the music, reclining back on the seat. Peter is arguing with Ariadne, who keeps laughing at him; a deep, warm laugh. She leans close to him so that he can smell her perfume mingled with her sweat from the dance. An old man, grey haired and obese, is also arguing with my brother. Next to him, and across the table from me, a man with a beard has his arm around a young woman with round, olive eyes. We have been introduced, quickly, by my brother but I cannot hold on to their names. A married couple. The man is involved in the argument. The woman looks bored, watches the dancing. I look at my watch. It is past midnight. Soon I should leave. Meet Johnny.

The argument bores me. They are discussing the politics of the Greek community in Melbourne. Words fly around me. My brother is arguing that young people, he points at me, need to be included in the committees and councils. Ariadne disagrees violently, her words coarse and direct. Fuck the Greek community, fuck the Australian community, the Vietnamese, the Italian, the Spanish. She is arguing for a new left, of young people, artists, deviants, troublemakers from all the communities to get together. She wants something new, something radical. This country is so boring, she sighs, I wish I was back in Greece. The men around her disagree. She takes a sip of her drink and gets up to buy another. I have no interest, she tells them, in involving myself with progressive, so-called left-wing Greeks if it is the same faces, the same conservative mob of wogs, married, bourgeois, living in the suburbs, who happen to be able to spout Marx and Lenin. The woman across from me flinches. Ariadne continues: I want to be involved with the deviants, the mad, the creative, all those people that the Greek community despises, that the general Australian community despises. For Christ sake, she screams at them, communism is dead. She walks off.

The conversation continues without her. I tune out and instead watch a fat guy in too tight jeans and a too tight shirt dancing gracefully near our table. His eyes are closed, sweat is dripping down his forehead. He looks ecstatic, as if he's on drugs, but I'm sure it is just the dance.

Ariadne returns and puts a glass of whisky in front of me. Peter, she announces to my brother, I want you to request
Your Two Hands
. I know the song. Peter, arguing politics with the old man, ignores her. I get up, tap her shoulder. I'll do it, I tell her. Upright, anger on her face, staring at my brother, she ignores me for a moment. Then turns, smiles at me and kisses me on the cheek. She winks at me. I go over to the bandstand, motion to one of the guitarists and request the Vamvakaris song for Ariadne. The guitarist
knows her and tells me they will play it soon. I go back to the table, sit next to her and whisper in her ear; you have to dance it with me.

–Ari, it would be my pleasure, she answers, turning towards me. I lift my glass and salute her.

–Are you proud of being Greek? she asks. The whole table is looking at me. My brother lights a cigarette and blows the smoke in my direction. The question makes no sense to me. I'm glad I'm Greek, I answer, but I'm not proud of it. I had nothing to do with it. The married woman laughs. That's the most sensible thing I've heard all night, she says to me.

–Are you proud of being Australian? The old man's question feels like an interrogation. The answer is easy. No, no way. Proud of being an Australian? I laugh. What a concept, I continue, what is there to be proud of? The whole table laughs at this and Ariadne gives me a hug. They forget me and continue their conversation. The band finishes a song and the bouzouki begins the sad cry of the Vamvakaris song. I jump up, leap on the dance floor and begin to sway to the music. Ariadne joins me, and we twirl and move around the floor, I mouth the tortured lyrics.
Your two beautiful hands will destroy me
.

Ariadne moves sensuously, coming in close to me, and I drop to my knees before her, clapping my hands together in time with the rhythm, encouraging her in the dance. She motions for me to rise and I leap onto my feet, turn twice on my left foot, twice in the other direction on my right foot. I block the rest of the pub out; do not see the other dancers around me and Ariadne, do not see the band, the crowd. I shut my eyes, Ariadne disappears except for the lingering scent of her sweet perfume, the light trace of tea-tree oil in her hair. I fall and stumble in the hashish rhythms of the song, chasing the agonised cries of the clarinet.

As the words pierce my skull, I see the unshaven face of George appear behind my closed eyelids, morning sun
across his face, and I open my eyes. Ariadne is on one knee before me, clapping along to the music, tears of sweat on her brow, her eyes half-closed, singing along to the song. The chorus is repeated for the last time, I fall to my knee in front of her and as the last note is played, held, ends, I lean over her and kiss her tenderly, lightly on the lips. Flirt, she calls me, grabs my hand and leads me back to the table. The band place their instruments down and announce a twenty-minute break. I look at my watch again. Definitely time to go but I keep my grip on Ariadne's hand.

–You're a good dancer, Ari, the married woman tells me.

–What's your favourite song? Ariadne asks me. Hard question. Favourite songs, like favourite films, like favourite people, change day by day, moment by moment. Hard question, I answer.

–What would you like to hear after the break? she insists, not taking a seat. I look over at Peter. Do you think they'd play
What Becomes of the Brokenhearted
? He shakes his head, grins at me, and announces to the table: My brother wishes he was black.

I scowl. I wish no such thing. That the best modern music is black is a simple fact, the logic of the ears, the objective fact of history. My brother, seeing my anger, rises from his seat and begins to hum the Jimmy Ruffin tune. Fired by the dance, fired by the drugs, by the night, I get onto the table and begin to sing the opening verse. Peter gets up, climbs on the table, clicks his fingers in time to my singing and joins in with me at the chorus.
What becomes of the brokenhearted
. Around us, the room has stopped and the crowd is watching us and that spurs me on, my voice louder, competing with the furious buzz of drunken conversations. I lose the tune and collapse into giggles, knock over a glass and jump off the table. Ariadne starts clapping and the people on the tables around us raise their glasses to us.

–Got to go. Ariadne kisses me goodbye. Pleasure to meet you, she tells me. Ditto, I say and head through the crowd, out into the warm summer air. On the way I pass the man in the fishing cap and nod to him. He ignores me. That causes no pain; he was a momentary figure in my life. That's what I like about casual sex with men; there's no responsibility towards the person you fuck with. Outside, sitting on the steps to the pub, Maria is smoking a cigarette and talking to Kosta. Where you going? she asks me.

–To the Punters, I'm meeting up with Johnny.

–Are you clubbing afterwards? Probably going to the Peel, I answer. I kiss her goodbye and head down Glenlyon Road. The lights, the music, the traffic of Sydney Road disappear and I walk down a dark suburban street, whistling the Jimmy Ruffin song. Dogs start barking.