7 ½

Christos Tsiolkas

• Publisher: Atlantic Books
• Year: 2022
• eBook ISBN: 9781838955663
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literature General
• Index: Literature

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.

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, ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• 7 ½
• Acknowledgments