The Pillars

by Peter Polites

Genres: General Fiction; Literary Fiction

Synopsis

WINNER OF THE NSW PREMIER'S LITERARY AWARDS MULTICULTURAL NSW AWARD 2020 The satire in Peter Polites' The Pillars is sharp and jagged, full of acutely observed moments on the streets and in the loungerooms of Sydney. - ABC Radio National, The Bookshelf Don't worry about the housing bubble, she would say. Don't worry about the fact that you will never be able to afford a home. Worry about the day after. That's when they will all come, with their black shirts and bayonets, and then you will see the drowned bodies and slit necks. And I would stand there and say, But Mum, why are you telling me this when I'm ten years old. Working as a writer hasn't granted Pano the financial success he once imagined, but lobbying against a mosque being built across the road from his home (and the occasional meth-fuelled orgy) helps to pass the time. He's also found himself a gig ghostwriting for a wealthy property developer. The pay cheque alone is enough for him to turn a blind eye to some dodgy dealings - at least for the time being. In a world full of flashy consumerism and aspiration, can Pano really escape his lot in life? And does he really want to? A novel of dark desires and moral gray areas, THE PILLARS is an extraordinary new novel from one of Australia's most exciting contemporary voices. Praise for DOWN THE HUME : ' DOWN THE HUME [is] essential reading in these times of "border protection"' - The Saturday Paper ' DOWN THE HUME 's propulsive rhythm feels like entering a strong current. Its fast pace and escalating plot are typical of the noir genre, but it is also filled with unexpected and precise turns of phrase, which can shift quickly from the menial to the lyrical.' - The Guardian ' DOWN THE HUME should rightly take its place alongside the fiction of Christos Tsiolkas [and] Maxine Beneba Clarke... as work that reflects the reality and occasional ugliness of Australia's multiculturalism.' - Australian Book Review ' DOWN THE HUME is a robust study of ethnic, class and sexual identities in contemporary Australia.'- The Weekend Australian

Release date: July 23, 2019

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 181

Sample

Rainbow flags will always trump the emerald green!

Kane paced from the sink to the table and kept mouthing off, his words running together.

A mosque? Down the road from here? No way!

Northern sun pushed through the glass doors that led to the backyard. Outside, Frenchie the French bulldog ran in circles, digging holes in the turf and lying in them. In the kitchen, only me and the stainless-steel appliances heard Kane’s blowback. A slow cooker making osso bucco gurgled, tomatoes and flesh. A NutriBullet sat waiting for the morning green shake-a-thon. Neither device responded; instead a currawong warbled at exactly the moment when Kane chucked the local newspaper on the bench. The paper was open to the development section, showing graphs and a picture of the mayor. A heading of large black lettering: NOTICE OF APPLICATION TO BUILD PLACE OF WORSHIP. Kane tapped one finger on the notice.

Kane’s idea of a joke was to remind me that I was his tenant. He told me not to call him my housemate. Pano – he would say my name with that Australian accent, drawing out the vowels and reminding me that even though I had my proper Hellenic designation, it was never to be pronounced right. Pano … I am your landlord, he said, pausing and then adding a JK every time, but I never laughed. I responded with self-deprecating banter. I am a serf making humble pie with two birds from the bush, I said, and he didn’t get the JK that I made.

As I read the proposal for an Albanian mosque, I heard Kane’s voice say, It would be fine if it was a synagogue. Then – at least – the house prices would go up.

My fingers slipped a Ristretto coffee pod into the Nespresso machine and pushed the button. A string of coffee oil that looked like the tail of a rat fell into the Bodum double-wall thermo glass.

Kane pressed his buttocks against the kitchen island. A tribal tattoo in black ink ran over half his body; the spirals began under his left arm and went all the way down the side of his torso. They disappeared under his Y-fronts and emerged to cover his thigh. He’d got himself inked in Bali during a Sydney Mardi Gras recovery session. In Bali, gay men getting tribal tattoos are as common as Nordic lesbians drinking Bintangs on the beach. But this ritual also represents a whimsical rite of passage, often initiated in the throes of an MDMA come down.

The black markings of indeterminate ethnic origin made him the most menacing-looking freelance IT consultant I’d ever met. As he talked, he crossed his arms over his chest and put one leg up on a stool. His affected pose made him look like he belonged on a gay influencer’s Instagram page. All he needed was the buttless underwear. I curled my hands around the thermo glass and pulled it close to my chest. The scent of bay leaves emanated from the osso bucco in the slow cooker and Kane told me that he was working from home today.

I tried to look him in the eye and avoid examining his parts, and asked what he was going to do about the mosque. Kane dropped to the floor and started doing his daily Hindu push-ups and said that he wasn’t keen on foreign things. From a plank position, he breathed in as he lowered himself down. On the exhale, he pushed forwards and arched his spine to look up at the ceiling. He told me he was going to start a residents’ action group to prevent all this redevelopment of Pemulwuy. Kane was determined to keep the original character of a suburb that was built a whole ten years ago.

Pemulwuy is a suburb that pretends to be a gated community, without a gate. The people carry themselves with the air of pioneers. Once upon a time it was a brickworks that supplied the seventies suburban housing boom. Western Sydney grew and grew, the brickworks providing cheap materials to Parramatta, Merrylands and Liverpool. The bricks fortified three-bedroom houses and blocks of flats. Brick veneer and double brick veneer. Blond bricks for walls, earthen red bricks for fences with buttresses. When the sand ran low, the area was turned residential. It was named after an Aboriginal warrior who fought against the colonisers during the Frontier Wars. A reminder of Australia’s history. But really the place was a big fuck you to all those suitcase-story migrants and working-poor blacks in the surrounding suburbs. Sleepy, anonymous and sterile, as calm as the man-made lake in its centre, Pemulwuy was designed not to offend and to be completely efficient. When it rained, the slight mound in the middle of the roads channelled the water to the gutters. Unlike the suburbs around it, Pemulwuy never had blocked drains and pooling rainwater.

Kane’s motto = No Change. The oh-so-delicate property values in our street could go the wrong way. His morning jogs in all-black New Balance activewear among the McMansions would not be spent avoiding illegally parked cars. His afternoon walks with Frenchie the French bulldog in a rainbow harness would not involve the sight of suss crescent moons. Kosovan war trauma was trying to snake its way among the water features and kit homes. With Kane it wouldn’t find a way in.

Before Mum’s brain became a beanbag, she taught me that the threat of a battle or a slight tremor in the economy could make society crumble. She prophesised that one day, while we all waited in line for skim caramel lattes, the stock markets would take a dip and hydrochloric acid would be flung in our faces.

She landed on Earth the exact day Hiroshima was blown up; her soul fell out of the Enola Gay at the same time the bomb did. Dealing with the after-effects of World War II created resilience and taught her life skills such as how to forage for wild greens and have knife fights with neighbours for food. It makes me sad to think that these are skills that the gen X and millennial snowflakes have lost.

On the days Mum gave me lessons on how to survive an apocalypse she sipped homemade raki. Raki is a Greek moonshine spirit that is only drunk with food; it comes in olive oil bottles and is also used to power tractors. She would pour seventy millilitres at a time into a coffee cup and tell me about seeing dead bodies. An uncle murdered by the invading German army, or her older brother who was killed by the Junta – even though these things happened decades apart. She would process the memories, take them out of the freezer of her mind, and two bodies appeared next to us in the kitchen. A swarthy uncle slit ear to ear on the speckled linoleum. A water-bloated brother leaning up against a cushioned chair. Mum getting progressively drunker on a spirit that was distilled in the backyard of one of the local unemployed Greeks.

Don’t worry about the fact that you will never be able to afford a home. Worry about the economy shredding! That’s when they will all come, with their black shirts and bayonets, and then you will see the drowned bodies and slit necks. And I would stand there and say, But Mum, why are you telling me this when I’m ten years old?

And with this fear in mind, like some Sarah Connor Clytemnestra, she taught me a number of post-apocalyptic life skills. The skillset was very specific to a post–World War II communist Greek village. In the garden just in front of the entrance to the apartment, she taught me how to grow tomatoes. She showed me how to use the white ash of an extinguished fire to wash my clothes in running water. A clear running stream was hard to find in the concrete wastelands of the suburbs. The closest thing was the Cooks River, which had running water but also had more metals than a mine. A river so polluted from illegal dumping that white, mutated fish with three eyes would leap out of it. So these lessons had to wait for heavy rainfall; when the gutters overflowed they became our creeks. She led me down to the street in full view of the neighbourhood bullies, took my skid-marked Y-front jocks, and wet them with gutter water. Then she got ash that she had prepared in a fire bin on our balcony and rubbed the ash on the skid marks.

In this Acropolis apocalypse, fermenting wine in a laundry sink was another handy skill that I learned. Wine could be traded for other goods, if the systems of finance collapsed. Along the way Mum picked up other tips, too. From Indian co-workers she learned about the healing powers of turmeric on inflamed body parts. From Korean neighbours she learned how succulents such as cactus and aloe vera could be transformed into beauty products to increase luminosity of skin, glossiness of hair and overall attractiveness. This would be useful if I ever needed to use my flora-enhanced good looks as a currency. Knowing the limitations of my general skills and abilities, Mum assumed that I would need to do sex things in Apocalyptoville to survive.

When I left my room after my morning procrastination Kane intercepted me in the hallway and asked what I was doing. He stood in the doorway of the home office. Behind him the printer whirred like a six-barrel rotary machine gun. I looked at the carpet and told him that I was taking a constitutional, going for a wander and heading over to Bankstown to meet an old high school friend called Basil. The noise of the printer filled the pauses in our dialogue. Kane put one hand up on the doorframe and leaned towards me. He said that I couldn’t be going for a wander and a constitutional as they were two very different things. He pressed his finger into my chest to make his point. He said that one signified purposeful vigour and the other implied an empty-headed leisurely stroll.

Kane suggested that as I take my constitutional I put flyers into letterboxes. Initially I said no, telling him that I was looking for inspiration to complete my second book of prose poems and that I had a casual form of anxious jitters about meeting my old acquaintance.

Kane popped out of the doorway, interested in my meeting. He asked what Basil did, but he really wanted to know if Basil was hot. I said to Kane that he was a scorching property developer with soccer-star thighs. A real jock fucker with a winner attitude too. When we were teenagers I used to hide behind the school gym and watch him lying on a bench doing an incline press. He attempted to rock a stringlet but had no definition. Still was hot though.

Once Kane’s jealousy peaked, I let him down. Basil was straight.

With one hand on my upper arm and one hand holding the flyers, Kane stepped closer to me. He craned his neck to look closer at me. As he held my arm, he started stroking his thumb up and down, kneading my tricep muscle. Kane asked me again if I would distribute the flyers for him. You could just put them in letterboxes as you walked out of the suburb? Each syllable emphasised by the stroke of the thumb.

A year earlier, I had discovered Kane of Pemulwuy on a website called A Queer in Both Your Houses – the premier website connecting gay and lesbian flatmates. For our first meeting, I wore plain chinos and a checked shirt. I sat opposite him on the couch while he interviewed me. There were no decorative cushions interrupting the clean leather lines of the modular sofa, and I saw this as a good sign that he prioritised an efficient aesthetic in his furnishings. I pointed to the replica Noguchi coffee table and asked if he liked modernist sculpture. He answered by telling me that he was thinking about putting modern sculptures in the backyard, and I realised he didn’t know what a Noguchi coffee table was. I didn’t correct him. If I had explained that I had a deep understanding of modernism and the Bauhaus, my knowledge of post-World War II design trends would have made me appear pretentious and exposed me. But the cloak of normality I was trying to convey was destroyed when I told him that I wrote, and that I was currently living on a government grant. When I told him I wrote poems his face wrinkled. He asked, Does anyone even read them? I said no; I know poets who have sold fewer books than they have Twitter followers. He laughed. I had taken myself down a peg and smoothed everything out. It was that ole Australian self-deprecation, a familiar signifier that I was no tall poppy. He called later that day to ask me to move in with him.

It was the house and the suburb that sparked my aspirations. There were no old couches on the street, there were no cars in front yards on cinder blocks and no high-density apartments. When I arrived home I could see how far I was from Mum’s messy apartment crammed with papers and broken TVs; from share houses with funky junkies and neglected pets. Finally, I had found a place where I could sit down and drink a tall glass of iced mineral water, garnished with cucumber.

On the day I moved in with Kane, I noticed the framed rainbow flag hanging in the hallway and my arms shuddered uncontrollably. Perhaps it was the elemental magic the six colours held, more likely it was because I had been lifting heavy boxes all day. Kane had purchased the flag in Rome. On the ugly rock-filled beaches of the Mediterranean he had used it to dry the salt water and Mykonos cum off his body. Its edges were frayed, the colours muted; sunrays and salt had faded it. On arriving back in Australia he’d had it dry-cleaned and custom-framed. Looking closer at the yellow stripe, I saw a faint stain that could have been the industrial-strength Euro jizz of an olive picker.

By the powers vested in him by the rainbow flag, Kane pushed the flyers into my hands. They were printed on pink paper and the Australian flag looked very gay: it could have been on a fag rag’s masthead. The flyer included a scanned reproduction of the mosque development notice, surrounded by warnings of property price drops in our neighbourhood. There were arrows pointing down towards a dollar sign. His mobile phone number was printed on the bottom. Exasperated with Kane and his relentless rainbow, I said yes, yes, yes, I would deliver some of the flyers and then make my way to Bankstown. As I exited the front door, Kane yelled out to me, reminding me to tell people that refreshments would be available. Refreshments! he yelled. Tell people about the refreshments!

I walked down the empty streets of Pemulwuy towards the lake. It was a Wednesday and the cars had already done their morning bottleneck out of the suburb. Where the houses didn’t have freestanding letterboxes, I had to go up to the doors and put the flyers in the metallic slots. From backyards dogs barked, in front yards cats tried to be my friend. The birds watched from above as though I was Tippi Hedren and they were hoping I might trip.

A young mother passed me in the street. She pushed a pram and held a carnation in her hand. Her shirt was made of a wicking fabric that ate sweat. The orange colour of her fake tan stopped at her neck, so her jawline and face were a slightly different colour. I couldn’t see inside the pram – she might have been pushing her child, a doll or a chihuahua. Her voice squeaked as she asked me about the flyers. I explained about the mosque and she started her sentence with a You Know What? She didn’t have a problem with Muslims coming into the neighbourhood and indeed her friends were ‘some of the good ones’.

I told her that my flatmate was my landlord and I was just a serf. She introduced herself to me as Lorna, pronouncing it like she was going to a job interview. I told her that he was really worried about house prices dropping, which could have a ripple effect across the broader Sydney housing market, causing the bubble to pop and heralding an acid-in-the-face-flinging apocalypse. She played with the carnation in her hand and said with the efficiency of a human resources mediator: I see we have an unresolvable issue here. I nodded my head in agreement, and said that it might lead to a Mexican stand-off in an Australian suburb named after an Indigenous freedom fighter. Both par. . .