The Slap

by Christos Tsiolkas

Rhys was an actor in the soap opera that Anouk scripted and, although Hector never watched the show, Rhys’s face was blandly familiar.

Gary was a prick, but he was an astute prick. Hector had only caught snatches of the soap opera, it was only ever background, but he had seen enough to know Rhys was never going to be the real thing. He was a second-rate Joaquin Phoenix playing Johnny Cash. He was destined for a lifestyle show flogging holidays or home renovations. Vermont was perfect, Vermont was frigging spot-on. The young actor screamed private schools, nutritious breakfasts as a child, the immense bland spread of the eastern suburbs. At least Rhys had the decency to blush.

She wasn’t thinking of anything—her mind was not floating above her body—she and Ali were the kiss. The kiss was all there was. ‘Can I fuck you?’ She just wanted

Manolis doubted that there had been a day in his forties and most of his fifties that did not pass without him regretting ever marrying, without him cursing the terrible burden of having a wife and family. But age did silence dreams, did mellow desires, even the most ferocious lusts and fantasies.

He looked up at the forbidding saints painted on the walls. You pricks, he thought to himself, you liars, there is no Heaven, there is only this earth, this one unjust earth.

Through the fine mesh lace of the veil, Manolis could see that her eyes were the same as he remembered. She was old, she looked as though her back could no longer support her, her hair had thinned, her face was a mass of wrinkles, but her eyes were the same.

The past loomed enormous, insurmountable.

There was the house in which Ecttora and Elisavet attended Greek school as children. It now had a Vote Green sticker plastered on its front door. He turned into Kent Street. He stopped in front of Dimitri’s house. The homes around it had all been renovated, their facades looked clean, they looked unlived in, like houses in the movies. Dimitri and Georgia’s front garden was crowded with the tender stalks of young broad beans, the first thick leaves of spinach and silverbeet. It smelt of the approaching spring. Two torn plastic bags were tied around a thin stick to scare away the birds. A fig tree towered as high as the house. Manolis hesitated. Was his mind playing tricks on him? Surely this house, this garden, belonged to the past. If he were to push open the gate, would it be real in his hands? Would the door disappear as soon as he began knocking on it?

He was terrified, a little boy confronting the immensity and indifference of the universe. You’ve had a long adolescence, Hector, she thought as she stroked her husband’s heaving back, a long adolescence. It is time to grow up. She did not mean this cruelly, she was not angry. She felt nothing. It was a fact. Just a fact.

It is possible the world is divided into three genders—there are men, there are women and then there are women who choose to have nothing to do with children. How about men without children, he answered quickly, aren’t they also different from fathers? She shook her head firmly, daring him to contradict her: no, all men are the same.

The moon’s borrowed light was beginning to cleave a rippled silver path along the darkening surface of the sea. She would keep her anger submerged.