Steve Toltz - Quicksand

At which point, the obviously shattered Aldo tumbles off the podium. I handed him back his phone. ‘A mean-spirited, anti-Buddhist wedding toast then.’

‘It was,’ the small man in the corner said, still without raising his eyes from his texting. ‘At the culmination of which, Aldo kissed several bare shoulders, accidentally hit the bride in the face and collapsed under the drinks table, whereupon he drank his arse into a state so near death that he was rushed to hospital to have his stomach pumped.’

‘Doc Castle’s my personal physician.’

‘The hell I am. I’m a doctor. Just not his. I’m more of a friend. Gary.’ Doc Castle extended his hand.

‘Liam Wilder,’ I said.

‘I’ve heard a lot about you, Officer,’ he said suggestively, as if he’d browsed a glossy catalogue of my core life errors that very morning.

‘Doc was my plus-one,’ Aldo said. ‘I would’ve asked you, but you were on the list of definitely-nots.’

‘Hell of an event,’ Doc Castle said. ‘She’ll not forget that day too soon.’

I looked hard at Aldo. ‘Did you try to kill yourself?’

‘Why is he talking about suicide?’ Doc Castle asked. ‘Just drank too much, didn’t you?’

Aldo fell back into silence, thinking his memories into a fine dust, before he blithely threw off the bed covers, exposing his pale body.

‘What are you doing?’

‘Getting the fuck out of here.’

He climbed out of bed and wobbled on his feet and began to dress in his befouled wedding attire. While he looked under the bed for a shoe I had a premonition of déjà vu, not that we’d done this before, but that we’d do it again in the future.

‘Should I go over and apologise to Stella?’

I had to break it to him. ‘She’s taking out a restraining order against you.’

Aldo bit his lip and sighed. ‘You can’t ruin someone’s wedding without paying for it the rest of your life. I get that.’

‘And this might not be the time to mention it, but she rang me about an hour ago,’ Doc Castle said. ‘You better pay her the thirty-five thousand dollars you owe her.’

Aldo’s body grew slightly hunched; he stood for almost an entire ghastly minute, during which I couldn’t come up with a single consoling thought. Half in, half out of his clothes, he’d been drained of the will to dress.

I asked, ‘Aldo, want to stay with me a few days?’

‘No. Just drop me home.’

‘Can I have a lift too?’ Doc Castle asked, finally looking me in the face. His bored eyes were an arresting blue. ‘My wife took my car home.’

‘No problem.’

Aldo wore a fogged expression as we moved down the silent corridor. Passing the nurses’ station, its desk strewn with files, Aldo suddenly seized my arm for leverage and jumped the counter. Oh crap, I thought. He flipped through the files until he came across his own. ‘Hey, don’t go there!’ An irate nurse at the end of the corridor was striding over. Doc Castle snickered. Aldo said, ‘Stall her,’ and I said, ‘Nothing doing.’ She yelled, ‘Officer! Officer!’ as she barrelled towards us, and when she reached Aldo he dummied right, a move she anticipated; she grabbed his shirt, he held the file beyond her reach. The bizarre choreography of their battle went on for another torturous minute.

‘This is against hospital policy!’

‘It’s my file!’

Two men in gowns and slippers looked on. The nurse at last grabbed hold of the corner of the file, but Aldo wouldn’t let go.

‘You can have it,’ she said, struggling, ‘but you need to put in a request … in … writing.’

‘That … makes … no … sense.’

The doctor and I watched on — it wasn’t an unamusing spectacle — but the problem with being an officer of the law is that everyone expects you to intervene. A gathering crowd of onlookers now nudged me with their elbows.

‘Aldo, cut it out,’ I said.

He let go all at once and the nurse tumbled back against the desk, file clutched to her colossal breasts. Condescension looked like it had been built into her face at conception.

‘I’ll get you that request,’ Aldo said calmly as we left, and the three of us slid into a mercifully awaiting elevator just before the doors shut.

In the car, Aldo asked Doc Castle a barrage of questions about his marital problems. Did his wife forgive him? Had he forgiven himself? How much had their daughter seen and did he think she would remember it? Aldo listened to the answers with his usual peculiar intensity. I tuned out. I didn’t feel like hearing my friend’s analysis of this doctor’s creepy marital strife and I felt, in fact, a weak sort of outrage that grew in intensity until we arrived outside Aldo’s apartment complex, Phoenix Court, a five-storey redbrick horror with cement balconies that all had underpants drying on metal railings.

Aldo had moved into this building three years before, the year friends could not stop telling him he had reached the age of Christ’s death. (‘Fucking odd thing to say to someone,’ he said to me at the time. ‘What are they implying?’) His apartment was on the first floor, right above a butcher shop, and the knowledge that only floorboards and a couple of metres of putrid air lay between him and all those red-veined carcasses swinging on hooks made him fearful that he’d be visited by the ghosts of cows and lambs and chickens, and be woken intermittently in the night by an eerie moo. That, and the bad ventilation, and an undefeatable cockroach army, and surprise visits from the overbearing landlord, and the more or less constant sounds of wife-beating drifting in from any number of adjacent apartments seemed to guarantee him, night after night, a steady stream of gruesome nightmares. One thing I knew about Aldo: he always despised dreams, even pleasant ones, for what he considered their tedious impenetrability and their shocking waste of creativity. He hated how every morning he had no option other than to open his eyes and remember. What was it this time? A faceless man? His dead sister Veronica scratching at an enormous red door? Regular dreams featured his cadaverous grandmother leaning against a tree with her oxygen tank, or his mother’s island slipping into the sea, or else he was marching into a river with a broken piano on his back. ‘God, how the human brain goes on,’ he said once. ‘It’s nearly impossible to not wake up embarrassed by the trite symbolism you’ve subjected yourself to during the night.’

Aldo climbed out of the car and pushed his head through the open window and said, ‘Every time I return home I’ve forgotten how shit this area is. Do you think the people who live in this neighbourhood have moved up in the world? I mean, Jesus, where were they before ?’

‘In hell,’ I said.

He laughed, and we watched him disappear into the building. What now? I could feel Doc Castle looking intently at me. ‘I don’t suppose you’re hungry, Constable?’

We drove to Woolloomooloo, to Harry’s Café de Wheels, and sat on the wharf eating chunky beef pies with buttered mash and staring out at the impossibly blue sky and dark water, a doctor and a policeman, two urban professionals with apparently not a single thing to say to each other. Eventually we found the area where our work lives intersected: the overprescription of drugs that was hiking up the crime rate, with most break-and-enters being done specifically to ransack medicine cabinets — oxycodone, Vicodin and Xanax were the most common prizes. And when that topic ran its course, the conversation turned quickly to where it was always destined to go.

‘Quite a character, that Aldo,’ Doc Castle said.

His understatement was tinged with amazement; he genuinely didn’t get exactly why he dropped everything to help our annoying, unfortunate mutual friend. ‘It’s rare to get so attached to another human being in adulthood,’ the doctor mused. They’d met at a game of touch football about eight years ago, he explained, and they’d been friends ever since.