Steve Toltz - Quicksand

It was an inoffensive request, but I didn’t feel obliging. I said, ‘ You’re his ex-wife. You deal with him.’

As the months of radio silence went by, I felt the gravitational pull of our friendship waning. The break started to feel irrevocable. Occasionally I’d wake with an ineffable sadness; there was no one in whom I could confide in the same way. I even missed Aldo’s irritating habit of not understanding me on the phone (‘Are you chewing?’ he’d say. ‘What’s that over your mouth, an oven mitt?’), and the times he’d call to ask my opinion on some random question (e.g. ‘Hey, do animals rape interspecies? I mean, a giraffe isn’t going to try and fuck a swan, is he?’). Sometimes I’d be reminded of him by a simple object — guitar picks (he used to carry them for Stella) or black gloves (which reminded him of strangulation) — and of course I’d think of him whenever I drove by hospitals or medical centres or saw a GOING OUT OF BUSINESS sign, or when I had to fish an insolvent entrepreneur out of his own swimming pool. The strange thing was that in all that time we never even bumped into each other. As I drove past the Hotel Hollywood, or was arresting a hash dealer within a few blocks’ radius of Phoenix Court, I’d keep one eye on the pedestrians in my periphery, but they were never him. Maybe he’d gone back to China or India or Dubai, to pursue some doomed idea to its dismal conclusion.

In any case, life without Aldo was OK. People shed friends all the time — why couldn’t I? Besides, with his arduous existence excised, I could focus solely on my own demoralising problems: I was under investigation for misplacing my gun; haunting my daymares were the mangled faces of an eight-year-old boy and his mother, crushed in the backseat in a car accident I had responded to; my marital discord had plateaued at a constant fever-pitch; and Sonja had started displaying increasingly aggressive behaviour. Always quick to hysterical anger, she’d sometimes sucker-punch me when I kissed her; now, to our horror, she had started biting people, and other than muzzling her, we didn’t know what to do. These were dark days that seemed meaningless and unending, and I could barely manage to get up in the morning.

Turned out, I was wrong about one thing: Tess and I hadn’t plateaued at all. Our marriage evaporated almost instantaneously when I called home during a night shift to say goodnight to Sonja. She answered the phone with a delightful, high-pitched ‘Daddy!’ and I told her a brief, sanitised version of my day’s misadventures, after which she reciprocated with her own and then suddenly broke into a horrible adult laugh. It was Tess, pretending. ‘You can’t even tell your wife from your eight-year-old daughter. Pathetic!’ she laughed. This so humiliated and destabilised me, every ounce of love for her rushed out of me in one slick whoosh, and not until later that night, in the bleak surroundings of the Marco Polo Motor Inn on Parramatta Road, did a sort of bright side occur to me. That was a pretty juicy scene, I realised, and sat up writing until two in the morning. Unfortunately my brain made its usual pilgrimage to the mysterious land where language dies. My imagination was impenetrably dark, boarded up. The ideas remained inexpressible, penumbral. I had linguistic thrombosis, my textual flow impeded by the narrowing of some creative vessel. I sat simpering at the desk, and thought: You fucker, you failed to cannibalise drug deals, corruption, murdered nurses, domestic disputes, drowned children, hit-and-runs, and now you can’t even fashion a decent story out of your wife’s sadism. You’re done. I poured 330 ml of Heineken on the keyboard until the screen went green. I had been dodging success with drone-like precision for nearly two decades. That’s it, I concluded. It’s finished. Seems persistence wasn’t the key after all.

Two months or so later, I had kept to my word. Although at times I felt a fraud, I had settled into a life I’d always feared yet secretly desired, a life uninterpreted and unencumbered by art. To that end, I had got on with the job of being a competent officer of the law. I moved out of the motel and into a warehouse apartment on Kippax Street where Sonja stayed every second weekend. I read teenage vampire romances that would not inspire me to pick up a pen. I acted on sexual impulses with the kind of menopausal, unhappily married, horny strangers our pornography culture had turned me onto. In other words, I was doing OK.

Until the afternoon Senior Constable Ronnie Grant came over with a tired uncertainty and sat on my desk reeking of every disliked great-uncle from childhood. He picked up the picture of Sonja and contemplated it in a lurid fashion. I snatched the photograph back off him.

‘You’re wanted down at Surry Hills,’ he said.

‘What for?’

‘Your boy Benjamin.’

I couldn’t even muster a sigh. To my surprise, I experienced no deeper concern than the interruption of my workflow. I felt pleasantly anaesthetised, or as if a wound had been expertly cauterised. Not even a feeling of déjà vu, nothing. Whatever Aldo had done didn’t pertain to me in any way. ‘Leave me out of it.’

‘You sure?’

‘Positive.’

He gave me a bleary shrug and shuffled back to his desk. For ten minutes, I got on with finishing an evidence seizure report: four knives, each with titanium four-centimetre blades; two transparent bags with traces of brown powder, possibly heroin; one mobile phone, Nokia. On the radio, the prime minister campaigned for re-election saying, ‘I’m just an ordinary bloke, and I want to do things for ordinary working-class families,’ and the opposition leader responded by saying he was just ‘an ordinary Australian who represented other ordinary Australians’. I sighed, felt the cold snout of duty pushing the back of my neck. Five minutes later I was agitated beyond belief. What had Aldo done now? I fast-walked over to Senior Constable Ronnie Grant’s desk, where he was the monosyllabic half of a telephone conversation; I stood for an agonising twelve minutes until he finished his call.

‘What’s the charge?’

‘Attempted murder.’

A jet stream of ice entered my body.

‘Was it Stella?’

‘No,’ he said, glancing at the Post-it note on his desk. ‘Clive Gibson.’

‘Who the fuck is that?’

‘Dunno. Clive Warren Gibson. Aged three days.’

Three days? It couldn’t be. ‘Stella’s baby?’

‘I don’t know these people you’re talking about.’

I slunk furtively to the stairs, took two at a time until I reached the roof and almost leaped into the clear blue air. It was incomprehensible that he’d ever harm anyone, let alone a baby. I’d seen him knock the cigarette out of a pregnant woman’s hand on the street. Unless.

From the rooftop I looked out with disdain at an exhausted city masking its exhaustion in a display of vitality: the backed-up traffic, businesssapiens (Aldo’s word) hastening in the shadowed streets. On the building opposite, an Australian flag flapped in the wind. Why bother with flags? We know what country this is: it’s the stupid place where twenty-plus million people boast about being ordinary.

On the way into Surry Hills station, a shirtless man with a bloodied face tried headbutting me. Everyone has potential for uncontrollable rages. I’d seen Aldo’s customary impotent explosions against corporations, injustice, God, banks, government, greed and ineptitude, but was I to believe that all his liberated demons had mobilised and marched on Stella’s newborn? No, it was some absurd misunderstanding. Unless. Unless.

The desk sergeant eating a kebab nodded hello.

‘I’ve come to see Aldo Benjamin,’ I announced.