Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘On your hands?’

‘Why not?’

I can’t think of a single reason.

It is a hot, blindingly bright morning near spring’s end, the sky a luminous sea of pale blue swirls. Birds have made nests in the telegraph poles. From the get-go, Aldo is angered by the broken footpath, its cracks and bumps. Brown leaves and sluggish lizards are crushed under his wheels as he rolls in and out of the thick shadows of overhanging trees. I walk beside him. When we reach the path that slopes down to the beach, Aldo keeps going.

‘We’re not stopping here,’ he says, without turning.

‘Then where are we going?’ I ask, catching up. His uneasy smile tells me nothing.

Through the sleepy green of the beachside suburb, we meander along the uneven footpath that lines the narrow road. Parakeets squawk unseen in the tops of large trees, and the air is thick with the damp odour of the sea. When the paved footpath ends, Aldo moves onto the road itself and keeps close to the guardrail that hugs the coastline, but his colossal chair forces cars to cross into the oncoming lane, lest they misjudge the overtake and knock him into the sea. En route, I’m thinking how he can never sneak up on a person again. Or trap any kind of animal.

‘What’s the title of your book?’ he asks.

‘The King of Unforced Errors.’

‘Hate it.’

‘I’ll change it.’

‘To what?’

‘Sour Grapes: A Memoir.’

‘No.’

‘The Slowest Death on Record.’

‘Better, but not great.’

‘And the tagline is He was afraid of life. And he was right to be afraid .’

‘Go suck a bag of dicks.’

To our left, homes built on near-vertical inclines; on our right, between the pine-shaded houses, we glimpse a ribbon of blue, or sometimes through front windows and out back ones, a whole slab of sea. We say nothing as we pass steep staircases that wind out of sight, landscape gardeners on cigarette breaks, the sporadic estranged husband asleep in his car, mailboxes in the shape of whales, and bright blue houses with weather vanes swearing on rusted hinges. Without warning, he turns off the road into a trackless expanse of waist-high grass. Aldo, a man captaining his own vessel, is radiating fear and determination, and I follow into unexpectedly dense bushland where the sky is all but obscured by interlocking canopies. The chair hums ahead of me as I trudge along behind, watching twigs churned up in his wheels that, from time to time, falter on the uneven ground. The sea air comes in strong wafts, and I feel a mishap is imminent; Aldo is sort of crouched now, tightly gripping the left armrest, and I catch up to him on a sloping dirt pathway that forces his chair on a dangerous tilt to the side. ‘Careful,’ I say, but then all at once we’re on a forbiddingly steep descent; as Aldo heads down he shouts for help, and I grab the back of his chair to prevent it flipping over on top of him. ‘Don’t let go!’ he commands in a panic. With me swearing and protesting, we teeter precariously on this scrubby path that twists down onto a small cove. We make it to the bottom, to the shadowless edge where the sand begins and the ocean roars and a breeze shifts the treetops and a raucous cloud of birds burst into the soft light. The beach is walled in by steep limestone cliffs on either side, and rising out of the sea is a rocky island, like an outpost. Four-foot sets are rolling in from the horizon, and in the anarchy of waves surfers are ducking and weaving and dodging around the huge monolith of rock as if they have impunity against bodily harm. It’s spectacularly dangerous.

‘A secret beach!’ I say.

Over the crashing waves, Aldo explains that the ocean recedes far enough to make it a beach only periodically, the last time being some years ago, when he came here with the artists. ‘So not a secret beach,’ he says, ‘a magic beach.’

Of course. Aldo had mentioned it during his toxic murder-trial testimony, which had warped the courtroom furniture and the jurors’ minds. Those of us who heard it never stopped hearing it afterwards, and despite an overload of sympathy for Aldo, we kind of hated ourselves, as though it were our own ears that had let us down.

‘So this is Magic Beach.’

I stare at the sand and the water and the small clusters of sunbathers and think: People will label anything magical at the drop of a hat. Aldo pushes his wheelchair forward until his wheels spin in the soft sand; he looks out, and for a moment he appears to me as faceless as an old coin, as he gazes at the kamikaze water-circus manoeuvring deftly around the island. It seems you could fall from a wave and be thrashed to death on that big rock, or wipe out early and be pinned against the sheer face of it. Or smash into the rounded boulders that fringe its perimeter. Or tumble onto the smaller, wave-polished stones that line the shore. Either way, these waves leave very little room for error, and there seems to be plenty of opportunity to narrowly escape death or, alternatively, not escape it at all.

‘Look at these fuckers,’ Aldo says.

‘The type of risk-takers that smuggle heroin in their stomachs.’

‘People have to stop saying that adults have lost their sense of wonder. Maybe the fuzziness of a caterpillar’s legs no longer impresses me like it used to, but people always do.’

His face is bright for the first time that morning. A slip of fugitive cloud drifts by. The sun on its errand up the sky.

‘What’s the time?’ he asks.

‘I don’t know. Midday?’

Aldo removes his T-shirt, and a silence forms around us. Here is his lifetime of scars, his sickly pale skin a mess of them, and a small drainage bag half filled with urine strapped to his belly with a suprapubic catheter, a permanent silicone tube that goes into a stoma in his lower abdomen, doing nobody’s eyes any favours. He catches me reeling and with a gaze locks our sad faces together. I am trapped in an old crate without a single airhole.

‘People always talk about wanting to die with dignity,’ he says.

‘They never shut up about it,’ I agree.

‘And when they use the word dignity in that sense, nine times out of ten they’re thinking of losing autonomy over urine and defecation, piss and shit, but for those of us who’ve already lost control of all that, what does dignity even mean?’

I genuinely have no idea. Our conversation cycles down to mere sighs. He spins his wheels once more but the chair doesn’t move anywhere. ‘Liam,’ he says, ‘I want to go down by the water.’

‘Should I carry you?’

‘No, I’ll crawl.’

Aldo shifts to the edge of the chair and performs a flustered though painstakingly precise choreography: he gathers his legs, moves in front of the footplate, puts his fist on the ground, and with his chest on his knees and his weight on his fist, uses his arm as a pivot to land on the sand, where he drags himself onto his side so that the sack of urine doesn’t catch and burst open.

‘Sure I can’t carry you?’

He shakes his head. This seems to be part of some outburst he’s been incubating all year, but if he thinks me carrying him is a worse spectacle than him crawling on the sand, spoiling people’s appetites, he is grossly mistaken.

I kick off my shoes and socks and realise the sand’s too hot for bare skin, yet Aldo’s crawling across it, oblivious — one of those dangers his deadened nerves keep secret from his brain — so I rush down and scoop him up and he lets out a furious shriek that gets people’s attention, people who don’t mind gaping open-mouthed and scrunching their disgusted faces right at you. I get him to the water’s edge and, carefully this time, lower him onto the wet sand where he’s immediately ambushed by a wave; he spits and sullenly drags himself back a few metres, his legs looking like ramen noodles inside his sodden pants. He moves his lips silently, crunching sand between his teeth; his eyes hold a darkish glare.