Steve Toltz - Quicksand

When I get him back to shore I say, ‘At least you tried. You can still hold your head up high.’

‘No, it hurts in that position.’

I laugh. He pats down his torso to confirm he is more or less unscathed. He sits up, catching his breath. Then says, ‘Push me back out.’

‘Do you think you’re being brave or something?’

His face goes hard with bitterness. ‘Ever step on an ant and then lift your shoe to see that flattened ant crawling away? Would you call that ant brave?’

‘Aldo. You can’t do it!’

The surfer bounds over and nearly, but doesn’t, high-fives us both. He says, ‘Beautiful effort,’ and grabs his board and strides back into the surf, which rears up to greet him. We stare into the hazy glimmer and watch him ease past the breakers and out to the calm flat where he hooks his board 180 degrees and gives us a wave.

Aldo sighs, and asks, ‘What time is it now?’

‘While we’re waiting for whatever you’re waiting for, can I interview you for the book?’

Aldo gives me his hardest stare. ‘Sell it to me.’

‘I know he’s a force of darkness, but Morrell once said —’

‘I’m not fucking kidding! Do not fucking talk to me about that man right now!’

‘OK. Let me put it another way. You’ve let a lot of people down. Justly or not, you’ve been accused of some pretty horrific things. But you’re a good person.’

‘A sleeper angel waiting to be activated.’

‘I wouldn’t go that far, but you do have a strong ethical code, like when we were eating Chinese takeaway in the park and you wouldn’t let me feed leftover Peking duck to the ducks. Don’t you want people to know about that?’

‘I couldn’t care less.’

‘Don’t you want people to know how you were such a devoted groupie to your wife that you even became a character witness for a child-murderer to advance her career?’

‘Meh.’

‘Or back in high school, how you told me kids who become magicians to be popular only wind up exacerbating their unpopularity, and then you confiscated my wand and cape?’

‘No one will give two shits.’

‘Remember what you told me you said at your sister’s funeral?’

‘Fucking terrorists.’

‘After that.’

‘Oh, I said it would annoy me to be killed by someone who doesn’t especially hate me as an individual, or who I didn’t personally betray.’

‘No, before that. You told us how when Leila had organised the holiday in Bali for the three of you after your dad’s death, you didn’t go because you’d rung the government’s travel-warning number, learned that you needed a shot for Japanese encephalitis, and decided it would be a tedious if not fatal vacation. As you waved her off at the airport, you said to Veronica, It will be one of those holidays where you’ll be jailed indefinitely for insulting the king, and I can move into your bedroom on a permanent basis. Enjoy eternity!’

‘So?’

‘Enjoy eternity were your last words to your sister.’

Aldo gives me a look that is a request for privacy.

‘OK,’ I say, changing tack. ‘Remember when you borrowed money to get an exploration licence in Queensland with Ron Franklin, to drill three holes in some prospect based on what, I can’t remember.’

‘A ground magnetic anomaly.’

‘Right. And the three holes were drilled, and no significant mineralisation was discovered.’

‘So?’

‘And the next year, a UK company discovered uranium in that exact same location.’

‘That was bad luck, but I knew what I was getting into. To be born is to be forewarned.’

I lunge for my notebook and write that down.

‘Hey, stop that!’

‘You know, despite your singular fate, to write about you is to troubleshoot the human spirit. I’m trying to appeal to your basic humanity here.’

‘Hmm.’ Aldo’s mind is adrift now, his thoughts wheeling away. He’s gazing sadly at the rolling blue ocean and the cloudy light like an old sea widow. He’s determined not to help me.

Unless. Oh Jesus, yes. I don’t know why I didn’t think of it before.

‘Stella’s in it.’

‘She is?’

‘Of course. I mean, she features quite significantly, as you might expect in a book about you. In fact,’ I say, ‘I’ve got the first chapter right here in my bag. It’s preliminarily titled “Aldo Benjamin, King of Unforced Errors: The Early Years”.’

‘Aren’t you even changing my name?’

‘Don’t you want to see your relationship from another perspective?’

‘Give it here.’

I fish the manuscript out of my bag and pass it to him. He rotates his bony arse until he has moulded the perfect indent in the sand, wets his thumb, and plunges in.

THE WEIRD TRUTH IS I’VE OFTEN become good friends with people I originally disliked, and the more I downright loathed the person, the better friends we eventually became. This is certainly true of Aldo Benjamin, who irritated me at first, then infuriated me, then made me sick, then bored me senseless, which led to his most unforgivable crime — occasionally, when in the process of boring me, he’d become self-aware and apologise for being boring. ‘No no,’ I’d have to say, feigning shock at the suggestion, ‘you’re not boring me, please go on.’ I sometimes had to plead for Aldo to continue to bore me.

Aldo had transferred to our school in the middle of the penultimate year, and about a month into our friendship, after an all-nighter on pills, Aldo dragged me on a dawn tour of the shitty neighbourhood he grew up in. We had to take two buses to get there, and as the sun rose over the city skyline, we ambled past forgettable stretches of warehouses running alongside a train station that ‘no unarmed woman should dream about walking from, even at dusk’, past a greasy takeaway shop where ‘one employee always kept a lookout for a health official’, until we arrived at a narrow warren of residential streets where the people coming out of their houses were ‘uglier than in the beachside suburbs but not as ugly as in the mountains’. The houses were all massive, all empty, and all had For Sale signs on their front lawns. The sight of his old home territory was over-exciting Aldo; as we moved through it, he bombarded me with random facts about his family that he seemed to be reciting from a census report: only thirty-five percent of them were overweight, they had blue eyes, his mother’s side carried the degenerative diseases, his father’s side had all the madness. Mostly, he said, they were B-negative. I thought: What the fuck is he talking about?

Until I met him, almost all my male friendships were based on homoerotic wrestling or the lighthearted undermining of each other’s confidence, but for Aldo and me, our connection was of like minds on pointless adventures, whether that be taunting bouncers outside nightclubs, riding shopping trolleys down suicidally steep declines, or attending first-home auctions to force up the bids of nervous young couples. In those days, Aldo and I had such great conversations that every sunset seemed like the end of an era. We were young and there were no unpleasant surprises waiting for us in bathroom mirrors. We did things we wouldn’t feel guilty about for literally years. Nobody was on a diet.

It was in the huffy silence of detention after the supervisor had left the room that Aldo and I first spoke. His blue eyes and copper-shaded skin made his ethnicity difficult to place. He was scrawling hairy penises on the desks; I was vandalising an overhead projector. The other students tracked our orbit around the room as we emptied the fire extinguisher. Every now and then I’d catch him staring at me as though out the window onto a fog-drenched paddock. I said to him, ‘What are you looking at?’ He said, ‘My sister Veronica was right. A teenage moustache is pathetic. I’ll shave if you do.’ I said, ‘Fuck you. What are you writing there?’ and tore the exercise book from his hand. Aldo was working on a project he called the Fair Price Index. Sandwiches (any kind): $3.50, haircuts: $11.50, movie tickets: $8.00, soup: $6.00. I said, ‘What the fuck is this?’ Aldo said, ‘This is what I’m going to pay for goods and services in the future.’ I said, ‘So no matter where you are, that’s what you’re going to pay?’ He said, ‘That’s the plan.’ I said, ‘But that’s ridiculous. You have to pay what they charge.’ He said, ‘You can if you want. I’ll pay what’s right.’ I said, ‘What a loser,’ yet several weeks later in religious studies, he offered me a sleeping pill to see who could stay awake the longest and I accepted, and when we were sent out of the room for snoring, he said, ‘Drink?’ I said, ‘A park?’ He said, ‘Toilet block roof?’ I said, ‘Lead on,’ and we stumbled drowsily to the nearby tennis courts, on the way discovering the appalling miracle that we both had a dead sister.