Steve Toltz - Quicksand

IT WAS COLD, SOOTY CLOUDS IN THE SKY. Students drifted in their early morning way, lightly dusted with a fine grimy car exhaust. Mr Hanson, who looked like the historical Jesus, was getting out of his car. A plane flew overhead. I headed directly to the narrow space between the library wall and the canteen where I was greeted with an unwanted round of applause and unreturned high-fives and everyone fought over themselves to inform me that Natasha’s brother and her friends were readying themselves to kill Aldo, to castrate Aldo, to knock Aldo’s teeth out, all vying to posit the sick motives behind what my best friend had done — and what he did last night at my party, they said, was rape Natasha Hunt in one of the empty houses. ‘Tash identified him,’ Tina Carter said, sucking in her cheeks.

IF THE RUMOURS WERE TRUE, I’d have expected Aldo to look as if his conscience was eroding him like an excruciating illness, but when I found him amid blue clouds of smoke in the boys’ toilets, he was deep in conversation with Jay Turnbull, discussing what I first thought was either the party or the plot of a movie, but I soon realised that Aldo was comparing Kristallnacht with the Cambodian Killing Fields— a senseless comparison if you ask me — in any case it was one of those conversations it does you no benefit to overhear. A kind of white noise roared in my head and I burst out with it: ‘You’re being accused of rape!’ He lifted a fearful face that looked like it had never known a smile. He was shaking, looking more afraid than he’d ever been in his life. Of course he knew, he said, why did I think he was hiding in the toilet stall?

This news had triggered in him an adult level of sweat. Aldo lowered his tone. ‘When they told you, did they say rape or sexual assault?’

‘I’m pretty sure they said rape.’

‘Because sometimes they’ll say sexual assault and you’ll assume rape,’ he said, as if he couldn’t catch his breath, ‘but when you read the details you see the assailant maybe only groped or at the most digitally penetrated his victim, which is horrible and equally uncalled for, granted, but a different ball of wax!’

‘I don’t think it really matters at this point. I mean, did you do either?’

‘Of course not! Jesus!’ Delirious tears began to fall. ‘I just want to be absolutely fucking clear about what I’m being wrongfully accused of!’ Aldo said this rape accusation was the worst kind of prank, and that the police were most likely on their way to the school to arrest him, and he didn’t know what to do. I said that to correct the error would be simple, surely, and he accused me of being ‘so fucking naïve’. Jay leaned against the wall and seemed to hang there, as if stuck on a coat hook. In the silence that followed, I recalled the time we were waiting with Ben Stack outside the Silverwater Women’s Correctional Centre in order to ask the next released prisoner if she would accompany one or all of us to the school formal. As we waited, Aldo and Ben argued over whether rape was about sex or power. Ben said it was about power. Aldo said sex. It was a heated argument even though neither seemed overly committed to his position. Aldo turned away from us as the electronic gates were sliding open to reveal the sinewy, cruciform figure of a woman with her arms outstretched. ‘Explain this, then: everything else in the world is about sex,’ Aldo said. ‘Evolution. Reproduction. Cinema. Advertising. Nation building. Bridge building. Moon exploring. Art creating. Everything is about sex. Why not rape?’

Now Aldo stepped out of the cubicle and in a thin voice that echoed off the concrete walls said that around the time the party had almost hit its chaotic zenith, he had been sitting beside Stella on the divan making jokes about them sleeping together, jokes she unfortunately took as jokes. When he put his hand on her knee she laughed, and he thought: It’s fucking galling that people take me as harmless even as I’m literally pawing at them, so he slid his hand higher, to her thigh. There was an excruciating pause as Stella leaned back and looked at his body as if she could use it to store paperclips, old currency and bobby pins, then she took his hand and led him out of the house, onto the street, into the still, airless night and into one of the empty houses, to an apricot upstairs bedroom where the whole thing took place in near-silence. She seemed to want clothed sex but he was determined to at least get her bra off, telling her, ‘If you think I’m going to lose my virginity without catching sight of a tit, you have another thing coming.’ Stella obliged; her breasts felt hard and cold, like packed snow, and his hands looked tiny and blue against her chilled white body in the moonlight. ‘Et cetera, et cetera, et cetera,’ he said, suddenly becoming shy. ‘But I can tell you one thing: it was one thousand percent consensual, that’s for fucking sure, and we stayed in that bedroom talking until dawn.’

‘Will Stella corroborate that?’

‘Why wouldn’t she?’

Who knew anything about anybody? I trusted my friend, but it was beyond baffling why Natasha had identified him as her assailant.

WAITING FOR ALDO IN THE POLICE STATION, seated on a sticky patch of dried Coke near the vending machines, I dug out of my bag Artist Within, Artist Without and turned to the section ‘Tribulations and Creativity’. Morrell writes: It is up to you to make every death of a parent a mixed blessing. Don’t waste time rebuking God or cursing injustice. Rather, transmit your lived pain as solace or amusement … If they are also artists, the truly unfortunate have a wealth of material. If they are not artists, their transformative materials remain lodged in their souls … The neurotic civilian is an incredibly sad, tormented person while the neurotic artist can use his sadness and torment as a sculptor uses clay. Purpose, or the illusion of purpose, are both better than none. I remember thinking as I waited for my friend to emerge from his interrogation that I was an artist and Aldo was not; I could write stories and poems, and Stella could write songs, while Aldo was not going to benefit from his problems in any way, was just going to suffer with no net gain.

STELLA STOOD WITH HER BACK ARCHED, as if her breasts might take off if they weren’t strapped in.

‘I told them the truth. It’s really unjust. We didn’t even actually.’

‘What?’

‘You know.’

‘What?’

‘But he never even, which means he never has. So the question about whether he would is just so. You know.’

‘Stella, what are you saying?’

‘What do you think I’m saying?’

‘You didn’t have sex?’

‘We didn’t fuck. We fooled around. We almost did. But he, you know. Ejaculated. Prior to. Oh God, I can’t believe I’m about to say this word. Penetration. Then again, I also said ejaculated.’ She gave an awkward laugh.

‘What?’

‘Yeah. So that means, you know, technically he’s still a.’

It was late; the setting sun reflected its reddish light in the street. Pedestrians seemed to move at the pace of gridlocked cars. I felt sick. Had Aldo neglected that detail of their rendezvous out of embarrassment? Poor Aldo! How sexually confusing can a single evening be? Rushed from a humiliating episode of premature ejaculation to a horrific accusation of sexual assault. Stella sat on the stone steps of the police station rolling a cigarette, her one bare shoulder emitting an odour of sunscreen. I thought: If this is true, a virgin accused of rape seemed the very definition of injustice.

SINCE MOVING AWAY FROM THE BENJAMIN COMPOUND, Aldo had lived with his mother Leila in their street-level apartment where all manner of pedestrians could see right inside the kitchen and watch them eating, sometimes in their underwear. They were more of an exhibit than a family, appearing to have no sense of being watched and always forgetting to draw the curtains at night.