Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Aldo wasn’t listening; he was back sitting with his head on his arms. Leila made a childlike pout and at that moment a brick crashed through the window with another threat scrawled across it: Your dead .

THE NEXT DAY, I DID MY OWN FEEBLE best to explain to Natasha’s brother and his flinty mates that Aldo had an airtight alibi, but the more I defended him, the more it looked like they were going to tunnel bodily through my chest wall. For her part, Stella interrogated the girl in her place of residence; she threw pebbles at various windows until Natasha emerged, mellow-eyed, and ushered her into a room with next to no furniture in it. Stella said that during the whole conversation the girl was holding what looked like a shoehorn and didn’t make the slightest physical movement. ‘Aldo’s a fucking virgin who doesn’t know his way around the female body, whereas would you say your rapist seemed to know exactly what he was doing?’ Stella asked. Natasha said nothing. A burning cigarette lay untouched in an ashtray next to them. Stella asked Natasha why, if it was pitch-black in the room, she was so certain it was Aldo. She said, in a voice that sounded like a finger was pressing on her vocal cords, ‘His silhouette.’ And: ‘His smell.’ And: ‘His energy,’ then described the same cold feeling she got whenever she was standing next to Aldo. Different strains of nausea grew inside both of them. Stella calmly demanded more details. Natasha said she had taken several bumps of the drug Special K and wanted to sit alone a moment. ‘He must have followed me in.’

‘Special K?!’ Stella thought a moment, then in a stifled voice said, ‘Oh, you mean the horse tranquiliser and powerful dissociative anaesthetic?’

Natasha smiled sarcastically. ‘It was him. I know it was him.’

Stella spoke now with the ferocity of a mother fighting for primary custody. ‘It’s not his word against yours, Tash, it’s mine against yours.’

‘It was him it was him it was him!’ she screamed, the sad spooky girl, as the room filled with moonbeams and shadows. ‘It was him it was him it was him,’ she repeated, her words seeming not just to hang in the air, but whirl like propellers.

AFTER THAT, ALDO AND STELLA SKEDADDLED together. Nobody could find either one. Feeling helpless, the only thing I could think to do was go around the school borrowing everyone’s photographs from the party so I could scour them for clues. I saw nothing useful. Around dinnertime on the fourth day, my phone rang; it was Aldo asking if I could score some pot.

‘Where are you guys?’

‘Brighton-Le-Sands Motor Inn.’

When I arrived he hurried me inside. ‘Did anyone follow you?’

‘Who do you think you are right now?’ I asked.

Stella was demurely tucked in under the sheets but her breasts were visible and the room stank of latex and full body sweat. Aldo confided that Stella had definitively laid waste to his virginity and his penis now enjoyed full employment. ‘Great,’ I said, feeling crotch-level hunger pains and dropping into the red vinyl armchair against the window. As far as I could tell, they had watched movies, got drunk, eaten chicken hero rolls they’d bought from the convenience store across the road and had to liquefy in the microwave on site, fucked on the stiff motel sheets like B-movie characters, and abused Leila’s financial support by renting every $12.99 VHS porn movie in the motel’s erotic video library. I felt an attack of my most chronic illness — the pain of missing out. The absurdity of these two high-schoolers hiding in a motel room having the time of their lives just burned me. They deflected my questions about how long they were planning to live like this.

‘Until it’s over,’ Stella said, with a melodramatic lilt to her voice. She had written three goopy love songs since they’d moved in, six pop songs and one power-ballad; there was something about being on the run with Aldo, she said, that had inspired the hottest burst of productivity in her whole life.

Aldo offset my jealousy by assuring me it wasn’t all fun and games; he was simultaneously living a high-adrenaline nightmare every time a car pulled into the car park or a child clomped in the next room or a housekeeper knocked unexpectedly or a neighbouring guest kicked either of the broken vending machines, trying to retrieve a dangling Mars Bar or a stuck can of Coke. He was on edge. And going crazy. He was stumped as to why Natasha had positively identified him and he flipped obsessively through the photos of that night that I’d brought with me, scouring the faces for anyone who looked like him. Aldo’s own face was tense and he had fear-wrinkles in his forehead. He sat stewing and quivering with anger, tried to see her side of it. There was no doubt she was raped, she wasn’t making it up, but why him? Why did she have to say it was him ?

‘I’ve written a song about Aldo’s innocence,’ Stella piped up from under the sheets.

‘Oh no,’ I said, and it occurred to me then that love is a decision, and the intensity of that love is more closely related to stubbornness than to genuine or spontaneous feeling. For whatever reason, Stella’s heart was a nesting ground for desperate passion, and she had leaped into this union with her eyes open and her mind set on adore .

WALKING INTO A NEST OF TEACHERS in a staffroom is like stumbling backstage at a theatre: everyone half in makeup, half costumed. Mr Morrell was crouched down, staring into the bar fridge. He took a bite from a cold apple and returned it before sitting in an armchair with a notebook. After his wife died, I remembered, he was often called the Weird Widower, but that was years ago, and now he just seemed overly sad. He sat there like the heir to a throne in a country that had just overthrown its monarchy.

‘Excuse me sir,’ I said from the doorway. I thought I saw him flinch, though I might’ve imagined it. ‘Come in, Liam!’ he bellowed. The other educators fumbled with their soggy pink donuts as I approached. Mr Morrell had been doodling on a student’s essay: a picture of a face. He saw me looking and tilted it towards me and said, ‘What do you think?’, the subtext of which I took as: Come on, Liam, universal acclaim has to start somewhere . I praised his artwork and then explained the situation: Aldo’s girlfriend was a singer-songwriter from Beaumont Hills High who thought her protest song would win over the hearts and minds of the vengeful mob who might get to him before he could be cleared of any wrongdoing. Mr Morrell thought it was an inspired idea. He’d fix it with the administration, put the whole scheme under his umbrella, as it were. Before I left, he asked, ‘Was it Valéry who called music a naked woman running mad in the pure night?’ I said that I didn’t know, that I didn’t really run in those circles.

THE STUDENTS GATHERED TO THE FLUTTER of pigeon wings and Mr Morrell helped Stella hook up her amp and microphone to the school’s PA system. ‘What did Hitler say? Without the loudspeaker we would never have conquered Germany? I play a little banjo myself,’ he said, then he took to the stage. ‘I have an announcement regarding an important interlude. An outside musician, someone who is not a student at this school — don’t feed the pigeons, McKenzie! — has written a song about one of our students.’ He closed his eyes as if inhaling a pungent bouquet. ‘Her name is Stella Winter and without further ado—’ he turned—‘come on out, girl.’ The students erupted in jeers and boos as Stella strutted the stage triumphantly, as if the concert were already over and she had played a legendary set, like Janis at Monterey.

‘Rapist’s bitch!’ someone yelled.

Stella throttled the microphone and bewilderedly glanced up at the biology-classroom window where Aldo cowered wearing an umpire’s mask, before she shouted, ‘This is called “The Aldo Benjamin Blues” and it is written in defence of an innocent boy,’ and as if deciding the treeless Zetland High quadrangle would be her musical birthplace, she did not sing so much as screech at the belligerent crowd, who leaned forward to discern the lyrics so they could hate them with more clarity and force— He wouldn’t harm a fly/Persecuted without knowing why/The girl she’d taken ketamine/And fingered Aldo Benjamin —and aside from the bemusing miracle that the accuser had been blitzed on the only illicit substance that rhymed with the family name of the accused, the song seemed to be an ordeal for the singer as much as for the audience. It went from sounding like seagulls cawing inside a rainstorm to a muffled drawl, like when someone talking on the phone has let the receiver drop to their chin. For that reason, perhaps, the students were transfixed, and after it ended there was a deep silence that seemed to envelop the entire school, which now looked less like a crowd and more like a still photograph of a crowd scene. Then came the boos. Stella responded with a cover of Jefferson Airplane’s ‘White Rabbit’ that she dedicated, in something of a non sequitur, I thought, to ‘Palestinian women shackled during childbirth in Israeli prisons’, a cantankerous finale that won her a vaguely fearful smattering of applause. After switching off the microphone and watching her pack away her guitar, Mr Morrell congratulated her on her robust performance, the volume and intensity of which had cancelled out any extraneous thoughts in his head; Stella said she had imagined she was in CBGB in ’73 but: ‘We live in an age where you can’t be transgressive anymore. To make any kind of lasting impression I’d have to literally get up there and fuck a dog in the eye,’ and Morrell, seemingly unperturbed by the concept, said brightly, ‘You’d be surprised, Stella. Conservatism is like plaque; even once scraped away, it builds up again to problematic levels, so that what is now permissible can yet again become taboo —’ He was cut off by the unexpected launching of missiles — pencils, textbooks, shoes, school diaries — and escorted Stella out of the line of fire. It was overall, I thought, a pointless debacle.