Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘What happens on Sundays?’

‘We’ll be happy on Sundays.’

‘Deal,’ Aldo said.

‘You sure?’

‘Positive. You?’

‘I’m in.’

Aldo punched the air. ‘I can’t wait for the next time some fucker says to me, Unless you’re a parent you can’t understand. I’ll be able to wave my fucking baby in his face —’

‘And you know what else I think we should do? Let’s get married!’

‘Hey now, one monumental decision at a time,’ he said. There was a long silence in that cold spring twilight. How had she come to this absurd conclusion? What did one thing have to do with another, in the twenty-first century? It was almost illicit! He was beset by a crazy moment of suspicion — had this been her endgame all along? He said nothing, and said it for so long, Stella grew sullen. He embraced her and whispered in her ear, ‘Listen, Stella. Whenever I hear that someone has stayed monogamous for forty years it reminds me of when you see in the Guinness Book of Records that someone has walked a thousand kilometres with an egg on his head. I mean, I admire his endurance. But what the fuck did he do that for?’

THREE MONTHS LATER, DESPITE STELLA’S dreams of an ambush of confetti and a rose-petalled waltz up the aisle on the stiff arm of her uncle, they were married in a blink-and-you’d-miss-it ceremony in the fluorescent-lit gloom of the registry office with only six guests: Francesca, Leila, Uncle Howard, Tess, myself and Sonja. There was nothing time-honoured about it. After the ceremony, at Stella’s insistence that their loved ones share in the total bliss of the occasion, the six of us went with the happy couple to — their first ultrasound. Aldo was terrified the baby would turn out to be missing a lung or already fossilised or Siamese twins joined at the face. He was in a hyperactive mood, fidgeting in his chair. He turned to the technician. ‘What did they use before ultrasounds — watercolours?’

‘Aldo,’ Stella said, ‘let her do her job.’

‘There’s its heartbeat,’ the technician said, and though we couldn’t really make out anything human, everyone crowded around to praise the softly throbbing centre of this bewildering blur. I thought: For a puppet in a horror film, you could do worse. Howard was looking at the technician’s legs; Leila squeezed my hand; Tess held Sonja up to the screen and whispered in her ear; Francesca narrowed her eyes in obvious envy; Stella looked relieved and rapturous; Aldo was frozen solid and turning the air electric with his anxiety and rotating nightmares. All the fears he’d ever had about himself metastasised to that little aquatic creature. The spectre of illness just got personal. Everything that went wrong in his life from now on would have something to do with that baby, he thought.

He was wrong.

LEILA’S MORTGAGE WAS UNABLE TO BE refinanced, a writ had been issued by the bank to take possession of the property, and the sheriff was coming that very afternoon to forcibly remove his mother from her home, Aldo told me in a panic on the phone. I told him she could claim hardship, what with her loved ones dead, her island sunk, her culture decimated, her language extinct, her body failing, her money spent by her surviving child.

‘We tried that. She got a stay of execution of the writ, but only for a period of seven days. That was six days ago.’ Aldo went on to tell me that the judge had had an annoying scolding tone, spelling things out in a condescending manner, and had said that not only did the lender have every right to take possession of Leila’s property, but if the property was sold for less than the amount of the loan, she may be liable for the remaining balance.

‘It’s inevitable then. You should voluntarily surrender the property and avoid court costs.’

‘She won’t. She won’t go.’

‘So what do you want me to do?’

‘Just be there when the sheriff comes.’

I hung up and thought: Sons may suffer the sins of the father, but it is mothers who suffer the sins of the son.

‘HURRY UP ABOUT IT, WE’RE ALREADY LATE!’ Aldo shouted to a heavily pregnant Stella in the Annandale Hotel. He knew she’d chosen this inopportune moment to swing by and pick up her last cheque because she dreaded the afternoon ahead even more than he did. While Stella spoke to the manager, Aldo pretended to use the toilet. He splashed himself repeatedly with cold water and had a quick tearless cry. He came back out just in time to see a pregnant woman toss a drink in Stella’s face and storm away.

‘What the fuck was that?’

‘She said what’s your birth plan, I said I don’t have one, and she said it would be such a shame if you let them do a caesarean, and I said well, whatever it takes, right? And she said no, no, having a natural birth is the most primal experience a real woman can have, so whatever you do, don’t let them give you a caesarean, so I said you’ve already failed the first test of motherhood, you know, by putting your own experience of being “a woman” over the wellbeing of the child. You may be a woman, but you’re no mother.’

Aldo sniffed Stella’s clothes. ‘Southern Comfort.’

‘I can’t take it anymore.’

‘You’re doing great.’

‘I feel like I’m three hundred weeks’ pregnant.’

‘It’s been hard.’

‘And my obstetrician keeps telling me I’m having a dream pregnancy.’

‘That son of a bitch.’

‘And I’ve got no more gigs booked! None!’

When they decided to keep the baby, Stella’s goal had been to set down at least eight songs and then not take ‘we don’t accept unsolicited demos’ as an answer, give birth while the album was climbing up the charts, breastfeeding while on tour. Problem was, after the twenty-week mark, Stella had reptilian sweats and prenatal rage, was perpetually hungry and light-headed, beset with a hyper sense of smell, extreme cramps, bleeding gums, the creepy feeling of heavy ovaries, and nipples so sore she couldn’t wear certain fabrics. Everybody told her to get as much sleep as possible, as if sleep could be stored up in the body like water in a camel’s hump, but due to her incessant discomfort, Stella had terrible insomnia. At thirty weeks she had to withstand the ubiquitous insensitivity of friends who told her she was abnormally small. When she popped, days were spent dodging citizens who believed it was socially acceptable to rub a stranger’s belly. Although he was learning not to voice every neurotic forecast, Aldo got rid of their cat in fear of toxoplasmosis, refused Stella single sips of wine, and forced her to consume vitamins to prevent spina bifida. They had sex for the last time five months in, when a little pool of blood sent them rushing in a hateful panic to the emergency room. Without the home remedy of sex, things grew unbearably tense, exacerbated by Stella’s inability to finish a single song; either it needed a bridge or had lyrical holes she couldn’t fill, or she wrote out of her vocal range, or she kept vacillating between keys. ‘My career’s going nowhere and it’s about to be put on hold!’ she fretted. Then there was the additional problem of live performance. On stage, Stella wore a maternity dress and held the guitar to the left of her belly, which made it hard to play. She sounded weird anyway; her diaphragm space was taken up by the baby so she had to bring everything down an octave; hormones thickened her vocal cords and her voice was hoarser than usual. Her feet were swelling and frequent toilet trips interrupted the set. Aldo was unhelpful. ‘Loud prolonged sounds contribute to prematurity and low birth weight. Is that what you really want?’

Stella, already stressing about her future, chose now to stand in the street, dripping with Southern Comfort, and let out a torrent of abuse, accusing Aldo of only worrying about realising his stupid ideas and working on his failed businesses and never being truly supportive of her music or doing anything serious to help her .