Steve Toltz - Quicksand

INSIDE LEILA’S APARTMENT, THE AIR bore a heavy odour of vintage colognes. Her friends — all members of the generation that took your arm with the force of a grappling hook — were there to lend moral support and face-stuff vegetable samosas and catch each other up on the progression of various ailments and upcoming funerals. It felt like, in other words, the premature wake of someone planning to die overseas.

I spent the best part of an hour trying not to inhale a yeasty stench and listening to what a son of a bitch that Aldo is. Every now and then I looked at the window to see the street procession peering in. A couple of schoolgirls with knee-high socks. Faces that resembled two a.m. mugshots. Why would anyone fight to stay here? That Leila was going to be removed from this overheated apartment with its permanent shadows and peeping eyes didn’t seem like a tragedy.

Leila was standing by the bookshelf, holding a handbag in her own home. She wore heavy eyeliner and clownish red lipstick, and a burgundy dye stained her forehead like a watermark. She had gotten unbelievably old. Disconcerting folds of skin gloved her trembling bird-like hands. When she saw me she put her arms out and held them aloft. I weaved my way through a Hawaiian-shirted corridor of elderly guts and stepped into the embrace. Her dress seemed made from rough army-blanket material.

‘Jesus Christ, this is so sad,’ I said.

I was still scratching from the hug when I turned to see a priest with white hair and rheumy eyes staring at me. She introduced him as Father Charlie. He gave me a crawly feeling that may or may not have been his personal fault.

‘Where’s that son of a bitch?’

‘He’ll be here,’ I said, wondering how long this bad-humoured afternoon would last. It drizzled briefly and I could hear the cars on the wet streets. I had the strange idea that someone was going to suggest we all commit suicide together.

Around three there was a timorous knock on the door, and Aldo walked in with Stella waddling behind. He crossed the room to face his mother. ‘Where did you dig up these old fossils? Luckily I’ve brought my defibrillator. I’ll start with this side of the room and work my way across.’

Leila’s laughter rang over the grey voices. She loved him. It was an airtight love. He felt forgiven. He hadn’t meant to ruin her retirement.

Her friends gathered around and Aldo listened patiently to their wheezing admonishments and foamy critiques. Two plump women spun competing visions of Henry rolling over in his grave. An arthritic uncle misjudged the distance and finger-wagged him in the eye. I took a couple of steps backwards, out of the blast radius. There was something gladiatorial about it. This was pure Aldo.

In his defence, he and Stella had made up a room in their house but Leila had refused it point blank, not wanting to intrude. She wasn’t comfortable staying with friends either and so she was going to a retirement home. Her packed bags, I now noticed, were in an unsteady melodramatic stack by the door. This was pure Leila.

There was a hard knock and forty guests made forty petrified smiles. The sheriff was rattling the door handle, calling Leila’s name. ‘Mrs Benjamin? Mrs Benjamin. This is happening. This is happening today.’

Aldo stood on one of the chairs. ‘Thank you, on behalf of my mother and me, for coming here today. There has been some unseasonable weather in my luck.’ He made a pointless gesture with his hands and laughed abruptly, like a serial killer trying not to sound diabolical to an indecisive hitchhiker. Two garbage men and the youths from the shelter next door joined the sheriff at the window and peered in, their shadows blocking the sun. Aldo said, ‘It’s sad that Leila is losing her home. You all have homes, you know the value of a home. And in those homes, come to think of it, ladies and gentlemen, you probably have one room you never go into, just an empty space. Maybe it was a child’s bedroom who moved out, maybe it’s a den or study you don’t really need anymore.’

Oh no, I thought. He isn’t.

‘That space is worthless to you, but did you know that it may have value to others?’

Was Aldo going to pitch?

‘There are people, obsessive-compulsive hoarders, who cannot help but accumulate possessions to the detriment of their very health and safety and who need, desperately need space, your valuable space . And all I ask of you, to help our lovely Leila in her hour of need, is the use of your spare rooms at absolutely no inconvenience to you, and with a small investment of a thousand dollars apiece, I can guarantee —’

‘Get out of here,’ Leila said loudly. She stood hands on hips with an erect bearing that looked to be taking a physical toll.

Sad amazement grew on Aldo’s face as he gauged the sincerity of her demand. He stepped down from the chair and bowed theatrically, slung his jacket over his shoulder and went to the door. As he pushed past the irritated sheriff, he glanced back around. I expected to see a sneaky smile but he looked so incredibly forlorn and serious, I wanted to press him like a dried flower between the pages of a book.

TWO HOURS AFTER ALDO HAD MOVED a terrified Leila into a neat brick retirement home nestled in bushland — he waved a teary goodbye to her at ‘medication cocktail hour’—he found himself at Paddington Markets contemplating a drifty-eyed clairvoyant at a tiny table, tarot cards fanned out in front of her. Aldo thought: Why not? Doctors tell us about our bodies, art about our souls, religion about our fears, but it’s masseuses, prostitutes, psychologists and fortune tellers who join us at the extreme limits of our narcissism, and while we are desperate to be diagnosed yet don’t want to be classified, and we don’t want to feel bullied by hope, and while, sure, it makes no real sense to invest my mental wellbeing in a woman I recognise as having once worked for a short time making keys in the hardware store, I do need to know certain things: such as will I turn out to be like my neighbour, a 98-year-old misery of a human being still waiting for his formative years? I’m relatively young, and society admires that in a person, but how the hell am I going to break my mother out of that dreadful home and pay for a wife and child when I’m so irredeemably in debt? Aldo blurted out his fears and watched the clairvoyant stretch her plump fingers over the cards. ‘Your child will live to be a hundred,’ she said. Aldo found himself overwhelmed by an eagerness to change the subject. ‘ Only a hundred? In this day and age?’ he said, and then heard himself make a strange and totally random proposition, offering to pay the fortune teller double to read her own palms while he watched.

She accepted, as if it were a classic, time-honoured request.

A rosy future taken care of by her son. That was it. That was all she predicted for herself. ‘A good boy, always does right by his old mother,’ she said. It was physically irritating. Her whole future was predicated on the whim of her stupid son, who, it seemed to Aldo, was capriciously tormenting her. She said, ‘He’s in there,’ gesturing to the inside of the shop. ‘You’re the same age, you should meet him.’

‘Because we’re the same age?’

‘Jeremy!’

‘Please don’t call your son.’

‘Jeremy!’

That’s when Aldo heard a voice shout, ‘Is that a fat version of Aldo Benjamin?’ and a balding man who was indeed his own age strode over, adjusting his pants. Her son, it turned out, was an old sort-of enemy from high school. ‘Jeremy, there’s only so much that deodorant can do for you on its own, you have to bathe eventually,’ Aldo said as they shook hands. They quickly began the old game of staring at each other’s foreheads. Jeremy asked, ‘Are you going to the reunion?’ Aldo said, ‘What reunion?’ Jeremy said, ‘The twenty-year high school reunion.’ Aldo said, ‘That’s in eleven years.’ Jeremy said, ‘Yeah, I’m not sure either, I’ll see how I go.’ And Aldo said, ‘Isn’t the ten-year one first?’ And Jeremy smiled acidly and asked if Aldo had heard that Stan Maxwell had thrown his two-year-old daughter off a bridge in a murder-suicide that went wrong. ‘No way,’ Aldo said, horrified. He tried to square the villainous atrocity with the Stan he remembered, but he could only think of the poor little girl, and the abject terror she must have felt on the way down to her death. Oh, how awful! ‘But you said it went wrong. How? How did it go wrong?’ Aldo asked in a panic. Jeremy was bright with the bad news. ‘Stan didn’t kill himself,’ he announced. ‘Well, that’s no surprise,’ Aldo said, ‘attempted suicides outnumber attempted murders a thousand to one.’ Jeremy said, ‘It’s always the quiet ones, eh?’ ‘Actually,’ Aldo recalled, ‘he was quite chatty.’ That was one up for him. Then Jeremy grasped his shoulder and said, ‘Some of us are getting together to help him out. What about you? Would you be a character witness?’