Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘I’ll pass.’

‘Stan would do it for you.’

‘Like fuck he would.’

At that moment, a bus pulled up and a cluster of sixteen-year-old schoolgirls poured out and headed into the chocolate shop next door. Jeremy fell into a charged silence, and then in a quieter voice admitted that he had begun to find the sight of young girls’ arms unbearable. ‘Unbearable!’ he repeated. ‘Their thin, slender arms!’ He sounded genuinely upset and Aldo was so terrified that he might say something further about their arms, he asked, ‘So what are you doing these days?’ Jeremy said, ‘I organise Wave Rock, a music festival in the desert.’

WHAT HAPPENED NEXT COMES TO ALDO as in an unpleasant dream — it comes with medical smells and desert winds and hairy faces floating out of darkness, and I will try to tell it like he lives it now, as a memory that waits in the street, engine idling, for whenever Aldo hates himself enough to take it for a spin.

It is two weeks later. Aldo and Stella are on a plane to Perth and then on a bus that barrels down a highway through bright-yellow canola fields and rolling hills of green wheat and salt plains and hours of straight road that stretches out like a long dirt tongue to nothing but nothingness and open sky and petrol-station coffee and a flatness of land that is almost comic. Aldo, his head resting on Stella’s shoulder, is thinking about his bargain, in which he agreed to be a character witness for the child-murderer Stan Maxwell if, in exchange, Jeremy would put Stella on the line-up for Wave Rock. He is thinking of the strange unruly silence of the courtroom and the character-witness testimonies amounting to nothing more than silly anecdotes about meaningless acts of banal friendship that seemed grotesque against the backdrop of a murdered daughter; there were genuine recollections of how the accused would grow introspective at story time, often lend lunch money, and — in Aldo’s own contribution — later in high school, would go very far out of his way in the opposite direction to give you a ride home, though, Aldo added, we all did in those days. During his testimony, Stan Maxwell was looking at him stonily, which was equally as unsettling as Stan’s former wife’s hollow-cheeked glare. Stan’s own defence, that he was showing the little girl the water when she wriggled out of his grip and fell, chilled Aldo — he thought of himself as a self-injuring clown with the potential to harm anyone unlucky enough to be left in his care, including his own child. Footage in the state’s arsenal was presented with prosecutorial relish, yet Aldo himself found the evidence inconclusive. A pixieish girl falling off the bridge, but whether Stan threw, shoved or dropped her accidentally was not clear. Aldo felt frozen in a ghastly fear that he was watching a preview of his own trial.

The bus to the festival arrives very late in the afternoon, just as the damp glow of a desert sun is setting over that incredible rock, and they are greeted by an old man with a grey goatee and two gaunt dogs who leads them to a converted bus where they will sleep on a mattress under a mosquito net. That night, a sky of sharp silvery stars, the kind of night that, as Aldo puts it, ‘stirs extraterrestrial desires that no earthling can satisfy’. Stella writes this in her notebook and Aldo feels the faintest throb of irritation. For the rest of the night he does not share any further thoughts; he doesn’t tell her that he feels like the whole world is an enormous aquarium before you pour the water in, nor that he feels they are as long dead as the stars themselves and the act of God remembering us is what gives us the illusion of life. Instead he stays silent and they fall asleep.

The next morning they wake late and eat vegetarian nachos in a tent with the members of Acquired Brain Injury, and Aldo gets into an argument with the lead singer over the composition of nondairy cheese. After lunch, Aldo and Stella walk around the two main stages checking out the early afternoon acts. The smell of marijuana is sweet and constant. There is an aura of debauched lethargy. Stella’s pregnant body draws curious stares. This is the biggest crowd she has ever played. She is going through her set list when Aldo’s phone rings.

‘Aldo! It’s horrible!’

It is Leila. The smell of the retirement home is both musty and antiseptic, and she describes the people the same way: musty and antiseptic souls, she says; the inmates here won’t stop complaining, she complains. Then there is the noise, the duelling televisions, the smell of pine cleaner and urine; twice she has been sexually harassed by male inmates, someone slipped her wedding ring off her finger while she was asleep, but the worst was being stuck living with all these overentitled baby boomers. ‘It’s intolerable,’ she cries.

‘Don’t call them inmates. They’re residents, like you.’

‘Inmates is what we are!’

‘Then come live with Stella and me.’

‘No! I don’t want to intrude.’

There is no way out, no consolation; it is the grimmest kind of horror story — one with guilt and regret. She had thought her future was an enigma, when it never was. It was waiting smack-bang in her field of vision all along. Leila is suffering and it’s Aldo who feels wronged. He hates himself for that feeling. He feels dwarfed by it.

‘And my blanket was stolen — you know, the red cashmere one.’

‘Are you sure you took it there?’

‘Of course I’m sure …’

Her voice recedes, and that’s his fault too, because he is no longer listening. This life she’s depicting — the wily nurses, the missing items, the lascivious male residents — is it paranoia or not? It is hard to hear the details now because she is speaking with her hand over her mouth. Now she’s bemoaning her Henry, her Veronica, her house, her youth, her health, her island, everything she has lost. Her tight voice is so alive with hurt, with loneliness and longing and outrage, and its every utterance discredits him totally.

‘Father Charlie is coming to visit, he’s the only one I can count on.’

‘Don’t let him in!’ Aldo says. He still can’t get over this dried-up priest going about in public in this day and age, daring to counsel vulnerable widows with terrible sons. ‘Listen, tell Father Charlie that you can no longer see him because being a Catholic today is like remaining in the Nazi Party because you like the autobahns.’

Stella slaps Aldo on the arm. ‘I have an idea,’ she says.

Aldo wraps up the call. ‘I can’t do anything right now. But as soon as I get back to Sydney I’ll sort this out. I promise. I love you. I’ll sort it out. I love you. Bye.’ Two I-love-yous to counteract hanging up on his abandoned mother.

It is two hours from showtime. Stella says, ‘Let’s go for a walk.’ They wander silently for two kilometres until they are afraid to go further. Not a shadow of a tree and nothing but edgeless sky, an unblinking hell of a sun, the heat mitigated by a breeze that stirs the dust. Aldo gazes around him at the old rocks and the oversized silences and the expanding desolation and negligible wind and the suffocation of all that space and dust pouring off the empty plains.

‘I’ve been thinking about Uncle Howard,’ Stella says.

‘What about him?’

‘I’m not supposed to know this, but he’s spent a shitload working his way through the spiritual ranks of that religion. Four million new clients a year.’

‘I think they’re called believers.’

‘Subscribers. You’ve spent your whole life on dumb businesses. You should start a religion, like Hubbard. Like Joseph Smith.’

‘Who’s that?’

‘He started Mormonism. They got rich too. You’re always preying on people’s need for self-improvement.’