Steve Toltz - Quicksand

It would have been better to watch you without sound.

‘Some of you think I killed her with my demoralising business snafus. Rest assured, I will avenge her death by dying myself one day, maybe sooner than you think.’ Blah blah blah. Then I said something about how she never stopped moisturising her hands and loved salad bars and kept Kleenex in a shoulder holster and had a hug Veronica and I used to call ‘the third rail’, and how when she was fifty-five she went out and bought black dye for her hair. I asked her why and she said, ‘I think I’m going prematurely grey.’ Premature, at fifty-five! She was a woman in denial. Then I improvised the poem I promised myself I would write as a tribute to her love of poetry.

I remember. Leila read poems to you after every dinner.

And before every bedtime right into late adolescence! Though it was more Veronica’s thing; she was the poet of the family. Leila always force-fed us French and Spanish poets. Apollinaire. Valéry. Reverdy. Breton. Cernuda. Lorca. Éluard. Jiménez. Hernández.

Let’s hear yours.

‘Mother. My mother. A monument that stood/for seventy-two winters before sliding/into the sea. Her face reflected/in her three-sided bathroom mirror, like a Bacon/triptych. She disapproved by stealth. Mouthed/her silences. Captained a family that went/down. Could fashion a crown of thorns out of any/topic. Attentive grudge-holder. Bestial temper. Own worst/frenemy. Shut-ins who live in glass houses/shouldn’t.’ That was it.

Shouldn’t what?

Live in glass houses. Clearly, I didn’t know what the fuck I was saying!

Do you want to take a minute?

I have something in my eye.

They’re called tears, Aldo.

Liam, it’s just me now.

You still have a ton of relatives, don’t you?

No.

On your father’s side.

Fuck those cunts.

So you’re an orphan. Welcome to the club. You’re almost forty.

No parents, no brothers or sisters, no children. Imagine, to never be able to have another incestuous thought!

Aldo, you realise you could easily fall into homelessness? You’ve the three magical ingredients: mental problems, terrible financial debt and zero support network. Add alcohol to this mix and you might vanish in the blink of an eye. Well, I want you to know you still have me. Remember what Aristotle said? Without friends no one would choose to live, though he had all other goods.

Yes, but that was in an epoch when all other goods meant a clay pot and some terracotta roof tiles.

Let’s get back to the reason you’re here.

Did I mention who I saw, as I was up there on the podium, in the back row sandwiched between manicurists of the deceased?

Stella was there?

And so pregnant, standing in a way that was sexy but I knew was bad for her hip. On catching her sympathetic look my heart went out to myself in the worst way. I thought: If only we could fuck shyly again! I hurried through my eulogy and practically trampled the secondhand coffin to make it over to her. She seemed to be ageing at half speed and was a tumult of familiar odours — jasmine and freshly spilled vanilla milkshake and wax bendy straws. ‘I’m so sorry, I loved your mother. Let’s go outside and I’ll watch you have a cigarette in memoriam,’ she said, reminiscing on Leila’s two-pack-a-day habit, and about how an hour after her last cigarette she would burp up smoke trapped in her lungs. We went outside where the traffic moved in fits and starts as if grazing on the dull surface of the road, and as my mind stumbled over thoughts, Stella placed her hand on my shoulder. It is tiresome to find even compassion erotic. I said, ‘I guess I should wish you luck for your caesar.’ Now we plunged into the vast unspoken reservoir of old pain. The number of people we were mourning doubled, and to prevent the descent of another curtain of awkward silence, she suddenly snapped, ‘What the fuck happened at the Railway Hotel? My uncle said you just stopped turning up.’

She was annoyed at you.

She was annoyed at my having squandered the opportunity she’d laid out for me. Like most people, Stella wanted lavish praise for tiny gestures of ordinary kindness, just as she expected to be rewarded daily for possessing common sense. I thought: She’d accept a kiss if I forced her, then wipe it off on the way home, so what would be the point? As if reading my mind, she gave me a look of pained uncertainty and I told her Leila was to be buried between Henry and Veronica, a little family reunion in a space I’d got her at Waverley Cemetery. It was her favourite. ‘Waverley’s everyone’s favourite,’ Stella said, which is true. It’s a hell of a cemetery. With nothing left for us to say to each other, she swivelled on her heels and waddled away.

So this was the last time you saw Stella before you tried to kill her baby?

I can’t believe you just said that to me.

Aldo, we need to get there. How did you know she was having a caesarean?

I assumed that no doctor, in light of her past history, would allow a let’s-just-see-what-happens birth plan. I called a certified paediatric emergency nurse I knew, who had friends at the Royal Hospital for Women, who found out on the sly that Stella had a C-section booked for April twentieth.

Why was it so important for you to see the child that is not yours?

Because I love her. Because the world is round. Because of the wonderful things she does. Because, because, because, because, because.

Because?

If she loses this second child then perhaps having lost the first was her fate and not mine.

So on the morning of April twentieth you —

Wait up. Where’s the fire? A person can’t take his own life without tying up loose ends, can he? My original intention was to take revenge, make amends, confront ghosts and settle scores, but I couldn’t be bothered with all that so I focused on one thing: apologies. I wanted to say sorry. So for a whole week I entered the houses of old friends and associates and colleagues and acquaintances in tears and left in tears and admittedly didn’t utter a comprehensible word in between.

I’m glad I didn’t answer the door.

My farewell was always ‘see you later’. To say ‘see you soon’ felt like I was sentencing that person to death.

What did you apologise for?

Everything, everything.

What everything?

Everything! I said sorry for ruining your experience of high school; sorry for threatening to fuck you with a monkey’s thighbone; sorry for pretending not to see that rainbow that time; sorry for making fun of your grandfather’s war record; sorry for asking if your new girlfriend had bird-headed dwarfism; sorry for saying you died in childbirth; sorry for boring you into the arms of death with Stella-related issues; sorry for saying ‘I’ve a thought’ then waiting for you to ask me what it was; sorry for not getting to know your children; sorry for summarising your problems back to you with a smirk; sorry for telling everybody your mantra; sorry for purposefully speaking slowly to prolong the conversation because I was afraid to go home alone; sorry for feigning non-judgement when I was judging you like crazy; sorry that I accepted your compliment about being a good listener when I was leveraging the severity of your many gag-inducing deficits to persuade you to partake in my schemes; sorry for abusing my knowledge of your weaknesses and habits and sad interpersonal relationships to get you to lend me money; sorry for making informal psychological assessments in brief psychodynamic therapy sessions you weren’t aware of having; sorry for looking into your bereaved or incest-surviving or recovering-alcoholic or histrionically emoting or chronically fatigued or prescription-medication-abusing faces and comprehending you for my own ends; sorry for using you instead of helping you understand your true value, for not pointing out you were sixes stalking eights, or sevens who were once eights while your partners had ascended to nines; sorry I never really helped all you uneducated adults who somehow managed to partner up, procreate and sustain full work lives with no apparent native language whatsoever and who for the most part test nothing you say against reality and boast that ‘what you see is what you get’, mistaking it for a positive trait; sorry for stifling raucous laughter and sending you back to your abused families with your firm belief in your own virtue and human goodness intact; I’m sorry for my fluency in bullshit; I’m sorry for you well-thumbed open books who have no idea whatsoever that you’ve had acute depression for thirty years; I’m sorry for flattering you even when it was not in your long-term interest; I’m sorry for allowing myself to be treated like a human security blanket, for forcing confessions through the sinister use of awkward silences, for purposefully not shedding light on your perceptual biases that even blind Freddy could see, for using your personality disorders to my advantage; I’m sorry for sitting back and letting you demonise yourself while I reaped your gratitude and ministered to your agonised souls with a prospectus or bank account number.