Steve Toltz - Quicksand

I am woken by a momentous wave, as if the first to crash on the shore this calendar year, and I hallucinate the sound of a crying baby, rasping and raked in the foam. I sit up, damp and cold, feeling only minimally alive. A terrifying swell is rolling, coming in rows every few minutes. A grey light spreads thinly over the dawn sky and the horizon is veiled in a light mist. Overnight the glassy waves have grown big and stormy, six-footers breaking over the tiny island, waves so big they seem to generate their own weather system. I can see the figure of Aldo propped up on a rock, a dance of white water spiralling up behind him. He’s shouting something, and making some kind of hand signal.

I think he is just waving hello. I say, ‘What a cock.’

Behind me, a laugh. I turn around. Her face swarming with hair, a toddler on her lap playing with his mother’s skirt. Christ. Stella.

‘You snore,’ she says.

There’s black eyeliner framing her gigantic eyes, and she looks padded out; the weight has aged her.

‘How long have you been sitting there?’

‘Not long.’

She gives me that intense stare of hers that feels like a part of her is also watching me from another vantage point with binoculars. She digs her nails into the copper sand. Clive, the puffy-cheeked toddler, shovels fingers of it into his mouth.

‘Do you have water?’

She passes me a bottle; it tastes like melted refrigerator ice. Wedged into the sand beside her is a small esky.

‘He called me. Asked me to get supplies.’

‘What did he ask you to get?’

‘The usual.’

‘What does that mean?’

She opens the esky to reveal gardener’s gloves, a coffee-filled thermos, a heavy rope, yogurt, sandwiches, tins of tuna and pineapple slices, jars of pickles, bananas, beer, fruit, a first-aid kit, a carton of Marlboro Reds, a lighter, and an old photograph, framed — when was the last time anybody framed a photograph? — of the two of them together.

I say, ‘Jesus, is that —?’

A barefoot dark-haired woman emerges from the path and heads towards us. She’s thin and pleasant-looking but with a hook nose that you don’t see so much in the twenty-first century.

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘Hi.’

‘I’m Saffron.’

‘Liam. We met at Aldo’s trial.’

‘Which one?’

‘I’m Stella. What’ve you got there?’

Saffron too has an esky in her hand.

‘Is that …?’

‘Aldo asked me to bring supplies.’

I laugh. ‘What a cock.’

‘I guess he was covering his bets.’

‘Wow, so that’s where he is? On that?’

There is abrupt silence as the three of us contemplate the rock: no longer a piece of sea-worn granite off the eastern seaboard, it is a solid abyss on which our broken mutual friend is miserably camped in the open air alone. We all stand absurdly, like pod people.

‘So, Liam,’ says Stella. ‘What are you waiting for?’

‘No time like the present,’ Saffron says.

I turn and make my plea to the large waves collapsing on the shore. ‘Just dash out, make a whirlwind visit to the rock and whip back? Is that what you mean?’

‘We’ll hold your spot for you,’ Stella says.

The waves, the waves. The kind that frequently swallow rock anglers and their children. Even if I was a regular surfer, I wouldn’t voluntarily go out in surf this big, but with Stella frowning and Saffron jubilant behind me, I feel an indispensable part of an ongoing drama.

A flash of lightning; the sky’s in a mood.

I strap both eskies to the nose of my surfboard and push out, battling the frightening waves. A grey bank of cloud hangs ominously above and it feels as if a storm is raging on the sea floor. It’s slow-going and I’m sloshed around like a shrunken head in a barrel. I get over the peaks and consider my approach. The ocean swells up over the island, leaving a short interval to swim onto the rocky base before the water rushes back out, creating a dangerous vacuum effect. This is going to be tricky.

‘Careful, Liam!’ Aldo shouts.

There he is, looking wolfish, atavistic, perched on a ledge without a wetsuit and propped up on the rock, belly spilling over tight black board shorts. I spot his surfboard wedged up between a couple of dark boulders. ‘Did you sleep?’ I ask, trying to stay afloat.

‘Got an hour here or there. The place is crawling with crabs!’

‘What?’

‘Crabs! One of the bastards nipped my toes.’

‘Come back in!’

‘Just leave the eskies.’

‘Fuck that. Those women are killers. I’m coming up.’

‘Not there!’

Relentless waves make access unsafe, and the rocks are too steep to climb onto. He gestures to a spot on the northern point of the island, so I paddle around. Here the waves are downright barbarous, but there is a jagged ledge that seems plausible. Aldo laboriously shuffles down to the water’s edge and grabs the nose of the board.

‘Untie your ankle.’

I take the leash off my ankle and toss it to him. He wraps it around a crag and it goes immediately taut. Whatever the ocean is doing to me, it is nonconsensual. Aldo asks if I know any sea shanties.

‘Just help me up!’

Between thrashing breakers, he pulls the eskies onto the rock, then takes my hand and steadies me as I cautiously slide onto the ledge and scramble up. The water is billowing dangerously. Aldo drags my board up after me.

Happy to be safe from the clamour of the waves, I make a quick perusal of the terrain. It’s craggy and uneven and mossy with unexpected shelves and rockpools; water foams in the crevices, sick with seagulls and their feathers. Vistas front and back. The waves are deafening here. I can see a couple of crabs with reddish-brown bodies and bright, red-tipped claws, no better than spiders in my estimation, and also Aldo’s handiwork: a jellyfish with a stick through it. The island is treacherously rugged, even for the sure-footed and nimble. It’s like some new planet you’d take a quick look around — then fuck off out of.

He tongues a cavity and gives me a look, as if he’ll turn a blind eye to trespassing just this once, and sifts through Saffron’s esky, tossing aside a bottle of Stolichnaya, grapes, cigarettes, ibuprofen, soap, sterile gauze bandages, disposable medical gloves, sunscreen, toilet paper, raincoat, vinegar, lemon juice, antiseptic cream, hydrogen peroxide and burn ointment. He drags out the binoculars and gazes at the women on the shore and nods a thankyou that they couldn’t possibly see, and throws a wild wave to Clive. Then he slips on the medical gloves and holds up a pair of tweezers.

‘I have a tick.’

‘Out here?’

‘Must have picked it up yesterday when we came through the bush. You get one?’

‘Nope.’

We both thought: Typical .

He burrows into his skin and yanks the sucker out.

‘Fuck!’

‘What’s wrong?’

‘I think I left the head inside.’

He tosses the tick’s body angrily into the sea and washes the wound with bottled water from Stella’s bounty. With a sulky expression he rubs the antiseptic cream on his hands and dons the gardener’s gloves. He slips on the shades and pockets a sheathed knife and lifts himself up on his arms and strenuously crisscrosses the rock face, reminding me of those quadrupeds in Turkey. He is going after crabs and other living things that hiss and roil in their shells.

‘This guy’s been bugging me all night.’

He presses his face to the wet, scaly rock. This position seems to cause him agony, but it’s like he’s come to realise his capacity to endure pain is elastic and he still hasn’t seen how far it’ll stretch. He returns from his hunt without success, bringing his portable carnage to a rest beside me. Blood trickles out from under his eye. When did that happen? He must’ve fallen soundlessly when I wasn’t looking. He looks like a fish unhooked too late.