Steve Toltz - Quicksand

Now, on Magic Beach, with all the artists wrestling lazily in their usual aura of benign lawlessness, consuming breakfast beers and joints, wrangling children, enjoying a faint tension among the egos while the songwriter Cash Caswill wrote a song in response to the tsunami, I dared ask myself the abominable question: Did Mimi love me back? If she did, she seemed to be asymptomatic. No blushing, no gazing into my face, no evident butterflies. In any case, could anyone love an immortal with no job prospects? I resolved to be on the lookout for clues.

Around two in the afternoon, the artists started playing a drinking game that involved writing haikus, and mine took out round one …

I lived by myself

as brother and sister,

the hermaphrodite said.

… although nobody seemed sure it was a genuine haiku. My second one wasn’t quite as good as the first one, or it was better. You decide:

My spirit animal—

A dog with its head

in a bucket.

The sun grew hot. I removed my shirt. The artists were stunned into silence, as if a curtain had been lifted at a sideshow.

— How the hell did you get those scars? Frank Rubinstein asked.

I ran through the list: motorcycle, skinheads, wrong turn, stray billiard ball, ambush by a party of thorns, Molotov cocktail, car antenna, gravel rash, cigars, etc. The painter Dee Franklin asked if she could draw me.

— Sure.

I noticed Mimi was quiet and turned the other way, facing the arc of gulls and the routine waves collapsing on the shore.

— We have to get going, Aldo, she said.

Was she jealous? Was this the required proof?

— Where are we going?

— You said you’d show me where Leila is buried.

— Now?

I could have played this out forever, though I couldn’t deduce precisely what she was jealous about, since Dee Franklin was in a committed lesbian relationship with Lynne Bishop.

— Yes, Aldo, right now.

Your patience is about to be rewarded, members of the press, because it is from here we may be approaching the answer to our most pressing question: Who probably killed Mimi Underwood? And yes, yes, Your Honour, I promise on my own eyeballs to only, in the briefest manner, stick to the salient points.

XIII

Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, someone had draped seaweed over the statues of angels in Waverley Cemetery, that beautiful hillside resting place overlooking the sea; they must have come up from the beach, barefoot and laughing, and now the violent aroma of sun-fried kelp rotting on graves made Mimi and me wince as we strolled through the grounds and I detailed how my mother’s people were bog-standard Christians in the way that their idea of God was a frowning octogenarian in a toga and heaven a glass-bottomed palace through which the angels observe and report. When we reached a large elegant cross I placed three purple orchids on the headstone.

— Leila Benjamin, meet Mimi Underwood. Like you, dear mother, she isn’t fond of her upper arms and has a temper that could scorch a field of sunflowers.

— It’s nice to meet you, Mrs Benjamin.

— A few of Mimi’s people are buried nearby. Not far, just over there.

— My grandparents. A couple of aunts and uncles. Isn’t that a nice coincidence?

We gazed at the headstone, fingers intertwined. The world was quiet, it had gone into a coma. The heat peeled clouds from the sky, and along the edge of the cliff suicidal joggers made their way to the next beach. Gradually the uneasy smile disappeared from Mimi’s face; I supposed she realised how ridiculous this all was.

— It was nice meeting you, Mrs Benjamin, she said dispassionately and moved to her grandparents’ resting place where she began her own ritual, which entailed removing her socks and shoes and sitting bralessly on a granite step, rolling a cigarette and staring at the oil tanker on the horizon. She looked slightly disappointed with herself; it seemed to me there was a failure taking place: the failure to get sad or to achieve violent regret, or perhaps it was the failure to remember — maybe she couldn’t picture the faces of her grandparents, or she had forgotten to forgive them for something, or she had overforgiven them — either way, she suddenly looked like someone fed up with self-disgust. I turned to my mother and the fear of public opinion rotting with her, then back to Mimi. I had an overwhelming craving for a quick fuck and a long nap. Nothing new about that, Your Honour, I’ve been horny and tired my whole life.

All right, all right. May I just say, in my own defence, I have the right to my own defence, so fingers poised, madam court stenographer, while we meet yet another suspect in this awful case.

Shoes in hand, Mimi came back over.

— Let’s go to the military graves and name all the unnamed soldiers.

— That sounds different.

We walked like a couple of old assassins down the unsteady path to the military section, through the rows of simple white crosses until we were at the edge of the cliff; the wind was stronger and the tall grass danced at the edges of the graves. Mimi stopped at the first white cross.

— Name him.

— What about T-Bone McNally?

Mimi removed a permanent black marker from her purple leather handbag and wrote T-Bone McNally on the white cross. Christ, I thought. When this girl names an unnamed soldier, she doesn’t fuck about.

— Next, she commanded.

— Simon Simonson.

Scrupulously she wrote that too. I watched her perfect calligraphy take form on the white cross and looked around to see if anyone was watching us.

— Now I have one. Elliot Grass.

I wrote it.

— You’ve spelled it wrong!

She tore the marker from my hand, correcting the name with agonising slowness, saying it aloud in a reedy voice filled with tears. The silence that followed felt sacred, apocalyptic. Elliot Grass. The name was familiar.

— Who’s Elliot Grass?

She didn’t respond. I thought back to all the stories she’d told me late at night in bed.

— The guy who gave you an eye infection when he came in your eye?

— No.

— The guy with the misspelled tattoo?

— No.

— The guy who kept making post-coital ta-da gestures?

— No.

— Wait. Is this the guy who shaved his moustache into a bowl and then smoked it?

— Yes, she said.

— And Elliot Grass wrote The Fussy Corpse !

— That’s him, she said. Then added almost as an afterthought, My husband.

XIV

Husband! The deceased’s face was crypt-like and refused expression. We stood in a thunderous silence; I felt perilously lost, cotton-mouthed, threatened. I do not like to love in anyone’s shadow, but at the same time I felt an encroaching sense of relief at the onset of complications, the restored order of unleashed monsters. Here’s where they’ve been hiding.

— What happened to you guys?

— He had this golden retriever named Honey, and when it died he bought another golden retriever and called it Honey II.

— No, come on. That wasn’t it.

— Men only pretend to give up the sex obsessions of adolescence but they never do.

— And so?

— So what was the quote, that Churchill one about democracy?

— The worst system except for all the others that have been tried?

— Yeah, well, that’s how he felt about monogamy.

— Let’s start again. Can we start again? What happened to your husband?

— He lost me, then outright refused to win me back.

— Can you be more specific?

— At nightclubs he and his friends did something called rape dancing, which I think speaks for itself.