Steve Toltz - Quicksand

‘I’m almost but not quite sorry for your loss. So fucking what?’

‘So fucking this. Before he died, he confessed something to me.’

‘What was that?’

‘He said he was the one who, you know, killed your mate. Aldo Benjamin.’

‘That’s not possible. He drowned.’

‘Nup. He was done.’

‘How?’

‘Baz went out there.’

‘Out where?’

‘Where do you think? To that rock.’

‘Why would he do that?’

‘Contract.’

‘Come on.’

‘Swear.’

‘Who contracted him?’

Here Neil studies his fingernails. I remove my taser and place it on the dashboard.

‘A woman,’ Neil says.

‘What woman?’

‘Middle-aged bird, a real stunner, wouldn’t stop crying, though. But the thing that struck Baz about her, he said, was how she wore denim and leather and suede all at once with tassels hanging off everything.’

Stella.

‘There was one other unusual thing. She told him to “make sure he doesn’t suffer, make it quick and painless”, which is pretty typical. Baz said people always want to make sure their hit doesn’t suffer, or else to make sure they do suffer, a lot, and people also say “make it look like an accident” like in the movies, or to “look like a suicide” or to “look like a robbery gone wrong”. But what she said, he said, people never say.’

‘What did she say?’

‘After you kill him, she said, make sure, a hundred percent sure, a thousand percent sure, a million percent sure, that he’s actually dead. Don’t leave him alive and suffering. Verify. Verify. Verify. She kept saying the word verify. It freaked him out.’

‘And so he …’

‘So Baz took the rubber boat out and climbed onto that rock one night and stabbed old Anton in the heart.’

‘Aldo.’

‘Right. He said he must have been out of it on something because he hardly put up a fight.’

I thought how Aldo feared stabbings among all violent deaths, how he’d feared the sensation of a punctured lung.

‘And then he dragged the body onto the boat and took him far out and tied an anchor onto his legs and arms and dropped him.’

‘How far out?’

‘I don’t know.’

‘Think. Very fucking specifically. How many minutes going how many knots per hour did Baz go before dropping Aldo onto the sea floor?’

‘Jesus, how the fuck should I know? He didn’t say. He just said he went out far.’ Neil scrunched up his face, worried his arrest was unavoidable. ‘So we good? I can go? Thanks, Liam. See you next time.’

‘And did he?’

‘What?’

‘Verify?’

‘Yeah. Sure.’

‘Baz said he was a million percent sure Aldo was dead?’

‘Yes.’

‘You’re certain. You’re certain that he was certain.’

‘Well, of course he was bloody certain. It’s not as if he’d be there alive chained to the bottom of the sea.’

XI

I’m taking scuba-diving courses now. I got my PADI Open Water certification. I borrowed a suit from Senior Detective Dan Westbury, the only weekend diver I know in the force. It’s a quarter-size too small and smells like pee, but I get in it and go out there once or twice a week. As it turns out, I hate being under the sea as much as being on top of it. Scuba diving has fast become the most hateful of all pastimes, aquatic, landlocked or lunar. The regulator vibrates on the inhale, the weight belt’s too tight, the mask foggy, the tank heavy, and each time I sourly don my fins and head down sloping sandstone or through seagrass or hotfoot it over oyster beds or wade through a swaying clump of plastic bags, milk containers, chip wrappers, and the occasional mosaic of sewerage discharge that is like moving through a vile concoction of womb and bowel, or I plunge into freezing waters from Doc Castle’s boat while he sits on deck, reminiscing about Aldo. (‘He wanted a blank cheque; he wanted a blank prescription pad; he wanted blanket assurances that he would be OK, and he wasn’t OK, he never was.’) I escape him in the dark rush of water, with baited hooks swinging at my head. I surface and splash around like a drowning man attracting the chilling sight of dorsal fins until in a shriek of air bubbles I make my descent, down to where the water feels thicker than water, with larger vectors of darkness to navigate and where one thinks only of Coleridge’s lines: Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs/Upon the slimy sea. Of course there are the beautiful rainbow-hued fish, but there are also — seen magnified through the mask — sea gargoyles that belong on the roofs of flooded cathedrals; bloated slow-moving scum-trailing creatures that seem to be all nucleus, with dull aureoles; barbs and stingers wearing their burst guts on the outside; acephalous creatures; beings with small eyes or, worse, eyeless, and who look so alien as to have no archetype, or so rock-like as to be impossible to anthropomorphise. Frankly, there’s too much biodiversity for my liking, everything in plague proportions: rat kings, tailor, salmon, great squid, snapper, flathead, sea dragons, cuttlefish streaking past like comet tails, slothful swarms of hybrids, lumbering catlike fish, fish with overbites and suckers and pincers and gaping jaws. I am frazzled by the vastness and infinite murk of this underwater ghost town.

I feel the claustrophobia of the mask and exhale bubbles into my line of sight. I’m deafened by the all-encompassing sound of my own breathing. Surges come out of nowhere — there are waves underwater! Who knew? And who knew how regularly I would wash out bloody nasal mucus swilling around the bottom of my mask, or bite down on my regulator mouthpiece so hard I dislodged a crown, or be shunned by gropers, bested by angry triggerfish defending their nests on sandstone reefs, terrified by a turtle springing out from a ledge, or misinterpret the body language of wobbegong sharks, wedge a foot between rocks, see fish eat my vomit. I’ve taken on Aldo’s fear of fears: in this case the pulmonary barotrauma of a quick ascent. I try to put it out of my mind.

In my dreams the ground that opens beneath my feet is the seabed.

Each week I go down into the delirium of lower depths, with my perpetual motion sickness and the weight of the ocean on my head and thinning gradations of light, where things get primordial and I hope to find a corpse of no fixed address.

I think of Stella’s shock decision to grant Aldo’s most unreasonable wish and hire a hitman. Well, murder is only a question of consent. Or implied consent. She had pre-authorisation. I can’t think too badly of her. As long as I will soon be able to put my head to his chest and hear the stillness of his unbeating heart and fulfil Aldo’s lifelong desire to be pronounced dead at the scene.

It is this prickly, preposterous, impossible nightmare of an idea that won’t desert me and keeps me awake nights. I think about Aldo’s old adolescent obsession with the Greek gods: gods who don’t think twice about impelling eagles to gnaw on your perpetually regenerated entrails, or getting you torn to pieces by dogs, or turning you into a deer, or into a spider, or into a cow, or into stone, or making you roll a giant boulder up a hill for eternity, or positioning food and water just out of reach or fastening you to a burning wheel forever. I think: Maybe he locked eyes with the wrong god out that plane window over Leila’s island, one of those shipwrecking, maiden-raping, virility-obsessed, black-ram-slaying, meddling, intemperate, vindictive, rampaging, oversensitive, humourless gods, with their discuses and thunderbolts, their sickles and cooking spits, their rites and ancestral hangups, initiations and vendettas, who wouldn’t lose sleep over coupling with a bull or their own mothers, who never saw a lamb they didn’t sacrifice and who still, for all we know, think virginity is the coin of the realm. Who can say for sure this god didn’t mete out a punishment so severe, chaining a human man to the bottom of the sea, simply because maybe he dared to fear it. This is the absurd nightmare scenario that keeps me going out there, expecting around every murky corner to see Aldo bloated or eyeless, looking strange or fishborn, marooned without death’s hospitality, dwelling unbravely and in total terror like a shipwreck on the seafloor, or Tutankhamun’s sarcophagus in an underwater Valley of the Kings. I cannot help but imagine a shrieking mouth of bubbles, the horror of a windpipe crammed with seawater, inundated with starfish, Aldo crankily passing the time by decoding the arabesques of sea urchins. But how could I find his tears in all that water? With the intolerable sound of my own breathing, how could I also hear a human heartbeat? This is insanity, these oppressive fantasies in the overcrowded sea.