"Tiddalik" by Michael McStay

1.

Costa had broken his leg. No sooner had he received his diagnosis than a stream of messages came flowing forth in the group chat, beweeping his state and putting in requests for alcohol, food, dexamphetamines, and other miscellania. He was going to be laid up at his mum’s house for at least six weeks, which obviously didn’t suit his lifestyle. For all that he had served our community, he was calling on us now to be with him in his time of need.

Lachie and I were the closest to Costa. So it was incumbent on us to support him (more so than the others, who mostly just endured his dominion). Everyone liked him, but the cold hard fact was that liking him was forbearance. Lachie and I seemed to just have that subservient nature, like a Versailles footman or death row executioner. Simply put, when compared to everyone else, we’d spent more cumulative hours listening to him rant at four-thirty in the morning about democratic principles in contention with plutomania or whatever thesis happened to have sprung out of the last YouTube documentary he’d watched. The rest of them had better things to do.

2.

We sat at Costa’s bedside, as though he had cancer or AIDS or something. His hairy toes were poking out of the end of his cast, pointing toward me with what felt like accusation.

For someone who had always seemed so gargantuan, who shrouded a room just by entering it, he was small there in his childhood bed, bereft, like a shrunken head. It was somehow touching that this man, who could send quivers of seismic shock through a party at his merest whim, was so contained.

He was midway through berating Lachie for having brought up his ex-girlfriend, even though it might have been him who had done so. In a brief aperture of his raving, he leant across to his bedside table to clutch at one of the cherry-and-pomegranate vapes we’d bought him (Lachie and I had argued about how many to bring - I was fast being proven correct that seven wouldn’t last a week). I took advantage of the breath to probe Costa about his accident.

‘I was playing netball and I tripped, that’s all that happened, it was innocuous, totally innocuous, but what happened was that I was going down and my foot didn’t go any further so my entire weight came down on it. Crushed the bones to dust, just a freak accident they said, so now I’m holed up like a fuckin…invalid.’

‘Why, though? It’s not the eighteen-sixties.’

He puffed. ‘I don’t know what you mean.’

‘Why don’t you use crutches?’

‘Fuck crutches.’

‘Or a wheelchair.’

‘I’m not using a wheelchair, Dylan.’

‘Sorry I asked.’

There was a certain joy he was taking in his misery. He couldn’t bear the thought of six weeks with only his mum to talk to, with nothing to do but play his online chess games and watch the news feed of the upcoming presidential election. I didn’t feel that this prospect sounded vastly different from his routine, except for the one obvious major alteration; he couldn’t party.

‘I miss you all so goddamned much. I know it’s only been two days but it feels much longer because of the anaesthetic. And Mandy’s thirty-first is on Saturday. I was looking forward to it, even though she can go to hell for what she said about me. But I already paid for my drugs, so I’ll guess I’ll just be sitting here off my face on ket trying to keep myself from going in a hole - unless you guys want to come out here at like…twelve? We’d  just be doing what we’re doing now, or unless you want to bring a couple of the girls, they could see my cast and bring a few drinks, you know, that could be good…probably don’t bring Lucy though, or Adam, they’re a bit -‘

In the depths of his soliloquies, he had a way of self-perpetuating. As much as we were unable to interrupt or contribute, so too did it seem as though he were unable to stop. There had been moments in the dead of an early-morning high when I could see a panic flashing in his eyes like a far-off supernova in the depths of a forgotten galaxy. I got to feeling like that flash of panic was a communique from the innermost being of Costa, the truest Costa, that was desperate to be recognised. That true Costa, like a castaway or a media company, was reduced to a crude, semaphoric state in which communication was both the end and the means, and purely one-sided. I would watch him suck in giant gulps of oxygen to fuel his logorrhea. As though he were sucking in all the air in the room. All the air from us who watched and laughed for his near-perfect performance. This character who veered larger than reality. This engine of the social.

‘ - I’ll need more booze though, if you don’t mind doing another delivery, which is all right because then we can hang out a bit more- ‘

‘Why will you need more booze? We’ve brought a whole case, plus the gin and the rum.’

‘And the wine,’ Lachie said.

‘I’ll pay you back, it’s just that mum won’t get me anything, ‘cause of what the doctor said - ‘

‘What’d the doctor say, Costa?’

‘Some medical bullshit, you know, they think we haven’t read up on these things, they’re talking out of their arse about stuff that appeared in a medical textbook forty-five years ago and got outdated forty-four-and-a-half years ago - ‘

‘Yeah, so what’d he say?’

‘He said I’m not ‘supposed’ to mix alcohol with the pain meds.’

‘So why did you ask us to bring you alcohol?’

‘I’m not going to go six weeks without a drink, dude. I went two days already and I was starting to shake like a bitch, and anyway Lachie didn’t mind - ‘

‘You knew he’s not allowed to drink?’

‘Yeah,’ Lachie shrugged.

‘Why did we get him alcohol then?’

‘It’s his choice,’ he said.

I turned back to Costa, who had slopped some dark red wine into the mug from which he’d been guzzling. ‘Maybe you shouldn’t drink for six weeks.’

‘I don’t want to be sober for that long.’

‘That’s kind of my point.’

‘Anyway, it takes the edge off the dexy’s, and I need the dexy’s for my ADHD, but it’s fucking lame when I have no one to talk to. So it’s good to take the edge off.’

‘So you drink when there’s no one around. And also when there’s someone around.’

‘When someone’s around, a bit of booze makes the conversation better. Jesus, Dylan, since when did you become a nun? Fucking rule-boy here.’

‘I just don’t really understand why you wouldn’t listen to a doctor.’

‘Doctors tell us to stop vaping, but you puff away on that little robot dick until you go crosseyed. And you’re one to bitch about booze; how many times have I carried you on my - literally on my back - to get to the Uber? And when exactly was the last time you paid me back for the coke I shout you? And the ket? And the MD? And the weed? I don’t even like weed, dude, and there I am spending my money on it so that you’ll stop being a killjoy all the time. God damn, excuse me if I’m not running a half-marathon every Tuesday. I have other interests. Shame on me for liking to hang out with people and for getting a good feeling from the people around me. I don’t have to stock everyone with wine from Auntie Grace’s vineyard, but I do it because I know that what’s good for one person is good for everyone. That’s what a community is, and that’s why we need to take care of one another. And you also, let’s not forget, wrecked my favourite - ‘

I’d set him off. To avoid doing so was one of mine and Lachie’s sacred rules. I was punished enough by Lachie’s glare to shut up then. We sat there for another few hours, never really being forgiven by Costa for our terrible sin of coming to see him.

3.

I grabbed Lachie by the arm later that night, when we were briefly left alone in the courtyard of the Bowlo. The girls had gone to take a bump in the bathroom. I asked Lachie what the hell was his problem, and why he hadn’t spoken up in my support today at Costa’s.

It wasn’t that I needed him to agree with everything I said, but I truly felt I was going crazy if no one else agreed that we had at least some degree of responsibility, as his friends, to help him. Not to coddle him like an infant, though he acted like it sometimes, but to make sure he was healthy when he couldn’t. At least, I thought, we could do that. At least, I thought, we could try.

Lachie told me that I was being overdramatic, a nanna, trying to control people and how they responded to the world. He said I was like the state government, which had over the past decade slowly choked the nightlife out of Sydney, a city we’d once loved. I told him that I was different, because my intentions were altruistic and I wasn’t a corrupt bastard wrist-deep in a casino magnate. Lachie said that altruism isn’t about telling people what to do. Or what not to do.

‘But he’ll fucking die or something one day, mate. It’s not cute anymore. We’re not getting younger.’

‘What’s our age have to do with anything? My dad still gets on the sauce, and your mum…well, fuck me, no offence. And that bullshit about your body getting less able to manage it, that’s nothing. If anything I feel way more capable of a bender than I used to be.’

‘I can tell.’

‘Like an athlete…practice makes perfect and that…’

The girls came back. Kate had a bit of powder ringed around her nostril. She told me to lick it off, which was an escalation I hadn’t expected. The chrome flavour of the coke numbed my gums almost immediately. Which meant it was good quality.

Mandy asked us what we were talking about, and Lachie immediately told her. He made me sound like a prissy old conservative. Honestly, the way he told it he wasn’t wrong. Kate rubbed my leg.

‘…and he reckons Costa’s gunna die.’

‘I’m not saying he’s going to die.’

‘That’s literally what you said.’

I rubbed my eyes, frustrated as hell. ‘I’m just saying…he might be a bit much, but he hates to be alone. And he hates to sit still. Now he’s being forced to. For six weeks. I don’t know if he can take it.’

Mandy gave me a grim smile. ‘You don’t trust people, Dylan. You’re not afraid that Costa’s going to go nuts. You fully expect it.’

I gave it up then, but I did ask if the girls wanted to go with me to see Costa tomorrow. I told them it’d mean the world to him. Mandy couldn’t be bothered, but Kate said she might. Lachie said he had breakfast with his parents.

4.

The problem Kate had with Costa, she said as I brought her a cup of black coffee, was that the entire universe had to revolve around him. She didn’t blame him. It was just his way. He was like Pantagruel, excessive in everything. Including his presence. She was honestly looking forward to a month and a half’s worth of parties where she could talk to someone without Costa’s thunder booming down the hall, vibrating in our glasses. Think of it, she said, a whole six weeks where we don’t have to debrief the next day about whatever scandalous thing he had said or done, six weeks where the friendship group could just get along without fractures or tensions, six weeks without the garbage bags full of gossip that always seemed to have Costa as their subject. And besides, he was bad to women. He was rude and dismissive when he spoke to her, and she didn’t like to feel that way.

She’d made her point. I told her as much. But I was still going to go, and I’d still appreciate her company. She muttered something under her breath and tried to find her bra.

5.

‘Lachlan told me you’re spreading rumours about me. I don’t appreciate that.’ Costa’s disdain was poised before I even entered. ‘You’re a little-goody-two-shoes worry-wart bitch. After everything I’ve done for you, you still talk shit about me behind my back. That’s being a bad friend. I’ve saved your arse on multiple occasions. Remember those chicks from Bathurst? I smoothed that whole thing out. And you say I’ve got a problem. Get thee thy plank outta thy own fuckin eye. You know what I’m talking about. You’re a fucking fiend on the gear.’

I told Kate to sit down in the chair by the window. Her hangover had kicked in. Costa hadn’t yet acknowledged her presence. ‘And anyway, I’m a remarkable human being. I read a whole thing on the Roman emperors when you left yesterday. Does that sound like a drug addict? How could I run a successful business if I were an alcoholic? Are you saying my business isn’t successful?’

‘No,’ I said.

‘Goddamn right.’ Costa looked out the window, straight past Kate.

The white light illuminated his dark skin and eyes. It was the first time in a while I’d seen him well-rested. But as I looked deeper into his expression of rough machismo, I realised how hurt he was. I’d embarrassed him with the one substance he couldn’t stomach. I’d intended to help him, but in doing so I had subjected him to mortality in front of his peers, whose opinions, for better or worse, he desperately cared for. He was a proud man. And if he had nothing else but pride, at least he had that.

Lachie was right. Who was I to try and tame a spirit like Costa? I felt a wash of shame for my arrogance.

‘I’m sorry, mate.’

He shrugged. Kate looked at me dolefully. I saw how little she wanted to be here.

‘I just get worried, Cos. I’m worried that things will get worse for us all. Not better.’

‘They probably will, you fucking idiot.’

‘You want to play chess?’

‘Nah, I’ll whoop you too quickly. We should play something for three players.’

Kate’s eyes brightened a bit. ‘I’ve got a pack of cards. We can play Gin Rummy.’

We sat there the entire afternoon, Kate and I, with Costa’s insurmountable, mountain-like presence beginning to eclipse his small room, smoking a joint, staggering out Costa’s and Kate’s dexy’s, sipping on some whiskey I’d found under the bed, laughing and swearing, competing and losing to Costa, who could not, in his indomitable excess, lose.

Michael McStay is an Australian writer raised on Bangerang and Wurundjeri country and living in Berlin. He has produced five full-length theatrical plays to critical acclaim. If he isn't reading or writing, he's probably running or talking too much.