Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  On the other hand, outside our warm bubble and abstract talks there was the flesh-and-blood Westie and his saga — Vicky, his parents, his future, his mood, which was dark and furious and obsessive, or swinging, giddily, the other way. In good moods he sometimes came to my place, or he hung out with me and Meredith. He was loose then, almost mild. Happy. In love. It was as if, with us, he was allowed the luxury of being in love, of appearing like a man who is satisfied at his core.

  But here’s the truly weird part: we never actually talked about it — about him and Vicky, that part of their relationship. Not then, not later, not ever. Or not directly. He and I saw more of each other again after that June night and day — after the scene with his parents and that other, spied-on, stolen scene in Trafalgar Street which I never told him about. He knew we knew; it was like some air had been let out, had swirled round us all and changed something, and that change meant that Westie sought me and Meredith out and we admitted him sometimes to our world. He came round with good weed, or he called at Meredith’s when we were there together, playing house. And he and I went running up Scarborough and round the Crater Rim on Saturday mornings, weekday afternoons. We didn’t talk about it any of those times. It hung there between us, though, as vivid and startling as a painted picture.

  I don’t know what Vicky did those days. She saw friends maybe, or her mother, the old rich bitch-grandmother that Westie refused to visit. I saw Vicky only twice between June and August — when she came to Base with Westie, to drink and dance, to merge and become anonymous, normal in the Saturday night crush. She was nice, Vicky; I liked her a lot, though I only knew her in a second-hand way. But when I talked to her, knowing what I did about her and Westie seemed to bang inside my head, make me hot and bothered, and I was always glad when Westie claimed her, pulled her off to the video games, the dance corner, their own world.

  I watched them once, while they were dancing together. For whole minutes they seemed like an ordinary couple, laughing and close, and then Westie put out his hand, touched Vicky, and she looked at him, and I remembered all over again; and in the middle of the frenzy and the smoke and spillage and noise I blinked, tried to close down my thoughts, switch off before doom-laden, Dee-style notions intoned in my head. Where will it end? It’ll end in tears. They seemed spotlit at those times, the truth hanging around them, loud and bright. But no one else knew. The word was that Westgarth had an older woman, she was Australian, arty, cool. The world went on around them, around all of us, ignorant and untroubled.

  Of course Westie was still full of her. He didn’t talk about the real thing, but he talked about everything else — her sister and brother in Auckland, her jewellery-making, the house she was in, the things they’d been doing. It was like a re-run when we were out running together, a slightly slowed-down, quieter repeat of a few months ago when he’d first met Vicky and showered me with facts about her. Only now their relationship was irrevocably changed and I knew it and he knew I knew it but somehow it was impossible for either of us to mention this glaring fact.

  And then there were his parents. Westie stayed at Vicky’s but he wouldn’t tell Liz and Dave anything, no address or phone number. He wouldn’t let me tell them either. He wouldn’t let me tell Dee in case she told them. This was Westie at his megalomaniacal worst — manic and controlling, issuing orders on several different fronts, then wantonly breaking his own edicts.

  For instance: he wanted to shut his parents out, slam every door in their faces, but he couldn’t leave them alone, either. He went round there to see them, to get things, to keep on chewing at the old sore. Then Liz would ask him if he was coming back and he’d say probably not and she would cry and Westie’d get furious with her tears, her wounded, pleading face.

  One time, trying to be calm maybe, desperate to fix things, Liz suggested they saw a counsellor, had some family therapy. Westie went off his head.

  ‘Family?’ he said. ‘Whose family? Not mine.’ That was when Liz called up Dr Max, Best Friend, asked him to come round for coffee. I was no help. I was paralysed with discomfort, weighed down by the things I knew, wanting only to get out of there.

  ‘A counsellor, for fuck’s sake,’ said Westie. We were doing Bowenvale. It was hard going, cold, drizzly, muddy underfoot, the running gear sticking to our skin.

  ‘Family therapy!’

  ‘Why not?’

  Did I say that? I think so. Sometimes, sick of his tirades, I experimented, sent him a wrong’un, a response he didn’t expect, curious to see how he’d take it.

  ‘Mightn’t hurt. Who knows?’

  ‘Fuck off, Doctor.’ He gave me a disgusted look.

  ‘Might help,’ I said, sort of committed to it now, taking a position I wasn’t even sure I believed in.

  ‘What’s to help, Doctor?’ said Westie. ‘It’s their problem, not mine. I don’t have any problem. Liz can go and see someone, pour her heart out, get her brain fixed.’

  He hated Liz these days, hated her feelings, her claims on him. He hated her love.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said to Meredith, for the hundredth time. ‘It’s like he has to stamp out Liz’s loving him, like it revolts him. But Vicky loving him is okay, even though it’s gone …’

  Wrong was the word that hung there, unsaid. But I couldn’t say wrong. It never seemed wrong, what was between Westie and Vicky, just out-of-kilter, and sad, and maybe hopeless — though I tried not to think about their future. For the first time I understood Westie’s addiction to now, the now which went on and on, world without end. The future was too troublesome.

  As for the past — I could see his problem with that, too. Once upon a time he doesn’t have a past; then, when he discovers it, it invades his present so comprehensively his life is turned upside down.

  ‘Liz can see the fucking counsellor,’ Westie said again, when we were at the Summit, winding round to Sugarloaf Reserve.

  ‘Well guess what, Doctor?’ I said. ‘Dee’s seeing one.’

  Sometimes, just sometimes, finding now difficult to get my head round, I had a sharp longing for the old days, pre-Vicky, when things had seemed predictable, when I could guarantee a burst of gaudy Westie commentary if I told him a Dee story. But even Dee seemed to be changing, I thought now; she was definitely less crazy; she wasn’t supplying anything like the old hair-tearing copy.

  ‘Yeah?’ said Westie, interested for a moment. ‘DeeDee Dingbat? She’s terminal, Doc, no counsellor’s ever going to change her. Your old lady’s crazy for the duration.’

  ‘Probably,’ I said, not knowing if it was true. ‘Seems to have made her sort of—’ Sort of what? What was the word to describe the changing Dee? ‘Steadier,’ I tried.

  ‘Medication.’

  ‘Nah,’ I said. ‘It really is a nice helpful counsellor. She’s going twice a week. And the old man’s paying.’

  We came to the Reserve entrance and I turned neatly at the gate, began heading back down immediately.

  ‘First one back gets the beer,’ I called.

  He trailed for the first fifteen minutes, then put on a sprint, blasted past me and hit Centaurus Road well ahead, dead on twenty-eight minutes.

  I was comforted by that. Some things, at least, hadn’t changed. He still had to win.

  But, imagine. You’re a first-place-getter through and through — you have been for ever, it’s your cardinal rule. You simply never countenance coming second, unless it suits some long-term plan. But, for the first time in your life, you’re deep in a game it’s impossible to win. You made the rules, sure; but you never counted on it being the one game where there are no winners, none at all, where the people involved are guaranteed to lose big time. You’re up to your neck in it, this game, you’re fully fuelled, unstoppable, riding high and unconcerned, but it’s all about to end. It has to end. Where can it go? A mother can’t keep on sleeping with her son, can she?

  It’s been a crazy, adrenalised time, six long months of it, a broken circle completing itself once again.
But it’s over. Everyone is about to go down in a heap, collapsible as the proverbial pack of cards.

  It was the last Tuesday in August, six months since Vicky had first contacted Westie, five months and one week since I’d met Meredith, four months since Meredith and I had found out about Westie and Vicky.

  It was also the old man’s forty-ninth birthday, and Gilly had invited us — me and Leon and Meredith — for a big happy-family dinner. Dee was surprisingly cool about this, refraining from comment. Normally, she couldn’t stop herself; she’d go on and on about the old bastard and the little slut — or trollop or gold-digger or, my personal favourite, doxy, speculating when the honeymoon would be over, hoping the trollop’s pregnancy was making her fat, hoping the old bastard had aged even more, hoping they had years of sleepless nights in front of them. Etc, etc.

  ‘Tell him his ex-wife’s present’s in the post,’ she said over her shoulder as we were leaving. She was sipping gin, watching the news. ‘A letter-bomb.’

  Pretty mild for Dee.

  ‘Something is definitely happening to her,’ I said in the car. Meredith was in the passenger seat, Leon lying across the back. We were like Mum, Dad and the Kid, off on a family outing. ‘I don’t want to get anyone’s hopes up, but it’s just possible she might be becoming normal.’

  ‘Don’t be so mean,’ said Meredith. ‘She’s okay.’

  She meant it, too. Even though my mother was Meredith’s antithesis in every way imaginable; though she wouldn’t have known Chopin or Lilburn if they’d answered the Psychic Hotline; though the notion of a pared-back aesthetic would have baffled her; though I worried her endless chat would bore Meredith to death: for some incomprehensible reason Meredith really did like her. She enjoyed Dee’s prehistoric ballroom dance videos; she thought Dee’s pantomime outbursts were fine — domestic entertainment, she said, a treat really, after the evenness of her life with Lindsey.

  ‘It’s novelty value,’ I told her, sure of it. ‘It’ll wear off.’

  The sprog was eight weeks away, but Gilly looked pretty trim to me. She was Dee’s opposite as well. She floated, quiet and efficient, from dining room to kitchen, talking just enough, keeping things smooth. She’d made the old man’s favourite dinner, ox tail stew — very chic these days — and a chocolate cake with a single tastefully placed candle. She smiled lovingly at the old man, toasted him with Deutz, and we all raised our glasses, genuinely pleased, right into this new happy-family number. She was doing a good job, Gilly. She was leading by example, slowly persuading us. She loved the old man so sincerely we were starting to like him again, too, feeling a creeping, unfamiliar optimism.

  But the point about that evening isn’t the old man, or Gilly. The point is that just as we were carving up Gilly’s rum-soaked chocolate cake the phone rang, and when Gilly answered it and handed it to me I couldn’t, for several seconds, work out who it was. I couldn’t make out that noise; couldn’t imagine who that high, animal wailing could possibly belong to.

  I’d never heard Westie cry. God knows he’d never heard me do it either. We just didn’t.

  He was bawling. It was a terrible, sucked-in, breathless and unpractised kind of crying, and it shocked me cold. I sat there, holding the phone, my face frozen, while Dad, Gilly, Meredith and Leon all stared.

  When I could say something, when I could get a word through, I told him, in as normal a voice as I could muster, Keep it together, Doctor. We’re on our way, we’ll be there soon.

  Seems like it was weeks then of Westie drunk or stoned out of his tree, driving like a maniac up to the Bellbird, passing out at Meredith’s, crying down the line to Vicky from half a dozen different phones, raging at his parents, at me, at the government, at anyone and everyone in a world that had handed him his mother as the love of his life.

  But it was only five days. It was a Tuesday when Vicky stunned him backwards, told him she had to go, they couldn’t do this anymore, it was final, one of them had to have the strength to end it. By Sunday morning she’d left his life, as suddenly, as wholly, as she’d come into it.

  She flew back to Sydney, to her old life, her old lover, her old house maybe. As far as we knew. And Westie sat alone in the Trafalgar Street house, tired out, stoned, listening to the silence, staring down the long tunnel of the future.

  Chapter Seven

  Imagine a Saturday, late afternoon. It’s September, spring, but a big dump of snow covers the city, a gift from the cold south. In the street kids throw snowballs, but mostly no one moves from their houses. They’re at their windows surveying their buried suburb, or they’re in bed reading, or they’re lying on thick woollen mats beside their woodburners. Like Meredith and me.

  Lindsey was on a skiing holiday and I was staying with Meredith, keeping her company. ‘Keepin’ company,’ she said. ‘Like they did in the olden days, in the US of A. You’re my beau and I’m your sweetheart. Any minute now—’ she stretched luxuriously, ‘—any minute now I’ll make an apple pie.’

  ‘Nah,’ I said, rolling over, pushing her damp hair away from her face, putting my fingers to her hectic cheeks.

  I felt like I’d known her for a hundred years only she’d never aged. For a hundred years we’d been side by side; we’d got closer and closer. We’d walked to and from uni, or carried wood together from her mother’s shed, or sat alongside each other writing essays, or kissed wildly in Dee’s car and at the movies, or leaned together against the stone wall in the old gun emplacements at Godley Head and looked out over the hillside, over the wind-raked tussock and whipped-up harbour. In all that time her skin had stayed shiny and supple, her long fingers stayed tight around my neck, her small bony body hardly stopped moving except when I kissed her, except when she sat by herself at the piano, listening hard.

  But I was changed, I thought; I was a wise old man now, transfigured by love, slowed down and peaceful, calm, clear thinking, utterly balanced. I wouldn’t have been surprised to look in the mirror and see folds of whiskered skin, grey hair, old clouded eyes. I wouldn’t have cared.

  ‘I had this crazy thought once,’ I told her, as we lay there. I was feeling confessional, full of confidence now that I could say anything, trust her with the ugliest parts of myself.

  ‘You, crazy?’

  ‘No, seriously. Listen. I thought you’d fallen for Westie, I thought you’d gone off with him.’

  She propped herself up on her elbow. ‘Me? Westie?’

  ‘I know,’ I was embarrassed by that old madness. ‘It was insane. I was temporarily insane.’

  ‘You never said.’

  ‘It was after he came to see you that time, that night …’

  We were quiet then, thinking of Westie, thinking of that time, thinking of now, the two-hanky ending.

  ‘Poor Westie,’ said Meredith softly, her breath feathering my face.

  I couldn’t say anything. She lay down beside me again and we stared at the white plain of the ceiling, our fingers just touching. It was still now, only the sounds of a faint wind.

  ‘I read this poem,’ said Meredith, into the quiet.

  ‘Each of us is alone at the heart of the earth,

  Pierced by a ray of sunlight:

  And suddenly it’s evening.’

  It should have chilled me to the bone, hearing that. I’m cold all over when I think of that poem now. But then — I felt so cocooned, you see; the old days seemed like just a bad memory. I thought it could go on for ever, this untouchable, wrapped-up happiness.

  The snow muffled the city and its sounds, made the citizens go quiet. Meredith and I lay in bed on Westie’s black Sunday morning, listening to the stillness, worrying about him, waiting for him. It seemed like he might detonate now, scatter himself Westie-style over the whitened city. I felt like I was holding my breath.

  We exchanged dead-end sentences.

  ‘Will he just go back to his parents’?’ Meredith asked.

  ‘God knows.’

  ‘He’s given uni away.’

  ‘
Yes.’

  ‘What can we do?’

  ‘Nothing.’

  In the end we did the only thing we could. God knows — and I’ve told myself that often enough — it seemed the right thing at the time. When Westie arrived and said he wanted to see the snow from the hills, we went for it; we wanted to stay by him, to do something.

  The snow was thick on the hills and banked up each side of the road, but the roads were all passable. We drove to Sumner, the only people around. The sea was quiet, flat and grey, almost waveless. None of us said much. Meredith and I were waiting for Westie, trying to figure his state of mind before we committed ourselves to anything, grimness or laughs.

  He drove slowly along the Sumner waterfront. He seemed slowed down himself, worn out or something: no more rage or tears. Eventually he talked about Vicky, almost matter of factly, but hushed and awe-filled at the same time, as if she had been some kind of natural phenomenon, a meteorite, a celestial appearance that had stopped people in their tracks briefly, then been assigned to the history books.

  He was right in a way. I’d barely known her, but I felt the effect of the combustible trail she’d left behind her. When I went to see her two days before she left, sat listening to her, watching tears mark a ragged line down the sides of her cheeks, all I could think was how mysterious she was, how — despite the facts of her life Westie had showered me with — the essence of her story seemed unknowable.

  We were driving up Evans Pass towards Godley Head and I was looking at the flattened tussock, the ice patches on the road ahead lighting up in the early sun, the wide stretches of untouched white. I was trying to get the hang of this oddly reasonable, wearily wise, lecture-hall Westie — the complete unlikeliness of his mood — when it hit me like an ice-cold slap that he was wildly out of it. He was sky-high — subdued maybe, but more stoned than I’d ever seen him. He was reality adjusted, big time. And at the very moment I realised this, his talking seemed to change: his tone, the things he was saying.