Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  He’d seen black widows and angels, he said, very low. You could be a demon and a darling and a closed stranger.

  It was like the descent from heaven, he said, turning the wheel slowly at one of those treacherous bends, driving like someone in a trance.

  ‘How do you mean?’ Meredith asked. ‘What do you mean descent from heaven?’ She was leaning over from the back seat, frowning, chewing her lip.

  ‘What the fuck have you taken, Doc?’ I said. I wasn’t angry; I was calm and hyper-nervous at the same time, sweat prickling under my hair. ‘You’ve taken something, haven’t you?’

  ‘Just a teeny-weeny tabby-wabby,’ he said, sounding momentarily so like his usual bent self that I relaxed, punched him hard on the arm.

  ‘Ow,’ he said, about ten seconds later.

  ‘He’s tripping,’ I said to Meredith, and watched her face fall, shocked.

  ‘It’s okay,’ I said, ‘he usually drives okay.’

  ‘Why’d you do a tab?’ I asked him. ‘It’ll make you—’ I looked at him, heavy-lidded, holding the wheel at arm’s length, his face unreadable. He wasn’t very good with acid. Sometimes it relaxed him, but it made him paranoid and panicky, too. It made him swing.

  ‘It’ll make you more sad,’ I said.

  He picked up a bit of speed then, leaned forward over the wheel, a parody of concentration. Meredith put her hand on his shoulder.

  ‘Let Jacko drive,’ she said.

  ‘Tripping seems sort of appropriate, don’t you think?’ he said, putting his foot down for the last incline to the top. It felt like we were shooting straight upwards. This is what I hated most about a tripping Westie — the unpredictability, the mad oscillating between options.

  ‘Vicky trips back to Oz, trips big time—’

  ‘Oh, for fuck’s sake.’

  ‘Please let Jacko drive,’ said Meredith again. She was shaking his shoulder gently, sending me agonised looks.

  It was glorious at the top, the text-book winter wonderland, but we were too busy watching Westie to appreciate it. And of course he wasn’t interested at all now that we were there. He was preoccupied suddenly with his internal world, with his body. It was too cold to get out of the car, he said. He was fucking freezing and he wasn’t going to fucking feel any fucking freezinger.

  ‘It’s 18 degrees in Sydney,’ he told us accusingly, as if it were somehow our fault.

  ‘Can Jacko drive down?’ said Meredith.

  I wanted to tell her to leave it, now really wasn’t the time to call his driving into question.

  ‘No, he fucking can’t,’ said Westie, getting savage in that lightning way he could. ‘No one else drives this car.’

  ‘Okay, okay,’ murmured Meredith, retreating into the back seat. She rolled her eyes at me, waved her hands round in semi-despair.

  He didn’t start the car immediately, but sat there, staring at his fingers tight round the wheel as if we were going to try to prise them off. I looked out the window at the Godley Head car park and harbour beyond, the pine trees and shaggy bushes heavy with snow, the slope of land rushing down to the sea. I counted the seconds.

  ‘Okay,’ said Westie, finally, ‘shall we begin our descent? I do believe the pilot will be doing just that at this precise moment on the Qantas 747 into Sydders.’

  What a melodramatic shit he was.

  We should have got out and walked down, but it was cold and it seemed better to be with the silly bastard than to abandon him to see-sawing paranoia, maudlin introspection. I checked out Meredith but she just shrugged; she sat there looking blank, like this was one hundred per cent beyond her experience.

  ‘Frederic C took the odd hallucinogen, didn’t he?’ I said, wanting to help, wanting to make her smile.

  She smiled.

  ‘But he didn’t go driving,’ she said, her fingers drumming a cross little tune on her knee, her eyes boring a hole in the back of Westie’s head.

  The thing is, he was careful; he didn’t do anything abrupt and final, like I’d feared. He didn’t drive us all at speed into a tree or pitch the car off the road, straight down to the headland waters. He took it slowly and he drove with the deliberate, concentrated attention of a comatose drunk. But the sun was behind us on the way back, making it harder to see the ice on the road, and when you hit ice on a descent, slow and concentrated aren’t really the relevant words.

  If you hit ice at a certain speed, as we did at Wheatley’s Drift, and your reflexes are their usual honed selves, it’s certainly no joke; but if you hit ice at a certain speed and your reflexes are not quite the ticket, are haywire in fact because your system’s loaded with lysergic acid, then it’s very definitely not a Sunday picnic because you can’t react fast enough or right enough to do the necessary thing.

  So though it’s a small patch of ice in a shaded part of the road, when your wheels hit it and slide, loose and giddy, and the car lunges oddly, without traction, careens to the other side of the road — when that happens, you don’t panic exactly; no, you’re more distracted by the feelingness of this sliding number and you swing the wheel almost dreamily and that wheel-turning is decisive, it’s fatal, it sends the car spinning, and the car leaves the road, tips sideways down the snow-covered tussocky hill, and it rolls once, twice, three-four times and lands with a sickening crunch on its roof, on a shelf 40 metres downhill.

  And all this happens, as they always say it does, in an agonising slow motion, with a ghastly stew of sounds and sensations buffeting you — swearing and screaming and crunching and tearing and stomach-dropping terror and the repeated thud of a heavy weight on snow and a breathless waiting for the end, for the light to be punched, for a blanket of dark and deafness to come down.

  When the rolling stopped, there was a long and total quiet. We were upside down, 1 worked out that much. My chin felt strangely positioned in relation to my chest and my left side was wet and bitterly cold. But my eyes were open. I could hear, I could feel, I could move. I realised in a slowed-down way that I wasn’t dead and for a moment a crazy euphoria raced through me. I felt elevated and hysterical, I wanted to laugh loudly with the most profound relief.

  ‘But I was being careful, Officer,’ Westie was saying, ‘I was driving below the speed limit, well below, I really was, but it went all slippery, Officer—’

  The door on my side was gone. It just wasn’t there. I had a perfect upside-down perspective of white hillside and a yellow sign which, even upended, I could read as Wheatley’s Drift. Eastern limit. Historic sight. Historic, all right, I thought. Against all odds, Jackson, Westgarth and Robinson cheat death, they live to tell the story, make history, ha ha.

  ‘Don’t think much of this tospy-turvy number, Doctor, whadabout you? Can’t figure out the seat-belt thing—’

  He was babbling so I figured he was all right; anyway, I was focused on getting out of my own seat belt, getting out of the car, getting my body round the right way, seeing the world from the correct angle.

  ‘How’d you get your door open?’ said Westie. ‘I can’t move mine—’

  ‘Meredith?’ I said. ‘Are you okay?

  I managed a surprisingly neat gymnastic roll out of the car into the snow and stood up, my legs more wobbly than a dozen old ladies’.

  ‘Meredith?’

  ‘The fucking door,’ yelled Westie, crawling out after me. ‘It’s fucking gone.’

  ‘Meredith?’

  The left back door was gone too. One small dissociated part of my brain registered a query about rolling cars and car doors, but most of my brain was bent on getting Meredith out, getting her to answer me.

  She wasn’t in the back seat. I could see that when I crouched and looked, but I couldn’t believe it so I crawled inside to check properly, to look under the seat which had escaped its moorings and banged against the roof — now the floor — of the car.

  Later, they told us the doors must have flown open on the first roll. On subsequent turns the wide-open doors would have been ripped from their
hinges by the weight and speed of the rolling car. Meredith, sitting in the back, sitting on her annoyance, fingering an imaginary piano and not wearing a seat belt, would have been tossed wildly, then flung from the car on one of its revolutions. Face down on the hillside, limbs splayed and dislocated, she would have been crushed and mortally wounded by the car’s weight as it rolled over her on the rest of its way down.

  We found her a short distance back up the slope, a crumpled rainbow, the spread of her dress a flood of colour against the snow, green and butter-yellow and bright red.

  But we couldn’t see blood when we turned her over. We couldn’t see any signs of injury. Her face was white and still, melted snow running down her skin.

  I breathed and breathed on her cheeks and eyes, trying to keep them warm, trying to make her lids flicker; I said her name over and over. I seemed to spend hours doing that, on my knees in the snow, breathing hot, wiping snow from her hair, talking, talking. But she got colder and colder and she stayed blind and motionless and she never answered.

  Chapter Eight

  After they buried Meredith I just wanted to check out, bury myself.

  I walled up in my room behind a mountain of text books, a storm of photocopying.

  Straight As, I told myself. If it wasn’t the answer or the cure, it was the palliative at least, a narcotic of the legal sort that would keep my mind and body from experiencing pain. Straight As would salvage some kind of sense from everything. Meredith was dead and it meant, in real terms, that life was over; it had been chopped off before it got properly started.

  But you can’t let that happen, can you? I knew you weren’t allowed to have someone else’s death spell the end of your own existence. They wouldn’t let me. I couldn’t let myself. I had to get on, eat, drink, live, suck it in. Study like a dog. Right up to the first final I was certain I could pull it off: I could make As and feel instantly recovered, permanently innoculated against pain.

  Grief does peculiar things to people, so they say.

  For six weeks, for hours at a time, I sat in my room, highlighting whole paragraphs in the text books, re-reading the lectures. I covered pages and pages with writing, condensing and condensing, reducing the subject area, the histories of three continents, of several centuries, to a digestible, understandable amount. It was all so big, so rambling and so hard to contain, but I was dedicated now to getting it tamed, this information; getting it under my belt so I could toss it up tidily in the exam room, get the business done, secure the marks, call it quits with the year that had taken me to heaven then turned my life to shit.

  I worked and worked, ignoring Dee who hovered with food and sympathetic looks; ignoring my father who rang most days; ignoring Leon who blurted tasteless questions about accidents, about vital organs, about death. I even shut out Westie who, after a quiet month, after much breast-beating and numerous remorseful, listless monologues, was all at once launched on a new trajectory and pretty much deaf and blind to anyone else’s world.

  I worked and worked and worked, until my eyes were strained and red rimmed, until my body was slowed with tiredness, until I had reduced four set texts, six essays, forty-seven lectures and countless pages of notes to four single pages of close script and then, finally, a number each — a number, for God’s sake. I was positive that I could go into each of my exams, say the respective numbers to myself, and the information would be unlocked, would pour onto the blank pages of the exam booklet and thereby ensure a kind of restitution, a feeling that the year hadn’t been a worthless tragedy.

  I knew I was behaving strangely, that I was studying so I didn’t have to think about the accident, about Meredith small and still in the snow on the Port Hills. I knew that, but I didn’t care. There were some concrete equations in my head. Passing exams equals business as usual. Studying equals being in control equals not losing it equals no one feeling sorry for me.

  ‘It’s all under control,’ I told Dee on the morning of my Pre-European New Zealand History exam. She was making me breakfast, sending sad-sack looks as she had for weeks. Her face was all tight and mournful as she moved between the stove and the breakfast bar doing her good mother number, but I couldn’t get pissed off because I was concentrating hard on keeping the numbers organised in my head: 17 for Asian Hist. 23 for Australian Hist to Federation. 98 for Pre-Civil War America. 134 for Pre-European New Zealand.

  I said them over and over as I ate a plate of French toast and maple syrup that tasted of nothing; I said them as I walked to uni, as I waited on the benches outside the lecture theatre. I said them over and over as I waited with a hundred-odd other students in the exam room for the supervisors to give us the signal to start. I said the numbers at 9.30 when we were allowed to turn over our papers, and then I stopped saying them briefly so I could read my Pre-European New Zealand History paper. I read it through, I circled four questions, I said to myself, Pre-European New Zealand equals 134, and then I picked up my pen and waited for all the weeks of learning to transfer themselves through my pen to the page.

  Then I went completely insane. I wrote, sure, but it wasn’t exactly history. It was a burst valve, some urgent plea coming out of nowhere, served up to the tutor who I knew suddenly I wouldn’t be seeing again.

  Geological time, I wrote, is such a tremendously long period to try and visualise; a useful way to understand the proportions of time involved in the building of the Port Hills is to imagine the earth is just one year old. The oldest rocks, therefore, would be laid under the sea six weeks ago. The Lyttelton volcano would have erupted just eight hours ago. Recorded history covers only a minute and the Canterbury settlement is only two seconds old. All of which means that Meredith Robinson will not be born for another sixty years and therefore could definitely not have died in a car accident seven weeks ago on the crater rim of the merely eight-hour-old Lyttelton volcano.

  I wrote for two and a half hours, explaining the elastic lives of Meredith Robinson and Max Jackson in the context of geological time, a new time, a time beyond the confines of recorded history.

  It was a kind of farewell, I suppose. Goodbye to good things, to a lit-up future, to the little detour of well-being and happiness I’d taken between March and September,

  I stood up thirty minutes before the end of the exam, handed my fevered text to the supervisor and exited through the swing doors.

  Then I went to find Westie.

  But before all that, before I went off my head, there was Meredith’s funeral and Meredith’s mother.

  Lindsey fell apart. Standard behaviour, I realise, for a parent losing their only child, but I couldn’t bear it, I couldn’t bear her doing it in front of me. It made four mothers in six months I’d witnessed losing it in one form or another, and I’d had enough. Call me heartless, but I just didn’t want to know. I had to keep myself together; I had to work hard at keeping Meredith’s face out of my head, her voice and her laugh and her smell, her shape and skin under my hand, the hundred and one startling things she’d ever said to me. I couldn’t afford to sit with Lindsey — a woman I didn’t even like that much — and listen to her talk about the past eighteen years, to look at photos with her. To listen to recordings of Meredith playing the piano.

  Course I didn’t know then that memories kept at bay sometimes can’t be recalled; they dissolve or something, evaporate. One minute you’re busy repressing; next, there’s nothing there. You’d kill to get those brown eyes back in the forefront of your mind’s eye. Those liquid fingers and those bony ankles wrap themselves around you in your dreams but when you wake up it’s all gone, you can never get it back on command.

  I was full of good intentions. I went to see Lindsey; she’d asked me to come. After the hospital, after the interviews with the police, after Westie had agreed to go back to his parents’ house, after the old man had driven me and Dee home, after all the foul post-accident stuff had started — crying adults, phone calls, medication, bruises, nagging pain in every part of your body, endless analysis of the
how and the why and the why didn’t and if only — after all that, I got suitably stoned and walked round to the house in Clyde Road, because that seemed like the right thing to do.

  It was 5 p.m., thirty-one hours since the accident. No snow now, thanks to consecutive sunny days. Doubtless no ice on the Port Hills, either. The westward traffic was piling up at the Memorial-Fendalton intersection. I saw the long line of cars waiting at the lights and thought how I’d been upside down in a car only a day and a half ago. I thought how I’d walked down this road with Meredith perhaps fifty times, and then I thought that, in terms of the universe, fifty times was nothing, it didn’t rate at all.

  But thanks to the hooch I felt perfectly insulated from the effects of all such random thoughts and sensations — weather, traffic, memories, physical soreness, the prospect of seeing Lindsey. I didn’t feel like Meredith had died, either; it hadn’t registered properly, though I’d seen her lifeless in the snow, held her cooling hand in the ambulance, talked to doctors and cops about how she’d died. I couldn’t feel anything about that deadness yet, though I was going round to say sorry to her mother whose holiday had been interrupted by a visit from the police, who’d flown back last night to identify her only child’s body, who’d visited me in the hospital ward, held my hand and cried and said, ‘Please come and see me.’

  Well, I was a good boy. I was the Doctor; I was going, just as she’d asked.

  It was a different story when I got there. For a start I’d never seen Lindsey less than well dressed before — even her gym gear always looked groomed. I’d never seen her without make-up, or upset or lost for words. I’d never seen her, I realised, when I walked into the piano room and found her sitting in a dressing gown at the piano, her hair unbrushed, her face puffy and raw, clownish smudges of mascara under her eyes.