She was looking at Meredith’s music, she said, all her pencil markings. As she read those markings, it was like hearing her voice, she said; she could hear Meredith’s voice saying all those words she’d pencilled on the music in her curling hand: Ritardando. Think. Ghostly sound …
I stared at the polished leg of the piano, the solid geometry of it, the shiny brass castor beneath, and I tried not to hear Meredith’s voice croaking those words.
‘We know her best, Max,’ said Lindsey, her fingers all over the music, stroking the words, feeling for something, like a blind person reading Braille. ‘Isn’t that strange? We know her best but we don’t really know each other.’
Well, that’d be too much for most, wouldn’t it? What could I say? That I didn’t want to know her, that I wanted to be a thousand miles away, and I wasn’t planning on going through the business of knowing anybody else ever again.
She just wanted to talk, I know that now; she wanted to tell me things and she wanted me to tell her things back so we could describe Meredith, recreate her, have her there with us somehow. But I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t bear it. As soon as she started talking, the tears rolled down her face and when that happened I knew I had to get out.
‘Sorry, really sorry,’ I said, and I kept saying it — Sorry, sorry, I’m really sorry — as I turned and walked out of the room, out of house. I walked fast, wanting to put as much space as possible between myself and such gaping grief, and to do it quickly so there was no chance of it catching me up.
Pathetic, I know. I’m not proud of it. I’m not proud of what I did the next day either, when Lindsey came round to our house and asked me to read a passage from some book at Meredith’s funeral. No, I said abruptly, almost a shout. Then I said it again, even louder. No. Sorry. No. I made some excuse, said I didn’t do stuff like that, it wasn’t me; and I walked out on her again, not caring what she thought, not caring that her face folded up, not caring that it was Dee who was left to put her arms round my girlfriend’s mother, offer her the temporary comfort of a hug.
And then there was the funeral. A horror story. I was stoned to the gills. In some other part of the funeral chapel Westie was off his head as well, but I wasn’t tuned to him. I didn’t feel tuned to anyone — my parents, Leon, Gilly, Lindsey, and least of all the person being memorialised.
They might have been farewelling Peter Rabbit for all the connection I felt with the body in the coffin and the things they were saying about it. I heard all the phrases — undoubted musical talent and loving daughter and vivacious personality and very promising future. I knew they were about Meredith but they could have been about ten different people; they seemed utterly inadequate, or not the point. They weren’t the real Meredith, the one I knew: the one who chewed her lip so often it left a little angular blister, who played Lilburn just for me, then raced across the room, jumped up and wrapped her legs tight around my waist.
All of it — the music, the readings, the crying — were as remote as Iceland — far, far away from me and Meredith and the private world we’d lived in for the last six months. So while everyone around me wept and sang and blew their noses and crumpled their hankies, I stared without seeing at the woman conducting the service and I ran a parallel funeral service in my head.
I said lines about never quarantining the past from a Sonic Youth song that had haunted me since the accident. I read the poem she’d told me in bed on our last morning together. (It was by an Italian called Quasimodo, dead as well.) I sang Somewhere Over the Rainbow in honour of her cat. I blasted myself with our signature tune, From the Port Hills. I knew it so well I could play it internally, full volume, have its high echoing bell sounds and thundery bass.
For fifty minutes I shut out the entire assembly and I had her to myself. I had my picture of Meredith, not her mother’s or aunt’s or old school friends’ or teachers’. I painted her face and figure and I talked to her and sang to her. I made her smile. I claimed her exclusively and absolutely, just mine, a stranger to the rest of the world.
That was the real goodbye. After she went into the ground I could never get her back properly in my head. There were a million images and sensations somewhere, but I couldn’t pull them into focus. I tried, God knows, but it really had come to pass — that state she’d described to me, that state she liked to think about. She’d become like the ethereal beginning of Chopin’s B flat minor Nocturne: she was almost nothing, floating off, merging with the physical world.
I could never listen to that piece of music again.
Westie was out of focus, too. Temporarily. Sometimes, in the aftermath of the accident I remembered his own private drama, the one that had been at the centre or just to the side of my thoughts — and Meredith’s — so recently. These days it was like a very distant memory. I felt as though Vicky Crawford — every conversation we’d had about her, all the angst of their secret relationship — had happened decades ago, back in some light-hearted, untroubled past. She’d been vanished by the tricks of time, bright and springy and stretched out one minute; closed-up and treacherous the next.
But, of course, Westie didn’t see Vicky like that. Westie saw Meredith that way. Meredith was dead. She’d been killed in an accident. Fucking bad luck, Doctor. Tragic and all that. But basically, not to put too fine a point on it, Doctor, ah, that’s it, isn’t it? There’s nothing anyone can do. End of story.
And, besides, much as I might have had difficulty bringing Westie into focus, Westie didn’t really do faded or blurred. Or not for long. He didn’t do back seat or giving space or chilling out. Not really.
Vicky was as fresh and sore as a new wound for him — on top, as they say, very present. After the accident he managed a reconciliation with his parents and went back home. He told them some story about Vicky which must have eased their paranoia — I never asked him exactly what. But though he’d resumed all the outward signs of his old life, papered over the cracks between him and his parents, he was still filled up with Vicky, with what had happened. I knew he was.
And he was always there, one way or another, phoning, offering drugs for pain relief — mental and physical: we both had neck problems for months after the accident; we both had things we didn’t want to think about. He was there, talking, talking — about Vicky, about his parents, about dropping out of uni, making money, travel plans. He was like a big persistent blowfly, diving and bumping you; or like a jackhammer operating miles away, its sound getting louder and louder as you approached. He was going to pull me back onto his road, for sure, the highway that had always been, was always going to be bigger, wider and longer than my little cul-de-sac.
As soon as I handed in my F-minus exam paper I knew I was heading back to the story of Westie’s life, because mine wasn’t a goer anymore. It was dumb and plotless; it had a cast of only one and it wasn’t going anywhere, it was badly stalled.
I came out of the exam room like I was coming out of a fog. I heard Westie suddenly, saw him clearly again for the first time in months. I saw him full frontal, his lines and edges black and noisy as ever, his demands, his world view, his preoccupations impossible to sideline. It was so familiar and, really, so comforting. It was like the old days — the real days, I thought now. I didn’t want to talk about Meredith or the accident or the big boring vista stretching ahead of me, and that suited Westie, like it had always suited him to have his concerns come first. He was up to his eyeballs in his loss. He only wanted to think about how to get the show that was his life back on the road; and, as always, he wanted me there to listen to him and cheer him on. It was the way it had always been between us, the way it had to be. The way that kept me more or less straight, the only way of operating I was any good at.
Course, you can’t go backwards. Even if forwards looks as dismal as an empty Saturday night, it’s probably a safer prospect than trying to settle for some shadowed, second-hand past. But I didn’t know that then. I wanted the reliable and the familiar.
I didn’t feel the p
oisonous little boils festering in me. I didn’t think about how much six months can change you. I didn’t know that time spent in an orbit outside Westie’s magnetic field might mean blistering on re-entry.
Chapter Nine
Imagine a stepmother so keen to please she wants to give a ringside view of her baby’s birth to two teenage males she feels — let’s be honest here — deeply ambivalent about.
‘Count me right out,’ I said to the old man. The words dropped out before I could stop them and the old man looked long-suffering, determined not to let fly at his son and heir. I could say anything around that time and they all made excuses for me. I was bereaved. I’d lost it in my finals. I was unhinged. Allowances should be made.
I could hear their thoughts.
‘Sorry,’ I said. ‘It’s just that — hospital …’
‘It’s a different hospital—’
‘Yeah, I know, but—’
It was true the old man and I got along better now, but we weren’t so close I could talk to him about the accident, about Meredith. I couldn’t tell him that my recall of one was hazy, and the other was reduced to a sensory nightmare — the ugly sounds of crunched metal, the blinding white of sunlight on snow, the feel of cold skin, the taste of acid rising in the back of the throat. And, most lingeringly, the smell of a hospital room, a rank combination of floor cleaner, eggs, cold vegetables, blood, crepe bandages, nurses’ uniforms, hot plastic, and beneath all that the smell of rot, of illness, of imminent death. It had seeped into my skin and lodged up my nose. Sometimes I thought I caught a trace of it on my clothes. So what if there were hospitals devoted to birth and good feelings: I didn’t want to go near a place even remotely associated with the human body in crisis.
And, anyway, who — apart from those who so carelessly cause the ‘happy accident’ — who actually wants to watch a birth? I didn’t want eyefuls of Gilly’s body parts. I didn’t want to hear her moaning. I didn’t want to see a red-faced, wailing extra-terrestrial in its first minutes of life, even if it was related to me.
In the end the sprog was practically born in the car. Seemed Gilly came from a long line of late but speedy birthers, women who felt a twinge one minute, then dropped the bundle in some inconvenient place.
‘Wouldn’t you know it?’ said Dee, pouring a river of gin. ‘Not only does she have a girl, but she isn’t ripped apart with the pain. What a bloody shame.’
You had to make allowances for Dee that day. You had to excuse her a little relapse with the gin bottle, try not being irritated by her telephone bitching to friends, to her sister in Hamilton, across the universe to Hamish in Holland. She got it back together in time for the old man’s arrival a few days later to pick us up. The sprog was home now, apparently, ready for viewing, all tucked up in the bassinet, wool-wrapped and sleepy.
‘Julia,’ said Dee. ‘Nice name.’
‘After Gilly’s mother,’ said the old man. He looked uncomfortable, slightly sweaty, like he always did when he talked to Dee.
‘Other names?’ said Dee.
Pause.
‘May,’ said the old man.
Another pause.
‘After your mother,’ said Dee, somehow managing not to look murderous or suicidal, managing to wave us goodbye without breaking down.
‘So what was she like?’ she asked, as soon as we got in the door, hours later.
‘Who?’
‘The baby, of course. I know what Gilly looks like. She looks like every woman whose baby’s only two days old. Washed out, puffy eyed, out to lunch. Triumphant.
‘So, is she a baldie? You and Leon were bald as badgers.’
‘Nope. She’s hairy. She looks a hundred and five, like a wizened old lady. She squirms and does black shit.’
‘All babies do that.’
‘She’s got blue eyes,’ said Leon.
‘All babies have blue eyes,’ said Dee.
‘All Caucasian babies,’ I said, really not wanting to have this conversation.
‘She’s got long fingernails,’ said Leon.
‘You had long fingernails,’ said Dee, her eyes filling.
‘They were all white and soft. I used to bite them off so you wouldn’t scratch yourself.’
‘Have a gin, Dee,’ I said, feeling more tired than ten women who’d just given birth.
‘She had this big scratch on her cheek,’ said Leon. ‘She liked me. I held her and put her arm in her singlet.’
‘That’s nice,’ said Dee, like someone had died.
I lay on my bed in the dark and tried not to think about Julia May Jackson and the churning feelings I’d had when I’d looked at her, when I’d stared at her Mr Magoo face and long dark hair, her tiny skink-like claw-fingers, her wide-open blue eyes.
‘What are you thinking?’ Gilly had said, taking me completely by surprise. ‘Does she make you think of Meredith?’ She was all loosened up, Gilly, postnatally confessional or something. It was just me and her and the baby, while the old man and Leon went for takeaways, and she was looking at me, speaking like she never had before, crossing some boundary that had always kept us comfortably separate.
I stared at her, felt the sweat break out.
But the baby made me think of Vicky Crawford too, her and Westie. And Lindsey. And Dee. And Liz Westgarth. And Westie again. Everyone, all of them.
‘Death,’ said Gilly softly, ‘birth, it’s all so strange.’ A tear fell out of each eye and she brushed them away, reached out, gently touched the baby’s curved, still palm with her forefinger.
‘I’m so sorry about Meredith,’ she said. ‘I’m sorry about everything you must be feeling.’
‘Mmm,’ I said, wishing she’d shut up.
New tears bubbled round her lashes, but I ignored them. I pretended yet another mother wasn’t getting emotional in front of me. I pretended the air around us wasn’t overheated and fragile.
I stared at the baby, sleeping, bunged up with milk. I looked at her small bits, nose and ears and lips, her soft nails and pink skin folds, and I thought how she was my sister, and how hard it seemed to care about it. How impossible knowing her seemed.
‘Big brother,’ said Gilly, crying and smiling at the same time.
‘Hmmm,’ I said, incapable of coherent comment.
‘So you won’t be a stranger, okay?’
Yeah, well.
‘So, Doctor,’ said Westie, ‘who does the sprog look like? Mr Magoo or E.T.?’
‘Mr Magoo,’ I said. ‘How’d you know about that?’
‘Read it somewhere. They always look like one or the other, apparently. For which read: extremely ugly.’
‘She’s … yeah, she’s ugly. She’s hairy.’
‘It’ll fall out.’
‘Yeah?’ How did he know these things?
‘Apparently. And then it grows back.’
‘No kidding, Doctor.’
‘Gilly’s tits big?’
‘Massive,’ I said, starting to laugh. ‘And sort of purple.’
‘You had a good look then, Doctor?’
‘Couldn’t avoid it, Doctor.’
‘Count me out,’ said Westie, definitively. ‘No Magoos for me. No E.T.s.’
‘You been reading the Woman’s Weekly, Doctor? Studying afterbirth?’
‘Nope. Vicky told me. She’s an expert.’
Twelve minutes. I timed him now, counted how long it took him on any given occasion to mention Vicky’s name. I might have handed it to him that time, but he was a genius anyway at bringing her up. Any time, any place, there were connections everywhere, though mostly in his tireless, completely preoccupied mind.
‘You know how it goes, Doctor,’ said Westie. ‘You can’t have something, you get to be world’s expert in it.’
Was he talking about Vicky or himself? Same difference. Vicky had lost him and the prospect of more kids, and had apparently spent a lot of her life thinking about babies, one in particular. Westie had lost Vicky and, waking, sleeping, he saw her everywhere.
>
It was late November now, hot and dry; the nor’westers were early but they’d flung the smog from the city basin; they’d slowed everyone down, too, made them torpid and aimless, but that suited me just fine, as it happened, because I was torpid and aimless anyway. I was taking one day at a time, as advised by the all-knowing adults in my life, but the events of each day taken one at a time never added up to much more than getting royally stoned and lying round somewhere with Westie, listening to him reorganise life, the universe and the meaning of every little thing.
We were stoned now and lying in the Westgarth gazebo. Westie still had no car, but Liz and Dave had promised him another one when the insurance came through. No questions asked. Not about the accident. Not about Vicky Crawford. Not about the big fat finger he’d given them for three months in the winter. Whenever I saw Liz Westgarth these days we both strenuously pretended she’d never cried into her coffee about Westie; we both pretended there’d never been the slightest ripple on the happy Westgarth family pond. These days Liz Westgarth looked dolefully at me, Max Jackson, the bereaved boyfriend, the sad bastard who’d stuffed up his promising first year at uni.
One of the many good reasons for being stoned most of my waking hours was that I didn’t have to think about uni, the humiliation of that exam, the grand waste of an academic year and future prospects. I was perfectly eligible for an aegrotat pass, as the old man kept reminding me; post-traumatic insanity grounds or something. I’d done well throughout the year, A-average. I was a sitter, he said, if I’d just bloody well go and see a doctor, get a medical certificate, talk to my tutors, blah, blah, blah.
But the very thought of that campus, the lecture blocks and library lifts, the gym, the cafeterias, the ampitheatre, the grassy riverbank inclines where I’d sat a dozen times with Meredith, it all made me want to vomit. After the exam disaster I’d cleared my room, thrown all the text books and lecture notes in a cupboard and closed the door, mentally and actually, on that part of my life.
Closed, Stranger Page 10
