Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  How did I know all this? Dee told me. She re-enacted the whole thing the next day. It was only when I was with Westie that the shame of it didn’t burn a hole in my battle-fried skull.

  ‘Who cares?’ said Westie in that soothing, feckless way, when I reported Dee’s new practice of turning up uninvited to Law Society functions, screaming at the staff when they denied her entry. Or her nocturnal expedition to the old man’s new garage, his new Beemer, with a bag of carefully shaped potatoes. Or her violently obscene phone calls to Gilly the Mistress. Or the barrage of mail-order items and subscriptions she’d unleashed on the happy couple.

  Who cares? I didn’t when I was flying round the Crater Rim track with Westie on Saturday mornings or listening stoned to music on Saturday nights. And I didn’t care much when Westie and I lay on the bonnet of his birthday present up at the Sign of the Bellbird under a winter night’s diaphanous cloak of stars, raving to each other about the very best Holmes and Moriarty stories, the very best early Star Trek episodes, the very best arrangement of female body parts we could dream up, the very best parentless, sibling-free future.

  Who cared? Not Westie, not me. Not then. It was only when I witnessed the searing exchanges between the old man and Dee — her foaming fury, the old man’s imperturbable face and remorseless logic — that I cared. Or when I listened on the extension to Dee talking to Vivienne at the Psychic Hotline, desperate for her deranged advice, trying to find some way back into the old man’s heart, trying to slide backwards into the old life and sew up a bright new future. I cared then.

  And I cared whenever Leon lost it, hit Dee, trashed his room, threw a chair at a kid in his class. I cared so much the only solution was to get the hell out, escape to Westie’s, lie in the gazebo, lie in his huge top-floor bedroom, lie beside his parents’ pool, lie back and listen to him remind me again and again why family barely mattered, why parents were highly dispensable, why brothers, aunts, uncles, grandparents were mere mosquitoes on the skin of life, why the four walls of our respective homes were simply short-term barricades that any day now — soon, soon, Doctor — we’d be vaulting.

  And meanwhile, there was his sixteenth birthday present — a new car — or his new mountain bike, or my new mountain bike, or our new PC, or building a collection of old Zappa records, or trying to get the cat stoned, or trying to source Uma on the Internet, or watching Get Smart again, or learning sax, or playing ten hours of backgammon, or trying to get Hannah Thompson to sleep with him. Or sleep with me. Or photography, or sailing, or kayaking or skateboarding or car maintenance or diving or—

  Or cricket, maybe? I liked cricket, I played it pretty well, I liked to watch it, I liked to talk about my optimum international team—

  ‘Cut it out, Doctor. Cricket’s for Milo drinkers.’

  Very funny. Cricket was my baby, Westie said. I could count him out of a game that too often didn’t have a clear winner, for God’s sake.

  ‘Gotta have a winner, Doc.’

  Yes, the other great Westie maxim, along with Who Cares? Gotta have a winner, man, and winner takes all. Winner takes the lead, the money, the kudos, the medal, the girl, and absolutely no prisoners.

  Of course it doesn’t take a genius to work out that Not Caring and Winner Takes All are pretty much mutually exclusive propositions. I knew it. Course I knew it. I knew right from the first day I met Westie and he pointed out he was taller than I was. I knew right then in the Fendalton Intermediate Year 7 classroom that winning was everything to Andy Westgarth. He pinned his colours to the mast, as they say. He grabbed me, let out a roar and raced headlong into competition, only he did it without a sound, merely by widening his grey eyes and lifting his eyebrow, provocative and determined.

  ‘We’re pretty definitely richer than you,’ he said, later that year, after he’d analysed our respective situations, our cars, our houses, our holidays.

  No arguing with that. My old man was a corporate lawyer with some big clients, but Westie’s was an international civil engineering consultant who clocked up enough air points every year to fly the family to the Arctic and back again twice over if they wanted.

  My old man had played club cricket, but Westie’s old man was a one-time soccer rep. Shame, Jackson.

  Dee was a ballroom dancing champion from way back, had a metre-long shelf heavy with trophies, a scrapbook, a wall of ribbons and photographs to prove it. Personally, I thought this was pretty unassailable, but Westie reminded me that his mother had, in living memory, taken out the Canterbury Tennis Interclub Veteran Womens’ Singles title for three consecutive years. A twenty-year-old scrapbook of paper cuttings and certificates didn’t rate with a triumph so recent you could smell its sweat.

  I knew that nine times out of ten Westie would, if he felt like it — and that was a big if — beat me in any maths exam or competition. I knew that four times out of five across the length of Wharenui Pool not style but blind determination would propel his fingers to the far side ahead of mine, though I was a technically better swimmer with strokes he couldn’t match.

  I knew that on most mornings round the Scarborough cliffs he would reach the summit seconds before me, but on an occasional morning I might surprise us both with a comprehensive win. And Westie’s shaded face would wear his favourite refrain. Who cares? Who really cares?

  Answer: Andy Westgarth.

  I worked that out early on. Westie cared like hell about coming first, asserting his ascendancy in any and everything from Connect Four to pulling girls.

  I knew that one reason he left cricket to me was that I had it all over him in that particular arena. Cricket was for suckers; and, oh yes, his line and length were a bit haphazard, he had the batting stance of a spastic.

  Same with history. On the one hand it was for Milo drinkers, long boring stories from God knows when. On the other hand it was Jackson’s baby — I had that field sewn up, and Westie never backed a losing horse.

  But, you know, Dee really didn’t have it quite right. She missed the real point. I never answered, ‘How high, Doctor?’ when Westie said his figurative, ‘Go Jump, Doctor.’ Whenever Westie said he was pretty certain his pectorals had the edge on mine; or when he reminded me he’d always been the Lego king of Fendalton, thousands of dollars of Lego in that attic room, Doctor; or when he insisted off-shore holidays proved his family’s financial superiority; or when he whispered, The blonde one with the serious legs is mine, Doctor, I didn’t lie back all those times and let him bounce up and down on me, grind me into the dust. It wasn’t like that between us.

  For instance, Dee, I sometimes felt like saying to my mother who never seemed to look past the surfaces of things; for instance, Dee, Westie may have designated me Watson to his Holmes, christened me Doctor, tried to pin the plodder on me, but I went head-to-head with him on that one, I called him Doctor right back and I never let up, not once, not ever.

  No, when Westie pushed his tanned, washboard chest forward and claimed first place by a continent in practically every area of our lives, sometimes I slugged it out with him, but mostly, I just let it go.

  Because I knew something else from the very beginning — knew like I knew the old man thought my mother sexy but stupid, though he’d never said it; knew like I knew Stevie Tan fancied guys, though he went after girls with great energy; knew like I knew Gilly sometimes wished Leon and me dead and buried, though she bought us presents, smiled at our every utterance, our very breathing.

  I knew — as part of some unspoken but primal creed agreed between Westie and me — that in the unnamed contest of our joint and separate lives, when everything was stripped back, the incidentals of home, school, sport and skirt set aside, then I, Max Cooper Jackson, had taken the coveted, the ultimate prize, the only one that really counted in Andy Westgarth’s universe.

  I was my father’s child. And my mother’s. Though one was terminally useless and the other as good as absent, I was theirs and they were mine. Though I felt like some cuckoo in their messy nest, I had sprung f
rom them, I was the happy accident of Dee’s ginny ramblings. I was their flesh.

  I was not adopted.

  Chapter Two

  Imagine two mothers.

  One was enough for me. Too much, most of the time. The story of Deirdre Robyn Jackson, née Summers, was long and muddled and enraging, but at least it was the only one I had to try and understand.

  Six months after Westie had met his second-slash-first mother I sat across the marbled Westgarth breakfast bar not drinking espresso with his first-slash-second mother, Liz. At her invitation. It was a horror story.

  ‘Son,’ she said, her voice urgent and embarrassing.

  ‘Son?’ I said.

  ‘You probably don’t think about that word, Max.

  ‘I wanted to say that word for years,’ she said, watching me, till I was desperate to turn away. She had blue eyes, the skin around them tired and taut, but the blue was cornflower, deepened by contact lenses.

  ‘You wouldn’t begin to know how it feels, Max, the nagging, endless pain, when that word is denied you. When you literally cannot have it.’ Her eyes were shiny bright, lit with tears.

  You’re okay Liz, I told myself, silently, I like you okay, and I’m sorry Westie’s so tough on you, I’m sorry about everything, believe me, but please don’t cry. Not in front of me. Not here, not when we’re alone together. I’m too young. I’m just not into this.

  I cursed Westie, his carelessness, the demands of his friendship.

  ‘Then, suddenly.’ She started up again. ‘One day, out of the blue, it’s yours. You can say it. Son. You can say it whenever you like. Son.’

  She wasn’t looking at me then; she was staring past me, out the French doors into her picture-book garden, or staring down some memory: a toddler, a kid with corkscrew curls and stone-grey eyes.

  ‘I could say it again and again, to anyone, at any place. I could say my son, I could say my son this, my son that, my son wakes up five times a night, my son could read when he was three, my son loathes carrots but he loves avocado, my son loves swings and banging spoons, my son loves water and soccer and running and music and Playschool and Sherlock Holmes. My son loves—’

  She gave a great jerky hiccough and a tear fell out of her eye, plopped in her coffee, like rain in a dirty puddle.

  We sat at the breakfast bar, utterly silent, staring at the cold surface, the cold coffees, the longest minutes passing. I wished I was deaf or blind or heartless or dead.

  ‘He won’t let me say my son anymore,’ said Liz Westgarth finally, her voice thick and agonised, just above a whisper.

  March. It was the month of the Fendalton Cricket Club end-of-season dinner, for which I had no partner. It was the month Vivienne at the Psychic Hotline told Dee she must get more green in her life so Dee spent five thousand therapeutic dollars on her winter wardrobe. It was the month the old man informed his kids the stork would be bringing a nice brother or sister in the spring. It was the month Leon helpfully beheaded Dee’s prize-winning standard roses, then hid in the Fendalton Park public toilets for twelve hours. It was the month Dee decided our kitchen decor was passé and began immediately on renovations, underwritten — strictly according to the terms of their separation agreement — by the old man. It was the month Dee’s old ballroom dance partner Hamish visited from Holland, stayed two weeks, drank two crates of wine, made long toll calls to his lover in Amsterdam and a drunken pass at me.

  It was our first month at university. It was the month I began my career as a serious-minded historian, marching to greatness. It was the month Westie changed his mind three times about what courses he was doing, and managed to exasperate four different faculties. It was the month Westie’s old man offered him a summer skiing holiday in Aspen, Colorado, if he made straight As. It was the month our old school principal hit the headlines, charged with diversion of school funds for personal gain.

  It was the month Dee took Leon to a hypnotist and the old man spent some time on the phone telling her eloquently what an addled, credulous, little philistine she was …

  But these things were, as Westie liked to say, just pimples on the already pocked skin of life. What made March really significant, what seared it on both our brains, was that Westie met his birth mother, Vicky, for the first time, a secret assignation on the freshly painted north-west seat in the rose round at the Botanical Gardens.

  And I met Meredith Robinson under a sun umbrella at the Fuller, Beachman annual family picnic on Quail Island. I watched her for hours — her soft unmade-up skin and round brown eyes under a wide-brimmed sunhat, her busy hands, her tiny, angular, bird-like body, her small, hard breasts — until the weakness in my groin made me brave and at the end of the day, as we sat together on the deck of the ferry back to Lyttelton, I asked her, very casually, to the Fendalton Cricket Club dinner.

  But first to Westie. Of course. He was stoked. He was sky-high. He’d shot so far into the stratosphere he could hardly speak. It was joy that lit him up. I’d never seen him like that before.

  First I knew he was gunning the car on the street in front of our house. It was Sunday, around 4. I was dozing in front of Sky, but I was half expecting him, expecting a report on the Big One, the trip to the Gardens, the face-to-face with the woman from his past.

  He’d painted a dozen scenarios in the days since she’d contacted him — gloomy, optimistic, fantastic; he was fizzing, he could hardly bear the time till he saw her. He speculated about everything: what she looked like, what she would wear, what the story was—

  ‘Her story?’

  ‘I know their story.’ He meant his parents, Liz and David. We both knew their story by heart; the one they’d been telling him since he was small, the one he’d been telling me ever since I’d known him: Liz and David, married ten years, can’t have kids of their own. They’re wealthy, they have a huge house, security, fantastic prospects, and no one to give it all to. Liz is depressed, eaten up that she can’t shower her love, all this wealth on a child; she’s lonely with David travelling so often, acres of time, nothing to do with it. Enter Westie, stage left. Down south, actually. He arrives, two weeks old, by Social Welfare car, and is handed to Liz, arms open wide.

  ‘And they wrapped you in swaddling clothes, Doctor, laid you in a manger.’

  ‘More or less.’ He’d smile, aim a punch at my head; I’d duck, go for his middle, he’d dart sideways …

  He lay on the horn so long Dee came at him from the front garden, brandishing a trowel. She was ticking him off through the passenger window when I came down the path. Dee ticking Westie off: a smack with a soggy tissue. She loved him these days; she was perpetually charmed by him, his looks, his smart tongue, his flirty behaviour.

  ‘Wanna ride, Dee? Take a burn with the boys?’

  ‘Very funny,’ said Dee, smiling wide, dangling the trowel, in no hurry to get back to the roses. ‘Some people have work to do.’

  ‘Thought we’d do the Summit Road, Doctor, check the pollution levels.’ This was code for sampling a small jar of weed Westie had stashed up near the Sign of the Bellbird.

  ‘Take Leon!’ said Dee, crumpling her face at Westie.

  ‘He can help you in the garden.’

  ‘Thanks but no thanks,’ said Dee. She stood and stared after us till we turned the corner.

  ‘Bloody mothers,’ I said.

  ‘Take a mother,’ said Westie, on Moorhouse Ave. He was doing 90, one hand on the wheel. He’d been completely silent for 4 ks, his face unreadable, his body charged and sparking.

  ‘Must I?’

  ‘If you could order one, what would you specify?’

  ‘Absence.’

  ‘Not allowed, Doc. Other qualities, please.’

  He swung into Barrington, laughing, and the hills were in front of us, blueberry in the late afternoon light. They always made me feel good. The hills meant getting out of the house, being above the city, listening to Westie rave, flying high in every sense. I felt generous suddenly.

  ‘Good cooking
, good looks,’ I ticked them off, ‘good brain, good sense of humour, good sense full stop—’

  ‘Goodness, Doctor—’

  ‘Shut up. And a good idea when she’s not wanted. And you?’

  He made me wait until we’d parked at the Bellbird, dug up the screw-top jar, rolled a tight one and settled with our backs against our favourite rock, looking out over Kennedy’s Bush and the flat expanse of city and plains, all the way to the Alps, stark and snowless.

  ‘Come on, Doctor, what’s she like?’

  ‘Don’t know if she can cook,’ he said, looking up at the sky. Then he turned to me, grinning, eyes exultant. ‘But all other functions seem in first-class order.’

  Trust Westie. Trust him to luck out with a real mother — he called her his real mother from that day — a real mother who had brains, beauty, wit and subtlety. And trust him to think of her like some brand-new top-of-the-range car or computer or mountain bike, something to stroke and gloat over, something to show off to his good friend Doctor Jackson.

  But next minute he was talking softly, so I had to concentrate to hear him; he looked into the distance, painted me the scene in the rose round. I watched him, but I saw the two of them, sitting together on the green seat at the edge of the colours, the muddled fragrances.

  ‘ … so weird,’ he said. ‘I didn’t see anyone else. I stood beside that thing in the middle, that—’

  ‘—sundial—’

  ‘—sundial. And I looked north-west, like we’d agreed, and she was sitting there. I knew it had to be her. It was like a movie.’

  ‘It’s illegal, you know.’ He liked that. ‘She’s not supposed to get in touch till I’m twenty. And she should do it through Social Welfare. But she had this information. She knew the surname and worked it out. So I can’t tell the folks. Not that I want to.’