Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  ‘So what’s she like?’ I was trying to imagine meeting Dee for the first time in my life, aged eighteen. I tried to imagine Dee planning something secretly — unlikely — or sitting on the north-west bench in the rose round, waiting quietly. Impossible. I tried to imagine seeing her through eager, fresh eyes, but I could picture only her face wearing all its furies and disappointments. I could hear only her usual tones: pleading, wheedling, complaining.

  ‘She’s cool,’ said Westie, dreamy. The weed, the time of day, the landscape spread out in front of us, it made us both languid, calm and hopeful. ‘Black as black hair. She’s a jewellery-maker. Quite tall. Nice clothes. She’s only thirty-four. Lives in Sydney.’

  He laid out these unconnected beads of information slowly and deliberately till I was just about asleep and dreaming the woman who was Vicky Crawford, dreaming her life and times.

  ‘She lived with someone but they broke up. She’s pretty successful over there. Not rich though. Got a sister and brother somewhere. Her parents made her adopt. She’s a swimmer. She was only sixteen, Doctor, and she always wanted to find me.’

  We watched the sun falling slowly behind the mountains, the brilliant red flooding the sky. There was no wind, but the damp and cold crept up our legs and back.

  I still couldn’t get my head around this extra parent, this total stranger who somehow belonged to Westie. It seemed like a mistake.

  ‘But you’re fair-haired.’

  Turned out his real old man was an American, a backpacker, gone, no name, no address. I pictured a Baywatch type, a jock, lean and muscled and edgy, like Westie.

  ‘She didn’t go off, Doctor,’ he said firmly.

  ‘No.’

  ‘He was at some party. She gatecrashed with her friends; he practically raped her. And then she never saw him again.’

  I tried to imagine this party, back in the seventies — the music, the clothes, the people. A baby-making party somewhere down in the black city below us, about the same time Dee and Martin Jackson were practising their own fertility rites in their spanking new split-level architecturally designed house in west Fendalton.

  ‘So, Doctor,’ I started. But I couldn’t work it out.

  ‘So, I’m seeing her again on Wednesday.’

  ‘What about your folks?’

  His face was still. ‘Don’t worry about it.’

  Months later Meredith told me that, on that first day, Westie and Vicky sat on the green garden seat holding hands. Vicky’s hands were freckled and bony and Westie gripped them tight, holding on, holding her there, not letting her go, not for a second, not ever, not now that she’d found him.

  After that it seemed like Westie poured a stream of Vicky information as thick and steady as oil from a bottle. Vicky Crawford was his new hobby.

  Course, Westie’s traditional way with a new hobby was to discard everything that had held his attention a minute before that. Goodbye surfing the net. Goodbye back-to-back episodes of the original Star Trek. Goodbye Simone Foster who was his sort-of girlfriend at the time. She was nice, Simone; she looked at me sadly, like I might help; but I could only shrug, look blank.

  All he wanted to do was go running. He’d call and I’d come. We’d pound the turf, mornings before lectures, afternoons, and, in the dark after dinner, round McLeans Island, on the hills, in the Park. We ran and he raved, Vicky stuff, the big stuff and the minutiae of her thiry-four years: her relationship with her parents — bad; So, Doc, I said, what’s new? Her middle name — Jane. Her ex-boyfriend’s job — art curator. Her taste in music — new folk, country-folk, Irish singers. Milo drinkers’ wank, Westie would have said pre-real mother. Her travels — South America, India, London, Iceland. Her star sign — Virgo. Earth, said Westie, no sign of a smirk — sensual, loving, intense. Her favourite food — sushi. Her favourite subject at school — art. Her first boyfriend — some guy called Grant Philpot. On and on and on.

  I was fascinated, no doubt about it — for a start, it was a distraction from Dee’s meltdown over Leon, and my father’s embrace of middle-aged parenthood.

  But it was more than that, too. I looked at the photo of Vicky Crawford that Westie carried round in his wallet now, and though she had softer features, dark brows, generous lips, an even sprinkling of freckles, I saw Westie himself hovering in her face. I was so used to thinking of him as separate from his parents — he insisted on that; it was an article of faith; he told everyone he was adopted. I was so used to him being unattached to anyone, floating unfettered in a world that had me so bound down, so related to my useless family, that the thought of someone who had a line to him, a blood connection, was very, very strange.

  ‘Funky,’ I said, briefly, looking at the photo, the bone earrings unlike any Dee or Liz or any mother in our orbit would ever wear, taking in the unplucked eyebrows, the arty, monochromatic clothes.

  ‘She can’t have any more kids,’ said Westie, one night when we were doing the McLeans Island circuit. It was rough underfoot, rocky and pitted. We passed kids having it off in their parents’ cars, out in the middle of nowhere; we passed the salmon farm, the fish plump and brooding in their ponds, the borders of Orana Park and — most surreal — old wooden bungalows waiting for buyers, shifted from their original sites, crooked and disabled, standing in rows in a vast paddock.

  Westie had seen Vicky four times now. They always met at their green bench, then walked through the Gardens, looking at the trees in their autumn tones, talking, talking. Vicky liked gingkos and elms and limes, said Westie, but her favourite was the massive Morton Bay fig. They sat beside it sometimes, out of the easterly wind, under the shelter of its spreading canopy.

  ‘Never thought I’d hear you being poetic about trees, Doc,’ I said. We were doing our press-ups at the edge of Russley Road.

  ‘Never really looked at them properly,’ he said, quite seriously.

  I heaved and pressed and blew hard, and thought how this was like the time he’d been religious. He’d read all the Old Testament stories, told me about them on the way to school, graded all the characters — Nebuchadnezzar was crazy, Abraham a tosser, Joseph a dude. He prayed too, he’d really got off on the trippy business of communicating with the ether.

  ‘It’s not ether, Doc,’ he’d said. ‘There’s something out there.’

  It was all over in six months, but I remembered his buzz, the ecstatic raves, the same big-eyed wonder at the world seen anew, seen passionately, the customary sneering gone right underground.

  Course I was there listening. I always listened. And I always got pulled in because that was the way it worked between us. He was like a marketing man, Westie. He sold you completely on the thing he was promoting — God, girls, ice-hockey, drugs, freak lists, old TV series. Real mothers.

  ‘It’s trippy how she’s so young, Doctor. She’s the same age as Trish Roberts; she’s the same age as Liz was when they got me. Fuck me, she’s only a bit older than Uma.’

  ‘What about your folks, Doc?’

  I said this every so often, like an earnest, good-living citizen, but I knew what was going to happen there. It’d be all bad. Liz Westgarth was going to lose it in the biggest possible way when she found out about Vicky. I’d seen Westie and Liz go head to head before. Not a pretty sight.

  ‘They’re going to find out. You’ve gotta tell them before they find out.’

  ‘Who cares?’ said Westie, returning to form, canning the autumn leaves and spreading chestnuts, all the poetics.

  ‘First to the car,’ he said, springing to his feet, heading north at speed.

  Four days later we were up the hill, inside the old stone building at the Bellbird, watching the smoke from fifty thousand woodburners fighting the first cold spell, and I was launched in my own little bit of paradise, spilling a gush of love and lust about Meredith Robinson in Westie’s well-cocked ear.

  Chapter Three

  Imagine mid-winter, a white sky, a pale sun.

  It was months after we’d met and we were ou
t at Birdlings, sitting close on a hill of flat stones, watching the waves, fierce and dirty, listening to the bang of the surf below us.

  ‘The thing about now, about this moment,’ said Meredith, chewing her lip, concentrating. She was trailing her forefinger across the back of my hand, making goosebumps rise. I was watching her face, its myriad movements. ‘The thing about every moment you’re ever in, it’s always going. It slips away immediately, you can never have it. Now is always leaving you,’ she said.

  I took her hand, small and cold and stiff, and squeezed it hard, and she smiled her sideways smile, showing her small, cat-like eye-tooth.

  ‘Thing is,’ she said, squeezing my hand back, trying to get me to understand, ‘I reckon nothing’s ever really yours, you never have it. Not things, people, not memory, not time, not … now.’

  I started to kiss her and she opened her cold lips gently, but a second later she drew back, thinking of another thing.

  ‘See, you’re holding my hand tight, and it’s so lovely, and we’re kissing and I can taste you and feel you. That’s now, and then it’s gone.

  ‘Lost,’ she said, holding my hand still, staring out across the mucky Pacific.

  So maybe it was just lust in the beginning, my thing for Meredith. I knew about lust. Just a glimpse of Pippa Gordon at inter-school athletics used to make my skin sweaty. And the other region pine-tree solid. I’d nursed a rock-hard passion for the Sonic Youth bassist for a couple of years. And Uma, of course. And Stevie Tan’s older sister had figured in some of my more AO fantasies. And I couldn’t get Susie Austin-Browne out of my head for months after I slept with her at one of Stevie’s wilder parties. I knew how lust worked. I was good and red-blooded, and I went through all the usual symptoms watching Meredith Robinson, listening to her oddly deep voice, smelling the weird smoky-tea fragrance that hung about her.

  But in the end it was more than lust. Had to be. Sure, everyone says that. But it’s true that in the end I could look at Meredith’s face, I could lie naked beside her and feel something that was light-years away from those old, familiar sensations I got with Uma and the rest. Course I never said that to Westie, or not for a long time, not till much, much later when I was saying a whole lot of things I’d buried deep.

  But back in that March, the air above the city clogging up, Westie’s head stuffed-full of Vicky information, my heart seized suddenly with passion, I could only tell Westie those so significant, so meaningless vital statistics.

  ‘About a metre seven,’ I said. ‘Small and kind of a pointy body, you know what I mean?’

  ‘You’re a flesh man, Doc—’

  ‘I am, I am, she’s not skinny, she’s just—’

  ‘Bony?’

  ‘No, well, sort of, but she’s very cute. She has this husky voice, and she wears kind of bohemian clothes.’

  ‘You sure about this one, Doctor? She sounds—’

  ‘She’s very smart,’ I said, cutting him off. I really didn’t want one of his ruthless assessments right now. I wanted to keep my soft-edged, violin-serenaded first meeting with Meredith Robinson completely intact.

  ‘So how come you’ve never met her at one of those Happy Families things before?’

  ‘Her mother’s just joined the firm.’

  ‘Her mother?’

  ‘Yes, Doctor, her mother. Women are lawyers these days, case you haven’t noticed.’

  ‘What about her old man?’

  ‘Not on the scene. It’s just her and her mother.’

  ‘So is Robinson the old man’s name or her mother’s?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ This was a very Westie line of inquiry. He always needed to know exactly how people were related, whose name belonged to whom, where parents were, and how come they were there and not there. So to speak.

  ‘Makes sense,’ Meredith said later, after she’d explained her own slightly different family. She recognised Westie’s interest in the mappings of family relationships.

  ‘Thing is, Max,’ she said. ‘Your family might be dysfunctional, but they’re dysfunctional in a normal way.’

  She meant it. Every muscle in her face was set seriously, trying to get me to understand that, though my father had walked out on his family and now lived elsewhere with a woman young enough to be his daughter, and was still procreating at nearly fifty; though he made clumsy, hopeless overtures to his two sons who no longer even liked him; though one of his sons had a ‘condition’ that might or might not be medically treatable; though his ex-wife was currently a compulsive spender and daily consulted the Psychic Hotline; that, despite all this, my family was normal?

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ she said, regretfully. ‘It’s complicated.’

  But at the beginning it was gloriously uncomplicated. I’d seen this girl, she was a doll, I’d asked her to the cricket dinner and she was coming. I was stoked.

  ‘She has these trippy brown eyes,’ I told Westie. ‘Like shiny chocolate.’

  ‘Shiny chocolate. For fuck’s sake, Doctor.’

  I thought about Meredith looking at me with her shiny chocolate eyes, telling me about French composers and about Chopin, her number one, she said, the man.

  ‘She plays the piano,’ I said. I was thinking about getting into some new music. Classical.

  ‘Classical,’ I said.

  ‘Vicky likes Classical,’ said Westie, passing me some weed.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘Classical’s okay,’ said Westie, slipping down, lying flat on the ground, zipping his jacket up to his neck.

  I lay down too, watched for the first stars. You could see them fine up here, above the clag, above the swamp and choke of the city.

  ‘Classical’s fine,’ I said, thinking I might buy a piano CD. Classical piano.

  ‘Soothing,’ said Westie, reaching over, taking the weed from between my fingers. ‘Romantic.’

  Soothing? Romantic? Westie?

  I should have listened harder. I should have heard warning bells then, ringing faintly, far off.

  The old man rang me the afternoon of the cricket dinner.

  ‘Big night,’ he said. For a litigation expert he could do a very unoriginal line in conversation.

  ‘Yes.’ I never said much these days, it only encouraged him.

  ‘Quite a season for you?’

  ‘Not bad.’

  ‘Best batsman?’

  ‘Doubt it.’

  ‘Never know.’

  Silence. I liked to make him sweat.

  ‘Well, good luck,’ he said.

  ‘Ta.’

  ‘Now the season’s over,’ he said, ‘perhaps you’ll come for the weekend? Sometime?’

  I didn’t answer.

  ‘Gilly’s very keen for you both to come—’

  I doubted that.

  ‘—goes without saying that I am too.’

  Sure.

  ‘Would you come, Max?’ He was really being patient for this one. ‘I’m sure if you come Leon will agree to come too.’

  No doubt.

  ‘I want to spend time with you, Max,’ he said patiently. ‘I would like to spend time with both of you.’

  Well, there were a thousand possible replies to that one, but I really couldn’t be stuffed.

  ‘All right. Sometime,’ I said, just to get him off the phone.

  But he hadn’t finished.

  ‘I hear you’re taking Meredith Robinson.’

  ‘Yip.’ News travelled fast at Fuller, Beachman.

  Pause.

  ‘Interesting young woman,’ he said, finally.

  And what did that mean?

  ‘Yip.’

  ‘I hope you’re careful.’

  That really was a bit much, wasn’t it, given his own record?

  ‘I never fuck on the first date, Dad,’ I said. ‘Unlike some.’

  Well. He asked for it.

  Dee loved me taking girls out. She fell over herself to be helpful. She gave me money, she lent me the car, she told me
not to worry about curfew, she told me to bring Meredith home, she promised not to wait up. She even offered me a stiff gin.

  ‘Piss off, Dee,’ I said, pushed beyond kindness.

  Her scattergun parenting drove me nuts. Either she was in bed talking to the Psychic Hotline day and night, letting Leon eat crap, letting him wander round Fendalton unsupervised with his delinquent friends, letting him watch videos all weekend, and hardly noticing my existence except to send me out for Chinese or to rave at me about the old man or Gilly or the Law Society wives who no longer invited her for lunches or her crazy sister in Hamilton who was sleeping with her kid’s school teacher or my grandmother who made no sense anymore. Or she was up and atomic, propelled by guilt, endlessly at our heels, over-attentive, making chive sandwiches for Leon, ripping Chupa Chups out of his mouth, baking muffins and pizza bases, buying us surplus clothes, screening Leon’s friends, ringing their mothers, asking me a thousand boring questions about school, cricket, Westie, Westie’s family, girls I might like, on and on and on.

  I wanted to gag her, hang her up by her hair. I wanted to say: Dee, get a fucking life, but somehow I could never quite do it. I could never say it and have to watch her face. I couldn’t say it now.

  I rang Westie instead, curious to know what he’d be doing while I squired Meredith to the cricket dinner. Except for this annual event we did Saturday nights together, even when one of us had a girlfriend.

  ‘Doctor.’

  ‘Doctor.

  ‘Big night, Doctor.’

  ‘Don’t you start.’ I was nervous suddenly, wished I was on my way round to Westie’s for a standard Saturday night. ‘Whaddaya up to?’

  ‘Watch a vid, have a smoke, spank the monkey.’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Might do a movie, might cruise round to Stevie’s. Might crash the cricket dinner. What’s on the menu?’

  ‘Beer.’

  ‘Got the prophylactics?’