Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  ‘And mothers,’ said Meredith, teasing me.

  I buried my face in her neck, moaned pathetically. She’d met Dee now and I had re-met Lindsey — as the mother of my girlfriend, rather than solicitor in the old man’s firm. The contrast between Ms Robinson and Mrs Jackson was enough to give me a strange new pain in my gut.

  Lindsey was everything Dee would never be. She was tall and cool, glamorous, cultivated, razor-sharp and ambitious. She was a nineties woman like her daughter, sliding up the career ladder and running a tight domestic ship.

  She was younger than Dee but she’d lived a broader, riskier, groovier life. She had been to Asia and South America and Africa; she’d had married lovers and foreign ones; she’d flourished in the cut-throat world of corporate law; she’d been independent and self-sufficient, hankering after no one.

  Her gaze and her voice were calm and measured and assessing. She’d never have heard of, much less consulted, the Psychic Hotline. She would never collapsed under her goose-down duvet with a crystal tumbler full of gin. She made me nervous.

  ‘And now, my mother,’ I said to Meredith, the first night she came for dinner. ‘A pen portrait.’

  We were parked at the Sign of the Kiwi, heading for home via the hills. I wanted to show Meredith the sun setting behind the mountains — the wide sky, the colour spectacle, the darkening chequerboard of the plains, the city turning on its night lights. It was the perfect evening for it. She’d probably seen it all before, but she hadn’t seen it with me.

  ‘Some salient points, so you’ll be prepared.’ I tried to sound dispassionate, like an academic with a checklist.

  ‘My mother is from Temuka. She’s quintessential small-town girl come to the city. Also prone to hysteria. Her parents were Presbyterians but she comes on like some Jewish momma caricature. She’s not your worldly sophisticated type. Wealthy — but suburban with strictly low-brow tastes. She’s an ex-ballroom dance and Latin champion—’

  ‘Cool,’ said Meredith coolly.

  ‘Embarrassing, actually. She’s small and blonde and curvy and dresses like a sex-kitten.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said, when Meredith didn’t respond. ‘She’s got good legs and big tits so she always wears short skirts and high heels and tight sweaters and lots—’

  ‘That’s horrible,’ said Meredith flatly.

  I turned to her, pleased, but she was looking at me with great reproach.

  ‘That’s a repulsive way to talk about your mother.’ She was very chilly.

  ‘You haven’t met her.’

  ‘You’re being a snob.’

  ‘She’s completely over the top,’ I said, hating the disappointment in her voice. ‘She’s done completely insane things; honestly, she opens her mouth all the time before her brain’s in gear, she’s totally erratic—’

  I stopped, hearing the words coming out of my mouth, the familiar phrases, the outraged tones. I sounded just like the old man.

  ‘She rings the Psychic Hotline every day,’ I said lamely, ashamed of myself at last, wanting, too late, to take it all back.

  We missed the sun; it had sunk quickly while I was giving my cameo. I stared miserably through the windscreen, unsure how to mend things. First fight.

  She touched me.

  ‘She must have got some things right,’ she said simply. ‘You’re pretty nice.’

  I took her hand gratefully.

  She was wise sometimes, Meredith; old and wise and generous. Constant as the hills.

  I was running with Westie all this time, through April and May, through the early smog and fog, the first frosts. We were both pumped, humming; we were both ready to fly out of our skins with exhilaration, so much was happening in our heads, in our hearts. Yes, I thought things like this; I said them too, though not to Westie.

  We needed to run. We needed to do something with the energy and pleasedness that pinged off us; our bodies would have flown apart, otherwise, shattered with pent-up pressure. We didn’t say this to each other but we knew it. We knew we wanted to pound pavements and hills till the sweat dribbled down our cheeks; we wanted to run so far and so fast that our legs and lungs wailed for mercy. We wanted to run and run and heave and gasp and spit and bitch — and then drop by mutual consent, gutted and steaming, onto the cold sands at Taylor’s Mistake or the pine-needle carpet at the top of the Summit Road or into the little hollow along the Godley Head track, to shut our eyes and die quietly, drink a litre of water, recover bit by bit, then exchange morsels, careful pieces of information about the women in our lives.

  ‘I met my grandmother,’ Westie told me one Saturday morning, early May.

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘What a bitch. Uptight. Ugly. Growing a beard. Husband died of fright, probably. Still trying to pretend she hasn’t got a bastard grandchild. Kept mentioning my parents.’

  ‘Love at first sight.’

  ‘Truckloads of money, though.’ He smiled evilly.

  We were at the top of the Godley Head track, looking down on the pines and baches of Boulder Bay. There was no one else around; the air was fresh and clear, and the Kaikouras were visible across the sea, a long dark shadow sitting on the water. I’ll bring Meredith here, I thought. In the middle of winter when the air is at its sharpest, when the sea and sky meeting make the horizon line seem as if it has been drawn by a thin dark-blue pencil lead.

  Or, in the summer, we could go down the other side of the Head, the lighthouse side, before first light. We’ll huddle in the long grass and watch the sun rising, huge and round and crimson, out of the sea. I could tell Meredith about the army up there during the war, useless bastards, delivering a warning shot over the bows of a civilian fishing boat and scuttling it, drowning the captain …

  ‘Doctor, you’re not listening to me. You’re staring at the scenery with a very dumb-shit, moony, I-am-getting-it-away look on your face. Cut it out. Are you getting it away?’

  I grinned, but I didn’t answer him. I couldn’t talk about Meredith like that. I couldn’t tell Westie about the heady, but quite careful, physical relationship we had so far, the slow delicacy of it. It was different from anything before, just as Meredith was so utterly different from any girl I’d ever hung out with.

  ‘Don’t go all coy on me, Doctor.’

  I grinned out towards the Kaikouras, resisting him.

  ‘Suit yourself then,’ he said, tipping his head back, drinking from his water bottle.

  ‘What about you, Doctor?’ I said, feeling his disappointment. ‘Who was that Uma lookalike?’

  Meredith and I had watched Westie doing his number at Base only a few days before. It was the first time I’d seen him with a girl since he’d met Vicky. The harem had well and truly dropped by the wayside over the last two months.

  ‘Some exchange student,’ he said. ‘Switzerland. She was only fifteen — they breed them sophisticated over there, Doctor. I hardly said hello and she had her hands down my pants. What about this, though? Liz asks me the other day why I’m hiding my new girlfriend, am I seeing someone underage?’

  ‘You going to tell them?’

  ‘Maybe.’

  ‘This is a small place, Doctor. They’ll end up hearing from someone. They’ll know Vicky’s family or something.’

  ‘They don’t. The old bitch made that plain.’

  ‘Still.’

  ‘Vicky doesn’t want to yet.’ He chewed a fingernail, frowning. ‘She feels bad,’ he said. ‘About coming back, about finding me. Liz and Dave — it wasn’t part of the deal then. She thinks it’s unfair on them.

  ‘She had to, though,’ he said, telling me like I needed convincing. ‘She had to, for herself. She was going crazy not knowing, not knowing whether the baby was okay. Me. She didn’t know whether I was dead or alive. She was going out of her fucking mind, with not knowing anything.’

  ‘Liz’ll go crazy,’ I said, thinking about the impossibility of pleasing two mothers — Vicky, crazy in Australia with not knowing. And Liz Westgarth, who would go
crazy knowing. And Westie a bit crazy, too. I wondered how he coped with the secrecy, the balancing act, the prospect that this flimsy structure he was controlling might collapse.

  ‘I like it this way,’ he said, reading my thoughts. ‘I like it being mine. Knowing about Vicky. Knowing her by myself. It’s not Liz’s business. It’s not Dave’s. It’s mine — and Vicky’s, and no bastard, no Social Welfare, no fucking politician making laws, no parent, no one had the right to keep information from us in the first place.

  ‘So I’m not in any hurry to tell them,’ he said, tipping out the last of his water into the small culvert at our feet. I watched it puddle, leak slowly sideways.

  ‘First back to Taylor’s?’ said Westie. He tossed his empty bottle into the grass, did a deep provocative knee bend, inches from my face.

  I got the bottle, stuck it in the back of my pants, watched him grin. He did that sort of thing sometimes, just to piss me off, just to see if I’d pick up after him, do the good Doctor, keep the landscape clean.

  Course, I did.

  ‘First back,’ I said, launching suddenly into a sprint, getting a head start.

  ‘Did you know?’ said Meredith, holding my hand in hers, spreading my fingers out over her palm, investigating them. ‘There’s actually a piece of music called From the Port Hills?

  ‘You’ve got pianist’s hands,’ she added. ‘I wish I had a stretch that big; tough fingers. It’s by Lilburn.’

  ‘Who’s Lilburn?’

  ‘Douglas. A famous composer.’

  ‘I’m just an ignorant cricketer.’

  ‘And it’s for the piano,’ she said, dropping my hand, getting up. ‘I’ve got it somewhere.’

  ‘Hey, Ms Robinson,’ I said. I could feel my throat close up as I watched her bending over at her music cupboard, the light curve of her bottom. She was wearing another velvet number, a cloudy purple, heavy on her small body. I was dying to take it off, that dress; look at her with no clothes, stretched out, naked and pale, in the half-light of her bedroom. ‘Is Mrs Robinson out for the whole evening?’

  ‘Mrs Robinson!’ She laughed. ‘That’s a great film! We should get it, get the video.’

  ‘Is she?’

  Meredith’s mother was conveniently absent. She was okay, Lindsey, always very pleasant but — maybe I was paranoid — she had an air of tolerance, as if she knew what I wanted — or thought she knew; as if I was some kind of predictable boy-wolf, nicely turned out, well spoken and well heeled, but the same as all men. After the obvious.

  I wasn’t after the obvious. Well I was, but I wasn’t after it. And it wasn’t the obvious, if you know what I mean. Meredith sent me into trippy physical territory, it’s true; and quite often when we were together I wanted to launch myself at her, rip her clothes off, go wild with her interesting bits. But other times — when she was playing the piano, for instance — a glorious calm settled over me and I could look at her lengthily, watch her tranquil face and gently swaying body in a quite saintly fashion, sex as far from my mind as last Monday’s lunch.

  It wasn’t obvious; it was familiar and strange, reliable and completely unpredictable, inside me and outside me all at the same time.

  Course, I was feeling a tad obvious right now. I couldn’t concentrate on her Port Hills music. I stood behind her, only half listening; I parted the back of her dark hair, exposing her neck; I touched the vulnerable bony bits, one by one to the top of her spine, then I bent and kissed a spot on her neck, licked it delicately, made her skin goose and shiver.

  ‘Hey, Ms Robinson,’ I said softly. ‘Let’s do a different sort of music.’ Incredible. A cliché that disgusting falling from my mouth. Sometimes I could hardly believe myself.

  She stopped playing and swivelled slowly on the piano stool, her face at my chest, but I knelt then and we were looking at each other, serious and intent.

  ‘Jacko,’ she started, her voice croaking in that sexy way.

  ‘Yes.’ I kissed her, but she pulled back, shaky.

  ‘I’m nervous.’ Her voice was so low I could hardly catch what she said.

  ‘It’s only if you want to,’ I said.

  I said that so easily, but it was the last thing I wanted, of course. I thought I might cry if she didn’t want to. I was eighteen, I’d slept with girls before. I knew the score. It was easy. But suddenly was easy seemed to belong to an old, bad life. Never before had I wanted so absolutely to do it properly. I wanted to love Meredith Robinson just right.

  We went to her bedroom. It was a big room, wide and spare and nearly empty except for a bed and a table, quite different from the rest of the house which was furnished with sumptuous fabrics and classy, expensive furniture. Meredith’s bedroom was uncurtained and undecorated, the only wall-hanging a framed picture of Frederic Chopin, her hero, at his haunted best — wild brown hair, a sallow, drawn face, eyes burning with genius and malady.

  The room was cool and woody-smelling, or peppery or something, I could never pin down that smell, but I wanted to wade into it, have it all over me.

  The cat was asleep in the middle of the bed and we had to move her before we could lie down and when we were lying down we talked awkwardly about safe sex, the most unromantic subject in the world, but it was part of getting it right, and when we’d talked and gone silent for a bit and the room seemed heavy with effort Meredith turned her face towards me and whispered something in my ear and my insides dropped and spun and I turned towards her, began kissing her, began loving her back, seriously, ecstatically.

  ‘Are you in love?’ said Leon, a few weeks later. He leered over the back of a chair.

  I was lying in front of the living-room woodburner, reading the general text for one of my history courses. There was an essay due. Somehow in the haze of April and May I had got my act together and started studying; it helped that Meredith was a deadly serious student, serious about her music degree, about a career as a professional musician.

  I tried to get my study done during the day so I could see Meredith in the evenings, but this was a Thursday, the night she rehearsed with a chamber music trio. ‘That’s nice,’ said Westie. ‘What the fuck’s a trio?’ He did that, played the philistine to my newly cultured, swainish self. I tried to ignore it. So I was at home, in the bosom of the family. Incredibly, I didn’t mind the family bosom these days. My new zen attitude to blood relatives and life in general meant that I could spend whole evenings when Meredith was busy and Westie was unavailable, just lying round reading or watching TV with Leon, or — unbelievable — helping Dee mull over fabric samples for the new kitchen curtains.

  I didn’t feel so trapped by the net of family misery. When Leon lost it and screamed at Dee or ripped pages out of his homework book or threw a mug out the kitchen window, I didn’t feel desperate or impotent, or furious with my father for not being there; I felt curiously detached, resigned. I tried to help, or I watched and waited for him to recover. And while I watched and waited my mind was occupied by other things. I thought of the conversations I’d had with Meredith about music, about history, about parents, about Leon; I thought about how I’d phone her soon, how I’d borrow Dee’s car, roll round and see her.

  If Dee had a meltdown over the old man and his new soon-to-expand family I didn’t feel bored or jittery or guilty. I listened to her raging, but I was floating too, a couple of metres away from her, on the edge of her reality, untouched.

  ‘Yeah, yeah,’ I said. And,

  ‘Mmmm, mmmm.’ And,

  ‘Don’t worry about it.’ And once, surprising myself, I put my arm around her small shoulders and said, as kindly as I could muster,

  ‘Suck it in, Dee, it’s only a bloody baby.’

  As for the old man and Gilly, I didn’t even mind burying myself for a long weekend in that part of the family mammary. I did three days of stylish, urban living in the apartment overlooking Hagley Park that had been Gilly’s single-girl pad until she’d opened her arms and her real estate to Jackson Snr.

  The old man
was trying hard these days; he was wooing me back with all the big guns of his personality: wit, rationality, a formidable intelligence, unexpected generosity, a good ear. I talked to him about uni and course options for next year, about cricket and the way it ate up your summer. I talked cautiously about Leon, where he should go to high school, whether he should see a counsellor.

  I ate up Gilly’s dinners and drank their wine and found myself almost enjoying their conversation. I sat on the window seat, listening to my father’s jazz collection, looking out to the river and the thinning willows and the peaceful swathe of green beyond.

  I watched Gilly cooking and cleaning. I watched her at the computer or painting the tiny room set aside for the sprog. I listened to her on the phone to her friends and her mother or talking to the old man. I looked at her properly for the first time — tall and slightly serious, with cute spectacles and a firm little frontal bulge. I didn’t hate her. I laughed once, before I knew what I was doing, when she made a joke about the old man’s pedantic language. I even gave a thought to the bulge — what it might be, who it might look like.

  I had been innoculated against all family ailments by something old and powerful. I was rapt, and wrapped up. I was so benign and hallowed and untouchable I could have nursed lepers.

  Yeah, I was in love.

  But I wasn’t going to discuss it, and definitely not with my moody and difficult twelve-year-old brother, sprawled in his chair now, PlayStation controls in hand, boredom and the desire to make trouble written all over his face.

  ‘Are you in love?’ asked Leon again. He was playing Raptor, the characters falling like flies because he was so fast on the controls, a PlayStation genius: strictly manual dexterity, no brain cells engaged.

  ‘That’s x-rated information, I’m afraid.’

  ‘Go on,’ he said, his eyes fixed on the screen, his thumb going like mad.

  ‘When your voice is broken.’

  Bad move. He skewered his last raptor and turned to me, a very prurient look on his face.