Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  Vicky was house-sitting in St Albans. So Meredith had told me: 37 Trafalgar Street, the address written down for her by Andy Westgarth, recently of Fendalton.

  But why did he write down his address for Meredith, I asked myself. Why did he need her to know where he was?

  I was driving there, to 37 Trafalgar Street — I was driving too fast, I was manic, no doubt about it. I had a speech planned. It was succinct. Fuck off, I would say. Keep out of my territory. Go find your own girl. And I’d point out that, far as I knew, he didn’t normally favour skinny, dark-haired artistic types, loquacious girls who had moments of metaphysical speculation, thinking girls who had soul.

  Course, I wouldn’t really go that far. Westie would laugh in my face if a word like soul jumped out of my mouth. Even though he routinely spewed sop about his new-found mother, as soon as something like that passed my lips over a girl, he’d have a great big swatting upper hand.

  I drove right over the small concrete-mushroom roundabout at Rutland and St Albans; some kids on the footpath saw me, opened their eyes and mouths wide, pointed at the car. I gave them the fingers, the little snots, accelerated ahead and drove over the next mushroom into Trafalgar. I was lathered, more than ready to give it to Westie, do pistols at dawn.

  37 was an old wooden villa, restored, with a bricked driveway and an iron gate and a cottage garden in winter repose. I knew all about Trafalgar Street, as it happened — we’d done a local history module on St Albans last year. I knew T. Street was one of the oldest in the city, the houses were second- if not third-growth buildings, it was built on damp, peaty land, dug out by the suburb’s early settlers.

  Who cares, I heard Westie say. Quite.

  His car was parked up the drive. I gave it a thump as I passed, as if I was thumping its owner. I’d been imagining an attractive scenario in which I told Westie where to get off, then somehow was driven to whack him satisfactorily in response to something he said.

  I stood on the porch on the north side of the house and knocked on the front door, but no one heard. Some quavering Irish singer played loudly inside. By the time I got round to the back door I recognised the voice and the album: The Chieftans. Dee thrashed it when she was feeling sorry for herself. I thought how not so very long ago Westie wouldn’t have been caught comatose listening to music like this.

  The back door was shut but I turned the knob and walked into the kitchen, newly renovated, Italian rustic — I knew this sort of thing now, a veteran of Dee’s kitchen theories over the last few months.

  ‘Yo,’ I called, a genial guest, not a pumped-up lover come to stake a claim. ‘Anyone home?’

  Old Van M was doing his thing as I walked through the dining room. Have I told you lately that I love you … One of Dee’s favourites. Sadly, I was familiar with his every sung word. There were sharp little Bose speakers in the corners of the room, a big wine rack filled with bottles. Whoever lived here had a bit of cash. And there was Westie’s black jacket slung over the back of a chair, his Star Trek key ring on the circular table. There was a quarter-full bottle of Johnnie Walker on the table too, a couple of glasses.

  It was the whisky that tipped me over, sent me temporarily mad, made me believe the worst for five interminable minutes.

  What if Meredith had come back here with Westie last night? The probability exploded in my head to the accompaniment of Van Morrison. What if they drank three-quarters of a bottle of JW and fell into the sack? What if Meredith was not at this moment in Music History but in bed with Westie somewhere in this house? What if he’d picked her up from uni, as prearranged; what if they’d driven here, come quickly indoors, fallen on each other, two people seized by ungovernable lust? What if I was a blind, stupid sucker who’d completely failed to notice a simmering attraction right beneath my nose?

  Later, I could never believe that I walked down that hallway, my feet so furtive on the polished rimu floorboards; that I pushed gently the heavy doors of first one bedroom, then another, then a third, my heart thudding in my chest; that I took a slowed-down painful look at each cool interior, each empty bed with its stretched-smooth cover and white pillows; that despite those empty bedrooms I kept going further down the passage, towards the front door with the long pink stubbled window, towards the living room where Van’s voice was coming out the door at me.

  I could never believe that I kept close against the passage wall, like an FBI operative in a movie, for God’s sake, watching my feet against the painted skirting, watching how softly I placed them; that I waited near the half-open door of the living room hearing Van say you’re the one, the one, the one, the one … before I bent my head very, very slowly around its edge.

  They never saw me. It was a long room, a fireplace at one end with sofa and chairs. There was another sofa under the bay window at the other end, and they were on the floor leaning on this sofa, their bodies and faces and hands on each other, engrossed in the other’s look and touch.

  I still don’t believe sometimes that I saw Westie kissing Vicky Crawford with such passion, kissing and kissing her long neck and tear-riven face, her wet and swollen lips; that I saw her hands in his hair, stroking his face, crying all the while; that I saw him pull her towards him, rock her in his arms; that I heard him tell his weeping mother in the sudden silence that came at the end of Van Morrison’s song, and as he kissed her face again and again, ‘You’re the one, Vicky, the one, the one, the one …’

  Chapter Six

  Imagine, you’re a sixteen-year-old school girl and somewhere deep in your heart you admit to yourself that you’re pregnant. You know how it happened, you know it’s a fact. But somehow, muddily, hopefully, you think that if you don’t let that knowledge bubble up from its dark corner, if you turn your face strenuously from its reality, this unwelcome foetal fact will never actually come to anything; it will quietly dissolve, it will go away and leave you alone.

  It doesn’t.

  Nine months later, still looking the other way, deeply shocked, you give birth to a baby. You look at it over the following ten days and you note in a detached sort of way that it has small flailing hands, that its toes curl when it cries, that it has masses of black hair, and its tongue peeps and probes between its lips, searching, searching.

  You keep that black hair, those curling toes in a shut-off corner of your memory for the next eighteen years, and every year, blurred anyway by the swill and pace of your other life, those images shrink and fade a little more until mostly you think you might have dreamt the whole lot.

  Imagine it. That’s what Vicky Crawford asked me to do when I went to see her months later, to try and understand, help Westie. There was a queue of mothers in my life that year.

  I tried. I tried to imagine being a girl, giving away a baby because people tell me I should, because I’m numb and dazed, because I’d rather go back to school, to my friends, because it’s too impossible to know what else to do. But I couldn’t really picture it, I couldn’t feel it. I looked at Vicky and I listened, but at the time I saw only the person who’d caused a whole lot of heartache. I just wanted her to go away; I wanted to close my ears against her story.

  Later, she sent me a letter.

  Imagine, she wrote. Imagine, you’re a thirty-four-year-old woman and for the first time you meet the baby you gave away eighteen years ago. Only he’s not a baby anymore, and though you’re filled with a new, calm rapture, in the midst of that flowering happiness is an ache for that baby you can never get back. Sometimes you find yourself searching the face and limbs of your new-found child for that old, lost baby and sometimes you think you almost see him, but it’s so fleeting, a trick of light or memory or hope, a mirage really. So you bury that ache.

  And now, the old strangled love and longing bursts through, and each time you see your son the most tumultuous feelings are generated between you. You want to hold him, you want to wind your fingers in his, you want to touch his skin, sing him lullabies and watch him sleep. And he’s the same. He’s been waiting
for you, looking for you so long with his mind’s eye that when he meets you, you are, literally, the woman of his dreams.

  Those feelings are with both of you constantly, simmering, humming in the small gap between you, until one day one of you — and you can never remember which — one of you puts a hand out across the gap, touches the other in a certain reckless way.

  And then you’re really lost. You’ve lost each other three times over now — that mother, that baby, those lovers; no past, no future, no time at all.

  There were so many things in that time, and so many things that no one had written the rulebook for. Not as far as I knew, anyway. For instance: How to cope with your mother when your father’s left her for a younger woman. How to deal with paranoid possessiveness that comes out of nowhere. How to react when your father knocks up the new woman. What sort of relationship to have with the new woman.

  What sort of relationship to have with your birth mother.

  All the others paled and dropped away that June afternoon as I drove away from Trafalgar Street, slowly this time, snail’s pace. I was knocked out — shocked, I suppose — not seeing anything in front of me, seeing other images which made me sweat, made me want to put my hands over my eyes, but peep through my fingers.

  What did I feel? Not much. Not really. I didn’t feel disgust or horror or fascination or devastation or whatever it is you’re supposed to feel when confronted by something like this. There was no rulebook on that one either.

  But I wasn’t surprised, either. It was as if that minute kernel of buried knowledge, that scene in the restaurant Meredith had described to me, had burst forth suddenly, fully grown and demanding acknowledgement. It was as if I’d always known things were different with Westie and Vicky. The way things were always different with Westie. Out of the loop, explosive.

  No surprise, no feelings, just a muddied stillness.

  But I couldn’t think about it. I was on autopilot. I arrived home unconscious of the route I’d taken, and after I’d parked the car in the garage I sat there staring at the numbers on the speedo till they began to strobe. And the whole time I sat there the sound of Van Bloody Morrison banged in my head, his achy, swallowed voice saying those words.

  I sat so long Dee came out to see what I was doing. She came through the door adjoining the house, peering over the bonnet into the windscreen. She was wearing pink rubber gloves, soft icebergs of foam all over.

  ‘I thought I heard the car,’ she said, coming round to the driver’s side. ‘What are you doing?’

  Here’s the weird part. I looked at Dee, my mother, small but lifted up on the high heels she always wore, so that she bent slightly at the closed driver’s window; I looked at her puzzled face which was so familiar to me but which I never really saw anymore; I looked at her cloud of brittle, white-blonde hair, her careful make-up, her pale shaped brows and big sky-blue eyes. I looked at her expensive clothes and earrings and the bright pink foamy gloves.

  I looked at all of her and felt something I hadn’t felt in a long time — relief. It came all over me, like an attack of goosebumps. I wanted to leap out of the car and give her the kind of hug I hadn’t bestowed since I was ten. I wanted to bury my face and my strange numbness in her Fendi-scented neck.

  Obviously I was unhinged. I didn’t jump out, hug her. I breathed deep and rolled down the window.

  ‘You all right?’ she said.

  ‘Course.’ My voice sounded odd to my ears, thin and unused.

  ‘Where’d you go?’

  ‘Checked out Westie,’ I said. ‘He’s shifted. After the blowup.’ I stared at the speedo, not wanting to look at Dee too long, feeling like the mere mention of Westie’s name gave everything away, painted a picture so graphic she’d roll over with shock.

  She just sighed, leaned her elbow on the window frame and blew on the gloves, made the foamy peaks tremble and part.

  ‘Might be for the best,’ she said.

  To my complete surprise Dee was with Westie on this one. And Vicky — though she’d never met her. Of course they needed to see each other, said Dee. Could’ve been her, she said.

  ‘Could’ve been any of us,’ she said. ‘I knew girls, I’ve known women — young, no contraception. We all have sex, for heaven’s sake, but some are just unlucky.’

  And then she veered off, Dee-style, interrogated me about my own sex life.

  ‘It’s under control, Dee,’ I told her. ‘Well under control.’

  I didn’t feel under control then, sitting in her car. There was something about her calmness, so much not her usual mode, and her sympathy for Westie and Vicky — it made me all thick in the throat.

  ‘Might just check out Meredith,’ I said, needing to get right away. I put my hands on the wheel, stretched out in the seat like a man at the end of a long, hard ride. ‘Won’t be long.’

  ‘Bring her for dinner,’ said Dee. ‘Go on. There’s plenty.’

  ‘I’ll see what she’s up to,’ I said, wanting for some reason to do something for her, for Dee.

  ‘About an hour,’ she said.

  I waved, backed out of the garage, turned out onto the avenue. But as soon as I was quit of the house I wanted to stop somewhere, park the car, put my head on the wheel, screw up my face and cry like a five-year-old.

  Of course Meredith knew. That’s what she’d wanted to talk to me about. That’s why Westie had gone round to see her. And that’s what he’d told her.

  I knew this, I knew it absolutely, even before Meredith told me, and she did tell me, of course. I arrived round at her house, walked in the front door and flung myself, mute, onto the living room sofa. Lindsey, obligingly, wasn’t home.

  I didn’t know where to start it. I sat and stared into space, trying to organise my head. But kept being hijacked by the memory of my stealthy passage down that hallway, my blind, chest-banging backing away from that doorway, the utter craziness of the next track on that CD — a dance tune, gabbled and racy — covering my exit from the house and the street.

  Meredith knew, anyway. She knew just looking at me. We were both in stepped-up, highly receptive states, I think, our nerve ends sharpened, ready for anything.

  ‘Why didn’t he say anything to me,’ I said, at last, after Meredith told me about the night before — Westie arriving, furious with his folks but driven by the other thing, obsessed with it, needing to spill it all. How he had told her every little bit about him and Vicky, right from the beginning, from her first tentative phone call back in February to their meeting on the green park bench, through all their time together, their absorption, each in the other, to the point they were at now — some dangerous territory none of us knew the first thing about.

  ‘I don’t get it,’ I said. ‘I’m his best friend.’ Funny how I was preoccupied with his not confiding in me. It wasn’t the point at all, but it was easier fastening on that little thorn, rather than analysing the other.

  ‘I think he did,’ said Meredith slowly. She was biting her lip, staring at her fingers, curved, working at invisible keys. ‘I think he did want to tell you, but it was easier to tell someone he doesn’t know very well. A girl, too, maybe. He told me so I’d tell you.’

  We sat there, quiet mostly, taking it all in.

  ‘What do you think’ll happen?’

  ‘What will they do?’

  There were no answers. I’d never felt so like a perplexed kid, so much back in that realm where knotty problems needed to be explained and solved by grown-ups.

  ‘Do you think it’s—?’ She was embarrassed.

  ‘Weird?’ I said. ‘Repulsive?’

  ‘Perverted?’ she said, tentatively.

  ‘No,’ I said. ‘Yes. No. I don’t know.’

  ‘Same,’ she said.

  We stayed sitting, trying to think, trying not to think, until the room was almost dark.

  ‘Come to our place for dinner,’ I said finally, remembering. ‘Dee said.’

  I watched her write a note to Lindsey. Gone to Jacko’
s for dinner. Backsun.

  I looked at that note on their kitchen table, on the pad they used to send messages back and forth. It seemed full of their long, intimate, ordinary mother-and-daughter history, all the language and jokes; it seemed very simple, very straightforward and right. Something ancient, something people used to know about, a way of being that was skewed now, slipping past us, out of reach.

  It was a gathering chaos after that. I read that somewhere later — gathering chaos — and I knew immediately it was the right description of that time, those winter months, June, July, August. In all that gathering chaos, we — me, Westie, Meredith, Vicky — were trying to be ordinary too: get up, chew, swallow, go out, run, shout, laugh, watch TV, drive cars, be with people, talk, touch, argue, relate. It was all ordinary, yes, but it was infected by new and strange. It was as if we did everything ordinary inside a skin of secret, contagious knowledge.

  There were two worlds, moving alongside each other, parallel mostly, but sometimes rubbing up, merging briefly. On the one hand there were the two of us, Meredith and me, living and breathing our wide-eyed, cushioned romance. We went to classes, we wrote essays and played the piano — Meredith taught me Frère Jacques, two hands. We watched movies, hung out at each other’s houses and veged in front of TV; we ate dinners with each other’s parents, then escaped, panting, to dance at Base or Suite. We drove in the hills on weekends, across the Summit roads and down into the green Peninsula valleys where we walked on the beaches or sat on piers watching the gulls and shags and gannets, the small dark forms of fishing boats out on the horizon.

  Sometimes, at Meredith’s place, I sat idle and empty-headed, watching her as she practised. Or I leaned back, closed my eyes and listened to her play Frederic C; listened to his heart-twisting melodies roil and seethe and fill the room. At nights, when the house was empty, and sometimes in the longer, late-winter afternoons, we lay in bed, looking at Chopin, dark against the white wall, avoiding our eyes. We stared at Frederic C and we talked about Westie and Vicky, the layers of their relationship, how it seemed so aberrant, but exotic, too; how impossible it was to imagine it in the future. And when we thought of that future we would sigh and turn towards each other, kissing and kissing, grabbing at each other like bodies under threat.