I didn’t know what I was going to do, but it wasn’t going to be study. I’d finished with history. My enthusiasm for the past had slid down the Godley Head bank at Wheatley’s Drift along with Westie’s car and the three of us; it had rolled all the way down to the sea and sunk from sight.
There wasn’t much to fill its place, as it happened, no ambition, no passion, no plans: nothing really — though a job would do, if it got me some money and filled up the days. Something. Sometime. Soonish.
It was a week since Julia’s birth, four weeks since my NZ History exam, and nine weeks since the accident and Vicky Crawford’s return to Australia. The days were long now; they felt endless sometimes, and hard to get excited about, but Westie and I had drifted into a pattern. I wandered round to his place and we got stoned. Or he cruised by in his mother’s car and we did some weed; then we drove to Orana Park or Willowbank or Waimairi Beach or Spencer Park. We strolled round the zoos laughing at the animals — unaccountably hilarious if you were bent. Or we sat in the sand dunes at the beach, watching the body surfers; we poked sand beetles with marram grass spikes, or paranoidly spotted katipos.
By mutual — though unspoken — consent we were avoiding the hills. We could have driven up to the Bellbird in Liz’s car or gone running along the Crater Rim or up to Whitewash Head, but the hills were a black spot, surrounded by an invisible magnetic barrier that repelled entry, or contemplation. I barely looked at them these days. I kept my face turned east or north. I knew that if you ran up Scarborough you faced straight over to Wheatley’s Drift. I knew that if you followed the Crater Rim path far enough you hit the track above the Godley Head road, and I wasn’t ready for that. I doubted I’d ever be ready for it again.
Anyway, running was off the agenda. So was cricket. My left knee had been stuffed since the accident, bruised, mending only slowly. Westie had nagging neck problems. We both had sore backs. We were capable only of lying round, smoking, talking desultorily; we laughed sometimes, about the past — old gags from the distant, safe past.
It was a hiatus; the bit-in-between that you later saw as the interval between two distinct periods. The only problem was, I had absolutely no idea what was supposed to happen when the bit-in-between was over. Work? Life? Happiness?
Westie, characteristically, had no such blank mental slate. He knew exactly what was next for him. Uni was a dead duck. He’d dropped out months before me, not even bothering with the nuisance of exams. He’d left ‘learning’ — he always gave it quotation marks — behind, barely a flicker crossing his face. And no murmur from his parents either. They were dedicated, it seemed, to playing it safe, keeping the peace and keeping him within their four walls. They feathered his bed, they plumped his pillows and kissed him good night, no awkward questions.
Shame they didn’t know he was planning to leave permanently at the first opportunity.
It was travel now, for Westie. He was getting out of Christchurch, out of the country, if it was the last thing he did. He was unclear about where he’d go. There’s a world out there, Doctor, he kept saying. The States, the Middle East — Class A stuff there, Doctor, Indonesia — cheap living, Doctor. Anywhere. Who cares where?
I listened to him turn over every possibility — the living, the climate, the drugs, the airfares — but all the time I heard another series of speculations, loud as a drum, though he never said them. For every elaborate, though vague, itinerary he served up, I simply heard a circular route to another, very specific place. I was sure that no matter which destination he talked about and settled on temporarily — it was Bali on Tuesday, Turkey on Wednesday, Guadalajara on Thursday — in reality he had only one destination and one object in mind: Sydney and seeing Vicky again.
It was over between them, officially. Vicky had put an ocean between herself and Westie and any kind of relationship they might have forged. Westie — for all his ravings and fury — had capitulated to that decision. Apparently. But I knew Westie. I knew that behind his submission to the reality was another story. He was dedicated to winning. I knew what Vicky had meant to him. I knew how profoundly he didn’t give a shit about the rights or wrongs of his relationship with her. So I didn’t believe for a moment that he accepted it was over. Behind all his travel talk I heard the real plan: getting Vicky back.
Stop! I wanted to yell sometimes, dying to end the double talk and for the other, underground story to be spoken. What’s really going on? I wanted to say. How can it be? Is she your mother or what? How will you do it? Tell me.
But there was a magnetic field round Westie too. For all the languor, all the reality-adjusted quasi-intimacy of that bit-in-between time, Westie was in strict control. He had an agenda. But he didn’t want it investigated. He deflected any questions before they were even seeded and shaped, long before they could be asked.
That’s my excuse anyway. That’s the reason, I always tell myself, why I never asked him anything real. About Vicky, about the accident, about a dozen things that were lying just beneath the surface of my blank face. I tell myself that the way Westie ran things was too hard to resist, too hard — in my weakened state — to break with.
Max, the good Doctor, did the only thing he was capable of at the time. He did his bit, as prescribed by tradition; he played along, he asked all the other questions. He did the straight man, the acolyte, the second fiddle, as was right and proper.
‘So what about money, Doctor,’ I said. ‘You’ll need a whack. Bali, New York, wherever, three grand at least.’
But he had that covered, of course. Dave the Rave, anxious to do the best by his son—
—sorry?—
—by his adopted son, had arranged some work in a chemistry lab, but Westie, ever ungrateful, ever creative, had found something less onerous, less nine-to-five, something with a much greater rate of return.
‘Yeah,’ I said, wondering why I couldn’t summon even a quarter of Westie’s energy. ‘Couldn’t really see you in a white coat.’
‘As a Greenie, Doctor,’ said Westie, exhaling with great control. ‘You realise. I prefer to work with. Entirely natural substances.’
‘Of course, Doctor,’ I said.
‘It’s conservation, really, when you think about it.’
In a sense. In a bent sense.
He had a security-slash-gardening-slash-dealing job, working for our ex-school dealer in his warehouse. It was all warehouses, now, Westie said: hydroponic cultivation, vast rows of dope plants under lights; it was perfect, he said. Think about it, Doctor — it’s clean, close at hand, a totally controlled environment, and, best of all, you’re completely safe from police helicopters.
Brilliant, Doctor.
As long as you had a good landlord — a blind-eye landlord, Doctor — and decent security, it was a piece of cake. Nick Cyprian would be harvesting a fucking epic crop of skunk, and when it was ready for retail he’d be cutting Westgarth in for a third, depending on the amount he moved.
‘He harvests two months before the open-air bozos, Doctor. I make six, maybe eight grand by March 25, and I’m outta here.’
March 25. Westie’s birthday. I could see how it was all shaping up.
‘His third warehouse season. Last main man’s doing the OE as we speak, lying on some beach somewhere — all on the untaxed income.
‘Untaxed income, Doctor,’ he said, sliding off the bench, stretching slowly. ‘It’s the only kind worth bothering about. Look at Dave, look at your old man, slogging from dawn to dusk. I’m telling you, Doctor, it’s not for Westgarth, Esquire.’
I closed my eyes, tried to picture Jackson, Esquire’s line of work. I tried to picture some future moment when I might be kissing a wife goodbye, driving daily to some office in a Beemer or a Peugeot, wearing a suit like one of the old man’s expensive three-piecers.
Impossible.
‘You want a piece of this action,’ said Westie. He leaned against the door of the gazebo, doing calf stretches. He’d had his hair cut very short, had it darkened. He w
as wearing cut-off cargos with fraying hems; the sun caught the gold hairs on the backs of his legs, showed his muscle definition.
‘I’m losing condition,’ I said, sitting up, lifting my tee shirt, seeing spreading flesh, imminent middle age.
‘Did you hear me, Doctor?’ said Westie.
‘We should get back on the road,’ I said, panic licking in a stoned way in my stomach. ‘We should start running again.’ That was an immediate future I could just about get my head round.
‘Doctor,’ said Westie, standing over me. ‘I’m offering you a summer job, easy cash. Nick said to ask. He needs two guys.’
Call me a coward, but I really didn’t fancy working with that particular commodity, however big the money. I knew Nick Cyprian, too, and he’d been a perfectly adequate dealer, but he wouldn’t be your average, good-hearted kind of employer.
‘Thanks, but no thanks,’ I said.
‘Why not?’
‘Don’t like to mix work and pleasure.’
‘Very funny, Doctor. C’mon, why not?’
‘Don’t like the uniform.’
‘You’re not making sense, Doctor.’
‘Don’t worry about it, Doctor.’
‘We’re not talking meaningful employment here, Doctor,’ he said, frowning, trying to work out my angle, my reluctance. ‘We’re talking quick but beautiful money.’
Fact was, I couldn’t imagine any scenario that spelled future employment, meaningful or otherwise. I could barely imagine drumming up enthusiasm for making mere money, easy or otherwise. Somewhere, from a long way off, I could hear Meredith talking about rich boys, trust funds, luxury, cushioned lives and consumerism …
But I didn’t want to think about that.
‘I’ve got to get back into running,’ I said, standing up, fastening on something small and achievable.
‘Doctor,’ said Westie, ‘you may be content to run from now to the end of the millennium, but I am outta here.’
I looked round the gazebo, at the plants, the steamed-up glass. The air was hazy with smoke, but I was so stoned it seemed for a mad moment that it was the words of every one of our conversations over half a decade that were thickening the atmosphere, making me feel suddenly short of breath.
‘Off you go then, Doctor,’ I said. I bent down, tied up a loose shoelace.
‘You should come with me, Doc,’ said Westie, a moment later. ‘Go on. Leave this shit-hole place behind. Come with me. Imagine it — sun, sand, weed, women.’
I looked up at him, up on the balls of his feet, launched, ready to do the big sell. His eyes were huge, asphalt-grey, shot with red. He was grinning. Maybe he was beckoning too. It was hard-core Westie, I know that much, and I felt a faint, painful nostalgia for it.
‘There’s a whole world out there, Doctor. And Holmes always takes the Doctor, Doctor.’
And there were promised lands and heavens on earth and rainbows with Vicky at the end of every one of them.
No thanks.
‘We need to get back in shape, Doctor,’ I said, smacking into his stomach with a soft balled fist. ‘See, flabby.’
‘Bullshit.’
I laughed at his outraged face, his sucked-in stomach, his peacock carriage. But I was thinking: Holmes always takes the Doctor, eh?
I needed air.
Chapter Ten
So, imagine it, your life is a big piece of crap:
Your girlfriend, the love of your life, is dead, and while her absence is, on the one hand, a profound terminal ache, on the other hand you can’t bear to think about her, so her memory recedes daily, further and further into the ether.
You’ve dropped out of university so spectacularly, so embarrassingly, the defeat has made you afraid to walk down certain streets, visit certain parts of the city, in case you meet your tutors, see old classmates. Or they see you.
While everyone round you is busy falling for her, you feel a disappointing nothing, a yawning blankness, whenever you contemplate your new baby sister.
You find — for the first time in your life — that each new day offers you less than zero. You’re so monumentally unmotivated you seldom get out of bed before midday, and even then you’re weighed down by a lassitude so heavy you can practically touch it.
Your declining fitness depresses you — sort of, your father’s lectures bore you, your mother’s concern tortures you, but only in a far-off, unengaged sort of way.
Your oldest friend — well now, there’s something weird, something you can’t put your finger on, can barely acknowledge to yourself. You spend most of your time with him, as of old, and he does his number in that familiar, playing-to-the-gallery way, but it’s gone odd, it’s fundamentally changed, only you’re too tired, too slow-witted, too stoned most of the time to analyse it.
Mostly, you know two things. One: sometimes when you’re with him the room closes in, or the air goes gummy, it’s as if you can’t get enough oxygen; you feel seriously short of breath, something close to blind panic, and you have to get out — outside, out of the way, just get.
Two: other times, most times, you’re watching him, your closest friend for eight years; you’re listening to him, hearing those well-known tones, that cynical laugh, the very pacing of his stories which is so second nature you could be doing it yourself — and you notice in a detached sort of way that you’re not experiencing that great cresting wave of excitement his company used to guarantee you.
No. It’s quite different now, it’s altogether new in the history of your relationship — though it chimes with something else. It is eerily similar, in fact, to what happens when you are near your baby sister, watching her pink-and-whiteness, listening to her mew and gurgle. You feel nothing; you feel … an absence of feeling, a cold, gaping blankness.
That’s the way with rage, apparently. It broods well, behind a great blank wall, building and building. And then it goes over the top, a tsunami.
All this and they still make you do Christmas.
Of all the insane-making family rituals to which Dee was addicted, Christmas was the one that drove me right over the edge. Why doesn’t some legislator with a social conscience abolish it? It had been bad enough when we were doing the nuclear-family number — Dee’s cooking and decorating and relative-inviting frenzy coupled with the old man’s irritation at the invasion — but since they’d split and the old man had gone to live with Gilly the whole thing had escalated; now Leon and I had to endure double the food, double the relatives, double the hanging around, double the head-banging agony.
Despite the white-and-gold Bible with the red velvet ribbon, the religious quotient in the Jackson family was less than zero. No Christian festival circus, I nagged every year. Just leave it, let’s go to the beach, go bush, go away, I pleaded, desperate for anything rather than the grinding tedium of decorating a huge carefully shaped and selected fir tree, or shopping for presents I didn’t actually want to give, or ploughing through a four-course meal Dee had read in some Christmas craft magazine, then doing it all over again at the old man and Gilly’s — or my grandmother’s, or Gilly’s mother’s, or Gilly’s grandmother’s, for God’s sake.
‘It’s a family time,’ said Dee, wilfully blind to the state of the family she was so bent on putting through the Christmas mill.
‘It’s a two thousand-year-old celebration,’ she said one year, pleased to be whacking me with the hand of history.
‘Dee,’ I said patiently, always able to best her with my fund of smart-arse, A-plus information, ‘Christmas as you do it is a Victorian myth, an invention of manufacturers. Santa was a Coke ad.’
But it was hopeless. She just carried on, buying up Swedish snowflake window decorations, making potato-print wrapping paper, spraying gold paint on bags of pine cones, baking three dozen miniature Christmas puddings to give as gifts, fashioning wisteria Advent wreaths for every entry to the house. She was steamed, right up until the day itself when she would drag us out of bed early for present-opening and German fruit-bread
toast, then haul Leon off to St Barnabas for a few carols and the annual Jackson injection of spirituality.
No church for Max, though. I put my foot down about that one years back. I hadn’t been inside a church since the end of Westie’s religious phase. I’d wait at home amidst the muscatels and almond shells. I’d sit and watched the gold-plated chiming angel tableau do its ceaseless revolutions. Or I rang Westie and snatched a quick smoke. Or turned the oven down, as instructed by Dee. Or turned it up. Whatever, I waited for Dee to return with my grandparents and stray relatives she’d dredged up so we could do the dinner and Dee could drink too much bubbly and get louder and louder and collapse finally, crying, in a chair beside one of her smaller topiaried Xmas trees.
You could argue that such a predicatable scenario had a soothing quality, and maybe — just maybe — it sometimes did, but this year I was too detached, too tired to manage even my usual grudging number — pissed-off elder son, participating under sufferance. I had a speech planned for Dee. I was going to say it once, and then I was going to exit.
Dee, I would say. Read my lips: Christmas is off. Max is not doing Xmas. Over and out.
I was either going to sleep through the day, or I was going to go out, go for a slow, rehabilitative jog. I was going to run until I found a small earthy burrow where I could park myself until the cracker-pulling was over.
Bored with mornings spent staring at my blank ceiling, I dragged myself out of bed before lunch one day a couple of weeks before Christmas and prepared to deliver the Jackson post-traumatic stress-disorder special.
It was a perfect, warm, sky-blue December morning, the kind in which your entire childhood seemed to have taken place, the kind I always associated with the smell of cut grass and hours of sweaty bowling practice. The house was airy and quiet. Leon was in Hamilton staying with our cousins; Dee was sitting at the kitchen table writing steadily in a book.
Two things occurred to me when I saw her, head bent, writing. One, she didn’t seem to talk about the Psychic Hotline anymore; two, it was December 14 and I hadn’t seen a single pine cone or can of Christmas snow anywhere in the house. She was leaving her run a lot later than usual.
Closed, Stranger Page 11