Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  ‘Hello Doctor? Anybody home?’ said Westie, watching my face, waiting for acknowledgement, grateful acceptance.

  ‘Very gratefully accepted, Doctor,’ I said, punching him lightly between his shoulders.

  But I already knew what I was going to do.

  Chapter Eleven

  Hate and love, love and hate — they don’t sneak up on you, do they? Catch you napping, knock you flat with a furtive left hook? Not really. They’re always there, solid as a mountain face, but in shadow maybe, unseen anyway, until some change occurs, some shift in backdrop when the cool light of truth is allowed through.

  I sat in the Park Terrace living room at one in the morning, listening to the intermittent street noises — cruising cars, the half-songs and shouts and beer cans of a three-day New Year’s party, the inner-city dogs, roaming in twos and threes, checking out rubbish bags. But I was wallowing in hate, in the comfort of it, how it was like an armour-plated belief, giving you purpose and resolve, ambushing affection, carrying you along, heedless to—

  I was smashed, actually — a lot of the old man’s brandy and most of a bottle of wine to follow. I couldn’t sleep. I was being kept awake by high-octane fury.

  I was cataloguing eight years of Westie sins — the demands, the ridicule, the insensitivities, the patronising assumptions, the sweeping kingly directives, the smash-and-grab ethos, the cynicism, the bleak, corroding analysis of family, school, girls, life, love, the whole damn thing — but most of all, worst of all, the bottomless, insatiable appetite for an audience.

  And that very obliging audience of one. Me. Doctor.

  I poured the last of the wine into the brandy balloon.

  Self-hatred wasn’t nearly as charmed a ride, though; it was a small boggy circle by comparison, taking you nowhere except the bottom of an empty brandy glass and the horrifying thought that you might not really have a personality, a solid defined self that was separate from your oldest friend, ringmaster-extraordinaire, Holmes to your Doctor, no matter how much you pretended otherwise, no matter how—

  There were sounds down the hallway, baby warbles, shusshing from Gilly. I put the empty wine bottle under my chair.

  ‘Hello,’ said Gilly, when she saw me sitting there in the dark, nursing a glass. ‘I thought us two were the only people up at this hour. She’s drunk gallons and now she needs a complete change, but I—

  ‘Are you all right?’ she asked, peering short-sightedly at me. ‘Can I switch on the light?’ She looked about twelve in her nightie, no glasses, hair in a long, tousled plait.

  ‘Never better,’ I said, speaking very carefully.

  ‘You sure?’

  ‘No problem.’

  ‘I’ll just get some clean clothes for Bubbles,’ said Gilly, propping the baby against some cushions in the chair opposite me. ‘Can you watch her?’

  ‘Hello Bubbles,’ I slurred. She went by a number of these soppy names: Bubbles, Petal, Flower, Tinkerbell, Poodle …

  She looked back at me in that baby way, wall-eyed, unblinking.

  ‘Whaddaya staring at, Bubbles?’ I said childishly.

  Her mass of hair hadn’t fallen out as predicted by Westie. It had grown still further; it stuck up now in ridiculous wispy spikes, a strange bristly halo. She was a very weird-looking baby, I decided, screwing my face around, trying to make her blink.

  I leaned forward and put my face level with hers.

  ‘Wanna take a picture, Bubbles?’ I said, a Westie-ism from way back, a challenge to any passing sucker who stared too long. I laughed thinking about it, a joyless grunt.

  Bubbles smiled.

  ‘Hey,’ said Gilly, coming back into the room with an armload of nappies and clothes. Her voice was a kind of whispered shriek. ‘She’s smiling! That’s her first smile, she’s smiling at you, Max!’

  Oh gee.

  ‘Nah,’ I said, looking behind me for some kind of hanging baby pacifier. They were all over the apartment now, wooden birds with flapping wings, bright yellow duck mobiles, feather mobiles, origami mobiles, pink-striped Chinese paper bird kites. It was like a kindergarten.

  ‘Must have been wind,’ I said. I could vaguely remember Dee saying such things.

  ‘No. Look! It’s you,’ said Gilly, ‘she’s doing it again, it’s you, it’s your voice.’

  ‘To what do I owe the honour, Bubbles?’ I said, popping my eyes at her.

  She smiled a third time, a genuine upward curve, a lopsided grin, like some sleepy drunk’s.

  ‘Isn’t it gorgeous?’ said Gilly, nearly expiring with delight. ‘You lucky thing, look, she can’t stop, she’s infatuated, hopeless love for her big brother.’

  Which is when Doctor Max felt a rush of hot, drunken tears, felt his vision blur, saw Bubbles Jackson’s lopsided grin wobble and dip, felt himself weak and furious and frightened all at the same time.

  ‘Poor old Bubbles,’ I said, averting my head slightly, trying to get a grip. I slammed my teeth together, desperate not to cry. ‘No time at all,’ I said, hardening my voice and my heart, ignoring the crazy baby smile which seemed plastered to her face; I was beyond caring what Gilly might think. ‘No time at all and the reality’ll smack you in the face, Bubbles: Each of us is alone at the heart of the earth, don’t you know, Bubbles? Pierced by a ray of sunlight—’

  Her lips curved, retracted, curved again.

  ‘Hey, Max,’ said Gilly.

  ‘And suddenly,’ I said, so close to my sister’s face she must have smelt my winey breath. ‘Suddenly, it’s evening.’

  More smile, a crack opening wider and wider.

  Well, I shopped him. I shopped my oldest, my best, my only friend, because at the time he seemed like a galloping infection, a blight on my life that needed to be swatted if I was to survive. I did it carefully and sneakily and efficiently, and without a pin-prick of doubt. I polished the plan for five weeks and set it in motion for the most deadly time, the hour guaranteed to inflict maximum damage — to commodity and personnel, to reputation and pocket and future prospects. And when that damage was done, I took my oldest friend up to the hills and I damaged him some more, just for good measure.

  Late January, the heart of summer, dog-hot, impossible. Leon and I were back home with Dee, who had returned from her holiday-slash-therapy with a new and permanent sobriety, a continuing calm and a vision for a new economic future: dance classes, for God’s sake — fox-trots, waltzes and bossa novas for the public she insisted was queuing up.

  She had the name all ready: Tango.

  ‘It’s a dance studio,’ she insisted, deaf to any scoffing. ‘I am the perfect person to do it — ex-champion, I taught before I got married. I know I can do it.’

  She had it all worked out. Hamish wanted to come back to New Zealand. They’d be going into business together — they’d always had a great working partnership on and off the dance-floor and two decades apart needn’t make any difference. Hamish had money for his share of the initial capital, and as for her, well—

  Turned out she’d talked it all over with the old man. Turned out they’d talked more than once. He’d come to some of her counselling sessions.

  ‘Knock me down with a feather, Dee,’ I said, in as emotionless a voice as I could manage. For some reason this all-new détente between Dee and the old man irritated the crap out of me. ‘Thought Jackson senior was off your Christmas card list for life.’

  ‘Hate is a one-way street, Max,’ she said, yet another from her bottomless bag of clichés. ‘I’ve finished with it. I couldn’t go on that way. It was eating me up — you know that.’ She gave me a long look. ‘It was eating Leon up.’ Still looking, hard and meaningful. ‘And I don’t think it did you any good either.’

  I was silent.

  ‘Your father and I have made our peace,’ she said quietly. She was standing at the bench, cutting up oranges and carrots for juicing; carrot-and-orange — her new, preferred pre-dinner tipple. ‘We want to move on.’

  Oh, well. Very nice. Terrific. And the
old man’s loan of thirty grand was a fitting parting gesture, for sure.

  ‘May the bluebird of happiness be with you always, Dee,’ I said, solemnly, taking an orange quarter, putting it in my mouth.

  ‘I hate your cynicism,’ said Dee. ‘It’s truly awful. And I blame myself—’

  I stuck a carrot in her ever-moving mouth. ‘Shut up, Dee,’ I said, turning to go.

  ‘Cynicism is a shield,’ she called after me, mixed outrage and vegetable matter. ‘You’re just covering up your real feelings!’

  Not at all. I knew exactly what my real feelings were. I was very in touch with them. As they say. I stayed close to them all through January, through the heat and the wind and the tossing nights and Dee’s interminable conversations about the new studio, through the eventual arrival of Hamish and the purchase of the building and the loud discussions about refurbishing and advertising and fees and opening dates.

  I hugged my feelings tight whenever I was with Westie through that long, sweltering month. We lay in the gazebo or by the Westgarth swimming pool; we drove in his car to the beach or the Ashley river with the stereo loud and the air-conditioning blasting; we went running, slowed-down and sticky, in the park or round the back of the airport. I accompanied Westie to the warehouse and noted carefully the height and thickness of the plants, speculated with him about the likely harvest weight and the harvest date which was so nearly there, Doctor, so very nearly there.

  I was a split personality. I waved the airy hand of friendship and sat on simmering enmity.

  In the occasional relief of a wet January night when I got out of bed and sat on the front verandah beside Dee’s groomed standard roses, looked at the washed street and the dripping shrubs and the summer sky and tried to remember Meredith’s face and body — I knew my feelings, I knew them well. They weren’t the least bit veiled. They were back-lit and electrified; severe and single-minded, fuelling me all the way to the day of reckoning.

  January 30. Westie mentioned that harvest looked likely some time over the next four days, though Nick was away again and it did need his okay.

  ‘What does he actually do when he’s away?’ I asked. ‘Business or leisure?’

  We had these kind of half-pie information exchanges, these question-answer sessions, but they were the oddest things: it was as if both our hearts and minds were elsewhere. It was conversation with no substance, no investment — like everything we did together these days, it seemed to me: an old, deeply ingrained habit, but with the centre scoured out. I was pretty sure that all the time Westie talked to me his thoughts were busy on other, parallel lines. I know mine were.

  ‘Business, Doctor,’ said Westie. ‘Not that I know what or where. All I know is that he pays me in cash every month. Naturally, I don’t ask questions.’

  Naturally.

  ‘He’s shipping out, anyway,’ said Westie. ‘Moving to Auckland. Bigger warehouse space. Acres of it, apparently. Not that I give a shit, though I guess I could always work for him there if I came back. If I come back.

  ‘What are you going to do, Doctor?’

  He took me by surprise, the first time in months he’d asked about my plans, non-existent though they were.

  ‘No idea, Doctor.’ I was lying beside the pool, eyes shut, the sun frying my torso.

  ‘No plans?’

  ‘Zilch.’

  ‘What does your old man say?’

  ‘He’s given up.’

  ‘They do that.’

  ‘But not often enough.’

  ‘I’ve got an idea for you, Doctor. A honey.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘DeeDee’s studio.’ He leaned over and nudged my balls. ‘You could be Hamie’s right hand-job man.’

  Oh, very funny.

  I shot my arm down, grabbed his wrist and twisted it, used it to lever him into the pool, pushed him under with my foot to drown out his laughter, but he wriggled away, swam under-water to the other end, did a couple of lengths. I watched his long tanned form pushing lazily through the blue and thought what a genius he had for turning even the merest interchange to his advantage.

  ‘It’s called charisma,’ the old man had said.

  I watched him surface, watched the spray of water fly backwards from him, hit the hot concrete. He was tall and tanned and physically tuned, his golden-cockerel self, untouched, it seemed, by any loss or pain or grief.

  I suddenly felt sure he was in touch with Vicky, had written or called. I knew it, like I’d known things about him in the past, though the words had never passed his lips. I wanted to shout questions across the pool, insist he told me: You’ve been talking to her, haven’t you, you’ve made plans, you’re going there, aren’t you?

  But I couldn’t. He wouldn’t let me. His wet and shiny and grinning self literally repelled those unasked questions like plate armour pinged arrows.

  ‘I can see you tango-ing, Doctor,’ he was saying. ‘I really can. Dee ’n’ Hamie’ll need someone handsome and light-footed, someone to partner all those—’

  I lay down again, shut out his voice, drowned it, even if I couldn’t him, by asking myself what might be the better way: an anonymous, untraceable phone call to the cops, or an anonymous, untraceable letter detailing where and when and who — everything they needed to know.

  It was that easy, actually. And that cold-blooded. Amazing how the mind, bent on retribution, can work so coolly, can see things so clearly.

  On February 2 Nick Cyprian arrived back for the big harvest. Between February 2 and February 4 Andy Westgarth, in characteristic fashion, gave his friend, Max Jackson, a blow-by-blow description of the projected harvest and drying process. On February 4 said friend, Jackson, with this armoury of lethal information, made a long, detailed and anonymous phone call to the central police station.

  Bingo.

  The police raided the warehouse around midnight — as per advice from their helpful source — and arrested two males, European, unemployed, aged nineteen and twenty-three; both men made a brief appearance in the District Court the following morning charged with possession and supply of cannabis with a street value estimated at three-quarters of a million dollars. A police spokesman said the cannabis seizure was a significant haul, and the mode of cultivation — all detail of which was suppressed for the immediate future — indicated a new trend in drug supply which greatly concerned police.

  Both men were granted interim name suppression and remanded on bail to appear on March 26.

  I didn’t know about the police raid, about Westie’s arrest and appearance, until it was all over. I lay in bed that morning wondering, not particularly anxiously, whether the cops had acted on my helpful information. I wondered whether Westie, caught red-handed, would know someone had pointed the finger. So to speak. I wondered whether he would work out it was me and, if he did, whether he’d pass it on to Nick Cyprian. I wondered whether Nick Cyprian would have a message for the sort of person who squealed. As they say.

  I wondered why I didn’t really care about Nick Cyprian and his possible, possibly ugly, reprisal methods.

  I wondered why I didn’t feel a shred of guilt about landing Westie in the biggest heap of shit he’d contemplated in his mildly shit-filled life.

  I wondered why I didn’t feel a shred of self-loathing for such a betrayal, for such un-Doctorish behaviour.

  And then I got up, put on my running gear, ran up Fendalton Road to the Park, and did three circuits of South and North, my body slicing through the fuggy heat, the sweat flicking off my face, my head clear of anything, serene almost, wondering absolutely nothing at all.

  Leon was waiting on the verandah when I got back. I ran through the garden sprinkler, then fell into the soggy grass, let the water cover me, drench my sweat-stained clothes and skin.

  ‘Westie’s been arrested,’ said Leon, turning off the sprinkler tap.

  ‘Sure,’ I said. A tingle started over my skin, a slow spread of horror and pleasure.

  ‘He’s in big fat shit,’ said
Leon.

  Dee came out onto the verandah. I sat up, pulled off my top and wrung it out, wiped my face.

  ‘He’s not kidding,’ she said. She was looking at me very oddly.

  ‘What’s up?’ I said, giving her a suitably quizzical look, an actor delivering some well-rehearsed lines, a carefully calibrated expression.

  ‘Don’t you know?’ said Dee.

  ‘Know what?’

  ‘You know nothing about it?’

  ‘About what?’ I meant it this time. I didn’t know exactly what she was talking about, and the suspense was suddenly unbearable.

  ‘Your father rang—’

  ‘Yeah?’

  ‘—he was in court this morning. Appearing for Westie—’ The old man? Not something I’d factored in. But hell, why not?

  ‘The Westgarths rang him at midnight from the police station—’

  ‘God, what’s he done, now?’ It was criminal just how right I sounded — so fond, so exasperated, so senior citizen.

  ‘Marijuana, Max,’ said Dee, like a hanging judge.

  ‘That all? Didn’t think they bothered arresting people for that these days—’

  ‘Growing it, Max,’ she said. ‘Cultivation for supply. A whole warehouse full — Westie and another guy. Your father said it’s an extremely serious charge—’

  ‘Three years max,’ said Leon, looking at me with great interest.

  Three years? Gee.

  I wasn’t worried it’d come to that — first offence, extenuating circumstances — tragic car accident, adoption issues, something useful like that. I’d thought it through. I didn’t want Westie to go inside; I just wanted him to—

  What exactly?

  Get a fright. Fall on his face. Be thoroughly chastened. Lose his unstoppable momentum, his rule-the-world demeanour, his arrogant assumption that things were going to pan out, go his way; that he’d be happy, though others, no names mentioned, were well and truly out of the loop.