Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  ‘Max? Max?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Did you know anything about this?’

  ‘Absolutely nothing,’ I said, managing somehow to sound regretful, a bit sorry that my good mate hadn’t taken me into his confidence.

  ‘This will devastate his parents,’ said Dee. ‘After everything else.’ She gave me a quick, wary look. People avoided mentioning The Accident in my company. ‘What’s he trying to do? Is he trying to rub their faces in it? Punish them?’

  I suddenly felt immensely tired, as if I was participating in some kind of race against phantom competitors, lap after lap after lap, no end in sight.

  ‘Give it a fucking rest, Dee.’

  ‘I see things differently now, Max,’ she said.

  Don’t we all, Dee. Don’t we all.

  ‘Are you going to go and see him?’ said Leon.

  ‘S’pose,’ I said.

  But I waited for him to come to me. It was all part of the race, the neck-and-neck battle we were engaged in, though only I knew about this stage of it; and it was all tactics now — a move here, a move there, a breakaway spurt, an unreadable gesture … I was crazy. I know that now. I was a self-appointed Grim Reaper, toxic with the idea of vengeance, obsessed with the power plays in our friendship. I couldn’t see any side of Westie that I didn’t hate, no motive that wasn’t labyrinthine and self-interested. He’d achieved monstrous proportions in my mind, a walking monument to bad karma.

  I should have looked in the mirror.

  I lay on my bed, waiting, trying to work out whether the waiting meant he knew what I’d done, or whether he was so stunned he couldn’t see which way was up. But Westie didn’t do stunned. He had only two possible responses to misfortune: a shrug of the shoulders and a supremely indifferent who cares? or head-on rage, a violent, foulmouthed denunciation of everyone and everything.

  It was the latter, as it turned out. When he rang, his fury was huge, but it was all for the cops. They’d been watching the warehouse, apparently. For months, apparently. They’d waited till the eleventh hour and struck, got everything, every fucking thing. They were probably smoking it themselves. Bastards. Arseholes. Sons-of-bitches. Etc.

  ‘What’re you going to do?’ I asked. I was genuinely curious.

  ‘Plead guilty,’ he said. ‘No choice, according to your old man. But we work on the defence. Plead mitigating circumstances, get a psychiatrist’s report—’

  ‘A shrink, Doctor? You?’

  ‘I’ll see any bastard, Doctor, I’ll sell my fucking grandmother—’

  Of course.

  ‘I’m not going down for three fucking years, Doctor, I’m not doing P.D. Your old man thinks he can swing community service with a good psychiatrist’s report—’

  ‘Well, it’s obvious you’re crazy, Doctor, why bother with the report …’

  ‘And those bastards have taken my car, I’ve got no goddamned wheels—’

  ‘Liz and Dave?’

  ‘Weeping and gnashing, all the usual shit. I’ll plead child abuse as mitigation — I’ve gotta get out of here, but Liz won’t give me the car—’

  ‘I’ll get Dee’s car, Doctor,’ I said, seeing the last part all of a sudden, seeing it clear as a summer day, all the words, all the feelings, as if someone had typed them up, handed me the script.

  ‘I’ll come and get you,’ I said.

  Chapter Twelve

  Old Lilburn, old Douglas, who knows what he was thinking or seeing when he wrote his piece, when he made those first chords, when he heard those insistent, rumbling bass sounds in From the Port Hills?

  Who the hell cares? Westie would have said. Me, as it happened.

  It seemed important to think about old Douglas that day, old Douglas and his piece. It was some skewed kind of credo — Lilburn and the piece and Meredith and the hills. I kept thinking of him as we drove towards the hills. I kept hearing that cloudy bass and the rippling high notes moving down and down the piano, the way I’d heard them whenever Meredith played the piece for me.

  I thought and thought about Meredith and Lilburn, and then as we got nearer to the hills, as they got bigger and bigger, I thought about the hills themselves, their purple-blue in autumn, the crouching black of winter, and now, in high summer, their straw-white shaven sides, parched and bleak.

  I thought of all that and heard that piano music crescendoing in my head, and when we started winding round the Summit Road and saw the city below us for the first time in four months I wondered whether old Douglas had looked down on a wintry city as he wrote his piece, a dreary plain cloaked in smog; or if it had been the summer glory we saw now, green and blue and yellow, wobbling in the lines of heat.

  And so, though it was hot and blue and and the hills were at their bone-dry best and we could smell the summer through the open windows of Dee’s car and Westie was doing one of his all-time great fuck-the-world-I’ll-win-anyway monologues and I was laughing in all the right places; though the climbing road and the long sweeping breast of hillside and the city below and the dope we’d smoked and the raving and the laughing and, at the top, the sparkling harbour and snaking rim road, though they all seemed so marvellous on the one hand, so known — at the same time, the swill in my head of Meredith and Lilburn and that music and everything that had happened; all of that made the familiar beauty, the benign lunacy of dope and driving seem like the backdrop and the full stage set and sound effects for the last scene of the final drama at the end of the world.

  And I was running the last scene of this little show at the end of the world. For the first time since the beginning of time — or so it seemed — I was directing operations. I was driving the car and choosing the time and the route, sure; but I was driving something else too, some intricate, undeclared operation — I knew it, Westie knew it, I’m sure he did. We both knew I was taking us some place we’d never been before — though here we were, in fact, right this moment taking a very familiar road, the road to Godley Head, a road we’d done a thousand times but, most recently and most significantly, four months and twenty-seven days ago.

  You have to be a bit unhinged, wound tight as a top, battery-powered and steered, to plan the last speech for the last scene from the end of the world. And you have to be high as a kite and pretty well lunatic to see the play through to the bitter end. The speech that brings the curtain down on a roaring silence, tells everyone there’s no going back.

  I’m not making excuses. It’s a fact. I was so off my tree I could drive the Godley Head road aware that Westie’s rage and rave were gradually diminishing, until he was quite silent and looking sideways at me, his stoned eyes asking an anxious question.

  I was so not in charge of myself I could slow the car and bring it to a halt right above the yellow sign that read Wheatley’s Drift. Eastern Limit. Historic site, and watch Westie’s face for a good long time, watch it whiten painfully, watch a pulse beat rapidly in his cheek.

  I was crazy enough to be able to get out of the car, go round to Westie’s door, open it, suggest he get out and look down long and hard and heavy on the drop of hillside where he’d killed, yes, sorry to call a spade a spade, Doctor, killed my girlfriend.

  An act of carelessness, I went on to say in calmly reasonable tones, oblivious now to the warm wind swirling gently round us, the breath-taking prospect of lowslung hillside and sea below us, seeing only acres of snow and a grey sea and the overwhelming need to punish Westie, obliterate our troublesome friendship — an act of such disgusting carelessness, I said, that I would never forgive him; an act so typical of his self-absorption, his gargantuan self-interest, that merely thinking about it made me want to kill him. Slowly.

  An act, moreover, for which he’d never shown the slightest remorse or responsibility, but instead had forgotten about as quickly as possible, an act he’d put so rapidly behind him it bordered on the immoral, an act he’d wiped conveniently from his mind so he could — as fucking usual — get on with the most pressing thing in his life: himself. />
  An act which had effectively ruined my life — though he’d barely acknowledged that, had in fact dismissed as mere. Mere! His criminal carelessness, the carelessness that had ruined my life, he’d managed, astonishingly, to minimise as a mere accident.

  But why should I be astonished? I said. It was absolutely characteristic. It showed his total fucking inability to feel, to empathise, to act like a normal human. But he wasn’t normal, was he? He was fucking abnormal, he was a fucking sociopath; he was so fucking abnormal the only woman he’d ever shown the slightest passionate feeling for, the only real involvement with, was his mother, for God’s sake, a woman who’d taken one look at him at birth and screamed, Take it away, the woman who hadn’t wanted to know him for eighteen years and when she did finally get inside his head had found him altogether too fucking weird because he wanted to sleep with her, did sleep with her, freaked her out so convincingly she had to piss right off again, put as many miles as possible between her and him, blah, blah, blah, blah …

  It poured out of me, a bilious, stinking mixture of truth, half-truth and tragic bullshit; it went on and on and on, unstoppable, a toxic stream from some burst canker deep inside me, a horror-story vomit completely beyond my control.

  I’m not excusing it, I’m not denying responsibility. I’m not saying I didn’t say it, and I’m not saying I didn’t want to say it — because I did. I’m just saying I went diving into territory well beyond my wildest dénouement fantasies. I set out to even up an unlevel playing field, settle the score I’d come to find so goddamned unfair; I set out to tell it like it was, serve up the home truths, lance a boil — pick your cliché — but I found myself in the middle of a volcanic spew I hadn’t counted on, saying some things I didn’t even know I thought.

  I told Westie what a shallow, exploitative shit he was, his capacity for friendship, for family, for love, for life as normal people knew it, less than zero.

  I told him, sorry and all that, but justice Jackson-style simply couldn’t let him glide off into the Australian sunset with Vicky Crawford. Not when Jackson, the sad old Doctor, had been deprived of his chance of golden sunsets, eternal hand-holding.

  I put my face just centimetres from his and told him slowly that only a pervert would sleep with his mother.

  I told him exactly how the police had sprung him, and why.

  I told him how terribly satisfying I found it that he wouldn’t be realising any overseas plans in the next couple of years.

  I told him he could choke on a Christchurch winter just as he’d assumed I would, only he could do it alone, he could do it from a PD van, from a Paparoa prison cell, for all I cared, but he could do it without my company because I was outta here as far as our friendship went, I was bailing, cancelling, pulling up stumps, shipping out in the biggest possible way …

  Well, you have to be pretty disordered to pull a number like that, wouldn’t you say? Your thinking has to have come good and loose, for a torrent that horrifying to flow so effortlessly, so endlessly?

  You have to have lost it quite seriously to bawl all that two centimetres from your friend’s face for an interminable period, and then — when you finally stop and turn from your now ex-friend with shaking knees and spit-filled mouth — think quite clearly what a good job well done that was, and think further — in a secondary and idle kind of way — what a strange, determining thing genetics were, what a goddamn fusion you were, after all, of your worm-turning, raging mother and your articulate, casually cruel old man, how their years of battle must have infected you after all, must run through your veins like a virus.

  You must have become quite separate from reality to be able to deliver all that, then get back into your mother’s car and drive away from that scene on the edge of a hillside at the end of your world, drive all the way back across the Summit Road and down into Cashmere without seeing or thinking anything, except a nagging annoyance that already you can’t recall how Westie, your ex-friend, actually took all that, you can’t recall the look on his face.

  You recall only that — historic place, historic moment — he didn’t say one word the entire time you gave it to him. He simply stood there, still as night but folding in on himself somehow, contracting; and all the time looking over your shoulder maybe, yes, that was it — never quite eyeballing you, never letting you in, making sure you never quite saw your victory, your annihilation, reflected in his grey eyes.

  I suppose he got a ride home. He would have hitched a ride, for sure, from one of the dozens of people up on the hills that day. It was February 6 after all, a holiday, and the hills were seething with runners and cyclists, trampers and people with kids, sun-worshippers and skaties, old folks walking in pairs. I didn’t see them as I drove back down, but I remembered them later, like people with walk-on parts in your dreams who come back to you, suddenly, the next day. I remembered them as I remembered, eventually, every detail of that afternoon.

  I know Westie did get home, though I never saw him. He arrived home in the early evening; he was quiet, his mother said later, thinking about court, maybe, certainly not bursting with joie de vivre, but you wouldn’t expect that, would you, after an arrest, knowing you faced the full force of the law, possible incarceration? Yes, he was quiet, Liz Westgarth said — and her husband confirmed that — he was quiet that evening and for the next week; he was quiet and he stayed at home — his car was with the police, after all. He stayed at home and as far as she knew no one came round, no friends, no girlfriends.

  He stayed in his attic room, as far as she knew, listening to music. She wanted to talk to him about the arrest, she said, the nature of the offence, but she wanted to keep a lid, too, on any conflict. They’d fought so much over the last year, she wanted to avoid fighting with her only son, avoid a repeat of those awful things they’d said to each other, so she left it; she thought she’d let a bit of time pass, then pick her moment carefully, talk sensibly, rationally, when she was feeling calmer, when he’d cheered up a bit.

  And he did cheer up — that was the thing. He came out on Friday morning considerably perkier. Ate a biggish breakfast, made a joke about something — she couldn’t remember quite what, something to do with the police — then he said he was going for a run on the hills with the Doctor — the Doctor being his friend, Max Jackson. Which seemed to Liz Westgarth a good sign all round — he was getting out, the exercise would do him good. He went out the door, dressed in his running gear, saying he’d walk round to the Doctor’s.

  It was only later — much later — in the early hours of the next morning when he still hadn’t arrived home and, uneasy now, she phoned the Jackson house to see where they’d got to, it was only then that she discovered there had never been any arrangement with Max Jackson, not for a run on the hills, not for anything. Max Jackson hadn’t seen his friend Westie since Waitangi Day when they’d gone for a drive up round Godley Head, and it was more than three weeks since they’d been running together.

  She couldn’t sleep after that, Liz Westgarth told the court.

  She got up and sat at the breakfast bar in her dressing gown, drinking coffee, watching the morning light leak slowly into her back garden, waiting for her son, waiting for him to come in through the french doors, his eyes wide and innocent, that old don’t-hassle-me look on his face. Soon, surely, she thought. Any moment now, he’d come through those doors and head straight to his room for the day, sleep it off, whatever it was he’d been up to. She wouldn’t ask any questions, she decided, best leave it alone, let him—

  But, of course, the only people to come through the french doors that day were the two police officers, one woman, one man, late in the afternoon. She was dressed by then; she’d made her husband breakfast, allowed him to reassure her, seen him off to work.

  But after he’d gone, she sat back down at the breakfast bar, stared out into the garden for hours, waiting still, expecting the worst.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Imagine your best friend, the biggest screw-you,
face-rubbing cynic you’re ever likely to come across, a non-believer to beat them all — imagine, aged fifteen, he knocks you sideways, does one of those scorching about-faces you’re becoming acquainted with, should expect now in the fourth year of your friendship. He tells you flatly, bare-facedly — not a flicker of embarrassment or irony — he tells you he’s found God, he’s become religious, Doctor, it’s the real thing.

  A thousand years ago, in Westie’s religious phase, I went with him twice to the Avonhead Anglican Youth Group, the place God resided, apparently — on Sunday nights, at any rate. I went twice because Westie promised me both times Pippa Gordon would show. Usual story, of course, Westie being big on promises and low on delivery — Pippa Gordon never showed. But I stuck it out to the end because the alternative was an evening at home with my mother and Leon, and those were the days when time in their company was best avoided.

  I remember only one thing from those two otherwise forgettable sessions. The facilitator read from the Good Book: Ecclesiastes 3. I remember the reading and I remember the chapter because later I looked it up in Dee’s big white decorative Bible. I looked it up and re-read it because, for a brief moment, for a tiny eye-blink of time, I was caught by that passage. I wanted to believe it.

  Maybe it was the way the guy read it, maybe it was the lulling poetry of the words, but probably it was the seductive nature of the concept — you know the one: Everything that happens in this world happens at the time God chooses. Everyone knows that one, even paid-up atheists. He sets the time for birth and the time for death, the time for planting and the time for pulling up, the time for killing and the time for healing … It was a song too: There is a season, turn, turn, turn, a time for every purpose, blah, blah, blah.

  A tidy little notion, a comforting notion all round, wouldn’t you say, especially if your father’s just bolted the family nest and you’re left at home with your mother who’s nuts and your brother who’s taken refuge in some pretty weird behaviour.