Closed, Stranger

by Kate de Goldi

  I took Dee’s Good Book off to my bedroom, read that passage through a few times and flirted briefly with the idea of blaming God for the shit-heap my family had turned into. I wanted some explanation in those days; I wanted to believe there was a reason for the misery.

  You live and learn. As they say. Eventually, I put the Bible back on the bookcase and I never took it off again. Eventually, Westie dropped his tango with Jesus and moved on to the next thing — harriers, saxophone, software piracy, Star Trek reruns, Annabel Fellows, Ellie Johnstone, school chess club, one of the many, I forget which.

  But the point is — the reason I mention Westie’s religious phase and Ecclesiastes 3 — is that on February 13, thirty-six hours after his wife’s 3 a.m. phone call, when Dave Westgarth rang and told me what had happened to Westie, when I’d listened to his brief, emotionless words, when I’d hung up and walked through the house to the front garden and stood there trying to breathe normally, trying to take in what I’d just heard — when that happened, the Ecclesiastes passage whipped through my head and it came to me with holy conviction how wrong it was. I knew, as I’d always, always known, that everything that happened in the world, everything that happened in my world, happened at the time Andy Westgarth chose.

  It wasn’t God or parents or teachers who set the time for death and birth, for sorrow and joy, for love and hate in my world. It wasn’t me, either. In my limited but potent experience, the only real time-setter, the only ordainer, the grand vizier since my twelfth birthday, was and had always been the one and only Andy Westgarth.

  I stood in the middle of Dee’s heavy-scented rose garden, sick with the perfume and this new, clear knowledge and the terrible news I’d just been given, and I heard my own version of Ecclesiastes 3 like some gift of tongues.

  Andy Westgarth set the agenda and the pace; he held the reins, he pushed the buttons.

  He called the tune and the time.

  The time for war and the time for hanging loose.

  The time for making love and the time for steering clear of girls.

  The time for tearing down and for buttering up.

  The time for mourning and the time for seriously delinquent high jinks.

  The time for sorrow and the time for mean, ironic, needle-sharp laughter.

  The time for silence and the time for manic, ceaseless monologues.

  The time for killing and the time for handing out Band-Aids.

  But most importantly Westie called, he named, he set, the time for birth and the time for death.

  And the time for death was 3.30 on a brilliant, late-summer Friday afternoon.

  A steep path, swiftly conquered; a gaping crowd, just as he liked it; a volley of searing obscenities; and then, the magnificent final gesture, the last word for glory.

  Then oblivion.

  They never found Westie’s body.

  Without a body you can’t have the inquest which determines the cause of death, so, officially, Andrew James Fulton Westgarth was — pending the discovery of an identifiable body — a Missing Person.

  Though a sizeable group of senior citizens, members of the Mt Pleasant Ramblers Club, could testify to a young man fitting the description of Andrew Westgarth that day — 1.8 metres, dark cropped hair, wearing a white Nike T-shirt, a pair of blue and black running shorts and a dark blue shallow-brimmed baseball cap — passing them twice on the Scarborough track, first wearing runners, then bare-footed; though the same group could identify that same young man as the one who rushed past them at the Whitewash Head incline, who took a heart-stopping angle, who, yelling, launched himself over the cliff at Whitewash Head into the air, towards the drop and certain death 200 metres below; though the police later found the Diadora runners identified as those belonging to Andrew Westgarth at the bottom of the Scarborough zig-zag; though Andrew Westgarth’s parents testified to a turbulent year, a pending custodial sentence and possible depression as likely contributors to a decision to take his own life; though Andrew Westgarth’s long-time and closest friend, Max Jackson, reported that he had not seen Andrew Westgarth — known to him as Westie — for six days, an unusual length of time in the history of their relationship, and though he corroborated Westgarth’s parents’ description of the previous twelve months as a time of considerable emotional upheaval — tragedy even — in Westgarth’s life, and the fact of the pending sentence a matter of agitation for Westgarth; though all this was established beyond doubt, it was still not possible, apparently, to bring in any verdict, much less one of suicide, in the matter of one Andrew Westgarth.

  That was the official version.

  Unofficially, the coroner allowed that, on the balance of probability, Andrew Westgarth had jumped to his death from the Scarborough clifftop, Whitewash Head, popularly known as Suicide Point owing to the inordinate number of deaths occurring there, sadly, over the preceding decades.

  Westgarth had killed himself, the Coroner allowed, while the balance of his mind was disturbed, the result, perhaps, of events occurring in his life over the previous several months.

  In the first weeks after Westie’s death I was sure I knew what the actual version was, the real story, the single determining truth or series of truths that had led him back up to the hills, to the Scarborough run, that February afternoon. In the first weeks after his death I thought many times about following him into the blue and white from the edge of the Whitewash Head cliff; I thought it was the very least I could do, considering it was — I didn’t doubt this — my diatribe at Wheatley’s Drift which had driven him to his death.

  Of course I never told anyone this. I played the unofficial inquest game along with the rest of them. I answered questions. I gave opinions. I helped in the determination of the final — unofficial — version of Westie’s last week. I accepted the long-faced sympathy of everyone — parents, friends, officials — who saw only that poor Max Jackson had lost two very close friends within six months.

  I played that game like my father’s son — with articulacy and insight, with commendable composure. I was a credit to my parents and a good private school education.

  Offstage, I lay in my bedroom, ostensibly prostrated by grief but actually immobilised by guilt, nauseous with the thought that I had, not to put too fine a point on it — let’s call a spade a spade — I had killed my best and oldest friend.

  Course, you can’t really survive with a number like that weighing on you. And after a while I found I didn’t want to die. That had just been the initial, pain-quenching solution. Despite everything, I wanted to stay alive. I wanted, inexplicably, to hold on to the cock-up that was my life. And so, after the first few weeks when I could only see Westie’s death as a horrifying message, a clear signal that I had — for all our history and intimacy — never really known him at all, had failed utterly to recognise his capacity for hurt; after those first weeks I started, slowly, to see things differently.

  I started to see Westie’s big jump bathed in a more Westie-ish light. There was a message there, sure, but it was another message altogether: a very visual message, the old familiar communication, the winner-takes-all, the who-really-cares — the big, fat, fuck-you-Doctor finger.

  If you see someone’s decision to die as a deliberate, customised gesture, a gesture so utterly in keeping with their anarchic style, well then, you can’t take the blame for it, can you?

  But then — because nothing’s so simple, especially not your own interior bedroom insanities, your late-night rationalisations — then it changed again.

  In June that year, four months after Westie’s death, Liz Westgarth rang. She was tidying out Westie’s attic bedroom, she said; she’d finally got it together to do that, and there were things, mementos, if you like, that she thought I should have. So, I went round there, the first time since Westie’s memorial service.

  I walked up the pebbled drive, past the hydrangea bushes and the sycamores, the chopped-back roses and winter camellia; the lawn was wet, there were mulched leaves underfoot, sl
imy, fungal-smelling. I saw the gazebo in the distance; I saw the gate to the swimming pool, and the front verandah where we’d slept sometimes in the summer. I looked up at the long mullioned bedroom window where he’d stood often enough, waiting, making lurid faces at me or leaning out, hurrying me up, calling ingenious obscenities — and I understood properly, as if for the first time, that he was no longer there, he was gone.

  And then I realised I couldn’t bear it.

  It was retribution. I had done something terrible as an act of vengeance, and something terrible had resulted. It was only just that I was ambushed, felled by horror and loss. Bereavement.

  There are many stages to bereavement, the counsellor told me — yes, I went to see Dee’s counsellor. Westie came too. He was in my ear the whole time. ‘A fucking counsellor, Doctor,’ he said. Get a life.’

  That was the problem, that was just what I was trying to do — get a life; only, as the counsellor helpfully pointed out, it was the wrong life.

  I went to see her later — a long time after I’d visited the Westgarth house that June day, a long time after Liz had given me some things of Westie’s, after she’d told me they’d accounted for all of his stuff, except — oddly — his passport. I went to see this counsellor a long time after I’d decided that of course — how could I have been so dense? — Westie wasn’t dead, it was unthinkable. He’d merely pulled a predictably elaborate scam and gone — God knows how, but he could have done it — he’d gone to Australia, where he was — even as we sorted through his belongings, consigned him to history, mourned him — undoubtedly reunited with Vicky.

  That’s how I wanted it. Just one truth, the new truth: Westie alive, and with Vicky. Because then everything was redeemed. All the messy paradoxes of our relationship, the pain of the last six months, would have been wiped out by that truth.

  I went to see the counsellor because, quite a long time after that day round at the Westgarths — when I realised just how much I wanted Westie to be with Vicky, how much I didn’t want him dead, when I believed he couldn’t be dead — for a long time after that I went looking for him.

  Or to put it more exactly, I went looking for the message, the signal I was sure he’d left somewhere for me, the sign that told me he wasn’t dead after all. That, on the contrary, he’d done the one thing that had obsessed him and, finally, defined his life; he’d done it — as I knew he must have done, because, of course, I did know him, above all and despite everything, I saw him really and truly, I’d got it right — he’d got to Sydney, he’d found Vicky, he’d made it right with her. He was with her now.

  And to prove it, I started searching.

  I drove up to the Bellbird and sifted through the yellowed newspapers in the stone house; I pulled ancient, scrunched paper out of the cracks in the stonework, certain of a coded message. I dug up the dope jar; I smacked down the long grass above Kennedy’s Bush, hunting, hunting.

  I drove to Scarborough and paced the track, digging through the ice-plants and the gorse at the side of the path. I walked the Crater Rim over and over, beating at the foliage to the left and right; I scoured the windswept Godley Head road and track, every culvert we’d ever run over, every hollow we’d ever rested in. I inspected every bush, tree, road sign and fence in the vicinity of Wheatley’s Drift, desperate for a sign of the real story.

  In the end, it was Dee who sprang me. Dee — no stranger to lunacy, of course — knew an obsession when she saw it. Course, she didn’t know what was really going on, and I never told her — I never told anyone except Sue, the counsellor Dee finally packed me off to.

  I went and stared out the window of Sue’s fifth-storey office once a week and talked to her, and she talked back at me about bereavement and love and guilt and keeping perspective and forgiving parents and owning your actions and having the courage to move on — all that sensible, life-affirming shit that had turned Dee from certifiable to straight-up community member in less than a year.

  It was Sue, finally, who made me see how impossible, how desperate, my whole Westie-in-Australia scenario was.

  And one other thing.

  In late August, six months after Westie’s disappearance, and exactly a year since Vicky Crawford flew back to Sydney, I got a letter from her.

  Imagine an unseasonably warm day, full sun and bright green winter grass. I sat on the verandah and stared, unseeing, at Dee’s fat, sticky hyacinths, their scent coming up at me on the warm air.

  I held the envelope, too scared to open it, certain and terrified and wildly relieved that it was a message from Westie.

  In the end, I rang Sue, and she stayed on the phone while I opened the letter and read it, the room receding, the blood humming in my ears.

  Dear Max, Vicky had written.

  I think of you so often, you seemed so much part of Westie, such a big part of his history — that whole life I didn’t know, but which he tried to tell me about during our six months together.

  You may not welcome this letter, and I’m not sure I should be writing it. It’s partly because I can’t write to Westie — I promised myself that emphatically. It seems the one thing I can do to make up for blowing his life apart, for leaving him once then coming back, then doing the unthinkable and leaving him again. I’ve told myself again and again that if I leave him alone now, he can recover, get his life back to normal. And every day I pray that he doesn’t hate me.

  But it’s so hard, Max. It’s a year since I came back here and there hasn’t been one day or night I haven’t thought about Westie — what he’s doing, how he’s thinking and feeling, whether things are all right for him, whether he’ll ever forgive me. There have been many days when I’ve been inches from the phone, from ringing him — but I’ve stopped myself because I have to believe that it’s right for me to stay away.

  I’ve been thinking how beautiful Christchurch looked when I was back there, that long warm autumn when Westie and I were first together, that winter when we didn’t seem to feel the cold because we were so wrapped up in each other. And then the spring — those clear days, the blossoms and spring flowers, the grass and sheep smells up in the hills. Which was when I realised we couldn’t go on. It’s all so strong for me, and every time I think about it Westie’s standing there in the middle of it all, breaking my heart.

  I suppose I’m writing to you, Max, to make contact with that time, but without starting it up, without hurting Westie. You probably don’t want to know about it — maybe you think it’s a terrible presumption my writing to you — and asking you not to say anything to him. Maybe you can’t forgive me, either, knowing what a mess I made of things.

  But maybe you’ll write to me one day, tell me how you are, and Meredith, and your friend — my beautiful son.

  I hope so.

  Love, Vicky

  She didn’t know.

  She didn’t know anything that had happened since she’d left — not about Meredith or Westie. Nothing.

  At first I couldn’t believe it, I couldn’t bear to believe she hadn’t known a thing about Westie all that time, that her family hadn’t contacted her. I’d always assumed they must have heard about it, read about it, and duly fed her the bad news. But after a while, it occurred to me that her family — in Christchurch, anyway — was just an elderly mother, a reluctant birth grandmother, someone who might easily miss a three-centimetre newspaper report, a coroner’s finding six months later.

  And the more I thought about it the more it made sense of her silence in the wake of Westie’s disappearance. It had always bothered me. I’d always expected somehow that Vicky would quietly reappear; she would slip back, a spectral figure on the edge of the crowd, a sad, sad bent head, someone to hold my hand and mourn with me in a way no one else could.

  That was it, really.

  I went through another mad, hopeful stage when I read Westie’s hand behind all Vicky’s poignant words, when I heard him laughing between the lines, and saw him, in her Sydney apartment, at her elbow, working out a la
st flourish to the exit from his old life.

  I explained it all carefully to Sue. I showed her the messages I’d uncovered in every other line. She answered me patiently with the old logical, unassailable steps in the argument:

  Sixteen pensioners had separately identified Westie from a photograph as the person who went over the cliff at Whitewash Head.

  There is no way you can survive a premeditated, well-sprung launch from that cliff.

  Westie showed text-book behaviour for a suicide in the week before his death.

  In the week before his death he heard some things from his oldest friend that may well have set off the volatile mix of disappointment, anger and grief he’d been carrying round for months.

  But, the passport, I said … Liz Westgarth never found that passport …

  Coincidence, Max, said Sue.

  There’s no single story, Sue, I told her. Like our history tutor said, there is no definitive story of any one event. There are many stories—

  —Max—

  —there are many stories from a multitude of perspectives—

  —Max. He’s dead, Max—

  —there are many possibilities, jostling and colouring and disputing each other …

  I let it go, finally. Had to — or risk going completely mad. Sue convinced me of that, eventually. And she came up with the definitive act for laying it to rest, too.

  One night in September, after a punishing hill run and a thousand nervous circuits round the house, I rang Vicky Crawford and told her about Westie. It was a terrible phone call. Indescribable. She was disbelieving at first, then inconsolable. I thought the sound of her quiet crying would kill me.

  After I hung up I started writing her a letter, a long, long one that was still going when the sun came up next morning. I told her everything — about me and Westie, our intense, competitive history from the very beginning to our last meeting. I didn’t pull any punches. I told the truth, as I saw it, in all its bright and unforgiving colours, about me and about him. I told her about the glory of Meredith, my utter happiness, side by side with Westie’s glory and happiness in her, Vicky. I told her about Dee and Leon and the old man and Gilly and Julia and Sue and Liz and Dave Westgarth. I told her about the months since Westie’s death and my feelings about Westie now. I told her about the future as it was starting to shape up, a shaky outline, but an outline nevertheless.