I told her she could ring me any time, to talk.
You could call that an ending, I suppose, but maybe it was something else, too — a gear change, a restart. I went to bed that morning feeling like the white noise which had filled my head for so long had finally been switched off. I lay there, exhausted beyond words, sadder than I’d ever thought it possible to feel, but somehow inexplicably, and just minutely, better.
Where does a person’s story really begin? Maybe it begins when they choose. When they open their eyes and see properly for the first time. When they sit up and take charge, look square-faced at the truth, start telling it for themselves.
Epilogue
I woke up on Westie’s twenty-first birthday with his voice laughing in my ear. He wasn’t actually there, but Westie was the one guy who could go away for ever and never really leave.
I could hear him so clearly sometimes. I could see him, like he was right with me, his eyes shot red and wide with their unique brand of stoned menace, his grin big and crazy, his voice filled with wonder.
I might have asked myself a dozen times a week why it was that Andy Westgarth had front seat in my consciousness, had a grandstand and a loud speaker, while Meredith, my girl, had disappeared from memory, dissolved. I might have asked myself that, but, actually, I always knew the answer.
It was easy enough, no great mystery. When I wrote to Vicky Crawford, I just told her what I’d always known in my heart.
He was there first. He was there longer. He’d been there louder and brighter, first and last and always, for ever and ever, world without end. Amen.
He’d been my other half, my mirror, my solid self, my yearning, my hope and my horror; my escape and my harbour, my poison and my pleasure.
I’d loved him.
I could say that now, easily enough. It was so clear. I’d loved his passion and perverseness, his courage, his carelessness, his unbounded aliveness. He’d offered me a haven and endless possibility, the chance to define myself, to borrow colour and energy when I couldn’t find it in myself. I’d loved all that.
And I hated him, too, just as I’d loved and loathed myself.
I’d known him intimately and, as it turned out, I hadn’t known him at all. I hadn’t, hadn’t seen — or wanted to see — his paper-thin bravado, his defencelessness, the curled-up baby ego that died when it was rejected twice over by a mother, then dumped on by a friend. I hadn’t wanted to know that Westie, just as I hadn’t wanted to know the small monster inside myself, the deformed thing that reared up and attacked him when he was down.
I’d hated him and loved him and now, two years after he’d left, I still wished he was here. I craved him sometimes, like the habit of half a lifetime that he’d been. I missed him, my alter ego, my dangerous friend, like an excised body part, an organ or a limb that is lopped off just to keep you alive.
On Westie’s twenty-first birthday — his coming of age, as they say — I had no idea what I’d have given him if he’d been around, but I knew what I’d do, now that he wasn’t.
I’d do what I’d done on that day for the two previous years, a ritual now.
I’d drive slowly towards the hills where I went now only on March 25. I’d take the causeway road, follow it round the base of the hills to Sumner. I’d drive to the end of Sumner, then turn up the road to Scarborough. I’d park Dee’s car and walk the track across the hills from Scarborough to Taylor’s Mistake. I’d do it slowly, like a pilgrim, thoughtful and regretful, each step one more in some ongoing penance.
I’d count the steps up to the stone bench, then stand briefly on the platform and look over to the Kaikouras. I’d watch the hill pasture underfoot and the pine-needle path. I’d smell the sheep and the gorse, the fish and salt spray. I’d pass the two grazing donkeys, the old-lady trampers, the paraponters at the grassy stretch. I’d climb the zig-zag, then do the steep descent to Taylor’s.
And on the way back I’d stop at Whitewash Head. I’d sit on the faded green bench and look out to sea, across the blue-grey to the wide, empty horizon. I’d wish Westie many happy returns. I’d talk and talk to him, and then I’d listen, wait to hear his voice, wait to hear it carried back to me on the wind.
Closed, Stranger is set in 1990s Christchurch, fifteen years before the earthquake that irrevocably changed the city. Max and Westie go running on the Port Hills, where the deadly faultline of February 22, 2011 was located.
The novel’s title references the closed, stranger system of adoption in place between 1955 and 1974 in New Zealand, a so-called ‘clean-break’ approach in which birth parents and their children were unable to access information about each other.
‘So where does the truth lie?’ said Jeremiah. ‘Huh, truth lies. Truth lies,’ I said, giving up before I started, knowing I could never explain.
Months after her life has been brought to a standstill, Catriona Stuart is embarking on a painful search for the truth. The truth about her boyfriend, Jeremiah, and his dangerous brother Simeon. The truth about her mother, about her past, and most of all about herself and her secret and why her world fell apart.
He looks at me now, full face, and I can see how drawn, how much older that face is — dark pits under his eyes, lines of tiredness. He’s not the warrior king I fell for eight months ago.
Christy is under siege. Her father is dangerously near losing it, her grandmother has lost it and Christy fears she has lost her boyfriend to a peacekeeping assignment in Bosnia. In an attempt to uncover an old family secret and settle all her relationships, she plans a train journey to the West Coast …
Kate De Goldi writes fiction for all ages. She has been the recipient of the Katherine Mansfield Short Story Award and twice winner of the New Zealand Post Children’s Book of the Year Award. Her novel The 10 PM Question won the Corine International Book Prize in 2011 and has been translated into many languages.
Also by Kate De Goldi
Like You, Really (1994)
Sanctuary (1996)
Love, Charlie Mike (1997)
Clubs: A Lolly Leopold Story (2004)
Uncle Jack (2005)
Billy: A Lolly Leopold Story (2006)
The 10 PM Question (2008)
The ACB with Honora Lee (2012)
From the Cutting Room of Barney Kettle (2015)
PENGUIN
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Penguin is an imprint of the Penguin Random House group of companies, whose addresses can be found at global.penguinrandomhouse.com.
First published by Penguin Books (NZ) Ltd, 1999
This edition published by Penguin Random House New Zealand, 2018
Text © Kate De Goldi, 1999
The moral right of the author has been asserted.
All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright reserved above, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of both the copyright owner and the above publisher of this book.
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Cover image © Pekic/iStock
A catalogue record for this book is available from the National Library of New Zealand.
ISBN: 978-0-14-377205-7
THE BEGINNING
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