Closed, Stranger by Kate de Goldi

Author:Kate de Goldi
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780143772057
Publisher: Penguin Random House New Zealand
Published: 2013-04-07T16:00:00+00:00

The snow muffled the city and its sounds, made the citizens go quiet. Meredith and I lay in bed on Westie’s black Sunday morning, listening to the stillness, worrying about him, waiting for him. It seemed like he might detonate now, scatter himself Westie-style over the whitened city. I felt like I was holding my breath.

We exchanged dead-end sentences.

‘Will he just go back to his parents’?’ Meredith asked.

‘God knows.’

‘He’s given uni away.’

‘Yes.’

‘What can we do?’

‘Nothing.’

In the end we did the only thing we could. God knows — and I’ve told myself that often enough — it seemed the right thing at the time. When Westie arrived and said he wanted to see the snow from the hills, we went for it; we wanted to stay by him, to do something.

The snow was thick on the hills and banked up each side of the road, but the roads were all passable. We drove to Sumner, the only people around. The sea was quiet, flat and grey, almost waveless. None of us said much. Meredith and I were waiting for Westie, trying to figure his state of mind before we committed ourselves to anything, grimness or laughs.

He drove slowly along the Sumner waterfront. He seemed slowed down himself, worn out or something: no more rage or tears. Eventually he talked about Vicky, almost matter of factly, but hushed and awe-filled at the same time, as if she had been some kind of natural phenomenon, a meteorite, a celestial appearance that had stopped people in their tracks briefly, then been assigned to the history books.

He was right in a way. I’d barely known her, but I felt the effect of the combustible trail she’d left behind her. When I went to see her two days before she left, sat listening to her, watching tears mark a ragged line down the sides of her cheeks, all I could think was how mysterious she was, how — despite the facts of her life Westie had showered me with — the essence of her story seemed unknowable.

We were driving up Evans Pass towards Godley Head and I was looking at the flattened tussock, the ice patches on the road ahead lighting up in the early sun, the wide stretches of untouched white. I was trying to get the hang of this oddly reasonable, wearily wise, lecture-hall Westie — the complete unlikeliness of his mood — when it hit me like an ice-cold slap that he was wildly out of it. He was sky-high — subdued maybe, but more stoned than I’d ever seen him. He was reality adjusted, big time. And at the very moment I realised this, his talking seemed to change: his tone, the things he was saying.

He’d seen black widows and angels, he said, very low. You could be a demon and a darling and a closed stranger.

It was like the descent from heaven, he said, turning the wheel slowly at one of those treacherous bends, driving like someone in a trance.

‘How do you mean?’ Meredith asked.

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