Closed, Stranger Page 4

‘Strictly Milo tonight.’

  ‘Don’t disappoint me, Doctor.’

  ‘Wouldn’t dream of it, Doctor.’

  Click.

  Meredith wore a crushed-velvet dress, deep red, soft as feathers. Her dark hair floated round her face. She didn’t wear make-up or jewellery. She had no bag, no coat, no extras. She looked, dressed, talked, was totally unlike all the other girls and women at the cricket dinner. She sipped wine and talked to me in her husky woman’s voice, her hands always moving, her expressive pianist’s fingers working all the time.

  She leaned close to me at the supper, telling me about her cat, Glinda. I hate cats, but Meredith describing the thick silver coat of her moggy, how they slept together, how Glinda chased Meredith’s toe under the duvet, how she greeted her when she came in from uni: I don’t know, I could see her long fingers buried in the lucky cat’s fur, I could imagine her purring back at the cat, the two facing off, brown eyes on green. I could have listened to her, watched her, for ever. She was sensational.

  I got a cup. The Clifford Cup. Best Senior Grade fielding effort. Meredith clapped me up to the platform and back down to the table. So did everyone else of course, but I was aware only of Meredith Robinson, a wild splash of red velvet, a small face, crooked grinning teeth, her hands going and going …

  ‘Let’s get out of here,’ I said when everyone started the serious drinking. I just wanted to be alone with her, to look at her and listen to her quirky voice, find out what she planned to do for the next thirty years.

  ‘That was interesting,’ she said, in the car.

  ‘It’s just a summer thing,’ I said, wondering if this might be true from now on. I could hear Westie: ‘Course cricket’s for Milo drinkers, you know that in your heart, but fuck me, it bites the dust cos a pretty girl likes you? I see mortgages, Doctor, I see serious shackles.’

  I looked at Meredith. Again. Sitting in the passenger seat, running the fingers over the skirt of her velvet dress — she was playing a tune, I realised later, when I lay in bed going over every inch of the evening — a tiny grin, a sparky movement all about her. She wasn’t pretty, really. She wasn’t like the girls Westie and I usually panted over. She was skinny, and her face was kind of crooked. She had a mole above her top lip. Her lips were thin. Her eyelashes were short and blunt like a doll’s.

  But she looked back at me with those round, frank eyes and said, laughing, ‘So Max Jackson, winner of the Clifford Cup. What do I know about you? You have longish hair the colour of wet cardboard, blue eyes, thick eyebrows. You’re tall and muscley but you have generous red lips and not one pimple. You have a pierced ear but no earring tonight. You have a mother, a father and a brother. And a best friend called Westie. No pets. You can run and swim and dive and drive and hit any sort of ball. You’re big on history. You played the clarinet once but you don’t know much about classical music.

  ‘See, I remembered everything.’ She laughed at the look on my face.

  She was looking at me and smiling all the time she spoke, and while she was smiling and speaking her burnt-wood smell seemed to leap out at me, her red dress seemed red-hot, her wonderful gruff voice was all over me, little licks of fire, and I thought I might break out in a rainbow of colours or spontaneously combust, because she was the most desirable, most alive girl I’d ever met.

  And I was fairly sure she was going to be mine.

  ‘So, where’re we going?’ I said.

  I was driving down Fendalton Road towards town, towards the hills and the sea, anywhere, everywhere. I hadn’t touched the weed, but I was up anyway, transported.

  ‘Half-way to Paradise,’ sang Meredith.

  We laughed like idiots.

  ‘How exactly do we get there?’ I asked.

  ‘Follow the yellow-brick road,’ she sang softly.

  ‘Outside or inside?’ I asked her. I drove slowly round the Park, taking in the thickened air round the streetlights, the City Council’s gold-leafed autumn banners strung high across the avenue, the floodlit clump of Roman pines rearing into the night sky. It was all so familiar, but I was seeing it differently: it was transformed, shimmering with possibility, a series of movie stills, highly coloured, ablaze.

  ‘It’s cooler these nights,’ said Meredith. ‘Since daylight saving ended. Mum and I had dinner outside all summer, but that’s over.’

  ‘Westie calls it daylight wasting,’ I said. ‘He can’t stand that someone else decides when the summer’s over, makes us all huddle indoors.’

  ‘There’s a new place,’ she said. ‘It’s got a fire going. I went there with Mum and her friends. They check out all the new places. You can eat, or just sit and have a drink, talk.’

  ‘Lead me there,’ I said, putting out a hand. She took it, squeezed gently.

  We sat by the fire at Pompei, holding balloons of brandy. (I handed Dee’s cash card over, very cool; born to it, like the old man when he took us out for celebration dinners.) We said stuff, minor things, the background colour of our lives. We sniffed the brandy and drank it, then laughed, feeling like frauds, playing at adult rituals.

  ‘I like it here,’ said Meredith. ‘It’s kind of like another century, Victorian or something, secret, don’t you think?’

  ‘And you’re dressed kind of pre-Raphaelite and my hair’s right, but shouldn’t I have a beard? A cigar would be—’

  I was saying this and putting my glass down and looking up all at the same time, carried away with the picture of us, when I saw a guy at a table across the way staring at me, his mouth open a little.

  It was Westie. He was sitting across from a woman, and though her back was to me I saw her dark hair and black top, and I knew instantly that it was Vicky Crawford.

  ‘Not actually so secret,’ I said slowly to Meredith, who was looking at me, then looking where I was looking, her expression a question.

  ‘You know that guy?’

  ‘You could say that.’

  I started to get up but they were already coming over to us, Westie looking sprung, uncomfortable.

  ‘Doctor,’ I said, standing, feeling sprung myself. ‘Great minds.’

  ‘Doctor,’ said Westie, distracted, on autopilot. He looked at Vicky, as if for guidance — not standard Westgarth behaviour.

  ‘Hi,’ said Vicky Crawford, putting out her hand. ‘Max. I feel like I know you.’

  I shook her hand and tried not to stare at her, Vicky Crawford, the only person in the world I’d ever met who had the same blood as Westie in her veins.

  She was nice-looking; nothing special, but nice. And young. It was strange to think of Westie’s real mother being so much younger than his, well, whatever Liz was. I felt dizzy almost, thinking about the two of them, the all of them, thinking about the implications, the history of it all, their histories, shared or unaligned; it all knocked round in my head.

  ‘Same,’ I said, lost for words.

  ‘Nice place,’ said Vicky.

  ‘Yes.’ I really couldn’t think of a single thing to say.

  ‘No doubt we’ll meet again soon,’ she said, smiling at Westie.

  ‘Sorry to ruin the ambience,’ said Westie, recovering himself. He widened his eyes at Meredith, who was waiting, watching.

  ‘Sorry,’ I started, but she did it all for me.

  ‘Meredith Robinson,’ she said to Vicky, holding out her hand. ‘Westie, I presume,’ she said.

  ‘The one and only,’ said Westie, making us all laugh.

  But I was glad when they went. It was too strange. I felt like a stiff actor in a bad play. I watched Westie pay the bill at the counter, Vicky standing a little distance from him, fingering the leaf of a plant. I watched him stand back to let her through the door and then give a wave behind his back as he disappeared outside. He’d been wearing an expensive black jacket and faded Workshop jeans. He’d been wearing the expensive cologne Liz had bought him in the States. He looked straight out of Esquire: smooth, rich, exceedingly well bred.

  I wondered if he held the car
door open for her.

  ‘So,’ said Meredith, staring after them too. ‘Westie goes for older women.’

  ‘No.’

  Course she didn’t know Vicky’s relationship to Westie. She knew he was adopted, I’d told her that — it always seemed to be the second or third thing to say about him, it was so much part of his own definition of himself — but I hadn’t told her yet about his birth mother tracking him down.

  ‘God, no,’ I said, ‘it’s not that — though, actually, he’s no stranger to older women.’ He’d once had major flirtation with a student teacher at school.

  I told her about Vicky Crawford. I told her about their meetings, their secrecy, Westie’s glory. She was very still, listening, her eyes wider by the minute. When I told her about the green seat in the rose round, eyes tear up and she reached out, put her hand over mine.

  ‘Imagine,’ she said.

  ‘But let’s get back to us,’ I said finally, wincing inwardly at the cliché, then worrying she’d think I was an unfeeling shit. Trust Westie, I thought irritably; trust him to gatecrash my big night. Even if he hadn’t been here physically, he’d have muscled in somehow.

  ‘Nice concept,’ she said. ‘Us.’ She looked at me steadily, kissed my brandy balloon with hers, a delicate chime.

  ‘Can I meet your cat?’ I asked, quietly slipping over into lunacy.

  She laughed and came back at me.

  ‘Can I meet your mother and brother?’

  It’d be all over, surely, when she met Dee, but I nodded like a wet thing.

  ‘Will you teach me Somewhere Over the Rainbow?’

  ‘Will you teach me how to bowl?’

  ‘Will you marry me?’

  ‘Probably.’

  We laughed and laughed, lounging deep in the Pompei fireside sofa, very close together, our thighs touching, heating beneath our clothes. We stared into the flames. And finally I turned and kissed her cool lips, very gently. She tasted of brandy and mint and her skin’s sharp interesting secretions. She tasted so exciting that my heart turned over and banged hard in my chest and I thought I might have a seizure, die of happiness on the spot.

  I survived. I drove home, in a haze of optimism. Everything about life seemed suddenly manageable; any wish for the future eminently possible. We talked as we drove but we weren’t really listening; we just wanted to hear each other’s voices, keep the connection.

  I walked Meredith to her front door, like a good guy, a nice boy in a fifties movie. Westie would have steamed with derision. It was a big front door, wooden, a brass letter slot. She leaned against it and held out her arms, slid them around my neck.

  ‘I’ll ring you,’ I said.

  ‘I’ll ring you too,’ she said. ‘I’m a nineties girl. We don’t wait round.’

  I kissed her lips, but chastely. I was happy to wait, float home on a cloud of possibility.

  ‘Your Westie,’ said Meredith.

  My Westie? No chance. Westie was nobody’s, he was the original freelancer.

  ‘I saw him before you did,’ she said. ‘Before he saw you. I saw this couple in the corner. He was facing me, I could only see her back. But her hand was up to his face, cupping his cheek, and he was leaning into it, he was leaning into her palm, and he was looking at her, this amazing look on his face.

  ‘And then he brought his hands up — he was still looking at her, he looked at her all the time — he brought his hands up and took her hand from his cheek and held it in his, and then he bent and kissed the inside of it, her palm. He closed his eyes for a long time and he buried his lips in her palm, kissing it.’

  Chapter Four

  There is no single story anymore, our history tutor told us, no definitive story of any one event. There are many stories from a multitude of perspectives, and they jostle and colour and dispute each other.

  The historian’s job, said our tutor, is to check out the sources, the diaries and journals and inventories and newspapers; and later the other histories, the ones already written, shaped by people from different decades and centuries, people with agendas.

  The study of history, said our tutor, is as much the study of how history is written, the study of its interpretations. Sometimes there are facts, she said, verifiable facts that can’t be argued. But often there are just interpretations of facts.

  There are no newspapers or journals or inventories in our history — the history, the story of me and Meredith and Westie and Vicky, our families and fates. There are no sources, primary or secondary, no plethora of perspectives. There is just me and mine.

  And what is my perspective anyway? A mash of memories — conversations, sensations — and a whole lot of questions that begin with Why? Not the least being, why do I tell myself our story over and over? And why does Westie’s voice sound so loud when for so much of that time he was out of the picture, and all I saw and heard was Meredith?

  April is the cruellest month. A poet said that — it was one of the old man’s favourites. He spouted verse a lot in the old days, before he shipped out. When he was happy with the world, pleased with himself — or some extra-marital adventure, no doubt — he spewed reams of the stuff, memorised during his triumphant progress through school and uni and beyond.

  I wished I knew a bit of verse myself now, or the right song lyric, a line or two or fifty that I could shout from my bedroom window or whisper to myself in the shower, a perfect pithy line I could throw at Westie while we were running round the Crater Rim. But Westie — I knew what he would have done. He would have turned, smiled, thrown back his own favourite piece of poetry, the only line he knew as far as I was aware, the line he said put all love and that kind of crap in proper perspective.

  ‘Doctor,’ he would have said, ‘you know perfectly well that Celia, Celia, Celia shits.’

  I was way past that sort of cynicism. April was my glorious month. And May and June and July. I was so happy I could hardly think straight. I chewed and swallowed food but I barely tasted it. I talked to people in my lectures, I played touch, I saw movies, but none of it took root, none of it had more than a passing significance. I stared daily at the brand new text books on the floor of my bedroom and sometimes I even opened them, read a few lines, but for the entire month after I started seeing Meredith my concentration span was less than a minute, my recall below zero.

  I could sit quite happily with Dee now, anaesthetised to her bilious view of the universe; I could hear her without wanting to scream or run for it. I could be around Leon, hear his basketball statistics, his interminable monologues about friends and enemies and teachers without wanting to lie foetal under the house. I could even hold an almost adult conversation with the old man, one where the scorebook of his misdeeds wasn’t visible to my mind’s eye, making me angry all over again.

  ‘I feel happy,’ I said to Meredith when we sat together in Dee’s car, holding hands.

  She gave me a look — mock concern.

  ‘It’s true,’ I said, pulling her across the seat towards me. ‘I’ve been miserable for years and now I feel happy. And optimistic. And full of good will towards my fellow man. And woman,’ I added, kissing her. I couldn’t get enough of kissing her. It was the most sensual, arousing act I’d ever experienced. She was rapid-fire, Meredith, a busy talker and mover, but when she kissed her tempo changed, her body stilled, she was cool and sweet-mouthed and exotically fragrant and slightly unfathomable. I wanted to melt into her, plumb her mysteries.

  Dee handed the car over these nights. I rolled round to Meredith’s and picked her up. We went to a movie or a bar. Sometimes we stayed at her house, watching TV, listening to music, talking, getting seriously physical. Sometimes Meredith played the piano while I listened and watched, enchanted and impressed by her talent, her absolute excellence in this area so foreign to me.

  I liked watching her play almost as much as I liked kissing her. She moved with the music, her hair falling across her cheek, her face completely still, her eyes and ears fixed on something no one else
could see or hear, an interior sound, piercingly beautiful.

  ‘This is Chopin,’ she would say, beginning some soft, melting thing.

  ‘I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘Polish. He had a cross-dressing lover.’

  ‘No kidding?’

  ‘He was consumptive.’

  I felt consumptive watching her. Frail and over-heated and short of breath.

  ‘What’s this called?’

  ‘Berceuse,’ she said, getting the faraway look, beginning to lose herself in the music.

  ‘Lullaby,’ she said, softly, retreating altogether, leaving me by myself, on my perch at the side of the piano.

  It was a huge piano, a polished black grand, a present to his talented daughter from her father who lived twelve thousand miles away in London, a wealthy man with a wife and other children, a man who’d never lived with or married her mother, a man Meredith had never met but who paid regular and large amounts of money towards her upkeep and education—

  ‘And edification,’ she said, pulling a face. ‘Not that he said that, but that’s what I imagine he would say.’

  ‘What’s he like?’

  She shrugged. ‘No idea, really, except what Mum’s said. Handsome, suave, rich, upper class, conservative. Big-time barrister. They had a relationship but he wouldn’t leave his wife and family. Very moral,’ she said, with irony. ‘So she came back here, and that was that. I’m not in a hurry to meet him.’

  ‘What’s his name?’

  ‘James Lawrence Fisher Meredith. QC,’ she said, like some BBC announcer.

  ‘Meredith?’

  ‘I’m Meredith Robinson, see. That way my mother can have her name and his together forever.’

  She put her hand over her mouth, laughing. ‘That was mean, wasn’t it? I don’t mean to be mean. Really. I’m quite grateful to old Daddy. I get the music from him — his sisters are musicians. It’s no big deal, him not being around. Really. I’ve never known it any differently. At least he’s always sent money, made it easier for Mum.’

  ‘Fathers, eh?’ I said, thinking how she’d never met hers, mine had walked out and Westie didn’t even know who his was. Three out of three: duds.