Winter Close

by Hugh Mackay

Genres: General Fiction

Synopsis

For Tom, a counsellor struggling to rebuild his emotional life after the breakdown of his marriage, the suburbs are his world. His neighbours in Winter Close are his 'people', a kind of twenty-first century tribe. Tom, however, has a weakness for jumping to dramatic conclusions about his neighbours' relationships with each other and with him. Although he's often wrong, the truth is even more engrossing than his fantasies. When a freak storm hits Winter Close, more is destroyed than trees and houses. Personal façades are demolished as well, exposing tensions and releasing repressed emotions that draw Tom and all his neighbours into a painful series of confrontations and reassessments.

Release date: July 1, 2010

Publisher: Hachette Australia

Print pages: 256

Sample

one

Like a hand raised at an auction, any vehicle moving at a hundred and twenty in a sixty zone—especially one with a faulty muffler—is bound to attract attention. Chika Frost’s BMW thunders down Eastern Valley Way, throbbing like a bush ballad, and brakes sharply for the left-hander into Winter Close. A police motorcycle attaches itself to the BMW’s tail. Viewed from the discreet eyrie of my front balcony, the familiar ritual of cop-issues-speeding-ticket-to-dumbstruck-motorist is curiously reassuring. Chika is perfect in the role, having played it often. Both men are clad in black leather jackets. The policeman’s head is almost as bald as the helmet now resting on the saddle of his bike. Chika’s spiky black hair is so heavily gelled it reflects the still-flashing blue light of the police bike.

The policeman is nodding in response to Chika’s long-winded tale of woe. From this distance, it looks as if he might almost be persuaded to sympathise. But he keeps writing the ticket while he nods, then tears it from his pad and hands it to Chika, whose body language eloquently expresses his resentment.

This is the moment for the policeman to mount his motorcycle and roar off. Instead, he is walking to the rear of Chika’s car, looking at the tyres, maybe, or checking the tail-lights. Now he is signalling Chika to open the boot and Chika is becoming agitated. The policeman is insisting. Chika is a picture of wounded innocence. From where I stand, I can almost hear his sigh of resignation.

Chika swings open the lid of the boot and the policeman leans over, out of my line of sight. Chika’s wife Alex, their baby on her hip, has emerged from the front door of number seven and is marching towards the BMW, demanding to know not what is going on, nor what a police officer wants with her husband, but why Chika is running so late.

‘Chika, your mother has been on the phone three times already. Where in God’s name have you been? There is no way we can get to her place on time. Chika!’ Then, more quietly, ‘Chika?’

It is as though Alex has only just noticed the police motorcycle with its light still flashing, just noticed the large policeman straightening his back behind the car, just noticed the green plastic garbage bag in the policeman’s hand, and just noticed that Chika is trembling. Even from my balcony I can see he is trembling. Chika can shrug off a speeding ticket—he has shrugged off many speeding tickets—but not this. Whatever it is, this has made him tremble.

‘Chika?’ Alex’s voice, sounding flat, repeats her question.

‘It’s nothing, lover. A speeding ticket, that’s all. I was in a bit of a hurry to get home to take you and the baby over to Mama’s. It’s nothing.’

I can’t hear what Alex says in response, but she is pointing at the plastic garbage bag which, it seems certain, does not contain garbage.

The policeman, bag in hand, goes to his motorcycle and calls someone on his radio. I can hear the voices, but not the words. Chika looks edgy, wild, almost like a man who might be thinking about making a run for it.

Tiny Enid Riley, full of concern, has emerged from her front door and is leaning on the front gate of number five. Rich Abel has arrived home in his black Volkswagen and is standing in the driveway of number eight, half-watching the constabulary tableau and half-waving to me on my balcony.

‘Evening, Rich. Chika’s been booked for speeding.’ I try to keep my voice down but there’s a sudden lull in the roar of traffic on Eastern Valley Way and Alex, hearing me, looks up. I wave.

Now I’m unsure how to proceed. I feel as if I’ve been caught out, watching too intently. I was already standing on my balcony before any of this happened, though Alex wouldn’t know that. Enid at her front gate seems somehow less intrusive than me peering down from my balcony. I step inside, saunter downstairs, take two beers from the refrigerator and untwist the tops. I pause at the front door, then emerge to offer Rich a beer and a little conversation across our dividing fence. Chika is still trembling, glancing nervously in all directions; he is ignoring Alex, whose shoulders have drooped with disappointment or distress, or perhaps both. They stand together like strangers at a bus stop, one agitated, one resigned to the wait.

Each of us steals occasional glances at the unfolding drama, talking about everything except what’s going on; talking about nothing in particular. The unwritten rule of the street is: the less said about Chika the better. More flashing lights arrive atop a police car with a male and female officer on board. The plastic bag is handed over and Chika is ushered into the back of the police car.

The motorcycle cop walks Alex back to her front door as Chika is driven away. The BMW stays where it is. It looks as if Chika’s mother won’t be seeing her boy tonight.

two

At our annual street party—held, according to Rich Abel’s careful formula, on the Monday night of the week before the week in which Christmas Day falls—we all get along famously, though it’s clear we have nothing in common beyond the fact that we’ve chosen to put our roots down in Winter Close. We’re neighbours, not friends; for most of the year, we’re content to leave it at that. Although we live in the same street, we inhabit different worlds.

I once came upon Mrs Spenser from number nine sitting on the flight of concrete steps outside our local supermarket, hunched over a magazine in which she appeared to be filling out the answers to some quiz. At a glance, you might have taken her for a vagrant: dumpy figure, greasy and unkempt hair, skirt awry, blouse less than pristine, purple socks folded down over the top of shabby joggers. Now well into her seventies, she’s lived in Winter Close longer than anyone else: she remembers, as a teenager, seeing US Army blitz wagons on Eastern Valley Way and double-decker buses painted in the khaki camouflage of World War II. Although she has long since retired from whatever work she used to do, she is clearly not short of cash: charity collectors are often so moved by her generosity that when they reach my front door they are still talking about the size of her donation.

Mrs Spenser appears not to care about most of the things that might normally preoccupy a householder in a suburb like ours. She speaks her mind, offends people by her directness, is careless about grammar and syntax, never washes her car and is an equal-opportunity gardener, refusing to discriminate between weeds and flowers.

She often sits down on the kerb, or a step, or someone’s fence, because that’s where she happens to be when she feels in need of a rest. The day I saw her on the supermarket steps, she was licking the lead in a remnant of pencil and scribbling with zest. I found it hard to imagine what kind of magazine article might have had the power to engross her so totally, even to the point of extracting written responses from her. ‘How to rate your love-life’, perhaps? (That was an uncharitable speculation, Mr Spenser apparently having pushed off more than twenty years ago. Mrs Spenser still lives in the house built by her parents, both of whom died when she was a young woman. At some point, Mr Spenser came, and subsequently went.) When I expressed interest in what she was doing, she held out the page to show me: ‘Win a trip for two to Bali’. If she won, I wondered who she would take. She never has visitors, and rarely goes out. Yet she seems irrepressibly alive and alert.

Filling in the answers to a magazine quiz is the kind of thing Mrs Spenser likes doing, especially when perched on concrete steps in the middle of our shopping centre. It’s not an affectation exactly, but she takes a certain sly pleasure in the raised eyebrows of her neighbours.

My neighbours in number eight, the house between Mrs Spenser’s and mine, wouldn’t be caught dead participating in magazine contests, or even buying magazines of the kind Mrs Spenser thrives on. None of them, not even the children, would sit down on the supermarket steps. For the Abels, slaves to perfection and loveliness, such things are simply not done.

Doctor Rich Abel and his wife, Doctor Ruth Abel, have three adorable, precocious, and oh-so-carefully-spaced children: Laura, nine, Ethel, seven, and Humbold, five. Neat timing, but what about the names? The Abels are the kind of family who want to be memorable as well as wonderful. Rich is Richard, but there’s no way you’d ever call him Dick. And Ruth, a general practitioner, is generally known as Doctor Ruth—even Rich calls her that, though possibly not in private. (A PhD in chemistry and once a renowned whiz kid, Rich likes to play the humble academic: ‘I’m not a real doctor, of course. My wife’s the real doctor.’)

They admit they wanted their children to have unmistakable names which, on reflection, makes Laura’s the hardest to understand. Perhaps hers was the result of a brief lapse into sentimentality on the part of her parents. Rich frequently manufactures opportunities to remark that sentimentality is a substitute for real emotion among the uneducated and unsophisticated, but the birth of their first child may have tapped into a rarely mined substratum of soppiness in them. (Laura has a similar effect on many people—including me, I must say.) No such lapses, though, with Ethel or Humbold.

I admit I’m quite sentimental, though I try to hide it from Rich. Doctor Ruth is neither so vigilant nor so judgmental, except when Rich is around and she feels the need to support his ceaseless struggle to lift us all out of the cultural slough of suburbia. For people living on the fringe of a suburb like Castlecrag, the Abels are an enigma. Rich, in particular, appears to hate everything the place stands for, yet he eschews the postmodern chic of a cluster-housing development on the campus of the university where he works.

Demographically, they’re a bit odd, having three children and an intact marriage. Rich frequently reminds me that they represent a mere eleven per cent of the households of Australia and that Mrs Spenser and I, living in single-person households, are more mainstream. So there’s a kind of eccentricity—pleasing to Rich—in having created a family that is almost anachronistic. They drive an old car, too, though not just any old car: a beautifully maintained 1974 Volkswagen practically qualifies as a fashion accessory.

Rich is fond of saying that the thing about Winter Close is that it fosters a real sense of community. That’s a big claim and I wish I could share Rich’s confidence in making it. Now that Sydney has grown to four million, communities are hard to come by: a common complaint among Sydneysiders is that ‘we don’t know our neighbours’—as if that’s the neighbours’ fault. I’ve given up saying, ‘Why don’t you knock on their door and introduce yourself?’ The puzzled looks I receive make it clear I’ve missed the point: plenty of people like not knowing their neighbours and only pretend to complain about it. Suburbia offers a wonderful cloak of anonymity for those who want the security of proximity without any of the demands of intimacy.

Some of the peninsula suburbs around the harbour—places like Balmain and McMahon’s Point—feel a bit like suburban villages, though almost all their residents go somewhere else to work, and there’s an uneasy alliance of old, local families and blow-ins who’ve gentrified the place.

There are some suburbs, though, landlocked between arterial roads and railway lines, indistinguishable from the acres of bungalows and apartment blocks that surround them, crisscrossed by overhead power lines and pay-TV cables, roads clogged by snarling traffic, where, for no apparent reason and with no encouragement from their environment—not even a delineated boundary to mark them off from the next suburb and the next and the next—people have satisfied their herd instinct by forging strong links with their neighbours and developing a palpable sense of pride in the place. With no visible charm to help them along, such suburbs can still work beautifully.

Castlecrag has no such natural disadvantages to overcome. It straddles the ridge of a peninsula jutting into Middle Harbour, the value of real estate rising steeply the closer you get to the water’s edge. Once a rather bohemian place where writers, artists, actors and assorted celebs coexisted with people living more conventional lives—at least on the surface—Castlecrag has gradually given way to rich dentists, merchant bankers, marketing directors and IT professionals. But the original spirit of the place survives in pockets of raffishness, and Walter Burley Griffin’s flat-roofed homes, built from the local sandstone and designed to blend with the surrounding craggy bushland, are a startling reminder of the area’s radical roots. Most of the street names are borrowed from the vocabulary of castle architecture—The Parapet, The Rampart, The Bulwark, The Postern, Sortie Port—and there are crescents and cul-de-sacs everywhere.

Although our postal address is Castlecrag, Winter Close can hardly claim to be part of the cultural or aesthetic heritage of the place: we cling to the very edge of it, grateful for the impact of its cachet on the value of our homes, but we would probably feel more authentic if we were part of Willoughby—a sprawling, unpretentious, comfortable suburb to the west, separated from Castlecrag by the width of Eastern Valley Way. We’re an undistinguished street—not a flat roof in sight and no local stone either. All the houses were built in the thirties and forties; our rather nondescript double-fronted brick-and-tile bungalows have mean porches at the front and generous verandahs at the back. No one could call us stylish.

The concept of the urban village is all the rage—there are even office blocks, not far from here, being converted into ‘vertical villages’—but the claim that we’re a village would seem a bit far-fetched to anyone who had ever lived in one. The dynamics of a traditional village, where frequent, incidental contact fuels a sense of neighbourliness and keeps people closely in touch, can hardly operate in a suburb like this, where most people come and go by car, serious shopping is done elsewhere and few people would travel for less than half an hour to get to work or school. But the magic happens in little pockets—a street here, a street there, or even one end of a street.

Perhaps it’s happening in Winter Close: Rich Abel certainly keeps the dream of it alive. Our annual street party was all his idea, and he invariably describes trips to the local shops as ‘going down to the village’, though it’s uphill all the way.

three

There is a loud crash from the outer office. Madeleine, my loyal receptionist and secretary, is renowned for her calm disposition, but when she’s roused anything can happen. It rather sounds as if she’s been roused.

I peep around the door that connects our offices. ‘Everything all right, Maddy?’ There’s no sign of broken furniture.

Maddy looks up from her computer screen and smiles without much conviction. ‘Sorry, Tom. I slammed the filing cabinet drawer shut with a little more vigour than is strictly necessary, that’s all. I’ve had Harl on the phone. It appears our fiscally challenged daughters have extracted the promise of a return airfare to London from him. Contrary to my clear instructions, needless to say. Instructions repeated on several occasions, I seem to recall.’ She shrugs. ‘I’m afraid they’ve taken that Oscar Wilde line to heart: “The longer I live the more keenly I feel that whatever was good enough for our fathers is not good enough for us”. I wish I’d never quoted that to them—it was meant to amuse, not inspire. I think it’s become their mantra.’

The smile has faded. ‘Your four-thirty isn’t coming, by the way. She rang just before Harl, sounding quite bright. I wouldn’t be surprised if we never hear from her again. It’s a funny business you’re in—losing customers is the surest sign of your success. I predict you’ll get a chirpy postcard from her in about a month, telling you she’s worked everything out and she hopes you’re as happy as she is. They never give you much credit, do they? Maybe you should send out recall notices for half-yearly check-ups, like my dentist does. Anyway . . . you can have an early mark if you like. There’s nothing else in the book. Can you sign these letters before you go?’

I work as a counsellor in North Sydney and Maddy has been with me since the day I began in private practice. Our office is in the front half of a converted railway-workers’ cottage. The owner lives in the back half and, although he pays too much attention to Maddy for her liking, the rent is reasonable, there’s no agent’s commission and he’s a handyman who rectifies any problems promptly.

Maddy and her husband have recently moved into a city apartment. Harley is about to retire from a career that made him fabulously wealthy when he sold his small IT company to his major competitor in a very smart cash-and-equity deal. The new owner went public at precisely the right time, the value of Harley’s shares increased tenfold and he sold them at their peak. The company subsequently collapsed and Harley stepped away from the wreckage into a comfortable, half-hearted consultancy. It’s a very Sydney story and Harley never tires of telling it. In spite of all this wealth, Maddy, a vibrant fifty-four, is desperate to keep working.

Their twentysomething daughters seem to be causing Maddy more grief than they did as teenagers. At about the time Maddy started working for me, her younger daughter, Fiona, had quit school halfway through her second-last year, dyed her hair blue and moved in with a guitarist who was living in his parents’ garage in the eastern suburbs. Both sets of parents finally objected to this arrangement and Fiona was brought home. She didn’t speak to Maddy for six months.

‘I know you’d love to have children, Tom, but have you thought it through? Littlies can be cute and charming, primary-schoolers can be sweet and earnest, teenagers are hair-raising but kind of fun . . . kind of. But young adults are a species of an entirely different order. We thought these two were up and away about five years ago. Now they’re telling us thirty is the new twenty. Susie wants to go back to university next year to do her master’s and Fi has just split up with a perfectly wonderful man whose only crime seems to have been that he admitted, under close questioning, that he wanted to marry her. Now she and Susie are off to London for a friend’s book launch. Did you catch that, Tom? A friend’s book launch. Knowing the friend in question, I have a feeling this event will redefine the meaning of “book”. And probably “launch”, as well. Harl must have rocks in his head. Well, he does have rocks in his head. We know that.’

‘Any desire I might have for children is purely theoretical, Maddy, as you know. Clare wouldn’t have a bar of parenthood and, well . . .’

‘I know. There’s no woman on your copulatory horizon. You’re a mystery to me, Tom. The world is full of women looking for someone like you—warm, caring, reliable, good sense of humour, straight teeth. I don’t get it.’

‘Thank you, Maddy. I’ll ask you for a reference if I ever need one.’

‘No problem. Look, Tom, do you mind if I say something? I mean, something rather frank?’

This is unexpected. Maddy is always frank, in my experience, and never particularly reticent about speaking up. We’ve worked together for ten years, and she’s the closest thing to a mother-figure I’ve got, though she’d be appalled to hear me say it. She is quite beautiful, with close-cropped grey hair, pale green eyes, and a figure that must be the envy of her own daughters. She dresses with the impeccable taste that Harley’s wealth permits—stylish suits, mostly, but all carefully understated so as not to intimidate my clients, many of whom are young and far from affluent. I love her with unbounded affection, yet there’s never been a hint of sexual tension between us. Maybe that’s our secret.

‘Go ahead. When didn’t you say exactly what you think?’ (Maddy was urging me to end my marriage months before Clare packed up and left.)

‘I’m worried about you and that Alex woman in your street.’

‘Me and that Alex woman? We happen to live in the same street, true, but we don’t belong together in a sentence like that. She’s married, for a start. What are you getting at?’

‘Come on, Tom. You talk about her every single day. There’s always something. The baby. The hopeless husband. The swishy skirts. I’ve never met the woman and I can tell you she’s trouble. She’s playing with you. I know the type. I suspect Fi might have the same gene. It’s all a game to them, Tom. You don’t seem to understand that. You take everything so seriously where women are concerned. I sometimes wish I’d known your mother. She must have been a bit . . . what? Severe? Demanding? Remote? You don’t seem able to handle women lightly.’ Maddy pauses and unleashes one of her trademark high-voltage grins. ‘Have I gone too far?’

‘I think you’re being a bit harsh on my mother. I was onl. . .