The Year Nick McGowan Came to Stay (15 page)

‘Do you have a daughter?'

Nick's eyes spring open. ‘Holy shit! Rachel! What are you doing?'

‘I want to know if you have a daughter?'

‘At one o'clock in the morning? Jesus, how long have you been standing next to my bed?'

‘Oh, get over it. I just got here. Is Sam your daughter? Yes or no?'

Nick sits up and mumbles something about the fact that he has a German excursion tomorrow and that at this rate he's going to sleep through his alarm.

‘Well?'

‘Sam's eight years old. I would've had to have fathered her when I was ten.

‘
Yes or no
?'

‘Jesus! No.
Obviously
. Do you think, maybe, we could talk about this in daylight hours?'

‘She didn't sound eight, she sounded five.'

‘Well, she's eight. Eight going on forty-two.' He rubs his eyes. Then he looks up at me, ‘What do you mean “didn't sound eight?” Were you eavesdropping on our phone call? God, it's like you think you're from ASIO or something.'

‘I just want to know who she is. I want to know why there's so much mystery around who she is.'

‘What mystery? There's no mystery.'

‘Well then why don't you ever say
who
she is? Hey?' I start to pace around his room. ‘If there's no mystery, why do you keep it such a secret? And why is some little kid ringing you all the time – including now, in the middle of the night?'

‘It's not a secret, Rachel, you've just never asked me. If you wanted to know who Sam was this whole time I would have told you. What is it with people? Nobody wants to ask anything direct. They just prefer to make up stupid rumours and spread them behind your back.'

‘Well, I'm asking. Who is Sam?'

He lets out a heavy sigh and says, ‘Sam is my best friend's little sister.'

And that's when Nick McGowan tells me what happened over the summer.

‘Two weeks before the end of school last year, during our exam block,' he stops, then sighs, and looks out the window. ‘Two weeks before the end of school last year, during our exam block, my best mate, Jason, decided to drive into Emerald in his dad's new Holden ute. It's about a two-hour drive from Middlemount and, ahhh . . .' He gives a half-laugh and rubs his eyes. ‘I don't know why I'm even telling you that because it's irrelevant. Anyway, on the drive home – and the road is fairly straight and flat for most of the journey, right?' He glances at me then. I nod my head, trying to keep up with what he's saying. ‘So he's driving home from Emerald, and there's apparently just one car on the other side of the road travelling in the other direction. It's being driven by some old guy. Anyway, what happens is this old guy has a heart attack behind the wheel. He has a heart attack just when Jason's car is approaching in the opposite direction. So this old bloke's car swerves and crosses the double line—'

My stomach drops.

Nick looks at me, runs his fingers through his hair and then returns his gaze to the darkness beyond the window. ‘And the old bloke's car collides with Jason's ute.' He nods his head. ‘They were both killed instantly.'

‘
Ohmygod
.'

‘Yeah,' he turns his head to look at me for a moment. ‘So my best friend gets killed in a car accident and Mike the police officer gets called, and the on-call doctor gets called, but nobody calls me. I'm his best friend. His
best
friend. I have known Jason Wilks since I was two years old.
And you know why nobody rang me that day – or the day after, or the day after that – and told me that my best friend had died? Because my dad told them not to because I was in the middle of exam week in Brisbane.'

Nick looks down at the floor and shakes his head. I'm at a loss for words. ‘That's what Dad told Mr Wilks. He actually told them not to tell me because I was in the middle of exams and I needed to do well to get into Medicine. So the morning that my best friend's coffin was being lowered into the ground I was sitting in a room in D-Block answering essay questions about
The Great Gatsby
. Sitting in an exam and later wondering whether I'd have the boarders' sandwiches for lunch or go and get a meat pie from the tuckshop.'

Nick's eyes have become glassy pools of water, and I watch as he tips his head back and looks at the ceiling – but the tears run down his cheeks regardless.

‘And I know why Dad did it, you know, I get that. I get that, but he should have told me.
He should have told me
.' He glances down at me and I nod my head, pushing tears from my eyes.

‘See? Do you understand now what I've been trying to say to you? Life can just be ripped from you. And you know why Jason had gone to Emerald that afternoon? To get me a birthday present. That's why he was in the car.
I am the reason
Jason was in the car. And, see, I've thought about it and I can't think of another time when he's done that before, driven into Emerald on a weekday after school.'

I lean towards him, try to take his hand. ‘Yeah but Nick, you can't—'

He shakes his hand out of my grip. ‘You don't get it. You don't understand. When I came to Brisbane last year I promised him I would keep in touch,' he says, staring at the wall in front of him. ‘And I didn't. I didn't keep in touch. And I'd promised him that I'd go home for the weekend of the Rugby League Grand Final and I didn't go. I backed out on him at the last minute because Mr Tallon wanted me to attend some pointless leaders' breakfast.'

‘At Parliament House.' I remember that breakfast. I was pissed off because I didn't get chosen to go.

He looks at me and shakes his head.

‘I was just so caught up in all that school stuff – the awards and the grades. And, he was my best friend. And this is the thing, Rachel. Life can just be taken away like that.' He snaps his fingers. ‘He was my
best friend
. So all this shit about planning our futures is pointless. Jason was planning
his
future. He wanted to be a mechanic, own his own garage. He'd already set up an apprenticeship with a guy in Rocky. Fat lot of good that did him. He didn't get up that morning thinking,
I wonder if I'm going to be killed in a freak road accident today
. And I was already losing interest in becoming a doctor – I just didn't have the heart to tell my dad. But this settled it. It made me realise that there's no point in doing Medicine if doctors can't even save people when they really need it. There's no point.'

I don't know what to say, don't know how to respond to any of this.

‘And now everyone's concerned about me. Dad, Mrs Ramsay, Mr Tallon, Mr and Mrs Wilks. Dad thinks everything will be solved if I just go on Prozac. They want to medicate me up to the eyeballs. And they're all scared, you know, that I'm going to do something to myself.' He turns and looks at me directly. ‘I'm not going to do anything to myself. I know what they're saying about me at school but I've never even considered it, Rachel. Not for a second.'

This time he lets me take his hand and I nod my head.

But then he's up, pacing the room, rambling about life being too short, how nothing matters and what a shit friend he's been.

I try to tell him that's not true.

‘No, nope, I've just got to face the truth, and the truth is I failed my best friend when he needed me most. And that's just something I'll have to live with.'

He wipes his eyes and sits back down. ‘Jase'd be calling me the biggest girl and giving me so much shit if he saw me now.' He gives a half-laugh.

‘So tell me about Sam,' I say. ‘How does she fit in to all of this?'

‘Right, right,' he says, nodding his head and looking at the floor. ‘Sam is Jason's little sister. That first time she called was a bit of a shock because I've barely spoken to her since the accident. But now I tell her to ring whenever she wants. Your parents said it was okay, and most of the time she just wants to talk about Jase. What he'd be doing today. Like watching “M
*
A
*
S
*
H”. Or hogging the Atari. Or building those stupid model planes that he was so obsessed with. Tonight she dreamt she saw Jason sitting at her desk. Apparently Jase had reminded her to keep training Tads, their border collie, to shake hands, because pretty soon he'd do it. And he told her that he was sorry for leaving her. And that it was nobody's fault. And that he was with her, watching over her, watching over all of us, all the time. That's why Sam called at eleven p.m. She'd wanted to tell me about the dream.'

‘Wow.'

For a moment we sit in silence. Eventually I turn to him and say, ‘Do you believe in God?'

His eyes narrow for a moment and he stares at me for a while. Stares in a rather intense way like a doctor looking at a troubling X-ray. Then he
looks out the window, and says in a voice like shattered glass, ‘Only in storms'.

We stay up till three a.m. talking about Jason and Sam and school and parents. Talking about expectations and careers and Party Hostess titles and life after school and life after death. We talk about how someone ends up with ‘Dog' as a nickname. How Nick's father broke the news to him about Jason on the drive home from the Emerald airport at Christmas. How Mr McGowan just wants Nick to ‘reach his potential'.

We don't come to any real conclusions that night. We don't have any epiphanies about the meaning of life or why we're all here. We just agree that life is random and hard. And sometimes it can feel like you're barely treading water.

Monday doesn't go the way I expect. When I get up I look for Nick. I feel closer to him now, and I want to see him and acknowledge what happened last night. But Nick has gone. Already left for school.

‘He got the early bus,' says Mum, folding some laundry. ‘The German excursion bus was leaving at seven a.m. Now whose black sock is this?'

I walk through the gates at eight-thirty a.m. – just in time to see a certain Zoë Budd saunter through the front gates wearing dark sunglasses, loudly cursing the sun's excruciating glare. During English she complains – loudly – about having a headache. During Modern History she shooshes people and asks Mrs Finemore if she could keep her voice down. Mrs Finemore responds by telling Zoë that she will not keep her voice down, and that she will confiscate her sunglasses if she does not take them off immediately.

Zoë – allegedly – has a hangover from the party on Friday night. A delayed hangover that has taken three days to kick in. A hangover on time-lapse.

During morning tea, sitting out on the grass, I tell Zoë that she is being ridiculous. She cannot possibly have a hangover on a Monday from a party on Friday night. But it's hard to tell if she's listening because she's lying down, with her head in my lap, and an eye pillow on her eyes. As soon as I start talking her left hand signals me to stop. So I sit there, leaning against the wall of the Science Block, thinking about Nick and last night's revelation.

By eleven-thirty a.m. the school is buzzing with news that Zoë Budd has a three-day-old hangover, and that Sally West had a party on Friday night that got kind of out of hand.

By one p.m. people are asking me if it's true that I ‘got with' Nick McGowan in Sally West's study.

By two p.m. the word is out that Nick McGowan saved somebody's life.