Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  ‘White fly,’ he says, lifting the leaves of the lemon, lime and grapefruit, revealing spots of what look like splatters of white paint on the undersides. ‘And you can’t eat the grapefruit anyway on that blood pressure drug, so why don’t we rip them out?’

  I have no answer, other than nothing must change. On that Ellie and I are agreed. Everything here is Carol’s. Those citrus were our first plantings: they’re older than Stan.

  He’s not waiting for my reply, but indicating three bushy seedlings freshly planted in a gap between the lemon and feijoa trees. ‘Happy birthday, Dad,’ he says. ‘I’ve just put them in for you. I’ve soaked the roots and given them crystals but they’ll need watering in a few days.’

  I’m staring at the plants, thinking that the leaf looks familiar, while Stan goes on to tell me that he’s brought the plants up with him from Te Kurahau, that they’re taken from a little trial patch he’s growing. He sees that I’m not with him. ‘Cannabis,’ he explains. ‘Weed. Though it’s actually a cash crop with huge commercial potential. I know you enjoy it and come the end of summer you’ll have your own supply, in bulk. You’ll never have to buy the stuff again.’

  I thank him, of course. Stan doesn’t know that I can’t recognise a marijuana plant in its natural state. I buy my reefers already packaged – they could be Cuban cigars. I no more know how to process a leaf into a reefer than how to catch a fish and cook it – if it doesn’t come skinned, boned and filleted, it’s no use to me. I’ve always been an iconoclast in this City of Sails, which by repute has more boats per capita than anywhere else in the world. There was a time in the early eighties when every man I knew who was coining it – and plenty were – bought a boat. Owning a boat, like the crash in ’87, was a rite of passage to financial maturity. I’ve always hated boats. The idea of being trapped in a tiny capsule on a heaving sea with people I don’t know – or even with those I do – fills me with dread. So I never fished. Carol and I were as one on that. ‘Thank you, Stan.’

  ‘You’ve already said that. You’re starting to repeat yourself, Dad.’

  ‘Thank you for pointing that out.’

  ‘Just saying.’

  I loathe that expression. By the time those words are uttered, we’re no longer in the present. The words are said.

  The sun is long gone, and if we were on set the DOP might be telling me the colour in the light has moved from maroon to blue to the darkest of greens. The solar lamps, also planted long ago along the edges of the track, begin tentatively offering their light. Many of them have given up the ghost, and the shadowy bush looms, but Stan’s horticultural eyes are looking through the penumbra towards the glossy pseudopanax that screens the long northern boundary. ‘See those blue flowers?’

  ‘Yes!’ They’re the delicate powder blue of a David Hockney pool, woven through the verdant green. ‘I’ve never noticed them before.’

  ‘Morning glory. A vine. It’ll strangle everything if you leave it. I’ll try and rip it out before I go back down south.’

  ***

  WHEN we get back to the deck, Ellie sees Stan for the first time. She rushes out from the kitchen into his arms. ‘You’ve come! You’ve come!’

  ‘How could I not?’

  Ellie tightens her pincer hug. ‘Christ, he’s as taut as a rope!’

  Their embrace is overtaken by a noise from the bowels of the house – Will, now wearing a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and boat shoes, from Nautica would be my guess. Whatever, the whole ensemble would have been bought from the same outlet at the same time with free parking for the first half-hour. Target shopping, he calls it. He’s shouting into his mobile, swigging on a bottle of beer, oblivious, until he clocks Stan. ‘Marlborough Man! How did you tear yourself away from bucolic bliss? Won’t the cows be missing you?’

  ‘We milk goats, actually.’

  ‘As long as that’s all you do with them, eh?’

  ‘And it’s Nelson, not Marlborough.’

  When Stan takes Will’s outstretched palm in his, Will draws him in for a manly hug. Stan’s so tall that Will has to stand on tip-toe and reach up. ‘Little bro!’ says Will. It’s awkward, ridiculous.

  ‘Would anyone like a drink?’ I ask. ‘I would.’

  Will drains his beer, burps. ‘Good idea, I’m running on empty.’

  Stan can’t resist the opportunity. ‘Still?’

  Will manages a laugh. ‘Just as well you’re not living on your wit, little bro, there’d be no money in that.’

  Ellie’s already had enough. ‘Grow up, both of you. It’s Dad’s day.’

  I like to think I don’t know how it got to this . . . But it was ever thus between them for as long as I can remember. Stan’s more Carol than the other two: her length of limb, but not her certainty about her place in the world. He’s always had a deference that got on Will’s nerves. Stan was the unexpected afterthought, five years younger than Ellie. Carol hadn’t wanted another baby and Stan, when he arrived, seemed to sense he was in this world on sufferance, that he should be on his best behaviour. He was sweet, compliant, beautiful, and almost from the start, his presence seemed galling to Will. On one of the few occasions I was home early enough, I was bathing seven-year-old Will when he asked me, ‘Daddy, if someone sort of smashed that new baby right in the head and killed it, would that be a good thing?’ I never told Carol.

  Will always had a mean streak, particularly when it came to his siblings. He left school early, under a cloud, as they say. The principal of the local arty liberal high school called us into his temporary office in a cheap prefab on a stiflingly hot early summer’s day to explain that Will had been caught having sex with a girl in the storage room of the gym, a younger girl who alleged he’d previously introduced her to marijuana. I daren’t look, but I felt Carol’s eyes burning me. It was made clear that if Will went now, of his own volition, he wouldn’t have to be publicly censured and expelled and the girl would be spared the inevitable rumour-mongering and character assassination.

  It was almost the end of the academic year anyway, and Will was never going to uni.

  I had a talk with Branko at Flame. Nepotism rules, he said. Bring him in, we’ll give him a start, see if he cuts it over the summer. It seemed like the perfect resolution and it was. It was only later that Carol told me that the girl Will had seduced at school was Ellie’s best friend. Former.

  Leaving school was the right move for Will. He proved adept at profiling his own generation, giving Flame an insight there, and then later, into the millennials who came behind him, of whom Stan was a classic example. For all his deference, Stan still had that millennial sense of entitlement and taste, which made them so hard to sell to. If they thought it was mainstream, they wouldn’t touch it, but how do you make money from clique cool in a domestic market of four million, where the ‘in crowd’ isn’t so much a crowd as a very small sect? Spending all day trying to corral millennial mercury must have driven Will mad. When he came home at night, student Stan bore the brunt of his brother’s ‘demographic research’. He used Stan as a whipping boy: pushed him, derided him, embarrassed him, called him a pussy. I should have stopped it, but even when I was there my attention was elsewhere.

  Maybe Stan saw me as an enabler: he couldn’t bolt fast enough as soon as he turned seventeen, to the other end of the country, to do a BA at Otago. I made sure he never needed a student loan, and he must have enjoyed it, majored in anthropology and stayed on in that academic holding pattern for another two years for a master’s – about as useful as tits on a bull. He then took what he called a gap year, which became two, teaching English as a second language in China, before the prospect of Te Kurahau lured him back to the southern landscape of his paternal grandparents. They were both dead by the time he got back, so he was still about as far from his family as it was possible to be.

  I look at the three of them still throwing barbs at each other in their
middle age and feel depressed that such an old truth can keep reasserting itself: whatever we’ve become out in the world, we always come home to be what we were.

  I want to call a halt, tell them to stop, to be civil, to try and accept the differences in each other, but instead I start obliquely on what I hope will be a cautionary tale about when I came home from university for the summer holidays after my first year away. Ellie is already holding one finger up. I can’t remember what that signifies. ‘We’ve heard this story before, Dad,’ she mouths.

  ‘Really?’

  Ellie holds up ten fingers, bunches her fists and holds up another ten. Okay, I get it. But that wouldn’t have stopped me. What stops me is . . . the story is gone. I ransack my brain but there’s nothing there, neither the story nor the point I was going to make with it. In my desperation I remember another story, an old joke, a favourite that Branko and I often recycled. ‘Have you heard the one about the Irish zookeeper and the orang-utan?’

  Ellie gives me ten fingers again. ‘Is that the one that ends with the zookeeper asking will they take a cheque?’ she asks.

  Well, that effectively kills that. I must have turned puce.

  ‘Sorry, Dad.’

  She means it to be consoling, but there’s no consolation for what I’m suffering. I should take her into my confidence, but I can’t, not now. I check again. My first summer home after starting uni, one of my favourite stories! Ellie could repeat it word for word probably, but from my brain it’s gone. If I was eighteen that first summer holiday, it would have been 1967. I open my iPhone and Google ‘1967’, thinking there must be a clue, maybe in Wikipedia, which I support with small donations, which Ellie doesn’t object to. ‘1967 in New Zealand’ lists things that happened: there was a gas explosion in the Strongman mine which killed nineteen miners, decimal currency was introduced – is that on the money?, Mr Lee Grant won the Loxene Golden Disc – I remember him, a lanky, lank-haired balladeer whose real name was Bogdan! That’s promising! And Great Adios won the New Zealand Trotting Cup. All this is fascinating in its own write, as John Lennon must have said around about then, but is utterly useless in prompting any clues about my story.

  Ellie is nudging me. ‘Dad, please don’t get lost in your phone.’

  I want to tell her that it’s not within my phone that I’m lost, I want to tell her what Dr Jeetan told me. I pull my eyes from the screen to my progeny. I’ve been absent for a swathe of conversation that seems to have extended and expanded the previous vitriol, so I’ve not missed much.

  I’d hoped things would change with the passage of time. Marlboro Man? That wasn’t a good opener from Will. He knows how much Stan would have been repelled by it: he was fourteen when he saw his pack-a-day mother die of breast cancer, and has never smoked, not even the marijuana he grows.

  ***

  WHEN Georgie returns from the longest pee in Christendom, carrying her hat, she apologises for being so long, and for not previously wishing me a happy birthday. ‘That’s okay,’ I tell her. ‘We’re not very good at celebrations.’

  ‘At least this birthday is working out better than his fortieth,’ says Will. He seems more nervous than usual about something, and turns his blue eyes on me. ‘Don’t you remember?’

  I wish I could say yes, if only to forestall the bad news I sense is coming. But I don’t remember anything at all. What year would that have been – 1989? Oh, shit. That decade with an eight in front of it. I fear the worst.

  ‘Mum organised a surprise party for you at the office, kept me home from school so I could come. But you were out at a long lunch with the wardrobe mistress, discussing’ – Will raises two fingers to telegraph irony – ‘serious budget concerns.’

  The mention of the wardrobe mistress raises a red flag, even though I tell him I really don’t remember. I don’t know how to stop him, even as Stan and Ellie join us.

  ‘Convenient memory lapse, Den! When we got the word you were on the way back, Mum and me and Branko and Trish hid in your office en-suite with the champagne. We’re all hiding there, waiting for the signal from Mum to burst out with the big “Surprise!”, when we hear the unmistakeable sounds of serious rutting. When Mum bursts into your office, the surprise is on her – you’ve got the wardrobe mistress bent over your desk–’

  Ellie, of course, is appalled. ‘Dad!’

  Georgie is clearly struggling to cope with what she’s hearing. ‘What?’ she says. ‘They were–’

  ‘Discussing the Ugandan situation, yes. I was twelve years old.’

  ‘I’m truly sorry, Will, and I’m sure I apologised to Carol many times.’

  ‘Mum tried to break the bottle of champagne over your head.’

  ‘Did she?’

  ‘Missed and hit the edge of the desk.’

  What can I say? I shrug at Georgie. ‘You know what they say: If you can remember the eighties, you weren’t there.’

  ‘They were talking about the sixties, Den,’ corrects Will.

  ‘Well, the sixties didn’t get here until halfway through the seventies, so we had a lot of time to make up.’ I’m still, through the fog of embarrassment, asking myself why Will wants to abase me in front of this stranger, and my daughter and youngest son, when it all becomes very clear. I don’t see it coming, even when Georgie dismisses further family reminiscences and tells Will she’s waiting for her cue.

  Ellie is clearly not in on the play. ‘Your cue?’

  I’m equally puzzled. ‘You’re not a thespian by any chance, Georgie?

  ‘I’m a prospective purchaser.’

  It’s Will’s turn to look embarrassed in the stunned silence that follows, a rare expression for him. I’m the only one who doesn’t get the subtext. ‘Of what?’

  Georgie explains that she and her husband know this neighbourhood, they live right on the water, one block down. I look at Will, still way behind the eight ball. ‘Her husband?’

  ‘We’re not an item, Den,’ says Will.

  ‘We’re looking to the future,’ says Georgie. ‘We’d prefer to have a glimpse of the harbour than be submerged in it. And have a beautiful garden.’

  Ellie turns on Will, furious. ‘How could you?’

  Georgie waves her hat like a fan to cool her reddening face. ‘Your brother was kind enough to let me informally appraise the place – under false pretences, I’ll admit.’ I’d not noticed, under the brim of her hat, how unnaturally high on her forehead her eyebrows were etched. Why would anyone do that to themselves?

  ‘I was just trying to keep the real estate agents out of it,’ says Will, finding his voice.

  Now I get it, finally. Why Georgie was gone so long, what she was doing in there, sniffing every corner of the house, while we were out here, unknowing, celebrating my birthday. My eternal smile must desert me – Georgie senses my dismay. ‘Your son told me I’d be doing your family a service.’

  ‘We need to do something, Den,’ says the procurer of this service. ‘Or the place will fall around your ears and be worth nothing.’

  ‘Your son said we could make an offer before the property actually goes on the open market.’

  ‘Think about it, Den. No agent, no fees!’

  I’m wondering what the connection is between Will and Georgie. They seemed from the first moment I met them such an unlikely couple, why didn’t I twig? ‘How did you two meet?’

  Ellie is more direct. ‘Where’d you find him?’ she asks Georgie.

  ‘Under a fucking rock,’ says Will.

  ‘I can believe that!’ Ellie’s now right in Georgie’s flushed face. ‘How did he know you were interested in buying this house?’

  Will, clearly worried that she will disclose something, tells Georgie she doesn’t need to answer. But Georgie is intent on retrieving some dignity. I’m not sure her next words do that. ‘My husband’s a proctologist.’

  Will protes
ts. ‘That’s a breach of confidence!’

  Stan makes the connection. ‘Will’s a patient.’

  His brother turns on him. ‘You want to die from arse cancer? Do you?’

  ‘So, he had his thing up your arse . . .’ suggests Stan calmly, as if seeking clarification.

  ‘Colonoscopy, yes. Burning off polyps. After Mum died–’

  ‘And you started talking shit,’ says Ellie, livid. ‘How fucking appropriate!’

  Georgie, alarmed at this scatological turn, rails at Will. ‘You told me he was ready to sell!’

  ‘Open to persuasion, I said. He is.’

  Ellie is adamant. ‘He’s not!’

  ‘He fucking should be!’

  They seem to be talking about someone in another room, and I get the feeling that’s where I should be. Georgie’s clearly not the brightest of bulbs, but clicks that she’s been sold a pup. ‘I’m sorry,’ she says. ‘I was given to understand–’

  But Georgie is ignored. Ellie and Stan have turned on Will. I can’t bear the detail of what follows. Ellie is furious, Stan less so, more appalled that Will has consulted none of us. Through it all, Will is defensive, but unrepentant: someone had to make the call. ‘Think about it f’chrissakes!’ he repeats. ‘No commission, no open homes, no advertising budget.’