Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  IT HAD BEEN a brilliant last day of freedom. Tomorrow she’d be back at the front line of a civil war in which every wound was an atrocity, yet barely made the headlines any more. Today she was still free, trying not to count down the hours before the first call-out, trying not to second-guess whether she was still robust enough for what she knew was coming.

  Early evening found her indulging a secret vice, watching Country Calendar. Sooner or later, she thought, Stan and the gang from Te Kurahau were bound to feature. Knowing Stan, there’d be no notice, she’d only find out if she saw it. It was somehow comforting to know that Te Kurahau was there, and all these other hard-working people too, happy and productive, coaxing bounty from an invariably beautiful landscape where summer never ended. They weren’t living in P-infested zombie towns, caught in the merciless maw of rural poverty and the Mob, or the Head Hunters or . . . She knew she was a worrywart, and one of her recurring anxieties was that she’d seen too much of the flip side of life to ever believe in goodness again. Or was that a sign of compassion fatigue, which the caring professionals spoke a lot about? The deeper, unexpressed fear was that once the well of compassion was drained it couldn’t be replenished and you joined the legion of hard-hearted cynics – though, if her older brother was any indication, most of the cynics she’d met had reached that state without ever traversing altruism. They’d not spiralled down from compassion and ideals, they’d been scraping along the bottom from very early in their often privileged lives. To her, their cynicism seemed entirely unearnt. But perhaps she was being cynical.

  After learning about harvesting seaweed, she surfed the movie channels and found an old western. She liked the horses and costumes and landscapes and wooden shopfronts with verandas, but inevitably, within a minute or two of arriving in town and dismounting at a saloon, the hero, in white hat and beige calf-skin matching shirt and chaps untouched by a speck of mud or dust, had become involved in one of those iconic, ridiculous fist-fights that go on for minutes, where the combatants take fifteen or twenty blows flush on the head only to pick themselves up with a bit of fashionable blood trickling from one side of their mouths and the odd blush of bruise that would completely disappear an hour later. She was guessing at the outcome: she couldn’t watch the saloon fracas play out, felt her gorge rising even as she flicked channels, ranting at the television, calling the makers fucking cretins. Did they have any idea what one fist on bone and brain could do? One punch?

  The anger was relatively new. She’d always been sickened by this crap, even though she realised that the reality of the action was on a par with cartoons. Was it worse than the ultra-real gore routinely on screen now? She didn’t know, she couldn’t watch that either. She landed on what looked like a romantic comedy. After thirty seconds she decided it was a stupidity, not a comedy, and hit the power button. She was alarmed at her outburst, the latent vitriol inside her, and glad that Yelena was out. She tried to calm herself by dredging up the remains of what had been a languid Sunday.

  There’d been no Luissa this morning. Few of Yelena’s friends got to stay over. When Ellie once enquired whether she had to ask them to go, or there was just an accepted protocol, Yelena had simply said, ‘I like a clean start to my day.’ Was Yelena brutal enough to tell her friends that, or did she couch it more diplomatically? In any case, it was a policy that worked well for Ellie: there’d been just the two of them in the cottage, no awkward breakfast scenarios or protracted farewells and false promises. And no matter how energetic the night had been, and how little sleep she might have got, Yelena was an early riser and enthusiastic day planner.

  First on Yelena’s programme had been an exhilarating ride along the black-sand beach at Te Henga and up into the dunes and trails behind the old homestead. The property was often used in film shoots: a lot of Xena and other blood-and-sand epics had been partly shot up there, and some Flame TVCs. Through those, Branko had become friendly with the owners, who had taught the girls to ride – Branko too, until he got so big no horse could carry him.

  Ellie had loved the riding picnics, loved the quiet intelligence of horses, loved the way you could see their souls in their eyes. She tried to remember why she’d stopped coming. She’d been about seventeen, and had belatedly discovered boys, but it wasn’t that. Carol had been diagnosed the year before, but within twelve months or so it had become pretty clear, though no one admitted it to her or Stan, that their mother was dying. Ellie had found it difficult to leave home after that. Even finding the wherewithal to go to school for her last year had been a battle. Den was hopeless, basically tried to carry on as if nothing had changed. Will was already gone and hardly ever came back, and Stan was only thirteen, a lanky, shy, awkward kid who had difficulty making friends at high school.

  After Carol died, everything changed again. Instead of going away to uni at Otago with some of her mates, like Yelena, Ellie took what she told them was a gap year. A gap year with no travel, stuck in the big house with stunned-mullet Den who seemed to have no idea how much he loved or needed his wife until she wasn’t there, and with Stan, who was in the fifth form and sitting important exams. One year became two, and three. Stan had more exams, then did what she had wanted to do, went to Otago. Ellie could have gone then, too, but uprooting herself to Dunedin had lost its allure: Yelena and the other girls she knew were finishing their degrees and coming back. Instead she’d enrolled in a BA at Auckland and became a student who commuted to her classes and went home. She’d gone to uni because nothing else appealed, chosen Auckland uni because nowhere else appealed, done a BA because nothing else seemed worthwhile, and maybe that was also why she’d fallen into completing a postgrad social work degree. There were slackers all round her, but it wasn’t that with her. She sometimes looked back and thought her choices had all been fall-back default settings, looking for Carol’s approval long after her mother was gone.

  Her relationship with her mother had often been testy. Den was so much easier to read and to please. Carol was moody and demanding, applying unfair academic and behavioural standards to her daughter that, in Ellie’s opinion, she didn’t apply to her sons. Ellie thought, and once told Carol to her face, that this pressure on her daughter came from her own underachievement, and why hadn’t she gone back to work? Carol had actually tried to slap her, but the action was so awkward and unpractised that she’d hit the point of Ellie’s shoulder with the tender inside of her wrist and suffered the bruises and remorse for days afterwards. In retrospect, it hadn’t been a fair criticism: since Ellie was very young Carol had filled her days with charitable work. She had raised money for Starship Children’s Hospital from the very beginning in the early nineties, and then, as the stars came out for Starship, Carol had moved on to serious fund-raising for some much less fashionable causes, like domestic violence, which was virtually ignored by both police and the judiciary back then. It was Carol who’d raised Ellie’s awareness of the NGO she was about to return to work for, and it was really Carol’s journalist eye that had informed Ellie’s view of the world. Den had always seen the world as his oyster, a potentially exploitable commodity; it was Carol who had real curiosity about the world around her and how it actually worked, or didn’t.

  At Te Henga, Ellie had a regular, Brownie, an aged bay gelding who had a bad case of flatulence. On the canter, he would pop like a machine gun, which was okay as long as no one got caught behind him. Ellie had been happy following Yelena as they finished the canter along the beach and worked their way up the sandy tracks through the big dunes and scrub, heading towards Lake Wainamu. In summer, they’d drive out in dawn light, but this morning it had been still dark, and the sun had come up as they were climbing into the saddles. Ellie had been offered a new horse, a frisky black mare, light-boned and quick, but she’d seen Brownie clocking her, and his ears pricking in anticipation, and decided she couldn’t be so disloyal. Up on the tracks through the dunes, it had been wonderfully quiet and calm. The big waves could sometimes sou
nd like steam trains breaking over the rocks at the point, but today they’d been orderly and respectful as they rolled in. The horses walked into the rising sun through the broom and lupins, the summer crackle and pop of exploding seeds finished for another year. Ellie turned in the saddle as they got to the top of the ridge and looked back at the Tasman, the curving swing of ocean bathed in dark blue. By the time they got to the lake, it was reflecting the still-low sun off its surface and radiating the first shimmers of heat back at them as they came down the big dune.

  She liked letting her mind flow with Brownie’s gentle rhythms, allowing her thoughts to go where they might. But this morning she’d tried to wrangle them a little more, to stop projecting into tomorrow, to suppress the feeling of dread rising in the pit of her stomach. She’d consciously directed her thoughts back to SD 00007982. A picture had begun forming of the man behind the number. Though she knew the chances of it being real were infinitesimal, that she might be lost in a complete fantasy, she found it hard to dislodge.

  On Friday morning, before she went out to the fertility clinic, she’d done her last delivery run for FreeLunch4Kids. For the past few months, since the house fire, when she no longer had to care for Den, she’d volunteered on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays to deliver lunches to children who had none. It was top-of-the-cliff intervention for needy children, more emotionally manageable than what she was used to – bottom dredging, picking up the fallen, the broken. She’d started as a sandwich maker and would regularly go down to the warehouse base at the back of K Road around 6 a.m. and spend a couple of hours making sandwiches: it was such a satisfying way to start the day. More recently, since she’d decided to go back to work and been battling every day to steel herself and to harbour her energy, she’d limited herself to delivering.

  Deliveries started about nine, but on Friday she’d gone in early to see Francie, the boss, to let her know she wouldn’t be available for any more runs. She’d arrived just as the sandwich makers were finishing up. And saw, as she hoped she would, Henry.

  Henry ran the whole team, the core and whoever else turned up: on Friday there’d been a group of employees from a local bank helping out as a team-building exercise. Ellie had been a little early, so she’d pitched in and helped to pack the little brown paper bags and then load them into cartons, referring to the list of schools for the day marked up on the big Perspex sheet. The mood in the kitchen and packing room was always uplifting. That might have come anyway from the feeling of doing some good in the world, but on the mornings Henry was there his presence was a big part of it too. He ran the kitchen and sandwich table with all the adrenaline and dynamics of a fitness class, played loud music and led the singalongs. He had a terrible voice but no shame, and that gave everyone confidence to let rip, even Ellie, who couldn’t sing to save herself. Henry’s choice of music was pretty eclectic and always upbeat, even when it was about lost love. On Friday morning, as she’d walked in past the plastic vegetable crates and cartons, George Ezra had been blaring, asking over and over again, ‘What are you waiting for?’

  Francie was out schmoozing suppliers, so when the packing was done and Ellie had been allocated her route and cartons, she’d sought a moment with Henry before she took off, to explain that this would be her last delivery for a while because she had to go back to work, and could he let Francie know?

  ‘Oh no!’ he’d hammed, ‘not work!’

  ‘That’s exactly how I feel about it.’

  ‘Jeez, Ellie,’ he said, concerned. ‘What work could that be?’

  Her friendship with Henry was recent, begun since she gave up work to look after Den. It’d actually been Henry who’d suggested she get involved with the charity. He was a mate of Yelena’s, an extension of the Kook A Chew crowd because he worked in the kitchen there, but he’d sometimes go out to corporate functions as Yelena’s handbag if she wanted to make a straight impression on some conservative potential client. That hadn’t happened in quite a while, Ellie suspected, because Yelena was successful enough to no longer give a fuck what anyone thought of her sexuality, so Ellie had seen less of Henry, unfortunately. She liked him. He was extremely easy to look at, and his big brown eyes, it seemed to her, always carried a light for her.

  It wasn’t till he asked the question that she realised he’d only known her as her father’s caregiver with time on her hands, not in her former guise as harried social worker. ‘I work for an underfunded NGO as an advocate for victims of domestic violence,’ she said, using a pat response she hadn’t needed for three years. No matter how she framed it, mention of DV had always been a conversation stopper. Nothing had changed: Henry’s smile faded and he seemed lost for words. She remembered what to say next to kick-start things: What do you do? But she already knew Henry worked as a chef in Kook A Chew till late, then three mornings a week got up early to supervise the sandwiches. So that was a no-go. As she tried to think of some other segue, she found she didn’t need to say anything.

  He smiled. A wide smile. He had great teeth, she thought, and eyes, and . . . stuff. Henry was by any measure a handsome man, charismatic. A strand of black hair, curly, had escaped from the red bandana he wore instead of a plastic hair-net, and fallen down across his forehead. ‘What you do makes you one of the good guys, Ellie,’ he said, offering a high five. ‘Kia kaha.’

  ‘Kia ora, Henry,’ she said, palm on palm, a caress rather than a slap. ‘E taku hoa.’

  He smiled again, then looked at her, she thought – or perhaps wished – as if really seeing her for the first time. His smile faded, which was a bit disconcerting, then he said, ‘Yelena told me about your dad, and you’ve been working here, and now I find out what your day job used to be.’

  ‘Is.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he said. ‘You look after people, Ellie. Hope someone’s keeping an eye out for you.’

  That was another conversation killer. Did she look like she needed help? What was she supposed to say? Reassure him that she wasn’t Nola No-friends? She tried to turn it into a joke. ‘There’s always Yelena.’ It sounded pathetic, even when he smiled and tried to run with it, praising Yelena.

  She’d left knowing that she’d see him around another day, as part of Yelena’s circle, because she’d become one of them. A pity they were all gay. With, she corrected herself, at least one exception.

  Lying on the sofa in front of the dead television in the sitting room, she picked up the information sheet from the carpet beside her. SD 00007982 had become a constant companion over the last two days. As she alighted once again on the answer to the last question, the essential question, I’ve been lucky. Why not share?, she realised with a start that the voice of the ghostly Tūwharetoan had taken on a timbre and accent she recognised. As much as she chided herself about the remoteness of the possibility, another part of her kept coming back with, Why not? Henry was Māori, he was the right age, he was obviously a chef, and he had, as far as she could tell, a similar sense of humour to the one displayed by SD 00007982. She could hear him saying exactly those words and all the others on the sheet. Despite her admonitions to herself, she began seeing Henry’s smiling face when she looked at SD 00007982, and somehow George Ezra’s voice was in there too: What are you waiting for?

  That ear-worm had accompanied her on the FreeLunch4Kids delivery route on Friday, one she hadn’t done before, through Sandringham and out over Mount Albert Road into the furthest reaches of Mount Roskill, a nest of streets she knew only too well. She’d been distracted by SD 00007982 for much of the trip, and by speculation as to whether Ezra might appeal as a name for her son. She thought it would have to go into the possibles list, though there was that American poet, Ezra Pound, who lived in Venice and was a Nazi sympathiser. Was Ezra Pound Jewish, she wondered? Surely not, if he was also a Nazi. Ezra was definitely biblical and might have been Jewish originally, but did that matter any more? Nothing was exclusively anything any more, in an ethnic sense. She’d seen Ruebe
ns and Herschels in Herne Bay, who were, or looked like, the sons of WASPs. Who would know? So, Ezra would be a possible. Or Henry. That should be on the list too, whether or not he was . . . If he was SD 00007982, would he mind?

  To get to the first school, a primary, she’d had to turn right into a street which she wouldn’t have used if the memory had come soon enough. But she was halfway down it, where it curved slowly to the left, when she saw the house. She believed in public housing, but you could tell immediately which of the old state houses were in private hands and which were still owned by Housing New Zealand. The old staties that had gone up in the fifties in a frenzy of optimistic nation-building after the war had great bones and floors of heart timber. They could be renovated, insulated and opened up to the sun. The sections were generous, the original quarter-acres most of them, room enough for a lawn out the front, a flower garden round the fence border, a garage or carport up the side and a vegetable garden and a few fruit trees out the back. In theory, there was no reason why the Housing New Zealand tenants couldn’t do the same with their land, and perhaps some of them did, but not the ones Ellie got to visit. She couldn’t bring herself to look at the house she remembered. It would be like the others, curtains always drawn, lank grass growing through an upended supermarket trolley, one corner of a grey sheet flapping on the clothesline dragging in the dirt, encrusted nappies caught by the wind in the fence, a rust-bucket parked car missing a wheel. The smell inside hit you like a slap, made your eyes water. Urine, cat and human. Old cabbage. Rotten food. Shit. Mould.

  He’d stopped his fist an inch from her face. ‘Is this a problem for you?’ he’d asked her, then smashed it into the wall beside her head. The gib-board folded in like cardboard: her face would have been pulped. He was still smiling. ‘No problem for me, eh.’ She remembered the mother with the kids gathered close, all wide-eyed but clear-eyed, settled in their trauma: This was normal. When she’d walked out, like a zombie, she’d got in the car, driven around the corner, this corner she was driving round now, and stopped, burst like a balloon, the tears and tension flowing out of her. When she’d gathered herself, she’d rung Sergeant Tracey Costigan at the DV Unit, put the phone down and cried again. What had stayed with her was the heat of her shame as he taunted her, his smile and his smell. Rotten teeth, chemicals and beer-infused saliva, and old, stale blood. A year later he’d killed the woman. He got life, twelve years non-parole, the kids went into state care, got fostered. That six-year-old boy had little or no chance of not becoming his father. That was how it went. Circuitous. Endless. She couldn’t even remember the boy’s name, or his father’s. But the street she remembered. This street. That house. Move on, she thought. Please.