Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  WE’RE HAVING BAKED beans on toast again for dinner, and it’s as at least as good as last night, maybe due to the mahi – that’s what he calls it – we’ve done. We’ve got most of the buds stripped and packed away from the weather in the back of the bivvy. There’s still room for the sun-loungers in there, so we’re sweet if the rain does come tonight. When I say we, it’s really been the boy doing the work. I think I’ve been some help, but there’ve been a few blanks. A couple of times, I was carrying armfuls of leaf from the swimming pool up to the table, and the boy had to lead me back from the rose garden. I was deeply apologetic, but he said it was sweet – everything is with him – because I’d been talking to my missus. I can’t remember doing that, but it stands to reason that Carol would like being around her roses. So he encouraged me to take some of the old leaf down to the roses after the buds were stripped, and lay it down as mulch.

  I’m following his movements with the knife and fork. I think my fingers are getting better, but can that be real? The fire is keeping the shadows at bay, but the boy chews and listens, chews and listens, just like last night, as his eyes keep raking the edge of the darkness. The night definitely smells of rain, and the boy gets up to put some more wood on the fire, telling me he won’t bother lighting the torches tonight because we’ll probably have to take shelter in the bivvy soon. It’s then, as he turns from the fire, that he sees something. It’s not that he says anything, just the look on his face. I’m spooked by that, even before I twist in my chair and see the face, whitish in the dark, staring in at us from the other side of the gate.

  ELLIE WAS DRIVING west along Tamaki Drive, making good time against the flow of traffic out of the CBD. She’d wanted to beat the rain. She was surprised how late it was as she left the refuge and headed back across town. The refuge, one of about ten secret addresses across the city, depended on the discretion and goodwill of neighbours who must surely have noticed the comings and goings of the ever-changing rag-tag procession of women and children.

  Simone had been inventive and reassuring with her children, turning the strangeness of the house, the bunks and communal kitchen into an adventure, ‘like camping’. Her lawyer had rung back and Simone’s occupation and protection orders were in train. She would be able to go home on Wednesday, after the locks had been changed, all the windows secured and an alarm installed. Ellie would go with them, in case Lyall was there and the orders needed to be immediately activated.

  She was bone-tired but floating. She’d done a great job of remembering all the shit about the job, but had forgotten this part, the sheer exultation when she managed to put together a safety plan that had started to work, and a woman and her children had successfully taken the first huge step to safety.

  At the end of Quay Street, Ellie dived out of the thickening traffic, turned under the overpass and threaded through the streets behind the Viaduct Basin to the chandlers and kayak and paddleboard shops at Sailors Corner, then on to Westhaven Drive, which took her around to the base of the harbour bridge, now lit up and looking even more like a giant coathanger.

  She couldn’t imagine any other work that could possibly give her this degree of stress or the same suffusing high of satisfaction. And Teresa had called back. Tomorrow after work she’d go to the clinic and meet SD 00007982. That he was willing to meet her was in itself a good sign. Maybe he’d be the one. Maybe she could love her life again.

  The rain seemed to be holding off. She’d get to Den and Jackson before it arrived, make sure Den stayed warm and dry overnight. Then what? She didn’t know. Pity there wasn’t a refuge for the old and bewildered that didn’t cost and arm and a leg. Or maybe there was: if she couldn’t find it, who could? She had to think about the best way of telling Jackson about his mother. She’d rung the hospital late afternoon and there was no change in Miriama’s condition. Serious but stable. She’d spare Jackson the details.

  She pulled into the driveway and edged up the dark bush-lined tunnel to the parking bay, swung right and was alarmed to see a grey hatchback already parked. It wasn’t a car she recognised. When she passed the passenger window, she saw the red ember of a cigarette flare. It was Lila, sitting smoking quietly in the car. In dark glasses. She blew smoke out the window as Ellie leant in. ‘You’re better not to go up there,’ said Lila. ‘Sorry.’

  ***

  ELLIE began running up through the dark garden, then slowed, fearful of what she might see, willing herself to take the next step. Steps. Then she heard Jackson’s voice, plaintive, followed by a terrified scream, cut off, then silence, which she was drawn into, as fast as she could go, through the garden gate and up to the deck, where she could see a figure framed in the fire from the oven, lifting the tomahawk, about to bring it down on someone or something lying in shadow. She screamed. The figure, a man in a denim jerkin, whipcord thin and quick, turned towards her. The slumped form on the ground must be Jackson, she thought, because her father was walking into the firelight now, drawing a pistol from his pocket, for God’s sake. A pistol from props, some kind of souvenir from Flame. Maybe Will gave it to him after the clearout. He pointed it at what must be Dwayne Collins, Jackson’s father. Den was screaming ‘Enough! Enough!’ in a strangled voice, close to tears. He didn’t sound like her father. His voice was so frightened and querulous it sounded like a falsetto. ‘Leave the boy!’ The man smashed down on Den’s arm and the pistol arced across the deck and clattered towards Ellie’s feet. Den was yowling in pain, Jackson whimpering from the shadow.

  The man raised the tomahawk again. It was so clear what was about to happen. He would cleave Jackson’s skull like a gourd. She picked up the pistol and ran at him, yelling. He suddenly pivoted from Jackson to her and raised the tomahawk a couple of feet to the right of her left eye. The man was calling her a cunt as if he knew her. ‘Do-gooder cunt.’ She remembered a line from some western: ‘Never bring a knife to a gunfight.’ Instead she’d brought a play pistol from props. His mouth was open in front of her, exuding the same stench as the man in Mount Roskill who punched the wall beside her head. Something chemical. Something rotten. The teeth, those that weren’t missing, were brown or black – she couldn’t tell in that light. The rancid mouth was spitting at her. She closed her own mouth as his hoick hit her pressed lips and rolled down her chin. ‘Useless do-gooder cunt.’ He had a thin, reedy voice to match the sneer on his white, unshaven face. He didn’t give a fuck about the pistol, must have realised it was a fake. His left hand went for her neck, maybe to hold her head in place for the tomahawk. She cursed her useless fucking father and his useless make-believe world and wished the gun was real and jabbed the barrel at Dwayne Collins’ eyes because that’s all she could do before the tomahawk smashed her. The gun seemed to come alive, jolted in her hand. She was looking with surprise at the pistol, hardly noticed him falling away, sideways, twisting with the force of the bullet, then head first to the deck.

  Her father was there beside her, dancing, exultant, holding up his arms like a victorious boxer. ‘Walter, you little bottler!’

  She looked at him. ‘Walter?’

  ‘Walter worked!’ he crowed, ‘after all these years!’ Then, as if by way of explanation of the obvious, he indicated the pistol, now hot in her hand. ‘I was keeping him for something. I had a plan, I knew I had a plan, I’d just forgotten what it was.’

  There was someone at the gate, opening it, coming in. Lila approached her father tentatively, as if expecting him to rise up in a rage. He was face down, thin and flat against the decking, the filthy mullet piled up on the back of his head, one side of the bloody bone-splintered exit wound. He looked like a dead possum. Road kill.

  Lila bent over him, as if to take his pulse or see if there was anything she could do. But it wasn’t a heartbeat she was looking for inside the greasy denim jerkin. She withdrew a wallet, then ferreted in the pocket of his jeans. She stood up with a bunch of keys, pocketing the wallet inside her black coat. ‘I’ll g
et rid of the car for you.’

  Jackson was stirring, trying to get up. Lila looked across at her brother. ‘He’s had worse,’ she said, then walked across to the gate and disappeared into the darkness of the garden.

  What the fuck happens now? Ellie looked at Jackson, trying to get to his feet. She should help him. She should. She couldn’t move.

  Den did it. He seemed enlivened. Maybe he was concussed or maybe the blow he took had shaken up a connection and some synapses were back in play. Jackson was getting his bearings as Den helped him to his feet, staring at his father. ‘Is he dead?’

  Ellie just nodded. She didn’t really know but it seemed pretty clear. Should she tell Jackson she was sorry? She wasn’t. She was still hyper, the adrenaline had nowhere to go and her whole body was starting to shake.

  Jackson limped across to the corpse. He was bleeding from a wound in his head, the blood running down into his mouth. He sucked some in and spat it down on his father. Then he turned to Ellie and Den, his face shining with blood in the light from the fire. ‘Should we bury him, you reckon?’

  ‘Good idea!’ said Den. ‘The roses!’

  Ellie looked at her father, his wild hair dancing in the light, as alive as she’d seen him since the night of the fire, but obviously losing it. ‘Roses?’

  ‘Blood and bone. Carol says the roses like a good feed.’

  winter

  THE NEWS, NOT entirely unexpected, but a shock anyway, had come late Friday afternoon. Stan was sitting at the big outdoor table – a slab of macrocarpa, religiously oiled with linseed over the years but now massively ravined by sun and rain – with Lester, who had rested his crutches on the back of his chair and stretched out his left leg so the scar could catch the winter sun. The knee looked red and fierce, Lester’s old skin pulled tight across the wound by stitches and staples barely containing the swelling underneath. Lester resented the artificial knee: it was a sign of weakness, that the unremitting toil of living sustainably off-grid had worn him out and forced him to seek help from a medical system he’d shunned. He’d had no choice: there’d been so many things he could no longer do.

  The main winter power source, a little hydro unit that sat in the watercourse on the other side of the house, relied on an intake further up in the bush. This kept clogging up, and during his first winter here, after the Wwoofers had flown like godwits back to the northern hemisphere, Stan had been the one who’d clambered up the rocky gorge to clear bracken and dead foliage from the grate so the water could flow and keep the little turbine whirring. Even back then, seven years ago, neither Lester nor Penny could get up there. Now there were others who could do that for them, the twins, or even nine-year-old Nathaniel, agile as a possum. But Lester would at least be able to clean the big solar panels, shifted, for accessibility, from the roof to a patch of north-facing slope nearby.

  There were things Stan needed to say to Lester, and now was the perfect time, here in the last rays of the short winter day, looking out at Lester’s beloved Kahurangis. It was Lester who had articulated the vision that had originally drawn Stan to Te Kurahau: ‘We’re building an alternative to the violent and acquisitive society around us.’ That had seemed so simple, so self-evident when Stan was twenty-five, but now, at thirty-two . . . He owed Lester a decent discussion, an expression of his doubts, even if the older man ended up hurt and, possibly, angry. But Lester wasn’t just worn out physically, he was pretty much talked out these days, so the longer they sat there with the sun falling at their backs and lighting up the snow-capped peaks in front of them, the more difficult it became. Stan had left it too long. Where would he start? With a half-truth? Was a lie better than an omission?

  When he finally mustered some resolve to begin the conversation and looked across, Lester’s eyes were closed. Stan marvelled again at the strength of those old bones, bullet bald pate melding to high forehead, falling to the granite lines of nose and cheekbones, the lower face framed by a white beard that hugged his jaw and climbed up to his temples. He looked like an Amish elder. In the seven years Stan had been here, Lester had become closer to him than his own father. He was thinking exactly that when Jackson came up the track through the gardens.

  Lester didn’t approve of cell phones, the power they demanded from the storage batteries, but Jackson had been able to keep the mobile Ellie had given him powered up by the battery of the old house-truck where the Wwoofers lived in summer. Pretty much every other day Jackson would trek down to the little hill of pines where he could get patchy reception. He would keep in touch with his sister, he said, but mostly he called Ellie, his ‘guarding angel’, and as a result, Stan was better informed about his family than he’d been since he first left home at seventeen.

  Through Jackson, Stan knew that his father had suffered a blitz of those unseen strokes and had been left so debilitated he was now living in a secure dementia facility in Herne Bay. Yesterday, when Jackson had called, Ellie had been visiting ‘Mr D’. She had warned Jackson that Den was down to two words, ‘Excellent!’ and ‘Enough!’, which began and ended the conversation, with nothing in between. But when she’d put Jackson on, Den had recognised his voice and said other things.

  ‘What things?’ Stan had asked.

  Jackson had been reluctant to say, so Stan speculated that his father had been rude.

  ‘He was never,’ said Jackson.

  Turned out that Den had spoken a kind of code. ‘Down tools,’ he’d said. ‘Lights out. Smoko!’

  Jackson said it was kind of an in-joke, but seemed troubled by Den’s words, and had gone down to the pines today to make a follow-up call. Stan was about to call out, ‘What news from the front?’ but something in Jackson’s gait, perhaps the urgency, stopped him. Jackson was silhouetted by the lowering sun, straggly hair flaming red. When the sun dropped behind the mountains across the valley at their back, the last range before the wild west coast, it instantly took both light and heat, and Stan could see the details of Jackson’s thin face, tight and tense. Chill rose up from the ground, hit the bare skin of Stan’s face like a slap. He shivered and knew.

  ***

  NEXT morning, Stan wanted to get started before anyone was up and about, so he wouldn’t have to replay the goodbyes of last night. All those ‘See you soons’, hugs and kisses, even from the men. Stan was convinced that men like Aaron and his older brother Will – perhaps even Lester at times – saw something weak and wounded in him, so when it came to man-hugs and handshakes, Stan braced himself and tried to get a decent purchase, make a strong grip. He felt like a fraud, particularly with the kids, his home schoolers. The adults, other than Aaron, might find it easier to understand once they knew, but in the meantime he had to go. He couldn’t stay here with his secrets.

  He’d woken at 5.30, dressed in the same outfit he’d worn to his father’s seventieth, when Will said he looked as if he’d just stepped off an R. M. Williams clothes-horse. Fuck Will, they were Rodd & Gunn, a label he’d never heard of before he saw their window display and walked in. He put some old undies and socks in his day-pack, a toothbrush, a razor, then stood at the centre of the yurt for a moment or two, and looked around for something else to pack. After seven years here, there was nothing else to take away, except the books he’d packed into a small carton last night. They were the ones Rachel had given him and which he felt he should return. After they’d confided their dysfunctional families to each other, she’d quoted Tolstoy – ‘All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way’ – but told him not to bother reading the old Russian because unhappy families had given rise to some wonderful modern literature, real and funny and dark and strangely uplifting. So he’d read the novels she’d given him: Anne Enright’s The Green Road, A. M. Homes’ May We Be Forgiven, Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections and Maggie O’Farrell’s This Must Be The Place, and now he couldn’t leave without them, though the Franzen was touch and go – so many pages of unne
cessary detail, so many trees that could have been left uncut. When he looked about, there really wasn’t a lot he would miss. The yurt had been a good shelter, not much more. It had a small wood burner, which struggled against the lack of insulation from the plastic windows.

  He closed the door behind him and moved out into the cold darkness, past the outdoor kitchen with a gas grill that died when the wind turned to the east, and pissed in the grass beside the composting toilet. He wouldn’t miss that kitchen, or the dunny you had to be so careful only to shit in. The Toyota Estima was parked next to the house-truck. He’d been intending to load the books in the back, then wake Jackson, but he should have known better: the kid was there, ready to go, as he’d been every morning since he’d first arrived.

  ‘Yo, Stan.’

  ‘You ever sleep?’

  ‘Like a baby down here. Give you a hand? You got a suitcase?’

  Stan told him this was it, and asked if there was anything else Jackson wanted to bring.

  ‘Got everything I came with.’

  That was true. The same clothes he was wearing when he got off the plane, and the flax kete he’d been carrying, which looked as empty now as it had been then. Ellie hadn’t been specific, just that Jackson needed a break from Auckland. ‘Who wouldn’t,’ Stan told her.

  Stan shrugged off his day-pack, laid it beside the carton of books and lowered the back door. When he turned back, Jackson was looking out towards the north-east. He pointed at a cluster of stars low in the sky. ‘Matariki,’ he said, ‘Happy New Year, bro!’

  Stan recognised them as the Pleiades cluster, Tien Mun, heaven’s gate, in China, not that he’d been able to see the night sky in Shenzhen.

  ‘My nan told me the big star would be her, and the six little ones would be the eyes of her tamariki, my mum and her sisters and brothers, and her mokopuna, me and Lila, all of us always watching out for each other.’