Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  And parts of that A3 still spoke to his soul:

  We accept all human beings as our brothers and our sisters and choose to behave towards them with love and not violence.

  We strive to develop a fruitful, beautiful countryside and to make our living in ways that do not harm the planet: and to study and put into practice safe horticulture, farming and living.

  But now there was this itch that he’d tried to ignore but couldn’t. He now knew he could live sustainably, he could feed and clothe himself and his family, if he had one, for as long as he lived, and probably live longer doing it that way. But was that it? For the rest of his life, until he was old and worn out like Lester? Was this it? He’d felt that question inside him for perhaps the last year, without real resolution. Until two weeks ago: it was weird how circumstances conspired to test vulnerabilities.

  Stan had never had to pool his assets into the capital fund, because he’d had none. He’d given himself and his labour wholeheartedly and it had never been a problem: you gave what you had. The doctrine of no private ownership had been easy enough to accept when he had owned nothing. But a fortnight ago, $500,000 had been credited to an Auckland account he’d thought was moribund. He’d tried hard to believe in Lester’s dictum that money and commerce were false gods, until that moment. He’d no idea that money could be an instrument of truth.

  It wasn’t just the money. There was something else he couldn’t allow himself to even think about last night in front of Aaron, with those grey eyes boring into him. Stan feared that if the thought was out there, floating in the ether, Aaron might pick up on it telepathically. He’d felt an incipient erection in his jeans and was glad of the big table shielding his lap as he desperately tried to keep thoughts of Rachel at bay.

  ***

  THEY climbed the last of the switchbacks before the road wandered across the flat summit, where dwellings could be seen among the gorse and scrub and mānuka. What did they do up here in the clouds, these people, Stan wondered? Surely no one could endure a daily commute down to Tākaka or Nelson from here?

  He pulled the van over to a shingle picnic area gouged out of the side of the hill. He and Jackson got out and looked back towards Golden Bay, unfurling itself in the rising sun, snow-white then green melding into blue as the land fell from the Kahurangis to the sea, then curved round to the mists of Farewell Spit.

  Stan became aware that Jackson wasn’t looking at the view, he was looking at Stan. ‘You’re not coming back, eh.’

  Stan couldn’t trust himself to say anything, or look away from the view.

  ***

  GOING down the other side, tiptoeing through the endless switchbacks, listening to the van’s suspension stretching and compressing, down to the red light where the one-lane tarmac ahead looked like a high-wire strung across precipitous clay gouges above and below, Stan had time to look out at another spectacular view, the coastline arcing eastward towards Nelson.

  He was unsure why he’d chosen Nelson to come back to, in what turned out to be a long, hot, glorious summer as 2010 morphed into 2011. Maybe because it was pretty much unknown, and he could look at it with alien eyes, like the backpackers and Wwoofers he’d hooked up with, working for their keep round the district, picking, sorting and packing fruit.

  He’d only ever been to Nelson once before, as a fourteen-year-old. It was shortly after his mother died, and someone – it must have been his father – had thought it a good idea to get him out of his home environment and send him down for a holiday with his paternal grandparents, Lance and Dorothy. They’d picked him up at the airport and taken him to a caravan in Tāhuna Motor Camp, a site they returned to year after year. The caravan’s wheels had been removed and it sat on old railway sleepers. He’d slept on a stretcher under the awning. Until that point, Stan had seen very little of them, probably because, as Lance made clear at every opportunity, Auckland was an abomination on the face of New Zealand and he wouldn’t be seen within coo-ee of ‘that shit-hole’.

  Lance, it turned out, was a tyrant, even asleep, when his buzz-saw snore rocked the caravan. No wonder Dot’s eyes looked so unpresent most of the time. Neither of them once mentioned his mother. Maybe they had always disapproved of Carol, Auckland born and bred (of parents who also both died young), or maybe they thought the best way to deal with grief was to pretend it didn’t exist.

  Stan remembered very little about those two weeks, except one day when he’d been swimming in the gentle waves of Tāhuna Beach. He’d swum beyond the tiny breakers and kept going until he was far enough out to see the whole arc of the beach and the Richmond Range rising up behind. He’d turned away from all that, and floated on his back looking up at the sky and then out to where the sky met the horizon. The thought had come to him that he could just float away, towards that horizon, that that was the best thing that could happen. He floated out there for at least an hour. It was such a benign beach there were no lifeguards, and Lance would be snoring under the umbrella as Dot tried to lose herself in a 400-page romance. As time passed, the idea settled calmly on him, that he would simply drift away. Another boy at Springs, a year older than Stan and also known as a ‘social retard’, had topped himself by jumping off an overbridge on the north-western highway. Drifting off to the horizon seemed an eminently better way of doing it. And maybe it would have happened, if the tide hadn’t turned and brought him back to shore. His eyes were closed to protect him from the salt, but he heard children’s voices and splashing, and when he turned over in surprise, his feet touched the sand.

  Now he could connect the dots and understand why his father had been so emotionally inept when Carol died, given his parents, but back when a grief-stricken teenage boy needed his father to come closer, Den had been lost in his own grief, and lost to Stan. He’d been so lucky to have had an older sister. He was sure of one thing from that time: Ellie had saved him.

  ‘Bro,’ said Jackson gently. ‘The light’s green.’

  ***

  LESS than an hour later, they had crossed the Riwaka plain and the Motueka River Valley, and parked at the Riverside Cafe, the old converted homestead beside the road at Lower Moutere, where Rachel served them breakfast. She was waitressing for friends who had the lease from the community, and was staying in the Riverside Sojourn, a board and batten not far from the cafe, the beginning of the community’s houses, which circled up the hill around a central park. When they’d come in, she’d been warm and welcoming but all business, getting them settled at a table and coffees under way. When she came back with the flat whites – Jackson still couldn’t order one without a chuckle – she said she’d booked them on a late-morning flight to Auckland.

  ‘Can I show you something?’ she said to Stan. He rose and followed her around the corner to an alcove that led to the loos. She stood in front of him, blocking the entrance, took his hand and placed it on her breast above her heart. ‘Just me,’ she said, then kissed him, pressing herself up against him. ‘That’s all,’ she said, ‘I’ve got work to do.’ She walked past him, back towards the tables, then turned and smiled at the rod in his moleskins. ‘You might need a moment to compose yourself.’

  Back at the table, Stan watched Rachel move about the big room, engaging, graceful. She was in jeans and brocade blouse but he knew that underneath she’d be wearing a plain black leotard, which he’d been hoping for an opportunity to peel off her later, but the timing of the flight would stymie that. She was an Israeli, born of parents who’d shifted to Tel Aviv from the US when she was three. She could remember nothing of Ohio – unsurprisingly, she said, after having gone back there for a look – but still had, to Stan’s eyes and ears, something of an American sensibility and accent, a languid ease of speech and movement.

  Stan found her surprising, in a good way. She peered myopically at the world through rimless glasses framed by long hair that fell from a central part, sort of John Lennon, circa Imagine. The glasses appear
ed to be too heavy for her nose and needed to be nudged back in place, always by her slender middle finger, never the index, with her ring finger and chunky opal prominent, and her pinky held out as if she was politely taking tea at Buckingham Palace. Maybe it was just a nervous habit now, like a tic, but the glasses and falling hair gave her a bookish air that was thoroughly justified. She’d majored in English literature and then become an editorial assistant at an international publishing house. Rachel seemed extraordinarily well read – she’d read all the classics and many authors Stan had never heard of, mainly Americans, mainly women. She still had an editor’s eye and strong opinions, named names, mostly American, mostly male, authors, she said, of bloated egotistical tomes, often late in their careers when – and this, Stan thought, might be the nub of her objection – they could probably bully their editors. Stan didn’t feel qualified to argue, but felt perhaps Rachel needed to write to quell her inner critic. One day, maybe he could give her the time to do that.

  There was another side to Rachel, a side that sat peculiarly with her bookishness, a driven energy also at odds with her appearance and with the way she moved and spoke. Maybe it came from the kibbutz where she’d volunteered as a teenager, where she’d met Aaron, and which he’d pulled them out of when some of its elements became privatised. She was a worker, who got things done efficiently and without fluster, whether labouring in the gardens, or home-schooling the kids at Te Kurahau, which is where she and Stan had made a real connection. Stan flushed at the memory, and tried not to devour her with his eyes, as she effortlessly covered the tables in front of him. She also had a kind of certainty and decisiveness about her which Stan found very attractive and a bit intimidating. He possessed so little himself, he found it hard to trust in others.

  She was certain, for instance, that medicinal cannabis was the wonder drug of the future, and had contacts with the green fairies around the province who would try and supply those in desperate straits. Some of them had been prosecuted, but Rachel had a powerful belief and had been the advocate for the trial plot at Te Kurahau, overcoming even Lester’s objections. The plot had failed, not through any genetic problem with the plants, as Jackson had made clear with his stories of success in Auckland, but because they’d been paranoid about it being seen and had planted it in a clearing in the pine plantation that hadn’t got enough sun or rain.

  When he and Rachel had begun whispering about leaving Te Kurahau, they’d planned to take advantage of public and private opportunities within Nelson to teach English. There were ESL pods for foreign students within some of the established high schools and privately funded intensive courses for adults who wanted to combine tourism with study. But that was before Stan’s manna fell from the sky. When Stan confided his windfall to Rachel she’d come up with another altogether more ambitious scheme for how they might make their way out here in the world.

  The idea had arisen when she’d learnt that the supplier of fresh lettuces to the cafe, Ron Halston, wanted to sell his hydroponics operation and retire. The lettuces were, apparently, a viable business in their own right, but Rachel could see huge potential in a different crop. She was convinced that legalising the supply of medicinal cannabis would be the first step towards decriminalising rec-reational use. She’d followed developments in states like Colorado, where growing and selling the plant was huge business, not just for smoking, but in creams and oils and the hemp itself. Big Pharma and Big Business was already gearing up for it here in anticipation, but experience in the States proved, she reckoned, that boutique suppliers of quality product would also have a future, like the makers of artisan craft beers. The success of craft beer was all around them in the Motueka Valley, with thousands of hectares being converted to hops, the tall poles marching across the valley like vineyards for giants. The set-up costs were rumoured to be so great that most of the owners needed foreign investors to help them cover the development, not to mention the harvesting and drying infrastructure. Whereas Ron’s lettuces, she said, were easily managed, already paying their way and they could transition into cannabis gradually, as the law and the market changed. To Stan it all made tremendous sense in theory: it might be a way of turning his windfall into a productive, even lucrative, way of life.

  Five hundred thousand dollars had seemed an impossible amount of money for a man who had no credit card, no mobile phone and who’d thought he had no bank account until all that money landed in it, courtesy of Will selling the section and releasing his mother’s share of the estate. What did you do with such a vast sum of money? What could you possibly spend it on? The lettuces would be a springboard into the world of commerce, a head-first dive into the deep end in fact, but driven by the thing he most loved doing: growing plants.

  Rachel had had a preliminary meeting with Ron and Wendy Halston at the cafe, in which, as agreed, she’d deliberately not mentioned cannabis, and had arranged for them to go and view the operation this morning. They’d have time to do that and get to the airport. That was Rachel. The only item she’d left off the agenda was the leotard peel, but that might have been difficult anyway with Jackson riding shotgun.

  After breakfast, there’d been time for an update on Nathaniel, and another quick teenage pash in the alcove leading to the loos, before Rachel finished her shift and joined Stan and Jackson in the Toyota. They drove further into the gentle hills of Moutere, up on to the Old Coach Road that ran north–south along a ridge between Upper Moutere and the coastal highway. There were views west to the big hill and the Kahurangis beyond, and east to the coast and city. They were looking on the eastern side for a letterbox with a number, but needn’t have bothered: the glasshouses were visible through established trees in a dale scalloped into the side of the hill.

  ***

  RON Halston was a ball of energy and enthusiasm, a bit dusty round the edges, but otherwise not a man for whom retirement seemed imminent. He’d got out of dairy farming in Southland fifteen years before, he told them, and that had proved to be the right move at the right time. Now he wanted to sell his lettuce business. Stan was too polite to ask why this timing seemed so right.

  When Stan told Ron and Wendy, who seemed like the anchor around which Ron swung, about the late-morning flight he and Jackson had to catch, Wendy said she’d get a cuppa ready, and disappeared back inside the brick-and-tile bungalow, as Ron led Stan, Rachel and Jackson back down the shingle driveway, bordered by bare-branched silver birches and liquidambars, to the central glasshouse. Ron told them it had been moved here from the Grove Street area in central Nelson, known as ‘little Italy’, where one of the Italian families who’d settled in Nelson had built it to grow tomatoes.

  Inside, there was a field of green lettuces extending from where they were standing at the western end, for about seventy-five metres to the far end, all at waist height, growing in what looked like lengths of spouting, which Ron called gullies. These sat across rails, and as the lettuces matured, they were gradually moved down the shed, from seedlings at the far end, to mature plants ready for picking, the ones right in front of them. When Jackson exclaimed that was a shitload of lettuces, Ron smiled and gave them the figures – twelve to fifteen thousand in this one shed, which, with the other sheds, produced six thousand lettuces for sale every week.

  ‘Would the wholesale price the cafe pays be about the norm?’ asked Rachel.

  Ron confirmed that the outlets he supplied around the area, mainly cafes and restaurants, but including one of the supermarket chains, paid about the same, with seasonal variations, and he also grew and supplied fresh herbs, coriander, basil and parsley. He picked a lettuce out of the gully right in front of them, showed them the lovely white roots – brown, he said, meant trouble – then popped it back into its hole. He showed them the electric pump in the corner which pumped water up into the overheard pipes running the length of the shed, and then down into the two hundred and fifty gullies, a litre of water a minute down each one.

  ‘Fi
ve hundred litres a minute,’ said Jackson.

  ‘A shitload of water,’ confirmed Ron with another smile. He showed them how the water dropped down from the gullies after passing through the roots of the lettuces and returned to the pump. ‘Each time the water passes through the tank, nutrients are fed in automatically, with sampling machines that measure conductivity and the pH levels. It’s all controlled electronically, but it has to be constantly monitored by the human eye, because if it goes wrong, you’ll get a shitload of damage real quick.’

  Jackson chuckled, but Stan was feeling a bit dismayed, seriously out of his depth, even before Ron started talking about acid burn and tip burn and the need for the big fans in the ceiling to keep the lettuces transpiring.

  Ron walked them through the other three sheds, the ones he’d built himself. The two big ones were single-skinned plastic, not glass. ‘Things grow better under glass,’ said Ron ‘but it’s harder to clean and when the panes break they’re a bastard to access and replace.’

  Stan, seriously awed by the hinged roofs and automatic venting systems, asked roughly how much it had cost Ron for each of these sheds.

  ‘Best part of a hundred thousand for each of the big ones,’ said Ron, ‘and only slightly less for the smaller propagating shed because it’s double-skinned for extra warmth.’

  Stan could feel his huge wad of money diminishing with each informational sally. He’d arrived here with a fortune, and now it didn’t look like enough for a deposit.

  By the time they left the sheds, he was overwhelmed by the cost and complexity of the operation. He tried to catch Rachel’s eye, to telegraph his anxiety or just to get a steer on how she was responding, but she had eyes and ears only for Ron. Jackson, oblivious to their plans, was also rapt. His stream of questions and comments indicated a more than nodding acquaintance with hydroponics.