Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  Ron was no fool, and as they started walking back up the drive to the house, he asked Jackson where he’d acquired so much of his ‘good oil’. Jackson kept his head down and muttered something about a ‘cuzzy up north with a garage’. Ron just laughed, said he hadn’t come down in the last shower, so Stan, emboldened by the cat being more or less out of the bag, and despondent about their chances of acquiring an operation of this size anyway, asked how easily the operation would transpose to growing cannabis.

  ‘The devil’s lettuce? Not something I know much about, son.’

  This time, Rachel’s eyes found Stan’s. She dipped her head and pushed her glasses up her nose: this wasn’t the plan, he was going off piste. Oh well, thought Stan, we’re stuffed anyway. But Ron surprised him.

  ‘I’m too old a dog to learn new tricks,’ he said, ‘and I’m from a pretty conservative background, so I don’t want to touch the stuff. But marijuana, from what little I know, would be a helluva lot easier to grow than lettuces, and a lot more lucrative, I imagine.’

  ‘Really?’ said Stan, the black cloud lifting. Rachel’s head had lifted too, and she was smiling.

  ‘Only thing is, you’d have to factor in one big cost that we don’t have with lettuces: twenty-four/seven security. We’ve already had one of those big fans nicked by some local pot-heads. If you grew commercial quantities of marijuana here, it’d be like the opium growers in Tasmania: you’d need armed guards shoulder to shoulder the last two weeks as the crop ripened.’

  ***

  UP at the house, over cups of tea and freshly baked cheese scones, Wendy talked about their former lives, dairying in Southland. The bitterly cold, dark mornings, crunching through the frost, the doors always open, mud being traipsed through the house. Her words resonated with Stan. Farming at Te Kurahau might have been as far removed from industrial dairying as it was possible to get, but cold and mud were agricultural constants, it seemed.

  ‘When we sold and went to see the bank manager,’ said Ron, ‘he was stunned that we weren’t tapping him up for a bigger farm, more cows.’

  ‘Coming here was the best thing we ever did.’

  ‘Down there we had no contact with the people who consumed what we produced. Here, we deliver fresh lettuces and herbs most days – as you know, Rachel – and get instant feedback.’

  ‘Brickbats and bouquets,’ said Wendy. ‘But mostly bouquets. Ron loves those relationships with customers.’

  ‘You’d be good at that, Rachel.’

  By God, thought Stan, there’s a twinkle in the old guy’s eye. Possibly picked up by Wendy too. ‘Are you married?’ she asked.

  ‘Yes,’ said Rachel.

  ‘No,’ said Stan.

  Wendy chuckled. ‘Clearly not to each other then.’

  ‘None of our business, of course,’ said Ron. ‘But you do need to be a good team, and from what I’ve seen, you’ve got the makings, with your right-hand man here.’

  Meaning Jackson, who had said very little, apart from ‘Nice scones’, to Wendy. ‘My nan used to make ones like this.’

  Stan had a moment of euphoria when he realised he might just about be able to buy the business, after Ron told them his accountant had valued it at ‘just under a mil’, on a gross turnover of four hundred thousand a year. Stan knew bugger all about borrowing, but with a fifty per cent deposit and four hundred k coming in annually to pay any interest, surely the figures would work. Meaning they could live in this house with brick walls and insulation sitting at the top of the rise where it caught the sun, and if there was no sun you could throw a switch and central heating would keep it warm as toast. With an indoor kitchen with a gas hob that didn’t blow out in an easterly. With rooms you could walk into and out of, with doors you could close. A room for Nathaniel and one for Jackson, if he stayed. An indoor toilet you could piss and shit in at the same time. And land of your own, three hectares of land! A green sward above the sheds, rising to a knoll with a paved area and bench where you could sit and contemplate the coast rolling around to the lights of the city at night. An orchard you walked through to get there, with established trees, plums and pears and apples, and raised planters behind the house where Wendy grew her vegetables, and flower beds. Enough grassland for sheep you mightn’t own and wouldn’t kill, just sell grazing rights to a neighbouring farmer. Maybe they could have a milking cow, maybe they could be self-sustaining here, with a cash-flow they’d never had at Te Kurahau. And there was a prize-winning winery just up the road where they had summer concerts, and easy access to the city and the Saturday market. An income. Money. Responsibility yes, but autonomy. Not having to run every thought past the co-operative. If he wanted to grow cannabis commercially, he could.

  Stan wrenched his concentration back to Ron. He handled the weekends, he was saying, but on a weekday there were two full-timers, one in the propagating shed and one overseeing the big sheds, then part-time pickers and packers and deliveries, and there was always ongoing maintenance ‘that you can’t do yourself’. It gradually dawned on Stan what ‘gross turnover’ actually meant: all these costs would have to be paid out of that, before any interest, and before any money actually landed in their hands. After tax.

  Then Ron said the obvious, which made Stan feel like such a fool: that the business was distinct from the land and buildings, separately valued, which would also have to be bought.

  ‘RV one point five,’ said Ron.

  Stan didn’t know what RV meant, but it didn’t really matter. The overall price was two and a half million, not ‘just under a mil’. He was wasting his energy on an impossible dream. ‘I’m sorry,’ he said, ‘I don’t think we can do it.’

  ‘Fair enough, son,’ said Ron. ‘Only you can know that.’

  ‘What he means,’ said Rachel, pushing her glasses up on her nose, perhaps to hide the flare of dismay in her eyes, ‘is we’ll have to work through the figures.’

  ‘Sure,’ said Ron. ‘Your accountant and lawyer will have a lot of questions.’

  ‘Right,’ said Stan. He had neither accountant nor lawyer and no more questions.

  ‘If you give me your email, I’ll send everything through.’

  Stan didn’t have an email distinct from the Te Kurahau website, and he didn’t want anything going there. But what was the point sending anything through anyway? Before he could say so, Rachel gave her email address, care of the cafe, as their ‘point of contact’.

  Whoa! thought Stan, and rose abruptly to his feet.

  ‘Of course,’ said Wendy. ‘You’ve got a plane to catch.’

  Ron walked them to the car. Stan pulled open the door, which creaked with rust. Does this look like someone with two and a half million? he thought. But Ron seemed unperturbed. Said it was a big decision, and he was happy to give them a couple of weeks’ grace before he put the broker on the job. He’d prefer not to have to pay a broker’s fee.

  Stan drove back down the driveway to the glasshouses, then up to the road, his face tight with humiliation, not daring to look at Rachel or say a word.

  ***

  THE silence lasted all the way along the Old Coach Road ridge to the highway, then right around the coast until they were on the straight into Richmond. Stan was accustomed to Jackson saying very little, but when Stan caught a glimpse of the boy in the rear-vision mirror, he was clearly feeling the tension. Rachel had been studiously following the scenery, face turned away.

  Lester was right. Commerce had inserted its ugly maw into their relationship and Stan, instead of being full of love, was full of doubt. He should never have confided his windfall to Rachel. Had that influenced her departure from Te Kurahau? No, he had to remind himself, her departure – their affair – had pre-dated that money landing in his account. But that was what money did: made you suspicious of other people’s motives. And yet Rachel had said she knew what she wanted, and it was him. Stan wasn’t so sure that she
should be so certain. After Aaron’s tyranny of mood, he probably appealed as a salve. Stan suspected that the same weak and wounded quality in him that alienated the likes of Aaron and Will perhaps appealed to women like Rachel, who might need some respite from domineering masculinity. Who knew? He didn’t any more.

  Maybe the stakes were too high for them, even without the lettuces. Rachel had walked away from Te Kurahau, left her husband and her son. Stan wouldn’t have dared ask her to do such a thing, but she had. How long, though, before she began comparing him with Aaron’s sheer competence on every front? How long before she began resenting him for the separation from her son? And for losing everything she owned to Te Kurahau? Maybe their relationship had already run its course, a means to an end, a springboard to jump them out of Te Kurahau, for her to get out of her unhappy marriage? Might their closeness and empathy be a by-product of sharing their poor-me stories, where they could cling together in victimhood and a desire to escape?

  On the Richmond straight, she finally turned towards him, pushed up her glasses. He glanced across, found her eyes. She’d been crying. ‘I’m sorry if I was out of line back there.’

  ‘Two and a half million? We’re dreaming. We shouldn’t have left them hanging.’

  ‘It’s worth their wait,’ she said. ‘You know what the broker’s commission would be if they sold on the open market?’

  ‘No idea.’

  ‘Me neither. A lot, though. Hundred grand, maybe?’

  ‘But it’s fraudulent to let them believe we have any hope of raising that kind of money, isn’t it? Can you see us walking into a bank? Explaining to the manager where we’ve been for the last ten years? Why we’re going to be a great risk borrowing two mil to run a business when we know nothing about payrolls, GST . . . Fuck, we don’t even know what we don’t know!’

  Rachel stared out the window again, though it was flat and featureless now as the hedge-rowed paddocks dwindled and transitioned from rural to suburban. ‘We can learn. Ron will help set us up. We can pay someone to do what we can’t.’ She turned back towards him. ‘I can see us there, can’t you?’

  Stan shook his head, not in denial but in hopelessness. He had seen himself there. And he’d seen Rachel there with him. ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘That’s the trouble.’

  ‘I didn’t want to close off the possibility before we’d explored it properly. We don’t have to walk into a bank. There are investors around, the guys stumping up for the hops conversions. An American’s behind the big conversion down the road from the cafe. Maybe he’d be interested in a quicker return than he’d get waiting for the hops to mature.’

  ‘So we wouldn’t be our own bosses?’

  ‘Is anybody? Were we really our own bosses at Te Kurahau or just victims of group-think? I’m certainly not my own boss when I’m waitressing. Who’ll be the boss when we’re teaching? It’s more important that we’re doing something we value, and that we have a financial interest in its success. I love the thought of the lettuces, even if the cannabis never happens. Delivering our fresh produce around the area, connecting with people, being part of a wider community.’

  Stan made a left turn onto the Richmond by-pass, an ugly semi-industrial assault on their senses. Stan felt lost. Rachel’s hand reached out and covered his on the steering wheel. ‘It’s true that your money changes everything. It gives us a chance. I wish I had something to contribute. I wish I hadn’t put my share of the Tel Aviv apartment into Te Kurahau. I wish. I wish. But it’s your call, I accept that.’

  Stan didn’t reply, but his thoughts kept coming back to the opportunity for a new life. It was the right business. Ron had nurtured his outlets. He wasn’t dependent on one customer. He had a great operation, doing something that would give Stan and Rachel maximum satisfaction, whether it was conventional lettuces they grew or the devil’s. He needed to talk to someone who wasn’t Rachel.

  At the airport, he parked in the kiss-and-drop zone and grabbed his day-pack from the back, as Rachel moved across into the driver’s seat. Jackson was already out, waiting patiently with his kete. What the fuck would he be making of all of this? ‘Your books are in the back, Rach.’

  She adjusted her glasses. ‘That sounds ominous.’

  ‘Nah,’ he said, leaning in to kiss her.

  ‘We never got to do that.’ She smiled.

  ‘What?’

  ‘That.’

  ‘Too busy agonising about money.’

  ‘We won’t make that mistake again,’ she said, her open palm caressing his cheek. ‘Love to your dad and the family I’ve never met.’

  ***

  INSIDE the terminal, they sat in plastic chairs and watched the departures board tick over. Stan tried to convince himself he could find satisfaction in teaching, that if he taught as he preferred to, responding to the pupils, not being too directive, it could be a lot like growing a plant. He grimaced, hearing Rachel telling him the simile sucked. His mind drifted back to money. He asked Jackson what sort of return the marijuana in Auckland had brought in. ‘I’m not interested in where the money went,’ Stan clarified, ‘just how much it got on the open market.’

  ‘Dunno,’ said Jackson. ‘My sis got rid of it. Ellie said Lila could keep what she made and use it to build wheelchair access for Mum.’

  It was the first time Jackson had mentioned his mother. It was always Lila. Stan wanted to ask what had happened. Presumably the wheelchair was a recent development? There were questions there to be asked, but Jackson’s mobile buzzed. He instinctively stood, to help reception, and pressed the phone to his ear. After no more than a few seconds, the kete dropped from his other hand onto the polished lino. Stan picked it up. It was empty, apart from a desiccated flower of some kind. Maybe a rose, thought Stan, judging from the thorny stem.

  Jackson looked stricken as he gave the mobile to Stan. ‘It’s Ellie.’

  ***

  ENGAGING with the outside world was one thing. Auckland was another. The isthmus looked like it was nesting in an oil slick, both harbours gun-metal grey with an oleaginous patina where shafts of sunlight penetrated the low cloud and struck the water. Stan looked down and felt sick. Auckland was, as always, something he had to wade through. Somehow, he had to get to the other side, the flight out.

  The arrivals entrance broke in front of him, swinging back like drafting doors in a sheepyard. He looked up and there was Ellie, standing beside a row of men in grey suits holding signs. She turned, saw them, ran across. Stan had time to think that she looked different, longer hair, taller – though that couldn’t be. She was beaming, that was the word. She looked as if she’d lost weight, a psychological shedding as much as a physical one, as if she’d broken out of a carapace. When she hugged him, she smelt like citrus, she smelt like the best part of coming home. When she pushed him back to arms’ length to look at him, she saw his tears and assumed they were for their father. Her eyes filled then. Den had been in a coma for the last twenty-four hours of his life. ‘The doctor said he might still be able to hear, so I told him we loved him. I told him you were coming.’

  Stan pulled her close again, not wanting to say anything to betray himself, or let her see something in his eyes that might have told her his tears were for her, and for his mother. Still.

  Ellie turned to Jackson with outstretched arms. He seemed to stand passively in her embrace, holding his kete, and Stan was worried that Ellie was embarrassing the boy, until he saw Jackson’s face over her shoulder, an enormous smile, his eyes half closed in rapture.

  ***

  ‘I’M parked over there.’ She pointed to the far side of the drop-off area, which she was scanning. ‘But Lila said she’d be here.’

  Jackson nudged her arm and directed her towards the far end of the drop-off zone, where two figures were locked in verbal conflict on the footpath beside a silver Prius. Stan could hear the raised voices, particularly that of a young woman, y
elling in the face of a traffic warden. ‘Oh shit,’ muttered Jackson and hurried towards her. ‘Hey sis!’

  Lila immediately abandoned the warden to run towards them on dangerous-looking high heels. She looked a helluva lot more upmarket than when Stan had last seen her, a twitchy twig with a shaven head doing her hip-hop schtick at his father’s birthday. She was wearing a sheepskin coat with a big wool collar over some sort of mini-skirt. The thought came to him: that’s where the marijuana money went. That’s okay, he told himself, it wasn’t mine. When she reached Jackson, Lila launched herself at him and they twirled as she kissed him. The warden, still watching, thought this a pantomime of major proportions. ‘Nice try!’ he yelled.

  Lila gave him the fingers. This was obviously Jackson’s first view of his sister’s transformation. He was shaking his head in wonder. ‘Jeez, sis, you’re looking–’

  ‘Just Karen fucking Walker!’ said Lila, doing another twirl, holding out her coat so Jackson could see her shimmering skirt and top.

  ‘Uber aren’t permitted to pick up passengers here,’ said the warden. ‘You can drop off, but not–’

  ‘Tell this arsehole,’ said Lila to Jackson, ‘that you’re my brother and I’m taking you home for nothing, for love.’

  ‘She’s my sis,’ began Jackson, dutifully.

  ‘They’re brother and sister,’ said Ellie. ‘I can vouch for them.’

  ‘And I suppose you’re related too,’ said the warden.

  Stan half expected Ellie to have a go at the man – the old Ellie would have – but this new, less combative version just smiled politely. ‘I’m parked over there,’ she said, indicating the squat concrete building at the other side of the crossing. ‘So why don’t you do your job and move on.’

  The warden, a middle-aged man who had probably seen better jobs, couldn’t resist a last rejoinder before taking Ellie’s advice. ‘Why don’t you all just get in your cars and fuck off.’