Necessary Secrets
Page 27
‘He could have avoided it all! He wanted to. He had a plan, which Will took away from him.’
Ellie shook her head, hopelessly, and the tears spilled as she did so, as if a glass inside her had been tipped. ‘He’s gone. Let him go.’
But he couldn’t let Will go. ‘And he’s selling meth.’
‘I think so,’ she sniffled.
‘I can’t take his money.’
‘Yelena thinks you won’t have to.’
Stan felt as if he was being stonewalled by the person who had always spoken truth to him. There was something he wasn’t getting, some subterranean change he couldn’t read. Ellie had done a moral somersault, from being Will’s accusing conscience to his apologist. What had happened to her? He hardly needed to ask. ‘He’s got something on you,’ he said.
She didn’t bother to deny it. ‘You don’t need to know.’
‘But it’s something.’
‘In the end, he’s my brother, like you.’
‘I didn’t burn my family home down to rort Mum’s will, I didn’t condemn my father to die in agony, I don’t make a living out of selling amphetamine to addicts!’
She looked away, to the rose garden, those little buttonhole roses, the only flowers in the middle of winter. When she looked back at him, her face had gone limp, as if she’d given up fighting something inside. ‘Cone of silence?’ It was a plea, more than a question.
Stan looked up at the bare branches of the melia, its bones outstretched in silent supplication to the grey sky. ‘No,’ he said. ‘I don’t want to know.’
He didn’t look at Ellie, and it took a while for her to speak, and when she did, she sounded beaten. ‘Most friends have a shelf life, Stan. Lovers don’t always last, social circles change, governments get voted out, empires rise and fall. But families are forever, good or bad.’
‘Sounds like a mafia manifesto,’ he said.
‘Was that a joke?’ she asked. ‘Look at me!’
When he did, he was already sorry for his flippancy. She looked wild-eyed and lost.
‘There are truths and lies we have to live with,’ she said. ‘And necessary secrets.’
He thought of his own recent experience at Te Kurahau, his secrets, kept from those who had sustained him for most of his adult life.
‘Don’t cast us adrift, Stan,’ she implored him. ‘Don’t cast me adrift. I may have made a terrible mistake, but don’t forsake me. Please.’
He felt his heart turning. Her distress rocked him. What right did he have to sit in judgement on the sister who had saved him? He was in the act of breaking a marriage, of separating a nine- year-old boy from his mother. How could he of all people be party to that? Then there was his dishonourable exit from Te Kurahau, turning his back on his second family as soon as he scored some serious money. Doing a runner with the dough. Glasshouses weren’t just for lettuces.
He remembered the central tenet on the A3 pinned to the wall above Lester and Penny’s dining table: We accept all human beings as our brothers and our sisters and choose to behave towards them with love . . . He’d always considered the profound beauty of that aspiration to be its inclusiveness: everyone was your brother, everyone was your sister. And yet how could you aspire to love humanity but not your own kith and kin? His blood brother might be a step too far, but he was freezing out his sister by birth, his sister by life, his sister who had saved him.
There was a new world coming, and his day in Auckland had given him some indication of the challenges it would bring. Could he embrace the new and still hold on to the best of the old? He didn’t know. What he did know was his love for his sister. He stooped and held Ellie in his arms. ‘Sorry, sis,’ he said. ‘Sorry.’
When he held her away to see if she’d stopped crying, she was wiping away tears. ‘It’s all good,’ she said, trying to smile. ‘It’s all good.’
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
My gratitude to Suzy Butler, John Daniell, Dr Jeffrey Fetherston, Fertility Associates, Timothy Giles, Chris Hampson, Sir Bob Harvey, Dennis Hitchcock, Irma Jager, Dr Darryn Joseph, Linda McDougall, Michael and Caroline McGee, Patricia McGee, Mary McGee and Creative NZ.
And, as ever and in particular, I’m indebted to the upstanding, dedicated little team at Upstart Press, Kevin Chapman and Warren Adler, and to my editor, Anna Rogers.
The quote on page 16 is from Helen Garner’s essay ‘White Paint & Calico’, collected in Everywhere I Look, published by Text Publishing – thank you Helen and Text.
On page 19, ‘They fuck you up, your mum and dad’ is from Philip Larkin’s ‘This Be The Verse’.
On page 54, ‘May God bless and keep you always, May your wishes all come true’ is from Bob Dylan’s ‘Forever Young’.
On page 106, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the magic hour boss’ is based on the line from Dylan Thomas’ ‘Do Not Go Gentle into That Good Night’.
On page 143, the verse is from John Keats’ ode ‘To Autumn’.
On page 285, the line Into the distance, a ribbon of black . . . is from Pink Floyd’s ‘Learning to Fly’.