Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  ‘Millions,’ said Branko, quite correctly. He’d just used the Flame Inc. umbrella to produce a documentary about his early Dalmatian forebears who had come here to dig for kauri gum up north and fallen in love with Māori women – a stunningly handsome genetic mix. He had this theory about television, which had seemed so cynical when he’d first espoused it: you tell the audience what you’re about to show them, then you show them what you’ve just talked about, then you tell them what they’ve just seen. The documentary he made on exactly those principles was a ratings success, not on the global scale of Lord of the Rings, of course, but there seemed to be a synergy between what he and Peter Jackson did, recycling the same endlessly repetitive tropes. Not that I saw all the movies. I went to the second LOTR to try and prove to myself that my reaction to the first one had been a jaundiced off-moment between me and the zeitgeist. But it was worse, if anything, redeemed only by the introduction of a character called Gollum, who at least had two dimensions. When I found myself wishing fervently that he’d wipe those big-eared, hairy-footed self-satisfied little cretins from the face of Middle Earth, I realised that there was no hope for me and my time in advertising was about done.

  I couldn’t bring myself to go near the final movie of the trilogy, the one that won all the Oscars. I could have looked at that kind of success and asked myself, ‘What have I done? Where has my taste and discretion taken me?’, and tried to learn from the experience, get my finger back on the populist pulse. But, I was fifty-something, still hurting from the loss of Carol, and couldn’t be fucked.

  Which reminds me. I’m well shot of it, my testosterone. Insidious, insistent, it constantly undermined my intelligence and good intentions. I sometimes miss the mindless drive, the excitement of the chase, the filling weight of blood in my penis, but it always came at such a cost and was much diminished, strangely enough, after Carol died and I was free to do what, in all honesty, I had always done. Whoever said that guilt heightened the pleasure, might have been half right. Will’s lips are moving. He must be talking to me.

  ‘I don’t mean to be antsy, Den,’ he is saying. I can’t remember when he last called me Dad. Maybe before he came to work at Flame, when he was sixteen or seventeen. Calling me Dad around the production office wouldn’t have been cool. ‘Leaving Claudia wasn’t easy. Hasn’t been easy.’ He’s facing the garden, more like bush, that begins at the eastern end of the deck, behind me, beyond a cute wooden fence and gate. He sees something that alarms him, and whispers to me, ‘You carrying your phone, Den? Don’t make it obvious but slip it to me.’

  I unlock the iPhone with my fingerprint, and palm it to Will. ‘Why the cloak and dagger?’

  When I try to turn towards whatever he’s looking at, he holds me by the shoulder. ‘Don’t move, keep me covered . . .’

  ‘What’re you doing?’

  ‘Dialling 111.’ He does so, then, with his phone to his ear, he steps to the side of me and holds his hand up towards the garden. ‘Stop right there,’ he shouts. ‘I’m talking to the cops!’

  I swing round to see who he’s talking to and quickly grab the phone out of his hand.

  ‘F’chrissakes!’

  Jackson is standing at the garden gate. Will’s clearly made some quick value judgements on the key elements he sees in front of him – an obviously part-Māori sixteen-year-old in T-shirt and reversed baseball cap, carrying a tomahawk. I suppose Jackson could look a bit out of context and vaguely threatening if he didn’t also have an armful of dry branches. Jackson is as alarmed by Will as Will is by him and looks to me. ‘What’s up, Mr D?’

  ‘Jackson, this is my eldest, William. Will, Jackson.’

  ‘Someone Jackson, or Jackson Someone?’

  ‘Jackson Collins,’ says the boy.

  ‘Works for West Indian cricketers,’ I offer. My favourite double surname was Grayson Shillingford, but Vanburn Holder and the incomparable Garfield Sobers also had a grandeur about them.

  ‘I was named after a league player,’ he says.

  ‘Of course you were,’ says Will.

  ‘Don’t be a tit all your life, Will,’ says Ellie, arriving. ‘Jackson, we’ve been worried about you.’

  ‘I haven’t,’ says Will.

  ‘Where’ve you been?’ Ellie asks.

  As if in answer, another figure steps out from the grass pathway that winds its way through Carol’s garden. She’s dressed tough-arse in black, torn stockings, Doc Martens, like a cross between Goth and punk, with a big black coat hanging open, showing a white T-shirt with a graphic of Keith Richards displaying his own chest with ‘Who the Fuck is Mick Jagger?’ scrawled across the front. Underneath all that, there doesn’t look to be much of her. She’s got Jackson’s skinny face and build, wiry and wound like a cord. ‘This’s my older sister, Lila,’ says Jackson. ‘Say hello, Lila.’

  Lila looks suspiciously at her brother. ‘You sure?’

  Jackson looks at Ellie. ‘I’se gunna check it out with you if she could come over.’

  ‘I wish you had,’ says Ellie. ‘One of the department’s conditions is that you have no contact with your family.’

  ‘Lila’s sweet, miss,’ says Jackson.

  Lila looks anything but sweet, but Jackson’s embarrassed and Ellie’s clearly conflicted, so while her better nature struggles to assert itself, I jump in. ‘Fine! More the merrier!’

  ‘Of course,’ confirms Ellie. ‘Welcome, Lila.’

  Jackson ushers his sister in front of him and says he’ll get the pizza oven going with the kindling he’s collected, and Lila can give him a hand. We watch them cross to the big outdoor fireplace. Watch Lila grab a fistful of finger food from the table as she passes. Watch her wolf it.

  ‘Help yourself,’ mutters Will. ‘Make yourself at home. What the fuck is going on here?’

  Ellie explains that she has offered to take troubled kids on respite placement, if the department can’t find anywhere else for them.

  ‘They? Them? How many–?’

  ‘Jackson’s our third short-term foster.’

  ‘Thought this was a strictly family gathering.’

  ‘Which begs the question of Georgie’s presence,’ I reply.

  ‘Please, you two,’ says Ellie. ‘Jackson’s family, for the moment. We’re fostering him while his own family’s in crisis.’

  ‘What sort of crisis?’

  ‘His father’s been in jail for beating up his mother. Jackson’s been in care on and off since he was eight, when his grandmother died.’

  Will smells a rat. ‘On and off? C’mon, what’d he do this time?’

  Ellie shrugs as if she doesn’t know or it doesn’t matter, but Will is insistent. Ellie says that he set fire to his school, which is news to me.

  ‘Arson?’ says Will, turning to watch Jackson feeding the branches he’s collected into the smouldering pizza oven.

  ‘They caught it in time,’ she says. ‘There wasn’t much damage.’

  ‘Good news all round then,’ says Will. ‘Should he be anywhere near that oven?’

  ‘He’s sixteen,’ pleads Ellie, ‘right on the cusp. Any more trouble in the next six months and he’ll be old enough to have a criminal conviction and go to prison, instead of a youth justice residence. Another lost boy. Not if I can help it.’

  Ellie was a social worker before she came home to me, whenever that was – two years ago? Could be four. She said she’d had enough. Compassion fatigue, she said. Was that just for my benefit? Ellie’s compassion seems inexhaustible. I support her, tell Will that Jackson is a good kid. ‘Better behaved than you were.’ That was a mistake.

  ‘When were you around to notice?’ asks Will.

  Ellie leaps to my defence. ‘Oh, give it a rest, Will, for God’s sake. These are kids who have nothing!’

  I wasn’t going to cast the first stone, but now it’s done. I pout, stamp my foot, tell
him it’s my party and I’ll have who I want. It’s a joke.

  ‘Sure,’ says Will, with not even a ghost of a smile. ‘I’ll go put some clothes on, so I can leave when I want.’

  He takes his towel and walks off towards the house. Not happy. Ellie excuses herself and heads across to Jackson and his sister, not happy. I stand there, sipping champagne I don’t want at a birthday celebration I don’t want. So far, so good. Normal family service resumed.

  ***

  THE light has slunk off behind the alders and eucalypts lining the western boundary. When I look back towards the house, I notice for the first time plants growing out of the spouting. They must have appeared over the winter; no wonder there were waterfalls from the roof in the rainstorms. Then I catch a flash of yellow on the balcony of my room upstairs. Georgie having a nosey round the house.

  Oh well, I used to do the same when I went out. Medicine cabinets were particularly interesting. That rich, suave couple serving drinks and canapés downstairs, he the perfect, relaxed mine host, she the happy hostess with the mostest? A medicine cabinet with large bottles of two different SSRIs, sertraline and citalopram, might betray them. Who’d have thought? If Georgie ventures into my en-suite, there’ll be no surprises. You’d look at me and say amlodipine for blood pressure and statins for sure, but unless you saw my disfigured big toe in a sandal, you might not plump for allopurinol, nor perhaps paroxetine. I resisted the anti-depressants for a long time, until I had no further use for what I called writer’s melancholia. I used to think it gave me an edge, an occasional discomfort with the world, an insight that I might not otherwise have had, similar to but different from the insights I got from cocaine and booze. Then being depressed just got boring and a waste of time, as time began to run out. I’d sold my share of Flame to Will, so the pressure was off, I didn’t have to come up with any more concepts, sixty-second narratives with commercial cut-through. That was our schtick to begin with: a boutique agency with its own production arm, the one-stop bullshit shop, Branko called it. I came up with the copy, began directing, Branko produced. Dream it, pitch it, shoot it. As long as Georgie doesn’t go into my roll-top and discover Walter. Where did I put that half-smoked joint?

  I look across to Jackson, still feeding the fire, as Ellie talks to him and Lila. Jackson has a long visage, an old man’s face atop his scrawny body. Lugubrious, until he grins, when the length of his face splits, and you see beautiful teeth, a credit, Ellie says, to his grandmother, who raised him in poverty and loving care before she died. But arson? Now there’s a word with a bit of cut-through.

  ***

  IN the gloaming, the pool looks luminous, as if the water is giving light back to slow the darkening of the sky. We’ll have half an hour before the mozzies arrive and need the torches lit to help keep them at bay. I grab the oversized matches from beside the fire and head over to the nearest bracket. In passing, I hear Ellie suggesting to Lila that she must be hot, can she take her coat?

  ‘I’m good,’ says Lila.

  Ellie offers her a glass of iced water.

  ‘Can I have one of those?’ asks Lila, indicating the wine glasses.

  ‘Sure,’ says Ellie, ‘white or red?’

  ‘Red makes my teeth turn purple.’ Lila takes a white, unscrews the top and pours herself a full glass. She swallows most of it. Ellie is looking at Jackson.

  ‘I’ll give you a hand, Mr D,’ says Jackson, looking to escape.

  He takes the first bamboo torch from its bracket and holds it while I strike the match and light the paraffin wick. By the time Jackson is replacing the torch in its bracket, Ellie has joined us. There’s an intense sotto voce between Ellie and Jackson as we work our way from torch to torch round the perimeter of the deck. I don’t catch it all but I know Jackson’s back story – or thought I knew it before Ellie dropped the arson word – so it’s easy to piece together her concern about Lila turning up here.

  Ellie is careful to fill me in on the kids who come for respite so I can make an ‘informed decision’, though we both know I have no say in these matters. If I did, I would tell Ellie that ‘respite’ is a myth perpetrated by do-gooders. These kids have to go back to their world, sooner rather than later. And when they do, they carry with them a knowledge they may not have had before, of a world they can never aspire to or access. How can that help them reconcile themselves to their lives? The art of advertising was to tantalise people with the possible, not flaunt the impossible. We at least tried to give people the key to realise a dream – buy this, be that. No good will come of rubbing these kids’ noses in a smorgasbord of comforts they can never have. But to say that to Ellie would be cruel. People need to believe what they need to believe, and it’s altruism that makes Ellie tick. I’d meddle with that to my own detriment, given that I’m her prime project. But at least I belong here.

  Jackson is here ‘in respite’ from a brutal father, recently released from jail. Who was incarcerated for beating Jackson’s mother with a lump of half-burnt wood from the grate, causing injuries that kept her in intensive care for several days. When she wouldn’t or couldn’t go to the cops, Jackson did. Stood in a witness box behind a screen, fourteen years old, and got his father three years inside. Now his old man’s out, after eighteen months, on ‘good behaviour’. Eighteen months during which a prison visit by his mother and Lila wasn’t complete without a threat against Jackson, who never went. The son who ‘narked’ on him and put him away was going to be ‘dealt to’. The father’s warnings were carried back to Jackson by his sister. How the authorities could know he was threatening his son, yet still let him out, I’ve no idea.

  That’s Ellie’s version of Jackson’s story, anyway. Which I now wonder if she might have finessed to make it more compelling for me. I don’t know. I can’t say no to Ellie any more, whatever she tells me, but I’m not sure she knows that.

  So here he lives, with us, in ‘temporary respite’, till what? What’s going to change in Jackson’s world? I don’t ask, but I can see Ellie’s concern that Lila now knows where her brother is. The father could beat that knowledge out of her, and then, according to Ellie, he will come for the boy.

  As we work around to the torches along the back of the pool, Jackson’s voice rises in defence of his sister. I can hear the high bleat of his pleading: ‘He’s burnt her with the pipe, miss.’ I gradually piece it together: it’s a meth pipe, and the father has been torturing Lila with it to find the address of her brother.

  That leads to an interrogation by Ellie as to whether Lila’s on P. Jackson denies it, says it’s just his dad.

  I look back across the pool towards his twitchy sister in the black coat, downing another glass of that god-awful gooseberry juice, Marlborough sauvignon blanc. What a crime against vini-culture, when the same terroir, my own home soil, grows wonderful chardonnay and pinot noir. Lila projects a kind of fierce vulner-ability: if she’s challenged she’ll either blow your lights out or burst into tears.

  I don’t hear everything Jackson says, but Ellie seems reassured. I’m not. I think about intervening, but to say what? Chuck them both out, return them to their own world and to the certain and, surely, brutal revenge of their father? If what Ellie says is true, I don’t want that on my head. I don’t have any idea what Jackson’s world looks like, but Ellie does. More than a decade as a front-line social worker with beaten mothers and vulnerable children in parts of this city I’ve never seen, before she came home to look after me. So I defer to her experience, of course I do. But what good can come of it? None. Yet good is what Ellie does.

  Lila is standing with her bum to the fire, looking right at me, right through me. The look says she knows how the dynamics work here: Watch it, you old cunt, I’m on to you.

  ***

  I FIND myself following Stan through Carol’s garden, along the winding grass track, all that is left of the once expansive lawn. When we moved into this house in ’78, she to
ld me lawns were a waste of nature’s time and energy and began planting until, within a decade, the grass was almost all gone.

  It’s too dark now to see Carol’s garden in all its glory. It looks magical in full spring light and utterly transcendent in the hour before sunset. That was often a time of suppressed panic for me on set when I and the DOP would be trying to milk every moment of the soft amber light, while Branko would be more worried about the schedule and completing the day. Earlier this evening, I caught that light perfectly in my final production, shot on my mobile. I feel for the USB in the pocket of my Rainbird and remind myself to try to stay in the present, because there’s not a lot more of it left for me.

  I was looking away from Lila’s stare, desperate for a change of focus, when I saw Stan, standing there at the garden gate, quietly beckoning me. God knows how long he’d been there, surveying the scene. Knowing Stan, quite some time – he’s never been one for the grand entrance.

  ‘Follow me,’ he said.

  I did, his long tramper’s strides. He’s got Carol’s length of leg, with stringy muscle. The garden is only about fifty paces from end to end, but the meandering track must add half that number again. There are roses on either side, many in bloom. How Carol could distinguish the fragrance of the Abraham Darby from the others, I’ve no idea. I do know that, along the borders of the track, are phlox, bearded irises, violets, larkspurs, granny bonnets and lupins. And there are many more, all, at least to my eye, exactly as Carol had them, the flowers mixed with herbs – sage, rosemary, chamomile – and at the back near the fence the big melia tree, where Stan’s umbilical cord is buried alongside those of Will and Ellie. Should I remind Stan of the historical significance of the tree whose newly leaf-laden branches we’re now passing under? I have a feeling he wouldn’t thank me, and say nothing. The main track leads to another wooden gate, which delivers you down some steps to the parking bay and double garage, but Stan turns onto a smaller track off to the left and we pass through a small grove of ponga and mamaku tree ferns guarding the north-east corner of the garden, where we stop in front of three citrus trees and a feijoa.