Necessary Secrets

by Greg McGee

  Ellie, bless her, tries to seize the moment, tells Will and Stan that she’s trying to do the right thing here. ‘I can’t affect what’s happening beyond the garden gate, but I’m trying to do what I can within this tiny world I can control. Make enough money to cover expenses while doing some good.’

  I presume she means the fostering of the likes of Jackson, though she doesn’t get into specifics, which is just as well, because Jackson and Lila are now huddled together over by the fire, trying not to hear our frenzied sotto voce. Will is being provocative, telling Ellie that he appreciates her enterprise.

  ‘It’s not a fucking enterprise. I’m trying to save us money!’

  ‘It is an enterprise and you’re costing us money. You’re looking at it the wrong way round, Ellie. The return on our capital asset you’re getting from fostering waifs and strays is so low that we are in effect subsidising you and your good deeds. Is that fair?’

  There, he’s said the magic word. If Jackson and Lila didn’t hear that, they certainly hear what follows, because Ellie’s reached tipping point and blazes at Will, calls him a selfish, scheming shit.

  ‘Love you too, sis,’ says Will equably.

  ‘You’re an opportunist, just using this situation to justify your greed.’

  ‘How do you think the world works, Ellie?’

  ‘It’s not fucking working!’ screams Ellie. ‘It’s not! Fucking! Working! Are you blind?’

  I look away, towards Jackson and Lila. Will might be impervious to Ellie’s pain and fury, but none of the rest of us are, as Will tells her she’s living in her own little echo chamber, running round after me, making pocket money out of the house as a foster home for young wastrels.

  Ellie belatedly tries to keep her voice down. ‘They’re guests here. How dare you try to embarrass them.’

  ‘They need a reality check too.’

  Ellie tells Will in a furious whisper that by any test of civilisation and humanity he’s a barbarian. ‘This is a home and it’s not your fucking capital asset until either Dad dies or he sells it – and that’ll be over my dead body!’

  Stan goes to hug his sister, but she pulls away, turns her back on us and heads across to Jackson and Lila. I can see her as much as hear her asking them to help her clear the table. Both of them seem grateful to put some distance between themselves and the rest of us.

  Stan stands awkwardly, looking after Ellie, grimacing. ‘The remorseless logic of the neo-liberal creed,’ he says, presumably to Will. ‘Funny how some people just don’t get it, eh?’

  The irony is wasted on Will. ‘Tell me about it,’ he says.

  Ellie comes back, red-eyed, sniffling. She bleakly surveys us and the detritus of the meal, our family celebration of my seventieth and last year on this earth. ‘Mum once told me,’ she says, ‘that she fantasised about setting this place alight, burning it down.’

  I’m stunned. ‘Her own home?’

  ‘Why on earth would she want to do that?’ asks Will.

  Ellie looks at him with a pure hatred. ‘The symbol of her repression, she said, the ties that bind, the harness and the whip.’

  It’s a suitably miserable end note. I don’t know where I am any more. My world has tipped. I was never more than a two-glass philosopher, even better on a full bottle, but I believed the hype, that I was part of perhaps the first existential generation, refusing to be defined by those who went before, by nurture, by class, by family or by circumstance. Yet here I am, captive to my progeny, mired in a desperate hierarchical struggle with my pride, like some old lion on the savannah losing control of his teeth, sinew and power. It’s clear that I’ll have to go.

  ***

  IT’S late, way past ten, when I climb back into my eyrie. I’m usually asleep by 9.30, awake at 11.30, asleep by 12 if I’m lucky, awake by 2.30, and so on, until dawn, when I’m exhausted by my nocturnal micturitions and need a couple more hours. I do wonder about the merits of having the en-suite so close. Sometimes I don’t actually feel like a pee but think that if I don’t make the effort to get up and empty my bladder, it’ll wake me in an hour anyway – in the event that I fall asleep, that is. I might lie awake for another hour or more, then feel I have to repeat the exercise in case I do, eventually, fall asleep. My deepest sleep is my afternoon nap, just for half an hour. When I come to, there are those wonderful few moments, when I’m no longer an old man with a black room waiting, no longer . . . anything, really, just a pure, unfettered, age-neutral cloud of me-ness. Until reality kicks in. Tonight, reality has kicked me in the head. I feel groggy, not sleepy. Acrimony at least made it easier to say ‘Goodnight’ instead of ‘Goodbye’ to my children as I took my leave and made my way across the big room to the stairs.

  By instinct I go to my kauri roll-top because I know it has everything I need. There’s a moment of panic when I open the top right drawer, then I remember my cunning plan. Both the things I need are in the big concertina box-file on the bottom shelf, under W, for Walter obviously, but also, and this is the cunning part, for M upside down, which is where my head was at when the idea came to me. Walter and the marijuana are the keys to facing the future, the few minutes that are left of it, with equanimity. I shrug into my Rainbird, in case the weather is inclement where I’m going.

  I know there’s a black room waiting for me. The exact dimensions may have changed from the first time I was in it: it’s so dark I can’t tell. On my stag night, I was off my head, dead drunk in this club. My so-called mates left me comatose in a room out the back where the band warmed up. This, I found out later, had been completely soundproofed, no light, one blacked-out door. I woke up sick as a dog in a black void – completely black, not a shard of light, no sound. I thought I might be dead. I was terrified, I’d never felt such fear. Couldn’t find the door, couldn’t get out. It might have been only five or ten minutes, but that’s a long time to be immersed in cold terror. But what awaits me promises to be so much worse.

  I’d been planning to tell the family my secret tonight. But Georgie’s presence and the ‘discussion’ about the sale of the house overtook any wish to reveal my news. In that context, sharing Dr Jeetan’s diagnosis might have seemed opportunistic, it might have sounded pathetic, as if I was pulling the old tear-jerker out of my back pocket, a poor-me play. Or Will might have seen it as a weakness to exploit. Fuck them.

  When Dr Jeetan suggested a precautionary brain scan, I asked him what it would be looking for. He tried to obfuscate, told me it was just part of a diligent diagnostic process.

  I didn’t buy that. ‘Towards what end?’ I asked.

  He’s a young man, Dr Jeetan, did I say that? Though ‘young’ is comparative these days: everyone is young. When I die tonight, I will have died ‘young’ in comparison with the soaring longevity of my generation. Anyway, Dr Jeetan’s capacity to empathise was not prejudiced by his youth. Clearly he could imagine my fear at what he might find, and it was that perspicacity and resulting reluctance to tell me more that really got me worried, as he stared long and hard at me through his silver-rimmed glasses. Finally he took them off, as if he didn’t want to have a clear view of me when the bad news hit. He said the scan would reveal, or not – preferably not – what he called multi-infarct dementia, which he explained as a series of mini-strokes, often called silent strokes, so small I don’t even feel them. Each time it happens, it kills another piece of my brain – though that’s my interpretation, not his exact words. As he talked, I began picturing these little dots of dead material in my head, gradually connecting, black spots of dead synapses, slowly spreading in 3D like a mad pointillist’s vision. A slow death. Dr Jeetan didn’t say that either, but what other conclusion can there be? There’s seemingly nothing I can do, no virtuous circle I can belatedly join, to stop these unfelt lightning bolts in my head. They will continue, randomly, arbitrarily, creating dead matter where living tissue used to be. I asked him as calmly as I could h
ow much I would know about where I was going. Would I know where I was and why I was there?

  He pulled out his avuncular chuckle, the one no doubt designed to assuage fear, and gently chastised me for jumping to conclusions which had, at present, no empirical diagnostic basis without a ‘confirmatory MRI’. I know language if nothing else: Dr Jeetan may not have noticed his movement from ‘precautionary brain scan’ to ‘confirmatory MRI’, but I did. And inside my imploding brain, I already know. When the past informs the present, you can feel confident of the future, take comfort in a sense of continuity. That seems to be my dilemma: my past is going, piecemeal but relentlessly – some of it already gone – until I am finally and completely lost in that black room without past or future. And this time, there will be no escape.

  Other than Walter, of course. The advantage of instant death is that I’ll become invisible, remembered as I was, rather than observable in my decline: muddled, befuddled, incontinent, a seventy-year-old toddler barely able to walk and talk, terrified of what he no longer understands . . . If I put the barrel to my temple, thus, aim backwards, surely the percussion of the bullet won’t pop an eye.

  ‘Party not go well then?’

  Jesus! I turn on her, startled. ‘Don’t do that!’

  ‘What, you might have pressed the trigger? I’d be doing you a favour, wouldn’t I?’

  How much does she know? Can she read my thoughts? She’s dressed as before, as ever, that summer print, looking gorgeous. I wave Walter around, struggling for the words I need to say to her. ‘There were things came up tonight, Carol. From the past. Embarrassing moments.’

  ‘There were a few of them,’ she concedes. ‘Which ones are we talking about?’

  ‘I don’t want to be specific, but I want to make sure you know that I’m sorry.’

  ‘A non-specific apology?’

  ‘A generic apology, yes.’

  ‘A generic acceptance then.’ She smiles.

  ‘Really?’

  ‘Yes, if that makes it easier. So . . .’ Her voice softens. ‘This could be the moment, Den?’

  I nod, nudge Walter against my temple. This is it.

  ‘Might be very good timing,’ she says. ‘In terms of the travel arrangements. Everyone’s here anyway for your birthday. Convenient.’

  I look at her. She’s still smiling. Her eyes are crinkling, which is supposed to be a sign of sincerity. I’m not so sure. ‘Thanks.’

  ‘You’re welcome.’

  For all her enthusiasm, it seems wrong to do it in front of her. She doesn’t deserve such grisly horror after what she’s been through. Would this be one other thing I’d have to apologise for? ‘Are you sure you don’t mind?’

  ‘When did my minding ever matter?’

  Aha! ‘You haven’t forgiven . . .’

  ‘Forgiving doesn’t mean forgetting, Den. How can I unremember?’

  The thought comes to me that I won’t have to unremember anything, if I stay alive. It’ll all be done for me, like a hard disk being reformatted. Slowly. In small, arbitrary patches. How much does she know about that? I should give her an opportunity to reveal herself. I open my arms to her. ‘Look at me. I’m fucking disgusting. The tyranny of age.’

  She laughs. Chortles. Head thrown back, brown eyes sparkling. ‘Not exactly an uplifting sight!’

  That’s certainly sincere! I’m a bit miffed, tell her it doesn’t become her, this chortling at my degeneration, but I lie: it does. She looks happy, at peace with the world. That pisses me off more. I get a vision of Branko with his young wife, what he was grappling with. Carol and I now are even more disparate in ages than they were then: my seventy to her forty-two. I can certainly see why these big age-difference relationships don’t work.

  ‘You always behaved as if you were immortal,’ she says, her smile leaving her. ‘Guess what?’

  Did I ever really think that? That I was never going to die? That I would live forever? I can’t remember ever giving it much thought. It just sat there, my eventual demise, a deal that couldn’t be renegotiated, finessed, derailed, gamed. There was no one to pay, to swindle, to persuade, who could stop it from happening, so what was the point of even thinking about it? But now it’s here. And Carol is already there. ‘One thing–’

  ‘Shoot.’

  ‘Ho fucking ho.’ But it works, I lower the pistol. ‘Since you’re here, there’s something I need to ask you. How does death work? Is there a God, for instance? Heaven?’ I gulp. ‘Hell?’

  ‘If self-euthanasia is so courageous and right, why should you want reassurance before you do it?’

  ‘What I’m asking is whether you’re my proof that there’s an afterlife?’

  ‘If I’m a figment of your imagination, the only thing I’m proof of is that you’ve lost it completely.’

  ‘Don’t play these games with me!’

  I must look as distressed as I feel, because she sits down in front of me, quite close, tells me she’s not here to deflect me or divert me from doing whatever I must do. Close enough to touch. I can smell her aroma, that Chanel number whatever, mixed up with something muskier, something I associate with the heat she always radiated for me. ‘I have another question. A last question.’

  ‘Will this hurt?’

  ‘Only me,’ I reassure her. ‘All I did, those hurts, those things for which–’

  ‘You’ve apologised generically.’

  ‘Yes. Did you ever stop loving me? I mean, I can understand it if you did, but–?’

  She looks at me for what seems far too long to gather any good news. ‘I wanted to,’ she says. ‘Tried to.’

  ‘But you couldn’t – you loved me!’ I don’t mean to seize on it like a triumphant athlete, but I do.

  ‘I did,’ she says.

  ‘You do!’

  ‘Why is that important to you now, when it never seemed to be then?’

  ‘I was young.’

  ‘Not always. But foolish, yes.’

  We’re very close. I’m still holding Walter, but I reach out with my other hand, towards her breast. ‘I still want you.’

  She smiles. ‘You can’t have me. But you have the memory of me.’ She indicates my crotch. ‘Surely you can conjure something up?’

  ‘It’s been so long.’

  ‘Shall I try to help?’

  She leans back a little, opens her legs, draws the hem of her dress up. It’s nothing really, but it’s everything, so suggestive. I tell her it might work. I massage my unresponsive cock with my free hand, increasingly frenetically.

  ‘Should you put your pistol down?’ she asks, then smiles. ‘Something hard to hold on to, I suppose.’

  Not helpful. I wonder if the neural pathway between my brain and my penis is already zapped. Down. Out. Destroyed by one of those lightning bolts in my brain. I give up, but thank Carol for trying. I look at Walter, but he’s drooping too, as if he knows his moment is gone. I cross to my roll-top and rummage under M before I remember, and retrieve the dead, half-smoked joint from W.

  ‘So,’ says Carol, ‘instead of your lead pill–’

  ‘Medicinal marijuana while I regroup.’

  I mouth the joint and lean close to Carol. She shakes her head. ‘Please – I love the way you do that!’

  ‘It’ll be the death of you.’ She breathes on me, my face, that same magical breath. I swear I can feel the sweet waft of it. And my joint is alight. I draw deeply on it, close my eyes in almost instant ecstasy, the burn of the smoke on the back of my throat, the THC finding its way up what remains of those neural tracks to my brain. When I open my eyes, she is gone.

  ***

  CAROL has left me in peace. I feel sure I can do what needs to be done. I walk out onto the balcony, joint in one hand, Walter in the other. One last look at the night sky, the moon lancing off the water. My eyes rove across the moonlit monoch
rome of sky and sea, and are drawn to movement in the foreground, down by the pool. There are two figures, hunched together, face to face, their profiles lit by a glowing ember between them. I can’t see any detail. I turn and lean, trying to see more, and damn near trip over the tripod of my Konuspot.

  I train it on the scene below, pocketing Walter in order to focus the lens. The frieze of two figures comes into sharp relief against the burning torches on the far side of the pool. I don’t initially understand what I’m watching. Then I do. They’re hunched over a pipe, a meth pipe. Lila is drawing deeply on it, before passing it back to Will, who takes his fill. Lila stands, does a little dance, turns away from Will and drops her big coat. She is naked underneath. So skinny I can see her ribs striating out from her spine as she walks down the steps into the pool. Her brown back is covered in small red welts. I remember Jackson’s plaintive bleats to Ellie about someone, presumably the father, burning her. She’s clearly feeling no pain now as she slides forward into the water. Will’s watching, rising, beginning to remove his shorts.

  Like most writers, I’ve a voyeuristic tendency, but I don’t want to watch this. It explains so much about my elder son. I step back from the Konuspot, turn and cross the balcony to my inner sanctum. I remember another intense conversation, this one between Will and Lila, after Lila drummed her rap beat into my head: One bullet in the chamber, one thought in my head, one press of the trigger, shoot and I’m dead. I couldn’t overhear what she and Will were saying but now I can guess what it was about. How do these people recognise each other? Is there a secret tattoo on their foreheads, visible only to other users?

  I call out to Carol. Where are you?

  I don’t want to be alone.

  summer

  THE PUBLIC POOL sat on a burnt-grass promontory that pushed out into the harbour, ringed by pōhutukawa. The trees had long since shed their Christmas flowers, and the carpet of crimson cinders they’d left on the paths winding round the perimeter had been scuffed to the side of the hot tar. Officially, summer was almost shot – the end of February was a couple of days away – but the sun blazed on as relentlessly as ever, and would continue, Will guessed, right through March and most of April. The climate, he was sure, was as fucked as everything else.