Page 69 of The Secret
The insistent rattle rattle of the thresher fills the line, a radio blaring heavy rock in the background. If he heard his phone, he wasn’t wearing ear defenders again.Fuck.I’ve nagged him about this. The machine grinds to a halt with a clatter and a sigh while Van Halen keeps exhorting me to “Jump!” I can envisage him standing in his sweat-damp shirt and hair stuck to his head, just like when we worked together when we were younger.
“Were you wearing ear defenders?”
“Calm down, Mom, my phone was in my pocket on vibrate. I had the goddamn things on. Make my head sweaty as hell.”
I grin into the phone.
“What is it?” he grouses.
“They’re stalling. We’re going to run out of money, Jed.”
He lets out a snort. “Tell me something new.”
I ignore him. “I worked through the funds we have left for the legal dispute this morning and we have enough to do one fight in court,maybe. But that’s a big maybe. If they drag it out or countersue, then we’re screwed. I talked to the lawyers today about trying to negotiate a deal.”
“We’d get very little in a negotiation, wouldn’t we?”
“Yeah. The only other option is to put the farm up as collateral.”
“To pay for lawyers’ fees? Fuck, I hate that.”
“Yeah, me too.”
“And the outcome is completely uncertain.”
“Yeah. I think the chances of us winning are low. We could get a better settlement than what they’d offer us in a negotiation, but whether we’d ever see any of that money with them dragging their feet and appealing or …”
“God, I hate this shit. Can’t we find someone to lean on them or take it on for a cut of the settlement or do it ourselves? Could we learn enough?”
At this point, I already know far too much about company law and shareholders and director contracts. The last thing I want to do is spend the next five years of my life fighting a legal case in South Africa.
“One of us needs to date a lawyer,” Jed mumbles, and it makes me laugh, because it’s a good fucking idea.
“Gonna have to be you, buddy, you’re the charmer out of two of us.”
“Used to be, not so good with the ladies now. Anyway, there’s not exactly a load of them on a twenty-thousand-hectare farm in the Western Cape.” He pauses for a beat. “You don’t want to do this, do you? You don’t want to fight a legal case.”
I blow out a long breath. “No. No, I don’t.”
“We can’t put the farm up, Dan. It would be good money after bad.”
“Yeah.” I sigh. I knew he’d say that, and actually, I agree with him.
“What about the ‘no win, no fee’ option?”
“Those guys are sharks.”
“Yeah, but it’s better than agreeing to be fleeced. We could at least talk to them.”
I glance at my watch. Liss is coming in tomorrow, and it’s already getting late. “Leave it with me. I’ll see who I can talk to now, find out what the score is, and see if anyone is prepared to take us on, what offers they might be able to put on the table.”
“Sounds good. Have fun.”
“Yeah. Yeah. Asshole.” I say, but he’s already hung up.
33
LISS
