The Red Queen

by Gemma Bowker-Wright

  They pulled up outside a white concrete building with a sign that said ‘Trev’s Tavern’ above the door. As he stepped out of the car Matt felt the heat melt around him. His body felt unbelievably light, weightless almost, as though he was swimming. He raised his arm to shoulder-height, letting it float, slowly, back to his side. It was cooler inside the pub. The smell of cigarettes, grease and beer enveloped Matt as he walked in behind his dad. At the bar his dad pulled two stools from their resting place. Matt watched him closely as he moved, the way his muscles strained as he lifted the stools, the tensing of his shoulders. His hair was thinner around the temples and he had a balding spot on the back of his head, like a target. The skin on his face seemed redder in the brownish pub light. Yet, for all this, he didn’t seem necessarily older. He could have been twenty-eight or thirty-one or forty-three. Somehow he appeared timeless, suspended forever in the moment. As Matt watched, his dad signalled the barman and ordered two beers. Then he turned to face Matt. They sat in silence, not looking at each other. The barman set down the beers in front of them, and with his action the atmosphere changed, as if a switch had been turned on, a fuse released with a slow hiss of steam.

  ‘So how’s things mate? Do you have a job?’

  Matt took a sip of the beer. Tiny droplets of condensation had formed around the glass. When he lifted it up there was a wet ring on the bar mat. ‘I’m fifteen. I’m still at school.’

  ‘Fifteen huh? Jesus.’ He smiled. ‘You shouldn’t really be drinking then huh?’

  ‘No,’ said Matt.

  They both turned back to their beer. The air was starting to feel sticky. Matt watched a woman come into the bar. She wore a low-cut top that finished above her midriff. In her belly button was a silver ring. It looked like the kind of rings put through bulls’ noses to stop them tearing up their paddocks.

  ‘Hey gorgeous!’ called Matt’s dad. ‘Watch this mate,’ he whispered to Matt. ‘This is how you gets yourself a woman.’ He waved his hand above his head. ‘Over here gorgeous. I’ve got a drink with your name on it.’

  The woman looked over, angling her body to face them. She put her hands on her hips and stared. Then she shook her head, just once. As she moved her head, Matt noticed a silver skull suspended on a slender chain around her neck, level with the tops of her breasts.

  Matt’s dad looked back at the bar. His body seemed, in an instant, to deflate. Matt began to feel something, a strange light-headedness. Perhaps it was the beer? Or the heat? He looked over at his father and wanted to say ‘It’s okay, Dad’, but the words wouldn’t form.

  When his dad looked up again he was grinning and there were patches of red on his cheeks as though he’d been scratching them. Looking at him made Matt feel intensely lonely and yet buoyant at the same time, as if he could float up off the stool. It seemed, then, as if he was watching his dad from a great distance, like he was up there, suspended below the ceiling, looking down at his dad’s head, all that way below him, balding and unprotected.

  They ate the birthday dinner sitting on the leather couch—Rhonda in the middle, Matt and Kerri on either side.

  ‘That’s the problem with your dad.’ Rhonda was eating a chicken leg with her fingers. ‘He has no concept of consequences. It’s like part of his brain is missing.’ She licked a greasy thumb. ‘His life is one big joyride.’

  ‘That’s not true.’ Kerri was sitting with her feet tucked under her body, her paper plate carefully balanced on her lap. ‘He’s not like that all the time. Sometimes maybe, but not all the time. Eh Matt?’

  Matt looked up. She was watching him, her fingers tracing the patterned rim of the plate.

  Between them Rhonda was dissecting a potato. She paused, her knife held in midair. It dropped suddenly, landing on the orange carpet end-on, bouncing once, twice. She leant forward to pick it up. ‘You’re right.’ The words followed the movement of her body like smoke, to the floor and back up to the couch. She looked from Matt to Kerri and back to Matt. ‘He’s not like that all the time.’

  No one said anything for a while. Rhonda went back to eating. Kerri went back to tracing the patterned rim on her plate. Sitting forward, Matt looked around the lounge. A series of photographs of Rhonda and his dad were spaced across the wall. He focused on one of his dad standing on a grassy hill with the sea in the background. It could have been taken anywhere—New Zealand or Australia; there were no definitive features to pinpoint its origins. His dad stood in the foreground, the kind of man Matt might only ever know in black-and-white dreams.

  ‘Fifty! My god!’

  It wasn’t her voice that startled Matt but her motion—throwing her head back against the couch, laughing. ‘Each year goes faster than the one before it. I liked twenty-seven, that was a bloody good year.’ She smiled, then looked excitedly at each of them in turn. ‘Let’s have some cake kids.’ She put her empty plate down in the imprint in the couch where she’d been sitting. ‘I’ll just get the cream from the fridge in the garage.’ From the kitchen they heard the sound of a screen door opening and shutting, forcefully.

  ‘So what do you think?’ Kerri was looking over at Matt, smiling. She put her plate on the floor. Matt noticed she’d picked fingernail-sized chunks from the rim in an even pattern. Her food was hardly touched.

  ‘About what? ’

  ‘The girlfriend.’

  ‘The what? ’

  Kerri made a sucking sound through her teeth. ‘Rhonda.’

  Matt shrugged. ‘I dunno. She’s okay, I guess.’

  ‘I didn’t like her at first, but—’ she adjusted her legs ‘—she’s different to how I thought she’d be. There’s something invincible about her. She looks like one of those women who could reverse a trailer up a driveway and put lipstick on at the same time. Don’t you reckon?’

  ‘Maybe.’ Matt shrugged again. ‘I don’t know.’

  They heard the screen door open again and bang shut. The sound of Rhonda moving around in the kitchen—a drawer opening, closing, electric beaters, something being dropped and picked up. When Rhonda came back into the lounge she was holding a chocolate cake on a round plate, a bottle of Lindauer tucked under her right arm. A crepe paper party hat clung to her teased up hair.

  ‘Your dad would love the fact we’re doing this.’ She set the cake on the coffee table. ‘He’s big on birthdays. Loves them.’

  ‘We know,’ said Kerri. ‘Don’t we Matt?’

  Matt shook his head slightly; it was neither a nod nor a shake, more of a shiver. He suddenly felt warmer; the room must be heating up. He took off his jacket and draped it over the back of the couch. A leather cushion was wedged in behind him. He picked it up, the leather so soft it felt damp.

  ‘Your dad got me two cakes for my forty-second.’ Rhonda opened the Lindauer as she spoke, then lined up three paper party cups on the coffee table.

  ‘Two cakes,’ she said again. ‘Two. He told me he believed in gluttony.’

  ‘He got me a birthday cake once too,’ said Kerri. ‘It had a swimming pool made of jelly.’ She brushed at something on her jeans. ‘He always came back for my birthdays.’

  ‘No,’ said Matt. ‘No he didn’t.’

  Kerri frowned. ‘Yes he did.’

  Matt was about to say, ‘You’re just making that up,’ but Kerri was looking across at him, her face poised, fine lines forming around her eyes.

  ‘He came to some of them,’ said Matt.

  ‘And yours—he came back for some of yours.’

  Matt looked away. ‘Yeah.’ Then, quietly, ‘Whatever.’

  Rhonda sank down by the coffee table, her legs straight out in front of her. She had removed her shoes. Her socks had holes in the heels. ‘He’s great your dad. Bloody impulsive, but great. I’ve never met anyone like him before. He’s got such a sense of—’ she reached an arm above her head and waved it around, her fingers opening and closing, as if she were trying to grab at something ‘—what’s the word I’m after here? I don’t know what it is, but there’s a
word.’

  ‘Happiness?’ said Kerri tentatively. She smiled, her face younger all of a sudden, brighter. She liked to be asked questions about words. Matt used to watch her doing the Listener crossword with their mother every week, heads bowed over the kitchen table, sounding out syllables.

  ‘Joy?’

  ‘No,’ said Rhonda, ‘that’s not it. I think it starts with R.’

  ‘Rapt?’ said Kerri. ‘Rapture!’

  ‘That’s it! I knew there was a word. I couldn’t put my finger on it.’

  Matt stood and walked across the room to the kitchen and out the door. Light from the kitchen window collapsed across the lawn, illuminating the closest part and fading toward the corrugated iron fence, where it framed blades of grass and dandelion leaves. A line of pot plants in various stages of life and death edged a concrete path leading to a rotary washing line. Matt walked out to it, cupping his hands around the metal pole. The metal was ice cold. It felt like his hands might stick to it if he held on. Behind him he heard the screen door open and bang closed.

  He turned as Rhonda walked across the lawn towards him in gumboots, each footstep making a heavy, tired sound. ‘You right?’

  ‘Yeah. Fine.’

  She stopped and kicked at a pot plant. Part of the terracotta pot came away, crumbling like dirt. ‘You want a smoke?’

  ‘I don’t smoke.’

  He watched her bend down to pick up a piece of the pot then hold it towards the light. Then she threw it to the far end of the lawn. The soft thud of it landing somewhere unseen.

  ‘Your dad said you were a liftie at Cardrona?’

  ‘Yeah.’ Matt let go of the washing line pole. ‘For the season.’

  ‘Good for you.’

  A cloud of breath surrounded her face. He could barely make out her mouth, only the shape of her head. This was the way he’d remember her, he decided—a smoky shadow, her distinctive voice the only thing defining the hard edges where she began and ended.

  ‘I’m sorry I forgot to invite you,’ she said.

  ‘It doesn’t matter.’ Matt took a step towards her, his feet sinking into the lawn. ‘Anyway he’s not even here.’

  She wrapped her arms around her chest, shivering. Now they were closer he could make out the key features in her face—her eyes, nose, the deep wrinkles around her mouth. ‘I tried to get your number from your dad, but you know how he is with numbers.’

  A shape moved across the light from the kitchen window, and Kerri’s shadow projected across the lawn.

  ‘You know your dad.’ Rhonda’s voice was slightly shaky, uncertain, all of a sudden.

  Matt watched her for a moment. Then he put his hands in his pockets. ‘You look cold,’ he said. ‘Let’s go back inside.’

  Kerri was given the spare room at the end of the hallway, so Matt slept in the lounge. When the others had left to go to bed, he walked in a loop around the room, touching the wallpaper, his fingers tracing at hip level. Then he spread out the pile of quilts Rhonda had given him on the couch and lay down, listening to the foreign night noses. A cold draught blew from somewhere unseen, circling the room, finding the cracks below the doorframes, the edges that didn’t quite meet. Matt shivered and rolled onto his side. He began to think about the time when he was five or six, before his dad left for Australia. They were going on a train ride, all of them—him, his mother and Kerri, through the Manawatū Gorge. They’d got on at the station just before the gorge and were in the last carriage, the one with tall windows on every side. Matt was sitting on his mother’s lap and Kerri was beside them, her legs dangling down. His mother and Kerri were looking out the window intently, watching something. And then Matt saw what they were looking at: his dad, up ahead, on the other side of the gorge, high above the river. He was standing on the road in one of the stopping bays, his motorbike parked to one side, and he was waving at them with both arms, making propeller motions. Even from all that distance across the river, Matt could see that his whole body was an expression of pure joy, as though nothing else in the world, at that moment, could matter more.

  ROCK FORMATIONS

  The Desert Road stretched out in front of us, long and windy, on either side low hills of red earth, tussock, rocks. A bank of cloud was creeping down from the north, reaching out its cloud tentacles.

  ‘I can see why ancient people had religious beliefs about the stars,’ said James. He took his hand off the wheel to run his index finger along the inside of my thigh. ‘When I see them on a night like this, away from the city.’

  I leant forward to look out the windscreen. He was right—the dimming sky was full of them, a dusty mass, thickening the further we drove. ‘My mother used to tell me they were the eyes of God,’ I said, ‘watching me.’

  ‘That’s creepy.’ His hand slipped away from my leg. ‘I thought God was meant to be a nice thing—a being—he, she—whatever.’

  ‘My mother’s God is all about sin and retribution.’

  James smiled. ‘I hope she never finds out about me.’ He put his foot on the accelerator.

  ‘Which one—God or my mother?’

  ‘Either,’ he said.

  A car came towards us—a whoosh of noise. The sound felt physical, like a bird flapping inside my skull. I’d had a migraine the night before and my body still felt light and hollow. I’ve had them ever since I was a teenager—there’s some link to hormones or genes, or both. My mother used to get them. I’m worried my daughter Aimee will too.

  ‘Aimee’s interested in beliefs.’

  James had caught up to the car in front. ‘How do you mean?’ He pulled out into the centre of the road to pass.

  ‘What different cultures believe in, spirits and gods and things—and how they got to those ideas. She studies my mother.’

  Aimee goes to stay with my mother for a weekend every school holidays. When she was small she used to report back on trips to the beach, the jar of lollies on the fridge, the dog. Now she reports back on my mother. She tells me how my mother asks God to change the colour of the traffic lights. She imitates her tone, the way she holds her hands on the steering wheel. She does an impression of my mother praying before a meal, head bowed, eyes closed. It’s unnerving to have my mother examined like this, broken into pieces.

  ‘She wants to be an anthropologist.’

  James leant back from the steering wheel as if its only purpose was to rest his hands. He wasn’t interested in hearing about Aimee—I could tell by the way he drummed his fingers, playing a soundless tune. But I wanted to keep her firmly in the picture. She would be part of the bargain, after all.

  ‘An anthropologist, eh?’ he said, flatly.

  In the side mirror, the car we’d passed was getting smaller and smaller. ‘Yes. She’s been arguing with Richard about it nonstop.’

  James wound down his window and cold air roared through the car. He wound it up again, but not before the temperature inside had dropped several degrees and I’d begun to shiver.

  ‘Why’s that? Is he upset she doesn’t want to be a—what’s he again?—an ice-ologist?’

  ‘Glaciologist.’ Richard, my husband, started off with geology at university—and he liked skiing. So he put the two together. Every direction Richard has taken in life follows this kind of logic. ‘No, I don’t think there’s anything he specifically wants her to be—he just has to tell her what not to be.’

  We descended into a valley. James slowed down for a hairpin bend, but he still took it too fast, the front wheels sliding for a moment on the gravel. I clutched my seatbelt. When we reached the plateau again all colour had been sucked from the world; the red earth had a new grey tone, the tussock bushes were pools of shadow, indistinguishable from the rocks.

  ‘What did you want to be when you were thirteen?’ I said.

  James was silent for a while. I snuck a quick glance at him—the stubble on his neck and chin made his face darker. Night had blurred his strong features, smoothing out the creases, scars, wrinkles.

  ‘
A photographer,’ he said. ‘I took out-of-focus pictures of my family. I thought it was what you had to do to be an artist—distort things. I would cut out key features, like their heads.’

  James makes a living from manual labour—building, renovating, gardening. He’s also a talented painter. He does landscapes—wide open scenes that cover the frame as well as the canvas. That was how we met. It was Richard’s idea, the painting. He wanted a piece of art for our new house. Our house, which is no longer new, is at the top of Khandallah and overlooks Wellington Harbour. The day we moved in Richard walked through each room, his hands behind his back, a thoughtful look on his face. I want something to go here, he said, pointing to the wall at the end of the hallway. It was the first thing people saw when they came through the front door—a bare wall.

  The car lurched and I reached out, grabbing at something in my line of vision. My eyes go funny after a migraine. Sometimes I see a row of moving lights, like a string of lanterns bobbing in the wind. I hear sounds too, a ringing within my inner ear that’s impossible to switch off.

  ‘You all right?’ said James.

  I smiled tightly. ‘Fine.’ I wanted to tell him to slow down, but it felt like nagging—the kind of thing I would say to Richard if it were him driving.

  ‘What about you?’

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘When you were thirteen,’ said James.

  Outside the window it was completely dark, nothing but the occasional blinding flash of headlights.

  I turned thirteen the year my father left. When he was gone my mother sold the house and we moved to Levin, where she found a job at a dairy. (It was a few years yet before she found God—he’d been waiting for her all along, apparently.) After school my sister and I would help with restocking while she doled out bags of mixed lollies, white bread, the occasional porn magazine. Sometimes at night I would hear my mother crying. A soft, moaning sound—like an animal left outside. One night I crept into my sister’s room. She sat up in bed, brushing her fringe out of her face. It fell back like a fine, white curtain. What do you want? I stood in the doorway, balanced on one foot. To see if the noise is upsetting you. She looked at me, her face expressionless. What noise?