The Red Queen

by Gemma Bowker-Wright

  ‘Actually,’ he said, knocking his boots together to get rid of the snow, ‘it was the other way around.’

  ‘How do you mean?’

  ‘We gave them a choice—me and Lynda. We asked them who they wanted to live with. We made it clear: Lynda was going back to the UK, and I was staying. It was up to them.’

  ‘Yes,’ I said, scraping the ice from the metal bar that locked us into the seat. There was ice on the seat as well; I could feel the stabbing cold of it against my thighs. ‘But perhaps it wasn’t that straightforward for them. Perhaps they didn’t feel they had a choice—maybe they felt they had to go with her because she needed them more.’

  The chairlift moved agonisingly slowly up the hill, stopping and bouncing, moving again. James looked across at me, his face unreadable behind his sunglasses. He could have been looking directly at me but I wouldn’t have known. ‘Who would Aimee chose?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘If you and Richard split, who would she want to live with?’

  ‘Me of course.’

  ‘But have you ever asked her?’

  ‘No,’ I said, ‘I haven’t—not yet.’

  ‘What if she wanted to live with Richard? Would you let her go?’

  After my father left I used to fantasise about the place he’d gone. Some days I pictured him in a desert surrounded by spiky cacti and bright red flowers the colour of dried blood. Other times I imagined a landscape of snow and ice like something from the Narnia books, trees heavy with icicles and wide open spaces of white. The few times he came to visit us—an afternoon one Sunday in winter to take us for a walk on the beach, a dinner at McDonalds for my sister’s tenth birthday—I would try to find clues. I searched the back of his jacket for twigs or for the seeds of some exotic blood-coloured flowering plant. When I was at university I saw him once. He was outside the train station with a woman. She had dark hair. He saw me and waved. I closed my eyes and walked away, pretending I hadn’t seen him.

  ‘Can you take a photo of me?’ I said to James when we got to the top of the slope. It was a long way down, and steep. We were still annoyed at each other. He took a shot grudgingly and I asked to see it. The digital screen showed a pale woman in yellow and black, the colours stark against the backdrop of snow.

  ‘What do you want it for?’

  ‘Aimee,’ I said. ‘She’d love this outfit.’

  When Aimee was small I caught her colouring in all our photographs in one of the family albums using felt tip pens. I was surprised rather than annoyed. She told me she was making people the colour of their souls. I took the album off her. There was one of me and Richard with our skin showing a rainbow of colours. Why is my face blue? Aimee looked at me like I was stupid. Because you’re asleep, she said.

  We slipped and slid our way down the slope. Midway down we gave up on the skis and slid on our bums, holding on to our poles, laughing. By the time we were down, the tension between us was gone.

  ‘What if you had had a choice?’ said James on our way back up the chairlift.

  ‘Sorry?’

  ‘What if your father had offered to take you with him when he left? Which one would you have chosen—the one who was staying or the one who was going?’

  The chairlift was approaching a rock face that fell away below us. If I jumped now the fall would be long, deadly—but in a few minutes it would be less than a metre to a soft mound of snow.

  ‘I don’t know,’ I said, ‘I don’t have much experience with choices.’

  As we drove down the mountain the layers of mist rose to meet us, swallowing up the land. But it didn’t go on like this. Halfway down it suddenly cleared and we drove out into a bright, cold day. It was only lunchtime and James wanted to do the waterfall walk before we drove back, get the whole way this time. But I could feel a headache coming on, a tightening across my forehead, like an elastic band.

  ‘You go,’ I said, ‘I’ll be fine.’

  James parked outside a café at the base of the mountain and I found a quiet table inside. Through the window I watched him leave, pack slung over his shoulder, not looking back. I took two Nurofen and closed my eyes. Inside my head was the ringing sound. It grew louder the harder I listened and soon it turned into a faint boom. I cupped my hands over my ears and tried to block it out. But it was useless; the sound was inside me. It was the sound of the rock formations toppling under a mountain of snow, crashing to the ground as the layers piled on, crushing each structure under a cold, silent blanket. They fall one at a time, like dominos—thousands of years to form, yet destroyed in less than the time it takes to draw a breath. When the dust clears there will be a person standing there—a woman—picking her way carefully back down the stream.

  ENDANGERED

  Erin is watching a documentary on the kākāpō. The narrator has a voice like gravel. When the Māori arrived in New Zealand they hunted the kākāpō for meat, he says, then the Europeans came and wanted the kākāpō for zoos, museum specimens, hat decorations. A woman in the late 1800s is shown wearing a hat with green feathers. Then a specimen in a museum perches on a branch, as if about to take off. Its eyes are made of glass. Erin shivers and picks up a cushion, holding it to her chest. Beside her on the couch Jeremy looks up from his book. Erin can feel his frown. The documentary shows a map of New Zealand with the forest—shaded in dark green—moving inwards over time, being erased. Sometimes when she looks in the mirror early in the morning Erin has the exact opposite feeling—her features are not quite there to begin with, so she has to wait a while for the image to fill out, expand.

  ‘Do we need to watch this?’ says Jeremy.

  ‘I do,’ says Erin. She feels it would be wrong to turn it off now.

  Early ornithologists, says the narrator, took a casual attitude to the kākāpō becoming endangered. Their primary concern was to collect as many as possible before the species went extinct. A silent grainy film clip is shown: a man in high leather boots emerging from a muddy track, holding a pair of bloodied birds. It’s the expression on his face that makes Erin shiver again—a grin.

  ‘They shouldn’t use that word,’ says Jeremy.

  Erin pauses the documentary and the screen freezes just as a scientist is saying something, his mouth half open. ‘What word?’

  ‘Endangered.’ Jeremy looks at Erin over the tops of his glasses. ‘It’s too close to extinct—it makes it seem like it’s already too late.’

  ‘But it probably is too late.’ Erin presses her knees together and holds her elbows. ‘If anything they should make that more clear.’

  Jeremy folds the top corner of his page. He’s been reading about the fall of the Roman Empire. ‘Why?’

  ‘With the way things are going—you know—the forests and rivers and everything getting cut down and polluted. By the time scientists get around to looking, it’s generally too late.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that,’ says Jeremy. ‘I meant, why put it that way? It’ll only make people sad and then they’ll stop caring.’

  ‘But that’s the way it is,’ says Erin. ‘It’s the truth. Look at the moa and the huia, and—’ She begins to count on her fingers, then stops. ‘People are still the same. We go around with our eyes closed thinking things are fine as they are. Once we open them again it’ll all be gone.’

  Jeremy runs his hand along the back of the couch. He takes off his glasses and puts them back on again, focusing on Erin. ‘The way things were then doesn’t mean it’s the way things are now. And people aren’t the same. We know about the facts, we know about the science. And when people have been kept in the dark they get angry about it. Being angry is better than being sad. Angry people try to change things.’

  ‘Angry people also destroy things,’ says Erin. ‘And anger can lead to violence.’

  ‘Yes,’ says Jeremy, picking up his book. ‘But that’s not what we were talking about.’

  Erin presses play and picks up the cushion, holding it close to her chest. Rain streams down the outside of the windo
wpane, making her feel drained. Tomorrow she has to drive five hours to see her family in Wairoa and attend her second cousin’s birthday party. She doesn’t want to go but she hasn’t been back in over a year. Jeremy doesn’t get it. ‘The kid’s turning one,’ he said, ‘he won’t even know. You should only go if you want to.’ He thinks Erin should value herself more and stand up to them. ‘That’s easy for you to say,’ Erin told him. Jeremy is an only child and his parents live on Waiheke Island and vote for the Green Party.

  The documentary has skipped to the present day. It shows a scientist trekking up a steep hillside, behind him a mountain ridge and a metallic-looking sky. Then the camera shows a kākāpō, not on the mountain with the scientist, but in a cage somewhere else. A group of school children are gathered around the cage, looking in.

  ‘Maybe we shouldn’t,’ says Erin.

  ‘Shouldn’t what?’ says Jeremy.

  ‘Have children—with things as they are.’

  Since Erin turned thirty last year, this discussion has been bubbling away between them, sometimes flowing back and forth like water. Erin is worried about her genes—what she might pass on to her children, given how her parents ended up. She’s also worried about toilet training and bullying and whether they’ll get good jobs and be able to afford a mortgage with the economy going the way it’s going. Jeremy thinks she’s overthinking the issue. He thinks she worries too much in general. He doesn’t like the way she seeks out sad information, breathing it in like air. Sometimes, he tells her, it feels like you’re living your life like it’s already over.

  Last night’s weather report said the rain was forecast to continue over the weekend. But it eases as Erin drives further north, giving visibility to certain shapes—hills, fences, the occasional house. Past the Kāpiti Coast she feels a familiar tightening in her chest. Turning on the radio she focuses on the slick wet road, the hills. The presenter introduces an interview with a forensic scientist. Through the waves of static Erin hears something about a murder investigation. The voices come in and out of reception, drowning then surfacing again. They’re saying something about bones—the delicate process involved in recovering them.

  On the passenger seat is a plastic dinosaur, the present Erin bought for her second cousin, still unwrapped. She’d chosen it with Jeremy—their first trip into the depths of Toy World. He picked it out, telling her a Spinosaurus was better than a Supersaurus. It had more teeth.

  She wonders what extinct species her children will be into. If she and Jeremy have children, that is. She thinks about how kids get so into dinosaurs—like a rite of passage, a fascination with something so out-of-this-world it’s beyond belief. Perhaps her children’s children will be reading about kākāpō, or kiwi, or tuatara, and imagining them as strange mythical creatures rather than real. They might never believe such creatures existed in people’s lives, in the same world in which people were driving to work and eating dinner and watching TV.

  ‘Tuatara were around with the dinosaurs,’ Jeremy had told her when they were coming out of Toy World, trying to remember where they’d parked.

  ‘But will they be around for much longer?’

  ‘Have you seen one up close?’

  Erin shook her head.

  ‘I think they’ll outlive me for one thing,’ he’d said. ‘Angry looking buggers.’

  The radio loses reception completely as Erin bypasses Palmerston North. She turns it off. The rain is getting heavy again. She has to turn the window wipers to the fastest setting to see through the flow of water.

  Erin arrives at the farm late. The family has already started dinner. They look up at her in a searching way as she walks in, as if she’s someone they remember vaguely, but can’t quite place. There is a tight feeling in her chest again, a squeezing inwards. With the rain and the traffic she’d forgotten to worry about the time. An extra chair is brought and she’s wedged in at the far end as her aunt Viv brings out a plate of food she’s been keeping in the oven for Erin—roast beef, mashed potatoes, carrots, peas. Everything smells of grease and nothing. Erin has forgotten this, the smell. It’s the same with other memories: birthdays, Christmases. Parts of her childhood seem to erase themselves while she’s not looking. Viv often tells her about holidays they went on, day trips out to the beach, relatives they used to visit, but to Erin, sometimes it’s as if it all happened to someone she’s never met.

  Viv asks if anyone wants seconds and the noise surges—talking and laughter, the crashing and clanging of plates being passed, chairs being moved, glasses of wine and juice being set down heavily, spilt. After the quiet drive, Erin finds it hard to cope with the commotion and jostling. She feels boxed in—the table is too small for so much food and so many people. Across from Erin sits Viv’s husband Mick. Then there’s Viv and Mick’s two daughters, Briar and Ruby, and their husbands, Bryce and Conrad, and children, two each. Erin can’t remember the children’s names, including the little boy on Briar’s knees whose birthday is tomorrow. She should remember, given she’s practically his aunt. Erin was adopted by Viv and Mick when she was three, after her mother drove off a bridge and her father started to drink. Erin can’t imagine how she lived with them all that time. Around her conversations begin and end. Questions are fired across the table.

  ‘I use two cups of sugar,’ Ruby is telling Briar.

  Bryce is engaged in a monologue about the rugby with Mick who nods occasionally but doesn’t respond. At the same time Viv is talking to Conrad about a relative Erin doesn’t know who suffers from a terrible illness that’s eating away at her from the inside out.

  ‘It could have ended in tragedy.’ Briar’s voice is buoyant, jarring. It cuts across the others.

  ‘What could have?’ says Erin, trying to tune into a conversation—any conversation.

  Briar jiggles her son on her lap. He looks up at Erin with large baby eyes and grabs at the air, his chubby hands clenching at nothing. ‘We’re talking about Candice,’ Briar says.

  ‘Who’s Candice?’

  Ruby hands one of her sons a cup of juice and holds it while he drinks, tipping it too fast so some of the liquid spills down his front. ‘Candice,’ she says, ‘you know Candice.’

  ‘You know,’ adds Viv, moving abruptly into the conversation. She raises her eyebrows and tucks her fringe behind her ear. Erin notices her hair is darker than the last time she’d seen her. ‘She used to come over and play with you girls when you were kids.’

  ‘Of course,’ says Erin, pretending to know. She has a sudden narrow memory of something—the smell of wet cardboard. She remembers an apple box and a girl about her age. They’re in a classroom together, standing near the back. The girl is holding out the box to Erin, one hand underneath to steady it. Inside is a duckling tied up with string. Its eyes milky white. The girl is saying something that Erin can’t hear.

  Briar picks up a piece of roast carrot and eats it, wiping her fingers on the baby’s bib.

  ‘She left her baby in the car, outside New World. It was a hot day.’

  ‘Oh no,’ says Erin, putting her hand over her mouth. Her mind jumps to all the images of babies being left in cars she’s seen on the news.

  ‘She was fine,’ says Ruby, ‘the baby.’ She wipes her son’s face with a tea towel, rubbing around his mouth and nose until he starts to complain to his father, who ignores him. ‘Everyone was fine.’

  ‘It was just an accident,’ adds Viv, loudly. ‘It could’ve happened to anyone.’

  Across the table the men are laughing. Bryce is telling a story about something involving a digger. Conrad interjects with something involving a ute. Back and forth it goes, mumbled words and laughter thrown across the table like a tennis ball. Mick, who is listening and not talking, catches Erin’s eye. ‘What’s that man of yours up to?’ he says. His voice is thick, unused—a man who likes to talk, but only in a quiet room.

  ‘He wanted to come,’ says Erin, ‘but he had to work.’ A lie of course—she hasn’t even asked him.


  ‘In the weekend?’ says Viv, who is in the process of transferring the baby from Briar’s lap to her own. The child makes a grizzly noise that threatens to turn into a cry, but doesn’t. ‘What’s he do again?’

  ‘He’s a mechanic.’

  ‘A good, solid job,’ says Mick. Bryce and Conrad make agreeing murmurs. ‘Not like the young men around here—running off to university to do whatnot. No one knows how to change a tyre anymore. They just leave and don’t come back.’

  Erin adjusts her weight on the chair and glances at Viv anxiously. She’s always going on about how Erin never comes to visit. It’s not that Erin’s ungrateful for Viv taking her in. She just finds being here overwhelming. It feels like standing at the top of a cliff, or being tossed and turned in a raging river. Every nerve in her body is overstimulated, as if readying her for fight or flight. Jeremy once said he thought she’d been traumatised by her mother’s death, and that’s the reason she feels jumpy about coming back here, and why she’s anxious all the time. But Erin doesn’t think so. She knows the story: the witness who saw her mother’s hand on the wheel, turning it deliberately to the right. She was wearing yellow rubber gloves, Erin’s mother, that was how the witness could so clearly see the movements of her hands. But for Erin the story is just that, a story; it’s not something to mourn. She doesn’t remember her mother as a real person.

  ‘That’s not true, Dad,’ says Ruby, returning from settling the three older kids in the lounge with the PlayStation, their half-eaten dinners still on plates scattered around the table. Erin can hear the occasional zap, pow and zing from the half-open door. ‘Seth came back.’

  Viv looks up as she is dabbing at the baby’s chin but doesn’t say anything.

  ‘You remember Seth?’ says Ruby to Erin. ‘He used to live over the road when we were at our old place.’