‘The one with the walnut tree?’ says Erin, looking out the window at the bare lawn. The house is on top of a bare hill surrounded by bare hills.
‘Before that,’ says Briar. ‘The place when you first came to live with us. The one by the creek.’
Suddenly they’re all looking at Erin—Viv, Briar, Ruby. A distant emotion washes across the table and the men look across, cautiously, too. Even the baby, as if sensing a change in the atmosphere, is quiet. Erin closes her eyes and tries to picture Seth. But she can’t. It seems strange that Viv hadn’t told her about his return, if it was—as they’re all making out—such a big deal. Viv emails Erin every Sunday to tell her everything that’s going on in town. What’s on at the library, who’s having a baby, who’s not having a baby, who’s moving away. The effort, to Erin, feels overblown somehow, almost desperate, as if the constant flow of mundane information is the drip needed to keep an ill person alive.
They’re all still looking at her, searching her face. ‘Sorry,’ says Erin, ‘but I can’t place him.’
‘Allen’s son,’ says Viv. ‘You remember Allen and Rita? They had that lifestyle block beside us—the creek was the boundary, we had no fence. Allen was the principal at a boarding school and only came home in the weekends.’
‘You must remember Seth,’ says Briar to Erin. ‘He tried to drown you once.’
Just then the lounge door opens and the three older children come out asking for ice cream. Ruby checks her watch then gets up from the table, disappearing into the kitchen. They trail after her, pushing one another, shouting. Through the open door the sound of a tap turned on, pipes clanging, the freezer opening.
Erin waits until the door has been closed before she speaks. ‘He tried to drown me?’ The tight feeling is clamping down, making it hard to breathe. On the other side of the table the men have started talking again, but their conversation is muted—the tone people use when they talk fondly of someone now dead.
‘Down in the creek.’ Briar points at the window as if they were still living in the same place. ‘I remember him tying your arms and legs and carting you off—we all thought it was a game. Then he starting carrying you in the direction of the creek and saying he was going to chuck you in!’ She laughs. ‘We didn’t think he was actually going to do it.’ She grins at Erin. ‘Of course we went and pulled you out so you were completely fine.’
Ruby comes back into the room and sits down heavily. ‘Are you talking about Seth trying to kiss us down by the creek?’
‘No, about the time Seth threw Erin in the creek. The kissing was later on.’ She turns to Erin again. ‘You must remember, Erin. He used to go after you and—’
‘This baby needs a changed bottom,’ says Viv suddenly, passing the baby to Briar. ‘Right about now.’ Briar takes the baby and goes into the lounge. The PlayStation is still going and Erin hears a computer voice say Are the players ready?
‘You were only about four or five,’ says Ruby, standing to clear the plates. She scrapes the food off one onto another, using a finger. ‘I’m not surprised you don’t remember.’
Erin doesn’t, but she feels she should. Or that it should have been talked about before now.
‘It must have been terrible for Seth,’ says Viv, ‘living with a father like that. And his mother the way she was. It’s no wonder really.’
‘No wonder what?’ says Erin, concentrating hard. She can visualise the house now; it’s coming back, inch by inch. The sloped lawn leading down to the creek, the big house next door covered in white stucco, its wide windows with double-glazing. She remembers seeing a woman in there—it must have been Rita, the mother. She was always inside, looking out.
‘Some men are just born bad,’ adds Mick in his slow, heavy voice. Everyone looks at him, waiting for more, but that’s it, the end of what he’s got to say. He stands up and leaves the room, heading, Erin knows, for the back porch. As if on cue, Bryce and Conrad follow him, pushing back their chairs quietly.
Viv turns to Erin. ‘Allen died five years back. I must have told you in one of my emails. Rita sold the house and moved off somewhere, she was a whole different person when he’d gone. And Seth—he went over to Oz to work in the mines, I think. We all thought that would be the end of it, we wouldn’t see him again. But then he turned up back here as a qualified teacher, with Candice, and a baby on the way. They met up in Melbourne or something. It’s funny how people seem to find each other again.’
‘Candice,’ says Erin, piecing it together, ‘who I used to play with when I was little?’
‘You were in the same class,’ says Ruby. ‘You had that teacher who was nuts about animals.’
‘Mrs McGowan,’ says Briar, returning with the baby on her hip. The baby eyes Erin cautiously, one finger in his mouth. ‘We had her before you. She used to bring boxes of ducklings to school during duck shooting season, the ones that were orphaned and needed hand-rearing.’
Erin sits very still. She has the strange vacant sensation again, that feeling she gets when she looks in the bathroom mirror in the morning and her identifying features have yet to fill in. ‘I remember the ducklings,’ she says. But Viv and Ruby are standing now, getting ready to ferry the plates back into the kitchen, and Briar is settling the baby in its carrier.
‘Candice is an unhappy woman if ever I saw one,’ says Viv, disappearing into the kitchen.
‘Why?’ says Erin. ‘What’s happened to her?’
‘Seth’s what’s happened to her,’ says Briar, looking up from the baby who is practising his vowel sounds. ‘He’s got to be hitting her. You can’t see anything, but it’s probably going on in places we can’t see. He probably goes for bits of her that aren’t visible.’
‘Why doesn’t someone do something?’ says Erin.
There’s a long pause. Viv comes back into the room, followed by the children who run through to the lounge in a stampede. Erin can hear the PlayStation starting again—the sound of an imitation gun.
‘What good would that do?’ says Viv. ‘It’ll only stir things up. Some women seem to go for those kinds of men, they can’t help themselves. Anyway, it’s not like he’s going to change. Men like that—it’s in their genes.’
Erin wakes in the middle of the night. She’s alone in the lounge, in a sleeping bag on the couch. Viv had offered the guest room but Erin didn’t want to dirty the sheets seeing as she was only staying one night. She sits up and listens; the silence is so deep it’s like the sound of a different dimension rather than the absence of noise. Her throat feels sore. As she concentrates on breathing she remembers her dream. In it a man was tying up all her family, one by one, hands and feet together. They were all sitting on a bank by the creek. It was a shallow creek, less than a foot deep, but deep enough to drown in if your hands were tied. Erin’s mother had drowned in a few inches of water, trapped inside the car, her safety belt holding her in. The witness hadn’t been able to get it undone.
Erin untangles her legs from the sleeping bag and stands up. The dream sinks around her, settling. She remembers it clearly now—the boy telling her to lie still while he tied her hands and feet, pulling the rope so tight it dug into her skin. Being carried down the lawn over his shoulder, unable to escape. Then suddenly falling into cool, enveloping water. It was peaceful, the sensation. She watched the water close over her head like a mouth. As she sank she could see the twinkling of sunlight. If Briar and Ruby hadn’t shouted for help, thinks Erin, or if Viv hadn’t come out of the house at that moment, if she’d been there in the water a few seconds longer, that would have been it. She would now be nothing but a photograph, fading on the mantelpiece; or just put away in a box in the attic alongside Briar’s horse riding trophies and Ruby’s netball gear.
The hallway is a pattern of mottled light coming from the glass doorway at the far end. Outside the moon has come out and the world is white and grey. Erin stands on the porch, the wood damp under her bare feet. Another memory is hovering in her line of vision. She clenches her fists. Suddenly she ca
n see him, Seth—tall and gangly with hair the colour of dirt. Cold blue eyes that feel as if they’re looking through her skin. He’s telling her to lie down by the creek and she doesn’t want to but he’s older and bigger. She can feel the earth underneath her.
Dawn the next day is delayed by rain. In the kitchen Viv fusses over the stove while Mick reads the paper, turning the pages quietly and sighing to himself. Erin drinks two cups of coffee and tries to eats a piece of toast. The crumbs catch in her throat and she starts to cough.
‘Careful there,’ says Viv. ‘You’ll choke.’
‘Viv?’ says Erin, putting her toast back on the plate. ‘I wanted to ask—’
Viv turns back to the stove. ‘If you want eggs you’ll have to get in quick. Mick’ll eat them all otherwise. There’s still some black pudding left.’
Before Erin can say anything else, Ruby is coming through the back door followed by her boys. Erin rinses her cup while Ruby and Viv talk about the day ahead, who’s bringing what to Briar’s, will there be enough food, will the older kids have enough to do. Outside the window Erin can see a grey-blue sky. She remembers what Candice was saying now, at the back of the classroom. She was telling Erin about an older boy who’d come in at morning break, how he’d told her he was going to teach the duckling to swim. She remembers Candice’s expression too—she wasn’t crying; she was talking calmly, as if she’d known all along this was how it would go.
Erin packs up the sleeping bag in the lounge, squashing it into the case. Ruby’s boys are sitting by the TV.
‘Are you going?’ says the oldest.
Erin nods. ‘Yip.’
He nods back at her, accepting this as a fact, and both boys go back to watching TV without a backward glance. But in the kitchen it’s not so straightforward.
Ruby leans against the bench and crosses her arms. ‘But you only just got here.’
Viv looks worried, and she studies Erin’s face. ‘What about the birthday party?’
‘He’s turning one,’ says Erin. ‘He won’t notice.’
‘But the rest of us will,’ says Ruby.
‘I’m just a bit worried about the weather—it’s forecast to get worse.’
‘It’s only a bit of rain,’ says Ruby. ‘Nothing to worry about.’
‘I don’t like driving in the rain.’
Mick folds his paper and gets up from the table. ‘We’ll see you next time then,’ he says as he shuts the door.
Erin turns on the radio as she leaves town. Rain, rain and more rain, says the weather forecaster. It gets heavier the further south Erin drives, the tail lights in front of her disappearing and reappearing in the grey. She has to force herself to slow down. Jeremy was right, she thinks as she drives, about anger being a more productive emotion. It’s like a drug, something strong and fizzing, moving through her body, evaporating on her skin. The strength of it is overwhelming. She wants to open the window and shout, or scream.
She stops at a café in Ötaki and buys a takeaway coffee. Her hands are shaking so much she can hardly get the coins out of her wallet.
It’s only when Erin is getting back into the car, pulling the door quickly to stop the water getting in, that she notices the plastic dinosaur still sitting on the passenger seat. It was the wrong gift anyway, she decides, as she indicates to turn back onto the main road. She should have got him a soft toy, something cuddly, maybe a toy kākāpō or a kiwi. Next time she’ll be better prepared.
An hour later she joins the line of cars crawling through the Hutt Valley. Somewhere ahead, behind the wall of mist, is the harbour—and beyond that the city where Jeremy is waiting.
THE TAKAHĒ
We arrived on the mail boat—a flat-bottomed boat with peeling paint that snaked its way slowly around every bay in the Sounds. The island was the last stop. Fiona and I climbed off, jumping the gap between the jetty and the boat, and the mailman handed our backpacks and box of research equipment down after us. He tooted twice as the boat moved away.
The two DOC rangers, a man and woman, met us at the end of the jetty. They stood there quietly, blending into the pōhutukawa; we didn’t notice them at first. The man, Steve, was probably in his late twenties. He was tall and had long muscular limbs and curly hair that looked like it had been cut with kitchen scissors. The woman, Grace, was perhaps five years older. There was something reserved about her, a stillness. When she talked, her face hardly moved; it was like her words were coming from somewhere a few inches above her. She touched my arm lightly as she helped load our gear onto the quad bike.
‘Do you think they’re like, together?’ whispered Fiona as we followed the quad bike up the track. She grinned at me widely—her teeth were small and white.
A few hundred metres from the jetty was the bunkhouse where Fiona and I were to stay. It had a large wraparound verandah and solar panels. A Swedish woman who had volunteered on the island a few years back had painted bright yellow daffodils all over the cupboards in the kitchen. The rangers had a separate house further around the side of the hill, in behind a grove of pōhutukawa. Fiona and I walked past it the first night when we were heading off to do our fieldwork. It was after nine and at that almost-dark stage when white objects glow. There was an amber light coming from the porch.
‘I wonder if they’re doing it,’ whispered Fiona. She turned around and her head torch illuminated the ground around me in a wide circle. I wanted to tell her to grow up but I just smiled. I hardly knew Fiona; she was in the same lab group as me and had the same thesis supervisor, but that was all.
It was a long walk to the first site. We had pegged it out in the daylight, when everything seemed closer, more compact. Fiona began to sing softly as we walked. The words were all jumbled up, a soft mess of noise.
‘What’re you singing?’
‘It’s a song from church. You wouldn’t know it.’
Fiona sat down on a tree trunk when we got to the site. We were in old-growth forest, the canopy high above our heads, creepings and crawlings and rustlings all around us. A morepork in the darkness up ahead began to call.
‘Let’s start searching.’ I switched my head torch to a sharper beam and looked up at the shallow slope rising through a grove of juvenile nïkau palms. Our aim for the first week was to capture and tag as many giant weta as we could. Then, over the second week, we were to monitor how many of the tagged weta appeared in our live capture traps. It was part of a research project between the university and the zoo on translocation and dispersal. Fiona and I weren’t being paid; it was just something we had volunteered for.
‘Can we have a quick break?’ said Fiona and she began to pull items of clothing from her backpack, folding them into a pile on her lap.
‘We should really get searching.’
Fiona turned off her head torch. ‘I hope we get to see a takahē.’
The thick kawakawa bushes all around us murmured in the wind.
More-pork, more-pork.
‘I really hope we get to see a takahē,’ said Fiona again.
It rained the next day, pounding against the corrugated iron roof of the bunkhouse. After breakfast I went out in my jacket and waterproof pants and began to walk around the island. The track was slick with mud. The island rose up steeply above the track on one side and fell away to the sea on the other.
After an hour of walking, everything flattened out and the track began to climb, higher and higher above the sea. I came to a gate, beyond it a low wooden cage. I sat on the gate for a while and looked down at the sea. It was grey and choppy, white-capped waves appearing and vanishing. In the distance I could hear the quad bike; it was getting nearer and nearer. Soon it came into view. Steve was behind the wheel. He was wearing an oversized orange jacket with fluorescent stripes, the kind that road workers wear. He waved at me. Several metres from the gate he stopped the bike and climbed off.
‘Do you want to feed them?’ He nodded towards the cage.
‘Sure.’ I climbed down from the gate. ‘What’s i
n there?’
‘Wait and see.’ He opened the gate and I followed him through. We walked over to the cage. Quietly he opened the door and passed me an ice-cream container filled with a reddish-brown grain.
‘Throw in a handful.’
The mother appeared first; she had a bright red beak, and green and blue feathers on her back. She came into the open part of the cage, rain dripping from her feathers like mercury. Then the chick appeared from deep inside the cage—a black fluffy bundle with a white beak.
‘They’re black like that when they hatch,’ said Steve. ‘It’s to keep them camouflaged so predators don’t notice them.’
‘When do they get all colourful?’ I asked.
‘Not till much later. It’ll look like that for a while yet.’ He moved along the side of the cage, checking the wire-netting. ‘Tell Fiona to come by if she wants to see one—these are the only ones we’ve got on the island at the moment.’
‘I thought there were several wild pairs living here?’
He shook his head. ‘They’ve been transferred to a sanctuary on the mainland. Found a stoat here a while back—a female—and we think there could be more.’
‘What about these two?’
‘They’re fine for now,’ he said, ‘as long as we keep them in the cage.’
–
It rained steadily for the rest of the week. Fiona and I didn’t get much fieldwork done. On Saturday night the rangers went off in the boat to another island for a meeting. Steve came over before they left and told me and Fiona we could go over to their house and watch DVDs while they were away, if we wanted.
We went over after dinner. The house was bigger than I had thought it would be. And it was modern-looking, just like a normal house at the end of a cul-de-sac in the suburbs somewhere, yet it was here, on an island, in the middle of nowhere. A skink darted under the couch as we opened the sliding door. Inside everything was tidy. Fiona sat down on the couch and started to hum. ‘I could get used to living here,’ she said.
On the wall above the couch was a row of photographs of Steve and Grace. In one they were standing on a jetty, holding hands. She wore a sarong tied behind her neck. Steve was pushing a pram in another photograph. Grace was there too, but standing in the background, her face out of focus. The pram had a blue blanket draped over it. One of the photographs was of a baby. Its eyes were closed. I looked closely; it looked unreal, its features waxy, almost like a doll.
The Red Queen Page 6