‘It looks like it’s dead.’ Fiona looked at me as she spoke.
‘It can’t be. It’s just asleep.’
‘Who would have a picture of a dead baby on their wall?’
I sighed. ‘Let’s watch a DVD.’
The weather cleared in the second week. The January sun returned, watery and languid, dripping down on the forest, the strips of beach, the sea all around. Fiona and I started working long hours to make up for the time we’d missed. We worked from nine every night until around five the next morning, searching the traps at each site over and over—we weren’t finding many of the tagged weta. Because of the heat, we didn’t sleep much during the day to make up for it, so we fell into a sleep-deprived, dreamy, out-of-body state. We sang loudly as we worked at night, everything and anything. We even began to make up songs.
I fell first. It was Tuesday night, or maybe Thursday; all the days had blended together. All I remember was tripping, then tumbling, briefly, into the dark. Then lying there on the cool damp earth. Fiona fell right after me; she landed on her hands and knees, then I felt her grasping my left ankle.
‘Are you okay?’ she said, starting to laugh. I laughed too. Then we started to cry, not because we were hurt or anything, we just cried. Around us the forest whispered and crackled and then pinpricks of light appeared—glow-worms. They lit up the bank we had fallen down in a pattern of spirals and mazes. For a long time we just lay there and looked at them. Eventually we sat up and knelt beside the bank. Our head torches were off—without light the sounds of the forest became louder, almost three-dimensional.
I could hear Fiona wiping her nose on her sleeve.
‘When I was seven,’ I said, ‘I released all the birds from the cages in the park around the corner from my primary school. I used my dad’s hedge trimmers to open the cages. I thought I was doing them a favour. But the next day, when I went back to look, there were three dead parrots on the cricket pitch, all bloodied and stuff. I think a dog must have got them. They probably had no fear after living in captivity for so long. It was horrible. I never told anyone it was me.’
Fiona wiped her nose on her sleeve again and sniffed. ‘A few years ago, this girl at the school where my brother was teaching said all these things about him.’ She picked up the leaf litter with her hands as she spoke, letting it fall back to the ground. ‘She said he was doing these things to her.’ Above us a branch rustled. ‘It wasn’t true, obviously.’
Fiona stood up and turned her head torch on, and the glow-worms disappeared. ‘I can’t believe I haven’t seen a takahē yet.’ Her voice was louder. ‘I hope I see one before we leave.’
‘You know there’s a couple in a cage,’ I said, swallowing. ‘Around the north side of the island? It’s about an hour’s walk from the house.’
‘No.’ She turned to face me, pinning me in the beam from her torch. ‘I didn’t know that.’
I stood up too and we began to head off, pushing our way through the tangle of bush.
‘Thanks,’ said Fiona, from somewhere behind me.
When our two weeks were up, Steve took us back through the Sounds in his motorboat. It was a windy day, waves rocking the boat back and forth and side to side. He dropped us at the jetty and motored off into the wide bay. We watched him turn the corner and disappear behind a peninsula that fell away into the sea.
Fiona and I caught the six o’clock ferry from Picton. We sat up the front, by the sea-stained windows. Between us was a grey cardboard box with tape around the sides and tiny holes punched in its top. Inside were fourteen giant weta we had collected to take back to the zoo as part of the translocation part of the project. We’d collected them on the last night, one from each of the traps. Every now and then one of us reached to steady the box.
When we arrived in Wellington we shuffled towards the exit among a mass of tourists. Fiona carried the weta box and the research equipment and I held our backpacks, one in each hand.
‘I can take care of them—the weta, I mean. For tonight. I don’t mind.’ She looked at me sideways. ‘You should come over tomorrow and we could take them to the zoo together. If you want to that is. I don’t mind.’
‘Oh, yeah. Um, maybe. I’ll see how it goes.’
‘You should come.’ She smiled and put the box on the ground at her feet.
‘I’d like to come but I’m quite busy tomorrow.’ I handed her backpack to her. ‘I might head off now. See you round.’ I started to walk away.
‘Hey,’ said Fiona. I turned and looked back at her. She looked younger from that distance, her ponytail pulled high on top of her head. ‘I’m stoked I got to see a takahē. Thanks for, um—’
I watched her for a while, waiting. She didn’t say anything else but remained where she was, just standing there and smiling so hard it looked like her face was about to break open and her white teeth scatter across the floor.
‘Bye,’ I said.
When I got to the exit I turned back. She was still standing there, watching me with that smile.
‘See you round,’ I called. I couldn’t tell if she had heard me.
WEATHER
From the outset, the year—a La Niña cycle—is out of sync. A wet summer follows a wet spring; the sky is sea-grey and the air humid. Whenever Ann walks outside she feels as if she’s wading through a barrier of still, murky water. It puts her on edge—the fine layer of sweat on her forehead in the mornings, the flutter of the bedroom curtain letting in yet another gust of heat, the tui in the backyard singing at midnight. By late summer the air becomes heavier still and Lew’s tomatoes rot on the vines.
One day Ann comes home from work at lunchtime to pick up a forgotten file. She finds it in the study under a pile of Lew’s gardening books. As she moves back through the house she hears the wind chimes, a sudden gust of noise. And then another sound, this time human. Lew is in the garden—Ann sees him before he sees her. She walks across the lawn, watching his tidy progress with the spade.
‘Aren’t you meant to be at the museum?’
He turns to look at her, startled. A streak of dirt on the side of his cheek. ‘I took a sick day.’
‘You don’t look sick,’ she says.
Overhead the sky is grey.
Putting down the spade, Lew reaches to pull at a clump of weeds. ‘I just thought the garden needed some attention.’
‘It looks fine to me.’
He doesn’t look up and she stands there watching him for a while. There’s a measured quickness to the way he works, his whole body bent forward. Deciding against an argument in the heat, she turns and walks back across the lawn, through the house, and up the hill to work.
The evening is breathless. Ann arrives home to find Lew in the garden still. In the kitchen the breakfast dishes remain undone, a pile of unfolded clothes in the hallway. On the bench a vase of week-old tulips that need throwing on the compost.
They eat dinner, cooked by Ann, in silence—the screen door ajar to let in the overcast evening. Ann eyes Lew across the table—tall, narrow, melancholic. ‘What’s wrong?’ she says, eventually. ‘The doctor hasn’t been in contact again, has he?’
Lew puts down his knife and fork and looks at her. Then he wipes his forehead with the back of his hand. ‘Ruth saw my ghost.’
Ann grimaces and stands to fill a glass with water.
‘I knew you’d be like this.’
‘Like what? A rational person?’
‘I’ve got a right to be concerned,’ he says, ‘after everything—’
Ann sits back down. ‘Okay.’ She tries to not smile. ‘What did Ruth see?’
Lew watches her carefully; she can feel the intensity of his gaze. ‘She said I was sitting outside, in the garden.’ A fly settles in his hair but he doesn’t brush it away. ‘It was hard to see, Ruth said, something to do with my aura.’
‘Your aura?’ says Ann, coughing slightly.
‘But she could tell I was very thin,’ says Lew quickly. ‘It was sunny, she said, but I was wea
ring a winter coat.’
Ann waits for him to go on but that seems to be it, the end of the story. She stands up again and takes the dirty plates to the sink. Outside the sky is heavy.
‘It’s going to rain,’ says Lew, moving to stand behind her. He takes over, turning on the tap and rinsing the plates one at a time.
Ann shakes her head. ‘We didn’t forecast it to.’
It rains for a week. Heavy late-summer showers that make Lew acutely aware of the surface of things—the slick wetness of the outside table, the mottled grey of each paving stone, each dark knot in the wooden trellis. The pots on the pathway fill with a black soup of soil and potting mix. Outside the bedroom window the gutter springs a leak, then a steady waterfall.
When Lew finally sleeps at night, long after Ann’s quiet breathing has become rhythmical, his dreams have an opaque quality, as if he’s standing behind a screen of moving water. In one he’s on a tour boat in Fiordland with Ann—a memory of a trip taken shortly after his operation, when he was so thin the cold made his bones ache. It was raining the afternoon they got to Milford and they had both gone off the idea of a boat trip. But the tour guide persuaded them it was best in the rain because the waterfalls were flowing. They saw the falls as the boat pulled out into the fiords, streams of white peeling away from the rocks, braiding and twisting in the long fall to the sea.
With the rain, the days feel longer—the time between morning and evening unpunctuated by the movement of the sun. It seems like a bad omen, such bleak summer weather. Luckily for Lew he has little time to worry. At work he’s kept busy with an influx of visitors to the museum—tourists, older people, mothers with small children. They linger by the exhibitions, going in twice, three times, reluctant to go back outside. One afternoon he oversees the setting up of a new series of paintings on the ground floor gallery. The room is long and narrow—as Lew walks from end to end, measuring the progression of the display, he moves through a pocket of cold air. The rest of the room is warm, apart from that one place. He points it out to Lynette who works at the reception.
‘Don’t ask me,’ she says. ‘I’m from Invercargill. I don’t feel the cold.’
That night the walnut tree in the garden next door comes down. It is after midnight when it happens. Lew, already awake, hears a crack, then a crash like a giant wave rolling towards the house.
‘What’s that?’ says Ann, jerking upright beside him. She grabs his shoulder and he can feel her body trembling. A woman who hates surprises.
‘It’s all right,’ says Lew, putting his hand on her back. ‘It’s only a tree.’
In the morning they survey the damage. The tree has come down across the fence, smashing out a line of fence posts, a section of trellis. Lew’s vegetable garden lies under the upper branches.
‘Rain got into the trunk,’ Ruth tells Lew as they watch the tree get cut into pieces, readying it for removal. She has come over with a box of chocolates to apologise for the inconvenience. She hands Lew a card made by her twin boys with two pictures of spiky trees, one upright and one fallen.
‘Thank you,’ says Lew, admiring the card.
‘Apparently it had been rotting for months,’ says Ruth, ‘but we’d never have known.’
Wind follows the rain, weeks of blustery north-westerly followed by a deadly cold southerly that shakes the house so the wine glasses in the cabinet above the sink rattle. Ann wakes one morning to find a layer of early autumn dew covering the outer edges of the window frame. Lew is hot and damp beside her.
‘You should take a sick day,’ she says, getting out of bed, ‘legitimately.’
He is asleep when she checks on him before leaving, or pretending to be.
Clouds race over the top of Tinakori Hill as Ann walks to work. She moves quickly, head down, shoulders hunched. Turning into the botanical gardens, she winds her way between the rose beds, through the patch of native bush and up the path to the green and grey MetService building. Her office is cold. Beside her monitor, a note left by one of the forecasters on the early shift says gale warnings. At the bottom a sketch of a gust of wind and a cloud with an angry face.
In the afternoon Ann has to give a talk to a group of physics students—something she does a few times a year. (‘Did you ever consider teaching?’ a lecturer asked her once. ‘God no,’ Ann told him. ‘I hate explaining things.’) There are five of them this time, all young and male. They crowd around her monitor on swivel chairs, a self-conscious semicircle.
‘Forecasting is never exact,’ says Ann. ‘There are nuances, and so many things that can have an impact. And things can take you by surprise; systems can change course suddenly, or turn out differently from how they appear.’ She points out a high settling over the volcanic plateau, tracing its progress with her index finger. ‘It won’t last.’ Scrolling down she moves to a low heading towards Wellington. ‘Look at this. This is now’—she clicks and the screen changes ‘—and look how much it has moved since yesterday.’
One of the students clears his throat.
‘Can you see it?’ Ann rubs her forehead as she waits for a reply. Around her the students make small movements—a shuffle, a scratch, a cough.
‘I would prefer an answer sometime this year,’ says Ann.
‘Yes,’ someone says, finally. ‘I think so.’
Lew is sitting on the couch wrapped in a blanket when Ann gets home, the radio on the news. She touches his forehead—warm, but not too warm. ‘You seem better.’
He nods and takes off his glasses. ‘You’re soaked.’
‘It’s raining,’ says Ann.
‘I would have picked you up. You should have called.’
Ann shakes her head. ‘It only started when I got to our street. We’re forecasting a storm for later tonight—a big one.’
‘I know,’ says Lew, his voice dry and quick. ‘Ruth came over to tell me she could smell cucumbers this morning. She often smells cucumbers before a storm.’
‘She would,’ says Ann.
After dinner Ann gets a headache, a dull throb in her left temple. It lingers until well after midnight. Beside her Lew snores lightly and twists the duvet. Suddenly it hits the side of the house—the storm—like something solid.
In late autumn there’s a burst of sunny weather; for days only the thinnest thread of white clouds trail across the midday sky. It gives Lew time to repair the cumulative damage from the fallen tree and the storm. The vegetable garden has to be replanted, along with the flower beds by the fence. Even Ann helps, planting roses she chose herself in a row along the side of the house. She tends them protectively, overwatering the soil and buying expensive potting mix.
Lew is digging out the front when Ruth comes through the gate on a still Sunday morning.
‘It’s looking lovely,’ she says, turning in a circle to survey the garden.
‘Isn’t it?’ says Lew proudly.
Ruth asks to see around the back and Lew takes her through the house, offering a cup of tea. ‘Ann’s asleep,’ he nods at the bedroom door. ‘Night shift.’
‘Please don’t wake her. I won’t stay long.’
‘That’s probably wise,’ says Lew. ‘Sleep is good for my wife; it gives her a chance to sharpen her edge.’
Ruth looks at him and he can see her hesitate.
‘Ann and I tease each other,’ he says, leading her into the kitchen. ‘It’s how we get along.’ He turns his back to put on the jug, reaching to the top shelf to select the least chipped cups.
‘You have a scar,’ says Ruth. ‘I’ve never noticed before.’
Lew turns to face her, startled, not by her observation but her tone—casual but direct, clear but cool. He touches the back of his head. The scar has a raised surface, fine and narrow, like a seam. ‘I had a tumour,’ he says, putting teabags in the cups. ‘A year ago.’
‘Cancer?’
He glances over at her again. She is wearing earrings made of coloured beads. The skin on her neck is smooth.
‘Benign. But
for a while they thought it wasn’t. I was very sick.’
‘That’s lucky.’ She leans her hip against the bench. ‘One of my boys had leukaemia, but he’s fine now.’
‘When was that? They both look so healthy.’
‘Two years ago. It was before my husband left us.’ Ruth smiles widely, revealing a row of straight teeth. ‘To look at him now, you wouldn’t know.’
Later Lew takes her into the back garden and points out the work he’s been doing—a new fence, vine tomatoes running through a wire netting structure. He shows her Ann’s roses.
‘They’re overwatered,’ says Ruth, bending down to touch the soil.
As he makes dinner that evening, Lew sees a dog he hasn’t seen before run along the side of the house. Ann has been called into work to cover a second nightshift, a sick colleague, so he’s alone. The dog trots up to the back door expectantly, as if it’s been there before. Lew goes outside and shoos it away, closing the gate. Back inside he rings Ann’s work number. She answers in her work voice, tight-lipped. ‘What’s wrong?’
He can hear someone talking in the background, the hum of office work. ‘Nothing, I just rang to see how you’re getting on.’ The sound of a door opening and closing. There’s a pause, and Lew isn’t sure if she’s waiting for him to speak. He touches the seam on the back of his head. ‘Do you ever think we should’ve had children?’
‘What?’ says Ann, her voice louder, tuned-in. ‘What did you say that for? Lew, I’m at work!’
‘If something happened to one of us,’ says Lew, ‘the other would be left alone.’
The Red Queen Page 7