The Red Queen

by Gemma Bowker-Wright

  She sat up and wound her hair into a bun, holding it in place with her hand. ‘Sorry?’

  I was holding my pile of notes against my chest. Dumping them on the bed, I sat down on the crumpled duvet. ‘My interview—what did you think?’

  ‘I’m sorry Zoe.’ She yawned. ‘I missed it. I slept in.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘It’s no big deal. It’s recorded. I’ll listen now.’

  ‘Don’t.’

  She got out of bed, pulling my dressing gown from the dresser where I’d left it. She put it on, tying the cord around her waist. ‘Why? It can’t have been that bad.’

  ‘It wasn’t—in the end.’

  ‘Great—I’ll go listen now.’

  ‘But I don’t want you to listen to it now.’ I could feel my face getting hot. I stood up. ‘I wanted you to listen to it then.’

  Turning back to face me, she held up her shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. ‘What difference does it make?’

  I pushed past her and went into the kitchen.

  ‘Don’t be like that,’ she said. ‘Come on—grow up.’

  Outside the day was warming up. I walked down the path and out to the street. At the park I stopped and sat on the swing, dangling my feet in the bark chips and replaying it all. The tide was out in Nelson Harbour, leaving a long stretch of muddy sand. As I swung higher, the metal chains started to creak.

  Summer was in the kitchen when I got back, her laptop balanced on the bench. I watched her through the window for a while. She was leaning forward, chin in her hands. The jug had just boiled and was letting off a funnel of steam.

  I crossed the threshold. ‘Okay, I’m sorry.’

  She turned towards me, smiling quickly. Her eyes rested on my shoulder, as if she was expecting someone else to come up behind me.

  ‘I’m sorry too,’ she said. She was still wearing my dressing gown.

  ‘You carried on,’ said Harry on Monday morning, ‘that was the key.’ Clare brought in a chocolate cake she’d made to celebrate—it was slightly dry on the inside. ‘I hardly noticed the mix-up,’ she told me, ‘you recovered so well.’

  Leon’s reaction was a surprise. He brought in a series of live shows he’d done when he first started for me to listen to and offered to set up a pre-recorded interview.

  ‘It’s like he’s a different person,’ I told Summer that evening. ‘All day he was so—nice.’

  ‘Some people take a while to warm,’ she said and went back to sorting through our mail.

  Something had changed between us—a slight repositioning that I couldn’t put my finger on. Perhaps it was to do with moving in together. We’d started to argue about small things—which of us had left the lid off the milk, the towel on the bathroom floor, the dishes in the sink. Summer seemed cautious around me, as if she was waiting for me to come out with something.

  At the start of May I suggested we take two days off and go to Tākaka for a long weekend. Summer was reluctant at first, but agreed. It was raining the morning we left and became heavier the further we got.

  ‘It was like this when I went to the West Coast with Simon,’ said Summer, her hand pressed to the window. ‘The weather always seems to be miserable when I go away.’

  I looked across at her. She had her knees up, feet on the dashboard.

  ‘Who’s Simon?’

  ‘Just a guy I was dating in Wellington.’

  I focused hard on the road. ‘A guy?’

  She wiped fog from the passenger window. ‘Ah-huh.’

  ‘How long were you together?’

  ‘Not long—it wasn’t serious.’

  As we got to the top of the hill, the mist cleared. Wet boulders dotted the fields on either side. It looked cold.

  I could feel Summer watching me. ‘Why are you acting upset?’

  I didn’t look at her. ‘I’m not acting upset.’

  I’d booked a bach for us to stay in—a friend of Clare’s owned it. The bach was large, eight bedrooms, each of them cold and dusty, a place that would have been great in summer. It rained the whole time and a thick mist descended on the sea so we couldn’t see much past the breakers. On Sunday we went for a walk in the rain then waited in the cold for a café to open.

  Everyone at work was grumpy when we got back. Harry stalked around the office. Clare’s cat had died in the weekend and she hadn’t been in since.

  ‘It’s a cat,’ said Harry, throwing a stack of paper on his desk. ‘Three days mourning for a bloody cat.’

  ‘She doesn’t have kids,’ I said, surprising myself for wanting to defend her.

  ‘So that makes it okay?’

  ‘That’s not what I meant,’ I said.

  It happened slowly. At first I hardly noticed. Leon began to stay later at the station, finding jobs to do, planning his programmes. Then he started to bring her recordings—the sound of waves on the beach in a southerly, wind chimes knocking together in the rain, a rubbish bin being blown down the street. Summer stored the sounds on her laptop where she mixed them with her own recordings, making sequences of noise. Sometimes she used them on her show, playing a game where listeners had to call in and guess different sounds. She did this around eleven, long after Harry had left so no one was around to object. I’d been recording her shows to replay during the weekends when I’d listen to them while doing other things. Now I stayed awake every night to listen to her live

  One evening I saw a motorbike stop at the curb. I didn’t realise it was Leon at first. Then the helmet came off and I saw his fine blond hair. He nodded at me. Before I could say anything Summer was coming out the door. She stopped at the top step, her bag slung over her shoulder. Leon lifted up the seat and took out a spare helmet, holding it out to her.

  ‘What’s going on?’ My voice was brittle—I could hear it ringing in my head.

  ‘Nothing,’ said Summer. ‘Leon’s giving me a lift to work.’ She walked down the steps, leaning forward to kiss my cheek as she passed, but her lips didn’t quite make contact and all I could feel was her breath, the warmth of it.

  I watched her get on the bike behind Leon, then as it disappeared down the street, turning the corner.

  Instead of going inside, I walked down the street and into town. It was after seven and already dark. At the first pub I found I ordered a glass of wine and sat at the bar, kicking my feet against the stool. I hadn’t eaten since lunchtime. Two guys in suits came in soon after—one of them went up to the bar to order.

  ‘Hi.’

  He turned to look at me. He was wearing a tie. ‘Hi.’

  ‘I’m Zoe.’ My voice sounded slowed-up, unfamiliar.

  He looked surprised but shook my hand. ‘Dave.’ Then he asked if I wanted to join them.

  The flat was dark when I got home. The bed unmade. I got in and must have slept for a while because when I woke Summer was sitting on the end of the bed. She started to cry and I started to cry and we both said we were sorry. I told her about Dave and said nothing had happened and she told me nothing had happened with Leon, they were just friends. I tried to go back to sleep later, but I kept waking. Beside me, Summer tossed and turned, twisting the sheets. At six I got up and made coffee in the kitchen, waiting for the sun to come up.

  When I got home from work that evening Summer was already gone. On the kitchen table her cloth bag—left behind. Before I could stop myself, I was rifling through it. Discs, pens, a pear, the recorder. I picked it up and pressed play. A bird call, a tapping sound, violin music. Each sound was simple, distinctly itself. I was disappointed, but I couldn’t figure out why.

  As I replaced the items my hand touched something else. A clear, plastic folder. I pulled it out. ‘My script’ it said on the front. Inside was a pile of typed A4 sheets. The writing was covered in highlighter, illegible notes filling each margin. The last sheet had a coffee stain.

  Harry held a midwinter party at his house in July and invited everyone from the station. With one week left on my placement, I’d had a go at almost e
verything—pre-recorded interviews, news reading, the weather. Now I was helping Harry with editing.

  Summer and I went the wrong way so we got there late. When we finally found it we realised we’d driven past twice. Harry’s house was completely different to the apartment I’d made up in the stories I told Summer that day. It was a tidy place with cream weatherboards and a garden. In the hallway, photographic evidence of two teenage children.

  The lounge was full of people I didn’t know. Someone handed me a glass of wine and I drank it quickly. All around me talking, noise. Summer went to find the bathroom and I had a brief conversation with a guy whose name I immediately forgot. Clare waved at me from the couch.

  ‘Zoe—I’ve saved a space.’

  I went over and sat beside her. Harry was sitting across from us talking to a blond woman.

  ‘So what do you think about working in radio?’

  I glanced around the room and caught sight of Summer and Leon together in the far corner. Summer was laughing, her hand held up to her mouth. When I looked back, Clare was smiling at me, widely.

  ‘It’s not what I expected,’ I said.

  Harry turned towards us; I could see he was half listening.

  ‘Why’s that?’ she asked. ‘What did you expect?’

  ‘I thought the whole being live bit would be easier. I don’t understand how people can talk for hours and hours and make it sound so unrehearsed.’

  From the corner of my eye I could see Leon touch Summer’s arm, moving her aside. Then he walked in our direction.

  ‘It seems to me,’ said Clare, ‘that you just be yourself.’

  ‘You have to think of it as a performance.’ Leon was standing beside Clare now, looking down at us. He sat on the arm of the couch, his long legs in tight black jeans. ‘It’s like acting.’

  ‘Acting?’ said Clare. ‘Really?’ She rubbed her eye. ‘It seems to me that the people who are best at it are just being themselves.’

  ‘It’s giving a performance,’ said Leon, ‘of yourself.’

  Suddenly Harry leant forward, breaking free of his conversation. He held up his hand, fingers splayed. ‘The trick is to be almost yourself, but never quite yourself. It only works if you hold something back; if you’re almost you. Do you see the difference?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Clare.

  I nodded too, but no one was looking at me. I looked around the room but couldn’t see Summer anywhere.

  Later I went to the bathroom and sat on the edge of Harry’s bath. It had started to rain. Large drops hit the guttering in torrents—stopping, starting, stopping again. After a few minutes it faded to a background hum—a sound you have to listen for to notice. Like when you’re driving a long distance and realise, suddenly, you’ve lost reception and been listening to static.

  BACK TO THE SEA

  After my great-grandmother died, my father, concerned my head was too full of fairy tales, took me aside one night each week to tell me facts. It was usually a Sunday evening. We would sit together on the porch and he would smoke his Sunday cigar and drink his Sunday glass of whisky as he talked. He told me how plants, instead of veins and arteries, have xylem and phloem through which water moves, like blood. He told me about the evolution of organisms from the sea to land and to the sky—and how some animals like the kiwi and moa had reversed the loop from the sky back to land. He told me how some traits evolved twice, in completely different places, but appeared the same.

  ‘What’s traits?’ I asked.

  ‘In people it’s things like the colour of your eyes or skin.’ He sat his heavy-bottomed glass on the arm of his deck chair. The whisky inside looked smooth and oily, like liquid gold.

  ‘In plants it could be the kind of leaves, or the branching pattern.’ For my father, everything came back to plants.

  I looked out at the hazy evening light, the air thick with pollen. I was only eleven years old and didn’t understand all of what he was saying, but I liked sitting out there with him, just the two of us.

  ‘It’s called parallel evolution,’ said my father, lighting his cigar.

  ‘Like two lines that are side by side?’

  Behind us the porch swing moved in the breeze.

  ‘Yes,’ he said, nodding, ‘and never touch.’

  I looked at him for a while. His long, dark face was puddled in shallow. ‘Dad, was Te Mata Peak underwater once?’ I’d been told this in school but it seemed impossible that something so huge could have once been underwater.

  My father turned to blow away a funnel of cigar smoke. ‘Yes, a lot of Hawke’s Bay was once, if you go back far enough.’

  My great-grandmother came to live with us the summer we moved to Hawke’s Bay. Because of my father’s job we moved frequently, skipping from one fruit-producing region of New Zealand to the next. It felt like we were always moving, my family—twisting and turning like a river.

  Our place, a rented property beside the research centre where my father was working, backed onto one of the test orchards. The kitchen window looked out on row after row of experimental apple trees. The house itself, a quickly knocked together weatherboard structure, was painted cream. It had recently been added to and its extensions were a slightly different shade. Surrounding the house was half an acre of lawn—neither my father nor mother had time for a garden: my father worked all day and my mother, who was a part-time florist, couldn’t be bothered with flowers at home.

  My great-grandmother arrived the day after Christmas. It was a surprise to me and my brother as we’d never thought of our father as having a family—the linking mother, our grandmother, had died long ago. Our mother, on the other hand, seemed to have too many: an endless array of uncles and aunts and cousins who were always turning up and staying slightly too long.

  She arrived in the middle of a Hawke’s Bay drought, dropped at the door one hot afternoon by my father’s uncle—a man we’d never met—who didn’t have time to stay, even for a cup of tea. And suddenly there she was, a tiny ancient woman, like someone from a fairy tale, so small the top of her head was just level with my father’s armpit. If I stood on tiptoes I was the same height. The hair on her head was fine and white, like dandelion fluff; beneath it the outline of her skull was visible. When I looked at her face I imagined what it would look like if the years could be peeled back. The image I pictured was my own—black hair, pale skin—a mould that had dropped through the generations like a stone.

  My brother and I sat at the kitchen table watching her stiff movements as our parents spoke to her in a slow deliberate way. She nodded, but didn’t smile.

  ‘Say hello,’ said our mother, nudging us each in turn.

  ‘Hello,’ said my brother, loudly. Then he got down from the table and ran outside.

  My great-grandmother turned to me, searching my face with her green gaze. I opened my mouth but no words came out.

  ‘Hello there,’ she said, ‘little one.’

  Her name was Aideen. On her gravestone it was spelt Aydeen—a mistake no one thought to have fixed. Originally from Ireland, she’d lived most of her life on the West Coast of the South Island. How anyone could live in the same place for so long was a mystery to my brother and me. Her family arrived expecting another version of home and got black sand, tangled bush, rocks as big as houses.

  Her memory of her life was an obscured pattern, like a mountain track where much of the view is blocked by trees and ridgeline and you only catch the occasional glimpse of sea. Some things she remembered with striking clarity—watching the soldiers going off to fight, dancing at a ball. She remembered how both her and the man she was dancing with were so nervous they couldn’t figure out how to hold hands. ‘All the other couples seemed to know what they were doing.’

  The man at the ball, my great-grandfather, was tall and expressionless in the sepia photo my father showed us—his lips, when I looked close, were cracked, perhaps by the salty wind. The only other photo was a black-and-white shot of my great-grandmother as a child, standing in fr
ont of her parents and brother on a verandah, all four partially shaded by the corrugated iron roof. As he passed the photo around, my father told stories his mother had been told: no running water, a bathroom that was outside, constant flooding that rose as high as the back door.

  ‘How did you cope?’ said my mother, putting her hand to her mouth.

  ‘Oh we had a garden,’ said my great-grandmother as if this was a logical explanation. But when my father showed her the photo she frowned. ‘I don’t know these people,’ she said, ‘any of them.’

  My mother was the one who took control, folding my great-grandmother into our lives the same way she folded clothes, rolling them tightly and putting them in the first drawer they would fit. To start with my great-grandmother was put in the spare room upstairs—where my mother went to sleep when my father snored. But this was too far from the bathroom and resulted in a row of newly washed sheets billowing on the line every morning. Eventually she was given my brother’s room and he was forced to move in with me. Our parents carried his bed into my room and set it up in the far corner by the door, moving my dresser out of the way.

  Despite this initial mishap, my great-grandmother seemed to take up a tiny amount of space in our lives. When I sat in the same room as her I often forgot she was there. She liked to be outside but found the Hawke’s Bay heat too much so she only went out in the evenings. She would sit on the porch swing looking out at the apple trees, her hand clutching the metal chain.

  ‘Go and talk to her,’ my father told me each evening.

  Eventually I plucked up the courage. It was cooler outside. I went to the far end of the porch swing and pulled myself up.

  My great-grandmother was looking out at the bird bath—the one feature on the bare lawn. A mynah was splashing about, ruffling its feathers so the water went in all directions.

  ‘Do you know the story of the selkies?’

  I snuck a quick glance at her. The skin on her face was pale and lined, like putty—it looked as though someone had grabbed a handful and pulled it downwards with their fingers.