The Red Queen

by Gemma Bowker-Wright

  He took it out and showed me—a smooth, white stone.

  The burial must have ended because everyone was walking back to the car park. Our parents came last—our father, tall and dark, his face expressionless; our mother’s high heels sinking into the grass. They got in the car and we drove away.

  ‘Well, I guess that’s that,’ said our mother. She gave a small sigh. In the side mirror I could see my father frown. I looked away, watching the archway of monkey puzzle trees as we drove along Marine Parade, beyond the branches glimpses of blue waves.

  Our parents started a murmured conversation in the front seat—grocery shopping, lawns to be mowed, new school shoes. My brother sat quietly and sucked his stone.

  Out the window the sea grew smooth as silk, as if the surface had been coated in oil. I knew that far out beyond the horizon, Pania and the selkies were drifting inwards on the slow, oily tide. By late evening they would reach the shore. Climbing up the stony bank they would move silently across the road and through the town until they found the cemetery. Then, listening carefully, they would skip down the rows until they found my great-grandmother’s grave. Snatching up the flowers, they would run back to the sea. And the next morning, or the morning after, the stiff stems would wash in on the high tide—hollow and white—like bone.

  BREATHING UNDERWATER

  The painted lines on the bottom appeared to be floating upwards, making it seem as if the pool was only a few centimetres deep. Sebastian sat on a diving board to pull on his flippers, trying not to think. They were wet inside from when he’d jumped in before lunch. But that was without the equipment on, just in and out. This time they had to stay down there.

  ‘Remember to breathe,’ said Julie, pointing to her mouth. She did an exaggerated breath—in, out, in, out—her cheeks inflating. There was a bit of something red on her front tooth.

  Sebastian did a thumbs-up back. As he turned he caught a glimpse of Meiying, hair in a towel turban on top of her head. She’d gone first, before either of the other couples, diving into the pool and disappearing.

  ‘Ready there?’ called Julie. Further along the bench, Meiying waved.

  Sebastian put the mouthpiece in place. Compressed air came flowing through the tube. He took a deep breath; the consistency felt strange—too thin somehow, lighter than it should be.

  ‘Go!’

  As he stepped forward he had a memory of Heather in the sea off Princess Bay. Her dog, Aslan, was following a stick caught in the undertow, and she was in the water up to her waist, going after him. Sebastian remembered standing on the beach and yelling at her. That was all he did, stand there on the beach, yelling.

  He was still at the edge of the pool, the surface of the water motionless. Behind him he could feel the collective gaze of the class, Julie and the other couples, all of them, watching him. Meiying was there too, somewhere among them.

  It had been a miscommunication, the whole diving thing. They were having dinner at a Malaysian place on Dixon Street—one of the kitchen hands was on Meiying’s English immersion course. They’d got there late and were squashed in at a table by the wall. It was for three people, the table, but the extra place setting had been whipped away as soon as they arrived, leaving an empty chair.

  Meiying started saying something about April. Something to do with Sebastian and her.

  ‘April?’ Sebastian leaned forward, wishing it wasn’t so noisy. They were only in the first week of March. ‘Mei, I think, we—’ There was no right time to say it.

  But Meiying didn’t seem to have registered he was talking. She brushed her fringe out of her face. ‘We dying?’ she said. That’s what it sounded like to Sebastian.

  ‘Pardon?’ he said.

  Close by a waiter dropped a glass of water on the floor.

  Meiying nodded, excitedly, her head bobbing up and down like a doll. ‘Fun. Yes?’

  ‘Fun? I’m not sure what—’

  But then the waiter was back and Meiying was ordering something, firing off the instructions in Cantonese. ‘I ask about job,’ she said to Sebastian when the conversation was over. ‘In kitchen.’

  ‘Great,’ he said. ‘That’s great.’

  The next day she’d emailed Sebastian a picture of a couple underwater—a man and a woman. He could tell by the shape of their bodies in the wetsuits, and the woman’s hair which floated upwards from behind her mask like deep-water seaweed. They were holding hands. Diving, said the subject line. Me you?

  It took Sebastian a few moments to piece it together.

  The course, it had turned out, was only a day. A Saturday. The open water part was taught separately, next summer. But you didn’t have to commit to that.

  An early autumn rainstorm had inundated Wellington the Friday before. It was still coming down as Sebastian drove across town to pick Meiying up, fat drops battering the windscreen. Parking outside her flat, he tooted the horn once. She came out immediately, running through the rain towards him. Over her shoulder was a plastic bag with one flipper poking out. She got in, shutting the door with a slam. ‘Hello?’

  Perhaps it was a cultural thing but everything she said seemed to be a question, requiring something of Sebastian, needing something. He took the bag from her and placed it on the backseat. ‘Hi there.’ The flipper still had the price tag attached. He was only planning to hire gear.

  Before leaving they’d sat for a moment. Meiying, Sebastian saw from the corner of his eye, was watching him side on, smiling shyly, waiting for him to kiss her. She always did that—a tilt of her head, the smile. He still hadn’t figured out if it meant she actually wanted to be kissed, or was simply expecting to be.

  ‘Well, let’s go,’ he said, turning the key. It took two goes for the engine to fire.

  The diving course was in Kilbirnie. There were no parks anywhere close so they had to make a run for it. When Sebastian got to the changing room his towel and togs were already wet. He peeled off his clothes slowly, trying not to think about his body being submerged in cold water. On the opposite bench from him two teenage boys were getting changed—shoes, pants, towels going everywhere. Self-consciously unselfconscious.

  ‘Wanna go off the high one?’ said one of the boys.

  ‘Nah,’ said the other.

  ‘Wuss.’

  ‘Shuddup.’

  ‘Let’s do it then.’

  ‘Yeah,’ said the boy, wiggling his shoulders as if to shake something away, ‘okay. Bring it on!’

  Meiying was waiting for him on the other side. Her togs were bright red and had Chinese letters across the front. Pointing towards the diving pool with her flippers she grinned, nodding eagerly. A child’s laugh was coming from somewhere, reflecting from the water, bouncing back down from the domed ceiling. As they walked off, circumnavigating the pool, Sebastian felt a small surge of exhilaration, a shiver. He gave Meiying a quick smile as they made their way carefully across the slippery tiles.

  They’d met in November at a barbecue in Island Bay. Sebastian hadn’t noticed her for most of the evening; there were lots of people there, the majority women. If he was honest he wouldn’t have noticed her at all if it wasn’t for his friend.

  The friend, a guy Sebastian was once at uni with, had been trying to set him up for over a year. ‘It’s time to get back on the horse,’ he’d been saying, periodically throwing Sebastian into awkward situations involving an assortment of girls, friends of friends, each one eventually lowering her eyes or turning away from him when yet another conversation fell into silence. Sebastian had made an effort with a few of these girls, at least at the start, because it was easier than saying no. There’d been a few dates. Dinners out. A wine-tasting kiss. Once, a late-night taxi ride home from an apartment on Cuba Street. It all felt like a game no one was particularly interested in winning.

  ‘She’s single,’ said the friend, pointing at a tall blond woman as she stepped passed the deckchairs where they were sitting, overlooking the bay. For a moment the woman glanced in their direction.r />
  ‘Nah,’ said Sebastian, ‘not my type.’

  ‘Fussy bastard,’ said the friend, grinning.

  That was the moment Meiying materialised. She was carrying a plate of prawns, held in place with a layer of cling film.

  ‘How ’bout Chinese for dinner?’

  Sebastian got up and walked away. Later, when the food was ready, he found a place by Meiying on the lawn, and sat down. ‘Hello there.’

  ‘Hello?’ She smiled, openly. Her skin was chocolatey smooth. Her eyes crinkled slightly when she spoke. A plate of food was balanced on her lap.

  He asked where she was from—China, somewhere. She laughed when he tried to say the name. It was a clear evening and they could see the South Island from where they were sitting. Sebastian pointed to it and told her that was where he was from. She made a circling motion with her arms and pointed to him, to the South Island. ‘Swim home?’

  He laughed. ‘I guess I could, if I was really determined. People do swim across. But they’re pretty nuts.’

  She smiled and nodded, excitedly. And, for a moment, he felt it too.

  There were two other couples in the diving class—one about the same age as Sebastian and Meiying, the other in their fifties or sixties. The older couple were Australian, or had lived there for a while; there was a faint twang in their accent, something that set them slightly apart—foreigners, but close to home.

  The instructor, Julie, was tall with rounded shoulders and the faintly puffy look the swimmers at Sebastian’s high school used to have, the serious ones who spent an unnatural amount of time underwater.

  They’d played a getting-to-know-you game at the start—names, favourite vegetable, why they wanted to learn to dive. The other youngish couple—Mike and Laura, carrots and kale—were learning ahead of their honeymoon in Fiji. They touched each other a lot while Julie talked: a hand on a thigh, a tap on an elbow, Laura’s little finger hooked around Mike’s thumb.

  The Australian couple were going to Cairns for two weeks in August.

  ‘Just for fun,’ Sebastian said when it was his and Meiying’s turn to say why they were learning to dive. ‘No future plans.’

  Meiying, who was sitting beside him, smiled as he spoke. He didn’t have to look at her to tell.

  ‘Great,’ said Julie. But it didn’t seem like the right answer.

  After the introductions they watched a DVD of an overenthusiastic American man going through the equipment, demonstrating what each thing was and what it was for. Meiying did sketches of everything in a waterproof notebook—tank, mask, weight belt. The pages of the notebook were yellow with a faint outline of a starfish on the back of each side. They were all meant to have brought notebooks, Sebastian realised. Mike and Laura were writing in an A4 book spread across the seat between them. When Julie looked over, he shuffled closer to Meiying and pretended they were working together, too.

  ‘Who’s ready for a swim?’ said Julie when the DVD finished, the credits floating up the screen in front of a blue background. She motioned towards the dive pool and told them to get their flippers and masks. On the way out Sebastian accidently grabbed hold of the Australian woman’s arm. It took him a moment to realise, amongst the moving commotion of people and dive gear, that what he was touching was human.

  ‘Oh, sorry.’

  She held a hand to her mouth, as if in shock.

  ‘Sorry,’ he said again, ‘did I hurt you?’ He could still feel her skin, the soft texture of it.

  ‘No,’ her voice was barely audible, drowned by the echoes from the pools. ‘I just got a fright.’

  But he still felt uncomfortable, embarrassed even, like he’d touched her somewhere private. ‘You sure I didn’t hurt you?’

  But then Julie was beginning the countdown in her pool-side voice, ‘Five … four …’

  When he turned back, the Australian woman had joined the others lining up at the edge.

  It wasn’t what he’d anticipated, the water. Sebastian had always hated that moment, ever since he was a kid. No matter how prepared he was, the sensation, when it happened, was always a shock. This water, however, was soft and tepid, not at all what he was expecting.

  Sebastian had met Heather, his first proper girlfriend, at university. She was doing animal psychology, a course he hadn’t known existed. They moved into a flat together, a one-bedroom cottage out at Moa Point, and stayed that way, alone, together, for seven years. When he looked back, Sebastian still couldn’t pinpoint when it started to change but he knew when he felt it. It was as if something had altered in the atmosphere around them, a layer of something, transparent but impermeable.

  Heather felt they’d got together too young, she said. It meant they couldn’t grow without stifling each other. They were too different, wanted different things. She went travelling for a year and met someone while she was away, a farmer from Queensland. They lived on a 20,000 acre block near Alice River now, dairy and beef. To muster they used a helicopter. Sebastian imagined it landing in a cloud of orange dust, Heather inside the bubble of glass.

  She’d sent a couple of photos at Christmas—one out-of-focus shot of a German shepherd sitting in a basket. This is my new dog, it said on the back. His name is Murungal. In Aboriginal it means thunder. The other was a landscape, a sun setting over hills of desert and grass. Sebastian studied the desert photo for ages, not because it was a particularly good picture—Heather had always been a point-and-shoot photographer—but because there was a partial shadow of her in it: a hand holding the camera. It was the size of her hand, distorted by the angle of the shadow, that caught his attention.

  ‘I feel like we’re suffocating each other,’ she’d said, back in Wellington when it was about to end. She’d put her hands over her eyes and made a small sound, a burst of air through her lips, as if she was trying to breathe underwater.

  It was five months ago now, when Heather sent the photos. Sebastian had thought about sending her a photo of Meiying in return, wearing one of her flimsy summer dresses. This is my new girlfriend, he would write on the back, her name is Meiying. In Chinese it means beautiful.

  In the end he sent a photo of an orca in Lyall Bay the summer before last.

  I’m doing great, he wrote on the back, really great.

  They only had twenty minutes for lunch. Julie looked at her watch when she told them. She looked at it twice, as if she hadn’t seen it correctly the first time. Or perhaps she’d forgotten in the moment she looked away. Mike and Laura got up and walked off. Sebastian saw them through the window a few minutes later, running across the road in their towels, laughing. He hadn’t remembered to bring food. Meiying had a container of cold noodles which she began to eat where she was, sitting on the bench.

  ‘Sure you don’t want anything else?’ he said. There was a café at the far end, beyond the other pools.

  ‘No,’ she said, nodding.

  The Australian couple were heading there too. The three of them walked over together, navigating the narrow spaces between the pools. The café was crowded—a group of kids had arrived just as they did. Sebastian found himself in the queue behind the others. They shuffled forward in a squashed huddle, an island of adults among the pushing, laughing kids.

  ‘So why are you learning to dive?’ he said above the noise.

  The woman spoke without turning her head. ‘Cairns. We’re going to Cairns.’

  ‘Of course—’ he cleared his throat ‘—you said at the start. Sorry.’ He took a pie quickly from the warmer. ‘Short memory.’

  She turned, nodded. Reaching out, she touched her husband’s arm. A child in the café was starting to whine in a high-pitched, animal tone.

  ‘First time you’ve been there?’

  The man took two packaged sandwiches from the cabinet, putting them on the same plate. ‘We used to live in Tassie, but never made it to the other side.’

  Sebastian took a step forward to keep up with the queue. ‘I went when I was a kid. My parents took me to the Gold Coast and w
e did a trip out to the reef.’ He was talking quickly, the words coming out in a single breath. ‘It was great. We just went on a boat, but it would be something else to see it underwater.’

  Suddenly the child who’d been whining erupted into a full-blown tantrum.

  ‘Our son drowned there.’ The woman spoke matter-of-factly, as if saying something everyone already knew. ‘He was on a research trip, looking for coral. He went down and never came back up. We want to go there to see it. The place.’

  ‘Were you waiting on coffee?’ The girl behind the counter was holding out a Styrofoam cup, her eyes on Sebastian.

  ‘No, it’s not for me.’

  When he turned back, the woman was crying quietly. Not red scrunched-up-face crying like the child in the queue, it was happening naturally, like breathing.

  ‘Excuse us,’ said the man, and he stepped up to the till to pay.

  Meiying had finished her lunch when Sebastian got back to the bench. She had her legs tucked underneath and was holding her flippers on her hands, like gloves. He sat down beside her. Across the dive pool he could see the Australian couple making their way back. They walked slowly, side by side, close but not touching.

  After lunch they learnt underwater communication.

  Julie demonstrated each signal first, saying what it meant: ‘I’m ascending! I’m descending! I’m out of air!’ Then they had to practise in pairs, lined up along the side of the pool, face to face. Sebastian and Meiying were in the middle, close to Mike and Laura. He could see them over Meiying’s shoulder, laughing at something, hitting each other playfully. The Australian couple were further away. They hadn’t spoken to him since they got back from the cafe, just eaten their lunch quietly and got ready for the next part of the class.

  Meiying was slow to grasp the signals. She kept getting them wrong, mixing up cutting the line and letting the line go.

  ‘That’s not right.’

  ‘Right. No?’

  ‘Wrong,’ said Sebastian, louder than he’d intended, ‘not right. The opposite of right. Wrong.’

  ‘Wrong?’