The Red Queen

by Gemma Bowker-Wright

  Rachel began to tidy her desk, switching on her computer.

  He coughed again. ‘Have you done any painting lately?’

  ‘Not lately.’ Her mouse had frozen. She moved it in quick zigzags around the pad, waiting for it to unfreeze.

  ‘Have you heard from Nathan?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘I hope he’s okay.’

  ‘I’m sure he’s fine Dad. He’s always fine—’ she paused. ‘And I’m fine. You’re fine. We’re all fine.’ It could almost be a song.

  ‘You’re right.’ Her father hesitated for a moment. ‘Well, goodbye then.’ He put down the phone.

  Nathan went to the police station on Thursday afternoon. They hadn’t seemed in a hurry to see him when he called. He waited on a row of plastic seats screwed to the floor with bolts that looked like fists. A female police officer came out of a back room and ushered him through. She had dark hair and plucked eyebrows. Although she looked about his age she was probably several years older. She reminded him of Rachel—heavy-looking without being fat, soft boneless cheeks, a sweet but sad voice—one of those women who, without realising it, had long ago lost the chance to be somebody else. She held out her hand. The contact made Nathan think of the homeless woman the day before and that look in her eyes—helpless, as though everything around her was imploding.

  ‘So you saw Mr Williams on Saturday in the Matukituki Valley?’

  He had a name. Nathan hadn’t thought of him having a name. He suddenly thought of the man’s family sitting on a plane, flying from the States or Canada. Or perhaps they were already here, waiting in an airless motel room somewhere in Queenstown or Wanaka. Tomorrow they might go for a drive into the Matukituki Valley and stand around in the car park, or walk a little way up the track, noticing each stone as if it was a piece of evidence, each blade of grass.

  ‘So you saw him on the Saturday?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathan quickly, ‘and Sunday morning.’

  The officer wrote in a notebook. Nathan looked around the room they were in. It was small; two chairs and a grey table, walls made of glass panels with frosting to waist height. Around it an open-plan office ringed with desks, each one stacked high with manila folders and jars of ballpoint pens. On one desk a vase of daffodils.

  ‘We have several sightings of Mr Williams on the Saturday. Once in the car park—’ she counted on her fingers ‘—two on the track to the Rob Roy glacier. Several around Aspiring Hut where he camped the night. No sightings after that. He wrote in the hut book he was heading up Cascade Saddle.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Nathan, suddenly feeling like a fraud. He cleared his throat. ‘That’s what he told me.’ Over the phone it had all seemed different. He’d felt confident, like he had more to say, critical information to give. Now, under the fluorescent strip lighting, he felt useless. He couldn’t even conjure up a picture of the man. How tall had he been? What colour hair did he have?

  ‘Did he tell you anything about his plans?’ She tapped her notebook. ‘His intended route from Cascade Saddle? He told the Wanaka DOC office he would be out on Monday and specified a different route to the one we believe he might have taken.’

  ‘No,’ said Nathan. ‘All he said was he was going up and over.’

  She looked at him, tight-lipped. ‘Up and over?’

  ‘We didn’t really talk.’

  She wrote again in her notebook, holding it angled so that Nathan couldn’t see what she was writing.

  ‘Can you give me a description of how he looked that day?’ She looked at him again, expectantly. ‘Do you remember what was he wearing?’

  ‘Just tramping gear. Normal tramping gear, shorts and stuff. And a hat. I think.’

  ‘Can you be any more specific?’

  Nathan swallowed. ‘No, I can’t.’

  Neither of them spoke for several seconds.

  ‘Is there anything else?’

  He dug in his pocket. ‘I found this.’ He put the matchbox on the table.

  ‘I don’t follow.’

  ‘On the track. I found it.’

  Picking up the box between her thumb and forefinger, she looked at it closely. ‘Do you believe this belongs to Mr Williams?’

  ‘Actually it belongs to me,’ said Nathan. ‘He borrowed it and didn’t give it back.’

  She looked at him, her gaze holding. ‘Where were you when you found it?’

  He told her. As he spoke he remembered being up on the high ridge, the forest falling away on one side, the boulders far below. His feet, as he thought about it, felt suddenly heavy.

  ‘Is there anything else you remember?’

  Nathan looked around at the objectless room, the grey carpet, the police officers walking around on the other side of the soundproof glass panels. One policeman was leaning against a desk and laughing, his head thrown back.

  ‘He looked happy,’ said Nathan. ‘When he was heading off he looked happy.’

  Rachel started a new painting after dinner. It was a still evening, cooling quickly, the warmth of the afternoon now an unlikely memory. She prepared her desk, lining it with newspaper, setting out the paintbrushes. She kept her paints in a box beside the desk. The box was metal. A perfect square. It had a bronze clasp holding it down, like a claw.

  The painting was going to be based on one of the photographs from Nathan’s latest tramping trip. He sent her photographs after each trip—a bundle of prints tied together with an elastic band. Sometimes a brief note with them or scrawled on the back of the envelope. I thought you might like these, cheers N. More pics for you—N. Some more I took, thought you might be interested.

  This was their main form of communication—visual, rather than verbal.

  Rachel thought about him as she filled a jar with water. Perhaps he was sitting alone in his flat. The space around him would be messy, a clutter of clothes, tapes and CDs, nothing in its right case anymore—everything in a state of transition. She pictured him: tall, long-limbed, sitting on his bed. Did he look happy? Sad? She couldn’t quite form an image of his face.

  The photograph she had chosen was lying flat on the desk. Rachel propped it up—it was a mountain scene. Peaks stood on top of one another, each straining to see above the next. Rachel angled it towards her, so it caught the full light. In the distance she could see a trail of red markers leading up a rock face, one after the other, becoming harder and harder to see. In the foreground, near a boulder, a small blue shape. Rachel looked closer. It looked like a hat.

  THE SANCTUARY

  None of the eggs have hatched. They are huddled, three slightly larger ones and two smaller, all pale blue, in the nest box. Each egg has the date it was laid written in pencil on the top. Rebecca closes the lid to the nest box and backtracks through the tree ferns, below her a carpet of beech leaves, twigs, rotting branches alive with insects and moss. About ten metres from the nest, she stops to sit on a fallen log, waiting for the kaka to return. They appear a few minutes later, breaking through the canopy ceiling high above. The female lands on the nest box, crouching there before disappearing headfirst into the round hole in the side. But the male lingers. He eyes Rebecca through the trees, bouncing up and down several times, as if testing the elasticity of the branch he is perching on. Then he swoops in a low arc to land by her left sneaker, his head to one side, watching her as if she is some kind of rare, beautiful bird.

  ‘How were they?’ says John. Or it might be Jeremy or Jerome. Rebecca can never distinguish between the men who work at the sanctuary: they all sound the same, and look the same—early thirties to late forties, healthy, weather-beaten, that free loose-limbed look men have when they haven’t spent their lives working in an office. Men who can tell the time with their skin.

  ‘The chicks in my lower box are doing well,’ says Rebecca, walking across the bridge towards him. Below her, dragonflies skim across the surface of the lake. ‘They’ve all put on weight.’

  John/Jeremy/Jerome adjusts the transmitter he is holding, turning the knob clock
wise then anti-clockwise—it makes a dull beep beep and then a tuk tuk like the sound a contented chicken makes.

  ‘But the eggs in the upper box I’m monitoring haven’t hatched yet.’

  ‘Which one’s that?’

  ‘Right at the top—’ she points to the track behind her ‘—by the boundary fence.’

  ‘Ah, yip.’ He twists the knob clockwise twice. ‘That’s a new pair. Haven’t bred before so they might not produce any live chicks this time round.’ The transmitter emits a faint whine. ‘Next time though.’

  ‘Can’t we do something?’ Rebecca kneels down to retie her laces. When she stands up he is smiling at her and she is reminded of the older men at the Ministry where she works; the way they look at her sometimes, vaguely amused, but almost unconsciously, as if they don’t quite realise they’re smiling.

  ‘I’ll check them out later this afternoon.’

  Rebecca watches him walk over the bridge and up the track on the other side. A beep, beep trails back over the water long after he has vanished into the māhoe.

  –

  Julia and Paul arrive when Rebecca is in the shower. She can hear Julia’s voice filtering under the doorway; something about a salad, fruit salad. Graham opens the bathroom door a crack. ‘They’re here.’ He slips inside, pulling the door shut behind him.

  ‘Give them a drink. I’ll be out in a minute.’

  ‘Don’t be long.’ He draws three kisses on the fogged up mirror. ‘I can almost see the tension. It’s like a spider’s web. I’m not kidding—it’s visible.’

  They’re in the kitchen when Rebecca emerges from the bedroom, hair still wet; she feels a drip escape and run down the back of her neck. Julia stands in the middle of the room, her hair a tangle of clips and clasps, her body strikingly upright and her toe tapping the floor, involuntarily. Paul straddles one of the kitchen chairs, his arms wrapped around the back, his head to one side as though listening to a very faint sound. Graham is over by the stove, arranging vegetables in a baking dish. ‘Help me,’ he mouths to Rebecca.

  ‘Come into the lounge.’ Rebecca ushers Julia and Paul through as she speaks. Picking up the bottle of wine from the table, she takes four wine glasses from the cupboard with her free hand, one by one.

  ‘I’ll carry those for you.’ Paul lingers in the doorway, running his hand through his hair. She glances at him sideways. He is still the same: not unattractive but in no way remarkable—short, with undefined, colourless features. It is not just his looks that are lacking in comparison with Julia’s former boyfriends, but something more subtle, a briskness of movement, a glossiness, the faint smell of aftershave and sex.

  ‘It’s good to see you again, Paul,’ says Rebecca, following him down the hall. He is wearing grey shorts. The backs of his knees are hairless, the skin a silvery colour.

  ‘How’s, uh—’ she pauses to scratch her nose ‘—work?’ What does he do again? She knows it has something to do with a lab out in Lower Hutt. Months back, when he was going out with Julia for the first time, he’d told Rebecca he took stale bread to work in his pockets to feed the ducks at lunchtime. There were heaps of them around he’d said. They waited in the walkways joining the labs to the research unit, waiting for someone to walk by and feed them. Sometimes they waited all day.

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Work’s good.’

  Julia is waiting in the lounge, her elbow resting on the mantelpiece, her posture angular. As soon as they enter she walks over and gives Rebecca an urgent hug, then, taking Rebecca’s hand, she leads her out of the room. Rebecca lets herself be led down the hall and into the bedroom.

  ‘I hope he wasn’t boring you.’ Julia shuts the door and throws herself on Rebecca and Graham’s bed, displacing the duvet. ‘He can be so boring sometimes.’

  ‘He wasn’t boring me.’

  Sighing, Julia sits up and rubs her head vigorously, as if trying to get rid of something stuck to her scalp. ‘It happened,’ she says.

  ‘What?’

  ‘God,’ says Julia. ‘Jesus!’ She throws her hands above her head, her movements wide and quick. She is a person who talks with her whole body, the words affecting her limbs in unpredictable ways.

  ‘What?’

  ‘Why am I such a bitch to him?’ She doesn’t look at Rebecca; her fingers pleat the duvet. ‘Do you think I’m horrible?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Rebecca, smiling. ‘Yes I do. And yes you are. But why did you get back together with him if you feel like that? I don’t get it.’

  Julia looks up, her eyes still, glazed. ‘Last night we had this conversation. I said, “What should we have for dinner, hon?” and he said, “I put some mince out this morning,” and I said, “But we had mince last night and that would be two mince meals in a row.” That’s what we actually said. Not lying.’

  Rebecca tries not to smile. She picks up the radio from Graham’s bedside and flicks the on switch. It emits a static sound, like gravel.

  ‘Who has these kinds of conversations? I’m twenty-six for God’s sake. ‘Twenty-six.’ She shakes her head. ‘This is not what people are supposed to talk about when they’re twenty-six. It’s a tragedy.’

  ‘I think you can talk about what you want to talk about when you’re twenty-six.’ Rebecca looks out the window at the cabbage tree shivering in the wind. ‘Anyway, it’s not a Romeo and Juliet “let’s all die” kind of tragedy.’

  Julia stands up and crosses the room. She trails her fingers across the top of Rebecca’s chest of drawers, coming to rest on a dish of earrings and rings. She picks up a pair of amethyst studs and looks at them closely. ‘It’s not what I thought I’d be doing at twenty-six, that’s all.’ She drops the earrings back into the dish.

  ‘Leave him then. It’s simple.’ Rebecca smoothes a crease in her skirt. ‘If you’re not happy then leave him. I don’t get why you got back together all of a sudden. What’s the deal?’

  Julia walks over to the window. Holding the frame, she tries to push up the sash, her arms straining.

  ‘Julia, what’s the deal?’

  ‘Do you think it’s hot?’ Julia turns to face her. ‘Is it just me or is it hot?’

  ‘I’m not hot,’ says Rebecca.

  Julia first got together with Paul ten months earlier.

  ‘I can’t see that lasting more than two minutes,’ Graham had said to Rebecca on the walk home after they’d met him for the first time. They’d met at a Thai restaurant on Cuba Street, the kind of place where everyone gets crammed in together, knees touching. Rebecca and Graham sat on one side of the table, Julia and Paul on the other. Couple versus couple. It was warm, oven-like; there was an overpowering buzz of loud, multilingual conversations. Outside, mid-January rain poured in a vertical stream.

  ‘So what do you do again?’ Rebecca had shouted across the table. But she couldn’t hear Paul’s response above the noise.

  ‘He’s so passive,’ said Graham as they neared the top of the Dixon Street steps. It was only raining lightly now. The city felt fresh but tired. ‘She’ll eat him up and spit him out in one go. Can’t he see that?’ Pausing on the top step he took off his jersey, pulling it over his head in one smooth motion. Rain tinkled against an overturned rubbish bin nearby.

  ‘Perhaps he’s struck down by love,’ said Rebecca. ‘Perhaps love has rendered him powerless.’

  ‘Why are you and Julia such good friends? I’ve never understood it.’ They were at the corner. Someone had painted a flock of black and white butterflies on the concrete fence. As Rebecca glanced at them quickly she could almost see their wings opening and closing. ‘She’s nuts. And she’s a carnivore. I can’t think of two people less alike than you.’

  ‘It’s quite simple really.’ Rebecca waited for him to catch up to her, noticing the way his face seemed shadowless in the dark. ‘Our friendship is basically one long conversation about breasts and men.’

  ‘I love that,’ he said. ‘I love that you say things like that.’

  Rebecca met Julia in Year Ten whe
n Julia started at her school. Julia was tall, confident and ruthless—a natural predator. Rebecca was small, shy and sometimes stuttered when she had to talk in front of the class.

  ‘I like your breasts,’ Julia said during the first art class they had together. She was sitting across the bench from Rebecca, flicking through a book on Renaissance Art, trailing her fingers across the pages as she skim-read. She wore a mood ring on her middle finger.

  ‘Um, thanks.’ Rebecca tried to hide her embarrassment by standing up to reach for another tube of oil paint.

  ‘Don’t be shy. They’re small but well formed. Mine are big and in-your-face. It’s hard to find low-cut tops that fit.’ She looked down at her chest, fiddling with the top button of her school uniform as though she were about to undo it. ‘Do you have a boyfriend?’

  ‘No,’ said Rebecca, looking away.

  ‘I do.’

  Rebecca met Julia’s boyfriend a month later on the bus. It was a chance meeting. Julia and Rebecca were going back to Julia’s place after netball practice to watch a movie. Rebecca was sitting by the window and Julia in the aisle seat. The boyfriend sat behind them eating corn chips. He offered the packet across the aisle to Julia who smiled and took three, eating them slowly, licking the salty orange coating off her fingers.

  ‘Do you think he likes me?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Rebecca. They were walking up the hill to Julia’s house. ‘Of course he likes you.’

  ‘But how do you know?’

  ‘The way he was looking at you. He definitely likes you.’

  ‘Do you think he likes me enough to eat out of my hand?’

  ‘Why would you want him to do that?’

  Julia walked ahead of Rebecca up the driveway, opening the letterbox and shutting it after her with a bang. She twisted her ponytail around her finger then pulled it around to her face, inspecting for split ends. ‘It was in a movie once. They’re in this flash hotel right, somewhere in America, New York I think. She goes to him, “Come over here, come over here and eat out of my hand.”’