Red Queen (13 page)

On a chipped dinner plate was a thick slab of freshly baked warm bread with a melting top of peanut butter and beside it a steaming cup of Milo. I looked up at her.

‘He’s brought out heaps of things. You should see the kitchen. We’ve got Gravox for the roast today. Salt and sugar, canned food, peanut butter, jam. I’m allowed to make bread every day until the flour runs out. There’s even a tin of powdered milk.’

I ran my thumb absently across my bottom lip and watched the swaying reflections in the Milo.

She looked at the food for a moment, and then looked back to me. She breathed out heavily. ‘You’re thinking we shouldn’t have it. I thought you’d be thrilled.’

‘It’s sudden, that’s all.’

‘Things had to be used anyway. But he’s just a pussycat. Scratch the right way and he can’t help but purr.’

‘Don’t talk like that.’

‘Oh,’ she said, exasperated. ‘Eat! You two would have to be the most irrational pair. Why don’t you just swap heads and be done with it?’

‘What’s that supposed to mean?’

‘It means stop frowning at me like that and asking me what I mean.’

I continued staring at her and she rolled her eyes and flopped back on the bed.

While I ate she poked around the room, looking behind things and in desk drawers. She wore tight tracksuit pants with two grubby stripes down the sides and an Essendon football T-shirt of my father’s. It must have been a warm morning, or she’d been busy enough in the kitchen to work up a light sweat, because her skin glowed. My eyes fell over her, the first woman’s body I’d truly known, the first woman who it could hurt to look at.

‘You doing the sheep today?’ she asked.

‘Not much to do. With Rohan home these last few days everything’s pretty right. Might slash some bracken.’

‘I thought we could go down to the creek,’ she said.

‘I don’t think so.’

‘Or I’d just go.’

I screwed up my face.

‘It’s not much to ask, Shannon. Everyone needs their own space … and you do both carry guns. You probably don’t understand what it’s like.’

‘We carry the guns for security, you know that.’

‘I haven’t got a place to go and recharge, to think about my things – family and that. People I miss. I’m trying to get my head around the way it is now, how it will be in the future.’

‘The creek’s too far. If I could see you from the yard it might be all right.’

‘So you can watch me – that’s what I’m saying, that’s my point. I’m like a prisoner here. There’s nowhere I can go and just be myself. I haven’t got a room, or even any of my own things. It’s all right for you – you’ve got photos, clothes of your own, a house full of things to make it real.’

‘They don’t make it any more real.’

‘Sometimes I don’t even know who I am, what I’m doing, what we’re meant to be doing here.’

‘This is about the books, isn’t it?’

She folded her arms across her body. ‘No.’ But then she dropped her defensive stance. ‘Not just the books; it’s the things I said. It’s everything I’ve got, everything of mine. The longer we leave it I’ll never get back there. If I’d been able to go straightaway there wouldn’t be this problem.’

‘You can’t tell me you don’t see the risk? What if you come in contact with someone? There might have been someone at the farm and you could touch a door handle, walk into a closed-up room someone could have coughed and sneezed in. We don’t know how long the new strains survive. How can a few things be worth dying for? Not to mention what Rohan will do. I know you don’t think so, but he’ll go right off. It wouldn’t be that you lied or snuck away – it would be the risk you put us under.’

‘I’d be careful – of course I’d be careful. This is exactly what I’m talking about; I shouldn’t need permission. It’s my life.’

‘It’s all our lives if you come back infected.’

‘Fine.’

‘I can’t —’

‘No. You’re right.’

Her body was made taller with her haughty pose.

I smiled. ‘You do shitty so well.’

‘Or should I say Rohan’s right. Because they’re his rules, aren’t they?’

‘I’m not one of your fourth graders; I know what you’re doing.’

‘Just let me go!’

‘No.’

‘Listen to you! Look at you! You are your bloody brother. It’s not about logic, because we all know there is no
risk
. We’re in the backblocks of nowhere. Who in their right mind would walk miles and miles down winding dirt tracks and through acre upon acre of pine forest without even knowing if there was anything here? And what about the fact that if they were infected they’d be dead before they even got off the bitumen? It’s really about control. You two like me unarmed and under your rules.’

‘Don’t be stupid.’

‘Stupid?’ Her eyes narrowed. ‘Let me guess – next I’ll be brainless.’

The tray had become uncomfortable on my lap. I sat it on the chest of drawers beside the bed. ‘Sorry. I didn’t mean it. I hate it when he talks like that.’

‘I can cope with one Rohan, but two might be a struggle.’

‘You don’t really feel like that, do you?’

She bent her head and looked critically across at me. ‘The three C’s, Shannon: cook, clean, and consent.’

‘I don’t believe that,’ I said. ‘The only thing we ask is that you don’t leave and expect to come back again. That’s the
only
thing we ask.’

‘Really. The only thing?’

‘Don’t turn it around like that. It’s not like that and you know it. If anything, it’s the other way around.’

‘Oh yeah, I drag you both kicking and screaming. The last few nights must have been such a hardship. How have you managed, Shannon? Ever stopped to think what might happen if I didn’t willingly sleep with both of you?’

‘Anyway, I don’t want to talk about it.’

‘No,’ she said leaving the room. ‘You’re just happy to do it.’

‘Well you can’t tell me you and Rohan talk about it,’ I yelled after her.

She came back, leaning against the door frame. ‘You don’t think so? What was it you said …? Blinkered enough not to see your faults or who you truly are? And who was that about again?’

I found her on the veranda with the guitar, sitting in the wicker chair and looking down at the placement of her fingers on the neck. There was a half-finished cup of coffee on the table beside her.

‘The place smells amazing,’ I said. ‘You’ve already got the meat on.’

‘Rohan’s coming back early. He wants to eat then. Can’t say I’ve ever been a terribly good roast cook; hope I don’t stuff it up.’

‘I’ll hang around and help you.’

She sighed and dropped her head back. ‘I feel tight inside – like I can’t properly breathe.’

‘Might be the caffeine.’

‘Yeah.’

‘Denny —’

‘I’m just homesick. Worried, you know. That’s the problem with being well-fed and warm – you’ve got the luxury of unhappiness.’

I sat down on the chair beside her. ‘I don’t want you to be unhappy. I don’t think I could stand it if I thought you didn’t like it here.’

‘It’s amazing we already have this expectation to be happy. It wasn’t that long ago that I thought food alone would be enough; and here I am a few weeks later, with a roast cooking in the oven and a cup of coffee next to me, and I’m complaining. I’m sorry, Shannon – I don’t want you to think I don’t appreciate what you and Rohan have done for me.’

‘Here.’ I took the guitar from her. ‘The wind’s up, he won’t be able to hear us from up there; I’ll play you something and you can sing.’

She smiled up at me, and held my gaze in a way that reached inside my chest and twisted.

Sleepy in the sun, with the breeze in my face and all around my cropped head, I had to wonder how she’d talked me into bringing out a rug and settling down this far from the cabin. We were spread out under the branches of a ghost gum. I could see the cabin over a grassy rise in front of me, and the bluff was in clear view, as was the fire track – but I suddenly realised that even though we could see Rohan coming home, we wouldn’t be able to beat him back, or get back unseen.

I sat up. My fingers were stinging from playing. Denny lay on her stomach next to me, with her top pulled up over her head and her flawless back in the full sun, seemingly tanning in the time we’d been there.

‘This is very bad,’ I said. ‘I’ve only just now realised how bad this is.’

She mumbled something into the rug.

‘How long have we been out here?’ I asked.

‘It feels too good to be bad,’ she said, turning to face me.

‘If Rohan walked up on us now he’d take the guitar and probably hit me around the head with it. Or do something more painful with it.’

‘Does he play an instrument?’ she asked.

I looked sceptically at her. ‘What do you reckon?’

‘He strikes me as the closet piano-playing type.’

‘Jeez, Den – your people-reading skills are sometimes right off. He hasn’t got a musical bone in his body. He would’ve been too busy blowing ducks from the sky or gaffing marlin over the side of a boat to ever find time to pull up a piano stool. He worked at the mill, you know? On the floor. Pushing buttons in screaming paper-machine hell and reading pornos in the endless breaks.’

‘But he hated it.’

‘Did he? He never said as much. Dad would slap him on the back every time he saw him for scoring a job that paid so well and with so many days off. Never mind what it did to your lungs, ears and intelligence.’

‘I think he did mind. Very much.’

‘What? You reckon he’d rather be flicking out his coat tails and playing Mozart to an audience?’

‘No. I think he’d want to be doing something not so far removed from this. Actually, if your mum and dad were here, I wouldn’t be surprised if this was exactly what he wanted. Virus or no virus. He might even be pleased the population problem had been solved in one fell swoop and he had a lifelong excuse to avoid mainstream society.’

‘Not a terribly Christian thought – so you could be right.’

She rested her cheek on the back of her arm. ‘Have you ever talked to Rohan about his religious beliefs?’

‘
Please
. I’ll have to sound like a prick on this and say – you have no idea.’

‘I can’t see that they’re so different from your evolution beliefs. He believes God is in everything and you believe the foundation of life is in everything. So explain the difference?’

‘Can we not get into this? I spent most of my life arguing about the finer points of just that, and it was frustrating enough when the sides were equal, but by the sounds of it I’d be on my own this time.’

‘Were you and your mum always a team?’

‘Always,’ I said, bringing up my knees and wrapping my arms around them.

‘Was she quite headstrong?’

‘Ah …? No, not really. Most people made the mistake of thinking she was tough because she said what she thought and had a low tolerance for bullshit. But she wasn’t really – not in the way people thought, anyway. She was very dependent on Dad … I don’t know exactly what for. Love, I guess. They were on their own – family outcasts. Mum for shunning the Toorak life in Melbourne and marrying below herself and Dad for working hard and making the break from the commission curse. Family get-togethers were fairly small scale, and if we did have to turn up for weddings or engagements we were either the hillbillies arriving on Mum’s side, or the upper-class snobs on Dad’s. We’d laugh about it – didn’t care; play up to it if anything. I think now what good parents they were – to make it seem like the joke was on our relatives, having us driving home with grins on our faces after what could have been bad experiences.’

‘Rohan did a lot with you then? He would have been older?’

‘He had his own place, early on, but was always around for dinner and that. He talked as though his house was more an investment than a home.’

‘Your mum must have had you late?’

‘Not really; she had Rohan really young – sixteen or something. That went down well with her family. Dad was young, too. I always thought of Dad as much older than Rohan, but he wasn’t really – he and Rohan were more like mates.’

‘And you were mates with your mum.’

‘Yeah, we were.’

‘That’s nice.’

Denny got up and pulled down her top. Her face was crumpled and sleepy. ‘Tessa,’ she said. ‘I like that name. Tessa Scott – did she take your dad’s surname?’

I nodded. ‘Were your family close?’ I asked.

‘Mmm, sure. You know – heaps of family, cousins always lobbing in, aunts and uncles who’d put you up if you were up their way. Fairly typical – but also my parents encouraged it, didn’t want us to lose touch.’

She spoke as though I had some earlier understanding of this, or as though I somehow knew her family. ‘So you had lots of brothers and sisters?’ I asked.

For a moment she held my gaze, tipping her head. ‘Yes,’ she laughed, getting up, ‘lots of brothers and sisters.’

‘What?’

‘It’s refreshing, a sort of freedom – so I don’t think I’ll say.’

‘About your family? Were you adopted or something? Or part of a family of famous singers, and I’m gunna feel like a fool for not realising?’

The sun lit up one side of her; she stood with parted feet and a hand outstretched to help me up. ‘Not famous, and definitely not adopted. You could say we were very down to earth.’