Red Queen (16 page)

She collected sticks and small fallen branches for the fire. We watched her in silence with our elbows on the rail and our legs out behind us and the binoculars fixed to our faces. A bank of black cloud was rolling in; thunder rumbled through it. The bush was still and hushed. She built a large fire. If she was concerned about the storm coming, she didn’t show it. Once the fire was well alight she squatted beside the growing flames and took items one by one from the backpack to burn.

There were times I couldn’t look at her face and had to drop my gaze and return to my spot, my body, and the hard smell of the binoculars and the sounds of my breathing. Other times I let just her mouth fill my vision, or the corner of her bruised eye, or her scruffy hair over the top of her ear.

When she came to a pair of blue and white sneakers, lace-ups, she looked up at us. The sun was setting. The fire threw an orange glow. She was hunched and lean, beaten and beautiful, caught in copper colours, with a bubbling black sky behind her. Breathtaking. Rohan shifted his position beside me. She waited with shoes in hand for something from us.

‘Let her keep them,’ I said. ‘You’re only punishing her.’

Rohan kept the binoculars to his face and she dropped the sneakers into the flames. She watched them burn.

She left the books to last; they were in a neat stack in the grass beside her. The fire was smoky and overloaded with clothes. While it got a better hold she sat with her knees up and looked through the books. She turned her back to us to read.

She was crying when she turned to the fire, sobbing loud enough for us to hear as she burnt them. Each book smouldered for a while before catching, and when it did the fire flared as if doused with a shot of petrol. She curled her arms up over her head and rocked as the pages caught and blackened and lifted in the heat haze to spin up into the orange dusk. The sin of burning them in a world where they might not be recreated or replaced lit up as real in me as the reaching fingers of flame. I winced and drew the muggy air in through my teeth.

‘Jesus,’ I said to Rohan. ‘What have you done?’

He was silent.

Finally, she burnt the backpack.

The first drops of rain were falling when she pushed to her feet. She was still crying, her lips parted, the tears on her cheeks left to run down her neck; she fought for breath, lifting her chin, gasping for air. Her gaze was vague and destroyed, and her pain heavy in her stooped shoulders. If she’d dropped to her knees – as it looked she might – I don’t know if I could have stopped from going out to her; as it was I’d stiffened my legs, planted my feet, and drilled my elbows into the railing.

She appealed to Rohan, wiping her face and looking at him.

Please
, she mouthed.
Let me back now
.

I could hear his harrowed breathing.

Rohan, let me back.

She wiped her face again and tried to compose. Maybe she sensed how close she was to cracking his resolve. It was obviously hard for her to pull herself together. I knew it was everything; not just this, not just the books, not her beaten face, but all that came before it – people she’d lost, things she’d seen, change, and maybe even the sex; there seemed as much shame in her sorrow as pain. Her face caved under the strain and her hands dug into her scalp.

Please
, she forced out again.
Rohan, I need you
.

He took the binoculars from his face and looked away.

‘She has to come in,’ I said.

The last light was taken quickly under the thick quilt of cloud and it began to rain. She stood in it, waiting. The drops patted in the dust below us, and steadily increased. Her figure became hazy as visibility was cut to half and then half again as the rain worsened.

‘Rohan?’ I said.

‘No.’ His voice was hoarse. ‘She can’t.’

Rain hammered down, gurgled down the drainpipes, crept across the boards, made lakes in the dirt, and silently roared. It was well after midnight, approaching dawn. The rain hadn’t let up all night. Rohan sat beside me on the veranda and we stared out at the silver-grey sheet; I kept expecting to see her shape materialise through it. I dozed and dreamt of her. Had her slick and machine-like, coming at us, climbing the rail and licking the rain from her top lip. I’d jerk back to reality, hear the teeming void, and see her fading shape in the wall of white.

‘Go to bed,’ Rohan ordered.

I held out a while longer before moving.

Inside it was warm; the damp that had seemed down to my bones was easily shed with the removal of my clothes. I couldn’t help but savour the warmth as I climbed naked into my dry bed. If I was a bigger person I wouldn’t need to sleep. Or I’d at least stay cold and damp and be closer to her that way. But I curled in my bed and was as removed as possible, comfortable, with no aching face or shivering body.

I pacified myself with the thought that she had some protection, she might not be soaked. The ground was high where she was. It wasn’t blowing. Just raining. I pulled the blankets over my head and dove headlong into the relative sanctuary of sleep, even if it did contain her slick advancing body.

2

THE DAY WAS
already steamy by the time I came out on the veranda and picked up the binoculars. The sky was aching, brilliant blue. Sunlight twinkled off swaying leaves and beaded grass. Rohan was behind me. I didn’t bother looking at him; he’d be pale and tired, with blood-shot eyes. He’d done the big blokey thing and sat out all night, probably not even shut his eyes. I could hate him for so many things.

She’d already been up and hung her sleeping bag over a low branch. It was dripping, literally. Her pillow was balanced in a fork on the same branch. The tent was open and airing. The box of food was sodden and set down next to the washed-away remnants of the fire. The bike was nearer to the tent and glistening.

‘Where is she?’ I asked.

‘Up near the stump.’

I focused the binoculars in. She was lying on her stomach in the grass, her head resting on one arm, facing away from us.

‘She call out anything this morning?’ I asked.

‘Nope.’

‘She looked pissed off?’

‘Well she wasn’t whistling a tune, if that’s what you mean.’

‘She’s going to hate you after this.’

‘I thought the general consensus was she hated me already.’

I lowered the binoculars and turned to him. Even though his voice was sardonic, his face was subdued. I held his gaze, trying to work him out.

‘You’ve made your point,’ I said. ‘Why make her hate you?’

‘I’m going to bed. Wake me if she does anything stupid.’

It turned out that we didn’t need to watch her all the time. I sharpened the axe in the tool shed, cleared the wash-up of leaves from around the cabin, and made bread. Rohan got up on the roof and fixed some loose shingles, and cleaned the gutters while he was up there. She lay in the sun most of the day, and gave the impression of not needing to be watched. She wasn’t coming in. As abhorrent as it was, she was like an intriguing reality-TV program out there. Every so often I’d hold up the binoculars and check how things were progressing, disappointed if she was sleeping, running the binoculars down her body, looking at what I wanted to, stopping on separate parts of her, my unknown vision like an unknown touch. Sometimes Rohan would come up and join me. And we’d both stand there, taking her in, watching what we shouldn’t.

There were times when she played up to us, like when she pulled down her jeans and squatted and urinated in full view, with a deadpan expression directed at us, or when she sat and rested her chin on her knees and stared us out, occasionally mouthing,
arseholes
. She made us laugh, but she wasn’t being funny. She was constantly, unwaveringly, grim. It was compelling to watch. I thought when she was warm again and had eaten something she might give a little, show some resignation, but she didn’t falter. If she could keep her anger up for two weeks it would be an insight into the extent of her stubborn nature.

On the third day it changed. Rohan and I were back to a routine of sorts; I stayed up late, he got up early, but he didn’t go up into the bush. We were bachelors again and in that wordless vacuum. Communication came in the way of curt sentences, or not at all. We both missed her, and would spend long meaningless minutes watching her do nothing at all. I gave up asking for her return. It seemed decided that she’d do it; now something of a test, a test of wills between her and Rohan, and a reason for her to outwardly hate him.

But after lunch on the third day I lifted the binoculars to see she had come to some sort of decision. She was sitting on the ground near the tent, folding gum leaves in half and in half again, and when she looked up I saw her expression was more resolute than resentful. She didn’t smile, I don’t think she was able to, but she did mouth
Hello, Shannon
without the dagger stare.

‘Hello,’ I said quietly back.

She repositioned her body so I could see her better. I watched her and she let me. During these moments it was as though she stepped silently up behind me and held herself the barest fraction from me; I could smell her and almost feel her skin and shivered with her imagined presence. When Rohan walked out I quickly lowered the binoculars, as if caught doing something wrong.

He lifted his own set and studied her. ‘You think she’s bored yet?’

‘She’s not eating much.’

‘No.’

‘Her face still looks pretty bad.’

‘Yeah.’

That was about the limit of our dialogue. I felt the boundaries come up, and was pleased. It was draining talking to him. I checked to see Denny’s reaction to him on the veranda. She’d found some bark and was peeling off papery bits and letting them flutter to the ground.

A southerly breeze blew. The remains of her fire glowed and sometimes a small shower of embers tumbled from it. The moon was a bright white crescent coming in and out behind heavy cloud.

I thought of her gaze and the way she’d looked at me earlier. There’d been a determination in her that only meant trouble. I’d been meant to see it. She was up to something.

I already sweated on it. Tomorrow couldn’t come quickly enough, so that I could find a moment to stand on the top rail and shake my head,
No, Denny. Whatever it is, just no
. I thought about yelling it to her now. Rohan was snoring. But the breeze would whip my voice into the night. She might be asleep anyway.