Red Queen (5 page)

She tipped her head back and really laughed. I was bewitched, and Rohan too – because I looked across at him and he was unrecognisable. She might have stopped laughing then, but the trouble seemed to be our combined bewildered response. She buckled and got a little hysterical. We looked at her bent position with no chance of pulling out of our zombie state. She sat down in the wicker chair.

‘Sorry,’ she gasped. She couldn’t look at us and waved her hand above her head as an indication of this. ‘I’m sorry. It’s just … I
can
sing.’

This set her off again.

I had never seen her laugh, and I had never seen her cry – until now. She brought one hand to cover her mouth and nose, her face suddenly crumpling into tight grief. ‘I can sing,’ she sobbed behind her hand.

Rohan took a long breath and turned away. I looked blindly at the hardwood boards at my feet and thought about touching her – we lived together, breathed the same air, ate from the same table, washed at the same sink – she was not contagious and neither was I. So why couldn’t I place a hand on her knee or an arm around her shoulder?

Rohan interrupted my thoughts and the pattern of her sobs with his voice. He had his back to us. ‘We can all sing, Denny. It’s how well you can sing that counts.’

She sniffed and wiped her nose with the heel of her palm. ‘I sing very well,’ she said.

‘Very well?’ he replied. ‘And how well do you play cards?’

She paused before speaking. ‘You’ll have to teach me.’

He looked over his shoulder. I noticed he’d trimmed his beard. His face stayed impassive as he stared at her. He turned back to the paddock.

‘Oh, I think you already play just fine.’

She lost – we both lost – every game to Rohan. He didn’t necessarily enjoy winning (although he despised losing), and wasn’t the sort to rub your nose in it. If anything he gave the impression of being disappointed that he was rarely challenged. Denny must have felt this about him too, because after the final hand she settled back on the cushion on the floor and suggested a game of chess, because she was better at chess.

‘We haven’t got a chess board,’ Rohan said.

‘I’ll make one.’

‘There’s no chess set.’

‘I’ll improvise.’

‘So let me get this right – you feel up to making a chess board and getting together a homemade chess set, but not able to get off that couch and do something worthwhile round the place?’

‘I —’

He stopped her with a raised hand. ‘Yes, you’ve been weak and been through a lot, and I know it’s
hard
. But if you can sit there with enough rational thought to play a decent hand of poker then you can rabbit-proof the garden, fix some fences and slash some bracken.’

‘I was going to say that I do feel stronger.’

‘What, right this very minute?’

She smiled. ‘No.’

‘No. So starting tomorrow you get up early and do the chooks and check the orchard before any birds come through. You can leave the fruit for Shannon to wash once he’s up. I’ll be gone most of the day, and Shannon will be busy with the sheep. He’ll show you what to do … and you can also help him. You can crutch and ring the lambs, collect firewood – that sort of thing.’

She nodded.

‘Have you got any experience with animals?’

‘A bit.’

‘What did you do? What was your job?’

‘I was a PE teacher.’

‘Farmhand would have been better. I also want you to look after the clothes – and be careful with them; not too much washing, and fix a tear straight away. And I see big problems with shoes. I really wanna be able to save the spare boots and overalls, in case we have to leave.’

‘It won’t come to that,’ I said. ‘Industry will come back on line, and the economy. Just from what Denny has said I can’t see it going on forever. We’ve got heaps of everything to see us through.’

‘Well we must have been listening to two different stories then, because nothing I’ve heard gives me that sort of pie-in-sky enthusiasm. You know what, Pup, you’d just wanna wake up to yourself. You do yourself no bloody favours, let me tell you.’

I might have bitten back, but I saw he was readying to go to bed and I didn’t want to stop him. Denny sat bright-eyed on the floor near the table, and I had the impression she might not go to bed yet. I wanted her to come and sit with me on the veranda.

Rohan put a log on the fire. I was almost too scared to move. I hoped she didn’t move either; it seemed that if we both sat perfectly still he wouldn’t comprehend that we were about to be left up together, like we were two children whose mother had forgotten bedtime.

Rohan left without saying goodnight.

Denny hugged her knees and stared over the card table and into the fire.

My chest filled with words, my tongue felt heavy with them, and yet instead of asking if she wanted to come and sit outside with me, I took the shotgun and stayed silent as I walked towards the French doors.

I sat down in the wicker chair. I had no idea why it was like this. Why the three of us were slow circling lions, eyeing one another and relying on the subtlest body language to communicate. The need to speak openly with her was as insistent as hunger.

I looked at the guitar beside me; I hadn’t played in the few days since she’d arrived. But even now it was the wrong time to play, with Rohan not yet asleep and liable to shout his disapproval from the bedroom.

She was moving in the lounge, by the fire. I heard her put the fire screen in place. I swore under my breath. I was still staring down at my feet when she quietly opened the door and came outside.

She had her blanket around her shoulders and peered at me in the dark. I took the guitar from the other chair.

‘I’m a night-time person,’ she said, padding past me in bare feet. ‘How about you?’

‘That’s why I got this shift; Rohan’s a morning guy.’

She folded herself into the chair; her feet were pale and wide.

‘I’m going to start saving my shoes and socks,’ she said. ‘If I’m only around the cabin there’s really no need for me to wear them. And they’re all I’ve got. Apart from those I left at the farmhouse.’

‘Rohan was thinking about giving you some boots.’

‘Really?’

‘What size are you?’

‘Eleven.’

‘Jeez.’

‘I know. Tell me about it.’

‘I was thinking the spares would be too big for you, but maybe not. I spose you played basketball.’

She nodded.

‘Did you teach primary school or high school?’

‘My last job was primary, but I preferred the older kids. They’re good fun if you get off on the right foot.’

‘And you sing.’

She laughed softly. ‘Yes.’

‘You’re a singing sports teacher.’

She fell quiet, and when I glanced up I saw her gaze was on me.

‘You remind me of before,’ she said in a husky voice. ‘I thought it was because you got out so early and didn’t see how bad it got – but I don’t think so. It might be the cabin too; there are times here when I forget. Like just now – normal talk, not about food, not about the environment or the virus. It’s so different when there’s food in your stomach and a safe place to sleep.’ She paused and looked down. ‘Yes,’ she said softly, ‘I’m a singing sports teacher. Or that
was
me. Now I’m not so sure.’

‘You look as though you could sing.’

‘You’d be surprised at how many people say that,’ she said. ‘I think it’s my big mouth, all teeth. You look like a muso – strumming around a campfire, on the beach. I was going to say in a Nimbin hippy scene, but I think we’re all starting to look pretty Nimbin.’

‘I can handle that.’

‘Mmm, me too in my day but now I think I’d only be happy about getting back to nature if it was on the way to a huge shopping centre, every supermarket and fast-food outlet known to man.’

‘Yeah, but what got us here in the first place?’

She nodded. We fell silent. The crickets were loud. We listened a moment together.

‘It’s strange the way you’re so social and moral,’ she said, ‘and Rohan’s … old school … dogmatic, but the one who’s instinctive and close to nature.’

‘A couple of schizo bastards, you mean.’

She laughed. ‘No.’

‘Rohan’s definitely dogmatic – it comes with religion; blinkered enough not to see your own faults or who you truly are.’

She pulled the blanket tighter around her. ‘Is Rohan very religious, then?’

‘As part of a family feud,’ I answered. ‘Dad would quote from the Bible, mumbling about the serpent rising in the east, and storing the ammo like a redneck from way back. While Mum wore her atheism like a badge and devoured
New Scientist
like it was the New Testament. Some families are split down the middle by footy teams; ours was along the parting sea line.’

‘I’ll sit firmly on the fence then,’ Denny said. ‘Which is pretty much where I’d be anyway. I will say though, there was a hell of a lot of ‘finding God’ going on out there before I got out. Some survivors prattled on about being the chosen ones, how they’d been exposed and didn’t catch the virus, and that those who survived only did because we were hand-picked by God. Can you believe that? These people were more than a little deranged from hunger and stress though.’

‘They didn’t understand the naming of the virus then – the Red Queen hypothesis.’

‘Well no, but neither do I really.’

‘The arms race principle.’

‘Yes … but doesn’t that mean we started the war with the virus?’

‘That’s right. When we changed from treating the symptoms of illnesses and began fighting the causes of them, we in effect took up arms against biology and went into battle.’

‘Didn’t we have to? Wouldn’t we still be dying of the plague and consumption if we didn’t?’

‘It would have kept our numbers down. And it looks like we’ll be dying of them again anyway. Not only has fighting disease proved to be counterproductive, it’s been our downfall – because all we’ve done is train the enemy to become a strategist. The unavoidable consequence of going to war with something is that the opponent will strive to survive, and more than that, it will learn from you. The irony being that the prey ultimately ends up smarter than the predator, and wins the battle.’

‘The virus knows all our tricks.’

‘More than that – it knows to change its spots and keep evolving. By fighting disease so aggressively we’ve effectively programmed it into a continuous cycle of mutation. It’s a vicious circle though – in the sense that the losers who do survive will then adapt and come back stronger.’

‘Running around and around, chasing tails.’

‘The circle of life, they say. Better than running frantically to a standstill.’

‘The hippies were right all along then –
give peace a chance
, even in the most fundamental sense.’

‘And we picked a fight with biology, the biggest guy on the block.’

Denny shifted in the seat, bringing her knees up.

‘The further we get into this,’ she said, ‘the more I realise my mother was right. She always shook her head at the new ways, even at education to a point. She’d say we try to learn too much. We want too much. She’d make me kneel in the dirt, the sun would be beating down and the flies thick in the air, nothing beautiful around us – dried grass and weeds, beer cans and rubbish – but she’d put her fingers to her heart and then to her ear, and then to her eye. I was meant to hear the birds and feel the sun on my skin and the warm dirt under my knees. I was meant to see the Australian sky. She’d nod as if that’s all I needed, nothing more.’

Denny sighed. ‘And I took no notice of her, of course. I thought she was stuck in the past. Holding me back.’

‘I wouldn’t be too hard on yourself; if this is any indication of the past, well it’s easy to see why we’d want to get out of it.’

‘Not everyone wanted to get out of it.’

For a while we didn’t speak. My throat was dry and my head full of thoughts.

‘Rohan’s snoring,’ Denny said, ‘– you can play now.’

For a moment we were both still, making sure he was asleep. I had the feeling Denny knew his patterns as well as I did. The way he dropped quickly into a deep sleep, and then after an hour or two he stopped snoring and was more likely to wake. She knew this was the time to play.

Having an audience made my fingers thick and clumsy; more so because it was Denny. She closed her eyes and leant back as I checked the guitar was in tune and fiddled around with some notes and chords.

‘What do you feel like?’ I asked.

‘Whatever you play well,’ she murmured.

‘Great, no pressure or anything.’

I played some modern stuff, mainly because I thought back and realised she would have only heard me pick out depressing old tunes. I wanted to show her I could play contemporary music – even though I took out most of the emphasis and slowed the tempo. It flowed though, and more than anything that’s what I wanted, to ease out the rhythm and go with some runs and have her lost in the undertow of it. I wanted to impress. Her approval came in the way she breathed.

Too often I botched a note because I lifted my gaze and fixed for too long on the dark shadows of her face.

As it does though, the music soon had me, and I didn’t plan the next song or have reasons. I played whatever came to my fingers and let the lyrics rasp from me. Time slowed and nothing mattered and the steeliness thrummed through me.