Red Queen (11 page)

Her leg came up beside his and the dark couldn’t hide the sly movement of her hips against him. ‘Yes.’

Rohan straightened his arms and looked down at her. He glanced over his shoulder at me.

The air changed in a second; suddenly weighted and slow moving in the room. Denny arched up against him. I had the furtive, almost nauseating feeling that I had to remain very still. Rohan tried to get up but Denny looped her leg around his. She put both hands around his neck and pulled him into a kiss. Rohan remained stiff-backed, but the air was loaded with deepening conspiracy. Denny twisted her limbs around him, and something in Rohan’s wooden movements told me she wasn’t usually this receptive. His voice was thick when he spoke, most of it I couldn’t understand, but it was obvious he wanted to go to the bedroom. Her hand was between them, rubbing; Rohan reached for it and I heard him murmur, ‘No’.

They stopped, breathing heavy, looking at one another. The fire tinkered and crackled. A contracting roof beam ticked with the repetitiveness of a clock.

It was a mutual agreement, but no-one spoke. Without words we agreed to something I’d spend forever never truly accepting, something only the cabin and the circumstances made right, if it did. As soon as they began to move in an unrestrained sexual way my head emptied of any rational thought. The need to watch was overpowering. I was dizzy and doubted I could have got up even if I’d wanted to leave. Denny stretched out under Rohan, encouraging him to touch her; she didn’t speak, and I guessed we all might stay very quiet in case the indecency was revealed. The dark also helped, because I could press back into shadows and they could keep to their pretence that no-one was watching.

But this changed too; although Rohan mostly kept his back to me, Denny began to move also for me, for my benefit.

Rohan took off her clothes. He was heavy with lust, defeated in the way he ran his hands over her skin when it became bare. She arched and willed more from him, moaning if he touched her roughly or kissed her uncovered skin.

Once she was naked I knew what she wanted; Rohan was still dressed. Denny worked herself higher on the cushions and Rohan lower on the couch. He got on his knees on the floor, between her legs. She lifted her legs over his shoulders and crossed them down his back, and then looked over his lowered head at me. The firelight just reached her face; it warmed her skin. She held Rohan’s head in one hand and put the other hand beside her, holding it tense above the cushions.

I knew her pleasure was real because it took away her ability to control her face, it took away her surface beauty, leaving her so totally bare it was confronting; her arousal was also in her eyes, and she let me into this – held her lust steady in her gaze, and put me between her legs, wanted me. If she had come then I might have also, but Rohan continued up her body. He undid his pants while she clung to him. When he leant back to take them off she put a foot on his chest to keep him from her. This was for me, because she made it so I could see her. She touched herself. Rohan wrapped his hands around the back of his neck while she did this, as if fighting with himself, angry, and growing more so. His aggression changed the room. She became submissive; compliant as he entered her, letting him thrust hard into her. She braced herself, gripping the back of the couch.

I thought that was it, and was relieved; I needed hours of dark and quiet to come to terms with this, what this was, how this would work. Rohan hid most of her body, and the actual act of sex had them removed from me. I felt able to breathe again, think again. But she shifted to one side and edged Rohan off her.

I don’t know how she did it. Somehow she made it right, a natural progression, but it wasn’t, not to me, not to Rohan. At that moment we were gone. Power, I came to see in a different light after witnessing her manipulation of the very air we breathed. We could only watch her. She made what happened next seem necessary. She made sex unrestricted and we agreed. She came to me.

The sequence of things slid and slipstreamed, so that if I turned my head I might be back in what just happened. And if I did look back I saw the potent span of her hips, the concave beneath her ribs, the dark brown of her nipples, and the simplicity of her hands by her sides as she crossed the room; I saw the sweat between her breasts as she came to straddle me. I couldn’t feel so well what happened because I encouraged the altered state I found myself in, as a way to cope, a way for control; I know she moved back on my knee to undo my pants, I know she linked her hands behind my neck and didn’t need to guide me inside her, I know her feet were by my sides and her knees were bony and sometimes brushing her elbows, I know she was warm and wet and in control and I was gripped with fear just before I came, and that she drove harder and took me deeper and breathed into my mouth that it was okay.

She was gone from me quickly, and gone from the room. I didn’t see Rohan lead her away, but knew he did. From my chair I could hear their bedroom door shut and then the soft moans of Denny. It was then I knew, or understood, how it would be, the contract we had jointly signed. The outlines were amazingly clear to me, as though they’d been genetically encoded, latent sexual concepts deep within my psyche, and it was this innate understanding that made it possible for me to hitch up my pants and go out to the veranda; it was the matter-of-fact zing in every cell of my body, overriding the sensational thoughts in my head, that brought the cool night air back to me and the calm veer into regulation.

Now, as I listened to my brother lose out to lust, groan as if in pain, I placed my hands carefully and deliberately on the twisted wicker of the chair and looked out at the moonlit paddock with nothing more telling on my mind than if the wind would pick up that night.

6

‘
YOU CALL
ME
rough?’ Denny held up a raw chop and waved it over her shoulder. ‘Look at this. It’s two inches thick.’

We’d closed the two barn-style shed doors to keep the flies out; the sunlight was left to struggle through thin cracks between the boards and old nail-holes in the corrugated roof. The air was rich with tangy blood, fresh meat, and the creaminess of white fat. We all wore gore-smeared aprons and stood at respective benches along the boarded walls. The butchered remains of the sheep sat between us in a plastic crate. Rohan frowned over at Denny.

‘You might manage not to overcook that one,’ he said.

She slapped the chop down. ‘What about the bone flecks? What purpose do they serve?’

‘Keep you on your toes.’

‘Of course.’

‘The carcass could have done with longer,’ I said, prodding the loose meat of a foreleg before putting it in a bag. ‘Three days isn’t enough. It’s hardly set.’

‘You two gunna keep complaining? I don’t see anyone over here offering to do the real job. Or refusing anything that lands on their plate. You seem to wolf it down all right.’

‘I was a vegetarian,’ Denny said, ignoring him. ‘Can you believe that?’

‘I can, actually,’ I said.

‘Not strict, just red meat. This,’ she said, looking at the congealed fat and cuts of meat in front of her, ‘would have made me throw up.’

‘And now?’

She smiled over at me. ‘I’ve been packing it away and wondering how it comes up raw.’

‘Not too bad,’ I said. ‘I tried some raw mince at a restaurant once. You remember, Rohan? We went to one of those places that had everything on the menu – kangaroo, crocodile, possum patties – that sort of thing; I had an au naturel veal burger.’

‘That’s right,’ Rohan said, ‘with salt and pepper and some salsa thing mixed in – I’m sure it tasted fine. And with Casualty down the road to pump your stomach if you came down with food poisoning, I’m sure it was low risk.’

‘Needless to say,’ I said, holding Denny’s gaze, ‘Rohan lashed out and had a well-done T-bone.’

‘Veal though,’ Denny said. ‘That is disgusting.’

‘I don’t think so. At least the calves didn’t have to go through the feed-lot system. They only had a short time on the mass-market conveyor belt.’

‘They sure did,’ she responded, ‘minutes, from what I heard.’

‘Better than years.’

We were quiet again, working efficiently, making room for more meat if Rohan carried it over and dropped it down. He finished first and rested a hip against Denny’s bench and picked faults in our system, snapping at us if we mixed cuts or over-filled the plastic bags. Denny told him to pull his head in. But he continued – gruff, critical, fatherly.

The sun was high and bright when we emerged from the shed with bags for the chest freezer. The chooks followed us. A pair of kookaburras sat on the top of a nearby fence, and warbled as we passed.

In the darkened shed by the house, waiting for Rohan to shift things around in the bottom of the freezer, Denny fidgeted and seemed to want to say something. Rohan didn’t need to look at her; with his head deep in the freezer he asked, ‘What’s the problem?’

She had her boots on, and dug at the dry floor with her heel.

‘We’re going to have a roast, right? Cook one of the legs and do vegies and that. Make a bit of a thing of it.’

‘Not till tomorrow.’

‘I just thought … to make it really nice, and if I knew what was in there …’

Rohan straightened and looked at her. ‘You want to see in the bunker.’

‘I’m just saying —’

‘I know what you’re saying – you want to see what’s in the bunker. But if I show you then I’ll only have the two of you on my case.’

‘I won’t nag for one single thing. I promise.’

‘You were about to ask if we could have something with the roast. You were thinking a dessert afterwards might be nice, perhaps some wine.’

‘No. Is there wine?’

He laughed, and stacked in the rest of the meat. ‘You should have just come out and asked, admitted you’re dying to have a look. Now I’m thinking you want every meal to be five-course.’

‘Rohan,’ she took a deep breath, ‘can I please see in the bunker – I’m dying to have a look.’

‘I’ll think about it.’

We washed at a tap by the chook yard. Rohan stood over us, telling us how to wash, pointing out to Denny how she didn’t need to turn the tap on so hard, and the illogical way she wet her face before washing her hands.

‘I was hot!’ she bit back.

‘Do it at the end.’

‘I was going to!’

‘You’d want to now, after doing it with dirty hands.’

She stuck her head under the tap as a way to drown him out, and then flicked her head up so the water hit him. He didn’t flinch and wiped the drops calmly from his face. He unbuttoned the top pocket of his shirt and took out a set of keys, and tossed them at her.

‘Lead the way,’ he said.

The steel door was concealed behind a tangle of blackberry that had been left to swallow the rest of the front of the container. There were three locks, big enough and strong enough to withstand bolt cutters and hacksaws. If anyone wanted in they would have to find the spare set of keys, which were under my feet, buried in a box in the ground. Or take the keys from Rohan.

Denny was excited; as I imagined I’d be if about to see it for the first time. She was lucky; she didn’t have the mixed feelings I had clouding everything about the bunker. My father’s spirit was in this place – judging, censuring, and as I heard the metal clangs and stiff creaking of the door opening I had the feeling he would be especially critical today, of both of his sons, considering what the last few nights had entailed. If I looked at Rohan I might have seen the same guilt in his eyes, a glimpse of an after-dark box as well-padlocked as the bunker. I became sure he was as suddenly racked with doubt as I was, but I couldn’t look at him; just as in the flickering light of the fire and the erotic stage Denny had turned the lounge room into, I couldn’t connect and confirm with him. Our daylight denial was as much a part of the understanding as our avoidance of eye contact at night.

Rohan leant past Denny and switched the interior fluoros on; they flicked and zapped to life and Denny stepped inside.

‘My God,’ she said.

We gave her a moment. Rohan was the first to go in and break her trance.

‘Give me the keys,’ he said.

‘Rohan,’ she said, as if he’d performed a miracle, ‘it’s full.’

And it was. The only space was a tight strip down the centre, which you had to walk down sidewards; the sides were filled with deep shelves and the shelves were stacked and tightly packed with cans of food and large plastic boxes filled with freeze-dried packets and tetra packs, long-life cartons, first-aid kits and medicine, more clothes and boots and knives and ammunition. There were airtight containers full of blocks of chocolate, Nutella, honey, Vegemite, peanut butter, salt, tea and coffee, dried milk, herbs and spices. There were bags of flour, rice and sugar, dried yeast, blocks of lard, and big tins of oil. Up high were more blankets and behind them litre bottles of bourbon and whisky, and casks of wine. Most things were within other containers and couldn’t be seen; what was most visible were the cans of food, the rows and rows of soups, stews, desserts, beans, tuna, the stacks of sardines, oysters and mussels. Denny bent her head to read the different labels.

I watched from the door and Rohan checked for signs of damp up the back of the shelves. Denny’s eyes roamed up to the roof, where there were new axes, crowbars and shovels attached to the beams.

‘This is amazing,’ she said. ‘Nothing like I thought. I was expecting a stockpile of baked beans and spaghetti – but this?’

Rohan pointed behind her. ‘You might wanna give the back wall a shove then.’

She looked past him at me; I hadn’t told her there were three containers, two making a big open room at the back, mainly because I wanted to see the look of surprise she gave me right now. Her excitement travelled to me; I walked in and craned over Rohan’s shoulder to try to see her face as she put both hands on the steel panel and pushed. It swung open.

‘Jesus fucking Christ!’ she said, and Rohan and I both laughed.

We ducked low and followed her in. Most of the floor space was taken up with supplies, so we stood close together. There was a potbelly stove and bags of coal in one corner, and in amongst the wooden boxes of food and equipment there were camp beds and swags and lamps. The food in here was more of the same, but in bigger quantities, and Denny was slowly turning, taking it in. We watched her face. She looked at us and grinned.