Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  When she takes her place and bows and steps forward, I wipe the horse spit on the back of my skirt. The air is so still and I lift my hair off my neck where it is damp with sweat and sticking to my skin.

  I see him out of the corner of my eye, just a scrap of movement over on the ridge. Of course we have never climbed through the fence or ventured onto the neighbour’s property but I always imagined just more of the same flat scrubby paddocks stretching away over the hill, right out to the horizon line. I look towards the movement, squint into the sun and it is a person, a boy, just another farm boy in a flannelette shirt like all the other farm boys we see loitering outside the shop or waiting for the school bus on the side of the road when our grandmother takes us with her to town.

  He is walking towards us and I tap my sister on her hip. She turns towards me and she scowls. This is the most important part of her day and I am interrupting her.

  I tilt my head and squint towards the boy, who is closer now. He walks with a lilt, shifting from side to side with each step, a swagger. I am reminded of gunslingers, gangsters, prison guards that I have read about in novels. His hair is cropped too short and his skull glares out beneath the stubble. He has the kind of features that mark him as a local. A shared thick jaw, a heavy brow. Emily says it is interbreeding, cousins marrying cousins, and it is hard to disagree when you see his face and it could be any face on any boy from town. He has that same sneer too, or maybe that is just the kind of look that my family inspires. We so rarely see ourselves through the eyes of others and it is odd to notice how wary of us they are, wary and contemptuous, fascinated and confused.

  He swaggers up to the fence line and grabs a lock of Flame’s hair in his fist and I can feel Emily flinch beside me. He hooks the horse’s neck up with his arm and slaps him gently, an upended headlock, and Flame just snorts and nods and stamps a little which is exactly what he does when we visit with him.

  ‘You’re not feeding Joey anything are you?’

  Joey.

  Emily’s hand becomes a fist but her face remains impassive.

  Flame’s jaw is still working at the last of a carrot.

  ‘Is there a problem?’

  We never talk to other kids, or rarely. I am not sure I could do it as easily as she is. I look down at my feet and I know this makes me seem shy but I am not. I am just unused to strangers, a strange boy this close to us without our grandmother around to intervene. There is a buzz of excitement, I feel as if anything could happen. No windows to lock tight against this stranger. He could so easily rob us or beat us, or kill us or worse. Because if a boy touches us it will be worse than death even. He settles his weight between his splayed feet, shifting from one to the other. He watches us through narrowed eyes, distrustful.

  ‘Yeah well, Joey is my horse and I need to know what he’s eating. There are things a horse shouldn’t eat although you wouldn’t know that I suppose.’

  ‘And why wouldn’t we know that?’

  My sister is short but she seems taller than this boy. It must be something about the way her back is so straight, her arms tight with anger, chin raised. She looks tall and strong and I inch closer, inside the comforting bubble of her fury.

  He shrugs. ‘You know. You, with your mum and your gran and all that.’

  She stares at him for a moment. I see her head move as she literally looks him up and down. She reaches out then and Flame leans forward, nudging the cup of her hand. The horse licks at her fingers and the boy yanks suddenly at the animal’s mane. Flame whinnies, stamps.

  ‘Don’t touch my horse.’

  ‘Horses don’t belong to people,’ she tells him. Her calm is terrifying.

  ‘Yes they do. I don’t know what dumb bullshit you have in your religion but in normal religion it’s that animals were put on this earth for people. Not the other way round.’

  She laughs, a little snigger of air and he spits on the ground at his feet.

  ‘Exactly what religion do you think we are?’

  I watch him swell to his right height. He inflates like a balloon, one short sharp breath after another. He is big, broad shouldered, his jaw looks too big for his face.

  ‘I don’t know. Vegetarianism—’

  ‘—is not a religion.’

  ‘Mormons.’

  She shakes her head defiantly.

  ‘Freak religion then. Cause you are freaks. Everyone says you are.’

  My sister stands straight and strong, an immovable force. For a moment I see a small version of our grandmother standing there, terrifying in her certainty. ‘This is not your horse. I have never seen you here before. You don’t even live here.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, his shoulders slumping a little, some of the air taken out of him. ‘I live here. Except when I’m at boarding school, eh?’

  ‘So go back to boarding school, eh?’

  I put my hand on her arm and tug at it. Our house is so close. I can see it from here. I take a step towards home but she doesn’t move. The boy knows he is being mocked, but he seems uncertain what he should do about it. He turns to face Flame’s glistening flank and pats it as if to prove that he has the right to do this when we have not.

  ‘Stop touching my horse. I might catch something off yous.’

  My sister speaks then and I feel the blood rising into my cheeks. I listen in horror to the soft syllables she learned from the alphabet in the back of The Lord of the Rings. I listen to the sounds slipping easily off her tongue and I cringe. It is not just that she is speaking Elvish in front of a stranger, it is that she is proving him right.

  It would be difficult living next door to the freaks. He is right about that. Real girls would go to their town school and eat the bad food and go to the rodeo. Real girls would wear normal clothes and say ‘eh’ at the end of their sentences and use words like ‘yous’ and ‘chicks’. I float somewhere outside myself. Looking down there is a girl in a hand-sewn dress with a bad home haircut and a dumb ritual with a horse that doesn’t belong to her. I step away from my sister, I edge back towards home.

  The boy spits in the earth once more. And then an astonishing thing happens. He slips up and onto the back of the horse. His fingers laced in the mane, he lifts and throws his leg over the horse’s back and Flame does nothing but a quick jog forward. I can feel my sister stiffen beside me. The idea that someone can ride him, that this boy rides him.

  ‘Just don’t feed my horse, freak,’ and he turns and trots away from us.

  She spits words at him. I am not sure exactly what she is saying but it is some kind of curse. She is our grandmother exactly. It is there in the way she stands her ground, speaking in a made-up language that will mark her as a freak more firmly than anything she might have said in English.

  ‘Let’s go home,’ I whisper, but she ignores me, standing stiff and as tall as she can until the boy has cantered off with Flame up and over the ridge out of sight.

  She turns towards me then but without looking at me. I am a disappointment to her. I am weak and my retreat has proved this. I see my grandmother’s terrible disapproval and wish there were something I could do to make it right. She stalks past me and I have to jog a little to keep pace.

  Oma in Hospital

  Oma pins me with the sharp needles of her eyes. I can feel it. My hands itch when she stares at them, my feet ache. I imagine she can smell John on me. This, more than anything, makes me sit uncomfortably on the edge of the plastic chair at the other side of the room. I am straight-backed and prim, my skirt smoothed down over my knees. I might be seven years old again, waiting for home-school to begin. I am like this with her, always polite, always sitting straight as the back of the wooden chair. Good sister. Praise for me, consternation for Emily.

  Now that there is only one of us to visit her, my grandmother frowns with half of her face. The other side of it is slack, rubbery, barely flinching as she catches sight of me. Her good hand taps. They’ve let her nails grow long. I imagine the struggle that the nurses must have with
her, harried looking young men and women staring at me sideways on the rare occasions of my visits. She bunches her fingers together so they resemble the beak of some avian predator. The tapping makes her seem hungry somehow. I sit on her left side where she can easily see me. On the right she sometimes forgets I am there at all, startled at my reappearance whenever I walk across the room to pour her a glass of water.

  The tapping sets my teeth grinding. She would chide me about this, but her words are jumbled up inside her head. The nurses tell me that she refuses to speak at all, preferring silence to the possibility of error.

  ‘My operation went okay,’ I say, to interrupt her tapping. She pauses, her hand raised, the fingers pressed together.

  ‘The doctor said the stone was the size of an Easter egg.’

  I know she’s not concerned with my minor ailments. She doesn’t speak but I can hear her clearly enough. You still have your words. You can use both your hands. You walk without a limp. You can read words on a page.

  ‘So, there were three men having their gall bladders out at the same time. Same operation as me, right?’

  Her fingers tap down on the metal table, a ticking of talons, a marking of time.

  ‘And, the doctor leaned over and whispered to me that my gall stone was the biggest.’

  Pride. Talking yourself up. I wish I hadn’t said anything at all. My straight good-girl back sags down just a little. I resist the urge to check my watch. There is tea and I sip it, drawing the minutes out. I will not have to speak for a while. I sit and listen to the tapping gradually quicken. Normally, I would talk about work next, but John is there in front of my office door smiling in that disarming manner, waiting like a puppy to be let in.

  He is new in my life. The last time I visited I spoke about him, my best student, an exciting talent. Perhaps she realised there was a transgression brewing before I even knew it myself. I feel her silence like a cold finger poking around inside my head, finding John there hiding among my secrets. As children we thought she knew everything. Now I wonder if she knows about John or, and I realise this with a sudden cold shock, if she knows that Emily has called. I can feel myself itching to confess. Emily would not want me to tell. Emily would want this to be our secret. The tea is weak and milky. This is how they serve their tea. Inside that silent body I imagine that she is furious. Only her fingernails betray her.

  I drink in silence. I look up and smile, a wan lie of a smile without teeth. Eventually I stand and the tapping stops, her fingers poised, waiting for me to leave. I kiss the slack side of her face where she will not feel my lips trembling. I wave to her neglectful eye.

  Bad granddaughter, liar. A disappointment of a woman leaving awkwardly, hip colliding with the wall. I leave the ward quickly, tripping over nothing, righting myself against the information counter.

  ‘Nice visit?’

  The nurse is a little younger than I am. His muscular shoulders pull tight against his uniform.

  I nod. My face is a mask of guilt.

  ‘She’s very…wilful, your grandmother.’ I imagine this is the kindest of the words he has for her. I feel embarrassed.

  ‘Formidable,’ I offer and he nods knowingly. I wonder how my Oma has demonstrated her power without the aid of speech or writing. Perhaps I should feel a camaraderie with the nurse but instead I just feel guilty again. I try to match his smile before I turn and flee into the heat of the bare car park.

  Safely away, I realise how tight my shoulders have been. I stretch my neck, one side then the other. A crackle of relief, an audible relaxing.

  When I settle into the car I can smell John, a small reminder of his skin. I find it comforting. I am taking deep breaths, drinking in the odour that has somehow impregnated itself into the upholstery. It is unsettling, this longing for someone you should not be with. It frightens me a little, which in itself is arousing. I sit for a moment.

  I turn the key. The car shudders but does not start. I try again and there’s more mechanical chugging. For a moment I imagine it is my grandmother, the insidious finger of her willpower stopping the car dead, but when I turn the key a third time the car starts. Not the witchy power of our Oma, then. If it was her she would never let me leave at all.

  Phone Voice

  Emily is in the lounge room. Our grandmother is in her study, the smell of turps and glue so strong that I become faint with it as I sneak past her door. I am still groggy from an early afternoon nap. Emily calls me a baby for having naps but when I try to stay awake to spend more time with her I am too tired to follow her games and she calls me stupid and sometimes I am so tired that she makes me cry.

  Today I steady myself on the wall and stumble towards the lounge room. Our mother is usually there somewhere, hovering near the window, but today I notice her absence. The first surprise. She must be in her bedroom, which is rare at this time in the day.

  Emily is sitting beside the phone. At first it looks like she is speaking into it, but when I take a step into the room I see that she is hunched over it, her ear pressed up against the back of the earpiece, her mouth near the back of the mouthpiece. She is whispering, ‘Yes, yes, yes, okay. Are you sure? Ah huh. Ah huh. Ah huh.’

  It is like a conversation but one where I can only hear the uninteresting part. The good bit of it is going on in Emily’s head. It must be a game. It is a game to fill in the time till I am awake. Now I am here I crook my fingers up against my head, my thumb to my ear, my little finger to my mouth. I walk quietly into the room thinking that she will be so surprised and pleased to have someone to play this game with.

  ‘All right then I am back again now,’ I say into my pretend telephone and watch her snap her head up sharply like a startled bird, her beak in the air, her eyes glazed as if she is having trouble focusing on the room around her.

  ‘So what were we talking about again?’ I say, quite loudly into my telephonic hand.

  ‘You’ve scared him,’ she says sharply. ‘You’ve scared him away.’

  And she seems truly upset by this. She puts her hand onto the telephone as if it were an animal that needs calming.

  ‘Who?’

  She glances at the phone and then back in my direction and she is coming back into herself. Her expression changes from one of bewilderment to the hard, one-sided smile my sister often has.

  ‘You’re too young,’ she says, ‘you wouldn’t understand.’ She reaches up to her hair, tightens the ribbon she has tied there and makes her way out through the back door. With the sound of it slapping, faster, coming to rest after a dozen little reprimands, I am alone in the lounge room. The phone is still warm from where her head rested against it. I lift it out of its cradle and listen. Nothing, of course. There was never anyone on the other end, but there is something in the flat, empty tone that makes me wonder, and listening closely for the longest time, it is as if I can hear someone breathing, regularly, in time with the note of disconnection.

  It is true. I can hear it. Someone is there, hiding behind the idea that it is a dead line. Someone is listening to me, breathing out when the low beep starts, breathing in when it finishes. The more I listen the clearer the breathing becomes. A cold wave creeps up the back of my neck and I slam the phone back into its cradle. I should walk away now. There are goose-bumps crawling along my upper arms. I am cold despite the warm air. I lean close to the phone and even though it is set in place, I whisper into the back of the mouthpiece.

  ‘Hello?’ And then when I hear nothing, ‘Who are you?’

  Now would be the time for a voice to come to me and I am tensed and ready for it.

  ‘Who are you?’

  I pick up the phone again and I am afraid. But Emily has been here before me, Emily is brave and I will be brave too. If Emily has found a friend hidden here then I will dig him out. I will not be separated from Emily’s games. I will not be a stranger to her friends.

  ‘Who are you?’ It is just a whisper and I am so tight in my limbs that my leg is turning to pins and needles with
my fear.

  No sound, just the flat low tone and yes, there, the breathing. Someone breathing through it.

  ‘It’s okay to talk to me,’ I say to the sound. ‘I’m her sister.’

  Tone, and breathing. I listen for a while and then when I hear the creak of the floorboards I put the phone back in its cradle and scuttle onto the couch. It is our mother, the zombie shuffle of her feet, tentative on the floorboards. For once I wish she would settle in the seat beside me as she sometimes does, but instead she stands at the window and I imagine she is watching Emily instead of me. It is ridiculous, but it seems that maybe they are keeping a secret from me, Emily and our mother and whoever it is on the phone. I stand and creep towards her, hovering beside my mother where I can see out to the back garden. My sister is nowhere to be seen.

  Séance

  ‘You know this is ridiculous.’ I am wearing the wrong thing of course. I changed four times and still I made the wrong decision. I am overdressed. It is a pretty frock, possibly my prettiest, a flattering black and pulled tight and low at the breasts, taking the attention away from my stomach. It is the first thing he noticed, I could tell. He stood at my door and his eyes kept darting to my breasts in a way that made me blush a little and made me want to slip out of the dress quite a lot. Still, he didn’t reach for them, no soft kisses, just an awkward shuffling of his feet as he waited for me to get my purse.

  This is our first date, if you can call it a date. I suppose he made an effort. He is wearing a jacket. I have rarely seen him in a jacket. This is an old one from a suit that is too big for him and he has matched it with his uniform old jeans and taped-up shoes. His hair has been brushed which is another sign of the care he has taken. It is a date, I suppose. I should not be going on a date with him.