Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘You should clean your room,’ she tells me.

  I swipe at my damp eyes with my forearm.

  ‘I am going to turn it round the right way.’ I hold the edges of the T-shirt gingerly, lift it slightly and she shrugs. ‘I will. I’ll do it.’

  ‘Fine.’

  ‘So why did you want me to put it on like this?’

  ‘To save you.’ She picks up a jar of blue water, a paintbrush sticking out of it. The only sign that she has been working. Her side of the room is, of course, immaculate.

  ‘What do you mean?’

  ‘It’s okay now,’ she says, ‘do what you like. The danger’s gone.’

  She lets the door slam closed behind her. I am alone. My eyes still sting. My hair is a tangled mess where she caught it in the neck of my shirt. I struggle to turn the T-shirt and I reach for a cardigan to hide behind.

  And then there is this.

  Emily stands suddenly and jogs on the spot. She opens the door and runs down the stairs and off towards the fence. It seems she might be about to leave the property. She will be punished for this. We will both be punished. I hurry out to the veranda. She tags the fence as if this were a game. She runs back towards me and I cower to one side, her hand stretched out to hit me, not to hit me, to tap the front door and then she turns again and runs, faster now, panting, sweating, running as if she is being chased. Fence, tap, door, tap, fence, tap, door, tap and I count a dozen repetitions before she stops suddenly and bends over, clutching her knees, catching her breath.

  It is a long time before she straightens and even then she grasps at her side and bends a little to ease the pain of a stitch. She slinks past me without even glancing in my direction, but when she opens the door she hisses, ‘Don’t bother thanking me,’ and slams the screen door shut behind her.

  And.

  She touches a vase sixteen times. Suddenly. Without explanation. Counting.

  And.

  She turns on her bed and sleeps with her feet touching the headboard.

  And.

  She crouches in the prickly grass and whispers something to no one and then kills a meat ant with her thumb. I watch her lick it off her finger and swallow it, eyes squeezed tight shut, a grim frown tugging her lips down. She speaks to herself but when I approach she stops and pretends she was not speaking at all.

  And one time she pinches me. I am doing nothing. I am sitting in the grass following an ant as it braves a miniature world of struggle and danger, dragging a twig, of all things. It walks backwards, hauling the thing clutched between two strong mandibles. I hold my breath as it reaches a rock and feels for a foothold with one of its back legs. Precarious, life and death, one false move and it will tumble. The stick will crash onto it, the ant will be crushed. Her fingers pinch my arm so hard that my eyes water. Palomino, who is sleeping calmly behind me, his warm dog-scented flank pressed against my back, startles at the sudden movement and scrambles to his feet.

  ‘What?’

  But she has turned and is running as if she is frightened that I might chase after her. I rub my arm, which is already starting to bruise. Palomino trails behind me as I walk back to the house. Our mother is standing by the window as if she was watching this exchange. Before our mother snapped she was tightly wound: a leprechaun, our grandmother called her, an imp, a spriggan. A troublemaker, but she says this in a way that makes the word into a compliment. You are just like your mother, she says to Emily sometimes but this is not a compliment.

  I let the door swing shut behind me and stand at the window beside my mother and slip my fingers into her hand. Maybe she can feel me. She rarely flinches when I touch her. My voice can’t disturb her waking sleep. Only our grandmother can make her sit or stand or eat.

  There is still an hour of free play left. Outside my sister stands at the fence line, leaning forward, making the taut wire stretch. I wonder what it looks like to be wound so tight that you might snap. I wonder if our mother used to pinch people all of a sudden or run laps of the garden as if her life depended on it, speak to herself quietly when no one else was there to hear. I imagine Emily after she has snapped: standing at the fence. She wouldn’t look any different. She is swinging back and forth and sometimes our mother rocks in her chair. Maybe Emily has snapped already. I watch her until my legs ache from standing too long in the same position. She has grown taller. She looks more like a woman than a child. She is beautiful and slender and yet her waist nips in, giving her an hourglass silhouette.

  There is a dark bruise on my upper arm. I wriggle my fingers out of my mother’s hand and rub at it. Mother keeps her hand curled over as if my fingers were still in her grasp. I watch as my sister picks one foot up, delicately as a foal, and stretches it through the fencing wire. She points her toe and touches the ground outside our property, turns to look back at the house. She isn’t to know that our grandmother is not watching, that the only ones watching are me and our mother, and our mother doesn’t notice her at all.

  And she picks up the phone again and listens and I know that it is just a part of this madness that is taking her away from me, but I watch her nodding into the handset and I wonder what would happen if I could hear it too. Whoever is on the other end of the phone is there with her now and I am here alone. If only I could see whatever it is that she sees. If only she would let me hear the voice on the other end of the phone. I am frightened but more lonely, perhaps, than scared. I follow her through a world of invisible hurdles, cantering just a little way behind.

  Waking Up with Him

  He has curled himself into a little ball, pushing his bottom into the curve of my hip. I can feel the heat come off him. He feels too hot, fevered, but this is how he is different from me I suppose. All my limbs are cold, the tips of my breasts are cold. I touch them and they are chilled, the little hard nipples like fingers of ice. He has shuffled so far over to my side of the bed that I can feel the hard edge of the mattress under my back. I suppose he has followed me as I shifted further and further away. I am unused to sleeping with company.

  He is like a wombat. This is what strikes me first, how large and round and soft and warm he is, his arms curled up into his chest, his knees butting into his elbows, his nose in his fists. I raise myself gently up onto my elbow to watch him, the beautiful soft expanse of his skin. His back is lightly furred. I remember when Emily and I were lying in the backyard, a conversation about boys. We were teenagers then, a brief interlude where we caught up with each other for a moment. Before this there were years of her racing towards puberty, me lagging, struggling to keep pace.

  But on this day we were almost even and she rolled over in the grass. She had taken her top off and laid it on top of her bra, a band of white cotton for modesty, her skin on either side reddened from the sun. I remember watching her pick an ant off her flat stomach and wishing my own stomach were flat like hers. I even wanted her skin, strawberries and cream. My skin was olive and whenever I picked up a drinking glass I smeared oily fingerprints all over it. I kept my shirt on while sunbaking, rested a hat over my face, any scrap of skin exposed to the sun would cook to a deep charcoal colour and Emily would point and tell me I looked like an immigrant, even though I knew Germans are supposed to be pale and not dark at all. I am the colour of my father. This was never mentioned but it was often in the air. I am of my father and therefore lessened.

  ‘When I meet the love of my life he will be smooth. No hair at all on his arms or his chest but messy longish hair on his head. Sandy hair, with white bits like he’s been in the ocean. I want him to smell like the sea, and when I put my ear to his chest there will be the sound of the waves.’

  This was a good time, before Emily began to leave me. I locked the image of the love of her life into my consciousness, wanting only what she wanted. Slim, hairless, oceanic.

  John shifts back towards me a little more, nestling. I lie back on my pillow and put my arms around the hot engine of his body. I rest my cheek on his hairy back and listen. Not the sound of t
he sea, but the regular thudding of his heart. A live human being, this human being asleep in my bed. I should never have let him stay over. I know this even as I hug him closer, relaxing into the pleasure of this warm body pressed up against mine. I breathe in a great gulp of him and it hits me deep in my gut where I can feel the desire begin. I know I am wet again. Sex on the couch, sex in the bed. He pressed a finger up inside me in the last languid moments before sleep and sighed, pleased to know that if we had the energy I would be ready to join him one more time.

  I wriggled down onto his finger, surprised by the little groan that escaped from my lips. ‘You should go home,’ I told him as he began to move first one finger then two inside me.

  ‘Un huh,’ he said, and then, ‘there you go,’ as he did that thing with his thumb and the contractions started deep inside, curling me back, my head stretched up and around like a new leaf opening to the sun.

  It is the smell of him that works its chemical magic on me. I press my face into the furred skin and breathe it. The joy of his warmth and his smell and his big solid body. I suck it all greedily into my memory. I should not have let him sleep over. Maybe I will never let him sleep over again. I let myself soak up all the pure, immediate pleasure. Every good moment must end. This is one thing I have learned in life, chasing after the retreating back of my sister, racing away from me and heading off to some place else.

  The Arrival

  ‘He’s here.’

  Emily sits with her face pressed to the glass. It is raining. Outside the sun is setting, stripping the pale golden glow from the tops of the trees. She holds one hand up to the glass door and her fingers are red as if she has plunged her hand into someone’s chest and torn their heart out. I know it is just paint but there has been something up with her all day. In home-school she was sullen and silent, replying to Oma’s philosophical question of the day with barely a shrug. Even at the ritual of feeding Flame, she peered out at the heavy skies instead of checking her steps, so that she tripped over a hidden stone and swore under her breath.

  I have been watching her for an hour, glancing up from the novel I am reading to see her frozen, her nose pressed to the glass, red fingers splayed. She looks like a wild cat tensed for the kill. When she speaks I bite my lip, afraid she might pounce on me if I so much as breathe.

  I watch her ease back from the window and nod, satisfied. Her hand leaves a smudged print, ghost-fingers. She seems to shrink back into herself as all the pent-up anticipation drains out of her. Emily sinks back onto her heels and whispers.

  ‘Raphael’s here.’

  I don’t know who Raphael is. There is only Emily, Oma, Mother and me. That accounts for all the people in our universe.

  Oma is in the kitchen, clattering. Mother sits staring at the blank face of the television. I watch as she turns her head slowly, stares out beyond the greasy prints of my sister’s hands, and all the hairs on my neck tug up to attention as a wave of unease trickles cold down my back.

  ‘Stop it,’ I whisper to Emily. ‘You’re scaring me.’

  She turns, looking slightly startled as if she had forgotten I was here at all. She stands and walks towards me and I try to hold very still but it is impossible not to flinch when she leaps towards me with her bloody fingers hooked like claws.

  ‘Boo!’ she says, then turns and slouches out of the lounge room.

  Our mother is still staring out of the window. I clamber up to stand beside her. Outside the darkness is filling in the shadows. There is a rustling and a thumping somewhere out among the trees where, despite the rain, a kangaroo is darting in and out of the dense scrap of bush. Wallabies and paddymelons are making their way across the train tracks and out to the stretches of clear-felled land. Possums uncurl from their damp tree-top beds. Outside the world is waking while inside we are readying ourselves for sleep.

  I peer out into the darkness. I know there is no one out there and yet every rustling branch seems like it might have been disturbed by a human hand.

  Raphael’s here.

  She said it just to scare me. And of course it has worked. I stare out of the window for a long time. I hear the hiss of onions hitting hot oil, smell the wonderful rich redness of dinner being prepared. I stare until the darkness steals the edges of the trees, making them shadows among shadows, and still the hairs all stand to attention on my neck. At some point I flinch as my mother suddenly turns back to stare at the television, as if whatever was outside has moved on.

  ‘He’s gone now.’ The words are past my lips before I can stop them. When I turn around Emily is there behind me. She must have crept back into the room without me noticing. She shakes her head and I feel suddenly ashamed.

  Emily goes to set the table and I help her. This is our job. We take our own places and wait for Oma to arrive with the bowl of food.

  Emily stares at me unblinking. Just as I am about to ask her who she was talking about, she picks up her knife and grips it with her fist, the tip pointing menacingly down towards the placemat.

  ‘Did you see anything?’ she asks, then answers herself with a sly smile. ‘Of course not. You didn’t see him at all.’

  Mother pulls the chair out and sits at the table with us. This is rare, but not completely unheard of. Sometimes her world and ours intersect by sheer luck. Mostly it is Oma’s job to lead her here and when she joins us she is confused, staring from one daughter to the other as if wondering who we might be. Today she just sits, resting her fingers lightly on her knife and fork, looking down at her placemat. When our grandmother brings the bowl and ladles pasta and sauce onto her plate she continues to stare until Oma lifts her elbow and directs her fork. I watch as she twirls it in the pasta. She chews, smiling vaguely, swallows. I serve myself. Plenty of garlic today, which is how I like it.

  A thump and a rustle. I glance out of the window. Wallabies. Only wallabies, but when I look back towards Emily, she grins knowingly. I stare hard into my bowl, ignoring the prickle on my neck, ignoring the rustle and thump, and continue to eat until my plate is empty.

  Stretching

  One more canvas. John is here to help but he is less than helpful. It is important that the canvas is stretched as tight as possible and John is young and big with it, although most of his bulk is free from muscle, but he is erratic in his efforts.

  He starts the project with his usual jovial enthusiasm.

  ‘I work on paper mostly, or pre-stretched canvases when I’m painting.’

  ‘Stretching is part of the art,’ I tell him but I am not sure he believes me. I assumed that a boy would have stronger hands than mine but his hands are small for such a large person. Strange that I have never noticed this. I have noticed the way he uses them, the gentleness, hands like a girl, soft and often smelling like soap. He is a hand washer. This is something else I have noticed. Now I see how the stretcher looks too big for him. He is awkward with it. He fumbles with the handle, strains with the heft of it. I hold the frame in one hand and the staple gun in the other and watch him juggle the one tool awkwardly. His fingers slip on the thick fabric. One section is nicely taut, another too loose. There is a wave in the canvas that is visible without holding the thing up to the light.

  ‘What’s wrong with the pre-stretched ones?’

  ‘Not tight enough. They use inferior wood. The finish is not as I want it. The canvas is not the best quality.’

  ‘But the expensive ones. Surely you could just get some expensive ones.’

  ‘To get the quality I want I would have to spend more than I have. We’ll just unpick this one and start again.’

  ‘Yes, I suppose so.’ But he looks unhappy with this decision. He watches me use the flat edge of a screwdriver to lever the staples out of the wood; his look might just be a glare. He turns, bored with the idea of frames and canvases, and picks up the palette. Bright patches of oil paint with a thin crust setting over it. He sniffs at it.

  ‘Your sister uses acrylics.’

  ‘Sometimes. When we were young it wa
s always oils.’

  The canvas slips in my fingers. I clamp it with the metal teeth of the stretcher and lean my whole weight against it. The wooden frame creaks a little. This is the kind of stretch you need. This. Here. Not the inconsistent almost-stretch of John’s attempt. I am tempted to get him to come over and look at the tension in the fabric, but he has moved over to the little cluster of my sister’s childhood artworks.

  ‘Are you tempted to sell them?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘But imagine how much they’re worth.’

  ‘Value.’

  ‘Yeah,’ he says, ‘value. Is your emotional attachment worth more than half a million dollars, say?’

  ‘I wouldn’t get half a million for them.’

  ‘One of your sister’s paintings sold for half a million at Sotheby’s a couple of weeks ago.’

  ‘Seriously?’

  ‘Don’t you Google her?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘You have how many paintings?’

  ‘I don’t know, I haven’t counted.’

  ‘Do you want me to count?’

  ‘Not particularly. I want you to hold the canvas while I stretch it.’

  ‘But you could get a new car,’ he says, ignoring my struggles with the stretcher and the frame.

  ‘I don’t need a new car. I like my car.’ Two lies, back to back, but he has annoyed me. I pull with all my strength, struggle to hold the stretch and move the staple gun into position at the same time. It is impossible.

  ‘I’m surprised no one has broken into your office and stolen the ones in there. Only now when that happens you’ll think it was me and you’ll come search my flat.’