Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  I lock all the windows and all the doors and I sit up on the couch, staring, hoping. I am hoping for John, I suppose, but it is easy to make the leap to that other visitor. They have something in common of course. John is a wonderful kisser. There have been other boys, not boys, men. Since I left home I have slept with older men, men with beards with flecks of grey, and deep forceful voices. Men who have erectile problems or prostate problems or backs that are shot. Older men who are nothing like anything from my childhood.

  Once a woman sat next to me at a bar and bought me a drink and flirted. I left before the drink arrived. That acrid sweaty scent in the cab, only realising that it was the scent of my own panic when I stepped out into my driveway. I called the psych in the middle of the night but it went to message bank even though she had said I could call her any time. I locked the windows and bolted them, I remember this. I drank vodka till I vomited and then I was morose till dawn, sleeping all weekend and still hung-over on the Monday, or maybe just exhausted from throwing up so much.

  Tonight I will not repeat that mistake. I look at the bottle of wine in the refrigerator and leave it where it is. No, it has not escaped my notice that John is a young man, a boy, not a teenager, as Raphael was a teenager, but I have learned to think and double-think my actions. There is no psych now to call at odd hours. I am done with all that, I am cured. Still I haul my knees up into the hug of my arms and I wait, pretending it is John I am waiting for.

  I wonder what time it is in Beijing.

  PART TWO

  Arriving in Beijing

  In the plane, after what seems like a week, we are finally making our descent. A young woman has fallen asleep, leaning forward in her seat. She has been snorting through blocked sinuses. A cold she has been harbouring for the whole flight has finally set in. I have watched it slowly overtake her, a sniffle at first, a dabbing at her nose with a tissue. She has been lethargic throughout the trip, falling in and out of sleep with annoying tinny music chiming from her earbuds for most of the way from Singapore.

  A sneeze drags her out of dream and launches her into the waking world. She fumbles in her pocket for another tissue, wipes her face, massages under her eyes to ease her sinuses, presses the flat expanse of her cheeks. Something to do with the change in pressure has caused her pain. More pain as we lose altitude. She presses her face, her eyes widen in distress, she pushes at her jaw. I have been trying not to catch her eye but now she reaches for my arm, pushing one hand to her mouth, massaging her jaw.

  ‘All my teeth ache,’ she says to me. Her accent is German. I am reminded suddenly of my grandmother.

  ‘Don’t worry, we’ll be there soon,’ I whisper, but it is little comfort. I watch as she writhes in her seat and just before touchdown she stares at me, her eyes imploring, her hands pressed to her face and I am reminded of that painting by Munch. There is nothing I can do to help. I sit with my seatbelt low and tight and watch.

  I take this relentless unease with me when I stand and slip my backpack on my shoulders and sidestep out into the aisle, leaving the woman to dab at her smudged eye shadow and blow her nose into the darkly smeared tissue, finally released from the terror of her descent.

  Emily isn’t waiting for me. I search the crowd of faces and there are a handful of westerners but their presence is eclipsed by the multitudes of Chinese people calling out to loved ones, wrangling stray children. They press against the barrier and shout. It seems like the cries are in anger, but despite the volume and tone of their greetings, they grin or laugh or at the very most seem mildly irritated.

  There is a sign for the taxi. I heft my suitcase and begin the long descent. I have barely slept and my back feels like it has been crushed into a small box for the long hours of flights and transits. I rest my bag on the bottom of the first flight of stairs, stretch my fingers out carefully. A patch of sweat is gathering where my backpack touches my skin. I should have brought something to tie up my hair. The curls are already turning into a nest of dark leeches, sucking the moisture from my neck.

  At the bottom of three more flights there is a taxi rank that seems to stretch out forever. Dozens of yellow cabs side by side and men in uniforms with flags ushering the slow blinking travellers into a stockyard of metal barriers. I follow the waving flags the length of two city blocks. I wait. Surely the man with the flag will move me to the appropriate taxi. There are other passengers jumping past me, ignoring the possibility of a queue. I step off the sidewalk onto the bitumen, heft my bag. I head towards a cab and the man with the uniform and flag steps up to wave me away. He says something to me in Mandarin and when I stare at him blankly he points abruptly to a cab further down the line. I aim myself at it, dragging my bag behind me. I stash the suitcase in the boot and climb into the front beside the driver.

  ‘Nee how.’ My only words. Then I hold the map up and point to the place where my sister lives. The driver pushes the map away, says something in Mandarin, sighs.

  ‘Shajing Hutong.’ There is an email in my phone. I retrieve it, point to the Chinese characters. ‘Shajing Hutong.’

  He shrugs, which may or may not mean ‘yes’ and then we are moving finally out of the airport and onto the road.

  I reach for the seatbelt but there is none. The driver has a belt hanging beside him but makes no move to buckle himself in. He sees me searching and laughs, makes a waving motion with his hand. I clutch at the leather handhold, adjusting to the idea of speed without protection.

  The cab is airconditioned but I can feel the heat of the day seeping in from outside the window. The driver presses something on the dash and there is a message recorded in Mandarin followed by the words, ‘Thank you for enjoying Beijing cab. We are happy to help you to find your location.’

  I check my map. The maze of streets spreads out to the edges of the page. I have no idea where the airport is in relation to the red dot I have marked. I lean my head back onto the hard seat and close my eyes.

  The cab jolts to a stop. I sit up, startled. The driver laughs and points to the numbers. Two hundred on the meter. I reach behind to where I have stashed my backpack, find my wallet and the unfamiliar notes. Mao’s face stares officiously out from each one.

  I struggle out of the cab and open my map. We must be there, wherever there is. A street sign in Mandarin but beneath the Chinese characters are letters that I recognise. I check the word against the map and find the corresponding street. A small victory. My sister’s place is here, somewhere behind the row of shops. I shoulder my backpack and drag my bag behind me. The footpath is cracked and patched but there is an entryway and the sign says Shajing Hutong. I drag my things up onto the cobbled surface.

  The road is lined by trees that arc over to touch fingers; the cracked shingles of a roof are tipped with gorgeous grey tiles. Manhole covers are pressed with delicate patterns of circles and lines. The bicycles ring their bells constantly, everything in slow but constant motion, everything rattling or ringing or shouting. A motorcycle honks and I step to the side to let it pass. There are people here, but not as many as on the main street. Doors are red and faded green and purple, chipped and rusted. The place smells. Not a pleasant tree-lined odour, but harsh scents of petrol and piss.

  I stare at the map, turn into a cross-street. The alley seems to become narrower. At the end of it are large red doors, slightly ajar, with knockers shaped like dragon heads. A dog barks from inside an adjacent doorway. I push one of the doors and there is an entryway behind. A potplant sags before two glass doors with elaborate metal frameworks. No curtains, no privacy. I heft my bag up and over the entry step. Emily’s door is the one on the right. I realise that I am holding my breath. I breathe out before I knock.

  Then there is Emily.

  She reaches towards me and gives me a kind of hug, at an angle, a little side-press and a tap of her hand on my back before she pulls away. The same clear sharp eyes, but the shape of them is outlined by dark circles. She is heavier, with something overblown about her skin as if she
has been suddenly inflated. She looks taut and mottled. Her top has shoestring straps and the skin on her upper arms is dimpled and picked at, scabbed over in places.

  I am shocked to see her this way, blown out and hidden under her own flesh, and this meeting is so many things: a death, a revelation, a gift that shrugs off its festive wrapping only to disappoint. This moment is also a mirror and I am reflected: I am this size, this weight. I am this same embodiment of jetlagged exhaustion. In her eyes I find my own loneliness and insecurities.

  I recover quickly, hiding behind the polite smile that I wear to classes, and she smiles back, one half of her mouth still drawn down into a frown of consternation. If you held your hand up to obscure half her face you would see politeness on one side and nothing but sorrow when you moved your hand over to the other.

  The heat is startling. Even the hottest Brisbane days have not prepared me for it. I have stripped off my jumper but my dress feels like a blanket. The little half-sleeves cling damply to my upper arms. The fabric hangs heavily across my chest. My bra itches.

  ‘Hey,’ she says.

  And I say, ‘Hey.’

  ‘Good to see you.’

  ‘Same.’

  Her voice is the only thing I recognise completely. There were photos of her, of course. It was impossible not to see these pictures staring out at me from the racks in art bookshops, once even leaping out from the television. When I did see them they held me transfixed. I stared at the pale beautiful woman, the girl grown tall and more glamorous. This was at the beginning of her notoriety, and once I had started to look at her I could not stop. I gathered up every magazine. I started to leave the television on in the background, stopping to check so regularly that even I could sense a growing obsession. I could have tracked her through the gossip columns, photograph by photograph. Instead I bundled the magazines I had collected into the recycling bin. Every so often I would come across a treatise on Emily’s work in the Art Monthly, a retrospective in one of the journals I subscribe to. I would be confronted by new work, each painting darker and richer than the next.

  But in general I have not seen a photograph of my sister since that brief period when I saw the edges of myself blurring, waking at odd hours in the night, expecting to see my sister grown older and more exquisite leaning over my bed. This Emily, here and now, is a different creature entirely.

  She stretches her hand out almost apologetically to take in the small immaculate room. White walls, white leather lounge chairs. A handful of paintings lean against one of the walls, neatly stacked one in front of another. There is a line of shoes beside the door and I wonder suddenly if I should have taken my own shoes off. The floor is tiled but perhaps I am tracking dust into her house.

  ‘White is the colour of death,’ she says, ‘at least it is in China. I hung white lanterns in the courtyard when I first arrived but my neighbour made me take them down. I’m not responsible for the walls or the colour of the lounge chairs. Someone else made that mistake for me.’

  She reaches out to take the satchel off my shoulder and there is an awkward moment when I abandon the weight of it and it almost falls from her hands. She moves the bag into one corner and I wheel my suitcase in beside it.

  She stands for a moment and I see her eyes travel down my body, but it is impossible to tell which side of her face best expresses her judgment. When she has taken in the length and breadth of me she opens her mouth as if there is something she is about to say. This is the moment where politeness demands a compliment, but she exhales and is otherwise silent.

  ‘You look good,’ I say and both of us know this is a lie. My sister’s silence was more honest. I notice a narrowing of her eyes and feel chastised.

  ‘Coffee?’ she asks. ‘Or do you want a shower straight up. The flight…’

  ‘Both sound good.’

  ‘Both, then.’

  She points to a narrow alcove at the side of a tiny kitchenette. The shower is no bigger than a camp shower, a small corner unit with curved glass doors. I notice that one of the panes is missing and there is a crust of crumbly glass clinging to the metal frame.

  I feel like a giant in her bathroom. When I turn sideways my hips bridge the distance between the sink and the wall. I stare into the mirror, to see if the stray dark hairs have begun to grow back on my chin, but the closer I get the more indistinct the image. There is something wrong with the mirror, some design fault. I step back, shed my clothing. I am glad that the image is not too sharp. There is a ledge above the sink and her body products are lined up neatly there. Brands I recognise but have never used.

  When I step into the shower I am mammoth. There is barely any room to turn. The water ricochets off my skin and out of the broken panel. I stand under the shower and allow myself to indulge in a short burst of tears.

  I emerge from the shower presentable. I brush my teeth and rinse the toothbrush under the running water. I put on lipstick.

  My sister is tucked up in one of the big white couches. She nods to a cup of coffee that she has left steaming on the table.

  ‘White and one?’

  I haven’t used sugar for years but I nod anyway. The coffee smells good and strong. The comfort of the familiar. I sip.

  ‘I’ve missed you,’ she says then, staring into her coffee. It would be a complicated lie to tell her that I have missed her too and so I move over towards her paintings.

  ‘May I?’

  She nods. I lift and turn the first canvas. It is taller than I am and heavy. I lean it against the wall. It is our grandmother. It is such a shock to see her this way. Her face is perfectly symmetrical, without any slackness or drooping. Our grandmother before the stroke. Our Oma. Her mouth has that same tightness of lip that I remember, her gaze sharp as diamond. She is sitting on a throne and dressed in Chinese robes, yellow silk. It is not a colour that flatters her; the softness of the fabric somehow underlines the harshness of her expression. The robes drop down over her lap and the hem hangs just above where her ankles are, bony furred ankles, hard cracked hooves beneath. This little detail changes the image from something that might be a tribute to something born out of the darkest corners of mythology. The hoof of a demon, the hoof of a sprite in human form.

  ‘For the exhibition?’

  She shrugs. ‘No. They’re for you. Happy birthday.’

  It is overwhelming. I glance at the stack of canvases, five of them, four still burying their faces against the blank wall.

  ‘I can’t take these.’

  ‘I’ve already booked the courier and paid for it.’

  ‘Emily, it’s not about the money, it’s just…’ John’s voice in my head, Do you know how much these are worth? ‘Don’t they have to go to a museum or something?’

  Emily snorts, ‘It’s not like they’re heritage listed.’

  I reach out to turn the second canvas but she struggles out of the soft white lounge chair and grabs my arm.

  ‘Come on, you’ll just embarrass me if you look at them now. Wanna go see some China?’

  ‘Sure.’

  ‘Not too tired?’

  ‘No,’ I say, although my limbs ache and if I closed my eyes now I would be asleep in seconds. ‘Not too tired yet.’

  She squeezes my arm so hard that I flinch. ‘It’s good to see you, Bec. I really have missed you.’

  ‘I’ve missed you too,’ I say.

  I gulp the last of the coffee, which burns the roof of my mouth a little. When I put my empty cup down on the side table she hands me a heavy D lock and a key.

  ‘Right-o,’ Emily says. ‘Let’s get on our bikes.’

  Riding a bicycle in Beijing is taking a leap of faith. There are road rules, it seems: most of the cars stick to one side of the road. When there is a red light some of the cars stop. There is an area at the side of the street that seems to be reserved for bicycles and mopeds except sometimes a car pushes down the narrow space and then the motorcycles and bicycles crawl to a stop, people step off their vehicles and drag them
up onto the footpath which also seems to be a place for bicycles and mopeds and the occasional car.

  It has been years since I rode a bike and this one is too low even for my short legs. The chain is rusted. When I put the brakes on, which is something I do every ten feet or so, there is a loud screech. When I reach for the bell, which is also a constant necessity, I have to let go of the handlebars briefly and the bike wobbles. At an intersection I step off and wait for my sister to lead the way. It seems the push of traffic is endless.

  ‘Sometimes,’ she says, ‘I close my eyes and just ride out into the traffic. It’s the only way to get across. There’s one unshakable rule in Beijing—don’t hit anyone. You have to trust that the cars are trying not to kill you. Okay, now,’ she says, and it seems that several bicycles have chosen this moment to make a break for it. I follow, weaving slightly, keeping an eye on my sister’s back. If I lose her I will never find my way to her house. I am overwhelmed by the size of this place, the sheer volume of cars all sliding to a halt to avoid the bicycles.

  Emily stops suddenly, resting one foot on the sidewalk. The English words Aroma Fashion are printed on the window under a string of Chinese characters. She locks her bike and I lift mine up onto the footpath beside it.

  ‘This girl’s okay,’ she steps up over the entryway. ‘She designs and makes the stuff. Mostly ripped off from pictures in magazines. But at least she picks good magazines.’

  It is quieter inside this shop. The woman sitting behind the counter is wearing red chiffon. Her hair is pulled back into a severe bun. She is the first carefully dressed Chinese woman I have seen. I realise now, as I look at her neatly tailored silk shirt, that the streets are packed with people who seem to have dressed in their oldest functional clothes. Ugly cotton prints, loose shorts, old patched sandals. Something about her neatness is jarring. There are patches of dark sweat in my armpits, a vague damp smell from under my hair. I can feel a fine layer of dirt gathering on my skin.