Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  ‘You are imaginary,’ I tell him, and then: ‘He is imaginary.’ Because there is no Raphael to listen to my strange exorcism. I close my eyes. I start to count. I am grown up now. I am sane. I don’t need to see her imaginary friends. I continue the count, steady, sure.

  He shifts, but I can still feel his weight in the room, the length and breadth of him. A person sharing this space. I can smell him when he steps closer. He smells like the paint still wet on the canvas; I open my eyes quickly to glance back at it. He looks so real but when I turn and look at the phantom in the room it is not the same person. His jaw is different, softer, rounder. The eyes are the same but the hair is darker. I close my eyes once more and continue the count. Nine, eight, seven, I feel his hand on my cheek, his lips soft against my own. An imaginary kiss and imaginary chill when the lips pull away from mine and I say, ‘four, three, two.’

  I have run out of numbers. I open my eyes, blink in the half-light. He is still here, staring, watching too intently. I see now that his eyes are different from the eyes in my painting. There is a harshness to them, a tired cynicism. This is Emily’s Raphael, not mine. Except it is not Raphael. I notice the downward curl of one side of his lip. Her lip.

  ‘Emily?’

  ‘Emily? She’s off somewhere doing something, whatever she has planned for her terribly important exhibition. She is so boring, Bec. She paints and paints and paints…’

  ‘Emily.’

  ‘We have time,’ she says. ‘Emily won’t be back for ages. I’ve missed you, Bec. I’ve never forgotten you.’ She steps closer again and she would kiss me but I press my hand against her collarbone. She is wearing a crushed velvet suit, boyish, but she is not a boy. If I let my hand drop she would step forward and kiss me again. I feel that old excitement, the kind of shivery anticipation that I haven’t felt for all these years. I remember the kisses, and more, I remember more. My cheeks flare red, I can feel my skin burning. I turn towards the canvas. The man that is painted there has my sister’s eyes, her mouth, her incredulous expression.

  ‘Emily,’ I say and the name conjures her. She frowns. She tilts her head. She becomes more herself. ‘Emily. Hey. Em.’

  ‘Don’t call her,’ she says, in her low and Raphael-like rumble of a voice. ‘Emily never wanted you here. I made Emily call you, Bec. Don’t call her back. I missed you. I love you.’

  I take her shoulders and I shake her. I call her name and she looks around startled as if she is afraid that she might hear me and slip back into her body. She shrugs me off and trips backwards.

  ‘Emily. It’s okay, it’s okay. Don’t go.’

  But she is scrambling away from me, ‘You’ve spoiled it.’ Her voice is a deep and frightened growl. ‘Emily’s heard you. Emily’s coming.’ And then she is gone.

  Façade

  I am careful to hold my skirt back, away from the paint. The painting is half done, and I suppose that’s how it will stay. I settle her painting beside it. Mine is a smaller canvas. Hers is more grand. Her Raphael looks nothing like mine, I can see the differences in the light of the day. Her painting technique is similar to mine, but John was right: we are only similar painters. Not the same. My brush strokes are more visible. My expression more vague. Her Raphael has the corner of his mouth raised in a half-smile. It is the kind of expression that Emily herself might wear, sitting with the other artists in the restaurant, turning one corner of her mouth up in what is almost a sneer. Raphael has Emily’s smile in her painting of him, but in mine he is just a sweet, tired man of my own age with eyes like my sister’s, which are also like mine. There is a difference in the way we treat light. Even in this reproduction of Emily’s style you can see my hand. The glow is gentler despite the directional brightness. It is easy to see which is her painting and which is not.

  I finish zipping the dress up, walk out of the studio and enter Emily’s bedroom. She doesn’t meet my eyes. She having trouble with the buttons on her dress but when I step towards her she flinches away.

  ‘It’s okay,’ she says, ‘I’ve got it,’ and continues to struggle with the fastenings.

  I sit on the edge of her bed and fold my hands into my lap.

  ‘It’s my birthday today,’ I tell her and she turns back towards me and this time her smile is even and genuine.

  ‘Yes,’ she says. ‘Yes, I know.’

  Galleria Continua

  I can hear my mother pacing. I have never heard sounds from her room after dark. I always imagine she lies carefully, her bedside light switched off and her internal light similarly extinguished. She falls quickly into that drugged sleep, the sleep of the dead. It bothers me to hear her pacing like this.

  The windows are locked. When I heard my grandmother moving from one window to the next, rattling her keys, I felt the panic rising in my chest. The windows are locked and my sister is outside.

  It is impossible to lie down and sleep. I close my eyes anyway. His hair is sandy at the tips. His face is chiselled. His smile is lopsided. I picture every detail I can remember. I feel the creep of his fingers up and under my skirt. If I can capture him exactly he will be summoned. Raphael. I picture his name on Emily’s lips. I feel a slight breeze and I open my eyes, expectant. The room is empty.

  I am the good girl. I am here, safe in the warm house. Outside it is dark and the rain is a constant petulant complaint. The ground will be a swampy mess of puddles and mud. Somewhere outside my sister, the bad sister, is alone and sad and rbandoned.

  There is a longish drop but the mud is soft and my knees sink into it. I walk away from the house and the rain is like a thick cloud around me. The sound of it swallows the world. It makes me silent and invisible. I turn to look at our house and there is the shock of a face at the window. Mother’s window. Our mother, staring vacantly out into the dark. For a moment it seems that she is looking straight at me.

  I trip over a tree root. I hiss and wiggle my toe in my mud-covered shoe. When I look back towards the house the window is empty.

  I find the fence, but in the wet dark, it is impossible to see. When I turn back the way I have come, it seems there is no house at all. The rain is a solid heavy curtain around me, thudding against my skin. The water has the weight of fists, a rough drubbing on my shoulders. The water runs down my chest and pools in my pants. This is my last pair of dry shoes. Even my boots are damp on the inside. For some reason the fact that all my shoes are wet has a certain finality to it. I must find my sister or there will be no dry shoes. It is so dark now I cannot even see my hands on the wire. I slide them; shuffle crablike through puddles up to my knees. Without the fence to guide me I would be lost.

  My thigh bumps up against something before I can see it. I pause. A branch, foliage. It is impossible to see anything and the sound of the rain is like the roar at a sports stadium.

  ‘Emily?’

  My voice lost to the force of it.

  ‘Emily? Raphael?’

  It seems childish to be saying his name out loud. It feels fake, like a kids’ game. My sister and I used to play a game where you call the pony and she gallops a little towards you till you turn around suddenly hoping to catch the movement of her hooves. If the pony is quick she will be frozen like a statue when you turn around. Calling Raphael now feels like I am calling the pony, but each time I open my eyes the world is frozen and there is no movement to be seen. No Raphael, no Emily, no sign of any pony at all.

  Beijing is like Brisbane. There is certainly the same kind of oppressive heat that we have back home. My fingers, slick with sweat, fumble the champagne glass. There are some Chinese people in the crowd but it seems that every Australian expat in the country has gathered in the art district tonight. Remembering my own exhibition a handful of weeks ago, I am nervous, mostly for myself. Emily will be perfectly fine. Emily is always fine in her own crazy way.

  We have spent the day together. She seemed relaxed. She seemed to know who she was. We hired a tour guide at the Forbidden City and the woman made us laugh with her frantic t
racts of history learned by rote and her habit of appropriating my camera to take photographs at particular ‘scenic’ parts of the tour. Smile cheese cheese cheese cheese she said before every photograph, then hurried us forward. Quickly, quickly. Plenty see. Hurry. Emily could have spoken to her in Mandarin but she chose to remain silent, enjoying the theatre. In the end we escaped, ditching the guide before the tour was over. She had been paid. She wouldn’t mind too much. We hid in a gorgeous ancient garden and Emily took my hand in hers and held it. It was my chance. I could have mentioned what had happened in the night but it was too nice a moment to spoil.

  We lay in the same bed. Emily and I, side by side. I felt well, at last, and wondered about my nights with Raphael which must have been nights with Emily. What terrible things we did. How cleverly we hid this from ourselves. I turned towards her, letting my hand rest against the small of her back, wondering. She shuffled carefully away.

  I dreamed of a storm, hailstones thundering down to smash on the ground. A pack of dogs were pressed up against my legs and one or another of the animals would take its turn to startle and run out into the thick of it. Hailstones like bricks, the potential for carnage, a mad dash to rescue the shaking little body of a whippet, crouching under cover as the hailstones rained down, each one bigger and louder, a hailstone the size of a cow. Dogs, running and howling and then it was too dangerous to run out and save them. Then the damage began in earnest.

  Emily was standing, staring at me tangled in the sheets. I woke to the fear and the excitement. Fear of the storm, excitement because my sister was standing at the side of my bed and anything would be possible.

  ‘Raphael?’ I asked her in a whisper.

  ‘It’s Emily,’ she said. ‘You’re just having a bad dream.’

  The art district seems like a city within a city. The place is a warren of little streets and alleys. We walked past a square the size of a city block where a hundred bronze dogs snarled and threatened a lone warrior, caught forever in the moment before his death. Beyond this the galleries are lined up one beside the other. If you tried to visit them all you might take a year to complete the task.

  The Galleria Continua is flanked by a pair of metal doors and the invited guests spill out onto the street where the waiters slink between them with their precarious trays. It is not a huge space, a spiral of stairs moves the crowd between one level and the next.

  Emily has been given the ground floor, the biggest space. The other artists have their places on the floors above because the crowd is here to see Emily Reich. That is clear from the way their heads turn as she passes. She is the icing on this cake. The crowd parts as she passes, chasing a waiter across the room to pluck another glass from his tray. I have drunk too much but she has had more, and I am worried for her.

  The black dress is tight at my breasts. It is strapless and I have a wrap, which I pull across the meat of my arms. I am, as always, too corporeal. My sister, is, as always, hard to grasp, impossible to figure out. I am flesh and she is nothing more than smoke.

  These people are glamorous. Young, most of them, a few older men, grey haired and besuited. A thin, flamboyant woman with a shocking bob of red hair and an Australian accent laughs loud as a bell, joyously commanding the attention of the room. I suppose she is older than I am but she is gorgeous in a little drop of black crochet, a flash of garish tights beneath it. A handsome young Chinese man bends to whisper something in her ear. I notice the way his fingers ease into the small of her back, a tiny gesture of intimacy. He is perhaps half her age. I miss John, suddenly, acutely. This woman is a wild and exotic flower and she captures the arm of a waiter and whisks a glass from his tray. So many beautiful people. I shrink into my black dress, aware that my shoulders are hunched, sipping furtively from a champagne flute.

  Emily is incandescent. She moves easily. I watch her working the room. She has a strange slightly overwound energy. She sweeps from one conversation to another, barely pausing to join in. She is wearing peacock blue nipped in at the waist, making her seem slimmer than she is. The silk is so fine that it fans behind her like a captured stream when she walks. I am proud of her and in one breath slightly apprehensive as she catches my eye across the room. Emily stops as if she is an appliance that has been turned off for a second. The smile disappears, the dress flutters to stillness around her abruptly immobile body. The loss of energy is only momentary but I have seen it, and when she turns, the smile flashing back to illuminate her whole face, it leaves me with a creeping unease that I can’t shake.

  There is a clinking, someone tapping a spoon against a glass. Speeches. Of course there will be speeches.

  I cannot summon Raphael. I am exhausted from trying. It is cold and it is wet and my teeth make a clattering sound which reminds me of skeletons and that in turn reminds me of Flame’s legs kicked and frozen stamping towards the moon. There is a sound, a rustling. For a moment it sounds human, footsteps. I am caught between fear and relief. What if it is Emily? I hold my breath expecting that she will slip under the bushes and snuggle here out of the rain, but the sound has stopped if it was ever there, a wallaby hopping away through the rain, or a snake searching for higher ground. Our property is all just muddy hills and new-formed lakes. I wrap my wet jumper around my shoulders although it is crazy to think that this will do anything to keep me warm. I imagine the leeches catching in my hair, raining down onto my back. I shudder, but push out into the weather. The rain is so heavy that I can’t see anything at all. Emily could be standing a metre away and I would miss her.

  I pull the wire of the fence down and step through. The barbs catch on my shirt, tearing the fabric. It doesn’t matter. I will be in trouble anyway, a mountain of misdemeanours, one more will not bring Oma’s wrath down with any more ferocity.

  There is a sudden break in the clouds and a fragment of starry sky opens up above. The moon leaks through like the finger of god and touches the building in the distance, a light glance on the roof before the clouds move back, eating the light. Still, I saw the building, and I head towards it. Perhaps my sister saw it too. Perhaps she made her way to the only dry place in a big wet field. I move slowly and cautiously. The landscape here is unfamiliar. There are divots and small shrubs, things to trip on, places to slip against. I fall more than once and I am sure I have taken the skin off one knee.

  It is a long way away. I am not certain how long, but it seems to take hours. I feel the damp flap as the rubber on the bottom of my shoe comes loose. It slows me down but I struggle on.

  I can smell the barn before I see it. It is the smell of hay and horses. I feel tears spring to my eyes and I see his mouth, teeth bared, belly bloating and I walk faster, trying to outpace the memory.

  The door is unlocked. I suppose there is no need to lock a barn. What is there to steal except horses? Maybe there is value in stolen horses, but you would think every horse is well known in a small town. Of course I am not certain of this.

  There are two horses stabled here. One of them is white and has his mane braided neatly in a rather stupid mat of interwoven plaits. The other is a chestnut horse, big and strong with a dark twitch of a tail. I have never seen these horses before. The barn itself is small and smells of animals and hay. I remember the smell of Flame, my nose pressed into his flank as I hauled myself up and over, the smell of Raphael, pungent, sweaty, and slightly familiar, a sweet human musk.

  It is so dry and clean in the barn. Fresh straw a vague pale sheen on the floor. It is dark, a building without windows. The clouds part for the second time tonight and there are thin slivers of moonlight squeezing between the boards and turning the horses into zebras. The sound of them is loud and close. I am shivering. My face itches. I can feel the leeches on the back of my neck although it is probably just my imagination.

  The little white horse shifts noisily, nudging the side of his stall and I flinch. There is movement. Something pale. I glimpse it just as the moonlight disappears. Still, something scampered, large, the size of a dog perha
ps. The size of a young girl.

  ‘Emily?’

  I hear the rustle of something moving, furtive, a slow creep.

  ‘Raphael?’

  The horses stamp and snort. They are unsettled.

  ‘Emily? Come on, you’re scaring me.’

  Something shifts over there in the dark. I back away. There is a hot flank behind me. The horse stamps and snorts and it is a huge thing, I am small beside it, I turn and dart away from the thud of hooves against the wooden floor.

  Something pale in the dark, limbs, legs, arms, a body, naked but for the mud. Hay catching in her hair like blonde spikes, for a moment I think it might be Raphael. I call out his name and she runs forward out of the dark, breasts bouncing awfully, the shock of her nakedness as she grabs for me, throwing me back and downward. We are tumbling. There are hooves near my head.

  ‘Emily!’ a thin shriek of a voice but the air has been knocked from me and then there is something in my mouth, something tugged hard, forcing my lips apart making it impossible for me to call out at all.

  Galleria Continua is all about a desire for continuity between ages, the aspiration to have a part in writing the history of the present, a history that is sensitive to contemporary creative practices, which cherishes the link between past and future, differences and similarities, individuals and geographies.

  I read the mission statement on the wall for the fifth time.

  ‘Blah blah blah blah blah.’ She is suddenly there with her face in my ear. I can smell her perfume, strong and spicy. She begins to read what I imagine is the Chinese translation underneath the printed English. The sounds seem so strange, these Chinese words and I am again struck by how quickly she has learned so much of a new language. I smile and turn but she is already a blur of watery blue heading off and away into the circle of her own art.