Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  Her canvases are huge. They sit in stately observance. The figures in the portraits are each in formal Chinese robes, their hands balanced calmly on their knees. The robes are wonderfully executed and at this size it is possible to see every stitch in the carefully painted silk embroidery. I recognise the genetic similarities in our style as if her paintings and mine are blood relatives. In this series of portraits the movement comes from the faces, not human faces but horses’ heads. Some of the horses are staring straight into the crowd, their wide frightened eyes following the observer. Some of them are just a blur as if the horse was tossing its head manically back and forth. One is a snarl and a lunge and it seems so real, such a moment captured in time, that most of the audience leave a little distance between themselves and the canvas when they pass it as if the creature might lunge out and bite a passer-by.

  The images are unsettling in their realism, the hem of each of the costumes is beginning to smoulder or catch fire. The stillest of the horse-head men has a tiny lick of smoke creeping out from the cuff of his crimson pants. The wildest blur of a horse-girl has a lick of flame climbing up her leg and into the skirt hanging from her lap. The human bodies do not demonstrate any kind of distress. It is only in the wildly turning heads that we see the panic.

  I recognise the feeling Emily has captured in these portraits. The idea that you can be perfectly still and yet inside you can be spurred to galloping. I am sure this can’t be a feeling that only Emily and I share, and I notice how quiet the crowd become when they pass the most panicked of the portraits. As if they themselves have become the human parts of the paintings, leaving only a faint distress lining the corners of their mouths to prove that they have been captured by this kind of claustrophobic unease at all.

  There are nine portraits. Three on each of the available walls. Of course the paintings are not the only part of the exhibition. It would be unlike Emily to let an audience off so easily.

  She is drunk when she steps up on the rostrum. She is surrounded of course by the carcasses. A full one, its head lolling downward towards the audience, its feet tied in a pose reminiscent of David Cerny’s St Wenceslas Riding a Dead Horse only in this instance the saint is conspicuously missing. Beside Emily is a hind leg suspended by the hoof. A hunk of flank spins in front of her so that I am forced to step to one side to see her.

  ‘Meat,’ she says in response to the inevitable question. ‘Carcasses, prime cuts, cadavers.’

  ‘Yes,’ says the young British man who has asked her the question. ‘But why?’

  She stares at him then with an expression I am familiar with. Confusion, sudden awareness, uneasiness. She looks at him as if he has been transformed into a gibbering lunatic.

  ‘He told me to do it,’ she says.

  I step forward. It is terrible to see my sister looking so lost and confused.

  ‘Who do you mean?’

  ‘Raphael.’

  ‘Who’s Raphael?

  She blinks.

  ‘Ms Reich, you haven’t provided us with notes. The other artists have prepared a dossier. Can you explain why not? Is there some reason for this?’

  She looks around, peering, as if searching for Raphael in the crowd. She finds me there instead and takes a step towards me, hovering at the edge of the podium. One more shuffle forward and she will fall off.

  Emily points to me with her open palm, a ringmaster, directing the audience towards the main attraction, conjuring me out of the crowd. I am suddenly visible. I am stared at. ‘My sister,’ she says and people respond with a scatter of tentative applause. ‘My sister, Rebecca Reich. Today is her birthday.’

  And then she steps down and walks towards me and puts her arm around my shoulder.

  Here, in the barn, I realise this is not a game. I am frightened of the horses. I am frightened of the neighbours who might find us here. I am frightened of my grandmother who might see that I am gone. I am frightened of Emily. Most of all I am frightened of Emily.

  She ties the scarf around my head, pulling it tight so that it hurts my lips and I feel like I might choke. She has let the horses out of their stalls. I can feel them brush against my hip. She takes hold of my cold, soaked jumper and tugs it up and over my head. She grips my dress and although I struggle away from her, run for the door, she brings me down. I thump to the straw and my ribs ache at the impact. She is sitting on my thighs and she struggles the dress up and over my head. I would cry if I could, but my mouth is stuffed full of cotton and she is rolling me over, gazing down at me with a terrible intensity. I hold my arms tight into my body, my elbow pressing against my chest. I don’t want her to see me this way, she takes my hands and forces my arms wide as though I am a butterfly pinned and waiting for death.

  She is holding something. I see now that it is a hairbrush. I recognise it from somewhere. It is old and the bristles are white and there is a purple rose on the back of it. I must have seen it on our mother’s dresser. She pulls it roughly through my hair and I try to scream. It hurts. My eyes water. I groan but there is no room for sound to come out.

  Emily brushes my hair. She whispers, ‘Keep us safe,’ but I am not safe. I am not safe at all. I hear the stamp of a hoof too close, the straw scratches the bottom of my feet. If a horse were to stamp now—

  ‘Emily.’ I try to scream her name but it is just muffled syllables trapped in fabric.

  ‘Flame, shhh. Shhh. Flame.’

  Emily turns my face towards her and kisses it, kissing my cheek, my forehead, my stretched-open lips. It is a bit, and I know that I am a horse. This is a bit. She bites my cheek as I struggle away from her.

  ‘Flame,’ she says, ‘come back Flame. Here boy. Here boy.’ I hear her whistle. The horses stamp more fiercely.

  She lifts me then onto my hands and knees. She holds my hair tight in her fist. She shifts and I feel the whole weight of her on my back, the harsh prickle of the hair between her legs as she starts to rock, forward, back, pulling my head sharply, forcing me to find the same rhythm, pushing my head down, pulling my head up. And then she is up and riding.

  There is fur near my cheek, one of the horses. They are too close and they are jittery.

  ‘Spirit of Flame, we invoke you.’

  She rides. She reaches back and slaps my rump with the flat edge of her hairbrush. I don’t want to play, I want to stop this now and I have no way of telling her. I groan and I dip forward, stretch back, I try to reach up, raising a hand and pulling at the gag.

  ‘Take to the bit!’ She slaps at my fingers with the brush, she tugs at my hair in her fist. I buck as hard as I can but she is strong and she can hold me if she wants to.

  ‘Spirit of Flame we invoke you.’

  And the horses. The horses are scaring me. I shake my head as hard as I can. I am sobbing and the mucus is running down my face. She slaps me harder with the brush and I can’t hold us up anymore. I collapse down, my face in the straw, the hoof of a horse close to my face. Emily crouches over me. I can feel her hips rocking against mine as she rides harder, faster.

  ‘Spirit of Flame,’ she is shouting now, ‘we invoke you.’

  My breath is huffing out of me in sharp puffs that tear at my lungs like the desperate scrabbling of tiny birds.

  I am not the first to smell the fire, and the smell of it comes before the flames. One of the patrons smells it, and the idea of the fire travels faster than the fire itself. One conversation after another silenced by the sudden troubled murmur. Then we all smell it, the whole crowd acting as one. A sudden surge towards the door.

  There are people upstairs where the other artists have hung their work, the crowd is pushing at itself racing to get down and out of the building, the corners of the paintings are catching fire. One of the grey-haired men has sacrificed his suit jacket to stifle the flames on one of the paintings, but the moment he takes the coat away the canvas bursts into flames once more. I am not sure how she has orchestrated this but I can see her hand as clearly as if she has laid her cards down in fron
t of everyone to play open misère.

  Emily.

  All the people are going one way and I am working my way past them in the other direction. There are too many people in this space. It is clear to me now. The space is small and the crowd is too big and somewhere in amongst it all there is Emily.

  ‘Em?’

  The hunks of horse flesh are hung on wires from the tall ceiling. Fresh meat, the blood still on it. It was easy enough before the fire to step around the horses, to stand at a little distance from the carnage, but now a horse head slaps back at me, twirling a grotesque pirouette on its wire. A Chinese woman in a pale pink dress presses past me. Her skirt is red with blood, the gore of a quartered horse.

  ‘Emily?’

  This mass panic is the installation, I see it now, pressing against the crowd I can see what she would have envisioned when she set up this work. Suits stained with blood, women in frocks trailing entrails, and Emily, master of ceremonies. Emily in her blue silk dress up on the podium. They would be facing the wrong way, this audience, but they are not the audience. There is only one audience member. The show has been played out for me alone and I am staring, as intended, at the spectacle.

  I stop, holding my place in the crowd, forcing the shrieking people to push past me. Paintings on fire, the dresses, the blood, the horse meat slapping against them like macabre wind chimes, and Emily on the podium with a horse’s head now fitted squarely on her shoulders, dripping blood down her blue silk dress. Fire is creeping across the hay that she has strewn on the floor, there is the back half of a horse resting on the ground in front of her, and I see the flames lick at it, the coarse fur catches, the flesh singes, the smell of it, smoke. My eyes are watering, I cough, but Emily seems unperturbed. She gallops on the spot, a childish parody of galloping. High knees jogging on the spot, hands raised like a stallion rearing, the hollowed-out shell of a horse’s head dipping forward back forward back as she rides ever forward, going nowhere.

  I can barely breathe. Fear takes your breath away, I know now why they say that. My chest is tight. My arms are shaking from trying to dislodge the weight of Emily on my back. The smell of the smoke is a shock. I freeze at the first whiff of it. I try to get more breath, to cry out or perhaps just to cry but my lungs are clenched with fright and now there is the smoke, thin and distant at first like thunder at a safe distance, but the smoke thickens quickly, the thunder rolls in. The storm is upon us. I struggle. The horses stamp and whinny. I hear a huge cracking sound like a beam splitting and I know that they have started to kick out. I am amongst it all, I am blind and pinned and I cough up great strings of phlegm. I want it to stop. I just want it to stop.

  The roof of the gallery is high but the smoke is thick and rising. The alarm sounds, finally, and the water starts and this too is a part of the performance. A horse in the rain, dead in the rising tide, its legs kicked up towards the sky, its belly bloated. The rain falls and she gallops. The flames lick at the tops of the canvases, greedily eating the last of the portraits, singeing the wooden beams set into the walls. Fire and water. A battle.

  The flames beat valiantly against the sprinklers but eventually are drowned. The blue silk clings to her body, the fabric outlines her breasts, her legs, her mane hangs limp and spent on her human shoulders, her dead horse eyes stare straight ahead unblinking. The ride is winding down, the dance is slowing, the exhibition is almost at an end. The room is empty. It is only me and Emily. It has only ever been me and Emily. I move towards her. Water drips off my chin.

  The gallop slows now to a canter, a walk and then it stops completely. The performance has ended. I have to smile at her despite myself. It was beautiful. A beautiful, awful, terrifying exhibition. I stand before her and I begin to clap.

  The smoke in the barn is so thick that I can barely open my eyes. The horses have bolted. I am sure of it. I can’t hear their whinnying. I can’t hear the crazy stamp and kick. I hold my hands in front of me like a blind girl and, like a blind girl, I look but I can’t see. There is someone in here, some person who isn’t Emily. Emily has fled. I see a face, so like but unlike my sister.

  ‘Emily?’ I know it is not. It is our mother here in the smoke with me. Ghostly, a frown. Awake and alert, it is our mother come to save me from my crazy sister.

  My lungs ache when I run to her. My head throbs. I clutch at her arm but she shakes me off.

  ‘Bad girl.’ I have no memory of her ever speaking, the sound of her voice startles me. It is like Emily’s. Here are words from my mother’s mouth and it is as if one of the horses opened its mouth and began to speak.

  ‘Do you want another baby? Do you? You’ll get another baby if you carry on like that!’

  Her hands slap at my naked chest, her nails tear at my skin. I fall, and there is air here, thin and acrid but I gasp at the little breath of air that finds me on the stable floor, I crawl after it, gasping.

  ‘Barn!’

  Spit flies from her mouth.

  ‘Like an animal! In a barn! Like an animal!’ and her voice cracks into a rasping cough. ‘Stupid slut!’ She slaps at her own face, once, and hard. And then I see the box of matches in her hand, she opens it, takes a fragile stick of wood between her fingers, lights the match and throws it. It lands beside me and I see the little glow of the straw as it catches. ‘Stay away from that barn!’ she spits. The same crackling noise the flame makes. I stumble on my hands and knees towards the doorway. I know it is the door because the air is suddenly rushing at me. I dive into it as if it is a stream. Voices. Emily? A man’s voice. I think of Raphael but I don’t know what to think about Raphael. Without Emily to tell me what to think I am rudderless. Men’s voices. I run towards the sound. My eyes sting, my breath burns in my lungs. I cling to a shirt, a stranger. I am aware of my nakedness and I hunch over, dropping back to the ground.

  ‘There’s someone in there.’

  I blink, look, seeing someone inside the barn.

  ‘Emily!’

  Someone is holding my arm so tight that it stings. I am pinned. I scream to her. Her name and she screams back, not my name, but a banshee calling out in the night, a spirit crossing back into the afterlife.

  I see her outlined in the window, but it isn’t Emily. I stare into the face of our mother. I see her, as if for the first time. The grin that I have never seen from her before, the way she opens her mouth and laughs, just like Emily, the way she raises her hands and claps. She is a woman raised from the dead, or at least woken from her drugged sleeping. Now I can see why Emily is just like her mother which is what our Oma has always said. This is my sister suddenly grown older.

  ‘Slut!’ she shouts it and this time she is laughing. The laughter turns sharp, a shriek. A wail. A sound too high and piercing to be human, the cry of an animal or a bird. Only a glimpse and then it is nothing but flame. The crack of a beam falling. The fire consuming all that is left of her.

  ‘Emily!’ I scream, staring around looking for her. But she has gone. She is nowhere to be found. Emily is gone and now I am alone.

  Emily lifts the hollowed-out horse head off her shoulders and her face is smeared with red, but there is water and the blood does not last. She tucks the grotesque and bloodied thing under her arm and bows deeply. I clap and clap and eventually she stands tall on her pedestal. Her body shakes with laughter. The grin I saw on my mother’s face in the window of the barn. I am back there now, I am half here and half fifteen years old. This is my sister and my mother simultaneously. A shared madness, but finally I have found my place. Witness, audience, sympathetic bystander: for once I am happy to be an observer. I do not feel left out of my sister’s game.

  ‘Fuck, Em, they’ll lock you up.’ I don’t want to lose her again. Even when she scares me, I love my sister more than I have ever loved anyone or anything.

  She laughs until the laughter changes and then she is crying.

  I move to touch her arm. ‘It was a good exhibition. The paintings, even the meat. It was a good exhibition. You didn�
�t need to set the place on fire.’

  Emily steps off the pedestal. ‘Raphael—’

  ‘Raphael? Emily. Come on.’

  Emily slumps onto the rostrum and holds her palms up and flat to catch the rain from the fire extinguishers. ‘Raphael must have burned the barn down, Bec. I didn’t. I swear.’

  ‘I know you didn’t. Mother did it, I saw her.’

  She is confused. She narrows her eyes. ‘But you never came to see me.’

  ‘They kept me away.’ It is true, but it is not an excuse. I could have tracked her down. I could have found her.

  ‘Well.’ She shrugs then, a little gesture of resignation. ‘I started this one.’

  She splashes water on her face and grins. ‘It was good though, wasn’t it? The paintings? The fire? The rain? And no one died this time. Did you notice that? I did it so no one died.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I tell her, ‘it was good. It was great, actually. I’ve never seen anything like it.’

  ‘Raphael wanted to do it for your birthday.’

  I feel my chest sink like a balloon deflating.

  ‘They’ll put you back in hospital.’

  ‘Yeah,’ she says. ‘But don’t you think it’s time I went back now anyway?’

  Kite

  The plan is to get the thing in the air before he notices. The winds are erratic. I have never been to his apartment and now I know why he always preferred to come to mine. The place is an ugly brick monolith. Washing hangs from some of the balconies, a boogie board leans up against a wall. The outdoor furniture on each level is cheap plastic. Someone has thrown an egg from somewhere and the shattered fragments of shell sit, a crusted yellow stucco at my feet. There is a ragged Australian flag hung in a doorway. Someone else has blocked the light with a curtain branded with Bob Marley’s face. There is the scent of tobacco and just a hint of pot wafting from the open windows.

  An erratic breeze tugs at the kite and sends it diving into the ground where its nose cracks on the hot bitumen. I aim the crossbar into another gust, pull at the string. The kite almost finds the current, teeters, loops. A change in wind direction sends it clattering into someone’s standing candelabra and I grab the string in my fist and haul but it is too late.