Steeplechase (2 page)

I press the phone to my ear and listen. My own voice on the phone. Me, somewhere else, talking to myself, slightly delayed. I imagine for a moment that I will have something profound to say to myself. Bec, I will say, I am about to tell you the exact moment of your death.

‘Who is this?' I ask myself, only it is not me, of course. Even before she speaks I can feel the realisation washing over me, a cold wave and all my blood running away with it.

‘Emily,' she says. ‘Your sister.'

‘I'm on morphine,' I tell her. I should feel relieved. I am not falling back into madness. This is not another Bec on the phone, this is Emily. My sister. My sister who I have not spoken to for over twenty years.

‘I heard you had an operation,' she says. ‘You had your gallbladder out.'

‘Yeah.' And then I wonder how she knew this. Maybe she called work. I should ask her.

I am going to ask her but she says, ‘So you're okay?'

‘Yeah.' But how would she know where I work? All of these impossibilities making my mouth taste dry and a little bitter on the back of my palate.

‘Well I just thought I would call.'

‘Thanks.'

I hold the phone to my ear and it seems there is no blood in my body. I am cold and I am sure I am paler than I was before the phone rang. I feel nothing, the pain is distant, but my body has shut down, conserving its energy. This is a fight or flight response, I read this somewhere, some popular science column in a magazine, all the useless facts we learned in home-school chiming discordantly in my head all these years later.

So then, fight or flight. I feel a calm readiness and if I am forced to flee I will flee with every scrap of energy I have stockpiled, my limbs pounding, my wounded body hurtling at breakneck speed.

‘Okay, as long as you're doing well.'

‘I am.'

‘Well I bought you a ticket to Beijing. In case you want to come over.'

‘Oh.'

‘Cause we talked about going overseas together. I know we talked about Paris and Berlin but I'm in Beijing so maybe…'

‘Oh,' I say. And, ‘When? Why are you in Beijing?'

‘I booked your ticket for your birthday. A week before your birthday. That's enough time to get holidays? You have work, right?'

‘Yes, at uni. But that's not much time.'

‘But enough time to get a replacement or something?'

‘Maybe. I don't—Beijing?'

‘Yeah. In China.'

‘You bought me a ticket already? Without asking me first?'

‘Yeah.'

‘Do I have to say yes or no now?'

‘No. You can call me. When the morphine wears off.'

‘I don't have your number.'

‘Well you do now because this is a mobile, right?'

‘Oh. I suppose.' And then the wave of sadness is back and I can barely speak from it.

‘I'll go then.'

And I want to say wait but my throat is locked up so I just nod, uselessly, the phone clutched too tight against my head and heating up my ear, probably giving me cancer.

‘Bye Bec.'

‘Bye Emily.'

And in the silence when the connection is severed I wonder if she noticed how similar our voices still are. If she was also taken aback by the identical inflections. That accent that is just a little too formal, the accent that marks us as children of immigrants, that edge of an Australian twang that we practised together as children, mimicking the kids in town till we thought we had it just right. That shared longing to fit in when it was inevitable that we never would.

I am still holding the phone and my ear is still hot and my body is still cold, and I force myself to take the phone away from my head and search its memory for the last incoming call. I store the number under one word, ‘sister'. I should have used her name but it is all I can think of in this moment. Sister. My sister. My sister just called me and I spoke to her. I imagine the words as if they were written in a book:
twenty-three years later my sister called
. I flip the phone closed, then open. Check through my address book just to see that her number is still there. Check the recent calls and it is true. She called me. Last incoming call.
Sister.
My sister.

I hold the phone against my chest and give in to the insistent tug of the morphine. I taste my grandmother's soup on my tongue and I might be fifteen again. I might be ill and recovering on the couch. I might be listening to the sound of my grandmother locking the doors and windows, that rhythmic slapping of drawn bolts, locks slipping into place, windows sliding on their rail. Before it all came apart, before the terrible thing. I close my eyes and I am transported to a time when I felt safe and secure and locked up tight.

Locked Tight

She locks all the doors and all the windows. I hear the rattle of keys taken from a hook by the door. It is summer and the air is stale and damp in the house. Perhaps outside there is some small breeze, something with an edge of cool to cut through all this heat and sweat, but our grandmother begins her rounds and there will be no evening relief.

We listen to the rattle and scrape as one window after another is pulled to. The jangle of keys, each window a different key and she must find it on the ring and then turn it in the lock before moving on. The house is a box for warm bodies. The collective heat of us accumulates.

I sit up in bed when our Oma comes in, but Emily does not stir. She is reading, turned onto her side, propped up with two white pillows. I hear the lazy
shick
of her page turning but apart from this she remains very still.

My grandmother is a short nugget of a woman, all wire and muscle. There is no stillness in her. There is a fat metal bar on her key ring. This is a weapon. If she is attacked she will use it, a heavy blow to the head. I believe she could overpower anyone.

She rarely talks about the past but there is this one story. She was sent away for safety, hoisted up onto a train. She was only young, our age or even younger, and she didn't have a proper ticket. When the guard came he tried to make her leave her seat but she hooked her fingers around the arms of her chair and held on. Eventually he shrugged and moved off, hoping to find an easier offender in another carriage. My grandmother has always been fearless. ‘I stay alive,' she says in her thick guttural accent. Her fearlessness has saved her many times, I suspect. I wonder about all the other times, the ones that she has not named. I watch her sinewy arms reaching and pulling and locking and it is impossible not to compare myself to her. I am more like my mother, round and squat and puffy in the cheeks.

She locks the window and turns in the doorway to face us: my bed and my sister's. She is standing on the line that runs the length of the room as if here at the exact place that divides Emily's half from mine she might speak to both of us and prove she is not playing favourites, which is something that she simply refuses to do.

‘Don't stay up ruining your eyes.'

I nod, but Emily says nothing. She flicks a page. Our grandmother pulls the door closed behind her and Emily rolls onto her back and holds the book open over her face. Her shoulders shake slightly. Maybe she is crying or maybe she is laughing. It is impossible to know what Emily is feeling at any moment. One emotion seems to morph so quickly into another. I hear our grandmother moving down the corridor and into our mother's room. Emily said once that she remembered our mother as she was before. She said she looked like a princess, but it seems impossible now.

There are thirteen windows in our house if you include the sliding glass doors. There are two heavy wooden doors. I count them, the soft squeal of my mother's window, the twin snappings of the windows in the studio. Our grandmother locks the windows to protect us, this is what she says. There are people outside, murderers, rapists, bad people who would hurt the children. She has been put in charge of the care of the children. Our mother has faltered in this task and it has fallen to our grandmother. We are her first concern, apparently.

Sometimes, like tonight, I hear her pause in her locking routine. She stands in her studio and I know she is looking at the art. She is the guardian of paintings worth more than all the land in this town. Work by famous artists is placed in her temporary care while she picks at the dirt and sludge of years, stripping everything back to its original glory. Sometimes she lets us come into her studio with our hands behind our backs to look. There will be some new work there, propped up on an easel or flat on the table, and it will be just another painting, some rich lady in pearls, some man at his desk, some landscape with trees, perhaps a lake.

I settle down onto the pillow and look towards my sister's side of the room, the calm side, the neatness butting up against my chaos. My sister is painting another horse. She rarely paints anything else. A huge majestic animal, chest heaving, eye turned to face the world, large and somehow seeming angry and frightened at the same time. It seems incongruous, this wild creature leaping from a canvas in the midst of the order that is my sister's side of the room.

‘Old people die of heatstroke.'

‘What?' I am whispering. Our grandmother is still just across the hallway, distracted by something in her study, picking at spots of glaze with a toothpick or easing dust away with a soft, dry brush.

‘Old people are so afraid they lock all the doors and windows and then they get heatstroke and they die, or else there is some kind of electrical fault but they are deadbolted inside and the fire burns them to death.'

‘Okay,' I say. ‘I didn't know that.'

‘Don't you defend her.'

She is speaking too loudly. I would like to tell Emily that I am not defending her but Oma would hear me say this. I bite on my bottom lip and roll over, away from the clean side of the room, my sister's side. I look towards the stuff I have left in uneasy piles leaning against a wall splattered with blobs of paint and coloured fingerprints.

Our grandmother turns the light out in her studio and continues on her rounds, the windows in the kitchen, the windows in the lounge room, the back door with its bolt and lock. We are safe now, the night will pass without a home invasion. Safe, protected, locked up tight.

Life Drawing

I pause outside the room. I am a little late. There is a rustling inside, wild creatures pacing in their cage. I know how lion tamers must feel, the effort it takes to perform the confidence trick. I set my face to smiling. I have put some effort into my clothing, just formal enough, just a little bit casual and the socks are mismatched, which was not planned but which is good for the look nonetheless. I am self-conscious. I am self-conscious about my own self-consciousness.

As I open the door the rustling abates and they are all there waiting. The girls are too thin and fashionably shy. They wear little cardigans and cute red shoes with buckles. Their hair is braided or cut into a fringe or tugged into pigtails. The boys are elegantly crumpled. They have almost all mastered the art of boredom. They sit on their own, preened and perfect and so uber-cool that even a simple conversation must be a carefully thought out interplay of style and ideas. The room smells of linseed oil and even here it is a scent that transports me back to childhood.

The easels are scattered about the edges of the room. The students hover close to but not directly in front of their sketchpads so as not to seem too keen. The model is young, quite pretty. She is wearing a simple wrap-around dress and under this she will not be wearing underwear. Lately they have all been beautiful. This one has a glow of bright red hair and perfect cheekbones. Her eyes are wide and intelligent.

He is talking with her. He is always talking with someone when I arrive. He is the only person in the room with no self-awareness. This is how he disarms me. His shoes are old and there is tape on one, holding the sole on. His jumper is faded, but not in that funky op-shop old-made-new way. It is just an old jumper with a stain over his heart where a pen has leaked. His hair is a sweaty mess. He is plumper than the other boys and his skin has a sheen to it that makes me think he was out last night, drinking.

The model grins at him, her face lighting up with pleasure. She laughs. He likes to make girls laugh. Sometimes he makes me laugh too.

I ease my satchel down and stand at the front of the room. There is a desk here, and a whiteboard that is never used. I perch on the desk and slowly, one by one, the pretty, bored faces turn in my direction. There is a dull ache in my stomach. It feels like I have been hollowed out, which is fair enough. I suppose I have been.

‘So we meet again.' There are some nods, a few grins. John whispers something to the model and she giggles prettily before standing, tugging her clothes tighter around her as if she is reluctant to shed them at all.

She smiles at me. Very attractive. I may have seen her before. Or not, six hundred models a year and all the drawings the same. The pose with the head bent forward, the one leaning back like a dancer, the lying on the floor as if dead or sleeping. There are only so many poses a body can adopt. She unties her dress and unwraps herself. Some of them like to do this in another room. Either way, they end up naked. The students are used to this now but there is still a certain awkwardness. There is never any interaction between student and model, except John of course. I watch him lowering his easel to chair height, the canvas is unbalanced and he grabs at it noisily. The girl closest to him smiles and they exchange raised eyebrows. John holds his finger to his lips and her smile becomes a wide grin. He is charming in his awkwardness.

‘So,' I tell them. ‘You know the drill, five-second poses, then thirty-second poses, then some longer ones. You okay with that?' This to the model. She has a name. It is on the job sheet that I have buried somewhere in my notes. When I started working here I used to make a point of remembering their names. Now I just stand and take my watch off my wrist and hold it, mostly for show. ‘Start,' I say, and then, ‘Change.