Steeplechase (20 page)

He grins. ‘Of course. I'm not invisible.'

He holds my fingers between both of his hands. He strokes the inside of my palm.

‘I missed you Bec,' he says.

‘But you aren't real.'

‘Aren't I?'

The waitress puts two glasses on the table. I watch as he takes money out of his pocket, places it in her hand. He says something to her and she laughs. I look down to where the glasses are sweating on the table. I can smell gin. My stomach twists against itself. ‘You are an illusion,' I tell him when the waitress is gone. ‘You are imaginary.'

He shrugs.

I put my hands over my eyes and begin to count down from twenty. I know how to do this, but I haven't done it for years.

‘What if I'm not imaginary? Isn't there even some potential for doubt?'

‘Seventeen, sixteen.'

‘What if I followed Emily here to China? Have been following her since that night in the barn?'

‘Eight, seven.'

I keep my eyes closed and my hands over my ears till the sequence of numbers is complete. He is a product of my own doubt. I must be strong in the knowledge that he will have disappeared. I am cured. I know what is real and what is imagined.

He is gone, of course, but his glass is still there on the table. I pick it up and turn it in my hand. A lip print on the glass. I wonder how I managed to magic that up. Did I drink from both glasses? Am I so hell bent on this self-deception?

When the waitress passes I hold my hand up and she pauses, smiles, hurries to my table.

‘Hello, how are you today?' She is sweet and bright and pretty. John would like her, I suspect.

‘Did you see the man who was here?'

She seems concerned. Her brow furrows.

‘You like to order?'

‘No. Did you see a man here with me?'

‘I am sorry.'

I point to the other glass, the lip print, the water sweating down the side and pooling at the base.

‘Man,' I say, miming a beard although Raphael was clean shaven.

‘I am sorry,' she says, and I nod.

‘Drink?' she asks. I shake my head. Two drinks are more than enough for me. I sip at his glass, Raphael's glass, although it isn't his glass at all. I expect the alcohol will make me feel worse, but the gin settles quietly into my body. A slight numbness. A pleasant relief.

My phone buzzes and for a moment I know that it will be Raphael. It is John, of course. I click through to the message.
I just said ‘I love you', in case you missed it. Don't know what I expected to happen. An earthquake? The end of the world? Instead it feels normal. Ordinary. Because it is true I suppose. You don't have to love me back, by the way. Just thought you should know.—PS It took me 8.5 mins to compose this text message—should have taken 30 secs.

Sweet John. I close my fingers over the phone. It feels hot in my hand. I finish the last of Raphael's drink and push the glass away from me. I clutch the phone closer to my chest and the heat of it is comforting as I start to drink the second glass of gin.

Confessions

I crawl into bed and drag the thin sheet up over my head. The heat hasn't let up. I scratch at my ankle. There are red welts there, some fungal infection from the sweat trapped under my sock. I am tired of waiting for my sister to return. Tomorrow I will find my own way to Tiananmen Square, the Summer Palace, the Forbidden City. Even if I am ill I will find my way there slowly. Stopping when I need to. I will take the bicycle. I have three more days in Beijing and then I will have to return home.

I turn over onto my side, shift again, there is no breeze and it's impossible to settle. The sheets are already soaked in sweat. There will be no sleep. I feel the rough carpet under my feet. I open her top drawer. Her clothes are neatly folded, they smell lightly of lavender. I am ambushed by an odd sense of longing and, surprisingly, a sudden urge to paint.

Her studio is the only other room in the house. The smell seeps out above the closed door and when I turn the light on in the hall I can see that there is no wall above it, just a rent in the wall, an odd rough-edged space. It is as if she tore that part of the wall free with a hammer and perhaps she did. The paintings she has made for me seem too large to fit through an ordinary doorway. I can imagine Emily tearing the plasterboard free with her bare hands. Strange to find the door open. Our grandmother used to lock her studio when she left it and somehow I expected Emily would do the same.

Linseed oil, turps, paint. This is where I come from. The smell of the womb. If you cut a vein our blood would spill out alizarin crimson, cobalt blue. The colours of our tiny cloistered world. There are lines on the walls, dry paint where paintings were leaning against them until recently. When she was a child my sister would never spill out over the edges of a work. In this way she has become more like me. I trace a damp umber line, rubbing the pigment between my fingers. My own studio is similarly scarred by lines of errant paint.

There are stretched canvases resting in a bundle. Pristine, primed. I wonder if she still stretches them herself.
Good craft right from the beginning.
I touch the smartly stapled edge of the fabric, the stiff sealed surface. The work of an expert. My sister's work.

The brushes have been carefully cleaned and oiled and wrapped in a slightly damp tea towel. I unwrap them and bring the tips of the bundle to my nose. So beautifully soft. Softer than the brushes I can afford. Only the best. The paints are carefully sealed and ordered in their box, from the deepest colours, black, blues, browns, to the lightest whites.

I uncap a deep rich brown and squeeze a worm of it onto the palette she has left there, resting on the table with the rest of her equipment. I take a canvas and turn it and rest it against the wall. I sit, cross-legged as I used to sit when I was a child. I feel the shift of focus in my eyes, my vision switching from the room to a place somewhere near infinity. I take a deep breath heady with the scent of colour. And I start to paint.

My hands smell of oil. I hold my fingers to my nose and the smell is calming, almost as pleasant as a lullaby. The scent of viridian—a day inching towards evening after rain—cadmium red—the picked clean salt-bone scent of some remnant of sea life. His hair is bleached blonde like a skeleton plucked from the ocean. His eyes are like algae. I let my eyes re-focus on the canvas and there he is, Raphael. The painting is nowhere near complete, but the face is particularly well realised, the eyes. The eyes are exactly right.

‘You haven't captured the line of my jaw.'

He is there behind me. He is a shadow at first, a lean, a sharp jut of shoulder. He steps forward into the light from the lamp and there are the eyes from my painting. I have a creeping feeling that if I turn around now the canvas will be blank, just a smudge of background colour and a white space in the shape of a person. He is here in person. I am struck again by how physical he is. The air moves when he does, there is a stirring when he raises his arm and points. I remember how his lips felt against mine. The physical representation of a shared madness, a folie à deux.

‘You are not real.' This is the mantra. I have learned it by heart. I now know what I must say,
If he ever comes back, close your eyes and tell him he is not real. He is your sister's imaginary friend. Count back from twenty. He will disappear.

‘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.