Steeplechase (12 page)

I open the fridge and stare into it as if the various mouldy stubs of carrots and zucchini might hold the answer to my problems.

I shut the fridge and rifle through my backpack. It is impossible to find anything in here. Purse, three books, two sketchpads, pencils, a box of oil pastels, some of them spilt and turning everything else in there to a blue smudge. I take them all out one at a time and pile them on the kitchen bench with the rest of the debris. There at the bottom of it all, among the shattered fragments of a stick of charcoal, is my phone. I shake it and the coarse black powder scatters onto the kitchen bench like dandruff.

It hurts my eyes to focus on the screen. My head is pounding and I am overcome by a wave of nausea as I type.
I think I went back to work too soon.
My fingers become black from the charcoal dust.
I think I need to take some time out. Is there anyone who can do my marking for me?

I sit with the message reading it over several times before pressing send. It is as if the send button is a detonator. Something explodes in my head and my eyes water with the pain. I feel my way down the corridor and lower myself cautiously onto my unmade bed. Even the cotton pillowcase feels too harsh against my cheek.

I have slept with my student, not just once, not just an awkward mistake, but several times, almost enough to call it a relationship. The sound of the rain smells like rotting flesh. I feel nauseous. Something buzzes like an electric shock in my fist. I wonder if I am still in hospital, if I have been given some kind of shock therapy for my sins, but there in my hand is my phone and the blinding flare of a message on the screen. I peer at it through almost closed lids.

Of course. I'll pick up your assignments tomorrow after work. Take a few weeks off. That is an order. Ed.

I feel like I have lost a battle I didn't realise I was fighting.

There is only one painting in this room, something I did in art school, a young girl caught in the act of turning away from the viewer. It looks like it is painted from a photograph but I did it from reflections in the mirror. One eye visible, partially obscured by hair.

I did have sex with him in this bed but mostly we did it in the lounge room where the traces of my sister are ever-present. I made love to him as he stared up and around with those huge awe-struck eyes, startled to be there in that room surrounded by paintings he recognised from books and magazines. A brush with fame. Having sex with Emily Reich's sister. Excited by the very idea of it.

I close my eyes and drag a pillow up over my head and eventually the nausea passes. Just a migraine. It has been a difficult week. I place my hands on my belly where the five scars are still red and raised, but healing. Something has been taken out of me. Something is missing. He is walking home through the rain or sitting on a bus and I am here holding my tender swollen stomach as if I had just lost a foetus I was carrying.

Meeting Raphael

Emily wakes me. It must be Emily, but I can tell in the darkness that it is not. It is not the way Emily would stand. He stands at a lean. I suppose you would call it a slouch. When he rocks forward a little the light from the window falls on his cheek and I notice the set of his jaw. Not Emily at all.

Raphael is just as I imagined he would be. I look behind him to where my sister's bed is pressed against the wall, the dark bundle of her sleeping body. Maybe I am sleeping too. Maybe this is part of some complicated dream and in a moment the boy standing in front of me will melt away into the darkness like every other shadow.

He is thin. His hair is a sandy thatch, the front of it sticks up and out like the brim of a cap, shading a high forehead and prematurely receding hairline. I remember lying in the grass beside Emily. Talking about boys. He is the kind of boy Emily described. Sandy hair, bleached from the ocean. His eyes are deep set and dark and his eyebrows are a little too thick for someone so young, giving him a wise but concerned expression. He might be my own age or older like my sister, but he might be older still, almost an adult. He has one of those faces where it is impossible to tell. He stands with his arms out and his fingers splayed as if to assure me that he has no weapon.

‘Raphael.'

Raphael raises a finger and places it against his lips. The house is silent. I can hear a scrambling through tall grass outside which might be a possum or a wallaby, a thump as a cane toad flings itself against the glass of the sliding door. All the sounds safely locked out in the tepid night air.

He nods towards the corridor, a sweet little gesture, a playful bob. He disappears out of the room and I am alone again. I wonder if I am frightened. I certainly notice the racing of my heart. I slide my legs over the side of the bed and onto the debris on the floor, picking my way across the room. There is a dreamlike quality to it all. The quiet shuffle of my steps, the silence of the room.

He is standing in the lounge. The windows are all locked. The doors are all locked. There is no way he could have slipped inside without a key, or without breaking something. He can't be real. He is a figment of my sister's imagination and he has somehow slipped out and into my dreams. I am asleep. I am certain this is true and yet I know also that I am wide awake. Raphael steps closer and I recoil as if from a phantom. His fingers brush my hand, curl around to clasp me; he feels real enough. He leads me towards my own front door and I can tell he has been here many times before.

The door is locked. He turns the metal handle and slides the bolt across. I am still slow and fuddled and for a moment I am back in home-school classes. The concept of parasites, invisible things living inside their host undetected. Maybe Raphael lives in the house, somewhere in the walls. If this were an old and crumbling mansion then it might be true, but this is a new building, thin walls, built to a plan. Raphael is here inside a locked house and the only explanation seems to be that I am still sleeping.

He stands in the doorway and tips his head back a little, pointing at me with his chin. It is a small gesture. A normalising little tilt of the head. This is a real live boy, not a dream or a demon or one of my sister's fantasies. Here is a person, standing in my doorway and silently suggesting we step outside.

A wallaby hops away, startled. I step down onto the dry crackle of grass. There is a slight breeze and the shrubs make the best use of it, shivering despite the heat on the wind. It is 2am and the world is still sweating from yesterday.

There is nothing unearthly about him, he is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His eyes are quite large and very dark but his face is a normal boy-shaped face, a little on the underfed side. He is at that stage where he has grown upward without growing outward.

‘Raphael. It is Raphael, isn't it?'

He shrugs. ‘I've seen you around,' he says, casually. ‘But you are prettier close up. You have a lovely face.'

I feel the heat of blood rushing into my cheeks. I glance up at the sky and there are all the stars, so many of them, an unbroken carpet of stars.

‘I thought Emily had invented you.'

He laughs. It is a lovely rolling sound that seems like it will never end, half giggle, half song.

‘Seriously. I thought she was making you up. Teasing me. She makes stuff up sometimes. Why haven't I seen you before?'

‘And yet I've seen you. And I've heard a lot about you already.'

‘We should wake Emily up.'

‘Should we?'

I glance back at our window, the dark glass there, the silence behind it. He is real or I am asleep. I have an overpowering urge to touch him. To feel that his skin is warm and alive. If I were to climb back into bed now I would not believe this in the morning.

There is a moon, but it is only a muted glow through a high, fine layering of cloud that now drifts, dreamlike, across the starscape. Sometimes I wake in the night and my sister's bed is empty. Sometimes she is up and pacing in the lounge room. Sometimes she is out in the yard. I have caught glimpses of her behind the curtain, calmer when she is confronted by the open space, acres of ground used for nothing but running cattle. Scrub and high dead grass and anthills the size of bicycles.

One particular night I looked out to see her crouching by the fence with her hands stretched through it, her fingers curling around the sense of freedom that lies outside. The bedroom window was ajar, the cold wind creeping through the chink in the armour of our house. When I pressed my face against the glass and made a shade of my hands I could see that she was speaking, to herself or to someone else. To Raphael, perhaps. Yes; in hindsight it might have been Raphael. There might have been someone standing hidden behind the tree line.

Raphael raises his hand. It would be an easy thing to take it, to feel his fingers in mine, to know he is real with flesh and blood and heat. It would be easy enough. I cross my arms over my chest. I am wearing a summer nightdress and I am suddenly aware of my chest, the puffiness under the thin cotton. I hunch my shoulders, clutching my ribcage.

‘I'm not dressed. I shouldn't be outside.'

‘That,' says Raphael, ‘is the adventure. Snakes in the grass, dingos hunting, cane toads underfoot. Alive, right?'

‘Did Emily give you a key?'

‘Emily,' he says then, looking over my shoulder to the window, Emily asleep behind it. ‘Do we wake Emily?'

I am outside at night in my nightdress and if my grandmother found me here I cannot bear the thought of what would happen. And what if Emily wakes and finds me outside with her friend? Her Raphael?

‘I've got to go back,' I say.

‘No.'

‘I'll get in trouble. This is awful.'

Talking to a strange boy in the dark, in my nightdress. I take a step back towards the house.

‘If you stay with me nothing bad will happen. I promise you.'

Emily's Raphael. Raphael belonging to Emily. My heart is racing now. I inch backwards, keeping an eye on him. If I turn my back on him what might happen?

I turn and run the last few steps up to the veranda, taking several of the concrete stairs at a time and closing the door behind me. I lean on it and slide the bolt across. He was inside. I woke and he was there. Simple as that. My face feels too hot. I put my hand onto my forehead. Maybe I have a fever and Raphael is just an invention of my struggling brain.

I peer through the glass. It is dark outside but I can see him. Pale, his hair like something shattered and swept into a pile. I watch as he reaches into his jeans pocket and takes something out, a pouch of tobacco. It must be difficult to reach into it and balance the pack, take a paper out and roll, but he does it so smoothly it is like a ballet of his fingers. He puts the pouch away and lights the end of his cigarette, the thing glows then dies then glows again as he sucks on it. He is staring directly at the house, a solid thing, not a figment of some illness.

He points at me. It is dark in the house and I am not sure he can see me standing here, peering through the space where the curtain does not quite meet the wall, but he points in exactly my direction. His lips stretch wide as he mouths,
Come outside
. He can't see me, it is not possible, but I shake my head anyway.

I watch him. He watches me. There is enough light and he is pale. For some reason, when Emily first spoke of him I imagined him dark. Dark haired, olive skinned, a true creature of the night. This boy is so pale I suppose, like Emily, he turns lobster red if he goes out in daylight without sunscreen. I imagine his skin becomes freckled. His hair has that bleached look of someone who spends too much time at the beach.

He finishes his cigarette and reaches into his pocket for the pouch again. It seems that he intends to wait me out. I watch the glow of his cigarette, a metaphor for his breath.

He is breathing and therefore he is real.

I creep back down the corridor and there is my sister sleeping. The dark lump in the bed where she has pulled the covers up over her head. Nothing of her to be seen outside the blankets and yet her presence permeates the room even in her sleep. I pick silently through the clothing on the floor on my side of the room. Jeans. A T-shirt. It is harder to find my bra and a pair of knickers but eventually I have it all tucked under my arm. I pull the door closed behind me, holding the handle and slowly letting it go so that there is not even a click of it closing.

I dress quickly, roll the light nightdress into a ball and hide it under the lounge. He is still here, in the soft moonlight. There is still a hot glow pointing to his mouth. I pause at the door, slide the bolt open. Closed, open. Even if he has a key he would only be able to enter the house if our grandmother forgot to slip the bolt closed, and that is impossible. The back door with its chain, the front door and its bolt. The sliding glass doors that must be locked or unlocked and then another little chain slipped across for extra protection. The house is a fortress. When I am outside the bolt will be left open. Our grandmother will know that I have gone. There is no way to cover my tracks. My heart sets up its deafening hammer-thump in my chest. My fingers shake a little as I lock the door from the outside. Locked but not bolted.

Raphael bends and rubs the glowing end of his cigarette in the dirt. He holds his hand out to show me three cigarette stubs.

‘Lesson number one,' he says with a disarming wink, ‘leave no trace.'

He reaches into his back pocket and when he removes his hand there is nothing but a few stray flakes of tobacco.

‘The door,' I tell him. ‘You can't bolt it from the outside.'

‘We will be back before anyone notices.'

Raphael wipes his palm on his thigh and holds his hand out to me a second time. I put my fingers against him and like this, suddenly, he slips his fingers between mine, a thatch of skin, and we are holding hands. This is the first time I have held hands with a boy. With anyone except my sister, our mother, or Oma. His fingers between mine, a delicate lacing, a gesture so intimate that I know I must be blushing, a red beacon flaring up in the dark. If he notices he doesn't mention it. He turns and drags me behind him like a boat. The air is a warm bath. Child's play, no harm. My boots snag on a clump of grass and I find I am giggling. He turns and grins and it is okay.