Steeplechase (13 page)

‘Where are you taking me?'

‘Don't you want to see where Emily goes?'

‘I suppose.'

And I follow. It is a simple enough thing. My hand in his hand. Our fingers interlaced. The sound of his shoes and mine at a canter. The hoof-thud against dry ground. When we come to the fence between our place and the neighbour Raphael lifts his foot onto the barbed wire to clamber through. I notice that he is wearing sandshoes, thin, a little worn where the cloth meets the white rubber toe. Emily has similar shoes, and somehow this normalises him a little. He pushes down with his foot and pulls at the top rail with his fist.

‘Watch the barbs.' I step gingerly through. My shirt catches and he shushes me, tells me to stop, plucks my T-shirt away from the wire.

‘You're not so used to climbing through barbed-wire fences.'

‘No,' I say. ‘I am not used to climbing through fences at all.'

Outside there are acres and acres of other people's land. This is what I notice first, how big it all is. This is the paddock where Flame gallops and it is only now that I realise why he feels the need to throw his head back, to lift his powerful legs with such abandon. There is space here to run. Our own garden is tiny in comparison. This giant expanse of grass, with hills and a little creek and a copse of trees, is all the world. The countryside feels smaller when seen from the back seat of a moving van with your grandmother and mother in the front. Now the sky stretches from one horizon to the next and the railway track underlines the distances that must be travelled to get from one place to the next. There is a moon, full and almost orange. I notice the way things are outlined, tree branches holding light in the cups of their leaves, leaving a deep black underline below a shimmer. Of course I will wake and realise that I have been dreaming. I stoop and touch the grass. The slasher went over it only weeks ago but it is thick and ankle deep now. The grass drips moon and is wet to touch, but it has not been raining.

‘What time is it now?'

He laughs. His face is creased with laughter, crumpled and folded in on itself. I don't think it was that funny just to ask the time, but I grin because watching him laugh is quite lovely.

He turns and whistles twice. The sound is piercing. Twice more, the shrill clear note and then I hear it and I know. Flame always answers to a whistle. I know this because we often call him over when we go to visit at some unexpected time. Emily can whistle more clearly than I can and she calls just as he is calling now, and Flame answers, just as he is answering now, with a staccato clapping of his feet against the ground. In the darkness the sound of his gallop is too loud. I turn back towards our side of the fence half expecting a light to flick on, my grandmother waking; or would it be worse to face Emily who might never speak to me again if she found me here?

Flame stands and stamps and nods his head. He knows me. He snuffles at the pockets of my jeans, hoping to find treats. He seems to know Raphael too and nuzzles his hand, sniffing at his pockets until Raphael reaches in and brings out the stub end of a carrot.

‘Bec.'

It is odd to hear my name spoken by this boy.

‘I want you to trust me, okay?'

I nod although I don't really trust anything at all, but before I can think about it he has knotted his hand in Flame's mane and thrown his arm over the tall shoulder of the horse and hoisted himself up until he is lying flat across the horse's back. It is a simple thing for him to change his slight weight and push himself into a sitting position, bareback on the horse. He is panting and grinning and he leans towards me and stretches out his hand. I remember the neighbour's kid we met all those years ago. We have never seen him since, but sometimes Flame does not answer the call and then I know the boy is home from school, out for a ride somewhere.

I shake my head. I feel myself running into a barrier that I will not be able to cross.

‘I don't know how to ride a horse,' I tell him and it sounds like a thin excuse.

‘You won't be riding will you? You will be sitting up behind me like a princess.'

Sometimes when Emily wants to be mean to me she calls me Princess, but there is no malice here. Raphael stretches his hand back to take in the rump of the horse as if it were a throne and I am stepping towards it before I have time to change my mind. I am taking his hand and he is pulling me. It seems a long way up even though I suspect Flame is quite short as horses go. Raphael lifts me and I reach over Flame's back but I am slipping and I land back on my feet, off-balance, stumbling backwards, almost falling but righting myself at the last moment. Flame takes a few skittish steps and Raphael pats his neck and whispers into his mane until he settles. The boy looks so confident up there and I am suddenly certain I can make it.

‘Count to three,' I say. He clasps my arm high up near the elbow and I clasp hold of his. He counts, and I leap on cue, reaching around the back of the gelding and transferring my weight until I am lying across his back. It is awkward to move from here to sitting and I have to clutch at Raphael to drag myself into the right position.

When I am finally sitting behind him, Flame takes a step back and I wobble a little as I settle. I clutch Raphael around the waist tightly; his skin is warm through the cotton. When he leans forward, nudging the horse gently with his heels to set him to a canter, I relax a little but I will not let go of his waist. He has a slim waist, like a girl's. Emily must have travelled on Flame's back. Emily must have felt the warm fur and the sharp backbone beneath, rudely separating her own legs, the slow rhythm of the boy's hips rising and falling under her fingers, the jolt of hooves thundering over uneven ground.

We ride till we come to an access road, neatly graded unlike our own. An open gate. We slow to a walk. It seems Raphael has planned this ride, opened the gate ahead of time, or else the neighbour leaves his paddock unsecured, which seems unlikely. There is a house, set back from the street but still visible. This is our closest neighbour. We pass this house in the car sometimes on the way to the post office. There are dogs here, little snarly cattle dogs that race to the fence and bark at us when we pass; it is odd to see the yard empty. The dogs are sleeping it seems, less disturbed by a walking horse than a crawling van, or else we are ghosts and their sharp noses and finely tuned ears can't detect us.

We reach the highway and the bitumen sucks up the moonlight. Raphael pulls at the horse's mane, stopping for the sleepless traffic and there is a moment when I feel unbalanced. I cling to him more tightly. Cars hush past. We wait as a road train claims all the space the highway has, one truck followed by another truck, and the lights are so loud that I duck my head down behind the safe barrier of his body. I feel the rush of air, buffeting me. Flame shifts his weight. The trucks rattle away in a fumy shout of wind and the following station wagon seems like no threat at all.

There are no lights on a horse, a problem that Raphael doesn't seem to worry about. He waits for the station wagon to pass then taps the horse into a canter. Perhaps he knows I am terrified. He holds Flame short of a gallop, which might make me vomit with fear. We keep to the side of the highway, on the gravel shoulder, but the cars still pass too close and my arms ache from keeping them so tense for so long.

On horseback it seems a long way to town. Eventually I see the light from the motel sign flashing, one bulb at a time flicking on, then three long dashes of light like neon Morse code before the whole pattern starts all over again. Raphael turns the horse's head up the hill by the shut-up shop. This is a part of the town I have never seen before. The low wooden houses, the picket fences, the feed sheds and stringy rose bushes struggling against the climate.

‘Where are we going?' I find that I am shouting unnecessarily. We clop up the side street in a lull in the traffic and the world has returned to its midnight silence.

‘A surprise.'

Raphael kicks Flame gently in the ribs and we are galloping for the first time and Raphael is tipping his head back and aiming a joyful shout at the sky above.

‘Come on,' he yells back at me, ‘do this!'

And the sound that comes out of his throat is a dingo's howl, deep and canine and aimed at the blowsy moon.

I hold my head up and feel the rush of warm air through my hair and the steady thump, thump, thump of my bottom bouncing up and down against the bare back of the horse and I open my mouth, intending to howl with him, but this is not a dream. This is real. Raphael is not a figment of whatever madness is troubling my sister. And I close my lips and duck down behind his shoulders again without making a sound.

I wonder if it is illegal to ride a horse on the road after dark. I wonder if, like with a bicycle, you are supposed to wear some kind of a helmet. I listen for approaching sirens. I am not the rule breaker in our family. If it weren't that my sister had been here before me I wouldn't be doing this at all.

He pulls off the highway suddenly. I wonder if you are supposed to indicate when you are riding a horse. It is possible that we are breaking multiple traffic laws, a domino effect, a tumbling of wrongdoings, starting with his appearance in our bedroom and ending here, in the crazy race down a grassed hill. And now I do scream as he wanted me to scream, my mouth as full as the moon and all the bright glare of my terror shining out in a howl, more cat than canine. So I yowl and cling to his waist and he runs the horse in a sharp little circle to a sudden halt almost, but not quite, unbalancing us next to a wall with a mural painted on it.

‘Hup,' he says, meaning down
.
I freeze. ‘Hold on to me tightly and swing your left leg over. I won't fall off.' But he very nearly does, taking the whole weight of me and crouching down over the neck of the animal for balance. He slips gracefully down after me and my thighs are numb from the pounding. I rub at them, trying to get some feeling back.

Raphael stretches his hands out to take in the wall, the grass, the buildings beyond. The school. There is a playground in one corner, sprint lanes etched out in white paint on the grass. There are banks of stairs covered by a corrugated roof where children must sit when there is a sports day or maybe an outdoor performance. Behind these the buildings are low and uniform and linked by paths each covered by the same corrugated metal.

‘Is this your school?' I ask, although I am sure the school only goes to grade ten, and I am certain now that he is the same age as my sister, maybe reaching the end of grade twelve.

Raphael shrugs. ‘Tonight,' he tells me, ‘this is our school.'

When he takes my hand his touch is an electric shock. We run together across the grassed area and climb the stairs and when we are perched on top my heart is racing. I am unused to so much space, so much running. No one can see me except my sister's secret friend.

When I have caught my breath he is leaning back, his arms stretched out, clutching the still-warm concrete.

‘Is this where you bring my sister?'

He nods.

‘And what? Do you break in to the classrooms? Write your names on the walls? Steal money from the teacher's desk?'

‘No,' he says, and when I ask him what they do here, my sister and the boy that I thought might be her imaginary friend, he leans close and puts a hand on the back of my head and kisses me. It goes on until my mouth is his mouth, my tongue is his tongue, our breaths intertwined as our hands are knotted together.

When there is no breath left in us, all air spent, he pulls away and smiles and pushes a lock of my hair away from my face. I think for a moment he might say something. I cannot; the kiss has taken all the breath out of me. But he doesn't speak at all. Instead he leans forward and his mouth is against mine, gently this time, nipping at the edges of my lips, and I learn the truth of it. That he is definitely not imaginary at all.

Make Believe Kisses

We paint John from memory. I have no photographs of him, which serves to underline the illicit nature of the affair. I can barely believe we ever made love. When we paint his left hand I remember the fingers slipping inside me, the frantic rhythm as he pushed them in and out. Fingering. A childish word, a thing that teenagers do in the school yard, the thing that Raphael did to me beside the deserted assembly hall. The smell of horse on his skin, the glow of a full moon helping to show us what was happening.

We paint John's hand so that two of his fingers, the middle two, the fingering ones, are pushed together. He whispered to me, never breaking his rhythm. He told me I was really wet and his words summoned another spill of juices from inside me. I closed my eyes but opened them almost immediately as I felt his tongue reach out to taste.

This moment is here in our painting, the press of his painted fingers, my imminent orgasm captured in his smug smile.
I know I can bring a girl to orgasm,
he said, and I remember this as we swap to the finest brush and touch the canvas lightly to underline the creasing of skin beside his smiling eyes. We paint his right hand only it is not a hand. I thought I would paint him as a bear but I suppose she sees him differently. The hoof is as we remember it, dark with a series of cracks near the base of it. The hair is neat and brown and peeks out from under his sleeve. We remember lying near a horse's hooves and watching the little cracks in them. We remember flinching as a horse stomped at the bare ground. We remember Raphael fingering me and how I flinched then, too, because it hurt. The harder he pushed, the faster the rhythm, the more I flinched and the startled wonder on his face as he held his hand up to the moonlight looking at the colour there. We paint the blood on his fingers, then. The same colour as the tips of the flames eating at the hem of his jeans and at his hooves.

When we are finished she signs the painting with her name, Emily Reich. A perfect match to the signature she makes without me. I step back and look at the painting from a little distance. If only I could paint this way, the skill in the detail, the quality of light. There is a reason my sister has become an icon of modern Australian art. I look at my fingers, flecked with blue and smelling of turpentine. This canvas will be dry before I leave and I will put it in the alcove with the other Emily Reichs. I will hide the alcove behind a stack of my own, inferior works, a treasure trove of paintings that no one will ever see but me: the Emily Reichs I have painted over the years, the Emily Reichs that my psychiatrist warned me not to paint.