Steeplechase (7 page)

‘You may laugh, but sometimes you just don't know what you're playing with when you call up the demons or what have you.'

There is some laughter but they are shushed by the pixie girl.

‘I agree,' says Pixie, ‘although we should totally do this now and everything, but if you get an evil spirit it might be impossible to put him back in his bottle.'

‘That's a genie, douchebag.'

‘
Paranormal Activity
,' says someone else and a few people make an appreciative sound.

‘That was so awesome. The first one.'

‘Hideous.'

‘Awesome.'

‘
The Exorcist
is pretty frightening still.'

I shouldn't have spoken. Three people splutter with laughter and another one shouts ‘Fuck me Jesus!' and lets his eyes turn upward, revealing a big globe of milky white in each socket.

‘No it's not,' John assures me and I know my cheeks are going red. ‘Well, not anymore. It's interesting, but there are too many references in
The Simpsons
for us to be scared by it. I think it's a generational thing.'

My cheeks are blazing and I put my head down and try to creep my fingers out of John's hand. He holds them tighter and presses his knee against mine.

‘I didn't mean anything by that,' he whispers and I shake my head hoping that he will take the hint and stop talking at all.

‘If you are there. Let us know,' says Charles. He touches the stone lightly with his finger. Andy has another corner and the third is held by a short boy with a Scottish accent who I haven't been introduced to.

‘Did you feel anything?' the Scotsman asks.

‘On the ouija board?' asks Andy, leering suggestively.

‘Of course.'

‘Ah, well no then, I didn't feel anything,' and there is a little laughter, more nervous this time.

‘If you are with us. Give us a sign.'

Silence now, I feel a tightness in my chest. Something is wrong. I am sick. It is a cramp perhaps, or maybe my heart. What if I were to have a heart attack in front of all of John's friends? Old lady passes out at dinner table. I try to swallow but my throat is dry.

‘Are you there? Is anyone there?'

I lean towards John. ‘I have to leave.'

Just a whisper, and he turns his head towards my ear and says, ‘Not just yet.'

They are waiting. Everyone is waiting. There is the kind of silence that you get when the room is full of people, little scraping sounds, the creak of a chair, the sound of a shoe squeaking against the polished boards.

‘We know you are there.'

And in the silence I know it is true. I know he is here. I can hear him. I can hear him breathing, and the moment I hear it I cannot unhear it. There is the regular breath in, breath out, breath in, breath out. I hold my own breath to be sure but his breathing does not falter.

The stone shifts slowly towards the corner of the board. Yes.

‘Yes,' Charles interprets for the rest of us. ‘Yes you are here with us now.'

‘He is here,' I say. But it wasn't him that moved the stone. That was Charles's finger or Andy's or the Scottish boy's. A simple parlour game, but he is here with us anyway, just like he was there with me when I was a child, on every occasion that I picked up the phone. The sound of his breathing in counterpoint to the flat beeping of the telephone. A disengaged signal but the boy was there anyway, and he is here now.

‘Stop it.' I shout so suddenly that even I am startled by it. He is here. I can hear him. I can almost see him. I trip back over the chair, fall, a plate clatters to the floor, the skittering of its many pieces on the floor. I can almost see him. I hold my hands over my eyes as if this will stop him from appearing.

‘This is bullshit,' the pixie girl shrieks. I have startled her with my sudden outburst. I stand and wrestle my fingers away from John. Everyone is staring at me. Someone laughs then stops and the room returns to silence. I can hear my heart thudding in a chest so tight that my own body might suffocate me.

‘I'm sorry John,' breathless. ‘I'm so sorry. I have to go.'

‘Hey, hey…' John stands.

‘Stay here,' I tell him. ‘I'll get a cab.'

But he follows me out. I am certain he has signalled to his friends, his palms raised perhaps, his finger circling his ear, whatever it is, it takes only a minute because he is trotting beside me by the time I reach the car.

‘Oh darl,' he says and touches my face and it is only then that I realise there are tears on it.

‘God. I'm sorry.'

‘It's okay,' he tries to comfort me.

‘That was a disaster.'

‘It's okay. Really it's okay. It was just a silly joke game.'

‘And I'm the joke.'

‘No.'

I nod and he gathers me up into his hug where I feel warmer and safer but not completely safe.

‘What happened back there?' he asks when I have settled enough to start the car.

‘I freaked out.'

‘Sure. But what happened?'

‘Old stuff. Dumb stuff. I'm sorry I embarrassed you.'

‘Honestly it's okay. They were all drunk. You probably made their night. Demonic possession, they'll call it. Charles will want you at all their dinners from now on.'

‘I can't go back.'

‘Sure you can. They'll all be rotten drunk. Half of them won't remember anything about tonight. The other half will be embarrassed about vomiting in Charles's pebble garden. Someone always vomits in Charles's pebble garden.'

‘Yeah?'

‘Sure they do. It's like a running gag at that place.'

He puts his hand on my knee.

There was no one there, of course. He is right. It was just a bunch of kids playing a silly, harmless game.

‘I was a million years older than everyone anyway.'

‘Yeah,' he shrugs, ‘there's that. You can beat yourself up about that if you like.'

He really does know how to make me smile. When I have put the car in gear I rest my hand briefly on his knee and he squeezes mine.

‘Come on,' he says, ‘let's blow this crazy popsicle stand.' And so we do.

Madness

‘Stop!'

I am facing the wall, the invisible line that must not be crossed. I do not look at her naked and she does not look at me. The masking tape on the ground dividing her side of the room from mine is a solid wall.

‘Stop! Now!'

When she shouts at me it is like an earthquake, fault lines in the invisible wall spreading out, the sound of her voice a wrecking ball. The wall crumbles. I have already put my jeans on, which is lucky because I am only half naked, the T-shirt clutched to that horrible embarrassment of my chest. I have breasts. There is no use denying this. What might once have been a mistake, a trick of the light, a glance at the wrong angle, is now an undeniable fact. My breasts are large enough to have a small overhang. You are saggy if you can hold a pencil up under them, my sister told me. Emily has not been blighted with breasts. My sister has a simple elegant swelling that just helps to accentuate her slender waist. My sister has no overhang. Our grandmother has kept my sister's training bra for me to wear and I am wearing it, but my swellings are too big already and the hideous rolls of flesh spill out the side.
Fat girls get titties
, her awful word so terribly appropriate. My fat-girl titties are hidden only by my T-shirt, which I bunch up over them as the invisible wall between her side of the room and mine tumbles down.

‘Don't put that shirt on.'

‘Why? Why not?'

I turn. The wall is down and I must face her. She is staring straight at me but her head is cocked to one side as if she is listening to someone, an invisible person in the doorway to our room.

‘You have to put your shirt on inside out and back to front.'

‘Why? No.' I turn away and struggle with the armholes, holding the cotton close and attempting to put my arms in at the same time.

‘No!'

She crosses the line. She is on my side of the room, kicking through the detritus on the floor, wading out into the unknown. She launches herself at me as if there were a bomb and I were about to stumble over it. Our lives apparently depend on this business with the T-shirt. She grabs it, and we struggle briefly before she rips it out of my hands and I am left with only my arms to press against the embarrassment of my flesh.

She takes the shirt and turns it, inside out, back to front. She grabs me by one arm and I struggle, but she is stronger. I feel the prick of tears, hot in the corners of my eyes. I am worried that she will look at my breasts but she ignores them. She forces my hand into the shirt and drags it over my head with such force that my ear bends back, caught up in the folds of the fabric. I shriek but she ignores me. Her nails dig into my wrist, the other wrist and it is done. My shirt is on, inside out and back to front. She loses interest instantly. She turns and picks her way over the debris on the floor on my side of the room.

‘You should clean your room,' she tells me.

I swipe at my damp eyes with my forearm.

‘I am going to turn it round the right way.' I hold the edges of the T-shirt gingerly, lift it slightly and she shrugs. ‘I will. I'll do it.'

‘Fine.'

‘So why did you want me to put it on like this?'

‘To save you.' She picks up a jar of blue water, a paintbrush sticking out of it. The only sign that she has been working. Her side of the room is, of course, immaculate.

‘What do you mean?'

‘It's okay now,' she says, ‘do what you like. The danger's gone.'

She lets the door slam closed behind her. I am alone. My eyes still sting. My hair is a tangled mess where she caught it in the neck of my shirt. I struggle to turn the T-shirt and I reach for a cardigan to hide behind.

And then there is this.

Emily stands suddenly and jogs on the spot. She opens the door and runs down the stairs and off towards the fence. It seems she might be about to leave the property. She will be punished for this. We will both be punished. I hurry out to the veranda. She tags the fence as if this were a game. She runs back towards me and I cower to one side, her hand stretched out to hit me, not to hit me, to tap the front door and then she turns again and runs, faster now, panting, sweating, running as if she is being chased. Fence, tap, door, tap, fence, tap, door, tap and I count a dozen repetitions before she stops suddenly and bends over, clutching her knees, catching her breath.

It is a long time before she straightens and even then she grasps at her side and bends a little to ease the pain of a stitch. She slinks past me without even glancing in my direction, but when she opens the door she hisses, ‘Don't bother thanking me,' and slams the screen door shut behind her.

And.

She touches a vase sixteen times. Suddenly. Without explanation. Counting.

And.

She turns on her bed and sleeps with her feet touching the headboard.

And.

She crouches in the prickly grass and whispers something to no one and then kills a meat ant with her thumb. I watch her lick it off her finger and swallow it, eyes squeezed tight shut, a grim frown tugging her lips down. She speaks to herself but when I approach she stops and pretends she was not speaking at all.

And one time she pinches me. I am doing nothing. I am sitting in the grass following an ant as it braves a miniature world of struggle and danger, dragging a twig, of all things. It walks backwards, hauling the thing clutched between two strong mandibles. I hold my breath as it reaches a rock and feels for a foothold with one of its back legs. Precarious, life and death, one false move and it will tumble. The stick will crash onto it, the ant will be crushed. Her fingers pinch my arm so hard that my eyes water. Palomino, who is sleeping calmly behind me, his warm dog-scented flank pressed against my back, startles at the sudden movement and scrambles to his feet.

‘What?'

But she has turned and is running as if she is frightened that I might chase after her. I rub my arm, which is already starting to bruise. Palomino trails behind me as I walk back to the house. Our mother is standing by the window as if she was watching this exchange. Before our mother snapped she was tightly wound: a leprechaun, our grandmother called her, an imp, a spriggan. A troublemaker, but she says this in a way that makes the word into a compliment. You are just like your mother, she says to Emily sometimes but this is not a compliment.

I let the door swing shut behind me and stand at the window beside my mother and slip my fingers into her hand. Maybe she can feel me. She rarely flinches when I touch her. My voice can't disturb her waking sleep. Only our grandmother can make her sit or stand or eat.

There is still an hour of free play left. Outside my sister stands at the fence line, leaning forward, making the taut wire stretch. I wonder what it looks like to be wound so tight that you might snap. I wonder if our mother used to pinch people all of a sudden or run laps of the garden as if her life depended on it, speak to herself quietly when no one else was there to hear. I imagine Emily after she has snapped: standing at the fence. She wouldn't look any different. She is swinging back and forth and sometimes our mother rocks in her chair. Maybe Emily has snapped already. I watch her until my legs ache from standing too long in the same position. She has grown taller. She looks more like a woman than a child. She is beautiful and slender and yet her waist nips in, giving her an hourglass silhouette.

There is a dark bruise on my upper arm. I wriggle my fingers out of my mother's hand and rub at it. Mother keeps her hand curled over as if my fingers were still in her grasp. I watch as my sister picks one foot up, delicately as a foal, and stretches it through the fencing wire. She points her toe and touches the ground outside our property, turns to look back at the house. She isn't to know that our grandmother is not watching, that the only ones watching are me and our mother, and our mother doesn't notice her at all.