Steeplechase Read online

  PRAISE FOR KRISSY KNEEN

  Praise for Affection: an intimate memoir

  Shortlisted, Queensland Premier’s Award for non-fiction 2010

  Shortlisted, Biography of the Year, Australian Book Industry Awards 2010

  ‘Sexy and beautifully written. Affection is a moving portrait and an absorbing read…An unforgettable book.’ James Frey

  ‘To focus on the prurient aspects of this memoir…is to miss its gorgeous heart…Affection is lushly written, a vivid and unabashed account of a woman coming to terms with her body.’ Courier-Mail

  ‘A rare feat…Beneath the surface sexuality, Affection’s triumph is that of an assured novelist of any genre. She sets a scene in curt but vivid detail and injects emotional vibrancy into even cursory encounters.’ Sunday Age

  ‘A lyrical gem. Kneen has a rare gift for constructing the most exquisite architectures of narrative and meaning from simple and elegant prose. Sometimes confronting, sometimes hilarious, and always amazingly honest.’ John Birmingham

  ‘Astonishing…Powerfully and voyeuristically erotic, a relentless yet tender examination of the body’s relationship to self-worth…An extraordinary debut.’ Matthew Condon

  ‘Beautifully written, painfully honest…Kneen’s stark, sensuous writing style and clear-eyed honesty are immensely appealing.’ Big Issue

  ‘Sex in Affection is well written, but it’s the contemplation in between that really shines. Insightful, evocative and bluntly, but never gratuitously, honest…Sexy, sad and deeply satisfying.’ Emily Maguire, Age

  ‘Affection is that rare beast; a sexual memoir that is not only uniquely interesting and daringly explicit but is also poetic, offbeat, confronting and funny.’ Linda Jaivin, Australian

  Praise for Triptych

  ‘I have great admiration for this book and frankly enjoyed reading it.’ Sydney Morning Herald

  ‘This is an astounding look at different sorts of love and Kneen is, above all, a sensualist.’ Adelaide Advertiser

  ‘With nods to Anaïs Nin and Vladimir Nabokov, Kneen writes with tenderness, joy and delight… Delightful, courageous and juicy.’ Big Issue

  Krissy Kneen is best known as a writer of literary erotica (Triptych) and sexual memoir (Affection). Steeplechase is her first novel and her first non-erotic work. She lives in Brisbane with her husband.

  furiousvaginas.com

  twitter.com/krissykneen

  KRISSY KNEEN

  STEEPLECHASE

  textpublishing.com.au

  The Text Publishing Company

  Swann House

  22 William Street

  Melbourne Victoria 3000

  Australia

  Copyright © 2013 by Krissy Kneen

  All rights reserved. Without limiting the rights under copyright above, no part of this publication shall be reproduced, stored in or introduced into a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior permission of both the copyright owner and the publisher of this book.

  First published by The Text Publishing Company, 2013

  Cover design by WH Chong

  Page design by Imogen Stubbs

  National Library of Australia Cataloguing-in-Publication entry:

  Author: Kneen, Krissy, 1968–

  Title: Steeplechase / by Krissy Kneen.

  ISBN: 9781922079879 (pbk.)

  ISBN: 9781922148100 (eBook)

  Dewey Number: A823.4

  For Chris Somerville

  ‘I leaf again and again through these miserable

  memories, and keep asking myself, was it then,

  in the glitter of that remote summer, that the

  rift in my life began; or was my excessive

  desire for that child only the first evidence

  of an inherent singularity?’

  VLADIMIR NABOKOV, Lolita

  Prologue

  My sister Emily likes ponies and show jumping and arenas. Sometimes I jump with her because she wants me to. I throw my head back and make the horse’s sound but it is never the right sound. She corrects me with her perfect whinnying, her neck exposed, her knees kicking high, a canter. I am not a good horse. I have not studied them as she has, chapter books where the beasts gallop, picture books thick with taut flanks and staring eyes. I jump over the obstacles that she sets for me but I never get a ribbon for my effort. Sometimes she whips me with a hickory stick which is not made of hickory at all, but instead a branch fallen from the ghost gum in the corner of the yard. She tells me that I am a bad horse, a lazy horse, a slow horse, and I take the whipping silently because it is true. I am a bad horse. I am not any kind of horse at all.

  The steeplechase is dangerous. She outlines the difficulties with her serious face, her furrowed brow. Horses fall, she tells me, riders die. She says that sometimes, on a difficult hurdle, a jockey will fall. The horse will be landing, its feet chopping the soil into clumps and if the rider falls into the path of the hooves his head will split.

  ‘It happens too quickly,’ she tells me. ‘The cameras are all watching the jump and then the hoof clomps down onto the rider’s head and the brains come out and it is too quick for the television crew to cut the filming.’

  ‘They could cut it afterwards, before it goes on TV.’

  ‘They film it live. The steeplechase is always live. But they don’t replay the jump in slow motion if the rider has been trampled to death. This is out of respect for the family.’

  I am sceptical but she is older and her description of a particular death seems real enough. She describes the way the man flips up and over the front of the horse. Too quick for him to scream or even show surprise. The hoof thumps down on his skull and his head snaps open like a grape when you press it between two fingers. The brain comes out and it is like grey pudding splattering up out of a dropped bowl. The other hooves tramp down onto the rider’s chest and legs and stomach and the horse falls forward, bending at its knees, its chin sliding across the choppy turf.

  ‘They shoot the horse in the head.’ She leans in conspiratorially to tell me this, her eyes wide, her breath laced with a forbidden sweetness from the Redskin she stole from the shop when our grandmother wasn’t looking. I can see the traces of the candy like lipstick on her mouth and for an awful second I imagine her taking my head between her hands and kissing me firmly on the lips.

  ‘That is the tragedy.’ She leans back and grins, all blood-red teeth. ‘They shoot the horse. It was never the horse’s fault to begin with, but they shoot it in the head, on camera, and there is no difference between the brains of a horse and the brains of a man. I’ve seen it. So I know.’

  She has set the hurdles to reflect a great degree of difficulty. Some of them are too high. One is perched over what she calls a ditch, the edge of a garden bed with flowers spread below it. One is a sand trap, one is a leap through the arms of the swing. Two of them are too close, only a single galloping step between them. We walk the course, which is apparently what they do in real steeplechases, bringing the horse’s nose to touch each hedge and ditch and creek. She mimes her horse, pulling the reins and gently patting the air where its nose would be. Sometimes she makes the horse’s noises, huffing and sniffing, getting the scent of the course that it will soon tackle.

  I have no such invisible horse. As I walk the course I imagine my own legs snapping as I trip over the swing set, falling into the pit of marigolds. When we are back at the starting line she has stepped into her horse. Her legs are high kicking. She sidles forward, back, kicks at the ground. I imagine that it will be my fall that is televised, and my sister’s hooves, shod in her black sensible shoes, that will be stamping on my head, popping my skull like a grape.

  ‘Riders,
mount your stallions.’

  They are always stallions. My sister rides a black one or perhaps inhabits is a better word for what is happening beside me, head lowered, pawing the thirsty yellow lawn, she snorts and stamps and grunts. More like a pig than a horse it seems, but I do not say so.

  ‘Ready, mark, go.’

  We are off. I run towards the first hurdle, a chair upended. I have to jump far enough to miss the back of it, which is lying flat on the ground. I run and leap and I have passed the first test but I am already a good three metres behind.

  I want to play her games. I want to love horses with the same uncomplicated passion. I try to mimic her drawings, but my horse’s legs are never sturdy enough, the knees seem to bend at the wrong angle. My horse always looks as if it is broken, fallen from her steeplechase and waiting on the page for the bullet in the head. I clear the second jump and the third, but the leap through the swing seems quite impossible, even as I watch my sister grab the chains and swing herself up and through, pulling her knees up tight against her chest. I stop at the base of the swing and step through, one heavy foot after the other. And this is the end of the race for me. I bypass the marigold trap and climb over the ladder instead of jumping it.

  She stands panting at the finish line and she is still a horse, sweating, nostrils flared, eyes wider than a human gaze. And as she watches me, walking, bypassing the last few hurdles, there is all the animal derision she can muster in that flat stare. I am not good enough. I am not fast enough. I am a slow, ugly disappointment. Horse becomes rider as she turns and flicks her ponytail in my direction, and steps gracefully in her jodhpurs towards home.

  PART ONE

  23 Years Later My Sister Calls

  I am recovering from an operation when my sister calls. The drugs they have given me are morphine based. They make my skin itch. I wake from painless sleep and sort back through dreams that plunge me into moments in my life I had forgotten. I woke up in the hospital. After the operation. Perhaps still in the theatre. All I knew was that it was bright and I was in pain and if I didn’t stand up and stretch out I would die from it. Then I was asleep again, and when I opened my eyes they asked me about the pain.

  I felt removed from it. Even now it is painful but it does not hurt. It is at arm’s length, although I can’t seem to bend at the waist or cough without feeling all my muscles tense, as if I am protecting myself from some injury that my flesh has forgotten. I suppose it hurts somewhere beyond the morphine. My body is growing a shell and all the cut-into, prodded-at, torn-out places are quivering inside that shell.

  I wake at home, in my own bed, and I am lonely and tired and I am hungry but not hungry as well, and strangely craving the kind of sour, hard candy that I don’t particularly like. I think perhaps I am overwhelmingly sad and want someone to take care of me. I think about my family for the first time in a long time. How I would hate for my grandmother to be here now, hovering over me, protecting me from every stray draught. But. Despite that, I would love some of her homemade soup and bread fresh from the oven and the comfort of her ridiculous proverbs and senseless wisdoms. I am thinking about my family when the phone rings.

  Maybe I am too sad to pick up the phone. I can feel my own tears welling, held back with great effort as you might hold back vomit. I am curled in a corner of the lounge and the phone is ringing and ringing. I have placed the two phones within reach, the home phone and my mobile. Standing is too difficult. I take a breath and pick up both phones and realise that it is my mobile, the weight of it buzzing in the palm of my hand. I flip it open and answer, mouth full of sleep, lazy tongue struggling for a greeting.

  ‘Hello?’

  And then my own voice, echoed back to me. ‘Hello? Hello?’ There is a slight delay, which adds to the strangeness of the moment. My first thought is that I am talking to myself on the phone. It has been years since my last visit to the psychiatrist. I am no longer mad. I am cured, and yet this sudden odd displacement of self drops me back into all the old worries.

  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.