Steeplechase Read online

  She locks the window and turns in the doorway to face us: my bed and my sister’s. She is standing on the line that runs the length of the room as if here at the exact place that divides Emily’s half from mine she might speak to both of us and prove she is not playing favourites, which is something that she simply refuses to do.

  ‘Don’t stay up ruining your eyes.’

  I nod, but Emily says nothing. She flicks a page. Our grandmother pulls the door closed behind her and Emily rolls onto her back and holds the book open over her face. Her shoulders shake slightly. Maybe she is crying or maybe she is laughing. It is impossible to know what Emily is feeling at any moment. One emotion seems to morph so quickly into another. I hear our grandmother moving down the corridor and into our mother’s room. Emily said once that she remembered our mother as she was before. She said she looked like a princess, but it seems impossible now.

  There are thirteen windows in our house if you include the sliding glass doors. There are two heavy wooden doors. I count them, the soft squeal of my mother’s window, the twin snappings of the windows in the studio. Our grandmother locks the windows to protect us, this is what she says. There are people outside, murderers, rapists, bad people who would hurt the children. She has been put in charge of the care of the children. Our mother has faltered in this task and it has fallen to our grandmother. We are her first concern, apparently.

  Sometimes, like tonight, I hear her pause in her locking routine. She stands in her studio and I know she is looking at the art. She is the guardian of paintings worth more than all the land in this town. Work by famous artists is placed in her temporary care while she picks at the dirt and sludge of years, stripping everything back to its original glory. Sometimes she lets us come into her studio with our hands behind our backs to look. There will be some new work there, propped up on an easel or flat on the table, and it will be just another painting, some rich lady in pearls, some man at his desk, some landscape with trees, perhaps a lake.

  I settle down onto the pillow and look towards my sister’s side of the room, the calm side, the neatness butting up against my chaos. My sister is painting another horse. She rarely paints anything else. A huge majestic animal, chest heaving, eye turned to face the world, large and somehow seeming angry and frightened at the same time. It seems incongruous, this wild creature leaping from a canvas in the midst of the order that is my sister’s side of the room.

  ‘Old people die of heatstroke.’

  ‘What?’ I am whispering. Our grandmother is still just across the hallway, distracted by something in her study, picking at spots of glaze with a toothpick or easing dust away with a soft, dry brush.

  ‘Old people are so afraid they lock all the doors and windows and then they get heatstroke and they die, or else there is some kind of electrical fault but they are deadbolted inside and the fire burns them to death.’

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘I didn’t know that.’

  ‘Don’t you defend her.’

  She is speaking too loudly. I would like to tell Emily that I am not defending her but Oma would hear me say this. I bite on my bottom lip and roll over, away from the clean side of the room, my sister’s side. I look towards the stuff I have left in uneasy piles leaning against a wall splattered with blobs of paint and coloured fingerprints.

  Our grandmother turns the light out in her studio and continues on her rounds, the windows in the kitchen, the windows in the lounge room, the back door with its bolt and lock. We are safe now, the night will pass without a home invasion. Safe, protected, locked up tight.

  Life Drawing

  I pause outside the room. I am a little late. There is a rustling inside, wild creatures pacing in their cage. I know how lion tamers must feel, the effort it takes to perform the confidence trick. I set my face to smiling. I have put some effort into my clothing, just formal enough, just a little bit casual and the socks are mismatched, which was not planned but which is good for the look nonetheless. I am self-conscious. I am self-conscious about my own self-consciousness.

  As I open the door the rustling abates and they are all there waiting. The girls are too thin and fashionably shy. They wear little cardigans and cute red shoes with buckles. Their hair is braided or cut into a fringe or tugged into pigtails. The boys are elegantly crumpled. They have almost all mastered the art of boredom. They sit on their own, preened and perfect and so uber-cool that even a simple conversation must be a carefully thought out interplay of style and ideas. The room smells of linseed oil and even here it is a scent that transports me back to childhood.

  The easels are scattered about the edges of the room. The students hover close to but not directly in front of their sketchpads so as not to seem too keen. The model is young, quite pretty. She is wearing a simple wrap-around dress and under this she will not be wearing underwear. Lately they have all been beautiful. This one has a glow of bright red hair and perfect cheekbones. Her eyes are wide and intelligent.

  He is talking with her. He is always talking with someone when I arrive. He is the only person in the room with no self-awareness. This is how he disarms me. His shoes are old and there is tape on one, holding the sole on. His jumper is faded, but not in that funky op-shop old-made-new way. It is just an old jumper with a stain over his heart where a pen has leaked. His hair is a sweaty mess. He is plumper than the other boys and his skin has a sheen to it that makes me think he was out last night, drinking.

  The model grins at him, her face lighting up with pleasure. She laughs. He likes to make girls laugh. Sometimes he makes me laugh too.

  I ease my satchel down and stand at the front of the room. There is a desk here, and a whiteboard that is never used. I perch on the desk and slowly, one by one, the pretty, bored faces turn in my direction. There is a dull ache in my stomach. It feels like I have been hollowed out, which is fair enough. I suppose I have been.

  ‘So we meet again.’ There are some nods, a few grins. John whispers something to the model and she giggles prettily before standing, tugging her clothes tighter around her as if she is reluctant to shed them at all.

  She smiles at me. Very attractive. I may have seen her before. Or not, six hundred models a year and all the drawings the same. The pose with the head bent forward, the one leaning back like a dancer, the lying on the floor as if dead or sleeping. There are only so many poses a body can adopt. She unties her dress and unwraps herself. Some of them like to do this in another room. Either way, they end up naked. The students are used to this now but there is still a certain awkwardness. There is never any interaction between student and model, except John of course. I watch him lowering his easel to chair height, the canvas is unbalanced and he grabs at it noisily. The girl closest to him smiles and they exchange raised eyebrows. John holds his finger to his lips and her smile becomes a wide grin. He is charming in his awkwardness.

  ‘So,’ I tell them. ‘You know the drill, five-second poses, then thirty-second poses, then some longer ones. You okay with that?’ This to the model. She has a name. It is on the job sheet that I have buried somewhere in my notes. When I started working here I used to make a point of remembering their names. Now I just stand and take my watch off my wrist and hold it, mostly for show. ‘Start,’ I say, and then, ‘Change.

  ‘Change.

  ‘Change.’

  The model lunges into impossible shapes. Perhaps she is a dancer or a gymnast, her breasts never seem to sag. She is gorgeous. ‘Change, change, change.’

  Little stick drawings, lines really, just the general shape and movement. They are no better or worse than any other students I have had. I walk slowly around the circle of easels and the works are interchangeable. Sharp quick lines of varying thickness. Some more interested in the curve of the back, some of them breast-men and women, drawing the pretty pert hang, the ever-changing direction of the nipple. Some of them concentrate on the hair.

  John has never been good at the quick drawing. I walk behind him and notice that today he has decided not to
draw the model at all. Instead he has begun to sketch my desk, the model’s dress hanging from it like a dead pelt, the puddle of skirt lapping at the ground beneath. Nothing quick about this drawing, he has started with shadow and is drawing back to the highlights. This is something my sister used to do. I recognise the intensity of the strokes.

  ‘Okay. A longer one now. Say, twenty minutes?’ The model nods. I walk, slowly, glancing. I do not interfere. I am here if they want me but they never do, these bright young things with their fifties dresses and their mad hair. When I walk past John’s easel, I see that he has begun to draw the model, finally. A close study of her face, politely ignoring her nakedness.

  My guts feel empty. An organ has been taken out of my body and it feels like my flesh is rearranging to accommodate it. I walk from easel to easel with this empty space inside me. I wonder if I came back to work too soon.

  John glances up as I walk by his easel and he is all grin. He wants me to like his work. And I do, but his need for my approval is even more charming. It is an effort for me not to rest a comforting hand on his shoulder. Instead I nod, and smile back a little and he goes back to his drawing with more enthusiasm. The woman in the picture looks pretty but sad. I do not see this in the model. This is something he has added, this edge of melancholy.

  When I complete the circuit and begin another slow pass of the easels I notice that he has begun to draw one of her breasts and I feel a sudden, inexplicable stab of jealousy. I should be at home on the couch with my pretentious subtitled DVDs and my Nabokov and framed Gentileschi prints.

  John looked through my video collection when he came over that first time and he laughed and asked me where the comedies were. I don’t like comedy seemed like a bad answer at the time and it is still a terrible excuse. I am like the rest of my students—a cliché. I wear my op-shop treasures and never watch television and frown at anything that is supposed to make me laugh. John makes me laugh.

  I frown at John now because he has moved down to the genitals and instead of making them half-there like the other students do, he has drawn in every fold and line and the model now looks more than naked. She looks exposed. I look past his cartridge block to where she is lying and yes, her legs are just that tiny bit parted and from this angle one of her labia is larger than the other and protruding slightly, but none of the other students have reproduced it in quite this detail. In John’s eyes, we have an incredibly well realised face, one breast, a vulva. He finishes it with the neatly trimmed pubic hair and moves down to the feet. He starts to detail the toes one at a time and I move on to the other students who have spent more time on the general curve of the hip, easing over the genitals with vague pencil strokes. I look at my watch. Half an hour to go.

  ‘Okay,’ I say. ‘Time for one more pose.’

  ‘You have three years’ worth of holidays accrued. You have four years of sick days.’

  I shake my head. ‘I know. I know.’

  Ed dresses like a teenager and he really shouldn’t. His runners are too bright. His T-shirt is ripped and the hair on his back shows through it. Sometimes, but thankfully not today, he wears a skinny tie over the top of his T-shirt.

  ‘I thought I’d be fine the next day. Keyhole sounds like something really small, you know?’

  ‘You’ve had a part of your body removed.’

  ‘Yeah,’ I say, ‘and they wouldn’t let me keep it, not even the stones.’

  ‘What? That’s crazy, that is your body. That belongs to you. I know someone who was offered his amputated leg to take home.’

  ‘Yeah, go figure.’

  ‘How do they expect us to make art? What, do they tell Damian Hirst he isn’t allowed to take his appendix home?’

  I have reached my office door and I stand there with my fingers resting on the handle and he hovers. He is an odd man, awkward, but his miniatures are great and the students are fond of him. He grins and I am reminded that I am fond of him too.

  He puts his hand on my shoulder and gives me his serious face, which is actually quite amusing so I smile. ‘Just take tomorrow off. For me. And book in holidays. A week, two weeks, four months. Take the rest of the year off. Go hire a studio and do some work. This isn’t a private university, this is the public frigging service.’ He shakes his head paternally. ‘There will be no burn-out on my watch.’

  I look past Ed and John is there, leaning against the wall at the end of the corridor, looking anywhere but in my direction.

  ‘I’ll take tomorrow off.’

  ‘Good,’ he says. ‘Great. And your holidays?’

  ‘Yeah. I’ll take some. Soon. I promise. After the exhibition.’

  For a terrible moment I think he might hug me. He steps forward and makes a little awkward gesture with his hand, which might be a wave or an aborted attempt to touch my arm.

  ‘Have a good day off,’ he says. I watch him walk past the place where John is leaning against the wall, then I step into my office and close the door.

  It is a room filled with paintings, postcard-sized prints and some larger ones, students’ work. And then there is the wall that is devoted to my sister. Pictures of sad men with flames eating their shoulders. Happy children with only darkness where their eyes should be. A boy with blowflies swarming where there should be only laughter. I wait a moment till he knocks, softly, a cat scratching. He knows I will be waiting.

  I press the palms of my hands against my eyes. If I wait long enough he might go away.

  The Pecking Order

  We pull up outside the shop in town and there are kids playing in the gutter. They have a ball that bounces erratically. They chase after it and laugh and fall over themselves trying to catch it. Their older brothers perch on the bench and smoke cigarettes. I can see the neck of a beer bottle jutting out of a boy’s jacket. They watch us jump down out of the back of the van. There is something not right about our clothing. Their clothes are bought and ours are made. Their shirts are bright with album covers on the front, our collared shirts seem prim.

  ‘Yokels,’ Emily leans over to whisper it into my ear. I snort because it is funny, but then after a moment I realise it is not funny at all. We walk into the shop, our grandmother, our mother and us, all similarly dressed. Our mother stands at the door. Everyone knows about our mother. No matter how tight you lock the doors the truth still sneaks out in a small town. She looks okay if you don’t talk to her. A little vague perhaps but she sticks close to us and keeps her head down and a stranger would never even know. It would be easier to leave her at home of course, but she might try to turn on the stove and then leave the gas on and burn the house down and the child protection would come and take us. She has to come with us when we go out but it isn’t so bad. Our grandmother says that at one time she used to play with matches, so we have to be vigilant and make sure she is safe when Oma is in her study or out changing the straw for the animals.

  I linger outside the shop watching the local kids. I would like to join in their game with the ball. There is something dangerous and exciting about perching on a bench, smoking a cigarette, sneaking beer. I stare at one of the boys, a skinny tall boy with his T-shirt rolled up at the sleeve and a bulge where his cigarette packet presses out of the cotton. He stares back, winks. I turn quickly and trail inside after my family.

  Today we are allowed a treat. It will be a long drive. Two hours if there is no traffic. We have a basket of food, roast vegetables baked into fresh buns, a quiche cut into thick slices, herbal tea in a thermos. Emily and I can choose one of the bad things each to take with us, an ice-cream or a can of sugary drink or a chocolate bar. We must choose carefully. There will be no chance to rectify a bad decision. I have been thinking I will have a Polly Waffle because of the packet, which is pink, and because it is longer than the other chocolate bars. I know that Emily will have an ice-cream. She always picks an ice-cream and she always finishes it too quickly because it melts in the hot car and drips down her hands onto her sleeves. I will take my time with my chocola
te bar, whichever one I choose, and it will last almost the whole two hours. I will leave a piece the same thickness as my thumb and I will give this to my sister because she will have spent the whole last hour watching me take excruciatingly small bites of chocolate, counting the distance between towns by the size of the bar melting in my fist.

  Our hands are sticky when we clamber out from the back of the van. Our grandmother tips some water into the cups of our palms and we shake them dry over a flowerbed.

  The museum is my favourite place in the world. I like it better than the art gallery, which is where we normally go so the museum is a special and unexpected pleasure. The doors slide open and it is always cold inside. It is a relief after the relentless sun on the top of the kombi. The museum smells like dust and time. It smells like history, crumbling parchment, old carpet, bones. We are greeted by the skeletal bodies of condors stretched out above us, flying in formation. Behind them there are other birds, some large, like the picked-clean bodies of pelicans, and some of them tiny, sparrows, finches, all of them wired into positions of flight, wings outstretched, angled down to catch an undetectable breeze.

  Our grandmother carries a large wooden box. I know there is a painting inside but in a museum it could be anything really, bones from something extinct, a dinosaur, perhaps something deformed, the conjoined skeleton of a lamb. We trail behind her down the escalator. She is strong. The box is heavy but she carries it easily. I notice her wiry muscles. She is old but she is tough, our grandmother. Never give up and never complain. Past the Sepik River display, deep into the bowels of the museum, the primordial back rooms where the dark is so thick that the pinpoint shafts of light carve it like cake.