Steeplechase Read online

  Our grandmother speaks with the man from the museum. He is a doctor and seems important. They talk about the Cretaceous era and then about herbivores, a skeleton found somewhere in the desert and then they talk about art, more pieces that they have in their collection, most of them in storage, some of them in need of work. She needs the work, that’s what she tells him and then they both look towards our mother who is sitting quiet as usual in a chair in the corner. After this they talk about money. I am not supposed to listen in to conversations about money and so I wander over to where my sister is peering into a fish tank on a bench.

  The tank is surrounded by bottles filled with dead things, lizards, insects, grubs, all suspended in a yellowed liquid. The tank is empty except for some twigs and leaves and dirt, or so it seems. I shrug and put my finger to a jar with a centipede inside it, but my sister taps on the glass tank, drawing my attention. There is a slight rustling of the leaves. I lean in closer and she points. I step back suddenly. There is a cockroach inside, or at least it looks like a cockroach, but it is as big as the palm of my hand and the same colour as the leaves in the tank.

  ‘In Burma,’ my sister says, ‘if you disobey the government they tie you down in a room full of these cockroaches and let them slowly eat your face.’

  I don’t really believe her but I step back anyway. She told me the same thing once about a giant crustacean called a coconut crab. Still, I watch the huge insect burrow under the leaf litter and it seems plausible.

  ‘Put your hand inside the tank,’ she whispers. She takes my hand and I lock my arm stiff and tight. She is stronger than I am and I watch in horror as my hand is pulled closer to the fish tank.

  The doctor is standing behind us suddenly. Emily drops my hand and she is all sugar and lace as she points to the tank.

  ‘Big bugs, huh?’

  She nods.

  ‘Natives. We breed everything larger here, don’t we?’

  He leads us into another room and makes us tea with real milk from a carton that isn’t powdered and lumpy.

  The doctor shows us another glass case that seems to be filled with more dead branches. I search the bottom for cockroaches, but Emily nods and points and when I adjust my vision I notice that some of the branches are insects that look like sticks and leaves.

  There are more jars on shelves and he shows me the preserved body of a snake that has mistakenly eaten an echidna. The spines poke out through its skin.

  ‘It is terrible what desperation drives us to,’ he says, and his voice is so deep and rich he might as well be a radio presenter and not a doctor at all.

  In the car on the way back our mother starts to sing, just softly, a little tuneless song that seems stuck on a loop. Our grandmother shushes her but she sticks with it. She is still singing when we pull into a little town for lunch. We sit in the park there with the last of our buns and leave Mother in the car to eat her lunch alone. If we took her with us she would only draw attention to us. Our grandmother stares at the kombi all through lunch and I suppose she is just checking up on our mother, making sure she does nothing to harm the wooden crates filled with paintings in the back of the car. Priceless, she called them. Actually this means very expensive rather than worth nothing at all.

  ‘Your mother is very smart,’ she says and I glance over my shoulder to where she is sitting, stiff-backed, staring out towards the parked van. ‘When something snaps it doesn’t mean you are not still smart. It is like a watch when the winding mechanism is broken, it still has the potential to tell the time. Although, of course, it is broken, so it does not.’

  Emily is sitting with her foot near my leg. She kicks me hard in the shin for no reason and when I look to her she is crossing her eyes, trying to make me laugh. It would be mean to laugh at our mother and so I scowl at her instead.

  The Nude Maja

  When I open my office door John is still outside. There is an awkwardness. He shifts his weight from foot to foot and his gaze is furtive. He looks everywhere but at me. The pages of his sketchbook protrude from his folder. It looks as if he might drop them at any moment.

  ‘Okay.’ I step aside and he sidles past me. The sole of his taped-up shoe flaps. He is tall and he hunches. It gives him a cowed look.

  ‘Hi.’ John sits in the comfy couch opposite my desk and picks up the nearest book, turning the pages so quickly that it seems he is not looking at the pictures at all.

  When the book is shut and resting in his lap he glances up at me. ‘I like the way Goya uses a single source of light.’

  ‘Did you read that somewhere?’

  ‘No. I just noticed.’ He glances up at the wall and nods. ‘Your sister does that too. One light source. It’s very dramatic.’

  I nod. John shrugs. ‘Just an observation.’

  ‘We all have our habits.’

  ‘Yes,’ he says. ‘You backlight things as if there is a lamp hidden somewhere behind them. Subtle. But effective.’

  ‘What do you want, John?’

  John shifts on the leather couch. He is round, round-bellied, round-shouldered, moon face gazing up at me half terror, half expectation. I am reminded of puppies when they get wind of food, wide-eyed hope and fear all at once.

  ‘To go look at your etchings?’

  This is a joke, of course, but he says it without a smile. He is all hunched over himself and his irises are small and dark in the wide white stare. It breaks my heart to look at him, his eager expectation.

  ‘I thought we were going to stop all that.’

  ‘Were we?’

  ‘You’re my student, John.’

  He leans forward and opens the heavy cover of the art book. He flicks past Manet, Raphael, Picasso.

  ‘You know Goya went deaf, right? I don’t remember what caused that.’

  ‘Cholera.’

  ‘Right. Well I was wondering if that’s when he changed his relationship to light. I was wondering why your sister shines a spotlight on her subject, head on, like from a car. Even when the light should be from the fire on his back or the girl with the burning hands, instead it’s head on like a car is rocketing towards her about to collide. What made her do that? Did she always do that? Even when she was little?’ He turns to look at my sister’s paintings, leans towards them as if listening for them to answer.

  ‘Or is it something to do with the illness?’ I say, perhaps a little too sharply. People are always trying to diagnose my sister through her art.

  ‘Maybe. I wasn’t trying to…I didn’t…’

  ‘No, John. She always did that.’

  ‘So, then you do this thing in your paintings where it seems like natural light, daylight, but there’s a halo or something, the hair outlined. Just a tiny glow and I bet people don’t notice it often.’

  ‘People have to see the paintings to notice something about them.’

  ‘Come on. You’ve exhibited.’

  He is right, I have exhibited once or twice. Before. Thumbnail reviews. No real feedback. Shouting into the wind.

  ‘You’re very observant,’ I say, and it is nice how he blushes. I have always liked that about him.

  ‘I liked your work today.’

  ‘She was nice.’

  ‘The model?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Mmm.’

  ‘You just don’t like her because she’s pretty.’ Which is probably true. ‘You hate them because you think they’re more attractive than you. Which is not true.’

  ‘Yeah, and flattery is going to get you a glimpse at my etchings.’

  ‘Oh. Isn’t it?’

  I sink into the chair at my desk. There are wheels on it and I push off and roll back and let the chair thud against the wall. It is a habit and I only catch myself doing it when it is too late. He grins and flicks through pages till he spots the one he is looking for. He holds the book up as if he were showing it to a child. The Nude Maja.

  ‘She looks a bit like you don’t you think?’

  He stares at the picture inten
tly, scratches his generous belly.

  ‘Except you’d have a big scar all down your front.’

  ‘No. Five little scars.’

  ‘Five?’

  ‘Yeah. Who would have thought keyhole meant keyholes. Five of them.’

  I notice his hand stretch out as if he would touch my knee, but I’m a long way away from him. He taps his fingers on his own thigh instead, a little gesture of comfort that I might have shared in.

  He is a nice boy. I kick my chair closer to him.

  ‘I would like to come over to your place,’ he says, peering down into his lap where he folds his fingers into a little fence.

  ‘To see my etchings.’

  ‘No. To kiss you. Make out a little bit. Drink tea after.’

  I press my fingers against my lips. They smell like a hospital. I wonder why this is so. I wonder if the anaesthetic is still in me somehow, sweating out of my pores. I am suddenly very tired.

  ‘I said I wouldn’t do that anymore.’

  He shrugs. ‘Sure, but we say these things. We mean them at the time.’

  I lean forward into the hug of my arms. My desk smells like linseed oil and I am suddenly longing for home. When I look up, there is such an open, expectant look in John’s eyes that I am a child once more, and nothing can be wrong with what we are about to do.

  ‘I am forty years old,’ I say, more to remind myself than to inform him.

  ‘I know,’ he says. ‘I’m twenty-three. I am an adult. I make my own choices. I would like to go back to your place if you let me. I would like to kiss you again.’

  We mustn’t sleep with our students. Some of the male lecturers do it. I have suspected, seen them out at dinner or letting the kids out of their cars first thing in the morning. I have always judged them harshly for it. It is immoral, I say. How can you be objective? They shouldn’t be allowed to mark their work, I say.

  I let John ride in my car. I open the passenger door and feel the quick sinking of the car as he steps into it. I remember the weight of him bearing down onto my chest, his arms straining to keep the bulk of his body from pressing the breath out of me.

  People will see us leaving together. Other students, other lecturers. When they confront me with this I will tell them that I am teaching him to stretch a canvas. Last time I did not need to make up such a story. Last time I gave him an address and drove home to pace and fret, wishing that he would become lost and abandon our meeting altogether, then worrying that this was exactly what had happened and sinking into the foetid pit of my own insecurities.

  I am afraid that I am too old and too ugly for him. I am not a good enough artist. He would never abandon me if I were as accomplished as my sister. He only became interested in me because of this sibling connection and the crazy brush with fame it affords him.

  This does not matter now. I slip behind the wheel and there is the smell of him, sweat, socks, oil paint, the vague chemical reek of the photo lab, a doughy masculine warmth that will obliterate the other smells when I remove his clothing. It is a smell that is so strong it should be off-putting but as I breathe in I am suddenly wet with desire.

  He stands awkwardly in the lounge room, the site of our first transgression. He sits on the edge of the couch where I lay him back and slipped his penis into my mouth and swallowed the sticky sharp flavour that I hadn’t tasted in years.

  I bring him a glass of wine and sip my own a little too quickly and I know that this is going to end with too little from him and too much from me but even that kind of unevenness is better than this awkward perching. I lean forward and when I am close enough he kisses me and I am too distracted by the complications of assessment time. The fact that he is my best student. The most talented artist that has sat in my classes. But if I mark him high as I have always done there will now be an edge of doubt. This is the ethical dilemma I have made for myself.

  His lips are full and soft. The kiss is damp without being wet and it takes a long time for him to softly part his mouth and allow me to find his tongue there. It is a kiss so full of excitement and desire that it is easy to lose the facts of the situation to the sheer physical pleasure of it. I am without guilt, and this alone makes me guilty. I am aware that he is younger than I am, fresher, more energetic. I am aware that my kisses are a pale substitute for the intensity of flesh and fire that he so admires in my sister’s work. When we are both naked and his head is dipped towards my breast, I see him glance up and beyond me. There is an image on my wall that my sister painted when she was fifteen. A raw and passionate coupling of anonymous bodies. I know that he is looking at the painting, his penis rising against my thigh and this small distraction is enough to make me want him more. I shift onto his lap and he is inside me. I have not forgotten to put a condom on him, I am not so morally bereft as to risk our health and safety. It is an easy enough thing to lift one leg and clamber over and onto him and from this angle he will be able to look over my shoulder and bask in the raw eroticism of my sister’s work.

  The little injection of jealousy sends a sharp contraction through my loins. When it has begun it is impossible to avoid the slide over into the disappointment of a premature climax. I come so quickly that it is almost without pleasure.

  Without the heat of desire it all seems so much more sordid. My bra abandoned on the rug, the stiff cups looking huge and somehow parental, the slight dark stain in the crotch of my knickers. I am aware too, that I am still sore and that my scars stand out a vivid red against my flabby pale stomach. The whole of my belly is even more swollen than it usually is. I am a wreck.

  I ease myself off him although I know he is not even close to his own climax. I roll the condom off and dip my head into his lap. There is the terrible oceanic smell of me. I try, impossibly, to breathe through my mouth and suck him at the same time. This smell is why I have not had anyone go down on me since I was a teenager.

  I know that if I meet this boy again, the pattern will have been set and we will be back here, me on my knees hoping that he will come quicker than he did the last time, wondering how long the tired muscles of my mouth will be able to continue at this pace. Wondering if this time I will have to gag when he comes into my mouth. Wondering how I will be able to swallow without smelling the reek of my own crotch. Knowing that other women do not smell as strongly as I do. Knowing that my sister is all candy apple and fresh baked bread and I am all day-old fish and seaweed caked in salt. I wish it was over. I wish it had never begun. I am wishing myself back to whatever went wrong in the first place that made it possible for me to be here now and with him. I am thinking about my sister when I should be here enjoying the moments when I am risking my career to be on my knees in front of this young man.

  There is a sharp pain in my gut but I keep at my task with a fierce tenacity. When it is done, I swallow quickly and slouch back on the couch. I place my hand under my ribs, imagining that I have torn open the wound and must be bleeding all over the rug, but it is still just a sore red puckered slit. Five bright scars without a drop of blood. I look at my stomach with a kind of disappointment.

  ‘I’m sorry.’ He is a nice boy. His concern is palpable. ‘Did I hurt you? I’m sorry if I hurt you.’

  ‘No.’ I let him cup my chin in his hand and I do like him enormously. He is the best artist I have ever taught. He is almost the equal of my sister. ‘It’s fine. Thank you.’

  ‘Thank you? It’s me that should be thanking you.’ And he kisses me with those wonderfully soft and gentle lips and suddenly I no longer regret what we have done, and the only thing I will regret is this lack of regret. I know in this moment that I am the bad sister, not Emily. It is easy to point the finger at Emily. But it is me. This insidious evil that pretends to be the nice girl in the family.

  H is for Horse

  I have my role to play and I take it very seriously. It is my job to make the first offering to the horse. There are words to say and I have said them every day since this particular ritual began. Saddle up, I say and here boy
, there boy, eat from my hand. For a while I also had to say take to the bit but, because we have no bit, Emily decided I shouldn’t say it at all.

  That was a few weeks ago now and all I have are the two lines and one handful of lucerne. The kitchen scraps are to be left for Emily, because Flame is Emily’s horse. She speaks to the horse in Elvish, and, because I have never managed to master the language no matter how often we play that game, I am never sure what she is saying. It doesn’t matter. Flame knows it is her and that she is the one who owns him.

  I am sure he can smell us when we are crossing the paddock. We have fifty acres and the land is uneven and boggy in places. There is a dry creek bed on our land but, unless it is raining heavily, I can’t tell where the creek starts and finishes. We trudge over high ground and low ground and by the time we get to the fence line we are ripe with sweat.

  She whistles three times. This is the start of it, and then, ‘Tch tch tch tch.’ We call him simultaneously, clicking our tongues against our teeth. Emily taught me how to do this and sometimes I think that, although I cannot whistle, I am almost better at the galloping sound than she is.

  He really is the most magnificent creature I have ever seen. Emily says that no one loves Flame except us and yet he is always well groomed. His flanks glow as if he has only just been brushed. His mane is never matted. When he runs a shudder ripples through his muscular body. When he stamps his legs twitch. He smells spicy, his chestnut coat warm and clean but pungent all the same.

  He is still nodding his head as if in agreement when I step up to the wire and play my part. A bow first, careful not to get in the way of his powerful nose which has knocked me in the head several times, once even causing me to bite my tongue. Then there are the lines I must speak, and Flame waits patiently for me to say them. I put the lucerne on my hand and am careful to hold it flat. I know that he could bite my fingers by accident. I suppose Emily told me this but I have no memory of when she said it. I hold my hand flat and do not flinch. I won’t let Emily see that I am scared of his searching lips and big teeth but I always am.