Steeplechase Page 9

  I pack my computer into my bag and head for the door. They turn to watch me leave like the heads of sunflowers following the light. Yes. This is how you win their love and respect. My sister knew this all along.

  I pause at the door and turn and tell them, ‘And don’t even think about skipping life drawing class tomorrow. Art history you can learn from a book, but unless you have a model in your own home and put the time aside to draw, I expect to see each and every one of you. On time.’

  ‘Hey.’ Ed catches me when I turn the corner and it is a shock to see him. I am suddenly ashamed of my actions. What if one of my students complains to Ed? He is wearing a T-shirt with a square of cartoon panels on it. It would be rude to stare at his shirt, but I wonder what irony is held in the printed squares.

  ‘Did you get the paper?’

  ‘No.’ Although of course I usually do.

  ‘You didn’t see the review of your exhibition? You should get the paper. Hey, sorry I got there late. I looked for you.’

  ‘Yeah, I left pretty early.’

  ‘You okay?’

  I snap my lips shut, look towards the pile of books and notes in my hands.

  ‘You need to take time off, remember?’

  ‘Okay.’

  He checks his watch and he is walking backwards, shouting to me even as he disappears back down the corridor, ‘Get the paper. Oh, and congrats. The paintings are—’ I can’t make out the last word. I turn and walk less purposefully toward the exit.

  There is a long walk from the classroom to my car. By the end of the corridor I have repented. If John runs to catch me up while I am still in the building then I will take it as a sign that he has only kissed her. I take the stairs one at a time, pausing at each landing. If he used the lift he would certainly overtake me. I pause at the door to the building as long as I am able.

  Outside on the lawn I decide that if he catches me at my car then maybe they made out a little but did not sleep together. I have not brought an umbrella. I hug my notes to my chest. The laptop is inside its water-resistant sleeve but I am still a little concerned for it as I feel the rivulets of rain cascading down my back.

  My shoes take in water and I am suddenly reminded of the boots I used to keep for rainy days, sticking in the mud of our yard, leeches, the smell of clothing that has sat too long on the laundry floor in a puddle of its own making. The year of the flood. My fifteenth year.

  I open the door of the car and get in. I sit and drip.

  He is younger than me. So much younger. He is my student and what I have done with him is wrong. Still I wait and watch the doorway. Students scurry out, covering their heads with their handbags, slipping folders under their T-shirts. The rain has surprised us all.

  I start the engine. Then, eventually, I drive home.

  ‘I don’t know what you want me to do.’

  He is standing in the rain and there is no point inviting him in now. It is too late, he can’t get any wetter. It is a warm rain. He shivers a little but it can’t be from cold. I stand in the doorway, blocking any entry he might be hoping to make.

  ‘I feel like everything is a test all the time only I can’t win.’

  ‘We can’t be together,’ I tell him, and he holds his hands out, palms upwards as if to catch great handfuls of rain.

  ‘Yeah. So, I go to a gallery opening with a girl and I get punished for it? You wouldn’t go with me.’

  ‘I can’t.’

  ‘I know. You knew I wanted to be your date. You told me to ask someone else.’

  ‘Date? You sound like you’re fourteen.’

  ‘Well that’s what you’re acting like.’

  ‘“How you’re acting”,’ I correct him.

  ‘Oh. Right. And pretending you’re my mother is a step forward?’

  My chest is too tight to breathe. I step back and there is room for him to come inside if he chooses to. He jigs from foot to foot as if he needs to go to the toilet.

  ‘Are we having a fight?’ I ask and he lowers his handfuls of water so that they drip onto the ground.

  ‘I suppose so.’ He stares down at his wet sandshoes.

  ‘Are you going to come in?’

  He looks up at me, his eyes are impossibly large and round. ‘I kissed that girl.’

  He is lovely. So shy and earnest and the best artist I know, except for my sister of course. There is always my sister.

  ‘She was a bit excited that you knew Emily Reich’s sister, wasn’t she?’

  He steps back. His shoulders look defeated. ‘So you want me to come in? Or maybe not.’

  ‘I can’t sleep with my students. It’s unethical.’

  ‘So you keep saying.’

  ‘See, now it is going to be even more awkward.’

  ‘What? I shouldn’t have kissed her?’

  ‘Kissed is a euphemism I assume?’

  ‘What? You want pictures?’

  ‘No,’ I say, stepping back to guard the doorway. ‘I don’t suppose you’ll be coming in.’

  He stands there with his slump-shoulders and his large intelligent eyes and I close the door and lean my forehead against it and listen to him, standing quietly there in the rain.

  There is something ridiculous about how much I want to be hugged by him right now. I suppose he needs a hug too. If there were one of those peep holes in the door I could look through it and watch him standing, soaked and miserable.

  I make tea and sit in the lounge room facing my sister’s painting. This is what he would have seen, looking up over my shoulder, sliding into me. More flesh on my bones than necessary, a pillow of flesh for him to lean into. I pick up the pile of marking and move over to the other side of the couch. This is where I was sitting that first time. I stretch out my hand, remembering his fingers. The first intimate gesture, the caress of his index finger up and down against mine, the tender curl of his hand, the innocence of such a gesture, the sweetness of our fingers tangling like an ill-fitting jigsaw puzzle. His fingers interlinked with mine. It is impossible not to associate this gesture with Raphael. I feel the hairs begin to rise on my neck.

  His assignment is somewhere in this pile. I take the first sheaf of papers off the stack and glance at the name on the second one. This is like a game of Russian roulette. At some point his name will come up and I will be too hard on him, or too easy, depending which swing of the pendulum has come around at the time.

  I shuffle pages, tapping the stack of paper against the coffee table, straightening the sheets. There are words but I can’t seem to focus on them. I put the essay down and press the palms of my hands into my eyes. Motes of light dance in the darkness, changing colour like a screensaver.

  ‘This is why you don’t sleep with your students.’

  I can feel the blood pulsing in my temples. When I push the table away the pile of assignments topples, spilling onto the floor. There are still morphine tablets left over from my hospital stint last week. I rummage through the medicine drawer till I find the packet. I take one. It doesn’t hurt so much if I bend my head over and onto the cradle of my arms. I sit like this at the kitchen table till the drugs kick in and it feels safe enough to move.

  I open the fridge and stare into it as if the various mouldy stubs of carrots and zucchini might hold the answer to my problems.

  I shut the fridge and rifle through my backpack. It is impossible to find anything in here. Purse, three books, two sketchpads, pencils, a box of oil pastels, some of them spilt and turning everything else in there to a blue smudge. I take them all out one at a time and pile them on the kitchen bench with the rest of the debris. There at the bottom of it all, among the shattered fragments of a stick of charcoal, is my phone. I shake it and the coarse black powder scatters onto the kitchen bench like dandruff.

  It hurts my eyes to focus on the screen. My head is pounding and I am overcome by a wave of nausea as I type. I think I went back to work too soon. My fingers become black from the charcoal dust. I think I need to take some time out. Is th
ere anyone who can do my marking for me?

  I sit with the message reading it over several times before pressing send. It is as if the send button is a detonator. Something explodes in my head and my eyes water with the pain. I feel my way down the corridor and lower myself cautiously onto my unmade bed. Even the cotton pillowcase feels too harsh against my cheek.

  I have slept with my student, not just once, not just an awkward mistake, but several times, almost enough to call it a relationship. The sound of the rain smells like rotting flesh. I feel nauseous. Something buzzes like an electric shock in my fist. I wonder if I am still in hospital, if I have been given some kind of shock therapy for my sins, but there in my hand is my phone and the blinding flare of a message on the screen. I peer at it through almost closed lids.

  Of course. I’ll pick up your assignments tomorrow after work. Take a few weeks off. That is an order. Ed.

  I feel like I have lost a battle I didn’t realise I was fighting.

  There is only one painting in this room, something I did in art school, a young girl caught in the act of turning away from the viewer. It looks like it is painted from a photograph but I did it from reflections in the mirror. One eye visible, partially obscured by hair.

  I did have sex with him in this bed but mostly we did it in the lounge room where the traces of my sister are ever-present. I made love to him as he stared up and around with those huge awe-struck eyes, startled to be there in that room surrounded by paintings he recognised from books and magazines. A brush with fame. Having sex with Emily Reich’s sister. Excited by the very idea of it.

  I close my eyes and drag a pillow up over my head and eventually the nausea passes. Just a migraine. It has been a difficult week. I place my hands on my belly where the five scars are still red and raised, but healing. Something has been taken out of me. Something is missing. He is walking home through the rain or sitting on a bus and I am here holding my tender swollen stomach as if I had just lost a foetus I was carrying.

  Meeting Raphael

  Emily wakes me. It must be Emily, but I can tell in the darkness that it is not. It is not the way Emily would stand. He stands at a lean. I suppose you would call it a slouch. When he rocks forward a little the light from the window falls on his cheek and I notice the set of his jaw. Not Emily at all.

  Raphael is just as I imagined he would be. I look behind him to where my sister’s bed is pressed against the wall, the dark bundle of her sleeping body. Maybe I am sleeping too. Maybe this is part of some complicated dream and in a moment the boy standing in front of me will melt away into the darkness like every other shadow.

  He is thin. His hair is a sandy thatch, the front of it sticks up and out like the brim of a cap, shading a high forehead and prematurely receding hairline. I remember lying in the grass beside Emily. Talking about boys. He is the kind of boy Emily described. Sandy hair, bleached from the ocean. His eyes are deep set and dark and his eyebrows are a little too thick for someone so young, giving him a wise but concerned expression. He might be my own age or older like my sister, but he might be older still, almost an adult. He has one of those faces where it is impossible to tell. He stands with his arms out and his fingers splayed as if to assure me that he has no weapon.

  ‘Raphael.’

  Raphael raises a finger and places it against his lips. The house is silent. I can hear a scrambling through tall grass outside which might be a possum or a wallaby, a thump as a cane toad flings itself against the glass of the sliding door. All the sounds safely locked out in the tepid night air.

  He nods towards the corridor, a sweet little gesture, a playful bob. He disappears out of the room and I am alone again. I wonder if I am frightened. I certainly notice the racing of my heart. I slide my legs over the side of the bed and onto the debris on the floor, picking my way across the room. There is a dreamlike quality to it all. The quiet shuffle of my steps, the silence of the room.

  He is standing in the lounge. The windows are all locked. The doors are all locked. There is no way he could have slipped inside without a key, or without breaking something. He can’t be real. He is a figment of my sister’s imagination and he has somehow slipped out and into my dreams. I am asleep. I am certain this is true and yet I know also that I am wide awake. Raphael steps closer and I recoil as if from a phantom. His fingers brush my hand, curl around to clasp me; he feels real enough. He leads me towards my own front door and I can tell he has been here many times before.

  The door is locked. He turns the metal handle and slides the bolt across. I am still slow and fuddled and for a moment I am back in home-school classes. The concept of parasites, invisible things living inside their host undetected. Maybe Raphael lives in the house, somewhere in the walls. If this were an old and crumbling mansion then it might be true, but this is a new building, thin walls, built to a plan. Raphael is here inside a locked house and the only explanation seems to be that I am still sleeping.

  He stands in the doorway and tips his head back a little, pointing at me with his chin. It is a small gesture. A normalising little tilt of the head. This is a real live boy, not a dream or a demon or one of my sister’s fantasies. Here is a person, standing in my doorway and silently suggesting we step outside.

  A wallaby hops away, startled. I step down onto the dry crackle of grass. There is a slight breeze and the shrubs make the best use of it, shivering despite the heat on the wind. It is 2am and the world is still sweating from yesterday.

  There is nothing unearthly about him, he is wearing a T-shirt and jeans. His eyes are quite large and very dark but his face is a normal boy-shaped face, a little on the underfed side. He is at that stage where he has grown upward without growing outward.

  ‘Raphael. It is Raphael, isn’t it?’

  He shrugs. ‘I’ve seen you around,’ he says, casually. ‘But you are prettier close up. You have a lovely face.’

  I feel the heat of blood rushing into my cheeks. I glance up at the sky and there are all the stars, so many of them, an unbroken carpet of stars.

  ‘I thought Emily had invented you.’

  He laughs. It is a lovely rolling sound that seems like it will never end, half giggle, half song.

  ‘Seriously. I thought she was making you up. Teasing me. She makes stuff up sometimes. Why haven’t I seen you before?’

  ‘And yet I’ve seen you. And I’ve heard a lot about you already.’

  ‘We should wake Emily up.’

  ‘Should we?’

  I glance back at our window, the dark glass there, the silence behind it. He is real or I am asleep. I have an overpowering urge to touch him. To feel that his skin is warm and alive. If I were to climb back into bed now I would not believe this in the morning.

  There is a moon, but it is only a muted glow through a high, fine layering of cloud that now drifts, dreamlike, across the starscape. Sometimes I wake in the night and my sister’s bed is empty. Sometimes she is up and pacing in the lounge room. Sometimes she is out in the yard. I have caught glimpses of her behind the curtain, calmer when she is confronted by the open space, acres of ground used for nothing but running cattle. Scrub and high dead grass and anthills the size of bicycles.

  One particular night I looked out to see her crouching by the fence with her hands stretched through it, her fingers curling around the sense of freedom that lies outside. The bedroom window was ajar, the cold wind creeping through the chink in the armour of our house. When I pressed my face against the glass and made a shade of my hands I could see that she was speaking, to herself or to someone else. To Raphael, perhaps. Yes; in hindsight it might have been Raphael. There might have been someone standing hidden behind the tree line.

  Raphael raises his hand. It would be an easy thing to take it, to feel his fingers in mine, to know he is real with flesh and blood and heat. It would be easy enough. I cross my arms over my chest. I am wearing a summer nightdress and I am suddenly aware of my chest, the puffiness under the thin cotton. I hunch my shoulders, clutching my
ribcage.

  ‘I’m not dressed. I shouldn’t be outside.’

  ‘That,’ says Raphael, ‘is the adventure. Snakes in the grass, dingos hunting, cane toads underfoot. Alive, right?’

  ‘Did Emily give you a key?’

  ‘Emily,’ he says then, looking over my shoulder to the window, Emily asleep behind it. ‘Do we wake Emily?’

  I am outside at night in my nightdress and if my grandmother found me here I cannot bear the thought of what would happen. And what if Emily wakes and finds me outside with her friend? Her Raphael?

  ‘I’ve got to go back,’ I say.

  ‘No.’

  ‘I’ll get in trouble. This is awful.’

  Talking to a strange boy in the dark, in my nightdress. I take a step back towards the house.

  ‘If you stay with me nothing bad will happen. I promise you.’

  Emily’s Raphael. Raphael belonging to Emily. My heart is racing now. I inch backwards, keeping an eye on him. If I turn my back on him what might happen?

  I turn and run the last few steps up to the veranda, taking several of the concrete stairs at a time and closing the door behind me. I lean on it and slide the bolt across. He was inside. I woke and he was there. Simple as that. My face feels too hot. I put my hand onto my forehead. Maybe I have a fever and Raphael is just an invention of my struggling brain.

  I peer through the glass. It is dark outside but I can see him. Pale, his hair like something shattered and swept into a pile. I watch as he reaches into his jeans pocket and takes something out, a pouch of tobacco. It must be difficult to reach into it and balance the pack, take a paper out and roll, but he does it so smoothly it is like a ballet of his fingers. He puts the pouch away and lights the end of his cigarette, the thing glows then dies then glows again as he sucks on it. He is staring directly at the house, a solid thing, not a figment of some illness.