Steeplechase

by Krissy Kneen

  There is water up past our ankles. We are wearing our wet shoes and it doesn’t matter that our bare shins are covered in mud. I put tea tree oil on my legs but it will be gone by now, washed away, the leeches will find me.

  We walk till we reach the far end of our property. The ground has become a lake. There are no islands of grass here. There is just a knee-deep sea for us to wade in. I can feel the tug of the current at my feet. This part of our land is now a river. She stands in the shallows and clings to the fence for support. She whistles; we wait. He wouldn’t be able to ford the river anyway. Still she listens, swinging slightly on the top rung of the fence.

  I brace myself against it as my sister stoops and climbs through. Her raincoat catches briefly on a snag of barbed wire. She stands on the other side on the neighbour’s land and looks back towards me.

  ‘Shouldn’t we go back?’ I ask and she shakes her head.

  Our house is a tiny brown rectangle amongst a tangle of trees. From the back step, with binoculars, you can see this fence. In the past I’ve used the binoculars to spy on Flame, watching him lean through the fence to tear at the longer grass on our side. It’s impossible to tell if our grandmother is on the back step. Emily is waiting for me. Emily wants me to join her. She steps towards me and I flinch, but she touches the fence repeatedly. I watch her lips move as she counts. Fifteen touches and then she turns and looks away from me. I feel left out when she does this kind of thing, as if there is a game and no one has told me the rules.

  I bend and step through the barbed fence and my coat doesn’t rip. I don’t fall. Nothing bad happens. I am standing outside our property in the bright light of day. I refuse to imagine what the punishment would be but I am certain that disobeying our grandmother by leaving our property in broad daylight is an unimaginable sin.

  Emily says nothing, turns and continues her trudge. I have been here with Raphael, but in the darkness it seems different. In the daylight there is less difference between our side of the world and theirs. There is a small cluster of trees in the distance and Emily turns towards these. Horses like to rest under trees, particularly in this kind of thunderous rain.

  The water is higher here. It is a creek, a fast-moving creek, I have to use my hands to move through it. The water is inside my yellow rain pants, they are ballooning with liquid, and the shock of cold wets my knickers. I have a sudden urge to urinate. No one would notice. I could pee right into the water. I am an adult now, I remind myself, trying to control the pain in my bladder.

  Emily has forded the newly made creek. She shakes out her yellow pants and continues on without looking back. I scramble through the muddy water. A branch of a tree idles past with a dead native pigeon caught in its leaves. I slip on something and for a moment the water sweeps my feet out from under me. I regain my footing with difficulty.

  I want to turn around. This place, the neighbour’s property, makes me nervous. There will be locals here somewhere, that boy we met once, only now he will be a man, tall and broad and frightening. There are other people’s houses surrounding us, country boys like our Oma described to us, drinking beer and swearing and shooting pigs. I turn and look back towards our house but it has disappeared over the ridge. If our grandmother were to look through binoculars she would see nothing.

  I drag myself out of this new-formed river and trip up the ridge where my sister stands beside a tree. I am wet and don’t want to be out here, I want us to go home. I climb up to the motionless statue that is my sister. I have a sudden urge to tug at her yellow rain jacket like I would have when I was much younger. I am wet and there are probably leeches all over me and I want to go home and so I touch the back of her jacket just lightly and I would beg her to turn around. I would beg her to come home with me but something in her face makes me pause.

  The ridge is a bank. Beyond the bank is a river, a real one, a torrent, the kind you would whitewater-raft down in an adventure story. Emily is staring upstream to where the river becomes a sudden tangle of fallen trees. Foaming water churns past the blockage, sticks thump against each other, sucked under, thrown up again.

  When we were little we used to play at steeplechases. I remember it in my bones. I remember the horses falling as if I had actually watched them fall. Eyes white with fear, teeth bared. I remember the pitiful shapes of the fallen and the dead, although I never really saw them fall at all.

  They didn’t look like this, fat and bobbing, barrel-chested. There wasn’t this single hoof aimed skyward, these branches wrapped like a thorny skirt around chestnut flanks.

  I imagine how the dry creekbed filled, new rain washing straight over the hardened earth. The mountains upstream and the tiny rivulets feeding it, gathering power, the sudden force of the water, the sheer volume of it following the old creekbed, a wall of water that could knock even a strong horse off his feet. Or maybe it was a slow swelling, finding its shape as Emily and I stood at the fence calling and calling and Flame did his best to swim across. Maybe it was an uprooted tree travelling slowly, its roots a net, a surprise ending. Hooves kicking out against the trip of branches, the white of his eyes bulging in surprise.

  My sister’s raincoat is slick under my fingers. I hold it tight but it is an inert thing. She doesn’t turn or blink or breathe. I tug on her coat one more time and my fingers slip and then she turns and it is her face but it is not her face at all.

  My sister’s face is gone and this demon of fury and horror has taken her place. Perhaps if I had the right thing to say, to make the world good again it would be all right. But my sister stares and I find I can say nothing at all. I open my mouth, but there is only the rain coming in.

  Dear B

  An old man pedals a bicycle with a tray attached. There is a train of children following him, reaching out with chubby little hands to stroke and to touch. The tray is filled with bottles and cages and bowls. A guinea pig blinks through the bars, there are birds and little grass thatched cages on grass strings. In a shallow bowl a handful of tiny turtles climb over each other, little clawed legs struggling to gain purchase on the curved walls of their cell. A boy picks one up and shakes it towards his friend. She shrieks and claps and the old man spits onto the ground and shouts something that makes the boy set the turtle back in its glass entrapment. The children peel away but others join them. I watch as the entourage slowly winds its way between bikes and scooters, pedestrians and motorcycles till they are swallowed up by the crowd and disappear.

  I wonder where my sister has gone. I wait at her place eating plain white bread, which it seems I am able to stomach without feeling too wretched. I make tea but pour that down the sink and replace it with water from the cooler in the kitchen.

  I walk a little way, glance in shops. It should be easy enough to work out the prices of things but I am confused. In my head it seems that the hand-embroidered silk scarves are very cheap but then in the next shop a mass produced paper lantern seems to be not much less than the scarf. A printed T-shirt is four times the price of both of these things added together. I massage the side of my head, which has begun to throb.

  Still no sister. There is nothing in the refrigerator except three bottles of Tsingtao beer and a can of tonic water. My stomach lurches when I think about food but it’s been a while since the toast. The bed smells of sweat and faintly of tobacco. The vat of filtered water is almost empty and I draw down a small glass and sip it gingerly. The smell of cooking wafts in through the kitchen window, pungent Chinese spices. I breathe through my mouth, battling another wave of nausea.

  Outside in the little alleyway leading to my sister’s flat a neighbour has filled a plastic trough with water and put a small upturned bowl in the bottom. A turtle perches on it, a pet I suppose, although maybe it has been bought for a particular meal. Turtle soup, turtle dumplings. I sidestep the trough and find my way out to the street. A young man throws a ball to a pale-eyed husky pup, slinks back into the open door of a place called Bye Bye Disco. He falls into an overstuffed couch, picks up
a piece of rope and dangles it towards the dog, letting it nip and leap and tug on the end.

  There are no customers in this little bar, just the young man and a friend drinking gin and tonics. The friend lies across the couch looking as if he is dying of consumption. I manage a thin smile, but the young man glances in my direction briefly and turns back to the game with the puppy. A little further down the street another man is threading things onto bamboo skewers. There is already an array of pre-cooked delights to choose from. Scorpions and what look like centipedes, strips of meat, long snaky ribbons that might be thick noodles although why you would put a noodle on a stick and fry it is beyond me. I should eat, but even the smell of this food is enough to make the bile rise up into my throat.

  The entry to the little café is down a step and past a little thrown-together pond. There are goldfish swimming through the tiny waterfall, another smaller turtle treading water, lifting itself up onto a shiny rock.

  ‘Ni hao.’ The girls at the counter are friendly. The window seat is free and I settle into it, rest my head in my hands. When the waitress delivers the menu I try not to look as if I might vomit on her.

  ‘How are you today?’ she asks. Her English is heavily accented but the words are recognisable.

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I tell her, and she nods.

  ‘Very well thank you.’ And there her English ends. Since my Mandarin has not even begun, I point at the photo of a glass of soda and she nods. I point at what looks like a piece of melon and she nods again. Fruit and water. At least this is what I hope I have ordered. She takes the menu away and I rest my cheek on my arm and gaze out the window to the busy street.

  Across the road a door opens. I am distracted from my low-level nausea for long enough to watch a tiny woman shuffle out onto the busy hutong.

  It is hard to tell how old she is. Doll-like, slightly hunched, a face that could be seventy or a hundred. She looks from left to right and back again, seemingly a little dazed. I can just see an old gas stove behind her, a frypan balanced on one of the burners. This is her house. She stoops and drops a yellow plastic rubbish bag near the closest tree. She is wearing slippers, a housecoat, everything in shades of brown, but perhaps the housecoat was once green. It looks too warm for such a hot day. She shuffles across to the tree at the other side of her door, finds a scrap of paper with her toe and kicks it till it falls amongst the tree roots. A small act of civic pride that marks this as her street. Maybe she has lived here all her life, and what she must have seen in that time. The sudden social upheaval that was the cultural revolution, this new encroaching trudge of capitalism, the gentrification of her hutong. She checks her yellow plastic bag. Yes. It is still there. She turns and shuffles back inside and shuts the door behind her. The window into her world is closed. It is just a wall between two shops with no indication that anything lies behind it.

  I clutch my soda water, sip gingerly. The bubbles settle my stomach. If I think about it too much I am overwhelmed by a wave of nausea but it is nice to be up and out and sitting quietly. I catch a waft from a nearby public toilet, a hint of shit and spice tinged with urine. I breathe through my mouth, take little sips of water. I open my book, flatten out the spine. The words blur into each other. I close it and slip it back into my handbag. Staring out the café window seems a lot less demanding at the moment. I watch some unusually well-dressed Chinese girls giggling together. They each have little white ears clipped into their uniform black bobs. One of them hops, makes cute little paws of her hands. Another tries to remove the ears, which seem to be sewn onto bobby pins, but the other girls slap at her hands, secure the ears more firmly. They skitter away, shrieking and pointing towards a dessert bar that has a huge queue of kids lined up outside it.

  He is leaning on the tree with the yellow plastic bag at the base of it. It is unusual to see a western face, but not a complete surprise. A few other foreigners have been wandering down this famous hutong glancing at their Lonely Planet China or their Top Ten Beijing. But there is something familiar about this face. I feel myself beginning to smile, a greeting, my hand half-raised before I realise I don’t know him at all. Not one of my students, he is too old, perhaps as old as I am, a middle-aged man with some grey coming, in a crumpled light cotton suit.

  He taps a cigarette onto his palm. Camel unfiltered. I am struck by a wave of nostalgia. The taste of tobacco sharp on my tongue. Filthy habit, but I do remember it fondly. Learning to smoke. Smoking and kissing. I touch my front tooth with my finger and wish I hadn’t, more germs for my stomach to battle. I wipe my lips on the back of my hand.

  The man lights his cigarette, bends and tucks the dead matchstick into the yellow bag. He turns and looks directly at me and he smiles before slipping the packet of Camels into the top pocket of his jacket and walking off down the hutong.

  I know him. I am certain I know him. I half stand. I could just say hello, see if he recognises me from somewhere. The idea of someone, something from home is so comforting. If he doesn’t know me at least we could have a conversation in English. I settle back onto the chair. I watch his back disappear into the crowd. The door opposite opens once more and the old woman emerges, shuffles over to her yellow plastic bag, bends, picks it up by the handles, settles the dust and rubbish inside it, puts it back down and nudges it with her foot. She straightens and peers around at the crowd seeming both startled and hesitant. The changes. And how quickly things might change again. She shuffles back into her house and shuts the door.

  I finish the last of my watermelon. The skin has been sliced and curled back on itself, delicate green fingers. A fancy wave. It is comforting to have something in my stomach. I feel a slight rush as from a drug, the sugars jangling in my bloodstream. I glance out of the window, hoping to see that ancient woman straightening her bag of dust again, and he is back. Leaning against her door. It is as if he knew I would be searching for the old lady and put himself in a place where he would be noticed. My psychiatrist would tell me to re-think that. I am not supposed to indulge my tendency to paranoia. So it is a coincidence then, but an odd one, that same familiar face, a name on the tip of my tongue.

  I search through my wallet and find some notes to leave on the table, enough. I stand and move towards the door.

  ‘Xie xie.’

  ‘Xie xie,’ the waitress says back to me. ‘Bye bye.’

  I dodge a gaggle of small children, a car, a bicycle. When I have made the small but fraught journey across the road the man is no longer anywhere in sight.

  It is easier to ride than to walk. Just a quick lap of the hutong. I step up onto the rusty frame. The chain creaks, the tyres are sluggish. They are probably flat or else I am too heavy. Fat white girl on a bicycle. Still, the slight breeze that is generated by my body moving through the air is pleasant. A car beeps behind me and I pull over to a shop door, rest my foot on the stair. Nothing happens fast here; I am struck by the lack of road rage. Cars beep, bicycles chime but this is to warn the rest of the traffic, a little burst of care, not impatience.

  I sway through the strolling throng, light headed. A fug of stench wafts from a hutong toilet. My guts turn, I breathe through my mouth. I will not be sick. To do so I would have to walk into that wall of stench to vomit into a vulva-shaped ceramic hole in the ground. I ride past as quickly as I can. Breathe in the slightly cleaner air of a Korean cold noodle restaurant. Another barrage of unfamiliar smells, but I am holding up well. When I see him I have regained my confidence. His hands are thrust into the pockets of his shorts, sweat under the arms of his T-shirt.

  Raphael. I know it is Raphael. I also know that it can’t be Raphael.

  Shared Delusional Syndrome. Folie à deux. I know what was wrong with me. I have been diagnosed and there is a certain relief in having a name for your troubles. I am cured now. The madness belonged to Emily, and I borrowed it from her for a while but now I am sane. This cannot be Raphael but here, looking at him close up, there is no question. This is him, here, after all these year
s.

  A gaggle of teenagers run in front of me pointing into the window of a shop and I am forced to step off the bike before I tumble off it. He has ducked into a shop. That is the only place he could go. I walk my bike slowly past the rows of windows. I know he will be here somewhere, but when I walk the length of the street I haven’t seen him at all. I turn, and perhaps that is him, vanishing down another alleyway. I climb back on the bike and ride after him, past him, but it is not the same man. It is someone much older, not the man I saw moments ago. Not Raphael. Not my Raphael. Not Emily’s Raphael at all.

  I suppose this foray is too soon. I am not well. There are toilets on every street and alley in the hutongs. That stink of human shit, the steady reek of urine. I will have to use one now. There is no helping this. Inside, I breathe through my nose. There are little porcelain recesses in the floor but no partitions between them. Squat toilets, rows of them. No toilet paper anywhere and I will need toilet paper. In the corner there is a basket of soiled tissues. I have tissues in my pocket. There is no one else in the room. If I hurry I can be done with it before anyone comes in.

  I ease my pants down and squat at the furthest porcelain bowl from the door. It is the closest I can come to hiding. Still, I find it difficult to concentrate on the task at hand. I am almost ready when an old woman shambles into the toilet block. She looks as old as my grandmother, perhaps older. She is small with a face wizened like a fallen apple. You can barely see her face through all the wrinkles. She is hunched almost in half and at first I imagine that her sight has gone because she shuffles over towards me. There are rows and rows of these toilet holes and yet she moves past them all and stands facing me where I am squatting. She lifts her skirt a little with one hand and then she lowers herself, rocking forward, backward, I imagine she might fall but when she is at her most precarious she reaches out with both of her hands and holds fast to my shoulders and makes the last of the crouch in this way.