ROUGH MAGIC
This book is a memoir. It reflects the author’s recollections of experiences over time.
Copyright © 2019 by Lara Prior-Palmer
First published in the United States in 2019
by Catapult (catapult.co)
All rights reserved
Jacket design by Nicole Caputo
Book design by Wah-Ming Chang
ISBN: 978-1-948226-19-6
Catapult titles are distributed to the trade
by Publishers Group West
Phone: 866-400-5351
Library of Congress Control Number: 2018950159
Printed in the United States of America
1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2
To Alfie
But this rough magic
I here abjure, and when I have required
Some heavenly music, which even now I do,
To work mine end upon their senses that
This airy charm is for, I’ll break my staff,
Bury it certain fathoms in the earth,
And deeper than did ever plummet sound
I’ll drown my book.
—The Tempest
ROUGH MAGIC
Contents
Chapter I
Chapter II
Chapter III
Chapter IV
Chapter V
Chapter VI
Chapter VII
Chapter VIII
Chapter IX
Chapter X
Chapter XI
Chapter XII
Chapter XIII
Chapter XIV
Chapter XV
Chapter XVI
Chapter XVII
Chapter XVIII
Chapter XIX
Chapter XX
Chapter XXI
Chapter XXII
Chapter XXIII
Chapter XXIV
Chapter XXV
Chapter XXVI
Chapter XXVII
Chapter XXVIII
Chapter XXIX
Chapter XXX
Chapter XXXI
Chapter XXXII
Chapter XXXIII
Chapter XXXIV
Chapter XXXV
Chapter XXXVI
Chapter XXXVII
Chapter XXXVIII
Chapter XXXIX
Chapter XL
Chapter XLI
Author’s Note
Acknowledgments
I
It was May 2013 when I was cooped up in an attic in Austria, au pairing for a family with six Ferraris. They lived in a converted hotel in the jaws of an Alpine valley.
“Lara? Larah!”
Every morning the mother shrieked my name up the endless floors. “Time to feed the baby!”
I had taken the role to practice my German, but she only spoke in English. My jobs varied from sitting with the toddler to vacuuming up the dead skin that snowed from his father’s bottom.
The family never left their house except to get in their cars, which they kept tucked up in the garage. They viewed their valley through window frames as you would a photograph. So sedentary a lifestyle in such physical surroundings made me itch. At night I hatched plans to creep up the mountain and slide down the other side into Switzerland, yet the mother looked appalled when I so much as suggested running to the church and back.
By the time she sacked me a month later, my body was rusty and yearning for usage. I returned to the silent butterflies of an England on the brink of summer, seeking an experience unlike any I’d had before. In theory, this ought not to have been difficult. The most exciting moment in my eighteen years had been collecting chickens from Dorset on the train and wrapping them up in wine crates for Christmas presents.
The next month, June, marked a year since my release from high school. Fleeing the red bricks had been my dream for years—at fourteen, I had thought of myself as the finished article, ready to either have babies or break free (to where I couldn’t say, though for many years I had been fixated on becoming a burglar). Despite my conviction that more education would poison me like pesticide on a lush forest, I had remained in London until I passed my final exams. Strangely, the dissolution of structure thereafter unnerved me.
What was it about turning into an adult? The color drained from the days and life became a calendar. I floated in a debris of possible dates and implausible plans, with neither the funding nor the fervor to propel me onwards. Friends were busy with jobs or university, inclined to holiday on beaches rather than accompany me to Kyrgyzstan—a place I fantasized about. Meanwhile, I hadn’t heard back from my application to go organic farming in Wales, nor from the orphanage placement in Ethiopia. Dead-end jobs and equestrian competitions came and went. I moved through the month of my birthday without any fixed direction.
It was a warm city day when, for the umpteenth time, I cast my rod into the depths of Google as if the internet might contain my future. After opening and abandoning endless tabs, I brought up the page of a horse race.
The passing London Underground train shook the building as I leaned into the photograph—long-maned ponies streaming over green steppes, space poured wide and free—in Mongolia. The open-voweled sounds of the word matched the freedom the country conjured in my mind. I couldn’t place Mongolia in history, nor could I place it on the map. The magnolia tree outside the window had passed full bloom; its pink petals were turning brown on the pavement. For a while my head merged these two words—Mongolia, magnolia; Mongolia, magnolia.
I had spotted the Mongol Derby online many years before, but the entry fee was exorbitant (around $6,000 at the time) and I knew I’d never afford it, at least not until I was towing some dull job along in my thirties. Sadly, the price was now even higher, thirty riders were already signed on, and the entry deadline for the August race had passed. I moved the mouse to quit the page, blinking back to the ponies for a pause.
Here was a truly peculiar invention: a 1,000-kilometer race on twenty-five wild ponies, a new steed for every 40-kilometer stage to ensure the endurance fell on the humans, not the horses. A Pony Express–style format that mimicked Chinggis Khan’s postal system but seemed from afar more like a perfect hodgepodge of Snakes and Ladders and the Tour de France on unknown bicycles. A competition they deemed “the world’s longest and toughest horse race.”
I moved the mouse back into the page and worked out there were seven weeks until the start gun. The entry portal seemed to still be open, despite the deadline having passed.
Mustn’t squish the mole that lives in my heart.
“Apply”—click.
II
Why do humans put so much thought into some decisions yet plunge into others like penguins into freezing ocean? Are we met with a sudden urge to avoid the direct path to middle age and subsequent visions of growing old in a lonely world of cats? I certainly have a fear of falling into the routines of my elders—their eggshell worlds of dangers and do-nots. But maybe I had a simpler desire to settle something unsaid, away from home. Or a longing to be wild and snort about like a horse.
No single reason seems satisfactory. I want to hand myself over to something, but I can’t tell what creates that need to leap nor what decides its timing.
In fact, maybe this was me at age eighteen: a bundle of urges, a series of plunges. I was loud and quick. I thrived on being the loser in the anecdotes I recounted—caught without a ticket on the Underground, shouted at unjustly by an anxious teacher. I bent the world this way and that—schlepping barefoot through London, to school in my pajamas, where I threw pens in class and blurted my frankest thoughts. What, besides a diagnosis of attention seeking, did any of this point to? I couldn’t yet tell.
If the fashion in which I applied to and signed on for the Mongol Derby was c
haracteristically thoughtless, the event itself would, perversely, leave me deep in thought. Grasses and a blue-domed sky. Bodies and wind and rain and pain. Wide, open prairies, and twenty-five ponies saying, Who are you? and Who are we?
By the time I took the return planes to London, words were tumbling out of me. In the writing I could mull the matter over, as a cow ruminates her grass. We had been given ten days to ride twenty-five semiwild ponies a long way around Mongolia. Why the need to go all that way and do such a thing?
I am telling a story about myself. There’s a British disease called modesty, which nearly stops me from sharing what I’ve written. After all, this is about an event that seemed to go well. Somehow, implausibly, against all the odds, I won a race labeled the longest and toughest in the world—a race I’d entered on a whim—and became the youngest person and first female ever to have done so. We read of sporting victories in the newspapers, but what about all we cannot see? It’s easy to forget the thudded moments of hopelessness involved in a journey, one’s deepest difficulties slowly made clear.
III
“She is not going to Mongolia, Julia! Julia, do you hear me?”
My father had discovered my plan to ride in the world’s longest horse race and was insistent I wouldn’t go. I listened from the next room as he bellowed at Mum in the kitchen.
“It’s too”—his foot stomped the floor—“opportunistic!”
Dad had encouraged opportunism in the past, but when it came to horses, he was keen for me to steer clear. He often told people how he’d made it a condition of marriage that my mother give up horse riding. Years after the summer of the Derby, I would overhear him shouting at her once more. “Lara’s been to Stanford University, Julia. I am not having her riding horses.”
My father, Simon, is a large-foreheaded man with Victorian characteristics, who grew up alongside his horse-mad sister, Lucinda. He is anti-riding, anti-horses: waste of time, waste of money (and please don’t talk about them at mealtimes). Aunt Lucinda’s Olympic riding career had coincided with their father going into overdraft, while Dad worked long hours in the City. The story of him tying his sister to the oak tree when they were little circulates frequently in the family.
“Julia, are you listening?” I heard him move closer to Mum at the sink.
Lodged in the thicket of my father’s anger, we would often find ourselves flapping with no clear way out. Mum quietly carried on with the washing up. If my father is a man who speaks clearly and interrupts often, my mother can be the catatonic opposite.
“Oh, I like prattling in the background,” she says whenever I tell her she’s mumbling, though she once followed up by saying, “I think I need to go on an assertiveness course.”
Mum is generally taken with the idea of horses (my older brothers used to jest that she married Dad just to get closer to his sister) and had been all wide-eyed when I first mentioned the Mongol Derby to her. Although my father’s fury had me bracing myself, it also summoned a sense of victory, since his anger seemed to speak from a powerlessness. Simon had no way of preventing me from going to Mongolia.
It seemed you needed to know how to ride to do this race, but the type of riding you did—the particular discipline—didn’t matter. I couldn’t say I myself had grown up riding—my parents did not ride, nor did my three brothers. Although Aunt Lucinda set me up with lessons when I pleaded for them aged seven, I lived and went to school in the city so horses were confined to Saturdays. More recently I’d been able to try Lucinda’s sport, eventing, but that only required riding for a mere hour or two at a time. A month after my nineteenth birthday, I would arrive in Ulaanbaatar, the capital of Mongolia, to discover that half the Derby competitors were experienced in endurance, which involved riding up to 160 kilometers from dawn until dusk. I had never even heard of such a sport.
One of my father’s fears had always been that I might turn out to be a horsewoman like his sister. Unfortunately for him, by my teenage years I sneezed and itched when around the creatures—symptoms of uncontainable excitement rather than an allergy—and could possibly be classified as a pony girl: I dreamed of saucy centaurs. I’d once hallucinated, while sober, an azure blue horse cantering towards me. I was truly taken with the romance of those rolling English parklands where my aunt laid down her horse histories.
Yet my equestrian imagination was tethered to my urban home, a hearty part of me city-slick, London-sly. My schoolfriends and I grew up fast in the capital, leaping across it alone on the Tube and pacing its streets with elastic courage. But I felt empty in the concrete nowheres. Truly, I only loved the city for letting me leave—on Fridays, we eased our way out through darkened traffic jams, arriving centuries later in the village of Appleshaw.
Appleshaw floats in a shallow valley where the tameness of Hampshire stops and the wilds of Wiltshire begin. Weekends there sent me out to make mud-balls with my brothers, walk miles without purpose, and swim away from time. The city basin, tasked with curating our futures, drew us back every Sunday night. My brothers and I slotted into the week as dirty plates do into a dishwasher. The routine days crawled by until the eventual swing back to Appleshaw on Friday, holy Friday.
In this way, privilege had us always on the move, and it shaped me—an in-betweener ungrounded, too spacey for London, too colorful for the country, probably suspended in particles above some motorway between the two. Certainly the M3 has more of me than most places do.
Within a week of my application, Katy, the Mongol Derby organizer, returned from plotting the course on the steppe and sent me an acceptance email. I might’ve been gleeful were it not for the phenomenal entry fee. She said most riders had entered the previous year with sponsorship secured. For several nights, preparing to let the dream decay with the remaining magnolia leaves.
There’s no knowing why Katy gave me 50 percent off when I asked for a discount, nor why she granted another $650 off when I couldn’t afford the halved amount. Maybe it had something to do with the fact that I had name-dropped my aunt, Lucinda Green, on my application—Katy turned out to be a “bit of a fan.” Or perhaps it was my opening sentence: I am extremely competitive and want to become the youngest (am 18) person to finish.
I trotted down to the bank with my head held delusionally high and poured out a lifelong collection of pennies from my checkered plastic pig, hoping they would top up my balance to near enough the asked-for price. Prior to that, I had refused to spend any of my savings, and it’s endearing to me now that I was willing to hand all of it over for a horse race I might not last very long in.
I was expecting quite the holiday—a green steppe stuffed full of feisty ponies, with hunky riders from all over the world. One to trump the sightseeing and sunbathing holidays I was used to. Earlier that year I had wound my way through India, stopping at temples highlighted by a Lonely Planet guidebook, viewing the world through a manicured prism as any good tourist does—but my eyes had run out of space. By the time I applied for the Derby, I was no longer keen on touring the world’s buildings with awestruck stares. My thighs were strong and my heart was raw, yearning for my own motion.
IV
“You won’t enjoy it.”
I held my tongue.
“Sure,” the voice on the telephone continued, “it’s phenomenal, but the accidents last year were horrific. Google them.”
It was high July when I rang Lucy, a past competitor. Down the line came factual splatter: broken ribs, amputated finger, cracked pelvises, punctured lung, torn ligaments, broken collarbones. On she went as I watched a ladybird crawl up the lamp at my side: bucking ponies, fraying girths, sicknesses, extreme dehydration, getting lost, not fun, don’t expect fun.
I couldn’t just slump there in that dusty Appleshaw chair and roll my eyes. Mongolia was coming for me in a month.
How many riders finished the race during her year?
“I think thirty-five of us started. . . . Seventeen finished.”
I thanked her and said goodbye, feeling my
wrist wilt as I dropped the phone back onto the receiver. I wanted to pull out of the race. Summer had swallowed its charm.
In the kitchen I told my older brother Arthur the news as he traipsed on by.
“Oh my.” He shivered and dashed upstairs, relieved not to be me.
I could not pull out of the race—I had paid for it and written letters asking for charitable donations in the name of it—so I let the terror energize me instead. Asked afterwards if I would dare attempt the race again, I’d reply that I could never again be scared enough to do so. The supernatural power of fearing the unknown stunned me into a state of readiness. With four weeks to go, I launched my attack.
Although my application claimed I’d been riding five horses a day, this was fiction. I had been au pairing the toddler in Austria.
“Never too late,” declared Mum as she poured herself another cup of tea.
I volunteered at the local stud, where I began riding three or four horses a day. I also started playing tennis again and running farther than usual. It is a horse’s habit to pace about when she feels a storm approaching. Winding herself up seems to ready her for the coming saga. Now that I’ve forgotten the accompanying terror, I long for the manic flurry of those July days, hopping from horse to horse as I edged towards the race. The whole affair indulged my existence.
Bartramia, a small and racy gray, was the closest creature to a Mongolian pony I could find at the stud. I rode her through all the valleys—even rode her bareback once. Her canter quickened as my calves clung to her full-moon tummy, my boots ripping through the knee-high ragwort. Onwards she flew, a wood ahead, no sign of slowing.
“Woah!” I shouted into the wind at her ears—could I bear this for 1,000 kilometers? “Woah now!”
At the last second she jinked left, braking on the turn as my chest jolted over her shoulders, leaving me hanging on with my thighs as she picked up her gallop again, on up the hill along the rim of the woods.
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