Rough Magic

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Rough Magic Page 8

by Lara Prior-Palmer


  I thought rarely of Devan. She was too far ahead to bother me at this point. The mass of my thoughts were only half formed and too dull for recording. As Georgie, Kirsten, and I rode the shoulder of a plain, a trio once more, I did have one question nagging me.

  “Has it crossed anyone’s mind what position we might be in right now?”

  At my last count, I’d been in twenty-ninth place with Brolly, so anything twenty-eighth or upwards would be a relief.

  “Yeah,” replied Kirsten and Georgie in chorus. “We’re fourth, fifth, and sixth.”

  It sounded as though they’d had this worked out for hours.

  In a later silence, I tell Kirsten and Georgie I am never leaving the tracks again, not for the next 900 kilometers. Our perfectionist GPSs are sending us in naively straight lines, while the tracks curve safe round the bogs, mountains, and rivers. They have been etched out by people who pass through often, for centuries on horse hooves, lately on motorbike tires. It’s strange to think I will only be passing through once, though I’ll return enough in memory.

  XVIII

  A veterinarian named Pete lumbers over the urtuu mudlands. After three hours of rainy trot, his smile is our treat. He says he’s surprised to find me intact—backpack, saddlebag, and pony all remembered and together. After I free the chestnut of his sweaty saddle, a man with a grin ambles him over to the horse lines for rest. In this way I move on, and so gladly does the pony. Strung to the ropes lie the next lot in wait, but the clouds are low and I feel no great draw to any of them, being tired of all the moving.

  Maggie suggests I eat. I still can’t tell what her exact function as steward is. In theory, she’s spectating a live show of humans slowly falling to pieces.

  I scarper to the dim-lit ger, where people sit variously on beds, chairs, and floor around the brown central fire, but no one sits at the rear, which is the place of honor. Kirsten’s head appears on the threshold while I’m slurping soupy noodles.

  “You coming, Lara?”

  “I think I’m going to eat these, be rude not to finish them—you go, you go.”

  Whatever caused the great hurry?

  Past-rider Lucy told me the food would be inedible, but I eat it all. I’m so hungry. If I’m served a sheep’s testicle, I will find it delicious, like my mother with a leftover apple stalk on the moor.

  I spent a fussy childhood pushing fish fingers into my pockets and fearing sauces that concealed cauliflower. This noodle soup is clear. It makes no attempt to hide the fatty meat. Later I’ll read of author Uuganaa Ramsay’s travels from her home in Mongolia to the United Kingdom, where she felt the pub soup tasted like dirty water and the orange juice made her twitch. She now lives in Glasgow and has written a memoir called Mongol, in which she reflects on bringing up her son—who has Down’s syndrome—in Scotland. Until recently, the word “Mongol” was used to describe someone with Down’s in English, and part of the memoir investigates the lingering prejudice Uuganaa and her son encounter in the UK.

  I gulp while the doctor drones on, stroking his beard at the lagging-behind of Georgie’s twin, who apparently held second place to Devan on the first leg yesterday.

  “I cannot believe Georgie Johnston is ahead of her brother. How did that happen?”

  He has seen James’s muscles and decided they mean victory. His voice is heavy, loud. I should be working to undermine his private-school ease, but I have noodles and a race on my brain. I play the game in my head instead, imagining him lying down—but even then he’s controlled and bold, so I envisage looking into him long enough that his eyes shift away, and finally, I land on a satisfying vision of him snoozing, retired from his chattering throne. People are lovely when they let go of their faces.

  When the doctor turns to ask me a question, I’m distracted by his horrid good looks. I mumble a diversionary reply. He and Maggie lean back with their eyebrows raised in laughter, and I turn away with a noodle on my lower lip, waiting for their confusion to settle. I’ve got no idea what I’ll say next.

  Shouts from the outside. Through the cinematic frame of the door, a stocky Black Beauty bucks his way through a rodeo show, twisting his body in defiance. A man is yelping in delight at the other end of the rope. This is Georgie’s next horse. I give thanks for the food and scuttle out to find mine, settling on a dun, a tan horse with a black stripe down his back.

  Four o’clock. Ten hours into this alarmingly long second day, we tear away from the urtuu. I tense my legs against the strain and flex of the dun’s torrential gallop. Georgie’s horse leads the charge, no sign of Kirsten ahead. I suppose we’re less Fun Bus, more “chasing pack,” now.

  From a camp, two women and their boys lean their bodies back to wave and shout. We return their greetings with gooseberry eyes, holding tight to our charges. If incessant galloping was how the Mongol soldiers’ days were spent, I ask myself if they just wanted all of the space and none of the kingdoms. Movement without settlement. I imagine they moved on happily and swiftly after devastating libraries in Baghdad and irrigation systems in Iran, obsessed with paths rather than places.

  “Where are you going?” shouts a Buddhist monk at a horse and rider in an oft-told story.

  “Ask my horse,” shouts the rider.

  Their bolt is too fast for us to check our direction. We wait for it to run its course. At first standstill, Georgie studies the maps while I stare at the sky and feel the dun pony’s breathing in my tummy. Quickly she links up to a gallop again, taking my pony with her. On this matter we’re in conflict: Georgie wants to let the ponies run as long as they want, while I’d like to contain their boundlessness and preserve the energy they’re expending as we shoot through merging lands.

  We come to an unfinished road and ride up its side. See how it cuts through the earth. As a typical tourist, I cry inwardly at the concrete. I’ve heard they call it progress. Why a single road here should upset me I can’t say—as though this place needs to be pristine while my city back in England is a blocked nose of concrete, trapping a whole mass of green beneath it. Ulaanbaatar too. Such unsoft stuff. I think we feel braver for it in London, bigger inside it, whatever braver and bigger might lead to.

  International companies are building the infrastructure they need to mine newly discovered minerals and metals in Mongolia. As ever, capital seems to require the whole earth for its market.

  From their tarmac mound, two lonely roadworkers beckon us but we gallop on, away from the day’s bad weather. Georgie’s map book points out a temple dedicated to the seventeenth-century Buddhist leader Zanabazar, slightly off route. We haven’t the time to stop for a visit, but I do wonder. How can a temple rise up out of grass and wind and silence?

  When the Mongolian People’s Republic was established in 1924, purists bombarded monasteries and temples, erasing a touchstone of Buddhist culture. I can’t continue beyond the word “culture” without feeling a bit ill. It’s difficult to write about, so much like a jellyfish in a net—only parts sift out, and most gets destroyed in the defining of it, especially by a foreigner like me, with my knowing tones and reliance on “facts.”

  Many temples are merely converted gers, which probably survived in disguise. The temple to Zanabazar, though, is a building that pulled through. It was founded in the 1790s by Bogd Khan, Mongolia’s first lama king, who also created the world’s first national park, Bogd Khan Uul.

  Blue sky, blue sky, where have you been—haunting the south with your terrible gleam. After thirty hours in hiding, the sun reveals herself and we pause at a river marsh to let our friends gulp shiny water. Georgie walks on with her pony. I hear his hooves plopping through water above sanded pebbles, and the sound of a still evening as he reaches the other side.

  Up the simple ridge we go, leaning forward over the ponies’ shoulders. I have named this horse Dunwoody, mainly because I have a lot of spare time in which to think up such things. It’s Richard the photographer’s surname, and I pronounce it Dun-woo-dee, as in “woohoo,” though I’m
not sure that’s right. The habit of naming helps me regulate the journey, like a botanist who navigates nature via Latin plant appellations. Structure.

  Herders here usually refer to their horses by color because there are too many to name. Besides, one horse can arrive in the world brown and depart it white, where another might evolve in one winter from dun to gray. Herders are attentive to their changing appearances. It’s a nice template for imagining a being without fixing its identity, given we each travel through so many in our lives.

  The hill leaves Dunwoody wheezing. I let him slow in case he’s having a breakdown. Georgie rides on ahead to increase her chances of making the fifth urtuu before 8:30 p.m. Meanwhile, Dunwoody indulges my sympathy, insisting on a grass feast every five strides. I’m only half engaged, occasionally shipping forth letters of persuasion to his ears. Dear Pony, you do not know what time is. Time is being early. Let us get going? Tufts of grass, banana-skin hats, whatever else—the whole charade—please come along. I like the grass too, like to let it amaze me.

  8:15 p.m. Some 30 kilometers ahead, Devan misnavigates her route from urtuu 5 to urtuu 6, riding the long way around. In her interview with ABC before she began the race, she took pains to explain how her father, an ultramarathon runner and U.S. Marine, had been training her in navigation. “Endurance is in my blood,” she finished.

  Ever so slowly we inch towards the objects of distance, a mouthful of grass per three strides. By the time Dunwoody lollops me into the station, he is wearing a lipstick of green sauce. I peer forth to the corners of his mouth with a mixture of admiration and despair, like a mother leading a child home from an ice-cream-filled day.

  When I dismount, he moors his mouth to the ground and refuses to move. Pete the vet has to walk over to us to take the heart rate. Thirty seconds pass hushed as he holds the stethoscope to Dunwoody’s chest. Recalling the earlier hyperventilation, I think, Oh poop, we’ve overdone it, his rate’s too high. Pete turns to face me.

  “Well, forty-eight. That’s the lowest post-forty-kilometer heart rate I’ve ever taken on the Derby.”

  I do not notice who takes Dunwoody from me, nor do I think to inquire after him later. I run up the hill for the loo, and bound on past it to loosen my muscles—harp-string tight. At the ridge, the view is sky, the last of a blue evening. Horses surround the station, suspending it in a dome of calm. I take in the full view and decide that this, here, is truly the valley of nothingness. I seem to think the same in every earthly bowl we reach.

  Dear Ma,

  Two days have passed. We’ve got 800 kilometers left. I’m pinned to one question: How will I make it to the end of this race with knees that have taught themselves to throb (knees mend but tights don’t—Mrs. Nunes), a tummy clenched small (lunch is for wimps—I’ve read it somewhere), and sleep deprivation burrowing into my resolve (am certainly not dying—except very slowly like the rest of us)? I feel like a turnip that’s just been yanked from the earth. It’s as though this is life as they lit it, as they meant it to be before the beginning of time, but my body can’t get used to it.

  The sun has faded and I’ve retired to an eerie ger, where I’ve just been rolling up and down in my sleeping bag, bathing in an expanse of floor—so much room after last night’s chicken farm. Those riders are scattered across the steppe this evening, spidering the map beside hearts of fur.

  I am enjoying the movement from home to home, perhaps because you raised us into a cyclical life—yo-yoing between Appleshaw and London, I became fond of packing, collecting, rushing, racing, leaving things behind. Maybe it was excessive that I also liked moving between bedrooms in each place, but the beds of my absent brothers let me shake off any sodden thoughts collecting in my own room. You see, Ma, I think I stain the spots I inhabit. When I sit in a corner to write a letter, I can’t sit there again. It feels nice to avoid the memory of me—or maybe I just lust after the new.

  Ideally I’d forget our address because honestly I mistrust all that it means. When the Soviets tried to introduce arable farming to the steppe in the 1920s, nomads would often plant a plot and not return for the harvest. Obviously the Soviets were disrupting their way of life, and why should they yield? But also, why tie yourself to a place?

  “Perhaps my children will live in stone houses and walled towns—not I,” said some khan in devotion to tented life. The refusal to rely on the same patch of land to perform year in, year out, resonates with the idea that you can’t depend on one place—or one person—to keep producing the same effect. But why let their inconstancy disappoint, when you can simply move on?

  I can’t help thinking humans might not be the only ones who feel tied. What about buildings stuck on plots and trees planted in mud? None leads as mobile a life as a ger. The poor house in Appleshaw, fixed there in Hampshire. Though her stillness will help me to slow any galloping motion in my chest when I return, she herself might like to click her ligaments and leave England too.

  I sat cross-legged in the corner of the tent, watching Kirsten rummage in her pack while I munched my last fruit bars to stave off the exhaustion. The doctor had told Kirsten that her partner back in Perth thought she was still in the city hospital recovering from fainting on briefing day. Her mood was tempestuous as a result.

  Kirsten had reached the urtuu forty-five minutes before the cutoff time, but she hadn’t moved on. We feared that families between stations wouldn’t know about the race or expect guests. She’d only have made it a quarter of the way to the next urtuu before the trackers penalized her movement. We imagined she’d have had to sleep on cold ground, tying her pony’s legs in hobbles only half effective before worrying the night away, a vision of her horse hop-hop-hopping off without her.

  Despite all the tent space, the night felt hospital-like. I preferred to be either packed in or alone entirely. Around the tarred fire, crew members chatted about matters once normal to us—television shows, London riots, and then a car mechanic. The doctor held the limelight, splattering his predictable English lines about the ger, but nothing much could bother me since sleep was so near. When we English get to foreign countries, I think something happens to our sense of humor. It’s as though whatever it was our wit was created for disappears. Our chins quiver, our proud noses lead us through.

  Meanwhile, Richard was shuffling round the ger, shamelessly pouring out cups of Chinggis Khan vodka for riders. I accepted a cup even though it was likely to sour the pain in my muscles. Soon after, I overheard the doctor mention Richard and the Grand National in the same sentence. Oh my. Our photographer was a famous jockey. Did he win the Grand National? I asked my neighbors.

  The tent tripped over itself in the shock—how could I not know? He’d ridden in Britain’s biggest jump race fourteen consecutive years, won it twice in 1986 and ’94, the year I was born, and been three-time Champion Jockey. I looked at Richard anew. What was he doing here, mucking in at the whims of the earth when all the Isles’ racetracks awaited him?

  Lying on my tummy, I pressed my pen into Winnie-the-Pooh. I like writing down snippets of a day, not just to record the past, but to get a sense of the present by retraveling time up to my seated, ceased point. The notebook was wet and overwhelmed, but here was the only place I could speak as though I would never be heard and write as though the world had no reading, only words lodged with the eyeless gods.

  After two sentences I was distracted by Georgie fainting beside the fire. Tsetsgee, the chief interpreter, had planted a forest of needles in her back for the pain, but this seemed to have overhwlemed her. Medical assistance was meant to come with a three-hour penalty, but none of us said a thing as the doctor and nurse rushed to hold her wrists and forehead. I winced at the commotion, as though Georgie’s vulnerability might lie within me, too.

  I added a half phrase to my two sentences in Winnie-the-Pooh and nodded off. Soon they’d be illegible, sucked back into the pages during the storms headed our way.

  The crew goes chit, chat, sleep.

  Like most o
ther teenagers I was not, at this time, in the habit of writing. I had written the occasional letter that veered off course (Horse, you really ought to take up writing. I haven’t had a single letter, not even a neigh) and confided sporadically in diaries (Dear god, my school is so petty. They told me off because I stuck a note on a teacher’s back), but there wasn’t much. Not like nowadays when I rush to find a pen with the intensity of an oracle in a fit (though I’m merely a thing in situ, elbowing my way through time).

  After the second day racing, there’d be little time for reflection. I wouldn’t confide a single further sentence in Winnie-the-Pooh. If matters worsened, my only skill would be to let loose laughter, an expulsion of the fury I might otherwise have felt—fury at being here, at having thought it would be fun to be here.

  The single written artifact from my early life is a diary I sporadically wrote between the ages of twelve and fourteen, which I recently read through. Its curiosity is its animal obsession. No one thought of me as an animal lover—too errant—yet the brief entries mention little more than pets.

  22 March

  Decided I wanted a parrot. Looked at parrots in a pet shop which was overpriced.

  23 April

  I did throw Dido’s poodle in the pool, but was helping it to find courage, etc. etc.

  Dateless

  I’m going to breed hamsters.

  It wasn’t an animal-mad childhood—there was barely a dog in sight and only the occasional hamster. Yet I was gripped by books like Shadow the Sheepdog; Fury, Son of the Wilds; The Story of Ferdinand (the bull); and The Cow Who Fell in the Canal. My favorite film was Racing Stripes, with its talking zebra and horses; more recently I’d enjoyed Madagascar and Madagascar 2, whose despotic King Julien, a ring-tailed lemur, I can still quote at length.

 

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