Kirsten and I rode hard into the stormy evening. Urtuu 9 was still out of reach but we were 10 kilometers closer than we’d expected. At the ridge, my eyes leapt into an opening in the land below. A lake. A landing strip for my senses—water stretching thousands of meters into the dusking west. I was making plans for a swim when we heard a cry from the top of the hill.
“Waaittt!”
I swung round. My horse balanced on the chalky slope. Then the voice again.
“Will you waaaaaiiiiiiiitt!”
Who would scream in this fashion? The race had been dramatic in a slow-cooking-pot way, but never so episodic or loud.
It was Chloe, on the peak. Atop her donkey. Kirsten and I carried on down.
“Wait, you fuckers!”
That is what I think she said though I preferred not to believe it. “You mustn’t swear, it isn’t ladylike,” my father tells me often. “Fuck off,” I reply, although half of me thinks swearing does cut the air. Kirsten and I sat still, caught between the values of the race and our reluctance to turn back up the steep hill. Urtuu 9 was within 3 kilometers and someone needed to catch Devan, or at least fulfill Charles’s prophecy.
Clare, fifty meters above us, turned for Chloe while we tiptoed on down. The horses hardened themselves up to a gallop by the water. The earth was worn and their hooves echoed. I glanced at the shore and batted away my urge to eat lake. Be lake. Be beneath lake. Lungfuls of air howled through us. Mongolian myth has it that the wind comes from an old woman in heaven. In her chin she has a sack of skin containing wind, which she opens when she’s angry.
Three minutes until cutoff and we were still 2 kilometers from the gers of the family at station 9. We would not make it. Now to find a place to stay.
People living in gers between urtuus didn’t tend to know about the race. I was unsure what they would make of our apparition. When bicycling in England, I always want to knock on doors mainly to see if the brick houses will undo their austere façades. Canvas gers share no such affront, and from afar we could spy people outside a lakeside camp.
I wasn’t able to see clearly the woman we were talking to, but by the time a man and two boys joined us, I felt a part of the network. It was as though I were in the corner shop near high school, with its memories of lollipops, cigarettes, and concrete, all standard and close to home.
Long after the family had offered us a place to stay, Kirsten was handing the phrase book to them and snatching it back in a form of linguistic hot potato. While she searched for polite things to say, such as “Thank you for your hospitality,” an elder man led the ponies to a pole and tied them without leeway to stretch for grass or water. I was anxious to walk them after their final gallop or their legs would go rigid in the cold. Steam rose from their backs into the thin evening air.
“Oh fuck it. Lara!” said Kirsten. “There’s no word for ‘hospitality’ in the frickin’ phrasebook.”
I told her, a decade my senior, that we should see to the horses, forget the thanks.
“Wait, Lara—I’ve got to tell them I’m a vegetarian.”
I stand by while she tries to explain this.
We tuck back into night, leading the ponies towards the lake. Two boys follow at a particular distance, which has me wondering about their intentions. They wear tight T-shirts, little signs of Ulaanbaatar sprouting on the steppe. The older men back at the gers are cloaked in heavy dels, which were once everyday wear for both men and women.
The pebbly shore is empty but for a brightly clad group strewn about a campfire. The ponies snort at the lake, suspicious. Perhaps they have never met so much water before. They refuse to drink. I want to strip down and swim but with the boys at our shoulders this can’t be the time—and I’m bound to the pony.
Thunder tips about in the night sky as we walk back up to camp. Kirsten leads her horse in one hand and holds two phrase books in the other. One is mine, an heirloom from Paddy, and I feel a strange guilt seeing it out and about, not knowing where he might be. The taller boy in the cap takes it now and flicks it through, stumbling over the English. Kirsten studies hers as she strides, mumbling Mongolian. Neither listens to the other. Behind us the horses are minding their business at the ends of the reins.
“Stupid!” the boy exclaims after some quiet, pointing at the book.
In a fit of enthusiasm for this word and our shared opinion regarding the shitty translations, I snatch the book from him.
“Yes, stupid!”
I throw it onto the ground.
Back at camp, my eye lands on the pony’s as I tie him up. His is a sweet and playful eye, running away and returning six times a second. Horses aren’t so blithely passionate as lovers—they rarely look at you directly. They share love with gentle tilted heads, their eyes pulled inward. If you scratch them where they’re itchy, they may niggle you back with their noses, during which I feel like an honorary horse. This pony, though sleepy, still bends away when I lift my hand to his withers. I’m sure he’s got hugs stored deep inside him. Perhaps his wildness will die down overnight.
The sport of eventing operates at the threshold between tameness and wildness. The horse submits for the dance of dressage but retains her spirit to dash across country. Riders train most days and make friends with their horses. They may even dream of inviting them into their kitchens, if only the creatures would more easily fit through doors.
There are too many horses to befriend out here. Badma, who I met at the phone shop in the city, said that in spring her cousin’s family sometimes takes cold foals into the ger, where they wrap them in skins and place them next to the fire. But thereafter, many of the horses live un-tame.
Kirsten and I move into an empty ger with two beds. She christens hers by flopping back onto it. We’ve not had beds since Ulaanbaatar. I pop outside to find the storm rolling near and a little boy who wants to play. His beaming cheeks cajole me into it. He runs, rolls, and expects me to chase but my steps are ill fitted to his scuttles and we’re both clumsy with our bodies. Aunt Lucinda says I still haven’t grown into mine. Then again, she says a lot of things. Says my voice hobbles along. Says I’m scatterbrained. Says I’m too relaxed.
I withdraw for exhaustion. He isn’t the first strong child I’ve met in the last few days. An I-don’t-have-a-bedtime sort of child. All those young jockeys who galloped 10 kilometers bareback for the start camp race were totally unfazed. And when I hung the herder’s son upside down for hitting a fellow rider with his Coke bottle, he simply resumed his antics, victorious at the attention.
On my way back to the ger, I see a woman milking a cow. I reckon she is doing this especially for us so I tell Kirsten what she’s up to—yesterday I tried the milk tea I suspect is coming our way and didn’t like it. It’s sweet and salty. Kirsten is crinkling plastic in search of her flashlight when the door swings open. We turn, both of us half dressed.
“Supper?” the boy pronounces slowly from the phrase book, his light shining at us.
Kirsten stands up with her headlamp mounted, which brings the boy’s blue tracksuit into fluorescence. She advances in her underwear to say, “Vegetarian. Wants dinner without mutton.”
Steam from cups of milky tea rises from his hands. We smile, and when he goes, leaving the tea with us, I peel my jodhpurs off.
“Jesus, Lara, what’s going on with those ankles?”
Kirsten’s light has landed on my feet. Ah, the site of the throbbing. Funny how patches of pain conceal themselves like the rhythm inside a song. My brain is too fatigued to attend to the various aches. I feel like one of those historic ruins, unbothered by the state of myself. I poke the spongy swelling in my ankle and fish into my bag of pills, hoping for ibuprofen. In a fit of boredom at start camp, I de-packaged six types of pills and put them into one bag. I can’t tell what is antibiotics, ibuprofen, paracetamol, water purifier, Pepto-Bismol, or vitamin C. I take three pills and pray.
“Where’s the tea gone?” I ask Kirsten.
She sniggers from her sle
eping bag. “Tipped the fuckers onto the dirt at the edge of the bloody ger, didn’t I.”
I’ve heard that some families toss milk into the air to invoke the protection of spirits at the start of a journey, and people sometimes place a bowl of cream outside their gers to honor the earth, land, and sky—baigal. But on page 22 of our map book, it says, Don’t spill any milk, it’s very unlucky.
Dinner never comes. Vegetarianism is untranslatable this evening. I eat a handful of Kirsten’s walnuts and lie down listening to the storm. My tummy rumbles along to the thunder. I’m keen to sleep, if only for my bedraggled day to find some formation, for dreams to move in and rearrange memory. The nights know how I feel.
XXII
It was 1968 when Aunt Lucinda went mute for a school term. She was fifteen years old. Apparently she wouldn’t even talk to friends. Her mother, my grandmother Gaga, found a poem Lucinda had written, and took her out of school for good. It was a bold decision, but so was the poem. It was set in a forest’s “cold bare hands,” Lucinda holding a leaf that crackles and breaks. She sees the leaf on the earth in pieces and declares her own leaf is
still holding out, though they’ve tried with all their strength
To crush me and make me fall . . .
I won’t I won’t . . .
I’ll stay alone in the cold friendless world
Striving for what I know is right.
It does sound a little dramatic. But after Lucinda was allowed to leave school, she won Badminton age nineteen. She would go on to win it five times more, on five different horses.
My fourteen-year-old self thought I should be a tennis player, even though I wasn’t much good. It was around this time my stomach ache began, a sea-deep irritation I struggled to articulate beyond claims of a dysfunctional digestive system. It proved a mystery to conventional doctors, too, though not to my father. “You’re just too tall,” he said. “Your intestines must be too long.”
Mum was also unconvinced. I presume she’d have sat up and listened if my diagnosis was death, but her daughter only had a tummy pain she couldn’t see. She said it was caused, like her ongoing headaches, by frustration. “Keeping it all pent up,” she’d say with a constipated expression. Maybe that was a subconscious instruction for me to be sexually free, a subject she wouldn’t otherwise broach. Yet I was at my freest at that time, unrestrained on London’s Friday nights.
My mother posted a strand of my hair to a psychic in Ireland, who rang five weeks later to announce I had anger and sadness in my belly. My London friends found this report really funny and began a daily inquiry as to the well-being of the monster inside me.
Time passed and Tummy Monster grew; their myth, my fact—until I learned to ignore it for long enough stretches that it became my myth too. People ceased asking. I suppose we think of pain as associated with an event—an accident, for example. We don’t imagine it going on forever. I found no space for pain and its expression in daily life.
These were the years when teachers were seeking a “cause” for my disruptive activities, dispatching me to a learning-difficulty center where I was declared dyslexic. One teacher at my previous school had blamed my behavior on my tormenting siblings. “Are your brothers at home at the moment?” she’d ask when I was in trouble or bullying a classmate. Then there was the woman who diagnosed me as a product of lifelong concussion. “I just think you’ve fallen off too many horses,” she finished, as though there were a brainy soup spilling round my head forever trying to solidify into its original state.
Now that I’ve left, it just seems that high school lacked any potential for renewal. It went on and on, same days, same people, same structure, incubating me in my youth. I wriggled my way through like a caught fish, unsure how to demand freedom, wearing its mere look in my eye. I often felt like running away from home. But that would’ve made Mum worry.
By the end of school, my stomachaches had spread to my arm muscles and my head, as though an unlived life were occupying me. I fidgeted. I was never still. Freud does say that symptoms have the right aims but accomplish them in the wrong way. Was my body concocting plans to escape itself? “Aching to go” might have come into its literal meaning.
“I think you’re just an octopus,” concluded my brother Arthur one day. Octopuses’ brains, he claimed, were spread across all of their legs. It’s not even possible to think of their bodies as separate from their minds. Neither controls the other.
My pains are still with me as I ride the race.
It was also around the age of fifteen that I learned my habit of leaving. Still today I can’t help slipping from parties without a word, and often I don’t make it to them in the first place. It usually seems best to be absent and slightly missed rather than present but distant.
In Mongolia, shamans-to-be often fall chronically ill in their teens. The phrase for this can be translated into English as “illness from nothing.” They’re also prone to running off into the forest or showing other unusual behaviors. Their families hand them to an experienced shaman with whom they will spend years honing their powers.
When I heard about this shaman protocol after returning from Mongolia, I was a bit disappointed there hadn’t been such a plan in place for me. I hadn’t been singing to spirits or speaking to trees, but still, why did no one think to take me out of school and send me to a shepherdess or a lovely witch in a thick, foggy glen?
XXIII
“How you feeling, Lara?”
Kirsten and I crawled into the same world. I swallowed all truthful thought and said, “Great, you?”
That night, I’d dreamed of babies on horseback. Of diving into a mud bath and wrecking my head. Dreamed I was everywhere, and unaware. That I needed to take a friend to the pesto factory—we had all come up from the sea in a slow arc and were preparing to plop back in.
Who’s in charge of my dreams?
Maybe it’s horses. They know where to steer me.
Can you carry on in the spirit in which you began? Kirsten and I knew nothing of how pain was spreading over the race field, dulling the resolve of riders who had set out to win—their pained bodies begging them to admit how little the competition meant in real terms.
The Derby had opened in a burst of energy, as so many “events” do. There was an exuberance to our meetings ahead of the race, but after start camp we had few chances to alter our impressions. Each person was like a book I’d only seen the front cover of. Devan remained, in my mind, Simply Ambitious; Todd was Simply Carefree; and Natacha was Simply a Chatterbox.
Who knows, maybe some of them still had me down as Simply Befuddled—the version of Lara who asked if we might please load each horse into a van and just drive our way round these 1,000 tiresome kilometers. Later, Clare would caption a photograph of me as “Totally on another planet,” and Sandra, the French rider, would gawp when she heard I was ahead. She said it was dishonest of me to wear a veneer of hopelessness at start camp when my essence was raw ambition, as if I were some kind of pool shark.
Kirsten and I were getting no more than a glimpse of one another. The race was condensed enough that no one needed to deal with long-term me, as sister, daughter, mother, lover, or friend.
Some of my impressions of other riders and crew members would change when I heard stories afterwards. I discovered that my dream lover Adam had actually thought the race far too competitive. I read all of Richard’s books and discovered the extent of his jockeying brilliance. As these snippets fell into place the race re-created itself in my mind. Apparently Monde’s reputation as a horse whisperer traveled down the course, which lead to excited herders giving him increasingly difficult horses. He connected with and mounted each one. Monde was interested in the Mongolian way of relating to horses, and had said, at Start Camp, that he was racing to learn, experience, and win.
Of the thirty riders in the group photo at start camp only half would end up at the finish. The others would fly home or return to the city early. During the race I rarely stopped
to think about where each of them might be. I was wedged in, damming time.
It’s the morning of the fourth day. I’m knackered. I feel farther from the finish than I did when I began, despite our being 350 kilometers closer. Kirsten’s presence tames the day—humans are such absorbing distractions—but I can’t summon myself to speak anymore. Words feel like an insult to truth (then again, even on life’s bright days I feel as though I’m throwing meaning into darkness when I speak).
Outside, the sky is low and camp is cast in gray lake-light. I lift my saddle off the ground. It’s supposed to be lightweight but my sleepy arms think it weighs more than a horse. Last night’s dreams filter through me as I walk to the pony’s open morning eye and whisper hello.
We’re just about to leave when the lady of the place hobbles over from the top ger and points to the white sign in her fingers: 30 USD. I look back up at her face. She has tied her bun tight, stretching back the wrinkles from the high points of her cheeks. She shoves a handful of objects into our hands—the key rings and shoelaces Kirsten laid on the door mat as a thank-you to her. At start camp, word had it no one would accept money on the steppe, only gifts. But the lady is shaking the sign, stone-faced. By steppe standards, the price is steep. Neither Kirsten nor I have that much except in emergency money.
I try to produce my old smile but the lady’s expression won’t soften. I walk ten steps to the pony. He holds still as I climb onto his back. With Kirsten, we sprint away and jump off ten minutes later at urtuu 9. 7:13 a.m. The vet listens at the chest of the pony, who lets me lay my arm over his neck.
Rough Magic Page 11