Rough Magic

by Lara Prior-Palmer

  Onwards I marched in the manner of a manic London commuter. I think this is the mode of my father, even in sleep. My, it must be painful to be pinned to the future. To exist in italics. In those taut afternoon hours, it was achingly obvious I was unable to live in the present like the pony, and equally unable to see into the future like the prophet Dashtseren. I was just stuck in the race’s petty timescale. Perhaps most of us are stuck. This may be why people flock to fortune-tellers and watch the news—to hear out an extended version of themselves, to see further forward.

  The dark backwards and abysm of time, says Prospero in The Tempest. If time was space—an abyss, a gulf—then what was space? Perhaps closing my eyes would’ve summoned my mind home. If I kept looking across those broad spaces, so many swatches of future at once and no solid objects for my eyes to cling to, I felt I’d go mad.

  Perhaps somewhere, somehow, the depth of the steppe also reminded me of death, the deepest thing I could imagine. The lure of the abyss, and the danger of falling in.

  XXX

  Four hours of hot riding pass me by. With the sun trapped in my skull, I lead a knackered pony towards urtuu 16. Figures dwindle in the fold of the hills, Charles the steward at their center. He and I haven’t crossed paths since urtuu 7 two days ago. Skeletons, mountains, and marmot holes hold the space between that day and this one, and the people from the early Derby have faded from my memory.

  As we near, I can make out his hands resting in his pockets, his bottom sticking outwards, and his cap concealing his face. I like to think you can see inside someone’s head from a certain distance. Barbara, a vet, fidgets beside him. Her hair is plaited back the French way, her deel is draped to her ankles and rolled up at the sleeves.

  “It’s eighty-two.” Barbara drops the stethoscope and draws back from the horse’s stomach.

  I gulp. So high.

  “Did you make it canter when it didn’t want to?” says Charles. His accent intensifies it for me.

  “Have you had high heart rates before?” Barbara joins in.

  “No, only my first horse.”

  Charles asks for my vet book, where records of fifteen horses lie. He peers over its seam at my heaving steed while I stand by, unsure where to look.

  “This one is gonna take the full time to go back down to sixty-four. . . .”

  The “full time” is forty-five minutes. The longest I’ve had to wait to date was Brolly’s fifteen minutes at urtuu 1. I shrink into a prickly silence.

  In the waiting minutes, Charles and Barbara let up a little.

  “I love your accent,” I say to Barbara. “Where’s it from?”

  She and Charles burst into laughter.

  “I am from Belgium.”

  Her words float across the wind with loose wisps of her auburn hair. I withdraw my feeling for Charles, seeing him bantering so idly with her. Maybe he’s just one of those trees who attracts bees. That’s what I think when I start to feel something about someone. I’m just another bee, and my young buzzing has been heard before.

  “Did you see Devan on your way in?” asks Charles.

  “No, I overtook her on the leg before. She wasn’t with a horse.”

  “Oh,” he returns quickly. “She must have taken a different route from you because she came through here an hour ago.”

  “What?” I act out a shrug. “I probably went the wrong way again.”

  But I thought I came the most direct way. Foolishly so, perhaps. How can she have passed me without my even knowing? Jetpack? I’m awed by my competitor.

  I move on to ask after the others, masking my frustration where I can.

  “A bunch of people going home from urtuu nine today,” replies Charles.

  “Is everyone OK?”

  “Yes. Adam, Alison, Paddy . . .”

  “What’s wrong with Adam?”

  “Oh. He had . . . chafing . . . on his . . .”

  Charles stops and gestures downwards, locking his eyes on me until I bend backwards in laughter.

  For twenty minutes I walk the horse but his heart rate stays high. I have overridden him. This is true, true in a terrifying way, like a medical diagnosis. Charles takes over the walking and dispatches me to the ger to taste the vegetable sushi, which is a surprising dish after days of messy noodles. I munch my way through the pyramid of rolls, burying my stomach in food while the horse breathes hard outside.

  A wide-eyed girl is watching me eating. I can hear Barbara’s laughter erupting out of flirtatious conversation. On my fourteenth piece of sushi, Charles stoops into our silence and looks from the plate to me.

  “What you done with the top layer of sushi?”

  I blush.

  Outside, Charles and I walk slowly. At his side, I feel the tightness in his chest, the challenge of being male. I wonder how he lasts inside that beard. The conversation leaps when he says Devan hasn’t actually overtaken me. He’s been playing with me? The cheek of it. So attractive. I feel silly for believing him.

  “No idea where she is,” he says.

  His eyes draw circles around me as I drop and laugh relief.

  “Lara, you know I buy you a vodka if you win.”

  Is he joking again? He’s stone-faced, and I am confounded. I thought he didn’t care, yet he seems to have a strange faith.

  Eight minutes before the forty-five-minute penalty time, my pony’s heart rate comes level.

  I ride a palomino out onto golden land. Bog seizes us twenty seconds after departure. His hooves sink between clumps of fluorescent grass and scramble on, falling from island to island while the light eases us onwards into the late afternoon. It’s the type of light I notice at Christmas time. It suits the ends of years.

  We’re making our way over the fingertip of a hillock midway through the leg when I see Charles’s khaki camper van bouncing in the distance and think, Oh dear, I’ve done it again, fallen in love, and found height in the falling. Evening slices it raw—the feeling that I long for him, and long to win the Derby for a new purpose: to impress him.

  I can distract from this embarrassing truth with another reference to The Tempest. At the end of the play, Prospero begs the audience to forgive his magical deceptions, claiming the purpose of his project was simply to please. In the 1623 version it’s written as elfe my project failes / Which was to pleafe.

  What if I just wanted to win for myself, without wanting to beat Devan or please Charles or any other audience? It’s a lonely thought; I wish I were strong enough for it.

  My pony goes quiet as the ABC crew car charges out to meet us. I’ve taken us straight instead of right for ten minutes so we’re behind time. It may even be nearing eight o’clock under this tangerine-lit sky.

  I haven’t seen the ABC lot since the rainy morning on the second day. My fancy for Alex has since gone extinct, replaced with my affections for Charles. Still, I’m excited to see him. Company. This sentiment vanishes when he begins question-flinging through his window, shouting things about my “being in the lead.”

  Later I will hear how last night, Alex had wanted to send Gloria the reporter out on a Derby pony at urtuu 9, but the pony escaped when she bridled him. He returned half tacked up with his legs thrashed, trotting lame. Alex asked to use another horse but the station was already short. He laid down his camera in protest and told everyone that one million people watch his show and that it is very important.

  The seventeenth urtuu lies in the lap of a rangy plain backed by woodland. I moor my mind in whatever’s beyond, the undanced spaces. I can see Charles squinting out from beneath his cap. He stands in front of a line of horses who drowse in the ethereal light. I climb off and walk the pony past the log fire towards him.

  While Charles takes the heart rate, Richard roams calmly, quietly—a sorcerer undercover. I feel the precision of his camera in the chaos of the station. Crew cars surround the gers like oversize litter. Bodies in T-shirts pop up like magic tricks. Striding herders, delicately tripping children, aloof interpreters, and ABC Ale
x right in my face, talking incessantly.

  Charles sets less of a stage here. As he holds the stethoscope to the pony’s ribs in silence, I ask myself whether he might be irritated, perhaps trying to hide the fact that he’s doing the absent vet’s job. I am briefly shocked by my admiration for him and decide to imprison him in descriptions such as inconsistent, even untrustable. Yet my ears are still pricked in case he comes out with any more lines I won’t forget, like that one about buying me a vodka if I win, which I somehow equate to us sleeping with each other.

  At 8:09 p.m. the palomino’s heart rate is still not level. With sixteen minutes to go, they’ll think me crazy to leave a station so late. Will you get anywhere? Will you find a place to stay? Doubt is king.

  Alex carries on. “Laura, this rivalry with Devan: Is it a question of UK versus USA?”

  My name has been punted about in many forms—“Lera,” “Lora,” “Larrah.”

  “No,” I reply, “this is a question of UK versus Texas. The rest of the U.S. is fine.”

  That must have been enough to make it onto American television.

  By thirteen minutes past, the pony’s heart is cool but someone has spotted Devan tumbling off the skyline. I rush to choose a new horse. The ABC reporters bumble after me, droning on with their rhetoric.

  “Laura is planning to ride out the station with just ten minutes to go.” (Emphatic swivel of reporter’s head in “Laura’s” direction.)

  “Laura, what is the strategy behind this?”

  Before I can tell my tongue not to, I hear it saying, “I can’t think of anything worse than spending the night in a ger with Devan, and you asking vacant questions through the tent walls.”

  There is a dodo’s heart beating in my breast.

  I can see my next horse behind Alex. He is bucking under a man from the urtuu’s Byambasuren family. Devan rides in from the east, her calves sandwiching a well-exerted pony. The crowd swarms in on her while Alex stays with me.

  “Wow, what’s that? Laura, let’s ask you one more time, why are you riding out with so little time?”

  He’s waiting for an answer. I give him a frustrated grin. “Because I don’t want to spend the night in a tent with Devan.”

  Or I just like to run away, because somewhere I am terrified of people.

  Devan appears on my diagonal. “Are you really planning to ride out now?” she says.

  I bustle off, using the rush as an excuse. I’m scared to look at her in case she sets me alight. “Standoffish” is the word she will choose to describe me in her post-race interview, which I think is probably fitting.

  8:17 p.m. Gathering up, I find my map missing. Disaster. But I’m into the theory that lost items are unintended sacrifices for some invisible good. I suspect the map has dropped out of my denim vest pocket, even though I don’t really understand how things fall out of pockets—the gravity of it, and why an object would do such a thing as to fall out of a pocket when it was so happily in there. What’s the need to escape?

  I see Richard’s camera looking at me and walk up to him.

  “Richard, do you think I can maybe please have your map?”

  He lowers his lens. I didn’t know his face could make such a shape—as though a potted plant has fallen onto his toes. If my mind weren’t cluttered with ideas of departure, I’d snatch his camera and capture his expression.

  Ten minutes and counting. Like Aunt Lucinda in one of her hare-brained rushes, I run to Richard’s car, ask Jagi, his bright-eyed interpreter, for his map, and trot back over to give him the news. “Richard, I’ve taken your map.”

  He mumbles, “But I need that to navigate between the next seven urtuus—”

  His slight frown makes me blink.

  “Do you want me to ask your interpreter if she’ll come with me instead?”

  “No thanks, Lara.”

  “So can I take the map?”

  I stand where I am. Power on my plot.

  Thoughts pause in his hair. “No.”

  “Can I use it to wipe my bottom on too?”

  8:21 p.m. I swing my sore leg over the next horse and we fly from camp, a spark released from the flame. In the falling dusk we rip round the mountains, casting off the plastic drama as green earth sweeps by. Every stride knits us further into the evening, until we feel night invite us in, alone, anywhere. I am fled, with Richard’s stolen goods in my backpack.

  XXXI

  What is space? Here.

  And where do we come from? No idea.

  To whom do you belong then? Daughter of the land and sea?

  Daughter of the land and sea.

  The sun is setting behind us. Shades of orange and gray. Dark clouds roll around the valley ahead where three gers rest, a column of smoke rising from one chimney. As the horse draws us in, a lady with tender dark eyes walks out towards us.

  It is 8:33 p.m. For twelve minutes the horse has galloped and galloped out of himself. Initially I couldn’t see any camps on our path and I thought we might have to bungee-rope it. But here we are at a standstill only three minutes after the 8:30 p.m. cutoff, a smug 7 kilometers ahead of Devan.

  One of these nights, my brother Arthur broadcasts that I’ve slept out in the open with my pony tied to my ankle. This gives the bungee rope the fame she’s been so desperate for—and in months to come, I will field inquiries about the mythical night attached to my steed.

  Myth’s capacity to mutate is strong; in the years after the Derby, people will ask about “that trek across Madagascar” or my “summer riding a donkey in Iraq.” Both of which, for a certain British psyche, may offer exactly the same story: girl on erotic power-animal traverses the exotic.

  Race rules penalize each minute of riding beyond 8:30 p.m. with a two-minute wait at the penalty sitting station (urtuu 20), but I reckon they won’t pick up on my extra three minutes. At briefing day I got the impression the trackers don’t transmit very frequent signals. Even if I’m penalized for those minutes, it will only make a six-minute penalty, which, when I come to sit it, will be negligible—it takes me at least ten minutes to change horses anyway.

  I lay the side of my head on my praying hands. I mean to ask, May I sleep here? I am a cauldron of my body’s juices and tiredness has rendered me close to mute. May I come in? The lady’s face broadens. She fetches her son and beaming husband to greet me, and we stand as a foursome in the tempered ecstasy of wordless conversation.

  The pony and I saunter away for a drink at the river, where the water is quiet. The light has spread her pre-dark colors, those shades of dusk that match the temperature of dreams. We meander until we find a resting place in the reeds. I bend my form around a ray of the lapsing sun and feel all the day’s motion leaking from my pores.

  While the pony plops about the water, I stare at some faraway gers. Like a village in Devon, the scene might’ve been the same three hundred years ago, yet during that time, some humans have busied themselves with inventing things like electric lights, television, and the internet—bewitched by the promise of increased speed, of motion forever onwards, upwards, and never enough.

  Have I been casting off chapters like a paper shredder, uninterested in anything but speed?

  The sun has gone under. Up at camp I stand calm, watching the boy tie my pony to an iron rod in the ground so he can graze the night away. We walk slowly to the tent, where I don’t know why I bother trying to explain to his parents that I’m riding 1,000 kilometers because—please, don’t be daft. Why the extended expedition? What is the concern? As though the journeys of our lives haven’t proven quite enough?

  They do not recognize the name of the family whose station I say I’ll seek come morning. They understand we’re headed over the eastern pass, so I leave it at that and turn to the noodles the lady has handed me. Her scraped-back hair shines under the light from a single bulb, so much tidier than mine.

  Opposite sits a man I think might be her husband. He eats, though she does not. The wrinkles in his cheeks move with each mu
nch. We grin a little but say nothing while the wet noodles dangle from our mouths.

  In the gers I tend to plonk myself down in any old place, but it is proper to sit in the south if you’re young, the north if you’re old, the east if you’re female, and the west if you’re male—none of which I’ll know until later. Apparently the social form inside the ger is strong enough that people sometimes unconsciously mimic its circles when meeting in Ulaanbaatar’s squared-out rooms.

  I don’t know what lovers do for privacy, given the lack of partitioning in a ger. Maybe if I wanted someone’s company, we’d meet on the steppe at night.

  I’m lying down for sleep when the son stoops inside. His legs bend like springs as he trips to the back of the ger and uncovers a television. It works! Well, why shouldn’t it? The screen lights up his face, radiating his smooth cheeks. Four more family members file in to spectate while he changes the channel to Forex economic forecasts. We gaze at the self-assured presenter, who thrives inside the screen, spewing out numbers somewhere in America. When the boy notices I find finance senseless, he switches to a German channel.

  From bed I try to concentrate on the characters on screen—wriggling fluorescent shapes—but my eyelids grow heavy. Minutes later I open them to the mother’s face dangling just above me, moonlike. Her arms are laying an extra blanket over my sleeping bag, and the family has shifted their focus from the TV to me. A giggle passes around the ger, as though it’s a very cheeky thing to be providing me with another blanket, or to be watching me as though I’m the television. I smile with my eyes shut again. They know not where I have come from, yet this is what they do.

  It must be fully dark outside, though I’ve not seen night proper since day one. The sky might have unscrewed or the trees escaped their shapes, I wouldn’t know. New moon, old moon, I wouldn’t know. I hear the horse neighing shrilly, as though calling a star down to earth. Me, I want to be tucked up in bed at home, hugged all round, loved like a well-soaked teabag. But no, not really—that must be someone else’s dream. It’s just I haven’t decided if I’m woodland-wild or fireside-tame, and probably I never will.